The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (47 page)

“It’s our fault, and we’ve made it up. Anyway, it’s only till spring, till we get away.”

“You mean
if
we get away. Mark my words,” said my father, “this thing will
not
be taken lightly. Not by them. You’ll see—not by them.”

I thought he was overly harsh, considering they were doing this entirely for us. And I saw Mr. Coe, always polite and thoughtful, go up to Mr. Kissel and say something like, “Very decent, most awfully decent.” And then he patted Jennie on the back in a fatherly sort of way, same as he did with Po-Povi, but I didn’t seem to mind with this one, somehow.

The second Sunday from this the converts were baptized, along with several others, being dunked backwards, held by the head and waist by two priests, in the font at the Bowery. We all attended, Mrs. Kissel, too, because they said she must be immersed and join like her husband, when she had fully regained her strength. There was a good deal of hocus-pocus along with the ceremony, a communion with wine, a choir of singers, with a band standing behind it, a sermon, and a lot of other tiresome stuff.

When they came to Kissel, the priests had a handful getting him
up from the water, but they plopped Jennie in and out in a hurry. You could scarcely hear her responses, her voice shook so.

Well, a day or so later the Council served notice on Kissel that he “must now conform to the rules of tithing,” and pay “into the treasury of the Lord,” meaning Brigham Young, one tenth of all his worldly goods. And if his goods increased, he must keep paying a tenth right along. What’s more, he must donate a tenth of his time to labor on the public works, the community farm (in season), roads, bridges, irrigation canals, and such like.

He discussed it with us, and we concluded to say nothing about the money I’d put up. He turned over what remained of this to me, and I sewed it in the pocket of my jacket. Then, with my father’s help, he surrendered a tenth of his goods.

“It’s a difficult division to make,” my father said, seeing the whole business as ridiculous, and having the time of his life, once he’d got over his rage. “Nobody owns ten of everything, you know. We’ll have to pick and choose.”

So he selected a tin drinking cup that had sprung a leak, some wormy coffee and flour, two tent stakes that could easily be replaced, a baby shoe with a hole in the bottom, a corset, two bottles of cough syrup, a copy of an I.O.U. for forty dollars that Mr. Kissel owed his wife’s father, and a book of Baptist hymns. Mr. Kissel flatly refused to saw off a tenth of his ax handle, on the ground that it would be going too far, and might cause offense.

“Frankly, it doesn’t make much of a showing,” my father said as he surveyed the pile. “We may have to dicker a little.”

He was dead-right. When the tax collectors came around to settle up, they said it was the paltriest offering they’d had to date, and then Mr. Kissel gave up one of the mules we had bought at Fort Bernard. Before they left they assigned him his “tithing labors” for the week.

But if we thought our troubles with the Mormons were over, we were badly mistaken. We’d made an enemy out of Elder Beasely, and Muller, the apelike brewer with adenoids, went kind of crazy in his head from being cheated out of his woman. With some
friends, he went to the Apostles and Bishops and tried to get the sealing annulled. I honestly believe if it hadn’t been for Brigham Young, and other fair-minded men among the Council, some way would have been found to undo things. As it was, Muller flung taunts at us twice on the street, and another time he overhauled Jennie, whilst shopping, and followed her, making what my father called “lewd suggestions.”

Kissel seemed mildly put out when he heard. “That wasn’t anything to do,” he said, which I figured was about the same as another man’s threat of a broken back.

Matters came to a head during a social evening at the Bowery, when they had games and contests. They were always doing something like that, nearly every night. If it wasn’t a supper and frolic like before, it was a candy pull or a sleigh ride or a dance or a picnic or a banquet or a round of games. And in the summer, shucking bees and ridge-pole parties, and they customarily put up swings under the cottonwood trees along the river and went fishing and swimming. Or, again, they made horseback excursions to the Great Salt Lake, which was nine miles from the edge of town. But this wasn’t always safe, on account of the Utes, or Pah-Utes, as the Indians called themselves.

Tonight at the Bowery they had a number of foolishy contests like pin-on-the-donkey’s-tail, but the silliest was a competition between a man and a cat to see which could lap up a saucer of milk the quickest. Everybody was laughing so, the man got to laughing, too, with his nose in the milk, which caused him to choke and fall into a coughing fit, and the cat won. But it was close. People kept telling him he had done very well, and that he certainly looked natural eating that way, and with a little practice would be as good as a cat any day, but he had a reputation as a sore-head, so he got huffy and went home.

