Delivering Virtue Read online

  Perhaps it was the heat and my need for sleep, but I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. In my more perverse moments, I had had similar visions myself.

  “And who might you be, sir?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I am just a tourist enjoying a holiday.”

  That was when the girl – Meshach, I think it was – stepped forward and whispered into the man’s ear. At this, Timotheus became suddenly agitated. He put on his hat, and then took it off again, stepping toward me.

  “Why, beggin’ your pardon… But… You’re not the Deliverer, are you?”

  I was at a loss. As I said, I did not fancy being associated with this miserable lot, but I suspected that I was indeed the same Deliverer to whom he referred.

  “How many miles do you figure you travel in a day?” I asked.

  “Oh, well…” He did not appear to want to change the subject, but said, “Three on average, I suppose. Sometimes as many as five.”

  By that rate, I summed, they would reach their fabled Zion sometime next century. Not that they would ever last that long. I imagined a pair of vultures chatting over the carcass of one of the girls.

  “How’s your believer?” asks one vulture of the other.

  “Tough,” he replies. “And spiced with a little too much indoctrination for my taste.”

  At the very least, they were doomed to spend a miserable winter in some cave along the way, copulating and birthing and starving. But then, I was reasonably certain that the Good Lord might instruct them to roast an infant or two to get them by.

  “God’s ways are truly mysterious,” I muttered.

  I felt Virtue give me an elbow to the ribs, as if signaling that she was ready to move on.

  Shadrach then stepped forward, away from her cart. “Please,” she said. Her voice was all aquiver. Tears glittered in her eyes. “Please,” she repeated. “Is it you? Are you the Blessed Deliverer?” She trained her gaze on Virtue. “Is she the Holy Betrothed?”

  An intense discomfort swept through my being. I felt sorely put on the spot. I felt unreasonably responsible for this girl’s happiness. How, I marveled, did this ever come to be? She seemed so terribly desperate.

  It was against my better sense, and not something I might have done given the leisure to think it out, but I could not let this poor creature take one more step westward without providing her with a bit of hope, no matter how ill-placed it might be. So I smiled at her, using a smile I had once seen in an image of Christ as he was painted on the ceiling of a church. I lifted my hand toward her, beatifically. And then, at the mercy of some foolish force guiding me, like some wooden puppet at the beck of his master, I softly spoke.

  “Bless thee, sister.”

  That was all it took. A grateful, sunny smile spread across the girl’s soiled face.

  A blackbird trilled in the cattails.

  And then, in the next instant, a great gush of amniotic water burst forth from between the girl’s legs, splashing in the dust at her feet.

  Everyone turned to stare.

  Shadrach peered down at her shoes.

  “A miracle!” grunted Timotheus.

  I took that opportunity to turn my horse and quickly ride away.

  I am sure it was irresponsible of me not to stick around and play midwife, but I did not so much as glance back over my shoulder.

  We galloped for a ways, until my heebie-jeebies subsided, and then we settled into a more casual pace. I looked down at Virtue and shrugged.

  “Sorry,” I said to my hoofed friends. “That was not as much fun as I had hoped.”

  A WELCOMING TRINITY OF poplar trees stood on a hillside in the distance, and I steered our course in their direction.

  It turned out to be a veritable oasis – a shady escape from the torrid midday sun.

  An artesian spring effervesced from among the trees’ roots, forming a small stream that trickled down the slope toward the river. The liquid ushering forth was fresh and deep-earth cool, and although it was not so snowy sweet as the water of my Sawtooth Mountain idyll, it was by far the best thing I had tasted in a good while. The animals and I drank long and hard, and then, after I had relieved the horses of their riggings, I regarded Virtue. She sat on a blanket, waiting.

  A bone-deep weariness besieged my body; the trail’s hardships had caught up to me all in a blink, and now the prospect of kneeling beneath the goat, filling a bucket, and preparing a sterilized bottle for the little girl seemed an insurmountable chore. But I knew she must be hungry. I yawned. And then, overcome, I yawned again.

