Three Looks at Ted May.

1. Ted May, the Bishop, Tomasz, and the Girl Kandace. August.

The yellow parallelogram moved up the wall. He could see it move. He fell back into sleep then woke again. The room became very hot and he was thirsty. His pillow was soaked and his mouth tasted of sulphur. After some time he reached for his glass but found it dry. With real effort he rolled his legs off the bed and used the railing to get downstairs. He gulped water.

This is my bed and I'm lying in it, he thought. The bed I made.

The afternoon sun poured brass on the faded carpet and the window sash ticked like a furnace. The light lensed through the neat row of Jameson bottles and he thought of church and then of his wife and the ranch and his mind followed the deep singletrack of failure and loss.

The water revived him. He resolved to go out. He knew he needed his friends at this guttering end of two days drunk. He showered and shaved and put on a fresh shirt and his good hat and boots then drove the two blocks to the sawmill. They were just shutting down. The jointer still spun and thrummed a low note. The late light projected the opening of the overhead door into the drifting pine dust.

I am a wreck, he thought. Hi, Tomasz, he said.

Evening, Ted, said the younger man.

The houselike bulk of the Bishop straightened and turned and came forward out of the gloom. Brother Ted, he said, his voice full of outsize delight.

Good to see you, Bishop, said Ted, and smiled though it cost him some effort in his bleary discomfort.

Ted took a broom off the wall and started moving sawdust toward the truck. The mill men did, too, and they swept for a while in near silence, til the Bishop started to whistle.

You have a spirit of gladness, Bishop, said Ted, and the Bishop laughed.

Yes I do, Brother Ted. I was born happy. It is the gift The Lord hath given me.

Tomasz was new here, just arrived a few days ago from out of state, looking for ranch work. He wondered at the Bishop's language, that he could be an old rancher one moment and a jovial Old-Testament prophet the next. He expected a deep and frightening cultic certainty in the big man but so far had seen nothing but good humor and moments of silliness. The Bishop seemed genuinely elated to run a decrepit sawmill and a good-size ranch and to return home spent every evening to his round wife and several children.

Ted was thorough with his sweeping. He ran the broom around and under every obstacle he could lift as he went. The mill men were tired and the Bishop was sloppy but Ted left his area nearly spotless. Got to floss the shop, he said. I got to do something, can't just lie around watching the houseflies.

You can work here any time I got work, Brother Ted, said the Bishop.

You know I don't work for pay, Bishop.

Along the road, in the gravel, the girl walked by, her posture erect, her head canted to keep her hair in place. She thumbed her cell phone intently, proclaiming with her body and her absorption that she did not notice the sudden stillness in the shop. The lowering sun came to the men through her yellow hair and through her yellow skirt and she and the sun and the pine dust that hung in the air seemed to them all of a piece, contrived for their benefit, a silent golden tableau in the sudden silence at the end of a loud and punishing workday.

The Bishop returned to his broom. Tomasz glanced at Ted. Ted smiled and shook his head. You see that Tomasz?

Yessir, said Tomasz.

What's that? said the Bishop.

The girl Kandace, is what, said Ted, with laughter in his voice.

I tried not to, said the Bishop, and then looked down as though the pile of sawdust contained an admonition, or a cure.

Well, I saw her, said Ted. And she is the sweetest thing I maybe ever seen. At least in recent decades, he added, after a moment of thought.

She doesn't even know we saw her, said Tomasz.

Ted said: She don't wear that tight little getup for no other purpose. She knows something. About being looked at.

They went back to sweeping and the sun reached deep into the shop a downangled wedge of light and bats dropped out of the high rafters.

I am getting old, thought Ted. It is unseemly to say such things of a girl at my age. I guess I got to learn to keep my mouth shut, he said. Carrying on like a boy. He thought, Sometimes you don't mark the passing time and make adjustments to your behavior.

They swept the three piles of sawdust into one at the tailgate of the truck.

Civilization and its discontents, Ted said. And Tomasz looked uncertain.

2. Ted May at Church, of All Places, and the Bishop. September.

"And, so, brothers and sisters, that's it for the temple trip and so let's get that put together and get the youth to commit to that and there's gonna be lessons this month on the various temple work: the baptism of the dead and what's it called? Endowments. And one of you counselors need to remind me," here the Bishop grinned in self-deprecation and the congregation tittered as he looked back over his shoulder at his two counselors, and he continued "to get them donations set up and the bus is," his heavy breath was too close to the microphone as he looked down his nose through his crooked reading glasses at a scrap of paper "thirty-five dollars each person over to St. George."

He paused. "Okay, and then we got the storehouse project which this month is peaches and," he looked out over his glasses at the congregation. "Sister Christiansen?"

