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CHAPTER NINE

    Consciousness came slowly, a white dawn. In my unheated, upstairs bedroom I could see my breath in the air. Hoarfrost was on my pillow. Frost flowers crept across the bottom and sides of the panes of glass like the whorls of intricate fingerprints. I lay in bed and catalogued my possessions–the usual detritus of ball glove and Indian headdress from an earlier time. There were the pictures from a hot rod magazine; a picture of the new rage on the radio, Elvis Presley; the pile of thrown clothes; and hanging on a rack of fine walnut was my precious new shotgun bathed in a light sheen of oil, its barrel a solemn promise of cold death to the Canada geese that I would kill next fall.

    I slid out of bed and went to the window and tried to rub the frost away for a view of the day. My hopes had been pinned on the storm. Drifts of snow were piled across the road and banked around the power poles in feathery tendrils. There would be no school today, which gladdened me more than usual. My grandmother was here, and I could visit her by merely walking a few blocks uptown. I may have expected it to be Christmas morning again or at least a holiday in some fashion. I slid back into bed and headed for Tahiti and the Wahines having finished Mutiny on the Bounty the night before.

    Downstairs, I could hear my father as he stoked up the wood range in the kitchen, and could hear the hammering of the water as it heated the pipes in the innards of the stove and coursed like a warm blood through the water heater.

    That fall I’d helped–rather watched–as my father lay out in precise lines the outline of the foundation of our new house. A large machine had been hired, and my mother was overjoyed at the hole in the ground. We’d been saving for years for that dark gouge in the lot we’d bought when I was first born. Spring would see the pouring of the foundation. My mother, whenever the new house was discussed, got a light in her eyes that differed from the other moods in her eyes. It had soft edges. Hints of the violet from her mother were in her eyes, but they were more blue, and flecked with specks of green, like bits of jade. We’d been renting the drafty old Victorian house since I could remember, and I thought I’d miss it, but my mother said that in my own room there would be a magic light in the ceiling that resembled the spoked wheel of a ship. It was a delightful promise, a helm for my fantasies. I was, after all, nearly fourteen and ready, I figured, to go to before the mast. Accompanying me would be a naked girl that looked like Jane Russell reposed on a pair of saw horses on the cover of Life magazine.

    The telephone rang. I knew it was notification that there would be no school, and I drifted back to the lagoon where the water was as clear and warm and I wondered what sea water tasted like– blood maybe? Then the telephone rang again, unusual, and in a few moments I heard my father leaving the house for work, and I drifted further to sea, across the reef, into the deep black trenches where there were fish with no eyes.

    There were other voices that brought me back to the icy present, and then footfalls on the creaking stairs that I could not attach to anyone I knew. It was not my father’s deliberate tread, moving as he did in a heavy silence most of the time, pulling his leather belt from his waist because I’d done something particularly egregious– like getting caught in a lie, or lifting a penny from the cigar box in the cabinet shop that was the cash register. He never came up to my room unless it was for the rare lash of his righteous anger. It was from my father that I learned that silence is the punctuation of meaning. When he spoke, to me at least, it was so rare as to be listened to with all the gravity of receiving the wisdom of Moses. His words were law and truths etched deeper than an arc of finger writing in stone, it was an indelible engraving on the surface of my heart. When he spoke to my mother, the timbre of his voice changed, and there was hint of amusing secrets, as if his words were sly winks. My father was the image of his father, solid, strong, reticent and purposeful, as if the Great Commission was an every day affair.

    Mad Joseph Smith’s religion was what had got us here. Still living pioneers occupied a half dozen houses in Immigration Valley, among them my great-grandmother who’d pushed a handcart across half the continent on the promise of a husband, salvation, and freedom.

    The Lattimores came west to Zion from Illinois via the Missouri persecutions of the Mormons. We had been pulled down to the Middle West by the religious upheavals of the times. The Lattimore’s had felt the call to seek out the truth of the seditious exiles from New York state that had followed Joseph Smith, the self-proclaimed prophet of the Latter Days, to Missouri. The family was swallowed whole by the ravings of the mesmerizing prophet, and shared in the persecutions of the Missourians, witnessed the Prophet’s martyrdom in Nauvoo, Illinois, and fled west following Brigham Young to the Promised Land of Zion.

