Redeye by Clyde Edgerton

and I came upon last winter.”
    â€œThere was some pots in the one we found, too.”
    â€œThat’s what Zack said.” He was sitting there with his feet up, his hands crossed in his lap and he looked like he won’t in no hurry at all which is not the way he is when he’s working—where he’s always in a hurry. I thought about my own daddy, what he might have been like.
    â€œTell me about it—the ruin,” he said.
    â€œWell, once we got in through this hole, it opened up and there was six or eight little rooms sort of built there. And this was high up on the cliff. It had been buried by a slide. You had to bend down to get in a room, but it looked like inside that nothing had been bothered much except some of the walls had caved in so that most of the rooms had a lot of rocks and stuff on the floor. Most of the rooms had ceilings about five feet high.”
    He leaned up forward like he was real interested. “You can imagine the place you came upon,” he said, “uncovered, and about ten times bigger—hell, twenty times bigger. . .”
    â€œYou’ve seen one that big?”
    â€œThe first one we found—Eagle City.”
    â€œHow old are they?”
    â€œCan’t say for sure. We cut down a very old piñon tree that hadgrown in the middle of one of their footpaths—had over three hundred rings in it, and the footpath was worn considerable, meaning the path was used a long time. And we don’t know how much time passed after the path was last used before the tree started growing.”
    He told me about coming upon the first dwelling he saw when he was up in the mesa hunting cattle. He put in all about snowflakes and the setting sun and all this. He hadn’t been able to find nobody that is much interested in all of it, and he needed help to go back in there for major excavations. He wanted to know if I’d go back, exploring with him, probably in less than two weeks. I said I would, for
sure,
and he said all I’d have to do is get Mr. Copeland to say okay.
    Somewhere in there I mentioned that we’d seen the ferry operator and his son up north of the mesa. Markham Thorpe and Hiram.
    â€œHe’s interested in the relics, too,” said Mr. Merriwether. “To prove that the Indians are a lost tribe of Israel. The Mormons are out to find relics that connect the Indians to Israel or to Jesus. They believe Indians came straight from Old Testament land and Jesus visited America during the three days after he arose from the dead.”
    â€œWhat?” That seemed strange. “And didn’t Bishop Thorpe used to have more than one wife?”
    â€œOh, yes.”
    â€œIs Hiram’s mother still around? Hiram seemed right normal.”
    â€œThat would be Harmony Beasley. She changed her nameback. They all say they’re following the law now. Harmony is a very fine woman. She and her sister came out here some years back in a traveling band, family band, and settled just north of Mumford Rock. Then Thorpe married Harmony and she and her sister had a falling out about it. They’d been very close, and very religious—Presbyterians, I think. They did a lot of religious music, but they’d break out into other stuff, too. The Indians around here used to love to hear them play. The Beasley Family Band. They all moved out and left Harmony behind. She’s running that little store north of the ferry. You’ve been by there. She seems to be very happy. Beautiful woman. I don’t have any trouble with most of their ways,” he said. “It’s just all . . . well, it’s a long story. And the worst of it was Mountain Meadows.”
    I’d heard about that for as long as I could remember. “What was that, anyway? I can’t get it straight.”
    â€œBack in the thirties and forties, the Mormons were run out of a couple of eastern states, and their leader, Joseph Smith, was