Re: A Great and Dreadful Day, Part V: Blood Atonement
Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2017 1:01 am
- FORTY-SEVEN -
It was past midnight when Sam, Christian, and Don finally reached the cabin outside of Ely. They could smell sagebrush in the air when they climbed out of the close confinement of the car, and the patches of snow on the ground were crunchy and frozen underfoot. They made their way up the walkway, and Cathy met them at the door.
“Good grief,” she said, shaking her head, with tears in her eyes. “Good grief.”
On the drive over, Christian had debriefed Sam on what had happened. Apparently, one of the group’s members had tried to get in touch with Gary following their meeting that same night, but there was no answer. This member—his name was Evan—had forgotten his glasses, or something to that effect, and he wanted to come by and get them, but Gary wasn’t answering his phone:
So Evan goes by to try and get the glasses, and he sees that all the lights are on in the house, but no one comes to answer the door. No one responds to him ringing the doorbell. At this point he’s getting a little worried. What if something happened to him? It’s not like he’s especially old or anything, but it’s not unheard of for a man his age to suffer a heart attack or a stroke. So Evan tries the front door, but it’s locked. Next he starts to work his way around the perimeter of Gary’s house, looking into the windows to see if he can maybe see him collapsed on the ground, or anything like that, but there’s nothing. He goes through the gate at the side of the house and heads around back, and he finds that the French doors have been left open. They’re just wide open to the cold, and the logs in the fireplace are still orange and glowing. Gary is just damned gone. Like he up and walked off.
At this point, Evan is getting freaked out, so he high-tails it out of there. As he’s leaving, he remembers something, which is that, driving up—like, driving up on the street that turns onto Gary’s street—he’d seen these two guys stopped at the stop sign, and they look just like Church people. Like missionaries, you know? Or Church Security agents.
So the question is: Did they do something to Gary? I’d put my money on “Yes” being the answer.
In the wake of this, a decision was made to clear out of Reno. Bennett had decided that it wasn’t safe to stay there any longer, hence why Sam had been summoned over to the Eldorado, though what had happened in the time between the call and Sam’s arrival was unclear. Apparently, Bennett had decided that it was too risky to wait, and had found another way out.
Sam, Christian, and Don went into the cabin and huddled around the table, drinking the hot cocoa that Cathy had made. They all asked about Bennett, but Cathy would only shrug her shoulders.
“I talked to him,” she said, “but I can’t say where he is.” It wasn’t clear whether she wouldn’t say because she didn’t know, or because she was unwilling to reveal the answer.
As they sat there, she told them the news about DeWitt Kelly. They didn’t have all the details yet, but based on what she’d been able to learn, DeWitt had committed suicide sometime early that morning.
“There is literally no way,” said Don. “No way in hell. It’s not in his constitution.”
“I don’t believe it either,” said Cathy.
“You think he was murdered?” said Sam.
“I didn’t want to be the one to say it,” she replied.
He frowned. “Why, though?”
“It makes perfect sense,” said Christian. “This is the Church lashing out, getting revenge for the bombing.”
“But I thought we had nothing to do with that? Isn’t that what Bennett said?”
Christian and Cathy looked at each other, and Cathy rose abruptly to get something from the kitchen.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Christian. “These guys in the Church think they’re Judges over Israel, and they have the power and the wherewithal to mete out justice however they see fit. And if they had singled out Gary and DeWitt as major apostate players, then it makes sense that they would go after them.”
Sam stood up. He felt as if he couldn’t sit still. He felt exhausted and paranoid, too, and like he wanted to put his fist through the wall. “What’s our next move?” he asked.
“For now we lay low. None of us has all the facts—I mean, we barely have any of the facts, so we need to just sit tight and wait for Bennett.”
“Yeah, speaking of which: where the “F” is Bennett? That sack of crap hung me out to dry up in the Eldorado, for “F”’s sake. I had some smooth-faced, crew-cutted Mormon bastard breathing down my neck, looking to put a bullet into me—”
“Take it easy, Sam,” said Christian. The three of them looked at each other for a few moments, and then Christian went on: “You’re free to believe whatever you want. You can leave whenever you want to.”
“Jesus Christ. What’s next? A lecture on free agency?”
