E. J. Part Three, The Circle (a novel)

PART THREE – E. J.

Chapter Thirty

Buff speaking

    When Clark started talking about E. J., Liz flung her arms above her head in mock horror and shouted, “Help! Help! Buffington Journeycake, save me! I’m sick of hearing about E. J.”

    “But E. J.’s a big part of the story,” Clark said.

    “Just listen to me!” Liz said, pointing across the tipi fire pit at Clark. “I dealt with E. J. by staying away from him,” she went on. “I don’t think I ever exchanged ten words with him – except that one time he called me every dirty name in the book,” and she turned her face to me and sighed.

    “Let’s just say I tried to avoid E. J.,” Liz said, “but nobody would let me. Everybody kept coming to me and saying, ‘What are we gonna do about E. J?’ every five minutes. I just told them, ‘Go see Louie, E. J.’s his baby.’ But they never stopped bothering me about E. J.”

    “OK, y’all, just be calm a minute,” I said, turning off my tape recorder. “On the way here from Santa Fe, I’ve been copying down some of the stuff from the tapes the other people made into my notebook. Here’s what they said about E. J.”

Taze speaking

    I had seen E. J. a couple of times, but I remember well the first time I ever talked with him. It was in Santa Fe at the mission several months after we had gotten back from Sequoyah and now it was getting on towards winter.

    I heard a banging in my office, like desk drawers opening and slamming shot. At first I thought it was Rivka – but she handles things more gently than that. Then I realized Rivka was downtown shopping. No one was supposed to be in my office unless Rivka or I was there. I flung the door open and ran into my office. There was E. J. in his soiled old Army fatigues sitting at my desk in my chair. One of the bottom drawers was wide open and E. J. was bent down fiddling with the papers in the drawers. When he saw me, he sat up, leaned back in my chair and grinned at me.

    ‘Hello, Taze,” he said. “How ya doin’?”

    “Who are you?” I said.

    “The name’s E. J. Caldwell,” he said. “I‘ve seen you before. Like up at that old buzzard McElroy’s mansion in Denver.”

    “What do you want?” I asked?”

    “I think I can help you,” he said. “If you want more money from the Pristine Foundation I can put in a good word for you, with them.”

    “Are you from the foundation?” I said.

    “Naw,” E. J. replied. “Let’s just say I have friends there. But you gotta do more for Pristine if you want them to send you more money. You’re gonna have to make more of an effort to get back in good with Bishop Louie again. After all, I just bet he wants money from you to put on his Circle next summer in Wyoming.”

    “Well-uh,” I started stammering. “Uh, tell them I’ll do the best I can about Louie.”
    “Good!” E. J. said, standing up and holding out his hand for me to shake. I took his hand, but I didn’t’ clasp it firmly because it was dirty.

    “I can do you some good, Taze,” E. J. said. “Just remember you could have a lot worse visitors than me.” He let go of my hand and hurried out my office door.

    I had heard that one of the forces behind the Pristine Foundation was a very secret private big business spy operation called the Corporate Security Agency. Did E. J. work for them? I never knew for sure.

    For the first time I realized how taking so much money from Pristine had destroyed my independence in a large area of my life.

Rivka speaking

    I first remember E. J. in Sante Fe after the Circle in Sequoyah. I had been having coffee with Waldemat, the German who was my lover of that winter, at a restaurant on the Plaza. I was going back into the Mission when this greasy-looking character in fatigues came from the direction of Taze’s office and passed me on his way out without saying a word. I vaguely remembered seeing him in Sequoyah, but I had never noticed before what fierce, hard eyes he had until he walked past me in the mission. I walked to the office and found Taze standing behind his desk, bent over and slamming one of his bottom desk drawers shut.

    “Who the hell was that guy who was just leaving?” I asked.

    Taze stood up. His glasses had slid down on his nose and he looked nervous.

    “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “It’s not like you at all to talk that way, and after all, this is a mission.”

    “Well,” I said, “who is he?”

    “His name is E. J. Caldwell,” Taze answered, “and he was here on business.”

    “For the Pristine Foundation?” I asked.

    “I suppose you could say that,” Taze replied.

    That night I wrote Manny a letter about this strange new guy named E. J. Caldwell who I guessed was some sort of courier for the Pristine Foundation. This was back in my big spy queen days, when I thought I could change the course of history if I sent the right information to the right person.

    As clumsy and boring as the People’s Party seems to me so often, I think they are right about people like E. J. They say you cannot defeat the E. J.’s of this world by backstairs intrigue. It take the action of the masses of people to deal with an E. J.

Manny speaking

    E. J.? Yeah, I got a letter from Rivka when he first showed up on the scene in Santa Fe, but he didn’t mean as much to me as the news I got from Turco, the Jewish Chicano kid.

    Turco hadn’t gone to the Circle in Sequoyah. He would never believe that those people who had been storing weapons and dynamite in the mountains had simply quit. He stayed in Zarahemla while the Circle was going on. He would sneak through the brush and watch what Louie’s old enemies at the Mormon church in the upper end of the valley were doing. And he kept his eyes on the road looking for suspicious–seeming trucks. But all that summer Turco saw no action.

    Late that fall Turco came down to the college at La Plata and told me that the weapons and the explosives were moving again.

    “How did you get down here from Zarahemla?” I asked.

    “I took Rural Bus services,” Turco said. “I got a season ticket. What’s the matter with that?”

    “I think it’s great.” I answered. “It means that whatever they’re doing, they’re not threatening the bus station to keep the buses from running to Zarahemla. Not yet at least.”

    Even so, Louie wrote me a week later that someone had shot up his mail box in the middle of the night. I tried to get myself ready for more trouble.

Buff speaking

    Just then Clark held up his hand.

    “OK, OK!” he said. “Turn your tape recorder back on. I got more to say. And I promise,” he continued, turning to face Liz, “It won’t be about E. J., at least not for a while.” Then , turning to he said, “Buff, you got your tape recorder on?”

    I said, “Yes.”

    “All right, here goes…”

Clark speaking

    This was in the National Forest in Sequoyah a couple of nights before we made the big Circle. Bishop Louie had asked me to stay up that night to watch that campfires didn’t burn out of control, that the cops or whoever didn’t come make trouble and so I would be there to break up any fights that might start.

    It was way after midnight, the moon getting big and low in the west. There was a white mist starting to form. My campfire was a heap of red ashes glowing in the mist. I was sprawled beside the fire – couldn’t get to sleep if I had wanted to, but I couldn’t stay awake either.

    And then Mike of the Coyote Family walked up and put his hand on my shoulder. He says, “Hey man, want to come with us on a little expedition?”

    “Huh?” I said, sitting up, “What do you mean?”

    “Oh, just come along with us!” I heard Ginny’s voice behind Mike. “Your clothes look all worn out,” she went on. “We can get you some new ones.”

    I got up and poured what was left of my can full of coffee on the fire and stomped on it till there wasn’t any glow. Then I followed a line of Coyote Family people through the high grass in the mist.

    They would stop around camps wherever there might be backpacks or something that wasn’t covered up safe in a tent and start picking stuff up. Sometimes they took the whole pack. At times they would even reach into a big wide-open tent and pull stuff out. They knew how to reach their hands in the depth of a tent and tell by the feel of somebody’s gear if it had anything they wanted. Then they’d pull out the pack, unzip it, get what they wanted and go on.

“Be sure and get yourself something,” Mike whispered to me as we walked from one camp to another.

I’m good at moving real silent because of all the time I spent stalking deer and elk, but all I got was a big paper sack full of dirty clothes. I dumped the dirty clothes out next to the tent where I got the sack. Then any time I was some distance from the Coyote Family, I would pretend to steal stuff and put in the sack. A couple of times I really did steal stuff, just to make it look good.

Then Mike says to me, “Do you know a place where we can stash this stuff?”

“I seen a clearing over there in the woods this morning,” I told him and I led the Coyotes among some tall trees to the clearing. They piled all the stuff they had stole together and put a heap of dead branches over it.

Mike shook my hand and smiled and said, “Thanks.” Then I took my paper sack and went by myself to the camps where I actually had stole stuff. I took the things I stole out of the sack and placed them next to the tents they come from.

Next morning I went around to a lot of camps as people was getting up to make coffee. I stood at their fires and said, “If anybody here is missing stuff, they should check in a clearing in the woods over there,” and I pointed to the place. “Go to the clearing and there will be a big heap of dead branches. Just pull them branches off and I bet you’ll find your stuff.”

I made it to most of the camps where the Coyote Family had stole stuff the night before, and the ones I didn’t get to, I sent runners to make the announcement. Then I went and told Bishop Louie, “Some folks was stealing stuff last night, but I made sure people could get everything back.”

He said, “It was the Coyote Family, wasn’t it?”

I says, “Yeah, but…”

Bishop Louie says, “Get them all together. I want to talk to them.”

For once I doubted Bishop Louie. I didn’t know if he would handle it in the right way. If he just preached at the Coyote Family and pissed them off, then I would lose a bunch of good friends. Still, I says to myself, “I think I’ll trust Bishop Louie to do best.”

I went to the Coyote Family camp. Mike come up to me with a big smile on his face and said, “Say man, we’re gonna have something for breakfast that you’ll really like – this fancy spiced coffee that we got last night.”

Just then this big, husky blond Coyote guy they called Farm Boy come walking out of the woods into the camp. “Shit!” he hollered. “We been ripped off! The coffee ain’t there – everything’s gone from the clearing.”

All the Coyotes said “Huh?”

I held my hand up for attention and says, “That’s what I come here to talk about. Bishop Louie wants to see you all right now.”

Mike snarled at me, “Man, did you snitch on us?”

I says, “I swear, I didn’t mention the Coyote Family name. But Louie knows. You better get it through your heads, he can tell what’s going on. Trust me, I promise, any trouble you all are in I’ll take on myself. If Louie sends they Coyote Family away from the Circle, I’ll leave too.”

“What about if he turns us over to the cops?” Ginny asked.

“You can believe me on this,” I says, “Bishop Louie don’t want to bring the cops in on this thing. He wants us to keep order at the Circle among ourselves.”

When we got to Louie’s camp, he was sitting by the fire with Aries John and Manny and Brother Maceo and Maceo’s wife Brenda.

Bishop Louie stood up and says, “Everybody sit down and we’ll pass around some cups of coffee.”

So we all sat next to the fire. The Coyote Family started to relax as they passed around the coffee and drank it, but every now and then they’d glance up kind of anxious at Bishop Louie.

At last Louie spoke up. “I need a camp to help us keep security at the Circle from now on,” he says, “To help find lost children and return them to their parents, to break up fights in a peaceful way, to make sure fires are out when there’s nobody around and especially,” he cleared his throat, “to help find stuff that got stolen and return it to the owners. I want you guys to work with Clark on that and also with these people,” and he stretched his hand out towards Aries John and the others.

Ad each of them others from Aries John to Brenda stood up and talked about how we all had to have trust in one another and be like a family at the Circle. Finally Bishop Louie come over and hugged Mike and Ginny and all the other Coyotes.

Then the Coyote Family stood up and walked back to their camp. Bishop leaned over and whispered to me, “Be sure and keep a good watch on them.”

