Volume 15, Number 1 (2013)

Irreantum Staff
Editor Jack Harrell
Poetry Editor Jim Richards
Book Review Editor Scott Hales
Layout Marny K. Parkin

Association for Mormon Letters Board

President
Past President Margaret Blair Young
Board Members Mark Brown, Dennis Clark, Eric Samuelsen, Philip Snyder,
Charles Swift
Secretary Darlene Young
Membership Secretary Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury
Treasurer D. Matthew Jarman
Awards Coordinator Dennis Clark
Webmaster Jacob Proffitt
Blog Moderator Jonathan Langford
AML-List Moderator Stephen Carter

Front cover: Paint These Fall Colors by Scott Samuelson

Irreantum (ISSN 1518-0594) is published twice a year by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML), Post Mart, 105 South State #114, Orem, UT, 84058; www.
irreantum.org.
Irreantum vol. 15, no. 1 (2013) 2013 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 endorsement by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Irreantum is indexed in the
MLA International Bibliography.

 5 From the Editor

Fiction

7 Steven L. Peck A Strange Report from Church Archives

27 Heather Marx Timpanogos
57 Braden Hepner Dairymans Lament

Poetry

19 Simon Peter Eggertson Moving About Unnoticed;

Shadows Before Tt, Narcissus After; What We Have Yet to
Learn from Using Hammers; Hawkings Next Equation
50 Matt Babcock Nostalgia for Teenagers; Dogs of Sligo; The
Spring Olympics
69 Melody Newey Chrysalis; Fish Bones on Black Stones
82 Melissa Dalton-Bradford Why I Carry Your ID;
Autobahn; Lake Bled

Creative Nonfiction

71 Les Blake The Souls Eye Is a Red Star

89 Jaren Watson The Checkers Champion of Orofino, Idaho

Critical Essay

101 Lynne Larson Our War With Hollywood: For the Sake of
Truth and Beauty, Lets Call a Truce
107 Angela Hallstrom Agency and Storytelling

Reviews

111 Kjerste Christensen Claiming Her Own Story

Aleesa Suttons Diary of a Single Mormon Female
115 Cristine Hutchinson-Jones Updating The Viper on
theHearth
Terryl L. Givens. The Viper on the Hearth
121 Ivan Wolfe Young and Gray Enrich Our History with
Marvelously Told Tales
Margaret Blair Youngs and Darius Aidan Grays One More
River to Cross
125 About the Artist
126 Contributors
Volume 15, Number 1 (2013)

-r-ntum
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 nonfiction, 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 instructions. Only electronic submissions will be considered.

From the Editor

Ill never forget the experience of writing my first short

story. It was 1990 and I was a 27-year-old BYU student with a wife
and three small children, taking my first creative writing class. The
teacher was the poet Daniel Beazer (now Dubrasky), whos now on
the faculty at Southern Utah University. She was teaching that summer between graduate programs, I think. After a few attempts at the
personal essay, she assigned the class to write a short story, something
Id never done before.
The apartment where I live with my family was on the ground level
of a house in the oldest part of Provo. I wrote the story in one sitting,
after my wife and kids had gone to bed. I printed it on our dot-matrix
printer and went out the screen door and stood on the front porch
for a moment to look at the darkened lawn and the sidewalk and the
streetlight on the corner. There I marveled at what Id just experienced. To have been in the mind of an imaginary character and to
have watched the story unfold as I typed was an exhilarating creative
experience. After that, I was hooked. I wanted that feeling again and
again. Thats when I began to see myself as a writer.
At BYU, a new world of books and ideas had opened to me. From
the time I joined the LDS Church, as a 19-year-old whod just moved to
Vernal, Utah, most of my reading materials had come from Deseret Book,
the mainstream commercial Mormon bookstore. Mormon theology and
history and literature is incredibly richoffering so much more than
what commercial publishers sell. Id hit a ceiling with the titles at Deseret
Book. Each new book felt like a repackaging of what Id read before.
BYUs libraries of literature and philosophy were vast by comparison.
I hope that, to some degree, the stories in this issue of Irreantum
will do for you what the BYU libraries did for me. Our own culture
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Irreantum

can limit us if we dont reach for its edgesor reach for the offerings of art and literature found in other cultures. The restrictions that
market demands place on published works are often very limiting
too. Because Irreantum is sponsored by the non-profit Association for
Mormon Letters, we can afford to look for the best Mormon literature without concern for big sales and slick sales pitches.
This issue of Irreantum contains poetry, fiction, essays, and book
reviews that represent the best standards of Mormon letters today.
This journal is an attempt to blend literary standards of quality with
the soul of Mormon cultural expression. Mormon letters has a long
way to go, I think, before it reaches its potential. In my view were just
seeing the beginnings here. But this journal, now in its fourteenth year,
is one of the places where those beginnings have taken root.
So take this issue out on the porch, or down into the family room.
Enter these poems. Join with these stories. Enter the minds of the
characters and speakers in these pages and watch a world unfold.
My hope is that youll marvel too.
Jack Harrell

A Strange Report from the Church Archives

Steven L. Peck

Notes for my report on Possibility Machines

By Elder James Talmage, Salt Lake City
Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
August 4, 1916
Dear President Joseph F. Smith and Elders Lund and Smith:
I thank your secretary for providing me with this quire. Herein I will
record the notes for my report on the Possibility Machines that you
asked me to investigate under the authority of the 1st Presidency. Pursuant to the facts, I believe that the people of Washington County
indeed have been engaged in procuring certain objects from a cunning
conman by the name Willard Bayes. I will endeavor to be as thorough
as possible while avoiding the palaver of those we interview for this
account. It appears that Mr. Bayes is a rather accomplished mesmerer
and as such has provoked the minds of those with whom he dealt
to wonderful imaginings filled with meretricious ideas relating to
his person and abilities. My hope is that given my training in science,
Iwill be immune to such manipulations. But we will see, for it appears
that hale men of sound mind have also been taken in.

27 June 1916
I travelled with Elders Richards and Whitney down to St. George. As
we arrived, the remnants of a storm were departing to the North and
the sun was starting to shine, although the day was cooler than normal
2nd place, 2012 Irreantum Fiction Contest

Irreantum

and clouds in the Southeast were yet menacing. Pres. Dole welcomed
us to his house and his wife set before us a delicious lunch of biscuits
and brown gravy with a fresh hot sage tea which warmed our hearts
and spirits. However, when we got down to business, the mention of
Mr. Bayes produced a visible pall on the faces of both President and
Sis. Dole. A shadow seemed to be cast over Pres. Doles visage, and Sis.
Dole departed the room in some manifest haste and did not return to
clear away our plates or serve a promised apple pie.
He admitted that he had indeed had dealings with Mr. Bayes, but
argued that the man was a harmless carnival man and that his claims
and curious devices were nothing but innocent amusements such as
might be had in any parlor in Salt Lake City. He seemed defensive, and
we ascertained that he was directing us away from the matter at hand.
We insisted under the authority of the Priesthood that the items he
had procured from the man be brought forth. Still, he hesitated, and
after some dissembling and much running his fingers through his thin
grey hair he arose and went into the back bedrooms where we could
hear a muted and indistinct but heated discussion with his wife.
At last he emerged and insouciantly tossed into my hands a
simple windup toy such as might be had from any five and dime. It
was smaller than those with which Im familiar, but in design there
was nothing that was not typical of such devices. It was a small redbreasted bird, handed-painted, and cast of tin. I gave the shiny key on
its back a couple of turns and placed it on the ground where it carelessly hopped about clacking and clicking after the manner of such
things. It brought a smile to my face and I thought how delighted my
daughter would be at such a trick. But the look on Pres. Doles face
was one of abject horror and fear. Had I seen only his countenance,
and not that which brought about his fright, I might have thought
Deaths scythe was being swung my direction in full vigor. Upon seeing my glance toward him, he recovered admirably and watched without expression as the machine wound down to stillness.
I was about to remark on the thing, when he held up his hand in such
a way as to silence me. He then picked up the toy and quickly carried
it from the room. I could not be sure, but it seemed that I heard a quiet
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Peck: Strange Report from the Church Archives

weeping from his wife as he returned. He sat down and asked what I
thought of the windup bird. I told him that it seemed harmless enough
and hardly worth the attention of the brethren in Salt Lake. He nodded and then asked rather abruptly what I missed most since coming
from England. I did not hesitate and told him what I wished for most
was a good cup of English tea. I know many of the brethren frowned
on such indulgences, but I found no harm in an occasional cup. At that
moment there was a knock at the door. It was Brother and Sister Sallys
boy (who youll remember from our previous visit made a wondrously
fine drawing of the St. George Temple) with a parcel that had come on
the train from Phoenix. It was a package of nothing less than a halfstone of Brooke Bond Builders tea, something I had not thought to see
again in this life. The coincidence was striking and gave us a good laugh,
which continued as Sis. Dole put a kettle to boil. I asked how it was that
he had thought to order such an extravagant item and he walked over
to a desk and pulled from one of the cubbies a signed order for the tea
at the cost of nearly $50. He said he remembered very well ordering the
tea, although he could not account for his reasons for the order. Then he
looked very solemn and said, What I dont know is if you had not wound
that bird and then wished for tea whether that order would be there or
not. That gave us all pause. The arrival of the tea did seem oddly timed
and the oddity of having ordered such an item seemed unaccountable
given Pres. Doles current financial situation, which, like for many, was
stretched as tight as a hide nailed on the side of a barn to cure.
He explained that the windup he had bought from Mr. Bayes was
claimed to have certain powers over time itself. You have three uses he
had been told. When they got home that night after winding up the
little creature and watching it dance, they wished that their son were
home from his mission in the isles of the Pacific. The second we had
uttered the wish we thought what a foolish wish it had been, for on the
mantle was a well-read telegram announcing his arrival to San Francisco
from the Islands and the promise he would be home that very day on the
5:15. We had prepared his room for arrival and he was scheduled to talk at
Stake Conference two Sundays hence. With all these preparations in place,
why had we wished for what was inevitable and already going to happen?
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Irreantum

He scratched his head and looked me in the eye and said slowly, What
I wonder is if it was as inevitable as it seemed before I uttered the wish. I
am deeply troubled.
Being of scientific sensibilities, I asked that the device be brought
back and that we give it another test. But his wife utterly refused us,
saying we had wasted one of their realignments as she called it, and
that, Each family can only buy one and that cost us a pretty penny, not
to mention the $50 we are out for your tea! She was quite angry and we
acceded to her request.
We visited several families who had bought the devices. Not all
were birds. There were frogs, bears, Indians with moving tomahawks,
and such. But all of the Saints we interviewed claimed strange stories. The most troubling was the Westfieldss. They had brought home
a little jumping mouse windup and on their first night wished for
something that set the hair on the back of my neck standing up. They
said that when they came home from buying a device from Mr. Bayes,
there was only one thing they had wished for all their lives. We wished
that our dear baby son had never died sixteen years ago. I dont know why
we would ask for such a thing, for there he was sitting on the divan just
like always, looking at us as if we were quite mad. He had just come in
from feeding the pigs and had just changed his attire to attend a game of
charades at the Varners house with some of his schoolmates.
Among those harboring the devices, such stories were common,
although none so dramatic. The sheer multitude of stories was concerning. One could have ascribed them to a mass mesmerizing by a
clever charlatan, for such things are certainly known to occur. However, we were unsettled in our minds, and after a thoughtful prayer
decided to visit Mr. Bayes ourselves and investigate the matter more
fully. Elder Richards, with full apostolic authority, warned those who
had machines not to use them until we returned with our report to
the First Presidency, for we suspected that if they did work in some
manner, it was by darker powers than the Saints had before encountered and there was more of Cains oaths about the windups than the
lamplight of the Gospel. For what if people could manipulate events
of the past? What harms could be done? What strange blessings
10

Peck: Strange Report from the Church Archives

contemplated? And with the ability common among a people with

all the contentions and foibles common to the Saints, what strange
things might result? Many had obtained these entertainments and
the potential for confusion was profound, if there were any truth
to the matter. We stayed awake late into the night speaking of these
uncanny events and renewed our commitment to visit the man that
had inflicted such things upon the Saints.
27 June 1916
In the morning, I headed to up the Virgin River to where Mr. Bayes
was known to camp. I suddenly wished that I had not been sent from
Salt Lake to investigate this matter alone. Some help from other
members of the twelve with whom I might have consulted would
have been beneficial at a time like this. I was terribly tired for I had
tossed and turned most of the night, troubled by the events of the
previous day. I also wish I would have asked the members not to use
the machines until we could settle the matter of what they were or
how Mr. Bayes was mesmerizing so many of the Saints.
The airship in which I rode was one of the newer models with a
steam driven propeller and helium in the bag chambers rather than
the hydrogen that had proved so disastrous to the South during the
Civil War.
Because the winds were contrary, I had some time before we
reached our destination, so I pulled out the Doctrine and Covenants
and read from Section 343. The verses therein had considerable value
to me because the Prophet had read them to me on my last visit with
him in the Emma Grand on North Temple. This would have been in
1890, right before his death. He was approaching eighty-five but his
eyes where as clear as a much younger mans, and although his hand
trembled just a bit as he took my own into his, his handshake was firm
and hearty. Brother Talmage, he said, smiling, Ive called you here because
there is something I feel I must tell you, but my mind is slipping a bit and
now, for the life of me, I cannot recall it. His eyes drifted to the painting
above his head and I followed his gaze. It was a large oil, painted by
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Irreantum

the German convert Udo Grimm. It was the Battle of Chickamauga

in which Joseph Smith III crushed the Confederate Army being led
by General Braxton Bragg and changed the fortunes of the war. Of
course, as is oft told, near the end of the battle a stray cannonball from
his own regiment took his life, one of the great tragedies of Church
history because many believed that he would go on to lead the Church.
Then he turned to me again and with tears in his eyes pulled the scriptures from his nightstand and read from the above mentioned scripture, Wherefore inasmuch as the Saints follow wisdom and seek to face
the future with the faith and courage befitting the elect, no device formed
against them shall prevail. Look forward. Fear not. The future is yours.
The Holy Prophet Joseph looked at me and said, I have forgotten what
I meant to tell you. I must rest. Ill call you again when I recall the matter.
I assumed it had something to do with the newly founded Charles
Darwin Academy where I was serving as President after my Ph.D back
East, but I never found out, for much to our sorrow he went downhill quickly, and by December he had passed away thus fulfilling the
prophecy that he would not live past his eighty-fifth birthday.
I turned to the D&C and pondered the scripture that had been last
read to me by the Prophet. It was about the future, the very thing at
risk. Was it not? Where these windups the devices to which the Lord
referred?
It was nearly dark when I found the camp of Mr. Bayes on the
banks of the Virgin River. He was living in a small sheepherders
trailer equipped with large wagon wheels and a wood canopy painted
white. A campfire was situated near the steps that led to the front
door, and as I approached I was sure my eyes were playing tricks on
me. The man I presumed to be Mr. Bayes was sitting on the steps that
led to his trailer. He was a large man with massive hairy arms and a
chest like a barrel. He had a flaming red beard that cascaded wildly to
his breast and a mop of similarly colored hair, like the mane of a lion.
But none of this made an impression on me because of the oddness
of his companion standing near the fire, stirring a large pot sitting
above the coals. This fellow drove all my thoughts about Mr. Bayes
completely away.
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Peck: Strange Report from the Church Archives

The man was diminutive. Smaller than a circus dwarf, but unlike
one, proportioned more like a tiny full-grown man than a midget. He
was as lithe as a willow but stretched to full height stood only to just
below my knee. His face was graceful and sharp and his eyes never
seemed to cease darting all around, settling nowhere, and giving him
an aspect of panicked and unblinking vigilance.
Mr. Bayes observed me for some time after my greeting him.
Unlike his companion, his eyes weighed me with a steadiness and purpose that seemed to wrestle away control of my will. I was forced to
abandon my gaze upon him and placed my eyes firmly on the ground
before me.
You have come for a toy, he finally observed.
No, but I have come to inquire how they work, how they are made, and
by what means you deceive people into believing their effects.
At my boldness, the little man stopped what he was doing and
looked at me. Mr. Bayes roared with laughter. It was then that I
observed that a red ribbon ran from Mr. Bayes to the small creature
(Icall him creature because the more I observed him, the less one of
the sons of Adam he appeared to me). It bound their wrists together
at a length of about thirty feet.
And who are you currently? he asked. Despite the odd phrasing I
answered honestly. I am Second Elder in the Church of the Firstborn
of the Son, Keeper of the Elysian Mysteries, and Proconsul of New
Ionian Sea City.
Ah, he answered insolently. It was at such times I regretted not having brought a shock of Centurions with me to act as guard. In fact, it
seemed especially odd that I had not. Normally, when I did the bidding of the Governor I would have them with me.
Drink with me before you disappear in a poof of someones wish and vanish into never having existed, the man commanded. His Latin seemed to
be tinged with a lilt from the great Southern continent and I wondered
if he was from the Sicilian continent below the narrow neck of land
spoken of in the Book of Mormon. I had served a mission near the
mouth of the Grand Po River and had travelled deep into the jungles
that lined both banks of the mightiest river on the planet.
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The man imbibed cup after cup of sour wine, the supply of which
there seemed to be no end. I pretended to join him, but in reality I
was tossing it into the sagebrush behind me. The little man observed
my behavior several times but said nothing.
At last overcome by drink, Mr. Bayes was snoring heartily. I turned
to the little man, who thus far had said nothing. He ignored me for a
moment but gave several exploratory tugs on the ribbon that bound
them. Sighed and then sat upon the ground.
Can you speak? I asked at last.
Of course, he said. It does me no good so why bother. So what have
you learned of the toys about which you are so curious? Here, try one. He
reached into a large bag at the base of Mr. Bayess wagon and handed
me a small windup toy like those seen in ancient times. I watched him
carefully as he handed it to me, looking for some cleaver prestidigitation,
but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The device depicted a hopping
animal now long extinct after the nuclear war between the Norman
and Roman Empires that had destroyed so much of the great island
continents fauna, including this hopparoo. I wound it up and it hopped
around frantically. Almost as it finished, two Imperial jets screamed
overhead, no doubt patrolling the air for Chinese incursions.
Have you a wish? I could not get over the strangeness of this fellow. His diminutive size. His strange dress, as if he had come from
something out of an earlier era, maybe just after the first millennium
of the Empire.
A wish? I have many. Right now Ive been travelling for weeks on a
monotonous exploration of this river system to find a suitable location
for the new hydroelectric dam, I am fretting constantly over many beleaguered concerns, and I can think of nothing I wish more than to see my
wife and children.
At that my wife turned to me and said, Why in heavens name would
you wish that?
I have to admit I was not sure why I had said it. My two children
were poking sticks in the fire, pulling them out and waving the burning ends around following the glowing traces through the dark air.
Sparks leapt from the flames and soared into the night sky.
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Peck: Strange Report from the Church Archives

I was a little embarrassed that I had said that in front of my wife.

The little man looked amused. He gave a couple of more tugs on the
ribbon, but when the snoring Mr. Bayes popped his head up and
mumbled something incoherent he quickly let the line go slack.
I rewound the little toy and watched it once again dance about.
The little man took out a strange wooden stick and started speaking to it in a singsongy foreign language. It was strange and melodic.
How I wish I understood that beautiful language, I muttered and he
immediately switched to Latin. Funny how these pockets of stability
arise, he said. With such drastic changes in the broader field you would
expect that an individual would not survive, but the conditions of these
are such that no one may end their own life, so to create the uniqueness of
an existing life much temporal structure must be maintained or designed
in such a way that survival is possible, like all the parents, and those communities that support the existence of that individual and all his predecessors. So despite radical large-scale changes, narrow lines remain consistent.
Much like stirring a pot of noodles, as a mass they can be rearranged much,
but the connection between two ends of a single noodle remain bound
together no matter how tangled the mass becomes. We have given nearly
two dozen of the toys away in the small town, and yet much remains of
these peoples past, even though entire large-scale histories are in commotion. These stabilities intrigue me.
It was apparent that I was in the presence of a demigod or daemon
of some sort. Had not the prophet warned us of such things? I interrupted the strange ramblings of the creature to find out more about
its presence and intent. Clearly the windups were doing harm, but I
had seen nothing that indicated harm other than the strangeness of a
propensity or predilection to wish suddenly for what one already had.
How are you called? I asked.
He smiled and said nothing, so I tried another approach. Why is
there a ribbon between you and Mr. Bayes?
He has learned my name and bound me. I am his servant. His slave.
Come now, man! The Empire banned slavery after the reforms of Caesar St. Stephen of Alemec at the Council of Alexandria in 984.
Of course, he said, even so.
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Irreantum

You are not of this world. I said this with such certainty that I was
surprised, for its realization came as the words were spoken.
It is worse than that, he laughed.
I thought of the many science fictionals I read as a young man.
Tales of travel to another world. It was said that no one liked strange
futuristic tales more than Joseph Smith as a boy. Indeed, the antiMormons are always trying to look for hints to the source of the Book
of Mormon in Montaignes Star Dreamer trilogy or in Sampsons Ring
of Bright Moon Rising, two of Josephs favorites. When his brother
Alvin was killed in the Empires Space Academy in a moon rocket
accident, Joseph gave up the genre because it reminded him of his
brothers death. But it is said he had read many as a lad.
I thought about the two desires I had expressed after each winding.
I am not a slow man in general, but I had wished for the presence of
my wife who had not ever left me and for understanding a language
that is perfectly clear.
Do these play with time itself? I said, holding the toy for his inspection.
He said nothing, but the knowing smirk that cut his narrow face
was not hard to interpret.
It was dark. Cassiopeia was low in the Northern sky. The snores
of Mr. Bayes had reached a deep sonorous cadence and the stars were
splashed across the sky in three dimensions. I thought of the Interempire mission now hurdling its way through the sky toward Vega.
Launched in 1906 it would reach there with its suspended crew in
1923. In the Southern sky the faint red glow from the Eruption of
1892 that destroyed the town of Washington masked the stars of that
region of the sky. My wife was sitting near the fire, joining the children in watching the blaze. She was reading to them from the Book
of Mormon by the dim light of the fire, and they were staring at the
coals frisking bright then dim in the errant breezes playing about
theflames.
Those things that you have given awayPeople are wishing things
right now, changing things as we speak. Am I right?
He shrugged again. These are not my concerns. I care nothing for this
place. Let someone wish that the Dark Ages never occurred, let someones
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Peck: Strange Report from the Church Archives

child wish to see a volcano, let someone in a fit of anger wish away their
spouse. I dont care. Chaos is just around the corner.
But we cannot cause our own death?
The daemon, for that is how I was beginning to think of him, look
surprised and laughed. So you understood me. How delightful.
A panic was rising with his words. Wish my spouse away? How
horrible, but could just an errant wish said in jest or consternation
perhaps change everything? Change the fabric of time itself? Was it
possible? Nothing seemed different from how I had always known
things, yet a nagging and gnawing discomfort and fear seemed to be
gathering around me, as if the world had an ersatz aspect. As if a second sense were steering me toward bleak conclusions, impossible yet
gathering shape in the darkness of the night. The bound daemon and
Bayes in his Etruscan skirt seemed to have about them a terror that
was hard to describe or even see, like a bird discerned from the corner
of ones eye as it darts from a bush, elusive, not completely entering
ones gaze, yet real and hard to mistake.
I walked over to the fire and put my arm around my wife. I turned
to the daemon and asked if my wife might not have one of the windups. From the bag he pulled a green tin frog, the key popping from its
back like a tiny pair of fairy wings, and gave it to her. She wound it up
and placed it on the ground where it hopped frantically like a piece
of dry ice on a griddle. She moved to say something but I placed my
finger on her lips to suggest silence.
My dear, ask that these words I am writing be preserved.
Ask who? She looked at me then at the sleeping man as if to ponder
whether I had been drinking.
No one in particular. Just say it to the air.
She rolled her eyes. Ok, let these writings be preserved, as is, forever
and for all time. How was that?
My son picked up the frog and having wound it watched as it
jerked its legs about, hopping this way and that, until finally it bound
out of the light of the fire and into the darkness of the surrounding
night. The moon was just setting over the rim of the canyon and the
blackness was now held at bay only by the firelight. With the moons
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departure it had gotten quite dark. Even though it had been only at
quarter stage, it had given a soft glow to the landscape.
Its too bad there are not two moons, my son said as he searched in the
willowy area just out of reach of the fire light, I would like that.
Selene was just rising from the other rim and light returned to the
valley. For some reason Selene always brought me more comfort than
Luna, its irregularities and odd shape providing a better metaphor
for humanity in all her weaknesses. The soft light of Selene was redolent of many a summer evening chasing fireflies as a child around the
amphitheater at the Temple of Athena that Joseph the Prophet had
built near Nephis Landing.
But there was work to be done. If I understood things rightly, then
my hopping toy had but one request left. A nonsensical request it
would appear. But nonetheless.
Momentarily I will look over at the little man, the daemon, and say,
I wish that little monster had never been captured.

