by Win Blevins
As she spoke, she had the sensation of stepping onto a floating log. It might take her downriver, or it might turn and dunk her.
“You could help me,” she said.
3
Sun Moon’s story sucked at my heart. I listened to how she was raised as a nun. A nun! Wearing these queer brown cloths as robes, staying clear of men, and hours and hours of praying and chanting. Then the part she wouldn’t say anything about, getting abducted. But Jumping Jesus—quick, she’d been practically enslaved, shipped like a burlap bag to Idaho, and required to play the whore. I felt the drama of the way she risked her life rather than give in to whoring. I suffered her bad cut with her, the swelling, the infection, the slow healing. I wanted to know more about her weeks of lonely, nighttime flight from Tarim. Heroic, that’s what her walk was. I knew heroic when I heard it.
She was not Chinese but Tibetan—what did that mean? It was frustrating that she wouldn’t spell it out. “I traveled from Kham into China, I was abducted and brought against my will to the United States. That is all I can say.” I knew a closed door when I saw one.
The whole story had a queer effect on me. Only an hour ago I had felt—well, knew in that queer way I found in the river—that all this day-in, day-out stuff was foolishness, these struggles to make a buck, having a spat in the family, getting sick or well, whatever—it was all trifling as the ripples the wind makes on a lake. Compared to the eternal music in the depths.
Yet here across three feet of sand was a human being who was suffering in just that struggle. Torn away from her life, getting enslaved, escaping—it felt hard as thirst in the desert. So … Yet… Sweet gizzards.
I gave up on figuring this out and went straight for the next step. It was mad, but everything was mad. “How do you want me to help you?”
“First,” she said, “you must tell me who you are.”
I was surprised that she turned it back on me. So. I took a deep breath. I made up my mind to tell the truth, even if she didn’t understand it, more of the truth than ever I knew until now. Right off I had the feeling of pushing my boat into the waters of a stream that no one knew where it went. I wondered, Is this what it feels like to be free-lost?
“My name is Asie Taylor. Don’t know how old I am, maybe twenty-one. Asie, a name from the Shoshone Injuns, in full Sima Untuasie, meaning first son. It sounds like Ozzie in English, but it’s spelled different.” I spelled the two words for her. “Name means ‘first son,’ or it’s a short version of ‘first son.’ Don’t know if I was born half-Shoshone or half some other Injun folks. Came from somewhere on the trail to Californy. Big stretch, somewhere in there.”
I took another deep breath. “When I was a kid, a fur trapper name of Taylor give me to some Mormons headed for Salt Lake City. He lived at Fort Bridger sometimes, with the Shoshone other times. Made his living trapping or guiding folks across the trail to Oregon or California. He was taken sick and dying, couldn’t tell them nothing. His woman was dead. Another woman belonging to another mountain man, a Shoshone herself, told them he called me Rock Child, but his woman, who wasn’t my real mother, called me Sima Untuasie.
“So when I was about seven, I ended up in Salt Lake. I don’t remember nothing of my real father or mother or that way of living.
“The Pfeffer family raised me as one of their own children, and educated me. I owe them a debt, though I didn’t always like ’em. They didn’t tell me I wasn’t theirs until I was twelve. I hated that. So I decided I didn’t want to be Earl Pfeffer no more. I threw out their name for me, took my father’s last name, and shortened the name my mother called me to Asie. The family didn’t cotton to that, but I didn’t care.
“To the Mormons I’ll always be a Lamanite, a descendant of Laman, son of Lehi, who was cursed with dark skin because of his sullenness. The light-skinned sons of Lehi on this continent were destroyed by the Lamanites. Among the Mormons I’ll always be an outsider.
“I worked in the Pfeffer family store in Salt Lake until I was eighteen. Then in the mere in Brigham City. If I worked hard enough, and tithed, and went to stake house regular, I was part of the Mormon community. If I studied and kept the commandments of virtue, charity, and tolerance, and served my fellow man according to the teachings of Christ, I would have received my endowments, and been a good Mormon.”
