Chapter 59 413 p.m. EST
“They all take a new name when they’re baptized into the church,” Colin told them, over tumblers of good Scotch. “Which is
how Ella Gresch became Faith Matthews—the third of Horation’s three wives—and her daughter June became Chastity. It’s Ella
Gresch on the death certificate, though.”
a pit with corpses in the rocky crags beyond Sarajevo. As it happened, the brigade commander didn’t last until Easter. He
leapt off the tenth-floor balcony of a hotel in Hungary in early March—leapt shrieking to escape the eyes of the dragon he
had seen in his closet. King Sorrow was almost sulky about it. He hated it when the mouse died before he was done playing
with it. War criminals, he complained. They don’t make ’em like they used to.
There had been twenty-four candidates on Colin’s spreadsheet the day before. Allie had narrowed it down to three: the Middle
Eastern mastermind of a 1993 attempt to bomb the World Trade Center, a Hutu extremist who financed genocidal militias in Rwanda,
and this last, Horation Matthews.
“Ella wedded him in 1990, on the nine-thousand-acre compound in Iowa that Matthews calls home. He’s got company: there’s another hundred people sharing his spread, largely composed of seven sprawling, heavily armed families.
The glue that holds them together is their own personal religion, the Scripture of the Kingdom Church, a branch of Christian Identity theology. ”
“Christian Identity theology—is that those freaks who handle snakes?” Gwen asked.
“Allie will give them a snake to handle,” Donna said. “She’ll give them all the snake they can take.”
“No, the Christian Identity types are white supremacists,” Van said. “Their favorite cross is the one burning in a Black man’s
front yard.”
“In theory,” Colin continued, “they’re led by their pastor, an elderly preacher named Jacob Weyland. Weyland ministers to
them in person but addresses an audience of another thirty thousand through his Sunday morning services on shortwave radio.
A few AM stations carry his broadcast too.
“But Horation is the power behind the pulpit. The property is all in his name—his legal name, Mathers—and he’s the one who
figured out how to keep them all fiscally solvent. Publicly, they claim to be living an agrarian lifestyle according to the
dictums of scripture. But their real crop is guns. They’ve done especially good business turning select-fire rifles into fully
automatic weapons and selling them outside gun shows.”
“This is what happens,” Donna said, “when you ban something that shouldn’t be banned. You create a black market so scumbags
like Horation Matthews can get rich.”
“Exactly my point,” Van said, “about marijuana. So glad you finally agree with me, Donna. You’ll be signing my petition to
legalize it right after we’re done here, yeah?”
“Might sign your ass,” Donna said, “with my bootheel.”
Arthur said, “Tell us about Ella Gresch.”
“And her daughter June,” Gwen added.
“In November of 1992, one of Horation’s three stepdaughters, Chastity—June to us—turned up at her grandmother’s house, in a thin blouse and jeans, shaking uncontrollably from the cold, and her feet clad in moccasins worn to rags.
She had walked and hitched nearly forty miles in them after escaping the compound.
June told her grandmother that Ella was dead and had been dead since August. June said her mother boiled to death. ”
In the summer, Ella/Faith had learned Horation was screwing June—raping his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter—and had made plans
to slip away by night. She had the bags all packed and the bus tickets paid for when Horation found out. Ella was confined
to the House of Reflection for five days to meditate upon her own faithlessness. The House of Reflection was a stone box,
too small to stand up in, with an iron floor and an iron hatch that locked from the outside. Faith started screaming on day
three. She was quiet again by the afternoon of day four. She had no voice left by then. Day four was the hottest of the week,
98 degrees outside, and almost 160 inside the House of Reflection, which was little more than a kiln. The dimensions of the
box forced Faith to remain kneeling, forehead almost touching the floor. When they hauled her out, she was not just a wasted
corpse, she was leathery from most of a week of slow roasting. Her death went unreported. Her corpse was buried on the compound,
in the family graveyard.
“For the love of Christ,” Gwen said.
“Well, yes,” Colin said. “That’s exactly how Horation viewed it. After her mother’s death, June spent a day in the House of
Reflection as well, to calm her hysteria. Horation wouldn’t let her call her grandmother to tell her what happened. There’s
only the one landline in the compound, and only men are allowed to use it. No cell phones, obviously. It’s still roughly 1975
in that part of the country.”
