Conceal & Continue

CONCEAL AND CONTINUE — a braided history of the breaking and keeping of faith For those who came after, that they may know the fire did not go out — it went under. 3 Chapter One THE BODY THAT COULD NOT HOLD * * * In the spring of the year eighteen hundred and thirty, in a small frame house in the state of New York, a young man of four and twenty years gathered a handful of believers and organized a church. And he made a claim that no quiet man makes: that the true faith had been lost out of the earth for centuries, corrupted after the death of the apostles, and that he had been sent to restore it whole. Whatever you believe of that claim — and I will not ask you to believe it — this much is plain and beyond dispute: it was a rejection. It looked upon the whole of respectable Christianity, the settled and comfortable religion of the age, and it declared that religion insufficient. It said the vessel every man around him trusted had cracked and let the water out, and it went looking for the water. And it came to pass that the world did not suffer this quietly. It never does. For understand the thing at the root, because the whole of this book grows from it: a faith which says the reigning order has lost the truth is the most dangerous thing a reigning order can permit to live. It is not dangerous because it is armed. It is dangerous because it is a mirror. It stands in the public square and says, by its mere existence, you have forgotten what you claim to keep — and there is no accusation a CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 4 comfortable people will punish more savagely than that one. Kill the man who robs you and the crowd calls it justice. Kill the man who tells you that your church has gone hollow, and the crowd will bring the wood. So they were driven. Out of New York, into Ohio; out of Ohio, into Missouri; and always the same shape to it — a people who believed together, and voted together, and bought their land together, and would not dissolve themselves into the general population as they were told to do. And the more they would not dissolve, the more the general population resolved to dissolve them by force. I will tell you what was done to them in Missouri in its own chapter, at its full and grievous weight, for it is the beating heart of this whole history and it deserves more than a paragraph in passing. Here, at the start, I set down only the shape of the thing and the law it teaches, so that you will know how to read everything that follows. Here is the law. When the body a man belongs to can no longer hold the thing it claims to believe — when it surrenders under pressure the doctrines it once bled for, or turns upon its own faithful to please the watching crowd, or breaks a strong man over nothing at all to prove a small man's mastery — then the believer is brought to the oldest crossroads there is. He has three roads and no fourth. He may rage against the body openly, and be crushed by it. He may bow his neck and grovel, and be kept as a tamed and useful thing. Or he may do the third and hardest thing: take the belief up quietly off the table where they can seize it, carry it out of the lit room and into the dark, and there keep it alive in secret until the season comes round again when it may rise. Rage, grovel, or go under. Watch for those three roads. You will see them walked again and again down two hundred years — by whole THE BODY THAT COULD NOT HOLD 5 churches and by single men, over polygamy and over the color of a man's skin and over a boy sent home from a mission for nothing — and you will see, at the very end, one living man walk the third road with a needle in his own hand. And that living man is why I have any standing to tell you this at all. For I am of that Missouri blood. My grandmother's people came west out of that hunting with empty hands, and what waited for them at the end of the promised road was not a land of milk and honey but a canyon in the desert and a rusted railroad boxcar abandoned on the dirt floor of it, and in that iron box my grandmother lived out her childhood. That is the near end of a line whose far end is a burning house in Missouri. And I have carried, the whole of my life, an anger I could never name and never source — a heat in the chest, a bone-certainty that the respectable order was not to be trusted and would turn on me the instant I ceased to be useful to it. I thought it was a madness peculiar to me. I thought it a crack in my own making. It was neither. It was inheritance. The repercussions of a burning do not die with the people who were burned. They go down into the blood and travel, generation upon generation, the way the shape of a nose travels, or the color of an eye, and they surface a hundred and fifty years downstream in a man who cannot understand why he trusts no institution and flinches at no fight. I did not understand my own rage until I turned and looked at the house my people had run from while it burned. A man reads an extermination order very differently when it was written against his own name. So here is the whole method of this book, set plainly at the doorway so you know what you have walked into. I will tell you the history — true, and full, and for its own sake, because it does not need me to be CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 6 worth the telling. And then, in each turn of it, I will show you where that history surfaced again in one living man, not because the man is larger than the history, but because he is the proof that the history is not over. The burning did not end in Missouri. It came all the way down, through the boxcar and the badge and the far country, to a man at a table in the dark with black ink and a steady hand. He is the aftershock. And this whole book is the aftershock finally learning the name of the earthquake. THE BODY THAT COULD NOT HOLD 7 Chapter Two THE BURNING * * * Now I will slow down, and I will tell you what was done in Missouri, and I will not hurry past a line of it, for everything after depends on your feeling the full weight of this in your chest and not merely knowing it in your head. Understand first who these people were, so you do not picture villains getting their due. They were farmers, mostly. Poor families from the worn-out farms of the East and from across the sea, drawn by a message that promised them a gathering place and a Zion of their own. They came into Missouri by the thousands and they did what poor believing people do: they bought the cheap land, they broke the sod, they built their cabins close together, they raised their meeting houses, and they kept to their own. And that was their whole crime. They were many, and they were of one mind, and they were growing, and they did not drink and vote and hate the way the old settlers drank and voted and hated. Their difference was a standing insult to the men already there, and the men already there resolved to answer the insult with fire. It began as these things always begin — with rumor, and with the lie that dresses fear in the clothing of righteousness. It was said they meant to take the county. It was said they stirred the slaves. It was said a thousand things, each one a permission slip for the violence that the sayers already meant to do. And then the permission slips were spent, CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 8 and the violence came. They burned the houses. Understand what that plain sentence means: they rode to a family's cabin, and they put it to the torch, and they stood their horses in the yard while it burned, and they turned that family out — the mother, the children, the old — into the open country with what they could carry and no roof to carry it to. They trampled the fields at harvest. They drove off the stock. They whipped men bloody in front of their wives. They pulled families out of their homes in the deepening cold and set the homes alight behind them. And in the autumn of the year eighteen hundred and thirty and eight it reached its blackest hour, at a little settlement on Shoal Creek called Haun's Mill. A mob of better than two hundred men fell upon it with no warning worth the name. The settlers who could ran for the blacksmith's shop and barred themselves within — and the shop was a trap, for the mob surrounded it and fired through the gaps between the logs as into a pen, and they did not stop firing. And when the shooting was done they came in among the fallen, and they found a boy of ten years hidden beneath the blacksmith's bellows, a child who had seen his father shot, and one of the men put his rifle to that child's head and killed him where he hid. And afterward that man was heard to justify it with words I will set down because their coldness is the whole education of this book: nits make lice. A louse, he meant, is only a nit grown up. Kill the children, he meant, or they grow into the thing you hate. That is the mind that hunts a people. That is what was loosed against them. And that same autumn the governor of the whole state of Missouri, a man named Boggs, set his hand to an executive order, and the order did not mince its purpose. It declared that these people must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state for the THE BURNING 9 public good. Exterminated. It is the word a man uses for vermin, for insects, for a thing beneath the dignity