She remembered what happened, remembered what they’d done.
It had been during the Copper Days celebration. Back then, the event had not drawn tourists and people from outside. It had been a local celebration, a miners’ holiday. Only there weren’t many miners anymore. The mine was closed. It had been closed since before the first Molokan had moved here, but that did not stop some of the more belligerent unemployed mineworkers from using them as scapegoats. They didn’t blame Molokans for the fact that the pit had run dry, or the fact that the mining company found it cheaper to move on rather than attempt to extract copper from the remaining low-grade ore—they blamed Molokans for the fact that they were no longer working. The Molokan farm was doing well, and that helped to focus their anger, provided them with a contrast between the Russian community’s growing success and their own falling fortunes.
Some of that hatred was directed at the Mormons as well, who were also surviving, if not thriving, during those tough economic times and who had stores of extra food in their homes and in the church. But it was the Molokans who bore the brunt of the resentment. They were foreigners. They talked funny, they dressed funny, and they didn’t even believe in war. They wanted to live in this country, but they didn’t want to fight for it, and that enraged many of the townspeople.
The seeds for what happened Saturday night had been sown Friday evening, during the first day of the celebration, when one of the bars had offered free drinks to all ex-miners. The First World War had just ended the year before, and the bar owner got up on his soapbox and started lecturing about what he’d seen in Europe and how important it was that every man be willing to fight when his country called him. The combination of alcohol, miners, and the subject of war had of course led to long, drunken diatribes against the Molokans and their anti-American way of life.
The horde of miners had slept it off Saturday morning, for the most part, and roused themselves for the fair in the afternoon, but by Saturday night they were at it again, paying for their own drinks this time, and angry about that as well.
This crowd was bigger. Not the whole town by any means, but a significant minority, and they added to their numbers as they barnstormed through the area, trying to drum up enough people to take some action, adopting a you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us tack that intimidated a lot of fence-sitters into joining them.
Agafia remembered the first smell of smoke, remembered seeing the orange glow from the top of the plateau as the Molokan fields were set on fire. She remembered, after that, how the drunken miners and their supporters had come after their homes.
And she remembered what they’d done in retaliation. It was something they had never spoken of since, something she never thought about and had almost convinced herself hadn’t happened.
But it had.
Russiantown had been destroyed that night. There’d been no real plot or plan, there was nothing organized or thought out. Roving gangs of angry, intoxicated citizens, true believers and the sheep who succumbed to mobthink, drove, walked, stormed through Russiantown, wanting to lash out, wanting to cause harm. And doing so. There had been beatings and assaults as well as property damage. Three women had been raped, two of them in front of their husbands. Her own uncle had been hanged by the miners, tied up and dragged downtown by the mob at the height of the frenzy, strung up on the cottonwood tree in the park, and it was after his murder, after seeing the suddenly lifeless body of a man who’d been alive only seconds before, that the riot or whatever it was ended, that the crowd, now cowed and silent, dispersed and went home, leaving rubble and broken lives in their wake.
They had watched the hanging from out in the street, her entire family, and though she had wanted to look away, she had not.
Nor had her mother made her.
The faces of the men who performed the act, who committed the murder, were seared into her memory. She knew they would never be caught or tried or prosecuted—not in this town—but she committed their faces to memory anyway.
Russiantown had burned to the ground, and the few buildings that were not burned had been looted and torn apart. Her family and John’s and Semyon’s and Vera’s and Alexander’s had been the hardest hit, and someone, she could not remember who, had told them that night, as they were nursing their wounds and surveying the damage and mourning the dead, as the fire wagons attempted to put out the fires so they would not spread to the rest of McGuane, that there was a way to get back at those who had perpetrated this wrong, that there was a way to exact revenge.
If it had been an hour earlier or an hour later, perhaps they would not have followed through, would not have allowed themselves to be led in this direction. But passions were high, and word spread quickly among the battered and displaced populace of Russiantown that they had recourse, that there was something that could be done to get back at the people who had destroyed their homes and lives.
They’d gathered together with a man she did not know, crouching in front of a fire next to a banya. The mood had been somber and secretive, and they had called forth a spirit from the forbidden texts of a prophet whose very name had been expunged from Molokan records and history. The prophet’s words had been saved, passed down haphazardly, here and there, by outsiders and malcontents, Molokans who weren’t really part of the church or the community, and though the existence of the words was known, it was not tacitly acknowledged.
Someone had found them, though, someone knew them, and after all these miles and all these years, the worst of them were spoken.
Jim had already been assisting Pavil Dalgov, their minister at the time, and it was Jim and the minister alone who had argued against revenge, who had told them in no uncertain terms that they were treading on the province of God. “Vengeance is mine, said the Lord,” the minister kept repeating, and he ran down a litany of the ills that had befallen those who had gone outside the words of the Bible for comfort or satisfaction, who had trusted not in the Lord but in their own basest instincts. They would pay dearly for this sacrilege, he told them.
The warnings were ignored, however, the forbidden words were spoken, and it had come out of the fire, a blackened thing of charcoal and ash, a creature of death that bowed before them and waited for their orders, willing to do their bidding.
Names had been shouted: the names of those who had inflicted the damage, the names of those who had accompanied the murderers and egged them on. The creature disappeared into the shadows.
And those men had died.
And their wives had died.
And their children had died.
Horribly.
It had been a betrayal of their Molokan beliefs and their covenant with God, this… summoning, this intervention from the spirit world. They knew that almost immediately, knew that the minister was right, that they had done wrong. There’d been no satisfaction in the deaths of their tormentors, no sense of rightness or justice, only grief and despair and the guilt of the wicked, but afterward they’d told themselves that something good had come out of it because it had reinforced their faith, had brought them back spiritually to where they were supposed to be. They had sinned, they all knew it, and they had rededicated themselves to God and the Molokan life.
The demon had died after performing its assigned duty. It had been created out of hate and magic for one thing and one thing only, and when that was done, it had dissolved into nothingness, its life extinguished with the death of its purpose.