In the Pool of Siloam

They packed a wagon with the requisite supplies: rice, flour, salt, dried fruits, dried meats, tin cups and plates, fishhooks and lines, ropes and pulleys, nails, tents, sugar and gunpowder and bedding and more. Amos even found room for the rocking chair Agatha's father carved for their wedding. On the appointed morning, they set off in a company of some hundred families—all in clean wagons, starched bonnets, polished boots. An impromptu hymn swelled among their fellow travelers as the oxen jostled forward, kicking up dust. Like the bustlings of a grand parade, Agatha said to Amos. She had to raise her voice over clattering wheels. The journey was her husband's idea, but Agatha obliged Mr. Fletcher in most things. After Amos read the Mormons’ book aloud to her and their seven children, it took little persuading for her to agree to join the Saints.They walked westward, to Zion. First in ill-fitting boots, then barefoot when the boots gave out, then in moccasins acquired from traders along the trail. The children collected buffalo chips for fuel, the men caught rabbits and fish. When Agatha's beloved rocking chair proved too cumbersome, she left it on the east bank of the Mississippi. Her angel girls adorned it with braided grass and wildflowers—like an altar to their life before. After that day, supplies dwindled. They mended stockings, dresses, shirts, until no more mending could be done. They made soup from water and mildewed flour. Their dry lips cracked and bled.And one by one, the Fletcher children began to die.Cholera took Hattie first. Arthur and Myrtle fell out of the jolting wagon into rapids that dragged them away, gulping and gasping, their desperate faces etched into their parents’ minds, their cries smothered by churning white foam. James was crushed by a wheel, and Lucy succumbed to mountain fever. Martin died one crisp morning when he sneaked his sleeping pa's musket from the wagon, peered into the barrel, and accidentally pulled the trigger. Amos reckoned the sound of that gunshot coulda split the sky. When they reached the Great Salt Lake Valley, only Opal remained—their youngest child, always precious, now even more so.Amos and Agatha were allotted an acre parcel near town, where they built a one-room cabin in haste, with gaps between the logs where the wind whistled through. They acquired a horse, chickens, seed and grains; they learned irrigation from their fellow Saints. Provisions were scarce and the weather unforgiving. That first biting winter, Opal took sick with pneumonia.Amos cursed himself for hauling them all west. For urging Agatha to leave her rocking chair behind. For fooling himself and his wife into so much loss. For leading each of his dear, obedient children to their deaths. He murmured to neighbors, friends, the brethren. Pray, they told him. Nothing to be done now except to pray.So Amos prayed. He fasted for a week, and on the seventh day, he knelt on the muddy banks of the stream behind their squat cabin. He pleaded with God. Did he expect the heavens to open? A thundering voice to deliver God's mercy? There was silence. He returned the next day and prayed again. Again, the same silence. Meanwhile, Opal's lungs rattled loud with each breath. He returned again a third day. He lingered, crying for mercy long after he ought; he had chores to see to, livestock to feed. But then there came a voice. Not thundering but small, like a snake inside his head, slithery and soothing, assuring him.There was in fact something he could do, a deal to be made—he must walk to a certain mountain lake and immerse himself in the cold water there. It seemed senseless, but Amos thought how Jesus had healed a blind man with spittle and clay. Wash in the pool of Siloam, Jesus told the blind man, and the man came back seeing. Amos left straight away, without waking Agatha, without kissing Opal goodbye. He could not spare a single moment. They would wonder where he'd gone, but all would be well when he returned.He walked into the canyon with the slithering voice inside his head, guiding him. He'd eaten nothing for near on ten days, but he moved like a man possessed. He had no business surviving this trek—miles of wilderness, of blistering cold, of rocks that slid out from beneath his feet, packed snow that dampened then froze his knit gloves, an ascent through staggering pines that dwarfed his large frame. Yet somehow, after some time, he reached a frozen lake at the top of a steep mountain, and he knew it to be right. The voice guiding him seemed to coil tighter then. Constricting his thoughts, choking his questions. He found a fallen tree branch and jabbed the ice with it. Heaved large stones to crack the surface. He used his bare hands to scratch and dig, until his nails were all broken, his fingers bleeding, skin black with frostbite. He could not give up or it would all be in vain—not just his journey here to the lake but all of it, his trek across the plains, his family's suffering, everything for naught. He lost track of how long he'd been digging. Could be days, nights. Finally he dropped a stone through the last thin film of ice.Opal's pale face and trembling hands and cornsilk hair glimmered briefly in his mind, as he plunged into the freezing water. The cold stung like all of Agatha's sewing needles piercing his skin at once. A kind of baptism, perhaps. He'd been washed clean in a river at home before embarking on the trail to Zion; this moment now seemed its own kind of holy. When he kicked back toward the surface, a solid shelf of ice blocked his escape. He twisted, searching for a hole, the one he'd dug or any opening for that matter—a break in the ice-blue luster, a glimmer of real daylight. There was none.The longer he floundered, the tighter the crush on his chest.His slithering guide spoke again: swim downward, it said. Dark shadows blotted his vision, and his lungs burned. At the bottom of the lake was a fissure just wide enough for him to pass through. He emerged thrashing in a dark cave. The surface here was only water and air, no ice. He threw his arms onto a rocky ledge, then writhed and hauled the rest of his body up onto the stone floor. He