The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (46 page)

“I am at your service, of course.”

“You are, I believe, aware of the official position of the Church in regard to treatment of the afflicted.”

“I recall that you, ah, mentioned it, on an earlier occasion.”

“Officially, diseases are held to be demoniac possessions. Cast out the devil, and the afflicted one is cured. That is the formal view.”

“And informally?” I said, beginning to see in which direction the wind blew.

“Mine is a grave responsibility,” said Young, with a defensive look of piety. “In my hands have been placed the spiritual and temporal fortunes of thousands, the chosen of God, We can agree that the question of the Prophet’s health transcends any rules devised for mortal man.”

I waited a moment, as the import of this sank in. Then I said, drily, “Kindly state your symptoms, Mr. Young.”

“For more years than I care to remember I have been tortured by the ague.”

“Will you please remove your coat,” I said, going to fetch my bag.

Can you imagine a more farcical scene? What excellent casuistry! Here is a man whose thunders from the pulpit against conventional medicine have frightened, perhaps even crippled, an entire cult, and what happens when he himself is threatened? He comes sneaking in in the dead of the night to a physician whom he has both warned and abused. I made a promise to keep that unsavory tryst secret, but I have already broken it with the best of cheer. Lieutenant Gunnison has agreed thai the paradox of Brigham Young is a fair and just part of any story on the Mormons.
He will include it in his book, but not,
at my request
, unless publication shall take place no sooner than three years from this date.

There is a great deal of good in this movement.
There is also some bad. Upon that inconclusive note we shall let matters rest.

I anticipate a crisis in our fortunes here before many weeks have passed. Devotedly yours,

B
ROTHER
S
ARDIUS
M
C
P
HEETERS
   

(
Impious, medical, monogamistic;
physician [sub
rosa] to God’s First
Lieutenant
)

For several weeks after my father treated Brigham Young we were left in peace about Jennie and Brother Muller. It was a relief not to be visited by that drooling ape; he made everybody nervous. January went by, and part of February, with Mrs. Kissel getting better at last, and then the old thing started up again. Beasely, prodded by Muller, had been working on the Council, and he got downright ugly.

It was too bad, because we had come to like many of these Saints. We even went to their parties, which were merrier than any I’d seen before. One was held in connection with a religious service, where an elder, who was said to be one of their heartiest speakers, arose and lambasted nearly every other form of religion, after which he defended the Mormons, saying, “It is an error, the prevalent opinion that we cleanse the nasal orifice with the big toe, and make tea with holy water. We have among us women who play on the piano and mix French with their talk, and men who like tight boots, and who think more of grammar than the meaning of what they’re saying, and who would ask nothing better than to be fed by other people for squaring circles and writing dead languages all their lives—albeit we would not give one good gunsmith’s apprentice for the whole of them. And, though we are out-and-out democratic, in spirit and in substance, we have plenty of the hard-to-comb curly-pates of people, of whom the saying is true, that ‘we have seen better days,’ so that if there is anything we can do, it is to take the measure of sham, half-cut pretensions, and write down their true figures.”

He was in a good vein; it was a corker of a speech, and my father took a lot of it down for his Journals. It made you realize that Salt Lake City held cards and spades over most other places, for as he said, “In our country, we don’t see what the Gentiles look at every day. We don’t see old men in the highway picking up manure with their fingers or children in cotton factories dwarfing their little backs before their milk teeth are shed. We don’t wear pantaloons sewed at ten cents a pair, and French nose rags brocaded at a hundred dollars apiece.

“We don’t have churches laid out in Sunday opera boxes, for fashionable hiring. We don’t see men hire other white men to wait on them at table, with bands round their hats, and cockades and uniforms to set off and proclaim their miserable subjections.
Our
men don’t see their own species put out their hands to them for alms in the streets, and they don’t see what’s worse—able-bodied young women, for money, asking the favor God has made man to beg of women, and that even a dog asks of his female …

“Heaven be praised, there is not yet a brothel, or a beggar, or a dramshop, or a drunkard, or a thief or a tavemkeeper, or a palace or a prostitute, no, thank God! not one of them yet, in all our settlement.”

