Helaman 6

By the end of Year 62 the tables had turned: the majority of Lamanites were pretty good people now and as a whole they put the Nephites to shame in discipline and zeal.

What helped this happen was that many Nephites lost interest and, frankly, lost their moral Liahonas. Good sermons ran off their backs like rain on an oiled roof. The more religious ones did get excited about the Lamanites. The Lamanites spiced up the church but didn’t blather all that shameless gunk their parents used to. They were a pleasure to have around. Variety works.

Lamanite missionaries combed the precincts of Zarahemla, stump preaching to wayward Nephites. They came across beautifully, too, with conversion stories that had the seediest backgrounds. People were spellbound. And they took these staggering juxtapositions of lifestyles to heart.

By the end of Year 63, Nephi and Lehi joined up with the Lamanite missionaries, bustling with sermons to the folks up north.

Unfettered travel was now feasible, given all the truces and treaties between the two big feuding clans. Nephites could wind through Lamanite territory, and vice versa. Soon people actually forgot about whose turf was whose. Same with the marketplace: importing and exporting lost their meaning. Everything was now domestic.

That latter fact fueled an economic boom, measurable in the stores of precious metals being smelted and stockpiled in vaults.

An update reminder: the southland was Lehi and the northland was Mulek. Each was named for the main pioneer of that area. In both, now, free trade joined with more polished craftsmanship to produce mega-wealth. This led to better farm prices, with grain rising in value the way it rose in height from the ground. The flocks and herds multiplied too. The human population followed suit.

Women began to capitalize on new markets. The old arts of knitting, weaving, sewing, and even embroidery dominated this new society where spiffy appearance seemed de rigeur.

Year 65 opened on this prosperous note. It closed with the note being accompanied by visions and predictions about future growth.

Year 66: Someone murdered Cezoram, cut him up on his throne and left him there marinading in his blood. The people voted for his son to replace him. Before year’s end he died in the same scenario as his dad.

Year 67: Worse yet. And there was only one reason: wealth. That’s all anyone hunted or sang about or salivated for in their dreams. They plotted with their eyes on only one outcome: more money. Blood was cheap. When someone disappeared everyone knew that money was the chief suspect. Anything else was incidental. Trivia. Because everyone knew the boss. And he wasn’t a he, just a thing.

The boss’ underlings, though, had a title people got to know: the Gadianton Group. Very corporate in its design. They even had a logo, but it was secret and, if you gave it away it had better be to another member of the group. No one knows it now. Or admits to knowing it. Every member had to kill to stay in. And every robbery had to have a corpse at the door.

Everyone knew they had killed Cezoram and his son, each killing an echo of the other, both of them the afterclap of the collective human brain’s disordered limbic system.

The Lamanites—now the putative heroes of this civilization—pursued every lead. They had no mercy on the Gadiantons.

The Nephites—they of the story’s new black hats—effectively pledged allegiance to the Gadianton Group with codes of silence, inside deals cut in the courts, chronic looking-the-other-way-ness. No one got caught. Or if they did, no one took the rap. The Gadianton Group also had its secret little hand signals its members used to detect impostors from trueblue gangsters, made men from interlopers. It was easy to be a killer or a thief. “But don’t be pretending to be a member of our club.” That was the gist of these protective codes.

They had their own legal system, though. It was a kind of reverse of God’s. If there was a Golden Rule theirs was the Lead-pipe Rule. As in “lead pipes rule.” Break the code and they’d break something else.

The whole system, legend has it, came down from Cain, who murdered his brother, tried to bury his secret, lied about it, and began a gang on the side,

though the demographics of that remain a mystery, since there was only one family at the time and it isn’t generally known as a crime family.

Anyway, Cain got his preemptive oaths of secrecy from the devil, the being who set up the bogus transaction in Eden and later drew the blueprints for the Tower of Babel, the corporate headquarters for what eventually became the Gadianton Group.

Let me just summarize the devil’s résumé: (1) he wrote the instructions for every sin; (2) he wrote the lyrics to every bad song; (3) he wrote the secret codes for avoiding detection by outsiders, or, conversely, ensuring detection by insiders. He particularly likes to manipulate emotions. In the end he is, pardon the wordplay, a heart surgeon.

Now he had a firm grip on the heart of Nephite-dom. Statistics showed that most Nephites were now bad, over-individualistic to the point of quasi-narcissism, and endlessly tantalized by shiny objects.

This metamorphosis had happened quickly, like an ambitious magic trick. Seriously, most of the change needed only a few months in Year 67, then into Year 68.

What ensued was cultural atrophy. As their obsessions and predation grew, their sensitivities shrank. And they looked all the punier for the rising religious quotient of the Lamanite population, who studied sacred books and practiced kindness, almost to the point of competitiveness. It was almost a note of pride to say one had been more charitable than another.

God, who hates disloyalty, quietly savors reversals. Sometimes the only justice one can enjoy is irony. And he knew all about that.

The Lamanite police moonlighted as preachers. So when they cornered any member of the Gadianton Group, they started to preach, maybe thinking that would be punishment enough for some of the perps to recant. It wasn’t long before the Gadianton Group had shut down its operations in Lamanite territory.

On the other hand, it was a land-rush business among the Nephites. People couldn’t run fast enough to get into this or that chapter of the group. Gadianton franchises went up everywhere. “Cut-rates” for business took on a new meaning. And the only things that got discounted were the sacred vows of the past. Prophecy—and some prophets, actually—went out the window.

The merger of state and business was unprecedented. The rich not only got richer, they squeezed out small-scale competitors with threats and incarceration. The war on poverty was now the war on the impoverished. As for those who took oaths of benevolence—legitimate Christians, that is—they got sent to the whipping shed. Corporate punishment became corporal punishment.

If the Nephite society were a fruit it would be a bad avocado on the windowsill, softening in the hot sun, about to split open and stink up the whole house, i.e., the universe.

Year 69: