Fielding Smith Hunting Deer ROUGH DRAFT

Well before noon he waits in a dry alcove behind the water for the last of it to sluice down. It sluices then trickles then drips into the scatter of fresh-washed rocks just this last hour flushed from the reef above. Early he rode his horse and led the mule hours below 144, an hour at least below the reef where the fireroad ends. From where he tied the horse and mule he walked a half hour, contouring mostly, to this perfect blind: a soft floor under big pines and behind a fallen tree still thick with brown needles and above a falling open meadow. A stream meanders below inside willow and chokecherry. Lupine, geranium, then black sedges low by the streambank. The opposite hill climbs to yellow aspen. He shrugs out of his blaze vest and stuffs it in his pack. He hears his wife make him promise to wear it but she is not here. He moves low and quiet and sets up his chair behind the fallen tree. His view of the meadow is wide and free through a sort of window he had pruned in the thick boughs. He sits and levers the bolt up and back one smooth movement at a time to chamber a round and he checks the safety before leaning the barrel into a crook with the stock to the right of his feet. With the binoculars he scans the whole far edge of the meadow, taking his time. He picks up the rifle and scopes a tree he knows to be 250 yards away. He had zeroed the scope at 200. He drinks water then sits silent.

The trees drip around him and steam rises from the meadow. A rock shifts in the reef above and a skitter of pebbles follows. It's still after the rain. He unfocuses his eyes and listens to the sounds: dripping, rattling of cobbles in the stream, distant woodpecker, jay, wheezing chatter of flocking siskins. He sits and sits. He pisses in a ziplock bag and pinches it shut. Later, breeze starts and he notes the scent of the meadow. He remembers his father the day he first showed Fielding this meadow, and he recites the names from that distant afternoon: pennyroyal, monkeyflower, paintbrush. Parry's and pale primrose. Fireweed, aster, bluebell, speedwell. Joseph Fielding Smith knew all the flowers , the birds, the trees, everything, it seemed, the world is made of. His mind, to young Fielding, was lists of lists, a whole taxonomy of the mountain and the desert verge. All the workdays of his life keeping the tractors of Youngville running, and all the other days and his Septembers horseback on the mountain. The garage, hot and cold, greasy, slag-gray, full to the high rafters of gray objects for which Fielding at first had no names, but for which he learned the uses and then the names.

A customer, an old rancher whose name Fielding can't remember: I seen that bird book at my grandkids' up to Salt Lake. There's a thousand birds in there. I'll be danged if you know them all, Joe.

His father: Only if they's on the mountain.

How many birds we got up there?

Fair number.

An you know them all?

I think so.

How come you learned em all?

When I was this ole of my hands and go up there I pay attention. His back was to the customer. He was intent on a stuck part.

It is just paying attention you saying? Seems you'd have to study, too. Yet how you'd do that I don't know.

I just learned it.

Well, who teach you?

I don't know. I know some from my mother.

You have the bird book when you was a boy?

We had only the scriptures.

Well it's a miracle how a boy could learn all the birds on the mountain without nobody to teach him.

Who teach Adam then?

He named em hisself.

Well.

So you call em by your own naming? Not like in the bird book?

I don't know what's in the bird book. But if it calls em by the same names I do then that would be a miracle. I jus calls em by the names I thought up when I first learned em.

Well, that explains it.

Look, I just fix tractors. I don't know what that bird book calls em or what they calls em in Viet Nam or Mexico. How you going to keep em straight if you got no bird names? If you want to keep em straight with Mexicans you got to use Mexican bird names. If you want to sell more than one bird book you got to use the names everybody agrees on. But until right now nobody ever been interested in birds in this town but me, so the names I use for the birds on the mountain are my own names, and I know this is no use to nobody so I'll use the damn bird book when I take Fielding up to hunt. I will see a bird and find it in the bird book and read the book-name and tell it to Fielding and if he cares to learn it, why, he will have means to converse about birds with others.

What about the Mexicans?

What about I finish this p.t.o. an you ask the boy what he's going to do about talking about birds with Mexicans. I got a lot full of broke tractors and it's haying.

Well. Fielding? Looks I made your daddy grumpy asking about birds.

Fielding knows the names in the books. His father didn't tell him his own names. He sits and sits and wonders what his father called them, and under what system of description or relatedness or other taxonomic basis his father had named them. Color, or the trees they rested in, or the food they ate, or the calls they made. Like cardinal or maybe raven. And dipper and swift. And like hummingbird and chickadee and warbler. But not like goose or swallow or sparrow. These had names either arbitrary or from an earlier language, maybe Adam himself's.

