You maybe believe that it was always the way it is today in Kolob, with the old Mormon ranchers on the one side and the newcomers on the other. This is untrue. When the hippies first come, even when the uranium prospectors come through here the years I was in France in the war, the Kolob people was well acquainted with fighting and backbiting. Of course, we was all of our own minds and as spooky and cranky as anyone else anywhere, but I think you can say we was in two groups: there was the few of us that had land and cattle and buildings paid off and the best grass for winter feed, water uphill of us, and so on. Then there was the rest who drew poor land or it was overworked and so did not have cattle or buildings to speak of, and poor water shares and debts, so they worked for us. Those of us who run the place, my family foremost, had our share of hardship. Our boys died of horses and ranching as much as the others. Our wives died of babies the same as the others. But when the droughts come we had the better water. In nineteen fifty-four our ponds dried to chalk and we had to drive our cattle over the mountain to auction. We lost half on the drive and sold the rest at a loss. But the creek this high never run out completely. We got two lean cuttings off the top pastures and kept our breeding stock. But the other group I mention, the poor-land group, they mostly pack up and move away in fifty-four and fifty-five til Kolob was mostly empty, only two children in school. Some of them come back in sixty or thereabouts to claim their land, but most we never seen again. They just didn't have the water or the grass to hold it. Now, these two groups, we had the resentments and suspectings and gossiping you'd expect, but we also had different personalities that got differenter during the drought and after. I am one of the blessed ones to of come from the water and grass families, so of course I have a perspective on this you can suspect of preferring my own people. But the water and grass families, the big ranchers, we was more educated and polite, valued a gentleness and dignity in our business and had debts of gratitude amongst us that cinched us together. Our clothes was storebought and clean. We did not wear skins and our hats was summer straw and winter felt. We had the better horses and gear and the cars and trucks and we went from time to time to the city and our wives had silver and china. The poor-land families just never did prosper. They was just wore-out. And their manners did show just how wore-out they was: they was a loud, fighting, foul-mouthed people who wore the same dirty clothes all year, patched til they fell apart. Just rags. And pelts, even. They was still deerhide shirts and pants common in Kolob before the drought. They was I think a reckless people, without respect for the tender feelings, no love or kindness or sweetness amongst them. You should suspect me of preferring my own people when I say this, but in them days a boy from a good ranching family would be a young gentleman, and a poor boy would be a reckless and careless scoundrel. They was rascals. I suppose they had nothing to lose, and I and my people we had everything to lose, so we had a code of good behavior we held, while them poor families was just wild. I have not missed more than a few meals except fasting in my life and I don't pretend I know what hunger and desperation will do to a person, but same way my horses are fat and shiny on their pasture, on green grass, with a barn and alfalfa hay in the winters, and wont run or kick when you approach them, them poor boys was like a wild, bony mare you run up a canyon gone to give you heck you try to rope her and will never ride proper.
One time my father was down to Larsons' to sign some paper to take Johnny Jepson's top pasture for non-payment. He owed my father for a loan to purchase water shares. This was the Jepsons the grandfather of Shirl, Kade's mother, down across from the Larson's that is now boarded up. So, my father was down there at the old Post Office in Larsons' porch and Joe Nelson's father was witness. Nelsons was and still is owners of the best grassland inside Kolob and in the draw, and the finest ranchers and upstanding in the Ward. So, my father and Joe Nelson's father and Sister Larson was waiting to take Johnny Jepson's deed to that pasture and he didn't show. So they ride over to Jepsons', just a sorry house of raw boards in a patch of sand and a sorry starved mule out back and Jepson come out yelling and lets his two dogs off their chains. So my father and Joe Nelson's father whistled their four dogs from the road and of course there's a dogfight, but four against Jepson's two, so Jepson goes and starts kicking my father's dogs. So my father and Joe Nelson's father get down and chase Johnny Jepson around and he, Jepson, turn on my father and bite him on the arm and on the hand and on the stomach and I think on the knee before they knock him down and tie him in the dirt. This was not just nipping, it was biting to take a bite of. My father had a strip of meat hanging off his arm and Jepson had blood on his chin and shirt. Anyways, this is what I mean saying the poor families was wild: the yelling, the settin the dogs on them, the kicking and biting, the not paying their debts. This was a reckless people, and no tender feelings in them. I guess Jepson had a pasture to lose, but he knew it was already lost and he was cornered. Desperate.
