Irreantum, Volume 6, No. 2, 2004

Irreantum
A Review of Mormon Literature and Film

October 2004
Beginnings
$8.00
Beginnings
Irreantum
A Review of Mormon Literature and Film
October 2004
Irreantum Staff
General Editor Laraine Wilkins
Fiction Editor Sam Brown
Creative Nonfiction Editor Kate Holbrook
Readers Write Editor David Pace
Special Features Editor Angela Hallstrom
Book Review Editor Jana Bouck Remy
Book Review Assistant Andrew Hall
Newsletter Editor Vanessa Oler
Copyediting Team Manager Beth Bentley
Copyediting Staff Colin Douglas

Sarah Maitland
Alan Rex Mitchell

Vanessa Oler
Steven Opager
Editorial Assistant Sarah Jenkins
Design and Layout Marny K. Parkin
Association for Mormon Letters Board

President Melissa Proffitt
Conference Chair Gideon Burton
Board Members Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury

Suzanne Brady

Jen Wahlquist

Eric D. Snider

Mark Thomas

Kylee Turley
Treasurer Lory D. Empie, Jr.
Annual Proceedings Editor Linda Hunter Adams
Webmaster Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury
AML-List Moderator Jacob Proffitt
AML-List Co-moderator Gideon Burton
Irreantum General Editor Laraine Wilkins
Irreantum (ISSN 1528-0594) is published three times a year by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML),
P.O. Box 51364, Provo, UT 84605-1364, www.irreantum.org. Irreantum volume6, no. 2 (October 2004)
2004 by the Association for Mormon Letters. All rights reserved. Membership and subscription information can be found at the end of this isssue; single issues cost $8.00 (postpaid). Advertising rates begin
at $50 for a full page. The AML is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, so contributions of any amount are
tax deductible and gratefully accepted.
Views expressed in Irreantum do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or of AML board
members. This magazine has no official connection with or endorsement by The Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints. Irreantum is supported by a grant from the Utah Arts Council and the National
Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Contents
Letter to the Editor
From the Editor
Critical Essays
What If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel?
Which of Course It Is Not Bruce Jorgensen 13
A Material Religion in Harrells Vernal Promises, or
Whats the Matter with Mormons? Robert Bird 33
Poems
Two poems Jared Pearce 42
Three poems Lance Larsen 64
Two poems Lisa Bickmore 68
Three poems Marilyn Bushman-Carlton 82
Short Stories
Brother Singh Heather Marx 45
October Soil Jack Harrell 71
Script
The Abracadabra Man: A Radio Play Jeff Metcalf and Howard Landa 87
Personal Essay
Adventures in Romance: Me, Mormonism, and Harlequin
Myrna Dee Marler 125
Departments
Readers Write: Beginnings
133
Reel Observations: Saints and Soldiers Eric D. Snider 147

From the Archives:
A Dialogue between Joe Smith and the Devil Parley P. Pratt 153
Reviews 165
Irreantum
October 2004
1 Nephi 17:5. And we beheld the sea, which we
called Irreantum, which, being interpreted, is many waters.
ear-ee-an-tum:
Irreantum: A Review of Mormon Literature and Film is

a refereed journal, published three times annually (Fall, Winter, Spring/
Summer) by the Association for Mormon Letters.
We seek to define the parameters of Mormon literature broadly, acknowledging a growing body of diverse work that reflects the increasing diversity
of Mormon experience. We wish to publish the highest quality of writing,
both creative and critical. We welcome unsolicited submissions of poetry,
fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays that address the Mormon experience
either directly or by implication. We also welcome submissions of critical
essays that address such works, in addition to popular and nonprint media
(such as film, folklore, theater, juvenile fiction, science fiction, letters, diaries,
sermons). Critical essays may also address Mormon literature in more general
terms, especially in its regional, ethnic, religious, thematic, and genre-related
configurations.
We welcome letters or comments. Please send letters and submissions to
submissions@irreantum.org. If you do not have access to email, mail your
text on a floppy disk or CD to Irreantum, c/o AML, PO Box 51364, Provo,
UT 84605-1364. Submissions on paper are discouraged.
Map facing the title page is from Herman Moll, geographer. Molls Maps:
Thirty Two New and Accurate Maps of the Geography of the Ancients, as con
tained in The Greek and Latin Classics. London: Tho. Bowles, 1732.
Letter to the Editor

I got my copy [of Irreantum] today. Thank you so much for publishing me. You have given me a lot of confidence. It is great to
finally see these poems in print. I did notice a word missing from
worst detailscob. It should be where she-swan hovered over the last of
her cob (a male swan). Doesnt make a lot of sense to me without it.
Janean Justham, Salt Lake City, Utah
S From the editor: Irreantum regrets the error. Below is the complete poem with
the correction.
Worst Details
just a slit of dark glass showed
between his lids.
come on, dad, i pulled,
on nothing
like when long grasses
sickened by dew, rotted at the root
slip out and fall away in your hands,
making you stagger
i prayed with her
but the words dissipated
in the doorway
not reaching the front room,
much less heaven
and misted back on us
one by one,
i told them all,
heard their gut-wounds
7
Irreantum S October 2004

and still stood,
messenger of worst details,
my back her shield
my sons,
charged by the lightning of it,
shaking in the thunder,
reeled under its weight,
determined to say goodbye
when no one could.
had to push them back,
make them let me go
then the enemy
stepped forward from the shadows,
stirred our shocked hearts
with his slim drawn sword-had to be there
in that small, sacred room,
where she-swan hovered over
the last of her cob,
eternal sorrow overcasting eternal love
had to lunge in, just to hurt us
we talked, we stood, we sang and played,
witnessed but did not believe;
we sat, we cried, we stared in shock,
took with us each one rose, and ate.
buried, he swirls around us still.
just once he should get the phone,
get the june gift hell never see.
at night i plan the funeral
that already was,
peer through darkness
to catch the foe
what will he do next?
and Shelifelong hope
drums out a rhythm of life
in my belly
8
The Christening of Irreantum
The original founders of Irreantum chose well when they

culled Mormonisms foundational book of scripture for a
title that could describe a literature uniquely Mormon. It
seems fitting to revisit the ways in which the title speaks to an established
literary tradition and the aspirations many of us hold for its future.
And we did come to the land which we called Bountiful, because of its
much fruit and also wild honey; and all these things were prepared of the Lord
that we might not perish. And we beheld the sea, which we called Irreantum,
which, being interpreted, is many waters. (1 Nephi 17:5)
The many waters of Nephis narrative are not geographically specific,

though the redactors of the Book of Mormon index have made an attempt to
pin down a location. The index entry suggests that Irreantum was probably
an arm of [the] Indian Ocean off Southeastern Arabia. Whether or not we
can pinpoint an exact location for these waters, the fact remains that interpretation, even imagination, is the key to reading the term. This is one of the
few words in the Book of Mormon that retains its original form and requires
interpretive commentary. (Other Book of Mormon terms that specify an act
of interpretation are equally rich for their symbolic resonance: Rabbanah,
Rameumptom, and Liahona; in the Bible, interpretation is often associated
with unfamiliar words or names, but it is also used in the context of dreams.)
The land where Nephi and his father Lehis people pitch their tents is called
Bountiful, the meaning of this name quite transparent. Nephi seems to think,
on the other hand, that Irreantum requires interpretation. Even to readers for
whom literature is more of a diversion than a fundamental need, the invitation to thoughtful consideration is one of the main jobs of a good literary text.
It is certainly what we are after in Irreantum, the literary publication.
The word Irreantum itself invokes ancient tradition. If it was Nephi who
included the interpretive comment of many waters in his account, then
9
he was working with a name that would have been exotic even to his own
people. Was there a history to the name that required an education beyond
familiarity with everyday language usage? Did the choosing of this name
invoke a tradition long established, where the word had lost its original
context for immediate understanding? We know Nephis family was rather
wealthy (goodly parents might just as easily mean well-to-do as righteous),
and thus, by Nephis own admission, able to provide their children with an
education. Nephi, in choosing to write, was conscious of all the learning
of my father (1 Nephi 1:1); perhaps this entailed training in various ancient
literary traditions. In selecting Irreantum for the name of a Mormon literary
journal, are we considering a name that is even more ancient than the original Book of Mormon text itself?
Irreantum, as many waters, implies a plurality. A Mormon literature in
the twenty-first century can be nothing but multiple. As church membership
grows, it becomes increasingly diverse, and its associated stories equally wide
ranging. While the bulk of Mormon literature seems to emerge from the
Intermountain West, I anticipate a flowering of new creative work that can
tell the stories of Mormonism. The environmental factors that encourage the
creation of great and lasting art are difficult to pin down. If the writing of
literature, as Virginia Woolf suggests, requires a room of ones ownexercised in private space and time away from community concernsthen some
church members, even those who under other circumstances would aspire to
write, may not have the necessary physical or psychic space available to them.
On the other hand, the stability offered by increasing numbers of established
Mormon communities offers opportunities for aspiring writers to consider
their experience against the fabric of an established tradition. These kinds of
communities are growing in areas outside the Mormon corridor of the West,
the result of a sort of diasporic wave that began with Mormons who, a few
decades ago, studied or worked outside the epicenter of Mormonism. Their
influence is now seen in third- and fourth-generation members whose experience is unquestionably Mormon but not Utahn.
Whether or not Mormons across the world aspire to write, I believe stories
and creative work always operate in a narrative tradition, oral or written, that
is as ancient as the world itselfindeed, more ancient and grander in scope
than that, if we take literally the notion taught in the creation account of the
Pearl of Great Price that we live in a world that is one among worlds without
number (Moses 1:33). Stories about the Mormon experience, whether from
10
Wilkins S From the Editor
a shining new convert or a tenth-generation member, appear as a matter

of course. Irreantum as a literary journal seeks to be a gathering place for
these narratives. Many of them are already out there and simply need to
find readers; others are yet to be written, and likewise require readers. The
editors of Irreantum want these to come from outside the cultural center of
Mormonism, as well as from within. We also welcome narratives that recount
the experience of Mormonism from an outsiders perspective. As the LDS
Church gains prominence with its increased membership, neighborhood
outreach for temple dedications worldwide, and the growth of Utah as a
business and tourist attraction, more people generally will have encounters,
either brief or extensive, with the Mormons. Indeed, we hope to appeal to an
audience beyond the Mormon literati, such that we establish dialogue with
the larger world beyond our immediate religious circle and connect with our
friends and neighbors through the ancient practice of narration.
But let me return to the original verse in which Irreantum appears. Irrean
tum signifies a resting place, associated with a land of abundance after a long
journey of hardship. Lehis family found this site after eight years in the
wilderness, a significant turning point for their maturity as a people, a coming of age, as it were. This resting place, however, was only temporary. The
many waters, besides being a source of sustenance for the bounty of the land,
became a threshold, a challenge to their crossing over into a new land, and
a test of their religious commitment. The invitation to move on after a longawaited respite was a call from heaven, embraced by Nephi, but rebuffed by
his brothers, who called him a dreamer. In spite of the ridicule, Nephi never
wavered. He understood the stakes for this journey were high. The ancient
stories of his people motivated him; in rebuking his brothers, he recounts
not only the narrative of the children of Israel who were led across the waters
of the Red Sea by Moses, but also of their children, who were led across the
river Jordan to possess their promised land. Nephi points to the many ways
in which the Lord makes it possible to follow the call to cross the waters. The
journey requires discipline, but God gives power to make it happen.
The many waters which Lehis people traversed were the medium through
which they exercised faith, not knowing what they might find once they
reached the other shore. This journey filled many of them with fear; many of
them would rather have turned back. But unlike their sojourn in the wilderness, during which theoretically at least, the people could have returned to
their homes, crossing the many waters allowed no such return.
11
The great literary works of the world have always told this kind of story.
If they do not entail characters who themselves pursue a journey from which
there is no return, then they enable a pattern whereby readers engage in a
process by which they can be equally changed. If this is an ancient motif, then
what is this literary enterprise christened Irreantum all about? What could
possibly be different about a literary tradition that is specifically Mormon?
Ido not pretend to have a definite answer. As I have immersed myself in
the critical literature available on the Mormon literary enterprise, I am at
times overwhelmed at the previous attempts, often articulated with elegance,
to define the possibilities. But those have no definitive answer, either. The
wonderful thing about a periodical is that it never really comes to an end.
We will thus define the parameters and possibilities of Mormon literature on
an ongoing basis. If Irreantum in its new incarnation can be a source of rest
and abundance, as well as an invitation to pursue a vision, follow a call, and
cross through to connect with something unknown but as rich in its offering
as the familiar place, then its primary goals will have beenmet.

12
Laraine Wilkins
What If the Book of Mormon

Were a Novel?
Which of Course It Is Not
B. W. Jorgensen
In keeping with this years AML Conference theme, "Wrestling
with the Word," I am about to wrestle with the Book of Mormon.1
Wrestle is Anglo-Saxon wrstlian, the frequentative of wrstan,
to wrest, thatis, to twist, wrench, wring, or distort; frequentative
means this is done over and over. To wrestle with the wordor words, as I
might prefer to sayseems inevitably to wrest them, over and over. Weve
been cautioned about that (2 Peter 3:16; Alma 13:20, 41:1; D&C 10:63),
though I fear wrest is just another word for interpret. Perhaps we can hope
that, despite our utmost effort, the word or words will finally throw us and
name us anew.
Is the Book of Mormon a translation of an ancient New World historical
record from gold plates, or is it some kind of historical fiction or inspirational fiction (Hardy xix). I dont mean to do much with that question.
Rather, Iwant to suppose and guess and speculate about how we might read
it if it were a novel, though I know the question Is it fiction? will not go
away. (For the moment, let novel mean book-length fiction.) For me,
the evidence is not all in; nor has the jury been impaneled. I suppose its
possible that what Harold Bloom called the religion-making imagination
(American 96, 97) of a barely literate farm boy named Joseph Smith might
have created such a text. We know he delivered most of it orally in about
sixty-five working days with his head in his hat and scribes writing his words
down with little or no punctuation or paragraphing (Hardy xx, 641, 64546).
We know that Henry James at the height of his powers, between 1900 and
1904, in roughly four-hour sessions with occasional breaks (during which
his male stenographer Mr McAlpine smoked or his less expensive young
13
lady typist Miss Weld crocheted), dictated three major novels, a biography,
voluminous correspondence, and many essays and stories (Edel 9395); we
know that William Faulkner wrote his fifth novel As I Lay Dying in less than
seven weeks (apparently during his twelve-hour night shifts as a coal-passer
at the Ole Miss power plant) and typed it in a month (Millgate 108); and
we know that the automatic writing of a few channelers has produced
texts of comparable and greater length than the Book of Mormon (Dunn
1721). But the proposition that Joseph Smith made it up (as distinct from
the well-documented claim that he spoke its words in sequence) calls for a
lot of explanations (e.g., of ancient Near Eastern matters absent from the
information environment of the 1820s, or of literary complexities that seem
beyond the reach of at least some of Joseph Smiths better-educated contemporaries). As David Hume might say, it is a question of proof against proof
(114), or perhaps probability against probability, and the case looks hard to
decide.
Thus it does not surprise me that the more or less official position of the
LDS church on the question looks rather rigorously fideistic, not based on
the rational deductions of science or logic. In his introduction to the 1997
apologetic collection Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited, Noel Reynolds
cautions that its contributors [. . .] are not trying to prove the authenticity
of the Book of Mormon though they are led to conclusions exactly opposite those of the books critics (3); and he modestly claims that some of its
textual studies . . . demonstrate the plausibility of the Book of Mormon as
an ancient book (4). Finally he says,
While we can never scientifically prove that the Book of Mormon was written by Nephite prophets, we can show through scientific and other scholarly
studies where the criticisms of the book fail. . . . Students who desire a fully
satisfying resolution of these questions will do best to accept Moronis invitation to find their own spiritual witness to the books truth through personal
study and prayer. (16)
Friends some years ago told us of a teenage son who accepted that invitation,
studied, prayed, and received a witness that the book was not true. What is
one to say to that? That he must not have had sufficient faith, not asked with
a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ? We do not often
hear such stories, yet the book has gained enough doubters and critics, even
within the Church, that we might charitably suppose they are not entirely
rare. And what if the form some seekers question takes is not (in a direct
14
Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel
echo of Moronis invitation [Moroni 10:4]) Are these things not true? but
Isthis a true historical record? or Is this a true translation from engraved
gold plates? or Is this a true revelation, from you, God, about how you
relate to this world and to human beings? A no to one form of the question
might not exclude a yes to another.

In a similar and more authoritative vein to Reynoldss Introduction,
none of the general authorities represented in the January and February
2004 issues of the Ensign claims that an historical or scientific case for the
veracity of the Book of Mormon, or for the officially accepted version of its
origin, has been conclusively proved, or allows that it has been disproved.
Perhaps Gordon B. Hinckleys testimony in the First Presidency message of
the February issue is nearly definitive:
The evidence for its truth, for its validity in a world that is prone to demand
evidence, lies not in archaeology or anthropology, though these may be helpful
to some. It lies not in word research nor in historical analysis, though these
may be confirmatory. The evidence for its truth and validity lies within the
covers of the book itself. The test of its truth lies in reading it. It is a book of
God. Reasonable people may sincerely question its origin; but those who have
read it prayerfully have come to know by a power beyond their natural senses
that it is true, that it contains the word of God. (6)
If the Book of Mormon is, as President Hinckley says, an unassailable cornerstone of our faith (6), it must be so to those, and only those, to whom
God gives full faith in it; to those not given such faith, it cannot be.
To choose faith or a power beyond [our] natural sensesin which
of course we must have faithover evidence is to acknowledge that ones
position is fideistic. This seems consistent with one of the books own teachings on faith, as set forth by one of its redacted narrators, Alma the younger.
In his sermon comparing the growth of faith toward knowledge with a seed
planted and nourished till it flourishes as a fruitful tree, he clearly poses
faith and knowledge as mutually exclusive or at least epistemologically
distinct categories: faith is not to have a perfect knowledge (Alma 32:21),
and if I know something, my faith in it is dormant (32:34), although
I may, and even must, still exercise faith in other things that I have not yet
come to know. The last narrator of the book, Moroni the son of Mormon,
seems to make the same distinction in his redaction of the Book of Ether,
when he writes ofthe brother of Jared that, seeing the finger and then the
entire spiritual body of the premortal Jesus Christ, he had faith no longer,
15
for he knew, nothing doubting (Ether 3:19).To have faith is not to know; to
know is not to have faith; to exercise faith may be a way to come to know,
yet there will always be something more (at least in this world) to exercise
faith in, something still not to know and thus to be in doubt or uncertainty about. As I read it, the language of the book itself opposes both faith
and doubt to knowledge; faith and doubt seem equal though opposite or
divergent responses to the absence of perfect knowledge or certainty. While
some have faith that the Book of Mormon is a book of God, others suspect
that it is not; and their suspicion might be charitably regarded as a negative
species of faith, to be judged by its fruits, one of which might be to remind
the faithful that their faith is indeed faith and not perfect knowledge.
I have no particular interest, in this essay, in the reasonable question of
the books origin. My faith is what it has pretty much always been: that it is
a book of God. But I do want to explore what that might mean, by way of
the question, What if the Book of Mormon were a novel? To me it seems
clear that its being a novel would not preclude its being a book of God.
The scandal, Harold Bloom has written, is the stubborn resistance of imaginative literature to the categories of sacred and secular (Ruin 4). But for the
Book of Mormon to be both a novel and a book of God might make its
author and proprietor or translator a deceiver (perhaps self-deceived) as to
its origins and provenance. This, too, however, is a line of thinking I do not
now wish to pursue. What I do want to think aboutfrankly, to speculate
aboutis how we might read it if it were a novel. Which of course depends
heavily on what we mean by that term, and on how we suppose we best conduct the reading of novels.
SSS
But even without specifying that term, some responses to the question come
quickly. If the Book of Mormon were a novel, we might not find it a good
one. Apostle Heber J. Grant said in a 1908 Conference session, It is claimed
by some that this book was written as a novel. I maintain that a man ought
to have his head tapped for the simples who would undertake to say that
any one would be idiotic enough to write a book like the Book of Mormon
as a novel, hoping to sell it to the people (57). The book is overtly and at
times (in some of Mormons thus we see editorializing) heavy-handedly
didactic, a trait or purpose we dont welcome in novels. Its also overambitious, attempting to cover a thousand years of history in not much over
500pages, resulting in a narrative more akin to an ancient chronicle than to
16
a novel. (Consider it came to pass: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles sometimes