President Smith, I found these notes on my person while at my desk

this morning. Strangely, I also find I am wearing my traveling clothes
and smell of campfire smoke. I will therefore be going home to change.
I will be back this afternoon. Almost as if in a dream, I remember saying the very words that end this narrative, but cannot remember the
context of having uttered them. I also have no memory of writing these
notes, but as they are addressed to you I will forward them accordingly.
President, I am quite shocked at their contents. I do not remember
writing them, but it is in my pen as if I were carrying on a narrative
that makes no sense and seems like something more akin to H.G.
Wells than any report in which I have been asked take part. I must say
that the joke is on me and whomsoever is having this bit of fun at my
expense has mastered my hand in almost every particular. So, in short,
I am likely forwarding someone elses frivolity. I have not time to be part
of whatever this is meant to be. I suspect it is B.H. Roberts and will
confront him at the first opportunity. But I send them to you President
Smith to do with as you see fit.

18

Moving About Unnoticed

Simon Peter Eggertsen

Draped black as night, five figures drift

into the street, slide their shade across
a mosques sun-perfected white,

an Aleph in Old Stone Town.
Biting the edges of their ruffled bui buis,
they prevent themselves from flying away

in the breeze, resist landing on Pemba.
Along the alleyway a prayer at a time,
they move as afternoon shadows do
sideways down steps, prompts taken from
the Zanzibari sun, color from the rare
tsiperifery peppercorns.
On Gizenga Street, just before it jags
to the left, they turn toward me. Sombre
Arabica faces, tiny blue-tinted hands,
confirm they are women, and married,
not some crowd of nightmare-darkened
spirits coming to chastise me for something

I have done, or forgot to do.
I greet them, Asalaam aleikum.
Eyes cast down and away as they pass
make me feel I am neither here nor there.

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Irreantum

Their silence is its own answer, whorls out

against the walls, reminds me that I should not
be speaking to them at all, that they are the ones

free to move about unnoticed.
After they have gone, the scent of Jozani-cloved

bath oil grasps the air.
Later, five black-sailed, spice-ladened dhows
begin their night journey north, intent on
carrying something of value away from
the mazed souks in Muscathandfuls of
Omani amber, bundles of golden earrings

would make fair exchange.
Zanzibar, February 2008

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Eggertsen: Poetry

Shadows Before Tt, Narcissus After

Dimpled, ping-ponged-ball moon, streetlight glower send three
shadows to follow me around H Ni at night. Teased by light,
they slap the ground, join, overlap, recede, windmill about me,
tremble, like children waiting for the red gifts of Tt. They want
to be my comrades hold my hand, stand on my feet. Im not sure
I need the company. Night is the time to be alone. Sometimes a
full fan, sometimes a slender joss stick, there are moments when
shadows pass each other by, race away toward the future, stretch,
thin themselves out, vanish from sight. Moments later, I turn to find
them behind me, quivering from laughter. Good-natured fun at my
expense. Without a word, ambition rising, they squeeze though
the whirl of cyclo spokes, emerge unshredded. No damage done.
After climbing, they cut through tree tops, steal around corners,
try to lead me where I am not willing to go. I move on, they follow.
Their obedience tires. And yet they persist, dark late-night delinquents
testing limits. But with Tt so near I dare not show my peevish dismay,
dare not insult them with a word or two of rudimentary Vietnamese.
They join men on the stoop soothing for a pungent smoke, then waft
away in the mist, rush to sit with the noisy street children clustered
around a weathered black door. They also sing for a landlord to open,
wish for his lucky money to fall into their bamboo cups, yearn for the
chance to hear the spit of pink firecrackers at midnight. In the market,
they rummage rowdy over the woolly clothes racks, search for the new
and the red, smother a basket of sun-bright mandarins, embrace
the green of watermelons, skitter across bundles of red paper and spirit
money, roust through the bright of springs yellow apricot flowers.
They tumble without caution through stacks of sweet rice cakes,
bnh chung, then spill out onto the narrow brick walk shouting classical
Tt couplets at lovers on the park bench across the street. As I pay for
my selection, they quiver to have the new money slipped into their hands
not mine. I know I will have trouble when I try to lose them. Will they

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Irreantum

ever give up? We are joined at the soul. To ward them away, a trace
of slaked lime, an arrow, a bow beneath the Tt-flagged bamboo? Or,
at dawn will they just disappear?
Tomorrow the narcissus will bloom.
Hai loc.


Hanoi, March 2007

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Eggertsen: Poetry

What we have yet to learn from using hammers

The first thing my grandfather did after building his
mountain cabin at Wildwood in the 60s was to
cobble together a tiny picnic tablethere, beneath

the hummingbirds dark-red, river birch.
He cluttered it with carpenters thingsleftover nails,
screws, hammers, wood, small saws, chisels,
purple-chalked snap linesdared us to do our own
building there, anything we wanted, our own world

if we wished!
Some of us were content to just drive nails into
the table top. We could feel the vibrations run down
its legs then up to our butts as we sat at the bench
pounding. Morning sunned, it now has the sheeny,
silver-sea look of pearl-button jackets, without

the clipped charm of East London accents.
A lot of those nails are bent, sideswiped by child-choked,
ill-aimed hammerheads, have the sad look of trees
just above Sundance the spring the avalanche played
a phrase or two of Hindemith on Lunds piano,
drew its line straight down the mountain, swept things
near to clean on one side. As Redford said, a canyon
breeze tousling his rusty hair, Just made matchsticks
of it all. He could just as easily have said chopsticks,

or fiddlesticks.
A fleet of boats, twenty-six in all, each built by a grandchild,
sails north up the cabins gray, rough-timbered wall,
shore and shoals fixed by the certainty of a river-stone

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Irreantum

chimney. They are all partners now with twenty-six trees

he planted across the creek, one named for each of us
Isaacs Norwegian maple, Annies box elder, Marens
quaking aspen, Davids pinyon pine, Eriks kinnikinnik,
Brigs cottonwood, Matthews weeping willow ... I forget
whose name is on the robust horse chestnut, the copper beech,

the timid blue spruce.

At that table, we learned we could never do any real

damage, however hard we tried.
We learned it was not a place to frame, or offer, apology.
We learned that moments there were not the time to
sense the guilt or remorse that often binds itself so tightly

to mistake.
We learned that no dismay would ever be expressed
at what if done to grandfathers dining room table
at home would be punished with words sharp as nails,
as stinging as the slap of his calloused palm to the face.
We still wonder, though, if there is any truth in what
they say about men with hammers in their hands ...

that everything begins to look like a nail?
Utah, July 2010

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Eggertsen: Poetry

Hawkings Next Equation

For the wheelchair dude who invented time.
Penny, The Big Bang Theory (2012)

Not far from the maze of Cavendish theory,

green stained glass twirls like Hawkings time in

the jumbled lane ways near Regent Street.
When a breeze teases and twists the medallions,
light eases from its hanging place, suns glower scatters
soft spectrals here and there, perfects its prism work,
throws tiny rainbows on to each hard, dirty brick,

then, lessening, brings reflection to its end.
A muted trombones voice curves the space at Rose
Crescent, bends with the breeze, radiates solemn
music. Wagner, Elsas Procession to the Cathedral.
Exquisite calm spreads along the lawns, swan glides

ripple the Cam.
In odd syncopation, counterpoint really, grateful coins
drop, collide, pound pieces pence smash, some falling
in, others out. Some stretch through the hole ripped
near the hat brim upturned on the walk, edge warped,

top collapsed in on itself like a dying star.
It will matter to someone that somethings left over.
Wait. Whose hand slows the coins? Makes them

heavier than they are?

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Irreantum

Not far from clattered Cambridge market stalls,

not far from Hobsons Post, Hawking hunches,
busy in Newtons old chair, held there by the gravity
of his own thoughtssolves fast, does not wait

for his voice to sync into explanation.
He calculates the volume of energy burped from
black holes, their hungry habit of treating waning stars
as if they were some sort of gassy celestial spaghetti,
sucking them out of the Milky Way without knowing

their names or numbers;
puzzles the size and shape of spontaneitya few Higgs
bosons crashing about, bold, breaking strange symmetries
wave by goddamn particle wave, slowing, adding mass

where there was none before;
wonders whether it is possible to find a place
in his equations to mark the elegance in all this
blatant initiation, note the heavy colding before
creation, find for the intricate ingenuity of

the hiding places of God?
Cambridge, November 2007

26

Timpanogos
Heather Marx

Beryl Wilson arrived at Brigham Young University writing to a boyfriend who was supposed to become a husband. Called to
the Andes Mission, Elder Montgomery Spafford embossed sheets of
airmail paper with Braille-like advice.
July 26, 1965.
Shake hands with President Wilkinson at freshman registration! Buy
your tickets early for the Homecoming game! Hike up Y Mountain and
see the fall colors!
During Beryls senior year at Idaho Falls High School, Mont had been
a freshman at BYU. Now Beryl took his place while Elder Spafford
took the gospel to South America. In his letters, the aspiring paleontologist reminded his hometown girlfriend about Provo features no
longer visible to the naked eye, from Late Pleistocene fossils embedded in the Wasatch Mountains to the metal sandwich structure inside
the new Deseret Towers dormitories to himself.
August 16, 1965.
When you walk outside every morning and see the Rockies, remember
your Mont in the Andes!
Beryl stored these tokens in a Florsheim shoebox under her dorm-issue
twin bed. Anticipating the double-bed era was discouraged for missionaries, so Beryl did the imagining for them: days of sketching for her

Honorable mention, 2012 Irreantum Fiction Contest

27

Irreantum

and science for him, evenings by the TV and nights of making out
and beyondunder the amber wool afghan from his grandmother.
The double-bed era was scheduled to begin where a couple years of
Church-approved art instruction left off. On Registration Day, Beryl
entered the Smith Fieldhouse seeking watercolors and oils but left, dazed,
with history, Book of Mormon, English and math. This unexpected mandatory coursework left her confidence as perforated as the IBM punchcards traded among the flotilla of tables. Not even a firm handshake from
Ernest Wilkinson, the jowly university president stationed at the Fieldhouse door, could ease her fear of Math 102. Mont, her long-distance savior through high school Algebra II, was on another continent; her father
was too far away, in miles and temperament, to help. Only the prospect
of spending the next two years eating baked chicken dinners across from
her parents kept her from packing up that very night.
The people unpacking around her offered minimal help, with math or
life. Beryl split her room in Vilate Kimball Hall with Julia Orton, and her
closet with Julias Belle of the Y aspirations. An only and reclusive child,
Beryl was fascinated by Julias chiffon ball gown, her red patent leather
pumps, her fingernails lacquered with one of the seven shades of lilac polish arranged in a V-shape on her nightstand. Julia, considering a major in
the College of Family Science, was impressed by Beryls drawing ability
until it proved unableor unwillingto capture the dress designs she
painstakingly described. But the Second Runner-Up to Miss Henderson,
Nevada, had also won the Miss Congeniality award, so Beryl was encouraged to try Julias just-used, still-warm hair rollers, or sample the apple pie
leftovers from her Sigma Delta Omicron meeting.
A narrow corridor connected their room to two more shared bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. The six co-eds, hailing from Idaho,
Colorado, Nevada, and three Utah towns, managed to ratify a cooking
and cleaning schedule, but couldnt agree about General Conference.
Bev Bazelle from Nibley wanted to spend the first Saturday morning
in October listening to KSL on the transistor while sharing a bowl
of saltwater taffy (a family tradition) with her roommates. Carolyn
Morris of Orem suggested a scenic morning hike up Y mountain,
arguing that the Apostles and Seventies would have plenty left to
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Marx: Timpanogos

say on Sunday. Though Mrs. Wilson, a zealous LDS convert of four

years, would have preferred her daughter at Bevs side (and Mr. Wilson, physicist and atheist, would have preferred his daughter in the
library), their daughter was not going to miss her chance to follow
Monts advice. Friday nights vote was 5-1 for the hike.
Beryl slept in what she considered hiking clothes and bumped her
heels against Monts shoebox while lacing her navy Keds the next
morning. Bev, stirring Cream of Wheat on the stove, did not look up
when her roommates said goodbye.
The Morris wheat-colored station wagon carried Beryl, Julia, Gloria, Anne, and Carolyn down 9th East and up to the trailhead, where
they saw that at least four other local motorists would not be jawing
taffy with Bev and the Apostles. The girls got out and started up the
trail. Holding still to support sketchbooks had not prepared Beryls
legs for the modest incline, and soon the waistband on her denim
pedal pushers was chafing through a sheen of sweat. Too winded for
small talk, Beryl mentally composed her next letter to Peru.
October 2, 1965.
I hiked up to the Y today like you suggested. I noticed a pale green bush
that looked like coral. I inhaled the sharp smell of the mountain grasses.
While taking a generous swig from Julias canteen during a pause,
Beryl turned and admired the view of Utah Lake. A letter from the
benthic zone of Monts shoebox had mentioned an umbilical freshwater river running north from Utah Lake into its larger, stagnant
progeny, itself the child of a lake which once covered western Utah
and parts of two other states. Beryl passed along this information.
Did you know that the Utah and Great Salt Lakes are puddles
left from Lake Bonneville? About 14,000 years ago, everything we see
would have been underwater. Can you imagine that?
While Julia shared refreshments and Carolyn her car, Beryl shared
facts. Her roommates, fearing a fifth week of Monts geological digest
parroted in Beryls sing-song alto, became restless. Julia replaced the
cap on the canteen and checked her Timex. Anne stifled a giggle as
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Irreantum

Gloria stood behind Beryl and mimed the breaststroke with her bony,
tanned arms. Beryl was turning to look when Carolyn grabbed her
lace-edged sleeve and pointed north to Mount Timpanogos.
Beryl, have you heard the local legend about Timp? she asked.
No, Beryl replied.
Its a beautiful story. Very romantic. Carolyn summoned an authoritative voice. Once upon a time, an Indian tribe was suffering from a
famine. In order to save their people, their elders decided to sacrifice a
young girl to the gods. The girl went to the top of the mountain so she
could commit suicide and save her people. On her way up, she met a
good-looking Indian brave. She thought he was the god, and he liked
her, so he didnt tell her otherwise. They fell in love and lived in a cave.
Sounds like Wymount Terrace, said Gloria. Everyone laughed.
Beryl had heard BYUs married student housing called rabbit hutches,
but love caves might work as well.
Things went fine for a while, Carolyn continued, but then the
brave hurt himself and the Indian girl realized her lover was mortal.
She felt bad because she was fooled. Here she was enjoying herself
while her people were starving. Anyway, she went to the top of the
mountain and jumped off.
No! exclaimed Anne, an English major whose wide reading of
unhappy endings had not yet trained her to expect them. To offer
conclusive proof, Carolyns finger traced the outline of the Indian girl
lying in state along their partial view of the Timpanogos peaks.
It was all hogwashBeryl knew, or Mont did, that Timpanogos
was a buckle in the earths crust, softened by the lapping of Lake
Bonnevillebut she kept this to herself. At least Indian melodrama
was a step up from beauty pageant gossip. There was no call to spoil
her roommates moment in the sun.
Beryl was glad to reach the final switchback. From campus, the
block Y was a puny white brand on a massive brown-green cattle
haunch; up close, it was a three-way traffic intersection on the moon.
Six decades of annual whitewashing had left a hard, thick coating on
three privileged strips of rocks and dirt. While the others hiked up the
letter, Beryl took an egg salad sandwich from her canvas knapsack and
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Marx: Timpanogos

settled on the bottom serif. In between bites, Beryl reverently stroked

the rocks bleached with Monts help last spring. His letter about the
bucket brigade passing whitewash up the trail was both practical (Be
careful of lime drops burning through your shoes!) and fanciful (The parallel lines of the bucket brigade reminded me of an English dance out of
some old movie.). The subject of dancing had soured his mood. I worry,
Beryl, that someone will dance away with you while Im gone.
Beryl wrote this off as a typical missionary fear, like Monts concerns about approaching strangers or making Spanish grammar errors.
Beryls face, with its weak version of her mothers Danish blue eyes
and strong replica of her fathers rounded cheeks and double chin, was
nothing next to Julias delicate features framed by an auburn flip. Considering all the Julias on campus, she didnt expect to dance until Mont
got back. Beryl slid her coke-bottle glasses up her sweaty nose and
covered her aching thighs with a sketch pad.
Here is my drawing of vegetation clinging to rock outcroppings. Here is
my diagram of the patchwork orchards and Monopoly houses approaching
the shimmer of Utah Lake. Here is your loyal girlfriend sitting on the Y,
awaiting your return.
Twenty minutes later, Beryl realized her legs were asleep. She stood
up. Blood spiked and pinched through her veins as she turned and
noticed that her four roommates had become six shapes. She hadnt
seen the others coming. They must have hiked down from the peak.
Maybe they carried the keys to a car parked at the trailhead; maybe
they were fellow General Conference refugees. Beryl packed up her
supplies and started toward her friends, curious about the laughter
suffusing the thin mountain air.
The group was spread out across the right fork of the Y. The girls
had made room on their picnic blanket for a sandy-haired young man
in a gray BYU T-shirt, while the other one, wearing a plain white
T-shirt and a crew cut, sat to the side on a piece of blackwatch plaid
flannel. Everyone was smiling, but the gray T-shirt man and Carolyn
were whispering together, her hand resting lightly on his arm.
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Irreantum

Hey, Beryl, whatcha drawn? Can we see it? asked Julia.

Beryl dreaded her roommates reaction when the sketch of Utah
Valley did not come out resembling a belted shirtdress. Nah, the pictures not quite ready. She pointed toward the lake. Theres too much
out there.
Gray T-shirt Man, who introduced himself as Craig, scooted off
the blanket and sat down by his friend, who introduced himself as
David. Carolyn made a spot for Beryl by maneuvering closer to Craig.
Gloria explained that the men were raving about the view from
the peak. Craig chimed in. I was just telling the girlshere Anne
reached over Carolyn and swatted Craigs armOK, women about
a BYU tradition. Every year, the Intercollegiate Knights light up the
outline of the Y with phlogiston. He glanced sideways at Beryl. As
you know, thats a classified substance produced in the basement of
the Eyring Science Center.
Beryl was appalled. Even Honor Coded BYU men would fudge
the truth to impress a girl.
No, no, no. Phlogiston, she explained, was a combustion theory
debunked in the 18th century. Its as much of a legend as the Timpanogos Indian girl.
Mont Spafford, ridiculed by peers for his squareness, might have
anticipated the groups derision; Beryl Wilson, surreptitiously tolerated by her roommates for her second-hand science, was shocked by
her ovation.
David was standing and applauding. That was great. Amazing!
Finally someone calls you on your B.S., Craig. He squinted at Beryl.
Now, did you say your name was Beryl or Carol?
All the girls started laughing, though Beryl couldnt tell if they were
laughing at David or at her. Surprisingly, none of her roommates were
thanking her for this information, without which they might have
gone on believing Craig and his phlogiston story. They should all be
grateful, so why was Carolyn rubbing Craigs mock-wounded bicep?
Why was Gloria laughing so hard she rolled off the picnic blanket?
Was the whole campus watching from the top floor of the library as
a line of raucous picnickers garroted the right arm of the Y? Did her
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Marx: Timpanogos

roommates politeness, their loaning of rollers and sharing of pies,

need the denser oxygen of the valley and the University to survive?
Beryl wondered if the lunar mountainside showcased her roommates
true feelings about her.
Beryl stood up and brushed off her white blouse, a hiking costume
now stained with sweat and dust. Very, very funny. You know, my feet
are pretty sore. I can feel some blisters starting. If its OK with you,
Ithink we should head back down.
The girls went silent. Julia spoke up first. Uh, the guys have offered
to guide us up to the peak. Its just a little farther...
Beryl, Ill take you back. Everyone looked over at David, who was
putting his arms through plaid sleeves. Lets get you home.
Random men didnt go out of their way to squire Beryl Wilson
anywhere: Gloria smiled and gave her a big wink. Escorted by a man
she barely knew, a man who had passed up Glorias long legs for thick
ankles showcased by grimy pedal pushers, Beryl tried to make the
best of things. OK. Ill see you all back at the dorm.
David swung Beryls knapsack over his left shoulder. Halfway down
the mountain, when Beryl tripped on a rock and twisted her ankle, he
put his right hand under her elbow, where it stayed the rest of the way.
To take Beryls mind off the pain, David described the scenery she was
missing. The peak is something else. Quiet and peaceful, except for
the leaves. Everywhere its wild reds and oranges and yellows. Looks
like the mountain is screaming through the colors.
Beryl considered using this poetic description in her next letter to
Mont until she blushed at the physical closeness of its source. Dont
worry about seeing the peak. You can go back in the spring. Or, hey,
just take my word for it. I wont tell anyone you werent there.
Trust in David Waldrick came easily. Impressed by Davids chivalry,
from supporting her elbow to opening the door of his black Thunderbird to whisking away a brown leather briefcase and a Boy Scout uniform
from the front seat, Beryl was no match for his flattery, which arrived
with the cold water he fetched her in the Health Center waiting room.
You were great up there today, he said. Do you mind me asking
how you knew all that stuff aboutwhat was it?
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Irreantum

Phlogiston? she asked.

