The Rock Child (12 page)

“There any calico in Salt Lake?”

It was Fat Dirty, addressing Sir Richard, who shook his head no. “All
the women in Salt Lake are spoken for, and kept close. It’s the only city I’ve ever been where a man can’t buy a woman.”

Then I knew what “calico” meant. Sun Moon squirmed next to me, and her agitation felt like prickly heat.

Fat Dirty grunted, wiggled his behind, and broke wind loudly. “We’re loco,” he whined in the direction of Half-Bald Leader.

“We’ve done talked about this,” said the leader. He glanced sideways at Sir Richard. “I’m going to Salt Lake to sell my outfit and catch the stage east. The others are gonna sniff the wind for gold awhile longer.”

“There are new strikes in Idaho,” Sir Richard said.

I took a deep breath, and Sun Moon claw-gripped my wrist.

“We want somep’n
brand-new,
” whined Fat Dirty.

Sir Richard nodded wisely, and nodded again. I wanted to ask him, “What the
hell
is going on?”

Then another spoke up. “All gold is fool’s gold,” said a high, soft old man’s voice.

I’d scarce noticed him before. He was skinny, crooked as a twig, and looked frail, except for his long silver hair and beard. This hair was spectacular, so long you could have tied the ends between his legs, and flowing and handsome. He looked like a picture of a wizard I saw in a book.

“Did you ever hear,” he began, “about the gang of miners that went to heaven?”

“Yeah, Zach, we done heard it,” put in Fat Dirty. “Twenty times.”

“When they got to the Pearly Gates,” this Zach went on unheeding, “St. Peter told them, ‘Sorry, you can’t come in—no more room.’

“The head miner took thought and asked, ‘Any miners in there?’

“‘Of course!’ replied St. Peter.

“‘Ifn I clear some out, can we get in?’

“St. Peter pulled at his beard a moment. ‘I guess so,’ he answered.

“‘Back in a minute,’ said the head miner.

“Ten minutes later out came a passel of men through the Pearly Gates, pushing and jostling to get gone. They charged right on past St. Peter, waving picks and shovels and shouting in excitement, and stampeded straight down to the Other Place. The miners waiting to get in looked at each other, cocked their heads, nodded, and headed right after ’em.

“The head miner come out of the gates and stopped by St. Peter’s side. They were looking at the empty spot where his
compañeros
had stood a moment before.

“‘Well,’ said St. Peter, ‘there’s room enough now. But how did you work that?’

“The head miner grinned. ‘Spread some tales,’ he said. ‘Said color was spotted in the River Styx.’

“‘My, my,’ said St. Peter. ‘Those men will endure hell for a mere rumor of fortune.’

“‘Yep,’ said the head miner, nodding sagely and still grinning.

“‘You may go on in,’ said St. Peter, and spread one arm wide toward the Gates.

“The head miner shuffled his feet and wagged his head. After a while he said, ‘Naw, I guess not.’ He shouldered his gear.

“‘Wait!’ cried St. Peter. ‘You spread those tales yourself. They’re false.’

“‘Yep,’ said the head miner, ‘but you never know.’ And started for the place below.”

When everyone got ready to spread their blankets, Sun Moon put her face right into Sir Richard’s. “These men go Salt Lake. We go other way. You know all time?”

“Yes,” he said with aplomb. “I knew which direction they’re going.”

“Why?” She shook the sleeve of his shirt. “Not safe! Porter Rockwell there, many Mormons, much help for him, much danger for us.”

“I have a friend who will protect us, I’m confident,” said Sir Richard. He laid his blankets on one side of Sun Moon’s and nodded me toward the opposite side.

“What friend?” insisted Sun Moon. She didn’t take to putting her welfare in someone else’s hands, particularly not a man, and more particularly not a white man.

He turned to her majestically. “His name,” he said, “is Brigham Young, known as the Lion of the Lord. We will ask him for sanctuary.”

CHAPTER TEN

“Porter Rockwell is trying to kill us.” Burton watched most carefully for change in Brigham Young’s face. He could see none. “To our very faces he took an oath to torture, dismember, and kill us.”