  I pondered Virtue; wearily, I looked at the goat.

  And then, flitting to the fore of my somnolent recollector, I saw an image, the inspired likes of which could only have arisen from the pastoral tale of Daphnis and Chloe.

  I studied the goat more closely. She was munching leaves, her milk bag heavy and full near to bursting. Turning to Virtue, I asked, “Shall we give it a try?”

  She appeared to nod, as if reading my thoughts.

  I lifted her into my arms and walked over to the goat. With one hand, I took hold of a horn and led the nanny toward the spring.

  “Stand still,” I told her.

  I cupped my free hand in the water and washed the dust from the goat’s teats. Then, kneeling on one knee, and with Virtue sitting on the other, I leaned forward, carefully positioning the child so that she might be directly beneath the goat’s udders.

  Virtue waited with her face pressed into the nanny goat’s bag, and for a moment I worried that my idea was foolish and unbecoming of the Holy Betrothed. But then the little girl grasped one of the long taupe nipples, turning it toward her mouth. She knew just what to do. She wrapped her pink lips around it. Directly, she began to suck.

  Unperturbed, the goat acted as if this were the most natural thing in the world. She was obviously relieved just to have the pressure subside. “Baaaa!” she said, and went on munching leaves.

  “Eureka!” I enthused. For this discovery would make my life much simpler. “No more bottles.”

  As Virtue imbibed, I struggled not to topple over. So weary was I. I felt as if I had been drugged, and I looked at the stream distrustfully, wondering if it might be some narcotic offshoot of the Styx.

  Finally, I could stand it no more.

  “I am sorry,” I said to Virtue. “But I cannot go on a minute longer.”

  I lowered her from the dripping teat and sat her on the ground, milk dribbling down her chin. Then I turned and crawled a ways on my hands and knees. “I just need…” I yawned. “…to take a short rest.”

  I collapsed face down into the leaves of grass.

  And then I remembered no more.

  Body and soul, I dropped into a black and dreamless sleep – a little foretaste of death.

  I AWOKE GREATLY DISCOMBOBULATED.

  Birdsong hailed me from afar.

  A shiver of leaves; a blurp of water.

  I felt as if I had endured an extended journey – one that carried me out beyond the farthest reach of the stars – and now I was coming back to where I had begun; I felt as if I had taken a tumble into spirit land, Persephone’s lair, and now – after being desecrated and harried within the parameters of my own soul – I was being spit back out into the land of the alive.

  I lifted my head from the grass. My brain seemed made of rock. I struggled to my hands and knees. A tremendous burden pressed down on me from above, but it proved only to be the weight of the air. My skin prickled. My eyes were blurry. But lo! When I was finally able to focus, I found myself perplexed to be staring directly at what appeared to be a gravestone.

  ?

  I gawked for a while, and then, lifting a finger, I traced the melancholic epithet scratched into the sandstone marker.

  NEVERMOR HER LAFTER WILL BE HERD

  It gradually came clear to me that, of all the places to doze, I had inadvertently chosen to prostrate myself directly over a grave. I peered down at the body print pressed into the grass where I had slept.
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br />   Yes.

  And yes.

  Somewhere down there, on the other side of that thin and worm-ridden blanket of sod, were the moldering bones and sweetbreads of a cadaver. At this dastardly revelation, I found myself palsied with a profound sense of necro-inapropriato.

  “Oowuh!” I keened, and spun away.

  Panting, with large drops of sweat rolling down my face, I endeavored to gather my bearings.

  First I spied the goat. She lay with her legs folded beneath her, blasé, chewing her cud while reposing against the trunk of a tree. Puck was in the distance, out beyond the shade, grazing. When he heard my moan, he looked over, but then went back to his meal.

  Virtue’s wrinkled blanket was spread on the ground, but the girl was not there.

  I jumped to my feet.

  “Brownie!”

  The horse whinnied softly behind me, and I whirled around to find the animal straddling the streamlet. His expression gave me to know that he had everything under control.