Yeah. Youre only a freshman, right? You must be really smart. You
havent flunked Intro Chemistry twice like Craig has.
Beryl took a sip from a paper cup and aimed her blush at a boot
print trapped in a teal linoleum square. Really, its nothing. My
fathers a physicist. Hes got stories like phlogiston coming out his
ears. For me, it would have been harder not to remember.
Now Beryl, you just dont understand, replied David. Its pretty
special to know that stuff. And not every girl would speak up like that.
I bet nobody puts anything over on you.
Keep going to church. Read your scriptures. Stay true to our faith, honey.
Everyone in the Idaho Falls High School Class of 1965, Beryl included,
expected her reunion nametag to read Mrs. Montgomery Spafford.
A fossil enthusiast she met in sophomore English, Mont had offered
welcome companionship to Beryl, an only child named for a neutron
moderator in fission reactions. Though clumsy with art appreciation
Beryls landscapes induced monologues on the absorptive properties
of Snake River basaltMont wrapped his calloused hands around
Beryls paint-stained fingers while she complained about the hours
her father worked and her mother worshipped.
Beryl, dont worry, he said. Theyre just full of their own lives.
When I get back from my mission, well get married and start ours.
Work hard, sweetheart. Finish as much school as you can. Before you
know it, youll be raising our children. Cant wait to see you again!
David Waldrick had other ideas. The Monday after General Conference, Beryl found a Carsons Market paper bag of Ace bandages outside her apartment door. That Thursday, she hobbled out of Math 102
to see David standing by the pendulum of the Science Center, holding
two bottles of A&W and offering help with trigonometric identities.
A month later, they ate hot dogs in the football bleachers as BYU
beat Utah for Homecoming. Afterwards, on Beryls doorstep, David
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Marx: Timpanogos

pointed toward the illuminated Y and confessed that the real phlogiston was kerosene-soaked mattresses. Beryls comment that Craig
deserved a mild burn earned her a peck on the cheek.
By Thanksgiving, Beryl had rearranged her art and her dreams
around David. She sketched his angular chin in the margins of composition notebooks. She streaked abstract landscapes with sine waves
of the oranges and reds she had missed on the peak but re-imagined
as the Lamanite palette of Davids future home. His prospects diffused
into conversations like the scent of the pink rose bouquet he brought
or the Old Spice he wore to their steak dinner at the Skyroom. The
Technicolor detail of his December graduation (Man, I cant believe
its over!), his job offer in Phoenix (Good firm. Nice city. Gonna go
places.) and his fantasy house (Three bedrooms and a pool in a new
development) turned deferred domesticity with Elder Spafford into
blurry, black and white static. Enduring years of his-and-hers college in
order to watch Ed Sullivan from a threadbare couch in some fossil-rich
patch of Eastern Idaho now seemed grim, especially with an attentive
financier and a built-in swimming pool on the next channel. (Never
mind the news bulletins from Gloria, whod heard about his string of
failed engagements from someone on the Heritage Halls Council. The
girls who deemed David Waldrick damaged marital goods were the
same ones who had mocked Berylor was it David?on Y mountain.
Who could trust them?) Dinner after dinner, Beryl met Davids reckless
hinting with calm reserve, curious to see what heand shewould do.
What he did after Beryls exams was slip her a gold filigree engagement ring and a sheet of airmail stamps. So you can tell the missionary, he explained.
Beryl thought Mont had been a secret. Perhaps Carolyn had spilled
those beansshe and Craig had been hot and heavy since Conference, bonded by the legend of phlogiston. The stamps showed a mustachioed scientist with a rocket launching in the background. Elder
Spafford would never know what hit him.
Sharp points from green plastic holly leaves were prodding Beryls
forehead as she looked through the white lace curtains across the
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Irreantum

front window of her parents rambler. When Davids black Thunderbird pulled up, she swooned at the bouquet of roses he took from the
passenger seat, and prayed her parents would, too. Pearlyne Spafford
still phoned Gitte Wilson every other week with updates on Monts
transfer to a new district of Lima, or his progress with the extended
Gutierrez family. Tom Spafford gave Edgar a steep discount on his
stationery supplies at the familys five and dime. These ties would be
tough to break, but Beryl had faith in Davids chivalry, embodied in
the vivid red flowers he handed her at the door.
Hey Beryl, go find a vase, would you? These are for your mother.
Beryl was rifling through the china closet when Gitte Wilson
stepped out of the kitchen. She wiped her hands on a meat-streaked
apron while appraising Davids fresh crew cut, clean-shaven face,
white shirt and thin black tie, navy blue suit jacket and slacks. Here
was a missionary without the badge; a missionary offering flowers, not
scriptures. Gitte shook Davids hand (he did not flinch at the blood),
accepted the bouquet and waved him toward the gold velvet sofa by
the piano. Her mothers insistence on immediately demonstrating
the sofabeds function mortified Beryl. Did her mother expect their
houseguest to fall asleep at 3:24 p.m.? Gittes directness must have
unsettled David, which accounted for the misstep of addressing his
future father-in-law as Mr. Phlogiston. Beryl hoped the insult had
not penetrated the keyhole-shaped bald spot on her fathers head,
diverted from a TV table piled with Physics Today only to inquire
about the condition of the highways (Passable, sir.) and whether
David had ever been to Idaho Falls (Had no reason to, sir. None
so lovely as your daughter, that is.). Beryl let herself relax while she
arranged the roses in a blue glass vase and David reassembled the
cushions on the couch. She and David made a good team. They were
going to be all right.
The roses towered over an acrylic pinecone centerpiece that night
during Christmas dinner, delayed until the 28th in honor of their visitor. Edgar Wilson usually resented bean countersthe Mr. Phlogiston nickname, duly heard and registered, hadnt helpedbut the boy
was smart enough not to peek at the classified notes Edgar scribbled
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Marx: Timpanogos

on a steno pad during the meal, and not to blink while Gitte held
forth about the pedigree charts taped to the dining room walls. (Even
Monts eyes had glazed over during endless Danish surname mutations.) It was unclear whether the March wedding date owed as much
to passionate romance as it did to Beryls unremarkable fall grades,
but Edgar Wilson trusted his wife to get to the truth. Gitte was in fine
form tonight, looming over their guest with the soup tureen, primed
to halt her daughters engagement the way Fermis suicide squad stood
ready to dump cadmium sulfate on runaway fission. After toasting
the union over a glossy orange wedge of pumpkin pie, Beryls father
retreated to angular momenta and the Pauli principle.
Beryls mother took the Dear John letter to Elder Spafford
harder than her husband, and perhaps Mont himself. Her daughter
had expected nothing less: loyalty to the absent was Gitte Wilsons
governing passion. Her devotion to Beryls father had begun in the
third stand of second violins in the Cambridge Community Orchestra. Edgar Wilson, fresh physics PhD and a visitor to M.I.T.S Rad
Lab, asked Gitte Gustavsen, fresh alumna of the Walnut Hill School
and aspiring violinist, to mind their cues while he worked equations
during breaks. After Gittes advancement to first violinsand Barb
Skinners failure to summon him back to the Water Music in time
he asked Miss Gustavsen to pair with him for life. Out of weak affection but iron compassion, she agreed to defrost Edgars roasts, mend
Edgars pants and raise Edgars daughter across four states while he
midwived atomic submarines. When the other Idaho Falls wives complained about their husbands long hours at the nuclear facility, Mrs.
Edgar Wilson rolled her eyes. These girls, she complained to Beryl,
must have had theirs closed when they said I do.
The fact that Gitte anticipated better luck getting through to God
than her husband worked out well for God. When Pammy Thalmann
invited her new Idaho Falls neighbors to an LDS ward picnic, Gitte
and Beryl brought a Tupperware of chicken salad and took home a
Book of Mormon. Beryl thought the missionaries were cuteone of
them inspired a series of charcoal sketchesbut her mothers interest
transcended good bone structure. To the woman forced to inscribe
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Irreantum

appointment reminders on her daughters thick sketch paper and

her husbands flimsy steno sheets, a book about men imparting godly
messages to family and community rang true. The men preached, and
their sons inscribed the words onto metal plates; the men pleaded,
and their errant children received visions. One prophet prayed, and
Jesus himself reached through a veil to touch sixteen stones into glowing, radioactive brilliance. Divine responsiveness proved an irresistible
novelty to Gitte. If channeling her quiet grit into this religion would
help her reach the God of that book, she was joining up and taking
her child with her. Beryl did not yet have what the Elders called a firm
testimony of the book or its church, but eighteen years of laundering
equation-spattered handkerchiefs had left Gitte Gustavsen Wilson
with stoicism to burn. Fourteen years of living with that stoicism had
taught Beryl when to give it a wide berth.
Baptism and confirmation granted the Wilson women the Gift of
the Holy Ghost. In celebration, Gitte gave permission for a triptych of
Beryls least inscrutable Elder Breen profiles to break up the gold and
white swirls of the dining room wallpaper. This artistic forbearance
ended when Gitte arrived at the site of her greatest temptation: the
Idaho Falls Temple. During her first visit, she stood in the baptismal
font and admired the murals of Christs baptism in the Jordan River and
Joseph Smiths in the Susquehanna. Re-enacting baptism on behalf of
twenty-eight deceased womensurely the most absent people of all
transformed Gitte. Concerns of the day now appeared ridiculous. Who
cared about Yuri Gagarin or Jackie Kennedy or the military-industrial
complex when righteous departed spirits were calling out, begging for
these sacred rites like the street children in India? Gitte stopped teaching
violin and started researching, recording and posthumously baptizing
Gustavsens and Madsens, Pedersens and Larsens. She imagined these
grateful ancestors whittling down her spiritual blindness from the other
side, scraping at her mental veil the way an instrument maker planed
the ribs of a violin. The more temple baptisms performed, she reasoned,
the thinner the veil became between Gitte Wilson and the mind of God.
The barrier between Gitte Wilson and the mind of her daughter took a different course. As ten-generation charts suffocated the
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charcoals, Gitte delegated more of Edgars dinners to Beryl and more

of Beryls church activities and art exhibits to that nice boy, Mont
Spafford. But loyalty to the absent proved one-way: none of the ancestors on the wall could help Gitte keep the Waldrick name from joining
them. Though David was several years older than Mont, to Gitte he
appeared half the man. Beryl was trading the missionary who taught
little Javier Gutierrez Soy un hijo de Dios for a beau who confessed
to his future mother-in-law, with a straight face, that his mission
plans were disrupted by emotional distress following the Kennedy
assassination.
On New Years Eve, while David chummed up to Edgar in the living room with small talk about combustion theory, mother corralled
daughter at the kitchen table.
Beryl, your boy is very nice. Very peppy. I know youre excited to
get married, dear, but how well do you really know him?
Beryl sighed and balled her fists on the BYU-blue laminate.
Mother, Davids a good guy. You have to be worthy to go to the Y, she
reminded her. Youre judging him because his whole family isnt big
and Mormon, like Monts. Thats not fair.
Beryls allegiance to David Waldricks hard-knock life was a barrier
Gitte had not been able to wear down. David couldnt help being an
only child, orphaned at ten and raised by an uncle. David couldnt
help that he was already sixteen when missionaries stopped for a
pickup basketball game at the park where he gave pointers to twelve
year-old boys. So what if he wasnt a returned missionary? David
had joined the church, stayed active for a decade, supported himself
through school, received several consecutive college draft deferments,
kept the books for three Orem businesses, volunteered with a Springville Boy Scout troop, graduated from BYU, wrapped a fancy piece of
gold around Beryls ring finger, and reserved a temple date. How many
chapters did this success story need? Would it kill her mother to relax
and be happy for her only child?
Congratulating Beryl hadnt killed Gitte, but it was coming close.
After splurging on a Christmas Eve mother-daughter lunch, enduring an awkward visit with Pearlyne at the store and placing a signed
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Irreantum

copy of Hugh B. Browns You and Your Marriage under the tree, she
had mentioned Monts name in Davids presence yesterday and heard
him move the wedding from March to February. Now she took off
her cat-eye glasses and rubbed her forehead, trying to erase years of
mental preoccupation.
I know all that, honey, but temple marriage lasts forever. Shouldnt
you wait a while?
Dont start. Beryl splayed her fingers across the table. I know you
liked Mont but you cant make me wait for him. You and Dad are the
same. You like control. Dad likes to control atoms, you like to control
dead people. Its my life, and I am choosing to marry David.
Remember, Beryl, Mont is going to come back
Beryl stood up. Dont worry. Well be out of Provo before then.
Dwindling maternal authority mutated Gitte Wilsons priorities. As punishment for years of parental oblivion, she penciled the
Waldrick name onto her charts and boxed them up for storage after
Davids visit. (Beryl was at a movie with her school friend Marie the
day the charcoals of the handsome missionary reappeared. For his
part, Edgar lavished uncharacteristic praise on that evenings meatloaf with canned green beans.) As punishment for smothering Beryls
dining room art in the first place, Gitte remained stiffly courteous
through the rest of Davids visit, Januarys Relief Society bridal shower,
and an all-day shopping trip to Pocatello. She took some comfort in
the Book of Mormon: even the Brother of Jared, with faith strong
enough to dissolve the veil and see Christs face, had endured periods
of His wrath. If this foolish marriage was born of a mothers distance,
born of obsessive genealogy, born of a new religion, born of a distance
in her own marriage, then the least Gitte could do was pay attention
while her daughter paid the price.
On a clear February morning, Beryl and David were endowed and
married in the Idaho Falls Temple. David had insisted on a small wedding party. Only Gitte and the Thalmanns witnessed the ceremonies,
joinedGitte was certainby her baptized spirit ancestors. Edgar
sat by Davids Uncle Dale in the temple waiting room. (Gitte had
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Marx: Timpanogos

packed Edgars last two Spaffords notebooks and a half-dozen yellow

Bics for the wait.) Mr. and Mrs. David Waldrick, dressed, respectively,
in a navy blue suit and an empire waist taffeta gown, emerged from
the temple and posed for pictures. Beryls high school friend Marie
took Polaroids of the couple against the backdrop of the graduated
white spire, while Uncle Dale photographed the newlyweds overlooking the Snake River. After Beryl changed into a lavender pleated wool
suit, Gitte laid out the wedding dress in the trunk of their Buick Electra. The scant caravan (the Vilate Kimball girls were busy with school,
though Bev had sent a card) headed to the Rogers Hotel for a wedding luncheon.
Gittes indifference to the celebration, the conversation and the
food spurred Pammy Thalmann to brighten this oddly solemn occasion. Seventeen years ago, Pamela Ash Thalmann had been one of the
young wives enlivening the social events which helped lure the nuclear
research facility to Idaho Falls. Today, she complimented Beryl on her
fabulous hair, nicely recovered from the white tulle bridal veil. She
requested the name of Maries gorgeous pink nail polish. She ribbed
Edgar about the secret science he was writing on those notebooks.
She informed David he was going to have to do all their taxes! Pammys tale about the city faking a road construction project to entice
the Atomic Energy Commission to set up shop in Idaho Falls cut
short Dales harangue about the lack of alcoholic beverages.
After Dales guffaw turned heads across the restaurant, he raised a
goblet of Canada Dry in salute. Pammy, sweetheart, you are one in a
million, he announced. Come by for a fillup anytime!
Uncle Dales factual ownership of a Texaco station outside Modesto
failed to curb Dick Thalmanns glare. Edgar looked nervously between
the men while his wife took her turn at preoccupation and gazed out
the window toward Spaffords.
Pammy just patted Dales ropy, spotted hand. Dale, dear, tell us
some more about the groom. Some of us have just met him! What
was David like growing up?
Dale straightened the lapels of his gray tweed jacket, nearly jabbing
Marie with a suede elbow patch. He stood up and walked around
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Irreantum

the table, where he gripped his nephews shoulders. Davids fingertips

trembled on the rim of his gilt-edged china plate.
David has always been lovable and true. A loyal and obedient boy.
A boon companion to his uncle. His natural father, my oldest brother,
does not deserve mention. But his mother, Lucyrest her soul
was a real sweet, motherly woman. While Pammy shooed away
the waiter refilling Dales coffee, David stared at the wreckage of his
chicken cordon bleu, rice pilaf and boiled pearl onions. Davy came
to me, bereaved and alone, on the train from Chicago to San Francisco. Mind you he was only ten, but already mature. Very wise. He
and I got on grandly. Such a great help at the station. An able bookkeeper and a fine student. David brought up his left hand to squeeze
his uncles right. Dales cheeks flushed red and his voice receded to a
whisper. Davy has become more than my nephew. His presence has
meant the world to me. I hope it would be true that those years living
with me have brought him ... even some small advantage.
David shut his eyes. When Pammy motioned for the waiter to bring
in the wedding cake, Dale broke Davids grip and sat back down. Beryl
stroked her husbands shoulder, a quiet echo of his uncles grasp, but he
made no move in awareness or response. Gitte was mystified. Why was
David ignoring her daughters affection? Where, for heavens sake, was
the romance? Didnt the man want the liberties he was now authorized
to take? Even Edgar had been frisky at their wedding dinner. While
her father, a music instructor at the Walnut Hill School, performed
Bachs Third Cello Suite, the grooms folded arms enabled a discreet
exploration of the brides left breast; later, at the Wellesley Inn, he
hummed the bourree while worshipping her right. Gitte had tolerated
that portion of her husbands mental preoccupation not ennobled by
the cause of national defense by recalling how Edgars mind, focused
and intense, could turn toward her body. Two decades later, the scientist still approached his wifes aging curves with reverence, astonished
that his daytime distraction had not yet driven her from their bed. To
Gitte, perpetual sexual awe still counted as a kind of love.
When the hovering waiters began outnumbering the guests, the
Wilson-Waldrick party left the restaurant and milled around the
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Marx: Timpanogos

parking lot. Marie had used Ivory Soap to scrawl Just Married
across the rear window of Davids T-Bird. Dick Thalmann was shuffling his oxblood loafers on the frost-coated sidewalk. Pammy had
her arm through Dicks and her French-manicured fingernails buried
in a fake fur muff. Dale had taken a brown paper Safeway bag from
the backseat of the Thalmanns Chevrolet and was striking a match
from the restaurant book (Excellence in Dining!) to light his cigarette. Edgars hands were jammed in his trench coat pockets, where
Gitte knew he was holding a Bic the way sculptors balanced chisels.
Here stood her nuclear artist, attracted to the weaponry that kept the
world safe; there stood her artist daughter, tied to a man whose body
and mind were not attracted to her, let alone the common good. Gitte
reached for Edgar. The warmth of his ink-stained fingers around hers
prophesied that he would set aside his equations tonight.
Gitte watched as Dale, reeking of Kools and gasoline, closed in on
Beryl and placed a sloppy kiss on her cheek. From his bag he took out
a manila envelope overflowing with black and white photographs of
little Davy.
Hes your boy now, dear, he told Beryl, shoving the envelope into
her chest. Go put these in a book now, would you?
Beryl laid the envelope across the front seat of their car while her
husband popped open the trunk. David then turned and embraced
his uncle, whosurprisedblindly flung his lit cigarette. (Dick Thalmann ground out the embers with his shoe.) When his arms freed up,
Dale picked up the Safeway bag and handed it to his nephew. David
opened the bag, smelled its contents, then wedged it in the trunk next
to his wifes bottle-green Samsonite luggage. Gitte looked to Beryl for
an explanation of the mysterious parcel, or even shared curiosity, but
her daughter was sitting in the front seat rummaging through her new
gold Lucite purse. When Pammy and Marie accepted Beryls offer of
cinnamon Dentyne stubs, Gitte declined. Who wanted a sharp taste
staking this scene deeper into memory?
Gitte gave Beryls hand a squeeze before she stepped back and
waved at the newlyweds through the passenger window. As the
T-Bird pulled away, Gitte prayed for strength to keep watch over her
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daughters future, though even God knew this vigil was better suited
to deceased ancestors, long reconciled to the flimsy veil between
themselves and their descendants mistakes.
Pocatello, home of the Sundown Motel, was an hours drive from Idaho
Falls in good weather, and only a few minutes more after a snowstorm.
Three days ago, as Edgar had shoveled their driveway, Gitte Wilson
quizzed her daughter about their plans. Why drive on your wedding
night? Why not relax at a hotel here? Why not take your time in Idaho
Falls and leave well rested the next day? Her mothers hinting at the
rigors of the honeymoon made Beryl cringe. Who wanted to run into
her parents, let alone Monts, downtown? Who wanted to feel their
eyes searching for evidence of marital bliss? Davids proposed itinerary, a five-day trek beginning in Pocatello and heading south through
Utah into Arizona, sounded fine to his bride.
His plans for temple worship were another story.
The Dentynes seventeen-minute lifespan was already longer than
the drive from Y mountain to the Health Center, or their brief rides
from his college apartment to Heritage Halls. Beryls narration of her
day had carried those Provo conversations; now, having spent their
wedding day joined at the hip, she had nothing new to share. David
seemed content to let the T-Birds engine noise do the talking. Beryl
reached into her purse for the gum wrapper and glanced at her husband. Framed by the Blackfoot Mountains, his profile was regal compared to her stubby nose viewed against the snowy plains to the west.
David Waldrick was the handsomest man of Beryls acquaintance. To
see him was to scoff at the rumors of women turning him down.
David, what day are we going to stop in Salt Lake? Id like to visit
the temple. What Beryl really wanted was to stop an hour south in
Provo to show off her gorgeous husband and newlywed glow to Gloria and the doubters. A supplemental temple visit would, she hoped,
curtail this sinful pride.
Im not sure about that. We dont have a lot of time to get to
Phoenix.
Shouldnt we make the time? The more we go, the better, right?
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Theres a temple in Mesa. You can go yourself when we get there.

You dont want to come, too? she asked, worried. The mornings
ceremonies, the locks in a canal that led from communal life in Vilate
Kimball Hall to eternal life with David, had left Beryl Registration
Dayconfused. Like a painting you didnt understand right away, the
temple would require additional gallery visits. David had tutored her
to a B in Math 102. She was expecting his help with religion, too.
Sure, Beryl, we can go. But like I said, we dont have lot of time on
this trip. How long were we in there today? Four, five hours? he asked.
I work, you know. That nice house doesnt just show up. Ive gotta go
out and get it.
Beryl bit her tongue. Of course he had to work; of course her
dream house wasnt really a channel change away. Things would be
tight for a while. Their first apartment would be modestthe carload
of supplies David took back to Arizona at New Years was barely half
of what she hoped to sendbut temporary. When Beryl had a baby
boy, and David hinted that should be soon, they would move up. In
the meantime, as Uncle Dale always said, they would have to eat it up,
wear it out, make it do or do without.
Beryl reached into the envelope and took out a handful of photographs, evidence that Little Davy, Chicago Davy, really had done without. His thin arms, knobby knees and sagging cloth diapers looked
nothing like the well-dressed, cherubic infant whose photographs still
lined her parents mantel.
You should know, I dont want to talk about those pictures, David
warned. Go ahead and put them in a book someday, but keep all of it
away from me. Theyre in the past. Were about the future now.
Beryl replaced the photographs and folded her hands over the
envelope on her lap, looking straight ahead. She had buried the box
of Monts words under her Idaho Falls bed; she could do the same
with the envelope of Davids pictures in Phoenix.
Agitated, David stopped in Blackfoot to top off a gas tank already
three-quarters full. He let the attendant keep the change from the $5
bill, then drove down the street and stopped at a grocery store.
Keep the engine running. Ill be back.
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When her husband had disappeared behind the signs for onions
(2lbs for 30) and Heinz ketchup (22 a bottle), Beryl pulled her purse
from between her beige two-tone pumps. She dug around and found
a loose Sears receipt and one of her fathers yellow Bics. Her notes
were brief: Support Ds work. Avoid Ds childhood. Easy on the temple.
She hoped this list would taper off early in their honeymoon, for
which she had high expectations. During their occasional make-out
sessions, Davids eyes had wandered as if searching for posted instructions, but Beryl wasnt worried. The Church taught that permission
preceded passion, and none of the M.I.A. leaders had seemed concerned that young people lacked passion. Beryl assumed that things
would heat upand her lapses would be forgivenonce everyones
clothes were off.
David, smiling again, returned and handed Beryl his purchase. She
kept the loaf of Wonder Bread balanced on the manila envelope during their remaining ride to Pocatello proper. As they pulled off the
highway, David cleared his throat.
Listen, Beryl. When we get there, Ill go in myself and get the key.
I know the owner. Well probably talk for a few minutes.
This was news to Beryl. How do you know him?
Her. Shes a widow. Her husband died two years ago. Stomach
cancer, he explained. I stayed there in December, the night before I
got to Idaho Falls.
The Sundown Motel was a one-floor U-shaped building whose fifteen rooms opened onto a recently plowed parking lot. David found a
spot by a white Ford Falcon, got out and walked into the door marked
office. After five minutes, Beryl reached over to the keys and turned
off the ignition. The car might get cold, but she could think better without the noise. Pocatello and Idaho Falls were so close. Why
hadnt David driven straight to her house back in December? Even
if he was tired that night, what had kept him at the Sundown Motel
until mid-afternoon the next day? What was this widow like? Was
she beautiful? Friendly? How had David spent that extra night?
Fearing additions to the list in her purse, Beryl kept these questions to herself when David returned to the carand pulled out the
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keys. Judy was happy to see me. She gave us a super rate. Room 11.
She and her son Gerald live over in Room 5.
Beryl hoped that arriving in Room 11, specifically the bed in Room
11, would take her husbands mind off Judy and Gerald. David seemed
chivalrous enough when he took charge of bringing in the baggage
from the T-Bird. His first load was light, just Dales paper bag and the
Wonder Bread, which he carefully arranged on the small round table
by the curtained window. Beryl sat on the edge of the bed and watched.
His next load was a gray canvas duffel bag for him and the Samsonite
for her. He dropped her suitcase by her feet, then sat downnot on
the bed, as she had hoped, but in a wicker chair by the groceries.
Perhaps David hadnt discerned her intentions. She couldnt blame him,
since those plans kept changing. Early this morning, before the temple,
Beryl was envisioning an elaborate entrance in the blue baby doll from her
bridal shower; now, legally married and alone in a motel room, she just
wanted to get to it. Maybe David was peering into the brown bag from
Dale because he was afraid to look at her. Maybe he was afraid, period.
Beryl would help. She walked over to his chair, kicked off her
pumps and put her hands on his shoulders. She reached around to
loosen his tie.
David turned his head sharply left. Hey, its too early to do that,
barked the profile shed admired on the drive. Its only, he glanced at
his watch, 4:16.
Well, were married, right? We can do this whenever we want. We
dont need a timetable, do we?
David chuckled and stood up. He turned around and put his arms
around Beryl. Im glad youre eager, honey, but not now. I was going
to head over and see Gerald. Hes a great kid. Only twelve. He doesnt
have a father, you know.
Beryl didnt want to hear about Poor Little Gerald right now. She
pulled David close and felt, for the first time in their acquaintance, a
hardness in the crotch of his suit pants. This meant a man was ready,
right? Was it possible David didnt know his own body? Had he not
registered this signal? Beryl reached down and lightly brushed the
bulge with her hand.
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David jumped back, landing in the orange print curtains. No, he

exclaimed. We are not doing this right now. I have somewhere I need
to be.
Only D should start sex. Beryl was not writing this on the receipt
without a fight. She stepped closer and unbuttoned her suit jacket
down past her white underwire bra, hoping the appearance of her
new temple garments would not hinder the consummation of her new
temple marriage.
Dammit, Beryl, I said no! David tucked the paper bag under his
arm and punctured the plastic wrap around the bread with his fingers.
He stepped toward the door and, after a couple deep breaths, turned
around and chuckled lightly. Sorry to raise my voice. I thought that
you heard what I said about going to see Gerald. You, you should
relax. Take a bath. Take a nap, even. Ill be back later.
Beryl abandoned the idea of reaching back to undo her bra. She
couldnt tell if he was laughing at himself for expecting his wife of six
hours to read his mind, or at Beryl for expecting timely romance. If
David wasnt ready to give her love, perhaps he would give her honesty.
Why do you want to see this boy so much? More than you want to
see the body of your wife, she added to herself.
As David smiled, a blush covered his cheekbones and mixed with
the first hints of five oclock shadow. Now he looked like the shy,
euphoric groom Beryl had expected, only with one arm around a grocery bag and one hand on the doorknob.
Beryl, the poor boy has never had an avocado. Ever. Last time I
was here, I promised him Id make him an avocado sandwich someday.
Dale brought these special from California. He took one out of the
bag and set it on the table. For you, if you get hungry.
David shut the door and was gone.
Beryl stood in place, stunned. When the draft of cold air reached
her half-covered chest, she pulled her coat closer and sat down, as if
occupying Davids chair would help her understand him. The motel
key was gone, but the car keys were still resting on the table. Beryl
picked them up and weighed them in her hand. She could be back in
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Idaho Falls by dinnertime. During her time in the Church, Beryl had
heard much more about bringing temple covenants to the dead than
she had about getting the living out of them. But if these ties could
be unspooled, Beryl figured shed have support from her mother. If
she used these keys, Beryl could wake up in her own bed tomorrow
morning, reach underneath for Monts last letter (Beryl, honey, I dont
understand. Why dont you love me anymore? What went wrong?) and
after some airmail apologies and a few legal billsgo on like before.
No baby doll yet, but no Poor Little Gerald, either.
Keys in hand, Beryl stepped over to the bed. She laid her head
on Judys pillowcase and considered her choices. This morning, marriage was something Beryl was rendering in her own colors and her
own medium; now, it felt like a picture that David had already taken,
emerging, like Maries Polaroids, from pale, avocado green to yellowish streaks to sharp black and white detail. Beryl was sure that Mont
wouldnt have left her alone on their honeymoon, but who could say
that a life with David wouldnt end up more exciting? Who could
guarantee he wouldnt return and be as gentle as he had seemed on
the walk down that mountain? If she left now, she would never find
out whether the harsh David or the caring David was real.
Questions aside, they hadnt been married a full day. If she left now,
like shed wanted to leave BYU after Registration, Poor Little Beryl
would look like a child herself. At heart, she still believed in the David
whose virtues she had championed at her mothers kitchen table: one
brief spat didnt seem like reason enough to back out. Beryl stayed
putin the marriage and on the bedwhile clutching the keys against
her half-open chest and drifting to sleep, as still as the Indian girl on
the mountain.

49

Nostalgia for Teenagers

Matthew James Babcock

Those were storybook days. I rode

a sleepy tide of translucent pink.
I roved as red nucleus, mute supernova,
cosmonaut of The Black Nowhere,
psychopomp of saline dreams. Talking
of the past summons language
impossible to you in your youth.
Nothing compares to the jeweled cages
of veins through which my thoughts
knifed like brilliant bluebirds. Who bolted
the sonic windows? When did hunger
skim the webbing from between
my toes? I would give anything for
sadness to sugarcoat my tongue
at the sound of secrets from strangers,
for the shouts of neighbors to seep
through the stained-glass membranes
like whale songs played on French horns.
If only I could somersault again
in the elliptical echo of my uncles
melancholy laugh, press my face
against the purr of playgrounds. I miss
paradoxes the most. Long mornings
of midnight. The slippery walls of my cell.
My navel a rubber band ready to unravel
and lasso Saturn. If I could just go back
then when I rise, as I do every day
to roam this corridor of perpetual dusk,
I would see each trip as a passage

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Babcock: Poetry

Ive already made. This time, I wouldnt wait

to float barefoot in my jumpsuit of mercury
toward the illuminated door. I would
relish not knowing if anything came before.

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The Dogs of Sligo

The place that has really influenced my life the most is Sligo. There used to be two
dogs thereone smooth-haired, one curlyI used to follow them all day long. I knew
all their occupations, when they hunted for rats, and when they went to the rabbit
warren. They taught me to dream, maybe. Since then I follow my thoughts as I then
followed the two dogsthe smooth and the curlywherever they lead me
Yeats, Letter to Katharine Tynan

The dogs of Sligo rally like a dark

tribe of roustabouts where my Dodge Stratus
cracks seventy thousand miles. Lanky, stark,
they are ambassadors to the solstice,
the rogue December night on which I drive
through a stretch of exurbia. Steamy
tongues pink and flaccid, their ragged grins woof
the madmans silver oath of anomie.
They are the earths urge to roam, one curly,
one straight-haired. From their dank, lice-ridden coats
and grizzled jaws wafts the hurly-burly
of mussel and seaweed stew that wrasse boats
on Donegal Bay ferry through like dreams.
The way they lope with the black Labrador
in maroon collar that skids through the beams
of my weak headlights suddenly makes clear
the mechanics of body and spirit
the thing I never seem to get quite right.
Like a dog racing its fleet silhouette.
Like trying to track black dog in black night.
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Babcock: Poetry

Saturday, we knew another child grew

in you at Henderson Funeral Home.
Untrained, we assembled with a stray zoo
of uncles and mongrel cousins, solemn
as apology, at the church in which
Margaret, my dads mother, lay. Some drawled
tributes, lapped tears. Soft ears and whiskers twitched.
Horns on the highway yelped. Door hinges growled.
Did the soul of our pup, as thin as scum
on the water in a slop-crusted dish
in the garage, pass my gentle grandmum
on the way downa nuzzle to the crotch
in greeting, a frisky nip at the hams?
What is spirit but a howl, the hunger
to retrieve? When the leash snaps, do we scram,
a kennel released, barking at strangers,
snapping at the wheels of the drab carriage?
Or sniff the rank backwater for crabs, dredge
noses in tide pools, muzzles caked with sand?
Do we fade or return to run the strand?

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Irreantum

The Spring Olympics

There would be one event: The Bloom.
To train, make all living things your team.
Lean your head ten times a day against
the same cold window, breathing steam.
Watch coliseums of snow melt gritty maps
of March into the parking lot behind
Mountain Ridge Apartments. The blind man
coaching his seeing-eye dog can shave
seconds off your memory. Recall when
you were six: running lit a torch in your lungs.
Eleven: biking to school, you broke
the record for youthful hope. Twenty-eight:
the losing streak of the present moved
the tape to thirty-seven, when years
became sprints. To never forget
the glory, parade with the ambassadors
of May. Let your eyes track the archery
of gnats. Follow the taekwondo of tulips
as the sunset blasts clay pigeons
of white glare over a stadium of rowdy peaks.
Cheer for the young lovers who lug
backpacks and argue out of earshot on
your street. They pivot, hold each other
like skaters setting for a lift, his skin
as pale as the Athenian sun that outlasted
Pheidippides, her hair as black as the streak
Jesse Owens ran through Hitlers blindness.
Score his attempts to kiss her. Her downward
gaze concedes nothing but her cheek,
then a silent starters pistol sends them off,
holding hands, at staggered paces, unsure
if they should release the baton keeping them
breathless in the race that never ends.
54

Dairymans Lament
(a novel excerpt)
Braden Hepner

Blair hired Roydns youngest brothers, Rodney and the

one they called Rapscallion, whose real name no one could remember, and gave them better pay than their brother had received which
meant significantly better pay than Jack. The two boys worked silently
and acted spooked as he taught them the routine. He could spark
no relationship with either one, social introverts that they were.
They watched him with solemn eyes and never spoke, only nodding
when he asked if they understood. The cows responded with more
emotion. The brothers didnt even speak to each other while working. During one of their first nights milking, with the two boys still
nervous around the big udders and fast legs of the cows, one ornery
animal caught Rapscallions elbow well with her hoof. He cradled it
and looked hurt and confused and for a minute it seemed he would
cry. Blair laughed long and slow from where he sat on a folding chair
at the head of the parlor and it sounded like a cold tractor trying to
start. Jack motioned for them to follow him up the steps and up the
exit alley to where the cow stood. She looked nearly smug there in her
spot until he imparted a lesson to the two boys.
You have to tame these cows to you, he said. They know whats
going on down there, and the way you tame um to you is by teaching
um about consequences.
He punched the cow rapidly in the side of the face three times. On
the third hit his fist glanced off the animals soft rearing nose and into
a steel bar and broke in a boxers fracture, that old wound he had first
received in high school from the hard head of Bobby Sue. The two
boys could not have known it and might have taken his red face to
57

Irreantum

be one of vengeance rather than pain. At Jacks insistence Rapscallion

placed the milkers on all four of her ripe teats and Jack left to drag hay
bales to the cows one-handed and spitting dark curses.
Mornings Blair spent most of his time sitting on the small folding
chair near the space heater at the head of the parlor while Jack milked
and stained his cast with iodine and manure, rendering a stinking
husk he wanted only to be rid of. Blair stayed in the house after milking. Jack returned for lunch to find him in the living room with the
drapes pulled, the room smelling of despondence, flatulence, and old
man creams, watching Matlock. It was embarrassing when Jack had
to coax him out of bed in the morning. Blair was awake before Jack
stepped into the room, but two or three trips back were necessary
before he got up and shuffled in his long underwear to the bathroom
and from there to his work clothes at the back of the house. Always
a stout, thick man, the flesh beneath his chin had begun to deflate
and loosen, swinging pendulously with his movement, wrinkled and
unsightly as a turkeys wattle. He revealed his forearms one night and
Jack noticed how pale and thin they had become, their blue veins
prominent beneath the mottled skin. His right eye grew rheumy and
leaked down the coarse skin of his cheek without his notice. More
than once Jack was struck with the notion that he could take the old
mans death without blinking. He grew comfortable in the gloom that
surrounded them and it soon became his. His upstairs bedroom was
unkempt and malodorous. He bought new clothes rather than wash
the soiled ones and it felt good to spend money. There were moments
when it felt best to sit down and do nothing and he would find a
rough bale of hay or a cold tractor cab and be surprised when he saw
that an hour had passed.
He was in the barn office one evening going through records when
he looked at the calendar and realized it was his birthday. He got up
and drove to the co-op to get something to celebrate as he had the
past few years but he was too late and it was closed. That evening he
sat at the kitchen table with Blair eating a bad casserole someone had
brought over a few days before. The food smelled of fish but there was
no fish in it. Blair in his undershirt, his aged and loose body shown in
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Hepner: Dairymans Lament

pitiful form, hard round gut pushing against the table, emaciated arms,
red-skinned chest with coarse silver hair sprouting above his low collar. Was this his grandfather? When had it happened? Jack was listening to the smacking sounds of Blair eating and thinking about his own
new age against the age of the other when there was a knock at the
front door. He answered the door in a weary stupor like a troglodyte
at the mouth of a cave and was embarrassed to see Martha standing
there, smiling and holding a plate covered with foil. He led her into
the kitchen and turned off the television and began picking things up,
but finding no place to put them he set them down again into their
clutter. Blair came out of his bedroom buttoning a shirt and looking
displaced in his own house. Both men were disheveled and still dirty
from the days work and both smelled of it. Martha lit the cake with
matches she had brought and she and Blair sang, the performance
inelegant, yet by the end inspiring a surprising swell of gratitude in
Jack. The three of them discussed Jacks hand, Rebekahs well-being,
and speculated about the disappearance of Roydn Woolums as they
ate cake at the table. Martha, sitting in this filthy room with two
soiled men who stank of the animals they kept, appeared comfortable,
a credit to her pretense or her soul. It was a whirlwind event with
her there, a very strange thing to have her in the house. She wasnt
there and then she was and then she wasnt again, and the two men
were left looking at each other over the remains of the cake. Jack was
left unsettled. He turned the television back on and Blair muttered
that he was sorry for forgetting his birthday. He seemed to be calculating in his head, trying to recall how long it had been since hed
remembered, marveling that the thing did indeed come around this
time every year. In a minute he grabbed a pen and scrawled a note on
the calendar day as if the same calendar would be hanging there next
year. They couldnt seem to settle back down at the table, and soon
both made their separate ways to their bedrooms.
Jack lay awake aching for her. He thought about his situation,
releasing slowly the feelings seeing Martha had brought him. It had
done his heart good because she was the girls mother. The winter to
this point had lacked focus, or rather its grim regularity had become
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Irreantum

jumbled up with the girl and with the inheritance, so he looked to

spring and saw how it would go. He could only fill his future with
the certainty of workthe same work, the same cycle, putting seed in
the ground, raising crop, reaping the harvest, and milking, ceaselessly
milkingand he wondered with some astonishment whether a mans
life could be stacked up and predicted this way a year ahead of time,
ten years, thirty, longer. He wondered if he had become as Blair, wholly
consumed by the necessity and perpetuation of his work, rendered
cheerless and without humor, utterly stoic and without imagination.
None of it seemed worth doing anymore without her. He pressed
his mind forward but his heart brought it back. He was fettered to
her, however unwillingly, and he could not make it otherwise. As he
searched into the future as if with a seer stone for some alternative, the
vision was not clear, and no revelation filled his mind.
On a night in the last raw week of November he drove into Willow
Valley alone and exhausted. It was dark when he reached the liquor
store. His truck was the only vehicle in the parking lot and he sat
there awhile waiting as if he could change his mind and knowing he
wouldnt. The same man was working as had been the night hed come
with Heber. He thought about browsing the aisles, seeing this world
again with a neophytes eye, an enthusiasts vigor, but went straight to
the wall of hard liquor and took a fifth of Jack Daniels from where it
sat gleaming dully on the shelf. He paid without a word and left.
In his bedroom he uncovered the bottle from its sack like his firstborn child sleeping. The weight and beauty of the bottle in his hand
lifted his heart and gave him this small thing to hope for. He cracked
the cap and salivated as the smell came up, remembering the bitter
heavy taste of the whiskey, remembering that he hated it. In an instant
the smell recalled the heartburn and the vomiting, the half-drunken
mornings milking cows, the sweats, the headaches. He had done it
then despite all this and he would do it now. He went to the closet
and rummaged for the small plastic cup he used to drink from years
before when he used a cup at all. He found it beneath a pile of clothes.
When he poured a drink and brought it to his lips his stomach turned.
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Hepner: Dairymans Lament

He took three drinks quickly and sat back to wait. He was haunted by
an old forgotten feeling. As he felt his sobriety fading he missed it and
felt sorry to see it go, to embrace the new reality that supplanted it,
the objective itself, which was not as welcome as he had hoped until it
became all he knew, and only then was he sure it was what he wanted.
He took another three and began to feel good. He turned on his dusty
radio and found a clear station. He missed her. He convinced himself that she would not be coming back, or worse, that if she did, she
would not be his. In his heightened sentimentality he wondered what
he wouldnt give to have her there beside him even for that night and
the answer was nothing.
He tried to read scripture from those vast works on the shelf above
his bed, but his eyes went on without his mind and he came up with
nothing and closed the book. He had another drink and went downstairs. Before he would always drink in odds. Putting on a thick coat
and boots he wandered outside and trod off through the snowy field
toward the riverbottoms. The moon was nearly full, a pale and skewbald bulb in the sky, almost offensive in its brightness, and when he
stopped at the fence and put his hand on the frosty barbwire he looked
up at it and fancied a man and his spacecraft on its marred face. He
looked down the fenceline in the direction of the lane. He reeled and
sat down hard. He found a wooden post with his back and leaned
against it and let his head drift to his shoulder and listened only to
his breath as it went in and out. He watched it plume into the air. The
coldness seemed a friend to him and he considered that he couldnt
feel it in his numbness. He laughed a few times and fell silent. His
thoughts went toward the terrible questions and he considered their
titles like books on a shelf. Some stood as bright and immutable as
they had when he first formed them. Others had morphed into complexities that threatened to undo their own logic; they were phantoms
this way, though nonetheless real. Some he could discourse on, others
confused him with their elusiveness and labyrinth of paradox.
There was something coming through the riverbottoms. The sound
came from behind him and as he heard it he lifted his head and positioned his ear. A squabbling barking rose from somewhere in the land
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Irreantum

down there and carried up the hill to him. Yips and broken howls.
Coyotes, he thought, and mad. They sounded frantic, bloodthirsty,
roaming through the bottoms in search of whatever pandemonium
might be found there. Hed never heard coyotes sound like that, so
wild and bold, so strong, and he wondered if he was imagining it. They
sounded and faded out, running the river toward the desert. After a
while he decided he was freezing. He got up and staggered back to the
house, drunk and weaving. He clattered through the back door and
pulled himself up the stairs where he fell to bed in his coat with one
boot still on.
If the sun showed on a late afternoon with its angled rays, casting shadows surrounded by thinned light, there was never better clarity with
which to view the earth. In the early evenings the western sky glowed
like a coal furnace and bathed the white landscape in shades of pink
and red. There was an early cold spell and the temperature did not
rise above single digits. The alternative to working outside was to stay
inside the stale house, just the two of them, so he moved around out
of doors in layers and insulated coveralls, his aching head topped with
a MoorMans stocking cap and its silly bobble. He climbed stiffly onto
tractors and turned their engines over in stubborn revolutions to no
avail, coaxed them with soft maledictions and a spray of ether. If the
engine took he got off and huddled near it for warmth and windblock.
He found the simplest pleasure in running the space heater into the
small office of the barn, taking his boots and socks off and holding his
bare feet up in the hot current. Below-zero mornings he dragged Blair
to the barn where they kept heaters blazing at both ends and handled
the mysteriously warm udders of the cows. They went through tins
of udder balm and watched for frozen teat. They split teats with new
razors that brought gouts of blood and clotted milk when it could not
be helped. When the cast on his hand was stain-darkened and stank
to keep him awake at night he took a hacksaw from the empty pig
shed behind the house and cut it off and regarded his wrist and hand,
how thin and pale they had become. It seemed on many afternoons
when he saw the blue Cutlass pull next to the diesel tank that he could
62

Hepner: Dairymans Lament

expect Roydn Woolums to step out of the drivers door and sidle up
to him like a friendly bedlamite with that vulgar grin on his face and
his eyes wet and magnified inhumanly.
Lord, she was larger than shed ever been. He grabbed his rifle and
saddled the horse and went north when the cold spell broke to see
about the land hed been given. He trotted the horse for a long mile
beside the pavement until he was at the edge of the wind-scrubbed
desert and then rode a track as far as he could, an hour in and out
of drifts until the track ran out of itself and simply vanished into the
sagebrush and left him to look at nothing. He took the horse forward
through the snow until he reached the perimeter of the ancient lava
flow and then weaved in a makeshift path, staying below the thrusts
of basalt when he could, between the jutting rises of hardened black
stone with its jagged cracks and fractured ledges. Snow had blown
and collected irregularly over the rugged land. It was deep in spots
where it had been deposited and at times the horse sunk to her belly.
There was life even on the stone in winter, green and orange lichen
like smears of tiny eyes. Winds over centuries had carried silt and
dirt from the surrounding earth and dropped it in shallow piles and
crevasses, and from this, sage and bunchgrass and bitter brush had
grown, along with the sporadic juniper tree. In this way the desert
was a great craggy stretch of black stone and white snow and drab
winter foliage, with junipers popping up like single green flames on
the plain. It was so cold and lonesome he could only curse the land
with every foul word he knew. But because he felt captivated by the
desert he rode on. There were sheer cliffs with talus slides at their bottoms where the rock had fallen off in large sheer-angled shapes, and
he believed he could sit and wait for the next to fall. One year. Two. A
hundred. He could see how the lava had flowed over the desert floor,
how it had slid down inclines and puddled at their bottoms, and then
hardened there, but the cliffs and platforms were a mystery, where
it had piled curiously into blunt crags and then hardened and broke
from form with the earths movements. Pillars rose upward and some
of these split apart in four mammoth pieces like the Holy Spirit had
blown it open with chisel and hammer. Huge sinkholes where the
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cooled lava formed giant cracked bowls. Three hundred square miles
of this beauty, and this flow preceding Christ by a thousand years.
The desert was a reverent place. Its remoteness pulled at him with a
dispassionate force that stirred his spirit. Any man who found himself
alone and pensive in the desert knew this force and reckoned with it.
The desert was a place that could lure a wretched man to wander in
with his miseries, where he then wandered within the miseries of the
desert, and their miseries became one barren song, whispered through
dry grass and fragrant sage, whistled over the hard stone and the lichen.
It had pulled Hebers father in and spit him out mad. The first settlers must have felt it, those builders of the high desert, pilgrims and
strangers, dispossessed and driven from their incipient nation into this
primordial and unbroken desert, a lonesome and solemn people, wanderers in an empty land, their lives passing away as it were unto them a
dream. How loud the sky must have been as they broke the first furrow
and raised the first timber, how large the wildness of the desert. The
land back then had been bigger than humankind itself, something to
entreat and supplicate like a god, to learn its ways and moods at the
calamitous repercussions of hazard and death until inured.
He rode past misshapen juniper trees with gnarled peeling trunks
that leaned east from ages of wind, gaping and crooked crevasses like
dry mouths, empty game trails that wound and fringed along basalt
acreage and box canyons, between heaving swells of broken black
stone, its edges dulled by windborne grit. The desert here provided
complete and bizarre solitude. He came to be beyond the sound and
sight of civilization. He might as well have been in any epoch in the
history of humankind, utterly alone with the horse. It was this kind of
gargantuan isolation and obscurity that must have evoked and reinforced in those first ragged saints the need of faith in Godfaith in
something larger than the individual, the group, larger than mankind,
for the desert and its emptiness was something larger.
The only sounds here were the horses breathing and her hooves
on the earth and the ring of wind over the cold plain. He made for
a small rise to get a bearing on where to hed wandered. The horses
shoes clanked brittle on the hard dark stone and once or twice she
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Hepner: Dairymans Lament

slipped in climbing. He dismounted and led her, careful to navigate

the fissures that could swallow and break her legs, the larger ones that
could swallow them both. At the top of the rise he could see the white
mountains rising above the plain. He could not see the town for the
undulating hills and broken terrain like an immense bed sheet being
shaken. The Solitudes threw back a sheen of sunlight that caused him
to squint, but he made out the north field and the geography that surrounded it. And beside it the cleft that was his canyon. What could
he do with a canyon? But he was a land owner now. In the context of
human history the idea that he, John Blair Selvedge, owned a small
patch of earth grew within him. It was the same earth the ancients
worked, that God had seen created and was his to apportion. And
so it was given, taken away, given again, taken, and ended up now in
a system that allowed Blair Young Selvedge to claim ownership that
others would honor and that he might then give to Jack. This idea
seemed absurd in the context of the earths age and history, mans
ephemeral presence within. Blair always said it was a stewardship,
never an ownership, because it could be taken away as it had been
before by superior forces, whatever they may be. That the land spue
not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that
were before you. As the steward pleased the Giver so he might retain
his stewardship, a fragile contingency at best. And an entire nation
unaware, dragging itself toward what awesome doom awaits it.
He rode for the canyon. It was a two hour ride to its mouth where
an old gate stood between railroad ties upended, and where barbwire
in need of mending stretched to the canyon walls on both sides in a
loose grin. Clouds had formed above him and hushed the world in soft
whiteness. He did not have the key to the padlock, so he took from
his saddlebag a pair of fence pliers and went to work near the closest
canyon wall. He pried at the old wooden post until he had the nails
out and after some work the top two strands broke and he was able
to hold the others down and lead the horse through. The snow here
was untroubled and deep. He mounted the horse and broke a trail,
keeping to the bottom next to the dry creek bed. On the south-facing
canyon wall the snow was thin and yellow grass stood from its crust.
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Irreantum