of murder — and it was written into the law of an American state against a church. It made the hunting lawful. It told every mob that had already been burning and whipping and killing that the state was now behind them. And that order — hear this and let it sit — lay upon the books of the state of Missouri, unrepealed, for a hundred and thirty and eight years. It was not formally struck down until the year nineteen hundred and seventy and six, within the lifetime of men now living. For the better part of two centuries it was, on paper, lawful in Missouri to exterminate my ancestors' faith. So they were driven out in the winter. Picture it truly, for it is the picture the whole book hangs upon. Families on the roads in the cold, their houses ash behind them, their dead not all buried, the sick and the newborn and the ancient carried in wagons across the frozen ruts toward a state line beyond which the killing might stop. Some died on that road. The children of that exodus would remember the cold of it into their old age. And here is the thing that must be understood above all the rest, the thing that turns this from a mere atrocity into the seed of everything: they did not stop believing. You could burn their houses and they held the faith. You could trample their harvest and they held the faith. You could shoot their children beneath the bellows and drive them across a state in the dead of winter, and they gathered their wagons and their wounded and their dead and they went, still holding, unbroken, the very belief they were being slaughtered for. When a people cannot be made to surrender a thing by fire — when fire only presses the thing deeper into them — then that thing has stopped being an opinion they hold. It has become the marrow of them. It has become blood. And CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 10 blood, as I have told you and will show you again and again, travels down. THE BURNING 11 Chapter Three THE SUCCESSION * * * And it came to pass in the summer of the year eighteen hundred and forty and four that the man who had begun it all was murdered. They had driven the Saints on from Missouri into Illinois, and there on the banks of the river they had built a city, and for a season it seemed the hunting might abate. It did not. The old pattern found them again — the fear, the rumor, the resolve of the surrounding country to be rid of a people too numerous and too united and too different — and it came to a head upon the founder himself. He was taken and held in a jail in the town of Carthage, awaiting a trial that would never be held, and on a summer afternoon a mob with their faces blacked stormed the jail and shot him, and shot his brother at his side, and the man who had organized the church in a farmhouse at four and twenty died on the floor of a cell at nine and thirty, a bullet in him and the window at his back. And with his death the people who had survived every driving now faced a wilderness worse than any in Missouri: the wilderness of having no head. For the prophet had left no plain and settled law of who should follow him, and into that silence rushed the oldest question that has broken a hundred movements before and since — who leads now, and by what right? And the answers the faithful gave to that question, and the way those answers divided them, lay out for us clean CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 12 as a diagram the very fork this whole book was written to trace. Some said the right of leadership passed by the office and the order — that the senior council of the apostles, and the strongest and surest man among them, must take up the fallen mantle and carry the church forward. And the strongest man among them was Brigham Young, a man hard as a wagon axle and twice as useful, and the great body of the people followed him. And he did the thing that only a certain kind of man can do: he looked at a nation that would not stop hunting his people, and he resolved to take them clean out of it — a thousand miles west, past the edge of the settled country, over the plains and through the mountain passes into a desert valley beside a dead salt sea, where no nation yet living wanted to follow. This is the branch the world remembers, and its story is the next chapter. But others said the right passed not by the office but by the blood — that leadership belonged to the founder's own lineage, to his son, and could not rightly be seized by a vote of apostles nor by the strength of any man's hand, however able. These did not go west. They stayed in the country of the murdered prophet, and in time they gathered around his son and his line, and became a separate church entire, holding that the true succession ran in the blood and that the westward multitude had followed a usurper into the desert. Now mark this well, because it is the first great instance of the law I gave you at the doorway, and it is not what a simple mind expects. Neither branch was wicked. Both believed. Both had bled in Missouri. Both looked with clear eyes at the shattered body they had belonged to and judged, each in its own way, that the body could no longer hold the truth as they understood it — and so each walked, in the direction its belief demanded, and the walking made two churches out of the one. One walked west behind the strongest hand. One stayed behind the THE SUCCESSION 13 sacred blood. And each was certain, to its bones, that the other had strayed. This is not the failure of faith. Hear me, for the whole book turns on it: this is what faith does when the vessel cracks. It chooses the water over the vessel. The tragedy — and it is a real tragedy, not a triumph — is that two faithful peoples, looking at the same crack, chose different waters to save, and walked away from each other forever, each keeping something true. Remember that when you are tempted, later, to think that the man who walks away from his church is always either a hero or a coward. He is very often only a believer at a fork, choosing which water to carry. And out of the branch that went west, at the very tail of that long migration, came my own blood — but that is the next chapter, and it begins on the trail. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 14 Chapter Four THE LONG WALK * * * Now consider the walk itself, for we speak of it lightly — the pioneers, the trek, the wagons — and in the speaking we forget that it was one of the great sufferings of the American story, and that ordinary families walked it on the strength of a belief men had died for. They went out from their burned country with what they could load, and they crossed the plains on foot and by wagon and, some of them, pulling handcarts with their own bodies for want of oxen — pulling their whole lives in a wooden cart a thousand miles by hand. And the plains did to them what the plains did to all who crossed: took the weak, the old, the newborn, the sick. There were companies caught by the early snows in the high country who froze and starved by the score, who buried their dead in the frozen ground each morning and walked on, who ate the flesh of the animals that died in the traces and then ate worse. The trail west is salted with the graves of these people, unmarked, gone to grass. And they walked it not as conquerors going to seize a rich country, but as a hunted people going toward the one place they thought no one would follow, to build in a desert nobody else yet wanted. And when they came down at last out of the passes into the valley of the salt lake, there was no Zion waiting. There was sagebrush and alkali and a hard bright emptiness. There was a desert that had to be THE LONG WALK 15 made to bear, by hand, by ditch and dam and endless labor, out of a soil that did not want them either. And they set to it, because setting to it was the only faith left to perform. They did not arrive at the promise. They arrived at the raw material of a promise, and were told to build it themselves, and they did. And here my own blood comes into the history, at the very end of the long walk. The people called Moore came west out of that hunting and that trekking with nothing in their hands, and their promised Zion, when they reached it, was a canyon in a place called Tooele and a railroad boxcar abandoned and rusting on the floor of it. A box of iron on the dirt. And in that box, through the baking summers and the freezing winters, my grandmother lived out her childhood. Sit with that image, because it is the whole inheritance pressed into a single picture. The reward for crossing a continent on the strength of a belief that men had been murdered for was a steel box in a ditch. That was the milk and honey. And here is the marrow of it: they did not turn back, and they did not curse the promise, and they did not die. They made the box hold. They made the canyon feed them. A child grew up in that iron box and did not know she was poor, because poverty that does not surrender is not poverty — it is endurance, and endurance is the first and hardest doctrine of my whole line, older in me than any sigil. I did not first inherit my strength from the mob or the exodus, though those are in me too. I inherited it, before all the rest, from a little girl in a boxcar at the bottom of a canyon who would not be beaten by it. And the God of that hard country keeps a strange ledger, and I set its