To the Valley of the Shadow of Death
On a day that Daniel Young would always remember, his father had come home wounded.
Daniel had been the first to see him, riding up the twisting path to their little farm to east of New Jerusalem. Four-year-old Daniel had run out to meet him, as usual, but this time his father did not swing him up onto the horse in front of him. He was riding slowly, slumped in the saddle, holding the reins in his right hand while his left hung limply at his side. He was pale and his clothes seemed to be splashed with blood. Daniel was confused and scared at the sight, never having known his father to be hurt.
“Get you mother,” his father said.
When they got him into the house, mother cut off his shirt. Daniel was horrified, in his young brain the sight of his mother willfully ruining good clothing was more shocking than the blood. “Don’t worry about me,” dad had said, upon seeing Daniel’s reaction, but his normally strong voice had faded to a weak murmur and mother continued on cleaning his wounds without paying any attention. Another shocking event since his father’s word was normally law. “Leave me and get the children to the temple,” he said. “The White Legs will be here soon.” The Temple was a few miles east in New Jerusalem, a magnificent thing of big white stone, but Daniel could not understand why they should go there when it was not even Sunday.
“If you lose any more blood you won’t be able to go anywhere,” mother said. But even as she spoke, Joshua, Daniel’s fifteen-year-old brother left the house, saying he would gather the horses. Perhaps if mother had gone with Joshua to get the horses, or if father’s horse had moved just a little bit faster things would have been different, and so it happened that the White Legs caught Daniel, his parents, and his two sisters.
Nothing in Daniel’s short life had prepared him for the appearance of the two men as they kicked open the door and burst into his house. In other circumstances perhaps he would have found them funny, their bodies covered in a chalk-like white and red powder and their hair tied in a unique dreadlocked style. But these men did not seem funny as they snarled with (Daniel understood only years later) bloodlust and heaved their heavy weapons. The fact that nothing would satisfy them but more blood, more screaming, more pain, was written on their twisted faces as they came into the room like foxes into a henhouse.
What happened next went by very fast, but Daniel seemed to remember every step, every gesture, as if it had been in slow motion. Both men wore what amounted to little more than scraps of leather and rags. Both had machetes drawn. At first their merciless eyes had dismissed Daniel and his sisters, taken brief note of mom, and settled on dad. They were almost on him before anyone else could move.
Mom dropped the bandage that she had been tying to his left arm, straightening up and turning to the intruders with a kind of hopeless courage. Dad sprang to his feet and got his good hand around the grip of his pistol. Daniel had cried in terror.
One of the men raised his weapon and brought it down hilt first on mom’s head, then pushed her aside, probably to avoid getting his blade caught while dad was still alive. Daniel only figured that out years later, at the time he just ran to his mother, clinging to her skirts as she staggered back and the man walked past. But he could not help looking at his father.
He had drawn his pistol from its holster and raised it quickly, firing a shot into the gut of the man who had hit mother. Like all small boys, Daniel had thought his father was invincible and seeing the intruder clutch at his stomach only strengthened that notion, but this was the moment he learned the truth. Dad was weak from blood loss, unsteady and sluggish. Even as the first intruder dropped to the ground, the second one struck. The blow landed where the muscles of his dad’s neck grew out of his broad shoulders. Daniel screamed when he saw the sharp blade slice into his father’s body.
Paralyzed with terror, Daniel looked up at his mother, their eyes meeting just as the man turned and struck her down as well. She fell to the floor beside Daniel with blood streaming from her head. The man then changed his grip on the blade, reversing it so that it pointed downward, then he raised it high and brought it down hard. There was a sickening crack of breaking bone as the point entered mom’s chest.
Daniel woke suddenly his bed drenched with sweat in the New Canaan Temple, far from the events of that day. He wiped the perspiration from his brow and sat up. He had forgiven those men, scared, desperate, and confused as they were, years ago. But that did not stop the nightmares. Daniel began a prayer to God, but his mind was elsewhere, thinking over everything that day had meant.
Joshua had returned just in time to save Daniel and their sisters from the fate their parents had suffered and they rode quickly for the Temple at New Jerusalem, only to flee again to New Canaan when it was put to the torch. By the time they reached New Canaan there was not a single family among their relatives that had not lost someone, in nearly every case either the father or mother had been killed. There were no relations to look after all the siblings, and so Daniel’s sisters were looked after until they were old enough to marry and hopefully bring a dowry, while he and Joshua were left with two options. They could beg and perhaps if they were lucky find a farmer who could use them for work. Or they could be given to God.
It was not unknown for small boys to enter the Church. The usual age was about ten or so, with a lower limit around five. Prophet Rigdon himself proposed for Daniel to join and Joshua and the remaining relatives agreed. And so, while Daniel settled into his life with the church, Joshua fought against the White Legs’ siege of New Canaan and eventually joined the military, mainly in the hopes of killing more White Legs. It pained Daniel to think that when Joshua died in that minefield with Graham there had been hate in his heart.
Daniel, for a time, too became possessed by an implacable rage, like he had been unjustly imprisoned despite the good conditions he lived in with the Church. He disobeyed orders, insulted his elders, stole food, and loosed horses, but he always stopped short of sacrilege and so he was always forgiven for everything else. And in the end he simply grew out of it.
There was no great event that brought him back to normality. His intense interest in his lessons probably helped. Medicine, mathematics, music, history, languages, theology, he found himself fascinated by all of it and soon found solace in his daily prayers and services. Before long he was far ahead of any of the other boys his age in his studies, something he assumed was because he had been with the church longer than them and had been educated more intensively. He did not realize that he was exceptional.
Daniel had seen his future very simply, when he thought of it at all. He would eventually be ordained as a priest, live a humble and obedient life administering to his flock, and in old age perhaps he would become a bishop. But he had wondered if God didn’t intend some other destiny for him. He remembered the parable of the talents: God expected his servants to increase his kingdom, not merely to conserve it. It had been with some trepidation that he had shared these thoughts with the Prophet, wary that he was simply being prideful.
To his surprise, the Prophet had smiled and said, “I wondered how long it would take you to realize this. Of course you are destined for something else. God does everything with purpose, and he doesn’t take as much trouble as he has taken with you over the formation of a man who is going to spend his life preaching to fifty men and women every Sunday. You must leave this place. You must tend to the lost flocks of the South.”
Daniel was daunted. Missionary work was never performed by one as young as himself at only twenty-years-old. But he had followed the Prophet’s command and went south, continuing a seemingly inevitable journey that placed him here now, praying in the Prophet’s rooms in the New Canaan Temple. And now, as he prepared to go south again, he wondered what journey he would be embarking on this time.