Game trails were visible like fine scars. Scrub oak climbed the hills at
both sides and at times formed a passageway around him. He rode
through this corridor of gnarled trunks and branches, snowy knobs
and brindled wood, until the canyon turned south and opened in a
broad expansion of gentle hills and thick sage. Given the deep basin
shape of this land it was called the Cauldron. The three tall peaks
that surrounded it were called the Hooded Sisters. He had been here
once before, when he was very young, with his fathera vague and
almost lost memoryand he could not remember the female names
of the peaks his father had told him. Their north facing slopes held
dark pines and these pines thickened upward toward their summits in
long pinnacles of black-green, though the crowns of the Sisters were
above the treeline and therefore barren and snowbound. It was at the
top of this glen that the canyon ended for all but game, diffusing into
several steep draws that swept their way upward toward the saddles
and summits. He broke through to the bottom edge of the Cauldron
and looked about him. The land was tall and solitary, starkly hued and
completely silent. There could be a simple cabin built in any of several
patches of scrub oak that covered the rolling land in wayward stripes.
It seemed cattle would compromise the place.
He kept to the west side and stopped once he had gained a vantage
point over the glen. He tied the horse and dismounted, made golden
slush, and as he turned and swung into the saddle movement from
below caught his eye. He squinted to see but the cold air caused his
eyes to water. He made out a small pack of coyotes coming out of the
copse of trees where the walls converged below, at least three, following his trail. Two stood upright watching him and another slinked
along to the side of them. He felt for the few brass bullets in his coat
pocket and brought the rifle to his shoulder and looked through its
scope. By the time he sighted the spot where the coyotes had been
they were gone. He scanned the next patch of trees, looking for movement beneath their bare branches. Four of the animals emerged into
his clearing and they were larger than he had thought. They disappeared into a depression and broke the next rise, trotting now where
snow covered the bald crowns thinly. He had never seen coyotes so
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Hepner: Dairymans Lament

bold, not in daylight. Elijah Warren, sheep farmer along the highway
to Hansel, used to pay three dollars a carcass. He took a brash shell
out of his pocket. It was long and shiny, heavy, with a brass slug that
tapered off to a sharp gray point. It bespoke death. He put it in the
chamber and set the rifle across his lap. The horse jittered back and
forth in the trampled snow and her breath came in plumes. She lifted
her tail and shat great steaming loafs of dung. A shell fell through
his cold fingers and he was on his way to swinging off to look for
it when the horse whinnied and stamped. He could see the animals
well enough now unaided and what he saw gave him pause. The pack
moved closer, picking its way up a shallow ridge, led in front by a black
animal he had not seen before. He knew then the source of those wild,
broken howls from the river bottoms the night he had sat against the
fencepost drunk. These were wolves, not coyotes, and their sporadic
lopes slowed as they encountered drifted snow and made their way
up the brushy terrain toward him. He caught his breath at knowingly seeing this species for the first time. He waited to see how close
they would come and grew nervous as they did come. He raised the
gun to the sky and fired, the report loud in the glen and caroming off
the peaks. The black wolf stopped and put his head to the air and
looked up to where Jack had him crosshaired in the scope. He led the
pack sideways and down and out of view. Jack watched the landscape
until he saw them again. They had gone east across the glen and were
approaching at a new angle and splitting up, sending two high and
three low, four hundred yards off. He was run through with a sudden
primal fear that thrilled him.
He turned the horse and took her down the slope to the windblown snow and pushed her into a lope up to the top of another rise.
He scanned the base of the east wall for a break in the tree line until
he saw one, and above it, crisscrossed game trails. He dropped into a
quiet depression and the horse broke snow and breathed heavily coming up the other side. There was no sign of either contingent when he
turned back to look, and then the black wolf broke the crest of a deadgrass hill and came rushing through the sagebrush two hundred yards
off, coming now at a broken run. Jack worked forward and upward
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Irreantum

toward the east wall, urging the horse on with his voice and the pressure of his legs. When he reached the edge of the slope and the horse
had climbed the game trail with a few lunging jumps he reined her
in and turned and looked down at the gathering wolves, rifle in hand.
The five came together not fifty yards below, and there they stopped
and looked up at him. Some of them sat, all of them grinned openmouthed and their pink tongues pushed in and out. They guarded
the easy way down but now seemed to be reconsidering their prey,
curious of how the fight might go with such a two-headed creature.
They looked like friends as they sat and stood in the snow and panted,
glancing around, up at him, back down over the trails they had broken, like they were waiting for Jack to speak to them from his hillside
pulpit. He studied the black wolf, its yellow-green eyes, a purely wild
thing, lupine and strange. Beautiful, strange creatures they all were,
warm in thick winter coats, their tired grins reminding him of his old
dog. He did not fear them. He did not see the beast in him in them.
He heard the helicopter before he saw it, and the wolves heard it
before that. At first he couldnt place it, and then suddenly it burst into
the Cauldron, swinging around the shoulder of the canyon ridge and
rising. The wolves scattered. He could see the pilot and a passenger
through the windshield, darker windows behind, before it turned and
rose to better take in the whole of the Cauldron. He watched the wolves
darting for the tree line and then looked back up to where the helicopter beat its rotors furiously and its noise echoed off the surrounding
slopes. He led his horse downward as the machine circled and hovered
far overhead. By the time he had circumnavigated the scrub oak below
and was headed for the copse that stood at the canyons debouche, the
machine had swung around the whole of the Cauldron and tore over
his head on its way down canyon. He followed at a much slower pace
until he reached the broken fence and crossed through to behold what
civilization they had come from.

68

Chrysalis
Melody Newey

Three days of white

threads wound
fine
around
around.
Three days of light

shrouded linen
fine
white

light woven.
Three days of ...
Where hast thou laid him?
And she thought,
Are his wings still wet?
When he said,
Touch me not.

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Fish Bones on Black Stones

No longer poor, homeless, tempest-tossed,
we are unwilling to go hungry. We stave our
cravings the moment they arise; rise from chairs,
move toward food, liquor, whatever satisfies;
silence the body before pangs expose our lack.
We have forgotten nourishing calls of shepherds
grown famished looking for lost lambs;
wisdom of want escapes us. We do not savor the
sanctity of an empty bowl or see roundness in
fish bones on black stones of an ancient lakebed.
We will not stop, listen to what our hunger tells
that someone has taken the thing that feeds us,
replaced it with a notion that we are not enough,
do not have enough or know enough or do enough.
We are hungry for ourselves and
fill our bellies with everything else.

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The Souls Eye Is a Red Star

Les Blake

The posted price of entry into Santiagos Museo de Bellas

Artes is 650 pesosabout a dollar and a quarter as the exchange rate
sits. There is no attendant in the ticketing booth and I approach a
security guard at the entrance who kindly points out the donation
box. So thats how it works here at Chiles finest art museum. In my
wallet I have a 10,000 peso bill, but only about half the suggested
donation in coins. I ask the guard whether anyone could break the
bill, but he just smiles and waves me through. I drop the coins in, and
feel immediate shame at my own stinginess. I could set things right
an hour later, as I pass by the donation box when I exit, but I dont.
Despite being changed in some ways, not changed in all. What is the
price, Im compelled to ask, for my cheap, ungrateful soul? And does
it keep increasing?
I take the redeye from Atlanta, and just before dawn, or the moment
of, as it turns out, I lift my window shade to see the deep coal expanse
of sky sliced at the horizon by a hair-thin streak of fiery red. It curves
slightly, whispering the curve of the globe, and for a long time I just
stare. The knifes blood edge gradually widens into an orange blade
that turns itself onto a bed of dark and perfectly mottled clouds. The
distant burning star grows, draws me closer in. I turn to look about
the airplane to see if anyone else is seeing this. Some have their eyes
closed with headphones on. Some have their heads cocked askew,
mouths slightly open. Two have eye masks on. Most employ the dollsized pillows. We are losing two hours, which puts us decidedly in
that fourth-watch-of-the-night vicinity, as it were. I am conflicted.
3rd place, 2012 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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Part of me wants to holler, snap mask bands, and roust my fellows

to consciousness. The other part of me, oh selfish!, wants to be the
sole owner of this scene. Everyone is tired, including me. I am awake,
though. Even though my eyes hurt I am awake, God help me, actually
watching the sun unroll itself low on the edge of the earth.
I hit the tarmac with about an hours sleep under my belt and
quickly turn on my phone to check the time. If I hurry I can catch a cab
into the city, check into the hotel, change into my suit, and run to the
temple for the 10:00a.m. endowment session, all before my business
meetings start in the afternoon. I know how that must soundthat
my first thought after a sleepless night on a plane to South America
is to hightail it to the House of the Lord for a worship session. But I
confess that for me this behavior is entirely uncharacteristic. Ive been
in Santiago twice during the previous year, and the thought of looking
up the address to the temple never once occurred to me. In fact, as of
one week ago my wife and I hadnt been to the temple in over a year
not a conscious decision, just the standard busyness of life winning
out. The week before my trip, however, our good intentions finally
crossed paths with our initiative and we scheduled a babysitter. After
a frenzied half hour of getting dressed, checking our clothes, feeding
the kids, and taking them potty, we dropped them off with our neighbors just in time for a meltdown. Five minutes later and we were finally
on the road and testing the elasticity of every traffic law en route to
downtown Salt Lake. We were too late for the endowment session
and were eventually redirected to a sealing room. At last we slowed
down. We turned our frantic faces away from each other, hands still
clasped. We breathed. Our sealer entered, shook our hands, and sat
quietly for a few moments, then went on to spend about equal time
performing the sealing ordinances as he did pausing to give us instruction and insight to the temple rite in which we were engaged. I felt the
mass of my own bodyweight upon my knees at the altar, rooting me
to it, to the center of that room, like some connecting point between
the physical and the metaphysical. I thought of Joseph Smiths welding links and there we were on our knees welding, consciously outside
of, yet conspicuously aware of time. Afterwards we sat together in the
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Blake: Souls Eye Is a Red Star

celestial room, my hand in my brides hand, and both of us, in some

way, in the holy hand of the Bridegroom. I felt a heightened awareness,
a newly understood angle of bittersweet significance. I felt a side of my
covenant relationships theretofore unplumbed. The ghost images of
that experience have me in a temple going mind.
Two blocks from my hotel, outside El Museo de Bellas Artes, are long
black banners advertising a special exhibit of Roberto Matta, the Chilean artist, a 100-year celebration of his birth and lifes work. Ithink nothing of it at first. Ive never heard of him. But as the week wears on my
impulse to see the exhibit is too great to ignore. As soon as a break in my
meeting schedule permits I ascend the entrance steps, pay what could
only be called a donation by the most meager standards, then walk
into the great entrance hall under a dome of natural light. The entrance
to the Matta exhibit is on the far side of the hall, and I decide to first
walk the oval perimeter, which is lined with sculptures from a variety
of artists arranged in curious mixneoclassic alongside folk alongside
abstract and so forth. I work my way along the wall until I come full
stop in front of one titled La Miseria. It is a mother, her back to what I
imagine to be some great and dreadful storm. She is wind-breaking her
daughter, who is backing into the safety of the mothers skirt. Daughter
is recoiling from my direction. From me. It seems. Daughters hand is
covering her mouth and she is cold and afraid. Mothers shawl is caught
in the wind and billows in my direction in a way that nearly unravels me.
Daughter turns towards Mother, while Mother, hand planted over her
heart, bends clutching Daughter. Both hearts turning to each other.
I enter the front doors of the Santiago Temple at 9:57 a.m. The kindly
man at the recommend desk tells me that Im too late for the endowment session. He asks me if I would like to wait until the 11:30 a.m.
session, but my schedule wont allow it. I grope for some word for
initiatories. Its been a dozen years since I returned from my mission,
but even then I didnt have a temple vocabulary. Preliminares? he says.
Yes. Preliminares. As I walk to the dressing room I turn the word over
in my mouth and enjoy the taste.
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Initiatory suggests that something has already begun. Though still

near the beginning, it has begun, or maybe is the beginning itself. But
preliminaries feels like it belongs in that netherworld before beginnings.
What of this business that must be done before anything else can
begin? I change my clothing and we begin the ordinance. The rotation
is lovely. The workers are attentive and careful to enunciate. They look
me in the eye. They smile. After a time, my ordinance worker steps
away and I am left with my thoughts. My eyes are wide open, sleepless,
and bloodshot red. I sit in the chair and look at the dripping water
faucet directly in front of me, a faint metronome clock without hands,
without gears, without end.
I begin to try connecting the dots from Palmyra to Santiago. The
sacrifices are rehearsed so often theyve become a refrain. The Kirtland
Temple erected at extremely high cost then abandoned in the wake of
financial scandal and mobbery. The Nauvoo Temple, abandoned and
burned. And the road from Illinois to Utah dissecting a prairie pocked
with hundreds of unmarked gravessaints who perished in pursuit
of a templed Zion, the fruition of which came only after decades of
arduous labor and inestimable sacrifice. It is maddeningly difficult to
comprehend the amount of time and thought and money and energy
that the Latter-day Saints have dedicated and are dedicating to temple
worship. I now begin to tally all the hours being spent by the temple
workers and patrons surrounding me. I see their faces. These are people
with families and jobs and limited means. They are both younger and
older than me. What are they doing here on a Tuesday morning during business hours? My reverie expands, and Im soon tallying hours
spent not only in this temple but the many millions of hours dedicated
in temples the world over. The reality of this is almost crushing. I can
see, I can totally see why so many people ask what we really think we
are accomplishing. Why has God decided that this is the way the work
must be done? Isnt this terribly extravagant, from a time standpoint?
If, when all is laid bare, all this temple business turns out only to be
just a bunch of well-meaning believers going through their motions,
would that not be absolutely cruel? I dont mean to be insensitive, or
blasphemous: please God dont let the question be blasphemous. Im
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Blake: Souls Eye Is a Red Star

not comparing it to videogames or television. I do not feel, despite the

endless tally marks, that temple worship is ineffectual or a simple time
fritter. After all, I cannot deny that within these walls I feel like I am
rolling in some larger current. But from a productivity standpoint, why
on earth are we spending so much time in these temples going through
all this endless motion? Why wouldnt an all-powerful, all-loving God
just accept the deads conversion to his gospel at face value, in whatever
form it occurred? Why require the ordinance of us, and why sit the
accepting deceased on hells bench until we do it? This is the underbelly
of a uniquely Mormon theodicy. The handless clock drips on.
I descend the stairs at the back of the entrance hall and enter the
Matta exhibit, entirely unaware of what to expect. I turn the corner
and see at once the work of a visionary, a passionate man speaking
in a voice strictly his. How did I not know about Matta? The figures are human and communicative and full of movement. They are
sexy and angry and joyful. Their bodies are in motion, which itself
feels beautiful and important and necessary. There is curve and give
in each. An inscription on the wall of the sala describes Mattas desire
to make the invisible visible. It says he yearned for his artsurrealist,
expressionist, to be causal, to incite a spirit of change within. Every
individual, every human life, is a bet with itself, with their own self,
with the world, Matta said. I come to one painting and the figures are
all smiling, all five of them. The facial expression is the exact type of
smiley face that my own toddler can draw. The frames of their bodies
are unclothed. Supra-natural. It isnt entirely clear where one begins
and one ends. They are caught in a dance, bent limbs flowing by the
dozen out from them, giving their soul expression. One figure, a man,
or maybe a woman, holds an inverted guitar in an outstretched hand,
fingers poised deftly in a chord. The sound hole on the guitar is a
bright red starthe only color on a canvas of neutrals. The painting
is called EL OJO DEL ALMA ES UNA ESTRELLA ROJA.
The last time I visited Santiago I was able to ascend the Cerro Santa
Lucia, the smaller of two prominent hills that give view to the city
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center. This time I want to make sure I hike the other, Cerro San
Cristobalthe much bigger, more prominent landmark. While many
of us like to imagine some divine being watching over us from above,
many devout founders of Latin American cities took it one step further by carving that divine being out of stone, or some such material,
then perch it on the highest point above their cities. Its not without
effect, annually prompting millions of processions from believers and
non-believers alike. Cerro San Cristobals summit bears a large statue
of the Virgin Mary, arms outspread in the manner of her son. The
whole of the hill is Chiles most famous metropolitan park, and there
is a line of cars waiting to pay entrance. Since Im on foot I wonder
if there is a friendly ascent. The man at the information desk assures
me that I can walk, but suggests I stick to the road and not wander
onto side paths, to avoid getting robbed. He tells me it might take me
45minutes.
An hour later Im wondering whether Im even halfway up. The
November spring is warm, and Im sternly berating myself for forgetting to bring water. Im thirsty. I turn about and see no one. Ive not
seen a hiker for quite some time, and the solitude is a little eerie. My
eyes fix on the nearest bend in the road, and I focus hard, hoping to
see some suggestion of summit. Four bends later and Im positive Im
only half way. I need some water. I think very seriously about thumbing a ride from passing vehicles, and I try to analyze the faces of drivers and passengers as they blur by, searching for kindness and pity. But
I cant bring myself to hold my thumb out. Instead, I stop and consider the rising vegetation to my right. The only shortcut is straight
up the hillside. I take my chances on the road to Jericho and stray off
onto a hint of trail that ascends steeply upward, closely attending my
peripherals for thugs and thieves. I scramble up the grade, slipping on
loose rock, grasping at slender branches to catch myself.
A minute later and Im on the switchback road again and have
shaved probably fifteen minutes off the hike. I round two more bends
and the city stretches suddenly in waves before me like a sea of concrete and glass. The continents spine rises hazy and massive in the
distance. I can see the summit ahead. A short time later I arrive at
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the base of the final climb. There is a small tienda and I buy a bottle
of water, for which the cashier could have easily charged me triple. I
can feel life returning to me, the weariness dissipates and my strength
recoups. The water is working. I take in the city and the surrounding
Andes and feel small. I feel myself a speck in this one city out of countless big cities in the world. Despite all this business of Gods awareness
of fallen sparrows, and the counting of hairs on heads, I understand in
some small sense Mosess and Benjamins nothingness. Both of them
left no room for argument on the subject of mans nothingness.
I ascend stairs leading to the rostrum and the Virgin statue. Just
before I reach the platform I pass an alcove with three large metal
A-frame racks that are caked in white melted candle wax. There is a
pin board situated behind the racks plastered with notecards of personalized prayers. There is a couple struggling to light their candle,
ineffectually, in the swirling downdrafts.
I turn to look up at the Virgin. Her robe is pleated and gathered at
the waist. Her sleeves hang down in great white folds and she bears
the tilted head of one who cares. A nearby wooden sign says SILENCIO. She stands on the dome of a relatively small round vestibule
whose glass doors are closed. The inscription on the archway reads
YO SOY LA INMACULADA CONCEPCION. And I remembered, in
that moment looking up at the Virgin and down on Santiago, the
Spirit of the Lord who visited Nephi. How often he commanded
Nephi to look, and inasmuch as Nephi was commanded to look he
did look. And I remembered how Nephi saw pregnant Mary, that
Mary. And how there was an angel who was very clearly trying to
teach Nephi something that was wholly important. Maybe even the
most important. And I remembered how the angel asked Nephi that
really great question, Knowest thou the condescension of God? And
how comforting it was to hear Nephi say, Absolutely not! And even
though he didnt say Absolutely not! that is really essentially what
he said, which comforts me. And how, as an illustration of the condescension of God, the angel shows Nephi the first Christmas and
the angel keeps telling Nephi, Look!, and Nephi keeps looking, and
you can tell as a reader that there is something that is on some whole
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other epistemological level going on here because Nephi is looking

hard. And that little baby is squirming about in what we have come
to pretty much know were the quite unsterilized and non-hypoallergenic arms of his young mother, the baby not entirely unlike a lamb,
it being not just a stable-like environment, but an actual stable, where
dirty animals sleep and eat and defecate willy-nilly.
And how, in that very moment during the vision, the angel asks
what seems to be a pretty strange question, if you think about it:
Knowest thou the meaning of that tree which thy father saw? And
if you listen to the tone of that question just right you can hear the
inflection of the angels voice saying You see? You see it, right? The
connection? Sure you do. Yes. Look. Yes! Thats it. Because Nephi
does see. Its the love of God. And he might even say to himself, Duh!
That was what the tree was all along, and it is clear as day now. Now
that I look at it. And, once again, there I was standing at the landing
that is down near the base of the Virgin statue with my sore feet and
my damp brow and my deliciously wet throat. People are walking up
to the glass doors of the vestibule upon which the Virgin stands, cupping their hands around their eyes and looking in. There are maybe
a dozen or so steps that I need to climb in order to also be one who
cups his hands around his eyes and looks in. And if you think about
it, one might consider that to be the real summit of the Cerro San
Cristobal, up there at those glass doors. But I dont move. I just stand
there for a minute looking, then start down the steps.
My ordinance worker steps back into the room just as the tally
becomes too much, and I retreat from it, caught there looking at the
cost of it all. These ordinances were given after this manner, said
Alma, and this that they might look. That I might look. And when
I look inward I see a person who is inevitably found wanting. Inexorably short of the glory of God. I am keenly aware that despite all
superhuman efforts to not fall short of Gods glory that I will have, in
the end, fallen. I will be imperfect. And the scriptures are clear that
even when Im trying, genuinely trying, to counterbalance with every
good work, I am doomed to be an unprofitable servant. Where is
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the motivation for an unprofitable servant? Such an eternal deficit, by

itself, offers poor incentive to good work (which is all too evident in
my own efforts). Because Ill easily let an entire year slip by without
going to the temple. And even then I cant even get there on time! In
fact, Im always late. Im always keeping back some merited amount
of money in my pocket, rather than freely giving, and Im always
looking for a quicker path up the hill, and Im quick to judge my fellow airplane passengers (damn their sleepy heads!). But all this, in
a moment of introspection, serves to remind me that I need to be
careful. I mustnt mischaracterize the arrangement. Though I might
not merit Gods love, though I havent earned it and may ever spurn it,
he still gives it freely and abundantly and without respect of persons.
And he isnt asking me to be ye therefore perfect by myself alone.
He is asking me to align myself with and be perfected in Christ,
which I can only take to mean his two great commandments of love
upon which everything hangs. Christs words, not mine. Such clear
intent must be preliminary. It may be a thread already woven within
me, long before I began to feel it, before I could see it or feel itsomething initiatory. Despite the scriptures not saying so outright, I sense
that one clear purpose of these ordinances is to enable me to love
more completely. My faith is a blend of tangible and spiritualboth
indispensable to my covenant relationship with God. And, somehow, even when I experience the temple only at long intervals Im still
blessed, once in a while, with moments of immaculate incarnation
the putting of my body in motion with my spirit, my daily life in all
its hum-drumery in motion with my spirit. Ordered by some grander
order. All this hands-on-head business, this holding and grasping,
this immersing, this eating and drinking, and even endless bodily
waiting, all emblematic. Making the invisible visible. The water faucet
continues, not so much like a clock, but rather instead like steady infinite drops from the caringest heart.
It still lingers heavy, the why question. Why this way and not another?
And is it the only? And I may not have all the answers. I do not. Absolutely not. But what answers I do have I hold close. The souls eye is a
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red star, for instance. Matta painted it so, and in a way thats proof. His
almas are all smiling and dancing, despite there being just a smidge of
color in what is, in reality, quite a few square feet of gray and brownish
canvas. And it wasnt even canvas really, because I got really close and
saw that the paint was painted on what actually look like earthclay,
soil, and dust, etc.over some type of burlapy material. I could see
what appeared to be weeds poking up through the chunks of earth.
And on that earth a small and unbelievably significant splash of blood
red, not unlike the color that occurs at the moment of dawn, when
our star cuts through the jet of night and lights up a bed of crenellate
clouds. And when that star dies, which by mortal standards will be a
very long time, it will become a Red Giant.
When I think of things that die, I all too often think of them shrinking in decay and getting smaller and less visible. But Red Giants grow
bigger. They get huge, these dying red suns. And though theyre not as
hot, which of course is why they are dying, they are hot enough to still
take in everything in their vicinity. And by everything I mean everyone.
And by take in I mean love.