use the similar expression Hr cuom, here came, or it came in this year
[Hulbert 16].) When Tolstoy began to write War and Peace, he had intended
a novel about the return of an exiled Decembrist in 1856, which obliged him
to treat the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825, which in turn obliged him to
go back farther and to treat the Napoleonic wars from 1805 to 1812 (136364).
The book we have, somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 pages depending on
the edition, comes nowhere near realizing Tolstoys plan to cover fifty years,
which on the scale he employed might have been impossible to carry through.
As an historical noveleven, if you like, an historical fantasyspanning
a thousand years, the Book of Mormon looks awfully thin, hardly novelistic
at all in the manner that readers of Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Hardy,
James, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others have grown accustomed to.
For good historical reasons, we generally expect realism in the booklength fictions we call novels; but we might find failures of realistic narrative plausibility in some Book of Mormon episodes or characters. How,
for instance, did Nephi, when decapitating and then stripping the drunken
Laban, manage to avoid getting blood (and possibly urine and feces) all over
himself as well as Labans armor and garments, which he put on every
whit (1 Nephi 4:19), and on which blood or other effluvia surely would have
been rather conspicuous? Bear in mind that he presents himself as [n]ever at
any time hav[ing] shed the blood of man (4:10) and this deed as no careful
surgical operation: I [. . .] took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote
off his head [. . .] (1 Nephi 4:18). The killing as retrospectively summarized
seems as bloodless as a 1950s western movie gunfight.2
Or what about Helamans stripling warriors, boys with no prior experience in combat or the use of weapons because theyre the children of a people
who buried their swords and spears and covenanted never to bear arms? If
theyre indeed striplings (see both the Oxford English Dictionary and the
Websters 1828 dictionary which Joseph Smith could have used), theyre
not the buffed-up, hunky and heavily muscled warriors of Arnold Fribergs
paintings,3 and there seems to have been little time for them to acquire the
physical condition and skill for hand-to-hand combat, let alone any kind of
psychological readiness. Not one was killed, though two hundred fainted
from loss of blood, and there was not one soul among them who had not
received many wounds (Alma 57:25). Helaman says they fought as if with
the strength of God, or with miraculous strength (56:56), and that the
17
miraculous power of God preserved them from death (57:26). Miracle or

magic may be taken as alternate names for the failure of realistic narrative
plausibility (as when science fiction or fantasy violates the speed of light or
the conservation of mass-energy); and as readers of a sacred text we take
its miracles on faith, or not. But human beings to whom miracles happen,
if they live to tell the tale, are still human beings, and as presented in the
story, the striplings are all too like the characters in some sort of combat
video game or the good guys in a Bruce Willis action movie. What did
it do to them to wound and be wounded? Or to kill enemy warriors?4 Did
itchange them in any way? Just as Helamans account fails to individualize
them at all (they have only a collective number, two thousand sixty), the
text is almost completely silent on the effect their warfare had on them.
Perhaps knowing the effect was simply not deemed expedient for readers,
though it might have made the story more believable.
Mention of novelists, especially Tolstoy, suggests another way in which
wed find the Book of Mormon a thin or weak or even bad novel: its
extreme lack of density and fine-grained texture in the presentation of
characters and the experiences of their social, natural, and physical world;
their manners, the whole hum and buzz of implication (as Lionel Trilling
called it [194]) of a particular culture, with a particular home in time and
place, that gives novels their lifelikeness and thus their rich relevance to
how we live our lives. There is simply not much of what Henry James
called felt life (45) in the Book of Mormon, or at least it is not encoded
or expressed in the ways that readers of novels from the eighteenth to the
twentieth centuries are familiar with.
All this, of course, could well support an argument that the Book of
Mormon is not a novel at all, that it clearly does not mean to do what
European, English, and American novels before and since its time have done.
But that would not be a decisive argument against its being some sort of
book-length fiction; it would only suggest that the writers narrative models
had not been novels; that, if Joseph Smith were indeed its author, hed read
few or no novels, and that his likeliest narrative models might be found in
the Bible.
SSS
In his essay Specific Continuous Forms in The Anatomy of Criticism

(1957), Northrop Frye protested against the sloppy habit of identifying
fiction with the one genuine form of fiction which we know as the novel,
18
and declared that [t]he literary historian who identifies fiction with the
novel is greatly embarrassed by the length of time that the world managed to
get along without the novel (303). After distinguishing several other prose
forms from the novel (romance, confession, anatomy), Frye arrived at a
fifth and quintessential form, the one traditionally associated with scriptures and sacred books, which treats life in terms of the fall and awakening of the human soul and the creation and apocalypse of nature, and of
which the Bible is the definitive example (314). Frye called the Christian
Bible the most systematically constructed sacred book in the world (315),
and in his later book The Great Code (1982) he broadly and intricately explicated its single archetypal structure extending from creation to apocalypse
(315). I now think Frye may have overstated the Bibles typological unity (315),
given its history of composite or documentary accretion and redaction
and the labor of committees of rabbis and then of church fathers in late
antiquity which went into its present Christian form, in which the Jewish
scriptures became what Harold Bloom has called that captive work, the Old
Testament (qtd in Alter 11). The very name we still call it, the Bible, from
the Greek plural ta biblia, stresses its multiplicity or, to use Paul Ricoeurs
word, the polyphonic nature of its religious language (41). Still, as not only
Frye but Erich Auerbach and others have persuasively argued, the Bible is a
principal ancestor of the novel, and, I think, nowhere more potently than
in its very polyphony, or in the multiplicity of its voices and genres as well
asits documentary traditions and sources.
Do manyor do anyMormons subscribe to the documentary hypothesis that the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible weaves together four (or in
some versions more) distinct documentary sources or traditions (Friedman)?
Im not aware of any official church position on this long-established (yet
in some quarters still controversial) view of the sacred text. But the Book of
Mormon wears its documentary nature on its face, with no hypothesis
about it. The book is not strictly of Mormon, since even the small book
within it which bears his name was completed (chapters 89) by his son
Moroni, who then added his abridgment of the Book of Ether and, last, his
own small and miscellaneous book. Mormons redaction and extension of
his Nephite documentary tradition comprises the books of Mosiah, Alma,
Helaman, Third and Fourth Nephi, and Mormon (up to chapter 7). But
because Martin Harris lost the original 116 pages of Joseph Smiths manuscript, Mormon did not edit or redact First and Second Nephi, Jacob, Enos,
19
Jarom, and Omni, which present the work of authors who lived centuries
earlier. If we trust the wordprint analyses done over the past quartercentury (Larsen; Hilton), the multiple authorship of the book is confirmed
(to echo Pres. Hinckleys word),5 and what we encounter when we read it is
not the voice of one author, whether Mormon or Joseph Smith (or as some
have said, God6), but of many. If Moronis addenda do not compromise
his fathers unitary redactive intention, surely Martin Harriss early loss and
Joseph Smiths late replacement of those 116 pages, and his patching the crack
with the convenient commentary of the Words of Mormon, do compromise
it. Again, though all its words came from the lips of Joseph Smith, to be duly
set down by one scribe or another and then punctuated and paragraphed by
the typesetter John Gilbert (Hardy xiv, xx, 647), the book speaks in many
tongues other than that of the man whose name it bears. Given its officially
accepted textual history, one might well hesitate to describe this sacred book
as systematically constructed.
One might also puzzle over the nature of its unity and whether, even if
it has, as I would prefer to say, some form of open unity, such unity can
be said to fully express the intention of any one author.7 Given the crack
between the small plates and the abridged large plates, patched over with
the Words of Mormon, can we even say the book, as we have it, perfectly
expresses Gods unitary and unifying intention? Those first 116 pages were
translated by the gift and power of God, but then Joseph, over Gods objection, let Martin take them, and Martin lost them, and after some time, God
showed Joseph how to repair the damage (Hardy 64445, 65355; cf. D&C
3:515; 10:13; 3842). Is the result Gods compromise with history and accident and human foolishness and knavery? Was Martins loss part of a divine
design? If so, what design, to what end? The result we hold in our hands, in
its received textual history and its very physical format, seems minimally to
bear witness to the imperfect or nonabsolute expression of the divine will
in this world: as a book of God, the Book of Mormon looks like Gods
bricolage.8
SSS
I will seem by now to have too long deferred or drifted from my main
questions: What if the Book of Mormon were a novel? How might we read
it? Its barefaced documentarity makes it rather unlike any novel we know
(even those multiple-author novels gangs of writers cobble for fun, a chapter
apiece, such as Naked Came the Stranger, or Naked Came the Manatee by
20
Carl Hiaasen and pals, or the Nick Wahr detective novels our friend Darrell
Spencer writes with his advanced fiction classes, such as Soul on Toast or Dead
Wrong).9 That is, unless weve been introduced, as I have lately been, to the
ideas of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, whose most penetrating and
useful description of the novel as a literary genre is dialogized heteroglossia (Morson 14245). Heteroglossia refers not so much to the fact that
there are many other tongues in the world than the one we speak (and
none, as St.Paul allowed, without signification [1 Corinthians 14:10]), as
to the fact that even within a single language, such as modern American
English, each of us speaks several tongues, in kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, nursery, workplace, locker room, marketplace, place of
worship, wilderness. Think of an Apostle at lunch with a Rotarianor
ofan Apostle who is a Rotarian. By dialogize, Bakhtin means that these
other tongues, no one of them privileged above another, interact with and
interinanimate one another (Morson 143), even in the daily discourse of
a single speaker, so that the worldviews and values they carry also mutually modify one another in a continuing process of prosaic creation
(2223) that constantly opens new possibilities. Even now, I am dialogizing
heteroglossia, interinanimating at least three tongues: my mother tongue
or native speech from my family in Salina, the religious tongue of Utah
Mormonism I also grew up with, and the tongue of the literary student and
critic. For Bakhtin, the novel is the literary genre par excellence because it
most richly uses and reflects the dialogized heteroglossia of ordinary everyday
life. Dialogized heteroglossia is what the Book of Mormon has lately begun
to look like to me, and that is one of the main reasons Ive come to my present questions.
As I so far understand Bakhtin (mostly at second hand by way of Gary
Saul Morson and Caryl Emersons Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
[1990]), the fully developed novel presents the world and human experience, indeed presents truth itself, as dialogical. For Bakhtin, Life by its
very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person
participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands,
soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds (qtd on 60). Bakhtins dialogue
should not be confused with logical contradiction or contrariety, or conflated
with the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Hegelian dialectics[a]greement is
as dialogic as disagreement (132); and participants in dialogue, which never
21
ends, though particular dialogues may break off, retain their distinct identities, their open unity as selves, and their essential outsideness to each other,
even as each is modified by their interactions, which evoke and create new
potentials. For Bakhtin, To be means to communicate (qtd on 50). Or, we
might say, dialogizing Descartes, We converse, therefore we become.
In the Book of Mormon, consider the dialogic interaction of Alma and
Korihor in Alma 30. We all know how their dialogue changed Korihor
Mistah Korihorhe dead. To summarize the episode too briefly, Korihor
preaches against the prophecies . . . concerning the coming of Christ (30:6)
and declares that ye cannot know of things which ye do not see (15), and,
when arraigned before the high priest Giddonah in the land of Gideon,
insists that ye do not know that there shall be a Christ (26). At last in
Zarahemla, Alma responds to Korihors ostensibly radical doubt with his
own radical faith, testimony against testimony, challenging Korihors lack of
evidenceye have none, save it be your word only (40)and appealing
to all things as a testimony (41). Korihor asks for a sign, that I may be
convinced that there is a God, yea, show unto me that he hath power (43).
Alma first reasserts a cosmological argument or argument from design:
yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things
that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets
which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator
(44). But Korihor still denies.10 So, using a rationale that echoes that of
the Spirit to Nephi (47; cf. 1 Nephi 4:13), Alma pronounces a sign upon
Korihor, essentially a curse, that he shall be struck dumb (49): broken off
from vocal participation in dialogue. And so it is, though Korihor belatedly
confesses in writing that he has been lying all along, claiming, in effect, that
his proclaimed skeptical rigor was just a pose. Thats a bit of a letdown; we
might rather have a real skeptic than one in bad faith, for that might make a
better story and a less easily won debate. But then history is often embarrassing in just such ways. Still, thats not the end of the story. Voiceless Korihor
becomes a wanderer, go[ing] about from house to house, begging food for
his support (58), thus, still by gesture and appearance, a partaker in dialogue;
but at last, in the land of Zoram, behold, he was run upon and trodden
down, even until he was dead (59). Mormon editorializes and moralizes:
And thus we see the end of him who perverteth the ways of the Lord; and
thus we see that the devil will not support his children at the last day, but
doth speedily drag them down to hell (60).
22
But the really interesting thing, dialogically, occurs in the next chapters
(inthe 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, still the same chapter11), the
inception of Almas Zoramite mission: in chapter 31, that after the end of
Korihor, Alma having received tidings that the Zoramites were perverting
the ways of the Lord, [. . .] his heart again began to sicken because of the
iniquity of the people (31:1). I suggest that one of the ways of the Lord
the Zoramites were perverting has to do with the treatment of wanderers,
strangers, beggars, and suppliants, who were as sacred to the God of Israel
as to Olympian Zeus: For behold, are we not all beggars? (Mosiah 4:19).12
Alma had played a major part in making Korihor a beggar and thus in bringing this bleak and violent end upon himit is better that thy soul should
be lost than that thou shouldst be the means of bringing many souls down to
destruction (30:47)and that, I dare to suppose despite Mormons almost
gloating tone, might be part of what sickened Almas heart. Alma himself
as a young man had played a role similar to Korihors, leading many souls
unto destruction (Alma 36:14), yet his soul was saved (Mosiah 27:831; Alma
36:1223). Now he sees there is something deeply rotten in the land of Zoram,
and the manner of Korihors death is the first concrete sign of it.
Recall now that Almas great sermon in Zoram, in chapter 32, is his sermon on faith, the seed planted and nourished and growing to a fruitful tree,
and that is the sermon in which he acknowledges that faith is not to know.
Is it possiblefor surely it is possible to read the story this waythat Almas
encounter with Korihor has dialogically changed him? That here he is still
in dialogue with a man to whom he can no longer speak?a man not only
struck dumb at Almas word but now also dead as a more remote consequence of that word? Alma cannot now do anything for Korihor, even if he
would, but he can try to reclaim the Zoramites who in their way, too, are
perverting the ways of the Lord. I do suspect that Almas dialogic encounter
with Korihor is changing him in ways he might not have foreseen. In Zoram,
Alma does not invoke the cosmological argument, and he does concede that
faith is not to have a perfect knowledge.
As Morson and Emerson put it, the constant and ongoing dialogue of life
requires a dialogic method and a dialogic conception of truth to represent it;
and So far, only literary works have approached this more adequate representation. The best novelists are far ahead of the philosophers (60). In Bakhtins
dialogic view, Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an
individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in
23
the process of their dialogic interaction (qtd on 60). The unity of a dialogic
world is essentially one of multiple voices, whose conversations never reach
finality and cannot be transcribed in monologic form (61): an open unity
in which the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been
spoken (qtd on 37; authors italics). Bakhtin left a late note: The word as
something personal. Christ as Truth. I put the question to him (qtd on 62).
In an LDS view, if Ive understood it rightly, Gods relation to the world
is dialogical, a thought we express in the core concept of personal and continuing revelation: God both speaks to us and hears us; he responds; our
words and actions may change his relation to us, even (like Martin Harriss
loss of the 116 pages) change his plans, or at least his next move. I began to
see this more than two decades ago when, having written one essay seeking
to unfold the typological unity of the Book of Mormon by way of Lehis
dream, I wrote what I thought would be a complementary essay on what I
then took as the books other large structuring and interpretative image or
type, Jacobs (or Zenoss) figure of the olive vineyard. It struck me then that
if we take Jacob 5 seriously as a figure for Gods relation to history, surely it
says that God does not always perfectly enact his sole will: And it came to
pass that the Lord of the vineyard wept, and said unto the servant: What
could I have done more for my vineyard? (Jacob 5:41). Faced with such an
undesired, unplanned contingency, the Lord must work creatively to respond
to his so often wayward human agents, literally cooperating with them to
shape the course of a history that he shares with them insofar as he acts in it.
Isaw and acknowledged in that still-unpublished essay that where typological unity might be taken to imply or presuppose that history is the playingout of a divine script, a finished design laid down before the foundations of
the world, the olive vineyard story suggested a radically contingent view
of history as genuinely open to both human and divine agency: the world as
not a closed but an open unity.
It has long seemed to me that the conduct of the resurrected Christ in
Third Nephi discloses the same divine responsiveness (however much we
might want to discount it, since there he appears again in the flesh, walking
and talking and laying on hands). When Jesus has ended his redaction of
the Sermon on the Mount (3 Nephi 1214), he perceived that there were
some among them who marveled, and wondered what he would concerning the law of Moses (15:2), so he begins another longish discourse to clear
that up (3Nephi 1516). That finished, he says to his audience, I perceive
24
that ye are weak, that ye cannot understand all my words [. . .]. Therefore,
go ye unto your homes and ponder upon the things which I have said, [. . .]
and prepare your minds for the morrow, and I come to you again (17:23).
In essence, he tells them he has places to go, people to see, the Father and
the lost tribes of Israel (17:4). But then he cast his eyes round about again
on the multitude, and behold they were in tears, and did look steadfastly
upon him as if they would ask him to tarry a little longer with them (17:5).
Then, filled with compassion (17:6), he invites them to bring their sick to
be healed, then their children to be blessed, in what becomes the most moving outpouring of grace in the book, a spiritual climax so transcendent that
no tongue can speak it and no one can conceive of the joy (17:17). Jesus
culminating act on this occasion is his institution of the sacrament, but the
text has given no sign that this was on his agenda for this day; it seems to
come as part of his spontaneous and compassionate response to the tears and
steadfast looks of the multitude.
Terryl Givens, for whom The [B]ook [of Mormon] functions primarily
[...] as an object for the exercise of faith and the vehicle through which personal revelation confirms a truth larger than the book itself (238), writes of
the Book of Mormon as both representing and embodying dialogical revelation (20939). (Its not clear to me that he means the term in Bakhtins strong
sense. He explicitly cites Bakhtin only for a distinction between authoritative
and internally persuasive discourse [8081; cf. 176, 236, 238], which seems
inconsistent with his later stress on dialogic revelation, since authoritative
discourse as Bakhtin describes it resists entrance into dialogue [Morson
219].13) Givens finds dialogical revelation throughout the Book of Mormon,
but most intensely concentrated in First Nephi, with other notable instances
in the books of Enos and Ether.14 In contrast with the Bible, where outside of
prophets acting in the role of national leadership, personal revelation is almost
unheard of (220), Givens finds that the Book of Mormon hammers home
the insistent message that revelation is the province of everyman (221). (Id
demur here: nearly all of his instances concern prophets who are national leaders or hereditary record-keepers. But the general point about dialogical revelation still stands.) In the Book of Mormon, Givens says, what is important
is not one ultimate Truth it embodies, but rather the ever-present reality of
revelation it depicts, a kind of egalitarian access to truths that range from the
sublime to the mundane, from principles of salvation to the location of game
(226). One ultimate Truth would be monologic; multiple truths are dialogic.
25
One of Givenss most persuasive though briefly discussed instances is

