Volume 13, Number 2 (2011)

Irreantum Staff

Editor Josh AllenFiction Editor Lisa Torcasso DowningPoetry Editor Jim RichardsCreative Nonfiction Editor Brittney CarmanCritical Essay Editor Karen Marguerite MoloneyLead Copyeditor Elizabeth Petty BentleyCopyediting Staff Lotte Willian and Liz JensenLayout Marny K. Parkin

Association for Mormon Letters Board

President Margaret Blair YoungPast President Boyd PetersenBoard Members Mark Brown, Dennis Clark, Eric Samuelsen, Philip Snyder,

Charles SwiftSecretary Darlene YoungMembership Secretary Kathleen Dalton-WoodburyTreasurer D. Matthew JarmanAwards Coordinator Dennis ClarkWebmaster Jacob ProffittBlog Moderator Jonathan LangfordAML-List Moderator Stephen Carter

Front cover: Window, abandoned house—Squirrel, Idaho, Brian Atkinson

Irreantum (ISSN 1518-0594) is published twice a year by the Association for Mor-mon Letters (AML), PO Box 581422, Salt Lake City, UT 84158; www.irreantum.org.

Irreantum vol. 13, no. 2 (2011) © 2011 by the Association for Mormon Letters. All rights reserved. Membership and subscription information can be found at the end of this issue; single issues cost $14 (postpaid); double issues, $16. Advertising rates begin at $50 for a full page. The AML is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, so contributions of any amount are tax-deductible and gratefully accepted.

Views expressed in Irreantum do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or of AML board members. This publication has no official connection with or endorse-ment by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Irreantum is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

5 From the Editor

7 Darin Cozzens The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand 59 Laura McCune-Poplin Anonymity 99 Mark Brown The Iron Door

34 Tyler Chadwick I once found religion at the dollar store; Self portrait with closed eyes; Landscape, with a Cricket’s Chirr; Litany, with Wings; Pater Noster

73 Jared White Celestial Bodies; Speaking in Tongues; After Reading Exodus; Poetry as the Art of Theft; Walking through Winter in Rexburg, Idaho, after William Blake

27 Suzette Gee Being Alone: Variations on a Theme 47 Kathryn Lynard Soper Seeing Stars 83 Melissa McQuarrie When Trees Fall 119 Kerry Spencer Who Peeks Through the Veil

135 Laura Hilton Craner “Everything That Actually Matters is Real” Anneke Major’s The Year of the Boar

139 Kevin L. Barney Saint Jana Jana Riess’s Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor

145 Doug Talley The Architecture of a Poem Lance Larson’s Backyard Alchemy

153 About the Artist 154 Contributors

Fiction

Poetry

Reviews

Creative Nonfiction

Volume 13, Number 2 (2011)

ı-rē-ăn tum

And we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum,

which, being interpreted, is many waters.

—1 Nephi 17:5

Irreantum is a refereed journal published twice annually (Fall/Winter, Spring/Summer) by the Association for Mormon Letters.

We seek to define the parameters of Mormon literature broadly, acknowledging a growing body of diverse work that reflects the increasing diversity of Mormon experience. We wish to publish the highest quality of writing, both creative and critical.

We welcome unsolicited submissions of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and plays that address the Mormon experience either directly or by implication. We also welcome submissions of critical essays that address such works, in addition to popular and nonprint media (such as film, folklore, theater, juvenile fiction, science fiction, letters, diaries, sermons). Critical essays may also address Mormon literature in more general terms, especially in its regional, ethnic, religious, thematic, and genre-related configurations. We also seek submissions of photos that can be printed in black and white. We welcome letters and comments.

Please visit www.Irreantum.MormonLetters.org for submission instruc-tions. Only electronic submissions will be considered.

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From the Editor

The oldest scar on my body is on my left foot. It’s thin and faded, and it snakes its way from my big toe to my knobby ankle. I got it one fall morning when I was just three years old. My mother was biking me to preschool, and I was riding on the back of her ten-speed in one of those little toddler seats. Somehow, my foot got caught in the spokes, and we crashed to the ground. Mom says my screams that morning were shocking—quick, gravelly, and surprisingly loud. She scooped me up, and that’s when she saw my tennis shoe, ripped open on one side and blood pouring out.

That was thirty-four years ago. Today, I can’t remember this wreck. What I do know of it comes from Mom—borrowed thoughts. Still, the scar is there. It’s faded and skinny, just a tiny white string stuck to my skin.

I have other scars, too. There’s the inch-long scar on my left index finger. I got it in 1994 while trying unsuccessfully to saw up a wood-pile. And there’s a barely noticeable scar on my forehead. I got it when I walked face first into the corner of my office door in 2003. Thank-fully, it blends right into my natural forehead creases.

There’s a large round scar in the middle of my chest. When I was a senior in high school, I went for a late-night run, and two miles from home—away from the lights of Riverton, Utah—it grew so dark that I didn’t notice the road sign right in front of me. I clanged into it and gashed myself wide open. That scar’s faded now, but for years it swelled and puffed and shined bright red and looked embarrassingly like a weird third nipple. Thank heaven for chest hair.

Of course, those aren’t all my scars. If I stood in front of a mirror and took my time about it, I’m sure I could find plenty more—fat ones on my knees, faded ones on my elbows, a long forgotten one on my shoulder, a chicken pox scar on my neck. And don’t even get me started on emotional scars. You’ll be here all day.

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So, yes. I am scarred. Banged up. Ripped open. Gashed. Chances are, you are too.

And, in my mind, that’s a big deal.Ask a group of children sometime to tell you about their scars,

and you’ll see what I mean. Even the most hyperactive of children will stand in line for hours just to tell you about his scars. You’ll hear about the exact numbers of stitches, the date and time of the injury, the black look in the eyes of the dog that caused it, and the flavor of the lollipops the chubby nurse was handing out in the emergency room. Pant legs will be lifted. Shirt sleeves will be rolled.

Stories emerge. Poems arise. Tiny philosophers compose lyrical essays. Quite suddenly, without warning, children who don’t even know how to read will be speaking in narratives, offering cautionary tales, waxing comic, exploring ambiguity.

Is this where literature comes from? Could it be that every work of art is really just the manifestation of a scar?

After all, it seems to me that scars prove two things:First, scars prove that we’ve been wounded. They reveal our weak-

nesses, our follies, our humanity, and they stand as a testament of the chance encounters we’ve had with pain. Doesn’t literature do the same thing?

Second, scars prove that we’ve healed. Whatever wounds we have borne, as we look at our bodies each day, those scars are evidence that time does heal. Doesn’t literature do this also?

In this issue of Irreantum, you’re going to explore a few scars. You’ll see the wounds of loneliness, of loss, and of so much more. And yet, at the same time, you’re going to read about how those wounds have healed—how they’ve crusted over and flaked away.

One day, Christ will come again, and when He does, He will stand before us and bare His scars. He will show us His hands and His feet. He will open His robe and reveal His pierced side.

When He does, I think there will be only one way to respond. We will stand, lift our pant legs, roll our sleeves, and show Him ours. Until then, we have these stories, these poems, these essays—testa-ments of the scars we bear, evidence of the healing we believe in.

—Josh Allen

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The Last Blessing of J. Guyman LeGrand

Darin Cozzens

Say the name J. Guyman in this part of Wyoming, and any Mor-mon older than I am will start quoting bits of a patriarchal blessing given at his hand. This is not horoscope or palm reading; this is a blessing. So just out of reverence, such quoting ought to be a more pri-vate affair than it sometimes is. But you can’t really blame people, not when so many promises through the years have turned out, especially the unlikely ones. The spinster marries. The barren wife conceives. The prodigal comes home. All in the Lord’s due time—which can be a long time, for sure—but all foretold nonetheless.

By the time I had my turn in the ladder-back chair in his tidy par-lor—June 1978—Stake Patriarch J. Guyman LeGrand had been giving blessings for forty-four years. Figuring from the day in 1934 when he was ordained by a visiting apostle, that period covers two full genera-tions of Mormons, including my parents and my older sisters—Afton Rae, Leona, and Eden. The way it works in the Church, he was not paid a dime for this service; he earned his living as a machine foreman at the sugar-beet factory in Ralston.

At some point in those forty-four years, the recording method changed from his wife’s stenography to a tape recorder, and Brother J. Guyman retired from the sugar-beet factory. And somewhere along the way, he wore out three or four Sunday suits and turned into an old man. But the blessings kept coming as powerful as ever. Hundreds of them—given in the same little house in Balford, by the same priesthood authority, to an endless line of young people with the same hope for the future lighting up their eyes. Thousands of them—all transcribed by Sister LeGrand on the same old typewriter, mailed out in the same timely fashion.

1st place winner, 2011 Irreantum Fiction Contest

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Only one thing made mine any different.It was the last one he gave.At sixteen, I couldn’t know he would lay his fairly steady, ninety-

seven-year-old hands on my head one Sunday afternoon, address me in full—Everett Tolbert Godwin—pronounce my patriarchal blessing, and be dead by that evening. At sixteen, I couldn’t know that within thirty years after feeling those hands on my head, dry as papyrus, I’d lose my dad, then the farm, and now my mother, and wind up, at age forty-six, working as an inspector for County Weed and Pest. None of which, by the way, was anything my blessing gave me to expect.

What I did know, sitting in my Sunday clothes in that ladder-back chair, was that the things Brother J. Guyman LeGrand said by the power of his priesthood office surged through my scalp and down my spine. With my arms folded and eyes closed, it was as if there weren’t any years between the Ever Godwin in that chair and the one who would provide for a wife and children through tillage and reaping, gleaning the comforts and necessities of life on land entrusted to him by his fathers. Those were the words. It was a strange and sobering thing to be sixteen and feel no distance of time between me and my progeny.

Or between me and my progenitors, either. By the summer of 1978, my grandpa Warner Godwin had been dead eleven years; I hardly remembered him. But during the giving of the blessing, I could see him wresting that land from the wilderness. That was the verb that came out of Brother J. Guyman’s mouth. I saw this wresting as Grandpa Godwin grubbing and burning sagebrush below the canal Loop—which he’d helped dig with a team and slip shovel—and my dad, in his boyhood, endlessly picking and piling and hauling off rock. To credit myself with some part in the wresting, I imagined jabbing my irrigating shovel upright between the grubbing hoe and rock sledge.

Tillage and reaping, wresting and entrusting. That’s what the bless-ing says. Not failed farmer hired as a weed inspector because he hap-pened to have a college degree in Ag Econ. At eighteen, I didn’t want to go to school at all, BYU or anywhere else. I planned to farm and

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didn’t much like pulling out on Labor Day, leaving my dad with eighty acres of unharvested beans. But my going meant everything to my mother.

Ag Econ! That’s rich. Just because several cousins on her side of the family were getting master’s degrees in business administration didn’t mean that’s what I had to do. So—Ag Econ. If you’re really going to farm—and not just loan money to farmers or sell them insurance or machinery or, in my case, police their weeds—you can pretty much boil eight semesters of lectures and textbooks down to this: Spend less than you make. My dad saw that law as being etched so deep in stone even a patriarchal blessing couldn’t counter it. But when things started going bad for us, I really half expected a divine overriding. I cited precedents. What about the spinster or the prodigal? My dad said, “Don’t you think, from God’s angle, they might have a little bet-ter claim on a miracle?”

My dad asked that question the morning the blood clot in his leg broke loose and drifted toward his heart. He was loading the hopper of the barley drill, down in a field Grandpa Warner called the milk-weed patch—to honor the one crop it could make with any predict-able abundance. The doctor explained it like a gob of mud hitting the fins in a water pump. Boom. His aortic valve sort of exploded. He was sixty-nine.

I held on for three more years, but there was no divine overriding. The only definite change in my prospects came when the man from FHA’s Denver office showed up one morning to tell me it was time to call it quits.

“It’s a blessing in disguise,” my mother said. “You can finally use that college degree I talked you into getting and make a steady salary.”

I’ve never told her, but there isn’t much about Ag Econ you need to know to drive around in a county pickup espying weeds. My patri-archal blessing does not mention turning into an offender for a word, which is pretty much how farmers regard the weed inspector. I know. They suffer him wandering their side roads and scrutinizing their plant life for one reason: so he’ll sign the “Weed Release” they need in order to sell their crops. You might want to nip that little patch on the ditch

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bank before it seeds out, Dean. Say, Harold, have you tried Roundup in that paddock of yours? Of course, the farmer is the one who has to do the actual nipping or spraying before the release is granted. In the five years since I lost the farm, I haven’t touched a machete or spray nozzle. I advise. I consult. I sign with a flourish. Everett T. Godwin. Serving agriculture in the Shoshone Valley. Smiling picture, with the whole Weed and Pest gang, in the New Year’s edition of the Balford Clarion.

“Could be, with the Pearly Gates calling, old J. Guyman wasn’t at the top of his game,” my uncle Eb told me one time. Uncle Eb’s a Jack Mormon and prides himself on a nose for doctrinal soft spots. If you don’t believe in the idea of God knowing you and everything that’s coming, then saying a farm kid will take over his dad’s place is nothing more than prediction. But I do believe. On the very day I graduated with my degree in Ag Econ, I told my parents I had decided: I wanted to come home and farm. I was twenty-four, unmarried, and not the least bit tempted by a steady salary.

My dad was delighted. As we took our pictures outside the gradu-ation hall, he said, “With your brain and my backbone, we ought to be able to earn the porridge.” Between his hat line and his poorly knotted necktie was a face ruddy with windburn, shaved maybe twice a week, not counting Sundays and graduations. After the wet combing wore off, his thinning hair was always at odds with his scalp. Yet, as he stood among students and professors in their robes and hoods, there wasn’t an envious or apologetic bone in his body.

My mother was not so delighted. She waited as long as she could, between the picture taking and lunch, before she said, “I hope you’ve given this a lot of thought, Ever. You could still apply for a master’s.”

I had given it a lot of thought, and I gave it some more that night. While my parents slept, I drove their car on the long road back to our corner of Wyoming, toward the farm and what I thought my life was going to be. Just before he laid hands on my head, Brother J. Guyman, patriarch and retired machine foreman, felt it meet—as he put it—to clarify two points. First, he said, “Don’t blame God for war and cleft palates.” Then, regarding the line of inspiration from God to the patri-arch to the person in the ladder-back chair, he gave me this counsel:

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“Any troubleshooting regarding what is said and what is understood had better commence at the bottom of the chain.”

For my mother, the surest sign of my blessing’s divinity would have been for my future in farming never to have been mentioned in the first place. Every chance she got, from the time I went to Brother J. Guyman until I left home three years later for my mission in the Philippines, she made that feeling known.

“Ever, you don’t want to farm,” she said on raw March evenings when my dad and I came in from riding cabless tractors. “Go get a college degree, for heaven’s sake. Train your mind for office work.” As my dad and I peeled off coats and coveralls, and jockeyed for the hot spot in front of the gas stove, she said, “Are you even listening to me?”

Yes, but I was in no mood to question my destined livelihood. Nights like that held too many rewards—the pleasant ache in the palm from the steering wheel knob, the warmth creeping back into my limbs, pork chops and boiled potatoes and bubbling-hot gravy wait-ing on the table, the good smell of baking-powder biscuits just out of the oven. Office work! The thought was repugnant.

My dad’s brothers all ended up away from the farm, and I wouldn’t have traded places with any of them, certainly not Uncle Eb and his ditch riding or Uncle Gurn roustabouting in the oil field. To me, even Uncle Rector cruising Balford’s streets in his snazzy police car was no step up. When he told his story of lying to the Navy recruiter about his age, he meant to emphasize the lucky timing of Pearl Harbor, how it spared him another summer of weeding and irrigating for Grandpa. I never understood why farming fared so badly in his comparisons.

Or in my mother’s. After family reunions at Aunt Helen’s big house, my mother was despondent for a week. For therapy, she rearranged furniture, beat rugs, and scrubbed everything in sight. “Your sister cer-tainly did well for herself,” she often remarked to my dad, referring to Aunt Helen’s marriage to Uncle Frett Jr., the banker.

On those cold spring nights, when I wouldn’t question farming, my mother turned to my dad. “Tell him, Tolbert. Tell him he doesn’t want to be out in the wind the rest of his life.”

“I don’t know, Mina. There’s worse places.”

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“And my patriarchal blessing says—”“I know what it says, Ever.”And she did. She and my dad had sat with me that Sunday after-

noon in Brother J. Guyman’s parlor, his last afternoon on earth. When the official copy of my blessing came in the mail, my mother right away retyped it herself, on carbon paper; she needed enough copies to complete the family sets she gave us all for Christmas that year. I won-der sometimes if her fingers paused, itching to make changes, when she came to that paragraph about tillage and reaping.

“Uggh! This heat,” she said on hot July nights, sitting close to the screen door and fanning herself with a Reader’s Digest. “Tell him, Tol. Tell him he needs to get out of the sun. Tell him what it’ll do to him.”

“I don’t know, Mina.”“And my blessing says—”My mother had her reasons for feeling the way she felt. Her patri-

archal blessing said she would refine her musical talents and use them as an ambassador for the gospel. In her middle teens she came to believe that particular line meant she might someday sing in the Tab-ernacle Choir. At the very least, it seemed to mean she would put a lot of distance between herself and her dad’s pig farm over by Cowley, and that was promise enough for her. She had a good voice; in just three quarters of college she took all the singing classes BYU offered. One of her teachers said she had the makings of a professional and arranged to send her to Chicago to prove it.

But a couple of months before she was to go, she met my dad at a stake dance in Lovell. He was just home from the Army. Before long, in accordance with another part of her blessing, she was convinced he was the worthy spouse she was supposed to share the fortunes of life with. And so she did. I have in mind forever a picture of my parents sitting at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, green FHA Farm Budget Planner, and a stack of bills.

“I don’t know where it’s going to come from, Mina.”“Well, I don’t either, Tolbert.”The greater the uncertainty, the more she sewed and patched, grew

and canned, plucked and stewed. One year, to follow a magazine’s

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prescribed schedule for planting raspberries, she had me in the garden plot in the middle of a spring snowstorm with a spade and bucket of water. In the constricted oval of her scarfed face, her nose dripped like a pipe leak. “Some August,” she said against the wind, “when you’re enjoying your breakfast berries with cream and sugar, you’re going to thank me.”

My mother’s sharing of fortune cost her more than just hard fru-gality; she never quite made peace with her lot. At church everybody appreciated her good voice, so she was called on pretty regularly to sing in sacrament meeting, at wedding receptions and harvest-dinner talent shows. But that sort of singing is not the Tabernacle Choir. And she never got to Chicago. Once in a while she spoke of how lucky we were to have what truly matters, the blessings money can’t buy, the sort of thing people say in testimony meeting. But most of the time she masked her feelings for the farm behind a defensiveness. Didn’t coaches and Scoutmasters know that some people actually had to work in the summer? Did activity planners think the whole world got off at five o’clock? Catch her in a certain mood, and the ticket to heaven was calluses and a backbone crippled sore from field work.

From time to time, frugality became deprivation. Why didn’t we ski or snowmobile in the winter? Or head for warmer places, to golf or ride sand dunes or whatever she pictured people doing in the name of fun? Why didn’t we have hobbies? She always asked that question after one of Uncle Rector’s visits. He liked to hunt pheasants on my dad’s place—he and Uncle Frett—and made a habit of stopping by every few weeks in the summer to see what was growing in the fields and how much bird cover he could expect come fall. He always had a new story about hauling Aunt Lib’s silly dog to some show in Bill-ings or bowling in the town league or riding the square dancing cir-cuit. During the leanest stretches every year, despite the language of her blessing, my mother made out like my dad was the one standing between her and better fortunes.

“Other farmers find a way to take off, Tol. The Binghams and Teagues are always going up to their cabins to boat and fish—where it’s cool. Why don’t we ever do that?”

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“The Binghams and Teagues have things I don’t have, Mina.”“Like what?”“Like a boat and cabin, for starters.”It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t have known what to do with

leisure if she’d had any. My mother in a nylon snow suit? In a golf skirt and visor? I can’t feature that. This is a woman who had slopped and docked and clipped needle teeth by the time she was ten years old. Don’t misunderstand me. She had faith in patriarchal blessings, her own and her children’s. She did. But she could be pretty selective in how she read them. She naturally loved any mention of mission-ary service or temple marriage or keeping the faith. But the older she got, the more she loved phrases she could read as guarantees of suc-cess and fulfillment. Whatever her definition of those two things, she went to her grave thinking they had eluded her.

She didn’t want them to elude her children. And if they didn’t elude any of her children, if all four of us turned out successful and fulfilled, then maybe she could make a vicarious claim.

That’s why she told Afton Rae not to let anything distract her from heeding the phrase in her patriarchal blessing about applying herself to her studies—and, in the process, earning a full scholarship to BYU. And nothing did, not even the returned-missionary son of Jersey Teague, one of the biggest farmers in the valley. The kid really liked her and was every bit the stalwart son of Zion promised in Afton’s blessing. But a couple of weeks into the relationship he made the mis-take of confiding that he planned to take his place on his dad’s dairy.

“Afton, you don’t want to get up at four o’clock the rest of your life to milk a herd of cows.”

So with tears fresh from the breakup, my sister went off to BYU, where, in her second year, she met Bennett. After the fourth date, she called home.

“An optometrist!” my mother said into the telephone. The stirring or beating or chopping for the supper pot stopped cold, and I heard her say, “Oh, my.” Career choice was all she needed to know about this guy named Bennett. Returned missionary, active in the Church, a

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young man of honorable intentions? Yes, yes, yes. But optometrist! That clinched it. What better guarantee of comforts and necessities? Of getting out of the weather and off the farm? And that’s what Bennett was doing. He grew up himself on a wheat farm in Agate, Colorado. Just as long as he didn’t plan to take Afton back to it, that upbringing was a bonus to my mother. It meant his folks wouldn’t look down on the daughter-in-law’s upbringing; it meant Bennett knew calluses.

Kayle C. Lowder was a little different story.“A lawyer!” my mother said when Leona telephoned.Kayle Lowder was from Costa Mesa, California—which meant

he suffered a sore backbone, when he suffered any bodily discom-fort at all, from too much surfing. But, eight hundred miles from the beach, he didn’t have to worry about surfing during summer school at BYU. From the moment he and my sister met at a pool party at their bishop’s house out in Orem—after a couple of his impressive backflips off the diving board—they knew they were more than just compatible. So she brought him home in early August 1979, only a little over a year after J. Guyman’s death.

“So, Kayle, do you have hobbies?” my mother asked at supper on the first day of their visit.

He said his patriarchal blessing promised the means and opportu-nity to enjoy life to the fullest. “So, yes, Sister Godwin,” he said, “you could say I take my hobbies pretty seriously.”

She was already smiling at the way this tanned wonder from the land of beach food was shoveling in her roast and rolls and fresh green beans, but now she beamed and said, “Just call me Mina.”

To that point in the visit, Just-Call-Me-Mina had spent her time apologizing—for our pair of smoldering burn barrels, for the chop-ping block and outhouse (with assurances that we did have a bath-room inside), for the kitchen’s slightly intestinal smell from several days of canning green beans. But now, as she looked from Kayle the Complimenter to Leona the Lucky, she could beam and relax. If hob-bies were in his blessing, he was destined to be a good provider. And coming so far just to meet her country folks must mean he had all but decided Leona was the one he wanted to provide for.

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After supper, in his California shorts and an old pair of my dad’s irrigating boots, Kayle stood swatting deerflies on the ditch bank while I moved water on a cornfield. He caught me looking at him.

“City slicker, huh?”As long as he knew his place in my cornfield, he was okay. I couldn’t

find anything not to like about him. When we were introduced, he had even complimented my name. “Ever? Like never-ever? That’s gnarly.”

But then, out in the field, after watching me for a while, he asked, “So do you really like farming, Ever?”

Ah-hah! Let him stand five minutes on a ditch bank instead of a surfboard, suffer a few fly bites, and the California beach kid was bound to come out after all.

“What’s not to like?”“Nothing,” he said, without stooping to my tone. “There’s nothing

not to like, Ever. You’ve got a good life here. You really do.” He hesi-tated. “But will it be enough thirty years down the road? That’s all I’m saying.”

What does that mean—enough? I’m still wondering. According to Kayle and his patriarchal blessing, it meant hobbies, of course. But, as he confided there on the ditch bank, it also meant his mission to a foreign people (in Italy), the rest of his education (in law school), and a life of rewarding toil with Lowder, Lowder, and Son, the law firm his grandpa had started during the Depression. Kayle’s future was set. Someday soon he would file lawsuits for people cheated by big companies and share the good things of the earth with a lovely daughter of God.

“And now, because of her, I’m standing in a cornfield in Wyoming!” said Kayle Lowder, laughing and happy. “Isn’t it amazing how the Lord keeps his promises?”

The success and fulfillment of her two oldest daughters gave my mother high hopes for her third—until Eden made her call home.

“He sells what?” my mother asked.What kind of guy believes goat-whey lotion is his ticket to wealth?

And how does that one guy, out of thousands, wind up married to my sister?

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Eden was different from Afton and Leona. She liked the farm. When we were little, and young enough not to understand how things work between husbands and wives, we actually planned to raise our kids together on my dad’s place. She didn’t go to college to escape menial drudgery; she went to act on a phrase in her patriarchal bless-ing about seeking all the education to which she could attain. So she attained two years’ worth, and, at age twenty, she attained Milton Mur-dock, from Ely, Nevada—a six-foot-two, 230-pound ex-linebacker with a head full of thick hair, a white-toothed smile, and a surgery scar on each kneecap. When they met, he was eight months home from his mission and only recently cut from BYU’s spring tryouts.

“You think I’d work like a dog to come back from two blown knees—wear ankle weights every day for two years in Korea—if I didn’t think I was meant to play Cougar football?”

He asked this question of Eden on their first date. Back in Ely, he said, when he was making most of the tackles for the White Pine Bobcats, everybody called him Mighty Milt. But not anymore. Lick-ing such a wound, he was bound to have looked handsome, easy to see as the one intended for her. Maybe that’s when she said that with faith and hard work, the sky’s the limit. And maybe that’s when he looked in her eyes and decided the Lord might have something besides foot-ball in mind for Milt Murdock. Whatever happened on that date, it happened two weeks before a big UPS truck delivered three pallets of goat-whey lotion at the top of the concrete stairway of his basement apartment.

The new plan was to make millions selling the lotion, then retire on the interest and serve the Lord in ways only rich people can—spon-soring scholarships, fundraising to fight poverty and disease, having buildings named after them. If goat whey caught on, he wouldn’t have much time for college, so, with only two semesters behind him, he dropped out.

But goat whey didn’t catch on. Nor did tap-water filtering systems, nor night-crawler sod stimulant, nor family survival kits in a bucket. Nor Therma-Zap. That’s the last one I was privy to before I gradu-ated and went home to Balford.

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“Come with me, Ever.” Milt was hungry for the per-head “bonus” he would earn taking guests to a Therma-Zap recruiting “seminar.” He invited my roommates too. But Tucker, long ago burned out on Amway, said no thanks. And Rolo, who mostly watched TV through four years’ worth of evenings in Provo, suddenly had an appointment at the library. “Looks like it’s just me and you,” Milt said. “This might give you a whole new perspective.”

