I first heard of Thaddeus Myrell in the spring of my fourth year in the Territories. A born child of Mormon, I’d been sent into the west at the age of eighteen to herald the arrival of the Latter-day Saints to an gross & unwitting nation. Mine was the particular honor of bringing word to the Indians encamp’d in the Oklahomas, one of the fabled Lost Tribes of Israel; from my earliest youth I’d been a passionate believer, & I set out on my mission in the highest of spirits, greatly pleased with myself as an agent of God’s will. My cousin Alva & I vow’d not to return home to Nauvoo, Illinois, until seven years had gone by, or the entire country south of the Cimarron river had been brought into the Church. We were happy, unencumber’d boys, younger than our years, who imagined the west as a vast quilt of green gorges & dappled fields — a somewhat grander Illinois. Neither of us was ever to see the country of our youth again.
What happen’d over those first three years is of little relevance to this accounting. Alva died four months into our mission, of gastritic fever; my own trials, though less decisive, were hardly less severe. Important is only that I suffer’d, that my zeal & good works were repaid with mockery & violence in those God-hating swamps, & that my own house of faith was thrown open to the four winds, so that the Prophet Himself was moved finally to abandon it. It was in this fallen state, tired in flesh & sick in spirit, scraping a living together by peddling liquor to the Chickasaws & Kickapoos & Choctaws in the guise of medicinal tonics, that I found myself one evening on the porch of a shabby grain depot, listening to two negroes chatter in hush’d tones about the coming of a new Redeemer.
“He come to Onadee last week,” the taller of them said. He was a thick-set, amicable gossip I knew well from my monthly visits. There were always one or two of his persuasion in attendance, listening slack-jaw’d to some gaudy story or other. His given name was Tempie.
“What he come there for?” the second negro asked. “To preach?”
Tempie gave a knowing chuckle. “He come to serve notice to them dirty Meth’dists up at de mill,” he said, glancing side-wise at me. Tempie had long been prisoner to the suspicion that I was a Methodist myself; someone had told him they went about in cast-o f suits of clothes.
“It’s all right, Tempie,” I said, sitting down on a sack of corn. “I won’t corrupt your immortal soul this evening.”
In answer Tempie shot me a look I’d long since grown used to from negroes & white men alike. “I ain’t one you sick Indians, Mr. Harvey.”
“Go on, already,” the other negro said. “How he sized? Big or little?”
Tempie puff’d his chest out as far as it would go. “Ah! He big enough,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Big as this. Voice like rattling thunder.”
His friend looked dubious. “Mr. Wallace say he call himself the Baby of the West.”
“He a baby, all right,” Tempie said, grinning. “He gonna shake his rattle till them rich folk in Onadee drops they purses & runs.”
“A confidence-man, is he?” I ask’d innocently.
At this the second negro looked at me as though I’d crawl’d out of a hole in the ground. “He a prophet,” he said. “Come to set the peoples right. Mr. Wallacesay he gone sweep the territory clean of heathens.”
Tempie snorted & waved a hand. “Mr. Wallace say,” he japed, puffing out his cheeks. Turning side-wise on his heels, he privileged us with a shuffling dance in parody of John Wallace, his master, who su fer’d grievously from fallen arches.
It was Tempie’s misfortune that Wallace, a hard man leach’d of all generosity by ten years in the Territories, chose that moment to come out of the house. “Tempie,” he said sedately. “You come over here to me.”
Tempie took off at once in the direction of the granary. His companion back’d himself against the wall & stay’d there, quiet as a beam. Wallace watch’d Tempie go, shifted his weight with a diffident grunt, cuff’d the other negro across the ear & turned his attention grudgingly to me.
“Inciting my niggers to mischief, Harvey?” he said, looking at me with unadorn’d distaste. “Been feeding them your cure-alls, peradventure?”
“Beg pardon, Mr. Wallace,” I answered quickly, my voice rising as it always does when addressing men of property. “We’ve been discussing the new preacher up in Onadee.”
“Ah! Him,” said Wallace, his manner suddenly much changed. He looked me over for a time; I returned his look with bafflement. In two years of acquaintanceship he’d not once looked me squarely in the eye.
“Come inside a bit, Harvey, if you like.”
The depot was no great establishment, cobbled together as it was of planks of every size & pedigree; to me, however, it seem’d a very mansion. The walls were paper’d from top to bottom with news-print, as in a negro’s cabin. I found nothing unusual in this at first; but as my host busied himself with a rusted co fee-pot & a lump of cold pork-shoulder, I saw that each wall was cover’d in individual clippings, & that each clipping had to do with the so-called “Indian Question” in one way or another. There must have been twenty years’ worth, from any number of papers & bulletins, dating back to the Territories’ natal days. My host sat me down at the little tin-topped table, handed me a cup of tepid co fee & said in a close-mouth’d, conspiratorial voice—
“One day, Mr. Harvey, the country hereabouts will be as fresh & unsulliedas humanity’s first garden.”
I said nothing for a time, stirring the co fee with my least filthy finger. The faith of my fathers had sent me in search of just such a paradise four years before; those four years, however, had done their share to educate me. “I find that hard to credit, Mr. Wallace,” I said at last. Again, however, my voice grew plaintive: “Of course, you’ve been here a great deal longer than I have. I’d be delighted, sir, to believe—”
“Believe it then, young man! Believe it.” Wallace’s breath stank of chicory & rancid butter. “We’re living next-door to Heaven out here on these plains. Close enough to smell it, if the wind is right.”
At this juncture I felt bold enough to attempt a joke. “That may well be, sir,” I answer’d. “But when the wind blows the other way, I smell something else entirely.”
“Noticed that, have you?” Wallace said earnestly. “There’s some that might agree with what you say.”
“I challenge any white man to deny it,” I retorted. “Which among us hasn’t suffer’d at their hands? They’re a godless, joyless, hopeless race of mongrels, in whom the seed of Heaven has grown crooked. You’ll find no sanctity in this territory, Mr. Wallace. And no Garden of Eden, either.”
I was as surprised as Wallace by the venom in my voice; I’d said far more than I’d intended. The desire to please him, to win his good opinion, was as strong in me as ever; but my tongue was thick with bitterness. Did this flatfooted old ass not see that he was living at the center of a vast grid of human misery? Did he actually think of this waste-land, this spiritual desert, this pissoirof the nation as the next best thing to Heaven? If so, then he believed what my father believed, what my cousin Alva had believed, what I myself had believed when I set out on my mission. The thought was almost more than I could bear.