the intense dialogue between Nephi and the Spirit leading to the killing of Laban (219), with Nephi shrinking from shed[ding] the blood of
man and the Spirit constrain[ing] Nephi until he finally takes up and
elaborates andparticularizes the Spirits rationale, and obey[s] the voice of
the Spirit (1Nephi 4:1018). Obedience is a possible dialogical response,
though disobedience or finding a creative alternative would also be. Nephi
had originally accepted the errand of obtaining the brass plates in full confidence that the Lord should prepare a way (3:7), and the way turns out
to be violence. Im taking a step or two beyond Givens here to suggest that
Gods dialogical participation in Nephis errand seems to make the Deity
himself tragically complicit in a deed that violates one of his own clearest
commandments: God bloodies his own hands here, by urging Nephi to
the deed, making him the triggerman"; as Nephi, later writing the story,
says, the Spirit told him the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his
righteous purposes (4:13). As (or by) the Spirit persuading Nephi, God
makes himself (in legal terms) principal and Nephi his agent or accessory in the killing of Laban; if Nephi is guilty, so is God. Knowest thou
the condescension of God? an angel will later ask Nephi (11:16), who has
not long since undergone this most shocking act of condescension: God
descending with Nephi to slay Laban. I begin to wonder if the God dialogically revealing himself in the Book of Mormon might best be understood
in terms of something very like, or very congenial with, the openness theology of the Evangelical Protestants Clark Pinnock and John Sanders and
their colleagues, who try to take seriously the biblical indications that God is
not impassible and does indeed respond or condescend to human beings
in their exigencies. Yet again in the language of Bakhtin, there is no alibi
for being (qtd in Morson31)not for Nephi, not for God; neither can say
Iwas elsewhere.15
SSS
I have begun here, I think, to read parts of the Book of Mormon in a

way one might read a novel, giving no single voice among its many voices
the absolute privilege of the last word in their dialogue, trying to take all
of them dialogically into account, trying to feel with and, at the same time,
to judge, from my outside and equally limited and nonprivileged position,
their thoughts and words and deeds, and in judging coming to know my
own possibilities incrementally better. One thing this means is that I do not
26
take the books narrative incidents, or its characters or their actions, as mere
instantiations or illustrations of one or another general principle or universal
concept or rule; each is singularly itself and thus always open to further discovery or interpretation. That is: if I am reading a dialogical book dialogically,
I put questions to it, and it puts questions to me. Our conversation is endless
and continually revelatory, always opening onto new meanings.
What may it mean, then, to call the Book of Mormon a book of God
or to affirm with the Eighth Article of Faith that it is the word of God?
We need to ponder the possible senses of of in those phrases. Clearly, of does
not claim that every word in the book is Gods verbatim utterance; too many
of its passages are explicitly designated as the words of or the commandments of or the record of one or another character or writer/narrator in
the book. What then is the status of Gods words in the book, of those words
specifically ascribed to God? In every instance I can think of, including the
voice of the first hidden and then bodily revealed Jesus Christ in 3 Nephi 9:2
through 28:11, Gods speech is reported speech; his words are always quoted,
always mediated to us by one or more human witnesses. (To report or quote
speech is to reaccentuate or double-voice it, and thus to dialogize it [cf.
Morson 13970].) When Nephi tells us God said to him, Blessed art thou
(1Nephi 2:12), the words are Nephis words reporting Gods words. When
he tells us God said to his father Blessed art thou Lehi (2:1), the words
must beNephis words reporting Lehis words reporting Gods words. And
so onto the English words Joseph Smith spoke and his scribes wrote down.
In reading scripture, as in hearing prophetic testimony, there is always at
least one human beings language between us and the words of God, because
although God wrote the ten commandments on tablets of stone, he does not
(except for the Quran?) write books; men and women do. And if he does
write, he writes in a specific human language at a specific time and place in
human history.
I see no way around this. Unless the way the book itself invites me to seek
my own direct experience of the voice of God, which may or may not be
granted to me. I may hear God (or a voice which I take on faith to be Gods)
speak to me. If you are there with me, you may or may not hear the voice,
may or may not discern the words spoken to me. The men which journeyed
with Saul of Tarsus toward Damascus hear[d] a voice but [saw] no man
(Acts 9:8), but we do not know if they discerned the words. Peter, James, and
John saw Moses and Elias talking with Jesus (Mark 9:4); but no one reports
27
what words were said, while they all did hear (and apparently did report) the
words of the voice [that] came out of the cloud (Mark 9:7) at the end of
the Transfiguration.
There seems to be a terrible privacy in the speech of God to any human
being. Occasions when more than one person hears the voice seem very rare;
for the multitudes in darkness all over the destroyed Nephite lands at the
time of the crucifixion, the long speech by the voice of Jesus Christ tallying
the destructions of cities and declaring wo unto the inhabitants of the whole
earth except they shall repent (3 Nephi 9:2) was literally a once-in-a-lifetime
experience. You had to be there. If you were not there, it is reported speech to
you. And to any readers taking the Book of Mormon on faith, it is reported
speech engraved in obscure characters on golden plates and then spoken into
English words by Joseph Smith talking through his hat, not even looking at
the stacked plates lying there on the table covered with a cloth, words written down by Oliver Cowdery, punctuated and paragraphed by John Gilbert,
printed by his boss Egbert Grandin, re-chaptered and versed and columned
by Orson Pratt almost fifty years later, glossed and cross-referenced another
forty years later by James Talmage (Hardy xiv, 648, 666). We readers are a
very long way from the immediate word of God in this strange book of
God. (Nevertheless, across gulfs of language and centuries, the studious
analysts have distinguished the resurrected Jesus Christs wordprint from that
of Nephi the son of Nephi the son of Helaman, from that of Mormon, from
that of Joseph Smith [Larsen 162, 167, 16970, 181].)
As readers of the Book of Mormon, wrestling with its words, we are all,
disquietingly, pretty much stuck in the situation of Flannery OConnors
Misfit: It aint right I wasnt there because if I had of been there I would
of known. Listen lady, [. . .] if I had of been there I would of known and I
wouldnt be like I am now (152). We might hope to remain less anguished
and less violent than he. Yet we may well wonder if, had we been there, we
would indeed know and not be like we are now, here in the place of doubt
and faith, not the place of perfect knowledge.
In a certain desperate and fearsome sense, it does not matter, cannot matter, if the Book of Mormon is fiction or not, because in one bedrock sense
it is, of course, fiction. Even God, when he enters into dialogue with us
and condescends to describe or narrate, binds himself to fiction: the divine
voice tallying the destruction of Nephite cities is uttering fictions, because
the brutal facts are elsewhere and words can only tally them, and the truest
28
statement in words is a fiction of the fact it states. So long as we and God

dwell in language, there is no escape from fiction, no alibi from making fiction and reading fiction. It behooves us to learn to read it better, to gain the
skill andthe patience and the heart to seek its truth, which is elsewhere.
Works Cited
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Harvard University Press, 1987.
Ashe, Penelope (pseud.). Naked Came the Stranger. New York: Dell, 1970.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1958.
Bloom, Harold. The American Religion. New York: Simon, 1992.
. Ruin the Sacred Truths. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Dunn, Scott C. Automaticity and the Dictation of the Book of Mormon. American
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Friedman, Richard Elliott. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Summit, 1987.
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. Dead Wrong: A Nick Wahr Mystery. Athens: Ohio University English 765,
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Hardy, Grant, ed. The Book of Mormon: A Readers Edition. Urbana: University of
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Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the
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Rust, Richard Dilworth. Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of
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InterVarsity, 1998.
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Notes
1. As given in plenary sessions of the Association for Mormon Letters Annual
Conference, 5 and 6 March 2004, this essay was second-draft and is now third-draft.
Id been mulling its main questions for about a year, from notions reaching back
30

maybe two or three years earlier, and first uttered its title aloud in August 2003.
Iwant to stress its tentative and speculative nature as an essay in the strong sense of
the word. It means to ask and begin to explore, rather than give conclusive answers
to, its main questions, What if? and How might? In later footnotes I will raise
further questions about my own ideas.
2. A colleague who heard the first presentation of this essay suggested to me that
sudden decapitation might somehow shut off arterial blood flow. Clearly this could
be looked into: what effects does decapitation have on blood flow in the carotid
arteries, and on bowel and urinary sphincter control? (Ive not seen any video footage
of recent decapitations in Iraq and would prefer not to.)
3. A neighbor, in a recent gospel doctrine class discussion, pointed out that agricultural and other kinds of physical labor can give amazing muscular strength to
people whose bodies and limbs are undernourished and slender. A point well-taken,
though it leaves unanswered the question of specific combat training with swords,
spears, javelins, etc.
4. Dan Baum, in The Price of Valor, The New Yorker, 12 & 19 July 2004: 4452,
has sharply specified what I could only suspect when I wrote this paragraph last winter. Fear of killing (45) and the trauma of killing have emerged as among the most
significant issues facing troops in Iraq, and something that the US Army simply does
not want to talk about, a dead elephant in the living room (47). Would the culture of ancient Nephites lessen the trauma of killing enemy warriors for Helamans
sons? There seems to be no way to know, but apparently no amount of TV or movie
violence, and no amount of combat training, has prepared young Americans for it.
5. Grant Hardy, a specialist in Asian history, has expressed doubts about the
stability of noncontextual word frequencies across translation from Semitic or Asian
languages to English.
6. Richard Dilworth Rust (9) suggests that Jesus Christ is the primary author of
the book.
7. Here I begin to question my own earlier Frye-like assumption, expressed in
the subtitle of my first essay on the Book of Mormon, Typological Unity. By
open unity (cf. Morson 94, 228), I understand the sort of unity a family has, or a
church, or perhaps any living organism or living community; my garden seems to
be an open unity, as does my lawn (ask the dandelions and bindweed). Some texts,
e.g., a syllogistic argument or perhaps a brief Emily Dickinson poem, seem to be
more nearly closed unities; others, like almost anyones journal, seem relatively open.
Ican suppose that a sacred text (especially a composite like the Bible or the Book of
Mormon) might have typological unity and still be open to elements that dont
fall within the systematic construction of its typology.
8. A bricoleur is a handyman, a doer of odd jobs, a Mr Fixit, who solves problems
and makes things out of whatever is handy. Claude Lvi-Strauss used the term in The
Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld, 1962, 1974).
9. Grant Hardy (email 30 June 2004) has suggested a better analogue: novels that
employ techniques like framing stories, letters, diaries, discovered documents, and
31

so forth. A single author who created various literary artifacts for the sole purpose of
putting them into a novel seems a closer comparison than novels in which successive
chapters were written by a group of friends. Yet on the orthodox LDS view of the
Book of Mormon wed still have to invoke multiple authors who for the most part
do not communicate directly with one another (Mormon and Moroni would be a
exception).
10. After all, as Hume showed in Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State
(esp. 13542), the cosmological argument does fail to prove anything more than that,
if there is a Creator God, he is just such as may account for the creation we see, and
nothing more: We can never be allowed to mount up from the universe, the effect,
to Jupiter, the cause; and then descend downwards, to infer any new effect from
that cause (137); or why ascribe to the cause any qualities but what actually appear
in the effect? (139). To be sure, Hume was criticisingor deconstructing, if you
likethe Enlightenment effort to establish religion upon the principles of reason
(135), but Almas testimony to Korihor may not express an entirely identical appeal.
11. In the 1830 edition, the Korihor episode and the account of the Zoramite
mission comprise a single chapter, 16, equivalent to our current chapters 3035: the
two episodes were originally (presumably on the plates as well as in Joseph Smiths
dictated manuscript) a single narrative unit.
12. On Zeus, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus: Those who [. . .] injure
a stranger have offended against the time [honor] of Zeus, and are punishable by
him (5). On the God of Israel, see (for instance) Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy
10:16-19.
13. This raises what might be the most troublesome question about my entire
essay. I suggest that the Book of Mormon is dialogized heteroglossia (and therefore
novelistic in at least that one essential sense). But Bakhtins theory of the novel sets
the bar very high: its not enough for a text to display either heteroglossia or dialogue alone (Morson 31415). In suggesting that the Book of Mormon includes and
aspires to authoritative discourse, Givens would seem to imply that it is a monological rather than a dialogical text. Yet if the Book of Mormon both represents
and embodies dialogical revelation, wouldnt it have to be dialogical? (Givenss
endnote citations to Bakhtins Discourse in the Novel in the collection The Dialogic
Imagination are inaccurate; apparently due to a copyediting error, all lack the initial
digit3.)
14. All of these, interestingly, come late in the dictation of the text we have, as is
strongly attested by the account of the loss and replacement of the first 116 pages.
15. Ive begun to wonder, too, if this might partly account for Nephis later
prayer, O Lord, wilt thou encircle me around in the robe of thy righteousness!
(2Nephi 4:33) and his declaration at the end of his life, I glory in my Jesus, for he
hath redeemed my soul from hell (2 Nephi 33:6). The tragically involved God who
descended with Nephi stayed close, and did not abandon him.
32
A Material Religion in Harrells

Vernal Promises
or, Whats the Matter with
Mormons?
Robert Bird
Shot in the arm and temporarily blinded, Jacob Dennison, the
protagonist in Jack Harrells novel Vernal Promises, recovers at
theAshley Valley Medical Center in Vernal, Utah. When Bishop Gallagher
visits him, Jacob accounts for the last three months spent roughnecking in
the oil fields of Rock Springs, Wyoming:
As far as I can figure it, in the last seventy-six days I was drunk about fifty-five
times.... I snorted crystal meth about a dozen times.... I looked at pornography and tried to have sex with three different women. Theres more I dont
remember because I was too drunk.... The day before I ended up here, I was
doing LSD with a satanic prophet named Dwayne. He beat me up and gave
me a vision of hell. (25354)
Although Jacobs tale appears to be a confession of hedonism, it is, instead, a

chronicle of a questthrough alcohol, drugs, and, later, religionto experience transcendence. Indeed, Jacob Dennison, being no mere roughneck, is
a late twentieth-century transcendentalist who seeks, in the words of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the classic proponent of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism, to see the world in God (Nature 48). But this metaphysical
idealism never satisfies Jacob, for it is, ultimately, as illusory as mind games,
and the dangers of its radical independence are potentially life-threatening.
Through the action of the novel, Jacob realizes that he doesnt need to escape
from material existence into transcendence to experience meaning. He can
create meaning from the matter around him by refining it, crafting it, and
establishing connections and relationships with it.
33
As the novel begins, Jacob works as the dairy manager at Garys Food
World and lives with his wife, Pam, in a trashy trailer in Vernal. Jacobs
mother, Regina, encourages the newly married couple to be active in the
Mormon church, but his stepfather, Harvey, would rather have him sell stolen oil-rig drill bits for profit than attend church on Sunday. Jacob dwells in
a materialist world of dairy products, time clocks, and drill bits.
However, as a transcendentalist, Jacob rejects materialism and believes, to
use Emersons words, in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human
mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in
ecstasy (Transcendentalist 95). In fact, Emersons description of the characteristics of a transcendentalist applies accurately to Jacob, for Jacobdoes
not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely property,...; he
doesnot respect government, except as it reiterates the law of his mind;
northe church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast
distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a
pantomimic scene. His thought, that is the Universe (Transcendentalist
95; my emphasis). Jacobs thought is his universe for, as a transcendental
ist, he holds the philosophical position known as idealism, the belief that
reality consists, fundamentally, not of matter or things (materialism) but
only of spirit or mind (idealism). Transcendentalism, then, is a form of
metaphysical idealism.
The conflict between materialism and idealism, two different metaphysical world views of the nature of reality, propels the plot of Harrells novel.
These two world views conflict because as Emerson describes, As thinkers,
mankind have ever been divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists;
the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the
first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class
perceive that the senses are not final.... The materialist insists on facts, on
history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the
idealist on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on
individual culture (Transcendentalist 93). As an idealist, Jacob constantly
clashes with the circumstances and fatalism of a material existence. Jacob
expresses his feelings about consequences in his colloquial speech, Theres
[always] hell to pay (Harrell 9). As Jacob demonstrates in the previous quote,
fatalism or determinism is implicit within materialism, for if all things are
matter, then all things have a physical cause, which means all thingseven
humansare determined by a complex causal network.1
34
Bird S Material Religion in Vernal Promises
As a transcendentalist, Jacob is repelled by all forms of materialism. Marty,

his boss at Garys Food World, is the personification of materialism. Focused
exclusively on profits and power, he becomes a source of disgust for Jacob.
Marty had been climbing the management ladder until he committed a
moral indiscretion and was banished from Provo to Vernal to become the
store manager. Upon finding out Jacobs semiactive religious background,
Marty takes it upon himself to teach Jacob a doctrinal lesson: In this store
Im the ten commandments and the Book of Mormon and the prophet
Joseph Smith all rolled into one.... When you walk in here, Im God!
(26). Unburdened by the possible spiritual realities of metaphysical idealism,
Marty focuses entirely upon increasing the stores profits. Martys spirituality
goes no deeper than the materialist desire for clean floors,... clean employees, and clean profits (19). Marty, living in a world of only matter, has no
interior lifeno life of the mind nor of the spirit.
As Marty is well aware, if reality consists only of matter, then property
and products (those things that can be bought with profit) are the ultimate
markers of value. It follows, that metaphysical materialists such as Marty
are also economic materialists. Those who believe only in matter desire
only to gather, buy, and control as many things (as much matter) as possible. In this world view, spiritual ideas are meaningless. For example, when
Marty sees Jacob kneeling down in the dairy, he pops his head into the
cooler, chuckling as he mocks, What are you doing, kid, praying? (25).
Knowing what is important in a materialist world and recognizing Jacobs
idealist tendencies, Marty educates him about what is real: Reality is what
you get paid for. Marty reminds Jacob, I dont get paid to talk, you dont
get paid to pray. Marty exemplifies all that disgusts Jacob about the materialist world view.
When the conflict between Martys materialism and Jacobs idealism
intensifies, Jacob flees. He quits his job, cashes his two-week check at the customer service desk, and finds himself on the road to Rock Springs. Emerson
explains this repulsion that idealists, such as Jacob, have with materialists,
such as Marty: With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it
cannot be wondered at, that they [transcendentalists like Jacob] are repelled
by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be
alone than in bad company (Transcendentalist 100). And Jacob, having
quit his job, finds himself alone, driving up through the aspen forest and the
high plains desert, feeling God in nature more easily than he ever had in a
35
church building. Wherever God was, whatever he was, he had to understand

how a man felt. He had to know that a man needs to get away. Otherwise,
why would he have created all this wilderness in the first place? (5455). By
leaving Garys Food World and Vernal, Jacob escapes from the banality and
consequences of materialism and into the open wilderness of transcendental
idealism.
Jacobs wife, Pam, however, remains behind, and the novel switches to the
struggle she has with an economic materialism pervasive in the LDS Church.
Pam perceives (though she would not articulate it in this manner) the economic materialism of the middle-class Mormons in her ward, the group of
which she hopes to be a part. Looking around their small and trashy (30)
trailer, Pam dreams about the future: As a visiting teacher, she had seen inside
some of the nicer homes of the well-established Mormon women, and she
began to imagine the kind of place she and Jacob might have some day, once
their marriage was sealed in the temple and they started making good money
(30). In Pams mind, being sealed in the temple and making good money is a
necessary and inevitable conjunction. Although she appears to be nave, she
is, instead, quite insightful. Pams Mormon theology of anthropomorphic
deities with bodies of flesh and bones living for the eternities on planets
strewn across the universe is materialist, and as Marty has already demonstrated, a materialist metaphysic necessarily leads to economic materialism;
property and earths, products and posterity matter in such a world view.
The economic materialism in Mormonism may, in fact, be the consequence of the philosophical adoption of metaphysical materialism, a theological position that can be traced back to Joseph Smiths later revelations.
Building upon the metaphysical position, which was the growing popular
belief at the time, that matter is self-existent2 (The elements are eternal
[D&C 93:33]), Joseph Smith, in 1843, conflates idealism into materialism:
There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is
more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see
it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter (D&C
131:7-8; my emphasis). After conflating idealism into materialism, Smith still
posits the existence of spirit by defining it as refined matter. (The questions
of how matter becomes refined or who or what does the refining remain
unanswered in his revelations.) By explicitly adopting the position that all
thingsincluding spiritare ultimately matter, Smith defines Mormonism
as a material religion.
36
Jacobs mother, Regina, has certainly been influenced by the material

