The Open Curtain Read online

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Now, Rudd,” she said, pursing her lips. “If you start with that attitude you’re already beaten. Is your glass half-empty or half-full?”

  I don’t have a fucking glass, Rudd thought, then thought, That’s Lael thinking. “Half-full,” he said. And then added, “Maybe even three-fourths full.”

  “That’s the spirit,” she said. “Now you’re talking.” Holding his paper in her hand, she walked to the front of the class, began to speak about what they should do next. He noticed as she spoke that people all around him were crossing out what they had written, quickly creating better combinations.

  “We will be going to the university library,” he heard Mrs. Madison tell the class. “I’ve made the arrangements. There, you will find a newspaper or magazine of national repute and look through it to find a news item that combines as many of your four answers as possible. So, for instance …” she said.

  And then she held up Rudd’s paper. He tried to look nonchalant, but he could feel his ears start to burn and he knew they had gone red at the tips.

  Fuck them, thought Rudd. Fuck all.

  But he knew he didn’t mean it.

  At least the field trip to the university library meant a few missed classes. She stood them all outside the doors, beside the frieze—a Utah artisan’s approximation of Mayan culture. He could also see, from where he stood, the dark bronze figure of an eight-foot Indian. What tribe? he wondered.

  They were to stay in the periodicals/microfilm area. They were not, under any circumstances, to leave the periodicals/microfilm area. A field trip of this sort was a privilege. If they needed something that was not in the periodicals/microfilm area they must request the “library pass.” He watched Mrs. Madison hold up the hall pass she had brought with her from school.

  They were herded through the doors and then through clicking dull green turnstiles. He stared at Ellen Barlow’s bare neck, just inches away, shuffling his feet so as not to step on her heels. Directly behind him, someone was popping gum.

  They went through and he looked behind him. Mark Pollard was the one with the gum. He blew another bubble as Rudd watched, popped it sharply.

  “What?” asked Mark.

  “Nothing,” said Rudd and turned back around. He could feel Mark’s hand even before it was on his shoulder, tugging at him, pulling him around. He felt himself growing distant.

  “Why did you look at me like that?” Mark asked.

  “Like what?”

  “You know what,” said Mark. “Want to fight or something?”

  Rudd shook his head no, then, as Mark started to look away, slung his forehead down hard into Mark’s mouth and nose. It hurt like hell. When he brought his face away he could feel the gum sticky and webbed all through his bangs. Mark was gasping, covering his mouth.

  Immediately there was a hand pinching his neck from behind, hard, a second hand on Mark’s neck.

  “Rudd,” Mrs. Madison said. “Suppose you tell me what’s going on here.”

  “I don’t exactly know,” he said. “I have his gum in my hair.”

  “And why exactly is his gum in your hair? And why is his nose bleeding?”

  He looked at her in a way he hoped was innocent. “We must have collided?”

  She looked at Mark who, blood dripping down his chin, just nodded. Mrs. Madison took her hands off their necks. “Go wash up,” she said. “I know you’re both lying, but at the moment I’m too busy to care. Once more and I’ll see you both suspended.”

  He splashed water through his hair, trying to rake the gum out with his fingers. It came out first in bits, then stopped coming out at all, tightening into clumps.

  “You’re going to have to cut it out,” Mark said, patting his face and nose with a tan, coarse paper towel.

  He nodded. He looked around for something to cut it with. There was nothing, unless he wanted to try sawing it off with the triangular teeth of the paper towel dispenser. He heard a click and when he turned, Mark held a pearl-handled stiletto in his hand. The blade was dull and oily, longer than his middle finger, twice as thick.

  “Why did you do it?” Mark asked.

  Rudd looked at the knife, shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. He really did not know, he realized. He had still been shaking his head no, he didn’t want to fight, when his head had struck forward and through Mark’s face of its own accord. It had surprised him almost as much as it had Mark. “Why do you have a knife?” he asked.

  “Don’t you like me?” asked Mark.