The Coyote Family done a good job as security camp. Then they stayed after the Circle and worked hard with us in the clean-up crew.

During clean-up Mike come up to me and said, “I’m friends now with Brother Maceo and he’s a nig – a colored person and I’m friends with Rivka and Manny and they’re Jews. Last night I tried looking in Hitler’s picture again, and I don’t see nothing no more.”
And the Coyote Family worked at security and clean-up at every Circle after that, year after year.

Chapter Thirty One

Liz speaking

    Now let me talk for a while. I didn’t come back from Sequoyah with Louie. I came back with Ivy and Brother Maceo and Brenda. All that fall me and Ivy would take loads of corn and beans and vegetables that we harvested here in Zarahemla down to La Plata in Ivy’s pickup. We sold our loads in the farmer’s market. The Zarahemla Community let us use some of the money to buy lumber to build a new community center in the place where Louie’s church had been burned down.

    We sure needed that community center, because after the Circle in Sequoyah, people were pouring into Zarahemla once more. They had to have a place where major decisions could be made democratically, not just Louie going into the tipi and talking things over with Aries John.

    Once me and Ivy showed up with the lumber, Brother Maceo came over to help us. After all, he’s a skilled carpenter. He loves wood and his other materials and he would hate the thought of inexperienced people like me and Ivy ruining the lumber and wasting it. Then Aries John and Emma and the rest of that family showed up to help, and then others. At last everybody was out there working on the community center except Louie. I think he wanted to leave that project for me to co-ordinate. Also, he still wanted to avoid Teresa, who had been with him and was now Aries John’s wife. But when it was getting close to winter, Louie gave us some money to buy material to finish the Community Center before the bad weather came. I think he got the money from Taze.

Clark speaking

    I know he got the money from Taze. Later in the fall, Taze wrote Louie and asked him to come up for Thanksgiving weekend at the new mission he was opening in Albuquerque.

    Louie says, “Negotiations are in the air!” and smacked his hands together.
    “Clark, you don’t you go up there for me this time?” he says to me. “If there are any problems, tell Taze I’ll meet with him later.”

    But in the Circle, we don’t want to have any big secret deals, so I could take who I wanted with me. I took Nephi and his wife Twyla who was getting upset about him going off and leaving her alone. Ivy let us take her pickup.

    When we got to the mission building that Taze had just bought in Albuquerque, he wasn’t there. His elders loaded us in a brand-new bus and took us out to his ranch near Santa Fe. It was a big adobe building over a hundred years old. They had just whitewashed it and they had some beautiful horses out in the corral. Inside they had Navajo rugs and Pueblo pottery and old Spanish wood carvings – all this stuff was the best quality, just beautiful. Somehow or other it looked like new antiques, shiny and fresh from the store.

    The elders brought us the biggest, juiciest turkey I ever seen. It was a good New Mexico turkey with green chili in the stuffing. Taze was late and the turkey was gonna get cold, so they let us chow down. We was just getting to the pumpkin pie, which had whipped cream six inches thick, when Taze and Rivka showed up.

    When Taze seen Nephi, he stiffened up and got a frown. He didn’t say a word to Nephi all the time we was there. Hell, he wouldn’t even look in Nephi’s direction. But Rivka sat down by Nephi’s wife Twyla and had a real friendly talk with her when we wasn’t talking business.

    Taze started pacing back and forth in front of us, stabbing the air with his forefinger as he talked. “First!” he says, “We need to have a new name for what we’re gonna do next year. The Circle is too much connected with the conflict we had in Sequoyah. Let’s call it the Great Assembly. I’ve been thinking of that name for years.

    “Next!” he says, whirling around and pacing in the other direction, “we ought to set up a sponsorship committee for next year’s Great Assembly. I’m suggesting that I should be on the committee and Bishop Louie should be on it and I have a list of people and organizations who should be considered for sponsors,” and he pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of his hip pocket and waved it at me.

    “Finally!” he says, “I would rather we have our Great Assembly next year in New Mexico – not Wyoming. My elders still need to work on putting this ranch together and I’ll need them down here next summer.”

    I lifted my hand and says, “Excuse me, but I think we ought to keep on calling it the Circle because…”

    “Oh, be quiet for a while and let me explain in detail!” Taze interrupted.

    I stood up and said, “I’d like for you to treat me with some respect!”

    Taze pointed at me and hollered “Respect! You’ll get respect when I think you deserve it!”

    Just then Rivka stood up and said, “Taze, relax! Say, everybody, who don’t we drink a cup of coffee and start all over again?”

    The elders passed around cups of coffee and Rivka went out to her and Taze’s car and brought back the pyramid Taze used to wear on his head. “Taze,” Rivka says, “I used to think you looked silly with this on your head. Now I think you’re acting a lot sillier without it. Maybe if you wear it, you’ll calm down.”

    She handed the pyramid to Taze and he put it on his head. Some of Taze’s elders was giving me looks like they was trying to stare holes in me. But after a while they stopped that.

    We finally come down to this: we would keep calling it the Circle and have it in Wyoming Taze wouldn’t sponsor the Circle and he would only send one elder to Wyoming with a little bit of food for us. Right there at the ranch, he wrote out a check for $500 for me to take to Louie. He told me he would call some people to send more money to Louie for the Circle in Wyoming.

Liz speaking

    So that’s how we got the money to finish the Community Center. For opening night, the People’s Party Youth Cultural Team came up from La Plata and put on a play with lots of song and dance numbers. Manny didn’t come with the team, but Rose, the other cultural team leader was there.    Me and Rose sang a number together and kicked up our toes at the moon.

    A lot of young people came to the performance from the small farms and ranches in the area and – get this – even a couple of teenage boys from the rival Mormon community up the valley. They snuck away from home and came to our show. The two boys told me that their fathers were in the group that burned down Louie’s church. Now they were laughing their heads off at the play in the community center on the site of the church.

    The word got all over the hills around there that we were spreading Communist propaganda. A few nights later someone drove by and shot a hole through our mailbox. Louie stayed awake for a couple of nights trying to figure out which ones among his enemies in the upper valley might be in on that.

    I could have been scared pretty bad. But what gave me hope was a grimy postcard we got in early January from Naples, Florida, sighed by 20 people. They crammed the information on the top of the back of the card:

“We held a Circle on a spot of drained land in the Everglades. We camped together from solstice Dec. 20 until the day after New Year’s. See you in Wyoming!”

    That was just the first message like that. Letters and cards started coming in from all over the country. By the equinox on March 21, they were a flood. People had been to our Circles in Colorado and Sequoyah – or heard about them – and now they were camping in the woods and holding silent circles on their own. Sure, we had given our address to people we had met at the two Circles we had been to. But they must have given our address to others and we were hearing from people who knew of us at second and third and twentieth hand. Here we were, still a handful of people in the back country of New Mexico and we were also part of this huge movement that was sprouting up everywhere.
You want to know why I never got worried about E. J.? It was all these other circles forming. Some of them as early as that spring had two or three thousand people. It was something way too big for all the E. J.’s on earth to destroy.

Clark speaking

    Now I’ll tell you about why I had to worry about E. J. Me and Bishop Louie and Aries John went to Wyoming around the end of May. Some people up there had already found a place in the mountains that they thought was a pretty good site and held a regional Circle in April. We wanted to check out the place, see if there was enough spring water for a lot of people and talk things over with the Forest Service and the Highway Patrol and the sheriffs in the counties around there.

So many people travel the roads hungry and out of work. A lot of them had heard of the Circle or at least that there was a kitchen with free food somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming. People who had been driving around looking for work drove their old cars and pickups up the dirt trails till they got to the Circle’s camp and they didn’t have no more money for gas and they just let their vehicles die there. People went to the end of their Rural Bus service tickets and didn’t have a nickel to go further on. People hitch hiked and walked the roads with their backpacks for miles. When they got to the Circle’s camp, they dropped to the ground and rested their sore feet and said, “No more! This is it!”

When me and Bishop Louie got there, I guess there was about 350 people. There was already a camp of some of the Coyote Family there to do security and more of them arriving every day. It had snowed several times in May and people was camping in cold mud.

Only one car in the whole camp worked – that was E. J.’s car. He had been there for two weeks and he was the only one with money to buy food and gas. Some mothers come up to his van to ask for food for their kids. The mothers begged pretty hard and finally E. J. pulled out a pistol and pointed it at them.

When the other women heard about that, most of them went and camped about half a mile from the men. A lot of them men was pretty hot at E. J. too. But E. J. had the food. He was there with a guy named Angelo. Angelo had a long, curly black beard and a big scowl on his face. He had once tried to be one of Taze’s elders, but Taze kicked him out. Now Angelo wanted to start his own religion. Where Taze wore a pyramid on his head, Angelo wore a tall, dark purple cone.

Angelo was about 40, but he was the leader of a bunch of teenage kids called the Young Warriors. I asked Mike of the Coyote Family camp about the Young Warriors. He said, “They tried to hang around with us, but we had to chase them away. They was just too young and immature and crazy.”

The Young Warriors tied hubcaps on their heads for helmets. E. J. and Angelo was trying to use them for security instead of the Coyote Family. The Warriors took food from E. J.’s van to all the campfires. Even though some of the Young Warriors was girls, the women who had their own camp didn’t like them. Still, the Young Warriors was the only ones who had the food, so what could the women do? They got their food from the Young Warriors – what there was of it.

Aries John’s pickup was fixed up pretty good now and we had all this money from Taze for food and gas – Bishop Louie found a place about a mile from where everybody was camped. They all moved there and the men and women was together again. We brought in enough food to keep everybody happy for a while.

About a week later, Brother Seraph, the elder from Taze showed up with some food from the Maria Russell Mission – more than we expected Taze to send.

Here’s the funny thing – Brother Seraph turned the food over to E. J. and Angelo for the Young Warriors to give out. Them three guys and the Young Warriors set up a big camp in the middle of everything – all the trails passed through their territory. Everybody that passed through, the Young Warriors would say, “We’re security. We gotta check you out.” If they didn’t like someone’s looks, that person couldn’t go through.

The Highway Patrol talked to Brother Seraph and E. J. and Angelo as much as they did to you. I heard the cops talking about the Young Warriors as “Circle Security.” One of the cops told the other, “The man with the purple cone on his head and the two guys with him are their leaders.”

“Dammit,” I says to Bishop Louie, “I’d like to cram Angelo’s cone down his throat. Then I’d kick Brother Seraph and E. J. to the top of a tree and I’d paddle the Young Warriors with all them hubcaps they wear on their heads.”

“Easy, easy,” Bishop Louie says to me. “Brother Seraph is from Taze. I don’t know who E. J. is from, but they’re both watching us and they want to see if we lose it.”

The Highway Patrol was with them folks because the governor of the state was a Republican and they had to answer to him. But the Forest Service was Federal Government which was controlled by the People’s Party so they was on the side of Louie and Aries John and me. They was even more on our side after Manny Zamora got up there because he’s People’s Party all the way and can give a good People’s Party rap.
The sheriffs I talked to – one of them was a Republican and one was a Nationalist. But they had to answer to the people of their counties – to do what was best for their own folks. And they liked me and trusted me a lot more than they trusted E. J. and Angelo and Brother Seraph. Pretty soon I was riding around with the sheriffs and the deputies – talking over everything in the world with them, out there helping them direct traffic from the main road to the camp.