I held back feeling. “Then I might even been allowed to marry a white woman.” I felt salt tears in one eye. “I doubt it, though.” I made myself look at Sun Moon and smile. “What else do you want to know?”
“You tell what happen today? How you wash up here on river bank?”
I didn’t know what to say. It would seem mad to anyone else, how I had come here. I hesitated. I quavered. I shook. Finally I said to myself, It being a day of madness, I will honor it with one more mad act.
Slow and hesitant-like, I told Sun Moon what happened that morning: Dissatisfaction with my life, queer feelings of things not being right, thinking time was out of joint. Now and then exhilaration for no reason. Voices in the trees, which turned out to be not in the trees but in the wind, and then turned out to be in the river. The waves calling to me. The flash flood sweeping me off, taking me to the world of waters. There the darkness. And in the darkness the music.
“When I come back to the world, I was singing songs I never heard before in a tongue I didn’t know. Still,” I told Sun Moon, “without knowing the words, I knew what I sang, or what the birds and the river sang through me.” I shrugged. “The spirit of flowing water. Soaring in the sky. I knew, just knew, knew more than knowing. Like you know your breath, your blood, your heartbeat.”
I lifted my eyes into hers, and had one clear thought. Now she will have nothing to do with me. I felt easy about that, and in a gentle way curious.
He trusts me with the truth. Had he been older, he might not have trusted her. Had he been Chinese, he wouldn’t have trusted her. This young man couldn’t even say what people he belonged to, yet…
So she began to play with her idea. Maybe, maybe …
She watched him without knowing what she was watching for. Why didn’t he break the silence nervously? Most people would. What a curious man.
Her thought was becoming a plan. My skin is nearly the same color as his. Our hair is the same black. She turned the idea round and round. She looked at it with her mind and felt of it with fingers and heart, like feeling the 108 beads of her rosary.
He was waiting. He had inner stillness. Maybe he was worth the risk.
“I no know whether you want help me. I not of your family, or even of your race. You take a risk. I offer you in return nothing.”
He nodded. She felt a pang of alarm, because she felt her warning might only be a temptation. I must ask him and get his free consent, truly free. Otherwise, all will come to grief.
“If I be caught, I probably am return to Hard Rock City as thief. Then Tarim me bail out jail, take home, drop charges, and make me his whore. For rest of my life. Contract say if try escape, serve rest of life.”
She looked into his eyes, trying to see. Her scar hurt sharply. She touched it and got a sense of augury. Danger? Or opportunity?
“Big fear not be caught. Tarim maybe so angry tell them OK kill me. I think I have no chance with Tarim now.”
Asie nodded.
“Maybe kill you, too.”
She took her heart in her hands and dived into the sky of hope. “We look Indian, you and me? Man-woman. Maybe you walk with me few days? Man-woman, no suspect. Walk to Salt Lake?” And protect me from Porter Rockwell.
Just what you expect on any business day.
I woke up this dawn as an employee at Boss John’s mercantile, room, board, and fifty cents a day, a life to the lullaby of boredom. In every direction, to every horizon, stretched deserts of the ordinary.
By noon, if that’s the time, a few things have come up. I’ve heard a concert from the river and the birds, and no everyday birds. A woman from the other side of the world has waltzed into my
life, and she’s asked me to go traveling with her. She says to Salt Lake. She means San Francisco. And why the hell not to Tibet?
My funny bone was tickled now, seriously tickled.
I studied Sun Moon. No damn idea. She didn’t have any idea. So I took consultation with myself.
Sweet gizzards, I couldn’t go back to my old life—I lost the whole wagon, all the supplies, and the mare. Now I had to go on the lam from Boss John.
Another thing, bigger. Why would I want to go back, now that I heard real music? Nothing wrong with the folks in Brigham City especially. But I felt as much like going to see Seward’s Folly and traffic with the Eskimos as go back to life among the Saints.
