IX

‘… all things are cleansed with blood,

without bloodshed there is no forgiveness.’

Hebrews 9:22

 

 

 

 

From the private journal of the

Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

 

I have tried over the years to recall what the man looked like, if indeed he was a man, but in truth I do not think I ever saw his face. The light, which lit the land around him and shone into mine, seemed to come from inside him, so bright I could not look directly at him. I recalled another of the priest’s highlighted passages that had made no sense to me until now:

… and his face did shine as the sun,

and his raiment was white as the light.

I threw myself forward in fear and awe and began to pray, begging forgiveness for all my sins, for I believed my judgement had come and this angel had come to deliver it. And when none came I held up my hands and asked the shining man what he commanded of me and his voice came back like a whisper inside my head.

‘What do you most desire?’ he said.

I replied with the answer I had given to all who had questioned me on my long journey. ‘I wish to build a church of stone,’ I said, ‘where God’s words of peace and love might be spoken aloud until they have driven all savagery from these lands.’

The angel spoke again, its words intimate and soft in my head:

‘But what do you most desire?’

And I knew then that he had seen through my half-made answer. I do not think I had admitted the truth even to myself before that moment, but his light shone so bright it lit up the darkest corners of my soul and I realized I could not hide anything from this angel and that, though it had asked me a question, it knew my answer already.

‘I want to be somebody,’ I replied. And when he said nothing further I spoke on, my words drawn out like yarn by his silence. ‘I want to be a man of substance. I want people to remember me when I’m dead and say, “That was a man that did great things, that was a man who found a fortune and used it to build something in the desert, something that will live forever.” I do not want to die as a nobody. I do not wish to be forgotten.’

And there it was. The truth. My truth.

The angel’s silence continued but I said no more, for I had nothing more to say. I had confessed fully and I knew even his bright searching light could illuminate nothing more in me.

At long last he spoke and his words were soft and kindly. ‘You are an honest man,’ he said, ‘and honesty like yours is rare and holds great value to me. So in exchange for that, and if you are willing, I shall give you what you desire.’

I wept into the dirt, hardly daring to believe I had reached this dreamed-of moment when only a few hours earlier I had abandoned the Bible along with my resolve to continue my pilgrimage. Only the light had changed my mind and drawn me on. And now here I was, making bargains with angels, or with Christ the Saviour, or maybe even with the Lord God Almighty himself.

‘I am yours to command, Lord,’ I said to the shining man, for whatever he was – man, vision, angel – I knew he was lord over me. ‘Whatever you would have me do, I will do it, and gladly.’

There was a mighty crash like a mountain splitting in two and a flash so bright I saw it clear as day though my eyes were tight shut and my face pressed hard to the dirt. The ground shook violently beneath me like a dynamite blast through bedrock, then all went dark and silent.

I don’t know if I was knocked senseless for a spell but I lay there for a long time and when I eventually looked up I saw nothing but darkness. The mirror was gone. My ears sang from the loud noise still and made me feel disconnected, as if I was floating in the vast night sky. Then the singing faded and a new sound crept in, the sound of running water.

I scrambled across the dirt towards it like an animal, drawn by my raging thirst. The darkness was solid to my light-ruined eyes and I made my way by sound alone, feeling my way over the ground and cutting my hands on the sharp edges of rocks and the spines of cacti in my haste to reach the water.

Something huge loomed out of the darkness and I cried out and pulled away in terror. The stink of sweat and death sloughed off it and I wondered if I had died out in the desert, that the light I had seen had been the dying dream of a man driven mad by thirst and exhaustion and I was now in some terrible limbo populated by death creatures, cursed for eternity to crawl through the spiky darkness, tormented by the sound of water that I would never find. The thing ambled past then snorted and I realized what it was – not some diabolical beast sent to torment me but my mule, drawn to the same promise of water as I.

I stood and grabbed the hair of its hide, and let it lead me on, trusting its animal senses more than my own. And when it stopped and the smell of wet earth and the sound of bubbling water filled the air around me I fell to the ground and into the cool shallows of a pool.

And I drank.

It was the sweetest thing I ever did taste and I drank long and deep of it, sinking my face beneath the surface and feeling the soothing cold water against my sunburnt skin. I wanted to fall into it entire and cleanse myself like a sinner at a river revival, but the pool was scarce more than a hand’s width deep and though it bubbled up readily from some fresh crack in the earth, it soaked away fast, the land being every bit as parched as I was. I took one last, long draught then unhitched every canteen from my saddle and tossed them into the pool. I threw my gold pan in too, scouring it with wet dirt and swilling away all trace of its most recent use before chasing my floating canteens through the water, pushing each one under until every flask had been filled and stoppered.