I was with the Nationalist sheriff the day the shit come down.

Chapter Thirty Two

Clark speaking

    The sheriff’s name was Johnson, but everybody called him Pap. The word come over his car radio, “Collision, automobile and pickup…automobile driver intoxicated, several injuries, people riding in the rear…driver and passenger in front, both probably fatalities.”

    We hurried over to the accident at 90 miles an hour – old, beat-up car smashed into old, beat-up pickup. The deputies was dragging a big fat drunk man out of the car, bleeding like a hog with his throat cut, blubbering, “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.”

    There was two young men and two young women knocked out of the back of the pickup. The deputies had stretched them out on the grass by the side of the road. Three of them was out cold. One of them, a woman about 20, still had her eyes open and was trying to talk. I went over to her. She stared up at me and said, “Oh wow, are you from the Circle? Can you make sure we get there?” Then she passed out.

    Pap, the sheriff asked me to come over and help him. He was too fat to get in the pickup cab, so he couldn’t even try to get the bodies out. I had to push up some glass and steel mess that was smashed in. Then I had to be real gentle getting the bodies out. One of them was dead all right. His intestines fell out and slapped against me and got me all bloody. The other guy was still alive, but if I hadn’t of been careful, he wouldn’t have been.

    We laid him out by the roadside. Then the Highway Patrol showed up and after that a couple of ambulances. When all these people, alive and dead was gone, old Pap, the sheriff, drove me back to the camp and let me off at Louie’s tent.

    One of the biggest men I ever seen was there. I’m six-two but his guy must have been six-eight, in a gray suit like a tent. Besides that he had on high-heeled cowboy boots and a tall Stetson hat and a super pissed-off expression.

    “Was you out butcherin’ a cow?” this guy bellowed at me, staring at my bloody pants.

    “No sir,” I says. “Been helping get some bodies out of a wreck.”

    “Well, I’m the president of the local Cattlemen’s Association,” he says, “and one of our members’ stock is missing and we heard it might be up here.”

    Pap walked up to this cattleman guy and said, “Don’t blame this young man for nothing! He’s as good a sheriff as I am.”

    The man calmed down but he still don’t look very happy. “The rancher who owned that cow,” he says, “it was one of his favorites. He was very fond of her.”

    “How fond?” bishop Louie says, “Three hundred dollars?”

    “Four hundred,” the guy from the Cattlemen’s Association says.

    Bishop Louie turned to me and says, “We’re running out on the money Taze sent us and we got 5,000 people now to feed.” Then he turned to the Cattlemen fellow and says, “I’ll give you $200 now and the rest tomorrow. Clark, go around to all the campfires and see how much money you can raise.”

    The first place I went was the Coyote Family camp. They had big hunks of raw beef laid out on a piece of canvas with pools of blood all over it. Ginny was cutting off pieces of raw beef and cooking them on a grill over the campfire. Everybody had their mouth full of the grilled beef with grease running down their chins. There was two little Coyote Family kids, hardly old enough to walk, running around naked, sucking on strips of grilled beef, with grease and blood specks all over their faces.

    I went up to Mike and says, “Dammit, what are you guys doing? I thought you guys promised not to steal.”

    Mike just looked straight at me. “We didn’t steal nothing,” he says. “If you’re talking about this beef, the Young Warriors gave it to us. They been handing beef out to a lot of camps.”

    Ginny stood up and faced me. “it’s a better deal than most of what the Young Warriors been doing,” she says. “Like if some young new comer gets supplies from Aries John to take to a camp they usually have to cross Young Warrior territory. And the Young Warriors come up and say, ‘Man, we’re Young Warriors and we’re the official security for the Circle. We’re supposed to give out some of that food, so give us some.’ And if someone tells them no, the Young Warriors threaten to beat them up. But I just tell them, “I may be a girl, but if you mess with me, I’ll whip your ass!”

    “They do give out some of that food they take,” Mike says. “They hand it out and say it’s from E. J. and Brother Seraph and old pointy-purple head Angelo and them three guys are supposed to be the real leaders of the Circle.”

    I walked on to another camp. It was a bunch of college kids. They all pointed at me and gasped and shrieked because I still had blood all over my pants from the car wreck.

    “I didn’t hurt nobody and I didn’t get hurt,” I says. “Can somebody give me a wet rag?”
    They gave me a rag and I wiped the blood off.

    I went around to all the camps asking for money to pay for the cow. When I got to E. J.’s camp, the Young Warriors was burying the cow bones in a hole by his van. One of the Young Warriors was holding the cow’s tail, popping it like a whip. E. J. was sitting there laughing, drinking beer. He looked a little drunk.

    “Hey, E. J.,” I says. “Can you help us with a little money to pay the rancher for the cow?”

    “Go away!” E. J. hollered. “That cow was a favor for the hungry people in all the camps.”

    “But E. J.,” I started, “Bishop Louie says…”

    E. J. stood up with one hand on his hip and the other holding his beer can. “Go tell Louie that if he don’t stop fucking with me, I’ll kill him!” he says.

    When I got back to Bishop Louie I only had $60 to help pay for the cow. I told him that E. J. threatened to kill him. Louie and me squatted together by his campfire and I asked, “Can’t we tell E. J. and Angelo and the Young Warriors to leave?”

    “Not as long as Brother Seraph is Taze’s elder. This cow is gonna wipe us out financially and we’re gonna have to call Taze and ask him for more money to feed all this crowd that’s coming. So we can’t send his man home. It looks like our friend Taze has more cards up his sleeve than I thought.” And he chuckled a little.

    I went to my blankets and laid down, dead tired. All of a sudden I remembered that dead man I pulled out of the wreck. He wasn’t a man. He was younger than me, not more than a boy. I put my hands over my face and started crying till I went to sleep.

Rivka speaking

    Taze wouldn’t go to the Circle in Wyoming. He said he needed to direct the elders in fixing up the ranch. Then he said he had such a bad headache he couldn’t even go to the ranch. I believed him. His face was gray and there were big bags under his eyes. I walked into his office and found him slumped over his desk with his head propped up by one hand.

    "Taze,” I started off, “I just came to tell you that I’m getting ready to go to Wyoming for…”

    “No, you can’t Rivka!” Taze groaned. “I need you to stay here to tell the elders what to do.”

    “Taze,” I said in as quiet and humble a voice as I could, “I want to do the elders a favor. I want to go away for a while so that for once they’ll have a chance to think for themselves.”

    “Oh, go ahead,” Taze said, and his head sank down on his desk.

    I started off in late June and took the bus as far as the lines ran. In Wyoming I seemed to be going forever through flat, brown country covered with sage brush, no trees, houses or people, just now and then a small heard of pronghorn antelopes. At the end of the line, a two-lane blacktop road turned off from the main highway toward the place where the Circle would be. I hitched a ride with a van full of friendly, cheerful young people, all of them left-wing and anxious to do missionary work for the revolution. I bowed out of that as nicely as I could. I’d had enough left-wing preaching when I was at home in New York with my parents.

    So they were singing and clapping rhythm while I stared out the back windows of the van as the blacktop turned to dirt road and the country became more mountainous. Tall pine trees started appearing more and more. As the van climbed higher, the air got cooler and I pulled my sarape closer around me. Then there was the big sign hanging from a pine tree – CIRCLE – WELCOME CENTER.

    I was ready to weep with joy.

    Under the sign was a canvas awning where some young people were giving out cups of hot tea. I had never seen any of them before in my life, but I flung my arms around each one of them before I took the cup of tea they offered. When I drank it, I was trembling, and not because the air was chilly. Then I ran down the path with my gear on my back for about a mile to the area where everybody was camped. At least when I remember, it seems like running, like it took me only a few minutes.

    So on I was walking among tents and shelters with my heart skipping. Then all of a sudden the path went through a thicket of bushes and small trees that shaped my way. “I’m in magic land again,” I whispered to myself.

    But just as the path led out of the thicket, two skinny teenage boys with hubcaps on their heads sprang in front of me and blocked my way.

    “We’re from security,” one of them squeaked. “We want to check your pack to make sure you’re not carrying weapons or narcotics.”

    I didn’t put up with commands from Louie or Taze, I wasn’t going to start with these kids. I just flounced my skirts at them, stepped off the path and started to go around them. Then one of them yelled, “Hold it!” and grabbed my arm. For such a scrawny kid, he had a strong grip.

    Up ahead of me I could see a large meadow surrounded by trees. Other teenage boys and girls with hubcaps on their heads were running around barking orders at each other. In the middle of this nightmare, looking very out of place, was Brother Seraph from the Maria Russell Mission.

    Brother Seraph had on jeans and a checked shirt, but with the bald spot on his golden hair and the long golden-orange goatee on his chin, he always looked to me like he should be in a monk’s robe. What was he doing here?

    “Brother Seraph, help me, please!” I called out as loud as I could.

    He hurried over and told the boy, “You can let go of her. She works at the Maria Russell Mission with me.”

    “OK, OK,” the boy said and let go of me grudgingly.

    Brother Seraph and I walked on into the meadow.

    “You’re a newcomer here,” he said. “Everyone who’s been camped for a while has worn a new path that skirts a mile around this place to avoid the Young Warriors. It’s the newcomers who get trapped.”

    “Well, why are you here?” I asked. “You don’t look trapped to me.”

    “I have to be here,” Brother Seraph said, nodding his head solemnly to emphasize his words. “And it’s not just for Taze. It’s because of them.”

    He jerked his chin quickly in the direction of two men sprawled in the grass with empty beer cans all around them. I recognized Angelo with the long, curly black beard. He had been a disciple at the Maria Russell Mission, just about to become an elder when I saw him kick a young disciple and flatten him on the floor. I told Taze, who ordered Angelo to leave the Mission that day. Now Angelo had a tall purple cone on his head. “Well hello, Rivka,” he giggled. “I’m pleased to see you here.” Then he took a swig from a can of beer and turned to the other man, who I recognized as E. J. Caldwell.

    “She got Taze to kick me out of the Mission,” Angelo said to E. J.

    “Bitch!” E. J. muttered in a low voice, but with such intensity that the word pierced me although I was still some distance away.

    “Come on,” Brother Seraph said into my ear. “Let’s get out of here for a while.”
    We followed the path out of the meadow into a grove of pine trees. Sure enough, the path we were on joined another path crowded with people, a path which made a long detour around the meadow. I was so mentally exhausted, I sat down abruptly on the big roots of a tree and took off my pack.

    “What’s going on?” I asked Brother Seraph. “Does this have anything to do with the Pristine Foundation?”

    ‘It’s much more than that,” Brother Seraph said, looking at the ground and shifting his weight from one foot to another as he spoke. “E. J. is a very low-level operator. But he’s being paid a little money for being here this summer by the Corporate Security Agency – they do security for most of the major corporations in the country and they supply a lot of the funding for the Pristine Foundation.”

    “What on earth are they paying E. J. for? I asked.

    “Basically to do surveillance on Taze and Bishop Louie,” Brother Seraph said. “You see, the Corporate Security Agency doesn’t like how Taze wasted all that Pristine money in Sequoyah and then didn’t accomplish anything with the Circle. Oh, they gave us a bunch more money all right. That’s how we bought the new mission building in Albuquerque and fixed up our ranch so nice. But they expect something in return.”

    “Like what?” I asked.

    “Here’s an example,” Brother Seraph answered. “A week ago E. J. and Angelo and the Young Warriors stole a cow. Louie had to pay for it, which really hurt him financially when he had to be ready to feed 10,000 people – there must be that many folks here this week. Louie called Taze for more money. Taze said he couldn’t have the money unless the Young Warriors were able to distribute a certain amount of the food. Taze told me over the phone that I was to supervise the agreement.”

    “But surely,” I said, “you don’t want to work with people like Angelo and E. J.”

    “No I don’t!” Brother Seraph said, frowning and sticking out his chin with a quivering goatee. “Taze doesn’t want to work with Angelo and E.J. either. Why do you think he’s been having all those headaches this spring? But we have to.” His chin sagged and his beard drooped. He shook his head.

    I realized that after all my playing spy, I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. By now the cool ground around the roots where I was sitting had given me back enough strength so that I put on my pack and stood up again. We walked into another group of campers. Brother Seraph pointed ahead.

    “Those may be the people you want to see,” he said.

    “Oh God, are they!” I yelled. Zephyr and Ivy and Nephi and Twyla – and Manny! All standing around a campfire. I ran forward shouting half-formed words of greeting at the top of my voice and collapsed into their arms.

    I was home.

Chapter Thirty Three

Liz speaking

    Louie wrote us a note from Wyoming – “When you get here, stay away from the Young Warriors!” Right after that, we had our vehicles repaired well enough to caravan from Zarahemla to Wyoming. By the time we got there, someone had put up a sign by the path saying YOUNG WARRIOR TERRITORY AHEAD!

    So we knew enough to take the side trail around the meadow where the Young Warriors were camped. Later, the Young Warriors took down that sign and more poor souls fell into their clutches. Then some other people put up another warning sign, the Young Warriors took it down again and so on, back and forth.

    I just wasn’t concerned with the Young Warriors or E. J. or any of that shit. My biggest interest was to put together the best medical tent I could. Louie helped me with that to the max – went out of his way to get me all the medicine and bandages he could send my way. Of course he couldn’t get me everything, but it was in Wyoming that I learned some things I could never have learned in nursing school. A half-Indian woman named Pansy from those Wyoming mountains taught me to identify and collect medicinal herbs.

    “You don’t just step up to the plant and yank if out of the ground,” she said. “You sit down next to it and look it over, get to know it and find out what it has to tell you about what it’s for. Talk to it in a soothing voice, explain that you need it – once if finishes talking to you.

    “Carry a handkerchief with you at all times,’ Pansy said, and she pulled her own handkerchief, which was black, out of her pocket. “Keep your handkerchief with you so it’ll have your own energy in it. Lay it on the ground and when you take a plant, put it on the handkerchief so the plant won’t lose some of its power into the ground.”

    I only began to know herbs there in Wyoming. But the knowledge of herbs has slowed me down and made me into a gentler person. A woman had a baby in Wyoming. I went to her tent to help her and found out how much I didn’t know. Lucky for us, word got around the camp and a regular woman MD showed up. I had some pretty scary lumps in the throat before she showed up. The cries of the woman in labor cut through me. For a second I wanted to run. Then the MD came and showed me what to do. I became determined to back to nursing school and get my degree.

    I loved the place where we made the Circle that year – a huge meadow with lots of bluebells on a slope high above where everybody was camped. It must have been over 8,000 feet above sea level and there was a cool breeze in our faces.

    The day after the prayer circle, most of the people still hadn’t gone. Louie called a big council circle in that same high meadow. He stood in the middle of that council and held his hand high. “I have asked people to come here,” he said, “to decide what state we will make the Circle in next year.”

    Everybody started shouting at once – “Maine!” – “Idaho!” – “California!” Then a slender young woman with long, wavy, golden-brown hair walked into the middle of the council circle. She started speaking in an accent that sounded like it came from some long-ago pioneer time:

    “Come to West Virginia! We need y’all so bad back in the East! There’s a group of us who made a regional circle this spring in the Allegheny National Forest in one of the greenest valleys on earth, big streams of fresh water to drink and swim in. We made our circle at a place where there’s a little village that’s been deserted for over a hundred years, with groves of apple trees all around it. We will help prepare the way. Come home back East!”

    Everybody started cheering and shouting, “West Virginia! West Virginia!”

    Just then a rather handsome man – blond-haired and beard, bald spot shining on his head – stepped out into the council circle. He raised both hands over his head and called out, “Louie! Louie!”

    Louie nodded and said “Yes,” in a low voice.

    “You have been with the Circle from the beginning,” the man said. “So has the Maria Russell Mission. You are part of those of us who really know what’s going on. You understand that we can’t leave our work undone to travel so far to the East. Yet you will need all our supplies to feed all the thousands of people who come. We urgently request that next year’s Circle be held in New Mexico or Arizona and we will block consensus on any attempt to hold it so far away.”

    “I will not take either side in this debate,” Louie said, “I will facilitate the council and leave it up to this democratic assembly. Either they will convince you or you will convince them.”

    A forest of hands went up. Louie started pointing at hands, getting them in some kind of order to make their speeches. A lot of people had spent a long, weary journey from the East to make the Circle in Wyoming. Now they wanted it closer to them. At first people were smiling at the balding man with the yellow beard and talking to him eagerly about the beauties of West Virginia. But the man wouldn’t even look at them. He just stood there silently and kept his eyes on Louie. And Louie wouldn’t say anything. He just kept pointing out who would speak next.

    Finally as the afternoon got warmer, people were shouting in anger and shaking their fists at the man who was staring at Louie. People kept saying, “I’m from the West, but I’d be glad to go East! Why are you holding us up?”

    I heard people around me muttering, “I thought we already decided it was West Virginia.”

    Another person would say, “And I thought Bishop Louie was the leader. Why does he let this thing drag on like this?”

    People started leaving the council, but we went on till sundown.

    Next day fewer people came to the meadow for the council circle. And it went on the same way all day, Louie and the man not saying anything, people getting mad and leaving. On the third day there were still fewer people and the same thing going on. It was obvious, the man was trying to wear everybody down to make the Circle happen where the Maria Russell Mission wanted.

Rivka speaking

    I dared to stand in council not far from Louie. All day for two days I watched Brother Seraph staring Louie in the eye, blocking consensus on making the Circle in West Virginia.

    Finally, the second night, we went back to Manny’s camp. I wasn’t about to go over where Brother Seraph was camped with E. J. and Angelo. Manny was telling a long, humorous story and all the people at his campfire were looking to him. Brother Seraph came over to Manny’s campfire to listen. I squeezed Brother Seraph on the shoulder. He looked up and I said, “Come with me.”

    We walked into the dark pine woods and I said, “Brother Seraph, I know you’re a good person. Why on earth are you doing this?”

    Brother Seraph looked at me steadily for a couple of seconds. His face was pink and innocent and simple – I mean uncomplicated, not stupid. His eyes were large and gray with bright sparks of intelligence.

    “You know why I’m doing this,” he said. “I have to. Taze and I both have to. There are other people in this besides us. The money – and a great deal else – depends on this. Louie knows it too.”

    “But,” I said, “If Taze and the others have to stay in New Mexico and take care of the ranch, couldn’t one of the Maria Russell Missions back East supply the Circle in West Virginia with food? Taze could do it with a phone call.”

    “The issue isn’t food supplies,” Brother Seraph said, “The issue is control.”

    He spread his hands and looked up at the starry sky wide-eyed. “I trust in God, the Father and Mother and Christ – and the spirit of Maria Russell.” Then he lowered his eyes to me and they turned sad.

    “But as far as things on this earth go,” he went on, “Taze is sincere, but he was always hungry for power. And as I followed after him, I started wanting a little taste of that power. So now we’re getting our punishment. We’re having to help someone else get power – somebody who’s a lot bigger and hungrier than we ever were.”

    By now I was clenching my fists so that my nails were digging into my palms. “Maybe the Pristine Foundation or the Corporate Security Agency or whoever it is can hurt you,” I said, but if you really have faith in God and all that, can’t you stand up to them? When I first looked for a spiritual life, I thought I’d find people who were interested in something besides money and power!”

    I started to cry. Brother Seraph walked off into the dark.

    Next day the same silent stare routine went on between Brother Seraph and Louie in the council circle. Finally at noon Brother Seraph flung his hands up in the air briefly. Then he walked out of the council circle and sat down by me. Everybody cheered except Louie, who maintained a solid, diplomatic poker face.

    “What a relief!” Brother Seraph gasped in my ear. Then he started taking in big gulps of the fresh mountain air. It was to be West Virginia next year.

Clark speaking

    About that car accident – The people who survived got released from the hospital when they still couldn’t walk – at least just to come to our camp. The ambulance let them out and people carried them in on stretchers. The big circle was over and it was the start of cleanup, but they was grinning from ear to ear.

    When cleanup started, Brother Seraph drove back to Santa Fe with E. J. Angelo stayed behind in Wyoming with his Young Warriors – after all, he was supposed to be their chief.

    The Young Warriors did help us out a lot with the clean up. Then one day Bishop Louie sent Angelo and some of the other Young Warriors over to one of the camping areas to ask people to take down their tents and move some place else so we could clean up there.

    I was standing with Bishop Louie in his camp on the edge of a big meadow, when I seen one guy chasing another across the meadow towards us, both of them running like the wind.

    The one in front was Angelo. Somehow he could run so fast and that purple cone never fell off his head. A couple of times he put his hand up to steady the cone, but he never stopped for a second till he got up to me. Then he grabbed my shoulder, like I’m his big strong refuge.

    “What’s that guy after you for?” I says.

    “Failure to communicate!” Angelo says. He caught his breath and laughed a little.

    The guy chasing him was a tall skinny Indian about 20 years old. He was one of the Young Warriors, with long, black hair streaming out behind the hubcap he wore on his head. He was waving a great big bowie knife and he had the craziest smile, with his tongue coming out of the corner of his mouth.

    “Hold it, brother!” Bishop Louie hollered and stepped right into the Indian’s path. “Now just slow down and tell me what’s the matter.”

    The young Indian panted for a minute. Then he says, “I’m gonna take this knife and I’m gonna scalp that ass hole! Then I’m gonna make him sit on that purple cone till the point comes out his mouth!”

    “What did he do?” Louie asked.

    “That son of a bitch there!” the young Indian screamed, pointing his finger at Angelo. The finger was trembling with rage. “We went to ask people to take their tents down and this lady told us real nice, she would take her tent down in a few hours, but right now she had to keep it up. Then Angelo pushed her down on the ground – hard!”

    “Now look,” bishop Louie says, calm and serious. “I been hearing all kinds of reports about the Young Warriors. It seems you guys have pulled a bunch of shit like that.”

