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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Guilt by association is a fixed principle in Zion. Perhaps the incident drew us closer to Clayton. The consequences would be severe for all of us, we knew. Through Clayton’s fearful tales, we knew that Ephriam was a hard man despite his mild appearance. Clayton was a city boy, if Alma could be described as a city, because it was as rural as a pasture, despite a wide paved main street upon which were grocery and hardware and bank and shoemaker and clothing store and drugstore and the venerable Novelty Theater.
Adjacent to the Western Family Groc., Ephriam was a shadow partner of Shepherd’s clothing store, full of straw hats and buckle galoshes, tough working cloth and fancy sewing notions for the womenfolk. Archie Shepherd was probably the most polite, condescending, and agreeable merchant in the community, and he was successful because he had a monopoly on the west side of the valley. The real city, Sodom to the east, was Pleasanton across the valley by ten miles. That railroad town was a pile and tract of wickedness with bars and neon lights and a Catholic church and even a Methodist congregation so the people of Alma only went to Pleasanton upon the direst of necessity; the mortuary was there.
The sun was slanting through the windows full of plants in the sitting room when Ephriam and Hazel Bostwick arrived at home. Clayton, hollow eyed, was sitting in his room on his bed, dressed in his Sunday best white shirt and dark suit and new shoes. The rest of us wore scuffed brogans, which were acceptable in church, because young men just couldn’t be kept in proper dress shoes we grew so fast. But Clayton had a source for new shoes.
“Now, Ephriam, I’m sure it was an accident,” Hazel had murmured in fear when she saw the look in her husband’s eyes.
“Will drop my business by twenty percent, you mark my word, Mrs. Bostwick,” he said with barely concealed fury. She had seen him like this before the time she had found and reported to Ephriam that there were some tobacco leaves in Clayton’s shirt pocket. That incident had cost Clayton, a cracked arm, an extra hour a day of study of the Book of Mormon, extra hours at the store stocking and sweeping, and he was forbade to consort with the likes of the Sullivan boy, the Smith boy, and that Lattimore-murderer outside of school hours. That punishment lasted a six months.
When Ephriam entered Clayton’s tidy room he calmly took off his heavy leather belt, stropped his suspenders against his chest with flat smacking sounds, and fiercely glared at his mouse colored, bespectacled young son.
“You may stand and drop your trousers, Mr. Bostwick,” Ephriam said, his voice trembling.
Dutifully Clayton stood and did as he was ordered.
“But it wasn’t me,” he finally wailed, “It was somebody else.”
“Will you compound your insult to the ward by lies?” Ephriam demanded.
“No sir, well, I just couldn’t . . .”
“Turn around.”
“Yes sir.”
And then, pushing Clayton over the bed, Ephriam laid into the backside of his son that was protected only by thin cotton underwear.
Mrs. Bostwick, in tears in the parlor, counted ten hard swats of leather smacking against flesh; it was only on the second lash that Clayton was howling with pain.
Similar incidents, with variations, were taking place at Doyle farm just outside of town; at the Smith farm down in the bottomland; at the Hotel Bruxelles.
The instruction and rebuke of Willy Smith remains in my memory as criminal. The Smiths, lineage bound to the Prophet Joseph Smith in a distant way, were ranchers, cowboys. His father ran nearly five hundred head of cattle, and was prosperous because of the unrelenting work of the past 40 years. It was because of the nature of the work, the hardship and sacrifice in the face of Immigration Valley’s implacable weathers, that Willy Smith feared for his life.
He was told to change into his work clothes, and then go directly to the big red barn and wait. And wait he did, for the rest of the hot afternoon in the nearly empty barn, the empty stalls, the smell of leather harness and horse a real perfume to his nose. But his fear had closed off his sense of smell, and he waited.
He waited past suppertime, and then it was dark, and still he waited until it was almost bedtime and still no one came. He could see the full June moonrise through the cracks in the barn board door, and the crickets and the frogs down in the sloughs began to chorus a comforting music.
He was asleep in the hayloft when he heard the creaking hinges of the huge barn door. He quickly scrambled down the ladder when the electric light was turned on.
LeGrande Linford Smith calmly ordered him to take off all of his clothes. Willy was astonished, but quickly did as he was ordered. When he turned to look over his shoulder, hiding himself in embarrassment he saw the horsewhip in his father’s hand, Linford’s face grim, calm, and silent.
“Put your hands on that stall board, and if you so much as make the sound of a mouse I shall redouble your punishment,” Linford Smith said.
The braided leather horsewhip was laid across Willy’s back and buttocks like a cat o’nine. Two of the twenty strokes laid open bone on a shoulder blade. After the twenty, with Willy on his knees, his teeth sunk into a pine stall board so he wouldn’t cry out, the electric light was snapped off, and Linford Smith went back to the house and went to bed.
But there was no such punishment for Andrew Lattimore. Only the tears of a mortified mother. To me her tears were every bit as severe as the lashings of the other members of the gang, that, and the silence, because that was all she had. I came to hate her dependence upon me but I loved her so hard I sometimes thought I would just run away. If I could.
I was completely free to come and go as I pleased. I worked seven days a week that summer. It was September, my senior year, my mother had said less than fifty words to me since the Testimony meeting. That form of punishment went deeper than any leather whip, because it was in the nature of instruction in the church that once the punishment was received, the lesson learned, it was forgiven, and forgotten. The trouble was, after my father died, she never forgot or forgave anything. She hated me, I thought.
For example, Willy Smith’s mother was in the barn tending to the cruel, bloody welts on Willy’s back ten minutes after Linford was asleep, and the next morning Willy was on a tractor mowing hay by sunrise, his father acting as if nothing had happened. That was it.
Biff Doyle, as large in bulk and girth as his giant father, was tossed around the tractor shed like a feather pillow, and when Theodore Doyle was sufficiently winded, Biff as meek as a pigeon, it was over.
But for me the silence she kept that whole of the summer nearly broke me, shamed me, and I truly thought about running away. And I thought of Death.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted
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