13
In the round sanctuary of the Sweet Assembly, Garner waited for Hank to begin his message. Garner had heard it before and liked it about as much as canned green beans that tasted like their tin containers. Even so, he had felt unseated since the storm shattered his kitchen window. The glass had been repaired, but he couldn’t fix the disquiet in his heart. It was clear to him now that the storm had stirred up a need in him like sediment on the bottom of a river, and the water would not clear. He needed his daughter, Rose. He needed her to come back to him.
He needed a miracle, which is exactly what the Sweet Assembly was known for.
Garner sat in the unyielding wooden church pew with a handful of tourists who’d recently disembarked from the ten o’clock bus. There were fewer on Mondays, especially in August, when many of Colorado’s children returned to school.
In Garner’s opinion, calling the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly a church was a bit of a stretch. For one, the concept of a harbor was ridiculous in these rugged mountains of this landlocked state. He supposed it was meant to be a metaphor, but still it was absurd. For another, the nature of assembly was intentionally undefined, so that the hardware-store retailer-slash-minister, Hank, could offer a nondenominational, interfaith, multicultural, doctrine-free inspirational message without offending anyone who dropped in. And when desired, the facility could be used for gatherings of other types, like parties for deserving town doctors.
These were shortcomings that Garner could easily overlook. Considering his present feelings about God, he didn’t believe anyone who visited the Sweet Assembly needed some hard-hitting message of deliverance from sin. That wasn’t why the tourists liked to come. Over the years, enough folks had claimed to have received miracles that a few people came with expectations of their own, though most seemed merely curious, hopeful of nothing except that they might be entertained by the freakish faithful among their number. Pilgrims brought prayers on papers that they tossed into the central fire pit, which burned round the clock. Some brought relics of loved ones who couldn’t make the journey. A collection of abandoned canes and walkers and pill bottles and other such symbols of healing were left behind in the circular aisles.
Then Hank and his wife, Kathy, transferred these “proofs” to an attractive display in the foyer, a showcase of the many healings that had taken place at the site of Mathilde’s Miracle.
In April of 1877, before Burnt Rock was even an official town, Mathilde Werner Wulff had built the original fire in desperate haste within the same ring of granite stones. Mathilde was the young wife of a German gold miner, a talented woman admired for her leatherworking skills. On a routine trek between the Wulff home and the mine, Mathilde and the Wulffs’ packhorse were attacked by a famished mountain lion, whose hunger was all but insatiable so early in the spring. It chased her some distance before one great and terrible leap struck her in the left thigh, punctured her skirts, skin, and muscles, then tore her off the horse.
The first miracle, she said afterward, was that she managed to keep hold of both her head and her husband’s pistol while the animal dragged her off in its yellow teeth. She withdrew the weapon from the waistband of her skirt and took a shot that might have taken off her own leg as easily as the cougar’s head. She avoided inflicting further injury to herself, but she also failed to strike the snarling cat, though she spent the entire contents of the pistol. How could she not have hit it, she later berated herself, when she could have grabbed its ears in her fists? She never had an answer for this, but the ruckus convinced the wildcat to drop her and turn its attention to less hazardous, meatier prey. The terrified horse thrashed some twenty yards off, its reins tangled in the grasping arms of a fir tree.
By the time the horse was dead, Mathilde had stumbled away.
From near death to near death she fled: the mad chase, the escape, and the bleeding leg conspired to disorient her, and as night fell she knew nothing about where she might be except far away from home, and well off any trails her husband would be able to explore before daybreak. She tore up her petticoats into bandages and then went in search of shelter, counting on her dead horse to save her now. If it was possible the wild cat might still be hungry, she had no way to separate her body from the stench of the sticky blood.
She collapsed against a pile of rocks at the base of a cliff so steep that no human of the day could have scaled it. With any luck, she surmised, neither would any wild animals be dropping on her from above. Next to her was a fallen tree, an evergreen made brittle and brown by disease, its exposed roots caked with long-dried earth. Using the dry needles, the decaying bark, and slim branches she could break off with her own hands, Mathilde assembled a tiny pyramid of materials that looked, according to her simple journal sketches, strangely like a miniature wickiup, a shelter of twigs and branches favored by the region’s Ute tribes. Patiently, with weak and quavering fingers, she generated enough of a spark with her flintlock to bring the little pyre to life.
When the bleeding from her thigh finally stopped, when the glinting yellow cat eyes did not appear in the light of her campfire, and when her body overpowered her mind, Mathilde gave in to sleep.
As the story went, she woke at dawn, cold and hot and delirious, but of sound enough mind to know that death would likely find her before her husband did. The fire in her pit had gone out, but the fire in her leg was an inferno of infection, and her will wasn’t enough to get her on her feet. She had no hope of gathering wood or retracing her bloody steps of the day before, and her mind filled with images of all the wild animals who might bring fate to her in their teeth: grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolves, and lynx.
She asked God to send death swiftly, and without fangs.
As she lay with her cheek on the dirt, breezy fingers stirred the dry ash of her fir trees and levitated tiny pieces. They fluttered like tiny attention-starved insects in front of her eyes, which gazed on her predicament from a despairing, sideways vantage.
