Mickelsson's Ghosts (99 page)

Lawler was saying, “We can leave your new diningroom. You already tore out the walls in there, and if you'd found anything I believe you'd have let me know.” He smiled. “Let's start up in the bedrooms. Human beings have a natural tendency to hide things near the bed. I suppose it's in some way sexual.” He gave the pistol a little wave, suggesting that Mickelsson get moving. “You have tools?”

Mickelsson nodded, still faint with the realization of how close he'd come to speaking of the box, and, with Lawler following, the gun trained on his back, went to get the pick, the wreckingbar, and a claw-hammer. He pushed the hammer-head down into his trouser pocket, crowded in with his pipe. He was only now beginning to register that he must actually tear the house apart, not only undo all he had done but reduce the house to less than it had been when he began. He thought of mentioning to Lawler the horror of that, then kept silent. Probably no one, not even a decent, life-loving man, would really understand. Psychological symbolism; shadows out of childhood. But ah, how powerful such symbolism was! In the hallway, moving ahead of Lawler toward the stairs, he ran his fingers along the new wallpaper. It occurred to him that if, by some miracle, he should get power over Lawler, he would certainly kill him. He felt remorse for the scorn he'd felt toward the well-kept old houses of Montrose, green-shuttered, white palaces, neat broad lawns. He'd disliked the people who owned them, he thought. People too gullibly pious, too proud and conservative; his
own
people, as much so as the people of Susquehanna.

The cat darted past Mickelsson's right leg, running toward the foot of the stairs, where, abruptly, it paused, tinted by the light coming in through the stained-glass windows. The newel post and bannister glowed as if from within. With his right foot raised to the first step, his left hand on the bannister, Mickelsson stopped. He turned, and Lawler looked at him, fat rolls forming on his neck as he leaned his head. The cat moved up three steps.

Mickelsson's fist tightened on the wreckingbar and pick. Lawler was maybe four feet away, within easy reach if Mickelsson were to raise the tools and strike; his left hand, on the bannister, would give him leverage. Lawler gestured with the gun. Light flashed on the lenses of his glasses.

“I won't do it,” Mickelsson said. Though he spoke with seeming conviction, the hand holding the tools did not move, still calculating on its own. The swing was too awkward; he should drop the pick, use just the bar. That instant the hallway rang out with a terrific explosion that made his heart leap, his knees turn to water, his vision go dim. Lawler had outthought him. The cat lay dead on the steps—still jerking but dead, the side of its head blown off, and Mickelsson's muscles were so weak he could hardly hold on to the tools and railing.

“Up,” Lawler said.

After a moment, with one brief glance at the cat, Mickelsson turned, a taste of vomit in his mouth, and continued up the steps.

“We'll begin,” Lawler said calmly, “by tearing off the mopboards, then we'll move to where the lath butts up against the doors and windows. If one wishes to hide things, those are the easiest places to open up and then put back as they were.”

“Yes,” Mickelsson said.

He swung the wreckingbar hard, cutting deep, as if by proving himself a willing worker he might escape being shot. Nietzsche's “slave” in bold cartoon. He knew the hope was futile, in fact moronic, and knew, too, that if he worked this way for very long in his present condition, he'd be too weak to do what was demanded of him. Nevertheless he swung hard a second time, then pried away an eight-foot length of moleboard—“mop-board,” Lawler had called it. For some reason the difference between their languages was chilling. There was nothing behind it, whatever it was called, but broken bits of plaster. He stabbed in behind a second length of moleboard.
Moles,
he thought, and again felt cold along his spine. He calmed himself. Lawler seated himself on the bed, the gun still on Mickelsson.

“What's all this really about, Edward?” Mickelsson asked as the second length creaked out a ways, then cracked. “There are no Sons of Dan. You know that.”

“Don't be stupid!” He scowled, barely containing his disgust at such ignorance.

Mickelsson swung again, then pried. “I've seen these Mormons,” he said, already breathing heavily. “One may not like them much, but any fool can see they're a gentle people. Docile as cows. If there really were this assassin squad you claim to be part of, people like that would get out of the Mormon Church so fast you'd think you'd walked in on a stampede.”