“Just listen.” He held up his hand. “All of this, everything that’s been going down—all of it—it has its basis in Church history and doctrine. They’re doing this because it’s all laid out in D&C 123. They think they’ve got a scriptural mandate to spy on people, and, if necessary, to take them out. That’s what they believe. It’s written into the doctrine.”
“Lilburn Boggs all over again?” said Cathy.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. But there is a precedent for all of this. It definitely happened in the early days, and during the time of Brigham Young. All of that is documented historical fact. There’s generally been no need for that sort of thing here in the 20th Century, though. The Church has adopted other means of dealing with problem people. But the more important point is that it always could happen. Like I said, this is woven into the doctrine and the culture of the Church itself. You get the right things falling into place, and sure: it’s possible. You seem to forget what you were like as a believer.”
“I never would have believed any of this crap when I was still a full-fledged member,” said Sam. “I would have told you that you were an anti-Mormon idiot.”
“But you believed that the Brethren were men called of God, right? That they were literally Prophets, Seers, and Revelators, did you not?”
Sam shrugged.
“Of course you believed that. And they believe it too. It’s entrenched. All of those old bastards are so sutured in to the culture of the Church. They’ve been embedded into it for all of their adult lives, and with their whole seniority/hierarchy thing, nothing is ever going to change. That’s how it works. The guys in the First Presidency are old buzzards who pass on their views to the next generation of old buzzards and all the old beliefs and ideas are preserved in perpetuity. But what I’m getting at is the sheer arrogance of it. The presumptuousness. Can you see yourself as being, literally, a prophet? Absolute power corrupts, and there is no more powerful position—at least in the person’s own mind—than the power of being the sole holder of all of the keys to the priesthood. So these guys will do whatever they goddamn please. Just think about the Laffertys, for example. This is dangerous stuff.”
Sam sat down on the back of the sofa, with his hands resting in his lap. He looked down at the floor. By now Cathy had returned to her old spot at the table.
“What do you think of all this?” Sam asked her.
She shrugged. “Chris has a point,” she said. “The arrogance of the leaders is pretty much undeniable. Some are worse than others. Pitt, for example.”
“But do you buy into all this conspiracy stuff? Do you really buy that the Brethren would actually sign off on murder?”
She shrugged again. “The Church operates in a culture of secrecy. It’s impossible to know anything with much certainty. Anything’s possible, I guess. And if what they said was true, about President Baylor being incapacitated, and with Pitt taking the reins. I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would wait for approval from the rest of the Brethren.”
There was quiet in the room again. Then Don spoke up: “Still no word from Bennett?” he said to Cathy.
“Maybe later tonight,” she said.
Sam hadn’t moved from his spot on the back of the sofa. He was thinking about what had happened back at the Eldorado. Had the man really been chasing him, and had he been an agent of the Church? It certainly felt that way. He still couldn’t shake the feeling, the terror he’d felt as he fled down the stairwell. But these days he was unsure about trusting his feelings and intuitions. It seemed a bit too much like what he’d been told to do as a loyal Mormon.
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” he said. “Why wasn’t anyone there at the Eldorado?”
“Well, I thought I already explained to you that it was probably because Bennett got spooked and took off before you got there,” Christian said.
“That’s exactly it,” said Cathy.
Sam remembered something: “You know, there was this strange message on the mirror.” He closed his eyes, so as to recall it: “It said, ‘My life is threatened by a little dough-head.’ What in the “F” does that mean? Do you know?”
Cathy looked to Christian for explanation. He was frowning. He looked at Cathy, and then back at Sam. “Apparently, Bennett wanted to deliver a message to you,” he said. “That phrase turns up in the journals of Joseph Smith, but Bennett’s version is leaving something out. The actual sentence reads, ‘My life is threatened by a Brutus and a little dough-head.’”
“So, then, what does that mean?”
“Well, I guess it means that Bennett smells a rat. That we’ve got a traitor on our hands.”
That night, Sam slept fitfully on a cot in what was apparently the home office of the cabin. The room had a bookcase with shelves that were lined with books on Mormonism—The Miracle of Forgiveness; McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine; works by B.H. Roberts, and others. Some were critical books that had been written by counter-cult ministries. There was an old Commodore on the desk, and a Remington typewriter nestled in the corner of the room.