I cannot fail now
. Burton had waited until the others left the room. It was high-handed, certainly, but he had gotten by with it. He had demanded to see the Lion of the Lord immediately, and then asked his courtiers and ministers to leave.
It worked
. To drive all before you with the wind of your self-certainty, that was in Burton’s blood.

Still no change in the great man’s expression. For any statesman one key to handling great matters with aplomb, surely, was to be surprised by nothing. The Prophet’s eyes ran deliberately over Asie and Sun Moon. Suddenly the two looked unprepossessing to Burton, even disreputable. A leonine eyebrow raised in Burton’s direction. He had no idea what it meant.

The story was quickly told. Sun Moon was a Buddhist nun, shanghaied to this country to work as a prostitute. She had been taken in bondage to Hard Rock City, where Porter Rockwell had won at gambling the right to be the first man to mount her.
We are doing well. The Prophet despises both gambling and whoring
. She fought for her honor, and managed to hold off Rockwell momentarily. He cut her, giving her
that scar, and promised that if ever he saw her again, he would kill her.

Burton listened to the sound of his own voice in the small office. It made his knees want to wiggle. This story was as strange as anything in
A Thousand and One Nights,
which he himself meant to bring into English as exotica. Yet their lives depended on it. In its defense plausibility could not be advanced, only truth.

The Prophet merely regarded Sun Moon. Sir Richard’s ward—for so he perceived her—ran a forefinger along the rut of her scar, perhaps unconsciously. Would the great man have sympathy for a woman at hazard? Or contempt for a woman who refused to bear children? A minion of a heathen religion?

Burton looked at Sun Moon and Asie and felt admiration. His face was open, American. Hers was hard with a half-successful attempt to hide her fear.
Terror,
Burton told himself.
The young woman must have been awash in terror for a year or more
. To them, this adventure was no game, but life and death.

“Is this true, Sister?” asked the Prophet.

“Just so,” said Sun Moon firmly.

“Exactly true?” the Prophet pressed. His few words ran with huge energy. Burton had heard that sometimes in cases of adultery Brigham Young suspended a sentence of death in favor of a tongue-lashing. Burton would have hated to receive such a word-whipping.

“
Just
so,” Sun Moon answered again.

The Lion of the Lord turned to Burton. “Tell me once more what happened when you and Rockwell chanced on these two on the road.”

Burton did. His account was deliberately simple and factual. He felt sure the Prophet would despise any exaggeration or fancifulness.

When the brief tale ended, Brigham Young let the silence sit. He regarded each of the three of them in turn and let the silence grow steadily, as a hot and oppressive desert sun rises to zenith.

Burton found himself jiggling with foolish hopes.
Remember your back pain and think of me as your Androcles
. He glanced sideways at his young companions.
I have brought you into the Lion’s den,
he thought. He could feel his own faith wavering. Presidents and potentates did not become great through sentiment.
I have thrown us at this man’s mercy
.

Burton sighed. It was true, he admitted to himself, that only desperation had brought him here. Hiding from the leader of the infamous Danites in the sanctuary of Brigham Young—preposterous. Rockwell and the Danites were the instruments of the Church. Mothers probably
used Porter Rockwell’s name to frighten their children into good behavior.

Burton found himself perspiring. Hope seesawed with despair.

“Please come with me,” said President Young.

The Lion of the Lord rose stiffly—Burton noted that his back needed skilled fingers once more—and exited. Down a hall they all went, out into a garden, through flowers to another building.

The Prophet mounted some stairs, opened a door, and left it to his visitors to follow his massive form. Burton gulped.
Are we going into Lion House itself?
Brigham Young’s residence was next to his office building.

“Brother Young,” said a middle-aged woman. “Brother Young,” echoed a young beauty. The two were evidently supervising the preparation of a luncheon.

“Mrs. Twiss,” said the Prophet. “Sister Abigail. These are our friends Captain Burton, Sister Sun Moon, and Brother Asie. They will be staying with us a few days, Mrs. Twiss. Whatever rooms you think fitting.”