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Why I Carry Your I.D.

Melissa Dalton-Bradford

I was sorting through your things still musky from you peeling
through the
layers of two Samsonites repacked by someone whod volunteered
when we would not could not come ourselves to
collect your every last mortal belonging could not leave
your coldening flesh for what remained still lying just as youd left it
on bed
or floor or in drawers or in closet like
the really good parka for the rough winter ahead wed bought together
laughing in highsummer heat and Id thought navy though youd
thought red and the furlined hood made a spectacle in the airconditioned mall and
how that fur had framed your spirited features and how wed agreed
on navy
which I now wish was your red better than my navy which was supposed to keep
you safe and warm
as Id promised
which inner conversation rises with others woven throughout
T-shirts boxers new
jeans stiff and flat and empty of your lankiness that filled them
I have had to leave those limbs as stiff and as flat so that here my
fingertips
harden at the thought and go white on the wallet we gave you
last birthday your eighteenth with all its fanfare and futuring and

Honorable mention, 2012 Irreantum Poetry Contest

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farewelling and these four slits in leather one for your first
bank account card and this is when I find it
this thin slip of impossible with your unsuspecting freeze-dried grin
facing the
college camera and a bar code with its generic fringelines that will
certify your
existence this facsimile of you-ness the fractal chip of an
everexploding universe compressed to a square and stamped
so shallow that when turned sideways it is the
slightest possible barrier between presence and absence
and when held in both hands against this harsh daylight
your enormity is eclipsed
subsumed by my thumbprint
your laminated vividness clotted
like the blood between us and you stare back at me like
a postage stamp emblem of history
the tiniest illustration for your borderless story
a static plastified token I sense by the hour will
replace your reverberating self
more objet dart than true proportion or singularity
a simulacrum
a reminder (though unneeded) of you which I carry
just as we two began:
you small but vast in my bodys pocket
my very skin hungering toward your identity.

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Autobahn
Tuesdays flat brisk blue as he cruises north from Starnberg running
late for his eight oclock. Straight shot. Adrenalin. Locomotion. Till
speed slumps
and the bummeling Bayrische Motor Werke fleet slows.
He cranes his neck above the steering peering ahead notes the jagged
looping
yodel of a Krankenwagen. No, three Krankenwagen with distant red
halos swirling
and two Polizeiwagen whose fiery headdresses blaze, their shrieking
chorus drilling, nearly, through his earphone muffling.
Gritting, slowing, slapping the wheel, he honks a Mercedes huff.
Texts office.
Texts client.
Texts broker.
Revs six cylinders.
Texts wife.
Scrolls through alternative routes in his handy screen while he
passes the
neon tape trimming a peripheral inconvenience.
Carnage, a curio cabinet
of shattered figurines lying in a bed of shards, flung hubcaps wadded
fistfuls of
metal. The chalky weight of tarpaulin, which dissolves in his rearview
to no more than a blip,
a vanishing point.

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Tuesdays flat purpling blue as he cruises south back to Starnberg

running
late for dinner. Swerveless. Hunger. Imperial. Speed-focused past
the blank and blood-scrubbed shoulder where that very morning
and its universe lie buried under the hush and
erasure of such immaculate asphalt.

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Lake Bled

near Ljubljana, Slovenia

Job 37:18

The waters surface is a pelt of silvery hair

on slick black skin and the oarsman
dips through its tautness like a surgeon
slicing small wounds
which heal in a watery instant leaving
no trace of incision.
Its out to the island in a twelve man ferry where
under a sun flaming as fully as a bush of forsythia
we take the hundred stairs of stone up
to the stucco church of St. Mary
white as bleached cotton
and ring the wishing bell by dangling all our weight
on an ancient knot at the end of fisherman rope.
Ziva, goddess of love, once had her temple here.
And another, the young sadness-crazed widow
left the bell, cenotaph to her lost husband
as well as to the oarsmen who drowned
rowing bell to island.
Grief upon grief joins the fleet of grief
like that of pagan and holy warriors
whose torn flesh bled
for this lone knob of limestone and ivy.
We row back early evening.
The oarsmans knuckles are gingerroot
and there are occasional abrasions of light
scars on the skin of water

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neon scabs, flickering

and just then the burning bush alights
on the belfry, setting it aflame.
Smoldering, the fire slinks down the column,
sliding silently
and slipping into oblivion.

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The Checkers Champion of Orofino, Idaho

Jaren Watson

Kids arent good for bad news. I was eleven years old
when my mom gathered our family in the kitchen and announced
that Grandpa had been arrested for molesting two girls. This was the
first wed heard of it, though not the first time he had done it. Just the
first time charges had been pressed. He would be sentenced to prison
in the small logging town of Orofino, in northern Idaho, where lonely
hours stretched into years, reducing a physical goliath into a broken
old man who, after his release, slept away the last few years of his life.
The girls who were the victims of his sexual predation were not the
only ones who suffered. Clearly, their families and indeed the whole
neighborhood were victims. All of us grandkids bore the shame of his
crime. Huddled around the kitchen table we were sworn to secrecy.
We neednt have been. It was not a thing to tell.
Of us, my mother felt most acutely the burden of this knowledge.
It was she who sought counseling as a victim of a sex offender to
discover, in her words, What does it mean to have a monster for a
father? If he was sick, does that mean I am?
The son of Swiss farmers, Christian and Margaritha Gerber, my
grandfather immigrated to the United States as part of the Mormon
migration in the late 1800s. They settled in Montpelier, Idaho, thirty
miles from the cold, clear water of Bear Lake that straddles Idahos
southern border with Utah.
I remember meeting great-grandpa Christian at a rare family reunion.
My nose had been bleeding and I stood on the grass in the sun with wads
of tissue stuffed in both nostrils. I looked at the ancient man slumped in
a wheelchair. Young as I was, I could see he wouldnt last long. Age had
2nd place, 2012 Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest

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robbed him of speech. His eyes were dull and watery, a nearly opaque
film congealing on the lower lids. His lower jaw had quit, leaving agape
his drooping mouth. I remember the heat of the day and wanting him
to close his mouth. Nothing in that old husk belied his early rage. Good
Christian had a temper. About weekly, he beat my grandfather. The
worst of these beatings occurred when Christian struck his son across
the forehead with a two-by-four plank, splitting open my grandfathers
head. Joe was left bleeding in the grass until some neighbors found him
and took him to a doctor who stitched his scalp.
The Gerbers spoke only Swiss in the home. When my grandfather came of age to attend school, he was shunned by the other children, labeled stupid by his teachers for his inability to speak English.
Joes formal education was spotty, having missed numerous days to
work on the family farm. Completing sixth grade, he dropped out to
work full-time. In his early teens he left home, finding employment
on potato, wheat, and barley farms in the high deserts of southeast
Idaho and western Wyoming. He labored in these dusty fields until
his early twenties.
In 41, when Yamamotos bombers got the jump on Pearl Harbor, Joe enlisted in the army, part of that waking giant that shook
the world. He served four years, engaged in the Philippines and Fiji.
Appointed sergeant in Battery H of the 6th Coast Artillery, Joe drove
a supply truck, hauling munitions to frontline infantry. He felt like a
sitting duck behind the wheel, as the supply lines couldnt engage the
enemy, but had to keep driving under fire. When shots ripped apart
his tires, he kept driving. Keeping the infantrymen well-stocked with
ammo, Joe felt like a valued contributor. His was a job he was good
at, his ragged boyhood poverty irrelevant. No one singled him out for
his shoddy English. He made friends with his fellow soldiers and took
pictures of his time serving.
He populated a glossy black album with black-and-white photographs that I remember seeing as a young boy. Most of the shots were
of Joe with his comrades standing side by side next to a supply truck,
the cold steel of a Howitzer, or other impressive artillery. A number
of photos showed the soldiers beaming next to Fijian women who,
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Watson: Checkers Champion

dressed in the local custom, wore only a simple cloth wrapped about
the waist, their bronze breasts bared.
One photograph stands as if at attention, available for mental
recall: a line of American soldiers standing proudly in a field. Each
man holding by the dark hair the decapitated head of a Japanese man.
The greatest generation, these, our best and brightest, fighting the
good warwith just a splash of head hunting. I revisited this album
recently and looked for this picture, but I couldnt find it. My mother
said she doesnt remember ever seeing it, that I must have imagined
it. But my brother remembers seeing it. Its disappearance, a minor
mystery.
After receiving an honorable discharge on October 28, 1945, Joe
sailed home and returned to work. Back in the states, he got a job at
the BQ Ranch in Cokeville, Wyoming, where he worked as a ranch
hand, feeding livestock and mending fence. There he met and fell in
love with Amy Rex, the ranch cook. Must have been some mighty
beans. The two were married and they moved to Montpelier, Idaho,
where they lived the remainder of their lives. Prior to marrying Joe,
Amy had a child, Elaine. Soon after their marriage she gave birth to
my mother, Irene.
While my mother was young, Joe worked at Walton Feed, where
farmers trucked in their grain, dumping it to be cleaned and bagged.
Joes job consisted mostly of loading bagged grain back into the farmers trucks. It was at Walton Feed that my grandfathers strength
became legendary. The hundred-pound burlap bags were tied with
ears on each end for easier lifting. Other workers lifted a bag at a
time, one hand clinging to each ear. Joe tossed the bags by twos, one
in each hand, into the waiting trucks. He was uncommonly strong, a
true Steinbecks Lenny. When I hear someone described as having the
strength to crush a man with his bare hands, its my grandfather Joes
hands I see.
After Walton Feed, Joe hired on with the Montpelier Coal Company. His job there wasnt much different than his work at Walton.
Instead of loading trucks with bags of grain, he loaded them with
coal by the shovelful. By the time my mother was in high school, Joe
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worked at El Paso Natural Gas, come to the region to mine phosphates. Here again Joe worked with trucks, but this time he was put
to work cleaning the acidic residue from the truck beds after their
loads had been dumped. It was dangerous. The extracted phosphate
was mixed with sulfuric acid, forming phosphoric acid, a primary
ingredient in fertilizer. Joes task was to hose down the trucks. Once,
while cleaning, acidic gas enveloped his body. His neck and chest were
severely burned by the fumes, as were his arms. His body carried a
lacework of scars for the rest of his life. Decades later, when I knew
him, he kept his white hair slicked back with Vitalis hair oil, never a
strand misplaced. His cheeks were so ruddy they fairly veiled the old
wounds, so red you had to look closely to notice the pink and dimpled
flesh at the edge of his collar.
The job at El Paso was Joes last. At 67, he retired and devoted his
time to raising hogs, a few cows, a handful of sheep, and cultivating a
large vegetable garden. The family ate the food and Joe often delivered
canned vegetables and meat from the freezer to several widows in the
neighborhood who had also emigrated from Switzerland.
During my Aunt Elaines formative years, when her lips and tongue
were learning to shape words, instead of learning mommy and daddy,
she learned mommy and Joe. Not her biological father, Joe insisted
that Elaine call him by his first name. As my mother grew, she imitated Elaines behavior, and the only name by which she ever called
her father was Joe. We took up that torch; I knew of no other name
for the man than Joe Gerber.
It is a question unanswerable now, why it is Joe refused Elaines
calling him dad. In a time where birthing children out of wedlock was
less common, perhaps Joe resented his new wifes former indiscretion.
Whatever the reason, it must have colored the formation of Elaines
identity, particularly in the mind of her recalcitrant father. While
Elaine was still quite young, Joe began molesting her. The abuse
spanned years. The details have not been disclosed to me. Ive not
sought clarification. What I do know is that my aunt suffered much,
and for a long time. She resented and feared the hulking man that
stalked her in her own home.
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Though Joes abuse of Elaine was terrible and frequent, during that
time it was apparently limited to her. He never treated my mother in
the same way. Oh, he was a crotchety bastard, but he didnt sexually
abuse Mom. He mistreated her in other ways. When she began menstruating, after she used the bathroom Joe would rifle through the
trash and inspect the pads. If they werent fully saturated, he berated
Mom for being wasteful.
Such derelict invasions of privacy werent uncommon. He propped
a ladder permanently near an apple tree in the yard, giving access to
apples in high boughs, but also vantage to the bathroom window.
Mom and Elaine always made sure to pull the blinds and even taped
the edges to eliminate cracks.
Likewise, in each of the girls bedrooms, windows were shaded
against Joes peering from outside. Mom remembers leaving the lights
off when changing clothes, or even lying on the floor to put on an
outfit, remaining below the level of the window. What father, this?
Reason enough for Dostoevskys Ivan to pull the plug on God.
One night while the girls were in their early teens, Mom woke to
the sound of Elaine crying. Mom went into her sisters room where
she saw Elaine moaning and writhing on the bed. She was taken to
the hospital and treated, the exact ailment not remembered. Not
many nights after, the fitful sounds of her sister woke Mom again. She
assumed it was like before and as she walked to Elaines bedroom she
heard No, no. Stop it. Still thinking Elaine was having some kind of
fit in the night, Mom turned on the light. There hunched Joe, hovering
over Elaine. Moms presence prevented whatever was about to happen.
Joe explained his being there by saying Elaine was drunk and that he
was trying to settle her down. But Mom remembers: Isaw what I saw.
Stopping Joe that time had nuanced ramifications. My mother was
relieved that she had helped to protect Elaine from yet another episode
of abuse. But as time progressed, something warped inside of Mom.
With the insidious nature common to victims of abuse, she began to feel
responsible for the horrors that Joe was inflicting on her sister. At some
level of consciousness, Moms reasoning turned on itself. I interpreted
it that, if I was able to stop it once, then I was responsible for the times
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I didnt stop it. More than twenty years later, in April of 1988, the year
Yellowstone blew up in flames, Mom received a call from her mother,
informing her that Joe had been arrested for molesting two young
neighbor girls. Moms immediate reaction was to think, Ive failed.
Joe Gerber loved children. Some of his happiest moments were playing with his grandchildren or other kids from the neighborhood.
Until it was reported to us that he had been arrested, nothing I ever
experienced hinted at his shameful desires. I remember him as a lover
of birds and small animals. He was a devoted tender of squirrels who
took up residence in the huge willow tree just outside the back door.
He fed them daily, and I loved to watch the squirrels with him. My
siblings and I would swing for hours on the swing set, while Joe ate
apples from the many trees in the yard, watching his grandchildren
with gentle contentment. He kept a kitchen drawer fully stocked with
bite-sized candy bars, and at every visit, all of us kids raced to the
drawer for sweets. He kept a box of toys out and a cupboard full of
games, of which he was a master. Particularly at checkers. He was so
adept at strategy that no one could beat him. Later, in prison, where
in varietys absence all things frivolous develop a solemn heft, Joe was
crowned as checkers champion of his cellblock.
In the sordid light of his offenses, all that I remembered as fun
and innocent was re-examined and deemed cunning and lewd. In the
moment of a phone call, eleven years of memories flipped on their
heads. As far as my grandfather was concerned, there was good in
nothing. Certainly he kept a drawer full of candy: bait for his next
victim. All the toys and games and candy and even the setting out of
seeds for squirrels were nothing more than a lurid ploy.
Two houses east of my grandparents lived two little girls. Three and
four, they were drawn to the friendly old man whose large yard boasted
numerous apple trees, fluffy sheep behind a wooden fence, and a swing
set they could play on whenever they liked. He was kind to them. And
he always gave them candy. On one of their many visits to his house,
he put his hand inside the younger girls pants. Around the same time,
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a seven-year-old girl from up the road was walking through the old
mans yard and needed help climbing a fence. He put his hand between
her legs and boosted her up, and she continued on her way.
The trial and sentencing of Joe Gerber happened quickly. Arrested in
April, he was in prison by May. Sentence: ten to twenty years. Justice
swiftly runs. Joe spent his first 180 days at a facility in Cottonwood,
Idaho, after which his supervisors reviewed the case for the possibility
of release on probation. Mom waited at home for the phone call informing her whether Joe would be released or sent to Orofino to complete
his time. When the phone rang and it was not the husky voice of her
father, Mom knew that hed been shackled and put on a bus, driven
by armed guards up the winding highway along the Clearwater River.
North through the Nez Perce National Forest, the old hunting grounds
of great Chief Joseph, to Orofino, his home for the next three years.
Through Moms efforts, Joes judge reduced his sentence to three years
fixed, five years indeterminate. Meaning, Joe was to serve a minimum of
three years, a maximum of eight. At the end of three years, the parole
board voted 2-3 to release him. However, a unanimous vote was needed.
Again, Mom intervened and the board agreed to review the case again
in ninety days. She argued that both Joe and society would benefit most
from his release on probation, where he could be supervised and counseled. If he were to serve eight years, he would be released on parole,
with no supervision. Statistics showed that offenders without supervision and counseling were more likely to reoffend. The board agreed
with Moms assessment.
In the end, it was a matter of money. While in prison, Joes diabetes
had progressed, and his necrotic left foot needed to be amputated. If
Joe were in custody, the state would be responsible for the significant
medical costs. Out he went.
Relinquishing the feelings of responsibility proved difficult for my
mother. In conjunction with the counseling she received, she began an
intensive study that would span years. She purchased and read dozens upon dozens of books about sex abuse, sex offenders, sex victims.
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The effects of the trauma experienced by victims of sex abuse are well
documented, and Mom pored over victims testimonies and psychologists explanations.
Through her study she became well-versed on the subject and was
hired for her expertise. Given the choice to work with offenders or
victims, Mom chose to counsel offenders. Her reasoning: I felt that if
I was able to stop one man from molesting one child, then Id made a
difference. Then Id started to atone for failing to stop Joe.
That victims bear the guilt of the crime is one of the ugliest aspects of
sex abuse. In what twisted way should my mother have felt responsible
for Joes actions? Yet she did. As part of the cycle, the seeds of Joes aberrant behavior likely began decades earlier when he witnessed his own
sister being raped by their father. Why victims become perpetrators was
a mystery my mother was determined to unravel. Its easy to understand
why: she wanted to end the cycle in her own family. It took years, but
Mom finally came to terms with her role as the child of a sex abuser.
My siblings and I took a divergent path. For my part, I discovered
over the years that the most difficult aspect of knowing of my grandfathers crime was our family pact of sworn secrecy. At the time, I was
too young to articulate, but my memory now is that if I knew a thing
so bad it couldnt be told, something was bad in me. Throughout my
life I have struggled with feelings of low self-worth and anxiety, and
while it took a long time, I now see those feelings growing out of that
shroud of secrecy.
Hardly do I suggest my discomfort compares with the pain of
my mother, or the trauma of those little girls. Rather, Im saying that
when a sex crime is committed, its effects have long arms, reaching
perhaps further than we know. Take this: upon detonation, an atomic
bombs concussive force is instant and deadly. Its ruination impressive,
sure. But, its radius is limited. Graver is the slow creeping invisible fog
that lingers in doorways, dancing with DNA. No respecter of post
and lintel lambs blood here.
While Joe was in prison, we were his only visitors. Mom felt it was
up to her to care for him, so we made several trips up to Orofino,
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a nine-hour drive. Once the guards ushered us through the double

fences capped with razor wire and past the metal detectors, wed sit
around steel tables in a sterile, concrete room. There we played rummy
and talked for a couple of hours. I remember looking often around the
visiting room, trying to find kids my own age. I didnt see many, but
of those I did I wondered whether they loved the men theyd come to
see, or instead were afraid. If theyd had the same nightmares as I did,
whose faces were their fathers, their grandfathers.
Because of the long drive, we turned the prison visits into our family vacations. Previously, wed always headed south during the summer,
to locations in Utah or California. But the years of Joes incarceration,
we headed north, exploring the vast wilderness of Idahos panhandle.
We fished on the Dworshak Reservoir and walked the creaky boardwalk at Coeur dAlene. We rode a jet boat on the Snake River in the
nearly bottomless gorge of Hells Canyon and rafted the mighty rapids of the Lochsa.
The most memorable trip for me was riding horses up the steep
mountainsides of the Seven Devils, where we camped miles from any
roads for two days. From the depths of Hells Canyon, the deepest
gorge in Idahofor years considered the deepest canyon in North
Americathe Seven Devils tower up like apposite gods, and while
there are higher peaks in Idaho, none boast a greater prominence, the
total rise from base to summit. The Seven Devils are a collection of
craggy peaks with ominous names: He Devil, the highest at 9,400
feet, and companion She Devil. Devils Throne, Tower of Babel, The
Ogre, Mount Belial, The Twin Imps.
If the names of the mountains are demonic, the views they afford are
divine. During the first afternoon after riding to our camp, Mom and I
left the rest of the family and hiked to the highest point we could find.
Our work occupied several hours, scrambling and scrabbling over rocks
and roots, picking our way up the slope. When we reached the top we
were taken aback by the seemingly limitless expanse that spread to a distant blue horizon. We were so high up that if we couldnt see the curve
of the Earth, we could sense it. Mom took a picture of me standing on
a large lichen-covered rock, the wild empty state of Idaho my backdrop.
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The next morning, after waking and unzipping the tent flap, we
were surprised to see three mountain goats standing just ten yards
away. They were perfectly still, just watching us. They were impossible
creatures, the blackest eyes countersunk in fur so white it was more
akin to snow, and indeed they looked like large lumps of snow freshly
cleaved from a drift just blown. Seraphim offer no mystery greater
than these.
Where we were camped was so remote, the mountain goats had
likely never seen people before, or at least their interaction was severely
limited. They gazed at us as curiously and intently as we at them. None
of us moved, none made a sound. I dont even remember hearing them
breathe. After how longwho knows?not long enough, the goats
turned on flinty hooves and walked slowly out of camp.
In my memory, it seems like that was the last of our trips up north.
Joe was soon released from prison, he got his foot hacked off, and he
went home to face the incarceration of immobility and old age. In giving me permission to write about the personal details of my mothers
life she expressed concern about narrative balance. If I write only of
the bad parts of Joes life, Is that the legacy that hes left with?
The legacy Ive inherited from my grandfather is two. One is forged
from memories of feeding seeds to squirrels and getting pummeled at
checkers by a man who loved nothing better than playing with me and
the other grandkids. Memories of hard work and demi-god strength.
The other legacy is built through years of Joes predation, of beguiling
innocent girls into trusting him. Of dirtying good things, where even
home is no safety.
Between 2003 (the earliest year for which data was available) and
2008, the number of incarcerated sex offenders in Idaho grew from 1,010
to 1,514, an increase of 50% in just five years. Recently, my brother, a physician in rural Idaho, told me of a ten-year-old girl who gave birth at Madison Memorial Hospital in Rexburg. The girl became pregnant when her
stepfather raped her. To avoid legal action, the family kept it secret.
As a father to my own young children in a society where these
crimes are becoming more frequent, the growing threat looms menacingly as I contemplate what the future holds for my children, my
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siblings children. How to keep them safe. In me is the blood of that

man. What father, I? Have I control over such things? God, take my
hands. Take my hands.
My memories of visiting my grandfather in prison blend razor
wire and guard towers with forays into the most pristine landscapes
I have ever seen. Most often the image that comes is that of three
mountain goats, staring into their otherworldly faces on a morning so
peaceful its as if the sun dare not rise. Its just that they were beautiful,
those goats, standing quietly on the roof of Idaho. So soft and white
and clean.

