In the Beauty of the Lilies (58 page)

There were gleaming places below the preacher’s eyes. His voice had become so husky and dry and twisted it must soon stop. “Watch with me a little longer, dear friends in this Temple of True and Actual Faith. Around the world millions say they believe the verities in the Bible but almost none of them do. Almost none of them do. They think it’s a myth, they think it’s an idle story told by tired old shepherds who didn’t know any better tall tales to pass those long cold desert nights. But this is the Temple of True and Actual Faith, my dear friends. Faith, faith is the jewel, the pearl of great price, for which the merchant ‘went and sold all that he had, and bought it.’ He bought it, as we used to say in Vietnam. That was our way of saying a fellow soldier had bought the farm, had entered the land of death. ‘The kingdom of Heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field,’ and when a man finds it, for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath and
buys
that field. We are here on that field. We are soldiers in the field, the elite corps of the one hundred forty-four thousand who will reside forever in that heavenly temple with walls of jasper and foundations of sapphire and emerald. Our human eyes would not withstand the glory of it; the glory of it will wash away our tears, our hungry stomachs, our fear and our cold here this long hard winter, our memories of the easy pleasures of the land of Magog that we left behind; a thousand-thousand-fold we will be repaid, everlastingly. Christ said it: faith as small as a grain of mustard seed will see you through, but only faith. Oh my faithful friends, when that cup comes, drink ye all of it. Though it be hot as molten lead, you wash it right down. ‘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.’ Amen. Now, good folks, let’s hear some discussion.”

The spring light in Colorado had become as sharp as a searchlight. The authorities, goaded by the criticisms of their inaction in the press, reasoned that, if any more frost went out of the ground, their vehicles might encounter problems of traction. The vehicles were tanklike M60A1 armored vehicles, bought cheap from the post-Vietnam Army by the National Guard and mounted with 105mm. ordnance and for this mission specially fitted with retractable booms and twelve-inch loudspeakers. The plan, approved by the Attorney General’s office in Washington, called for the vehicles to approach the Temple close enough for grenade launchers to fire, through windows and holes broken in the walls, packets of the chemical agent CS—a non-pyrotechnic form of tear gas that would not, Fred Dix assured a press conference given while the assault was taking place, harm the infant lungs of even the youngest children. The FBI and ATF operatives, and the helicopter pilots and artillerymen of the Colorado National Guard, were under instructions to exercise extreme restraint in the return of gunfire. This rescue mission was to begin at dawn, but complications, including a caravan of press and media traffic alerted by a news leak the night before, delayed the schedule, so that the first armored vehicle did not make its breach, with its strangely antediluvian, proboscislike boom, in the wall of the main building until after nine o’clock. Silhouettes of Temple members flitted past the windows of the old farmhouse. Exploding packets of CS crashed through the panes and hurtled through the splintering clapboards with a muffled popping noise. A lively spring wind, smelling of rising pine sap and thawing sheep dung, had come up beneath
the sharp white sun. Reporters speculated into the radio mikes and television cameras rimming the thousand-yard razor-wired periphery that on such a breezy day the tear gas might be blown in one side and out the other. Further, the extensive Temple armory was known to include gas masks. “With all winter to prepare for this, Peter,” the ABC correspondent broadcast to New York, “it seems unlikely that those inside have not developed a battle plan.”

Government choppers—big ones, Bell 214s, beloved in Vietnam, with the sliding doors that provide a wide field of fire for the mounted machine guns—swayed and clattered overhead, drowning out the loudspeakers assuring those inside the Temple that no harm was intended and that they should come out and surrender. “This is not an assault. Do not fire. We are introducing non-lethal tear gas. You are responsible for your own actions. Come out and you will receive medical attention. No one will be injured. Submit to proper authorities. Do not subject yourself to further discomfort.” These words in doom’s barking voice were chopped up by the Huey rotors and carried off on the wind. The armored vehicles, their breastplates of iron shielding frightened young National Guardsmen, roared louder as the booms nudged and chewed at the walls. There were abrupt cracklings of exterior boards, and the higher-pitched glassy crunch of a window being shattered, and then the dull popping of the launcher, the flat whack of the packets exploding, and the ghostly rush of the gas, gas that though non-toxic would sting like clouds of enraged bees.