Talking to myself like that, I sat there. I meant to consult with myself like a reasonable fellow. But a notion came into my head. I thought of the call of the fish hawk, my bird friend. Fish hawks were here this time of year, but gone in the winter. I could make the fish-hawk call. It was a dot-dash kind of call. Starting slow and flat, it built, rising in pitch and in loudness and feverishness, and then it trailed off. I’d gotten fish hawks to answer my call. I’ve wondered what I was saying in their language. I took thought. Maybe I oughta try to find out. Maybe I should go wherever the fish hawks go in the winter. Wherever that was. West, the bird scientists said.
Or maybe I was just loony. I’d danced a twirl with death, and now everything seemed different. Couldn’t say different how. But helping a person from the far side of the world seemed as sensible as anything else. Or going to the far side of the world. Way more fun to be free-lost than go back to my old life.
I realized I was looking at Sun Moon blankly.
“We can travel as sister and brother,” she added. I wondered how old she was. Her eyes had seen a world of trouble, and showed it. Still, her face … I judged her to be similar to me, though I didn’t know for sure how old I was. “They look for a Chinese woman alone, not two Indians.”
I love you. It felt good, the loving. I still wasn’t sure what kind of love it was, but I thought maybe it included more than she’d want. And me, twenty-something and never touched a woman. In Deseret womanhood seemed untouchable unless you were a Saint, and white and delightsome. I looked Sun Moon up and down.
Then I put that thought away. Yes, we’ll go together. Go to Tibet if need be.
“We must buy right clothes,” she went on. “We must look right.”
“OK,” I said. “Yes.” I nodded, kind of to myself. “Heckahoy, yes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
In that same summer, 1862, Captain Richard Burton of the British Army, not yet Sir Richard by a quarter century, came to Salt Lake City for the second time. His first journey, in 1860, was for the purpose of seeing one of the four holy cities of the world, which in Sir Richard’s view were Mecca and Medina in Arabia (sanctified Moslem places), Lhasa (the holy city of Tibet), and Salt Lake City, the mecca of the Mormons. He told about this journey in his book City of the Saints.
The second journey has been a secret from the world, which thought he was in Fernando Po as consul at the time. In fact he was on one of his cloak-and-dagger missions. Of all his roles, soldier, scholar, author, explorer, the one that made him happiest was secret agent.
Here’s the way he explained the whole thing to me and Sun Moon.
The British government wished to present a certain matter to Brigham Young for the Prophet’s consideration.
Among Her Majesty’s countless minions, only one was on terms of credit with the Prophet Brigham Young, none other than Captain Burton. Who, as chance would have it, was bored with his diplomatic work in Fernando Po.
How could he not have been bored? Captain Burton was by profession a soldier, by temperament a spy. He was the master of many guises. Disguised as an Arab, at the risk of his head, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling among Arabs. At various times he had passed himself off as a Persian, a Tibetan, an Egyptian, a Hindu, and a Sufi, speaking all these tongues like a native, and master of every custom and nuance. Expert in all matters about India, Persia, Arabia, the Hind, and East Africa, he spoke twenty-nine languages. (When Sir Richard translated the Kama Sutra into English, one of his enemies quipped wickedly, twenty-nine languages including pornography.) Most recently, he was an explorer, the discoverer of the source of the Nile. How long could such a man remain in his study writing books? How long spend his evenings making polite conversation with local potentates? How long do without his wife, for Fernando Po was so primitive white women couldn’t live there. It was a fever-hole island off the coast of West Africa so uncivilized I haven’t found it on a map yet.
So he was dispatched in the spring of 1862 to Salt Lake. The journey was to be secret, he was cautioned. That was the part Sir Richard liked.
This is how Sir Richard told it to us, and the way he wrote it down. When he knew that his mission would never be revealed publicly, he kindly had his journals of the journey copied out for me.
These journals revealed what he didn’t tell us at the time. Captain Burton was indeed the finest Orientalist and linguist of his time, and among the finest explorers. But in the army and Her Majesty’s government generally, instead of being praised, he’d been belittled. So at forty he was a bitter man, feeding miserably on the fruits of scorn.
