Posted on May 23, 2008

The Hole: Part 73

Elliot sat down. “Here,” he said. “I think it’s safe to open it now.”

They’d left the museum without encountering any trouble and come outside to find Cassandra gone, as expected. That was her mission, Elliot thought. She did it but she didn’t stick around to see how it turned out.

Evajean had led them down the street to a hotel and Elliot broke the glass front door to let them inside. Only when they’d found an open room and locked themselves in did Elliot feel comfortable taking out the package.

Evajean took it from him and turned it over in her hands. “What do you think it is?”

Elliot shrugged. “Open it.”

She sat down on the bed and began peeling the tape off the box. “Why’s it wet?” she asked.

“Basement damp,” Elliot said. “From being down there so long.”

“But it wasn’t damp down there,” Evajean said. “At least not that I could tell.” She removed the last piece of tape and pulled the box flaps open. She reached inside and took out a black rectangle, a quarter of an inch thick and the size of a paperback book. “It’s a journal,” she said, thumbing back the cover. As she flipped through, a folded paper fell from between the pages, landing by Elliot’s foot. He bent and picked it up, unfolding it across his lap.

The paper was a large square, eighteen inches on a side, and covered, on both sides and except for a slim margin, with tiny, handwritten symbols in narrow rows. Elliot looked at it briefly and then set it aside. “Who’s is it?” he asked Evajean.

She turned to the first page and shrugged. “It doesn’t say.”

“It’s in english, though?”

“Uh huh.”

“What does it say?”

So Evajean read from the small book–and, in the time it took her to do so, many of those questions that had for so long nagged them were horrifyingly answered.

****

“Your grandfather was the prophet of the one true faith.” That was my esteemed lineage, or so my mother told me time and again, whenever the anniversary of his death brought its day of mourning. “Your grandfather was chosen by God to redeem His church and gather His flock in the name of His only begotten son, Jesus Christ.”

As a child, hearing those words, there was always a degree of disappointment and shame. Why had I not been called to a similar mission. Why did God shower all this attention on my grandfather and none on me? Perhaps it was this resentment that lead me to reject Joseph Smith’s faith, that started me on the path from Mormonism to deism to agnosticism to, eventually, atheism. I admit that as a possibility, but ultimately I must reject it’s truth and hold to the power of my reason. I gave up the faith of my grandfather and of my mother not out of resentment or anger but, rather, because I came to see it as simply false. The fantastic stories they told were just that and the grand cosmology, with it’s three levels of heaven and plethora of gods nothing but flights of the imagination as wonderous as anything from Mr. Wells.

I was excommunicated on my twentieth birthday. No longer a Saint, I left Utah and moved to New York to attend university. Whatever their degree of truth, the stories of the ancients my mother had read to me from the Book of Mormon found lasting influence, and I decided to dedicate my studies to archeology and classical languages. I found I had a knack for it and rose quickly through the ranks of scholars, eventually securing a professorship at one of the major northeastern colleges. It was years later, during a summer sabatical, that I decided to travel to where my grandfather’s legacy began: Palmyra, New York.

I am not sure why I did this. Mormonism itself held little lasting interest for me and any spiritual pull it may have had was long usurped by a rationalist world view. Perhaps it was only that consanguineous call so many of us feel when we reach a certain age, the desire to go back to where we came from and see it through older and, in a way, newer eyes. Whatever the reason, that summer saw me renting a small cabin in the forests of western New York, visiting first my grandfather’s home and then–unfortunately, as events would have it–searching for the mythical Hill Cumorah, where he supposedly found those crucial golden plates.

Knowledge of the location where the untranslated Book of Mormon was dug from the earth died with my grandfather, or at least that was the accepted wisdom of the time. Many argued that there never had been such a place and that the Hill Cumorah was nothing more than another fabrication in a long line by Joseph Smith. This view was the one I held until that summer and it is one I wish I could still hold on to today.

I will not bore the reader with a detailed account of how I began to track down that legendary spot in the hills outside of Palmyra. Suffice it to say that the process entailed numerous conversations with increasingly country–and unsavory–folks who pointed me to further peers, all wanting some kind of compensation, though usually offering me the choice between turning over money or alcohol. The former seemed to be roundly prefered. This process occupied me for weeks, during which time I was able only to work sporadically on my translation duties for the university. It all came to a climax, however, when an old and dirty trapper, who the locals called Bear, informed me of the things he’d seen while making camp one night at a location deep in the forest. He was sure he could direct me and said he would if only I’d listen to his tale and feed him whiskey while he told it.

We met on a Thursday evening in an empty farm house Bear claimed was owned by his brother. The house appeared to have not seen use in some time, though. Dust coated the furniture, what little there was, and all of the ground floor windows were cracked or broken. I smiled at Bear and let him seat us at the small table by a cold and empty stove and decided not to press him on the actual owner of this sad dwelling.

After he’d finished three shots of the relatively cheap drink I’d brought with me, Bear began. “It’s a right nasty thing,” he said, “to see something so awful when you’re all alone.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He leaned toward me, his breath harsh with my whiskey. “Nature. That bloody mother bitch. Horrible, it is, when she tears herself from the earth to hunt.”