He sits and sits. From time to time he uses the binoculars, always moving slowly and shading the lenses to avoid reflecting sunlight. In the mid afternoon the creek rises abruptly, then goes back down. Above this draw not a cloud visible. Thunder at the very edge of hearing.

Fielding, buddy, keep that barrel down.

Sorry.

Don't be sorry, son, jus do it right an keep quiet.

Okay. His arms have cramped and he's very tired, but Fielding doesn't show it.

They walked half the day and Fielding didn't know what they were doing except when his father led them into a stand of oaks and squatted by a round depression in last year's leaves, and held up a tuft of yellow hair. Tawny. Then Fielding followed him out of the oaks and parallel to a narrow bare path. After a while they reached a small beaver pond but kept back in the aspens. They sat on a beaver-downed tree and watched til dusk and finally the buck came down halting with his handsome head up testing, testing and at last to the sedges where he bowed to drink. His father held a hand out to say wait. Fielding waited. His left hand shook on the foregrip. That was the .257 Roberts. The buck stood and stepped and stopped. He faced them dead square and the world, all its sound and color, drew into the buck's amber eye and his father turned his hand then palm up so gentle Fielding shifted the rifle behind a trunk and knelt off the fallen tree silent into duff. His left hand he steadied on the trunk and extended his thumb and rested the rifle there and his father withdrew his hand as if to say You are on your own, son, and he thumbed the safety and sighted. The buck stamped a fly twitched an ear licked his nose. Fielding sighted at the shoulder. The buck drank again then stood and turned. Fielding held his breath. His father blew quiet behind him and he remembered to breathe. He waited. The buck stepped and presented his flank but a branch was in the way. He waited. The buck stepped again and he followed the flat behind his shoulder until the buck stepped clear of the branches. His hands shook and his breath caught and the sound came too soon, a shock and almost a whiteness in his head. He knew it was wrong, felt it in him after all that practice shooting the cutout. He racked the lever [LEVER ACTION .257? Yes Browning BLR 1969] and jerked the rifle back back up and looked across at the still pondbank that seemed to never have seen nor heard mention of buck. He sat back. In the still air the pale smoke still hung like a stain after the rifle's shameful early report. He sat back ashamed, small, childish and eager. His father stood and gripped his shoulder for a moment. It's okay. Next time.

The sun has lowered to the top of the spruces across the meadow and their shadows comb toward him against the nap of the grass. A cold breeze comes up. He bends low behind the fallen trunk to put on his wool coat and hat. He can't see into the shadows. A marmot moves in some tumbled boulders. He sits and sits. His right hand is cold on the trigger guard.

He has added to the map over several years, black for routes he's scouted and red for kill sites paired to his shooting positions. He has gradually outlined the vast area close enough to 144 but not too close. The map shows what he believes to be the swath of land from which he can haul meat hoseback, but which is inaccessible enough that the geared-up ATV-lazy suburban hunters won't come within hearing. The area shrinks year by year. There are more hunters, and they are stupider. Their machines are more capable. The fireroads reach deeper into the forest, and they are better-graded. Their rifles shoot flatter. And his own strength is waning and the sweetness of the hunt is dilute with years. And he has no son of his own to teach, who would give new purpose to what he feels is an old and obsolete practice. What was once necessity is now, to be honest, just a game or entertainment, something that men of a particular race and politics do to show their allegiances. Just this morning he rode down a raw recent extension of the fireroad past a parked gleaming new F-350 hitched to a trailer of six ATVs. Across the rear window a decal: TAKE MY CARBON FOOTPRINT AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR LIBERAL ASS. The reek of gasoline. The scattered brass. The grotesque calibers: .340 Weatherby, .300 WinMag, [  ], the overkill ammo of amateurs with puerile military fantasies hunting what? Cape buffalo? Black rhinos? Tyrannosaurus Rex? Terrorists? His own worn .308 has for several years felt antiquated and shabby and he has longed to replace it, but now it feels like a craftsman's tool, sufficient, perfect for the job, an unflaunted indication of experience and superior skill and quiet masculine competence. The horse and mule, too. And the wool and leather. Shut up, now, he tells himself. You are getting smug. You do this for the meat and for the quiet and in memory of your father. Then he rode on, picking a route away from the plume of bacon stench that came from their camp in the trees.