It was a blessed distraction, a mesmerizing dance of nature, until some of the soot floated onto her face and stuck to the tears that wet her cheeks. When she reached up to wipe it away, the ash smudged and left a greasy gray residue on her fingertips. The stain reminded her of the purple stains left on her hands when she applied iodine to her husband’s mining injuries.
Mathilde had no iodine with her, but the ash smudges brought to mind a distant idea that the ash might have similar effects. And this lent her some hope.
Even for a woman of her predicament, hope would rear its head. Garner supposed this was part of the story’s allure for him.
She reached into the burned-out pile and scooped out a handful of warm ash. Spitting into the flyaway flakes, she made a muddy poultice and plastered her slashed leg with it, making several small batches in her palm until she had covered her wounds and packed the pasty goo deep in her muscles.
Historians speculated that this simple procedure probably extended Mathilde’s life long enough for the surgeon who eventually treated her to do her some good. The antiseptic properties of ash had long been recognized and in her case, in spite of the unsanitary way it was prepared, managed to slow down the infection.
But Garner and others had always considered that part of the story a simple tale of good luck and quick thinking, though Mathilde’s journal claimed it was God’s hand that stayed the infection. That was not the miracle that drew people to the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet assembly.
The real appeal was rooted in what happened next: after three days in the wilderness, without food or water or fire or the ability to walk; after the limited search-and-rescue skills of the other miners gave out; after her husband collapsed of despair, having found the awful remains of her mount, Mathilde was carried into the tiny settlement on the back of a lovely Spanish horse that no one had ever seen before—and after three more days, never saw again.
She rode in on her stomach, slung over the gray-dappled white hide like a pile of trapper’s furs, unconscious and dangling but alive, her unbound hair sweeping the dirt. Fine beads made of pottery, along with three eagle feathers, were woven into the horse’s fine mane.
If she hadn’t been so near death during the ensuing week, she might have been more overtly mocked when she finally told her story of how the horse presented itself. Mathilde claimed that on the morning of the third day, after hours of begging God for death had morphed into disoriented dreams, the sun woke her. She watched the white beams turn blue in the morning air, and then she saw them touch the ashes of the fire that had died the first night. The sun’s blue rays were like the spoon of her stew pot on the hearth at home. It stirred the remains into a dusty whirlwind that gradually produced the physical forms of the horse and a man, a Native man with coarse dark hair, clothed head to toe in winter buckskins that rattled with decorative beads. He was tall and thin, formed like a runner, with a narrow jaw and kind eyes. He was spectacularly tall, well over six and a half feet, and had slender fingers that were also noticeably long. A peace pipe was tied at his waist.
He lifted her onto the horse and spoke to her in a language she didn’t understand. And though she didn’t know the words, her soul heard them as the words spoken by Jesus to the paralytic at Bethesda: Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. Then the man slapped the animal’s rump, and the horse’s gentle sway rocked her back to dreams.
The horse was touched, fed, watered, and sheltered by several witnesses before it disappeared from the mining settlement, which made it difficult to dismiss Mathilde’s story entirely as a fever-induced hallucination. Still, there were theories about where the horse had really come from. It was wild, some said, in spite of its decorated mane. It was the lost and wandering property of a nearby tribe. It was offered by a Ute hunter who took pity on the injured woman and sent her home, expecting neither recognition nor compensation for his good deed.
It was this last theory that seemed the most reasonable to Mathilde’s husband, and it was supported by the eventual discovery of the campfire site where she’d spent her precarious days, two miles above the Burnt Rock settlement. There they found the shredded bloody petticoats she’d used for bandages, and a peace pipe made of willow.
The Ute tribes of the region were known as a peaceful people, and Mathilde’s husband wanted to show his gratitude to them with a gift. With Mathilde’s consent he withdrew from their stores the most valuable possession they owned: a fine leather saddle tooled with mountain flowers and overlaid with pure hand-hammered silver. The fenders, the skirt, the housing, and more were heavy with the precious metal. Mathilde had made the saddle for him as a wedding gift while they were still in Germany, in anticipation of their new life together in the Wild West.
He went with a fellow miner who knew the languages of the Utes, and the interpreter made a path for him. All of the nearby villages insisted that their horses and warriors were accounted for and knew no story of a white woman hovering between this world and the next.
One tribal elder, however, claimed to recognize the willow pipe when it was shown to him. He said that the man Wulff sought lived apart from the tribes and had come to the region with white missionaries years earlier. The elder didn’t know where the man could be found, but offered to accept the saddle until his next appearance. In exchange they provided Wulff with a horse, not knowing he no longer had one, and then they loaded the mule he’d borrowed from a neighbor with heavy bear furs and tightly woven baskets filled with food.
Mathilde never engaged in any debate about the believability of her story, and she never altered her account of the man and horse rising from the ashes like the mythical phoenix. She told the story once publicly, then never again, and her experience might have been forgotten in time if her grandson hadn’t taken interest in the crumbling journal written in her fading hand.
