DAMNED SPOT
By David G. Pace
I imagine heads flung forward from the blow of bullets behind, backward by the slashing of sharps, and I take it from there. I am the one who gathers women’s hair left sun-bleached and tangled in the sage to weave a Sunday brooch for my mother. Left unattended in the Bishop’s Tithing House I open a back room to mounds of bloodied clothing. The stench is so great I run home, screaming. We know the story from seminary (class of 1979): It was the Paiute, or J.D. Lee’s fault. But in the Pioneer parade I see Brother Brigham riding in the fine carriage recovered that day in that mountain meadow on 9/11, 1857. I could never have imagined Arkansans would have so much blood in them.
David G. Pace is the author of the novel “Dream House on Golan Drive.” (Signature Books). His creative work has appeared in Quarterly West, ellipsis, literature and art, and Alligators Juniper, among other periodicals, and in the Torrey House anthology “Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild.” He won second place in the creative nonfiction category of the 2019 Utah Original Writing Competition.