utterance was the very breath of God itself.
“What’s this Gen-tile?” he asked as the coals began to glow anew with the infusion of air.
Young cleared his throat. “A Gentile is a non-Mormon. One who has not yet come to the faith that will save him everlasting.”
“Me? I’m a Gentile?”
“What faith are you, Mr. Bass?”
“I don’t figger there’s a name I can rightly put on it.”
“Were you raised up with any church teaching?”
“My ma, she tried hard,” Titus explained. “With me an’ her other young’uns. But I s’pose your kind would call her a Gentile—no matter that she was as good an’ God-fearin’ a woman as ever walked this earth.”
“I would never mean to give offense—”
“Much as she tried to get the Bible into my head an’ part o’ my heart,” Bass continued without waiting for Young to finish, “I fell into the life what snared most boys I knowed on the frontier, snared ’em same as me. Whiskey an’ wimmens. Bad whiskey and even badder wimmens.”
He liked watching how those temporal, carnal words landed on their ears: the averted eyes, the downturned faces, as each man did his best to stare at the ground; a few gazed upward as if asking for heaven to cast its gloried benevolence on this pagan sinner, perhaps even asking for a thunderbolt to be sent from above to strike down this blasphemer.
“Even Mary, the mother of Christ Jesus, was an apostate from the true church,” Young instructed. “She herself was not redeemed by the blood of her son.”
“He was the one they nailed on the cross, weren’t he?”
With a smile, the Prophet nodded. “Yes. The Christ Jesus, who married the two Marys and Martha too before He was betrayed and crucified … married all three, whereby He could sow His seed before He ascended to the right hand of God.”
“My mam didn’t ever teach me Jesus was married afore,” Bass admitted as he studied the iron band again. “Havin’ three wives, hmmm—sounds to me like you’re saying Jesus wasn’t satisfied to be with just one woman.”
“Do you doubt that Christ Jesus married the three?”
He shrugged and replied, “I don’t know enough ’bout anything to answer your questions. I’m just a simple man who manages to sin a lot—”
“What sin was once in a man’s heart is of no bearing to God,” Brigham Young replied. “And therefore of no bearing to me. It’s what a man decides to become that marks him for the Lord’s work—”
“It ain’t a case of what I’ll become, you best unnerstand. It’s what I
The Prophet took a step closer, holding out his hands before him, palms up. “Look at these hands, Mr. Bass. Once these were the hands of a carpenter. I too was a simple man with the hands of a carpenter.” He looked up from staring at his palms. “Did you know Jesus was a carpenter Himself?”
“Before you say He married them three women?”
“Christ Jesus—the Savior who came to the New World after He was crucified,” Young extolled. “He appeared to God’s chosen to tell them how all others in the land of Old Israel had forsaken Him and His promise. So Jesus left them with a new promise, and that word is told in our holy book. How Adam was God, conceived on the great star of Kolob, the site for the conception of all the gods. The most amazing story of all is told in our book, Mr. Bass.”
He wagged his head and turned back to the coals, dragging the iron strip out of the fire again and looping its crescent over the end of the anvil. “I don’t read much. Ain’t since I come out here.”
“One of the Apostles could read some of the holy book to you—”
“I got work to do.”
But Young was not easily deterred. “While you continue with your work.”
“I’m too old—”
“No man should deny himself a chance at eternal life, especially when he grows long in the tooth, Mr. Bass.”
He picked up the hammer and gave the red-hot crescent a slam, sparks sputtering from the anvil. “I am what I am, Preacher. I see what I see, an’ I hear what I hear. No man can see or hear for me.”
“But you can see the truth, hear the truth of our word, and judge for yourself as the many who have already made a stand for the new nation of Israel.”
Again and again his hammer rang against the crimson metal he inched around the anvil, slowly tightening the crescent into a solid circle the size he would need to work onto a wagon’s wheel hub. “I been out here since twenty-five …” and the hammer rang. “I seen things with my own eyes …” that hammer rang again. “Things I’d never dreamed … back east … heard an’ smelled an’ felt … all manner of things out here … things what wasn’t really there … they’s called ghosts … or shades … or hoo-doos—”
“Spirits, Mr. Bass,” Young interrupted. “Like the Holy Spirit that will enter your bosom and seize your heart with a fire of unquenchable flame.”
“Hoo-doos or spirits … no matter what you call ’em … that sort of thing may give a man like you … the willies an’ shakes … but such ghosty doin’s don’t make no nevermind … to the peoples out here … out to these here mountains … the red folks ain’t the kind to preach an’ push … what they have in their heart … push it on me the way you preachers push … a man’s medeecin is his medeecin … so who the blazes am I … to make so little of what another man carries … in his heart … who the hell am I to say … what makes him a man? … or to say I’m a man … an’ he ain’t?”
“I’ve attempted to explain to you where the Lamanites have been judged wrong, where the Indians, the cursed ones of this continent, came from and how God turned His face from them because they turned their faces from His true word,” Young said impatiently as he stepped around the side of the anvil to gaze directly into the trapper’s face. “The Indian believes in the sanctity of his beliefs about his world because he is in a state of ignorance—he knows not the word of God, Mr. Bass. Be careful, very careful, you do not covet the ignorance of these savages, or you are a heathen yourself, destined for the pit of fire. The reason these heathens can’t spread the healing power of their teaching is because they have no knowledge of the one true God.”
Scratch slammed the hammer down on the red-hot iron with a vengeance. “Their God is the same as yours, Preacher.”
Young’s face brightened with that benevolent smile that made Bass realize the Prophet believed he was ministering unto a lesser man, one who was every bit as ignorant as a heathen Indian, totally unworthy of salvation for the color of his skin.
“No,” the Prophet argued, “the spirits of these Indians are not the same as the one true Creator. These red savages live in a state of ignorance, for there will be no happy hunting ground for them when they die without the salvation of the word.”
From the corner of Scratch’s eye, the old trapper spotted his wife step from the open doorway of the store and stop against the building, then slowly settle to the half-log bench propped against the cabin wall. Waits-by- the-Water smiled at him, then closed her eyes and turned her face up to the warming sun. Apparently very much at peace.
Turning back to Brigham Young, he asked, “Your God an angry God, Preacher?”
For a moment, Young appeared to heft his thoughts around like a carpenter might take the measure of the grain in a piece of wood. “Yes, at times He can be an angry, vengeful God. When He alone determines He will smite the unrighteous—”
“What of all them sinners back to Missouri?” Titus asked as he continued to hammer on those last few inches of iron. “Other places too … where the folks riz up … an’ throwed you Marmons out? Why didn’t your God … smite them Gentiles … why did your God … make it so hard on your people?”
That question startled the Prophet. He quickly glanced at those followers around him with a look that Titus figured was Young’s wondering if any of them had explained the story of their years of travail to this ignorant Gentile.
“It is not for a man to know the inner workings of the heart of God, Mr. Bass,” he finally answered. “I suppose it will all be revealed to us in due time.”