arithmetic here because it matters for what comes after. That same child grew, and married a man of the faith, and that man rose — from CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 16 what beginnings you can imagine — to become a captain of the city's police, and then the chief of them, in the great city beside the salt lake. From the bottom of a rusted boxcar to the chief's chair in a single turning of the generations. This is what the driven do when you fail to kill them. They do not merely survive the ditch. Given a generation, they climb out of it holding the keys to the city that would once have burned them. Remember the keys. They come down into my own hands, and they are about to matter. THE LONG WALK 17 Chapter Five THE BADGE AND THE PULPIT * * * The people who came down into that desert valley did not come as lambs, and any history that paints them meek has never read the record and is lying to your face. They came hardened. They had been hunted across a continent and had buried their children in the frozen road, and they arrived with a flint in them that the fire itself had struck — and in the mountains they did the thing that hunted peoples do when at last they hold ground of their own. They built a fortress. And a fortress is not kept by gentle men. It has its guardians, and its guardians were terrible, and I will not soften them, for their terribleness is part of the truth and this book has sworn off comfortable lies. There was a man named Orrin Porter Rockwell, friend to the founder from their boyhood, who became the most feared gun in the whole territory. A badly-set leg in his childhood had left him lame and mocked for it, and when a mob burned his family's home while they stood and watched, the boy made a vow that he would never be helpless again, and he made himself into a marksman such as the frontier had rarely seen. It was told among the people that a prophet had blessed him that no bullet nor blade should ever harm him so long as he never cut his hair — and he wore it long to the end of his days, and died at last in his bed, which for a man of his trade was a kind of miracle all its own. He was bodyguard to two prophets and a sworn CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 18 deputy of the law both at once, and men called him the Destroying Angel, and near the end of his life he spoke the words that the whole of that hard breed might have taken as their epitaph: I never killed anyone who didn't need killing. There was another they called Wild Bill Hickman, an enforcer and a spy, a man of many wives and many children and many killings, who rode as one of the deadliest guerrillas in the little war the Saints fought against the army of the United States. There was Lot Smith, who in that same war burned the supply trains of the American army and ran off its cattle and near halted an invading column without taking a single life, by fire and cunning alone. And there was a doctrine spoken in those hard years, a buried and terrible doctrine, that certain sins were so black that even the blood of Christ would not answer for them, and that the sinner must have his own blood shed to be made clean — and it was called blood atonement, and the church of today has fled from it as a man flees a house on fire. Hold that doctrine in your mind. It goes underground here, in this chapter, and it comes back up, transformed, in my own hands near the end of this book. I will not hide the dark edge of these men to make you love them. The same fire in them that would not kneel to a mob was the fire that, in an evil hour at a mountain meadow, would make some of them the murderers of innocents — but that is its own chapter, and I will not spend its horror here to buy these men a cheap glory. What I will say here is only this: these were men of real authority. When Rockwell spoke, or Hickman, or the chief of a frontier city, the word had weight, and the weight was the office, and the office meant something precisely because the men who filled it were not afraid, and everyone knew they were not afraid. THE BADGE AND THE PULPIT 19 And the badge came down into my own house, and it stayed there two full generations. My grandfather rose, as I have told you, to be the chief of the whole city's police — the boxcar child's husband, holding the keys to the city. And my father after him gave thirty years to the same work: not a chief behind a desk but a sergeant of the street, from his young manhood to his graying, thirty winters of it. And my father trained me — not in catechism, which no one in my house much troubled over, but in iron. He taught me the gun, the load and the aim and the care of it. He taught me to keep my own life with my own hands. He taught me watchfulness the way a devout man teaches his son to pray, as a thing you do daily until it is no longer a thing you do but a thing you are. I was armed and made wary by the man who loved me most. It is a strange inheritance to hand a boy, and I have never once been sorry to have it. And on the other side of my blood, on my mother's line, there runs a spring so near the source of the whole American story that the world knows its name even where it has forgotten every other Mormon who ever drew breath. Back through the old names of Camomile and Middleton, the blood runs up eight generations and more to a man called John Moses Browning — of Utah, and of the faith, and the greatest maker of firearms the American nation ever produced, the mind and the hand behind the guns that armed a century of soldiers. My father and my mother traced that line themselves, walking the names back one by one, and they tell it to me still, the way my people have always told the blood to their children — mouth to mouth, generation unto generation, no clerk and no court required. I do not set it here for a doubter to weigh in his scales. I set it here for my sons, that they may know whose water runs in them. The maker of the guns and the marker of the sigils are one river, eight bends apart, and the water CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 20 came all that way down and reached me. So in my house the gun and the God were never enemies. They were kin. They sat at the same table. And then, when I was grown, my father did a thing I could not forgive him for the better part of my life: he forbade me the badge. You have a mind, he said. Go and use it. Do some other thing than this. And it made me burn, for here was the very trade of my fathers, the shape of my own blood on both sides, and the man who had taught me the gun would not let me carry one for the city. So I went behind his back and put my name in to be a policeman without a word to him — and mark this, for it is the sharp point of the thing: I was already covered in the marks by then, the ink plain upon my hands and up my neck for any man to see. And still I passed. Every test they set me. Every interview. They looked at the marked man and found no fault in him and the door stood open before me. And then I turned around and walked away from the open door, partly for no nobler reason than that I would not be the thing my father was. But hear now the turning, for it is why his no was a pillar of my life and not merely a wound in it. In the years that followed I watched what became of the badge my father had worn. The officer who once carried true authority became, in my own time, a kind of little security guard hung about with cameras — watched and doubted and despised by the very people he was sworn to keep, second-guessed in every motion of his hands, the weight bled slowly out of the office until the badge was a costume with a lens pinned to its chest. A lawman of twenty years before, in the age when the office still carried its own gravity, I would have shined at. But in the age that actually came for it, I would have hated the work with the whole of my soul — the cameras, the crowd's ready hatred, the endless scrutiny, the authority hollowed out and handed back to me empty. My father, standing where he stood, could THE BADGE AND THE PULPIT 21 see the thing coming up the road that I in my youth and my anger could not see at all. He did not forbid me the badge because I was unfit for it. He forbade me because he was fit enough to read the wind, and he loved me enough to shut a door before it slammed on my hand. And is that not the very engine of this whole book? The lawman and the pulpit were broken to the same harness in the same years — the fierce office sanded smooth to please the camera and the crowd, the fierce faith sanded smooth to please the government and the general public. My own father performed the book's central act of discernment upon my life before ever I could perform it for myself. He saw an institution losing the very thing that had made it worth serving, and he steered his son clear of the wreck before it happened. Be something, he was telling me, though it took me half a life to hear the sentence under the sentence, that they cannot take the meaning out of. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 22 Chapter Six POLYGAMY SCORNED * * * Now we come to the first of the two proud things, the first of the two doctrines that made these people strange and hated and themselves — and to the first time the great church was made, under pressure, to let go of a thing it had bled to hold. And I must tell this one carefully and against the grain of everything you have been taught to feel, because you have been handed a cartoon in place of a history, and the cartoon is a lie that serves the people who drew it. Hear the thing you were never told. Plural marriage is not a perversion invented by frontier fanatics. It is one of the oldest and most widespread institutions in the whole religious history of mankind, and it runs straight down the spine of the very scriptures the West holds sacred. Open the book that Jew and Christian alike call holy. Abraham, the father of the faithful, the rock of three religions, had Sarah and he had Hagar. Jacob, whose twelve sons became the twelve tribes of Israel — the very foundation of the chosen people — got those sons upon Leah and Rachel and their two handmaids, four women, and the scripture does not blink at it. David the king, the man after God's own heart, had many wives. Solomon in his glory had more. The patriarchs upon whom the entire Hebrew and Christian story is built were, to a man, polygamists, and their scripture records it not as their shame but simply as the shape of their households. POLYGAMY SCORNED 23 Nor did it end in the deep past. Plural marriage persisted in Jewish practice for centuries into the common era. It is permitted under Islamic law to this very day, written into the fourth chapter of the Qur'an, that a man may take up to four wives under stated conditions. It has been permitted in Hindu law and in the custom of Bali. And in our own present moment — not in some vanished age but now, as you read this — polygamy remains legal or lawfully tolerated in something near fifty nations of the earth, across the whole breadth of the Middle East, across much of Africa, and among the Muslims of India and Malaysia and the Philippines. Whole civilizations, past and living, have held plural marriage to be a normal and honorable estate. It is the modern Christian West, and it alone, that has declared monogamy the only moral form and then forgotten that its own declaration is the young and local rule, not the ancient and universal one. When the Saints took up plural marriage, they were not inventing a sin. They were reaching back past the tamed present to the practice of Abraham, and they knew it, and they said so. And they believed it as doctrine, truly and to their bones — a restoration of the patriarchal order, bound up with their deepest hope of eternal families and the binding of generations. I will not pretend it was only ever a cold measure of survival, for that would be its own kind of lie, and a knowing reader would catch it and rightly doubt everything else I tell you. It was a belief. But hear now the other half, the half no sneering account will ever grant you, the half that turns the whole matter over in your hands and shows you its true face — for it was also survival, and the survival was real, and it was honorable, and it is the reason a whole people did not simply die out. Consider their situation with a clear and unsentimental eye. Here was a people being hunted. Their men died — in the mobbings, on the CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 24 long killing walk across the plains, in the guerrilla war against the army. A faith that made converts scarce made believing husbands scarce, and a widow of that faith, in that desert, with fatherless children and no kin and no state to catch her, had almost no road to survival at all. And into that hard arithmetic came plural marriage as a shelter. When a man was murdered or died on the trail, his brother or his friend took the widow and her children in under his own roof and his own name and his own protection — fed them, defended them, raised them, when there was no other roof in a thousand miles that would. Picture it truly. A brother taking his dead brother's wife and children under his arm because the alternative was to watch them starve in a ditch. That is not a harem. That is not appetite. That is a strong man shouldering a second family, and a third, and a fourth, because in that place and that hour there was no one else to shoulder them and letting them fall was not a thing an honorable man would do. And here is the plain truth that ought to end the sneering, and I say it as a man who knows the weight firsthand. I have one wife and three children, and I am a strong man, and there are days it puts me on my knees. It is hard — with a car and a grocery store and running water and a hundred conveniences those people never dreamed of, it is hard to provide for and protect and hold together one wife and three children. Now take away the century of conveniences. Take away the safety net. Put the man in a desert with no law but what he makes, and give him five wives and thirty children to feed and clothe and defend with his own two hands. That is not a man wallowing in pleasure. Pleasure is easy. That is a beast of burden. That is a workhorse carrying a whole village on his back across a wilderness. By the brutal arithmetic of that place, a man who could do such a thing and not break was among the very strongest of his entire generation, for the weak POLYGAMY SCORNED 25 men could not do it and did not. I will tell you the honest truth of what rises in me when I hear a soft modern person, safe behind every convenience, curl his lip and call those men perverts and their households sick. What rises in me is not anger, exactly. It is a kind of pity, for the smallness the sneer confesses. The man who says it is telling me, without knowing he is telling me, that he has never once in his life carried anything truly heavy — that he could not survive a single week of the load he mocks. I look at a man who kept five wives and thirty children alive in a desert with no help coming, and I do not see a predator. I see a savage and towering strength. I see the kind of man whose hand I would brace myself to shake, half expecting the shock of it to run up my arm and set me shivering. I would not fight such a man. I would not dream of it. And when they came, under the siege of a whole hostile nation, to give that practice up — that too is coming, in the next turn of this history — understand that they were not surrendering a pleasure. They were surrendering a shelter, a whole architecture of survival and belief woven together, and that is why the surrender cut so deep, and why it split the people as deeply as it did. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 26 Chapter Seven THE SIEGE AND THE SURRENDER * * * So the nation set itself to break that shelter, and it did break it, and the breaking is the first great instance in this history of a church surrendering under open force a doctrine it had bled to hold. Watch the shape of it closely, for the same shape will come again over a darker doctrine in the very next chapter. Law was piled upon law. First one act of Congress against the practice, then another heavier, then a third heavier still, each one tightening the screw — until the government was not merely fining and jailing men for their marriages but reaching for the throat of the church itself. Men were hunted down for their households and thrown into prison. The leaders went underground, or into exile, or into cells. And at the last the government moved to seize the very property of the church, to dissolve its legal right to exist as a body at all, to take the temples themselves. The whole edifice was brought to the actual edge of destruction — not the loss of a comfort, but the end of the church as a living institution. And under that siege, with the temples in the balance and the church's legal life all but forfeit, the president of the church announced that he had received the word of God, and in the year eighteen hundred and ninety he issued the Manifesto, and the practice of plural marriage THE SIEGE AND THE SURRENDER 27 was officially laid down. And when that first surrender did not fully take, a second and stricter Manifesto followed in the year nineteen hundred and four. Now here is a thing that must be said with great care, for it is the true hinge of this whole book, and two honest people may read it two ways and I will not cheat either of them. The leaders were cornered. Survival was on the table — not the survival of a preference but of the temples, the property, the very legal existence of the faith. A believer reads the Manifesto as God in His mercy granting His besieged people leave to preserve what could yet be preserved, revelation arriving through the hard door of circumstance. A skeptic reads it as raw necessity dressed in the borrowed robes of revelation, a business decision with a prophet's signature. And the plain evidence — cornered men, mortal stakes, a doctrine of two generations reversed in a season under the government's boot — fits both readings and settles neither one. I will not pretend to settle it for you, because I cannot, and any man who tells you he can is selling you his side. I will only point at the shape and make you look at it: a distinctive belief, held through fire for two generations, surrendered under open and documented pressure the moment the alternative became annihilation. Mark that shape. It is about to repeat. And mark, too, what the surrender produced, for here the pattern branches yet again exactly as it branched at the prophet's death. Not all would let go. There were those who held that a thing God had