Lee had removed Usher’s hand from his coat, slowly, his fiery eyes narrowing as they rose from the grisly necklace of human ears interlaced with blackened, shriveled penises once pendant between the legs of Usher’s victims, worn front and back like a medieval church scapular.
His eyes turned up in an owlish frown, Lee told the Danite leader, “Only so long as your soldiers walk the path of righteousness. Only so long as that, Jubilee—will you be allowed to commune among us. These are gentle folk and you, your men—”
“Are rough-hewn, yes,” Jubilee had interrupted. “They are fodder only, Lee. Don’t you see? Among them are the makings of our greatness. Yours and mine.”
“Count me out of your blood work, Jubilee,” Lee had protested, wagging his head meaningfully, his Adam’s apple as big as a turkey’s egg.
Usher had laughed, a caustic sound, like ice breaking apart in northern rivers. When he spoke, his words came sharp, filled with bile, cutting with a lasting sting. “Seems I recall a great deal of blood work done at the behest of John Doyle Lee back to 1857,” he said more softly then, theatrically. “That train of Gentiles, wanting nothing more than to make their way to California. You slaughtered them all—man, woman, and child at Mountain Meadows—didn’t you?”
“What of it!” he protested in a voice as tart as pickling brine, the rangy dance of his big Adam’s apple bobbing up and down his stringy neck.
He had rocked back into Lee’s face, the venom returned to his words, licking a fleck of spittle from the fleshy curve of his lower lip as he said, “Don’t seek to preach to me about blood work, John Doyle Lee! We know where we each stand, whereof the call from on high comes. And now we share the same dream of seeing that false prophet Brigham Young removed from his temporal throne.”
“The years have brought a change in … circumstances, shall we say?” Lee replied, his face as dreary as a priest’s at a sacrifice. “I want nothing more than to live out my life—”
“The old fires dying in you, my friend?” Jubilee had asked. Then sighed. “All right. I think we understand one another. For the time, I only ask you and yours to help me embrace these men within the folds of your faithful for the coming winter. Help me teach them the true faith, John Doyle—and in return you and yours will be paid handsomely for all that we are fed, for the roofs put over our heads.”
“I cannot escape the feeling that you have brought to my doorstep an army of occupation,” Lee protested softly, his arms swung out wide as if submitting to crucifixion. “These are gentle, common people—”
“But we both know it will take an army, its arm raised in vengeance, to seize this land from the heretic. That army then to wield its sword to wrest our kingdom away from the Gentiles and their federalized government so far away in Washington City. Look out that window, John Doyle! Out there I have the beginnings of just such an army. And if you stand beside me, together we will not fail Almighty God!”
So Usher led them north to Utah again in seventy, there to sojourn another winter in the bosom of Lee’s Mormon faithful. And what was all the better, Jubilee wintered right under the nose of that heretic prophet, Brigham Young himself! Winter after winter Jubilee returned them here, leading them up from the blood plain of Arizona and New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua. From here in Cedar City, Jubilee could keep a watchful eye on the development of affairs among the Prophet’s insiders, the political machinations of the Quorum of Twelve, the pulse of the rock-solid membership from Stake to Stake. He sent those he could trust the most to be his eyes and ears among Young’s faithful. In the end the Danite chose emissaries who had never been known to associate with Jubilee Usher, new men recruited across the past few years and taught the requisite theology at Usher’s knee, told who to find and who to talk to, who to trust and who to keep at arm’s length. It was always a winter’s task, this grooming of a handful of his crude hellions, making of them men of the cloth, men the likes of Lemuel Wiser.
There were cracks in that solid wall Brigham Young had fortified about himself, cracks through which Usher made his patient, dogged inroads: waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment to bring that unsteady wall down around the Prophet. It would not be long, he told himself now as he washed the woman’s back with hot, soapy water. Steady progress could be measured, progress in the crumbling of Young’s hold on the Church and its Empire.
“And you will stand at my side, dear woman,” he told her, dragging the coarse cloth back and forth over her white shoulders. How he loved women untouched by the discoloring rays of the sun. “A most fitting life-mate for the new Prophet. How the faithful will rejoice in our happiness.”