  Rudd shrugged again. “I never thought about it much,” he said. “I like you good enough.”

  Mark made a slow and awkward pass with the knife, forcing Rudd back a step. He smiled. “Just kidding,” he said, and handed the knife, haft first, to Rudd.

  Rudd took the knife and held it, the light winking off the blade’s edge and into his eye. Lael, he knew, in his place, would probably stab Mark. I am different from my half-brother. I am my own person. He lifted the knife, began to hack off clumps of his own hair.

  1903 sounded like a slow news year. The 1903 New York Times came month by month in a faded yellow box on an open-centered spool, just like every other year, but he couldn’t remember having heard the year mentioned in Ms. Stahl’s The American Tradition class. Perhaps the paper would be stretching for stories and would report on minor human interest sorts of things, something that would come at least marginally close to the parameters forced upon him.

  He put the microfilm in wrong and everything was sideways and backwards, the letters turned inside out. The spindle had not gone through the center hole, and the spool inscribed an oval as it turned. The harried reference librarian fixed it for him quickly, casting looks of hatred all the while at Mrs. Madison, who either remained oblivious or was exceptionally skilled at appearing so.

  He began to crank the reel forward. When he got to the first page on the first day of January, everything was still sideways and it took him some time to figure out how to rotate the projecting apparatus to get the text to project correctly. Even then it was still in indifferent focus, strands of the page sharp, the remainder slightly fuzzy and blotted.

  He started scanning titles. Girl Met Polite Burglar, something about iron and steel. Polite? he wondered. Taylor to Be Hanged, but no relation to Former Mormon Church President John Taylor as far as he could tell, then a flash of black and January 2 where Boy Accidentally Kills His Brother With Rifle. Directly below, Ball Given in Barn. The boy’s murder in the present tense, the ball in the past, though both had already occured. Some significance there, he was willing to bet, but not enough to keep him from cranking through advertisements and on to the next day. Horses Tortured in Trench and Got Carving Knife By Mail. French Painters Here. He began cranking faster, flashed past an ad for muslin underclothing. Sultan Rewards Spies (perhaps by giving them muslim underclothing?), Congo Raiding to Be Stopped, Activity in Billiards. Does the New York Times still list billiard activity? he wondered. French in an Amiable Mood (perhaps because their painters are out of the country), and a few columns later, French Murderer Not to Die (just one more reason for the French amiability). More billiards, Moving Day for Jesuits, Brought Dead Dog to Life, “survived with adrenalin injections ten hours without a head.” Holy Hell.

  He wound the reel back up and took it off, packing it into its box, then went to retrieve the February reel from the pull-out cabinets.

  He got the reel on and threaded right. Typhoid Spreads at Ithaca, The Cake Walk in Vienna, Mr. Morgan Burlesqued, A New Kind of Orchid. Horse Kicked and Many Died. MERIT is what sells, OLD CROW RYE. It is a straight whiskey and cannot be equalled. Just below, The Frisky Mrs. Johnson. Large Oysters Scarce This Year. Uncle Sam holding up some men and rockets wrapped in tape—a political cartoon that made no sense to him. Rev. Robert Street Burned to Death. “Daughter only injured, she will survive.” At least this one’s related to religion, he thought. He could ask Mrs. Madison if, since he couldn’t find any
thing Mormon, Rev. Robert was close enough. He knew she would acquiesce, but would also tell him he needed in future to persist, because Good Things Come to Those Who Wait. She was always saying crap like that, and pronouncing it like a headline. The Plague in Mexico. Body Discovered by Divers.

  He came to February third. Billiard Championship. He could ask to change his topic to billiards, list his hero as “a billiard player.” Anthracite at Retail right next to Easy Divorce. Men’s $5 shoes for $3.50, then, turning to February fourth, Men’s Shoes for $2.25. Match Caused Explosion, Shot Woman and Self. Important to Every Home—Silks. Billiard Champion Lost. Chorus Favorite Dead.