That evening with a black line he excluded another valley from his map. The good hunting areas succumbed to a rising sea of noise and heedlessness and stupidity. The vast swaths broke into archipelagoes of harder and harder land. He hopes that the deer gather in these places, too, driven out of the easier land by bacon and gasoline and 1,000-yard target practice and abandoned gutshot carcasses.

For years he has been on the verge of discerning a pattern in deer movements. A finer set of movements within the coarse seasonal migrations up and down the mountain. This discernment could allow him to break free of the long cramped waiting in blinds within sight of streams and from the long days of looking in rough terrain. There must be some faint but inviolable patterns, and he would discern them if he worked at it long enough. He would pay attention the same as his father had. But the deer kept humbling him. Last summer he had scouted a promising area. He had found a hidden way down into a valley that he had thought entirely enclosed within a battlement of vertical Navajo. For years he had looked down on grassy meadows and streambanks unsullied by cattle and had seen the complacent deer. Then he found the way through the rocks, so narrow he had to take the panniers off the mule and lead his horse. Once in the valley he set up and watched, and for three days hadn't seen a single deer. He had to go home, so he packed up and was headed out when a buck stepped into the meadow ahead of him and just watched, unalarmed. He took out the rifle and shot him. What had kept the deer away while he watched? And why had that instinct failed this buck? He didn't know. Heat made them go upmountain, and cold made them go down. Water governed their daily circuit. But all their other movements appeared random. After all this hunting.

The sun seemed to get hung up in the tops of the spruces. It stayed there for some time. He expects it to move but it doe not, and he considers that his expectation must derive from clocks and rest in some habitual conception of time that it always move forward in measured increments. Our ancestors and the indians must have seen time as starting and stopping, and slowing and speeding, he thinks. Bullshit. In the shadows dew forms on seedheads that now cast their own lunar light. Day and night at once in this same meadow, and summer and winter, and the falling away of years.

He listens to the stream and thinks lonely thoughts of all the many days he's patterened deer alone on the mountain. This last June when the deer had gone about as high as they would he had marked his map with question marks showing his guesses about where the deer would be in September on their way back down to the winter hay stubble of Kolob. He was riding a familiar slope above 144, checking for sign in the deep-cut trails that meandered up the mountain according to no logic but the inscrutable hunches, interests, daydreams and ambitions of deer. As he rode he pondered their fecklessness and supposed it to be neither intelligence nor stupidity, and neither could it be simple instinct, because wouldn't instinct have produced by now a more decisive and efficient behavior? Would instinct alone guide so many deer for so many years to climb an arbitrary arc across the hillside, reach the summit, then bend back and loop around an outcropping and through a copse, only to wander, single-file, back to where they'd started? It must be a kind of distractibility or maybe an aesthetic sense, or some set of preferences unattached to mere survival, he had concluded. Or the seemingly arbitrary path is the map of unperceived forces. Or subtleties for which he has no sense. Maybe deer are like children, who eat and drink when they must, and have more or less predictable and sensible fears, but who otherwise follow only momentary enthusiasms without regard for reason. So he rode and thought and stopped now and then to add to the map on his pommel. And late in the day he cut below a stand of aspen and followed a trail into dense willows and reined at a bright movement ahead. He stood in the stirrups expecting a deer and saw instead the girl step out of the pond on the far bank. The water was silver on her. She stood in the sun and towelled her hair with her shirt, then turned and turned in the sun until she finally dresses and disappeared into the willows. The world closes and condenses to a point of soundless attention when you sight a buck and it did identically when he saw her that day.

He sits. Cramps and tremors started some time ago. The meadow is now all in shadow. He scans the streambank, but in the dark all is disordered and depthless. He sets the binoculars aside and brings up the rifle. After some time he hears them down there. It is evening. The dark comes and the deer hang back. He waits as atill as he can. Then one and another move into the meadow, heads up. They stand all straight to him. The lengths of their bodies arrayed radially from him, the centerpoint. Aware of him there he thinks though he has not moved. One by one they step forward up out of the sedges into the meadow itself and the sky holds a washed-out whiteness only as scrim to the black spruces. He levels the rifle and thumbs the safety. The sound of a twig snapping brings their heads up and ears forward. Then another snap and a third, these anomalous sounds suddenly in pattern, an iamb that is only human, the beat of a man coming down a hill sidelong, and as the several deer bound all in an instant back over the stream as man crashes through the treeline. Charlie Cowary, all in new blaze orange swinging a big rifle with an oversized scope stamps into the meadow verge and looks around. Looks right past Fielding as he sits, then at the sky. He shrugs out of his pack and fumbles, then clicks on a headlamp and pans it over the meadow, though the prick of light makes no difference in the diffuse evening light. Fielding notes, as though with one ear the racket Charlie is making, and as though with the other the crashing departure of the deer down the streambed and angry sets the safety as Charlie cinches his pack and leaves the empty meadow the way he arrived. A sudden malicious urge fills Fielding, and he fills his lungs and makes of his voice the most contorted and violent shriek he can, which he lets taper to a long howl and he is gratified to hear, after a moment's silence, Charlie begin to sprint up in the trees. Fielding's voice comes back to him from the cliff-face above Upper Lost-a-Cow. It was the call of no known creature as though his throat had opened onto another world from which nightmares take shape and leap into this one to terrorize and kill, and to send back to the order and safety of the highway those who stray too far into the wilderness only a more cautious and skillful hunter deserves.