Captain Burton noticed that his host got down from the carriage awkwardly, like a man with chronic back pain. It amused him that the Lion of the Lord had the same frailties as other men.
The two of them walked to the top of the knoll, where they could see the entire city laid out to the south. Burton turned to the west. The sun glinted harshly off the Great Salt Lake. He expanded his chest to let the desert air in. His skin welcomed the desert sun. “Very impressive indeed,” he said. “Great strides in only two years.”
Brigham Young nodded, immune to flattery. Burton decided to leave the man his silence, whether it was rooted in circumspection, superiority, or an aching back. President Young stood facing Temple Square. Here the man had erected the visible form of his hopes for himself, his vast family, and his people, the faithful of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As an indefatigable reader and researcher, Burton well knew what these hopes were, to strive toward perfection, to have themselves sealed to their spouses for time and all eternity, to have their children and progeny sealed to them, creating an eternal family. He was no victim of the biases and foolishness of their enemies, who would say nearly anything to slander the Saints. No, Burton truly knew, from the testimony of the Saints themselves. He had journeyed across a great ocean and crossed a vast continent, twice, to visit Great Salt Lake City.
Burton appraised the man before him. He had appraised many powerful men in his time, men of many cultures and countries, making reports on their strengths and weaknesses to the Honourable East India Company or to his government. Some of them had been madmen, and the world judged Brigham Young a madman. As it judged Richard Burton a madman.
The world was wrong, certainly about the Lion of the Lord. Burton knew President Young’s history. The man had taken over from the dead Prophet, Joseph Smith (now madman might apply there), in the Saints’ hour of darkness beyond darkness. He had mustered in that moment the vision, the courage, and the requisite ability to inspire. He had led the Saints across the state of Iowa and the frozen Mississippi River, then across the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains, not knowing where they were headed. He had designated this valley the place of salvation, and somehow had inspired his people to heroic energies. Few of the world’s enterprises in creating utopias were so successful as Salt Lake City.
Burton knew the audacity that required, the foresight, the steadiness, the intelligence, most of all the courage.
Brigham Young knew himself and his people, understood his strengths and weaknesses, knew what he wanted, and was implacable in his determination. Burton would have liked to flatter the man, cajole him, even deceive him, but he knew none of those would work. He was going to be reduced to tellin
g the simple truth.
He felt naked.
“What have you come here for, Captain Burton?”
It was said softly, but Burton was not deceived. The Lion of the Lord had just set aside politeness. The man pivoted and fixed him with a gimlet eye. Burton knew better than to take the fragility of the pivot for weakness.
He also knew intuitively how tough the Lion could be. Burton felt a spasm of cold. He was in a country ruled for five hundred miles around by this man. An astute leader, very much so. A man of indomitable will. A man of huge responsibilities, and determination to meet them by any means necessary. A man followed by thousands of unquestioning adherents. To make an enemy of Brigham Young in Deseret would be dangerous.
Burton took a deep breath. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he told himself. A man who sticks his neck out before a potentate may get his head cut off, he also told himself. “Mr. President,” he said, “one art I learned in India is maalis, the skill of massage for aching muscles.” He did not add that his teacher was a courtesan. “I became an adept. Would you let me try?”
Burton got the pleasure of seeing he had truly surprised Brigham Young. The Lion of the Lord regarded him doubtfully. “Saints do not attend doctors. We trust to the healing hands of the anointed.”
“I am no physician,” answered Burton. He held up his big hands and flexed the fingers. “My gift resides in my hands alone.” He’s hurting severely, or he’d have said no instantly. “I seem to have a particular gift for backs.”
Young looked around apprehensively.
Good luck we came without a driver, thought Burton.
Young removed his broadcloth coat. His motions wanted to be decisive, yet were made tentative by pain. “I will not go further,” said Young. He turned his back to the gentile, sat on a boulder, and put his hands on his knees.