    “But we’re all sick and tired of it,” the young Indian says. “We seen at this place how nice everybody treats each other. A lot of us never seen nothing like that before. Angelo ain’t our leader no more.”

    “All right,” Louie says and gripped the young Indian’s shoulders and stared straight into his eyes. “If you want to give up doing like you been doing, one of the things you gotta give up is getting even.”

    He stared into the young fellow’s eyes for about three minutes.

    “OK!” the young Indian huffed. He turned around so fast his long black hair whirled in the air behind him. Then he walked back across the meadow away from us.

Rivka speaking

    After cleanup I left Wyoming and traveled two nights by bus. I was in Santa Fe in the middle of the morning, unwilling to go back at once to the mission. I walked around enjoying the familiarity of the little city. Then early in the afternoon one of those quick New Mexico downpours happened. First there was a clear blue sky, no trace of cloud, very warm. Then a black shawl of cloud with long black fringes flung itself across the sky from west to east. I ducked under the arcade of a row of stores and had fun watching the wind blowing the slanting lines of rain. I knew it was a lot better than anything else I would have to face that day.

    Finally when the rain quit and the clouds had paled to gray and started drifting off, I walked to the Maria Russell Mission. Taze was sitting in his office looking as gloomy as I had left him. “Hi,” I said, shy in the face of all that sadness. “What’s going on?”

    “Two days ago,” Taze said, “Brother Seraph brought E. J. here. Then Brother Seraph told all the elders about what had happened in Wyoming. That day Brother Francis, Brother Wisdom and Brother Counsel packed their stuff and walked off with Brother Seraph to the bus station. Brother Seraph’s last words as they walked out the door were, “I have to go commune with Mara Russell elsewhere.”

    “So our best elders left, “ I said, and all because of what E. J. did in Wyoming?”

    “That’s not all,” Taze said, “E. J. sat around all the rest of the day on the sofa in the front room and smirked. Two more elders walked out yesterday. I called the Pristine foundation and asked them what I could do. They told me to ask E. J. to come to the phone and they talked to him a while and he left. Now in some ways we have to start all over. Do you have any ideas for which disciples we should make into elders?”

    “As an ex-Bishopess,” I said, “I think we should have an Eldress. How about Sister Hannah? Here we are supposed to be communing with the spirit of a female prophet and emphasizing the female side of God – and we haven’t had a woman elder yet.”

    “Sister Hannah it is,” Taze said. “And we won’t do anything next year about the Circle in West Virginia but send some food. I regret what we had to do this year in Wyoming, trying to get Louie to pay attention. But I think he’ll have a lot harder time in West Virginia – and not from us. It’s all because he won’t listen.”

Chapter Thirty Four

Nephi speaking

    When you become part of a place like Zarahemla, as you get older you enjoy watching it grow and change right in front of your eyes.

    We all went to the Circle in Wyoming and ate stolen beef. It made me burp up a smell like rotten eggs.

    When we got back, Joseph, the son of Aries John and his oldest wife Emma had his first birthday the second week of August. Then Aries John’s second wife Cassie was pregnant. All of Ivy’s kids was going to school. Funny thing – when the Rural Bus services stopped coming to our valley for a while because they was afraid of people shooting at them, Norma, the little Chicana lady that drove the school bus never stopped. Norma picked up the kids from our end of the valley and from our enemies at the Mormon church in the north end of the valley. She took them all to school in Highlander, the county seat. Of course a lot of times the kids went off in the woods and didn’t go to school, but that’s just natural in any farm community. Norma was there anyway.

    I would go out with Clark and Turco and whoever else wanted to show up to patrol our boundaries between us and the folks at the upper end of the valley. We would watch for trucks taking weapons and explosives. Sometimes Twyla would come too, but I think she was watching for what I was doing as much as for weapons.

    We still had lots of people coming to Zarahemla. They seen us at the Circle and they wanted to find out more about us. I know the People’s Party government provides free medical care and low rent public housing and six month jobs for young people in the National Forest and repairing highways but it just don’t get to all of them. A lot of people feel left out and restless. We want them on our side and not on the side of whoever was stashing all them rifles and dynamite sticks in the mountains.

    People started showing up and camping along the Pobre Clara River in time to help us harvest the crops. We had to explain to them, “Get water from the river and boil it for you bath, but once you have soap in your boiling hot water, pour it out on the ground a good ways from the river. Keep the river clean, folks.”

    The leaves on the cottonwood trees started turning gold and floating down to the ground. Little whirlwinds would cross the valley and carry the leaves round and round, way up in the air, maybe 20 feet. The whirlwinds would pick up long plumes of white dust and fling it in your face if you wasn’t looking. Then before we knew it, it was winter. Our valley was so deep that it didn’t snow, except maybe a little frost right before daybreak. I would get up about that time and go out in my shirtsleeves to pee. I wasn’t too cold at all, even though I could look all around me and see the snow reaching way down low on the mountain sides.

    Every so often there would be a sudden warm wind from the south. Then the snows on the mountain would melt and water would just pour down the slopes and loosen the rocks. Sometimes the rocks would slide onto the roads. It might be a couple of days before a crew would come from La Plata or Highlander to remove the rocks – which means we might be stuck and unable to travel all that time.

    So if there wasn’t too many rocks, a bunch of us would go out and pick them out of the road. One time after dark, me and Twyla and Brother Maceo and about ten more was out there clearing a rock slide like that. We would take turns holding a flashlight so people coming would know what is going on.

    Then eight young people from that church in the upper end of the valley come in a pickup to help clear rocks. About the main difference I could see between them and us was that our group had Twyla and a couple of other women and their bunch was all guys.

    Plus we had Brother Maceo. Most of them stared wide-eyed. I bet they hadn’t never seen a black man before – just heard there was one at our end of the valley. Then Brother Maceo’s wife Brenda, who’s white, drove up with hot coffee for all of us. She hugged Brother Maceo and them guys from the upper valley really did stare.

    All except for two teenage boys, Hiram and Alma. They come up and shook my hand and Brother Maceo’s hand. “We remember you,” Hiram says. “We come down to your community center when the folks come up from La Plata to put on a show.”

    “Yeah,” I says, “That was right before Bishop Louie’s mail box got shot up.”

    “Me and Hiram didn’t have nothing to do with that,” Alma says. “It was just that some people up in our part of the valley thought your play was all communism. I don’t know what communism is. I just thought the play was funny.”

    “I don’t know what communism is either,” I says. “All I know is that them people have come up from La Plata and put on their shows other times and it never did me no harm.”

    Brother Maceo’s wife Brenda went back home in her car. Then all of us from both ends of the valley started carrying the rocks off the road with each other, all talking and laughing together. Just then a man drove up in a car and stopped. He stuck his head out the window and I could see he had sharp lines around his face like he was mad all the time.

    “You boys!” he called out. “Stop fooling with these folks and get on home. Right now!”

    “OK, Brother McClintock,” Hiram says. Then he whispered to me, “Elder McClintock’s in the Danites. He was with the bunch that burned down your church.”

    “Hurry up!” Brother McClintock snapped.

    Some of them got in his car so they wouldn’t have a cold ride home in the rear of their pickup. But Hiram and Alma reached out and touched me on the shoulder and ran to get in the pickup so they wouldn’t have to go back with old McClintock.

    I don’t feel so scared of the guns and the dynamite after that. I figured we could win them over. What I forgot was, we couldn’t win all of them over – not in New Mexico or no place else. And just some of them kind of people can be an awful lot.

Liz speaking

    It’s strange how my whole relationship with Louie followed the same pattern as Rivka’s. The spring semester of 1975, I did just what she had done – I went back to nursing school. I went up to Albuquerque and started back to my courses at TVI. Just like Rivka, I found that I could avoid a lot of quarreling with Louie by staying away from him at school.

    I still had my own mean streak. I loved to invite these sweet wimpy-looking college girls to play pool with me. I’d take them to these bars where all these drunk Chicanos and Indians were hanging out. The college girls would be so nervous it was easy to beat them at pool.

    I think when Louie came up to visit me, we got along a little too well, because by May, there I was in the middle of final exams, sick and pregnant. In June Louie hitched up to visit me where I was staying at the People’s Party Youth shelter. He met this 15 year old boy at the shelter who got real interested in the circle. So this boy decided he’d hop a freight with Louie to West Virginia, where that year’s Circle was to be. I saw them off in Albuquerque railroad yards. I was all nauseous from pregnancy, sad to see Louie go and sad that I couldn’t go to West Virginia because I felt so bad.

Clark speaking

    Aries John kept working on his pickup later and later into June and we didn’t know if any of the other vehicles in Zarahemla could make it. So first Louie took off hitching to West Virginia and then I did. When I got to West Virginia, the first thing I found was that all the local newspapers had interviews with what they called, “Circle leader E. J. Caldwell.”

    I got to the site in the National Forest. It was as beautiful as they had told us the year before – hills all soft and round and green instead of sharp bare rocks like New Mexico.

    A bunch of local young people from West Virginia was camped there and they
was all pissed off at E. J., because he had gone around to all the papers and told them he was our leader. He had never come to the National Forest to see these local people even once.

    Right after I got there, Bishop Louie showed up with this 15 year old kid named Rick. We went around to the local newspapers and told them, “We’re from the Circle and E. J. don’t represent us.”

    And they’d say, “We’re glad to hear that because E. J. had a way of acting nasty. Not polite at all.”

    The papers printed our side of the story – also that a young farmer named Hank Coombs who had worked on the local Circles would let us use his pasture for parking. Right after that, Hank started getting phone calls from all kinds of Klan and Nationalist people threatening his life.

    Then Bishop Louie called up Taze and said, “Can you send us food or money?”
    Taze says, “If you and E. J. have agreed on a spot.”

    Bishop Louie says, “I found a spot, so I’m sure E. J. will show up and say it’s all right with him.”

    “OK,” Taze says. “We have a Maria Russell Mission in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’ll call and have them take you a small truckload of food.”

    And sure enough, E. J. did show up. Hank, the farmer who let us park on his land had a big white frame house over a hundred years old. E. J. come up on the porch and hugged Bishop Louie and blubbered, “I’m sorry I ever caused you guys all that trouble.”

    Hank took me out in the back of his house and pointed to E. J. on his side porch. Hand said, “As far as that guy is concerned, I don’t trust him yet. It’s like my mama used to say – handsome is as handsome does.”

    Hank lived with a woman named Lorene. They had a beautiful little blonde four-year-old girl named Lucindy. When Hank started getting phone calls from people who threatened to shoot him or blow up his house with his little girl in it, all these coal miners showed up with rifles to protect him. These guys was strong in their union and in their People’s Party organization. Some of them come by the National Forest where we was camped for the Circle and offered to stand guard for us there, too.

    “No,” Bishop Louie says. “This place is like church. We can’t have guns here.”

    Then they offered us a couple of jugs of corn liquor, but Bishop Louie says, “We can’t have that stuff here either. It’s just too dangerous. All the people around the Circle have to keep their minds straight.”