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Our War with Hollywood:

For the Sake of Truth and Beauty, Lets Call a Truce
Lynne Larson

Last summer I attended a session at BYU Education Week

entitled Hollywood vs. Religion, presented by an instructor Ill call
Brother Brown. Brother Brown spent the class hour demonstrating,
with a number of film clips, how the portrayal of Christianity and
those who devoutly practice it has deteriorated in Hollywood from
the halcyon days of the 1930s and 40s, when good Christian characters were a staple of popular movies. Biblical epics were plentiful, and
the kind country vicar or the Tin Pan Alley clergyman was a requisite
part of so many modern morality tales. Brother Brown lamented the
fact that Bing Crosby and The Bells of St. Marys and Spencer Tracys
Father Flanagan have been replaced in our day by a plethora of films
featuring evil priests, redneck pastors, and flimflam con artists ready
to fleece the congregation, financially, emotionally, and often sexually.
There was no dialing back for Brother Brown, no equivocation. In
his view, Hollywood is now in league with the devil in a war against
religion in general and Christianity in particular, and its battle plan is
calculated and precise. Good Christians are no longer to be seen as
heroes or sympathetic pilgrims sharing a weary journey through life.
They are no longer to be portrayed as wise and benevolent, and if they
are intelligent it is only in a smarmy, devious way that feeds their own
greed and lecherous purpose. Relentlessly, Brother Brown criticized
what he called the disproportionate number of modern films which
show religious leaders in a negative light. By the time he was finished,
most of the hundred or so people in the room probably went home
determined to immediately cancel their Netflix subscription.
With all due respect to Brother Brown and his Education Week presentation, I came away from the session disappointed. It was not that I
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doubted the fact that Hollywood films have changed in their presentation of religion, it was that Brother Brown painted the evolution with
such a broad and vitriolic brush, promoting an Us vs. Them mentality,
that I have come to resist. Moreover, the modern film clips he showed
were specious, out of context, and most often from terrible B movies that
no one had ever heard of, much less taken seriously. For every possibly
anti-Christian, anti-religion film clip he showed, I could have named a
dozen others where the opposite was true. The Preachers Wife, Amazing
Grace, and The Mission came immediately to mind, and very recently
The Life of Pi, to say nothing of Mel Gibsons excessive and controversial
Passion of the Christ, or the fact that A Christmas Carol in ten different versions is still shown every holiday season. These are all first-tier,
expensively made, modern films that show Christianity and those who
practice it in a positive, sympathetic way. And this list does not include
hundreds of other films, which, while not overtly Christian, demonstrate through expert story-telling the basic virtues of the Christian gospel: honesty, integrity, compassion, and a regard for those less fortunate.
Unlike Brother Brown, I think Hollywood films dealing expressly
with religion have improved since Bing Crosby taught the wayward
urchins of St. Marys how to sing, and Father Flanagan made angels
out of the delinquents in Boys Town. They have certainly improved
technically, and new freedoms within the art have made greater emotional and intellectual exploration possible. Old films are fine, but for
the most part they were unrealistic, nave, and one-dimensional. Life
(and religion) is far more complex, and I cant fault modern creative
artists for attempting to portray those complexities in a very real way.
Additionally, good filmmakers, like good authors, deal with irony.
Irony is a staple of the best art we have. Perhaps this is why the devious priest makes such an interesting character. He is not inwardly
what he seems to be in his cloak and collar, as he so blatantly preaches
one way and lives another. How can anyone blame writers and filmmakers for exploring that striking dichotomy?
So while Brother Brown may lament the lack of overt Christianity in
modern movies, I see instead great artistic progress in the way religious
themes are presented. My only lament is that the misguided attacks of
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Brother Brown and others like him serve to cheat LDS audiences out
of the vicarious experiences that great films can provide. Additionally,
as this war against Hollywood continues in so many wards and Sunday lessons, and movies are made the whipping boy for all that ails the
world, our own fledgling writers and filmmakers are often forced to
choose sides as they try to entwine their artistic talent with their faith.
A hundred years ago Orson F. Whitney said that someday we Mormons would have our Miltons and Shakespeares. It hasnt happened
yet, and it wont happen until we have an LDS audience that supports
and encourages our best creative artists and understands why Hollywood at its finest is to be emulated instead of despised.
I am a lover of the creative arts, especially literature and film, andI
am also a member of a church which prizes truth. In this dual role,
I have spent many years pondering John Keats Ode on a Grecian
Urn, trying to determine how his famous final declaration about art
applies to my religion: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know. Beauty and Truth. Art and
Religion? Form and Function? Eloquence and Reason? Style and Substance? However Keats is interpreted, certainly, we should appreciate
the concept which the poet affirms that beauty and truth are indeed
entwined. We should work to support the worthy efforts of our gifted
colleagues who strive for a balance between these elements each time
they paint or write or act or direct or produce. Great films can be
and often are the epitome of that balance, because they can combine
so vividly the beauty of visual art with the truth of the written word.
In the tradition set by Brother Brown, I would like to discuss a
dozen films, and in a longer version of this essay I would do so. But
because space is limited, Ill refer to only one, a highly acclaimed TV
miniseries, Jesus of Nazareth, produced in 1977 and directed by the
renowned Franco Zefferelli. This films speaks with natural eloquence
and ranks head and shoulders above the wooden and cheaply produced Biblical films of the 1940s, when Jesus and the apostles repeated
their lines as if they were reading scripture underwater. This film contains a depiction of Jesus telling the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We
can find this parable in the New Testament and be inspired by simply
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reading it, for it is intrinsically beautiful and true with no adorning.

But the depiction of this parable in the film adds something more to
the printed page. We are touched and moved by Robert Powells skill
as an actor, his timing and eloquence, his ability to somehow make
the story fresh and new although its a tale weve heard a thousand
times before. Thats what skilled creative artists do.
Then we have the setting, which gives a visual context to the telling
of the story. Not a visual sequence this time of the prodigal son languishing in sin and then returning to his father to seek forgiveness, but,
interestingly, the context of the telling of the story. How the story is
told is as important here as the story itself. Form and function. Beauty
and Truth. Then we add Zefferellis masterful directionthe thoroughly engaged faces of the listeners, the stunned silence as the storys
power takes hold, the stirring climax, the emotion reflected in the faces
of the people who are hearing the parable for the first time. Beauty
expanding and enriching truth. Hollywood, with its money and its
outstanding list of talented actors, directors, writers, and artists, is
superbly equipped to produce such excellence.
We who recognize the power of beauty and truth when they work
flawlessly as one should look with caution on the negative attitudes promoted against Hollywood by a thousand well-meaning Brother Browns
throughout the church. For such attitudes work against those of us who
strive to contribute and share our own artistic talents with the world
and with our fellow saints. As our available LDS audiences are incessantly taught to view Hollywood as a sworn enemy, and to shun at all cost
anything it produces, our own climb toward artistic excellence is put at
risk. For as the audience we seek continues to be sheltered from anything
creative, provoking, or in any way outside the box, our art, in response,
becomes hollow, flat, and uninspiring. We are tied to whats easy, safe, and
traditional because thats all our audience will accept. Forced into mediocrity, our own creative artists are discouraged from emulating excellence
because it is so often branded with the tainted Hollywood label.
In Isaiah 54:16, the Lord says, Behold, I have created the smith that
bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for
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his work. Art is a powerful fire. Its impact can be immeasurable. Think
of the finest movie you ever saw or the most enduring novel you have
ever read. Chances are it came from Hollywood or was turned into a
Hollywood film. The talented smiths that bloweth the coals in the
fire of our imaginations often live and labor there. Perhaps God has
indeed created them and their instruments for his own good work.
Certainly there are many bad movies to avoid. But they should be
avoided because they are bad movies, not because Hollywood is calculating to destroy the world. Certainly some films are not for children,
but once we have put away childish things, we can learn much from the
vicarious experiences Hollywood at its best so often provides. That such
experiences may be encouraged and not condemned is my hope and
purpose, as a writer, a patron, and a consumer of the creative arts.
My second film example presents not only a Christian setting, but
a Mormon one as well. This is from Richard Dutchers Brigham City,
another modern, overtly Christian film that Brother Brown apparently
forgot. Here the local sheriff of a small town is also the ward bishop,
and his failure to solve a ghastly series of murders weighs heavily on
him as a law officer, but mostly as a bishop who has failed to protect his
ward. In this climactic sacrament meeting scene, a guilt stricken Bishop
Clayton lets the bread pass, and then looks on in amazement at the
reaction of his congregation. I have LDS friends who were uncomfortable with that scene. For me it was a stunning affirmation of the significance and purpose of the sacrament in our lives. I have often thought of
that scene as I take the bread and water every Sunday. Im glad Dutcher
put it in his film. It expands the meaning of the sacrament for me by
laying on another level of truth and beauty to the ritual.
As with films and filmmakers, so with writers. Continuing with
the theme of sacrament meeting, I would like to share a simple experience of mine that will help prove my point. Just this past December I
happened to be out of town, missing my home wards Christmas sacrament meeting. A good friend of mine, who happened to be part of
a Relief Society choir that day, emailed me the following description:
You did miss a lovely Christmas program in Sacrament meeting,
she wrote. It took me by surprise. I wasnt expecting much, and it was
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very humble, in the way of the people in this ward. We got up and
sang The First Noel, as planned, right at the beginning of the program, and as I looked down over the congregation, I was very moved.
I saw several people there who I know have such terrible struggles.
One woman who has a drug problem and is just out of jail, there with
her parents, who themselves have severe health and poverty issues. A
young couple who were there with her parentsshe has been quite
wayward, not in a destructive way but just resistant to the gospel and
to the things I know they wanted her to do. Sister Taylors daughter.
So many others. And I thought, yes, this group of motley, struggling,
often demoralized souls need the grace and the noel that these songs
are about.
My friend is a writer, but at that moment she might as well have
been a filmmaker. Instinctively, she knew all about beauty and truth
and how they are entwined. She might have simply said, We had a
good Sacrament meeting while you were gone. Instead, she added
beauty to her truth, and provided me with a moving image of something that might have remained pedestrian and commonplace. She
did something that good writers and good filmmakers always do.
Certainly there are many among us who regard art or beauty as completely extraneous to the truth of our message of the Restoration. Last
year I wrote an article in which I praised honest and graceful storytelling, on film or paper, as a powerful tool in promoting lifes virtues.
A friend of mine emailed an objection, reminding me that the dry
doctrine of the scriptures, unadorned, always overshadows stories
and story truths. I disagree with him. Ive come to believe what I was
taught in graduate school, that creative fiction sometimes can be truer
than fact. Too often, however, those of us engaged in creative work
run against a wall of opposition erected by the very people who claim
to believe in the Thirteenth Article of Faith: If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report, we seek after these things.

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Agency and Storytelling

Angela Hallstrom

Human beings love stories. Scary stories, happy stories,

true stories, made-up stories. Stories whispered between friends, told
over the pulpit, projected on a screen, printed in a book. A Yiddish
proverb proclaims, God made man because He loves stories, and
while I tend to believe Gods creative motivations are a bit more complex, I wouldnt be surprised if, in our love of story, we indeed take
after our Creator. Im sure Irreantums readership is among those who
take particular pleasure in prose fiction: made-up stories, artfully
crafted and committed to the page. I count myself among you. These
are the stories I have spent a good portion of my life reading, thinking
about, and trying to write.
During my tenure as Irreantums editor and contest coordinator,
I had the opportunity to read hundreds of stories for this journal.
Even though the pile of yearly contest entries could be daunting, reading those stories was one of the best aspects of my job. Every year I
found myself pleasantly overwhelmed by the variety of stories there
are to tell. That said, not every submitted attempt at storytelling was
completely successful. It was relatively easy to spot the stories that
werent quite ready for prime time, and even easier (but much rarer!)
to identify the exceptional pieces that impressed me from the very first
page. But in between the obviously amateur stories and the knockouts were the most difficult pieces to judge: the stories that showed
a considerable amount of writerly skill but wound up somehow lacking. Many times I found myself jazzed by a storys beginning, excited
about being carried away to new heights of insight or punched in the
gut with surprise, only to find myself at the bottom of the Microsoft Word document, repeatedly pressing page down and saying to
myself, This cant be it. Is this it? Please tell me this isnt it!
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Ive spent a lot of time thinking about these not-quite-there storiesnot only the stories submitted to Irreantum, but those Ive
encountered in creative writing workshops, discussed in writers
groups, and even (especially?) my own floundering attempts. Some of
these stories are missing a clearly focused conflict, but most of them
lack a satisfying resolution. It can be particularly difficult to end a
short story in a satisfying way: resolutions in short fiction are often
(but not always) small and quiet, and small and quiet can be much
trickier to pull off than grand and sweeping. Youre George Lucas
writing Star Wars and you have your protagonist blow up the Death
Star. Youre Andre Dubus writing The Fat Girl, and you have your
protagonist unwrap a candy bar. But done well? Unwrapping that
candy bar can be just as explosive as Luke in his X-wing, firing away.
The following, then, is my attempt to think about some of the
aspects of good storytelling by using the principle of agency as a way
to organize my ideas. But before I dive in, a caveat: these are observations and suggestions, not necessarily hard and fast rules. And even if
they were, the best writers often know how to break rules in innovative and surprising ways. Also, not all prose fiction needs to be storydriven; however, the vast majority of the fiction I do come across is
attempting to tell a story in some way, and Ive found the ideas below
helpful, especially during the revision phase of writing.
The ability to revise a piece of fiction at the narrative level (e.g. being
willing to rearrange, or even dismantle and reconstruct, a storys structure) is one of the key elements of effective revision. Many writers
are afraid to do this, however. Revision at the language levelwhere
sentences are rearranged and individual words are added or deleted
is easier to handle than narrative revision. Not only is language-level
revision more familiar than narrative revision (language-level tinkering is the type of revision that was most often emphasized in school),
but its a lot less frightening, since it doesnt require a writer to consider rearranging, overhauling, or, worst of all, completely discarding
pages and pages worth of work.
But being willing to do this kind of revision, and learning how to
do it well, is an absolute necessity for fiction writers. Structuring a
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Hallstrom: Agency and Storytelling

story in a way that it allows for the build up and payoff we all crave
as readers is a skill, andgood news!its a skill that can be learned.
I, for one, know a lot more about how to structure a story than I did
when I first started writing short fiction. And one of my biggest aha
moments came when I realized that agency is at the core of all good
stories.
Generally speaking, readers are looking for characters who choose
and then reap consequences as a result of those choices. We want our
characters to act for themselves and not be acted upon (2 Nephi
2:14), a notion I find particularly compelling as a Mormon writer and
reader. So now, whenever I sit down to work on one of my own stories,
or function as a teacher or writer or editor trying to help others revise
their work, I try to keep the following agency-related rules of writing
good stories in mind:
1. Your character must have a DESIRE. He or she has got to want
something, and want that something intensely. The thing itself can be
big (Save the world) or it can be small (Get a haircut). It can be
external (Win a dance competition) or internal (Learn to forgive)
or even both. But if you character really desires something, then your
readers will want to see how she goes about getting it, and voila. Well
turn the page.
2. Your character must make a CHOICE in the pursuit of that
desire. This is one area where new writers often go off the rails. They
think that if something bad happens to a character (she gets a dreadful disease, her husband leaves her, her purse gets stolen) then theyve
created a conflict. But no. Theyve created an incident. The conflict isnt
in place until the incident compels the main character to choose what
do about it.
3. This choice must be made manifest in ACTION. Your character
can choose to harbor feelings of revenge against the husband who left
her, but unless she does something about those feelings (slashes his
tires; stalks his girlfriend; finds a new, better man) then your readers
are left wandering around inside your main characters head, suffering
through her litany of complaints without anything actually happening as a result. We have enough friends and relatives to regale us with
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complaints unattached to any motivation to do anything about them.

We dont need it in our fiction.
4. There must be OBSTACLES that get in the way of the attainment of your main characters desire. If your main character has
an intense crush on the most beautiful girl in his biology class and
wants to ask her on a date, well, hes gotta have some failures before
he achieves his success. I know that in real life some people seem to
get what they want as soon as they burst out of the gate, but in fiction? It makes for flat, limp storytelling. And just as Mormons are
firm believers in agency, were also big believers in the creative power
of opposition. (Perhaps all beginning fiction writers should just read
2Nephi2?)
5. Your characters must experience CONSEQUENCES directly
linked to their actions in pursuit of the original desire. The way things
turn out at the end should be a function of whatever it is your main
character has been doing all story long. Endings that seem too easy
are often a product a writer failing on this point. If your character
wakes up and finds it was all a dream (please no!), or if somebody
sweeps in and fixes everything for your character at the last minute, or
if it turns out that your character didnt need to worry because everything would work out on its own anyway? This kind of storytelling
robs the reader of vicariously experiencing the choice/consequence
paradigm that seems hardwired into our story-loving brains.
6. At the end of the story, CHANGE has been effected. Your character isnt the same person as he was before. The world around him, or
his perception of it, is somehow altered.
Im not arguing here for formulaic prose or paint by numbers storytelling. These ideas can be applied and fleshed out in any number
of ways. But I also know that effective fiction writing is more than
stringing together pretty words and interesting ideas. Writing stories
is a crafta craft that more and more Mormon authors are mastering.
The better we learn our craft, the more likely we are for our stories to
exist beyond the desk drawer or computer hard drive and enter the
hearts and minds of readers. After all, thats why were compelled to
tell stories in the first place: so other people will listen.
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Claiming Her Own Story

Kjerste Christensen
Review of Aleesa Suttons Diary of a Single Mormon Female
(Abilio Press, 2013)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a story about

a single Mormon woman must end with her finding a husband. But
what happens when real life doesnt follow the standard Mormon narrative? How does such a woman find her own story, against the cultural grain? And is that story still worth telling?
Diary of a Single Mormon Female is Aleesa Suttons debut work.
The book consists of excerpts from Suttons actual diary (from ages
1030), interspersed with present-day responses and narration. The
diary entries mainly focus on Aleesas relationships with boys, from
pre-teen crushes and first dates to more serious relationships in college and beyond, and she writes about these relationships with frankness and humor. (However, she does clarify in a note that names have
been changed in order to protect privacy.)
When the book starts, Aleesa is a pre-teen who lives outside of
Vancouver, British Columbia. She is obsessed with boys and tends
to create a fantasy world around her crush of the moment, seeming
genuinely surprised on the (rare) occasions when mundane reality
intervenes. For instance, after years of crushing on a guy from her
ward named Jon, a now-teenaged Aleesa finally gets up the nerve to
ask him out on a group date, confident that it will be the dream date
shes always imagined. Instead, it turns out to be a rather awkward
evening during which she and Jon struggle to make small talk.
Later, she and Jon both end up at BYU, and they go on a few more
dates after his mission. They are now better friends than they were
in high school, but he still likes to take the opportunity to humiliate
her by reminding her of her adolescent awkwardness. She remains
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so convinced of his dream date potential that she doesnt really stop
to take stock of his cruelty to herself and others, but when he starts
dating someone else, Aleesa finds that she is actually relieved to let go
of that particular fantasy.
As this particular relationship demonstrates, Aleesa tends to live
in the future (which she imagines will be exciting) instead of living in
the present (which can be dull). She is always looking forward to the
next dream date, the next big move, or, naturally, the bliss that married life will bring. Shes also good at having crushes on boys, but bad
at noticing when they dont treat her well.
It is, unexpectedly, a non-Mormon boyfriend who eventually sets
Aleesa straight regarding how she allows others to treat her. After a
move to Toronto and a particularly bad breakup, a now 28-year-old
Aleesa decides to look for love outside of the usual YSA dating pool,
which is how she ends up dating a Russian computer engineer named
Boris. Although their relationship doesnt end in marriagethey
both realize that their religious differences pose too great an obstacle
for their relationship in the long termit does leave her changed for
the better, because he points out that she has a mistakenly low opinion of herself, based in large part on the lack of a man in her life. He
convinces her that she has a lot to offer and that she needs to stop
undercutting herself. As she puts it: His faith in God never developed the way I wanted it to, but his faith in me was unquestionable. It
was the spark that ignited a deeper sense of self-confidence than I had
ever known before, and I will be forever grateful for it (176).
I think its telling that it takes a non-Mormon boyfriend to show
Aleesa how much of her self-worth she has invested in the approval of
others, particularly Mormon men. From within the Mormon paradigm,
where marriage is all-important, its easy for Aleesa to focus on earning
the approval of a man, since that approval is the first step to a relationship, and a relationship may lead to marriage. From outside that mindset, where marriage is just one of many valid life options, Boris tries to
show Aleesa that she can be proud of who she is, on her own.
To be sure, a focus on men, marriage, and a perfect future is not an
uncommon trait in a young Mormon woman, but the strain of seeing
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Christensen: Claiming Her Own Story

oneself as perpetually inadequate takes a toll on women who dont

marry on the culturally prescribed schedule. Aleesa comes to realize
this when all of her lifes expectations seem to come crashing down
at once, after years of Mormon single-life and dead-end relationships,
leading to depression and a profound crisis of faith, during which she
has to face some very painful truths about her view of herself and her
place in the Mormon church.
Aleesas voice is the biggest strength of this book. Not only is she
brave enough to show us her actual diary entries from her pre-teen
and teenaged years, her present-day responses to her past self s diary
entries are full of dry humor. She also turns that same wit to comment on life in the Mormon singles scene:
Casual dating doesnt really exist for us Mormons. Theres too much
riding on it. And unfortunately the advice from leaders is conflicting.
Your top priority is finding a marriage partner, we hear, but date lots
of people to find out what you like. Dont rush into anything but dont
delay, either. Dont fear commitment but remember the person you
marry will be with you for eternity. Yikes! Sometimes marriage feels
so much like a duty, I forget that I need to fall in love first (171).

