In the Beauty of the Lilies (53 page)

“Clark,” Eddie, the sheriff’s deputy, rather languidly said, “you don’t go shooting up county school buses. That’s just not done. I’m afraid we got to bring somebody in for it. Already, we’ve got reporters on the line, wanting a story.”

Luke broke in, “Mister, don’t pay no mind to what Slick here says—you’re not getting no tire money out of me nor Big Daddy neither.”

Esau was not surprised that the mountain men called him Slick behind his back. At times, after an afternoon spent in Lower Branch sharing a brew with Eddie at J.C.’s or jollying up Charlie Rowe, the Burr County tax commissioner, he had
felt slick to himself. But Jesse appreciated him, he knew.
From each according to his talents
.

Luke was going on into the phone, “We been paying taxes like royal suckers and what’ve you morons been doing with the money? Feeding a ton of welfare freeloaders and pouring Hell’s own slop into our children’s heads.” Then he hung up.

Within twenty seconds it rang again. Esau reached for the extension but Luke yanked the main phone so the wires pulled up the box at the baseboard, and the receiver at Esau’s ear went dead. There was a purity to the silence, and a bliss in the fact that he could do no more; he had gone the extra mile, it was out of his hands. He reported Luke’s crazy action to Jesse and Jesse smiled, a little the way Jim had winked. The prophet searched his mind for a quote and came up with, “ ‘Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away.’ ”

Jesse seemed a foot taller, taking charge, assigning men their posts, stroking the heads of the gathered children and looking for a second into the faces of each. Before they descended into the bunker, with their blankets and stuffed toys and food supplies, Jesse asked them all, the women and children and men still in the living room, to huddle in front of the cold fireplace for a Bible reading. He read to them from Revelation 21: “ ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

“ ‘And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

“ ‘And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.

“ ‘He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.

“ ‘But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.’ ”

Jesse looked up and told his frightened flock, “Those murderers and idolators, those whoremongers and liars will soon be at our gates. But, little loved ones, I am Alpha and Omega. My enemies shall be thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, and I will give the faithful freely of the water of life. There will be for us no more death, or sorrow, or crying. Children, what did God promise He would do? Who can remember what I just read?”

He looked hopefully into the little faces, and all were silent until a scared boy of about five said tremulously, “Wipe, wipe away—”

“God shall with His own beautiful hand wipe away all the tears from our eyes,” Jesse paraphrased. “Now, is there any more beautiful passage in Holy Scripture than this solemn promise in Revelation? Better believe it, my little ones, and allow the fear to ease from your systems. Jesse is watching over you. Big Daddy promises to take you with him wherever he goes. Amen. Now hustle your butts down below with your mommas and don’t come out till a voice you know for sure calls you out.”

Some of the older children laughed at the sudden “hustle your butts”; the smaller ones were in a transfixed state, beyond laughing or any expressed emotion. An animal freeze reflex had rendered them numb, clustering close to their mothers; a number of their noses were running, and one little girl had a bright nosebleed from one nostril, which no one
was attending to, as they all shuffled in a hush off to the bunker.

Luke and Zebulun both had their tactical ideas but the more urbanized, younger men only trusted Jesse. The mists that had lately been befogging his spirit—from excessive simmering in Revelation and female sexual juices—had burned away; he was calm and faintly aloof and lazily leonine, the way Clark remembered him the first time they met. He sent Luke up to the roof with his telescoped M-16 and the lightweight M-79 grenade launcher; Tom and Mephibosheth were to guard the back with AK-47s, Jonas and Jim were brought down from the roof to join Matthew on the second floor, and Zebulun and Esau and himself were stationed on the first floor, the first line of defense. Jesse kept an M-16 for himself, tucked some spare rifles—converted AR-15s, mostly—and a stack of ammunition magazines over against the fieldstone fireplace, and put Zebulun in charge of the .50-calibre Browning machine gun. They mounted its tripod on the overturned bookcase, which they lifted some inches up on Bibles, behind a shield improvised from a rusty old tractor seat jammed into the half-open window. The plump Hawaiian dimpled and giggled in delight at this sign of trust from his leader; in his apprehensive happiness he kept testing different chairs in which to seat himself behind the gun, like a pianist finicking over the bench height.