Then they laid down a mat for wrestling, and who turned out to be the best wrestler there? Our old friend Muller. He came out dressed in a pair of very tight knee-length pants, without shoes, and did some bend-overs and flexed his muscles. He was built exactly
like a gorilla, just as I said, not very tall, or even necessarily broad, but with very long arms, no neck to speak of, sloping shoulders with heavy muscles underneath, and bowlegs, nimble and strong. A person behind us said he always won the matches, and during last summer had crippled the son of an immigrant who tried to recover damages but was driven out of the Valley by Muller’s friends.

Elder Ezra T. Benson, the announcer, said Brother Muller, “our popular young brewmaster,” would defend his championship against all comers. It was all good-natured, and noisy, and a lot of people called up sarcastic things like, “Where’d you get the bloomers?” and “Why don’t somebody rig him a trapeze?” He really
did
look like a monkey, and was partially covered with silky black fur, except for his head, which would be bald as a bullet in a couple of years.

After a good deal of prompting, a group in one corner pushed a candidate up front, a young towheaded farmer who was brick-red with embarrassment. This was exactly what Muller came for. He practically killed that farmer; he made him look as bad as possible, because people said the farmer’s girl was there. While the match went on, all the good nature sort of seeped out of things; it wasn’t at all funny. Taken all around, these Saints were a bullheaded bunch, but they were human, too, and didn’t like to see anybody treated like this. When the farmer put on his shirt and limped back, he had a bloody nose and a sick grin on his face, but he was mad clear through. I could scarcely look at him, with his girl watching and all.

The contest had lasted only two or three minutes, and Muller made the most he could out of winning. He strutted around, grinning and holding up his arms, and then, drat the luck, he spotted Mr. Kissel. The grin dropped off Muller’s face in a hurry, but he strode right down from the stage, into the audience.

“Here’s a big hunk of blubber,” he said, looking at Matt. “Give him a big hand, everybody. Maybe he’ll step up, if his liver ain’t doing flip-flops.”

My father and Mr. Coe leaned over to whisper that we’d probably
better go, but Mr. Kissel sat staring up mildly, as if he was thinking it over.

Then Muller made his big mistake.

“He’s got his
wife
with him,” he said, referring to Jennie. “With a nice piece like that, he don’t want to get bunged up none.”

Nobody laughed or applauded; in fact, I heard a couple of men say that Muller was a poor loser, and ought to be hushed up.

“I’ll wrestle,” said Mr. Kissel, getting to his feet and starting for the stage. When he peeled off his shirt, there was a gasp of surprise, and even Muller’s cronies, who were likely more afraid of him than fond, took to calling up that he’d better watch his step.

Elder Benson cried, “Begin,” and Muller bounded out, feinted to the right and left, then scrambled onto poor Mr. Kissel’s back.

“This is farcical,” I heard my father say. “Matt hasn’t even a rudimentary knowledge of wrestling.”

“My apprehensions are along rather different lines,” replied Mr. Coe.

No matter what else you might say, Muller
was
a good wrestler, quick as a cat, powerful, too, but right now he wasn’t bothering to observe the ordinary rules of sport. It looked more as if he wanted to murder Mr. Kissel. His face was contorted and blotched, and his lungs heaved with pure rage.

Riding Mr. Kissel’s back, he got a strangle-hold, and several men near the stage cried, “Foul! Foul!” so Elder Benson stepped in to break it. But when he turned them around, we suddenly saw that Mr. Kissel wasn’t discomposed in the slightest. Then the truth dawned over everybody; Muller wasn’t able to get Mr. Kissel off his feet. It was ludicrous; lots of people commenced to laugh.

None of our bunch laughed, though. For the first time since we’d known him, including Coulter’s scrap with Matlock, Mr. Kissel seemed annoyed. He didn’t look mild any more. As my father said later, he gave every appearance of having a bellyful of threats, bad language, insinuations about Jennie, Mormon immersion, tithing, secret societies, plural marriage, arrows burning in the night, and a considerable number of other things, most of them centering on
Muller. It was awesome. Very deliberately he reached up over his shoulder with one arm and seized Muller’s head. Then, knotting up his giant’s strength, he wrenched that unhappy brewer off his back, turned him a somersault in the air, and slammed him down on the mat. It rattled some dishes on the shelves.

