resting place in UKULORE VALLEY TABERNACLE
and enshrined within the town square which
from this day forth will be known as MEMORIAL SQUARE.
To mark this most holy day,
a monument befitting THE PROPHET
will be unveiled.
Faithful Ukulites
at 3.00 pm on this day, Friday 12th August 1932.,
the Children of Israel, ye Faithful Ukulites!
shall march from the Tabernacle on to Memorial Square,
where the body of the Prophet and Martyr will be laid
to rest for all time.
Prayers conducted by Sardus Swift.
Simon Bolsom, historian and biographer,
will read from his forthcoming biography
Jonas Ukulore: Prophet and Revelator, Man and Martyr
in the Big Hall.
Eliza Snow shall sing, accompanied by Alice Pritchard.
Supper will be held after the service in the Little Hall.
No plates necessary, ladies. Catering handled by Valley Functions.
– ALL SHALL ATTEND–
It was shrouded in a massive canvas tarp, with a rope threaded through brass eye-holes girding it at its foot. The tarp cover made it look like a great, grey Sphinx, eroded by the sands of time into faceless obscurity.
Clustered about it, the congregation of Ukulites was overawed.
A huge truck had rolled into town the previous morning, with the monument standing draped and grey there in the back, looking just as it did now. Sardus Swift, who had left the valley at five o’clock that morning and taken a cane trolley to Davenport and a train up to Orkney – insisting he ride with the contractors the 380-odd miles back to the valley ‘in case of complications’ – sat, hat in lap, his bearing straight-backed and stern but with a flush of pride about his face that even he could not suppress.
Both of the memorial contractors, a fat Mr Godbelly and a fatter Mr Pry, looked exhausted but jolly. It had taken a dozen men to swing the monument, lowered by chain from the truck, into its allotted position in the Square.
Even some of the cane-men had lent a hand, in spite of the fact that for them tomorrow’s ceremony would be off-limits – those not strictly of the faith were forbidden to participate in the celebration of what was, for the Ukulites, a Holy Day: the day commemorating ‘The Martyrdom of the Prophet’. The valley’s residents tolerated and had tolerated for many years the unorthodox practices of the Ukulites who, though they comprised no more than one fifth of the valley’s two thousand or so denizens, owned the refinery, most of the cane acreage, and the vast majority of the business and residential space. This, of course, was the chief reason why the small sectarian colony was suffered to operate in (and in fact control) the valley; but it was a precarious ascendancy, and the Ukulites had borne their share of adversity in the ongoing battle to retain their enviable, but not unassailable, position.
Since the time when, in the last days of winter 1862, Jonas Ukulore had led his small band of adherents into what was then an unfarmed, virtually uninhabited valley, the Ukulites had fought for, defended, and embraced their beliefs with uncompromising rigour. It was this steadfast adherence to a strict dogma, set down in a testament written by their prophet in 1861, coupled with the keen and aggressive business methods employed by Joseph Ukulore, brother of Jonas, which had assured the Ukulite colony its longevity. Indeed, if Jonas was the prophet, Joseph was the profiteer.
It was in 1859 that Jonas Ukulore, a Welsh convert to the Baptist faith, began to have revelations, and in due course he had announced to the Baptist authorities his revelation that he was the ‘Seventh Angel’ predicted in the Book of Daniel, and that destiny would see him as ‘a mighty man, yea a prophet in Israel’.
The following year Jonas and a few of his followers were excommunicated by the Church authorities, his revelations having begun to conflict with orthodox dogma.
On two occasions he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of orthodox vigilante committees, and observing the growing hostility toward alt Baptists and other sectarian bodies Jonas and his band of adherents fled the trouble in search of a suitable spot to establish ‘the new Fold’. Finding the secluded valley in ‘a state of divine pendency’, the group pooled all possessions and set up residence.
The Prophet spent much of his time in secluded prayer, as he prepared himself for ‘the second coming’, which had been revealed to him in one of his three hundred or so revelations, all of which he documented meticulously. Meanwhile his brother Joseph, former agriculturist and business man, took control of the valley’s monetary interests and planted sugarcane.
The cane flourished in the humid valley; soon the excess bulk of each crop was being sold, at a healthy profit, to the Davenport Mills.
The valley flourished. The crops burgeoned. The profits rose. It seemed that God had indeed been a generous overseer to the valley’s growth, and the colony’s future prosperity seemed secure.
Early, in August 1871 the Prophet, wearing a white robe and golden crown and holding a gilded sceptre, announced to his disciples that ‘the hour was nigh’ – the second coming was at hand and all must prepare for the imminent crusade out of the valley.
One week later, as fifty or so men and women marched behind their white-garbed leader, shouting hosannas and singing his praises, Jonas Ukulore was shot through the head by an unknown sniper, the single bullet killing him instantly. The assassin was never discovered, but was naturally assumed to have come from the outside. Taking this as yet further evidence of the treachery of the Gentiles beyond, the Ukulites abandoned their projected crusade and remained inside the valley; and as this course brought rich rewards, they came in time to read into the tragedy a dramatic justification of their faith.
Under the guidance of the ever resourceful Joseph Ukulore the valley continued to prosper, the townsfolk eventually building trolley-rails to Davenport and little by little recruiting ‘outsiders’ to work the cane-fields.
In the year 1904 Joseph undertook the gargantuan task of organizing the building of the sugar refinery, fully aware that at the age of eighty-three he would not live to see its completion, let alone to share in the overwhelming rewards that his industry would certainly bring. The following year, the foundations of the refinery having only just been laid, Joseph Ukulore died, leaving the valley a legacy of ensured future prosperity.
From Vargus, A Regional History (Vargustone Municipal Offices, 1921)
And so it was that on this day the Ukulites mourned their Prophet.
‘Hail the Prophet, ascended to heaven
Traitors and tyrants now fight him in vain
With God he’s on high, watching over his brethren
Death cannot conquer the hero again’
sang Eliza Snow.
And Sardus Swift pulled back the tarp.
III
Ah never cried as a baby. That is to say, throughout mah babyhood never once did ah cry – no, not a peep. Nor did ah bawl away mah childhood either, and during mah youthhood ah resolved to contain all mah emotions within and never to allow one sob without – for to do otherwise surely laid one open to all manner of abuse. And now, as ah count away the final seconds of mah manhood – as ah don the death-hood – ah will not crack. No. In all mah lifehood ah have never once cried. Not out loud. No, not out loud.
And as a tottering infant ah always tried mah best to stay out from unner mummy’s feet. Ah did. Nor did ah pester mah father when he was working – asking him a whole lot of dumb questions that he couldn’t answer, that sort of thing.