When he woke up, a crack of daylight was showing at the edges of the curtains. He cleared the crust out of the corners of his eyes and sat up and looked dazedly at the room. Where am I? And what am I doing here? He stretched his arms straight out overhead and felt the muscles loosen along his spine. He wondered, for whatever reason, what Emily and Kaylee were doing. It had been weeks since he’d seen either of them. Probably Emily was still looking into the prospect of filing divorce papers. Don Smith had offered at one point to hook him up with a good divorce lawyer, but Sam had demurred—he didn’t see the point in it. The lawyer would focus on dealing with Emily, when in reality this was the fault of the Church. It was the Church that had convinced Emily that her eternal salvation was more important than keeping the marriage together. Sam’s story was just a drop in the bucket: during his time with Bennett’s group, Sam had heard story after story of people’s families being torn to shreds in the wake of some person’s doubts or all-out apostasy. He wondered what the point of it all was. Was loyalty to the Church really worth it for these people, if it wreaked this much havoc on their families? Obviously, on some level, it was. For them, the promise of salvation offered the best means of dealing with the pain of being alive.
He had to squeeze his eyes tightly shut for a moment in order to clear the thoughts from his head. Thinking about it was causing his blood pressure to rise. Above all he felt helpless; unable to do anything in response. He climbed out of bed and stood up and wandered out into the kitchen. Christian was still asleep on the sofa, but Cathy was stirring about near the stove.
“Making hotcakes,” she whispered. “Don went out to get a few things. And Bennett should be here any minute.”
Sam nodded and sat down and drank a cup of coffee. Eventually, Christian stirred and got up and Cathy went about cooking and flipping the pancakes and serving everybody. Christian mumbled a few more things about the supposed turncoat, though he refused to single out anyone by name. Sam half-wondered if Christian considered him to be a suspect. Then, as they were finishing up, the door opened, and in walked Don and Bennett. Bennett’s suit was slightly rumpled, but apart from that he looked as vital and unflappable as ever. There was no sign of redness in his eyes, nor any stubble on his cheeks.
He smiled his strangely white smile and nodded to everyone: “It’s good to see you’re all safe and sound. But we can’t stay here. Gather up your things and let’s move out.”
...Next Time: Elder Steele's conscience....
It was past midnight when Sam, Christian, and Don finally reached the cabin outside of Ely. They could smell sagebrush in the air when they climbed out of the close confinement of the car, and the patches of snow on the ground were crunchy and frozen underfoot. They made their way up the walkway, and Cathy met them at the door.
“Good grief,” she said, shaking her head, with tears in her eyes. “Good grief.”
On the drive over, Christian had debriefed Sam on what had happened. Apparently, one of the group’s members had tried to get in touch with Gary following their meeting that same night, but there was no answer. This member—his name was Evan—had forgotten his glasses, or something to that effect, and he wanted to come by and get them, but Gary wasn’t answering his phone:
So Evan goes by to try and get the glasses, and he sees that all the lights are on in the house, but no one comes to answer the door. No one responds to him ringing the doorbell. At this point he’s getting a little worried. What if something happened to him? It’s not like he’s especially old or anything, but it’s not unheard of for a man his age to suffer a heart attack or a stroke. So Evan tries the front door, but it’s locked. Next he starts to work his way around the perimeter of Gary’s house, looking into the windows to see if he can maybe see him collapsed on the ground, or anything like that, but there’s nothing. He goes through the gate at the side of the house and heads around back, and he finds that the French doors have been left open. They’re just wide open to the cold, and the logs in the fireplace are still orange and glowing. Gary is just damned gone. Like he up and walked off.
At this point, Evan is getting freaked out, so he high-tails it out of there. As he’s leaving, he remembers something, which is that, driving up—like, driving up on the street that turns onto Gary’s street—he’d seen these two guys stopped at the stop sign, and they look just like Church people. Like missionaries, you know? Or Church Security agents.
So the question is: Did they do something to Gary? I’d put my money on “Yes” being the answer.
In the wake of this, a decision was made to clear out of Reno. Bennett had decided that it wasn’t safe to stay there any longer, hence why Sam had been summoned over to the Eldorado, though what had happened in the time between the call and Sam’s arrival was unclear. Apparently, Bennett had decided that it was too risky to wait, and had found another way out.