aspects of this religion. Thinking to help her son appreciate the magnitude
of the priesthood, Regina buys Jacob the book The Priesthood in Zion, in
which every chapter is written by a different church authority (131). After
giving this book to Jacob, she happily shows her additional find: I got this
too, she said. She held out a cardboard picture in a plastic frame. It was Jesus
caressing the cherubic face of a little child. It was marked down, so I couldnt
pass it up (132). Jacob believes that, for Regina, buying Jesus is not much
different than buying a grandfather clock. Both are done to impress the visiting teachers (129). However, Reginas purchase of the cardboard Jesus may
be her attempt to experience the transcendent through the material. In her
book Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, Colleen
McDannell explains that the making and buying of religious artifacts may
be an attempt to experience transcendence, not through doctrine, but
through material culture: cross-stitch, pictures of Jesus, and nativity scenes.
McDannell notes that religion in the real world may always be a conflation
of the sacred and the profane, spirit and matter, piety and commerce (4).
Certainly, Reginas attempt to experience transcendence is through her material culture and its artifacts, cheap as they may be.
SSS
In contrast to the forms of materialism left back in Vernal, Jacob encounters in Wyoming the metaphysic he yearns to adopt: idealism. Jacob meets
Dwayne Helper, The man [who] looked like a cross between a Catholic
Priest and a rock star (92), a drug-dealing metaphysical idealist who recognizes something authentic about Jacob: Is [your name] Jake or Jacob?
Jacob I guess. Dont guess, Dwayne said. Know.... If you dont know
who you are, how will anyone else? (92). Although Jacob is hesitant, at this
time, about who he is, Dwayne knows Jacob is a seeker, an idealist, a twentieth-century transcendentalist. Jacob doesnt realize, however, who Dwayne
is; personifying idealism, Dwayne borders on madness, wanting to enact the
anarchy that Jacob has only thought about theoretically.
At the keg parties Jacob frequents with his friend, Mickey, Dwayne stands
out as a magician, performing minor sleight-of-hand tricks that awe the
uninitiated. During one trick, Jacob sees a flash of light and hears something
crack as Dwayne apparently passes his hand through a table. Dwayne then
points at each person in the circle, telling them to Think about what you
saw (102). Of course, Mickey is the first to answer, I know what I saw....
37
Your hand went right through that table(102). Others think they saw the
flash of a knife blade as it went through the table. Dwayne, however, requests
only Jacob's response. In fact, Everyone looked at Jacob as though he was
supposed to have the right answer (102). But Jacob doesnt know what he
saw; was there a light, he wonders? Was there? Dwayne said, Youre the
one who saw it. Dont ask me to tell you what you saw (103). Jacob wants to
know how the trick works. But Dwayne answers bluntly, Its not a trick....
He leaned over and tapped Jacob on the side of the head. The tricks in there,
buddythe human brain. Thats the real magic. Thats where the illusions
are. The truth isnt out there. Its in your head, what you decide(103).
Dwayne, the metaphysical idealist, articulates what Jacob has always wanted
to believe: the truth is what he perceives, or as the idealist George Berkeley
put it, To be is to be perceived. Like Jacob, Dwayne rejects materialism,
noting that he does not trust materialists, for they are, in his words, children
of science, blind to magic (290).3
Dwaynes most convincing magic, however, occurs when he, Jacob, and
Mickey drop acid in a snow-covered cabin on Limestone Mountain. Dwayne
describes the acid trip as a religious ritual; if the ritual is not done right, there
can be negative effects, such as the guy who had just had a fight with his
father before taking the drug and ended up stabbing someone with a pocket
knife. Dwayne explains, The reason people have bad trips is because they
go into them with bad feelings (Harrell 219). Dwayne assures Mickey and
Jacob that in the cabin that day everything is just right: they are going to
have a good trip. During the trip, Jacob sliced a beautiful yellow pepper and
started to feel strange sensations. Electricity flowed through his body. The
pepper appeared to be fluorescent. He could smell and feel its yellowness.
He heard its yellowness when he sliced it. He put a piece to his nose, and it
nearly knocked him over, it was so sour and sweet and strange. He took a
bite. It was beautiful (221). The yellow pepper he slices while stoned is so
much more in his perception than the mere matter of which it consists. For
Jacob, this moment confirms, at the time, the accuracy of idealism. Jacob
perceives things to be much more than what constitute materially, and for
Jacob, to be is to be perceived.
For Dwayne, however, the acid trip in the cabin is not for mere experimentation with idealism, with experience as thought. During the drug-induced
escape, Dwayne demands that Jacob completely renounce material existence
by murdering Mickey. For Dwayne, murder (the ending of someones mate38
rial existence in the world) signifies the ultimate elevation and acceptance of
idealism. Dwaynes evil demand leads Jacob to realize that, ultimately, idealism (by focusing on the spirit) devalues the body and even human life in this
material world.
By the end of the novel, Jacob has explored a range of various possibilities of metaphysical reality, from the coarse, economic materialism of Marty
to the illusory, dangerous idealism of Dwayne. After rebelling against the
economic materialism and determinism associated with materialism, he is
initiated into the awe and mysticism of idealism, but idealism eventually
seems no more than tricks of the mind which have terrible implications for
the meaning of life in this world.
Finally, Jacob must choose between these competing metaphysics. Having
carved a wooden Jesus out of walnut and nailed it to a crucifix of oneinch pine, Jacob takes this Jesus and drives drunk up Dry Fork Canyon.
Experiencing a drunken and accident-induced vision, Jacob sees before
him two images: Dwayne, offering his free-will idealism, and Jesus Christ,
lying by the road, his feet and arms lashed to a post and a beam (333),
an image stirred in his mind by the wooden crucifix. Earlier in the novel,
Jacob rebelled against a coarse materialist view of Christs atonement. He
had thought of Jesuss atoning suffering as mechanistic, a machine working
around the clock, waiting to grind to dust every last particle of sin until
there was nothing left of Jacob Israel Dennison except useless, will-less
obedience (173). Now, he is confronted with a different kind of Jesus, not
a distorted Jesus waiting with mechanistic justice, but a human being, a
Jesus incarnate in flesh, whom he can embrace despite the hindrances of
the cross by pressing his face into the cool, clammy skin of his neck (332).
Turning away from Dwayne, Jacob empathizes with Jesus and with the pain
of his material body.
This encounter with the human Jesus guides Jacob back to the other
relationships in his life, with his wife, his newborn daughter, and his bishop.
Jacob also begins to sense that all through his transcendent quest of drinking,
drugs, and sex, his most satisfying experiences occur, instead, when he refines
the matter around him by making things out of wood (174), as when
he spends a Sunday crafting a chair at the community college wood shop.
Meaning is made out of matter by establishing relationships and crafting art
out of it. With this realization, Jacob no longer has to escape into a world of
illusion and its inherent dangers.
39
As Jacob feels at the beginning of the novel, materialism and a material religion ought to be rejected when they remain on a coarse, superficial
or purely economic level. Marty, the materialist, contributes little to the
significance of this world, and Regina could create more meaning by crafting her own material artifacts or entering into deeper relationships with
material human beings than by purchasing mass-produced religious icons
of Jesus. Jacob realizes that matter does not have to remain meaningless; it
can be refined: Wood can be refined into crafts, language into narrative, and
relationships among material humans into love. Although Jacob, as a transcendentalist, never does see the world in God, he does, in the endin his
relationship with Jesus, his wife, his daughter, and in his craftbegin to see
God in the world.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Transcendentalist. Emersons Prose and Poetry. Ed. Joel
Porte and Saundra Morris. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. 93104.
. Nature. Emersons Prose and Poetry. Ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. 2755.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sufferings of Young Werther. New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co., 1957.
Harrell, Jack. Vernal Promises. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2003.
McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Notes
1. Unless the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics allows for metaphysical
free will in a materialist universe, materialism necessarily includes determinism (the
position that all thingseven the choices made by humansare caused). However,
the complex causal network behind human acts may never be comprehended and,
therefore, never controlled by behaviorists. This line of reasoning results (pragmatically speaking) in human freedom. Furthermore, compatibilism is a metaphysical
position claiming that as long as the causes of actions are internal (coming from
within the person), humans can be held responsible for those acts, even though they
were ultimately determined.
2. Many early nineteenth-century thinkers addressed the significance of selfexistent matter and its implication of metaphysical materialism: We cannot destroy
matter any more than we can create it (Say, Catechism of Political Economy [1816].
p. 19). Samson Reed, in his work Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1821;
40

Transcendentalist: A Reader. Ed. Joel Myerson. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000. p. 47), claims that [t]he spiritual part of man is as really [sic] a substance, as
the material; and is as capable of acting upon the spirit, as matter is upon matter.
3. Dwayne would call materialists what Young Werther does in Goethes novella,
The Sorrows of Young Werther:
Oh, you rationalists!... You stand there so calm, so unsympathetic, you
moral men! chide the drinker, abhor the irrational, walk past like priests, and
like the Pharisee thank God that he has not made you like one of these. I have
drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I repent
of neither: for in my own measure I have learned to understand how it is that
all extraordinary beings, who have accomplished something great, something
seemingly impossible, have always and necessarily been defamed as drunk and
mad. (Goethe 63)
Dwayne agrees that materialists never can stir their passions sufficiently to become
great.
41
Jared Pearce
Apology
She was thinking about being written
on, and writing herself beyond
the skins inks, the feminine
poses she knows far deeper
than a creed. She had read the beginnings,
culture springing from the covenants
rooted in God and Adam: God called
him, but He named Himself
secretly. Later there were others in the divine
presence, always God re-writing
their names: Abram, Sarai, Jacob without
apologieswhy should He,
He may have His way. Then she recalled David
and Jonah heard God, that even His confiscating
word is subject to the man who reads,
calls himself. But Eve, that flower
of civilization, named by a man
as she was, did she ever want to dispatch
herself in Gods name and in the skin
that collected her? or was there a call
from deep in the cosmic
brain or the gardens glowing fruit that alerted
her, pulled her beyond all her schemes? What
then? Could she hold
42
Pearce S Two poems
up under such pressure as Sarah or Eve, after thirty

years could one still believe a consecration? And then,
would that be herself truly, or only the collective
responses to the divine name
calling? In a prophets or handmaidens
terms, to serve is the thing: Here
am I, King. But the backward grammar
can be revised? On the temple wall,
the stone tablets, writing
everywhere down to the circumcised
hearts bleeding, as it were, great cups
of wedding wine.
And so she was troubled, in her heart, why
Gabriel would speak in such manner; casting
consequences in her mind: was this a new
name, or just more of the same?
A Case for Loneliness

And they shall hang upon him all the glory
of his fathers house, the offspring and the issue,
all vessels of small quantity, from the vessels
of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons.
Isaiah 22:24
The spirit holds us in: a film
of space, agony, magic, that lubricates
individuality. Our outside corks
the planet's pith and blood, keeps it
all inside us. Thats why
43
fingerprints seem vital: the illusion

and paradox of touch. Our troughs
store the void for contact, gobble
up the infinite membrane
that keeps us all in
separate vessels. Yet
even this fails. Im holding one
snowflake, it balls up foetus and sprints
to the dying others on the walk, still
coated as its pieces shatter
from the fall. Im hardly responsible,
could have saved it, maybe, had I broken
the layer of myself, the cup
that keeps me from splashing out all
over the things I love.
God will save the cups, will
save the flagons, all stacked up,
drained and ready for the supernatural
cupboard. Its the shell
He loves, the eternal element makes
us slick in the material pond, and which He
picks up gracefully, prints flamboyant
as Andromedas galaxy. Then whats left melts
piecemeal to the gory earth, finally
naked and warm and easy.
44
Brother Singh
Heather Marx
Arvinder Singh, almost D.D.S., savored the moments when one
thing turned into another. He was centuries too late for the evolution of door keys into tooth extractors, but just last spring he
discovered that a half-price tackle box from Tent City could carry dental
instruments, and now he was watching two Mormon missionaries transform a gurdwara from business as usual into urgent whispering. Who are
those boys in suits? Can you read their badges? What are they doing here? Who
is that with them? How remarkable! The dark tendrils of hair escaping from
the patka on a five-year-old boy reminded Arvinder of other changes: stragglers from the cloth-covered bun had tickled his own neck twenty years ago,
but now a saffron headscarf (borrowed from the visitors supply) tightened
around neatly trimmed hair. At the Guru Granth Sahib, Arvinder pressed
down his forehead and blurred the boys mark on the foam green carpet. The
next two foreheads would not belong to Elder Webster and Elder Sagamore;
instead of kneeling, they bobbed toward the silk palki covering the sacred
book. Arvinder stood up and fished five twenties out of his pocket. It was
more than hed ever given before, but the way things were going, the son of
Davinder Kaur, PBS cooking show host and Balwinder Singh, late proprietor
of Five Rivers Indian Restaurant, might not be giving this way again.
Arvinder blamed his uncertainty on the missionaries, whose presence
in a Sikh gurdwara he blamed on their little blue book, whose presence in
Arvinders tackle box he blamed on a graying airport cabbie named Earl.
Inhis right mind Arvinder would have refused the gift, but after poring over
the Matrimony Binder on the redeye from San Francisco to Boston, even the
phone book would have tempted him. His mother saw the interview for a
dental residency at UCSF as little more than a stray grain of rice on a thali
crowded with potential brides. The Bay Area has so many Indian families,
and a residency is such an auspicious time to begin, she assured him. Ill
45
visit the prospects myself during the fall KQED pledge drive. Never mind
that he hadnt matched yet, his mother prodded him to find a two-bedroom
in a good neighborhood and sent him a three-ring binder of profiles from
web-savvy parents seeking an educated professional of Sikh background for
marriage to cherished daughter. Every few pages, Arvinder leaned against
the airplane window and worried that one of these womenencouraged by
one of these familiesmight actually settle for his middling looks, preprofessional myopia and casual religiosity, all for the sake of an Indo-American TV
personality whose charm had clearly skipped a generation. He felt sorry for
that cherished daughter already.
The missionaries followed Arvinder and sat down in an open vein of carpet
on the mens side. They seemed nervousSagamore was sweating through
his headscarf, Webster was picking at the carpetbut this kind of nervous
might do them some good. Arvinders phone call to the hotline number
inside the book (Uh, yes, hello. Do you sponsor a Book of Mormon reading group in my area?) had produced two boyish Utahnslean, brown-eyed
Webster dwarfed by beefy, redheaded Sagamoreand their ignorance of Sikh
religion and history had produced Arvinders best sewa opportunity in years.
Supplementing the missionaries first lesson with Partition, their second with
the Golden Temple Massacre, and their third with U.S. hate crimes wasnt
a voluntary service like dusting shoes in the gurdwara or stirring dal in the
langar, but educating the uninformed had been good enough for his father.
Balwinder Singh had delivered these same lectures thirteen years ago, the
day Arvinder stuffed his turban into his backpack and came home with a
bowl cut. If all these people had been killed for their beliefs, he had asked,
why couldnt his older son uphold the faith in an American high school?
Arvinders silent shame almost ended their relationship. The silent glare he
gave the missionaries whenever they asked him to schedule an appointment
to change his religiongo in Sikh, have an extraction, come out Mormon
was supposed to end theirs.
But the missionaries still called and wrote and visited. Sitting between
them, watching their eyelids sag during kirtan, Arvinder concluded that
Mormons were pathologically poor listeners. Tabla-drum bluntness hadnt
worked in Earls cab, either. Thats fine about not changing your religion,
Earl had answered. Ill settle for changing your book collection. Reading
the Book of Mormon was supposed to jumpstart a catnap, but Arvinder
devoured the antiquated usage, the names like Zoram and Sherem, and the
46
Marx S Brother Singh
wars between Nephites and Lamanites. Later, when the book started devouring his coffee, swearing, social drinking, and occasional sexual encounters,
Arvinder realized that Earl had lied about the book collection. The little blue
book was going to change his whole life.
The missionaries, visibly relieved to be eating again after their fast, sent a
buzz through the langar. They come all the way from Utah at their own expense?
The thin one has eight siblings? The big one has a football scholarship? How
remarkable! Extra chapatis were brought when the mattar paneer proved too
spicy for Elder Webster; extra paneer was brought when the portions proved
too modest for Elder Sagamore. This warm welcome, a credit to the sangat
and the gurus, annoyed Arvinder. Where were the glares at the Mormons
lanky, moody sahajdari? Where were the whispered reprimands? Why, after
checking back with his old religion, had it failed to check him?
Arvinder forced himself to ignore the mattar paneer needling his tongue
and remember the karah prashad. Paneer he could get anywhere, but the dull
sweetness of the sacred pudding he could only taste in a gurdwara. The way
the blue book was settling into his tackle box and his free time, Arvinder
could only guess when he would be back.
SSS
Intrigued by the Book of Mormonby the emigration of Lehi to the Promised