Kade Goes Dancing at the Barn Dance

This is the barn dance up ahead. They are parking on the road in the dark in the pickup Ezra borrowed from the Bishop. There is three up front and there is four in the back. They picked up Lauro and this new hippy named Fox and this girl from down at the yurts. Lauro and them are smoking grass not Kade he does not smoke that shit. Kade is drinking beers and stomping them on the truckbed, You better sit down in here says the girl they are down in the truckbed in the hay and fencetools and the twine and the trash the Bishop's truck is full of. Kade is more happy sitting on the stakes up in the wind. You're going to lose your hat Kade says Lauro. He is smiling he flicks his jay into the night. Kade gives the girl a beer she taps the can on his and they drink and he stomps the cans and they get out on the dirt. Ez cuts the engine and they hear the music it is the band from Youngville they are playing the Kolob song the girl is dancing so he swings her in a circle Jesus Kade put me down she says so he is laughing. They are walking by the parked cars to the barn at the end. This is where he moved the handlines this morning on the Christiansens' alfalfa. The handlines are straight that is how he places them. There is some in a truck in lawnchairs drinking he seen them same boys over to Cannonville he sneaks up to their bumper in the dark and bounces the truck hard and they yell Jesus and Fox says Everyone is praying tonight. Ez and his buddies pass a bottle it smells strong. In the light of the barn there are the people in their good jeans and their dresses, some are dancing. This is the barn where the Christiansen boy shot hisself he was Kade's Mom's age they was in school. Also he hung hisself. The way he done it was that he put the gambrel rope about his neck stood on the rail pulled the trigger fell and the gambrel caught him and he rolled out on the rail trolley to the middle they thought he hung hisself til they saw his sunday jacket bloody and most of his head up there in the roof he was dressed for Sunday they never did know why he done it. These are the Christmas lights and the music is loud that is how these boys play it. Those are the cigarette and jay lights here and there in the dark away from the light. Here is Ted he has a flask he hands to Kade it is strong Hi Mr May he says he says Come to dance with the pretty girls? Yes of course. He tries to get Ted to take a beer but he does not he says No thank you Kade how's your mother. She is okay she is not coming That's what I figured says Ted I'll see you round he says and sits on a tailgate with the new cowboy Tomasz who Kade gives a beer and says Hello how are you he says Pretty good thanks Kade and he taps his can on his and on Ted's flask. This is the stansion he welded the hinge on and burned his arm pretty bad. He is looking up to see if the Christiansen boy's head is still up in the roof he knows it's not but he always looks. They cleaned it up but the gambrel is there still they still hang a buck or a elk on there if the weather is cool. This is the sand they put in here for dancing and the stage that is wood from the old church basketball court the basketball lines do not line up now. He is dancing now and Crazy Billy in the band is smiling at him he has beads in his beard he is a crazy son of a gun playing them drums in his work Levi's and just a undershirt. He is looking for Kandace she said she would dance with him. He sees the girls from Youngville but he does not see Kandace. He is doing some spins and kicks and they are playing Twist and Shout the dancers made a circle around him to clap and holler they are passing this bag of wine with the little plastic spigot. This girl from Youngville comes out and does this move that he seen on TV with one hand up and head turned then the other hand up and head turned the other way the tops of her tits is shiny and bouncing so he does his horse-riding move and tips his hat at her and the dancers all yell and laugh and this guy he did saltcedar work with in the canyon hands him the bag of wine and he drinks it. Then he sees Kandace come in so he runs to her and picks her up and spins her and she is yelling something he can't hear it is too loud he just spins her til he almost falls over a chair and then she goes somewhere he don't know where so pretty soon he goes out to a old Mustang in the dark and drinks some Gatorade. It is true he can circle almost her whole waist with his hands she is that small and he is this big. He asks some cowboys do they want to armwrestle he has his elbow on the trunk of the Mustang they say no thanks nobody hardly ever will armwrestle he is that big. Now it is later and he walks back to the truck but it is gone so now he is walking home in the dark along 144 he can still hear the band back there there are eighteen lights in Kolob. Here is the Nelson boy's new pivotline twelve heads it is the biggest in Kolob. Those are some mulies going over the fence. This is the driveway and there are the heelers not barking they know him. There is his Mom's light on she is up waiting for him reading.  He lets the screendoor slap he needs to put on a new closer Hi love she says from her room How was it? It was fun Are you drinking? Yes more than you said she says nothing he goes in and kisses her she is reading she is wearing her reading glasses she is very old and pretty. Now he is upstairs he got axle grease on his good Wranglers he don't know how he remembers to turn out the light it is a long day now it is time to sleep he thinks of Kandace.