In the early 1920s, Jonathan Wulff came to Burnt Rock after a season abroad in Egypt, where he’d become caught up in the excitement surrounding Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The young archaeology student participated in little more than the grunt work associated with the great find, but that didn’t dampen his plans to pursue a career in antiquities. They were temporarily interrupted, however, when he fell from a ladder into an excavated tomb and broke his left leg, which subsequently became infected. As his condition worsened he was sent away to Paris so that grumblings about the pharaoh’s curse would have no reason to spread among his colleagues.
Though Jonathan improved in France, his full recovery was expected to take months. And so he chose to recuperate among the family that had enthusiastically funded his education and career with the profits of their successful mining operations.
During his stay in Burnt Rock he was gifted with his grandmother’s journal and the peace pipe that had remained in the family. His father thought that Jonathan would appreciate the romance of Mathilde’s tale, which by that time had devolved to the status of family folklore. Jonathan did like it, and found the journal entries to be good entertainment in the chilly spring evenings. They were written in German, but he had the education to translate them. While his broken femur healed by the warmth of the hearth fire, Jonathan concocted his share of jokes about the ashen Spanish horse and its dusty warrior, and regaled his nieces and nephews with ghost stories of dead men who hunted recalcitrant Wulff children.
But each night, after the family had gone to bed, he’d stay up by the light of the family’s one electric lamp and part the aging hand-stitched papers, searching for a certain page, a particular paragraph that humbled his academic cynicism. At age twenty-three his grandmother Mathilde, the same age as he when the journal was given to him, had written:
It does not matter what anyone has to say of my experience, or that the preacher would rather I tell it different. Christ Jesus my Lord saved my soul when I was a girl, and He saved my body now that I am a woman. That He did it as a man breathed up of the ash the way Adam must have risen on the Sixth Day is not for me to examine.
It is no matter that I lack the preacher’s schooling, or that the men fear I be guilty of cavorting with the dead, or that the wives look at me from the tops of their noses as if I am addled by sickness. Whatever the explanation for my salvation, I am no senseless creature. I credit my life only to the Lord, Who numbers our days. Today I live though tomorrow I may die. But since I live when I ought to have passed on, I am bound to Truth, which is this: it is not for me to prove what God did, nor how, but only to remind all that He did it. There is no point in a miracle except that it expose the glory of the Lord, and so I’ll not try to cover it up. Look at what God has done!
Jonathan found her simple thinking to be endearing, a relic of an earlier time when faith was still hanging on to reason by the skin of its teeth. But he couldn’t deny that this last line of her journal touched his heart in a deep place that was hidden from everyone who knew him. He had fond memories of his grandmother, because she had lived until he was ten, and he had heard the story of her miraculous rescue long before he was aware of a journal.
If he had known her writing first, before he knew the person, he might have expected her to be austere and dogmatic, closed-minded and stern. But his memory could only recall a woman of great softness—in the eyes, in the jowls, in the hands, in the belly—whose arms and heart were always open, and whose hugs smelled of the metal-heavy mountain water she bathed in. She would greet him by cupping his chin in her hand and approving of his good health by exclaiming, “Look what God has done!” so that he sensed his very existence was a good thing.
But something more than sentiment held his eyes on the page, night after night. It was the possibility, however slim, however ludicrous, that his grandmother knew something important about this life, in this world, that he did not. And to a man of learning who respected all people of the past, this possibility was unbearable.
So on a warm day toward the end of April in 1924, when he thought he was strong enough, Jonathan gathered his cane and a rucksack and a small shovel and a canteen full of water. Not wanting to impede his healing, but knowing he couldn’t make the hike on foot, he cautiously rode his father’s most gentle horse uphill to the site of Mathilde’s Miracle, which until that day had been her miracle alone.
The area was not preserved as anything special, and fifty harsh winters had eliminated the ashes and altered the shape of the vegetation. But the cliff that had sheltered Mathilde was identifiable by its outcroppings, which she described in detail in the journal—she’d even drawn a picture. And some months after her recovery, before the next winter set in, Mathilde had returned and placed a small ring of broken granite rocks around the spot where God had “breathed.” It was her version of a monument. An altar.
When Jonathan arrived and saw the rock ring, long anchored to the ground by snow-soaked mud and durable mountain grasses, a breeze passed over him that caused him to shudder. He would tell his family later that he thought of the apostle John’s account of the angel that stirred the waters at the pool of Bethesda, though no doubt Mathilde’s journal entries had given him this idea. Whether the breeze was divine, Jonathan couldn’t say. Still, he was compelled to show his respect for God, regardless of what modern science had to say, by dismounting his horse, cane in hand.
He planted the tip of the cane in the firm ground next to his strong leg and leaned on it for support. The carved stick snapped in two and the bottom half toppled away, and as he overcompensated for his sudden imbalance, his full weight came to bear on his injury.
It didn’t stagger under the weight of the surprise. He felt no pain. Instead the wasted muscles of his unused legs seemed to coil and hum, waiting to spring him into long-awaited action. Look, you are well again.
The tip of the broken cane was like a pharaoh’s staff in Jonathan’s fist. He raised it to the sky and tilted his face to the sun and began to laugh.
“Look at what God has done,” he chuckled. “Look at what he has done.”