    The Lattimore’s strained west fueled only by the fervor of faith. My great-great grandmother pushed a handcart for nearly two thousand miles. I remembered my grandfather, before he died, telling and retelling the tale of when they were stopped by the Rockies for a time, labored over them, were crushed by the enormity of the spaces of the west until they came to the Salt Lake Valley, and stopped to stay.

    My mother’s people, Methodists from Arkansas and Baptists from Missouri, were latecomers to Zion by any standards, which meant any time after 1880. My mother seemed to resent this, and perhaps her zeal for church activities was prompted by her need to prove herself doubly worthy to have married a man like the handsome Jonathan Winthrop Lattimore who had such impeccable Mormon ancestry.

    The town puzzled the few odd strangers, the drummers and the few government workers on the forest who stayed in the town any length of time. To those transferred from more sophisticated places– which was anywhere else in the country– Immigration Valley was a stubborn, rigid theocracy, insulated in contradictions, as if Salem, Massachusetts had been picked up by a curse and set back down in an eastern Utah Mountain valley.

    The six hundred odd souls, some more odd than others, had faces awkwardly blasted from granite. Farmer’s faces, lay and clerical at the same instant, faces with the stern knowledge of God seamed deeply like ice fissures in granite. Faces as dull as graying oatmeal, their countenances pinned always close to their manure stained souls. The faces of the women, especially the line of their mouths, were inverted smiles like waning moons, and as a matter of cultural status; they became thick in the body and wore a countenance of empty, premature knowing. The women were an oppressed race and they accepted it because they were assured, each Sunday, Tuesday, and Saturday in church that all was as it should be. And they believed it.

    The prophet Brigham Young had learned his lessons well from Joseph Smith, that bogus prophet, in the eyes of the few ‘Christians’ in the valley. The Mormons learned early that insularity is protection for the faith– and emotion. The consolidation of civic power from school janitor to County Clerk is in the hands of the faithful and was an unspoken, but unbreakable fact of life in Zion. Then as now, insularity also kept the government off the backs of the early polygamists until more important considerations such as survival led the Church to disavow one of Joseph Smiths more sacred doctrines.

    The sprinkling of Methodists and Catholics and the odd Baptist who managed to lead their lives within the confines of the valley had a hard time of it. They lived in isolated frame houses in the small town of Appelton across the valley by nine miles, on the east side. Nothing on God’s earth smiled on his chosen people– my people– without the extraction of some good part of their soul, or so it seemed to outsiders, and to me. Dour, secretive, the people of Immigration Valley were hard working to the point of slavery, obedient as church mice to the wishes of the men in Salt Lake City.

    This is not to say that the Mormons of Immigration Valley did not enjoy sunsets and good food and the wealth of many children. Except, even now, in times of plenty, their mouths are pinched and down turned. They seemed to strive to replicate on our own faces the images in the photographs of their starving and beleaguered ancestors.

    When Brigham Young sent my people into the valley from Salt Lake in 1864 he was sending them to starvation. Perhaps it was that memory which kept life, as good as if was, on the basis of a grim business for all of time.

    The town memorialized its war dead including those fallen to local Indian massacres. There was one such grave of dubious authenticity. The roll call of stones held the names as if the graven words were a reminder to God of various flights of poetic bent– thought to be a sublime heavenly asset. The town was piously charitable toward its dead because they found it hard to be charitable to the living. That was the responsibility of the church, after all. The slightest flaw of character in a man condemned him to a life sentence in the town of hell.

    The past was peacefully adrift and shuffled about in tomes of genealogy, like a pack of worn cards. High card cut to see which family got raked over the coals this week. The town cringed before its proud past, as if we were not of sufficient metal to live up to the deeds of the pioneers. There was nothing of note, or even a desire, to reach out and advertise for a metropolitan future.

