Joeconfessions

I. The Gods Are Among the People 

       Came
then I. No schooling or Religion, a wild ass’s colt like
my daddy before me–that was me when the buckboard
stopped in Palmyra Town. They’d smelt the rat back in
Bainbridge, found me guilty and fined me as a disorderly
person and an impostor. Be it what it would, in Palmyra
I was nothing graveled but buoyed up with the flotsam of
God.

       Came then Isaac
Bullard in his bearskin at Woodstock half a dozen hills
away, him who thought bathing a sin and hadn’t changed
his girdle in seven years. Ann Lee reincarnated Christ,
her Shaker halls hardly thirty miles away. Twenty-five
miles west in Jerusalem the  preacheress Jemima
Wilkinson–another Jesus–died and was reborn in 1776
swearing she’d break the Bond of Death and never die
again. When she did her body rotted in Jerusalem for
nine years but the lawsuits in the Canandaigua
courthouse kept her fresh.

       Came then Joseph
Dylks the Leatherwood God about the time we started up
in Kirtland but he was a hairbrain. As proof he was
Immortal he claimed no one could harm him but a mob tore
out his hair and that showed it wasn’t so. They tried
him too but it turned out that in Ohio it was not a
crime to be a god.

       Came then William
Miller who calculated the Advent to the day and
flourished even after the Great Year 1843-1844 became
the Great Fizzle. And not just for the Millerites
because ‘44 was the pinch of the game when obloquy
cornered me in Carthage town and assassins smote me low
in the dust.

That much I remember. How much time has passed since
then I couldn’t say. I speak to you from the Grave and
without a calendar. The passage of time is sand and
gravel.

II. Treasures in the Earth

           

My daddy told me the best time for harrowing up money
was in the summer when the heat caused the buried chests
to rise. He told me how the Ancient Ones of this country
rode camels and the proof was on Cuyler’s farm. There
was a cave and heaps of Gold in it and stands of arms
and on a peg hanging at one side of the cave a camel
saddle. Eight tumuli within twelve miles of my
progenitor’s farm.

           
I had a peep stone I found digging a well for Mason
Chase twenty-four feet deep in the ground. Dark it was
but in it I could see worlds, my mind as untrammeled as
the wide West. I caught sparks from the Methodists at a
camp meeting on the Vienna road, studied the Spaniards’
lost silver mine in the Susquehanna Valley, and learned
how to lead a black sheep in a circle with its throat
cut.

           
I told farmers where the Gold was in their fields by
putting my shew stone in my hat and my face inside the
hat to keep out all light but what came from out the
stone. I told Josiah Stowel there was Treasure in the
root of a stump five feet below the ground and lying
beside it we would find the tail feather of a jay. Sure
as certain we found the feather though the Gold had
moved on down.

           
Obadiah Dogberry was the Editor of the Palmyra Mirror
and said he didn’t need a scry stone to see through me
but what he saw was just the man. He saw not the me I
truly am.

           
I tell you I had no thought of Religion just Gold but
when enough people never found any I moved on to words
and that turned out to be the real Treasure the Lord had
laid up for my store.

III.
The Red Sons of Israel

           
The Mound Builders then was all the rage. Every son of
us knew no ignorant savages had built them mounds and
left such monuments. It had to be the lost tribe of
Ephraim or other of Israel’s sons and those mounds got
left from their apocalypse. William Henry Harrison
assured us it was so. You remember right before his
election he wrote that the last great battle between the
peaceful Moundbuilding race and the savage redmen took
place on the banks of the Ohio. That was my first
notion, to write a history of the Moundbuilders, a book
to answer the questions of every farmer with a hummock
in his pasture. A history of the Indians was found in
Canada at the base of a hollow tree, workers on the Erie
Canal dug up brass plates along with skeletons–it was
in the air a spirit moving among the mounds.

           
One day on the creek I found some glittery fine white
sand. I tied it up in my frock and taken it home. When
they asked what I had in my tote, it came to me to say
it was the Golden Bible, and they all believed. How can
you resist gulling people who want to be gulled?

           
I learned a trick from a scryer named Walters who’d read
to folks from Caesar’s Orations or something in a tongue
he didn’t know or them neither and then translate it as
whatever the occasion called for to be served up. When
the chariot came for Walters his mantle fell on me.

           
A lot of the rest of it was foolery and I soon learned
better, that there warn’t no need to sacrifice the
barnyard cock, though that black sheep walking a circle
with its throat cut held folks’ attention for a while.
What they really wanted first was to believe in me, and
I looked inside myself and found that it was true. I had
a gift. In time I’d make a history of the Red Sons of
Israel who built the mounds, in due season I would tell
them where the Nephites hid their Gold.

           
I got in trouble though through comely Emma cause she
was the first woman I courted but I couldn’t gull Josiah
Hale. After I took and married her I had to bring her
back. He told me I was a shiftless fraud and couldn’t
support a wife. Joseph wept. I admitted I couldn’t see
in a stone now, nor never could, I said I’d get a job,
and he let me keep her. For comely Emma, I paid that
price.

           
But folks kept after me to look in my stone–mauger my
rectitude, how could I say them Nay? Came home one day
with ten quarts of fine white sand tied up in my frock,
and when they wanted to know what was in it it came to
me to say what I heard about a history found in Canada
called the Golden Bible and I told them that’s what it
was. They believed it, and that was when I felt the
gift. Mighty quick then the next thing came to me was to
avow I was commanded to show it to none. This was the
Gold of Truth I’d found: folks want to be fooled.

IV.
A Marvelous Work and a Wonder

       First the way I told
it was that a white salamander, then I said an angel
named Moroni gave me black clothes, put me on a black
horse with a switch tail, and told me where to find
the drumlin I later called Cumorah Hill. I was to call
out a secret name. The Treasure would be in a
stone  box, unsealed, and so near the top of the
ground the box would beckon me. I harrowed it up and
took out the Golden book but when I turned round up
started a great toad and smote me on the head with a
rock.We wrestled something prodigious. Maugur his
demency I never let him go.

The writing on the plates, I said, were in “reformed
Egyptian.” Looking back now I see I timed that just
right. It wasn’t till 1837 that this Champion fellow
read the Rosetta Stone

whereas I was already reading my plates.

Lamanite inscriptions, I’d say, paintings, and
hieroglyphs on the rocks of this continent that only I
could read. To the Nephite record I added the story of
the Jaredites. It told how they had fled the tower of
Babel about 2500 BC in eight watertight barges made so
they’d sail any-side up with windows in both the top and
the bottom. And this was the way of it and how Hebrews
first came to North America.

           
I made some bloopers too. I had John baptizing in
Bethbara and Jesus born in Jerusalem but I turned all
that to good account by telling my people God preferred
the weak things of the world, the unlearned and the
despised, as an iron rod to thrash the Nations.

 [several missing pages] *       
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IX. Coda

           
Over my corpse the widow of William Morgan of Masonic
memory wept. Fearing  gentile vandals, they filled
the pine box they put into the grave with sand. My
people had learned a thing or two. Sand outweighs Gold
or Death sayeth not.

My martyrdom showed that God had placed His Seal upon
me. My legend became epic then Truth. All traces of
fallibility and fraud removed. It glued the Church
together and made my mouth words Truth.

No man knows my history.

You don’t know me, nor never knew my heart.

I was ordained from before the foundation of the world,

For some end, good or bad. Deep water was my bourn.

What might have been my course had I lived

Only the dark glass of Providence can know.

From Cumorah Hill to Carthage jail

I made a good flight but too low I flew

My sins caught up with me in old Nauvoo.

Gravel and sand

That’s what I am.