Yet for minutes within the compound there was an apparent peace, an uncanny meek silence. The telephone no longer answered, though the FBI kept ringing it. A government sniper saw through his scope, through the windows of the
battened family quarters, the shape of a man making a scattering motion, as if sowing seed. At the other end, from the men’s dormitory, two men were firing what appeared to be .50-calibre armor-piercing rifles with such effect at an M60 that the co-driver felt obliged to reply with a long burst from his turret-mounted 105mm. repeater, blasting a wall to splinters and blowing Jonas and Medad into the next, merciful world. A number of television trucks, making a break in the wire-fenced official periphery, had moved in close enough to be drawing fire from the Temple as well, a turn of events the exhilarated reporters breathlessly described. After so long a news fast, this feast.

Now a lull was ordered, and the clumsy machines backed off fifty or so yards, on the churned-up mixture of mud and ice and snow and straw, and the fleet of helicopters, which included a Bell AH-1 Huey Cobra with heat-sensor cameras, lifted up so high that the sound of their wings was like that of many distant horses running. In the momentary quiet could be heard the bleating and baaing of the unfed sheep and their lambs. It was after ten o’clock. The sun was a white sore spot in a thin high haze. The air was invisibly, inaudibly full of urgent electronic communications and consultations and bulletins. The combat engineering vehicles, uneasily shifting on their treads and moving their howitzers like nervous antennae, waited in a loose circle for those within the Temple to come out and surrender. But for answer instead there rose, from the family end of the ramshackle set of linked buildings, a curl of smoke that was not tear gas. The smoke went from white to yellow, thickening. A second plume, from an upstairs window above the porch roof, joined it. The wind whipped the smoke nearly sideways, then let it straighten like a spinning top for a second, its color deepening to an oily, boiling
black. Only the watching cameras, implacably whirring, knew what to do. Several explosions, ammunition or propane tanks, sent jets of orange flame shooting out the old sash windows and through the curdling asphalt-shingled roof. “Dan,” CBS’s correspondent panted, “this has to have been set, it’s spreading so fast.”

Within the Temple, the sounds and shouts, the splinterings distant and near, the unintelligible blaring voices from outside, the thuds and gusts of tear gas and wind-whipped flame had been merged in a great rushing, a dragon on the other side of the wall. Smoke billowed past the upstairs windows and sped in black curls along the ceiling. It struck Esau in the face and flooded his eyes and throat with a peppery, unbreathable heat. It felt personal, a deliberately insolent gust of Satan’s poisonous breath. He had a gas mask dangling from his belt but couldn’t decide to put it on. He was upstairs in the office; he had wanted to answer the phone, its incessant ringing yet another voice of this many-headed assault. But Jesse had told him, “Let the bastards ring—no more truck with the Devil, Slick.” Jesse had looked glassy-eyed and sweating and paper-pale but smiling moments ago, limp with a kind of relief, when Esau had last seen him, standing at the office windows staring at the arc of momentarily stilled vehicles in the flat front area where four months ago the state-police car had been halted and the invaders pinned down by bullets. “The rod has blossomed,” he said. “The Lord is at hand.”

Sheets of smoke and invisible gas hurried through the room and it seemed a shutter kept dropping in Esau’s head. His eyes watered and stung to the point of blindness and suddenly Jesse was gone from the window. Fat Zebulun, waddling, giggling in his excitement, had come splashing pungent kerosene through the room—over the desktops, the floors,
the cardboard files, the vanilla-colored computer and laser printer with its stacked supply of glossy paper. Esau wondered. According to the plan that had been drawn up, Mephibosheth and Jim were to ignite the barn and the family wing, with the pottery workshop and the auditorium Mephibosheth had built. When had the plan been put into action? Esau hadn’t heard Jesse order it, but he must have. Jesse had been now here in the office with the men, now there in his bedroom with the women and children, and again no place at all that Esau knew of. The whoosh of lit kerosene added itself to the rushing, the hellish transformation of the air. A tangled knot of women and children burst, coughing, eyes streaming, out of Jesse’s bedroom. Esau, crouching to see and to find air for his voice, shouted for them to follow him down the stairs. He could not get it out of his head that the insulting, billowing, insinuant, ubiquitous smoke was a person, a malevolent soul with a mind.