Land, by the obedience of his son Nephi, by the rebellion of the other sons
Laman and LemuelArvinder was not as interested in baptism. If the gurdwara visit hadnt pulled him back to Sikhi, it hadnt pushed him toward the
Mormons, either. Who wanted to be there when his younger brother Simran,
who said japji every morning from the Guru Granth Sahib, noticed the blue
book on his brothers coffee table? Who wanted to see his mothers face when
she met her Mormon son instead of a Sikh daughter-in-law? Better to read
the book and shed bad habits on his own. That way, nobody but the missionaries got hurt.
Before inflicting that wound, he would fit in a little more sewa. His work
was not yet donetheir eyes still glazed over during accounts of political
and religious persecution that didnt involve an exodus to the American
West. During the fourth lesson, Arvinder was diagramming the square at
Jallianwala Bagh when Elder Webster snapped to attention.
He pointed to the single, narrow passageway. You say the British army
blocked the exit here, right?
47
Could the sewa be working? Yes. The troops fired on about ten thousand
unarmed Punjabis. Several hundred people died.
Arvinder, where do you believe their spirits went?
The Guru Granth Sahib knewI shall merge in the Lord like the water in
the sea and the wave in the stream.
Sikhs believe the soul lives on, he answered, squinting to make out the
illustrations on Sagamores flip chart. Bright, colorful circles, like balloons.
Souls who have more to learn after this life are reincarnated into other bodies. The ones who have finished learning can stay with God.
Then why shall I come again? The coming and going is under the Will of
theLord and Realizing this Will, I shall merge in the Lord. Nineteen months
out, Arvinder trusted his father had merged. Nothing less would have satisfied him.
Brother Singh, we also believe that spirits return to God after death, said
Elder Sagamore, shifting the chart closer. Its called the Plan of Salvation.
The circles now looked like a board gameFirst Prize Celestial, Second
Prize Terrestrialin which the water in the sea and the wave in the stream
were now a Spirit World. Balwinder Singh was there, they claimed, nodding at the same flip charts as his son. Arvinder didnt think the man who
closed Five Rivers for the birth- and death-dates of all ten gurus would give
the time of day to Webster and Sagamores great-great grandparents, but
people didnt always stay who you thought they were. Maybe his father
had picked up a blue book there. Maybe he liked what he read. Maybe he
wanted his son to get baptized, then slip inside a templewhere priesthood
transmitted the Mormon Amrit ceremony to dead ancestors, friends, even
endless lists of strangersand send him a baptism, the way hed sent money
to family back in India when he was alive.
An important part of the Plan of Salvation is baptism into Christs true
church, said Elder Webster. Arvinder, will you be baptized into His church
on Saturday, the twenty-fifth?
Ill give it some thought.
This time, he really would. It was one thing to drag out salvation for
yourself, another to drag it out for a blood relative. If this stuff was true, any
of it, he owed it to his father to find out. For the man who tried so hard to
save himextra Gurbani classes, public readings of the Guru Granth Sahib,
a family trip to the Golden TempleArvinder could manage three hours of
church each Sunday; read the blue book on his lunch break; pray m
orning,
48
night, and during coffee breaks. If God could change Arvinders mind about
baptism, that was a Moment Arvinder could not miss. The missionaries
assured him that his new lifestyle would offer God abundant chances to
speak his mind.
The express checkout lane at Star Market wasnt supposed to be one of
them. Watching a woman in sky-blue surgical scrubs unload mangoes and
strawberries from her cart, Arvinder remembered the fruit from Lehis Dream.
He opened his tackle box and leafed through the blue book. And it came to
pass that I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I beheld that it was
most sweet, above all that I had ever before tasted. Yea, and I beheld thatthe fruit
thereof was white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever before seen. Sweet
could be any fruit, but white narrowed it down. Narrowed it down to nothing in this produce department; nothing in Boston, Massachusetts; nothing
on earth. And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly
great joy. Arvinder felt his usual rush of pride from finding an answer in the
blue book, followed by an unfamiliar prickling in his nose. The fact that
he could find answers in the Book of Mormon became the answer, cutting
through tabloid photos of Julia Robertss double-wide incisors, fourteen
brands of breath mints, his forgotten PIN number, and his doubts about
baptism. Wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it
also; for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit. The tears his father
shed while taking Amrit were dignified; the tears Arvinder pressed into the
worried cashiers Kleenex tissue were not. But truth, revealed at this inconvenient Moment, was still truth. Arvinder couldnt change that.
The fifth lessondevoid of sewawrapped up early.
Arvinder, will you be baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints on Saturday, the twenty-fifth?
Let me check my Palm Pilot.
On the twenty-fifth, Arvinder followed Elder Webster into the public
bath they called a font. After the tepid, green-tinted water billowed through
Arvinders white cotton jumpsuit, a pile of male hands prayed and pressed
the Holy Ghost into his head. When Bishop Quint Bacon asked him to share
his testimony, Arvinder stepped up and ran a hand through his damp black
hair. Uh, thank you. I thank you all for being here. I thank the missionaries.
I thank EarlI guess Brother Beckstead, nowfor the book.
Arvinders nose quivered. The Holy Ghost could really pick his Moments,
right here in front of all these people.
49
I hope my father can see me, he whispered. I hope he will choose the
baptism Im going to send him.
On the twenty-sixth, Arvinder was waiting outside the Family History
Center, papers in hand, when Sister Carvalho unlocked the door.
This pedigree chart looks super, Brother! Really super! But before you can
get baptized for your father, youll need written permission from his nearest
living relative, she explained. Now Ervin, dear, is your mother still alive?
Couldnt you just ask her?
His eyes blinked several times as his nose threatened to twitch. No, he
could not ask her. This was his mother, the witness to his binding promise
from the Oncology Ward, Room 315b. Arvindereven if you will never take
Amritplease, marry as your mother wishesyou and your wife must look
after herwill you do this for me, son? As Arvinder nodded yes, Davinder
Kaur had squeezed his hand in approval.
The night before graduation, Arvinder stowed his scriptures in his box
spring and knelt to ask the Lord a few favors. Could He please help Arvinder
gracefully back out of tomorrows arranged marriage discussion? Could He
please delay public scrutiny of his new religion until some future Right
Moment, preferably when his professional achievements and gray hair would
cushion the blow?
Unfortunately, the Lord pleased only to make Arvinders Book of Mormon
a very poor mattress: he lay awake all night, reliving the sheer inconvenience
of every Right Moment in his short Mormon life.
SSS
Graduation Day began well enough. Arvinders mother proudly took his
arm on the way from the rental car to Carmichael Quad, detaching only
to pose for photographs with D.D.S. mothers who recognized that Indian
woman from TV. Simran found him after the ceremony and embraced him,
commenting that his big brother looked so good in a mortarboard, he really
should consider a turban. Arvinder was relieved; the five-year-old who pommelled him with skinny, flailing arms the day of his first haircut had let him
off easy thirteen years later. Nothing could restore the admiration he once
felt from the little boy with the tidy patka, but Simrans hug was encouraging.
People, even family, could surprise you.
Days could do the same thing.
Afterwards, at Arvinders North End studio, Simran sprawled on the bed
and immersed himself in back issues of dental journals while his mother
50
peeled potatoes in the kitchenette for aloo gobiquick divots in the eyes,
then scrape, scrape, scrape. Arvinder, his eyes blurring over the Latin on his
diploma, willed dental dams and blinded potatoes to distract them from the
absent binder, from the blue book burning through his mattress.
Arvinder, roll that thing up and go get the Matrimony Binder. Lets have
a look.
The profiles of all thirty-eight cherished daughters had perished in the
clinics paper shredder two days ago. Arvinder felt a terror he recalled from
nightmares about extracting the wrong tooth and leaving a dark, bleeding
socket in the mandible. Im sorry, mother, but I cannot get married. Not
that way.
What do you mean? Simran snapped shut a winter double issue. His
mothers paring knife clanged on the floor. Tell me honestly, son, are you
seeing anyone?
No, mother, I am not. Not since a holiday party last December, when
french-kissing Candace took his mind off arranged marriage. The next day,
Arvinder wondered if she might appreciate a matching instrument case. He
called from Aisle 9 of Tent City to ask her favorite color; Candace asked
him not to bother. I dont know what came over me last night, she confessed, but on that egg nog, you were a totally different person. Damn near
communicative.
Davinder Kaur was angry. If its not some woman, then what is it?
Ipromised your father I would arrange your match. Now you are breaking
my promise. Arvinder, what has come over you?
Mother, Simran, you should know that I am considering Christianity.
The Right Words, spoken by prophets in the blue book, could level prison
walls; the Wrong Words, spoken by Arvinder at 67 Winthrop #C, leveled his
mothers hopes for a cherished daughter. Considering Christianity was all it
took for her to gape at Arvinder as if the last twenty-seven years were a cruel
mistake; for Simran to call him a liar and a deceiver and hurl magazines at
him; for Davinder Kaur to steer her younger sons shoulders toward the door,
the stairs, and the rental car three blocks away.
The electronic fallout was immediate. Simrans email attachments blasting
Christian conversions in the Punjab followed Arvinder all summer long, all
the way from his studio in Boston to his one-bedroom in San Francisco. His
mothers email, on the other hand, was suspiciously cordial. She insisted on
buying him plane tickets home for the winter break, which meant his visit
51
would coincide with an uncle's flying in from Chandigarh. Arvinder foresaw

a vacation saturated with religious outreach, the kind endured by would-be
Lamans and Lemuels everywhere. He knew the intervention wouldnt succeed, but he also knew he deserved it.
Would he stay silent during the lectures this time, or would he speak up
and share the blue book? Professional duty had prompted Arvinder Singh,
D.D.S., to inform total strangers about their anterior caries; Brother Singhs
missionary duties had inspired him to hide his scriptures under his bed. But
now, a second copy of the blue book rested next to the saucer of fennel seeds
on his kitchen table. Someday he might have the courage to tell his mother
about baptism for the dead; she might sign a permission letter; he might send
his father a baptism from the temple in Oakland; Balwinder Singh might
accept it in the Spirit World. All this was still possible, Arvinder told himself,
because people didnt always stay who you thought they were.
SSS
On his first Sunday in San Francisco, Arvinder took the bus from his apartment on Carmel Street to the church building. He followed the prelude
music to the foyer, where he joined a strawberry blond family of four in a
receiving line.
A man just older than Earl was shaking hands with everyone. Welcome
to the ward, Brother and Sister?
Dixon, they answered together. Jared and Deena.
Bishop Bob Davies. Great to meet you. What brings you kids to San
Francisco?
Im doing a dental residency at UCSF, said Brother Dixon.
Super! Lots of those every year
Sister Dixon steered her children to a side pew; Brother Dixon left to greet
someone across the chapel.
The bishop turned to Arvinder. All those dental residents had left their
mark on Bob Davies front teeth, illuminated by a uniform white veneer.
Welcome to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints! Its great to
meet you. Im Bishop Bob Davies.
Im Arvinder Singh. Nice to meet you, too.
Brother Anderson! Super! So glad you could visit us today. Can I find the
missionaries for you? They were just here a minute ago
That wont be necessary. I am a Mormon.
Oheven better! Sorry about the mixup. So many new people.
52
Arvinder squeezed onto the edge of the Dixons pew; to his relief, Jared recognized him from orientation. During the opening hymn, he introduced Arvinder
to Deena, four-year-old Kloey and two-year-old Karson. Kloey dumped a
paper cup of sacrament water on Arvinders gabardine pants; Arvinder blocked
her escape to the aisle with his knees. Deena rewarded his quick thinking with
a Tupperware container of fish crackers, which he arranged on one of the green
hymnbooks like the main hall in a gurdwaratwo rectangular sections divided
by a single aisle. Mesmerized, Kloey nibbled from the mens side during the talks
while Arvinderimagining his mothers scowlsampled from the womens.
Kloeys father seemed to have the inside track on Undercover Mormons.
That first Sunday alone, Jared introduced him to fellow residents Dallin and
Spencer, Hyrum from the D.D.S. program, and Darren Paul on the clinical
faculty. Three days before, Arvinder had given up while scanning the resident
orientation crowd for Mormon colleagues. With a male dress code ranging
from the missionaries white shirts and ties to Quint Bacons three-piece
tweed suits to Earls polyester cardigansand a female dress code described
only as modesthow could a desi from Chicago be expected to know? For
that matter, how could people tell about him? The four Indian residents
wearing steel bracelets would see a South Asian in Dockers and a blue Oxford
and assume he was Hindu; the Mormons, as he discovered later, would shake
his hand and call him Brother Anderson.
Arvinder met his fifth Undercover Mormon the day he skipped the LDS
Student Association bag lunch to drop off some insurance forms.
If you have to miss Deenas famous tuna sandwiches, Jared said, you
should stop by and say hello to my sisters Visiting Teachers old roommate.
She works in the International Office. Her name is Julie, or Holly. Some
thing with Ls.
Somehow, Jared could identify other Mormons across chapels and large
buildings. Do you Mormons all know each other?
Come on, man, Jared laughed. He hung up his lab coat, then slapped
Arvinder on the back. You mean do we Mormons all know each other! Well,
theres only one way to find out.
We Mormons, standing outside the International Office, were chicken.
Arvinder pretended to study the quilt hanging on the wall while trying to
remember Earls secret formula. Arvinder could hand out dental advice
toanyone, but how did Earl get up the courage, fare after fare, to hand
out the blue book? Admitting your beliefs to your family was hard enough;
53
roclaiming them to total strangers was impossible. The turban, kara, and surp
name that had always spoken up for his religion were now as silent as he was.
Arvinder was remembering the smell of tuna sandwiches from Jareds
locker when he heard a female voice.
Hello Sariah... Oh nothing. Same old, same old. I can talk for a
minute... Wade canceled on you? Fifteen minutes before your lunch date?
Well, thats just super!... Such a typical male. Now do you believe me about
Mormon men?
The opportunity to learn the truth about his new brotherhood nudged
him closer to the door.
The best ones get married right after their missions. You and I, Sariah,
were ten years too late. We get to pick from the divorced and the damaged.
Great. Kenny Webster, fresh off his mission and scraping through his
sophomore year at Southern Utah University, was a better prospect than
Arvinder Singh, D.D.S. Davinder Kaur would be appalled.
Julie-Hollys voice softened. Sorry to bring you down this early in the
day... You need to take cookies? Sure, Ill pick some up... Hey, you know
me, Sariahanything for Enrichment!
Enrichment, defined by the world as the addition of niacin to flour, was
the evening meeting of the Mormon Relief Society. Sariah, Lehis wife, went
to Enrichment. Julie-Holly, her confidant, went to Enrichment. Arvinders
future wife, mercifully blind to his obsolescence, would go to Enrichment.
Hey there! Which square is your favorite?
Startled, Arvinder turned from the quilta convenient screen for projecting the image of his future wife mixing cookie doughto face a slender
blonde in a peach sweater twinset and a gleaming gold crucifix. This must be
Julie-Holly in the flesh.
Um... well... I prefer the Spanish lace, he stammered.
She smiled and shook her head. Too bad. Nobody ever likes the Turkish
pillow cover.
Arvinder glimpsed an octet of brilliant white maxillary anteriors. The
quilt is great. Did you make it?
Her lacquered fingernail pointed toward a placard that read like the
Book of Mormon on the SATQuadrants:Unity::Tapestry:Diversity
in Sixteen Small Squares, by Holly Jerusha Foster. The Brother of Jared
had taken sixteen small stones and asked the Lord to turn them into light
bulbsHolly had taken sixteen multinational pillow covers, oven mitts, and
54
handkerchiefs and turned them into art all on her own. Holly was not just a
fellow Mormon, but a fellow visionary; she, of all people, would appreciate
the genius of his tackle box. Arvinder warmed to the idea of her.
The quilter herself, at your service. She shook his hand at full Bishop
Davies strength. And who might you be?
Arvinder Singh. Im starting a residency at the dental school.
Super! He cringed at the word. So, Mr. Singh, are you here on an F-1
or a J-1?
Im a U.S. citizen. Just like Bishop Davies, Holly saw him as an alien.
Sorry. Most people come through here to register. A nail dug into her
chinshe seemed genuinely sorry. Can I ask you if Singh is a Sikh name?
Yes. My family is Sikh.
Sat Sri Akal! Thats my only Punjabi, sorry.
Sat Sri Akal. Very good. A Mormon woman who had heard of Punjabi?
That was excellent.
Thanks. I learned it from a cabbie.
Arvinder smiled. Yes, cabbies know a lot of things.
A phone rang from inside the office. Uh oh, thats for me. Sat Sri Akal,
Mr. Singh!
That she knew it meant hello and goodbye was another excellent sign.
SSS
As nice as Holly had looked in the hall that day, she looked amazing in a
lavender salwar kameez with gold trim. Maybe she would wear it again if he
asked. Arvinder had asked her to the UCSF Diwali Celebrationwell, hed
slipped a flyer under her office doorand she showed up, dressed to please.
Every time the crowd clapped along during the program, Holly joined right
in; the more amateur the performance, the louder her applause. Finally, a
Mormon who knew how to listen.
Like all good Mormons, Holly also knew how to ask. Arvinder stifled his
questions week after week in Gospel Essentials class, but Holly boldly surveyed other Diwali guests about her tray of homemade samosas. Were the
spices strong enough? Was the dough sufficiently flaky? How was the ratio of
peas to potatoes? They were fine, everyone told her. You did a very fine job.
But Holly wanted hers to compete with the best in townwould anyone
know where to buy them?
Arvinder hadnt eaten out in San Francisco yet; fortunately Sunita, another
resident from the clinic, hadnt noticed.
55
Holly, you should ask Arvinder where he gets his, she suggested. His
mother is Davinder Kaur, the one on TV.
Davinder Kaur is your mother? Arvinder felt like a movie star shopping
for a loaf of bread. Im a huge fan. Can we do lunch?
Even Mormon women liked him for his mother; at least she hadnt called
him old.
I would be honored, he replied. Honored, even under these conditions.
At Passage to India, Arvinder strummed his fingers on the table, hoping
that Sunita was right about the food here. He thanked the server profusely
for the two glasses of ice water; he knew the work was menial. All through
high school hed waited tables like these at Five Rivers, right down to the
saffron tablecloths pinned under thick glass squares.
Sat Sri Akal, Arvinder! cried Holly from the doorway.
Hi there, Holly, he replied.
Today, Hollys questions began on the vegetarian side of the buffet line.
Arvinder, how does your mother make aloo gobi? I dont think Ive seen that
episode yet.
She wasnt missing much; he considered his mothers aloo gobi her weak
spot. You know, this is probably just as good.
She nodded thoughtfully. Where does naan come from?
You put the dough in a circular oven called a tandoor. Same oven as the
chicken.
Where are the samosas, Arvinder?
They come separately. Let me find the waiter and order some.
Later, when Arvinder thanked the waiter for the bill, Holly was busy
spearing rice grains with the tines of her fork. Every grain is separate!
Amazing! How does your mother do it?
I dont knowshe just does. His experience was less on the cooking
side and more on the serving, clearing, and appreciating side. He hoped this
wouldnt be a problem for his new Mormon friend.
The waiter took Arvinders credit card and Holly looked up. Help,
Arvinder! I dont understand your Diwali!
Excuse me? I thought you were there, too. She looked like a natural
lighting a diya.
No, no, I mean why do Sikhs celebrate Diwali? The Hindus were honoring Lakshmi, but who were you? He stared, confused. Honoring, I mean.
56
Arvinder knew this answer by heartBalwinder Singh taught that the

holiday meant more than lights and presents. A Muslim emperor took a
Sikh guru prisoner. Fifty-two Hindu princes were also in the prison. When
the emperor released the guru, he asked if the princes could join him.
A row of shiny nails on curled fingers came to attention on the glass tabletop. What happened?
The guru was going to be set free through a very narrow tunnel. The
emperor told him he could take as many princes as could touch his clothing,
so the guru had a coat made with fifty-two long tassels. Each Hindu prince
grabbed onto a tassel, and all of them walked out of the prison together.
Oh, excellent! People from different religions helping each other. She
patted the wrist once encircled by his kara. Like us.
Arvinder knew better, but kept it to himself. Now was not the Right
Moment to reveal himself as an elderly Mormon bachelor to a highly
Enriched woman. Better to make another lunch date.
SSS
At each of thirteen buffet specials, Holly wore a new, distinct twinset and
asked questions. Who were the gurus? What is a gurdwara? Where is the
Punjab? She held onto an answer for as long as it took to request another.
Arvinder imagined her stashing them in her beaded macram purse.
This tandoori chicken is super! Really out of sight! Can I have your last
piece? she asked during Lunch Eight, the one with the warm burgundy
sweater set. Oh, and was it forty-two or fifty-two tassels on the gurus coat?
Arvinder gladly dispensed chicken pieces and tidbits of Sikh culture, grateful she never asked about his missing turban. But Hollys episodic discretion
had its downside; she was certainly dragging her feet about Arvinders salvation. Since she was Mormonand since she obviously liked himwhat was
she waiting for? Maybe not everyone could hand out the blue book in a cab,
but somewhere along the shared miles of buffet lines, Arvinder expected at
least a Book of Mormon pass-along card. At Lunch Eleven, right after Holly
dribbled chicken makhni down her sage-colored top, he jumped in and
asked about her home state. Primed for pioneers, temples, and Mormons,
Arvinder heard instead about Utahs arid climate, cultural homogeneity, and
historical contributions to the textile arts. She mentioned nothing about the
blue book; nothing that would lead him to the Church of Jesus Christ if he
werent already there.
57
Hollys religious tolerance drove Arvinder crazy. An image of kissing

his way down Candaces neck had teased him months before the holiday
party; his Holly fantasies, though purer, were just as urgent. Boxing the
little Dixons into their pew each week, he imagined scooting down to make
room for Hollyluminous in the modest skirt and sweaters she probably
wore to her own ward, eager to tickle the back of Arvinders neck with her
fingernails like Deena tickled Jareds. He coveted her lifelong Mormonness
with an envy he hadnt felt since the fourth-years were fabricating porcelain
crowns while the first-years carved wax teeth. Open admiration of Hollys
Gospel Essentials mastery, her years of temple baptisms, and her charts of
saved ancestors would all be hers the minute she mentioned the book.
Arvinders frustration came to a head at Hollys post-Thanksgiving beach
picnic, a thank-you gesture for his raiding the tackle box to repair the dislodged
crown on #19, Sariahs lower left first molar. Neither gray skies nor whipping
wind nor soggy turkey samosas (Theyre super, he lied) would stop him from
making his own Right Moment today. After the meal, Sariah immersed herself in the latest Nora Roberts while Arvinder suggested a beach walk for two.
Two hundred yards later, his parka and his courage buckled under three
glass pieces, two shells, a knob of driftwood, and twenty-something black
rocks. By four hundred yards, the pressure was too great.
Holly, listen, theres something I need to tell you.
Oh, that stuffs way too heavy, isnt it? she asked. Why dont you set it
down and teach me some Gurmukhi? You could write our names! Together!
Right here!
Her treasures thudded softly into the wet sand. Arvinder recovered the
driftwood and etched their names while Holly traced the lines and curls in
the air.
Please, Holly, Ive got to say something here
Sariiiiiiah! she yelled. Her roommate set down the book and squinted.
Come see Arvinders masterpiece! Bring the camera!
Arvinder hurled the driftwood into the ocean. The water answered by lapping at their feet and washing their names away.
SSS
Holly scheduled their final date while pulling up to Carmel Street after the
picnic. Ill be selling quilts at a Christmas boutique, Arvinder, and Ill have
a surprise for you there. I know its a Christian holiday, she said, but would
you be very offended if you came?
58
Arvinder glared out the passenger window. No, not at all.