What it gave me was the willies. Four or five overgroomed ex-missionaries in three-piece suits and tasseled dress shoes, bearing testimony of attic insulation in front of a hotel conference room full of penniless college guys. At the end of the show, the ringleader, the winner of last year’s Hawaii trip, trotted in from wherever he’d been hiding and introduced himself as Val. He parted his hair slightly off-center and wore contact lenses with a turquoise tint. Blinking with well-practiced sincerity, he allowed there’s nothing wrong with digging ditch or pounding nails all summer, for five or six bucks an hour—if a person is satisfied with that.

“But, gentlemen,” he asked after a long pause, “is that going to sat-isfy you?”

No!“Do you think the Lord wants you earning peanuts when you could

make ten or fifteen thousand dollars—in one summer?”NO-OOO!You would’ve thought we were rallying for the virtue of sisters and

mothers—not foam pellets. And eight long years after Mighty Milt Murdock made one last goal-line stand, on knees already ruined for college ball, he could join again in thumbs-upping and whistling.

“Go-ooo Therma-Zap!”He left Eden seven months pregnant with their third child, went

out to Portland and shared a flat with several of the two hundred guys who, like him, had stampeded to the sign-up line. They just knew they were meant to make all those thousands—a minimum for can-do self-starters with stick-to-itiveness, promised the fast-blinking Val, who saw the world through turquoise lenses.

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Cozzens: Last Blessing

Milt lasted a month going door to door, had to borrow for a bus ticket to get home.

Go Therma-Zap.

One night in March, a couple of years after I graduated and left Provo, Eden called me and confided that none of the schemes since Therma-Zap had turned out any better. Once upon a time, the sky might have been the limit, but not anymore. She was crying. To make rent, she explained, Milton managed the apartment complex they lived in. He did do that. He was a good guy, she assured me, and she loved him. But he wasn’t the one begging day-old bread from a bakery, lining up, week after week, for government-surplus honey and cheese and powdered milk. He wasn’t the one hauling babies around on two different paper routes. “I tell you, Ever,” she said, “I never thought life would be this way.”

She blew her nose and apologized, said she had to tell somebody and was tired of listening to our mother harp on how Milt should have gotten an education like Bennett and Kayle, how a coaching job—or any job at all—would look pretty darned good about now.

“Maybe I should have encouraged him more in that direction,” Eden said. “But he was so convinced that this was what he’s supposed to do. How do you argue with that?”

That was as good a question for Never-Ever as for Milton Mur-dock. In a lifetime, what is enough? At the time of Eden’s phone call, Grandpa Warner had been dead over twenty years. I sort of wished I could phone him and ask if it was going to matter in the hereafter whether I held on to the land he grubbed out of sagebrush. Godwin, Godwin, and Son.

“I don’t know why I’m such a boob tonight,” Eden said. Then, after a pause, she said she missed the fields in April, green with new grain. She wondered if we were busy getting ready for planting. She hesi-tated. She said they were coming for a visit the next week—was there any chance Dad and I could use Milt on the farm for a while?

“Does Milt know you’re talking to me about this?”

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“I’m going to tell him,” she said.After our good-byes, I thought how strange life is. I loved the farm.

I did. On the last leg home from the Philippines, in a prop plane from Denver to Cody, I choked up when Heart Mountain came on the horizon and I could place again the little patch of Wyoming I grew up on. And a few years later, after my own graduation ceremony, I was antsy to get home. My folks were looking forward to dinner and a movie and a second night in a motel, which was as close to a vacation as they ever got. Yet, at the time, I saw my offer to drive through the night as a great generosity.

But home for the long stretch was different from home between semesters of school. Not so much better or worse—just nothing within the range of my foresight. When Eden called, I was already headed into my third season using my Ag Econ degree to drive worn-out, cabless tractors in forty-degree weather. Those hours breathing diesel exhaust went a long way toward dispelling the charm of wind, of living by myself in a trailer house above a milkweed patch, of sit-ting every Sunday on the back pew with old Widow Penroy and her bachelor son Hewell.

And riding the tractor seat only magnified the charm of the BYU life I was in such a hurry to leave. With each hour roller-harrowing in lonely fields below Balford, college girls got prettier, classrooms warmer, and Provo skies bluer. I found myself envying my old roommate Rolo, of all people. He had finally gotten up off the couch and was going for a master’s degree—in business administration. Unbeknownst to him, his chosen path met with my mother’s hearty approval. On top of that, he was dating the profoundly beautiful cousin of my other roommate, Tucker. Through many hours of engine throb and self-pity, I wished for another of Tucker’s many fair and marriageable cousins to come loping toward my tractor on a white unicorn, its hooves unmuddied by tilled ground. The Lord must wonder sometimes if we don’t actu-ally relish discontent.

At breakfast, a couple of days after Eden’s call, my dad and I dis-closed our intention to offer Milt a job. My mother looked up from her oatmeal and said, “Are you both out of your minds?”

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Cozzens: Last Blessing

I said, “It’s got to beat goat lotion and attic insulation.”“Ever,” she said, “I’m not sure farming beats anything.”I never told her what went on in my head while I drove tractor. She

would have said, “See what I told you?” And she would have missed the point. Dreaming bluer skies didn’t make a case against farming; it made a case against dreaming bluer skies.

True enough, I hadn’t predicted life with any accuracy to brag about. But my mother hadn’t either. While she rightly foresaw her own satis-faction with her two oldest daughters’ full and happy lives, she didn’t foresee its underside: the envy hidden amid her fuss at every new bounty made possible by optometry and law; the cheerfully swallowed hurt when they laughed at her methods—scraping swill into a bucket perched right there on the clothes dryer, baking with lard, stretching a can of tuna to its utmost limits with mayonnaise; the smiling weari-ness at my sisters’ overdone praise for their modest upbringing—Oh, Mother, how did you ever do it with just one bathroom and that old car?

It was odd, but in such moments my mother actually took up for the farm. “We made out all right,” she said. “You two look like you survived just fine.” At such times, she actually cast me as an ally. “Your brother here came back,” she said. “He must not have minded the life so much—did you, Ever?”

Still, my mother didn’t want Eden to come back; she wouldn’t go that far in taking up for the farm. But her worries about our Milt strategy were wasted. He wasn’t the least bit interested in the munifi-cence of Tolbert and Ever Godwin.

“You mean like farm work?” he asked, sitting across from me and my dad at the kitchen table. “With you guys?”

Now that it was clear how he felt about our work, we kindly asked what sort of work he was partial to. He didn’t hedge at all, at least not in the way you might expect of a guy who hadn’t drawn more than half a dozen paychecks in a row in almost eight years of marriage. “I want to succeed,” he said resolutely, parroting one of the motivational hucksters whose books and tapes he was always pushing on my folks.

My dad told him that a lot of life depended on how you looked at success and failure. And, in my tender wisdom, I said the wealth

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promised in his patriarchal blessing might have to be read as some-thing due a lot later in life. Or maybe it couldn’t be read as money at all. Milt had never seen my dad as anything but a good old farm guy and my mother as an able meat-and-potatoes cook, but he respected them. So out of that respect, he made a show of at least considering my dad’s point. But mine? In one ear and out the other.

Then, very politely, with a conviction Therma-Zap Val would be proud of, Milt said to both of us, “I think when the Lord says material success, he means material success—sometime in normal mortality.”

So Milton and I ruined my mother’s clean sweep of success and fulfillment in her children.

Nevertheless, by the fourth year of farming with my dad, I could have stood in somebody’s cornfield and checked off a good many of my own promised blessings. Tillage and reaping—I had that one for sure, all day, every day. The biggest one missing from that season of my life was the lovely daughter of Zion. And without that one, I couldn’t see how my promised parenthood would come to pass.

“It’s not a new problem,” my dad said on another cold March eve-ning, after another day of windy tractor work, over another supper of pork chops and gravy. “Look at Isaac and Rebekah; look at Jacob and Rachel. Many a great man has had to go beyond his native borders to find a worthy helpmate.” He kept his eyes averted from my mother, whose spatula was sliding two biscuits off a hot cookie sheet onto his plate. “For that matter,” he said, with no change of tone, “look at Tolbert and Mina—he had to go all the way from Balford to Cowley.”

It took a moment for that last sentence to register with my mother. When it did, she clucked her tongue at my dad’s effrontery and mur-mured, “Many a great man.” But for an instant, with her spatula poised above the millionth biscuit of her life, she smiled.

I was no great man. I lived in a single-wide trailer above a milkweed patch. I knew who was at the bottom of the chain and where to direct my troubleshooting. In counseling Milt Murdock, I was more than willing to delay his blessing to some distant point. Yet I was hoping to claim my own a little earlier than that. And a hundred times a day

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Cozzens: Last Blessing

I invoked his logic to justify that claim: When the Lord says a wife, I think he means a wife—sometime in normal mortality.

And so he did.“You’re going where?” That’s what my future wife’s father said when

she announced she was coming to Wyoming, to teach history at Cody Community College. Like any father in his shoes, he naturally wondered why Jen had applied for something in the boonies when hometown Fresno and other nearby California places had all kinds of schools where someone with her degree could teach. Jen didn’t know—until her other possibilities evaporated. But she still didn’t know why Cody was the one that didn’t evaporate. We hadn’t known each other very long when she told me all this. “Come to find out,” she said with less-than-romantic resignation, “Cody is pretty close to Balford. And Balford—a spot on the globe I never otherwise would have had the pleasure of knowing—is where you happen to live.”

A farmer! Oh my!Even in my most maudlin white-unicorn moments, I could not

imagine my future mother-in-law uttering that line in her Fresno kitchen while talking into her Fresno telephone, at least not with any positive intonation. As part of my marriage proposal, I told Jen about the tillage and reaping, wanted her to see the same inevitability I did. She said I was confusing a blessing with a plan and forgetting who was responsible for each. She said it sounded like I wanted mortality to be neater than it could be. She said maybe I was trying to hold the Lord accountable for making me, Everett Godwin, accountable. Then, after a long pause, she said the Lord might have guided her to Balford, but he wasn’t forcing anything. “What you’ve done with your life so far is your choice,” she said, “and whether I do it with you from here on is mine.”

When my mother died a few weeks ago, my sisters and their fami-lies of course came home for the funeral. After the dedication of the grave and the Relief Society meal at church, we all went back to our house on its half-acre lot in Balford, the house Jen and I moved into when I lost eight hundred acres of farm land and pasture. Our children

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and their cousins—and their children—had the run of the yard and house, except for the living room. There, on the sofa and loveseat, my sisters sat close to their husbands. Jen and I sat in kitchen chairs.

“Ever miss the old farm . . . Ever?” Kayle Lowder asked, to break the somber silence. Even in mourning, he was fascinated with my name. He said he thought of me every time he came across a client chris-tened with something unusual. Eventide. Glory. Rainbow. “I kid you not,” he said. “That’s what got signed on the dotted line.”

After a moment, Eden looked at me and asked, “Do you miss the farm?”

The quiet in the room was like a lid I didn’t want to lift.After a moment, Afton Rae said, “I know I miss it.” Then she said,

“It was such a good way to grow up. I wanted so much for our grand-children to see that way of life.”

“Yeah,” said Milt, who lately was managing a takeout barbeque res-taurant in American Fork, Utah, and selling animated movies of Book of Mormon stories, “but it’s sure a tough way to make a buck.”

Bennett, who has made an awful lot of bucks checking people’s eyes in his string of optometry clinics in Denver, nodded with a very reflective look on his face.

“I always just assumed,” said Leona, “that you’d end up farming Daddy’s place, that we’d keep it in the family. Doesn’t your patriarchal blessing say that?”

The room fell quiet again. We had all lived beyond the halfway mark of our lives. As spouse or parent or human being, every person there had known some piece of the mortal mix—if not money prob-lems, then something else. Sickness and setback, a wayward child or two, shaken faith. Even a cleft palate.

But then Jen, who remembers history better than most and always gives faith its due, said, “He did farm it—for twelve years.”

A week or so after my sisters went back to their lives, I found myself driving over what used to be my dad’s farm but is a farm no longer. I went not on Weed and Pest business, but to help with a service proj-ect for a couple from church who moved here from Lansing, Michigan.

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Cozzens: Last Blessing

It was the first time I had made myself go back since I lost the place five years ago. Turning down the properly graded and graveled lane was like launching a tour of my own failure. I found myself trying to decide where my mother’s raspberry patch might have been, but there were no toeholds for memory. Barns, bins, burn barrels, chicken house, outhouse, our house—everything was gone except the land. And it was cut up into lots for new-home units, one of which now belonged to the nice couple from Lansing. Their big brick house was all but finished; they just needed help landscaping the sizable yard.

“Before we get started,” the wife said, using the balustrade of her front porch as a rostrum, “I just want you all to know this house—and your help—is an answer to our prayers.” She said her patriarchal blessing promised she would raise her children in a place of peace and beauty, away from the dangers of city life. “We feel we’ve found that here in Balford,” she said. She looked then to her husband, who made everybody laugh when he pointed to two approaching trucks and said it looked like it was time to work for some of that peace and beauty. He asked if we’d gotten the word to bring wheelbarrows and shovels and rakes. Soon enough we knew why. One truck was full of rock, and the other, potted sagebrush.

Midafternoon of a warm day in June, thirty years ago, Patriarch J. Guyman LeGrand stood behind a ladder-back chair in his parlor, on two spots of carpet worn in the shape of his Sunday shoes. At that moment, he was alive and lucid and, as he put it, healthy as a horse on oats and beet molasses. A few hours later he was dead.

He and Sister LeGrand had been married seventy-five years. In her sudden loneliness, she told many people, including my mother, the story of his last hours. Even after Sister LeGrand died herself, that story nagged me; I wondered if she had blamed me, if maybe she thought giving my blessing had something to do with that afternoon being her husband’s last. But, strangely enough, since my mother’s death, that same story has been a comfort.

After my blessing, after my parents and I drove off, Brother J. Guy-man returned the ladder-back chair to its place in the corner, put away

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the tape recorder in his little closet-office, and changed into a pair of blue cotton coveralls. Then he went outside to move the lawn sprin-kler. Sister LeGrand said he looked at her begonias for the longest time. He finally came back in, read scriptures, and announced he was going to lie down a minute before evening prayer and his Sunday sup-per of bread and milk. A little later she set the bowl and pitcher and loaf on the table, then peeled and sliced a peach the way he liked it.

“Papa,” she called, “you don’t want the milk to get warm.” Only when she had called a third time did the dread come over her.

When J. Guyman retired from the sugar-beet factory, the bosses gave him a nice pocket watch. Lying in his blue coveralls, on the nar-row bed in their cracker box of a room, he was clutching that watch in one of his papyrus hands and staring with the most amazed expres-sion at something through and far beyond the ceiling. After all those years of inspired foresight, what fell under the sweep of his eye there at the end? Something beyond tillage and reaping, I’m sure of that. Lately, riding farmers’ back roads, I imagine my mother looking and looking in the same direction. And whatever she sees, whatever lies in front of her now, it is enough.

27

Being Alone: Variations on a Theme

Suzette Gee

I.

“I usually don’t wet the bed if I say my prayers,” my niece, Ainsley, assures me as she climbs into the bed in my spare room. It’s her week-end to be spoiled by her single auntie. She lies back on the pillow, her head resting in a pool of lamplight.

“It usually works better when I pray lonely,” she says.I smile at her. “You mean when you pray alone?”

“Yeah. Lonely.”

II.

I’m at church, in my usual spot on the back row, one arm leaning against the wooden armrest of the long, red upholstered bench, the other resting on my bag full of singing-time props. This is the miscel-laneous row, unofficially reserved for never-married singles, like me, widows, or empty nesters.

Brother Hawkes makes his way along the back row of the chapel, pushing his aged father in a wheelchair. He leans over the wheelchair and shakes a few hands as he passes. Looking at the silver-haired peo-ple on either side of me, he asks, “Are you sure you’re old enough to sit on this row?”

Sometimes families, usually visitors, try, unsuccessfully, to sit on the bench. Since the singles are spaced unevenly, it’s awkward to squeeze a family in between them. Once a family persisted, asking

2nd place winner, 2011 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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the singles on either side to move so that they could wedge each family member in as they arrived. After scooting over three times, I finally picked up my stuff and moved to a metal folding chair in the cultural hall.

III.

I spot Jeff in the Super Walmart parking lot. A smile spreads across his face as he approaches.

His older brother and I starred in the musical Oklahoma together and made school history by spending thirty minutes in the wrestling room learning how to kiss. (Only a couple of minutes were spent kiss-ing, the rest in nervous laughter, which ended when Mike took me by the shoulders and shook me, saying, “Stop resisting!”)

“How many kids do you have?” he asks, positive that at any moment, a dozen of my offspring will join us.

“None, that I know of.”

IV.

Janel chats with me, as we cross paths in the hallway after church one day. “Jerika comes home from Young Women all the time saying, ‘Why isn’t Sister Gee married? She’s so pretty.’”

V.

Craig is here for another weekend. We’re driving down Main Street, his elbow resting on the middle console, a hand hovering just above my knee. I’m not sure why he does that. Like the anticipation is better than the reality.

“I like it here,” he says, looking around. “It’s like the Garden of Eden.”I can feel the hesitation in his voice. The hand hovering above my

knee. But . . .“It’s just not my Garden of Eden.”

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Gee: Being Alone

VI.

I sit on a metal folding chair during an institute devotional as a speaker tells of his father, a farmer who raised a child with disabilities.

“How do you handle this?” someone once asked his father.“Well, it’s like carrying a sack of grain. You just throw it up there

on your shoulders, so it’s good and square, and then, by damn, you bear it.”

VII.

On a Sunday morning, I sit in my olive green chair, feet perched on a leather ottoman. I have a few hours before church. I read through my patriarchal blessing and notes from other blessings I’ve received, all of which mention my future marriage. At age twenty, they were comforting. At forty, perplexing. I stop, looking out the picture win-dow at my arthritic boxelder tree. Sigh.

Maybe I’m Not Trying Hard Enough.I wander into my study, flip open my laptop, and get on the Inter-

net. I purchase a book: Why Can’t I Fall In Love: A Twelve-Step Pro-gram by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. A friend recommended it.

For good measure I also purchase Fortytude: Making the Next Decades the Best Years of Your Life—Through the 40s, 50s, and Beyond.

Finally, I log in to ldssingles.com. I scroll through a few screens. Should I sign up again? I shut the laptop. Maybe after I’ve lost a few pounds.

VIII.

My book slips onto my lap as I lean back on the rickety lawn chair I inherited from my grandparents, breathing in the intermit-tent waves of lilac perfume released as the wind whispers through the bushes. I close my eyes and let the sunlight seep beneath the fringe of my eyelashes. My cell phone rings. I open one eye to peer at the caller information. Jodi Cell. I flip it open.

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“Hey.”“Whatcha doin’?” my sister asks over baby Hannah’s whimpers.“Just lying here in my backyard, reading a book,” I say sleepily.“No fair,” she sighs.

IX.

Before church starts, I sit in the chapel on a bench, talking to my friend Melissa about her freshman year in college.

“All of my roommates are either dating or engaged. It’s so boring,” she complains. As we talk, a ward member comes over to greet us. As he leaves, he checks Melissa’s hand for an engagement ring. She raises her hand and wiggles her ringless fingers. I hold mine up too.

They laugh.

X.

I stand in the kitchen, spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. When my phone rings, I squeeze it between my shoulder and ear and listen while an acquaintance tries to set me up with a relative.

“He’s had some problems. He cheated on his wife and left the Church for a while. But you know . . . .”

“I know.”The last two slices of bread always make a sandwich.

XI.

My sister’s kids troop into my house, some heading straight for the toys, others for the piano. After the first few minutes of happy chaos pass, Abby proclaims, “You live here all by yourself. You don’t have any kids.”

She’s trying to sort me out. Categorize me. Like on Sesame Street. One of these kids is not like the others.

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Gee: Being Alone

XII.

I try to navigate a lettuce wrap to my mouth, while two former mission companions fill me in on their lives—husbands, kids. We laugh about things we’ve seen on each others’ blogs.

“You know we all want to be you,” Tammy says matter-of-factly. The lettuce wrap pauses on its way to my mouth, juice leaking onto my fingers.

“Me?” I ask in confusion.“No kidding,” Marla agrees. “Where are you off to next? Morocco

one month; Alaska the next. The only traveling I do is with Dora the Explorer.”

XIII.

I pace around the house, straightening pillows, glancing at the clock. My stomach is a pool of acid. I go to the bathroom every few minutes. Blind date. Twenty minutes and counting. I piece together the fragments of what I know about him.

He works on a farm. He loves to sing. He lives in Utah. We could work around it. No ex-wives or children to worry about. Maybe he could live here with me.

Suzette. You haven’t even met him.“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love,

from love to matrimony, in a moment.”And who asked you, Mr. Darcy?

XIV.

I wake up too early on a Saturday morning and lazily drag my foot over pale green, silky sheets, thinking hazily about the Relief Society activity I attended the night before. Reviewing the people who were there, I realize that all of the attendees were widows, divorcees, and singles. My invitation didn’t mention that the event was for singles only, and suddenly I’m oddly offended. I lie there with a frown,

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wondering why people’s thoughtless comments make me laugh, while their conscious thoughtfulness sometimes stings. Suddenly I’m not a person. I’m a project.

I complain later to my parents.“It took you that long to realize only singles were there?” my dad

says with a laugh. My mom just looks concerned; if I seem unhappy then she’ll start worrying.

“I guess it was the assumption that I had nothing to do on a Friday night that bugged me. Or that, because we’re all single, we’re all the same, whether we’re forty or eighty.”

My parents don’t say anything.

XV.

Four months after my Grandpa’s death, I lean over and hug my Grandma as my parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews all file out the door after our weekly Sunday visit—several hours of visiting while eleven children periodically stampede through the living room like wildebeests in a nature documentary.

“It’s so quiet when everyone leaves. It’s the loneliest feeling,” she says with wide eyes.

She’s still surprised by it.

34

I once found religion at the dollar store

Tyler Chadwick

—the Word, wrapped in cellophane rippedon the binding side where the price tagshould have been, top-shelved besideatlases full of trips my daughters havetaken across the in-laws’ living roomfloor, roving Grandpa’s hardbound bookof oversized maps with an eight-by-ten lensthat gives an omniscient eye, makes the hillswave, the oceans and rivers climb the banksof their innocence; beside pocket plannersand a package of Wrigley’s the clerk will have torestock on an impulse tier because someonechanged minds, chose the two-for-a-dollarnut rolls instead, let the chewing gum liea half-aisle down.

*

—and again on a morning run up Galbraith Hill:the rise and fall, longer rise and fall of bodyagainst wind, flesh pressed into dawn likethe New Zealand fern leaf I flattenedin my KJV and smuggled past customsinto the canon of memory; the leaf I’ve climbedlike Eve Adam’s rib, Jacob angels’ chatter, ChristHeaven’s Manichean spring, my soul rubbed thinon the altitude, God at my heels, the cricketsgone dumb in the thrum of His entourage,the meadows tongue-tied at their sigh.

Honorable mention, 2011 Irreantum Poetry Contest

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Chadwick: Poems

*

—and now in Noachian blue: in dove swellheavy as Eden in fall, flesh come ripe as Evespooning with amniotic sky, the delugereceding in purl and girth of vestment, wind,and limb bent beneath atmospheres of God;in the leaf ribs she tells like a roadmap to peace,tests for the pulse of the tree Adam plantedthe night they buried Abel, watched Caindrift into dusk, his pathology thick over fieldshe and Abel had idled as boys, wrestling bodiesblending into harvest like Abel’s bloodthe moment Cain pulled the blade, heard Lucifer’slaugh in the gash, and turned to wipe his handson the flock come to drink from the river of God’ssudden tears.

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Self portrait with closed eyes

like a brumal serpentlistening to Earth

shed her crystalline

skin, slip off her chillat dawn’s seductions

supple as hibernacula

warm with bodiesslendering into instinct

and appetite—Eden’s

infinite metaphorssidled up to God’s breast,

areola iron on the tongue,

milk rich from desire’s simmerand slow burn, the flame

set low so not to sear the soul

still this side of vision, lurkinglike the mourning dove’s

anti-climactic elegies

teasing Eve from herbackwoods mythology

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Chadwick: Poems

heavy with temptation’s

pome and tang and the raspof cherubim wings strung like

words along Lucifer’s tongue

as he conjures shame fromher constant wound—fig

weeping matins in Eden’s half-

light while Adam snoresdownwind, only stirs when

she’s roused scent enough

to slip into his dreamsas the rib slipped from his side

the morning God stopped by

and found the basket of figshe’d left last visit

still sitting on the altar,

thrumming with June Bugsundone in the eating, mad

with the zephyr’s rasp

through the scales of the constrictorstretched at sleeping Adam’s side.

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Landscape, with a Cricket’s Chirr

Beneath the ramble and catch of tumbleweed: the lull of horizon delicious with distance and elegy,

dead-ends and blue highways hoarse with the whisper of wind, dust, wood, bone, memory—the grist

of solitude stirred up the morning you woke determined to pluck the sun from God’s thigh

as he passed, full-stride, over this side of town. That’show Jacob got new-named, you say

when the story comes up with friends—and strangers, for that matter.Like when you were painting

plein air roadscapes outside Redmond and you used it to ply conversation with the breeze as she watched you

seduce landscape from ripples of soul stirred by her sigh. Yes, you say, that’s how Jacob got new-named.

Never mind it was his hip flicked out of joint when the angel stopped wrestling fair, wrested God

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Chadwick: Poems

from Israel’s shank. Never mindyour layover in Peniel via Genesisleft sand in the visions you put on

and off like shoes at Mnemosyne’sfire ring. Never mind that won’t earn you a cross-reference from “Jacob (see

Israel)” in God’s Almanac of New Names: From Michael (seeAdam) to the Present. Never mind

God hasn’t appended his reputation to your presence on these roadssupple as a cricket’s chirr

from the cleft between landscapeand soul, soul and skin, skinand the palette you’ve mapped

like the zephyr’s tattoo: blue-veined compass rose sown in the right inner-thigh, points unfurling like

worlds from God’s tongue the moment his syllables slipped into desire, he seduced the first coo

from the fecund dove,and the wilderness rapturedwith verbs.

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Chadwick: Poems

Litany, with Wings

With Thee, O, let me rise, let me combine. O, let me imp my wings on thine. Let me slip across your lesser coverts like the lift that slips you into sky. Let me hitch on that lift up Jacob’s ladder. Let me spoon with your slipstream beneath the atmosphere’s sheets. Let me tease plumes of light from the altar of your skin. Let those plumes purl like incense. Let us purl like incense. Let’s sear the soul’s tabernacle, let desire rise like leaven, let our verbs rise like leaven, let our flesh braze and sweeten on God’s flaming tongue. Let’s allelu this sacrament of flesh. Let’s savor the body’s carnival. Let’s masquerade singular as Legion. Let’s legion singular as God.

–After winged figures by George Herbert and J. Kirk Richards

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Pater Noster

The breath of life that comes in sharply once, and is forever after going out.—Jim Richards

i. Litany

Ah! to, snakelike, tongue your subtle psaltery. To

taste your staves profane as the Gloria Patris

tonguing my cheek, tonguing the irresistible,

iron-rich canker I’ve mapped like a bad habit,

traced and retraced like a compass rose

etched in the mouth’s wilderness. To tell

faces sketched from memories remembered

sidelong, laid down on lambskin scraps strung

like shrunken heads on God’s rosary, features

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fingered dull through a Sibyl’s aeon spent

stroking the omniscience she inherited from her folks.

