“But we both know it will take an army, its arm raised in vengeance, to seize this land from the heretic. That army then to wield its sword to wrest our kingdom away from the Gentiles and their federalized government so far away in Washington City. Look out that window, John Doyle! Out there I have the beginnings of just such an army. And if you stand beside me, together we will not fail Almighty God!”
So Usher led them north to Utah again in seventy, there to sojourn another winter in the bosom of Lee’s Mormon faithful. And what was all the better, Jubilee wintered right under the nose of that heretic prophet, Brigham Young himself! Winter after winter Jubilee returned them here, leading them up from the blood plain of Arizona and New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua. From here in Cedar City, Jubilee could keep a watchful eye on the development of affairs among the Prophet’s insiders, the political machinations of the Quorum of Twelve, the pulse of the rock-solid membership from Stake to Stake. He sent those he could trust the most to be his eyes and ears among Young’s faithful. In the end the Danite chose emissaries who had never been known to associate with Jubilee Usher, new men recruited across the past few years and taught the requisite theology at Usher’s knee, told who to find and who to talk to, who to trust and who to keep at arm’s length. It was always a winter’s task, this grooming of a handful of his crude hellions, making of them men of the cloth, men the likes of Lemuel Wiser.
There were cracks in that solid wall Brigham Young had fortified about himself, cracks through which Usher made his patient, dogged inroads: waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment to bring that unsteady wall down around the Prophet. It would not be long, he told himself now as he washed the woman’s back with hot, soapy water. Steady progress could be measured, progress in the crumbling of Young’s hold on the Church and its Empire.
“And you will stand at my side, dear woman,” he told her, dragging the coarse cloth back and forth over her white shoulders. How he loved women untouched by the discoloring rays of the sun. “A most fitting life-mate for the new Prophet. How the faithful will rejoice in our happiness.”
She always sat quiet and unmoving at these times, also taking refuge in the warmth of this small room and the heady steam rising from the tub of soapy water Negro George had prepared for them. Twice a week Jubilee ordered a bath drawn, filling this large cedar tub that was itself long enough for even a man of Usher’s height to stretch out and fully immerse himself. It was Lee’s old baptismal pool, relegated to a stall of a little-used barn years ago when a new and larger one had been constructed for the polygamist by Usher’s winter soldiers. It was then that Jubilee adopted the tub and discovered its most savory use.
While other Saints might not practice the healthful properties of regular bathing, Jubilee Usher was a man who believed in the periodic, methodical cleansing of the body as much as he believed in that periodic and seasonal cleansing of his souclass="underline" the release of pent-up lusts and furies on the heathen populations with which this land was so cursed.
“If Lee ever discovers what delicious, what randy use I have made of his old baptismal,” he murmured to her as he drew the soapy cloth across the woman’s shoulders, “I’m afraid even he would raise his hand against me. To think—the blasphemy, he would cry!”
Seated outside the tub behind the woman, Jubilee gently pulled her head back and kissed her, hard and moist and long. She did not resist when he forced open her mouth. But neither did she kiss him back. He let the back of the woman’s head rest against the gunwale of the cedar tub. His cheek lying against hers, strands of her soppy hair dripped over his shoulder as he murmured warmly into the dampness of her ear. Jubilee brushed the coarse cloth up and down the round softness of her breasts, enjoying the reddening, rigid response of her nipples as he excited them. Lightly he kissed them, sucking on her breasts, as sweet as scorched honey.
Outside his bathhouse each spring arose the tremulous squeals of baby frogs in the marsh, reminding him it was time for another season of renewal. Soon would come his appointed hour to march south. Killing savages and Mexicans alike, wiping them off the face of God’s kingdom, was nothing less than ripping good fun.
He raked his teeth down the side of her neck, shifted himself, and came round to settle where he could bring one of her breasts to his mouth. How he liked this too—the way her breath caught in her throat when his hand plunged into the water and dallied between her thighs. Still, each time she composed herself after that initial surprise. Nonetheless, after so many years, he still waited for her to lose herself in him.
But he would be patient with her. The same way he had become patient with the pace of events in Deseret. Five years ago he had returned in what he then hoped would be triumph, only to find that his loyalty had been discarded, torn asunder and thrown aside by the powers of the Church. But he would be patient a little longer.
Usher rose at the side of the tub, laid aside the washing cloth, and began to push the pearl buttons through their holes in his shirt, then hung it on the back of a chair.
His faithful soldiers always left their victims sprawled in blackened pools of their own crimson and excrement, each man, woman, and child lying in their horrific wig of dried blood where the flies and beetles and winged creatures began to gather moments after his gunmen ripped the hair off the gaping skulls and stood to hang their trophies red-raw at their belts like profane pendants above the warm bodies the men would then take their pleasure on.
Jubilee took one button at a time from its buttonhole in his britches, savoring his growing desire for her, the delicious way his flesh anticipated hers.
Indeed, the cracks in Young’s defense were widening. Through them one day soon he would ride at the head of a mighty army to wrest power from that pretender to the throne.
Laying his wool britches over the back of another chair, Jubilee stepped out of his temple garments. He straightened them on a hanger. They were all he wore for underwear. Like the other faithful, Usher believed no clothing was to touch his body—nothing but these ordained and sacred garments, which served as a shield, much as the strength of his soul shielded him from the harm of evil so rife and rampant in the Church itself.
Outside he heard the rise of some laughter, a snippet of a song, and knew the men enjoyed themselves here, as they regained their spiritual strength for spring’s coming sojourn into the land of the heathen. From time to time each winter, he regaled his soldiers with flip made with imported rum and John Doyle Lee’s own home-brewed potato beer, the heady concoction flavored with cinnamon and blended with a hot poker.
He turned from smoothing the garments and looked at her reclining there in the soapy water, curls of steam rising from the tub’s still surface, soppy ringlets of her blond hair turned dark, pasted against the side of her face as her eyes watched him approach, then looked away to stare at the ceiling.
Yes, he thought, the Mormon faithful. They would once more respond to a charismatic leader. They could not fail to respond to his power once he made his play against Young.
As big a man of towering bulk as he was, Usher slipped into the tub with barely a ripple, settling back against the side, where he took up one of her feet and kneaded the sole of it with his thumbs. Her eyelids always fell when he did that—perhaps in some hedonistic response to the sheer pleasure of it, perhaps because she realized what always came next.
After kneading the sole of her other foot, Jubilee brought the woman’s feet together at his groin, stroking his soft underbelly with her wrinkled toes, working the feet downward, ever downward until he had them both pressed around his hardening flesh. Up and down, slowly, deliciously slow he moved her feet along his shaft in that warming womb of soapy water, studying her half-lidded eyes as he brought himself to a full erection.