Colin had got them all phones for Christmas, sleek Nokias in brushed stainless steel, a different shade for each of them.
Arthur had been utterly baffled by his.
“I already have a phone,” he had said. “In my kitchen. And another in my office, on campus.”
“Yes, but what if you want to talk to one of us while you’re out on a walk?” Colin asked.
Arthur had regarded Colin with true bewilderment. “If I’m out on a walk, couldn’t I just . . . walk to a phone?”
“You can send text messages with it,” Colin added, starting to sound a little desperate.
Arthur said, “But . . . if I have a phone in my hand . . . why would I text you?”
Colin considered Arthur with a mix of amazement and horror. “It’s kind of beautiful. It’s like the future bounces right off
you.”
“How’s a motherfucker like Horation Matthews cook a woman to death and walk away like he burned some cookies in the oven?”
Van asked.
“Well, basically, the First Amendment,” Colin said. “But since we’re talking about things getting burned up, who wants to
go ignite the Christmas tree? It’s dark enough now.”
They were twenty minutes packing themselves into boots and puffy snow jackets and gloves. Colin led them—like Christopher
Robin leading Pooh and the other stuffed animals—out across a snowscape swept into pearly dunes by the wind off the bay. The
sun was a glow of infected red light behind the black pines in the west. In the freezing, salty air coming off the water in
pulses, Allie felt almost like a human being again. When she looked around, she noticed that Gwen and Arthur lagged behind,
walking together, but not talking. Sometimes they made her think of parents who had lost a child years before and were more
tightly bound by their silent grief than any vow. It was hard to believe they weren’t married, the way it seemed they sometimes held whole conversations between one another in a glance. Allie didn’t have that
with Van. She wondered if she ever would.
Colin was talking again. “Turns out, everyone on the compound had spent time in the House of Reflection, for one crime or another against God or their community. Horation spent a weekend in there himself, kneeling on nails, to punish himself for putting off work. He had the scars to prove it.” The Christmas tree, fourteen feet high and smelling sweetly of the season, sprawled on the edge of the stony embankment.
Driftwood had been piled around it for a bigger blaze.
“Furthermore, it turned out Father Weyland, not Horation, was the one who commanded Ella to climb into the House of Reflection . . . and in his deposition he insisted she entered with her eyes shining to God, and that when she screamed, they were screams of joy. The House of Reflection represented a cruel, dangerous, barbaric form of punishment, but its use was entirely protected by the First Amendment’s promise to allow the free exercise of religion. ”
“Does the First Amendment protect Horation’s right to fuck his underage stepdaughter?” Donna said, her voice choked, and Allie
wanted to put her arms around her.
“Charges were never brought. Chastity—sorry, June—was killed behind the wheel of her grandmother’s car before they could set
a trial date. She sideswiped a tree at nearly seventy miles an hour and got her head crushed in. No one could say why she
was driving so fast. There were no witnesses to the accident. She left a statement that Horation Matthews had been raping
her since she was fourteen. But her arms were scarred from wrist to elbow with cuts she admitted administering to herself,
and in her diary, she talked about being visited by angels, and once of traveling to Jerusalem and back in a single night,
carried on a cloud. Several of Horation’s sons were prepared to testify that Chastity was mentally unwell and had claimed
she was raped by demons, the postman, and Bill Clinton.”
“She was probably telling the truth about Bill Clinton,” Donna said, in a husky voice.
“You mentioned Horation has other stepdaughters?” Gwen asked.
Colin nodded. “As it happens, Horation did spend six weeks in jail, after a long standoff with state police. They wanted child
protective services to interview his other children, and he wouldn’t let them. He was eventually brought in under arrest,
and the two surviving girls, eleven and nine, were interviewed separately. They both agreed Horation was a lovely father,
and that they were happy and learning how to go to heaven.” He paused, lifted an eyebrow. “The one in the cast insisted she
had broken her arm falling out of a tree.”
Donna’s lips were pressed so tightly together they were white, which was when Allie decided.
“All right,” Allie said. “Let’s do him. Before the other girls are old enough for Daddy.”
Donna looked at her with such gratitude, Allie felt her heart might fail her.