To lip the oracles you’ve lipped like live coals

passed in God’s palm to purge the palate.

To savor how her Verb verbs everything else,

how her cleft-tongued hymn

seers everything else.

ii.

Scratch that: sears. Like

the conversation kindledbackstage memory.

The one you can›t help eavesdropping on, pressing

your ear to a glass pressed to the partition you raised

to keep the noise down.Next door, a chorus

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incants oracles fromthe soul›s velum. But all

you hear is the string of blasphemies you let

slip from your dreams just before you wake.

iii.

No. Not blasphemies:God›s image stripped bare,

retrofitted with words pinched from the dove›s

dictionary, etymologies shat on the water›s face,

turned spindrift, pronounced, Elegy. Movement. Desire.

Grace. Breaths skipped while you translate

the body’s pieties into stones pale and smooth

as faces waiting, waiting to be named.

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iv.

Like the pebbles my two-year-old

plucked (and repeat) plucked (and repeat)

plucked (and repeat) from stones pooled

in the feral lot next door, her wonder brushed

impasto on words you can’t help but tongue:

Look. Rock. Roly-poly. Reticular desires

relentless as the DNA between us. As the verbs

we’ve fallen into. As the pill bug carapace down

in her palm, parsing the breeze, kicking air

to finally bring itself right.

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Seeing Stars

Kathryn Lynard Soper

I. Descent

It’s an hour or so from sunset when we pile into the Jeep—me and my roommate Stacey, her friend Dave, his friend Tim, and a couple whose names I can’t remember, who Stacey and I squeeze next to in the back seat. It’s the beginning of my sophomore year at BYU, early September, 1990—a few weeks since I met Reed, the man who becomes my husband eighteen months later. I’d rather be with him on this Friday night, and I regret promising Stacey that I’d come along for a caving trip west of Utah Lake. Tim starts the Jeep and I search in vain for a seat belt

The warm air pushes against my cheeks as we pull onto I-15 south and Tim accelerates to freeway speed. He pops in a cassette tape, and Led Zeppelin blasts from the stereo speaker, reminding me of humid east-coast nights after high school graduation. I first heard the music years ago, vibrating through my brother’s bedroom door; I stole his cassette tapes and listened to while them lying on my bed, using a battered Walkman with foamy earphones. The tapes came with me to Provo, where I sat under a tree next to the freshman dorms with my Walkman blaring “Whole Lotta Love.” I wondered if I’d ever find my place in the high Mormon desert. A long year later, I’m finally catching glimpses. When we hit Santaquin and leave the freeway for Route 6, I boost myself to sit above the Jeep’s back seat, knees over the headrest, hands gripping the black foam padding of the roll bar, hair whipping in the wind.

1st place winner, 2011 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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The western horizon glows rose pink as we leave Route 6 for High-way 68, driving north to Elberta. After the seven-mile turnoff there are gravel roads and cattle gates, then the rise of Blowhole Hill, which houses Nutty Putty Cave. When Stacey told me about the cave I pic-tured an arched hole in the side of a mountain, with damp passages leading past formations of stalactites and stalagmites. But when the Jeep stops we’re nowhere near a mountain. The hilltop is barren with dead scrub brush and outcroppings of broken rock. I have no clue where the cave might be, but I’m too cool to ask. Tim leads the way toward what looks like a moon crater ahead, and as we approach I see a black hole in its middle. The cave opening. Apparently going in means going down.

Dave and Tim go first, lowering themselves from boulder to boul-der into the darkness split by flashlight beams from above. They spot the rest of us as we climb down, and as I descend, I feel the thin, dry air of the hilltop swell with moisture, which soon dampens my lungs like a swampy Maryland night. Once we’re all inside, Tim points the way forward; we duck our heads and follow him through a tight pas-sageway that narrows to an opening barely big enough for an aver-age-sized college kid to trespass. We get down on our stomachs and wriggle through the opening in a long-forgotten primeval motion, and I’m surprised by the ripped piece of carpeting that pads the bottom of the tightest place, evidence of the modern world we’ve left behind.

We emerge into a more manageable space known as the “Big Slide,” a sloping cavern studded with boulders that we scramble over on our way down, grateful for thick jeans and long shirtsleeves that shield our tender flesh. The cavern walls are close enough to touch with both hands, and we move single file, feet first, pulled by gravity deeper and deeper into the earth. Fifty yards ahead, the cavern widens into a pocket of space, the “Big Room,” where we sit and rest on the bedrock. The damp air makes the flashlight beams opaque. At one point Tim and Dave turn off their flashlights, and we plunge into utter darkness, thick as ink. I can’t see my hand in front of my face—I’m not sure it even exists. I would doubt that I existed at all, that anything existed,

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were it not for my voice bouncing off the rock walls and returning to the twisting cavern of my inner ear. I tamp down my panic and crack jokes as a way of whistling in the dark.

But even when the flashlights snap on again, I can’t shake the uneasy knowledge that I’m so far below ground that light cannot reach me. We retrace our steps up the Big Slide, breathing the thicker, hotter air as we crouch and then crawl and then squirm our way back toward the cave entrance. Night has fallen since our descent, and when we reach the cave mouth, I’m disoriented, unable to see the way out. Tim and Dave climb up and shine their lights through the opening, and when my turn comes, I follow the yellow beam up to the surface and out into the hilltop air, shockingly cool and thin in my gulping lungs. As I move out of the light, I look up, and my mouth gapes wide:

Stars.I’ve seen stars before, of course. As a child I spotted the Big Dip-

per on Brownie camping trips and slept beneath a twinkling sky on our family sailboat. I saw scattered white glimmers over the night-black Atlantic during our yearly trips to the shore. But even when far removed from the ambient light of the cities and the suburban sprawl, I never saw anything like this. I have never seen this inverted bowl of blackness pricked by a billion points of blue-white light. I have never seen heavenly bodies flowing in currents like a brilliant river, the milkiest of ways. And if I hadn’t followed Tim down into the cave I wouldn’t be seeing it now, either. Something similar, yes. And still impressive. But only to one emerging from the dank bowels of the earth could the world be this vast, this clear, this fresh and bright and wild.

What shocks me most is realizing the stars were already there when we descended into the cave. They were there as we drove along Highway 68 and Route 6 and I-15. They were there when the sun peaked at noon and when it peeked at dawn. As I continue to stare, the gears of the universe shift and the earth slowly rotates, making the stars whirl around and above my head, like a diamond kaleidoscope spun by the hand of God.

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II. Blue Boy

The kids and I are decorating Christmas gingerbread men when the phone rings. I sigh, knowing that even a few minutes’ interruption could spell disaster in a kitchen full of rowdy kids wielding tubes of frosting. I head toward the phone, snatching the sprinkles away from twelve-year-old Ben, who’s sprinkling them straight into his mouth. My mother’s name shows on the caller ID; I pick up to tell her we’re in the middle of a mess and I’ll call her back. “I need you for just a minute,” she says, and her numb voice stops me short. When I ask her what’s wrong, she clears her throat and says, “I have some bad news about your brother.”

My brother. George. He is my only blood sibling, elder by two and a half years. He was my ally when our parents’ marriage ended, my witness in the troubled wake of our mother’s remarriage, and my sole partner in the subsequent dance between two families separated by divorce. On holidays we’d make our way through the maze of cheek-kissing Greek relatives crowding our Yia Yia’s living room. Together we’d survey the buffet table, snitching pieces of roast lamb and bak-lava from the shining silver platters. Together we’d doze in our father’s smoke-filled Oldsmobile on the long drive back to our home. Dad would drop us off across the street a half-block away from the house because he couldn’t tolerate any closer proximity to our mother.

But we stayed close, George and I. Once a month we navigated an overnight stay at our father’s dark townhouse in Capitol Heights, where we holed up in the wood-paneled den to watch Love Boat and Fantasy Island and eat Jiffy-Pop. During family vacations on the Dela-ware shore we spent days crashing through the green gray Atlantic waves, popping bubbles of seaweed, and poking jellyfish with sticks; in the late afternoons we’d roam the tar-creased boardwalk, buying crappy novelties from the beachfront five-and-dime and wasting hours in the arcades, where I’d faithfully stand at George’s elbow and watch him play Spy Hunter and Galaga.

Even after he outgrew family vacations, he drew me to his side again and again, often sequestering me to listen to whatever music he was currently obsessed with: Rush in the early eighties, Metallica in the

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late; Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin throughout. I loved it all, because he loved it. Each track is a memory: “Fly By Night” is the beach house bedroom we shared, with cheap prints of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Lawrence’s Pinkie on the walls. “Brain Damage” is his deodorant’s muskwood scent, which permeated his bedspread and drapes. “Over the Hills and Far Away” is the day he drove our mother’s blue Ford van home from an explosive family therapy session; dizzy with rage, I picked a spot on the back of George’s gingery head, and I stared at it, like a dancer spotting for a turn, while Robert Plant yowled poetically through the stereo speakers about following the open road.

The last time I saw George, he was driving a van, a battered pea green camper-top VW belonging to the guy riding shotgun, a dead-head with stringy black hair and vacant eyes. It was 1997, years since we’d crossed paths during one of my trips to our hometown. The depression we’d both suffered from a young age had followed us into adulthood, but while my life took a sharp upswing after leaving home, his continued its downward spiral, moving from substance use to abuse and addiction. He blew out a knee in a car accident just weeks before he was to join the army, and then blew the $60K insurance settlement that could have given him a life, leaving him broke and broken, drifting from state to state and sleeping on friends’ couches. I knew we had grown apart, but until he pulled that van into my drive-way, I didn’t realize just how different our lives had become: I had a house, three little kids, a stable marriage, and a temple recommend. He had a rucksack of filthy clothes, a box of Grateful Dead bootleg tapes, and a pal named Jelly.

The two men stank, so when they asked if they could do some laun-dry, I readily led them to the basement, where they stripped naked right in front of me and put on the least dirty clothes they could find in their bags and threw the rest in the washing machine; when I came back downstairs to check the cycle, the wash water draining into the utility sink was muddy brown and heavy looking, thickened with earth. I knew they must be hungry, so I made them vegetarian sand-wiches—grilled provolone on rye, my specialty—and watched them devour several each. My kids watched too, from a slight distance, shy

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in the company of this uncle they didn’t know. I wondered if George noticed how much two-year-old Ben looked like our father, but I didn’t get a chance to ask—as soon as the laundry was done, they hit the open road. I waved good-bye from the front porch, balancing the baby on my hip and holding Ben’s hand to keep him safe as the van pulled out of the driveway.

The crash came two years later. Nevada, fall of 1999. Two people died; a strict new DUI law held George accountable. He received two prison sentences, each two to twenty years. After serving his mini-mum four years, he was released on a writ of habeas corpus due to controversies surrounding the new law and to misconduct by his attorney, who was disbarred soon after George’s trial. But now, just eighteen months later, in December of 2006, the state’s appeal has been granted and my brother has been summoned back to prison to finish his full sentence, which might last longer than his life.

But he hasn’t gone back. This is what my mother calls to tell me: instead of complying with the warrant, George has disappeared. Nobody knows where he is headed—Canada? Mexico? Nobody knows when, or if, we’ll ever hear from him again. I stand in the mid-dle of my kitchen, hands itchy with flour and apron smeared with but-ter, with my children chattering in the background and the smell of cinnamon billowing from the hot oven and gobs of frosting hardening on the countertops, while my brother runs scared, over the hills and far away, looking for a cave to hide in.

III. Day of the Dead

When I come inside from lighting the jack-o’-lanterns, the boys are waiting for me.

“When are we going to go?” Sam asks from behind the white sheet of his ghost costume.

“Yeah, let’s go,” says pirate Matt, swinging his pumpkin-shaped candy bag. He is eight and Sam is six. None of our older four kids are willing to be seen trick-or-treating with their parents. Matt and Sam would actually be pleased to have both of us tag along, but taking a

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long stroller ride in the dark is not our preschooler’s idea of a good time, so one of us will stay home with him while the other walks the neighborhood. I know Reed will refuse to take the boys more than a few blocks, so because I am I good mother, I volunteer. And because I am a bad mother, I bring along my iPod, placed strategically in my jacket pocket so that I can easily hit pause if the kids stop thinking about candy long enough to talk to me.

I’ve forgotten that kids can think and talk at once, and they keep up a steady stream of chatter from the moment we step off our porch. It’s a glorious not-too-cold Halloween night, with crisp autumn air and a magical indigo sky, and as soon as the boys are occupied at the neighbors’ door I scroll through the iPod menu to find the right music for the occasion. Although my tastes have mellowed as I’ve aged, I’ve been in a Led Zeppelin revival phase for the past few weeks, and they’ve got the perfect song: “The Battle of Evermore,” a delicate bal-lad set to impossible melodies on mandolin and Jimmy Page’s three-necked guitar.

The queen of light took her bow and then she turned to go, The prince of peace embraced the gloom and walked the night alone. The dark Lord rides in force tonight, and time will tell us all— Oh, throw down your plow and hoe, rest not to lock your homes; Side by side we wait the might of the darkest of them all.

Matt and Sam scamper up to show me their loot before running off to the next house. Supposedly, the treat begging echoes the medi-eval traditions of All-Hallows-E’en, when cakes and wine were set outdoors as offerings for the deceased, and All Souls’ Day, or the Day of the Dead, when the cakes would be distributed to children and poor folk who went from door to door singing and praying for the deceased in purgatory. Every cake eaten represented the freeing of a soul from that limbo state between heaven and hell.

Somehow I doubt the Twizzlers and Snickers in the kids’ pumpkin bags will hold the same redemptive value, but I won’t begrudge them their annual candy fest, especially now that their oldest siblings are outgrowing the fun. Ben, now fourteen years old, no longer presides

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over the post-game candy trade, cutting shrewd deals and scamming the littlest players like my brother George once did. Diagnosed with clinical depression two years ago, Ben is withdrawing from our family circle more swiftly than I anticipated. He still talks to me about music and school and friends, but I can no longer hold his hand to keep him safe, as I can with Matt and Sam. Watching the two little boys gape at the full-sized candy bars handed out by one generous neighbor, I real-ize they will never be more open to me, more eager for my company, than they are now.

On impulse I look up at the night sky. It shows few stars due to the artificial light and pollution of the Salt Lake Valley, but I can see the telltale angles of the cup of the Big Dipper. Large trees are blocking the full view, so I change my position on the sidewalk, and Matt and Sam return from their latest candy conquest to find me peering into the distance. I try to show them what I’m looking at, but pointing doesn’t quite do the job. With the help of reference points from roof-tops and tree limbs, Matt finally spots the constellation. Sam does too, or at least pretends he does. Matt’s eyes are glowing with discovery, and I’m thrilled for him. But I’m also sad that he doesn’t know how much else is up there, sad that the only Milky Way he knows is in his pumpkin bag.

I want them to see the stars. I will take my kids camping, Matt and Sam and anyone else who still looks when I point—last time we went, years ago, they were too little to stay up past dark. Better yet, I will take them to Nutty Putty Cave, where they can experience not only the vastness of the sky but the closeness of the earth, and know both through contrast. Rather than just showing them the stars, I will first give them the adventure of crawling underground like the worms and ants they study in our backyard. Then I will lead them out of the stifling narrowness into the starry brilliance of a clear night, and they will see what I saw, and know what I know.

But as I follow the boys up our street and watch them break into a run at the sight of our house, there is much I do not know. I do not know that three weeks hence, on November 24, 2009, a man named John Edward Jones, age twenty-six, a student at the University of

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Virginia’s medical school spending Thanksgiving with his family, will join eleven companions for a trip to Nutty Putty Cave. I do not know that the six-foot-tall, 190-pound man will separate from the group to successfully traverse a narrow cavern called the Birth Canal only to become lodged in a pinch point at its far end, a cervix eighteen inches wide and ten high. I do not know about the twenty-seven-hour rescue attempt which will follow, involving more than 130 volunteers, and that Jones will hang headfirst, 125 feet below ground and 700 feet into the cave, for more than eight hours before a rope-pulley system will ease him free and lift him to an upright position. I do not know that a failure in the rope system will soon drop him back into the pinch point, where he will slowly suffocate from pressure to the chest, and that he will die around midnight on November 25, leaving behind a wife and a baby daughter.

When I do come to know these things, some time later, I will also know that due to the extremely high cost and danger of retrieving the body, the family agreed with state and local officials to entomb it in the cave, and that, despite hundreds of protests, the cave’s main entrance was sealed shut, in addition to the passageway holding the remains. The way in and out is now blocked by a concrete plug. A stopper in the blowhole. A stone sealing the tomb.

Visitors might regain access to the main entrance at some point in the future, but even if the cave reopens, I know I will never reenter it. I could not force myself to squirm through its narrow openings while remembering the botched delivery of John Jones. I could not guide my boys down the rocky slope of the Big Slide with the knowledge that one man never climbed back up again. I could not sit with them in the inky oblivion of the Big Room, so near the corpse of the young father, hanging like a soul in purgatory, quietly decomposing in the dark humidity of the Birth Canal.

IV. Stairway to Heaven

We are entwined in bed when the phone rings. We let the machine answer, annoyed by the interruption but determined not to lose focus.

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Seconds later the phone rings again. Reed mutters something, and I silently curse whoever is lame enough to call repeatedly at 10:30 p.m. When it immediately rings again, Reed lunges out of bed, grabs the phone from the computer desk and barks a hello. I brace myself on behalf of the caller, probably one of the kids’ clueless friends, who’s about to get an earful. But Reed doesn’t say much. All I hear is “yes” and “okay” and “thank you” in a tone of voice I can’t identify; I can see the outline of his upper body in the window’s faint backlighting but I can’t see his face. After half a minute he hangs up the phone and turns on the light. “Get dressed,” he tells me.

Ten minutes later I’m backing the car out of our driveway, my head buzzing with adrenaline, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel. Ben is in the passenger seat. I drive as fast as I dare toward the nearest hos-pital, leaving Reed behind to watch over the little boys. When we’re two blocks away, Ben groans and clutches his stomach. I pull over, and he opens his door and vomits on the side of the road. His shoulders heave again and again. I lean back against my seat, limp with sudden relief. Once the retching stops I get out of the car and study the pool of vomit on the asphalt. In the yellow light of the streetlamp I see what I was hoping to see: intact capsules, blue and white, at least a dozen. These are the capsules he swallowed without water minutes before, from the prescription bottle with his name on it, holding a ninety-day supply of antidepressants. When I tossed the bottle on his bed that evening, reminding him to refill his pill case for the week, it was jammed full. An hour later, when Reed and I burst into his base-ment bedroom, it was half empty. Ben sat on the side of his bed, still holding the laptop he’d used to compose a suicide note and email it to his best friend, who (thank God) is not clueless and didn’t hesitate to call us, or to call us again and again.

I get back into the car and turn the ignition. Since the urgent medi-cal crisis has passed, our best bet for treatment is the pediatric hos-pital half an hour away, so I flip a U-turn and head east toward the freeway. Ben sits quietly next to me. I-215 bends and curves like the road we drove together the summer before last, a rural road leading from the Utah side of Bear Lake to Minnetonka Cave, a limestone

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formation tucked high in Idaho’s greening hills. We had the van win-dows cranked down and the iPod cranked up, and I played him “Stair-way to Heaven” for the first time. Tonight the windows are shut tight against the February chill, and there is no music playing.

As soon as I’m able to form sentences I begin asking Ben questions, and he answers me calmly and candidly, both of us pretending that words can help, that words can explain.

His voice sounds just like my brother’s in tone and cadence. His words are ones my brother might have spoken. I try not to notice, but at sixteen, Ben is more like George than I can ignore. Thankfully he has a stronger family, a stronger identity, a stronger support system—but he’s haunted by the same grim melancholy, the same crushing self-doubt. Like George, he carries an ink-black void in his heart that light cannot reach. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of Ben in his Led Zeppelin T-shirt or hear him laughing from the other room, I think he’s the ghost of my brother, and I shiver. Tonight, I am shivering.

The hospital rests on a mountain bench overlooking downtown Salt Lake City. It’s past eleven when we arrive. The ER parking lot is full, and the parking garage feels too far away, so I pull into a deserted loading zone. Ben follows me through the sliding ER doors to the tri-age desk. The admit nurse asks me why we’re here. I’m not sure how to answer. We’re here because Ben is having an acute psychiatric crisis. We’re here because I handed this kid my mental illness and then handed him a potentially lethal dose of medication. We’re here because my son wants to die.

I stammer something about an overdose and produce the half-empty prescription bottle from my coat pocket. A blonde nurse takes charge, peppering Ben with questions until she’s satisfied that he’s not an immediate threat to himself or others. He is stripped and gowned, weighed and measured, bled into a test tube, drained of urine, pumped with IV fluids. We are questioned by another nurse, a physi-cian’s assistant, the resident internist, and the social worker on call. When the lab reports indicate no toxicity, we’re put out to pasture in a room at the end of the hall. “It’s been a crazy night around here,” warns the social worker. “I might not be back for a few hours.”

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She shuts the door behind her. The room is cramped and dark, windowless. Ben passes out on the narrow cot, overcome by fatigue. I slump in the vinyl armchair in the corner, panicked by the closeness of his pain, this dank despair heavy enough to stop a heart. I try to pray. In my mind I envision that one, God himself, who came down among the children of men and embraced the gloom, alone. That one who, in due time, will lead his children out of the earth’s gaping mouth and into the clearest of nights. But as I sit in this pinch point of a room, my view of that future redemption is faint, too faint, a dim light flickering at the back of a cave. I can only cling to the hope of things unseen for my son, my brother, myself.

I’m startled awake when the door opens with a rush of fresh air. The social worker apologizes for taking so long; she was needed by a bereaved family in the pediatric ICU. I look at my sleeping child, bro-ken but alive. The resident has cleared Ben for discharge, and an ambu-lance is waiting to transfer him to the neuropsychiatric in patient unit down the road. Within minutes the EMTs arrive with a gurney and strap Ben down for the ride. He looks so young beneath the restraints, so weak and so pale, shrouded in the hospital’s white woven blankets. As he’s wheeled away, I wave to him, but his eyes are closed.

I gather Ben’s discarded clothes and walk through the sliding exit doors into the last vestiges of the night. It will soon be dawn. Approaching my car, I inhale the thin winter air, icy like menthol, which clears the staleness from my lungs. As I pull out of the hos-pital driveway, I see the vast valley spread below, its edges curved up into mountains that touch the overarching heaven. It is veiled by haze. When I look up, I see nothing but black. But when I look down, I see wide swaths of white and gold, countless lights forming constellations of cities and towns and neighborhoods, each bright spot marking a street, a home, a life. And it shocks me anew that so much goes unseen in the light of day, that only darkness can reveal these stars, these souls, glittering on the ground as if the earth has become the sky.

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Anonymity

Laura McCune-Poplin

Except on the brightest of days, the cement skyscrapers of Bor-deaux’s low income housing projects were dark and cold inside, their entries lined with metal mailboxes labeled in identical cursive lettering, not because the same person had written all the cards, but because all French handwriting looked alike. Even if Lucy had been blind, she could’ve identified the lobbies by the smell, lemon-scented ammonia and cigarettes, and by the sound of her black shoes on the tile floor.

Lucy bent over to read the mailboxes, her breath curling in front of her face as she silently mouthed names. Boudou. Crespin. Bredoutin. Chowachi. Mboup. Roux.

“Who are we looking for again?” she asked Soeur Miller, her com-panion since October transfers. When Soeur Miller got off the train, she stretched her long thin arms and belched so loud their district leader, Elder Williams, awarded her the title of honorary elder.

Soeur Miller pulled the ward list out of her backpack and turned the pages with her mittens. The names in the creases were illegible.

“Christelle Laborde.”“Are you sure there’s no apartment number?” Lucy asked. She had

a love-hate relationship with the part of missionary work involving inactive members of the Church. Although she could rationalize the hours spent trying to locate a missing person (which she much pre-ferred to contacting or tracting), she resented having to actually barge in on people newly discovered. She figured they had stopped coming to church for a reason.

“Nope. No number,” Soeur Miller said. “We could always tract her out.”

2nd place winner, 2011 Irreantum Fiction Contest

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Lucy bent over and resumed reading. “I’d rather look at mailboxes.”

“Whose turn is it to knock?” Soeur Miller asked as they climbed the stairwell, sweating beneath their winter coats, their footsteps echoing three floors high. There was an elevator in the building but Soeur Miller insisted on taking the stairs. In Bourge, she had ridden an elevator so old it had gates instead of doors and had slipped two floors and made her pee. She was so scared, she vowed never to ride another elevator for as long as she lived. Lucy didn’t mind. Some-times she and Soeur Miller would sing Christmas carols in the stair-well, their mediocre voices made beautiful with hollow acoustics and harmony.

“It’s this one,” Lucy said to her companion, waving her over. They stood on the straw doormat elbowing each other and repeating “you knock” until Lucy gave in. She always gave in, afraid of what some-body might do or say if they opened the door to find two American missionaries standing on the doorstep in the dark, hitting each other and whispering in English.

“She’s probably not home,” she said, sighing as she rapped the door four times. She always knocked in groups of four. Three felt incom-plete. A baby started to cry inside, and Lucy winced, knowing it was her fault.

“J’arrive,” a voice shouted as the door slowly opened to reveal a lit-tle boy, his diaper falling off and stripes on his face where tears had cleared paths through dirt and crusted snot. A woman wearing a mis-shapen T-shirt and carrying a half-naked baby on her hip yanked the little boy away from the door. “How many times have I told you not to open the door to strangers?” she said in French. Looking up, her expression changed from one of anger and apology to one of disgust.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, wiping hair from her face with the back of her wrist. In her hand she held a baby bottle. “I thought I told you never to come back.”

“Is there anything we can do for you? Any way we can help?” Soeur Miller asked, leaning to the right, trying to see into the apartment.

“You can leave.”

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Lucy nodded and started to turn away, but a little girl, wearing a dress two sizes too small, appeared.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything?” Lucy asked. She waved at the little girl, who smiled shyly and buried her face in her mother’s leg.

“Need? I’ll tell you what I don’t need. I don’t need your religion or your Jesus,” she said, letting go of the doorknob to cup the little girl’s head. The door swung wide and the living room became visible. It was clean, but almost bare: the only furniture, a floor lamp and a sagging couch. The linoleum floor looked cold, and all three children were barefoot. “What I need is money. Does your Jesus have money? Can your Jesus give my kids Christmas?”

Lucy thought the question redundant because without Jesus there wouldn’t be Christmas in the first place, but she knew Christelle was referring to presents and not salvation, so she didn’t say anything. Soeur Miller started to talk about the Church welfare program, but Christelle held up her hand with the bottle in protest. “Maybe you don’t understand French. I said I don’t want to hear it.” She shut the door, leaving the mis-sionaries standing on her doorstep in silence. At the other end of the hall-way, the elevator door rang open, the light from inside spilling into the corridor, creating shadows and depth where before there was only gray.

That was when Lucy got her idea.

She told the elders about her idea at the next district meeting. Elder Tyler tipped his chair against the wall and laughed. “The lady hates us, and you want us to eat oatmeal for two weeks straight so we can buy her kids presents?” He shook his head and the other elders laughed too, except for Elder Duchêne who lifted his shoulders and puffed out his cheeks and said in his native French, “Je pense que c’est une bonne idée.” Elder Williams sighed and rolled his eyes without looking at his companion. “You would.”