The night of Pearl Harbor Dayanother Five Rivers restaurant holiday
a turbaned cabbie dropped Arvinder at the LDS SanFranSingles Christmas
Boutique, advertised by a lighted wooden sign impaling a bed of hapless
petunias. Standing in the entryway of the Russian Hill Victorian, inhaling
cinnamon and carols, Arvinder scouted a path through the four evergreens
and forty women, straight through the populous heart of Enrich
ment.
For the only visible male, the atmosphere was awkward; for the greenest
Christian, surreal. Christmas had shifted from an overhyped Diwali to his
holiday. His tole-painted wooden Santas. His knee-high wire reindeer. His
mantel full of crystal Salt Lake Temples, $39.95 each, one religion away from
the brass Golden Temple in his parents house outside Chicago.
Over here, Dr. Singh!
Sariah, wearing a Krafter Kashier badge, beckoned Arvinder into the
Krafters Kitchen, where he paid $8.50 for a red gingham bag of sugar cookie
mix Made With Love by Sariah Lu Spencer. He noticed her blush as she
handed him his change and a cup of virgin egg nog.
Holly will be glad to see you, she said nervously. Its been so nice knowing you, Doctor. Good luck with everything.
Was Sariah moving? Had Holly forgotten to tell him? He was going to ask
about forwarding her dental records when a customer walked in with a Wise
Men centerpiece made from corn husks.
Gotta go ring this up, said Sariah, flashing her crowded, pale yellow
teeth. Merry Christmas, Doctor Singh!
Arvinder picked up his gingham bundle and set off to find Holly, whom
he discovered when he paused for breath under a portrait of George Washing
ton, knees bowed in prayer. Surprise at her vigorously braided hair and garish
Austrian frock contaminated what should have been pure relief.
There you are! Sat Sri Akal, Holly!
Lieber Arvinder, surely youve noticed the dirndl. She gave the skirt a
quick twirl. Im dressed for the Adventssingen. Sariah will take over the
booth after I leave with Hans.
Holly had been right about the boutiqueArvinder was definitely surprised.
Uhsuper. I hope you have a great time.
She beamed back. I will, I will. But of course, youre here for something
else! She held up a Safeway bag and claimed his elbow. Shall we find somewhere to talk?
59
Arvinder followed her down a narrow staircase to a one-car, one-lightbulb

garage. Holly set the bag on the hood of a black Land Rover.
Arvinder, I have so enjoyed our lunches, she sniffled. Was she crying?
Were she and Sariah moving? I have learned so much about your religion
and your people. Im so sorry weve reached goodbye. Please accept this gift
as a token of my appreciation.
He set the cookie mix on a stack of wheat cans and untied the knot in
the Safeway bag. Inside, wrapped in gift tissue addressed To Arvinder,
From Holly in crude Gurmukhi, was a saffron quilt the size of a baby
blanket. Arvinder held it up and saw the blue khanda appliqud across the
center and fifty-two tassels hanging from the edges. Simran would love it
for his dorm room.
The quilt is nice, Holly, but I dont understand. Why are you saying
good-bye?
Youre Sikh, Arvinder, and Im not. It would never work out between us.
So that was it. Holly wasnt moving anywhere, she just wasnt seeing
him clearly. People must be her blind spot. She could recognize the artistic
potential of an oven mitt, but she couldnt look at Arvinder Singh and see
him changed by the blue book. Holly Jerusha Foster wasnt going to share
her religion with him, Hans, or anyone. She saw youand left youjust the
way you were.
Pressure from the Next Available Moment was cresting into a headache
he would have to tell her now. She might be surprised, but one good laugh
and this would all be over. Holly would forget Hans and the Adventssingen;
Arvindera newly-called Home Teacher, a wobbly tenor soloist in the Ward
Christmas Programhe was the one she wanted to sit with.
Actually, Holly, only my family is Sikh. Someone gave me a Book of
Mormon back in March. Now I am a member of your church.
Hearing this, Holly buried her face in her hands and groaned. Arvinder
almost offered her the quilt, but he didnt know if her tears would mar
thesatin.
Finally, she looked up. God, Arvinder, why didnt you tell me? she asked.
All this time, you were Mormon? And you thought that I was, too?
Something was wrong hereDeena Dixon never said God like that. Holly
was making less sense after the Moment than before.
Maybe he could explain. That first day, in the hall, I heard you on the
phone talking about Enrichment. Thats how I knew you were a Mormon, too.
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Holly rolled her eyes. You never saw me at church, did you?
Wellmaybe you go to a different ward, he protested. You do,
dontyou?
She swung her hips and watched the bright blue skirt swish back and
forth. Arvinder, my family is Mormon, and my roommate is Mormon, but
Im what Mormons call less active.
While Arvinder waited for a pass-along card he didnt need, Holly had
been waiting in Arvinders blind spot. Engrossed in their pew for two, he
hadmissed Hollys change from Jareds somebodys Visiting Teachers something into a less-active member. Even Mormons didnt stay who you thought
they were.
Holly, Im sorry to hear that, he said. Would you tell me more about it?
Thats one long, long story. Hans is waiting.
Do you want to go somewhere and talk? Get a cup of cocoa, maybe?
pleaded Arvinder as she walked toward the staircase. Im a good listener.
Holly turned back at the door. That far from the light bulb her skin was
wan, yanked taut by the braids. Look, Arvinder, thanks a ton. You are such
a sweetheart. Dont ever let them change you.
Arvinder was leaning against the Land Rover, packing the cookie mix and
the quilt into the Safeway bag, as a male voice greeted Hollichen upstairs. Ten
minutes later, he left to ask Sariah for some Tylenol and another cup of nog.
SSS
Arvinder took a final swig of dilute Sprite before dropping his cup in the
outstretched trash bag.
Thank you, sir, said the flight attendant. Her ash-blond ponytail and
prominent canines, #6 and #11, reminded him of Holly.
Youre very welcome, he answered, envious of the flight attendants
handy script, her cheat sheets posted by the intercom. Given his upcoming Right Moment, Arvinder wished God had posted a cheat sheet for him.
Welcome to Flight 1783 nonstop to Chicago-OHare. Seat backs and tray tables
should now be in the full upright and locked position. The captain has turned off
the seat belt sign. I am a Mormonare you one, too? If not, would you like to
know more?
Palms slippery with sweat, Arvinder leaned down, reached into his carryon, past the quilt for Simran, the Alcatraz T-shirt for chachaji, and the foilwrapped sugar cookies for his mother and pulled out the blue book. He set it
down on the tray table of the empty seat to his right. After wiping his hands
61
on his gray khakis, he reached over and tapped the shoulder of the passenger
in the window seat.
A fortyish manmaybe Italian, maybe Catholic, maybe Undercover
Mormonlooked up from the in-flight magazine and met Arvinders best
new-patient smile.
Hello there, sir.
The head nodded.
Ive got a book here. You areuhwelcome to it if you getuh
bored.
The man squinted at the books gold lettering. Thanks, he muttered,
but no thanks.
Three minutes later, Arvinder fished out a sugar cookie.
Seven minutes later, the window-seat passenger squeezed past Arvinder,
claiming he needed to stretch his legs.
Thirty-eight minutes later, Arvinder checked in with Lehi.
And it came to pass that I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I
beheld that it was most sweet, above all that I had ever before tasted... And as
I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy.
That the passenger saw the fruit and walked away could not blight
Arvinders success; his very ignorance of this manhis religion, his desire to
change itfelt like progress. Ignorance must be the secret formula behind
missionary work. When Earl didnt know if a twenty-something IndoAmerican male would read the Book of Mormon, he asked. When Webster
and Sagamore didnt know if Arvinder felt ready for baptism, they asked.
Back when Arvinder knew everything about Hollys religion, he didnt ask,
and now her answersand all her questionsbelonged to Hans.
Arvinder would never learn what had pried Holly loose from the book
that pried him from Sikhi, or whether Balwinder Singh would grab hold
of a temple baptism when it arrivedsome kinds of ignorance turned
into knowledge before others. Baptism had taken weeks to make sense, but
Arvinder knew the blue book was true right away, just as he knew good
smiles or knew about the tackle box. With a little rearranging, the boxs white
plastic tiers carried his explorers, mirrors, polishing burrs and spoon excavators; with a little more rearranging, the Book of Mormons stories could carry
all of him. Laman and Lemuel, who bound Nephi in cords for his obedience,
became the high school jocks who slammed Arvinder against the lockers
and unwrapped his turban; Nephis courage became Arvinders during the
62
four hours between gym and the barbershop; Lehis despair for the sons who
rejected the fruit became Balwinder Singhs anguish that night when he met
his clean-shaven boy.
When his story overflowed the blue book, Arvinder was not surprisedhe
supposed even prophets had blind spots. But Arvinder had watched Simran
hug their grieving father in the entryway; he could feel Laman and Lemuels
despair, their brief, unrecorded yearning for the fruit.
S This story was awarded first place in the 2004 Irreantum fiction contest.
63
Lance Larsen
Winter Takeout
In the pass, fishtailing around corners, in the whiteout
of maybe and two-way traffic, I said yes
to everything. Yes to snow heavy as Ecclesiastes.
Yes to vertigo and the wheels locking up
if it came to that. Yes to the physics of forehead
kissing glass and the hush of more snow
and whatever follows claritybeing found clean
or found out. At the truck stop all I could manage
was hunger. So I ordered a catchers mitt
of a cinnamon roll slathered in icing, and waited,
hunched at the counter, beside swinging kitchen doors.
Thats when she sidestepped past, her hands
on my waist her only excuse me. A waitress in stripes
and the heavy blue of December mascara.
But releasing carefully, like a skater. Silly to call
that incident holy. Her hands didnt linger.
Her minced steps and the pout of her body
were only fatigue. But so what? I needed to be touched.
I could call her Casualene and say she looked
like her name only sadder. That all night I had felt
my ransomed body sliding along ice and barbed wire,
and felt it here needled by a scratchy jukebox.
64
Larsen S Three poems
I could say I licked my fingers all the way to Idaho.

All true. How I ached to guarantee her a charmed life.
How chivalric and beside the point I was.
How dark the highway, how much darker the snow.
S Originally appeared in Paris Review.
Landscape, with Hungry Gulls

If I said burial, if I said a lovely morning
to prepare the body, who would I startle?
Not this pair of teenage girls in matching swim suits
making a mound of their brother.
And not the boy himself, laid out like a cadaver
on rye, who volunteered for interment.
In the language of skin, he knows that sand rhymes
with patience, and that patience worketh
a blue sky dotted with gulls, if only he remains
still enough. And he does, his face a cameo
dusted with sparkling grains. Meanwhile, my son
brings me offerings he has dug up
a jaw bone, a pair of vertebrae, ribs like planks, three teeth.
At my feet, an ancient horse assembles.
A lesson in calcification? A beginners oracle kit?
If the sea gulls canvassing the beach
are questions, then the pelican riding the dihedral breeze
above the buoys is an admonition, but to what?
The sisters are at work again, making a giant
Shasta daisy of their brothers face,
six pieces of popcorn per petal, his eyes blinking.
Now they scatter leftover kernels across the mound
like sextons scattering lime. To my left,
ankle deep in shallows, my son catches minnows.
65
No, not minnows, damsel fly larvae,

which swim like minnows but have six legs.
He places them in a moat, so they can swim freely.
Soon enough they will climb this castle wall.
Soon enough they will shed their syntax
and leave water for air, like a good translation.
The sisters move farther down the beach
in hopes that the sea gulls will make a snack
of their brother. So many motives.
Theirs: to dress a body in sand and stillness.
His: to sip the world, mouth to beak.
The gulls draw closer, to peck at his heart.
I am pretending the body is only an idea.
I watch the pelican. I keep reminding myself.
A pelican is not a pterodactyl with feathers.
A pelican is not doing moral reconnaissance.
A pelican does not know my name.
I close my eyes long enough to drift up and up.
Poor man, napping there far below, who looks
and smells like me but is stuck in a beach chair.
Quick, someone teach him to bank and hover.
And this horse my son is decorating the moat with,
broken into pieces so various and eloquent
where are its pastures, does it have enough to eat?
S Originally appeared in Grand Street; forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize
2005: Best of the Small Presses.
66
Larsen S Three poems
Rehearsal
Either the wall is dripping eighth notes, or sugar ants
are trafficking again in borrowed sweetness.
Still hot, still the same in-between hour but morning
has slipped its tethers to nose around inside me.
Im half breaths away from discovering holiness
or pity. That shuttered bedroom Ive carried
since birth where luminous bodies wait to be kissed
awake. The house natters on about permanence.
The responsible mail truck rumbles closer, then idles
down, making a ritual out of getting my name
wrong. I kneel. When is waiting a color? If I were
my daughter, Id hang my hair till it swept the floor.
S Originally appeared in New York Review of Books.
67
Lisa Bickmore
The Undoing
If it were my bed and my house, Id turn
my hand to undoing. Id strip the bedding
and blankets away, and unquilt the mattress
and shred the tick. The shoes Id take
out of the closet, ready for the feet leaving
the house in pairs, in pairs of pairs.
Sweaters wed no longer need, since its summer
and we no longer talk about the cold; and so out
of the drawers theyd come, and the drawers, too,
the chests with their naked ribs. At the basin,
Id leave the bar of soap, half dissolved from
our hands washings. Someone else will think
of cleanliness. Out of the box would come the rings,
earrings, necklaces of encircling affection; Id
open the windows to make my hand more free in
letting fall the glittering things to the lawn below.
Out of albums would fall the photographs, like leaves
of an unsewn book. Even the socks with undarned holes
in their heelsthese Id unravel, stitch by minute stitch.
These domestic details have always prophesied
their own demise; I fulfill their promise.
And those bodies, the bodies that sleep
in the beds! I am wondering what to do with them,
how to unmake what Ive made, the bodies Ive made.
Every day they are taller, longer, like tadpoles changing
form in water, a dart and a wriggle, the disappearance
of a fin, the last vestige of a tail; then a muscled thigh,
the exact inventory of toes. These too are undoing,
undoing their freshness and newness, leaving me
with only memory which does nothing but crowd
the house. Clean it out. Let these hands which have made,
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Bickmore S Two poems
unmake. Let this be the end of my making.