“You're mistaken.” Lawler had to raise his voice to be heard above the wreckingbar. He seemed glad to do it. “First, of course, most of them don't know about us—at least not for sure. Nearly all of them, I imagine, have heard about the massacre at Mountain Meadows, back in the early days, and most of them have heard enough rumors of things more recent to keep them uneasy, when they think about it, which for the most part they don't do.” He tapped his forehead, tilting his head forward and rolling his eyes up like a medieval saint in a painting. “Most of them have heard how the Angels of Death”—he modestly closed his eyes—“the Danites, Sons of Dan—how we shot Governor Boggs of Missouri as he sat at his window.” Lawler watched Mickelsson sadly from under half-closed eyelids, as if to admit the assassination attempt had been perhaps a little stupid. “These gentle Saints you speak about would never admit to an outsider, I imagine, how much they suspect or, in some cases, know. But take my word for it, they're not altogether unaware of our existence.”

“Mountain Meadows?” Mickelsson asked, and kept working. It was not Mountain Meadows he cared about, of course. Nobody's “early days” were all that glorious.

Lawler's voice, behind him now, had a kind of shrug in it, but no real apology. Maybe, in fact, he was enjoying himself. “Rich wagon-train from Arkansas, back in 1857, passing through Utah on its way West. At the time we were in undeclared war with the United States government. It's a long story, but briefly, this: some Ute Indians—or mostly Ute Indians; they may have been supported by white men in Indian dress—swept down on the wagon-train. The train formed a defensive circle, and fought back. As the attackers soon learned, the train had sharp-shooters—the best Indian-fighters money could buy—so the ‘Indians' were ineffective. That, however, was not the end. The Saints arrived and persuaded the train to surrender into Mormon protection. This the train did, giving up its weapons, and the Mormons systematically shot every man, woman, and child above the age of eight. Interesting? Hey? Think what discipline it took! How many people do
you
know capable of shooting unarmed women and children? Children under the age of eight, I should mention, were loaded into wagons and carried away to be adopted into Mormon families. This is the touching part: while they were leaving in the wagons, riding up the trail out of Mountain Meadows, the young children saw the whole thing. Most of them didn't remember it in later years, of course.”

Mickelsson turned briefly to glance at him. Lawler was neither smiling nor frowning. He sat motionless, the bed sagging under his weight, the pistol still trained on Mickelsson. “And you're telling me the Danites did this? Your people? And the heads of the church knew it? Ordered it?”

“Come, come,” Lawler said, giving him a little wave, “no childish righteousness. Nobody's boasting about that sordid affair. But use your head, Professor. It was an act of war. The Saints had been driven from Missouri by brute force, and the U.S. Cavalry was amassing for an attack. The rules of war were not the same in those days as we like to believe they are now. It was a rich train—one of the richest that ever travelled West—and rich in arms as well as gold. In eighteen fifty-seven massacre was a standard wartime practice. It took stomach, but our forebears had a good deal more stomach than we do.” He looked down at his own vast tumescence glumly, as if noticing he'd perhaps made a joke. “A few years later, when times had changed, the church itself turned on the general in command of the operation—a cousin of Robert E. Lee.”

“Terrific,” Mickelsson said. He put down the wreckingbar to move his dresser and trunk out of the way. They'd be scratched beyond repair when this was over, he thought—then went clammy, remembering it wouldn't matter; he'd have no use for trunks and dressers. “Terrific,” he said again, with still greater disgust.

Gently, wearily, Lawler asked in his fussily good English, “Does irony comfort you? I am not responsible for the cruelty of life at that time. You're a descendant of Vikings, if I'm not mistaken. Are you responsible for the sack of Paris?”

Mickelsson worked on, clenching his dust-gritty teeth, saying nothing.

“But to return to your earlier, more interesting point,” Lawler said, “I think it is the case that most Latter-Day Saints, if you ask them about the Danites, will tell you that there certainly are none. But we're adults, you and I. We know about people.

“Look at the matter philosophically. I think we're in agreement, you and I, that people ought to act as individuals, with individual thought and will. How else can we have a democracy? The trouble is, they don't. People are lazy, if not stupid—and I do not honestly believe the problem is stupidity. They don't
want
to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera. Given that fact, one has two apparent choices: to try with all one's might to teach them to think and to value thinking—and we both know, as teachers, how seldom that works—or to
control
their thinking, de-fuse them, so to speak—intellectually castrate them, you may prefer to say—and we both know how frequently, even in the university classroom, we do that.”

Abruptly, Lawler leaned forward from the side of the bed and stood up, darkly frowning, and backed, on tiptoe, with graceful, almost princely movements, to the bathroom door, which he threw open suddenly, as if he thought there might be someone behind it. The bathroom was empty, like the rest of the house. He closed the door and looked hard at Mickelsson. “Did you hear something? Is there someone here in the house with you?”

“I didn't hear a thing.”

Lawler seemed to ponder it, tapping his chin with two fingers, his lips sucked in. Then he seemed to dismiss it. “All right,” he said. “Very well, where were we?” He nodded. “Ah. Controlling people's minds. Yes, exactly!” His expression became solemn again. “Has it ever crossed
your
mind, Professor, that we're in the process of wiping out physical illness? Fifty per cent of all cancer we can stop; we're close to winning out over heart disease; we're on the threshold of discovering the secret of aging. Do you know what that means? Soon the one great enemy—the only one remaining—will be
mental
illness. Imagine it! A whole planet of everlasting mad zombies! Freedom, civility, repression, frustration … increasing crowding, increasing indignity and an interminable life for suffering it all … Your kind of dream is finished, you see, your admirable but deadly liberalism. Life must defend itself against the mad raging horde. It's right at the door, believe me!

“For that reason, you see, we have in our church a hierarchy of knowledge and control—much as the Freemasons at one time had. It's basically what you might call a
military
structure: those who know, and those who, in descending degrees, obey. Those who obey are persuaded that the church knows best. I know, I know, you scorn that. Who doesn't? You want everyone to think for himself, starting with propositions in the original Greek.” He shrugged, then shook his head impatiently. “But they
won't,
that's the evident fact of the matter. Believe it or not, most people
want
to give up all traces of their humanness to some authority that frees them to be comfortable, healthy beasts. If they weren't Mormons, they'd be union fanatics or Organization men,' and their children would be Moonies, or scientologists, or members of the Way International. Have you read about that?” Lawler's eyebrows lifted, his face full of sadness. “Someplace in Ohio—Lima, perhaps? A
profoundly
dangerous outfit, I'm afraid! Gun-crazy, and rigidly mind-controlled by drugs.
We,
as you know, do nothing like that. Our use of violence is selective—that's one reason no one is even sure of the present existence of the Sons of Dan. The membership of Way International, I might mention, grows by leaps and bounds. People, you see,
like
to be slaves! But no organization in the world—with the possible exception of the Jehovah's Witnesses—is growing as fast as the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. We play no tricks, we use no drugs—we
forbid
escape through drugs. We do not use ‘front organization' trickery like the Moonies—cheap house-cleaners and babysitters who will poison and steal your child's mind.” He smiled as if mournfully amused by such childish wickedness. “No, no! We work with
human weakness itself,
the most powerful drug of all. The universal hunger for security, easy answers, magic, and somebody to blame. The religious
thirst,
as your friend Nietzsche says, for things which are
against reason.
That's the formula, you know. The medieval Church Fathers understood it, especially the mainly political ones, the kind that started crusades. And every modern Holy Roller knows it—fundamentalism, what is it but a secure closing of doors, permission not to think?” Lawler's eyes closed to slits. “Your friends the Lutherans are not so far from that, my dear Professor. And the Presbyterians—notice how they speak more and more of
Jesus within!
Not ‘the historical Jesus,' pride of their tradition—oh no! Too much slippage there! ‘Jesus within!' Saves all kinds of annoyance, you know. Who needs Hebrew or Greek to read Jesus within? I watch these things with interest, as you see. But we Mormons, we were there ahead of them all. Make no mistake, Professor! We don't make people weaker than they are. We make them
profoundly
what they are!”