Lucy let the subject drop.

“So do you think we’ll lose weight?” Lucy joked. She and Soeur Miller were snaking through aisles in Leader Price, filling their bas-kets with generic cereal and canned green beans.

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Soeur Miller smiled. She was the only soeur in the mission thinner than Lucy. “Maybe if we lose weight, people will think we’re French.”

At the checkout stand, the woman sitting behind the cash register sighed as the missionaries stacked canned food on the rubber mat that moved in spurts, causing the tops of the towers to crash down. Lucy looked at their purchases and felt her heart grow sad. After a particularly bad day, the soeurs would prepare their favorite comfort foods and eat away their frustrations. Like the day Geneviève threat-ened to kill herself because Lucy asked if she ever planned on coming to church now that she was baptized. The only bright part of that day had been the crème fraîche and lardons pasta with stuffed mush-rooms that Lucy made, with baguette and Brie and globe grapes so round they made the soeurs’ cheeks bulge.

Lucy wondered if they would find solace without cheese.Looking at her companion, who wore a worried expression on her

face, Lucy tried to smile. “This is for a good cause right?” she asked.Soeur Miller nodded. “The best.”The last time Lucy had eaten nothing but cereal and green bean

salad was during splits at the beginning of her mission, when her companion swapped places with Soeur Tait for the weekend. At first Lucy thought Soeur Tait would be a welcome respite from her com-panion, who after four months still didn’t talk much and rarely smiled. But during their weekend together, Lucy realized that everybody had problems. Soeur Tait’s problem was food.

After watching Soeur Tait eat an entire baguette with one wheel each of Camembert and Brie, followed by a whole pan of brown-ies and a half kilo of pasta, Lucy excused herself to the bathroom to throw up. Simply the idea of eating that much food had made her sick, and she refused to eat anything for the next three days except for cereal and green bean salad. On her last night, Soeur Tait confessed to Lucy, already groggy with impending sleep, that she had gained fifteen pounds in the three weeks she had been living in France—that’s how badly she didn’t want to be a missionary. But her parents had promised to pay her student loans if she went on a mission, and Soeur Tait couldn’t make that much money in eighteen

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months let alone eighteen years, and so she ate her way out of debt and sadness.

When the cashier finished ringing up the groceries, she looked over the rims of her glasses and squinted at the total. “Deux-cent cinquante-trois francs, s’il vous plaît.”

“We bought a whole week’s worth of groceries for less than forty bucks,” Soeur Miller whispered to Lucy as they stacked cans into their backpacks and doubled plastic bags. “You know what this means, don’t you?” She often asked questions as though Lucy could read her thoughts.

“That after next week we’ll have one thousand francs for presents?”“That we get to go shopping and call it work.”

Lucy followed Elder Tyler down the toy aisle in Champion, making a conscious effort not to walk too close. When she was lit-tle, her favorite part of Christmas was running to the mailbox with her brother the day after Thanksgiving to find the Sears Wish Book shoved inside. They would open the catalog with great reverence and scrutinize pages that smelled like ink and left a black residue on their fingers. She’d lie on her stomach, so close to her brother their legs and elbows touched, developing a longing for toys that their parents could never afford. She wondered if Champion had a Wish Book.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us you were actually going through with this,” Elder Tyler said. He bent over to check the price on a Play-mobile castle and stood up, his face disgusted.

“You didn’t have to come,” Lucy said, taking a box of finger paints off the shelf.

Elder Tyler took the box from her hands. “Paint is too messy,” he said. “What about these?” He held up a package of sixty-four crayons.

“Are you buying?”Elder Tyler turned over the package, looking for a price tag.

“You can get anything you want if you’re buying.” Lucy made her eyes as wide and innocent as possible.

“Don’t give me that look.”“Why are you being so stingy? It’s Christmas.”

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“If you hadn’t kept your little plan a secret, I could have saved more money.”

“I told you at district meeting. You said I was stupid.”“I was being facetious.”Lucy walked past Elder Tyler and pretended to be absorbed by a bin

full of stuffed animals made out of washcloths. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him walk off, gripping the package of crayons in his hand.

An empty feeling spread through Lucy, making her feel slightly ill. She felt this way whenever she and Elder Tyler argued, or when she thought about being transferred. They were going on six months together, December would make seven, and they had seen each other every day for the last five. Picking through the toys without seeing them, Lucy tried to think about something else.

“Is it really that difficult?” Elder Tyler asked softly when he returned.“Is what that difficult?”Elder Tyler pointed to the bin of stuffed animals.

“So are we done here or what?” Soeur Miller asked as she and Elder Wells rounded the corner with a shopping basket full of clothes and shoes and books. They wore identical smiles, so large and toothy Lucy smiled too. But when she looked into her own basket at the toys, bot-tles, and diapers, her smile disappeared. During the past two weeks, the soeurs had cheated three times on their green bean diet, and now Lucy felt guilty, regretting the seventy-five francs they spent on pas-tries and cheese because they were tired and depressed. At the time, seventy-five francs didn’t seem like very much money.

Looking at her basket again, Lucy tried to imagine the expression on Christelle’s face when she opened her door to a mountain of pres-ents—the same expression she imagined whenever she craved choco-late or Orangina Rouge—as a reminder that her hunger was serving a higher purpose. But now she realized that real life limited her gener-osity to five, maybe six, presents, and her mountain deflated from the size of her heart to the size of her wallet.

“I think we’re going to have to put most of this back,” Lucy said.Elder Tyler looked at his feet and cleared his throat, and Soeur

Miller elbowed Elder Wells in the side, unconcerned with the taboo

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of touching an elder. Elder Wells didn’t care either, and this made Lucy feel more normal, as though they were all good friends. But no matter how much she wanted to, Lucy couldn’t bring herself to touch Elder Tyler.

“Tell her,” Soeur Miller insisted.Grinning, and with his head turned slightly, Elder Wells looked

at Lucy out of the corner of his eyes like a little boy with a secret so important it required a slow telling. “My mom wired me money for my Christmas present,” he said, pausing to take a deep breath. “And I decided to use it all for Christelle.”

“All of it?” Lucy asked. “But you don’t even know her.”So excited her head bobbed, Soeur Miller elbowed him in the side

again. “Tell her how much.”The apples of Elder Wells’s cheeks turned red, making him look

like a Kewpie doll. “Two hundred dollars,” he said, and Soeur Miller grabbed his hand to thrust it in the air, declaring him loudly the champion of Champion. Elder Tyler shook his head and looked away, but he, too, was smiling.

At first Lucy didn’t speak, she didn’t know what to say. But every-one was waiting for her reaction.

“You’re my hero, Elder Wells,” she said finally. Soeur Miller snorted with laughter.

“I’m serious. You’re the most generous person I’ve ever met,” Lucy said, but this made his blush deepen, so she looked at her watch instead, remarking out loud they should probably go.

Soeur Miller and Elder Wells started walking toward the check out. Elder Tyler followed them, but stopped when he saw Lucy wasn’t coming.

“How come you never tell me I’m your hero?”

Standing on the sidewalk at the mouth of Rue St. Catherine with bags of presents at their feet, Lucy watched as busses stopped and spilled passengers onto the cobblestone. So far fifteen differ-ent busses had come and gone, but Lucy and Soeur Miller were still waiting for the elders. They had asked Elder Duchêne to deliver the

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presents dressed in civilian clothes so Christelle wouldn’t guess whom they were from.

“What time did you tell them to meet us?” Lucy asked Soeur Miller, the cold air coating her throat with a thin film of mucus and making her voice scratchy. She looked up the street of tall, eighteenth- century buildings that reminded her of Paris, only cleaner. Lucy was so cold she tap-danced time steps to keep warm. No matter how many layers Lucy wore on top, her skirt always let cold air surround her legs and give her goose bumps, even when she wore extra long socks that left only her knees exposed. Since her bike accident, Lucy refused to wear tights.

Soeur Miller didn’t answer Lucy’s question. She wasn’t a morning person. Sometimes she wouldn’t utter a single word before ten thirty. She more than made up for it later in the day.

Side by side, the soeurs waited while pedestrians and mopeds and busses swirled around them in chaos and noise before disappearing into intervals of quiet, making Lucy feel both permanent and invis-ible, like the stone archway behind them, or a tree. But Lucy also felt guilty because a better missionary wouldn’t keep quiet among so many people.

When the fifth A bus in a row pulled up to the curb, Lucy saw the elders and looked for Elder Duchêne but didn’t recognize him.

“Holy cow, Duchêne, you really are French,” Soeur Miller shouted as he walked over and set a large cardboard box at their feet. “You look like everybody else.”

“What’s in the box?” Lucy asked when he stood up. She couldn’t believe how different he looked. He wore a black pea coat, jeans, and dress shoes. Even his hair looked different, slightly messy as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it. If she had passed him on the street, Lucy would have never known he was Mormon, let alone a missionary. If she had seen Elder Duchêne while contacting, she probably would have walked by, assuming him too French to be interested.

Elder Duchêne smiled and lifted the box’s lid. Inside were seven rows of baby food stacked three jars high. “Tyler said you needed more food.”

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Lucy raised her eyebrows at Elder Tyler. “And I thought you didn’t care,” she said, bending down to pick up the jars and read the labels.

“Look in my backpack, Soeur Adams,” Elder Williams shouted, jumping in front of Lucy so his bag was at her eye level. She unzipped the backpack and saw oddly shaped packages wrapped in newspaper.

“I bought cleaning supplies. Is that not the best idea ever? Who doesn’t need cleaning supplies?” He waited until Lucy zipped the bag closed before turning around. “And man, cleaning supplies are expensive.”

Lucy told Elder Williams she was impressed. That she never would  have thought about cleaning supplies. And Elder Williams declared himself the smartest elder in the mission.

“Dude, Duchêne, you’re going to have to make ten trips to carry all this stuff,” Soeur Miller said, stomping her feet to keep warm.

Tired of standing, Lucy went to sit on a nearby bench and placed her backpack on her knees. Pulling out a card she had written, she read her note to Christelle: “Joyeux Noël, from?” Then she started to worry that her idea might not work.

She glanced at the shopping bags filled with presents wrapped in red and green paper and thought how unreal they looked, as though an artist had painted them onto an old photograph. Like many people in France, the missionaries wore mostly somber colors, their clothes blending with the gray sky, gray cobblestone, and gray buildings. Lucy had learned in church that everything could be separated into black and white and right and wrong, but now she realized that anybody who would say such a thing must have never been to France. Or if they had, they must not have opened their eyes. Everything in France was gray.

From her seat on the bench, Lucy heard Soeur Miller laugh. Elder Williams was telling a joke; Lucy could tell from the way he bent for-ward and looked Soeur Miller in the eye, smiling through every word he said. Soeur Miller tilted her head backward, opening her mouth to fit the size of her laugh, and Elder Williams stood up straight, pleased with himself and the effect his joke was having. Elder Tyler and Elder Wells were talking to Elder Duchêne, and although Lucy didn’t know what they were saying, she could tell by the shape of their lips that they were speaking French.

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The cold of the stone bench seeped through her cotton skirt and numbed her thighs, but Lucy didn’t stand up or move to rejoin the others. Instead she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, wondering if French gasoline differed from American gasoline because the traffic didn’t smell the same. Inhaling again, Lucy said slowly in her mind the name of the city, trying to internalize her surroundings so that years later, she would walk down another street in winter and remember this moment, when she was still in Bordeaux and not yet transferred. Opening her eyes, which were watery and somewhat blurry from the cold, Lucy watched the missionaries huddling around the presents and wondered for the first time in her life if it was possible to love too deeply.

Elder Tyler glanced in Lucy’s direction and excused himself from his conversation. He walked over to sit next to Lucy without speaking. They were close, but not touching, and at first Lucy considered scoot-ing over to give him more room, but she decided not to. A minute passed, and the silence, although not uncomfortable, made Lucy curi-ous. She turned her head to look at Elder Tyler, who was watching a young mother push a stroller on cobblestone, the child asleep despite the bouncing. He didn’t move or in any way acknowledge Lucy or her attention, so she tried to commit his face to memory, staring long enough that when she closed her eyes, she could see the negative of his profile imprinted on the insides of her eyelids.

“What?” Elder Tyler turned to Lucy, waiting for her to say what she was thinking, and she almost did, but she chickened out, not know-ing how to put her thoughts into words but wanting to tell him that she could no longer imagine a world without him in it. Instead, she pressed her lips together and said, “Everybody has been so generous. I’m going to feel stupid if this doesn’t work.”

Soeur Miller blew hot air into her mittens. “Any day now, Duch-êne,” she said, speaking to nobody. Elder Duchêne had been gone for almost twenty minutes.

“You think I should go in there after him?” Elder Williams asked, kicking the wall Lucy was leaning against, her backpack still on.

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Of all the missionaries Lucy had ever met, none looked so Ameri-can as Elder Williams. Tall, as in six feet four inches tall, with blond hair and blue eyes, and freckles on his nose and cheekbones. Elder Williams was attractive enough in Lucy’s opinion to be in a Gap ad, or Calvin Klein. Especially because his suit was always slightly askew, as though his haphazard elegance was intentional.

“Give him a few more minutes,” she said. If Christelle saw Elder Williams with his suit and tie and nametag, she would know for sure the missionaries were involved. And Lucy wanted Christmas to be a miracle. Miracles become less impressive when discovered to have been achieved by ordinary means. And even less impressive to the point of meddlesome when performed by Mormon missionaries. Lucy wanted Christelle’s Christmas to be anything but ordinary. She tried again to imagine Christelle’s face when she opened her door to presents piled so high they almost reached her chin, but now she could only remember Christelle’s face angry. With deep pockets of sadness clinging to the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“Look.” Soeur Miller hit Lucy in the arm and pointed toward Christelle’s building. Elder Duchêne was strolling through the park-ing lot, hands in his pockets, smiling.

“She saw you didn’t she? You took the elevator didn’t you?” Soeur Miller asked him.

“Yes. No. She opened the door right before I finished stacking the presents. She said I was so loud she could hear me in the kitchen.” Elder Duchêne said this like it was really funny, but nobody laughed.

“It’s okay though,” he said quickly, “I told her I was Père Noël three days early.”

“And she was okay with that?” Elder Tyler asked.Elder Duchêne nodded and Lucy felt the knot lodged in her stom-

ach begin to dissolve.“What did she say?” she asked.“Did she cry?” Elder Williams always wanted to know if people

cried, were crying, or thought they might cry.“Oui,” Elder Duchêne said. “But not until her kids came to the door.

They all just stood there, like they were afraid to touch the presents.”

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“So what did you do?” Elder Wells asked, and Elder Duchêne looked happier than Lucy had ever seen him. Everyone was speaking French. Usually the missionaries spoke to each other in English, and Elder Duchêne couldn’t understand what they were saying.

“I carried them inside.”“She let you inside?” Soeur Miller asked.“So then what happened?” Williams asked.“Nothing.”“Nothing?”“I said I had to go. So I left.”The other missionaries nodded in understanding as they absorbed

Elder Duchêne’s story, but Lucy refused to analyze what just hap-pened. She always thought too much, and this time she wanted only to feel because she was feeling more necessary and important than she had felt her entire mission.

And Christelle would never know.Walking back to centreville, the rest of the day looming too long

and too empty, Lucy tried to figure out what she and Soeur Miller could do. Elder Tyler matched his stride to Lucy’s without saying anything. She thought again of leaving Bordeaux and him, and her stomach fell for what seemed like the thousandth time, convinced she would become for him faceless and common, disintegrating into fond but unspecific memories and bad photographs.

“So, are you worried about transfers?” she asked.“I don’t worry until there’s something to worry about.”“But you know you’re getting transferred.”Elder Tyler stopped walking so Lucy did too, turning around to

face him. “If there’s nothing I can do about it, what’s the point of wor-rying?” he asked.

“So if you’re not worried about transfers, are you at least a little bit sad to leave Bordeaux?” Lucy asked, holding her breath without realizing it. She hoped he would say yes, because his sadness would validate hers and make it more manageable.

Elder Tyler shrugged his shoulders, and his coat fluttered because of his hands in his pockets. “Not really,” he said. “I’m sick of this place.”

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Looking into the street so he wouldn’t see her face, Lucy decided not to ask any more questions. But her silence was not the comfort-able kind, nor intimate. Lucy’s silence made Elder Tyler seem distant, as though he had already left and no longer walked at her side. The only reassurance of his presence was the sound of his shoes against the sidewalk, their footsteps no longer unified, the uneven pacing dulled by the noise of passing cars.

“Well, I’m going to miss Bordeaux because I won’t be with you any-more,” Lucy said finally. The effort it took for Lucy not to say things exhausted her. She was tired of being exhausted all the time. “You’re the reason I love Bordeaux so much.”

Elder Tyler stopped walking again, but Lucy kept going. She wanted more than anything to be alone. To lie down on her bed and cry without having to wonder what her companion might be think-ing, constantly aware that her space was not sacred because it was not her own. But she had reached the place they had started from, still swarming with busses, and realized there was no place left to go.

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Celestial Bodies

Jared White

There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. 1 Cor. 15:40

1

After studying etymologies, I ask my wife, while watching her apply makeup in the bathroom mirror,

Why do you wear cosmetics?

They make me pretty.

But you’re already pretty; you don’t need them.

You want me to wear them, trust me.

To this I say,

Cosmetics comes from the word cosmos, which means to put into order that which is in chaos.

She looks at me, says nothing.

2nd place winner, 2011 Irreantum Poetry Contest

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2

There is one of the sun one of the moon one of the stars—

3

I’m sitting in my house, alone, as a child, during lightning.

The power leaves the house as from a body in death. I fumble through

a drawer for a flashlight and take it with me to hide under the stairs.

I turn the light on and cup my hand around its lens. My skin glows

translucent, a glove unable to contain the light inside.

4

They’re not white, these bodies, as if dusted with flour or caked makeup,

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but of a foreign brightness, a spark in the chest

that spreads by veins to quicken—

5

In my brother’s second winter he finds in my coat slung over the sofa one thin glove.

It is white and dirty and loose on his hand as his fingers wiggle life into its cotton body,

a smooth gesture to embody that which was disembodied. With his hand waving

he mimes among us, touches my face, trills the keys of mother’s piano, crab-walks on her table.

6

—and each mortal thing resumes:

lucid as breath; the fingers flex;

nerves pulse light and heat, stoking

fire until the body rises up, walks.

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Speaking in Tongues

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, says the minister on TV. I notice he’s reading from a teleprompter, and struggling. He starts to laugh to buy time, sounding out the word he’s looking at. His southern accent offers him no credibility to my northern ear. He turns to his default sermon: interpreting Bible verses in ways not done before. His producers don’t realize he’s breaking new ground, an odd miracle. His slurred speech suggests a serious breakthrough in turning backstage water into wine. His sermon is on speaking in tongues, the notion that no one can have a secret prayer language, but that God’s spirit translates one tongue to another’s yielding ear.

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After Reading Exodus

it’s as if I’m on sacred ground wherever I go, so I stay shoeless, let my hair and feeble beard grow

for months. My neighbor burns a bush of heaped mulch that flames and spits. I can’t hear

what’s being said between them. I plague all day the jerks in traffic, casting black boils to their backsides.

Driving to the beach I imagine I’m leading the procession of cars from lives of bondage toward the sea.

I weave a dead snake through a rock rake’s metal teeth, hold it up while standing on the roof of my car parked at the mall. Security

guards approach cautiously. I spread my arms slowly at eye level, palms outward. I speak declarative praise to the sky, but nothing happens. They laugh—

It starts to rain.

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Poetry as the Art of Theft

I first learn to steal in church as a child. During long sermons I thumb apart pages, search the hymnal. It feels heavy and comprehensive. I land in the sectioned appendix where the page is marked by Meters, syllables numbered in each phrase of text. I don’t yet know of sin, or redemption, or the longing I will develop for both. I catch on immediately—interchanging texts and tunes, paring and re-pairing, stealing words from one rhythm to bless another with articulation, my hosannas washing past priests, under pews, pillars of smoke ascending into darkness.

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Walking through Winter in Rexburg, Idaho after William Blake

Though this walking has been dark for hours, still I search—

the asphalt, the snow- fields, the dark pool above with distant thimbles of light, like leaves scattered by wind across a surface —for the moon. Around me wind blows blue- tinted snow. The blackmoon, aching for spring, drowns in grey clouds. Ice coats handrails, bare trees, lean and tired, lean and are tired.

How like a god the snowy owl— luminous, blushing light, perched on a hummock in the snow- field, its white plumage bristling against sleet. No— against sleep. O what balance you keep in black wind!

Nearby, children’s pinched voices float taut through dry air, their numb limbs shiver, vision blurs to lake, lashes blink away flakes while Blake busies God’s inner ear: The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark deep-founded habitation.

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I imagine seeing through God’s windows fires flame and thaw while night’s white-hot frost windburns my skin raw.

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When Trees Fall

Melissa McQuarrie

As soon as my four-year-old, Nathan, sees me filling up the inflat-able pool, he puts on his swimsuit and calls to his siblings, “Let’s go swimming!” Minutes later, I slather my children with sunscreen and sit on a lawn chair under the cottonwood tree while they jump in and out of the pool and chase each other in figure eights on the lawn, blades of grass sticking to their feet. Ten-year-old Kylie suggests they make a whirlpool, so she and Nathan and eight-year-old Shane run in circles in the water, then lie down and let the current carry them, their faces tilted toward the sun, while two-year-old Miranda stands next to the pool and squeals, “Pool! Pool!” and claps her hands. Nathan splashes me and giggles. I smile, lie back and skim through a magazine, try not to doze.

A sudden rush of air through the leaves punctures the languid afternoon; I look up to see slate-gray clouds obscuring the sun, trees tossing and bending in the wind. The hair on my arms is standing up, and a flash of uneasiness makes me say, “Time to go inside.” No sooner do we come inside and start to dry off than we hear a loud crack and a window-rattling boom, and we look outside to see the cot-tonwood tree uprooted and lying across the lawn chair and the pool, both smashed flat. Water from the pool is flooding the lawn, swirling leaves and bits of bark over the grass.

When my husband, Scott, comes home a few minutes later, my hands are still shaking and Miranda is still crying. Scott looks at the tree and the flattened pool and chair, and hugs me tight. “I had a feeling I should come inside,” I say, because now I see divine order in the tim-ing of the afternoon’s events, the makings of a faith-promoting story

2nd place, 2010 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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we can tell our children for years to come. As Scott thanks the Lord several times during the dinner blessing for our protection that day, I silently add my own thanks to his, secure in the knowledge of God’s watchful care. Then we chatter and joke as we pass around platters of barbecued chicken and potatoes—except for Miranda, who cries,

“Pool!” every few minutes and bursts into fresh tears. Scott finally says, “Let’s go buy a new pool,” and, since tomorrow is the Fourth of July and we just narrowly escaped death, I tell the kids to leave the dishes and hop in the car.

And it’s as we’re pulling out of the garage, still talking and laughing, that we see the emergency vehicles across the street. Two fire engines, two ambulances, three police cars—all with their lights flashing—parked in front of the Thompsons’ house; people standing like effigies on the Thompsons’ front lawn, looking toward the backyard. I turn off the car stereo, hear the whoosh-whoosh of my heartbeat.

“Wow! Look at those fire trucks!” Nathan says, and Miranda squeals, but the rest of us are silent as we drive down the driveway. Scott stops the car in the middle of the road to ask our neighbor, Greg, what happened, but somehow I already know.

“Riley. They found him in the pool,” Greg says. He wipes his eyes and looks away.

Riley. I want to leave before my children see what happens next, but we’re stuck amongst the vehicles and people in the street, so we all watch as two paramedics wheel out a stretcher with Riley strapped on it, in his swimsuit, his eyes closed, his legs splayed. One of the paramedics is ventilating him.

“Oh no!” Nathan says. “I won’t be able to play with Riley anymore.”I’m mute as I watch Kellie, Riley’s mother, and Kris, Riley’s father,

run out behind the stretcher, as I watch the paramedics load Riley into the ambulance, watch Kellie and Kris follow a policeman to a police car. When Kellie turns toward us, I catch a glimpse of her face—tear streaked, the color of cement. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, ducks her head and climbs into the car.

“Don’t worry, Nathan,” Shane says. “He’ll have to go to the hospital for a couple of days, and then he’ll be okay.”

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I feel Kylie’s eyes on me, waiting for me to say something. Scott and I look at each other, say nothing.

•It will seem absurd to me later, but after they take Riley away we keep driving to Toys-R-Us to buy a pool. To buy a pool. It just doesn’t occur to us to go back home. As we turn onto the main road, I remem-ber how Kellie’s face shone the day she told me she was pregnant. A caboose baby, she said, since Charisse was already six. We were stand-ing in the hall at church, and I was holding newborn Nathan, and Kellie stroked his head. We didn’t know then that her baby and mine would one day play together, run Mattel cars along the floor and watch Sesame Street, and swing plastic golf clubs. Or that they’d be the only two boys in Sunbeams and sit next to each other in Primary, heads together, giggling and sharing confidences.

All the way to Toy-R-Us and back, while Kylie and Shane sit qui-etly in the backseat and Miranda sings to herself, Nathan peppers us with questions: How did Riley get in the pool? Did he fall in? Why weren’t his mom and dad watching him? Why didn’t anyone hear him fall in? Why did they need two fire trucks? How long will Riley be in the hospital? Scott and I try to keep our answers matter-of-fact as we take turns responding with vague, noncommittal phrases that will become our mantras in the months to come whenever we discuss this night: I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Later, after the kids are in bed, we piece the story together. The Thompsons were having a pre-Fourth barbecue and pool party with their extended families. After the barbecue, while the adults did the dishes in the kitchen, Riley came inside and tugged on Kellie’s shorts, asking when he could go swimming. Because her oldest two children were gone at friends’ houses and Brady, the eleven-year-old, was play-ing volleyball on the lawn with his cousins, Kellie asked Charisse to take Riley in the pool, where some of the teenage cousins were already swimming.

“Don’t forget to put on his floaties,” Kellie said, as Charisse led Riley out the door.

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The same microburst that had felled our tree had scattered pool toys and Riley’s floaties all over the backyard. Charisse told Riley to wait for her at the side of the pool and ran to retrieve the floaties. By the time she came back, Riley was floating facedown in the built-in Jacuzzi attached to the shallow end of the pool. The teenage cousins were still swimming in the deep end; the younger cousins were bat-ting a ball back and forth on the lawn. And the adults were laughing and talking inside the house.

My children look up as flashes of red, white, and blue light up the night sky and then fizzle in the darkness. I’m sitting on the damp grass, holding Miranda on my lap and swatting at mosquitoes, while Scott lights fireworks in the street and our three older children dance around him and clap their hands. “Watch out!” Scott says. “This one’s going to be loud.” I cover Miranda’s ears as the firework explodes into a fountain of white heat and shrieks like a banshee before whistling to extinction. Scott helps the kids light sparklers. They twirl them in wide loops and flinch as sparks singe their arms. I hug myself and shiver: my children are lighting fireworks while Riley lies brain-dead in the hospital, on life support.

When Scott said our family prayer last night, he asked for Riley’s recovery—“if it be Thy will”—while my chest squeezed tight like a fist. When, toward the end of the prayer, Scott again thanked the Lord for protecting us from the falling tree, I opened my eyes and glared at him. Later, as we were getting ready for bed, I erupted: “How can you thank the Lord, in front of our children, for protecting us when Riley clearly wasn’t protected?” My hands were shaking.