    However, to be polite to the coal miners, I did go out with them in the woods several miles away and drink some of their corn liquor. They laughed when I’d drink down a big swallow and then nearly fall over backwards. But they cheered when I managed to stand back up straight every time. That shine is great stuff. Made me see sparks in front of my eyes.

    The local miners brought their families and some guys with fiddles and banjos and had a small dance in the meadow near where the Circle would be. Some of the people in our camp had made pies from the green apples that was growing in the groves around in that valley near this old deserted mining village and we passed the pies around to the miners and their families. A bunch of the people that showed up for the Circle was out there – square dancing naked. One old lady who come with her son, who was a miner said, “I been married 50 year and had ten children and that’s the first time I ever seen a man buck naked in my life.”

    That night after the square dance, I was standing guard at the entrance to the camping area with some Coyote Family people and some local teenagers, Hank, the young farmer, drove up in his pickup. He stuck his head out the cab window and says, “I just heard from the Highway Patrol. They found the bodies of two young women who was hitching to the Circle – face down in a meadow, shot in the back.”

    I run as fast I as I could and got Bishop Louie. Just after we got back to Hank’s pickup, a car drove by and somebody fired a rifle – “crack!” Me and Bishop Louie both flattened ourselves down on the ground. The car did a U-turn in the middle of the road and drove the other way real fast, with someone in the car screaming, “We’ll get you Louie!”

    Next day the Highway Patrol drove out to our camp with photos of our two sisters who got killed. We called everybody together and passed around the photos, but nobody knew who they was. We had more coal miners than ever driving by, offering us rifles, but Bishop Louie kept saying, “NO, we’ll keep trusting the Spirit to help us.”

    “These people said, “You all must not be human!”

    I will tell you the truth. I had a pistol packed up in my stuff. I would carry it around under my coat at night. I had been carrying that pistol at every Circle. I still had a lot of the Klansman in me. But I was beginning to ask myself, “If a bunch of people did attack us, what good would my own pistol do? I guess the Spirit really does have charge of this movie.”

Chapter Thirty Five

Buff speaking

    As Clark was telling this, Chad, Louie’s two year old son, came back into the tipi, Clark said, “I gotta quit for now. This is too hard to tell with a little kid around.”

    Chad jumped into Clark’s lap and threw his arms around Clark’s neck. The two of them played together for about half an hour before Chad left the tipi again with Aries John and his wife Cassie. It wasn’t the first time we had to stop recording the interview because Chad came in the tipi – or the most serious, either.

    When Chad was gone, Clark gripped his big hands together and started popping his knuckles.

    “It hurts to talk about that whole business in West Virginia,” he said. “Not because I got shot at and not even because of them two sisters that got killed. It’s because I was in the Klan once, same as them guys that done the killing. I was proud to get my Klan membership card when I was 15. My father and mother are in the Klan. I know lots of good people in the Klan. In West Virginia, I felt like it was me killing them sisters and me shooting at Bishop Louie – and me shooting at myself!”

    He winced and kept his head down staring between his knees. He grabbed his knees and his knuckles kept cracking - loud.

    “Buff,” he said, “I’d rather not talk no more about what happened.”
    “OK,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything for a while. I’ll read you some notes I took from Manny while I was down in La Plata.”

Manny speaking

    I got together a caravan of vehicles to West Virginia from La Plata. We went to Zarahemla first and a couple of their cars joined us and we gave rides to a lot of the others – most of the vehicles in Zarahemla were in no condition for a long trip.

    As we drove into the eastern country I saw how I had forgotten what a difference a rainy climate makes. The same species of weeds that come up to your knees in New Mexico spring up almost to your head in West Virginia with broad leaves and lots of flowers. There is a fragrance in the air of thick clumps of rain-soaked grasses and weeds. The deer peek out at you from the woods near the roadside.

    When we got to the encampment for the Circle in West Virginia, I met up with Ron Drexel, who I had known – sort of – in New York. Ron was the leader of Advance Revolutionary Independent Movement – Advance for short. You see, first there was the Revolutionary Independent Movement which said that capitalists would never allow the People’s Party government to remain in power, much less set up a full socialist society. They said we should be ready to mobilize the labor unions to block a military coup or a Nationalist uprising, which they said might come any day now.

    The Revolutionary Independent Movement disagreed with the People’s Party, but they were friendly with us. Sometimes they would even help campaigns for People’s Party candidates. But then Ron Drexel led a big split by Advance from the Revolutionary Independents. Ron and his Advance group were always yammering, “Let’s store up as many guns as the Nationalists!”

    Right before I went off to college, my parents and I were doing a show in Central Park. Ron led a demonstration of Advance kids against us. They were carrying signs like SMASH THE COWARDLY PEOPLE’S PARTY! Ron shook his fist at us and shouted, “When the time comes for the shooting, we’re gonna get you mother fuckers!”

    That’s how Advance was. They treated the People’s Party as a worse enemy than the capitalists or the Klan or the Nationalists. The only people Advance seemed to regard as worse enemy than the People’s Party were the Revolutionary Independents, the original group they had split from.

    I was just walking down the trail in West Virginia when I heard a high sharp voice say, “Hey, Manny! Come up here and see me!”

    I turned around and saw Ron Drexel sitting up in a hammock which he had strung up in a grove of trees next to some large, expensive-looking tents. A bunch of Advance people were standing around the hammock, including a couple of good-looking female followers. Ron always attracted young women for what I thought was a rather passive role for a revolutionary organization.

    I walked up a gentle slope slowly and reluctantly toward the grove of trees. “Oh, hurry up!” Ron called again, making a sharp, jerky motion with his hand. “I won’t bite you!”

    I trotted the rest of the way up to Ron’s hammock. He stuck his hand out eagerly. I extended mine more slowly and shook his hand, still a little reluctant.

    “Say, Manny,” Ron said. “I want you to look at our latest Takeover!” He snapped his fingers and one of his followers went over to a big stack of newspapers and got a copy and brought it over to me and stuck it in my hand.

    Before I looked down at my copy of Takeover, I looked straight at Ron to see what he was like now. He hadn’t changed a bit – still the small, thin, wiry body like a greyhound about to charge into a race. He was smiling at me instead of shouting insults, but in his eyes there was still that, “I’m gonna get what’s mine,” look. I had been away from New York so long I had almost forgotten that eager, hungry look and even in New York, it’s not so much the native New Yorkers who look that way. It’s the people like Ron Drexel who came to the big city from elsewhere to seek their fortunes.

    I looked down at Takeover. As usual they wasted about 20 pages in crazy, irresponsible rumors, but they always did it with class. The rumors were told in a prose quivering with excitement, attractive to young people who weren’t well informed and even to those like myself who were. There were lots of very good photos and wild, multi-colored artwork, including some of the funniest cartoons I have ever seen. A real expensive job.

    “Look at the centerfold!” Ron boomed out, reaching into the newspaper and starting to turn the pages for me. When Ron’s fingers reached the centerfold, I saw a huge banner headline across two pages:

“ADVANCE IS MY KIND OF REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATION – ALOYSIUS O’CONNOR, PH.D.”

    Underneath the headline was a photo of Dr. Al O’Connor and Ron standing together with their arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning from ear to ear. Al O’Connor was famous for his experiments with LSD, but I had always heard of him hanging around with yogis and swamis and cult leaders like Taze, not self-proclaimed revolutionaries like Ron.

    “I took LSD with that guy,” Ron said, sticking his finger down onto Al O’Connor’s photo. “So did a bunch of other Advance people. Al taught us about revolutionary love. So we’re gonna stop giving shit to you People’s Party guys.”

    “What about your old comrades, the Revolutionary Independents?” I asked. “Gonna get back together with them?”

    “Nah,” Ron said with a scornful flick of his hand. “We’re gonna smash those bastards. They’re way off course. But forget them! What’s really important is the Circle. The People’s Party Youth Alliance has most of the young working class people with steady jobs. But the Circle reaches the masses of unemployed youth with that revolutionary love I was talking about. And say – I want you to meet the guy who really told me about the significance of the Circle. Hey, come on out!”

    And E. J. Caldwell came walking out of one of the tents with the same big nonchalant grin he must have had when he was hanging around with the Pristine Foundation and the Young Warriors. Ron reached out of his hammock and patted E. J. on the back. “Me and this fucker E. J.,” Ron said, “we took LSD together. Go ahead, shake hands with him!”

    “Oh, we’ve met before,” I stammered. But E. J. had his hand stuck out. I shook it as well as I could manage. I hurried away from that grove and I didn’t hear any more about Ron and Advance until the day of the big Circle – which gets into another, somewhat related subject.

    In the East we have just a big youth unemployment problem as out here in New Mexico. However as a native New Yorker, I’m kind of proud of our unemployed Northeastern kids. Back there you see them on every street corner selling handcrafts while out west they all seem to just panhandle or scrounge in dumpsters. I’m proud of the kids back home, but they caused us a problem.

    They showed up at our encampment in West Virginia with their boxes full of beautifully tie-dyed T-shirts, necklaces of seashells and quartz crystals, multicolored whatnots of macramé and carved wood and pottery. Great! But we wanted them to barter and they were selling their stuff for money.

    Around the Circle, we want to keep everything for free. It stuff gets sold for money, that will make us into a commercial trade fair. We’ll have to pay taxes, we’ll have all kinds of complications in dealing with the Forest Service, the whole thing is just nuts! So everything has to change hands without money to protect the sacredness of the occasion.

    Every day among our camps in West Virginia there were more and more vendors selling their stuff in louder and louder voices. They were so desperate and poor that the account of the two sisters being killed didn’t scare them away. Finally on the morning of July Fourth as people were walking in silence to make the Circle in the big meadow near the apple grove, a lot of the vendors were still going strong, right on the edge of the circle. Finally Ginny of the Coyote Family broke her silence and screamed, “I’m sick of having this money-changing in my temple!”

    She ran out of the Circle up to a sheet a vendor had on the ground and she scooped up a big handful of his shell necklaces and ran off. He yelled, “Help me, everybody! Stop thief! Stop thief!”

    A bunch of other vendors took off after Ginny. They were a lot bigger than she was and they were gaining on her. So I left the Circle and made my best high school track team sprint to protect her if anything happened.

    We were camped in this lush green valley, everything perfectly beautiful except for this one small spot we called Yecch-ville. At that place, water seeped into the ground from the limestone strata and made a small bog which smelled so bad that no one would camp near it. Ginny ran up to the edge of the bog and tossed the necklaces into the blackish greenness of Yecch-ville. At once Ginny was surrounded by vendors shouting in her face.

    I ran up and gasped, “All right, what’s the matter?”

    “She threw away my best necklaces!” a vendor cried out. Now I won’t have money to get back home! I’ll have to go hungry!”

    “OK, Brother,” I said. “Come back to the Circle with me. We’ll take care of it.”

    He walked to the Circle on one side of me with Ginny on the other and the other vendors, following. I walked in the middle of the Circle and raised my hand.

    “I hate to disturb the silence!” I called out, “But there is a brother who has lost many valuable things. He has no money for anything. Could people please come over and help him so that his spirit will be at peace enough to take part in the Circle?”

    Many people kept their silence, but there was an under current of whispers of discontent. Finally a lot of people came over silently and turned their pockets inside out and got out a lot of change and some bills and put the money in the vendor’s hands.
    Just then I saw Ron and E. J. selling copies of Takeover to the little crowd of vendors on the edge of the Circle. I ran over to Ron and whispered, “What do you mean, doing this? You know we’re not supposed to sell stuff?”

    “But I saw other people selling to people on the way to the Circle,” Ron whined. “So I decided it must be OK and I…”

    “You call yourself a revolutionary!” I whispered loud and angry. “A revolutionary is not someone who does something because they see everybody else doing it!”

    Ron gave out a few more copies of his newspaper without asking for money. Then Ron and E. J. walked away from the Circle and headed back to their camp. I went back into the Circle. Ginny and I held the hands of the brother who had lost his necklaces in Yecch-ville. When the sun reached high noon, I saw tears go down his face.

    Two days after the big Circle, we started a council to decide where we would make the Circle next year, 1976. There were fifty-dozen suggestions – all loud – a lot of feuding between the East and the West. Unlike Wyoming, the West Virginia nights were so mild that people stayed late in council to argue for their favorite state. I had no special wishes of m own. I was just pointing to people to take turns speaking, when Louie came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder.

    “We just got word on who killed the two sister,” he whispered in my ear. “Somebody just showed up with some information. I want you to be there with me to hear it.”
    I went over to Ginny and whispered, “I’ll be gone for a while. Why don’t you point out which person is to talk?”

    Then I went off with Louie in the dark to find out more about the murders.

Chapter Thirty Six

Clark speaking

    OK, I think I can start talking again about the killings. Mike and some of the other Coyote Family people were out doing security at the turnoff into the encampment area that night. Mike come running up to me and says, “There’s somebody at the turnoff who wants to talk to you real bad.”

    When I got there, I seen this skinny blond boy, about 17, who looked all pale and scared. The blond kid wouldn’t say nothing for a while.

    “Well, what is it?” I says.

    Then he come up practically in my face and says in a low voice, “I was with these guys in the car when they killed them girls.”

    I turned to Mike and says, “Go find Louie. Tell him I’ll be at this tent.”

    I walked with this young fellow to Louie’s little pup tent. We sad down in front of it till Louie showed up. Then the boy says the same thing – “I seen them girls get killed.”

    Louie says, “Just wait a second till I get back. I want to hear the whole thing.”

    Then he went off and come back with Manny – also Ivy and Brenda from Zarahemla and Hank, the farmer who was letting us park on his land.

    “OK,” Louie says to the kid, “Now start.”

    “They come up from North Carolina and found me,” the boy says. “They said ‘You wanta come with us?’ I says ‘Sure!’ But they didn’t tell me what they was gonna do, I swear!” And he started to cry and put his face in his hands.

    “All right, all right!” Bishop Louie says, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, “Who come up from North Carolina?”

    “Klan, Nationalists, folks like that!” the boy snuffled with his face in his hands.
    “Why did they come to you?” Bishop Louie says.

    “Because they know my family!” the boy says, pulling his face out of his hands. He let his hands drop to his sides and he had kind of an angry flash in his eyes.

    “My family was always big in politics and the Baptist church in this county,” the boy says. “Then that Communist People’s Party and the coal miners’ union took the county over. We’ve been fighting them for a hundred years. They killed some of my family back then. We hate the bastards!”

    “So what did the people from North Carolina tell you?” Bishop Louie asked.

    “Oh, they said they come up just to give the Circle thing a good scare,” the boy says. “They said it wasn’t nothing but a big front for the People’s Party to win over the young people. They said if we could scare the Circle away, we could win the young people back for the Nationalists.”

    By this time, listening to this boy talk, I had a bad headache. Half of me still felt the same way about the People’s Party that he did. Half of me was still for the Nationalists and the Klan.

    “What’s your name?” Bishop Louie says, “And what are the names of the men from North Carolina?”

    “My name’s Billy Yandro,” the boy says and he started to wheeze and gasp. “You won’t tell nobody I been here, will you?”

    “No, I won’t,” Bishop Louie says. “Just tell me what the men’s names are.”

    “You won’t tell nobody I told, will you?” the boy says.

    “You mean you can’t be a witness?” Manny asked.

    “No! No!” The boy hollered. “I may as well go now.”

    “Just calm down,” I says. “You don’t have to be a witness. Just let us know the names.”

    “I don’t know if I can,” the boy says, and tears started streaming down his face.

    Ivy reached her hand out and put it on the boy’s shoulder. “You don’t have to be a witness if you tell us,” she says, “I promise.”

    Then she looked at Bishop Louie and says, “this may not be something we can bring to court, at least not for a while.. We just need to know – who are we up against?”

    Then she turned back to Billy and stroked his shoulders and says, “Go, it’s just for us here to know.”

    “Charlie Donaldson,” the boy said, starting to cry again, “Mack Jones and Tommie Ray Wilkes.”

    The boy was crying hard and I was trembling too. I had met that Tommie Ray Wilkes back when I was working for Jim Einkorn in the Nationalist Youth Corps. These had been Jim’s kind of people – and the kind of people I was gonna grow up to be.

    “We seen these two girls hitching along the highway with their bed rolls,” the boy went on. “One of them was wearing a jeans jacket with the word CIRCLE embroidered on the back. They asked us to take them here. On the way there was this big meadow full of flowers. Tommie Ray asked the girls, ‘Y’all want to go out there and look at them pretty flowers?’ and the girls said yes. Charlie stayed at the wheel of the car. Mac and Tommie Ray followed the girls out into the meadow. The girls was down on their knees smelling the flowers. Mack and Tommie Ray pulled their pistols out and shot them in the back. I couldn’t believe it!” And there he was crying again.

    “They took me home and they went over to the next county,” the boy started up again. This time his voice was calm and dull, kind of tired, “They drove over to the next county. They ain’t got the union or the People’s Party in that county. The sheriff in that county is a friend of my family’s. These three guys had talked with the sheriff before they come over here. He knowed they had come here from North Carolina to raise hell. I don’t know whether he knowed everything they was gonna do. I just wanta go now.”

    We walked up to the turnoff with this boy, to his old pickup that he had parked by the side of the road and drove all off. All that night the crickets kept up steady - rick! -rick! - rick!

Manny speaking

    This young guy named Yandro – I’ll never forget that name –told us the details about the murders and how the sheriff in a nearby county was covering up for the killers. The state government of West Virginia is controlled by the People’s Party and so are most of the county governments. But the counties where the People’s Party doesn’t control – Fascist is the only work I can use to describe them. The murders were hiding out in one of those counties. And these murderers had the gall to call the Highway Patrol and tell them where the bodies were.

    I noted down the names of the three people in the murder squad. Then I went to bed, feeling really sick. Next morning I was sitting at our campfire drinking my coffee when Ginny of the Coyote Family came dragging along half dead.

    “Did the council ever decide where to make the Circle next year?” I asked.

    “Finally!” she gasped and dropped to the ground across the campfire from me. “I got so tired of pointing to hands!” she said. “I have this little carved stick with a turquoise hanging from it. I gave the stick to one of the people and told them to pass it around the council circle and let each person hold it and take turns speaking and then pass the stick on. They kept passing the stick arguing about what state to make the Circle in – kept on and on and on till three o’clock in the morning.”

    “What did they finally decide?” I asked.

    “Well,” Ginny said, “by that time the only people left awake was E. J. and Ron Drexel and his Advance Organization. They had been arguing for hours, trying to get people to make the Circle in Texas.”

    “Texas?” I piped up. “What on earth do they want the Circle there for?”

    “Because the Republicans are having their national convention in Dallas next year,” Ginny answered. “Ron wants to take the Advance kids to Dallas next summer and picket the Republicans for being a bunch of capitalist pigs.”

    “But will there be water in Texas? Will there be…” I was starting an oration.

    “Who gives a shit?” Ginny said scornfully. “They wore everybody else out. All the other people went to sleep and let them do it. I just wanted you to know. I’m going back to the Coyote Family camp and sleep.” And she staggered off.

    I remember so much of nature at the Circle in West Virginia – like how when we dug pits to bury compost near sassafras trees, the earth smelled like sweet sassafras. Or the golden and greenish glow from the fireflies and other luminous insects drifting by me in big flights at night. But over it all is the shadow of the murder of our two sisters – and the way Ron and E. J. manipulated us into having our next Circle in Texas.

Liz speaking

    On a bright sunny day in late July, I was sitting in the recreation room of the People’s Party Youth shelter in Albuquerque, feeling hot and miserable and pregnant when Louie stumbled in. I have to say stumbled – which is unusual. Louie’s movements are usually well coordinated. His whole body seemed slanted to one side as he limped along. He had a purplish bruise on his cheekbone and his shirt and pants had big rips in them. What was most surprising – he wasn’t wearing his leather loincloth with the Mormon symbols in beads over his trousers.

    All I could say was, “My God, Louie, what happened?”

    “I was hitching from the Circle in West Virginia to Pittsburgh to catch a freight there,” he said, sitting down in a chair facing me. He took a couple of deep breaths and continued. “A car drove onto the shoulder and screeched to a halt right beside me. A guy stuck his head out the window and said, ‘Hop in!’ All I could think was ‘Fantastic! I’m in luck!’ I got in the car.

    “There was three guys in the car, all grinning at me. They drove a few miles up the road, then, all of a sudden they swerved onto a dirt road in the forest. I hollered, “Hey, wait a minute!” But they kept on going for about ten miles. They stopped at a place where trees made a deep shadow over the road. Then one of them grabbed me and drug me out of the car. The other two got out. The three of them started shoving me back and forth. Then one of them bobbed me so hard he knocked a tooth out.

    “I hollered, ‘Please! I’ve got a wife and a kid about to be born!’ But another one of them kicked me to the ground. Every time I tried to get up, they kicked me. In my ribs, in my balls, in my head. Finally I went unconscious. When I woke up, they was all gone. I think I had a cracked rib. I hurt so, I just laid there beside the dirt road all night and tried to sleep. Next morning I walked the ten miles back to the highway. I waited and waited for a ride, but I was so dirty and raggedy I didn’t get a ride till past noon.
    “Finally I got to Pittsburgh and washed off in a filling station bathroom. I rode the freights here. Then guys stole my sleeping bag, everything I had. The cushions in this chair are the first soft thing I’ve felt in three days.”

    “Come on to my room,” I said. We went there and Louie fell across my mattress. He didn’t wake up till the next morning. One of the first things he said after he woke up was, “I bet the same fuckers who worked me over are the ones who killed them two sisters.”

    I said, “What?”

    Then he told me about the murders. It made me sick that we would have a child born into this kind of danger. As we ate breakfast, Louie still had his head hanging down, kind of dazed. “They might have left me for dead,” he said, stabbing his scrambled eggs with a fork. “But then they could have shot me like they shot the sister. No – they left me alive because they thought I would be scared enough to do what they want – or do whatever whoever got them to whomp on me wants. I just don’t know.”