The people at this celebration, and there must have been hundreds, liked these remarks very well, and nodded to each other with satisfaction, saying things like, “You told the truth, Brother,” and “Pitch it in hot, for the Lord’s sake.”

But when he took to building up Brigham Young, he got the best reception yet. As he said, the Prophet could be just as nice in his person as anybody might wish, perfectly clean and neat, “But he has no mind for some kinds of niffy naffy finical whilly whaling. He has never tried to make himself a Lamb, or a Dandy, or a Lawyer; and therefore neither can I try here to make him out such.”

In winding up, he paid tribute to the Prophet’s speech and the criticisms some people made of it as being too sprightly.

“As to the language, his ‘vehemence,’ and ‘vulgarity’ and ‘obscenity,’
and as for the language of the Mormons in general, it is our boast that, as we have manners and customs growing up in our Basin that differ from those of people lying across the Beaten Tracks of Travel, so we have already, a style of speaking all our own.”

The elder’s statements about Mr. Young came because of an unusual tribute the Prophet paid on a recent Sunday to a high official of the United States. From the pulpit, he expressed a wish that this man “become a vagabond afflicted with scab, and be loathsome to himself and all his former friends, wishing for death, without dying, for a long time.”

Mormons as a sect, you see, took a downright view of their enemies, and didn’t believe in mincing words. Finishing up his talk, the elder said, speaking about disbelievers, “May they be winked at by blind people, kicked across lots by cripples, nibbled to death by young ducks, and carried to hell through the keyhole by bumblebees.”

No, sir, if I was out looking for trouble, I wouldn’t bother heckling Mormons. There may be some that would enjoy being nibbled by ducks, or carried through a keyhole by bumblebees, but I don’t happen to be one of them.

Anyhow, the dinner and frolic that followed made up for everything. These people knew how to have fun and it wasn’t any blue-nose affair, either. The food came first. I’ve never seen a spread like that anywhere, even at the church socials in Louisville. The main dishes to start with were roast beef, roast mutton, chicken, roast and boiled veal, roast pig, wild fowl, bear meat, and game pie, along with garden truck and sauce, pies, puddings, preserves, pumpkin butter, and oysters and sardines in cans, from the East. For drink, all the tables had pails of porter and ale, and a few had champagne from the grocery.

When everybody had eaten their fill, the ones that could get on their feet commenced a big figured dance. They did the quadrille, waltzes, minuets, schottisches and the like, and I noticed that the
men weren’t shy about hugging and squeezing their partners. As music, they had a violin and accordion, but around nine o’clock the Nauvoo Brass Band arrived, and then they made things tune up for sure. I didn’t know people could dance so, but Mr. Coe said it came from the strength they got out of the food.

During a couple of intermissions, a Swiss Choir and a Welsh Choir sang several numbers, and did it nobly; they made real music.

Nobody was backward about drinking ale and porter, but there wasn’t any rowdyism, if you overlook a bunch of children that were playing tag and upset a table, hitting a very elderly old man with chin whiskers on the head. He rose up from the floor, only a little dazed, not seriously injured at all, except to one of his legs, which was kind of twisted, and caught one of the children, a boy with a mouth so foul that everybody predicted he’d grow up and become a bishop, in the back of the neck with a turkey leg. It was a handsome shot; it would have done credit to a man half his age. Several people got up and congratulated him, and offered him a fresh mug of porter, and after that they carried him to the infirmary.

At twelve o’clock they served refreshments of ice cream, cake, pie, nuts, and more beverages. Then the dancing started up again. It was to go on until two, but my father said Po-Povi and I had been up long enough, so we started home. It was a beautiful night, sharp and frosty, with stars sprinkled all over the sky, close down too, winking and snapping. Beneath our feet the snow lay so dry and cold it gave off a rubbery squeaking, and over in the river you could hear ice booming and bonging, where a crack would appear and run down the line, as if somebody had slid an iron along there. It was a very nice time to be alive. Walking along, Mr. Coe, my father, the Indian girl and I, we took deep breaths of that icy air, good after the food but hurting your nose too, and agreed that things were going tolerably well, now. February would soon be gone and then March, and after the spring thaw we could pack up and resume our way, to California. And at last, of course, the gold. It was exciting.

But when we reached home, there was a sign on the door, with some queer symbols around the edge, and in the middle a sentence written in coarse print:

YOU AND THE GIRL HAVE EXACTLY TWO WEEKS.

—THE DANITES.

Right after breakfast next morning we held a conference, trying to figure how to proceed. From what we knew of these Danites, they wouldn’t balk at anything in the way of terror. Even Coe looked disturbed. But Mr. Kissel was the most cast down, because he felt he and his wife had got us into the trouble by having to stop for a rest. Everybody was in a kind of self-blaming humor. Jennie spoke up to say, “I’m the one he’s after. It’s my fault, after you took me in like one of your own.” She began to dab at her eyes, more angry than sad, as usual. Then she said, “Why doesn’t that worthless Coulter turn up the way he promised?”

And after this I’m switched if Po-Povi didn’t offer to escape and bring back friends from the Cheyenne nation, only she called them “Paikanavos,” which lived somewhere to the southeast. “I belong to the doctor,” she said, in a timid but serious way. “Now I can bring much braves.”

“Many,” observed Coe, who had been keeping up the lessons. “The adjective ‘much’ is applicable to a
singular
noun, such as ‘wheat,’ or ‘sand’; ‘many’ is the plural form—‘many braves,’ ‘many horses,’ and so on.”

I couldn’t to save my soul figure any way
I
was to blame, for once, so I didn’t bother to speak. But my father cried, “Oh, poppycock! It’s nobody’s fault. What’s more, these pigheaded ranters aren’t going to make us do something we don’t want to do. This is still the United States of America, and we’re living in the enlightened nineteenth century, not the Dark Ages. I decline to be cowed by
the long arm of Sanctimony. If these are God’s Apostles, I’m the late Nebuchadnezzar.”

This was interesting, but it didn’t seem to solve anything, which was customary with my father. Nobody
believed
he was Nebuchadnezzar, so what good did it do to ring in that old skeleton?

And that night he changed his tune a little. We were at supper when came a crash at the window, with a drawn-out tinkle of falling glass, and when we scrambled up to look, a burning arrow was sticking in the center of the floor. My father snatched it out and blew at the flame, then unrolled a coil of paper from near the tip.

“ ‘Thirteen more days,’ ” he read, white to his hairline.

“They might have killed somebody,” said Mr. Kissel, as if he was only now realizing what all this meant.

We continued supper, but nobody was hungry any more; neither did we talk. And afterwards I saw Jennie and Mr. Kissel whispering together. A few minutes later they excused themselves and went to Mrs. Kissel’s room, where they stayed half an hour or so. When they got back, the men discussed the idea of finding Major Bridger’s Mormon friend, the one mentioned in his note—Hugh Marlowe. But Mr. Kissel had lost interest. All in all, it was a very poor evening.

In the afternoon of the day following, after the store was closed, my father and Mr. Coe and I saw Jennie and Mr. Kissel coming down the road together toward our house. It seemed odd.

But my father suspected something, for he stepped into the yard and faced them.

“Kissel, what have you done?”

The big fellow looked as shaken as he could get, likely, and Jennie was pale but determined.

“What had to be did, we done-did.”

“What do you mean?” cried my father, seizing his arm at the elbow. “In God’s name, what
have
you done?”

“We saw the Prophet. If the two of us immerse, he will sanction a sealing of the lass to me.”

“In name,” said Jennie, looking down at her feet.

“Mrs. Kissel begged it so.”

“Do you stand there and suggest that you’re
joining
this bullyragging gang and are
marrying
the girl? I may have misunderstood you.”

“Until we get free. Bed would in nowise be involved,” said Kissel, with an awful grimace of embarrassment.

“My dear friend,” said my father, much agitated, “this is a princely and self-sacrificing gesture. But think what’s involved. In effect, you are going back on your own faith, and as for the marriage, you’ll either be a bigamist or legally bound to two wives of equal station. I urge you to reconsider.”

“It’s done,” said Kissel. “I thought it over first.”

“What about you, Jennie?” demanded my father, wheeling around. “Are you anxious to be married as a Mormon?”