    The town was laid out in neat Brigham Young squares. The allotted lots were spacious squares upon which first log cabins with dirt roofs were built. Later came the Victorian frame, and even later to the more prosperous were raised stolid brown brick houses– pure utilitarian Mormon cubes which stood guard against any pretensions of weather or modernity. What they were after was a perfect replica of an English country village. What they got was America.

    I already knew, or suspected in a guileless way, that Grandma Rada would snort down her thin perfect nose at the notion that Alma would ever amount to more than a bucolic greensward with laughable ambitions.

    The Missouri Steele’s on my mother’s side had not been taken in by that bogus philanderer Joseph Smith, and remained, at least on the lips, cracker Baptists. I may have gone to my grave not knowing there was such a thing as Baptists and Methodists and such had it not been for Grandmother R. As for Catholics, we young Mormons caught all of the vitriol Salt Lake could muster, and they were blamed for everything from communism to bad weather. It was years until I realized what initial tension there must have been between mother and daughter and husband regarding religion. My Mother must have been a traitorous act in Grandma Rada's eyes, in the final look, and only a mother’s love could forgive her marrying a Mormon from a small mountain town in Utah. Gad! as she would say.

    Other steps, other voices. I was astonished when there was a small knock on the door with its thick peeling enamel.

    “May I come in?” It was my grandmother’s voice.

    “Sure,” I said, burrowing deeper into the heavy quilts, and confused. She entered the room, dressed in a business suit as if she were going to work at the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company where she had been working for the past fifteen years. A dark suit and white blouse and sensible shoes. Under her eyes a shadow fluttered, but below was that radiant smile at the sight of her grandchild. When I was born all was forgiven.

    “Good morning, how did you sleep?”

    “Brrr,” I said.

    “Oh, poosh,” she said, sitting on the side of my bed, looking down at me with love. “When your mother and I were living in Pendleton during the depression we had to take two water bottles and three cats to bed with us, and we still froze.”

    “That still doesn’t make it any warmer here,” I said with certainty, and she laughed. And then her face went to the window with its pattern of frost breaking the light into white on white. An illuminating light.

    “I spoke to your mom, and we decided that you should know why I am here, and it is best that I explain it to you.”

    “Uh, huh,” I said wisely.

    “There are some things you must know about . . . Buck and I, and I think you’re a grown up enough young man to understand.”

    “Understand what, Grandma?” I asked. Adults were interesting, and complicated, and had all kinds of license. They could eat as much of whatever it was they wanted, could go hunting or fishing whenever they wanted, and even didn’t have to go to church if they didn’t want to. That was adulthood, and I wanted it quickly. When I was in college, before I joined the Navy, I remember a poet friend of mine, deep into wine, telling me that ‘Freedom is license to deliver.’ And I nodded with solemn understanding at the time. Had Grandmother uttered that freedom is license to deliver inanity I’d have asked, ‘Deliver what? Coal? Newspapers? Birthday greetings?’ Adulthood is a reluctant admission that one must be careful of freedom’s full measure, like being careful what you pray for because you might get it. And freedom has nothing to do with indulgence. A bitter disillusionment.

    “When your mother was just a little girl, her father, my husband, Arthur Lamb, died.”

    “You mean,” I said, and then thought a moment. “That Buck isn’t my grandpa?”

    “He’s your step-grandfather. I remarried before you were born, so it was only natural that you would think he is your real grandfather. And, all things considered, he’s been a . . . thoughtful man.”

    “Yeh, he’s neat,” I said, trying out some slang. “But I don’t think I understand,” I said. “So Buck is not mom’s father?”

    “That’s right. Your real grandfather was in the Great War, the First World War. I married him just before he went to France to fight. Oh, he was a fine man. You’d have liked him.”

    “I like Buck,” I said.

    “Of course you do,” she hastened.

    “And he bought me that tricycle when I had my tonsils out,” I defended him. I didn’t mention that a truck had run over the damn thing two hours after I’d received it, and never had another. Perhaps that was my first step toward adulthood, and it had nothing to do with license. It was damned unfair.