“Are you sure?” Colin said, his breath smoking in the darkness. “There are strong cases for the other candidates. Matthews
hasn’t done anything like what the Hutu militias did in Rwanda last spring. I guess the worst of it is over now, but for a
few months the rivers were choked with bodies.”
“No single money guy is to blame for all that murder,” Donna said. “It would be like getting even with Jack the Ripper by
killing his banker.”
“And we can’t undo a genocide,” Allie said. “We missed our window to make a difference there. It isn’t too late to stop Matthews.
As for the other guy on the short list—what was his name? Usama bin Layden?”
“Laden.”
“A nutcase who thought he was going to bring down the World Trade Center with a bomb in a van? Better luck next time.”
“Gwen, can I have that box of matches?” Colin asked.
He produced a can of bear spray with a festive green ribbon tied around it; Donna had bought them all bear spray for Christmas,
said it was better than Mace, better than pepper spray. He lit three sturdy kitchen matches with one hand, held them together,
pointed the can, and depressed the trigger. There was a whoosh and a roar and a tongue of flame eight feet long blasted out
across the Christmas tree. The branches of dried pine erupted into fire.
“Fuckin’ metal!” Van cried, rising up on one foot and playing a few licks on an air guitar, and then they were all taking
turns using their cans of bear spray as makeshift flamethrowers, pouring fire down on the vast tangle of branches, until the
flames were twenty feet high and they had to step back from the heat.
Allie looked around at her friends, the people she loved most in the world.
Their faces were damp with sweat and aglow in the infernal light of the bonfire.
Colin grinned—he was often happy, but he was frugal with grins.
Van was breathing hard, as if he had run up some stairs, and rubbing his nose, and Allie knew he was thinking of the cocaine zipped into the inside pocket of his parka.
He liked to do lines off her stomach and from between her breasts.
He said if he couldn’t be in a band, he could at least do drugs like a rock star.
It was his favorite form of foreplay. The glow of the flames played across Donna’s bold, handsome, confident features.
In the gathering dark she looked like the better version of her brother, the surer version.
Gwen held a glass of Scotch in one mittened hand, taking little sips, her eyes merry in the firelight.
Arthur seemed to have retreated farthest from the fire, and he alone seemed to take no cheer from it.
He was contemplating Colin, appeared almost to be reading his friend’s face, as he might’ve studied an illuminated manuscript.
When he spoke, though, he spoke to Allie.
“You said it’s not too late to stop him, Allison—but stop him from doing what?” Arthur said. “We know he creeps on adolescent
girls. But unlike Bin Laden and the Rwandan militias, do we know he presents a threat on a large scale?”
“I think we do,” Colin said, answering for her. “Him and his whole community, which King Sorrow may well destroy while he’s
taking out Matthews—we can hope, right? Horation has an online manifesto where he talks about crucifying federal officers
and IRS agents. He writes approvingly of the Unabomber and lists the addresses of doctors who perform abortions in case ‘anyone
wants to pay one of these guys a visit.’ I couldn’t prove the manifesto is his in a court of law, but I know it’s him. It
was uploaded from his compound’s ISP and he has consistent misspellings, favorite phrases.”
“What’s an ISP?” Van wanted to know.
“Who allowed him to post a manifesto online?” Arthur asked.
Colin glanced at Arthur with real surprise. “An ISP is your computer’s fingerprint, and anyone can post anything online. Including essays threatening the wholesale slaughter of government officials.”
“And AOL will just let you do that?” Arthur asked, outraged.
“He didn’t post it on AOL. He posted it on the World Wide Web.” Colin absorbed Arthur’s baffled look and said, “Think of AOL as a medieval city. The Web is the uncivilized wasteland beyond the castle walls.”
“What’s out there?” Arthur asked.
“Mostly racists and pictures of cats,” Colin said. “Porn is next. Soon as people get faster connections. Historical note:
every new leap in technology is powered by people’s desire to talk about their cats, start race wars, and look at other people
fucking.”
Allie said, “I don’t think Tipper Gore is going to allow porn on the internet. She doesn’t even like Twisted Sister. How are
tits going to get past her?”
“Tits always find a way,” said Donna.
“Thank God,” Van said. He raised his can of bear spray and shot a great blast of dragon’s breath into the night.