commanded could not be uncommanded by the pressure of Washington, and that the church, in surrendering, had itself fallen into apostasy. And these walked. Out of them came the fundamentalist branches that endure to this day — and the cleanest and quietest specimen of them all is the body that came to be called the Apostolic CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 28 United Brethren, the group men name for the Allred family that led it, though its own people call it simply the Work, or the Priesthood. Attend to the AUB, because it is the perfect and instructive case. It was no wild and lurid cult. It was moderate, and near-cooperative; it held the great mainstream church to be a true if fallen and diminished institution; it did no missionary work of its own and sent out no preachers; and some of its people even kept their standing in the mainstream church, that they might still enter its temples. These were people who had walked in order to keep a thing, not to burn everything down behind them. And yet the old frontier violence had not finished even with them — for their leader Rulon Allred was shot dead in his own office in the year nineteen hundred and seventy and seven, murdered on the order of a rival prophet of a rival sect. The killing of prophets did not end at Carthage in 1844. It reached into living memory, into the era of the automobile and the telephone. So here is the first full face of the law. A church, hunted for a distinctive belief, having held that belief through fire for two generations, at last surrenders it to survive — and in the surrender breaks faith with a portion of its own most fervent, who will not surrender, and who walk away to keep what the body has laid down. The institution bent in order to live. And a boy not yet born would one day feel, in his own small and bitter war, the underside of that very bending — would learn in his own flesh what it is when the body you belong to decides that its own survival is worth more than its promise to you. But that boy is still chapters away. Here, only fix the shape in your mind: the proud thing surrendered under siege, and the faithful splitting over the surrender, some walking to keep a truth. THE SIEGE AND THE SURRENDER 29 Chapter Eight THE BAN * * * Now we come to the second of the two proud things, and it is the darker by far, and I will tell it without flinching in either direction — for I will neither spare the church a truth that shames it nor slander it with a lie, and both the sparing and the slander are betrayals of the record, and this book long ago swore them both off. Hear first a thing that is very often forgotten, because it inconveniences every side at once. At the founding there was no ban. In the earliest days a black man named Elijah Abel was ordained to the priesthood and served as a missionary, and there exists no trustworthy record that any man was denied the priesthood for the color of his skin in the founder's own lifetime. The bar came later. It was in the year eighteen hundred and fifty and two, under Brigham Young, in the Utah territory, that the thing was spoken plainly into policy: that men of black African descent should not hold the priesthood nor enter the temple. And to justify a bar that had not come from the founder, hard doctrines were built up over the generations that followed — that the dark skin was the mark of an ancient curse, a sign of divine disfavor; that such souls had been less than valiant in a life before this one and wore their lesser valor as their color. These things were taught from the pulpits as the doctrine of God for more than a century. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 30 And in those same hard fortress years the fierceness of this people bred its single blackest hour, and I will set it down plainly because a history that hides its subject's worst crime has forfeited the right to be believed about anything. In the autumn of the year eighteen hundred and fifty and seven, at a place called Mountain Meadows, a company of emigrants passing peaceably through the territory on their way to the far coast was set upon — not by outside enemies but by the Saints' own militia, with some local allies. They were besieged, and then they were approached under a white flag of truce and a promise of safe passage, and they laid down their arms on that promise, and then they were fallen upon and slaughtered. Men, women, and children, near a hundred and twenty souls, murdered under the broken flag; only the smallest children were spared, as too young to ever testify to what had been done. This was no deed of the mobs that had hunted them. This was done by the hunted people, by the same fierceness that had crossed the plains and burned the army's wagons, turned now upon the innocent and the trusting. I set the massacre here beside the ban on purpose, that you may hold the two of them in one hand at the same time and feel the true and terrible weight of this people. Hunted victim and murdering hunter. Burned innocent and burner of innocents. In the same generation, sometimes in the very same man. Any account that hands you only the martyr is a comfort and a lie. Any account that hands you only the monster is a slander and a lie. The truth — the harder, fuller, more human truth — is that a people can be both at once, and this people was both, and you must carry both or you have not understood them at all. And the ban endured. It endured through the whole long climb of the church up out of the desert and into wealth and respectability. It endured past the freeing of the slaves, past the winning of civil rights, THE BAN 31 past the point where the surrounding nation had moved on and left the doctrine stranded and glaring. It endured until the eighth day of June in the year nineteen hundred and seventy and eight, when the president of the church announced that the word of God had come, and the priesthood and the temple were opened to all worthy men without regard to the color of their skin. And the great mass of the people received it with weeping and with joy. But not all. Some had believed the old teaching too long and too deeply to let it go, and among the fundamentalist branches were those who judged that the church had once again caved to the pressure of a watching world — and the quiet AUB, which had so long kept a foot in both houses, now shut its door against the mainstream temple over exactly this, and grew in numbers from the very split. And at the last, in the year two thousand and thirteen, the church published an essay that disavowed the old justifications outright and by name: that the dark skin had never been a curse, that no race stood higher or lower than another in the sight of God, that the theories of the past had been the errors of men and never the doctrine of Heaven. Now mark the shape, and mark with all your attention how it differs from the polygamy, for in that difference lies the hardest and most important lesson of this entire book. In both cases a distinctive thing was surrendered under the pressure of a watching world. The shapes rhyme. But here is the knife's edge that splits them: the polygamy may well have been a thing they should have been left in peace to keep — ancient, scriptural, honorable, a shelter and a belief — while the ban was a thing they should never for one day have held at all. It was a poison, and its surrender was a cleansing, however late and however pressured. And so the walking divides by its cause. When men walked out of the church to keep plural marriage, a fair person may CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 32 argue they walked to keep faith with something true. When men walked out of the church to keep the ban, they walked to keep a poison in their veins and called it faith. Do you see it? The same brave act — the split, the refusal to bend, the walking away to preserve what the body surrendered — and opposite verdicts fall upon it, and nothing tells the two apart except the rightness of the belief itself. This is the thing I most need you to carry out of this book, above every other thing, and it is the hard stone at the center of the whole matter. It is not enough to be strong enough to leave when the body loses its beliefs. The strength to break is common as dirt. Any fool with a grievance can walk out a door and call himself a prophet for it. The leaving is only ever as good as the judgment behind it. A man who walks away to preserve a truth and a man who walks away to preserve a cruelty have performed the very same brave and lonely act — and the one is a prophet and the other is a zealot, and only the rightness of the thing they carried out the door will ever tell you which is which. So when you meet a man — and you will, for I am nearly one of them — who walked out of his church and would have you believe that the walking itself made him righteous, do not grant it to him for free. It never does. Ask him always, and ask it hard: what did you walk out to keep? THE BAN 33 Chapter Nine THE WITCH AND THE SAINT * * * Now I must reach back behind all of it — behind Missouri, behind the founder, behind the very dream of the church — to the oldest rhyme of this whole long song. For the pattern I have shown you working itself out among the Saints is not the invention of the Saints. It is as old as belief and power standing together in one field, and its deepest and most terrible form is the one the winners of history named witchcraft. Hear the truth of that word, for it has been lied about for five hundred years and the lie still walks around wearing the clothes of common sense. The winners did not discover witches. They manufactured them. There were among the people, as there have always been, the keepers of the old knowledge — the healers, the midwives, the readers of signs, the ones who held the rites and remedies that ran back before the new faith had come to conquer the old — and the new faith, having won, needed a thing to burn, needed an enemy to point at, and so it took the old ways and painted over their face the face of the devil. It invented the pact with Satan, the midnight sabbath, the black book, the compact signed in blood. The witch, as a thing to be hunted, was a costume — a costume the winners cut and stitched and then forced onto the body of the pagan, so that there would be a crime on the books to answer for, a shape to put to the fire. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 34 And then they hunted the costume they themselves had sewn. Across three centuries of Europe, something near a hundred thousand souls were dragged before the courts for it, and forty to sixty thousand of them were killed, the most of them women. And the manner of it must be told plainly, for its grotesquerie is not a garnish on the history but the very heart of what men will do to what they fear. The confessions that damned them were manufactured under torture — the accused had her thumbs crushed slowly in iron screws, her legs crushed in the boot until the bone was pulp, her body hauled up by the wrists and hung from the ceiling until her shoulders tore, and this continued until she confessed to flying through the night air and to lying with the devil, whose body, one poor broken woman told her torturers to satisfy them, was cold, and smaller than her husband's. And the law itself was the trap that held her: in the German lands a single magistrate was at once her judge and her investigator and her prosecutor, she was allowed no counsel to speak for her, the questioning was done in secret, torture was required to produce the confession, and the sentence the confession earned was death by fire. And the machine was built to feed itself, for the torture that made the innocent confess also made her, in her agony, name others — a neighbor, a rival, anyone to make the pain stop — and so a single accusation would spawn a hunt that consumed a village. On one day in one German town, a hundred and thirty-three people were burned. And the ones the fire took were almost always the powerless: the widow with land some man wanted, the woman alone with no husband to shield her, the sharp-tongued healer whom the village had always half-feared. Now lay that beside what was done to the Saints — the burned homes, the child shot beneath the bellows, the extermination order THE WITCH AND THE SAINT 35 signed into law, the families driven across a frozen state — and feel how the two hunts rhyme, bone for bone. Both peoples hunted by law, the machinery of courts and orders and magistrates turning mob terror into legal righteousness. Both made into a manufactured menace by rumor before they were made into ash by fire. Both destroyed by a comfortable majority that had decided their difference was a crime. The grotesque particulars on either side are not there to sicken you for sport. They are there so the rhyme lands in your gut, where truth actually lives, and not merely in your head, where it can be filed and forgotten. But now hear the one place where the rhyme breaks, for the breaking is the most important thing in this chapter and perhaps in the book. The witch was almost always innocent of the very thing she died for. There was no coven. There was no real craft behind the accusation, no true pact, no power at all — only an imagined evil, sewn into a costume and forced onto the helpless, and then burned. But the Saints were actually there. They were actually organized, actually numerous, actually practicing the forbidden thing, actually building a power that could vote as one body and answer force with force. So the witch-hunt destroyed the powerless for a pure fantasy, while the Mormon-hunt tried to destroy the powerful for something that was really, dangerously there. One people had no fire in them and were burned regardless. The other people were the fire, and were hunted precisely because everyone could feel the heat of them. And yet — and here is the thing they share, the thing that is the whole point and the whole inheritance — when the world will not abide what you are, and when it cannot reach in and kill the belief itself no matter how much of your flesh it burns, the belief does not die. It goes underground. The old gods went into the deep woods and put on CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 36 the names of Christian saints so that their feast days might still be kept and their people might still find them. The craft went into whispered recipes and hidden marks and the things a grandmother teaches only in the last year of her life. Conceal, and continue. This is the oldest survival of every hunted thing, older than any church, and I confess to you now that it is the thing I have done in my own body — and it is time I stopped speaking only of the dead and told you how the pattern came all the way down and surfaced, at last, in one living man. That is the next chapter, and it is mine. THE WITCH AND THE SAINT 37 Chapter Ten THE ACTOR * * * I told you at the doorway that I would show you where the history surfaced in one living man. Here he is. Here I am. And I will not spare myself, for a witness who flatters himself is no witness at all. I was not raised in the faith the way the faithful are raised, and this matters, for it set the crack in me early. My mother came into the church a convert, to marry my father. In our house there was drink kept quiet behind the cupboard door, and we went up to the meeting now and again — not for the doctrine of it, which no one in that house ever sat me down and taught, but for the order and the belonging and the structure of the thing. I never once read the scriptures as a boy. And the children of the faithful at the school would not have me among them, for I was too wild, too loud, too much, and they drew back from me the way a hand draws back from a hot stove. So that by my eighteenth year I hated the whole of it — hated the valley, hated my girl, hated my father and my mother — and I looked upon a mission not as any call from God but as a door out of a house that was burning down around me. It was an escape, and I have never once pretended otherwise. And here, at the very threshold of my going, the Lord set two men in my path, one hard behind the other, and they were not alike, and the whole of this book lives in the difference between them. I went first to a bishop and I laid the whole catalog of my sins before him and told CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 38 him I meant to serve, and he looked at a young man who had never so much as opened the book he proposed to go and preach, and he said: No. Be good for a year, and then we will see. And I felt the door shut, and I felt in my bones that the year would never come. But a month later I came into another ward, and there was another bishop there, and he already knew me, for he knew my father, and he was the warden of the prison. And I tell you he was a real man, not a sheep like the first — his name was Turly, and he believed in me, which no man of the church had yet troubled himself to do. He drew me aside and asked me, plainly, if there was anything I wished to get off my chest, and I told him no, I had confessed it all to the last bishop already. And he looked at me a long moment and asked if I thought I was ready. And I said yes. I need this. And he said: Well then. Let us fill out your papers today. That is the whole of the difference between the two kinds of men who hold authority. One saw a problem and shut a door. The other saw a man and opened one. I will carry Bishop Turly's name to my grave with honor, for he is the very thing this book is homesick for. I will not tell the whole of my mission here — that is a book of its own, and I will write it in its place. I will tell you only the wound, and what the wound began. I served two years, and near the very end of them, with the whole race all but run, a new president came over the mission, and to show the mission whose hand now held it he cleaned house — sent a score of us home in a single week, that every soul remaining might learn to fear him. And I was among the twenty. And hear what I was sent home for, for the smallness of it is the entire point and the entire wound: I went to a picture-house to see a Batman film with my companion, a gentle nerdish soul who loved it, and I told him it was all right to go. I went to a Halloween party. I kissed an older woman, once, upon the mouth. I drank a single beer. I went swimming, THE ACTOR 39 one time. That is the whole of the charge sheet. There was no fornication. There was no black sin. There was nothing that a reasonable man would break a boy over — and they broke me over it. I came home confused and broken and ashamed, ashamed for a thing that did not merit shame, and the