Sam, Christian, and Don went into the cabin and huddled around the table, drinking the hot cocoa that Cathy had made. They all asked about Bennett, but Cathy would only shrug her shoulders.
“I talked to him,” she said, “but I can’t say where he is.” It wasn’t clear whether she wouldn’t say because she didn’t know, or because she was unwilling to reveal the answer.
As they sat there, she told them the news about DeWitt Kelly. They didn’t have all the details yet, but based on what she’d been able to learn, DeWitt had committed suicide sometime early that morning.
“There is literally no way,” said Don. “No way in hell. It’s not in his constitution.”
“I don’t believe it either,” said Cathy.
“You think he was murdered?” said Sam.
“I didn’t want to be the one to say it,” she replied.
He frowned. “Why, though?”
“It makes perfect sense,” said Christian. “This is the Church lashing out, getting revenge for the bombing.”
“But I thought we had nothing to do with that? Isn’t that what Bennett said?”
Christian and Cathy looked at each other, and Cathy rose abruptly to get something from the kitchen.
“It doesn’t make any difference,” said Christian. “These guys in the Church think they’re Judges over Israel, and they have the power and the wherewithal to mete out justice however they see fit. And if they had singled out Gary and DeWitt as major apostate players, then it makes sense that they would go after them.”
Sam stood up. He felt as if he couldn’t sit still. He felt exhausted and paranoid, too, and like he wanted to put his fist through the wall. “What’s our next move?” he asked.
“For now we lay low. None of us has all the facts—I mean, we barely have any of the facts, so we need to just sit tight and wait for Bennett.”
“Yeah, speaking of which: where the “F” is Bennett? That sack of crap hung me out to dry up in the Eldorado, for “F”’s sake. I had some smooth-faced, crew-cutted Mormon bastard breathing down my neck, looking to put a bullet into me—”
“Take it easy, Sam,” said Christian. The three of them looked at each other for a few moments, and then Christian went on: “You’re free to believe whatever you want. You can leave whenever you want to.”
“Jesus Christ. What’s next? A lecture on free agency?”
“Just listen.” He held up his hand. “All of this, everything that’s been going down—all of it—it has its basis in Church history and doctrine. They’re doing this because it’s all laid out in D&C 123. They think they’ve got a scriptural mandate to spy on people, and, if necessary, to take them out. That’s what they believe. It’s written into the doctrine.”
“Lilburn Boggs all over again?” said Cathy.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. But there is a precedent for all of this. It definitely happened in the early days, and during the time of Brigham Young. All of that is documented historical fact. There’s generally been no need for that sort of thing here in the 20th Century, though. The Church has adopted other means of dealing with problem people. But the more important point is that it always could happen. Like I said, this is woven into the doctrine and the culture of the Church itself. You get the right things falling into place, and sure: it’s possible. You seem to forget what you were like as a believer.”
“I never would have believed any of this crap when I was still a full-fledged member,” said Sam. “I would have told you that you were an anti-Mormon idiot.”
“But you believed that the Brethren were men called of God, right? That they were literally Prophets, Seers, and Revelators, did you not?”
Sam shrugged.
“Of course you believed that. And they believe it too. It’s entrenched. All of those old bastards are so sutured in to the culture of the Church. They’ve been embedded into it for all of their adult lives, and with their whole seniority/hierarchy thing, nothing is ever going to change. That’s how it works. The guys in the First Presidency are old buzzards who pass on their views to the next generation of old buzzards and all the old beliefs and ideas are preserved in perpetuity. But what I’m getting at is the sheer arrogance of it. The presumptuousness. Can you see yourself as being, literally, a prophet? Absolute power corrupts, and there is no more powerful position—at least in the person’s own mind—than the power of being the sole holder of all of the keys to the priesthood. So these guys will do whatever they goddamn please. Just think about the Laffertys, for example. This is dangerous stuff.”
Sam sat down on the back of the sofa, with his hands resting in his lap. He looked down at the floor. By now Cathy had returned to her old spot at the table.
“What do you think of all this?” Sam asked her.
She shrugged. “Chris has a point,” she said. “The arrogance of the leaders is pretty much undeniable. Some are worse than others. Pitt, for example.”
“But do you buy into all this conspiracy stuff? Do you really buy that the Brethren would actually sign off on murder?”