I sat back from the edge of the widening pool, taking steady mouthfuls of the sweet water from one of the newly filled flasks and wondering at the miracle of it all. I must have fallen asleep like that, for I seemed to blink and it was morning and the pool now lapping at my feet.

I gazed for the first time upon the water that had appeared so miraculously in the night. It was now about the same size as a large corral, the spring still bubbling vigorously at its approximate centre and sending ripples out to the irregular edges. Two halves of a large boulder lay split clean in two like the shell of a nut, exactly like the reflected image I had seen in the night. I turned to where the mirror had stood and saw a small bundle lying on the ground. A cold shiver ran through me as I recalled the dead child I had discovered on the track only the previous day.

This could not be her.

It couldn’t be.

I stood slowly, my body cold as death, and walked stiffly over to the bundle. It was not the body of the poor starved child, it was only my Bible, wrapped in sacking, its pages open and fluttering in the cold morning breeze. It must have slipped from the saddle in the night and I saw that its spine had cracked in the fall and the pages were loose in the cover.

I stooped to pick up the book and felt a sharp pain arrow through my palm, which made me drop it again. I turned my hand over and saw a fragment of silvered glass embedded in the soft heel of my hand, a remnant of the broken mirror. I gripped it with my teeth and drew it out then held it up, somewhat fearful as to what I might see reflected in it. But all I saw was myself, and the ordinary land stretching out behind me stained red by the blood that clung to the surface of the glass.

I tucked the shard into my shirt pocket, took up the Bible again and pushed the pages back together, checking the book from cover to cover to make sure it was all there.

But it wasn’t.

A single page was missing. It was from the book of Exodus, verse twenty, where Moses comes down from the mountain carrying God’s ten holy commandments. I felt sick at this discovery and felt it augured badly that, through lack of care, I had allowed God’s holy laws of all things to be lost in this wilderness. I rose up and searched the land all around for any sign of the missing page but found nothing and vowed to make amends for my carelessness however I might.

I carried the Bible back to the waterhole and placed it under a heavy rock to keep the thieving wind from its pages. Sunlight flashed on the surface of the water now, the canteens floating and bobbing like strange fish. I crouched by my gold pan to bathe my wounded hand in the water collected there and saw sunlight glinting at the bottom of this too – and something else. I stirred the sediment into murky clouds, my wound now forgotten, then lifted the pan and started moving it in small circles, tilting it forward a little each time to let the water and lighter particles of mud and rock slop out. When there was no more than an inch of water left at the bottom I let it settle.

Bright flakes of gold shone warm and yellow, along with crystals of lighter green. It was malachite, lots of it: the rock here was rich with copper.

I untied the kerchief from round my neck and tipped the contents of the pan on to it. The total haul was tiny, about the size of a robin’s egg, but when I held it in my hand it felt good and heavy. I spent the rest of the day working the waterhole, taking samples from the pool and the surrounding land, but it didn’t seem to matter where I stuck my shovel in the ground, it always yielded mineral-rich earth. The copper was everywhere.

When there was about an hour of daylight left I lit a fire and set a pan of beans atop it with some chunks of dried beef stirred in. Then I sat and drank coffee while it cooked.

The fruits of my labours covered the most part of a blanket now, a pile of ore rising almost up to the eye of my mule, the sight of it made me anxious. There was too much to carry and I would have to return with wagons to cart it away. But I needed to make it back to the fort first and get the legal papers signed before someone else happened along, drawn by the water, someone who might have a wagon or a faster horse and who might steal it all away from me yet.

How quickly the world turned. On my outward journey I had nothing to lose, now I had the world within my grasp and was filled with watchful fears because of it. I saw dust rising far to the north – maybe a dust devil, or maybe horses – and kicked the fire out, smothering the embers with dirt so no smoke from it could give a clue to my location. Then I sat, wrapped in blankets, and ate my cold banquet of beef and soaked beans, watching the land go dark around me.

I had come to this spot by a circuitous route but figured if I took a direct line back to the fort I could get there in four days. When darkness had swallowed the land I packed enough provisions for a week and gathered all the water bottles from the waterhole. What little remaining space there was in my saddlebags I crammed with rock samples and a couple of small dust bags filled with the finer material I had collected. Then I slung the pale Christ across my back and balanced the Bible on top of it all and lit out of there, leading the mule north by the light of the stars, little knowing what horrors still awaited me.