He would be in Heaven within minutes, he realized. The ordeal, the cup of wrath, and then an eternity of Jesse’s company. The thought seemed no stranger than the fact that he had once been a boy playing Wiffle Ball fungo with Rex Brudnoy by his mother’s concrete swimming pool.
Start stretching, Superguy
. How had he acquired this clattering scorpion’s tail of women and children? They clambered after him down the narrow stairway to the little entrance hall with the pine newel post and the pewter vase still holding some dried stalks of wheat. The front door was locked, locked and barred against the minions of Gog with their guns and telescopic lenses aimed like horns of the beast. He pulled at the knob, and the bell on its rusty spiral spring softly rang. The wailing people behind him kept grabbing at him. They were trying to ride out to birth by clutching his heel. There was no
avoiding the birth blossoming around them but their bodies still sought escape and comfort. The blubbering and shrieks of the children were especially aggravating. He called for them to get low and hold their breaths. The long living room, a shambles of sleeping bags and broken glass and bales of straw fortification around the windows, was packed with smoke, a series of thin acrid walls, but, taking a gasp and crouching, he shouldered his way through, with this terrible thick tail of scrabbling sobbing innocents behind him. In a few minutes they would be all out of this into the icy-cool clarity of Heaven, gold and blue and jasper, with marble stairs and still lakes and the women drifting about in tiaras and silken gowns falling in parallel folds like Elizabeth Taylor in a movie whose name he had forgotten. Angkor Wat.
See it before you die
. Life is such a quick little mess. The rubes had kept boasting of burning the Temple down but there hadn’t been enough thought given to where people should arrange themselves to die. Hands fought to hold on to him from behind. Scuttling, eyes clenched, Esau touched the fireplace’s round blackened stones, the plaster walls, a table, a sofa; the old iron latch of the door to the kitchen materialized under his fingers.

The air was relatively clean in the kitchen. There was only a haze stirring between the blackened ceiling of tamarack beams. He took a breath. Here more people were gathered, multitudes. The others must have come up from the buried school bus. An event was in progress; Esau saw through the mullions of the upper window sash and the bunches of drying onions and herbs hanging from ceiling hooks a man running up the stony barnyard slope toward one of the armored vehicles. He recognized Benjamin, one of the newcomers who had fought through the snow to get here. The vehicle had
opened its plated door and almost swallowed him when something made Benjamin pitch forward like a scarecrow thrown off his stick; he had been shot, by a bullet from the Temple. Jim lowered the rifle whose barrel he had jammed through a pane, smashing it, there under the hanging bunches of drying herbs.

The back kitchen door, like the front door, had a winter storm shed built around it, so getting out would be a clumsy operation. But Jesse was blocking the inner door in any case. In a haze like the mist on a river’s edge they had gathered around Jesse and he was smilingly distributing something. What he had in his hand was a box of Triscuits. “ ‘This is my body,’ ” he was saying, “ ‘given for thee.’ You’ll feel no pain with this, honey, absolutely Scout’s honor; take, eat.” Weak white hands were reaching out and taking greedily. The women and taller children, some of them wearing white robes, had faces distended by a kind of rapture. In the same uplifted minister’s voice, Jesse called, “Start launchin’ ’em, boys! Set ’em free!”

Jim came closer with the Ruger hunting rifle and gave Esau that flip little sideways look of his, suggesting that both of them should have known better, but why not? Zebulun held a snub-nosed Colt .38 and, all in a sweat that stained his colorful short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, he jerkily raised the revolver and pointed its four-inch barrel and a woman, Jael, fell to the floor of the kitchen, the side of her head spouting blood, blood all over her shiny young dark-brown hair with its plastic butterfly barrette, there by the foot of the iron cookstove, the hole spurting like a water bubbler, pulse after pulse until it quickly dribbled down to an ebbing red nub, pumping less and less into her matted hair. Jael had been plain, overweight, with acne, but her voice had been surprisingly
melodious and precise; when her turn came to read the Bible, she had visibly preened, singing every syllable. “She’s there already!” Jesse yelled out, through the thickening mist. “Our sister has reached those pearly gates!” His face was glazed with happiness; he had arrived at the fountain of faith.