She shrugged again. “The Church operates in a culture of secrecy. It’s impossible to know anything with much certainty. Anything’s possible, I guess. And if what they said was true, about President Baylor being incapacitated, and with Pitt taking the reins. I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would wait for approval from the rest of the Brethren.”
There was quiet in the room again. Then Don spoke up: “Still no word from Bennett?” he said to Cathy.
“Maybe later tonight,” she said.
Sam hadn’t moved from his spot on the back of the sofa. He was thinking about what had happened back at the Eldorado. Had the man really been chasing him, and had he been an agent of the Church? It certainly felt that way. He still couldn’t shake the feeling, the terror he’d felt as he fled down the stairwell. But these days he was unsure about trusting his feelings and intuitions. It seemed a bit too much like what he’d been told to do as a loyal Mormon.
“There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” he said. “Why wasn’t anyone there at the Eldorado?”
“Well, I thought I already explained to you that it was probably because Bennett got spooked and took off before you got there,” Christian said.
“That’s exactly it,” said Cathy.
Sam remembered something: “You know, there was this strange message on the mirror.” He closed his eyes, so as to recall it: “It said, ‘My life is threatened by a little dough-head.’ What in the “F” does that mean? Do you know?”
Cathy looked to Christian for explanation. He was frowning. He looked at Cathy, and then back at Sam. “Apparently, Bennett wanted to deliver a message to you,” he said. “That phrase turns up in the journals of Joseph Smith, but Bennett’s version is leaving something out. The actual sentence reads, ‘My life is threatened by a Brutus and a little dough-head.’”
“So, then, what does that mean?”
“Well, I guess it means that Bennett smells a rat. That we’ve got a traitor on our hands.”
That night, Sam slept fitfully on a cot in what was apparently the home office of the cabin. The room had a bookcase with shelves that were lined with books on Mormonism—The Miracle of Forgiveness; McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine; works by B.H. Roberts, and others. Some were critical books that had been written by counter-cult ministries. There was an old Commodore on the desk, and a Remington typewriter nestled in the corner of the room.
When he woke up, a crack of daylight was showing at the edges of the curtains. He cleared the crust out of the corners of his eyes and sat up and looked dazedly at the room. Where am I? And what am I doing here? He stretched his arms straight out overhead and felt the muscles loosen along his spine. He wondered, for whatever reason, what Emily and Kaylee were doing. It had been weeks since he’d seen either of them. Probably Emily was still looking into the prospect of filing divorce papers. Don Smith had offered at one point to hook him up with a good divorce lawyer, but Sam had demurred—he didn’t see the point in it. The lawyer would focus on dealing with Emily, when in reality this was the fault of the Church. It was the Church that had convinced Emily that her eternal salvation was more important than keeping the marriage together. Sam’s story was just a drop in the bucket: during his time with Bennett’s group, Sam had heard story after story of people’s families being torn to shreds in the wake of some person’s doubts or all-out apostasy. He wondered what the point of it all was. Was loyalty to the Church really worth it for these people, if it wreaked this much havoc on their families? Obviously, on some level, it was. For them, the promise of salvation offered the best means of dealing with the pain of being alive.
He had to squeeze his eyes tightly shut for a moment in order to clear the thoughts from his head. Thinking about it was causing his blood pressure to rise. Above all he felt helpless; unable to do anything in response. He climbed out of bed and stood up and wandered out into the kitchen. Christian was still asleep on the sofa, but Cathy was stirring about near the stove.
“Making hotcakes,” she whispered. “Don went out to get a few things. And Bennett should be here any minute.”
Sam nodded and sat down and drank a cup of coffee. Eventually, Christian stirred and got up and Cathy went about cooking and flipping the pancakes and serving everybody. Christian mumbled a few more things about the supposed turncoat, though he refused to single out anyone by name. Sam half-wondered if Christian considered him to be a suspect. Then, as they were finishing up, the door opened, and in walked Don and Bennett. Bennett’s suit was slightly rumpled, but apart from that he looked as vital and unflappable as ever. There was no sign of redness in his eyes, nor any stubble on his cheeks.
He smiled his strangely white smile and nodded to everyone: “It’s good to see you’re all safe and sound. But we can’t stay here. Gather up your things and let’s move out.”
...Next Time: Elder Steele's conscience....