Captain Richard Burton blanched. On four continents he had seldom been so surprised, or so delighted.
I am being invited into the most secret of chambers, into the very harem of Brigham Young
. For the first time in two decades, perhaps, his deeply tanned skin looked pale enough to be English.

The Prophet said, “We will see to your comfort and your safety.” Then the great man indulged himself in a small smile. “Even Porter Rockwell,” he said, “has no access to my bedrooms.”

For a moment the simple kitchen scene spun in Captain Burton’s mind, and he felt woozy.

Mrs. Twiss led them up a set of stairs to the second floor. Seething with curiosity, Burton noted a long, handsomely furnished parlor, with a floral Brussels carpet, mahogany tables, a rosewood piano, a melodeon, a woodstove, a velvet sofa, and gilt chairs. Across the long hall were rooms that appeared to be private.
Bedrooms for the wives,
he thought, and his mind spun with questions.

Up more stairs to the third floor, through a long parlor partitioned into receiving areas. Private rooms stretched in each direction, a score or two dozen by Burton’s guess. Compared to the second floor, this one was plain and homely.

Mrs. Twiss opened a door to two identical, connected rooms with
high, narrow Gothic windows facing the street.
Can this woman be one of his wives?
Burton’s mind leapt all around the possibility. Mrs. Twiss was fortyish, plump, amiable, a bundle of motherly cheer—
and I cannot not imagine her inspiring lust in so virile a man as the Prophet
.

“Dinner is at five,” she said. “Very promptly at five.” He watched the round, matronly bottom of Mrs. Twiss as she bustled out of the room and closed the door behind her.

The three friends looked at each other, safe for the first time in days. Sun Moon sank into a chair.

Suddenly the door scraped open again. Sun Moon jumped up, and Burton saw the eyes of a bolting deer. “Would you care for anything you don’t see?”

“A lamp for reading and writing,” said Burton.

“Of course.”

I will fill pages and pages with scandal and delectation
.

He looked at his companions.
I wonder how long we can stay. Safely
.

While his friends napped, Richard Burton wrote in his journal:

At last Sun Moon has told me more of her story. I think she broke her silence, in part, for the luxury of speaking her own language, and hearing it spoken back. She fingered her scar often as she talked. She does not realize that it makes her not less attractive but much more—the first mark of life on a cloistered existence, a mark of courage in the face of violence. I admire her
.

She comes from the plains of Kham, far in the northeast of Tibet, of which I know only by report. Though the Tibet I know is high, dry plateaus surrounded by ranges of great mountains, she says her home country is a well-watered highland, lush with grass and wildflowers. Her convent is associated with the monastery at Zorgai, widely known for the tradition of scholarship in literature and philosophy. Zorgai is but a few days travel from the Chengdu, capital of the Chinese province Sichuan
.

Entering the convent (
ani gompa
or
tsunpo
) as a mere child, she was thus shorn of family. Now she is stripped of all life’s
small accommodations, even a flask of holy water, a rosary of 108 beads, and a prayer cylinder. Surely she also misses the brown robes she keeps hidden
.

Though she avoided my inquiry about her abduction (how I long to lure that story from her!), she specified at length her doctrinal instruction, the memorizing and recitation of texts, the rigorous examinations which she stood, her beginning in the discipline of meditation. She stated, though, that her daily meditative practice has been intermittent in the time that has passed since her abduction, and admitted that she is a comparative beginner in the practice. She seems more the intellectual than the contemplative
.

A fascinating incongruity then—a nun whose religious strength may not be the state of her consciousness, the supreme awareness of oneness that proceeds from meditation, but her learning, a creature not of spirit but intellect
.

Sometimes anger and violence inhabit her eyes—for which none could blame her! Abducted, perhaps raped, enslaved, attacked by an infamous killer, and now hounded by him. In these misadventures has her faith been shaken? Affirmed? Does she abide yet in the dark night of the soul, seeking, seeking, and as yet seeing only darkness?