The overall format of the bookswitching between diary entries

from the past and commentary from the presentalso works well.
When the diary entries cant carry the main narrative, Aleesas present
voice steps in to carry the story forward. She also uses her present
voice to admit to things her past self wasnt ready to face, or even to
respond in-line to some of her diarys more over-the-top statements.
My biggest criticism of this book is that Aleesa doesnt seem to be
clear on her audience. The book contains a number of annotations
which define terms such as bishop and fireside and give brief summaries of points of Mormon belief such as the Godhead. If shes writing with a Mormon audience in mind, these annotations are largely
unnecessary and run the risk of pulling the reader out of the story.
However, the bulk of the book (especially the actual diary entries)
relate events which are deeply rooted in Mormon culture and doctrine.
(E.g., when shes trying to decide if she wants to stay at BYU, she goes
to the grounds of the Provo temple to seek inspiration on the matter.)
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If shes writing with a non-Mormon audience in mind, practices such

as these are going to be foreign to her audience, and would potentially
require much more explanation and contextualization than she gives.
I would have recommended that she cut the non-Mormon annotations entirely, reframing the book with a Mormon audience in mind.
Although many of Aleesas insecurities regarding her single status
come from her own personality and individual circumstances, theyre
also strongly reinforced by Church culture. For instance, shes wrong
to invest her self-worth in the validation of others (particularly in a
small pool of single Mormon men), but its pretty easy to draw that
conclusion from media such as Johnny Lingo. (In fact, her parents love
the film so much that they have customized wedding rings based on
the story.) At the end of the book, Aleesa includes a short list of basic
cultural changes that would help Mormon singles feel more supported
in the Church, including focusing more on each individuals relationship with God (as opposed to putting so much emphasis on marriage
and family) and having more nuanced and positive discussions about
celibacy (instead of treating single adults the same as single teenagers
and using fear and guilt as the primary motivational tactics for maintaining sexual purity).
In some ways, Diary of a Single Mormon Female is unsatisfying
because it doesnt have a grand ending that wraps up all the loose
ends. (Theres a reason, after all, that romantic stories generally end
with a wedding.) Also, the resolution that she does find is inherently
personal and non-transferrable. That said, these elements are also the
strengths of the story. Real life doesnt ever get wrapped up in a tidy
and they lived happily ever after, and real crises of faith, such as the
ones frequently encountered by Mormon singles, are most likely to be
addressed in personal spaces such as prayer and the kind of private
thoughts best recorded in a diary.

114

Updating The Viper on the Hearth

Cristine Hutchison-Jones
Review of Terryl L. Givens. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths,
and the Construction of Heresy, updated edition. (Oxford UP, 2012)

Since its original publication in 1997, Terryl Givens The

Viper on the Hearth has been a mainstay of the study of Mormonism
and anti-Mormonism in American culture. And deservedly so. Givens work provided the first substantial scholarly book-length exploration of images of the Latter-day Saints in American culture in any
time period. His examination of the representations of Mormons
in the United States in the 19th century is sweeping in its coverage
of the period; thorough in its inclusion of a wide variety of sources,
from newspapers to popular fiction to fictive memoirs; and convincing in its argument that, whatever American claims of separation of
church and state and tolerance for differing religious views may have
been, religion was at the heart of mainstream Americas intolerance,
suspicion, and occasional violence toward the Mormons. For many
students of Mormonism and of American religion, Viper has served
as an introduction to anti-Mormonism in America. For the generation of scholars who have examined the subject since Vipers first publicationincluding Megan Sanborn-Jones, Patrick Q. Mason, and
J.Spencer FluhmanGivens scholarship has served as a guide. No
one can engage in a study of anti-Mormonism in the United States
without responding to his arguments about the mechanisms of and
motivations behind anti-Mormon sentiment in American culture.
Much of the updated edition remains, in its essentials, unchanged,
although it is evident that Givens has edited for clarity and smoothed out
the language in many placesa very real improvement, given the original texts heavy use of theoretical language. The first part of the book
then and nowsituates Mormonism within the broader context of the
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revivalism that swept the nation in the early 19th century and spawned
numerous new movements within existing religions as well as entirely
new religious communities. Givens dedicates this section of the book to
explaining exactly what it was about this new religion that so offended
the Mormons American neighbors. He convincingly argues that what
made Mormonism different from so many other new and existing religious movements in this period was its collapse of the distance between
the sacred and the profane. Mormonisms claims to ongoing direct communication with God and the eventual assertion that human beings can
become gods and that God himself was once humanwhat Givens
calls Joseph Smiths unrelenting anthropomorphizing (99)radically
transgressed traditional boundaries between humanity and divinity. By
rematerializing and rehistoricizing Christianity, Smith and his followers put the unavoidable features of religion-making on the table for
everyone to see (93). In short, by infusing the profane with the sacred,
Smith forced more orthodox Christians to confront the reality that
their religions, too, were man-made: Mormonism stands as a defiant
reminder that, much as it tries to, orthodoxy cannot escape the fact of
its own construction (102). As a result, Givens argues, orthodox Christians fought hard to define Mormonism as something completely other
in order to protect the wholly sacred nature of their own religions.
In the books second part, Givens analyzes a wide variety of sources
to demonstrate several strategies that American Protestants used
in their efforts to combat and contain the new religion. Comparing
anti-Mormon rhetoric to the language and images deployed against
another religion feared and maligned in 19th-century America
Roman Catholicismhe shows that opponents of the Latter-day
Saints recycled images that were already familiar to a wide American
audience. The popular Indian captivity narratives of the 18th century,
which had been adapted with great success into Catholic captivity narratives like those attributed to Maria Monk, morphed into salacious
tales of Mormon kidnap, debauchery, and murder. Orientalist views of
Islama religion all but unknown within the nations bordersprovided Americans with handy imagery to cast the men of the Mormon
hierarchy as foreign potentates at the head of captive harems and a
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Hutchison-Jones: Updating Viper on the Hearth

subjugated populace. And because, as Givens shows, the boundaries

between genres were unfixed in this period, the lurid imagery of popular novels couched as memoirs were considered true enough to be
used as evidence in the news and on the floor of Congress in arguments
for containing or suppressing the Mormon menace. Givens effectively
demonstrates that, popular claims to the contrary, 19th-century antiMormonism was inspired by religious difference and not simply by
social and political concerns. (I agree with Fluhman, however, that
religion is not as wholly the cause of the rift between Mormons and
non-Mormons in this period as Givens argues.1)
The most significant changes in the updated text are to the final
chapter, which focuses on the Mormon image in contemporary American culture. This is not surprising given the events and the materials produced in the 15years since Vipers first publication, from Jon
Krakauers bestseller Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) to The Book
of Mormon on Broadway (2011) and Mitt Romneys two runs for the
presidency in 2008 and 2012. What is surprising, however, is how few
new examples Givens incorporates into the revised chapter despite
the wealth of new Mormon images available for analysis. By and large,
the examples of contemporary American images of the Latter-day
Saints that he used in the original edition of Viper are untouched in
the update. He extends his discussion of Tony Kushners play Angels
in America, but does not address the substantially revised award-winning HBO Films adaptation first aired in 2003. He adds only one
new writer to his description of contemporary novels (17677), and
his only addition to his discussion of Mormons on television is the
HBO show Big Love (20062011). He retains an extended discussion of an episode of the show Picket Fencescancelled in 1996but
makes no mention of other prominent examples of the Saints on
the small screen, including a full season of the medical drama House
and multiple episodes of the wildly popular Comedy Central series
South Park (1997) that deal with Latter-day Saint characters.2 He
also doesnt engage with the numerous news magazine episodes on
Mormon-related topics, or, aside from a brief mention of Dancing
with the Stars, with Mormons on reality TV.3 And while he discusses
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Krakauers examination of violence and Mormon fundamentalism, he

does not engage with other depictions of Mormon violence like the
1996 television adaptation of Zane Greys The Riders of the Purple Sage
or the 2007 film September Dawn.
Most surprisingly, Givens only devotes two pages to an examination of the medias coverage of Mitt Romneys Mormonism during
his five-year campaign for the presidency. Further, Givens focuses
exclusively on the most egregious examples of anti-Mormon rhetoric leveled at Romneyclaiming, in a show of hyperbole, that these
examples demonstrate that the medias coverage in general seemed
but a step away from calling for the pogroms that accompanied nineteenth-century anti-Catholic hysteria (185)without reference to
the relative infrequency of attacks on Mormonism in the overall coverage of Romneys campaigns. He also generally ignores related information or alternative interpretations that lessen the impact of his
assertion that the media turned rabidly anti-Mormon in the decade
of Romneys candidacy. For example, he asserts that evangelicals publicly resorted to the pejorative cult word as if it were a general occurrence (184), without noting that popular evangelist Billy Grahams
organization removed all references to Mormonism as a cult from its
website soon after Graham endorsed Romney.4
Givens treatment of the media coverage of Romneys campaigns
is part of a larger lack of nuance in his choice and interpretation of
sources in the updated chapter. In his expanded paragraph on Angels
in America, for instance, he claims that Kushner reprises nineteenthcentury anti-Mormonism (178). (He cites my own essay on Kushners
representation of Mormons in the play in such a way that it appears
that the essay supports his argument that Kushner is simply intolerant [17879]. It does not.) He entirely ignores the plays final scene, in
which Kushners ideal community comes together, led by one of the
plays central Mormon characters, to embrace a reinterpreted angelic
vision. Similarly, he quotes Stephen Colbert mock[ing] the miraculous experiences of both Joseph Smith and Moses, thereby, he asserts,
using Americans contempt for Mormonism to undermine more
widely held Judeo-Christian beliefs (187). He does not acknowledge
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Hutchison-Jones: Updating Viper on the Hearth

the possibility that Colbert connected Smiths and Mosess miracles

not as a means of denigrating Moses, but rather as a means of challenging his viewers to consider that their own beliefs are not so different, in their essentials, from the Mormons. Finally, Givens does
not engage with sources that demonstrate increasing tolerance and
efforts at understanding, including Helen Whitneys widely respected
documentary The Mormons (2007)in which Givens was heavily
featuredand more recent examples like NBCs Rock Center episode
Mormon in America (2012).5
Givens final purpose is not, however, to engage with non-Mormon American ambivalence toward the Latter-day Saints. Rather, he
wants to show that the mainstream that Mormonism fought so hard
to join in the 20th century is under attack, and Mormonisms success
in joining that mainstream is now the source of the attacks against
the religion. He seems to lament that Murphy Brown and the Gilmore Girls [have] replace[d] Ozzie and Harriet and the Waltons. He
views the values celebrated by ABCs popular sitcom Modern Family (2009), with its celebration of second marriages, multi-cultural
families, and gay parents, as the new ruling paradigm (178)the 21st
centurys new orthodoxyand regards Mormonisms embrace of the
traditional values represented by Ozzie and Harriet as the new target on the communitys back. He finally argues that anti-Mormonism
is on the rise because anti-religious sentiment is increasing in the
United States. Because Mormonism embraces the sacred and the
supernatural that is at the heart of Christianity, he argues, attackers
of Mormonism are implicitly, and perhaps deliberately, really attacking the foundations of Christianity itself (187). His updates, then,
are not simply about describing and explaining the myriad responses
to the Latter-day Saints in early 21st-century American culturerepresentations that have been sharply divided along the lines of the culture wars in the last several decades. Rather, in the new edition of
Viper, Givens uses his analysis of Mormonism in the public sphere to
place himself squarely on the side of the defenders of the traditional
values that the Mormonsor at least the Mormon imagecame to
embody a half-century ago.
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Notes
1. See Fluhman, Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in
Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2012), 5354.
2. Givens does engage in an extended discussion of The Book of Mormon on
Broadway, another Trey Parker and Matt Stone creation, but in some ways the
Broadway show soft-pedals the television shows sharp wit. See Probably (2000),
in which Saddam Hussein is banished from hell to live with the Mormons (who
are, incidentally, the only people who get to heaven); Super Best Friends (2001), in
which Joseph Smith is one of Jesuss team of supernatural crime fighters; and All
about Mormons (2003), in which a Mormon family moves to town and their son
gets the last word.
3. The first category not only includes numerous profiles of fundamentalist
polygamy, but also NBCs Rock Center episode Mormon in America (2012). The
latter ignores TLCs popular reality series Sister Wives (2011).
4. See for example The Washington Post, After Romney meeting, Billy Graham
website scrubs Mormon cult reference (October 16, 2012).
5. In her seminal essay From Satyr to Saint: American Perceptions of the
Mormons, 18601960 and her later follow up Surveying the Mormon Image since
1960, Jan Shipps notes that while negative images of the Mormons have persisted
throughout the 20th century, there has been an increase in positive images across
the same time period. Both essays are printed in Sojourner in the Promised Land:
Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000). My
own research has also demonstrated that the frequency of positive images increased
during the 20th century, as well as showing that many depictions of the Mormons in
the late 20th and early 21st century are richer and more nuancedin short, treating
the Saints as fully developed human figures rather than caricatures.

120

Young and Gray Enrich Our History with

Marvelously Told Tales
Ivan Wolfe
Review of Margaret Blair Youngs and Darius Aidan Grays Standing on
the Promises: One More River to Cross (Zarahemla, 2013)

What can I say about Margaret Youngs and Darius Grays

One More River to Cross that hasnt already been said when the book
first came out? Its simply amazing, tender, warm, joyful, realistic, intimateand dozens of other adjectives I could list.
When the first version of this novel appeared in 2000, it was one of
Deseret Books finest moments (I dont want to get into the perpetual
controversy over whether Deseret produces or squelches quality work,
but I think everyone can and should agree these books are wonderful,
and Deseret was taking something of a chance releasing them, as they
do deal with controversial historical matters such as the priesthood
ban). Now, Zarahemla Books has stepped up to re-issue them in an
expanded form. I see no hint that these new versions are directors
cuts that include parts editors at Deseret may have cutinstead,
more historical information and other stories have come to light, and
so Young and Gray have added more in order to do justice to the full
story of black Mormon pioneers.
In this first volume, that means there are a few more names, a few
more incidents, but nothing significant (I suspect the next two volumes may contain more new material). I havent done a line by line
comparison, so I dont know if there are any other additions (such
as adding in potentially disturbing material Deseret Book may have
balked at).
The main characters are Elijah Abel (the first black Mormon pioneer ordained to the priesthood by Joseph Smith) and Jane Manning
James (who lived and worked in the Smith house in Nauvoo), though
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several others appear (such as Janes eventual husband Isaac, as well

as an ancestor of co-author Darius Gray). The timeframe covers the
early days of the Church, ending in Nauvoo as the saints prepare to
head west. Overall, the novel doesnt have a plot so much as a series
of anecdotes that cover important events in the lives of each character. Though many of the tales are speculative in nature (such as
the Abel familys decision to flee their master), Young and Gray base
every incident on solid historical information; each chapter ends with
a discussion of what was invented in each chapter, what was based on
actual records (though Young and Gray mostly rely on secondary and
tertiary sources), and often quoting from the actual oral histories of
those. They also include a comprehensive bibliography at the end of
the book.
However, the stories themselves remain marvelously told. The
narrative voice chosen by Young and Gray (the narrator is herself a
fictional character, identified as a great-granddaughter of Jane Manning James) is caring and nonjudgmental. Even when some white
Mormons behave in racist and uncaring ways, the narrator has a
more resigned, sad, and weary tone, rather than an angry, hurt, and
disgusted one. The narrative voice wants to tell you stories, not pass
judgmentschoosing charity over contention in all cases, and this
makes the narrative gentle and easy.
Not that the events it describes are all that easy, though nothing
here can be taken as challenging the church in any way. (This, perhaps,
is the likely intent of the restrained yet warm narrative voicethe
events themselves challenge readers, so it helps to have a narrator with
a welcoming, friendly voice.) In fact, the book is remarkably faithfulalways assuming the truth of the Church and never questioning
the basic doctrines. Prayers are answered, miracles are taken at face
value, and Joseph Smith comes across as amicable and friendly. Events
that might seem somewhat challenging to readers unaware of many
details regarding early church history (women giving blessings, for
example) are treated in a passing manner, rather than made prominent. The most challenging aspects of this book deal with the flawed
nature of early saints and how even those chosen by God couldnt
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Wolfe: Marvelously Told Tales

quite escape the racism of the societies they inhabited. Even there,
though, the narrative emphasizes charity and forgiveness. A good
example comes from one of Elijah Abels missionary journeys, where
his white companions reflexive racist assumptions cause quite a bit of
frictionyet Elijahs companion still comes across as basically a good
man in the service of a worthy cause.
I only have two reservations about the novel, and both are a matter
of personal taste. The first is that too many of the events seem to be a
greatest hits of the era, even when it stretches credulity (for example,
Elijah Abel meeting the head of the Underground Railroad, or many
famous quotes from early church history just happening to be said
within earshot of the protagonists). However, the narrative voice covers for some of that, as it is clear the narrator jumbles various tales
together in the interest of telling a compelling story (and because shes
telling them second and third hand, having heard them from her aged
grandmother). While she (the narrator) gets the essence of the stories right, the reader will likely forgive the occasional mixing of a few
stories.
The second has to do with the format. As mentioned above, each
chapter ends with historical notes that detail their sources (and discusses what speculations they made and their justifications for such).
To me, this interrupts the narrative flow and dilutes the power of the
narrative voice; I personally would have preferred to see the notes
in appendixes. However, I can understand the decision, as the audience aimed at (mostly a faithful Mormon readership) can be very
concerned about accurately (if faithfully) representing what actually
happened. Putting the notes at the end of each chapter is a way to
ameliorate those concerns immediately, so while I dont like it, I can
live with it. (I do wonder at their choice to attribute most of the hymn
titles to a 1976 Protestant hymnal, when many of the hymn titles are
found in LDS hymn volumes as well).
Often, its not so much the stories we have, but how we tell those
tales. Young and Gray have created marvelous, faithful narratives that
will hopefully allow for these tales to spread and become part of the
general narrative of Mormonism.
123

About the Artist

Scott Samuelson has taught English at Ricks College/
Brigham Young UniversityIdaho for 31 years. His watercolors and
artists books have been shown regionally. His furniture, ceramics,
and paintings pervade his childrens homes. His letterpress and type
cabinets fill his basement, where Fat Matter Press produces cards
andbooks.

Artist Statement
The idealist says, Art tells truth beautifully. The questioner responds, And what is truth? What is beauty? The intuitionist
says, You know them when you see them. The artist says, Perhaps I
can answer these questions by making something.
I say, my art sometimes begins with an image (magic light on a
landscape, a spine in the desert). Sometimes my art begins with an
idea, (How might the seven Spirits surrounding the throne of God
[Rev. 1:4] be symbolized?). Sometimes medium is central, (What
would this look like rendered as a wood cut, a sculpture, a photograph,
a book, a watercolor?) But most often it is an exploration, a venturing
forth, a quest: (What does this have to teach me? What can I learn
by trying this?)
I want my art to surprise me and to teach me. If it does, perhaps it
will reveal beauty or truth to the viewer.

125

Contributors

Matthew James Babcockteaches English at BYUIdaho in Rexburg. His book, Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis,
is available from the University of Delaware Press. He has received
the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, two Pushcart Prize
Nominations, and his novella, He Wanted to Be a Cartoonist for The
New Yorker, won first place in Press 53s Open Awards in 2010. His
poetry and creative nonfiction are forthcoming in Poecology and War,
Literature, and The Arts.
Les Blakewas raised in southeast Idaho and is a graduate of Brigham
Young University. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife Christy
and their three sons. His poetry has appeared in Sunstone Magazine
and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Kjerste Christensenis the Faculty Cataloger for Contemporary
Mormonism at Brigham Young Universitys Harold B. Lee Library.
As such, she gets to catalog all of the interesting books about Mormonism that everyone else is writing, which seems like the best of
both worlds.
Melissa Dalton-Bradfordresides in Geneva, Switzerland, with
her husband Randall, and Dalton and Luc, the two youngest of their
four children. (Their daughter, Claire, is currently a full-time LDS
missionary in Rome, Italy). She took a BA in German and an MA
in comparative literature from BYU, and taught German, humanities, English, and writing at the university level. Her poetry has been
anthologized in Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets (Peculiar Pages) and in Dance with Them (Segullah). Her poetry and essays
126

Contributors

have garnered numerous awards and been published in Irreantum and

Segullah. She has written a substantial grief anthology generated by
the tragic death of her oldest son, Parker, at the age of 18, and her
book Global Mom: A Memoir (Familius) was published in June 2013.
She blogs at Melissa Writes of Passage.
Simon Peter Eggertsenwas born in Kansas, raised in Utah,
schooled in Virginia and England. He has degrees in literature, language, and law (BYU, Virginia, Queens College, Cambridge). His
verses have been or will be published in Nimrod, Vallum (Canada),
Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, FreeFall (Canada), Dialogue,
Weber: The Contemporary West and elsewhere. His verse recently
won the Irreantum Prize for Poetry (2012) and was shortlisted for
the Fish Short Memoir Prize (Ireland, 2012). He has been a finalist
for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (Nimrod, 2009), awarded an
International Publishing Prize (Atlanta Review, 2009), and had two
honorable mentions among the New Millennium Writing Awards
(#29, 2010). His work is anthologized in Fire in the Pasture (2011) and
Animal Companions, Animal Doctors (2012).
Angela Hallstromis the author of the novel Bound on Earth and
the editor of a collection of short fiction by Mormon authors, Dispensation: Latter-Day Fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her husband
and four children and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin
River Falls.
Braden Hepnerlives with his wife and son in Idaho. His novel will
be published by Torrey House Press in summer 2014.
Cristine Hutchison-Jones received her BA in American Studies and Religion from Florida State University in 2001, and her PhD
in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University in 2011.
She is a cultural and intellectual historian of religion in the United
States with a focus on religious intolerance and representations of
minorities. Her dissertation, Reviling and Revering the Mormons:
127

Defining American Values, 18902008, explored images of the Mormons in American news, fiction and non-fiction writing, and television and film. She is the author of Center and Periphery: Mormons
and American Culture in Tony Kushners Angels in America (in Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen, Decker and
Austin, eds. [Utah State University Press, 2010]).
Lynne Larson, a retired teacher, has written widely for national
and regional publications, including Dialogue, Sunstone, the Journal
of Mormon History, the Ensign, and the New Era. Her stories and columns have appeared in Utah Holiday and Mountainwest Magazine.
Her historical novel, In the Shadow of an Angel, was released in July
by Covenant Communications. Its theme reflects her abiding interest
in Mormon and Western history, particularly with regard to women.
She and her husband Kent live in American Fork, Utah, and have
three grown children.
Heather Marxwas the winner of the 2004 Irreantum Fiction Contest and has served as fiction editor at Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought since 2008. The recipient of English degrees from Wellesley
College and Boston University, she lives with her family outside of
Boston.
Melody Neweyearns a living as a registered nurse, grows a respectable garden, and writes when shes not building sheet forts with her
grandkids. Her poetry has appeared in on-line journals and small
press throughout the Wasatch Front.
Steven L. Peckis an evolutionary ecologist at Brigham Young University. His novel, The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Press), was
named the AML best novel of 2011, and he was a Finalist for the
Montaigne Medal. His horror novel A Short Stay in Hell (Strange
Violin Editions) and middle grade novel The Rifts of Rime (Cedar
Fort Press) were published in 2012. His poetry has been nominated
for the Rhysling Award given by the Association of Science Fiction

Contributors

Poetry. His poetry book Incorrect Astronomy was recently published

by Aldrich Press. His creative work has appeared in Abyss & Apex,
Daily Science Fiction, H.M.S. Beagle, Encounter Magazine, Irreantum,
Jabberwocky Magazine, Lissettes Tales of the Imagination, Pedestal Magazine, Silver Blade, Tales of the Talisman, Journal of Unlikely Entomology,
and Warp and Weave. He has received a number of awards for his
fiction. More about his work can be found at www.stevenlpeck.com.
 orn and raised in eastern Idaho, Jaren Watson is back where
B
he began. He teaches technical communication and composition at
Brigham Young UniversityIdaho and, with his wife and children,
enjoys a quiet life in the slow lane. Jaren received his graduate training at the University of Arizona, where he earned a Master of Fine
Arts in fiction. Even when not asked his writing aesthetic, he supplies
it anyway, quoting Akira Kurosawas dictum, To be an artist means
never to avert ones eyes. For assistance with the painful details of
this essay, he extends his reverent thanks to his mother, Irene Watson.
Ivan Wolfeteaches English at Arizona State University and earned
his MA in English from BYU and his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of TexasAustin. He is originally from Homer, Alaska.

129

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