Jesse said, “Slick, here’s a special gal I know you’re going to love,” and placed in Esau’s hands a graceful old-style hunting rifle; the long blued barrel floated outward like a flexible, sensitive wand when he embraced the polished stock, of silky checkered walnut. “Ruger M-77,” Jesse said. “Three hundred Winchester Magnum. Pop the pimple on your girlfriend’s nose at five hundred yards.” It was Jesse’s teasing way to speak
to his men as if they had roguishly active sex lives, when he had taken all their women from them. But one of his cryptic salutes or recognitions lay in giving Esau not a coarsely murderous military automatic but this delicate bolt-action scalpel of a weapon; he was finer, he felt Jesse was saying, than these hammer-handed rubes around them.

The Ruger’s rear sight was an intricate leaf shape, the front sight a beaded ramp that seemed to Esau, waving the barrel through the window, to swing into its target like a ball of mercury popping into the bottom of a cup. Jesse had shown him his window, there in the living room; Esau took the creaky green-painted kitchen chair Jesse had sat on when they had first talked. He propped open the loose worn window with a stick of kindling and nestled his face into the cool smooth concavity of the stock’s cheek piece and let his gunsight follow the drifting flight of a hawk cruising the valley below. The November wind was sharp on his face and his eyes watered as he took in the beauty of the morning: the mountainside falling away in blowing grassy terraces interrupted by clumps of cottonwood and pine, the sun hidden behind an approaching slant sheet of cloud whose edges were white eddies of fish-scales sculptured like curved ribs of sand left by a receded tide, the receding valley miles beyond and below struck by yellow sunlight beyond the giant cloud so that its ragged lake gleamed a blind blue and the tilled and fenced fields in these lowlands seemed a checkerboard of nappy, nicely sewn fabrics. He did not want to give up this world but must believe that its glory was the pale shadow, the weak foretaste, of a better.
If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith
? He clung to his gun lightly, as if this slender machined construction of steel and wood were indeed a woman, a slim resilient
mother who would bring him through this fever, this fear, this burning water above his organs of excretion. His strained nerves seemed to be lifting him off the floor, so his feet in their scuffed orange Frye boots belonged to somebody else and were as remote as the hawk he had lost sight of. He kept swallowing something thicker than saliva. He had a sudden vision of something he enormously wanted—one of those peanut-butter sandwiches he used to make as a child, of two Keebler saltines, square in shape but breakable into two, at the counter of the kitchen overlooking the swimming pool, when Rex wasn’t there and he had hours to kill before Mom showed up full of her day and dying for a Spritzer.

Above him the men on the second floor were tramping loudly, in circles it seemed, to work off their nervousness. Each minute of waiting was so long a thousand small noises filled it. “Gog’s having a slow day,” Jesse drawled. “Must be a bake sale over in Magog City.” It occurred to Esau that Jesse had taken the two least dependable men, himself and Zebulun, under his wing here.
Upon this rock
.

The footsteps upstairs went still; Clark heard the murmur of the approaching cars, a murmur so subtle it might be imaginary, like a breeze in tree branches, or the rustle of blood in your skull. Then the breach in the morning’s peace rapidly enlarged, though still out of sight, since the road was at a lower level than the pastures where sheep nosed after green leftovers in the frostbitten brown grass. Two tiny vehicles appeared far down the dirt road—a white police car with its blue rooflight whirling and a pale-blue van behind it. “Murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers,” Jesse quoted aloud in a light voice, to amuse himself or to hearten Esau and Zebulun. “The beast and the kings of earth have sent their disbelieving weasels.”