  “You need not worry,” he seemed to say.

  And sure enough. There, beneath the protective arch of his body, was little Virtue. She sat waist deep in a basin-sized pool, her yellow hair matted to her head, her dress soaked. She smiled at me, perfectly pleased, and held out her hand. A blue pebble lay in her dripping palm like a stone teardrop.

  “Oh, precious darling!”

  I hopped over and snatched her up into my arms, holding her tight. She, in turn, wrapped her arms around my neck.

  I could not say what then came over me. Some force strange and unfamiliar. But I did not want to let her go. I hugged her to my heart, leaning against Brownie’s shoulder for support. “Oh,” I said, and began to laugh and laugh – a near maniacal merriment that started small, built up, and then would not cease to flow.

  “Ha ha ha!” I laughed. “Har har ha!”

  I would have been sorely pressed to explain myself.

  “Ha ha! Oh, darling! Ha ha ha!”

  On and on like that for a good long while.

  *****

  When my hilarity at last subsided, I took in the scene around me. It was the same time of day in which I had originally collapsed, and at first I thought my nap might only have lasted for a single minute. But then observing the well-trodden grass, and the plentitude of horse apples and goat pellets littering the ground, I deduced that my torpor had been much more lengthy. At the very least, I had slept a full twenty-four hours, plus a minute, give or take. A complete revolution of the earth.

  “I feel a bit like Mister Van Winkle,” I told Virtue, as I shucked her from her sopping attire.

  Even she seemed to have grown a mite older, a tad bigger than I remembered her being when I had held her beneath the goat just the day before.

  I went to the girl clothes kept in one of the trunks and rummaged for a size larger dress. The one I found was pale yellow with blue cornflowers printed all over it, surprisingly flamboyant for Mormon wear, and not proper for the trail, exactly, but I held it up for her to see.

  “What do you think of this?”

  She nodded, and smiled. I swear she did. And so I closed up the trunk and brought the dress over for her to try.

  I kneeled before her as she sat posing in her new outfit. She held her arms out to her sides, palms down, as if modeling for me. I had an odd sensation, another in my continuing series of odd sensations for that day. But as I viewed the little angel before me, I was granted at once a premonition coupled to a nostalgic and long submerged recollection – I saw a vision of Virtue as she would someday appear as a young woman; I saw a vision of Virtue as she had always appeared throughout the ages. I will never be able to explain this entirely, as I have come to learn words express much, but not all. Serve it to say that it was just one more confused and mysterious epiphany granted to me that day in the shade of that enchanted grove.

  *****

  We spent the rest of the afternoon readying for the journey ahead. I washed diapers. I fashioned a new type of sling in which to carry the child. Wrapping the saddle horn in cloth, I prepared a padded seat for Virtue to sit upon. The new sling would now hold her face out to the approaching world, a soft strap holding her close against my belly and lower chest. Her little legs would now hang on either side of Brownie’s neck. This would allow her the amusement of viewing the scenery and tousling Brownie’s mane. It was a bit more cumbrous than the original design, as I had to hold my arms wider to work the reins, but it accommodated Virtue’s growing person with more ease of movement for her, and she accepted the truss with a girlish alacrity.

  The day melted with the heat and the evening approached with the promise of a cooler time for travel. After filling Virtue at the nanny’s milkworks, we mounted up and set off. The gloaming would come with a settling breeze, and then the moon would light our way through the night.

  As a self-amusing joke, I left Virtue’s too-small dress tied by its sleeves to the branch of a tree, suspecting in my mind that the poplar grove might beckon McDonald and his child-wives with its magical offering of shade and clean water. They would surely look upon the dress as a miracle tendered them by their god. Perhaps they would even swaddle their newborn in its folds. I did not figure it mattered if the latest whelp be male or female, as that particular band of wayfarers seemed to suffer anyway from some small measure of gender confusement.