    “Yes, of course. But Charles, oh, he was so tall, and lean, and handsome. I met him in Portland, and we had five happy years before he . . . went.”

    “What happened to him?”

    “Well, he caught some poisonous German gas in his lungs, and when he got back to America it was found out he had tuberculosis, and had to go to a sanitarium. Look,” she said, almost shyly, and reached into the prim pocket of her suit coat and withdrew a picture that had been laminated. The black and white photograph looked worn, and thin beneath the plastic. I raised it to the light and saw a man standing on a rock overlooking the sea. He was tall, wearing a fedora hat, and wore a long dark cape loosely around his shoulders. He looked thin, but he was leaning jauntily on a cane, his eyes looking directly at the camera. He looked like a gangster, or a poet. It was just a photograph.

    “He was tall,” I said neutrally.

    “Oh, yes. You’ll be tall too. You’re growing like a weed.” I handed the photograph back, and waited, not sure what this information meant to me. I wasn’t terribly moved thus far with the news, just puzzled.

    “Why didn’t Buck come with you?”

    “That’s what I wanted to explain,” she said, and took my hand. I was too old for such displays. “You see, Buck has had a very hard life.” She looked at me as if that explained everything. I had no idea what a hard life had to do with anything. “Your mother was about your age when I met Buck. That was in Nevada. Buck was a prospector; he lived in the desert a lot and looked for silver. He was a handsome man too, and he was such fun,” she said. I waited. “We had come from Pendleton to a little old place that doesn’t even exist anymore called Novell. I’d got a job with a mining company as a secretary, and things were getting better for your mom and me.”

    “Better?”

    “Yes, when Mr. Lamb died in the sanitarium I had to find a job to support us. I sewed, and cleaned, and worked in the woolen mill until finally I went to a secretarial school at nights. It was, well, it was difficult, you see.”

    I nodded, baffled.

    “So I had this opportunity. We went to Nevada on the train. At first I hated the place, so hot, and it looked like nothing lived there except for snakes and sagebrush.” She shuddered, involuntarily.

    “Snakes?” I said. Now she had something I could understand. There were timber rattlers in our country.

    “And then I met Buck Buxton, and we were married,” she said, as if that explained everything. With adults, it was the unspoken that meant everything, but because it was unspoken it meant nothing. “He was, well, a good man . . . then,” she said, and seemed to go blank before recomposing herself. “When we moved to Pocatello I got a very good job and he still thought he could get rich by prospecting. Nothing ever came of it. Did you know that Buck drinks?” she asked, suddenly.

    “He own a bar,” I said with accusation, and admiration. My father had taken me into Bucks Bar once although my father swore me to secrecy about that afternoon. I think he drank a glass of beer, but I was very young. The fact that Buck owned a bar in Pocatello was something that we kept a secret in the Lattimore family. It was something that set me apart, to have a relative in the business of sin’s commerce. At the same time it as fascinating.

    The Word of Wisdom was drummed into me so deeply it was graven on the bones. There was nothing so terrible as to be known as a drinker of anything stronger than Postum. It may seem as nothing, but I did not know then that my grandmother smoked cigarettes– that delicious tang on the edge of her clothes, a perfume that identified her as special– and was thus in the same sinful and hell-condemned category of souls who were not Mormons.

    “Yes. But it doesn’t follow that a man who owns a tavern has to drink,” she said. “In Buck’s case it is true, though, but you must never assume things like that about people. And, well, you know we bought a bar, a tavern in Pocatello . . .” She had my undivided attention now. “Not all of us are as holy or as strong as the people . . . here,” she said, and in a brief dropping of some veil I saw an enmity so forceful the cold in the room was diminished. “I mean, some people, Buck for instance, can’t take a drink. Well, he’s become sick and . . . he’s not himself,” she said, and I saw tears tremble on the lower horizon of her eyes.

    “Is he in the hospital?” I said, thinking he had appendicitis, or a hernia.

    “No. I’ve tried to get him to get better. He’s sick,” she pronounced.

    “He’s going to hell,” I said.

“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.