He paused, studied the wall for a few moments. “I think we still need to be grateful you and the kids weren’t crushed by that tree,” he said.

Hours later, I lay in bed staring up through the darkness, crying, my mind churning with images of the fallen tree and Riley strapped to the stretcher. Had that feeling of foreboding really been a spiritual prompting or was I just using common sense when I decided to go inside? And why hadn’t Kellie felt even a hint of warning, as she stood

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in her kitchen, that her little boy was drowning? I tried to unravel the mysteries of divine intervention and coincidence, accident and fate, until, head throbbing, I finally got up and took a sleeping pill.

First thing this morning, Nathan asked, “Is Riley coming home today?” I swallowed and shook my head , then told the older kids that the bishop asked us to fast today. We skipped the parade, and instead of having a picnic in the canyon, we went to a matinee, where I slumped in my seat in the dark and let the tears slide down my cheeks until I dozed off halfway through the movie. Later, we gathered at a neighbor’s house for a ward prayer. Brother Parker, who’d been at the hospital all day with the Thompsons, said Riley had wiggled his big toe and fluttered his eyelids—and we all brightened, until Brother Jackson, a doctor, said that just meant Riley’s neurological system was misfiring, a sign that his body was shutting down. Everyone fell silent then.

The kids have stopped twirling sparklers now to sit on the grass and watch the big fireworks erupt over the stadium. Across the street, the Thompsons’ house is silent. As colorful pinwheels whirl through the sky and the whole city explodes with light and sound, the Thompsons’ sprinklers pop up and start their rhythmic sweep over the manicured lawns and tidy flowerbeds, just as they do every night.

The cemetery is set against the hillside, overlooking the valley. A hawk is circling overhead in the hot, still air. Bronze plaques, placed flat in the ground, dot the wilted lawns, and a mound of dark earth is piled next to Riley’s plot, dug at the edge of the grass, where the flat terrain drops off into a steep, scrub-covered slope. I can see the children’s school just below us and the sun-bleached valley, the faraway streets, the lake beyond, colorless in the noonday sun. Next to the plot is the casket, covered with white roses and teddy bears. A large bunch of white balloons is tied to one of the folding chairs set up on the lawn.

Two images I will carry with me for years to come: Riley’s cowlick, visible over the side of the small, white casket at the viewing this morn-ing; and the look on fourteen-year-old Noelle Thompson’s face when it was time to kiss Riley good-bye before closing the casket, when she

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turned to Kellie and whimpered, “Mama.” Kellie was so busy hugging Noelle and consoling her other crying children that she barely had enough time to plant a hasty kiss on Riley’s forehead before the morti-cian lowered the casket lid. And I thought in that moment how lonely she must feel, stuck at the bottom of the totem pole of the grieving.

The morning after they took Riley off life support, I found a gar-dening glove in the laundry room and sat the children on the couch. Using the analogy I’d seen in Primary, I put the glove on and took it off as I moved through premortal life, mortality, death, and the resur-rection, ending with, “So right now, Riley is like this hand without a glove, but he’s still Riley, and when he’s resurrected (putting the glove back on), he’ll have his body again.” Nathan watched me, then took a turn putting the glove on and taking it off. “So, when will Riley be resurrected?” he asked, and I tried to think of a way to explain life-times—millennia, perhaps—to a four-year-old.

The sun is hot on my arms and legs, and sweat trickles down my shirt. Before Kris dedicates the grave, one of Riley’s grandmothers unties the white balloons and gives a balloon to each of the Thomp-son children and their cousins. She tells them to release their balloons into the sky and send their love and well wishes up to Riley in heaven. I watch the balloons drift upward, like dandelion tufts, neck craned so far backward it hurts, until they shrink and disappear.

You’ve got to hand it to Kellie and Kris. Here they are, two Sundays after Riley died, sitting in their pew in sacrament meeting. Kellie is wearing pearls and a gray dress; her hair is styled and she’s wearing makeup. Looking at her you’d never know. She sits up straight as she listens to Sister Reichman’s talk. She doesn’t run from the chapel screaming when Sister Reichman mentions Riley. She doesn’t pull out her hair or claw out her eyes. Panic grips me as, for the briefest of moments, I imagine myself in her place and know with absolute certainty that I could never be as strong and accepting, as full of faith, as Kellie.

In the few quiet moments Scott and I have had with Kellie and Kris since the funeral, they say they’ve felt peace and reassurance and

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comfort. They say Riley’s death was God’s will. They say they can even see a divine pattern in the events of that night, that Riley was meant to go when he did. No blame, no guilt. Although I’m glad this inter-pretation of events comforts them and I want to believe Riley’s death was part of some grand cosmic design, this thought unsettles me as much as the thought of his death being a tragic, preventable accident—either way, God seems distant and incomprehensible and unfeeling.

Scott and I have sidestepped the issue of fate and told our children that, although we don’t know why Riley died, we’re certain he’s safe in heaven, that his family will see him again. At church last week, how-ever, Brother Wilson said Riley was too good for this world and that he has a great work to do on the other side; others, like Kellie and Kris, murmured the phrase, “meant to be.” The kids were told in Primary that Riley is a very valiant spirit, that he completed his life’s mission.

This morning, when our home teacher, Brother Frasier, visited us before church, he told our children that they are just as valiant as Riley, with an important mission to fulfill, as well. “I didn’t want them to think they were less righteous,” he said to me as he was leaving. Afterward, I had to explain to the children that being as valiant as Riley doesn’t mean they’re going to die.

Now, in sacrament meeting, I search my memory for some sign that Riley was too good for this world—but then, I wonder, aren’t all three-year-olds too good for this world? I think back to fast and testimony meeting two weeks ago, when we sat behind the Thomp-sons. Riley was wearing a light blue shirt and khaki pants; his cowlick was slicked with gel. He smiled cheekily up at Kellie when he took two pieces of bread during the sacrament; he drew pictures of trucks and handed them over the pew to Nathan and ran toy cars along the bench. He went out with Charisse for a drink of water and, toward the end of the meeting, he laid his head on Kellie’s lap. Kellie had run her fingers through his hair.

The bishop is announcing the sacrament hymn. I watch as Kellie puts her arm around Charisse, and Charisse lays her head on Kellie’s shoulder. In the past ten days I’ve seen Kellie and Kris wipe their eyes and hug friends who line up to console them, and I’ve heard them

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say they’re grateful Riley’s exaltation is assured. They talk about the mir acles they’ve experienced since Riley’s death: the dying flowering pear tree in their backyard has suddenly, in the middle of the summer, sprouted new, green leaves—a testament to the resurrection. They call it their “Riley tree.” They see evidence of God’s compassion every-where. With one crucial exception, I think: Riley still died. And then I feel ashamed.

I’m sitting with Nathan in a small, soundproof room, having his hearing and speech tested. For some time now, Nathan hasn’t been pronouncing consonants at the ends of words, and the last several months he’s added a slurp between syllables. I finally took him to the pediatrician a couple of weeks ago and got an order for an evaluation.

Since Riley’s funeral, Nathan’s been asking every morning, “Will Riley be resurrected today?” and every morning I say that it won’t be for a very long time. A few days ago, when Miranda heard us talking about Riley, she ran to the laundry room and got the gardening glove, then ran back and gave it to Nathan. He threw it on the ground.

Yesterday Nathan found me in the kitchen; he was holding a toy tank. “Look! Riley left his tank here!” he said. And I remembered how, the last time Riley had played at our house, he’d brought his tank and clutched it while I took him and Nathan to the grocery store, and he and Nathan had held onto the grocery cart, giggling, and chased each other through the aisles.

“How will I give it back to him?” Nathan asked, and before I could answer, he said, “I know! I’ll save it for him until he’s resurrected.”

When I looked at him, opened my mouth to speak, he sighed and said, “I know. It won’t be for a long time,” and he trudged back to the playroom.

A technician fits headphones over Nathan’s ears and makes notes while Nathan repeats the recorded words he hears. And as I sit behind my son, I take in his white blond hair wisping over his neck; his shoulder blades, like bird wings, visible under his yellow T-shirt; his thin, sun-caressed arms; and his legs dangling over the chair. My son is here, alive, I tell myself, feeling a rush of relief so exquisite that

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I have to resist the urge to press myself to him and inhale his musky, little-boy scent and kiss the back of his neck.

At the end of the evaluation, when the technician tells me Nathan needs speech therapy and hands me a referral card, I think of Kellie, who will never take her son to speech therapy. I accept the referral card gladly, my eyes welling with tears.

Nathan is refusing to get dressed. For days now he’s been grabbing toys from Miranda, banging his head on the floor, crying at bedtime, and waking up in the middle of the night. I’ve been trying to comfort him and keep our household running as usual, but I’ve found myself crying while doing the dishes, feeling heavy limbed as I drag myself out of bed, and staring at my plate at the dinner table, unable to fol-low my children’s chatter. Now, as Nathan stands before me in his pajamas, crossing his arms and scowling, I suggest that we call Quinn, a new five-year old boy down the street, and invite him over to play. Nathan shakes his head. “I want to play with Riley,” he says.

I sigh. I sit on the couch, pull him onto my lap, and rest my chin on the top of his head.

“Why did Riley have to drown?” he asks.I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say.

“Do you think he slipped and hit his head, Mommy, and then he fell in the pool?” he asks. “Do you think he was running? I wish he’d walked slowly, like an ant, like this,” and he hops off my lap and marches in exaggerated, slow steps around the room. When he climbs back onto my lap, he says, “If I’d been six instead of four, I could have jumped in the pool and pulled Riley out. I’d be wearing my goggles, and I’d know how to swim.” Then, starting to cry, he says, “I know he’s happy in heaven, but why did he go in the pool by himself? Why didn’t Riley’s mom and dad watch him?”

Heat surges through me as I think, Why weren’t they watching him? Why didn’t they put a lifejacket on him? If they hadn’t been so careless, my child wouldn’t have lost his best friend, and none of us would be grieving, and I wouldn’t have to answer these impossible questions.

And then shame again, bitter on my tongue.

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I hug him, whisper consolations, then take him to the kitchen table and give him paper and crayons. I ask him to draw a picture of Riley—“the way you remember him,” I say—so we can give it to the Thompsons. He begins drawing, biting his lower lip. When he’s finished, he holds up the paper.

I see a swirl of blue enclosed in a rectangle, and a little stick figure in the blue swirl. Feeling my heart pound, I say, “What is it?”

“It’s Riley. He’s in the pool,” Nathan says. His eyes are earnest, inno-cent as they look into mine.

My shoulders sag. There’s no end in sight to this pain. I wait until he runs off to his room to play before I shove the picture in a drawer.

Picking up some groceries one morning with Nathan perched in the front of my cart, I round the corner and see Kellie straggling about the produce aisle, pushing an empty cart. I haven’t talked to her in almost two weeks; I’ve been too preoccupied with the turmoil in my own house, and—let’s face it—I’ve been avoiding her, not wanting to be reminded of my own fears and questions and feeling at a loss as to how to comfort her. Now, running into her like this, with Nathan in tow, I wince. I make myself go up to her and say, “Hello,” and when she turns around, I see that her face is thinner, longer, and lined with tiny rivulets carved along the length of her cheeks and at the corners of her mouth, and that she has purple shadows under her eyes. And it hits me that while I’ve had a glimpse of sorrow these last few weeks, I can’t even begin to fathom the wide, black, bottomless pit that is her grief. She smiles wanly and ruffles Nathan’s hair, and as Nathan looks up at her through his eyelashes and grins, her eyes fill with longing and ten-derness so raw, so palpable, that I clutch my chest and exhale in one quick, sharp breath. I don’t want to add to her pain, so, after exchang-ing a few pleasantries and giving her a hug, I flee to the checkout.

The fallen cottonwood tree in our yard has been cut up and stacked in the woodpile, the broken lawn chair and pool thrown away, leav-ing a circle of dead grass. I always thought I could count on God’s protection, but the world is now all sinister shapes and sharp angles.

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Determined to be more vigilant than Kellie and Kris were, through the hot, brittle days of August I snap Nathan and Miranda into life-jackets when I take them to the local pool, and I sit on the edge of the pool, my eyes darting constantly from one of my children to the other, as sunlight bounces off the water like shards of glass. I flinch when someone shuts a cupboard door or drops a plate, and once, in a restau-rant, I yelp when someone knocks over a chair. Some nights I dream I’m moving in slow motion, always too late to catch Nathan, who falls headfirst from a high ledge onto cement. Other nights I dream I’m suckling a baby, always a boy, and even though I’ll be forty in October, Scott and I talk about having another child, in case—well, we don’t say that part out loud.

One morning, before the heat pulses from the pavement, I sit on our front porch and watch my children ride their bikes down our driveway, circle the cul-de-sac, and ride back. Everyone has a helmet on, including Miranda, who is on her tricycle. As she rounds the cor-ner to the garage, her tricycle pitches, then tips over, and she falls onto the concrete. She lies there like a doll, unmoving, and my heart leaps into my throat and I think, This is it. I can’t shake the fear that tragedy will strike us too, dividing our lives forever into Before and After. I sit on the porch, legs turned to jelly, until I finally make myself run to Miranda and pick her up. Her eyes flutter and she starts to cry. Just a little fall—and she was wearing a helmet, after all. I laugh and chide myself for overreacting, but my hands shake the rest of the morning.

And then a week later, over breakfast, I read in the newspaper about a family who was picnicking in the canyon, celebrating their grandmother’s remission from cancer. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all eating around a picnic table. A microburst swept through, knocking a massive tree onto their table. In the split second between the snap of the trunk and obliteration, someone managed to grab the baby, sitting in his car seat, off the table. But several other family members—including a five-year-old girl and the newly cured grand-mother—were killed.

Sitting at the kitchen table stirring my oatmeal, I marvel that I ever presumed to understand God’s will and purposes. I will never know

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why my children and I were spared the day the tree fell or why Riley drowned. I will never know why accidents happen, why some people die and others live. And something else—a truth I haven’t wanted to face but that now hits me with relentless force: I will never feel secure again, because, try as I might to keep my children safe, they could still die at any moment.

I put my head down on the kitchen table and weep.

The trees in our yard are crimson and copper and gold against the sap-phire sky, and sprays of purple asters spill onto our leaf-strewn lawn. Relieved to put the summer behind us, I turn my attention to making school lunches, potty training Miranda, helping Kylie with her poetry project, and driving Nathan to speech therapy and soccer and Shane to karate. On Saturdays we rake leaves, clean out the garage, and put away the patio furniture. I prepare my Relief Society lesson, go visit-ing teaching, plan the Cub Scout pack meeting. Some days I’m so busy that I hardly think about Riley at all; other days I can’t seem to think about anything else. Walking into Toys-R-Us in late Septem-ber, I see grinning, hollow-eyed skeletons dangling from a shelf, and I picture Riley in his casket, the flesh rotting off of his bones. I shudder and walk back out the door.

At night after everyone else is asleep, I send prayers up through the darkness: petitions for comfort and healing, appeals for help in making peace with my unanswered questions, and entreaties for pro-tection—always for protection. Some nights all I can do is say “Please,” over and over, before falling into a fitful sleep.

Mornings I drive by the Thompsons’ house as I take my kids to school, and I think of Kellie alone in their house all day, now that her remaining kids are in school. Her days with a preschooler are suddenly over for good. At church one Sunday, I hear that one of the neighbors bought a puppy for the Thompsons, so Kellie will have company during the day. I don’t remember Kellie ever mentioning that she wanted a dog.

Meanwhile, Nathan makes some new friends at preschool, and he’s played a couple of times with Quinn. Though he still wakes up some

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nights crying, he doesn’t bang his head on the floor anymore. One afternoon, as I’m driving Nathan to speech therapy, we’re listening to Sheryl Crow on the stereo and sunlight is streaming through the win-dow. I find myself tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, humming along to the tune, feeling quiet inside for the first time in months. As we pass the Thompsons’ house Nathan says, “You know, Mom, I’m not angry anymore that Riley died.” Then he sighs and looks out the window. “I’m just sad,” he says.

The Primary children are sitting on the stand, fidgeting, swinging their legs, and whispering as the Primary-program sacrament meeting begins. Nathan is wearing a little-boy suit, a white shirt and tie, and a fake mis-sionary nametag. His hair is combed and lying flat, and he’s sitting next to Katie and McKenna. He told me last week that he hates being the only boy in Sunbeams now.

After the Sunbeams sing “I Hope They Call Me on a Mission,” Sis-ter Johnson walks to the podium, says, “We want to dedicate this pro-gram to Riley, our special little Sunbeam, who we all love and miss very much and who is serving a valiant mission on the other side,” and her voice cracks. Then all the Primary children and the congre-gation sing, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” And even though I try not to, I glance over at the Thompsons, and I see Kellie and Kris wip-ing their eyes, and the Thompson children sitting with their heads bent, their shoulders shaking.

Last week, when the Varleys spoke in sacrament meeting, Sister Varley talked about their two-year-old son dying twenty years ago. “It still hurts,” she said. “We still think of him every day.” Kris left after sacrament meeting, and later, when Scott and the elders quorum presi dent visited him, Kris was in his jeans. His eyes were red, and he said, “Is it going to hurt like this for twenty years?”

After the Primary program, I’m walking to Sunday School when I see Kellie, Noelle, and Charisse sitting on the floor in one of the side alcoves. Mascara is running down Noelle’s face and pooling onto her shirt, and Charisse is gulping between sobs. Kellie’s back is to me; she’s wiping Noelle’s cheeks and brushing the hair away from

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Charisse’s face, murmuring something over and over. In the wake of so much grief, I wish the carpeted floor would open up and swallow us all. As I walk past them, Noelle looks up at me over Kellie’s shoul-der, and because I don’t know what else to do, I keep walking briskly, all the way down the long corridor to the Gospel Doctrine room.

Riley would have turned four today. I remember his birthday because it’s the same day as Kylie’s. So after we sing “Happy Birthday” and Kylie unwraps her gifts and escapes to her room with her new books, I sift through my stacks of photos until I find pictures I took of Riley at Nathan’s last birthday party.

We’d hired a magician; he entertained the kids in the family room, and when he waved his wand over his hat, Riley shouted “Abraca-dabra!” along with the other children. And then he watched, laugh-ing, as the magician pulled brightly colored cotton squares, tied in an endless row, out of his pocket. In the photos Riley is wearing denim Oshkosh overalls and a sage green shirt, the same color as his eyes. In one of the photos he’s standing next to Nathan, pulling his lips apart with his fingers and making a silly face, and in another photo he’s eat-ing birthday cake. And though the heavens remain a mystery to me, I find myself hoping, as I trace my finger over Riley’s face, that one day God will show me how all of it—fate, chance, death, loss, and grief—is magically tied together in one bright, divine pattern.

I crop the photos carefully, frame them with cardstock, glue them on a scrapbook page, and write the date. Then I put the page in a sheet protector and write a note to Kellie and Kris before stopping by their house to deliver it on the way home from Nathan’s soccer game. Kellie opens the door. I hand her the scrapbook page, gushing out a hurried explanation, hoping I’m not making a huge mistake. But she smiles, takes the scrapbook page, exclaims at the photos, laughs at the pic-ture of Riley making the silly face. “That’s a typical Riley pose. What a goofball,” she says. She tells me they’re going to the cemetery, says she’s bought flowers and a couple of toy cars to put on Riley’s grave. She thanks me again, and I hug her tight, stroke her hair.

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As I drive away from the Thompsons’, Nathan in the back seat, I hear Nathan say, “Poor Riley,” and I feel the familiar throbbing in my chest. And then I go home to frost Kylie’s cake and tie balloons to the chairs, to make quiche and fruit salad for her birthday dinner, to celebrate with gusto, while Kellie and Kris put flowers on Riley’s grave.

The Sunday after Riley’s birthday, Scott and I take the kids to visit Riley’s grave right after church. Nathan is holding Riley’s toy tank on his lap as we drive up the winding road toward the cemetery, nestled against the cinnamon-colored foothills. It’s a warm, late-fall day, the sky a fathomless blue; the afternoon sun is like liquid amber, spill-ing over the hills and washing the cemetery with soft light. Crunch-ing leaves underfoot, we walk across the cool, wide stretches of lawn. The air smells of freshly cut grass and damp earth, of moss and wood smoke. It’s the first time I’ve been back since the funeral.

We walk to Riley’s grave at the edge of the hillside. Afar off, I can see the lake, a shimmery silver in the afternoon sun. The grass has filled in over the edges of Riley’s grave, although the smooth bronze plaque, with Riley’s name etched on it, is still shiny. We see evidence of the Thompsons’ visit here yesterday: blue and white carnations, a teddy bear with a blue ribbon around its neck, and a toy car, which Nathan exclaims over. He places the tank on the gravestone next to the car, says, “Happy Birthday, Riley. I brought you the tank you left at my house,” as the rest of us are quiet, listening to the breeze sighing through the leaves.

Then Kylie, Shane, and Miranda run off to play hide-and-seek amongst the trees while Scott and I meander through the ceme-tery. When I glance back, I see Nathan lying on his stomach. He is stretched out on the grass covering Riley’s grave, chin propped on his hand, talking, still sharing confidences with his friend.

Though it’s hard for me to imagine now, I know that this ache in my chest will ease—after all, I remind myself, it wasn’t my child who died. And I know that, though I will always make my children wear helmets and seat belts and life jackets, someday I will no longer wake

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up every morning holding my breath, waiting for trees to fall and the mountains to tumble down.

But what I don’t know yet, is that six months from now the Thompsons will move away; that, years from now, their house will remain vacant, the pool sealed up tight, the lawns gone to seed and the unwatered trees withering in the summer heat. I don’t know that, though Kellie and Kris and their daughters will remain devout, nei-ther of their surviving sons will serve missions, or that every time I see Kellie—once a year or so—I will still see her grief etched in her face. I don’t know that during these brief encounters we’ll men-tion Riley and I’ll feel that bittersweet ache, and then we’ll talk about Kris’s job or Noelle’s new baby, after which I’ll return to my intact life, the tumult from that summer fading with every passing year.

I don’t know any of that yet. For now, I breathe deeply as I watch my children scamper over the cemetery lawn, watch them whirl and spin in the afternoon sun, flit through light and shadow. I watch Nathan leave Riley’s grave and join in the chase, his arms flung out, his head back, running as fast as his mortal legs can carry him.

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The Iron Door

Mark Brown

Jesse Ipsen told someone at church he’d seen the Iron Door. Between sacrament meeting and Sunday School, he stood in the foyer of the meetinghouse, summer morning light resting in bright squares on the carpet, and he said, “Dangdest thing. There it was. Rusted, of course, but right there.”

His friend cocked his head. “You’re saying you saw it?”Jesse grinned like he’d told a silly joke. “Yeah, crazy, huh?”

“So was it there? Was the gold inside?”Jesse laughed and shook his head. “Jeez, I don’t know. I didn’t open

it. It looked rusted shut.”The other man almost seemed to wince. He looked away for a

moment, eyebrows low and pushed up against each other. “Shoot, Jess. If it was me, I’d have pried that thing open with my fingernails.” He shook his head, chuckled, and looked back at Jesse. “Well,” he said, patting Jesse on the shoulder, “let’s get to Sunday School before they think we’re skipping, eh?”

By the time church ended, three other people asked Jesse about the Door. They wanted to know what it looked like, what he’d been doing up in the hills, and, most importantly, where he found it. Jesse answered them as straightforwardly as he could. The Door, he said, was mostly cankered with orange rust but still had some patches of what must have been its original black paint. It sat in an outcropping of basalt, set there with some kind of concrete. The large, notched tumbler and latch handle were on the right and three big hinges held it to a timber set in the mortar.

Honorable mention, 2010 Irreantum Fiction Contest

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“I was up there on my days off. Just hiking around, you know. I went up Saturday morning and spent the day. Slept out last night and then was taking one last walk around this morning when I saw it. It’s pretty far up there. Seems like it wasn’t that far from the top of the center peak. On the west-facing side behind some trees. That’s probably why no one ever saw it. It’s masked pretty good.”

Verle Rasmussen, the high priests group leader, frowned as he lis-tened to Jess and said, “The whole town’s been all over those hills for years, Jess. Doesn’t seem likely you’d just stumble across it walking around like that.”

Jesse shrugged. “I saw it. It was there. Don’t know what to tell you other than that.”

The old man scowled and said nothing more.

At home after church, Jesse heated up a can of soup and made a mayonnaise and cheese sandwich. He sat at his small kitchen table and ate while staring out the window that faced the Plymouth Hills to the south. The purple basalt cliffs stuck out like bones pushed through skin. The hills’ deep hollows were filled with birch trees and cottonwoods, and thick groves of green junipers covered the rounded tops. The range of hills walled in Plymouth Valley like heavy green gates.

Jesse stared hard at the second tallest peak, at a spot near the top on the east-facing side. Swathed in dark green, it looked no different than any other part of the hilltop. But Jesse murmured aloud in his empty kitchen, “It’s right there.”

His phone rang six times that afternoon. Six different people called, asking about the Door. Five men and one woman—all from church. One person said, “Congratulations.” Another all but called Jesse a dirty liar. A man Jesse graduated from high school with offered to come pick him up and drive him back to the hills that very afternoon.

“C’mon, Jess. Won’t take more than a couple of hours. It’s light out till nine these days. You can show me and we’ll head right back.” Jesse said he wasn’t up to it. He hung up and didn’t answer the phone again that evening.

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The next morning, Jesse dammed the ditch above the western field and watched as cold, clear water welled up and poured out of chan-nels in the bank. Water would creep down the furrows for a few hours until it reached the far side when Jesse would come back and pull the dam. He leaned on his shovel handle while the tan, sandy earth turned black as it grew wet. To Jesse, the shape of the dark water inching down the furrows looked like dark knife blades pointing south.

His boss, Granger, drove up in his orange Ford pickup. He heaved himself out of the truck and waddled over, adjusting his enormous overalls. “You moving to the Rockland Pass field next?”

“Yeah. There and then the reservoir field.”Granger breathed heavily and nodded. Under the hot, hard July

heat, his jowly face looked like it might pop. “You’re a popular fella these days. Folks been asking about you all morning. ‘Did he see it? Did he really see it?’ You’d think I was your answering service, Jess.” He smiled.

“Sorry ’bout that. I didn’t think it’d cause so much fuss.”“Hell, Jess, people in this valley have only been looking for that

damned door for the last hundred years almost. You show up at church and announce you saw it just as nice as you please. What do you think’s going to happen?” He pursed his lips and looked as if he might start laughing. Instead he just smiled at Jesse.

Jesse shrugged. “Hadn’t thought about it that way, I guess.”Granger spat, lifted the red bill of his hat, and wiped the sweat

away. “I know you saw it,” he said. “I know you don’t lie. Ever since that first year you worked for me, I’ve known that. You accidentally let that cow out on the road that got smashed all to hell. There was a dead cow, a wrecked car. Most other men would’ve blamed that loose animal on a washed-out fence or something like that.” He stepped closer to Jesse and lightly punched his shoulder. “But you took responsibility.”

Jesse felt his cheeks flush and he looked down at the ground.“I know you don’t like me talking about it. You’re embarrassed

about leaving that gate open. But you stood up like a man and told the truth. And that’s why everybody’s calling about you seeing the Door.”

Jesse cocked an eyebrow and looked up.

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“You know I tell everybody about how honest you are. I always say, ‘The Lord loves an honest man and Jesse Ipsen’s an honest man.’ People around here know you tell the truth. So when you say you’ve found the Iron Door, it’s not like when some half-brained idiot who wandered up here from Utah says it.” Granger spat again, as though the word “Utah” tasted bad.

Jesse smirked. “Guess it’s a good thing the Lord loves me because it doesn’t seem like much of anyone else does right now.”

“Well, people’ll either love you too much or not at all depending on whether or not you can show them that door. Myself, I’m more wor-ried about keeping this wheat from burning up.” He pointed at the field. “That’s the only gold I’m concerned about.”

Jesse pushed through the rest of that day, turning water, feeding animals, and repairing Granger’s ancient combine. He occasionally found himself looking south at the hills. A car drove up as he threw a muddy dam into the back of his truck. Jesse recognized the two teen-age boys from town, one with a silver stud in his lip and the other with disks in his earlobes. The driver hung his head out their windows and asked where they could find the Iron Door. Jesse directed them as best he could, trying not to stare at the metal stud hanging out of the boy’s face. The driver said, “Thanks, man” as though he was sur-prised Jessie even spoke to him, and then he drove off. After dinner at Granger’s, Jesse drove to his small house that sat in the far corner of a hayfield between an irrigation reservoir and a line of slate-colored grain bins. As he pulled up to the dirt driveway, he saw three cars parked a hundred yards down the road. He slammed the door to his truck with his elbow, leftovers in his hands, and muttered to himself,

“I ain’t going into the hills tonight, you ignorant donkeys.”

That evening, someone tapped on Jesse’s front door. He sat in his easy chair staring for a long time before getting up. He parted a yellowed curtain and peered outside. A saggy, middle-aged woman stood on his porch, arms folded across her chest. She gazed slightly to the side as though she didn’t want to look him directly in the eye

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as he peered through the window. Jesse recognized her and noticed that the thick glasses that normally hung around her neck on a chain were perched on her long, lined face. When she taught the Gospel Doctrine class on Sunday, Sister Hughes sometimes held her glasses up as though she was going to put them on, but she never did. She looked foreign and somehow menacing to Jesse with them on her face. Jesse glanced both ways out the window and couldn’t see anyone else. He opened the front door just enough to poke his head through and quietly say hello.

“Hello, Brother Ipsen, how are you? I’m sorry to bother you.”Jesse looked both ways again. “No bother, Sister Hughes. What

can I help you with?”“People tell me you’ve found the Iron Door up in the hills.”Jesse said nothing.Sister Hughes waited a moment and then spoke. “You may not

know this but it was my grandfather who first heard about the door.”She unfolded her arms and Jesse saw she held a small black book.

“This is his journal, and I was wondering if you’d like to hear what he wrote about it.”

Jesse’s mouth pulled into a straight line. “Why?”The question seemed to take her aback. She stammered a little.

“I thought . . . you’d be interested. I thought you might want to know . . .” Her glasses caught the porch light glare, and, for a moment, she looked completely moon-eyed, like a helpless child.

Jesse’s face softened, and he opened the door. “Sorry ’bout that, Sister Hughes. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just been an odd couple of days.”

She stepped in, the book hugged to her chest again. “I understand, Brother Ipsen. I understand completely. Something about the story of that door up there drives everyone around here a little crazy. I’m sure you’ve already gotten an earful from several folks.”

Jesse chuckled a little. “Sure have.”They moved through the house to the kitchen table, and the woman

put the book down gently. She spoke as she used her thumbnails to slowly pry open and turn the brittle pages.

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“You’ve heard about how the story of door began?” she asked, look-ing at him over the top of her glasses.

“Bunch of criminals robbed the stage that went between Pocatello and Tremonton, and they hid everything behind an iron door they’d hauled up into the hills.”

“But do you know how that story got started?”“Didn’t one of them kill the others and turn up here in Plymouth?”Sister Hughes nodded and sighed. She left the book on the table

and settled back in the chair, almost looking as though she was going into a trance, her eyes half-closed, her face pointed upward toward some far corner of the kitchen ceiling. “My grandfather was working a field out near the hills when he saw a man sitting under a tree. It was spring, and Grandpa was plowing. He’d pass one way and then the other, and the man didn’t move. At first, he thought he was just resting but, once he got closer . . .” She paused, staring into a far corner of the room, and then suddenly snapped her eyes back and looked directly at Jessie. “He saw blood all over the man’s clothes.” Jessie won-dered if she had practiced this dramatic pause when she told this story at family reunions and quilting bees.

She seemed to sense Jesse’s mind wandering, so she leaned dra-matically forward to look at the journal on the table. She turned two more pages and said, “He took him home and sent for the doctor who was ten miles away.” She slid the book in front of Jesse and pointed to a passage. Jesse read to himself.

The man was very pale and shook terribly though it was a warm day. I  held a plaster to his wound but it caused him as much pain to have the blood stanched as to let it flow. He grippd my wrist and said his two companions had betrayed him and tried to take his property. I killed them, I killed them, he waled. His excitation worsend his condition and made his blood flow all the faster. I told him the doctor would care for him and all would be right in time. He settled some at that but began making a quiet sound with his breath like a kitten calling for its mother. It did not disturb me to hold back this man’s blood but I must confess, having heard him cry out of murder in his distress, I wondered if the crimson on his fingers was solely his. The evening drew on and I was troubled that the

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doctor had not yet arrived. The man seemed also to feel this anxiety and he called me from the window. He was very low now and his face was as white as milk and his lips and tongue were ruby coloured from the blood in his throat. He spoke in a whisper and his words were hard to make out. He said Sir, your doctor will not save me. I’ll die now. I am a thief and a murderer. You will find my partners in the hills to the south near the top. Our door is there, our iron door. The gold is behind the door. It is up near where the waters divide.

Jesse pushed the book back with his fingertips and looked at Sister Hughes.

The old woman said, “It’s real, Brother Ipsen.”Jesse’s face clouded. “I know it’s real. I saw it.”Sister Hughes bit her lip and seemed to consider what to say next.

Measuring her words, looking at the book on the table the whole time, she spoke. “I showed you this so you would know I believe you. So you’d listen to me. People have been buzzing about your announce-ment in church. Trying to teach the Relief Society lesson was like try-ing to herd cats last Sunday. Half believe you and want to follow you into the hills so they can get a look themselves. The other half think you’re a liar or crazy or just out for attention.”

Jesse clenched his jaw. “I didn’t make any ‘announcement,’” he muttered.

She reached across the table, stopping just short of putting her hand on his. “I know you’re telling the truth, Brother Ipsen.” She paused and waited for him to look her in the eye. When he did, she spoke again.

“But I think it would be best for everyone if you just say you made the whole thing up. Or you could say the brother at church you spoke to just misunderstood what you were saying.”

Jesse stared at her, mouth half-open, confused. “Why would I do that?”

“People have gone their whole lives trying to find that door and what’s behind it. Spent their money on metal detectors and geological maps when they could have been paying their tithing. Neglected their children because they had to spend every weekend in the hills looking.”

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She tapped her fingers on the page of the journal. “Lives have been ruined.”

Jesse shook his head. “But I did find it. I don’t need to spend any-thing or neglect anyone. I saw it. There’s no need for me to lie about something I actually saw.”

Sister Hughes spoke softly. “You’ll never see it again. No one who ever claimed to see the Iron Door has ever found it a second time. It’s not meant to be found and opened, Brother Ipsen. That door and the gold are just a test from Heavenly Father. He uses it to test our hearts for greed. He uses it to see if we’ll do the right thing even when there’s earthly treasure to be had right in our own backyard.”

Jesse folded his arms and looked away with half-closed eyes. “I don’t think God’s in the buried treasure business.”

“God is in everyone’s business.”Jesse looked back at the old woman, his eyes narrowed and his

teeth clenched. “Sounds like someone else I know.”She sat back and simply said, “People in this town will go crazy.”

She pulled the journal toward her and closed it, her fingers resting on the worn cover. “You watch,” she said, “you watch. Finding that door and what’s behind it will become the only thing anyone will talk about.” She scowled at Jesse. “You watch. Gold. That’s all anyone’s going to care about. Iron and gold.”

Jesse held his hands out to her. “But that’s just it! I don’t care about it. I don’t need a bunch of stolen, buried, hidden, stupid treasure any-way. I wouldn’t know what to do with it even if I had it. Why do you think I didn’t even try to open the damn thing? I’m happy how I am and don’t need any more.” He paused and looked at his hands flat on the table. “I just don’t want people thinking I’m some kind of liar. I saw that door up in those hills yesterday and I’m not going to say I didn’t just because a bunch of idiots in town are greedy.”

Sister Hughes tilted her head as though watching something curi-ous. “But sometimes we’re asked to do things that seem wrong for the sake of the greater good. Whole tribes were wiped out in the Bible because God commanded his children to wage war. Nephi cut off Laban’s head so his family could have the Brass Plates. If God is

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willing to ask someone to behead a man for the sake of others, I think he’d be perfectly willing to ask someone to lie a little in order to pre-serve a community.”

Jesse’s cheeks flushed. “Except He’s not asking,” he said. “You are. And last I checked, you weren’t in charge of passing along His mes-sages. Not to me.”

Sister Hughes opened her mouth to speak, but then abruptly closed it. She picked up the journal and stood. Jesse stood too and followed her as she walked silently to the door. The kitchen linoleum crackled as they walked across it.

Jesse opened the door and Sister Hughes walked into the blue dark-ness beyond his porch light without saying anything. Jesse called after her. “I can solve this whole thing, you know. I can just take people up there and let ’em have at it.” He heard her open her car door. “No one has to waste another minute looking for it because I can just show it to them, and then they can decide who opens it and gets what’s inside.” Her car door closed, and the engine started. He watched the head-lights blink on, turn onto the main road, and grow faint with distance.

Despite what he said, Jesse didn’t return to the hills. For the next three days, he stopped answering his phone, avoided going into town, and didn’t even take his dinners at Granger’s, choosing instead to eat canned soup by the light of his television at home each night. On the fourth day, when Granger suggested some important but not press-ing maintenance for the combine, Jesse felt happy to do it because he knew the machine was at the back of the property, far from the road, and wasn’t likely to include visitors.

Jesse sat on a tall stool at the side of the rusting John Deere combine. Replacing a drive belt covered his hard, thick hands with scrapes and friction burns. He had a wide pool of shade cast by the old machine when he started the job that morning, but the sun had climbed and left just a hard, black shadow under the combine. Sweat drops ran down his back. His hands hurt.

When he heard a truck drive up behind him, he hoped it was just his boss coming to check on his progress, but he had a feeling it wasn’t

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Granger. Jesse turned around and saw Arch Jones from church pull-ing up. Arch was just two years older than Jesse, but his thin, almost transparent blonde hair and the dark bags under his eyes made him look two decades older. Jesse fished a socket wrench out of the tool-box on the ground to finish reattaching the belt cover. He kept his back to Arch as he approached.

“Hey, Jess.”Jesse didn’t turn. He kept ratcheting loudly. “Arch.”

“Talk to you?”More ratcheting. “I guess.”

“You been back up to the hills yet?”“I’m sure the whole town knows I haven’t.” Jesse tucked the wrench

under his arm and dug around in his pocket for another bolt.“I’m wondering if you have any of the gold bars from behind that

door.”Jesse wheeled around, the muscles in his shoulders and chest felt

tight and coiled, like he might punch Arch in the mouth. “Yeah, right the hell here in my toolbox, Arch! In fact, I think I have a couple in my pocket.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his grease-covered jeans. “Hmm. Nope, musta left my hidden treasure in my other pants.”

Arch sagged and said nothing.Jesse wiped his arm against his forehead and took a long breath.

“I don’t have any gold. I haven’t even been back up there. More I think about it, the more I think maybe I don’t want to go back. I don’t need people following me, hounding me, or begging me.”

Arch pursed his lips, looked up into the hot clear sky, and said, “Alright, then. Sorry to bug you.” He turned and walked back to his truck.

Jesse watched him go, so bent and unsure in his steps that he looked like a man walking to his own funeral rather than one on a treasure quest. Feeling like he’d kicked a cat, Jess called out just before Arch climbed in the cab. “Why’d you ask? What do you want it for?”

Half in the truck, half out, Arch said, “You know my mom’s been sick awhile. We’re needing to put her up someplace where she can have a nurse all the time. Places like that are expensive and . . .” He

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paused, and Jesse saw the purplish bags under his eyes as they turned toward the hills. “I was thinking that maybe if you had more than you needed . . .” He looked back at Jesse, his face twisted up in a combi-nation of embarrassment and hope. Sweat gleamed beneath the thin layer of his hair as he mumbled, “I was thinking maybe you could loan me and Jean something.”

The anger that strung like an electric wire across Jesse’s shoulders flickered out. He dropped the wrench back into the toolbox and walked over. “Sorry, Arch. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. How’s your mom doing?”

They talked for a few minutes, and Arch described his mother’s decline. Closer now, Jesse saw how Arch’s skin looked slack, like it barely had the energy to hang on to his bones.

Arch said, “So that’s all. It was a shot in the dark, and I’d never nor-mally ask you for money ’cause I know you don’t have any more than anyone else. I just thought maybe if you did, you’d be able to part with some.” Arch looked sideways at Jesse. “But you don’t, right?”

Jesse shook his head. “Nope, I don’t. If I had it, I’d give it to you though. To tell the truth, I have no idea what to do. I didn’t think a thing about what might be behind that door when I saw it. I just thought it was kinda neat that it was really up there. Now everyone and their dog has heard about it, people are calling me on the phone at all hours, waiting outside my house, calling me a liar, asking me to lie. I don’t want any of this.”

Arch nodded and said his wife needed him back home. He climbed into his pickup and shut the door. After he started the engine, he said.

“You oughta ask the bishop what to do.”Jesse grunted. “Yeah?”

“He’s been real good to Jean and me. Every time we’ve had a ques-tion, he’s been real good about telling us what to do.” Arch gave half a wave and drove off.

Arch’s sad, slack presence hung in the air like the tan dust his truck raised as it drove away. Jesse sat back down on the stool and shut his eyes. Sun pressed down on his shoulders. He looked at his watch. Lunchtime. He decided to head home and make a call.

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Bishop Rulon Foster opened the door to his office and motioned for Jesse to come inside. Jesse stepped out of the light-filled foyer and into the cool, silent office. He sat down across the polished desk from the bishop and rubbed his eyes.

“Bright out there,” he said.Bishop Foster looked at the door and nodded. “I don’t think they

considered the sun when they laid out this building. All those win-dows facing west—makes summer a tough time to wait for the bishop here. From about four until nine, that foyer is like a magnifying glass.” He smirked a little. “As if some people weren’t sweating enough.”

Jesse chuckled. “Well, bright or not, I appreciate you meeting me on an off night, Bishop.”

“I meet with people when they need me.” He gave a short smile that left as quickly as it came. “You sounded like you had something to say on the phone so I figured a Thursday night meeting was in order.” He laced his long, white fingers together in front of him. “So what can I do for you?”

“You’ve heard about me and the Iron Door?”The bishop nodded, his face blank.“I just need some help because I don’t know what to do. I have

people asking me for money, other people telling me to say I made it up. I’ve got folks parking outside my house every night waiting for me to go back into the hills. I just about punched out Arch Jones yester-day because he asked me about it.”

Bishop Foster raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s not the sort of thing you need to talk to me about. Maybe if you’d actually struck him, but the desires of our hearts are usually things you can reconcile with the Lord through prayer.”

Jesse shook his head. “No, that’s not it. I’m not worried about want-ing to hit Arch. If I came to talk to you every time I wanted to sock someone, you’d see me after every trip I take to the hardware store.” He chuckled but the bishop didn’t laugh. “It’s this business about the door. It’s just got me all stirred up and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Are you experiencing a stupor of thought?”Jesse thought. “I guess you could say that.”

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“When you think about all this business you’ve started, do you feel confused or uncertain? Do things not seem as clear as they should?”

Jesse clenched his jaw a little when he heard “this business you’ve started.” He leaned back in his chair and spoke slowly. “I feel confused about how everyone seems to have gone a little crazy since last Sun-day. I didn’t mean to start anything.” The bishop nodded in a way that seemed noncommittal to Jesse, as if he was only pretending to listen. Jesse paused and looked over his shoulder at the door to the office. He took a deep breath and spoke again. “Thing is, I don’t think I want to go back to that door. I imagine there’s money to be had in leading everyone to it, but I don’t need the money, and I certainly don’t want the attention.”

For a moment, Bishop Foster almost seemed to smile but he leaned forward across the desk, and his face changed. His eyes widened, became disbelieving. “And so?” he asked.

The air in the room shifted and turned dry. Jesse pushed the heels of his dress boots against the legs of his chair and slid it back slightly. His teeth clenched, but he continued. “On the other hand, there’s people who need help around here. Arch Jones came by yesterday to ask for help in paying for his mom to get put up someplace half decent. If I did go back to the Door, I could maybe help him. Others maybe. I’m just wondering if it’d be the right thing to get the gold and use it to help folks, or if I should just leave it be, seeing as how I don’t really need it, and it manages to get people a little worked up around here.”

Bishop Foster pursed his lips and studied his white, folded hands. His dark, imposing brows covered his eyes, and, for a moment, he seemed to be praying. Without looking up, he asked, “Do you hold a temple recommend, Brother Ipsen?”

“Uh, no.”“Have you ever been interviewed to receive one?”“No, sir.” Jesse squared his shoulders and sat up straighter in his

chair.The bishop peered out from under his brows. “It’s the highest, best

thing a Mormon can do, you know—attend the temple.”

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Jesse nodded, his face hardening, his throat growing tight.“Temples are the Lord’s house. If a man wants to be close to Him,

that’s where he goes. Do you know the questions I ask during the interview?”

Jesse said nothing.The bishop continued. “I ask about your testimony, of course—

whether or not you believe in God and Jesus Christ. Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I need to know if someone has that foun-dation of belief. Then there are other questions that focus on whether or not you act on those beliefs.”

Jesse’s neck felt hot and tight, like he was standing out in the field at noon. He didn’t understand what the bishop was doing.

The bishop saw Jesse glancing over his shoulder at the door and leaned to the left to catch his eye. “The other questions, Brother Ipsen, are about what you do in your life, the things that show whether or not you’re a disciple of the Lord.”

Jesse nodded, unsure of what else to do.For a moment, the bishop’s face looked sad, as though he felt sorry

for Jesse. He said, “Do you live the Word of Wisdom, Brother Ipsen? Do you abstain from coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco?”

Jesse’s heels pushed the chair back farther. He’d come here look-ing for help for help. This was not what he expected. He answered anyway. “Yeah.”

The bishop leaned farther across the desk. “Do you live the law of chastity? Saving yourself for your future wife and no one else?”

“Yeah.” He replied as though it was a stupid question.The bishop seemed to hear the tone in his voice and scowled a

little. “Do you pay your tithing? Do you offer a full ten percent of your increase to the Lord?”

“Yes,” Jesse said.The bishop paused for a long moment. He studied Jesse’s face, his

gaze still and steady. Finally, he said, “Are you honest in your dealings with your fellow man, Brother Ipsen?”

Jesse shrugged like it was the easiest question of all. “Of course,” he said.

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Sighing, the bishop looked down again. “Are you sure?” he asked.“Sure I’m sure. What do you mean am I ‘sure’?”“Bishops can’t read people’s minds, Jesse. I can’t see into your soul

or anything like that. But sometimes, the Lord gives us a little insight into folks, helps us to give them a second chance to say what they meant to say.”

Jesse’s narrowed his eyes. “What kind of insight are you talking about?” he asked.

Bishop Foster shrugged. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Do you want to maybe reconsider that last question?”

Jesse stammered. “Do I . . . ? Hell, no, I don’t.” He leaned forward, the heat of discomfort stoked into a fire. “I came here for a little advice, not so you could . . . what? Interrogate me? Tell me you don’t believe me? What kinda bishop are you anyway?”

The bishop gritted his teeth. “We’re not just here to be listening ears, you know. I’m a judge in Israel. It’s my job to speak the truth and call people to repentance for the sake of their souls.”

“Is that what you’re doing? ’Cause it sounds a lot like you’re just being an ass!”

Rulon Foster pointed his finger at Jesse’s heart. “You’re saying you saw something that simply doesn’t exist! You are creating contention and discontent for people with real problems. They should be spend-ing their time with their families, not camped out in front of your house. People should be coming to the church for assistance, not ask-ing you for gold.”

“Tell me about it,” Jesse said as he stood up, knocking his chair over behind him.

The bishop shot up. “It wouldn’t be happening if you hadn’t said anything in the first place!”

“I said it because I saw it!”“People have looked for that door for a hundred years. You stumble

across it one morning on a stroll? I don’t think so.” He stood, knuckles pressed flat on his desk, eyes wide.

Jesse cocked his head to one side and squinted. “Is that what this is? You’re just pissed because you never found it or something? You

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spent your summers up there looking around and didn’t find anything so that means no one else ever can?”

The muscles in Rulon Foster’s jaw flexed, forming twin almond-shaped dents on the sides of his face. He exhaled long and deep and then sat down. “The Spirit has left this meeting,” he said. “It’s probably best that we don’t continue.”

Jesse sneered. “If you think the Spirit was ever here to begin with, it’s probably best we don’t.” He turned and left, slamming the door behind him.

The day’s last light lit up the rows of Russian olive trees along each side of the road, and the tawny skin of the hills glowed like embers about to go out. As lovely as the world was, Jesse filled the cab of his truck with curses as he sped south. He swore at the bishop, Sis-ter Hughes, Arch Jones, and anyone else he could think of. Not long before the turnoff to the Plymouth Hills, Jesse looked in his rearview mirror and saw three cars following him. He swore again. He realized they must have followed him from the church.

Dust plumed as Jesse stomped on his brakes at the turnoff. He got out and tore the wire loop off the access road gatepost. Behind the gate, a two-track dirt road crawled up a ridge of the hills. For a moment, Jesse considered refastening the gate and speeding off as fast as he could. But as the cars following him approached, he recon-sidered. He held on to the steel gate and felt how cold and heavy it was. Even if he could chain it shut, nothing could stop people from climbing over it and following him up the hill. No gate, no chain, no hiding out would stop anyone who really wanted to follow him. Hell, he thought, I can’t even meet with an idiot bishop without someone staking me out.

He stood in the middle of the entrance until the three cars arrived at the turnoff. Then, with a shrug, he threw the gate open and motioned for people to follow him. Two trucks and a car trundled across the cattle guard and up the access road. Jesse looked into each vehicle as it passed. He didn’t recognize the first man but knew the other two: one was the guy from high school who had called him the first night after church, and the other was Sister Hughes’s son. Wordlessly, Jesse

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returned to his truck and headed up the incline with the other vehicles close behind.

Once the incline grew too steep, Jesse parked, put the parking brake on, jumped out of his truck, and started hiking without looking back at the others. The land grew wild and rocky toward the top. Wheat fields ended and basalt boulders sprang up amid wide patches of sage-brush. The road turned to an increasingly rough and ill-defined trail. Jesse still wore the white shirt, slacks, and dress boots he wore to see the bishop. He felt dark sweat rings circle his armpits. No one spoke. The men heard only their labored breathing and the crunch and slide of loose stone underfoot. Jesse stayed a few steps ahead of the others and never looked them in the eye.

Jesse found where he’d slept the weekend before. The indentation of his sleeping bag was still apparent in the thin grass next to the blackened fire pit. He paused, orienting himself, and the other three men looked around as though they expected the door to materialize out of the air. The fields below already sat in long, blue shadows, but sun still hit the spot high on the hill where the men stood. Faded light shone across the campsite, burnishing the cheat grass, gilding the edges of sagebrush. Gnats dove and circled above the men like hyper-active motes. Abruptly, Jesse walked off, passing through a clump of juniper trees, the others hurrying after him.

After an hour of the men clambering around, the sun sank. The chill air raised gooseflesh on Jesse’s arms and neck. Three times he started at the campsite and walked along the narrow basalt ledge he remembered leading to the door. He circled back, trying a different path each time and each time, he came to nothing—a pile of stones, a blank ledge, gnarled junipers. Each time, he moved more slowly, looking more carefully. He tried to remember whether or not he’d done something different before, if he had gone over a small ridge or made a turn. Somewhere along the trail each time, things began to look unfamiliar. Jesse’s head hurt, and his feet burned from slipping around in his boots. He felt the eyes of the men behind him drilling into his neck.

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After the last try, the man Jesse didn’t know said, “You even know where you’re going?”

The cold sweat on Jesse’s collar chafed his neck. “I ain’t your tour guide, mister. I didn’t ask you to come along, and I sure as hell didn’t ask you to ask me anything. You got questions, head back down the mountain and see if you find any there.”

The man’s mouth dropped open. He looked at the other two, eyes bulging, then looked back at Jesse. “Who do you think you are?” he sputtered.

Jesse took two quick steps toward the man, fists balled. “I think I’m the man who’s going to toss you down this hill if you don’t decide to get out of here yourself.”

The man flinched and backed away. Once he stood about twenty feet off, he spoke. “I thought you might have been something because of what people said about you. But you’re nothing. This is nothing. You’re just another liar. Just a sick, little liar.”

Jesse scooped up a fist-sized rock near his feet and pitched it as hard as he could. The man spun, and it hit his turned back with a dull thud. He cried out, and Jesse bent down and grabbed another rock. The man scrambled down the ledge and behind a juniper tree. The sounds of his stumbling as he hurried away were sharp and clear in the evening air.

Jesse turned toward the other two men. Even in the dim evening light, he could see them watching him, waiting to see if he was going to throw something their way. Jesse let the stone fall out of his hand. He suddenly felt very tired. His shoulders sagged, and he felt his feet pulse in his boots. He wondered about the other man and winced at the thought of him stumbling through the dark, a black and green bruise forming on his back. He looked around at the shadows and outlines of rocks and juniper trees. In the dark, everything looked alien, and Jesse wasn’t even sure where he was standing. He saw Rulon Foster’s face, his finger pointing at his chest. Heard his voice. You stumble across it one morning on a stroll? I don’t think so. Looking into the dark sky over his head, Jesse said, “You two can leave. There’s nothing to see.”

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“There’s nothing to see or you’re just not going to show us?” one of them asked.

Jesse looked down and sighed. “Either way. Doesn’t matter. You might as well go home.”

Sister Hughes’s son said, “You’re just saying that. You just want us out of here so we won’t know where it is. So you can have it all for yourself.”

Jesse smirked. “Maybe. You’ll never know.” He turned and walked back along the basalt ledge. His legs felt thick and heavy as he picked his way through the darkness. The other two men followed at a dis-tance. Finally, Jesse found the screen of juniper trees that flanked one side of his old campsite. He ducked through it and sat down in the spot where he’d slept the weekend before. He took off his boots and rolled the soft leather tops down toward the heel. He propped the two rolls together as the other two men came through the trees.

“What are you doing?” one of them asked.“Going to sleep.”“Out here? No sleeping bag, no coat? Just going to lay down on the

ground and snooze, huh? You think we’re stupid or something?”Jesse put his head on the leather pillow he’d fashioned. “I’ll only

think you’re stupid if you stay up all night on a cold hilltop just to watch a man sleep.”

The man from Jesse’s high school spat. “You’ll close your eyes for two seconds until we leave, and then you’ll hop up and head for the door.”