    And he grumbled something and put a big forkful of scrambled eggs in his mouth. I could see there were tears in his eyes. I felt so sorry for him, I decided to pay the bus tickets for us both to Zarahemla. Because I had dropped out of nursing school one semester to be with Louie in the first place, I still had work to make up. But hell, I could always do it some other time. And I was feeling so awful, being pregnant.

    So I went back to Zarahemla with Louie and a lot of the time I felt awful there. Louie was in a sad, subdued mood all that fall. He didn’t blow up often, but when he did, it was pretty bad. Still, I had the beauty and power of nature to walk around in and get away from him when I couldn’t stand it.

    In January 1976, I was ready to have my baby in the bed in the adobe house. Three of Aries John’s wives – Emma, Cassie and Zerena – would be there. Not Teresa. She was still to edgy from when she broke up with Louie and I moved in with him. Also Ivy and Brother Maceo’s wife Brenda were there. And I had all but a semester of nursing school finished, so I told myself, “I’m all set.”

    But I kept going in and out of labor for hours and the baby still didn’t come. I kept pushing against the walls, which were soon covered with my greasy hand prints. Ivy brought a bunch of paper towels to clean up where I broke water and soon I was writhing over that heap of blood-stained papers.

    Then there was a knock. Louie answered the door and ushered a stern-looking gray-haired woman into the bedroom. “I’m Opal Kimball,” she said. “I live up at the other end of the valley. I’ve delivered some babies in my time and I thought I might possibly help.”

    Then she looked at the mess and said, “OH, no!” She had an upset, almost angry look on her face. But she took a deep breath and said, “Honey, has anybody taken you out to pee yet?”

    “No, no,” I said, “Oh god, I want to!”

    Opal helped me lift myself out of the bed and led me to the bathroom. She called back over her shoulder, “Get all that dirty paper off the bed and take some clean pieces of cloth and boil them.”

    When I peed, what a relief! Opal led me back to the bed and stripped the sweaty, bloody sheets off of it. Then she said, “Lay down now.”

    I relaxed on the bed, feeling at ease because at last I was in the hands of someone who knew what she was doing. Everybody else had been arguing among themselves about what to do. Her hands on my body were very strong and gentle. The other women brought in the clean, boiled cloths and Opal wiped me off with a couple of them. It seemed like no time at all before she delivered my son Chad. I gasped and said, “Thank God!”

    Later I said to Opal, “Your people up there burned the church down here. Why did you help me?”

    “Oh, I heard ‘em up there talk bad plenty about this place,” she said. “But my grandsons went to a show down here. They said there wasn’t no harm in you folks. So I’m here because it’s the only Christian thing to do.”

    Since then I have more faith than ever in the ability of people to come together.

Chapter Thirty Seven

Clark speaking

    After the Circle in West Virginia, a whole lot of people come to Zarahemla to see what our thing was about. I would spend the night, sometimes a couple of nights with several of the young ladies who showed up. I always tried to be nice to them so they would remember me as friends. Finally by the end of August, I ended up really in love with a beautiful young blonde woman named Loretta Sanders – I called her Retta. We moved into a tent together.

    But then Retta said, “I don’t want to stay here. I love the Circle, but Bishop Louie is too depressed all the time and when he’s not depressed he gets too loud and angry.”
    So we hitched to Albuquerque. At first we stayed in the People’s Party Youth Shelter and I got jobs at hiring halls unloading trucks and Retta worked as a waitress. I’ve always said I was waiting for a good job, steady construction work, not those little bitty temporary government construction jobs for the unemployed.

    Then zap! Retta was pregnant. I had to get a job that paid more than unloading trucks. I might not like working for the government, but they control most of the construction jobs. I ended up on one of these public works jobs, building the freeway across the north side of Albuquerque. As far as hard work was concerned, it wasn’t no little bitty job, especially after the weather got cold. But it was temporary.

    Just after New Years, 1976, the job had only two weeks to run. Me and Retta was renting half of a little house for $120 a month. One thing I will say in favor of the favor of the People’s Party, all the public housing they build keeps the rent down in the other places.

    But I was walking around one Saturday, wondering where next month’s rent was gonna come from after the job was over, when I heard a voice, “Hey Clark!”

    I turned around and seen Brother Power, one of Taze’s elders, standing in the door of the Albuquerque branch of the Maria Russell Mission.

    I walked up to him and he says, “I been seeing you around for quite a while and I told Taze about you. Then a few days ago, he told me if I seen you again I should get you to call him collect right away.”

    So I says, “OK,” and walked in the mission to use the phone. It was great, just getting into a warm place, out of the cold street. I rung up Taze and he says, “Say, Clark, I hear you’re working on building the freeway.”

    “How do you know?” I asked.

    “oh, I try to keep tabs on things,” he says. “Hey, why don’t you come up to Santa Fe when your job’s over?” I know of a house where you and Retta can stay for free out on some land near Taos – and a job, too.”

    Dang, he even knew Retta’s name! Well, I couldn’t risk Retta and my future child being out in the cold while I’m looking for a job that may not even be there. So two weeks later me and Retta was at the Maria Russell Mission in Santa Fe. Taze introduced me to a man with a head of white hair and a smile full of bright teeth – his hair and teeth looked like they must glow in the dark.

    “Clark,” Taze says, “this is Dr. Al O’Connor,”.

    All of a sudden I’m staring and pointing at this guy. “Hey,” I says. “I teen you with Taze at the Circle in Sequoyah.”

    “Yes indeed,” the fellow says. “Those were the days.” He even talked with a smile.
    “By the way, what’s the job?” I says.

    “Oh, I bought some land near Taos,” he says. “There’s an old adobe house where you can live and a lot of forest. I need someone to take care of the place for the rest of the winter while I’m in Tahiti, and you can cut firewood in the forest. I have several art-type friends who have moved to Taos and I can line you up selling firewood to them.”

    I didn’t have no place for me and Retta to go, so I says, “Yes.” An hour later me and Retta was in this big, black car and Dr. Al O’Connor was driving – nice warm heater, real expensive car. He drove us up among steep snowy hills covered with piñon and juniper and cedar trees. On a snow-white hillside was a big, long pinkish-brown adobe house.
    Dr. al led us up to the door and there was E. J. grinning from ear to ear in his dirty old army clothes. And next to him was this guy Ron Drexel who I kind of remembered from the Circle in West Virginia.

    “These people will work with you,” Dr. Al says. “There’s plenty of space. They’ve got their rooms, you and Retta will have yours.”

    I thought about leaving because of E. J., but I could smell food. “Are you hungry?” E. J. asked.

    “Oh, wow, am I!” Retta shouted.

    We went in to a table with plates full of lots of hamburger steak and beans. Coming in from the cold it was great, and I know Retta needed it. She had that fork out just raking the food in. I was getting after mine pretty good too. I stuffed myself full before all the snow had melted off my work boots.

    As soon as I looked up from my empty plate, Dr. Al says, “Now, Clark, you guys can split the money from the firewood however you see fit. I don’t want a penny of it – except for a little bit that I want you to spend on a favor for me – and Ron here,” he says pointing to the scrawny guy sitting next to E. J.

    “Ok, what’s the favor?” I says.

    “Ron has an organization called Advance,” Dr. Al says. “He has some money from his group to offer Louie for the Circle. I want you to take the truck that you’ll use to haul firewood, gas it up and carry Ron and E. J. down to Zarahemla to talk to Bishop Louie about working with Advance.”

    “Uh-do you want to sponsor the Circle and be God like Taze did in Sequoyah?” I asked, poking my fork in Ron’s direction.

    “No, I don’t,” Ron says. “We know that Advance would be too political to sponsor a spiritual event like the Circle. But we would like to work with Bishop Louie on some projects. We can supply food for the Circle – and we want our name kept out of it!”

    “And E. J.,” I says, pointing my fork towards him. “There won’t be no more Young Warriors and stuff, will there?”

    “I promise,” E. J. says. “Absolutely no more Young Warriors. Look, we’re gonna talk to Louie face to face. And you know he’s a hard man to fool.”

    Dr Al left us there the next day and went off to Tahiti. He gave us a bright, shiny new chain saw – a real expensive piece of business, when you consider what gasoline costs. But Ron already had the money from Advance to buy our gasoline for the truck and the saw both. He even had money for most of the groceries. The main thing we used the money from the firewood for was beer 0 especially E. J.

    We had a list of people from Dr. Al to sell firewood to. All of them had adobe mansions just stuffed with Indian and old Spanish craft stuff. They all had great big baked clay fireplaces and they loved the smell of piñon wood burning. It’s hard work walking out in the snow and suing the chain saw and then loading the wood onto the truck, but I still think them people paid us more than it was worth.


    Maybe Dr. Al told them to pay us so much. And me and E. J. and Ron drunk more beet than I knew existed, which got Retta kind of pissed off at me. When it was time to go to Zarahemla, the truck cab was big enough where us guys could take turns squeezing behind the seat and Retta could have rode, but she said, “I want to be by myself for a while.”

    We left her with a lot of groceries and headed off.

Taze speaking

    In the fall of 1975, Dr. Al O’Connor bought a piece of land near Taos. He wanted to be near a group of rich art buyers there who were also doing LSD sessions with him. Some of them were Pristine Foundation people – the Foundation has a lot of interest in art, especially of a spiritual nature.

    Then Al brought Ron Drexler out to my horse ranch near Santa Fe. “I want you to meet my favorite revolutionary,” Al said, and Ron extended his hand. I shook it gingerly. I wasn’t very impressed with him. I was less impressed after I heard his conversation – endless gossip about the New York left-wing bohemian scene.

    When I was alone with Al, I said, “I thought you told me you weren’t interested in left-wing stuff.”

    “Don’t you see?” Al said with that everlasting grin, “Ron has taken revolution out of the dreary world of fact and made it into an art – a new spiritual high. He can thrill rich people talking about violent revolution. It’s like going to a horror movie. When it’s over, they’re just as rich as ever. And they love it. He’s been to bed with the daughters of half the big wheels in Pristine Foundation – and a number of their wives.

    “Besides that,” Al went on, “it’s great when I’m snowed in at night near Taos having all Ron’s sharp wit around. And guess what? He brought E. J. Caldwell with him. Do you know E. J.?”

    “I’m afraid I don’t, I said.

    “I tell you,” Al said and started chuckling. “E. J.’s so much fun to have around. That guy is a million laughs – especially when were taking LSD.”

    Thank you for not bringing him here,” I murmured under my breath.

    “One thing more,” Al said. “Can you arrange for Ron to meet Bishop Louie? It would probably be worth some extra money from the Pristine Foundation for your projects.”

    I was sure it would be worth some money to me. And I knew that with E. J. around, if I didn’t cooperate, I would have some trouble.

    “Let’s wait till the best opportunity to see Louie,” I told Al. “I promise you it’ll be soon.”

    A few days later Brother Power told me, “I’ve seen Clark around Albuquerque a couple of weeks in a row. He must be living there.”

    I told him, “Have somebody from the mission there follow Clark and check on what he’s doing. Then get in touch with him and have him contact me – collect.”

    I knew Louie trusted Clark more than almost anyone else in the world. If anyone could help Ron make a remotely good impression on Louie, it would be Clark. But I was amazed to find out who really made a good