Alma 3

Blessed makeshift architecture of carnage. What man can do in God’s name, God would never do in his own.

Their own dead, of course, they buried and lamented with military funerals, great gaudy affairs that victors always mount for themselves—though in this case, they had to fill huge pits with corpses and body parts of more victims than they could count. After backfilling the mass graves, they marched back to the city, where many women who should have been widows, and children who should have been orphans, were dead themselves, their rotting bodies stinking up the tramped-down fields.

The Lamanites and Amlicites drew ugly stares even at their best. Both groups streaked their foreheads with red dye. The Lamanites shaved their heads and went naked, except for loincloths and pieces of armor. Their skin was dark, too, which the white Nephites thought disgusting and blamed on their ancient misbehavior against Lehi’s better sons. Everybody believed in curses in those days: skin tone, infertility, sickness, deformity. These were ways God had of keeping the chosen people at arm’s length from anyone who could wreck their bloodlines. Or their theology.

Because dark skin pigment overwhelms light, the word was out: mix your bloods and the curse falls on all.

Meanwhile, anyone who dismissed the Lamanites’ animus toward Nephites and who believed in Nephite traditions and historical perspectives became honorary Nephites. So bloodlines weren’t everything.

Amlicites didn’t have dark skin. But it seemed to everyone that the face-painting was a poor attempt to look cursed. The idea was always that darkened skin was a “mark” from God. If you marked yourself, that counted the same.

All this was according to those traditions of which we spoke, though the scriptures remained fuzzy on the question. The going concept was:

—God marked bad people’s skin—or the skin of anyone who had babies with them

—God revoked the name “Nephite”—i.e., “good guy”—from anyone who drifted from Nephite ways

Amlicites unwittingly fulfilled both legs of the concept: they fought their own people and painted their own faces. Curse, curse.

In a free society, everyone gets to earn his own curses.

But back to our story. The Lamanites quickly regrouped and attacked again in the same battle zone. Nephites moved into position to push them back, though Alma was still healing from wounds of the last battle. Short story: the Nephites won. Peace, though steeped in grief. All this had happened within one year. People still visited the mass graves and howled for grief, when they weren’t lying in bed wishing they themselves had not outlived their betters. The dead, everyone knew, had crossed a barrier, met the real Judge, the one that infinitely outranked Alma. The verdicts of that judge flowed from the kind of spirit each person had chosen to serve.

God and the devil both pay a fair wage. Let’s let that be the moral of the fifth year of the judges’ reign.