The four-rail gate to the Temple yard, fenced off from the
sheep by barbed wire, had been closed and chained with a plastic-sheathed padlocked chain. It took the three men from the state-police car—two in state troopers’ wide flat-rimmed green hats and black winter jackets, the third in a gray suit, with a bent way of holding himself—some minutes while they puzzled at the chain and the situation. One cop produced a bullhorn but Esau’s blood was pounding in his head so hard he couldn’t hear what was said. It was an urgent, barking mumble. Then came the sound of a gunshot, rather puny in this vast out-of-doors beneath that huge leaning leaden sheet of cloud crumbling above at its edges into the light of a hidden sun. The shot might have come from above, from Luke on the roof, or been one of the policemen shooting out the padlock. Very quickly, and like a film in no synchronization with the rattle of gunfire and indignant yells of men, the police car rammed through the gate, shedding its shattered long boards as it moved forward fifty yards or so and then stopped, when its windshield shattered and holes began jumping up in its hood. The two cops got out with drawn pistols and one of them immediately did a hippety-hop and fell in the dust by his back tire; the other crouched behind the car but it wasn’t giving him enough shelter. From the angle of Esau’s window, the farthest to the left, a silhouetted slice of the crouching figure showed through two upright slats of the porch rail. The blue-barrelled Ruger’s sight moved to place its bead on that target almost of its own snaky will. Not only was Clark’s head suddenly as clear as an adjusted TV screen but his eyesight too; he could see the buckle on the cop’s belt and the shine on his boots and the duller black gloss of his empty holster. Esau held the bead steady just above that holster and squeezed off a round; the recoil pushed his shoulder like a girl’s playful tap of flirtation and
the abstract target flipped away like a tin cutout in a shooting gallery. Then it became a man, a dark shape trying to writhe to safety underneath the car, a now-hatless trooper with the round white face of a boy, not even a boy, a white-faced mammal, a frightened hurt creature staring from its burrow. The trooper was trying to lie still but something, pain, kept stirring his body around underneath the car. The car, a new white Camaro with the black letters
STATE PATROL
on its hood, was swaying on its springs as bullets slammed lavishly into its thin metal. Zebulun was going into raptures with his machine gun, filling the room with smoke and the tinkle of brass cartridge shells hitting the floor, and the men on the second floor were pouring a racket out of their automatic rifles and whooping, ugly ecstatic noises out of their throats, and stamping on the floor with such a drumming of footsteps that Esau tried to picture the dance they were doing. There was a fat wet thump on the veranda roof; then a split-second’s shadow such as a buzzard or an airplane passing in front of the sun casts flicked at the corner of Esau’s vision. Whatever it had been was out of sight now beyond the porch boards, where he couldn’t see. He could only see the porch rail with its upright slats, their dry paint raggedly scabbed off, and framed between them the little figures of the scene beyond.

The blue van hadn’t come into the courtyard; two of the men in it had produced rifles and were firing from around its corners while the third man, crouching, raced up to the riddled police car with its shot-out windshield. Now the man in the gray suit who had come in the police car emerged from the back of it and began waving his arms in some kind of surrender. Clark recognized his friend Eddie, the sheriff’s deputy. The bead of his gunsight just nicely covered the man’s head at that distance but when he squeezed he evidently
missed, because the deputy kept waving and holding his arms out in a wide frantic gesture as of benediction. Jesse, leaning against the frame of the window next to Esau’s, snorted softly and said, “Looks like they’ve had enough of the power of the Lamb. Now they beg the mountains to cover them. What’s your pleasure, Zeb? What do you say, Slick?”

Esau asked, “You can’t shoot men not firing back, can you?”

“They’ve tres
passed
, brother. They’d never sin again, and would thank us from Heaven.”

Zebulun asked, “Shall I do it? Shall I let ’em have it?”

Esau slipped the bolt back to reload and the naked oily metal in such close-up struck him as obscene, like an aroused dog’s red bared penis.

“ ‘And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them,’ ” Jesse quoted. “Revelation twenty. Those devils are already dead and damned forever, Slick, in the eyes of the righteous God. We got to brush you up some day on the fine points of true and actual faith.”