Kade and His Mom Go to the Small 'm' market

This is his mom saying Let's go to the Small 'm' market I just need this one piece of glass I don't need to go all the way up to the store. The dogs can go so he gets their ropes. This is the driveway fresh graded and all the weeds drying in the burn-pit. Here is the back way. When he was small he stopped here to watch a snake go down a gopher hole and a cat also stopped to watch under that bush and the cat went in the grass to another hole and waited and the gopher came out and the cat caught it and took it and then the snake came out they was hunting the same gopher. Here is the new foundation for the city people Fielding is building. It is right in the middle of the back way where the Larsons used to throw their bottles. This is the Larson house that has no windows just boards when he was small he played in there he could fit through a gap in the window boards. It was before the roof caved and it was still dry. It is broke now the chimney that one time had smoke and two men was sleeping in there in sleeping bags on the floor and his Mom told him stay away from that place we don't know nothing about them hippies. Here is where they go through the church fence it is down where the ditch washed out a post and they walk through to the back of the Small 'm'. This is the Mexican throwing trash in the dumpster and his Mom waves and so does he and the Mexican touches his hat and finishes his cigarette he is always in a hurry. Here is the porch and it has Kandace, and Charlie and some tourists and so he stops to see Kandace. She has a book. He stops and his Mom goes in. He puts the heelers on their ropes. They don't need ropes but that is the rule at the Small 'm'. Kandace is so pretty he likes to be her friend. Kandace was reading her legs are long and in the sun her hair is up and it is yellow. Kandace waves her way with her fingers she always waves this way. Hi Kandace he says You are pretty and the girl Kandace smiles and says You're sweet Kade. These are the tourists taking phone pictures of theirselves in front of the Small 'm' they have on black chaps and they have new Harleys lined up, the 1200s and he takes out his bandana and wipes the dust off the chrome on the gastank of one and the tourist says You don't have to do that and Kade says It is dusty this will make it pretty and Kandace puts down her book and smiles at him and pats the bench next to her so he goes over and sits down. What are you doing Kade. Going to the Small 'm' he says. My Mom is getting glass cut the brushhog throwed a rock when I did the driveway right through the kitchen window right in the sink. Kandace laughs. Her shorts are very small so the pockets poke out on her legs that are brown. He puts his hand there on her leg and she pushes it away and laughs Oh Kade you are too funny so he puts his hand in his pocket and he has dollars he forgot so he goes inside and gets a popsicle and he goes outside and gives it to Kandace but she doesn't take it. She always eats popsicles but she doesn't want this one so he eats it and gives the sticks to the dogs. The tourists start the Harleys and it is loud and the dogs get riled and Kandace covers her ears. It is hot the sky is blue the cloud has sat there downvalley all day not coming up. Are you going to the barn dance says Kandace Yes he says I will dance with you are you wearing a dress Yes she says What one he says It is blue. This is the one she wore that day at the cemetery for Old Man Nelson's funeral It is very pretty he says. Here is Charlie now coming over Hi Kade, Kandace he says. He is now standing there because Kade's Mom is coming out with the glass it has blue tape on the edges. Window broke? Yes she says From a rock. Kade he says I have some chainsaw work you can do and stacking cordwood and Kade says he will do it tomorrow today he has the Nelson boy's handlines it is going to rain later so he will see him tomorrow.  Let's go honey says Kade's Mom How's your mother Kandace? Kandace says Okay she picks up her book and stands the benchslats marked her legs pink Kade says Kandace I can see those screwheads on your legs from the bench. Oh Kade she says and his Mom says Let's go honey and he looses the dogs and they go into the willows with that piece of glass.

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.