Open doors, open windows. Let nothing
but air inhabit these rooms, these many mansions.
S Originally appeared in Frontiers.
From a Pastoral
as the birds practice migration in late summer
For the white secret of their underwings;
for the patterns of their markings,
which gather them together in clans;
for the dusky sky which has spilt its roses,
the wild sunflowers tall as saplings,
the wind picking up and carrying on;
for gulls alighting on a field just plowed,
for small planes landing, and the slow descent
of parachutes into the late western light;
for color that darkens into nothing in shadow,
brightening to nothing in light;
for enigmatic water in canals and ditches,
cutting through the palimpsest of suburbs
over old farmland; for haven in change,
in moving on; and for the morning,
when the sky lightens like a milky stone
over the old sugar factory road, and the lightning
daring to go everywhere; for the luck of this,
for my lack which turns to starved sight, draws
near to birds, seraphim of dawn and darkness,
pieces a reckless music out of the sky.
S Originally appeared in Mudfish.
69
October Soil
Jack Harrell
It was a Tuesday evening when Brother Judd came by. Alyssa
and I had been grocery shopping, and on the way home she was
talking about finding another job. The clothing store where shed
been working had just closed its doors. The baby wasnt due for a while,
and she wanted to earn some money before Christmas. Brother Judd was
standing on the front porch of our apartment house in jeans and a flannel
shirt when we turned into the driveway. At first I didnt recognize him. Id
never seen him anywhere but at church, in anything but a suit. I parked the
car behind the house, and he came around to meet us. He helped us with
the groceries, asking how wed settled in, how I was doing in my classes. He
said he figured there was a big difference between living in the Rockies and
living in the Midwest, where wed just come from. He said hed only been
back East once, when he was in the Army. I didnt tell him Illinois wasnt
quite the East.
He said hed come to talk about Thomas, a fourteen-year-old in my Sun
day School class. Thomas had moved down from Montana with his mother.
Im worried about the boy, Brother Judd said. His mom says the divorce
really upset him. Hes one of those kids who writes poetry. Dont get me
wrong, he was quick to add. Hes a good kid. Hes just not making friends,
thats all. Do you think it would help if we got him into Scouts?
Some people have difficulty fitting in, I said. Maybe he just needs
some time.
It still wouldnt hurt to reach out to him, Brother Judd said. He handed
me a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. Youre studying psychology, he said.
Take him out for a hamburger. See what you can figure out.
I picked up Thomas the following Saturday afternoon. He was a tall kid
with a pointed nose and frizzy brown hair. He didnt like burgers, so we got
pizza and found a city park. It was a soggy October day, already a bit chilly.
71
Except for some college guys playing mud football, we were the only ones
around. We sat there at a picnic table with our jackets on and a pepperoni
pizza in a cardboard box between us. It was awkward from the start. He
grabbed the first slice of pizza, taking a big bite, pulling until the strings of
cheese gave way. You married? he asked with his mouth full.
Yeah, I said, almost a year now. I reached for a slice and put it on
anapkin.
You got a kid? he asked.
One on the way.
Did you grow up here?
No. We moved here about two months ago, from Illinois.
What made you want to come here? he asked.
He tore off the crust of his pizza and tossed it in the box. I told him I was
working on a PhD, that one of my professors in Illinois knew one of the
professors here. I even told him why I was interested in psychology. My dad
had been a drinker and a cheat. After going bankrupt a couple of times, he
left me and my mom when I was four. I wanted to understand what would
make a man live that way. Maybe my dad didnt know any better, I finally
said. Maybe he could have been a better man. He just didnt know how.
I didnt want to move down here, Thomas said. It was my moms idea.
I nodded, still thinking about my dad. Id never said that before, how he
could have been a better man.
Ive got two older sisters, Thomas said. They stayed in Montana.
You didnt want to? I asked.
I guess not, he said. It was my choice.
That word choice struck me, the way he used it.
So what happened with your parents? I asked.
My dad loved too many people, he answered.
Id never heard it put that way before.
Youre a psychologist? he asked.
Not yet. Itll take a few years to get the degree.
Is that why you wanted to take me out to lunch, to figure me out?
Brother Judd said you write poetry, I answered. Apparently, that's a
serious problem.
Did Brother Judd tell you to take me to lunch?
Hes worried, you know. Hes actually a pretty nice guy.
Thats his job, isnt it? In the Church, I mean.
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Harrell S October Soil
I wanted to change the subject, turn things back to him. So whats your
poetry about? I asked.
He looked up from his pizza. Death, he said.
He waited for a reaction. I didnt react. One of the mud football players
scored a touchdown, and there was a lot of shouting. I took the last bite of
my pizza and grabbed another napkin.
You ever think about death? he asked.
I was looking out across the park. All the time, I said. My dad died in
January. For weeks I had the same dream. I was four years old, standing by
his coffin and crying.
Jeez, he said. Has Brother Judd taken you out to lunch?
I turned to him and smiled. He was already looking away, hiding a smirk.
So the blind lead the blind, huh? he asked.
Looks that way.
When we got back to his apartment he said, You wanna read some of my
poetry? Everyone worries, but no one ever reads it.
We went inside, where his mom was working on a stack of bills at the
kitchen table. She said hello and gave a quick, uncomfortable smile. Thomas
put the box of leftover pizza on the counter and disappeared down the hall.
I stood with my hands in my coat pockets while his mom wrote out a check.
Bills come whether youve got the money or not, she said.
They sure do, I said, and she put the check in an envelope.
When Thomas came out, he handed me several 8 x 11 inch sheets, folded
in half and stapled into purple card stock. Black Light, it said on the cover.
And underneath that, Poems.
Theyre not that good, he said.
I dont read much poetry, I answered.
Theyre very good, his mom said. Just a little depressing, thats all.
Anyway, Thomas said, thanks for the pizza.
Yeah, I said. No problem. So Ill see you tomorrow? In church?
Sure, he said.
As I drove home, I wasnt sure what Id accomplished. See what you can
figure out, Brother Judd had said. I wasnt sure what he expected, but I
didnt think an afternoon of pizza was going to fix anything.
The next day in Sunday School, we talked about Adam and Eve leaving
the Garden of Eden. It seemed appropriate, for Thomas and me bothbeing
cast into an unfamiliar world. I wanted to say something to him after class,
73
maybe say it was nice having lunch together, but he was gone before I had the
chance. Monday came, and I got busy with school. That week Alyssa got a
job as a seamstress for the theater department at the university, and on Friday
evening there was a note saying shed be working late, getting costumes ready
for a play. I tossed my book bag on the couch and called Thomas. There was
no answer. I went back outside, sat on the front step, and let out my breath.
It had been a long weekreading for hours in the library, grading
Psychology 100 papers, enduring class lectures, taking endless notes. I knew
grad school was going to be tough, and hard work didnt bother me, but
this kind of work was different. It was tedious and lonely. I stepped out into
theyard and looked back at the house. The place Alyssa and I rented was the
ground floor of an old home that had been divided into three apartments.
Iwondered what the place had looked like in its glory days, before it was
taken over by students. I walked back to the garage and started nosing around
among the buckets of paint and tools and the landlords lawn equipment.
In one corner I found a leaf rake and a weatherworn package of lawn bags.
Ididnt think about what I was doing. I just took the rake and the lawn
bagsout to the front yard and made ready to pull the damp leaves into piles.
The evening air smelled of autumn. The metal tines of the rake combed
through the moist grass and scraped thinly against the sidewalk. An easy
breeze blew through the trees, rising and falling, making the leaves murmur.
The evening sun cast an orange hue on the world. For that moment, I was
alone. For that moment I felt like Adam in the Garden of Eden. Man before
the fall. No grad school, no dissertation, no troubled teens at church, no
baby on the way. It was a different kind of loneliness, and it felt good. But
Adam couldnt stay in Paradise forever. He had to take his chances in the
world. He had to be a husband to Eve, a father to his children. He had to
believe life was worth the risk. I leaned on the rake and looked up Fell Street.
Nighttime was coming, cool and dispassionate. Paper skeletons haunted the
windows of the house next door. Across the street, the neighbors had raked
their leaves into orange and black plastic bags, like frumpy jack-o-lanterns.
In the other direction, toward the college, lay one house after another, but
the neighborhood was deserted.
Kneeling down, feeling empty, I began to gather the dank leaves into bags.
As my gloveless fingers raked through the decaying leaves, a thought arose,
as if from the soil itself. What would it be like, I thought, to be Adam,
the first man, on a lonesome autumn night? The thought was vivid and
74
haunting. I could see Adam, young and stronga figure from a Renaissance
paintingbanished from the Garden; Eve by his side, both fated to roam the
fallen earth. On their faces the shame of being cast out. Beneath that shame,
a thoroughly human pride, driving them forward.
Then the vision was gone. I was staring up at the old house again. It
looked dejected, an unfamiliar place a thousand miles from anywhere Id
ever lived before. This drafty apartment house was my home now; it was
Alyssas home. Soon it would be our babys home. Alyssa would deliver in a
few weeks, and we didnt even have insurance. Wed taken a lot of chances,
and for what? So I could be a psychologist, so I could help people feel whole,
when I didnt even feel whole myself.
The next week, in my Introduction to Counseling class, Dr. Lowe told the
story of a five-year-old child hed been working with, a boy whod been the
victim of serious neglect. The boy responded to his abuse by restricting his
bowel movements for days at a time, until he had to be hospitalized. He was
finally put into the custody of the state; his parents faced criminal charges.
Dr. Lowe said the boys psyche would never be completely healed. I walked
home from class through the dark of that October night with nothing but
the harvest moon to watch out for me, and I wondered if Dr. Lowe was right,
if there really were some devils that could never be exorcised.
When I got home, Alyssa was curled up on the couch, watching a madefor-TV movie, something about a mother and a child and a custody battle.
How was class? she asked, her eyes on the set.
Okay, I said. I wanted to tell her how Id felt that night raking the leaves,
but I didnt know how to make sense of it. She drew her legs up and made
room for me on the couch. I slumped down just as the man on the TV was
shoving his ex-wife into the wall. The mans eyes bulged; his tie was loose and
yanked to one side. Its my son, he shouted. You cant take him!
Alyssa said, Theres macaroni and cheese in the microwave.
The man on the TV stormed out the door, leaving the woman sliding
down the wall, trembling and sobbing.
I went into the kitchen. I warmed up the plate of food and poured a glass
of milk. I went back into the living room and ate on the couch. In the closing
scene of the movie, the ex-husband held his son at gunpoint on a dangerous
cliff while the mother begged him to release the boy. Just as the boy slipped
from his fathers arms, the father lost his footing and fell backward, over the
cliff. The boy ran to his tearful mother, and the music rushed in to assure us
75
that everything would turn out okay: this child would never suffer for the
death of his father because on TV no one grieves the loss of the guilty.
Alyssa turned the TV off. Some people deserve what they get, she said.
I took my plate to the sink, and we locked the doors and shut off the
lights. While Alyssa was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, I said, I had
the strangest thought the other day.
Whats that? she asked through her toothbrush.
I was thinking about Adam and Eve, I said. You know, one minute in
the Garden of Eden, where everything was perfect, and the next, out there
in the world, where things die, and everything eats everything else.
I heard her rinse and spit. What made you think about that?
I dont know. I just started thinking about what it would be like.
She ran water in the sink. When she came into the bedroom, she was
wearing a maternity nightshirt that said under construction with an
arrow that pointed to her belly. She switched off the light, and we got under
the covers.
When they were cast out of the Garden, I said, maybe it was springtime, and then summer came, and that gave them a chance to gather food,
and then it was autumnthings dying and turning cold. It had to be scary
for them. I was on my back, my hands behind my head. She was on her side,
facing me. Heres these two people, I said, husband and wife, the only
people on the face of the earth. Living it all for the first time. I mean, thats
what we believe, right? Evolution or dinosaurs or whateverthe human race
started with those two people. The children of God, and God way off in
heaven while they toughed it out down here all alone.
I glanced over. She was looking at the curtainless, circular window, high
on the bedroom wall. Just think about Eve, she said, having her first baby
with no doctors. Not even a midwife. Maybe they watched the animals have
babies. Maybe thats all they knew.
I turned my eyes to the ceiling. They went to sleep every night, the only
people on earth.
We lay there silent for a moment. Then she kissed my cheek with a smack.
Well, now we have nice hospitals and good doctors, and we dont have to
worry so much.
I squinted at the dark ceiling. Now all we have to worry about is having
babies without insurance.
She touched my arm. Well make it, she said. People get by.
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Doctor Lowe told me the other day that Id better pick a specialty soon. If
I dont find something my first year, Ill fall behind. And its got to be something that advances the research of one of the faculty members. Otherwise,
no ones interested.
Youll find something, she said. Wont you?
Maybe it was a mistake to come here, I said.
She sat up and leaned on one elbow, searching my face. What do
youmean?
I tried to explain, but everything I said was something we already knew.
Theres four years of coursework, just like what Im doing right nowwriting papers, reading five books a week, going to lectures, being a teaching
assistant. On top of it all, I have to find a specialty and hook up with a faculty member who likes me and my work. Then theres a dissertation to write.
That could take a couple of years, and after that theres the internship. Well
have to move to who-knows-where, pulling up stakes, trying to fit in. I dont
know, it seems tougher than I thought.
But there are good things for us here, she said. Dont you think? I mean,
look at whats happened so far. Weve got friends at church, and Ive got a
job. Its gonna bring in money until I deliver. And after that, Sister Grant
said shed watch the baby. I can bring home some of the work, too. Scott said
hed let me take home one of the sewing machines. I can work here while the
babys sleeping.
She reached for me in the darkness and we embraced. I closed my eyes.
Icould feel the roundness of her belly between us, already an insistent child.
Besides, she whispered, we prayed about this, remember? And it
feltright.
Yeah, I said. I know. But the truth was, I could feel my faith slipping.
It was easy, like letting go of someones hand.
This is gonna be a good place for us, she said.
I didnt say any more, but I lay awake for a long time, long after Alyssa was
asleep, watching the full moon through the window. That night I dreamed
I was Adam, the first man, kneeling beneath the same moon. I was on a
mountain, at a pure fountain of water that gurgled in the silvery light. I was
washing my face in the fountain, washing my hands and my head, but it
was no use. I couldnt wash away the feeling of sin, of separation from God.
Istood and walked to the edge of a precipice. In the moonlit valley below,
the silvery ribbon of a river flowed. The trees all around showed their limbs in
77
shadowy outlines, and the farthest mountains stood in silhouette before the
starry sky. I sat down on the edge of the cliff, and an awful sensation swept
through me, as ripe as the voice of the devil himself. What would it mean,
I thought, if I jumped from this cliff? What would it mean to die?
I turned, and he was sitting beside me. The devil was a naked old man
with brown, withered skin, his shoulders hunched, a look of sullen resignation on his face. What went through your mind just now? he asked.
I looked back at the darkness before me. A feeling.
What did the feeling say?
It told me to jump.
Do you want to die?
I dont know what I want.
Youre fallen. His voice was beguiling and mournful.
I dont trust you, I said.
Youre wise, he said. Never trust anyone, thats what I say.
I turned to face him once more, but he was gone. There was only the cold,
still air. I stood and fixed my eyes on the moon. It hung above me like a hole
in the curtain between earth and heaven. I took a step, away from the edge,
I thought, but I was already falling. As I dropped through the empty air, the
withered man stood above me, and I was lost.
I sat up in bed. I looked around the moonlit room. Alyssa was asleep; the
house was silent. In the bathroom, I turned on the faucet and splashed water
on my face. When I looked in the mirror, I recognized the old man from my
dream. In the hallway, on a shelf above the furnace, I took down a manila
envelope of photographs my sister had given me. One of the photographs
showed my father slouched in a recliner, bald from chemotherapy, a tired
grin on his haggard face. It had been taken a month before he died.
I was four years old when he left us to work in the oil fields of Kansas.
Ihave no memory of this; I only know what my mom told me. After he ran
off, she never called him by his real name. She just called him Kansas. Kansas
could cheat a miser out of his last cent. Kansas was a playboy. Kansas always
had a scheme.
The first time I remember seeing him was when I was ten, the only time
my mom ever spanked me. She warned me that morning not to go to
Shannons apartment. But it was summer vacation, and Shannon, who was
eighteen, lived a few blocks away with Jared, her new husband. I rode my
bike around town for at least an hour before I parked it next to Shannons
78
front step. When I walked into the apartment, a man was sitting at the
kitchen table. Jared and Shannon and the man were eating homemade
French fries out of a bowl lined with paper towels. The man had red cheeks
and a steady grin. The first thing I smelled was the Tabasco sauce Jared put
on his fries. Shannon said, I thought you werent allowed over here today?
I shrugged, and the man called me by name. He asked me if I liked school,
if I had a lot of money saved up, how many girlfriends I had.
He asked me if I was tough. He picked up the bottle of hot sauce sitting
in front of Jared and pretended to read the label. He was eyeing the bottle,
and then me, talking about being tough. Then he said hed give me a SusanB.
Anthony dollar if I could swallow a tablespoon full of Tabasco sauce. Jared
said hed do it, and the man said, I know you would.
My sister shook her head. Leave the poor kid alone, she said.
When I got home, my mouth still stinging, Mom was waiting at the front
door with a yardstick. She dragged me into the house and paddled me until
both of us were crying. I didnt know why shed done it until it was over. She
said that it was my father Id seen, and she never wanted me to see him again.
Years later, I did see him again. He was traveling through Illinois in a
pickup loaded with scrap iron when his fuel pump gave out. That was when
my brother Mike was working for him. Mike was the oldest, and he had
grown up before Dad left Mom. He acted like Dad and looked like him, too.
They were stranded on the highway outside of town. Jared was at work, so
Shannon asked me to go along and help. We brought them a fuel pump from
the parts store and stood on the highway shoulder for fifteen minutes while
they put it in. I remember standing next to the truck and my dad asking
Mike for a screwdriver and then a wrench. I remember him looking at me as
though he couldnt remember what he wanted to say.
After that, I saw him alive only once more, right after Alyssa and I got
married. Shannon had a Thanksgiving dinner at her house, and my dad
came. Mom stayed home that year. Thats when the picture was taken. Hed
lost eighty pounds from the cancer by then. He said he was dying, and there
wasnt anything we could do about it. He was weak and gray-skinned, nothing like the smooth-talking liar Mom had hated for so long. I wanted to tell
him I didnt have any hard feelings, that I didnt believe everything Mom had
told me. But he just sat there looking sick, and I didnt say anything. When
he died, I went to the funeral with Shannon and Jared and Mike. Alyssa
didnt come. What did he ever do for you? she said.
79
At the viewing, I looked down at this mans body. In his face I saw my
brother Mikes face, and mine, too, in thirty years. I figured out that in
mywhole lifeor at least that part of it I could rememberId been in my
fathers presence for three or four hours at most. I looked at his hands, folded
over his stomach, the hands of this stranger. I wondered how many dollars
they had counted, how many handshakes theyd made over deals that were
lies. I wondered how many women hed touched, women who werent his to
touch. A few people stepped up to the casket, interrupting my grieving, if
thats what it was. I didnt know what to call it. I just stood there, not knowing what I was supposed to feel. Then, in the middle of that emptiness, the
feelings of a four-year-old child rose up within me. You were supposed to
be my dad, the feelings said. And you werent there.
Standing in the hallway of our apartment on Fell Street, I looked at the
photograph of my father in the chair. You cant change me, his gaunt face
seemed to say. Im dead and you cant change what I was.
You could have been different, I wanted to say. You could have been
my father.
The answer came back, raw and quick: That place inside you will always
be empty.
If there had been something there, something besides emptiness, maybe I
could have killed it or changed it or hated it. But there was nothing. It wasnt
anger. It wasnt some wrong hed done. It was just nothing. Maybe it was
what hed felt that day alongside the road, working on his truck, watching
me and knowing I wasnt really his son.
The next day, I called Thomas and made plans to go out for tacos.
On Saturday, the Taco Barn was bright and busy, bustling with customers
in from the cold autumn rain. Thomas seemed happier than before, and I
wondered if something good had happened at school. After we sat down with
our food, I took his book of poems from my coat pocket and put it on the
table between us. I finally read your poems, I said.
What did you think? he asked.
I liked them, I said. I liked the one called Black Light the best. What
did it say? If the light is black, its still light, too bright to see. Something
like that.
Yeah, something like that, he said.
He unwrapped his Taco Supreme. I took a sip of my drink. Ill tell
Brother Judd youre not crazy, I said. Maybe thatll buy you some time.
80
He smiled, and this time he didnt look away. Something good flashed in
hiseyes. Was it something he saw in me, or something I hadnt seen in him
until now?
When I got home, I came in the back door and found Alyssa at the
kitchen sink, washing her lunch dishes. Howd it go? she asked.
It was good, I said.
I hung my jacket on one of the kitchen chairs. I still had years of school
ahead of me. We still had no insurance. I still wasnt sure how we would
make it. But for the first time in days, it didnt seem to matter. I stood behind
Alyssa and put my arms around her as she rinsed her plate. I breathed in the
smell of her hair and kissed her neck.
Im glad youre home, she said.
I put my head in her neck as she dried her hands. She turned and held me.
Our baby was big between us, like some kind of mystery. Alyssa looked up at
me. I wanted to give her my whole life. I didnt want to keep anything back.
I thought about my father, about Thomas and his father. I thought about
Adam and Eve, going through it all alone for the first time. Alyssa closed
her eyes and folded herself into my chest. This is nice, she said. Holding
her there for that moment, it was like being one with God. It was like being
redeemed. We didnt talk. We just stood there, on the edge of being one flesh,
together in the slant shadows of that autumn afternoon.
81
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton
Love in Those Days

In those days no one anxiously
tried to find someone
to fall in love with.
There was no ticking clock,
no social pressure,
no rush to settle...
We were in fourth grade,
too young to be sensible
or weigh suitability.
It was just that he had black hair,
and a way of standing there
waiting for the bus...
We had all the time in the world
in those days,
and the world had time for us:
it gave us a dozen lazy years.
We could change our minds
without dividing our stuff
or thinking about custody.
I accepted his red personality, gradually,
and learned things about him
he couldnt have told me
by listening to his report in History
on Dag Hammerskold.
Love was a trickle
of water, an accumulation
of unnoted stitches.
82
Bushman-Carlton S Three poems
In those days it wasnt scientific.

It happened without
sending out invitations.
No one was rational.
Love happened:
you just mosied
down
its
soft
slopes.
Siblings
No matter where you fall
on the family time line, it matters.
All factors considered, it matters.
That theres an older sister
who has already conquered
and planted her flag, that an older
brother has absorbed some
of your own small fears.
Being last can be
like climbing from a tub of honey.
If you follow a moving shadow
or hopscotch between several,
it mattersthat coming after
like back wheels, sparks popping.
It matters that theres one place
83
for each of the strings on the cello

even though its the same cello.
And the view from each place matters.
Whether its yours to walk into void,
panting to stay a few steps ahead
or to hear someone else going
or coming matters. Even if
you veer off the tracks, and run
helter skelter to new country.
Each Stitch in Time

What we love opens the door.
Stephen Dunn
Its not about a good nights sleep
or buffing the drinking glasses to a shine.
My mother-in-law lives to embroider.
There are dozens of grandchildren, greats.
She sews sets of dishtowels for each,
flour sacks from Lehi Roller Mills,
her own patterns ironed on. And
sets of His and Hers, watching the sales
for plain white pillowcases, the ones
already hemmed. Shes seventy-seven
with good eyes yet, and just needs
her green chair, and lots of floss,
the kind with a sheen. Between her grandchildrens
there are sets promised for a friend
and for a woman out of state who pays.
84
Bushman-Carlton S Three poems
And then, a sudden surgery.