"It's huckleberry jam."

"That's my favorite. Good on a sandwich." They laughed. "Ok, so we got the peaches and the jam and we need to represent the ward over to Youngville gettin all that canning done, and it's not just the sisters need to get this job done, brothers. There is boxes to haul and when they got a bulging can, why, some brother's got to step up and taste it and see it's not got the botulism." The congregation laughed again.

"You can't say it's anyone's fault," Ted thought. "She could say I was a drinker and she would not be wrong, but who did not want sex and drove me to drink?"

"Okay, then. I think we got a announcement from the Relief Society." He looked through some scraps of paper, one of which fluttered down from the pulpit into the first row of folding chairs, where someone caught it and handed it back up. The Bishop took it absentmindedly while he read from a scrap. "Sister Smith? C'mon up." He turned and lowered himself heavy between his counselors.

"And who is a scrawny and bony son of a bitch with a temper that she didn't want to have sex with? You can't say it's her fault."

Sister Smith strode to the pulpit and seized the microphone with an abrupt wrenching grasp, setting off feedback that she alone seemed not to hear. "Brothers and sisters, it's that time of year again. The annual Gold and Green Ball will be October first. Brothers, you need to dust off your good suits and get your wives, your wife some red roses, which they are four-ninety-nine the dozen at the Ditchfield Walmart, and set the date aside. Every couple should be there. It's pot luck and the decorations will be the loveliest thing you ever seen. October one. And we got to get the punchbowl back from who took it home last year. And we need volunteers to stay after and put up the chairs and tables, so brothers each and every one of you got to sign up on the sheet going around in Elders' Quorum today. Thanks and see you there." She strode off the stage, her heels beating the floor.

The Bishop heaved himself up to the pulpit again and raised his eyebrows and grinned for a couple seconds, for no reason other than to show his affability in contrast to Sister Smith's officious brusqueness. "I wish someone would make a best-of video of me up here," he thought. "I am a entertaining son of a gun."

"Course, she knew who she was marrying. It's not like I was unknown to her. She knew I'm a angry man. If I didn't have the ranch back then she would of married a man who did." He pictured her sitting up there at the organ the way she used to do, with her bony back too straight and her hair too young streaked with gray. He pictured her sitting on the other side of the cold woodstove in the kitchen wearing her coat, and in his mind he held his hand palm-up, in a simple gesture as if to say "Light a goddamn fire if you're so cold," but when he looked up the Bishop was talking:

"...gonna be your last chance in September, so let me know or talk to the ward clerk and we'll be sure to meet, long as I'm home before my dear wife's got the roast out of the oven."

"You always take blame all the way back to Adam. Or Eve," he thought. "Goddamn her. For taking my youth. For her cold self and for taking everything." He thought of the ranch as it had been when they got married. The wide and neat hayfields. The new Ford. The house painted. He pictured her at the woodstove looking up and seeing him gesture, and saw her turn back down to her book with a sour expression on her face. Not a word between them. Both just bones and sinew and silent resentment still in their twenties. "If that lawyer walked in here..." he looked around the chapel and at his neighbors and lifetime friends, the long row of yellow crewcuts where the Bishop's boys flanked their roundshouldered mother, "...I would shoot him in the head," he thought.

The Bishop eased himself back down into the chair. It creaked loudly as the organist played the first moaning notes of the sacrament hymn.

"...shoot him and be justified," he thought. "Come into my life, don't even talk, don't cook good enough to get a hog to eat it, the sour looks, the avoiding me, the never once showing me gratitude or appreciation."

The Bishop looked out over the congregation as they sang. He looked at his boys, all broad and yellowhaired and dressed in the white shirt and blue clip-on. He could hear Gladys sing. "What a lovely voice," he thought, "she still has got after all these years." He thought back to when he was a boy and they sang with Gladys at the talent show and won, and that everybody laughed as they took the stage, both of them big and chubby and apple-cheeked and dressed to match in clothes his mother had made special, not counting on the comical effect of the bold plaid. He thought "This is the life I have got." He looked at his wife, not singing but staring forward with her thick arms folded high across her bosom. He looked at Ted out there at the back of the room, scowling and holding his hat. Ted smiled up. The Bishop felt okay about being the Bishop, right then. He thought ahead to his funeral. They would say that he had always been a kind and decent man, raised his boys right, been a hardworking rancher and mill-man and a valiant defender of his faith.

"Then leaving and taking the ranch and I pay both lawyers. That dried-up lying thief."

The middle-C was sticking again, producing a slightly warbling drone. The room was too hot and smelled of deodorant and diapers and mothballs. He could smell the storebought white bread all the way back here.