Jesse said, “Suit yourselves. If your wives aren’t wondering where you are, I guess I don’t care where you spend the night.” He looked out at the dots of orange and yellow light flickering on in the shadows of the valley floor. He thought he could tell which lights belonged to the church where he’d left the bishop just a few hours before. He shut his eyes. “Go ahead and wait. It doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m not. Doesn’t matter. Tonight’s as good a night as any to sit and wait for something to happen.” He yawned. “Good luck.” Jesse turned over and breathed deeply.

Jesse listened for long minutes as the other two men stood behind him, no doubt staring at his back, trying to decipher whether or not he

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was really sleeping. They muttered to each other a few times, and then Jesse heard them turn and walk down the trail, rocks scraping beneath their feet as they went. Once he was sure they were gone, Jesse rolled onto his back and stared up at the stars. They looked hard. Cold crept up his legs, and his feet felt thick and raw. He leaned forward and rested his forehead on his knees. His breath caught in his throat for a moment. He pictured Bishop Foster behind his desk, shoulders stiff with anger, his finger pointing at Jesse’s heart. He heard his voice: “I’m a judge in Israel. It’s my job to speak the truth.” He saw the distain in the bishop’s eyes, heard the doubt when he asked, “Do you want to maybe reconsider that last question?” Jesse shook his head and felt his lip curl with hatred for Rulon Foster. For him, for Sister Hughes, for the dimwits who parked outside his house night after night, for the poor, stupid fool with a stone-sized bruise on his back.

Jesse closed his eyes again and saw the Iron Door in his head. He felt the cold iron against his palm and the immovability of the ridged tumbler. He saw the rough orange lichen blotching the face of the door and the old concrete caught in frozen drips hanging over the frame timbers. It sat under an overgrown brow of basalt, like a dark half-closed eye looking over Plymouth Valley. Jesse saw it clear and bright.

He looked out at the lights in the darkness. “To hell with you,” he said aloud. “To hell with all of you.”

119

Who Peeks Through the Veil

Kerry Spencer

They come to me in a dream.It’s one of those dreams you’d expect to hear about in church—the

kind of dream for which rationality demands dismissal while irratio-nality demands attention. The problem is you’re not sure what to pay attention to and you’re not sure what to dismiss. And yet, you can’t forget about it.

Right before the dream, I am stumbling into my professor’s office, collapsing into a self-pitying heap.

“Oh, honey,” my professor, Zina, says. “You look like you need choc-olate.” She sifts through her desk drawers and pulls out a Snickers bar and tosses it to me. “For your dementors,” she says. “I’m sorry about the scholarship.” She pauses, as if she wants to say or do something else. “I have to teach a class. But I’ll be back. Take a nap and wait for me? You look tired.” She points to the lounge-like chair she keeps in her office—specifically for naps—and leaves.

I am tired.My exhausted, twenty-year-old self must be a mess. Eyes all puffed

and red. Un-washed hair frizzing. Shoulders sagged by my git-like crying at my own failures. All I can think about is that I’ve lost the Rhodes scholarship and will, consequently, never go to England.

And going to England feels so much more important than it seems like it should.

As I sit in the nap-chair, I try to push all of my self-pity into each bite of chocolate. But as I eat, I keep hearing the judges’ gritty questions.

1st place, 2010 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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“Don’t you feel a little naïve for having faith?”“Missionary work is a form of imperialism. And imperialism is one

of the greatest atrocities of the modern era. How do you feel about being a part of the atrocity?”

“You’ve read Chaucer. You’ve heard of the ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ What makes you think it’s spun by God? How do you tell the difference between divinity and sheer chance?”

It was an unexpected line of questioning—one I felt completely unprepared for. I had been convinced that, irrational as I knew it was, my competing was of vital, eternity-laden importance.

So I answered the best I could. And I thought I felt a power there with me as I was talking. I thought I saw one of the judges cry.

And then I lost.I stood with the other eleven finalists, waiting for the results. We’d

all made it past state finals. This was the last level of the competi-tion: four of us would go to Oxford. We were in the lobby of a Texas hospital where one of the judges was a doctor. Poorly clad patients in wheelchairs, IV’s attached to the handlebars, kept rolling by.

When the judges came out of their deliberation in the conference room, I knew it wasn’t a good sign that they wouldn’t look at me. But I was still unprepared for the empty place in my chest when they didn’t call my name. Why was it so important to come here? To lose? It didn’t make sense. And it kept not making sense even when I was back. Even when Steve—who I’d met at State finals—e-mailed me to ask me on a date. And especially when I knocked on Zina’s door and when she handed me the chocolate.

But at least when the last of the chocolate melts against my fingers, I feel some of my self-pity melt along with it.

Completely spent, I decide to try that nap.Generally speaking, I don’t really sleep very well. Especially dur-

ing the day. But I drift quickly into a haze. And suddenly, everything around me is calm and fuzzy with light.

I’m dreaming.There’s someone standing in front of me. He’s young and old in an

ageless way. He’s got blonde hair and he looks like my dad.

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I cock my head to the side—silently asking him why he’s standing there.

He looks me right in the face and he says, “You have to find us.” There’s an urgency in his voice and he doesn’t blink.

I look down to his left and notice that a girl is sitting there next to him. Her hair is darker than his and she doesn’t say anything.

“But where are you?” I ask.There is a beat of silence before he answers.“England,” he says.And the dream is over.Ever since I was a little girl I’d been taught about dreams. About

Lehi, dreaming of the Tree of Life. Joseph, interpreting the dream of the baker and the king. Joseph Smith, listening to angels that spoke as he lay covered by his bed-quilts.

A lot of what I’d heard came from my grandmother. She lived with us when she had congestive heart failure and, even though she did eventually recover, at the time we all thought she was dying. She couldn’t lie flat and breathe, so she’d sit upright in a chaise—a cro-cheted blanket covering her newly thin legs (that she claimed she was far too old to shave).

Terrified that she might die any minute, I would sit next to her every night until two or three in the morning. She’d hold my hand and tell me about my uncle who had visions. Her friend who heard voices. The way that the ghosts of her ancestors would speak to her at night when she was worried that she was about to pass. The prophets of the Bible must have seemed maniacal, she’d said. But I would be a little crazy, too, if I could see through the veil. Glimpses through the veil can terrify you with their violence.

“You need to remember,” she said to me once, “when the veil between the worlds is open . . . it’s dangerous. Spirits flow both ways: life meet-ing death. If you’re not careful, you could fall back through.”

If I had been older, or more cynical, maybe I would have rolled my eyes.

But I wasn’t old and I wasn’t (yet) cynical. All I knew was that the clocks in the room seemed to whirl their arms around too fast. And

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that every minute, every second, that I could spend with my grand-mother was terribly important.

So when I have the dream . . . when I feel how important it seems . . . It’s not terribly hard to ignore every bit of my rational self. Dreams can matter, I decide. Especially when they seem like they matter.

But there is something still so baffling about it all. The urgency—the pleading. The call to a quest. The best I can figure is that the peo-ple in my dream are ancestors. And ancestors are important, I think. That’s why we’re sealed—one generation to the next—in a line back through time and forward into an eternal round. Our connection to both the people before us and the people who come after us is sacred. Maybe, I figure, maybe I’ll still get to England. Because my ancestors are calling me to find them. The spirit of Elijah finally speaking to me, the way my grandmother said it might someday.

“How are you doing?” Zina asks when she comes back from teaching.“Good,” I say. But, even though I try, I can’t elaborate any more than

that. It all feels too important, somehow. Even the nap-chair and the chocolate have started to feel like holy space and sacred communion.

“The chocolate was magical.”When I go home, I sit on my twin-sized bed—surrounded as it is

with piles of books and notepads full of my scratchings. I watch the curtain to my bedroom window blow in and out, as if it’s breathing.

The last time my curtain breathed that way was on the morning I decided to apply for the Rhodes scholarship. I had been eating oat-meal and when the urge hit I called it the ghost of Cecil Rhodes call-ing. But it was just a feeling. If I’d had another grandmother, I might have called it something besides a ghost. The only other sources of the feeling I could think of were God and the devil. I did not want God to tell me to do something so annoying. And the devil seemed an unlikely visitor at dawn, when I was eating oatmeal.

Today I hold a notebook in my lap, wanting to write the dream about my ancestors down. But I can’t even do that. The words don’t come because every time I try to think of them, they’re pushed out of my head by waves of calm.

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It’s six years before I can write it down.And it’s three years before it ever occurs to me that the messengers

of my dream could be anything other than ancestors.Because it’s not until three years later—when I am married to

Steve, who I met competing for that Rhodes scholarship—that I find out that we can’t have babies.

And it’s not until that same three years later that a professor—who is practically a stranger to me—walks up and asks me to come teach a study abroad class with him. It’s a hiking trip, he says. More than two hundred miles over seven mountains.

And it’s in England.

We’re en route to Milton Abbey, hiking through a muddy forest. The light is dim—twilight in the midday. There is no sign that there might be wild animals, but the thick trees that surround the footpath are the kind that you’d expect to look into and see multitudes of glow-ing eyes looking back. Ancient England had lions, but today is the first time I really believe in them.

My feet are leaden with mud and I am so exhausted that I feel almost as if my spirit isn’t fully connected to my body. It’s hovering just outside the space of my body, connected only to my toes. I’m embarrassed to be so exhausted. Embarrassed that the injections have made everything so dark and fuzzy feeling.

I should be grateful, I think. Here, in England, IVF is so much less expensive than it is at home that even we—on our grad-student budget—can afford it. This is our only shot at having a baby for years. The only shot at making that dream I had unfold. The fact that I have to hike two hundred miles on IVF hormone injections shouldn’t be an undue sacrifice. Even though my reaction to the hormones has been . . . extreme. I’ve been seeing things, hearing things. At night I dream of dismembered body parts and demons who eat the rancid

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carcasses of cats. When I wake up in the morning, I can almost feel fur caught between my teeth. My head will pound, I will vomit, and then I’ll start to cry.

But is it really the injections making me feel this way?The emotions feel real. The disorientation and darkness feels real.

Every bit of anxiousness has a real cause. Can I blame drugs for that?I try to keep my eyes wide open and a smile pasted on my face.

But the view ahead is obscured by a misty haze and the squishy path underneath our feet punctuated by sharp rocks that you can’t always see. I’m not hiding much of anything very well.

I slow my pace and look around. The trees are tall.And then my spirit, still hovering in front of me, looks at me.“Someday you’ll be rich,” she says.I have never cared about being rich. But in that moment—surreal

as it is with the living shadows of trees hovering—it seems like a really, really wonderful idea.

There are two people nearby talking about their boyfriends. They must know that I can hear them, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to pretend I can’t or if I’m supposed to join in the conversation.

The spirit who looks like me speaks again.“And when you’re rich, people will want to hear you speak. They’ll

cry and applaud at the very sound of your voice.”The connection between me and my spirit loosens. It’s elastic now

and stretching away from me.Steve is far ahead of me, smiling as he talks to someone in the

group. I think, “He is such a good guy.” A bird squawks above me. I look up at it.

The spirit who looks like me says, “He’ll probably be an apostle someday. You’ll have to travel the entire globe and everywhere you go people will fawn.”

Someone in the line of hikers bumps into me, and I let myself fall farther back in line.

Says the spirit, “When you’re rich and powerful no one will bump into you. Or if they do they’ll be sorry. They’ll rue the day that they bumped into you. . .”

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My guts start filling with . . . a yearning. It’s a completely unfamiliar sensation—a mix of greed and bloodlust.

“You can make it happen you know. It’s easy. Watch.”In the sky in front of me, I see a cliff . . . I see the cliff and I see the

person who just bumped into me . . . I see them falling down the cliff . . . and then I see myself—pushing arms out—standing at the edge of the cliff. Smiling.

I stop.The hikers keep moving forward, like a moving body of water. I

look around, trying desperately to snap my spirit back into my body, but I can’t.

“Who are you?” I ask the spirit. “Because you are not me.”She smiles once more, fading into the shadows of the trees.I quicken my pace and try to find someone to talk to, to pull myself

out of the fogginess of my IVF-addled brain.For a while, I almost feel like myself again.But when we get to the Abbey, Steve hands me a pamphlet about its

founder—King Athelstan. He was king a long, long time ago—some-where around 900 ad. I read over the pamphlet with a tired sort of dis-interestedness. I’m hot and cold at the same time and so exhausted that I approach the grandeur of the Abbey with something like boredom.

I leave my heavy-with-mud shoes at the entrance and walk around in my wet wool socks.

The Abbey looks like every other cathedral we’ve been to so far. Ceilings so tall you feel like you’re outside when you’re in. Stone walls that echo against a quiet so present it seems to encourage reverence. Walls of graves etched with the names of noble patrons, whose life-time of money earned them a hollow carving in rock.

I read through the pamphlet as I walk—the cold, hard of the floor such a contrast to the muddy path.

Before he was king, the pamphlet says, Athelstan was walking in the wooded hills above what would become Milton Abbey.

It’s strange to read of a king, walking the same place that I just walked. I wonder how heavy with mud his shoes were. How tired he was as he came out of those woods.

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The pamphlet goes on.But as he was walking, he started to see visions.Visions of himself as the greatest king England had ever known.The visions grew more and more persuasive. More and more

appealing. It was simple, he told himself. Just a few things to do first. Watch.

And he saw it all play out in his head, stomach churning with something like greed and bloodlust.

There is a bench next to me and I sit down on it.I can still feel it in my gut, too—that unfamiliar yearning.But Athelstan did more than just feel it.He was so swayed by his visions, that he went down to the town that

stood at the edge of the forested hills. He burned the entire village—and its people—to the ground. And in the space of the destruction, he erected Milton Abbey. A tribute to God and his greatness as king.

The abbey feels cold as I put the pamphlet down.I can almost see that spirit who looks like me, laughing. A phantom

haunting the very stones that I sit on.I watch the other members of the group move past me and am

again struck by the sensation that they are part of a moving body of water while I am a rock, stuck in the mud of the riverbed.

Could it be a real demon? I think. One whispering temptations, driving you to sin, or maybe insanity?

How large is the gap between sin and insanity?I start to shiver. The IVF clinic has been messing with my brain.

Literally. I told them I’d had nightmares. I told them I’d been seeing things. They said it wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t abnormal, either. No one really knows what happens when you change the chemistry of a person’s brain.

I can’t see Steve anywhere. But I think I can hear him just outside the Abbey. I think I can hear the way his laugh is so present and I wonder if I’ll ever be capable of being so present again.

Is the veil between the worlds a mix of molecules and neurons?When the clinic shut down my pituitary gland, did they evacuate

my brain of whatever chemical was keeping it closed? Are the hills of

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Milton Abbey inhabited by a spirit that once haunted a king and now haunts me?

I stand up and I walk from tomb to tomb inside of the Abbey, scanning the names of the dead. My wet, wool socks leave footprints behind me as I go.

It’s egg collection today. They gave me a valium this morning, but I don’t feel it working. Not even a little bit. The room is hot and I am half naked and shaking. The doctor is almost unrecognizable in her surgery garb. She is covered from head to foot and is wearing goggles. I can’t see her eyes.

They give me something in an IV and everything starts to get fuzzy fast. My legs are pried back (so dignified!). Steve is squatting next to me, all whispering and smiles.

When they asked me earlier how much I weighed, I was embar-rassed about how much weight the hormones made me gain. So I lied. By about thirty pounds.

It’s not until they use that weight to start calculating my anesthesia that I realize you should never lie about your weight to doctors who might have to give you anesthesia.

The next thing I remember is pain. Screaming pain. Writhing pain. Tearing pain. And a fuzziness. I am here and there and nowhere all at once.

And then, in my mind, I am back at Tintagel, where the sun beat down at us when we scaled the cliffs. I can feel the sun against my eyes, my head throbbing against its piercing. The sun is blanching.

I think about the word “blanching” and immediately my inner voice begins to recite Elizabeth Barret Browning’s “Grief ” in a nonstop loop as I kick at the dust of the cliffs. Intra-poem “Grief ” morphs into John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud,” and then “Batter my Heart.”

Below I see the bright aqua of the Atlantic Ocean, crashing onto the shores next to Merlin’s cave. The air smells like dust and salt.

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I remember the way Steve meets me on the top of the hill where, underneath our feet, lie the ruins of a castle floor. He walks with me to find shade. I am beginning to stink with sweat and my headache intensifies, shooting a stake through my pupil to the back of my skull.

Steve kisses me and puts a “pregnant” flower into my hair. “It’s a magic flower,” he says, pointing to the way the belly of the flower bulges. “The ancient veins of power pulse here with the mystery of conception. All they need is an offering now.”

“You talked to George too long,” I say. George, the bus driver, kept going on about the “veins of power” underneath Tintagel Castle. I frown in the blanching sun, unable to smile at Steve’s magic flower. My inner voice of Browning-Donne chanting grows louder and louder, humming in a cacophony of grief, sin, and death.

We make our way, shoes in hand, down into Merlin’s cave as the tide comes in.

“You feel the power here, don’t you?” asks Steve.Cold waves crash, stinging against my feet. The cold slowly creeps

from the numbness of my toes to my torso, but the ache in my head lingers and the stink of my sweat mingles with the crusty smell of water and sand. “Yes,” I say. “I feel it.”

I wade into the oncoming waves inside the cave, pushing my sun-glasses up into my hair to help adjust to the darkness of it. I’m teeter-ing upon rocks as the swirl of the tide sends me off balance. While I try to right myself I do not notice that my sunglasses have fallen from my head and have been sucked into the swirling vortex of water and rock.

Back on the beach, after the tide has pulled the cave opening almost completely underwater, I notice that they are gone.

The Tintagel Gods of conception have taken their offering, says the ghost of Cecil Rhodes, who is laughing. And fortunately they have a taste for hideously ugly eyewear.

I cry out, shake my head.“No, Cecil Rhodes isn’t allowed to be here,” I say.

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“Don’t worry,” says the doctor. “Hallucinations are common with this type of anesthesia.”

“I lied about my weight,” I say.They don’t believe me. The nurse strokes my arm, “Hush, honey. It’s

going to be okay.”The pain is making me sweat and it’s a struggle not to scream out.My memory is doing funny things.In front of me, I see my thesis and I see myself sitting over it,

hunched with anxiety.My advisor wants another draft. And he wants it to be good.I don’t care if it’s good. I just want it done.But I know that if it’s going to be good, I’m going to have to con-

sider the logical possibility that there is no God.Because the premise of my thesis is that Enlightenment philoso-

phers misinterpreted the physics of Newton’s Principia. That the hypotheses upon which their atheistic philosophies rested were laden with fallacies.

You can’t write that kind of thesis without considering the logical possibility that there is no God.

I close my eyes. Take a breath. I’m not entirely sure whether or not I’m about to talk myself out of my faith and it terrifies me.

Axioms, I think.If you follow them back far enough, all logical conclusions are ulti-

mately based upon fundamentally improvable axioms.Trace the logic back to the axioms . . . what’s the axiomatic difference?The pages of my thesis get caught in the breeze of my swamp cooler,

but I let them scatter.Nothing.Something.I realize.That’s the axiom.There’s either something.Or there’s nothing.Neither one is provable.

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Neither one is necessarily more probable.But both are the beginning of two very different types of logic.

“My left ovary is screwed up,” I say. “Scar tissue. It burst a few years ago. And I lied about my weight.”

The nurse leans down harder on me because I am writhing.I repeat things without knowing that I’m repeating them. “My left

ovary,” I say, “it has scar tissue . . . ”Every few minutes, I see the doctor hand off something to the

embryologist, who then runs into the lab next door.“We’ve got another one,” I hear coming from the other room.If I could be just the tiniest bit coherent, I might realize that this

is the moment of human conception: dreams meeting reality inside a Petri-dish.

Psalm 19.I’ve been having Steve read it to me every night. I’m not entirely

sure why, but it has resonated with me in a way none of the other psalms have.

The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.There is no speech, nor language, where their voice isn’t heard.Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end

of the worldIn them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun . . .

The sacredness of nature. The importance of words. How all things testify of God.

I can feel myself shaking, feel the nurse holding me down.I start to cry. A deep moaning sob that I could never have allowed

myself if I weren’t drugged.

It was never Cecil Rhodes who sent me to compete for those schol-arships, I realize. Never Cecil Rhodes who sent me on this trip.

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It was always God.

I try not to writhe, try not to let the pain get in the way of the collection.

Should we have faith in God? Or faith that He’ll do what we want Him to?

I know the answer to this and it makes me feel desperate and angry. I don’t want to be told that an empty uterus is all part of God’s plan and I don’t want to be told that He wants me to suffer. I want Him to tell me it will all work out. I don’t want Him to tell me that it will be okay even if it doesn’t work. I want it to work.

I am not okay with failure. And it makes me feel like a terribly self-ish person.

Now I lie on the edge of a London gutter.The air smells of dust, grime, and cigarette smoke. Vaguely, I am

aware of the filth that is coating my hair, dirtying my clothes. But I can’t make myself care. Everything is hazy from the egg-collection anesthesia and my stomach is aching.

Steve is knocking, trying to get the property manager to open the door so we can check in and I can lie down on an actual bed instead of a grimy gutter.

“We’re not open right now,” says someone from inside. “Come back in an hour.”

“But I told you we’d be coming,” says Steve. And he did. He told them I’d be having surgery. That we needed to check in right after it was finished.

“It’s lunchtime,” says the nasally voice through the door. “Come back in an hour.”

Steve looks at me, a little desperately. I see the lines of anger, com-passion, worry, all deepening as he looks. “But my wife,” he says, “she’s not doing very well.”

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His face is so kind. So Steve.The voice from the other side of the door snaps, “A person has

to eat!”And Steve steps away from the door, fuming. He kneels down next

to me, touches my hair.I’m aware that I could be crying, but that I am feeling so hazy that

I can’t tell whether or not I am. I simply smell the dust, the cigarette smoke. I feel the pavement under my hips, the total dirtiness that has accompanied this entire attempt at an, ironically?, immaculate conception.

And then, there in the steamy London gutter, I feel her next to me.When I think about it, she’s been watching me for days. Watching

as the heat set me snapping. Watching as I retched at the toilet during Les Misérables Watching as I cried when we rowed our way across the lake at Hyde Park.

Today, when they took those eggs so forcibly from my ovaries, they put them into a dish. There was no sex. No meeting of man and woman in love. Just a violent attempt to force open the veil.

I look at her Madonna face. She seems so young. So much younger than I would have ever imagined. How violent was her immaculate conception? How hard was it to open the veil and let Jesus through?

“Did you know?” I want to ask her. “Your uncle talked about light and darkness and death when he heard. But did you know he was talking about you? That you would have to go through something even Joseph, sweet as he was, could never understand?”

I close my eyes, listening to the hum of traffic as it is filtered by the concrete.

I don’t know yet that this procedure is going to bring me those children I dreamed of. But I do know things I didn’t. That conception, no matter how miraculous, brings you directly through the shadow of death. That God meant it when he told Eve that she would have sorrow in childbirth.

And that even she, mother of God, was a daughter of Eve.I watch the black taxis whiz past, stirring up black fumes.Steve reaches out, holds my hand.

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She puts a hand on my ankle, sends me a gentle smile. “These immaculate conceptions,” she says, just a hint of laughter underneath the softness of her voice. “They just never let you in the inn afterward, do they.”

And for just a moment, I forget about the pain. I forget about the grime and the ache in my stomach. The entire dirtiness that has accom-panied this possibly futile attempt at an immaculate conception.

I just stare at the open veil.And I laugh right along with her.

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“Everything That Actually Matters is Real”: Genre-blending and Anneke Majors’ The Year of the Boar

Reviewed by Laura Hilton Craner

Review of Anneke Majors’ The Year of the Boar (Self-published, Kindle edition, 2011)

“My lifetime is shorter than my literary ambitions” writes Anneke Majors in the forward to her new autobiographical novel, The Year of the Boar (Kindle location 5–6). She continues, “Many of the stories came to me in a much more barebones form than you see here. . . . But I stand by these stories as true stories because the characters are true. Everything that actually matters is real” (Kindle location 8–9).

And so begins The Year of the Boar, a lovely and comforting offering in the genre-blending autobiographical novel style of Coke Newell’s On the Road to Heaven (2007; Provo, Zarahemla Books). This is not a light comparison. Newell’s offering was the first book to win both the Association of Mormon Letters’ and the Whitney’s Best Novel Award in 2007—even on the heels of the literary scandal of James Frey’s fictionalized memoir, A Million Little Pieces. So what does an

“autobiographical novel” offer Mormon readers that typical mem-oirs or historical fiction do not? According to Majors’ forward, it’s simple. Truth.

Primarily a missionary tale that follows the author’s own mission in Japan, The Year of the Boar is an autobiography-in-stories that swirls in and out of time—even jumping to the future in a final sec-tion—but finds its anchor in the Chinese Zodiac and the soulful Sis-ter Majors, who embodies the very traits of the zodiac Boar. She is diligent (when it comes to persevering through bad weather, she beats the US Postal service) and compassionate (when stuck with a nega-tive companion, she tries to love that companion by always finding

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positives and doing the emotional lifting). She is extremely likable and everything a sister missionary—a woman bringing truth to the world—should be.

Truth in the Mormon lexicon is a slippery term. It is canonically defined in Doctrine and Covenants 93:24 as “knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come.” But that knowl-edge comes from many sources. Scripture and prophetic statements are the most reliable, but personal revelation and experience are the most common, and complex, sources. Fairly often it is in the personal nature of truth that Mormon testimonies, and Mormon art, flour-ish. It is a case in point that Majors invokes truth and realness in her introduction but never actually defines what she means by those words. Regardless of how important the concepts may be to her, their slippery nature leaves them obscured even in the author’s mind.

The Year of the Boar is Majors’ second self-published novel and is based both on the time she spent as a missionary in Japan from 2005–2007 and stories from her family history. In a June 2011 interview with William Morris at A Motley Vision, Majors described her book as a conversion story. She said:

It’s, at first examination, a missionary story, but I like to think of it actually as a conversion story. Its essence is the process of conversion and what that means in the context of history, family, and everyday life. I do hope that The Year of the Boar brings some fresh offerings to the missionary story genre, and among those would be the perspective of sister missionaries, the experience of women in the modern world, and also a realization of the realities of the gospel in Asia.1

The book is split into three sections and follows four women and their conversion stories through the rotations of the Chinese Zodiac. The first section is the Year of the Rooster, which chronicles events in 1957, 1969, 1981, and 2005. The second section is the Year of the Dog and starts in 1949, jumping forward in history also by twelve year intervals. The third section is the titular Year of the Boar and resolves all the story lines as it follows events in each of the Chinese zodiac boar years.

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Craner: “Everything That Actually Matters is Real”

The Year of the Boar shines most when Majors is applying her cre-ative talent to other smaller, transitory characters and not herself. It is their moments of revelation and experience that give the book its truth and reality. Because Majors chose a blended genre she isn’t hemmed in by the literal nature of truth that a more typical autobiography would call for. Also, because she isn’t writing historical fiction, she is free from the genre constraints of fidelity of time and overemphasis on well-known historical figures. Majors’ novel paradoxically bucks literal truth in order to embrace real, experiential truth. Because her genre gives her leeway, she is more free to communicate truth.