  He read about Her 102d Anniversary, flashed past the article just below it, registered it only a few pages later. He wheeled back:

  Hooper Young’s Trial To-Day

  His Lawyer Will Ask Further Delay—

  Prosecution Blames Mormon

  Friends and Relatives

  Jesus, he thought. He had managed three out of the four categories, purely by hazard. He was a believer now, but in what he did not know. Research, maybe. Or blind chance. He began to read:

  William Hooper Young, grandson of Brigham Young, will go on trial this morning before Justice D. Cady Herrick, in the Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court, on the charge of having murdered Mrs. Anna Nilsen Pulitzer last November. The trial may not proceed, however, for W. F. S. Hart, Young’s counsel, will ask for delay on a number of grounds, one of them being that his client is physically unable to withstand the strain of trial.

  Assistant District Attorney Studin reiterated yesterday his statement regarding the disappearance of several witnesses, but said that nevertheless Young would be convicted. While Mr. Studin did not lay the disappearance of these witnesses directly at the door of the Mormon Church, he declared emphatically that the Mormon friends and relatives of the defendant were putting forth efforts to defeat the case of the prosecution. Mr. Studin pointed to an article which appeared over Young’s name in the October number of The Crusader, the magazine edited in Hoboken by the prisoner and his friend Dixie Anzer. The article was headed “Sunrise in Hell,” and in it, Mr. Studin said, there appeared more or less vague references to the “blood atonement” doctrine.

  It was learned yesterday that, while the prosecution would not assume this doctrine had any direct relation to the motive for the murder, it might be used to throw additional light on the tragedy. The “blood atonement” doctrine teaches that the soul of any Mormon who has gone back on his or her faith may be saved by the shedding of the blood of such a person as was the woman, and that the blessing thus conferred would reflect credit in the other world on the person who commits the deed.

  Damon Philips was punching him between the shoulderblades, calling him punkass, telling Rudd he had to have the microfilm machine.

  “Just a minute,” Rudd said. “I’ve found something.”

  “What happened to your hair, punkass?”

  “Mind your own business,” said Rudd.

  “Man, what’s wrong with you? You’re not usually like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Usually you’re normal.”

  “What do you mean, normal?”

  Damon shrugged. “You know, normal.”

  He didn’t know what to say. I never know what to say, he told himself. Getting up, he surrendered the machine.

  He stood leaning against the microfiche cabinets. The Crusader, he thought. Sunrise in Hell. Hardly building blocks from the common sector. Looking through the card catalog, he found no mention of a magazine called the Crusader. He went back to leaning.

  “Well, Rudd,” said Mrs. Madison. “Did you find anything?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “I guess that old glass was half-full after all.”

  His father’s books were in a small slope-ceilinged demi-room halfway up the stairs to the attic. They were in stacks against the walls, empty boxes scattering the space between.

  He began to look through them, sorting the church books out of the stacks, brushing the dust off of them, stacking them near the door. As he worked, dust spun slowly in the air. When he licked his lips, he tasted dust.

  Carrying some books down to his bedroom, he spread them on his bed. Mormon Doctrine, one was called, a dictionary of sorts. He opened it, leafed through the A’s to the B’s, stopped at a section called “Blood Atonement Doctrine.”

  (See Atonement of Christ, Calling and Election Sure, Christ, Flesh and Blood.)

  From the days of Joseph Smith to the present, wickedly and evilly-disposed persons have fabricated false and slanderous stories to the effect that the Church, in the early days of this dispensation, engaged in a practice of blood atonement whereunder the blood of apostates and others was shed by the Church as an atonement for their sins. These claims are false and were known by their originators to be false. There is not one historical instance of so-called blood atonement in this dispensation, nor has there been one event or occurrence whatever, of any nature, from which the slightest inference arises that any such practice either existed or was taught.

  Next to the passage someone—probably his father—had written

  Untenable, c.f. Confessions of John D. Lee or even the practice of swearing, upon pain of death, not to reveal the ceremonies of the Mormon temple.

  He skipped down a few lines:

  … the true doctrine of blood atonement is simply this:

  1. Jesus Christ worked out the infinite and eternal atonement by the shedding of his own blood. He came into the world for the purpose of dying on the cross for the sins of the world. By virtue of that atoning sacrifice immortality came as a free gift to all men, and all who would believe and obey his laws would in addition be cleansed from sin through his blood….

  2. But under certain circumstances there are some serious sins for which the cleansing of Christ does not operate, and the law of God is that men must then have their own blood shed to atone for their sins. Murder, for instance, is one of these sins; hence we find the Lord commanding capital punishment. Thus, also, if a person has so progressed in righteousness that his calling and election has been made sure, if he has come to that position where he knows “by revelation and the spirit of prophecy, through the power of the Holy Priesthood” that he is sealed up unto eternal life (D. & C. 131:19-5.), then if he gains forgiveness for certain grievous sins, he must “be destroyed in the flesh,” and “delivered unto the buffetings of Satan unto the day of redemption, saith the Lord God.” (D. & C. 132:19-27.)

  President Joseph Fielding Smith has written: “Man may commit certain grievous sins—according to his light and knowledge—that will place him beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ. If then he would be saved, he must make sacrifice of his own life to atone—so far as in his power lies—for that sin, for the blood of Christ alone under certain circumstances will not avail…. Joseph Smith taught that there were certain sins so grievous that man may commit, that they will place the transgressors beyond the power of the atonement of Christ. If these offenses are committed, then the blood of Christ will not cleanse them from their sins even though they repent. Therefore their only hope is to have their own blood shed to atone, as far as possible, in their behalf.”

  Next to the last sentence, his father had marked an asterisk.

  He heard noise from the hallway, turned the book face down. It was his mother. When she saw the books spread around him, she smiled.

  “You’re finding your faith at last,” she said, moving forward to embrace him. “You’ve returned to the fold.”

  It was all he and Lael spoke of the next time they met, Lael at first feigning lack of interest then gradually coming around. He had not heard of Hooper Young, he admitted, but he did know something of blood sacrifice. He told Rudd about the Laffertys. Two brothers, a few years earlier, one a bishop or a former bishop, he couldn’t remember which, who sacrificed one of their wives and her child at a makeshift altar and slit h
er throat so the blood would run out over the altar to baptize it, and the words blood sacrifice were used, but there had been nothing as flagrant as writing about it in advance. “Sunrise in Hell,” was it?

  “There are a lot of fucked up people in the world,” said Lael, and then leaned forward. “What else do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Isn’t there more?”

  “I didn’t have time to check.”

  “And by the way,” said Lael. “What happened to your hair?”

  He reached up to feel his hair, his bangs still uneven though he had tried to cut them straight. It surprised him that Lael had noticed his hair at all. Perhaps Lael was paying more attention than he had realized. He was mulling this over when Lael stood and climbed onto the scooter, and before Rudd knew it they were on their way down from the canyon and back to the library, Lael taking the curves and slopes quickly as Rudd slid on the seat, trying to hang on.

  There was a lot to it, more than Rudd had first guessed. The Times, Lael found through a guide the reference librarian recommended, had reported copiously on the crime, on Hooper Young’s identification and capture and then, almost five months later, the trial.

  He sat cranking the records up one by one, reading the articles as Lael peered over his shoulder. Only months later was he able to think it into coherent form. At first glance it all washed over him without really sinking in, and he left the library with names and places churning through his mind. But eventually, though he never articulated it as clearly as he wanted, it all came together:

  On September 19, 1902, a woman’s body was found in a mud ditch between New York and Jersey City, nude and lying in slime. A leather strap was wound about her waist, knotted at the back, and affixed to a twenty-pound hitch weight, of a peculiar make. The woman’s skull had been fractured in two places—once just above the right eye, again a few inches above the left temple. A smoothly cut gash, about six inches long, extended diagonally downward from her left side through her belly.