"Makes a man drink and drink bad," thought Ted. "Shit on them." He found himself up and walking to the door. Outside he smelled woodsmoke, and the yellow cottonwood leaves ticked across the parking lot. He loosened his tie and got in the old Ford and found his Waylon Jennings cassette, and drove the few blocks home. The mountain was in clouds. He pulled his handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped dust from the dashboard.

He removed his Sunday hat and put it atop the coat-tree. In his hurry to be on time this morning he had left his plate in the sink. Now he washed it and placed it in the rack. He fired the stove. The same one. Her rocker sat there still all these years later. A lightweight ladderbacked chair his mother had also used. He slid it 'til the runners were under the iron stove, then wrenched it hard forward and the old dry wood splintered almost without his effort. The legs came out of their mortises, then the spindles and armrests. The back took some work. He finally removed the kettle from the stove, raised the chair above his head, and brought it down. Then again with vehemence and it broke to sticks. These he swept into a pile in front of the stove. Sitting in his own chair now, he fed the stove the shambles of the chair. The old maple caught and a surge of heat filled the room. "A winter in here," he thought, and reached for the Jameson.

3. The Kolob Tabernacle Gets Under His Skin. December.

By fiat the prophet seer and revelator had it built at the crossroads, not at the corner of one quadrant but at the geometric centerpoint at the very intersection of the centerlines of the two roads in the perfect as-drawn crosshaired bullseye of what would have been a roundabout had more urbane planners had their way but which evolved in fact to become a rough rutted swerve of trafficked bare hardpan and later a merely expedient sweep of asphalt in the midst of which the Tabernacle now stood autonomous, alone and to appearance arbitrary so that what began as fiat ended up as apparent mistake, the certainty of the prophet seer and revelator coming finally to light as hamfistedness, the way what is white and bloated and fishbitten finally slips its chains and surfaces to indict.  He thought: this is a likeness of our discomfort with the social order: that the Tabernacle, meeting place for the propagation of edicts, the leveling of censure, the knitting of the congregation, the buttressing of values and family and general cohesion, should so whelm the townplan that all roads must needs finally go their near-heedless way around it lest it govern overmuch the hurried passage of the people who no matter their allegiances must get where they are going.  And that in delaying them every day by looming there omnipresent, unaware of its architectural solecism, a shadowing reminder of their oaths and contracts, it so chafe and irk that they tire of the order it was placed there to keep and become wild.  Thus the rough expedient looping of the blacktop where the prophet had designed a neat-compassed circle did for him, for this modern man this century later, symbolize the accommodations people, individuals all, make to live with each other else the social contract so irk and chafe that at some personal culmination one of the overregulated citizens mix fertilizer with diesel and bring down the Tabernacle.  In this vast country, at least, it is in no one's nature to be so overseen, stared-down on and disapproved of, by this kind of unblinking panoptic presence of distant authority.  It loomed there and he imagined it circled with a wind-rippled God-sustained red banner declaring Non Annuit Coeptis under an unblinking eye.  One may love the church and resent its nagging.

Then one moonless night in the deadwinter the man ran off the expedient asphalt, well into his fifth of Jameson, and came up in the ditch in the deep snow, tires frictionless, and the headlights bore an upangled wedge of light through the snowfall directly at the facade of the Tabernacle.  For a long few minutes as he reeled behind the wheel it glowed alone and faceless in all the night and as the man noted how its fine old stone was now nearly hidden in the aluminum and vinyl of the expedient costeffective tithebought recent remodel and the whiskey sidled up his esophagus in unctuous laminar flow then he became convinced of his night's work.  He offed the headlights, lurched the two blocks home, and returned with paint and roller.  In the near-complete dark he overturned a trashcan, chinned the gutter over the new modular aluminum entry, made the roof, and considered his canvas: an uninterrupted upper wall of squared blocks of red sandstone maybe forty feet across and taller than he could reach.  He marked the very axial center of the wall, the spot bisected by the cardo of Kolob Town, and drafted in white oil housepaint a vast eyewhite, almond, symmetrical, and stylized.  Then an arm-compassed iris of barnred, then a pupil in stoveblack, which he drew smallish because he imagined it would seem to squint its contempt.  He stood back woozy in the cold and disordered by the gusting of the snow.  The eye was plain even in this moonless solstice, fairly done, clear and simple, iconic.  He threw the paint buckets down into the snow and jumped after.  He worried briefly about the footprints in the snow between his truck and the road.  He left the paint to freeze, fetched a shovel from the truckbed and began to dig and some time later, with the whiskey wearing off, he drove home.