leaders would not so much as tell my own father and mother what their son had been returned for. And mark how I came home: strong. Two years on a fixed-gear bicycle had built my legs like a frog's, and my chest was hewn hard, and I had put on fifteen pounds of new muscle, and I came home looking like a man of war with no beard and no ink yet upon me, and I still wore my garments upon my body in faith. And they brought me before ten men, of whom I knew but one, and these ten took from me my Return With Honor, and stripped from me the rights of my priesthood, and put me outside the fellowship, and would not let me stand before the congregation and speak my homecoming word as every returning missionary is given to do. It was cruel, and it was done in the dark, and I will let the cruelty stand there in the dark and speak for itself, for I do not need to guess at the hearts of those ten men to show you plainly what their hands did. And they told me — as such men always tell you — that I might earn it all back. So I did. Hear me: I did. For six months I played their game to the very letter, and proved myself, and performed every proof of worthiness they set before me, and at the end of it they gave it all back into my hands, my full membership and my priesthood and my standing, restored. And I accepted it. And then I disappeared. I went dark, and I did not come back. For I had learned by then the thing this whole book is built to teach, though I could not yet have said it in words — that when the body you belong to will break a strong man over a picture-show and a single beer to prove a small man's mastery, CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 40 then it has lost the power to hold its own beliefs, and the faithful thing is not to rage and not to grovel and not to stay. I earned back everything they had taken, so that they and I would both know that I could. And then I would not give them the keeping of it. They did not deserve me. That was the first time I walked. And I see now, from here, that it was not a fall at all. It was the first time in my life I chose the belief over the building. I only did not yet know where I was walking to. Where I was walking to was down. I went into a far country and spent myself in it — rich and poor, married and divorced, every drug and every rule broken and some kept too, that I might try both roads and know them — and I came at last to a low place that had no floor. And it was there, in the very middle of the falling and at no clean and tidy bottom, that the old craft found me. I did not go seeking it; I want that understood. It came to me in the dark and laid its hand on me and did not turn away as the church had, and as the schoolyard had, and as the ten men had. The marks, the sigils, the old signs the winners had named witchcraft — they knew me, and they took me up, and I tell you as plainly as I know how to say a thing: they pulled me up out of hell and set my feet on ground. And once I had ground again I did not merely stand upon it. I climbed. The pursuit of the thing remade me so entirely that I will not shrink from the word for it, though I know how it will sound in soft ears: it made me godlike — not a god to be bowed to, but a man handed at last a command over his own life that he had never in his days been permitted to hold, a clarity and a mastery I had been taught could come only from an office that other men would grant me or withhold. And here it was, given freely into my own hands by no authority but my own study and my own will. I was made new. And the people who had THE ACTOR 41 known me all my life looked up one day and did not know the thing they were looking at — and they did not love it. They feared it. And this is the cruelest turn of the whole story and the one that binds me to every hunted thing before me: the stronger I became, the harder they drew back. I had climbed up out of hell under my own power and made myself whole, and my reward was to be shunned harder than ever I was shunned for being weak. There is no forgiving a man his strength when your whole comfort depends on his staying small. So I did what my blood and every hunted thing before me has always done. I did not renounce it. I took it underground — and the underground was my own skin. I drove the whole of it, the marks and the knowledge and the power and the thing I had become, down beneath the surface of me, under the ink, into secret, where their eyes could still reach but their understanding never could. What they could see, they could not read. I made my own body the hiding place, the way the pagans made the deep woods theirs. Conceal, and continue. And then, because even a hunted man must still walk out among them and buy his bread and be spoken to, I learned the last and subtlest craft of all the hunted, which is the craft of the mask. I became an actor in my own life. I altered my very countenance, so that my face gave each man back the face he expected to see. I changed my language, and spoke to each in the tongue that would not frighten him. I changed my bearing and my focus and the whole outward show of me, and I played, for each company, the character that company required — the son my parents could sit beside without grief, the friend my friends could bear, the tolerable and unremarkable man the world would let pass by without reaching for its torches. And I played him well. And not one of them, in all those years, ever knew that the man they were speaking to was not there — that while they spoke to the actor, the real one stood CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 42 elsewhere, alone, in the dark, keeping the truth of himself where they could not get at it. The polite and tolerable man they finally made their peace with was the costume. The thing they had shunned and driven under my skin was the person. I did not vanish when I went dark. I only stopped letting them see me. And it worked, and it kept me alive, and it cost me very nearly everything — for a man who is never once seen is a man who is always, always alone. THE ACTOR 43 Chapter Eleven THE PROXY AND THE BLOOD * * * Now hear a matter of doctrine, for it is the hidden hinge upon which my whole turning swung, and it reaches all the way back to the hardest and most buried teaching of those frontier men. At the very center of the faith I was born into, as at the center of all the Christianity that surrounds it, there stands one great load-bearing beam, and it is this: that another has paid the price of your sins. That a proxy stood in your place and bled, so that you might walk free of your own reckoning. It is called the substitutionary atonement, and it holds up the whole house, and I was handed it as a child is handed whatever it is handed, without ever being asked to weigh it in my own hand. But recall now the buried frontier doctrine I set before you back among the enforcers — the blood atonement, the hard teaching those hard men once spoke, that certain debts are so grave that the blood of the proxy will not answer for them, and that a man must shed his own blood to be made clean. The church of today fled from that doctrine and is ashamed to have ever held it. And yet I tell you plainly that I have taken it up again — not as they meant it, not as a punishment the church lays upon a man from above, but turned, the way a key is turned in a lock, into a sovereignty that a man seizes for himself from below. And I will tell you how the world itself, in a small and ordinary way, taught me to turn it. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 44 The first mark I ever wore was set into my skin by a man, and the name of that man was Jesus. I paid him money, and he gave me a wound and an ampersand — a single character, and, which is to say there is more — and I took it after the ending of my first marriage, when the story had run all the way out and I would not let the book close. And the second man I paid to mark me botched his work, and I paid him twice for it, once for the ruining and once again for the mending. And there, in that small and stupid and ordinary ruin, the whole great doctrine cracked open in my hands, and I heard myself say in my own heart: if any man is to ruin me, let it be me. If any blood is to be spilled for my own doings, let it be my own blood. So I bought the needle, and I taught myself upon my own leg, and from that day I have paid my own price, in my own blood, for every mark I bear. And do you see what I had done, years before I had any words to name it? I had fired the proxy. I had looked at the entire doctrine of another man bleeding in my place, and I had said: no. I do not want it. I will own my reckoning. I do not need a proxy. I had rejected the great load-bearing beam of the whole house I was raised in — not in an argument, not in a book, but in ink, on my own leg, in the dark, with my own hand. And I had reached, without knowing that I reached, all the way back past the meek and tidy modern church to its own most savage and buried thing, and I had picked that thing up off the ground where they had dropped it, and made it mine, and made it no longer a punishment but a freedom. And I keep the doctrine still, even now, even in the small hours of this very night as I lay black ink slowly over the back of my own hand. For most men who do this work wipe the skin between the passes with a soft cloth, a damp and gentle rag, a small mercy against the sting. I do not. I clean each pass with a stinging alcohol pad, and the burn of it is THE PROXY AND THE BLOOD 45 chosen, deliberately, every time — for I will not accept even that small anesthetic, will not permit even that little proxy to stand between me and the full and rightful price of my own doing. The sting is my own signature, written fresh on every pass. No one else runs my show. And the mark that the man named Jesus set upon me, the ampersand, the there is more — it goes under the black this night along with all the rest, and not to erase it, for it did its whole and faithful work, but because it was the one signature upon my body that was never my own. I fired Jesus, and I took up the needle, and the hand speaks now in a single voice, and that voice, at long last, is mine. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 46 Chapter Twelve THE BLACKOUT * * * And so we come to the last of it, and to the dark of a morning, and to a man sitting alone at a table while his whole house sleeps, laying black ink slowly and patiently over the back of his own hand. I have shown you the whole pattern now, traced down two hundred years and into one living body. The founding that was itself a rejection. The burning that would not make a people let go. The prophet murdered and the church split over how his fallen mantle should pass. The long killing walk, and the boxcar at the end of it, and the keys to the city one generation on. The two proud things, the polygamy and the ban, surrendered under the siege of a watching world — and the faithful splitting yet again over the surrender, some walking to keep a truth and some walking to keep a poison, and only the rightness of the thing to tell the prophet from the zealot. The oldest rhyme underneath it all, the hunted belief that will not die but goes underground and wears a borrowed name to live. And, in each turn of it, one living man in whom the whole long pattern surfaced again — not because he is large, but because he is the proof the pattern is not finished, the aftershock that finally learned the name of its earthquake. For hear what has become, in our own soft day, of that fierce faith. It has been sanded smooth. The fire that crossed a continent and buried its children in the frozen road and would not surrender its belief even THE BLACKOUT 47 under a lawful order of extermination — that fire has been planed and polished down into a thing the government and the crowd can comfortably abide, a mild Sunday face, a tidy and inoffensive and tolerable church. And I was born just after the taming, carrying the old undomesticated fire in my chest with nowhere left to put it. I go and I sit among them, and they stare at the marks on my hands and up my neck, and they draw back — and not one of them knows that the man they will not sit beside is the fiercest believer in the whole room. A man cast out for nothing, who earned his way back and then walked away on purpose; who went down into hell and was hauled out of it; who fired the proxy and took his own reckoning in his own blood. They see a tattooed madman who fell in with witches. They do not see that he is only the last man in a two-hundred-year line who could still tell when the vessel had stopped holding the water. I do not attend anymore, not as a member among members. Not out of bitterness — I honor what that church was, I honor the boxcar and the exodus and the blood that bought my very existence — but because I can see plainly that its shape and mine no longer hold each other, and I respect us both far too much to stand there and fake it. And here I must set down, side by side, the two men who taught me by their opposite examples what a faith is and what it costs, and they are my father and myself. For my father — the thirty-year lawman, the man whose eye could read the wind coming for the badge before I could, the man who trained my very hands — my father now stands in the house I was raised in and denounces it all aloud: Brigham, and the founder, and the believers, the whole of it, cast out of him entire. He kept the practice of the thing for the better part of a lifetime and then threw out the belief. And I, the marked one, the one they would call the apostate, the one who fell further than my father ever dreamed of falling — I CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 48 never once denounced it. Even at my lowest and my darkest I said only that I was not active. I have always known my name still stood in their books. I still, now and again, walk into a meeting house, ink and all, and I feel safe there, and I am not lying when I say it. Not weak and strong, understand — that is the wrong frame and I set it down and choose a truer one. My father is not a weak man; no weak man wears that badge for thirty years. My father is a man gone blind. The one trained his whole life to observe, to read a room and a road and a wind, has gone blind to the one fire that made him, blind to the inheritance in his own blood, and denounces the very thing that is the deep source of his own hard strength. And I, who was never fooled for one moment about what I still belonged to even as I hid it under my skin — I could see. That is the whole and grievous irony of it, and I set it here in the book with grief and not with contempt, because a son ought to grieve his father's blindness and not spit upon it, and because my own sons will one day read exactly how I spoke here of the man who fathered me. It is the book's own hard lesson turned upon my own house: that the eye to know what is worth keeping is rarer than any strength, rarer even than a lifetime of hard-won sight — and that a man may have every strength and every skill of observation and still go blind to the one thing that mattered most. So I have learned the exile's hard and final answer, and it is this: the old fierce church that could have held a man like me is gone, and I will not find it standing anywhere on the earth, and so I must be it. I have three children. Three children is a congregation. I am the prophet and the guardian and the whole standing frontier for them, and I will raise them in the old fierce shape with all the fire the modern church let go cold, and I will teach them the one thing this whole book was written to teach: that a belief is only ever as good as your judgment of it, and that THE BLACKOUT 49 when the body you belong to can no longer hold what is true, you take the true thing quietly off the surface where they can seize it, and you carry it down into the dark, and you keep it, and you continue. And that is what the blacking of my hand has been, all this long night. It is not vanity and it is not erasure. It is the whole doctrine of this book performed upon my own body. I am doing to my own marks exactly what the pagans did to their gods and the fundamentalists did to their kept faith and every hunted soul in this whole history has always done: I am taking the sacred thing off the surface, where it can be read and punished, and I am burying it where it will survive whole. The black is not the grave of the mark. The black is the woods. And I go slow, and I go sober, and I take the full sting of every single pass — because unlike a certain bad and drunken night whose foolish red I am covering over even now, this time I am the one who runs my show, and no one else, and I will feel the whole price of my own hand and be glad of it. And in this hour, while I work, one of my sons is awake beside me. His name is Maverick — the unbranded one, who will go his own way — and he kicks and turns in the dark and keeps a watch he is far too small to understand. His brother Malachai sleeps on, and his sister, and their mother, and it is my shift to be awake and to listen for them, that the rest of my house may sleep soundly. Maverick will not remember this night. But it is written now, and that is the whole reason it was written — so that the record cannot be lost, the way I once learned to write what mattered into my own skin in a season when I was losing my memory, because the skin is the one archive they cannot seize and cannot burn and cannot lock away even from a man in a cell. I made my body the vault. And now I make this book a second vault, against the same forgetting. CONCEAL AND CONTINUE 50 So hear the last word, whoever you are, and hear it especially if you are the one I wrote this whole thing for — you who are tired past telling, and cast out, and certain in your bones that the fight is no longer worth the finishing. You come from something. Whether it runs in your literal blood as it runs in mine, or whether it is only your share of the long human inheritance of every hunted thing that ever refused to lie down and die — you come from people who were burned and did not stop believing, who were driven and did not stop rising, who were scorned and did not stop being what they were, but only learned to carry it deeper, down where it could not be taken from them. The fire did not go out. Hear me. The fire did not go out. It went under. It is under you at this very moment, in the dark, banked and waiting, and the only thing it waits on is for you to stop mistaking the cold ash on the surface for the death of the thing beneath. Get up. There is more. There is always, always more. Conceal, and continue. * * * Conceal, and continue.