  MOST EVERYTHING WAS GOING well. We settled into a routinized march that put the dusty miles behind us while inching us closer to our goal of the Prophet’s fabled rock city. Puck and Brownie remained fit. No-name goat traveled fast while eating on the fly, producing prodigious quantities of milk on the thinnest diet of tares. Virtue remained healthy. After a time, the moon rose ever later, waned to a sliver among the stars, and then went dark altogether, forcing us to travel by daylight. Hot work. But everyone met up to the challenge, and I was duly impressed with my team. Embarrassingly, and with no small measure of distress on my part, I turned out to be the weakest knot in the rope.

  Since I was a young man, I have suffered a recurring medical condition that, at the times of its utmost severity, makes undistracted productivity quite elusive. It is delicate to discuss, but as it is integral to my burden in this life, I have been forced to deal with it as a lame man might deal with a clubfoot, or a blind man the nonuse of his eyes. Undeniably, I am perhaps placing my malady in the company of the more noble infirmities, the likes of which were so favored for cure at the hands of the Savior himself. For surely nowhere in the King James Version of the Bible will you find a case in which Christ lays his healing touch on my particular affliction. No. I have found but one surefire treatment for my most debilitating disorder, one that can at times be difficult to acquire on these more unpopulated stretches of the frontier.

  To make short of the long of it, I had the most intensely engorged membrum virile a man could humanly endure. An ailment that had become re-irritated so many days earlier, at that first delicious premonition of Delight’s snow-white skin.

  Unfulfilled, it pained me something awful, making my hours in the saddle near to unbearable. My vision swam with the hallucinatory puzzle pieces of the female body. Breasts and lips and derrieres floated all around my hat. My pulse became erratic; I breathed in a huff. And a general numbing dizziness consumed me, a result, I presumed, of my blood evacuating my brain and arms for that more enthusiastic limb of my body. More than once, I nearly pitched off Brownie in a lightheaded faint.

  The situation was becoming increasingly dangerous, until at last, I could stand it no more.

  “Whoa!”

  It was late in the afternoon, but not yet time to call it a day. My comrades found it most surprising that I had chosen to stop where I did. There was but a small willow tree on a stagnant backwater of the river, offering only enough shade for us all if we huddled together. The mosquitoes hummed in the air. Puck shot me through with a smirk of exasperation. He stamped the ground with his hoof.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I only need a moment.”


  Of course, I did not elaborate. Since I was traveling with two females (one only a child) and two geldings, it did not seem their empathy would be easily solicited in this particular situation.

  I haphazardly spread Virtue’s blanket under the tree, and sat her on it to wait. She looked at me searchingly, but I did not return her gaze.

  “Take a rest,” I told everyone, and then I walked away briskly, in a rather bow-legged fashion.

  *****

  The obvious answer to my impediment was to find a bit of privacy in which to relieve myself by way of my own hand. Any normal man would have done just that, and then got on with his day. This was my hopeful intention as I dropped into a low wallow out of sight of the others. I quick pulled my trousers to my knees, preparing to unload my burdensome niggle into the bug-rich mud between my boots.

  I gazed down in disgust and wonder. There was my gargoyle, rearing up pink and gnarled in the sunlight, seemingly wearing a grin.

  “Hello, Old Lucifer,” I said. He so often seemed an ornery entity separate from my person as a whole.

  Uncomfortable as I was, I did not commence to strangulate it first thing. Instead, I endeavored to recall an ancient form of mediation I had read about, one devised centuries ago by monks dwelling on the banks of the Ganges, a system designed to clear one’s mind of all thought and disturbance.

  “Breathe in,” I whispered to myself.

  Om.

  “Now breathe out.”

  Again - Om.

  I practiced this in and out breathing for a few more inhalations, and although I believe I might have achieved some fleeting seconds of lucid mind-wash, I could not completely void my consciousness of the more distracting elements, namely – one must forgive my candor – an apparition of the female organ. It hovered before my mind’s eye like a lotus flower to which a man might feel compelled to bow down. But for all the eroticism implied in that vision, I was simultaneously beleaguered by yet another vision that was its nemesis.