My personal favorite transitory character was Tetsuo, a man who survived World War II in Japan, and helped translate the democratic constitution and later works as a public servant. Tetsuo’s defining moment comes when he finds a crucifix (“the European god nailed to the character for ten like they always depicted him” [Kindle location 1790–1791]) in a bombed-out Christian church. Majors writes,

[Tetsuo] thought for a moment about taking it home, showing it to his mother, keeping it as a curio. But as he went to slip it into his sack, he felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t his to keep, and it should be with someone who would know how to take better care of their god than he. The stat-ue’s face was pitiful, contorted with pain. For so long he had resented this big European church up on the hill, staring down at them all like it deserved to be above them. He had had no regard for the Europeans or their little god, but now, holding it in his hands that way, it looked so frail. He hesitated, wanting to make the right choice. But was leaving it on the ground in the rubble the right choice either? He decided to hold onto it, but only for safekeeping. He would come back when there was someone back to rebuild or take care of the church in some way, and he would return their god to his house, hopefully a house that would be strong and beautiful again. (Kindle location 1791–1798)

Moments like this one, small moments where the characters must negotiate between the ever-shifting political and spiritual forces around them, are what give this book its heart. This is where the truth that the author purports to provide and that the characters are all seeking, nebulous as it may be, comes to light.

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Occasionally, the book stumbles. As a self-published work it falls to some common editing errors and a few structural difficulties. Some characters appear and are lost too quickly in the revolutions of the Chinese zodiac calendar, making their backstories hard to hold on to (a family tree in the opening pages would have alleviated that). Other times bits of Mormon phraseology creep in where they shouldn’t (at one point a Baptist minister offers to pray over a man’s dying wife and asks, “would you like me to be the voice” in a way that seems a bit too home-teachery [Kindle location 1839–1849]). Sister Majors tends to think in run-on sentences that often take up paragraphs at a time and give her portions of the book a rushed feeling. There are even odd moments of over-explaining, like when a fictional Chinese stake is being formed in 2013 and the author stops to explain what a stake means to Mormons (Kindle location 2328–2330).

But overall the book is ambitious and heartfelt. Majors’ obvious love for Asian cultures and peoples, her love for the gospel, and her own personal devotion to artistic truth make The Year of the Boar an enjoyable read. Full of interesting historical tidbits about Japan and China, and small period vignettes in Texas and France and even Alge-ria, this is an ideal book for book clubs and vacation reading. It is, as the author insists, very real, very truthful, and very nice.

Note1. Majors, Anneke. Interviewed by William Morris. “Q&A With Anneke Majors

on Her New Novel.” A Motley Vision. n.p., 8 June 2011. Web. 8 Sept. 2011. <http://www.motleyvision.org/2011/anneke-majors-new-novel/>.

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Saint Jana

Reviewed by Kevin L. Barney

Review of Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2011)

My daughter Emily was the one who lured me into the Buffyverse. I was late to the party, but I made a deal with her: I would buy the DVDs of the various seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as they came out, watch them, and then give them to her to keep. So that was how I ended up watching all seven seasons, and how she got a complete DVD collection of them.

I have a fond memory of the time I took Emily with me to Sun-stone for a little daddy-daughter bonding. The highlight was a session graced by Jana Riess. At that time I knew who she was and had read some of her work, but she did not yet know me from Adam. She began her session with a Buffy trivia quiz, which my daughter handily won. The prize was an autographed copy of What Would Buffy Do?, and although we each already had a copy and had read it, Emily was thrilled by the experience. And just the fact that I knew who Jana was and had access to someone as cool and whip-smart as that gave me major points with Em. When your daughter is just beginning to emerge from the black hole of the teenage years, trust me, a father will take all the cool points he can get.

That was a long time ago, and in the intervening years Jana and I have become friends. I somehow managed to run into her twice on my recent vacation to Utah, first at the FAIR conference and again at a session of Sunstone—the only one I made it to this year. And at Sunstone, she gave me a treasure: an advance reading copy of her new book, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor, recently published by Paraclete

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Press. (Paraclete comes from the Greek word rendered “Comforter” in the KJV of the Gospel of John.)

For those who may not know Jana Riess, she has an impressive background: an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, a master’s in theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in American religious studies from Columbia University. What impresses me most about Jana, however, is that she converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a (knowledge-able) adult, with eyes wide open. Her previous contributions to Mor-mon letters include The Book of Mormon: Selections Annotated and Explained and, with Christopher Bigelow, Mormonism for Dummies. The volume under review, Flunking Sainthood, is intended for a broad rather than a specifically Mormon audience, but it is nevertheless a book Latter-day Saints would do well to read.

Jana’s original idea for this book was to chronicle her experience in reading great spiritual classics of the Christian tradition over the course of a year. As the project was being conceptualized, however, Jana upped the ante and determined not only to read spiritual clas-sics, but to live the spiritual disciplines they encouraged. She would devote one month to each discipline and write about her experiences along the way. There was a problem, however. She found as the year progressed that she kept failing in fundamental ways in her efforts to practice these spiritual disciplines. Although she almost gave up the project, an editor convinced her that writing of her failures could be even more illuminating than writing of her successes. So Flunking Sainthood was born.

With her year’s plan in hand, she begins the project in earnest in February, with “Fasting in the Desert.” While this practice was inspired by the early Christian Desert Mothers and Fathers, their fasting practices were so extreme as to be positively dangerous. So instead Jana decides to apply Ramadan-like fasting procedures for the month, even though it is not actually Ramadan. This is perhaps cheating a bit, because she knows that February will be a relatively easy month for her fast, given the shortness of both the month and

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the days of the month, but that doesn’t make her fast easy. Far from it. Going without food and water during daylight hours for an entire month is a major challenge, even for a Mormon who has some experi-ence with fasting. At first, the challenge is quite daunting, and she’s not sure she can do it. With the help and encouragement of a Muslim friend, however, she sticks with it, and it does indeed get easier. But then she reads the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:16–18, and she real-izes she has been doing it wrong, making a big (and public) thing out of her ordeal, when she should have been doing it sub rosa, as a little secret between her and Jesus. One of the things Jana learns from her experience is the importance of community in fasting. The easiest day of her fast was the first one, because her own religious community was fasting also on Fast Sunday. She envied the Muslims who fast as a global community together during Ramadan.

Later, following a (failed) attempt at practicing lectio divina (learn-ing to read in a contemplative, meditative fashion) in April, May brings us to her chapter on “Nixing Shoppertainment.” Her goal is to abstain from all shopping during the month, except for her family’s groceries, and avoid advertising (good luck!). Although shopping as such just isn’t her thing, she learns that she “needs to be hyperaware of all the ways [she seeks] status and approval from other people. She admits that she likes “being petted with praise when [she speaks] at a conference and people applaud [her] ideas, [her] brain, [her] verbal quickness, [her] humor. “I just eat that shit up,” she writes.

Wait a minute, I’m thinking, did she just say “shit?”As if to answer my question, she continues:

And yes, I say “shit” here because that’s what the potty-mouthed apostle Paul calls anything that we feel inordinately proud of but ulti-mately doesn’t point to God. The word he uses in Philippians 3 is sku-bula, which is not the most respectable way Paul could have phrased it. The Greek of his day had its own euphemisms, polite terms like poop  and  caca. Paul could have chosen any of those words, but he didn’t, presumably because he wanted to call attention to the foul-ness of all our status-seeking. We are sinners, full of shit, I most of all. There is excrement in me.” (56)

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By the month’s end Reiss has come to the following realization about “Shoppertainment”:

It’s not just about curbing materialism, though that’s a good thing, or even about not coveting. It’s about taking some choices out of the mix, of letting God’s guidance dictate the basic contours of what I will and won’t do. I’m not just reducing physical clutter by not shopping; I need to reduce spiritual clutter by becoming the kind of Christian who does not covet. (64)

Such insights abound in Flunking Sainthood, especially during the month when Jana tries to keep the Sabbath day holy. Mormons may read this and be curious about why Jana would need to spend a month learning to keep the Sabbath. I mean good Mormons do that every week, right? Uh, wrong. Every Latter-day Saint should be required to read that chapter at least, so that they have some idea of what “keeping the Sabbath” really means in the Orthodox Jewish context. Our petty observances are a trifle compared to what they go through for the day.

I really enjoyed reading about all the ways she had good intentions, but had not fully thought through everything, such as undoing the alarm in the morning so her dog could go outside and do its business. Within the space of mere minutes she had struck out three times on her Sabbath observance. Her failures aside, though, Jana’s descrip-tion of the actual rituals of the Sabbath are quite lovely. First comes the lighting of the candles. Then there are the Sabbath prayers. Next come the ritual blessings. Jana’s husband Phil gamely lays his hands on her head and tries not to laugh as he calls her a “woman of excel-lence” (drawing from the ideal woman imagery of Proverbs 31). But what particularly touched me was when Jana and Phil jointly lay their hands on their daughter Jerusha’s head and give her a parental bless-ing. Although Jerusha is anxious for all the ritual to stop so that they could finally eat already, the image of that blessing is beautiful and filled me with a fair amount of sacred envy for such a tradition.

Personally, the chapters I enjoyed the most were the ones featur-ing the most concrete and understandable practices, such as fasting,

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cooking with Jesus, giving up shopping, keeping the Sabbath, hospi-tality, going veggie, fixed-time prayers, and end-of-year generosity. The other ones were more abstract and harder for me to wrap my mind around, just as they were hard for Jana to grasp as well. The book is a brisk read, however, and it is everything I expected it to be: personal, insightful, and funny. But I most appreciated the Epilogue, in which Jana reflects on her failures, and eventually realizes that those failures may not have been failures after all. I can’t spoil the ending for you, but suffice it to say that I found it to be quite powerful.

I highly recommend Flunking Sainthood, whether for yourself or as a gift. Perhaps you should consider buying a gross and handing them out to relatives, friends, and strangers, in your own attempt to practice, as Jana did in December, end-of-year generosity.

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The Architecture of a Poem

Reviewed by Doug Talley

Review of Lance Larson’s Backyard Alchemy (University of Tampa Press, 2009)

Ever since Walt Whitman abandoned rhyme and the iambic foot for the cadences of the King James Bible, American prosody has increasingly gravitated to the many possibilities of free verse. The very premise of free verse continually poses an implicit question, “What is the proper architecture of a poem?” This question lies unarticulated in Lance Larsen’s latest work, Backyard Alchemy, and his attempt to answer this question with each poem makes the book a fine, exhila-rating read. What, for example, is the architecture of the poem “With the World as my Body,” where the title itself suggests a vast, uncharted construct? The poem in full reads as follows:

What sort of lover would I make as a field pasturing the winters of a lame draft horse

named Ulysses? As a wild apple tree unclenching its one good limb in a riot of white

blossoms? Or as this puddle on a dirt road holding the world chastely in its wet mirrors?

Make a green dance of me, lattice of trees. Drop from this bedroom of sky, lost wren,

to drink at the blue pageantry I reflect then carry my stillness over three mountains.

This deceptively simple structure begins with a series of conjectures marked by a clean layering of images—a field with a horse, an apple tree with a single limb of blossoms, a puddle reflecting the world. These conjectures give way to a series of related commands: “Make a

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green dance of me,” and “Drop from this bedroom of sky,” culminating in the poem’s ultimate mystery, “carry my stillness over three moun-tains.” The poem, therefore, is loosely structured like a sonnet, not with octet and sestet, but rather a sestet answered with a quatrain, yet this does not fully explain its architecture.

The poem’s theme, that the body of a man can be thought of as a world, may call to mind George Herbert’s poem, “Man,” particularly in the following lines:

For man is ev’ry thing, And more: He is a tree, yet bears no fruit; A beast, yet is, or should be more . . .

His eyes dismount the highest star: He is in little all the sphere . . .

O mighty love! Man is one world and hath Another to attend him.

In Larsen’s treatment of this theme there is no central event, no occasion leading to an epiphany, around which the poem is structured. Nor is there an ordered, logical development of the theme as in Her-bert’s poem. Rather, Larsen has dashed a bit of paint around the idea that one’s body might be viewed, not as a metaphor for the world, but in a sense, the actual world itself. The poem does not narrate an expe-rience from which it derives, but rather creates its own experience, as though a poem, instead of reflecting upon the beauty of a fading aster, could become itself, on its own terms, that very flower.

Central to the theory of such writing is a willful suspension of dis-belief. To enter the cathedrals of mystery this kind of poetry offers, we cannot rely alone on our pedestrian natural senses—those of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Instead, we must surrender to an idea Robert Frost once proposed: “Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody’s doubt what-soever” (Robert Frost, Poetry and Prose, edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson, Henry Holt and Company, New York, p. 299). Poetry, like faith, need not be understood in its entirety in order to have value. We can appreciate and adhere to belief in an

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afterlife without any understanding of its mechanics, or without any visible, physical evidence that such an afterlife even exists.

The principle of rapt belief lies at the heart of Larsen’s organizing method, whatever structure a particular poem may otherwise take, not unlike the artwork of Marc Chagall, that most poetic of mod-ern painters, to whom Larsen pays homage in the poem, “With Cha-gall as My Tailwind.” Chagall believed deeply in the rustic simplicity of his childhood Vitebsk and returned to the images of that village repeatedly in the chickens and goats, the fences and rooftops, that float through his paintings like birds on the wing. When rapt belief governs in art, the chicken need not take its logical place and propor-tionate size scratching for feed in some corner of the pen, but instead can grow to the size of a horse and walk on air and carry a man to boot. Larsen believes in this audacity, the audacity that can “steer an immense country” to one’s own liking, as he states in his tribute:

nail

my shoes to the floor, I will still twist free and float to my beloved, whether she be a giraffe-headed bride

or Moses sleeping. Each bouquet a reprieve, each wing a chance to think out loud in whites.

Larsen strings his lines on the page in a manner similar to Chagall’s own sweeping brushwork. By way of contrast, when Keats reflected on a Grecian urn and envisioned a shepherd on the vase “[f ]orever piping songs forever new,” his poem became a metaphor for the urn, presenting itself as an object every bit as timeless as the urn, but that poem never proposes to be the urn in the way that Larsen’s medita-tion proposes to be, not a metaphor for Chagall, but rather a “Chagall” itself. Such an architecture claims a rather high ambition, and Larsen seems to say as much in his opening line, “I steer an immense coun-try.” Whatever else we may look for in an artist, self-assurance is a welcome quality.

The fault-finding critic might complain of excess, as one might complain of excess in Chagall, that Larsen at times uses too much

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metaphor, or in his continual stretch, overreaches for it. A Larsen poem, if nothing else, is always packed. Anyone who cares to look for and find excess, can call it such if so inclined. As an example from

“In Memoriam,” Larsen writes “I’ll be forced to convert my father into past tense,” a fitting image for this elegy written in anticipation of death, and then adds, “my mother into a detective / novel written under the skin.” Here the reader may halt, because the metaphor begs a puzzling visualization and may feel too stretched to continue the fine, expanding passion of the poem. One could point to Dante Aligh-ieri instead as a cleaner model when he commences a swell of passion and the figure with which he caps his point is perfectly natural and unforced, as in Canto III of the Inferno:

voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle facevano un tumulto, il qual s’aggira sempre in quell’ aura sanza tempo tinta, come la rena quando turbo spira.

Dante has just entered the threshold of hell and hears the horrible wailing of those who have been refused even there:

voices shrill and faint, with the wringing of hands, made a tumult that churns forever through that rank air unbounded by time, like sand whipping through the midst of a squall.

Precisely because of his skill in delineating a deep and vivid pas-sion, I have set Larsen next to Dante, before whom, in one respect or another, we all pale as poets. Still, the comparison is difficult to resist because of Larsen’s ability in his best work to build and cap his passion in the Dantesque manner with images that are clear and com-pelling. Even in the poem “In Memoriam,” where arguably the slight hitch occurs midway through the poem, his foundational comparison of two potted chrysanthemums, likened to his parents, builds to a natural and entirely fitting image in the last lines: “Colors? / White to calm, shivering purple to wound like rain.” Here, we are left with a pure, strafing poignancy.

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With repeated readings of Larsen, the critic should simply conclude that it is this very reaching, this continued stretch of imagination for the vivid, compelling image, which gives Larsen’s work its strength and vitality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poem entitled

“Socratic.” Here Larsen poses the same question seven times, “What did he die of,” referring to the death of Socrates, and follows each ques-tion with a different answer, each answer in its turn considering certain possibilities and stretching the imagination to quixotic, but compel-ling conclusions. The first and literal answer is that Socrates died “[o]f quaffing the hemlock,” but in answer to the question repeated again, he answers “Not enough tears and too many,” suggesting in this paradox all the spiritual irony of Socrates’ martyrdom as Plato narrates it in the Phaedo. From this point forward in the poem, Larsen’s quest for the answer ranges through a multitude of sympathies, so when the ques-tion is asked for the fifth time, we have progressed through two millen-nia of human quandary to the present day, still searching for truth in the same Socratic framework that the architecture of the poem sets up:

Q: What did he die of?

A: Of that which resists categories, of the tangential and irrational, of armchair fabulists like me wrestling with death but remembering a pig-tailed girl with Down’s syndrome who petted my hand on the bus: Is your wife pretty? Do you love her? What color is her hair? Like being interrogated by a Sybil. Red, I finally told her. Meaning, yes, she is pretty. Meaning, yes, I love her. Meaning not red, but a chestnutty alive color like wind storms, as coppery as it was curly until her hair darkened during pregnancy and that shade I can’t name vanished from the earth. Call it red.

In these lines is found a key to Larsen’s excess, which I prefer to call largesse, presenting itself in a phrase that all but aches with resigna-tion, “that shade I can’t name.” Larsen cannot name the color, but all the vast range of a deep, poetic nature will labor richly, and offer gen-erously, in the effort.

Paradoxically, Larsen’s quest for the proper architecture of a poem may find its ultimate largesse in the prose poem, in that structure

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which seems to abandon structure altogether. Some of the best work of Backyard Alchemy is found in this form, as in “The Provenance of Ether,” which relies on the traditional formula of a poetic occasion, but abandons every other vestige of traditional structure—rhyme, meter, stanza, even that rudimentary staple of free verse, the line break. The occasion is an intermission of Bizet’s Carmen inside the Royal Albert Hall. Instead of breaking for the restroom or a “kiwi sorbet,” the poet remains seated and watches as the stage crew tears down the set for the next act. This, of course, would be the otherwise dull, prosaic interlude, slipped in quietly between the music and art of the opera. A poem about such an interlude would quite naturally take its form in prose, and yet far from being prosaic, the poem is rich in metaphor. During this intermission “six giant trees lower from the sky, like brooding deities.” The poet watches “this cabal of twisted branches descend, then pause, then hover a few feet above earth, like landing space ships.” The stage is now literally set for what ironically becomes a kind of negative epiphany:

What does it mean, this lowering of the heavens, this haunting? How can I explain the inwardness that suffuses the stage? One can taste the unsung tremolo, a lightness. But wait, one tree touches down, and stagehands gather to anchor it. Then a second tree, then all of them. Stupid earthly trunks, opera, history, convention. I who was floating have touched down too. Let the trees rise, let all of us rise.

This image of floating trees, articulated as a “lowering of the heavens,” does indeed haunt the soul. The moment is richly poetic and memo-rable, and the whole occasion primed for an ultimate epiphany. Find-ing himself unexpectedly in this poetic moment during the opera’s intermission, Larsen asks the recurring questions that have threaded through every poem of Backyard Alchemy, the questions that remain unanswered but for the largesse of poetry, “What does it mean?” and

“How can I explain?” And when “stupid convention” reasserts itself and the trees are anchored to the stage, the poet, of course, laments the lost epiphany, the opportunity to remain in this magical “provenance

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of ether,” and properly insists, “[L]et all of us rise,” let us rise continu-ously to the privilege of poetry.

A poet understands that on some level we are the words we speak. They are more than veneer, more than the sheen of our daily conversa-tion, because they may on occasion pour from the very fountain of the soul and become the audible symbol of it. Every poem contains the potential for some unique imprint of the spirit. And the poet knows that every human being possesses such infinite variety of spirit that time does not diminish, but improves, the opportunity to explore that variety. In Larsen’s Backyard Alchemy, his third and best collection of poetry to date, we have a rich poetic voice in the full, forward swell of that exploration.

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About the Artist

Brian Atkinson has been making photographs for nearly thirty years. He began his formal training at Ricks College in 1983 and then spent seventeen years in Logan, Utah, pursuing a Master’s degree and working as a professional photographer. In 2003 he returned to Rexburg, Idaho, to take a faculty position in the art department at BYU–Idaho. He is married to his sweetheart, Marie, and they have two children.

Artist statement

These photographs are part of an ongoing project I began while in graduate school at Utah State University. I have always found myself drawn to abandoned spaces—houses, schools, churches, offices. The interplay of light and shadow combined with the strange-ness of forgotten objects left behind makes for haunting and compel-ling images. All of the photographs included in this issue were taken between Logan, Utah and Ashton, Idaho.

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Contributors

Kevin L. Barney studied classics at BYU before obtaining law degrees at the University of Illinois and DePaul University. He prac-tices public finance law with Kutak Rock LLP in Chicago. Kevin also blogs on Mormon subjects at www.bycommonconsent.com.

Mark Brown was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1974. He lives in rural Illinois where he teaches English at a small college. Mark and his fam-ily live near the banks of the Vermilion River.

Tyler Chadwick lives in Pocatello, Idaho, with his wife, Jessica, and their four little girls. He’s (almost) a doctoral candidate in English at Idaho State University, and he teaches freshman composition at ISU and online for BYU–Idaho. He sometimes blogs at Chasing the Long White Cloud and A Motley Vision, and he’s the editor of Peculiar Pages’ recent anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mor-mon Poets. His latest poetry project (of which his poems in this issue are a part) is an ekphrastic engagement of J. Kirk Richards’ paintings. An online archive of Richards’ work can be found at www.art.jkirk richards.com.

Darin Cozzens grew up in Ralston, Wyoming. He has been a semifi-nalist for the Ohio State University Press Prize in Short Fiction and a finalist for both the Iowa Short Fiction Awards and Sarabande’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. His first collection of stories, Light of the New Day and Other Stories, received a 2010 Honorable Men-tion in Short Fiction from The Association for Mormon Letters. He has taught in Georgia, Arizona, and, for the past ten years, at Surry

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Contributors

Community College in Dobson, North Carolina. He and his wife are the parents of four children.

Laura Hilton Craner is a wife, mother of four young children, writer, blogger, dabbler in the expressive Arts, and Mormon literature enthusiast. You can read more of her work at www.motleyvision.org or at www.butnotunhappy.blogspot.com.

Suzette Gee lives in Sugar City, Idaho, and teaches composi-tion, literature, and education courses in the English Department at BYU–Idaho. She attended Ricks College, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University. She is a doctoral student at Idaho State University.

Laura McCune-Poplin lives with her cat, her son, and her husband in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. She teaches first-year writing classes at Emerson College. “Anonymity” is an excerpt from her unpublished novel Entertaining Angels Unaware.

Melissa McQuarrie has a BA and an MA in English from Brigham Young University. She has published creative nonfiction in Inscape, Dialogue, and Segullah. As well as serving as head prose editor for Segullah, she writes monthly for the Segullah blog and is a copyeditor for the Mormon Women Project. She lives in Provo, Utah, with her husband and four children and their dog, Daisy.

Kathryn Lynard Soper is the author of the memoir The Year My Son and I Were Born (Globe Pequot Press, 2009) and the founder and editor-in-chief of Segullah, a journal of literary and visual art by and for Mormon women. She has edited four published anthologies and contributes to Mormon forums from Meridian Magazine to Sunstone on a variety of topics including gender issues, disability, mental health, sexuality, family life, and spirituality. Kathryn lives in South Jordan, Utah, with her husband and seven children.

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Irreantum

Kerry Spencer teaches writing at Brigham Young University. Her quest to England resulted in two beautiful babies—Sam and Lily. Neither are remotely close to being babies anymore, but of course they’re still beautiful. Most days. The Spencers live in a hundred-year-old house in downtown Salt Lake City, but they hardly ever see ghosts there lately. (Even Cecil Rhodes.)

Doug Talley received a BFA in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and a JD from the University of Akron. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals and in 2009 his work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection of poetry, Adam’s Dream: Poems for a Latter Day was recently released by Parables.

Jared White received a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Brigham Young University in 2007 and in 2008 entered the MFA program at the University of South Florida, from which he graduated earlier this year. He has taught undergraduate courses in composition and cre-ative writing and has given presentations throughout the country on creative writing, popular culture, and creative writing pedagogy. His work has been published in Confrontation and Mason’s Road.

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Thanks to Our Donors

The Association for Mormon Letters gratefully acknowledges the following members who have made an extra contribution by pay-ing AML dues at the Lifetime, Sustaining, or Contributing levels. In addition, we have listed those who have received an honorary lifetime membership in recognition of their influence and achievements in Mormon literature.

Lifetime Members ($500)

AnonymousMarilyn BrownRobert HoggeLaVerna Bringhurst JohnsonR. B. ScottThe Eugene England Foundation

Sustaining Members ($250)

Merilyn AlexanderElouise BellSignature BooksMary Ann Taylor

Contributing Members ($100)

Stephen CarterNeal KramerR. Don OscarsonCherry & Barnard SilverBruce SmithFarrell M. Smith

Honorary Lifetime Members

Lavina Fielding AndersonElouise BellWayne Booth*Mary L. BradfordRichard CracroftJames D’ArcTerryl L. GivensJohn S. HarrisEdward HartBruce JorgensenGerald LundWilliam MulderHugh Nibley*Levi PetersonThomas F. RogersSteven P. SondrupDouglas ThayerEmma Lou ThayneLaurel T. UlrichTerry Tempest WilliamsWilliam A. Wilson

*deceased

Irreantum Subscription Order Form

❏ Irreantum subscription Includes Association for Mormon Letters membership. Annual dues: ❏ $25 regular ❏ $20 full-time students ❏ $100 contributing ❏ $250 sustaining ❏ $500 lifetime The nonprofit Association for Mormon Letters (AML) promotes

the production and study of Mormon literature and its enjoyment by all. All members of the Association for Mormon Letters•receive a subscription to our twice-yearly literary magazine,

Irreantum,

•may participate in discussion and recognition of Mormon lit-erature through AML Awards and the AML Review Archive,

•sponsor AML events such as the AML Annual Meeting, and

•sponsor the AML website and AML blog along with access to the AML proceedings, which includes papers presented at the annual meeting, and access to the AML Review Archive. There are now over 1,000 literature and film reviews archived on the AML website, and everyone is welcome to browse through the archive.

Make check payable to AML and mail to:AML, PO Box 970874, Orem, UT 84097-0874

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The Association for Mormon Letters and Irreantum Magazine are pleased to announce our annual literary contests:

The Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest,

the Irreantum Fiction Contest,

and the Irreantum Poetry Contest

Contest RulesIndividuals may submit a maximum of three entries total to all three contests (e.g., a person may submit one entry in each genre, or a per-son may submit three entries to the fiction contest). Winners are not guaranteed publication but agree to give Irreantum first publication rights. Irreantum staff and members of the AML board are not eligible. Because Irreantum is a literary journal dedicated to exploring Mormon culture, entries that relate to the Mormon experience in some way will be given preference in judging. Authors need not be LDS.

For complete rules, see irreantum.mormonletters.org/Rules.aspx

Submission WindowJanuary 1, 2012, through May 31, 2012. Winners will be announced on the AML’s website, www.MormonLetters.org, on August 31, 2012. Irreantum’s annual literary contests have no official connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.