Muller wobbled up to his feet, dazed, and Mr. Kissel stepped forward, grasped his waistband, and ripped the knee-length pants clean off, leaving him standing there bare as the day he was born. But he didn’t stand that way long. Mr. Kissel picked him up, crotch and neck, and threw him about thirty feet into an empty row of chairs behind the stage. He went down in a crash of splintered wood, and this time he didn’t get up.

“So much for the Danites,” said Mr. Kissel loudly, and you could have heard a pin drop. Then people got up and began to file out. There was trouble coming, and very few wanted to be on hand when it started.

We got the new champion dressed, then hustled him home, but an hour later there came a knocking at the door and Brigham Young was standing outside with two grim-faced priests that we didn’t know by name.

“This is a bad business, doctor,” said Young, coming in.

“Bad enough, I’m afraid,” replied my father, with a look of defiance. “First it was Muller hounding Mrs. Brice, then arrows shot through our window, and now, insulting treatment at a public meeting.”

“Brother Muller has a broken mandible.”

I could see my father itching to make a sarcastic inquiry about the ague, but he held his tongue.

Mr. Kissel had been out of the room, talking to his wife, but now he came back.

“I got riled,” he said, regarding Young steadily, not really apologizing. “Commonly, I don’t.”

“You will appear before the Council tomorrow morning at ten, Brother Kissel,” said Young. One of the priests then drew him aside, whereupon the three held a whispered conference. “Yes,”
Young added, “you must bring your sealed one. This is a command from the Prophet and the High Apostles, and is not to be disobeyed, under pain of drastic punishment.”

They left, as before, with no further words.

The instant the door slammed, my father cried, “All right, the time’s come to get in touch with Marlowe. We can’t waste a minute. Our situation here is intolerable.”

“I’m mortal sorry,” said Matt, and again, in explanation, “I got riled.”

Then Coe spoke for us all, I think, when he said, “I must tell you, Kissel, that I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything half as much. You were
absolutely splendid!”

Things began to move fast now. There was nothing for Kissel and Jennie to do except head for the Council in the morning, but before they left, it being a Sunday, my father jammed on his hat and struck out looking for Brother Marlowe. I went along. I was interested to see how he worked it.

When we got down toward the Bowery, he began nodding to this person and that, wishing them good day in the friendliest tone, and finally spotting one of the rattlebrainedest old biddies in town, he said, “Sister Morganthaler, how nice to see you. I mistook you for your daughter. I wonder if you could give us some information.”

“If I’m able, I’ll give it and willing, Brother McPheeters.”

“We’re on the search for Brother Hugh Marlowe. He ordered an elastic stocking, and they’ve just come in, I promised to let him know.”

“Elastic stocking! At his age? I wouldn’t thought he had a busted vein in his body, him so skinny.”

“It’s for his father-in-law. It’s a secret, and if you ask me, a very decent gesture. I don’t know any more useful gift, when you need one.”

“Father-in-law, Brother McPheeters! Why, Brother Marlowe ain’t married. Leastways he wasn’t last night.”

“Of course not,” cried my father with a chuckle. “What I meant was, the father of the girl he’s courting. There isn’t much that escapes you, is there, Sister?”

“I’ve got good eyes, if I do say so, but I’m bound to admit I didn’t know he was courting. Who’s the girl?”

“I swore I wouldn’t tell,” said my father. “but I know I can trust you, Sister Morgenthaler. Will you keep this under your hat?”

“I won’t breathe it to a soul, especially Sister Larkin. Last secret I told her, she spread it over town in less than an hour.”

“Well, then, what’s the name of that farmer out near the University, the fellow with the very pale blonde daughter?”

“You must mean Amos Tillinghast.”

“That’s the man.”

“Well, I’m beat. That daughter of his couldn’t be over eleven or twelve at the most. It’s a scandal.”

“That’s exactly what I said, but the next question is, where do I find Marlowe?”

“Right where you’d expect, Brother McPheeters—in the room Brother Thomas rents him, above your store.”