Her traveling companion, Asie Taylor, might be the Tibetan instead of Sun Moon, with his tawny coloring, round facial structure, and physiognomy. Where she is often closed to the scrutinizing eye, he is open-faced, easy, open in his emotions, an amiable fellow traveler, good-hearted, curious, showing a trusting spirit, bearing hardship cheerfully, like lamas I have known. Thus this irony: Asie has more of the spiritual serenity which is the object of meditation than even the nun. Perhaps his spirit is his strength! Perhaps her intellect is hers! Oh, delicious!

However, he is not
quite
at ease. In many postures of body, gestures of arms, and hesitations of speech is the pull of something he seeks, yearns for. That something is churning in Asie Taylor, keeping him from the serenity which is his nature. Yet what goal could surpass serenity? I know not. Neither does Asie Taylor
.

Burton put away his pen and slid the notebook into a jacket pocket. Asie was sleeping. Burton listened to his quiet, even, peaceful breathing and felt envious. He was often sleepless—sometimes he barely slept for months on end. Often that was because he was afraid for his life. Such was the fate of a spy among enemies. The last year, though, he had suffered the pangs of hell for another reason—a reason he had in common with far more ordinary men than he—his wife, whose name was Isabel.

He got up, walked to the high, narrow window, and looked out unseeing onto South Temple Street. Burton had known Isabel for a decade, meeting her first in the south of France, where he loved to go, then in Italy, then in England, whose society he at once despised and longed for acceptance in. She was his ideal of feminine beauty, beauty of face, of form, and of soul. He courted her. She responded to his feelings with similar emotion. Praise be to Allah, not just sentiment but passion! He asked her to marry him. Her family were opposed—they were Catholic, his Church of England. (Praise be to Allah, no Britons knew what faith Burton actually embraced!) Though he converted formally to Catholicism, and Isabel accepted his proposal, the family still opposed the marriage.

Then he descended truly into hell. They were engaged, but Isabel refused to set a date for the wedding. She wanted to wait until her mother acceded. Wait and wait. Years now, torturous years. Burton knew Isabel’s mother would never abandon her opposition. Meanwhile, he had got to be forty years old. He wanted marriage. He was frustrated.

Richard Burton had copulated and cohabited with many, many women. In the East women were available, sometimes easier to get than clean drinking water. He wanted Isabel. He had not touched her, and would not before the nuptials. He nearly went mad with frustration. When he came to America the first time, he gave her an ultimatum. On his return they would be married with dispatch, or he would break the engagement, and they would never see each other again.

She made her choice. They were married.

His marriage taught Burton what Dante had not imagined—that a
man could at the same moment be in paradise and descend to a lower circle of hell.

Isabel in herself was everything he had hoped for, passionate, intelligent, vitally interested in his adventures, enthusiastic about his writing, dedicated to his career.

She demanded fidelity, which was no surprise, but was difficult. He was not a man to keep his passions within. She insisted that he give up cannabis, hashish, laudanum, and other journeys into the lotus state. And she asked that he cease drinking hard liquor, and be content with the solace of wine.

Not unreasonable, he had told himself at first, for he did love her, and not exceedingly difficult, save for three factors:

The first was that he was naturally clandestine, a lover of keeping secrets.

The second was the necessity of keeping his religious life hidden from view of everyone, even his wife. Burton was a Sufi, a member of the passionately mystical Persian sect of Islam. This devotion required certain customs and rites. One demand of Sufism was concealment: No one outside your family must know of your devotion and practices. In Burton’s case, his family was forbidden as well. So he turned a false face not only to his enemies but to his countrymen, the family he was born to, and even his wife.

Some of his religious practice he could pass off as mere eccentricity: He never touched food with his left hand. He shaved his body hair, all of it. He never took the name of God in vain, even among his profane fellow officers. He gave alms generously.

Other practices were trickier to hide: He knelt facing Mecca and prayed five times a day. He observed the Feast of Ramadan in the ninth lunar month, meaning that he did not eat during daylight hours and in that month permitted himself no indulgences whatsoever. Making his hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca was a fine device on his part—he had gone under the guise of a daring episode of espionage for his government.