Anyways, so, back to Handy Whitehead. You want to understand that boy you got to understand the temperament of the poor people. They are a wild and fighty people, even the ones who come back after the drought. Some got their houses back, but no good land or water attached. Most just pulled in a trailer and lived in that, or in anything weathertight they had. Same as always, they work for the ranchers. Handy's family, the Whiteheads, always worked for my family, the Youngs, here on the ranch and cowboying on our leases. Handy's father worked for my father. He was as wild as any, but we was friends of a sort. When Whiteheads was losing their land during the drought, I think in fifty-six, my father made him a deal: that Whiteheads could stay in their house on a acre if they deeded the pasture to my father, and he would forgive their debts. My father had more water than he needed and trenched a new ditch to Whitehead's land, now ours, and watered it and then had Whiteheads work it. At my father's orders they planted it in winter rye and watered heavy and disked the rye under and planted again and ran just a few dairy cows, and within a few years that pasture was pretty good again. I think Handy's father was shamed. He lost his land, then worked it for my father, and it greened up only when my father owned it. Of course, it was the water. That land was just blowsand without water, and my father owned the water. But before the drought Whitehead had a few head of his own and had some pride. After, the pasture was almost ready for corn, but Whitehead owned nothing and my father owned more than ever. There was a a few years Handy's father would not look me in the eye or speak to me more than necessary. He still cowboyed with me, but I can't honestly say we was friends. His clothes got shabbier and his horse died one winter all underfed, out there between his house and the road with its ribs showing, a shame on that family. With no horse they cut no heating wood that year, and maybe would of froze in that plank house if my father hadn't sent down a truckload of wood. So my father, with the notes and deeds, the water, the work, even the stovewood, you could say he owned the Whiteheads. Handy grew up in that. Just a skinny, running-nose, yellowhaired boy in poverty. I felt terrible about that. I could hardly look at Whiteheads in them days. But Handy didn't want to live like that, in that sorry house on that little square of sand and goatsheads. One thing you need to understand about Handy is he is much smarter that you and me. I suppose that hunger and cold and humiliation put a pang in his mind. Not that he was good in school. Hardly went. But when they paved 144 in sixty-eight the bookmobile came down from Salt Lake. It was a big event, like the circus come to town. That old schoolbus full of books and the pretty lady that checked out the books. Handy checked out the limit every three months, and he read every word. And when he ran out of his books, he borrowed others and read and re-read every one. It didn't matter hardly what. Adventures, Huckleberry Finn, recipes, how to wire a house, romances, he read all of them. He got several of them committed to memory. Handy is the biggest reader I ever met. You might think he's crazy, but he's just halfbroke. Goes on about every darn thing and you can't half understand him the way he talks wild. But there is not a better-read man in Kolob. When he was I think twelve, still little and ragged and wild, we was at the chapel for the talent show, it was always the good families sent their children up to say a poem or part of the Gettysburg or a Article of Faith or what have you. Sing a song. So, Handy goes up out of turn, unannounced, wearing his gray patched poor clothes, and started reciting. Just looked up and started in with that wild squawking voice you heard, and he had us just spellbound. Ten minutes he said this wonderful poem about black ships and the heroes, and the war between the Trojans and the Greeks. We was thrilled. I can still remember. We was all just gone from the room in our imaginings. That boy would of gone on to the end but my father stopped him to let the other kids have a chance.
Showing posts with label Kolob. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kolob. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
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.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
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.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
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.
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.
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Ted May Goes to Church for a Change
"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 woulda 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 Sister 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 a duet 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.
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 woulda 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 Sister 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 a duet 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.
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