Redeye by Clyde Edgerton Page A

assassinated, killed. So they split up into several groups and the biggest group settled in Utah, set up a kingdom, more or less, and decided that San Diego would be their seaport.”
    I wondered if my kinfolks had been Mormons. I was always trying to remember about my family. They was just vague shapes, kind of.
    â€œAll this was fine, but you see, the problem was that the Mormons wouldn’t follow United States laws, just Mormon laws, and it got so bad with them breaking U.S. law and not punishing their people that President Buchanan sent twenty-five hundredtroops to replace Brigham Young as governor with a fellow named Cummings. This was back in fifty-seven. Well, the Mormons got fired up and declared war. But they were in close with the Indians—had to be, they figured—and they still are, you see.
    â€œIn the meantime there was a wagon train from Arkansas on the way to Utah. What the people on this wagon train didn’t realize was that the Mormons had decided that if any wagon train that wasn’t Mormon came through Utah, then they would refuse to trade with it—no water, no grain, no bread, no supplies of any kind. So when the wagon train—it was the Chandler Train—started down the length of Utah, no Mormon would give them water or sell them anything. Nothing. A good deal of tension developed.”
    â€œHow’d you find out about all this?”
    â€œMy father was obsessed with it. He was in the army and visited the site in fifty-nine, two years after it happened. That’s how I know so much about it. I was about four years old at the time, and I vaguely remember him coming home and telling about it all.” He reached over for the little glass of plain tea—or whiskey—he was drinking from. Then I figured he might be a little tight and that’s why he was talking so much.
    â€œHow old are you?” he said.
    â€œI’m about fifteen, sixteen.”
    â€œGet you a number and stick with it. Say you were born in seventy-five. You probably were. You got a date?”
    â€œNosir.”
    â€œWhat’s your favorite month?”
    â€œI don’t know. April?”
    â€œMake it April fifteenth, 1875. You are sixteen years old. So you were about two when Boyle, Calvin Boyle, met the firing squad because of it all. Twenty years between the doing and the trying one man.
    â€œAnyway, back to fifty-seven. Some of the Mormons started in preaching sermons, hot, fiery sermons, advocating blood atonement and such and such, and so by the time the wagon train got to Mountain Meadows, the Mormon leaders had told the Indians, mostly Paiutes, to wipe them out. Gave them the go-ahead.
    â€œThe people in the wagon train were preparing for a week of rest at Mountain Meadows when the Indians attacked on a Monday morning, I think it was, and killed six or eight of the immigrants, wounded some others, but the immigrants somehow managed to circle up their wagons and hold them off. For all of that day and two more days. Inside those circled wagons they buried the dead, dug a trench for the wounded, women, and children. Conditions were terrible.”
    He took his feet off the table and started stuffing a pipe. “My father used to tell me about it. He told it over and over. He’d say, ‘Imagine you were a child in that wagon train.’ I can tell it to you the way he told me: ‘Imagine you’re there. You’re four years old. You are watching your mother and father at war—for three long days and nights in a little grassy valley, inside a little fort of wagons, holding Indians at bay. You see people dying. You attend makeshift funerals. Your parents are stricken with the terror andthe horror happening to them and you. You knew all the people who are now dead. You hide in a trench with your mother and the dying.
    â€œâ€˜On the fourth day, the Indians disappear. There is a feeling of astonishment, relief,