lay there like a choking fish as his limbs convulsed. Sensation needled outward from his heart to his extremities—and then only numbness. An ominous void crept over his frozen skin, flesh hardening and turning a sickly purple-black, every inch overtaken by frostbite.His last, flickering thought was a vague terror that Opal wouldn't recognize him when they met again.The story Agatha told Opal was that Amos had gone looking for a doctor, had surely been disoriented in a sudden snowfall. So easy to lose one's way in a whiteout! She did not say that she had seen Amos heading away from town, trudging across a far field, that morning when she went to gather eggs from the coop. She'd called to him and heard no response. The man had led her here to his Zion, among strangers who called themselves Saints, had allowed nearly all of their children to die along the way, and now in the face of their final, greatest heartbreak, had abandoned her to fend alone. She nursed her daughter and held this secret in her chest. When finally Opal turned a corner—waking after a long, deep sleep with a sudden vigor that brightened her cheeks—Agatha credited only herself.They lived a tenuously happy year together, the two of them in their cabin. Opal grew plump; Agatha refused a kind offer of marriage from a respectable widower. They made do however they could, and somehow both kept well fed and warm. The trouble came one gold-sky afternoon when they were riding their spotted mare. Opal occupied the saddle, with Agatha on the bare rump behind it, arms circled around her daughter's waist. Hundreds of small black birds erupted at once from the harvested field beside the trail, all flapping wings and sharp chittering. Then a shrill whinny, and the mare reared, and Agatha pulled Opal with her as she slipped off. Opal heard the sickening crack before she saw her ma's skull—split open on the corner of a blood-splattered rock. Sharp severed cornstalks skewered Agatha's legs, arms, the soft skin above her collarbone. Opal threw herself over her lifeless ma. She might have lain there forever among the scattered husks, if the man whose field it was didn't come looking after he found the riderless mare.Brother Dalton carried the girl three miles in his arms, to his own modest house. It was quickly settled that he and his wife would take her in; everyone knew that Opal Fletcher had no one left in the world. In those first weeks she said nothing, ate nothing, slept fitfully if at all. The Daltons and their three sons took it in turns to bring her porridge and stew; the oldest whittled figurines that he dressed up for Opal in scraps of ribbon and twine; the younger two coaxed her into timid smiles and reluctant, murmuring giggles that in time became full-throated laughter and clever retorts.Opal liked to say in her later years that she'd swallowed a lifetime of sorrow in her first decade, and thanks to that bitter medicine she was spared other great tragedies as an adult. She died warm in clean sheets among a few souls who loved her: the Dalton boy she married at seventeen (now a grizzled, half-deaf man), four grown children with their own broods, her dear friend Martha who held her hand when she passed.Amos was reborn in the cave. Not a man anymore but a monster—he knew this instinctively when he woke. The muscles and sinew once warm inside his body had calcified into something like roughhewn stone. He simmered with a newfound rage. Why was he led to this desolate place—for what ungodly purpose? The slithering voice answered, its earlier soothing quality dissolved into menace: Did the purpose matter so much as the end? The contract would be honored. Opal would live, so long as he remained in this cave. The wan, sickly girl would grow plump and healthy and old. For Agatha there was no such agreement—but Opal, his gem, gleaming and clean and warm. And he would live, in his own way, here. He'd learn to feed on blood and bone. To trap game that swam or died in this lake: fishes, worms, snakes, any veined flesh he could drink from.Amos thought it may be that the demon was lying now; maybe Opal would live regardless. Surely he could find a way out through the winding tunnels of the cave, could walk home the way he'd come, now impervious to the cold. But imagine Opal's dread at his new form, imagine Agatha's revulsion. Imagine he had failed, leaving his wife forsaken in her grief. And now what? He was a shameful creature who had bargained with the devil. She'd surely never have him back. He confined himself to his new chambers, a damp, dark grotto where few creatures lived.The demon voice spoke to him even when he endeavored not to listen. The voice encircled and constricted him—to ignore it was impossible. His own voice shrank inside the other's grip, until he forgot its once-honeyed timbre. And with it, his final dregs of human feeling withered. The child, the wife, only nameless vague shadows to him.At the bottom of the lake, blood was hard to find. Jagged stones lay strewn along the lakebed; matted milfoil fronds fluttered in the darkest water. Wormy leeches wriggled through muck and blooming algae, making no secret of their self-satisfied bloat. Above all that, garter snakes writhed, and various trout swam in sun-warmed pools. Sometimes, when a bear caught its dinner from the shallows, the metallic taste of fishy innards would sink just low enough—still warm, though diluted. These crimson dribbles only parched him further, but he lapped up what he could.More sustaining meals ebbed in and out with each passing year. The valley swelled with newcomers. Those people who found the hidden lake in spring, in summer, could not resist a swim. On silver-lit nights he prowled near the surface, laying traps and shadow-stalking his prey. Those nights, the blood burned molten down his gullet until he became luminous himself. Scaly mud sizzled off his skin; his shriveled limbs flared strong once more. Seeing him, his prey always floundered, choking and feeble. Their delicate flesh—peach, bronze, umber—slick after being dragged underwater. They shivered in the drafty cave and bargained without collateral. Most of them could offer nothing more than open veins.