At the hospital she frets: for what shes done,
and hasnt yet, reminding each of us
Dont use Clorox! just mild soap
on our gardens for sleep, on peacocks and ducks
announcing the days of the week in our kitchens.
She chooses colors and stitches judiciously:
surrogates for phrases she cant say.
Most are blunt, many-hued,
the stitches taut. On occasion, though,
an unexpected daisy blooms,
or theres an airy swarm of yellow dots.
85
The Abracadabra Man:

A Radio Play
Jeff Metcalf and Howard S. Landa
Scene 1
(Professor Middleton speaks as though completing a thought.
Louie Prima is playing in the background. He is typing on an
Underwood Portable, but it is also clear that he is typing to the song.)
Professor
... So, in conclusion, what Jung means to imply is this: the individual can
remain adjusted in the external wall but could lose control in his interior
psychic world. Uh, huh.
(The typing begins.)
Professor (Repeats part of the first line, but slides into music)
... the individual can remain adjusted but could lose control in the interior
world...
Baby, baby it looks like its gonna hail.
Baby, baby it looks like its gonna hail.
Youd better come inside,
let me teach you how to jive and wail.
Atwood
Professor, you buzzed me?

Professor (Doesnt acknowledge Atwood is in the office)
A woman is a woman,
and a man aint nuthin but a male.
87
A woman is a woman,
And a man aint nuthin but a male...
Atwood (Louder)
Professor?
Professor (Continues singing)
... One good thing about him is he knows how

To jive and wail!
Atwood (Even louder)
Professor Middleton!
Professor (Frustrated. The typing stops)
Look what you made me do! The G and I keys are stuck together.
Atwood (Ignoring the professor)
Gee, I... didnt...

(Music gets turned down)
Professor
Didnt I just say that? The G and I are... never mind. Atwood, you cant
sneak up on me like that.
Atwood
You buzzed me, Professor.

Professor
The problem with your generation, Atwood, is you have no appreciation for
good lounge singers.
Atwood
Do you mean, Professor, that somebody of my generation would never recognize Jump & Jive by Louie Prima... even if it is sung by you?
88
Metcalf and Landa S Abracadabra Man

Professor
Atwood, Im not suggesting that you wouldnt...

Atwood
Even though it was rendered almost unrecognizable moments ago by somebody in this office?
Professor
I was the only one in the office.

Atwood (Sarcastically)
Your Honor, I rest my case.

Professor
Cute, Atwood, but not funny. Lets try this again. Good morning, Atwood.
Atwood
Good morning, Professor. You buzzed?

Professor (Playing with the words. Affecting a southern accent)
Buzzed? I most certainly am not buzzed, young woman. I resent the implication... the mere suggestion that I indulge in the wicked sin of alcohol, that
I might have been tempted to ...
Atwood (Interrupts, gets down to business)
Professor, Im going out on a limb here. One of two things: (1) You always
get like this if youve just finished a lecture and want me to type it into the
computer, or (2) Youre meeting your mother for lunch today, and youre trying to figure out a way to avoid her.
Professor
You are good, Atwood. Very good. Today, unfortunately, you are correct on
both counts. I was wondering if you might meet my mother for...
Atwood (Interrupts the Professor)
Ive met your mother.

89

Professor
For lunch?
Atwood
Type up your lecture notes... yes. Lunch, no.

Professor
Just this once? You could tell her that...

Atwood
... That her son... That her son, a distinguished Professor of Psychology at
the University of Utah, that her son, a world renowned Jungian scholar and the
recipient of virtually every teaching award at this venerable institution doesnt
have time for his own mother. (a beat) Sorry, not in the job description.
Professor
Ill gladly pay.

Atwood
In more ways than one. No, Professor.

Professor
You can take the rest of the day off.

Atwood
Im done in four hours, anyway. No.

Professor
Good heavens, Atwood. Why not? She adores you!

Atwood
I adore her. Absolutely not.

Professor
Just give me one good reason, Atwood. Just one.
90

Atwood
Because I have eaten. Because she is your mother. Because I like her. And,
finally, because you made the date. Four good reasons.
Professor
Right, Atwood, be that way. You know, if the situation were reversed I
wouldnt hesitate...
Atwood
To tell me no. (a beat) Enjoy the lunch Professor.

(The sound of Atwood walking out of the room. A door shuts.)
Professor
And who said, There is no such thing as a free lunch?
Scene 2
(Alta Club. Lunchtime. The sound of glasses, plates, forks, and knives
clinking.)
Bartender
Good afternoon Professor Middleton.

Professor
Good afternoon, Lennie.

Bartender
May I get you something to drink?

Professor
Please. The usual.

Bartender
Blantons Single Barrel Bourbon. Yes, sir. Coming right up.
91

Professor
On second thought...
Bartender
Yes, sir.
Professor
A single with a side car.

Bartender
Yes, sir.
Professor
On third thought...
Bartender
Yes, sir.
Professor
Forget the Blantons. Instead, just bring me a bottle of Hemlock. If it was

good enough for Socrates, it is good enough for me.
Bartender
I take it your mother is joining you for lunch, sir?

Professor
Yes, Lennie... the shadow side of the psyche.

Bartender
I beg your pardon, sir.

Professor
Just something Jung used to say.

Bartender (Joking)
Brigham Young or Steve Young, sir?

92

Professor
Very good, Lennie. I dont know whos writing your material, but its better
than mine.
Bartender
Thank you, Professor. Ive been doing a little stand up lately, down at Wise
Guys. Can I get you anything else?
(We hear the sound of women laughing.)
Professor (Nostalgic)
Ah, Lennie, you could roll back time to the good old days of the Alta Club
when there was at least one safe haven for men in this city. A complete sanctuary. A refuge, so to speak.
Bartender (To be said instead of sung)
Where a woman was a woman,

and a man was nothing but a male...
Professor
Lennie, you amaze me! Louie Prima... I was just singing that very song
earlier today. You know Primas music?
Bartender
Prima is the definition of the lounge singer. It doesnt get any better.
Professor
Lennie... youre preaching to the choir.

Bartender
He is the best there was, Professor... Sinatra, Davis, the whole Rat Pack...
they all loved him.
Professor
Those were the days, Lennie. Those were the days.
93

Bartender
So, Professor, what will it be? Whats the call... bourbon or hemlock?
Professor
Call me a cab so I can put my mother in it as soon as she gets here?

Bartender
Ill make it a double. She just arrived in the main foyer.

(The sound of high heels crossing the floor.)
Emma
Connie, I am so sorry. Have you been waiting long?

Professor (Implores his mother)
Conrad. Please, Mother. People havent called me Connie in thirty-five years.

Emma
Im sorry darling, its an old habit to break.

Professor
After thirty-five years?

Bartender
May I get you a drink, Mrs. Middleton?

Emma
Thank you, Lennie. A Manhattan, please, and make it stiff.

Bartender
Yes, maam, Ill be right back.

Emma
Something dreadful happened on the way to the Alta Club to meet you...
Professor (Interrupts his mother, truly concerned)
Panhandlers... theyre getting aggressive...

94

Emma
No, at Main Street Plaza...

Professor
The demonstrators?
Emma
They are absolutely horrid. And in front of the conference center... picket
signs, bullhorns, and yelling the most horrid obscenities... I dont know
how the Mormons can put up with it.
Professor
It is simply bear baiting, and I loathe it. Somebody is going to get hurt.
Emma
The demonstrators were yelling at the Mormons, and the Mormons, bless
their hearts, were trying to ignore what was being said... it was all so vile...
Professor
Such a mess. What were people thinking? What was the Mayor thinking?
The City?
Bartender
Manhattan?
Professor
What? Im talking about Salt Lake City, Lennie!

Emma
Just ignore him, Lennie.

Bartender
Yes, Mrs. Middleton. Your Manhattan.

Emma
Thank you Lennie. (a beat) Now listen to me, Conrad. There was a man
dressed in white, trying to make peace between the demonstrators... he had
95
G-O-D emblazoned on the back of his robe. The man thought he was God.
People were shoving... I was afraid...
Professor
Maybe he was dyslexic, maybe it was supposed to be (spelling it out)

D-O-G...
Emma
That is not funny... Conrad... not funny in the least...

Professor
My apologies. Please, go on...

Emma
And God couldnt keep the masses from each other. I was terrified; I didnt
know what to do...
Professor
You could have been hurt.

Emma
But I couldnt move, I couldnt draw my eyes away. I had this sense...
Professor
... that something would erupt.

Emma
That I was somehow connected to this...

Professor
In what way?
Emma
I dont know. I saw this man, a church member and a demonstrator start to
push each other... and scream... And then another man... somehow
different... like he didnt belong in either group... sweep into the mix of
things. It looked as though he was holding something in his hand...
96

Professor
Good heavens, Mother.

Emma
God tried to intervene... but it was already rolling... this ugly swell...
Ithought Id be trampled. I ran across the street...
Professor
Then what?
Emma
I looked back across the street at the church member who was arguing with
God. There was a third man, the one who didnt belong, the one with something in his hand... to the side of God. He was very angry... outraged.
He saw me looking at him. Our eyes locked... it was so surreal, like time
had slowed and I could see in his eyes... recognition... shock... he
acknowledged me...
Professor
How bizarre... how utterly bizarre...
Scene 3
(Door opens and closes.)
Atwood
So, you survived lunch with your mother?

Professor
Yes. And thank you, Atwood.

Atwood
For?
Professor
For making me go. For making me do the right thing.

97

Atwood (Surprised at the Professors seriousness)
So, whats the punch line?

Professor
I do appreciate it.
Atwood
Why the serious demeanor all of a sudden?

Professor
My mother was on Main Street Plaza today, and she saw God. There was a
disturbance. She could have been crushed... .
Atwood
Start over, Professor, please.

Professor
The demonstrators are out in force. My mother was walking past the conference center, and she saw God... that is, a man dressed as God trying to stop
this crowd of angry people from crushing each other. Things got terribly out
of hand. It was a regular mob scene.
Atwood
Oh, Professor...
Professor
She could have been trampled.

Atwood
Shes okay, then?

Professor
More shaken up than anything.

Atwood
I can only imagine how she must...

98

Professor
I just dont think those protestors should be allowed to demonstrate in such

a fashion.
Atwood
Its a First Amendment Right...

Professor
The demonstrators are trucked in from different states... theyre paid to be

belligerent...
Atwood
It doesnt matter...
Professor
And you of all people... should feel...

Atwood
Incensed... because Im Mormon... because I worship there?

Professor
Because it is wrong... because its foul...

Atwood
My faith is strong. And my faith in the First Amendment, even more so.
(abeat) May I be blunt, Professor?
Professor
Atwood, blunt is your middle name. Ive never been able to stop you before,
so why should I try now?
Atwood
You feel guilty because you didnt want to have lunch with your mother...
Professor (Offended by the suggestion)
That is simply...
99

Atwood (With consernation)
Professor?
Professor
... The truth. I hate to admit it, but you have touched...
Atwood
And you would never have forgiven yourself if something happened to her.
Professor (Trying to defend himself. Weakly.)
Its an interesting observation, Atwood... that is to say, in some respects you

might be on to something.
Atwood
And when you dont meet your mother, she makes you feel guilty.
Professor
There is no need to be disrespectful toward my...

Atwood
No disrespect meant here, Professor, but you know Im dead on.

Professor (Laughing uncomfortably at being uncovered)
And just what makes you feel so certain of this analysis, Atwood?
Atwood
Because I have a mother.

Professor
Yes, I know that, Atwood. I have been blessed with a keen sense of the obvious.
Atwood
Do you think your mother has cornered the market on guilt?

Professor
No, but between you and my mother, my question is...

100

Atwood
How do I deal with it?

Professor
Exactly!
Atwood
Ive got a tremendous advantage over you.

Professor
And that is, Atwood?

Atwood
Ive got nine brothers and sisters to lighten the load. We all take turns.
Professor (Impression of Groucho Marx)
Well, madam, I have a fondness for cigars, but I know when to take it out
of my mouth.
Atwood (Correcting him with her own Groucho)
Very good, Professor, but I believe the line is, I love my cigar too, but I take
it out of my mouth once in a while.
Scene 4
(Interior of Middletons apartment. The sound of keys, a door opening,
and a cat meowing.)
Professor
Ah, Sigmund, my faithful feline companion who does not talk back. (Sound
of the radio being turned on) Okay, Sigmund, try this one...
Reporter
(This entire speech is to be bled in and out of Middletons discourse with
Sigmund.)
Im here live at Main Street Plaza, where earlier today, a man was stabbed
during an outbreak of violence between members of the LDS church and
101
protesters. So far, police have acknowledged the man is in serious condition

at the University of Utah hospital. The name has not yet been released but
police have taken a protester into custody. And, as preposterous as this might
sound, the accused has simply given his name as God. Reporting live from
Main Street Plaza, this is Doug Fabrizio of KUER radio.
Professor
Lifes but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
For one million dollars, Sigmund. Your answer is?
Sigmund
(A purr and meow)
Professor
Want to use one of your nine lifelines?

Sigmund
Meow?
Professor
Final answer?
Sigmund
Meow. Meow.
Professor
No, Im sorry, it was not Julius Ceasar. From Macbeth, act 5.

Sigmund
Meow. Meow. Meow.

Professor
Okay. One more.

102
Oh happy dagger!
This is thy sheath;
There rust and let
Me die.
Sigmund
Meow. Meow. Meow.

Professor
Absolutely correct, Sigmund... Romeo and Juliet! Bravo, my feline scholar.

And for your just rewards, a tasty Whisker Biscuit cat treat.
Sigmund
Meow.
Professor
My constant companion... you are welcome!

(Radio is turned off.)
To sleepperchance to dream: Ay, theres the rub.
Scene 5
(Door opens. The radio is on low.)
Atwood
Good morning, Professor. Have you heard the news? Your mother got away
from the demonstration just in time. Your friend, the Judge has the case. Its
on now. Listen.
(The sound of the radio being turned up. Reporter will fade in and out.)
This is Doug Fabrizio, KUER radio, live from the Matheson Courthouse in
downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. Im covering the controversial case, some say
monumental case, known as the State of Utah versus God. The trial revolves
around a fatal stabbing during a violent demonstration on Main Street Plaza
over free speech rights. Earlier, the victim was at University hospital, where
he later died. The victim was subsequently identified as one Arnold Hoffman.
103
The defendant, who appears to be a homeless drifter, insists he is God. So far,

the police have been unable to track down his real name. The judge is...
Professor
... a stately looking LDS gentleman...

Reporter
Oft described as a liberal thinker with a fine sense of humor.

Professor
Ha! More like a liberal drinker with a wicked sense of humor!

Reporter
The prosecutor is Lamar Edwards...

Professor
From the fire and brimstone school of law.

Reporter
Considering the players involved and the community divided over the
original sale of Main Street Plaza to the Mormon Church, most legal experts
expect plenty of heat and...
Professor
My, my... It is a damned and bloody work; . . .

The graceless action of a heavy hand.
Atwood
Professor?
Professor
King John, Atwood. Turn this up. This intrigues me...

Reporter
... and a number of surprises. Now, back to the court proceedings.
104

Bailiff of the court
Hear ye! Hear ye! All rise. This Court is now in session.
Judge
What have we on the docket today, Mr. Edwards?

Edwards
This is the preliminary hearing in the case of the State of Utah versus a defendant who insists upon calling himself God.
Judge
God, huh? You think you might be overmatched here, Mr.Edwards?

Edwards (In a fervent and religious tone)
Your Honor, on February 7, 2004, the defendant did willfully and maliciously
stab one Arnold Hoffman with a four-inch stiletto. We have fingerprints, we
have eye witnesses, and a history of violence. Furthermore, the defendant
dares to desecrate what we hold most sacred, our belief in God.
Judge
Hold on to your skivvies, Mr. Edwards. Let me ask the defendant a few questions if you dont mind. (a beat) God, is it?
God
Yes, your Honor.

Judge
Are you represented by legal counsel?

God
No, I will be appearing to those with faith, pro se.

Judge
I would think a defendant with your capability could at least conjure up

Clarence Darrow.
105

God
Sorry, your Honor. An atheist, you know.

Judge
Do you have anyone to assist you?

God
Yes. (a beat) My son.

Edwards (Mutters loudly)
Jesus?
God
Precisely (a beat) or more precisely, Jesus (pronounced hay-seus)... Jesus

Antonio Rodriquez Salazar. We call him Zapata.
Judge
God, you have indicated that you wish to take the stand. Bailiff, would you
administer the oath?
Bailiff
Raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, so help you God.
God
I do. So help me, me.

Judge
Since this is a preliminary hearing Im going to ask a preliminary question.

God, where were you February 7 at 2:30 in the afternoon?
God
Everywhere.
Judge
Everywhere?
106

God
God is everywhere.
Edwards (Interrupting)
Is that an alibi defense or an admission?

Judge
At the least an interesting conundrum.

Edwards
As the prosecutor, I must ask a question.

Judge
Of course you must, Mr. Edwards. Why should this day be different than
any other day?
Edwards
Dont you have a propensity for violence?

God
What do you mean young man?

Edwards
If you really are God, you must recognize this? For I will pass through the
land of Egypt this night and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt
both man and beast and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute the judgment of the Lord.
God
Exodus 12:12. Im a whiz at smiting, but I never smote anyone who didnt
deserve it.
Judge
God, do you understand that the prosecutor has eyewitnesses he will call
totestify?
107

God
Who dares to bear false witness against me?

Judge
Point well taken. Do you plan to call any witnesses?

God
Impeccable character witnesses. The Pope, the Dalai Lama, Sister Theresa,
and (a beat) Roma Downey.
Edwards
Judge, we certainly have enough to proceed to trial.

Judge
Mr. Edwards, you are premature and frankly sometimes immature. What
we need here is a psychiatric examination. The court appoints University
of Utah Professor Conrad Middleton to conduct the exam. (Gavel pounds)
Court is adjourned.
Reporter
This has been quite an afternoon.

(The sound of the radio being turned off.)
Atwood
Well, Professor, it seems like you have another mystery to solve.

Professor
Hmmm... (a beat) Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.
Atwood
Merchant of Venice?
Professor
Very good, Atwood. Very good. A cat treat?
108
Scene 6
(Police interview room. The sound of keys and a doorknob turning.)
Guard
There you go, Professor. If you would like, Ill stay here with you while you
interview this clown.
Professor
Well be fine, thank you. (a beat) What should I call you?

God
God would be fine. God, or Mel Torme. I always liked the sound of his
name.
Professor
You know why Im here?

God
To see if Im sane.
Professor
Precisely. (a beat) So, are you?

God
Is anybody these days?

Professor
Youve been charged with murder. Things dont look good for you. Fingerprints,
witnesses, blood all over your robe... do you understand the seriousness of
a murder charge?
God
Thou shalt not kill. I was pretty clear on that point... It was one of my top
ten. Had Moses jot that one down.
109

Professor
So, why only ten commandments? I always wanted to ask.

God
Short attention span. I believe in editing.

Professor
What else would you add if you could add a few more?
God
Theyve worked pretty well so far. Maybe something about Friends not letting friends karaoke.
Professor
(Laughs) The 11th Commandment. Thou shall not karaoke! I like it! (Switching
directions and tone)
So, how will the trial play itself out?
God
Whatever will be, will be.

Professor
Que sera, sera. Thank you, Doris Day. (Accusatory, trying to frustrate God)
Omnipotent? All knowing and all seeing. This should be a no-brainer for
you, God. Just tell the court who did it... point the finger... give us the
motive and connect the dots. Save us all a little time and money. The police
can do the rest.
God
Its up to the jury. One never knows. The question of free will. I might rethink
that one... that and NASCAR racing. Who would have thought... ?
Professor
Do you hear voices?

God
Millions of them...
110

Professor
Read minds?
God
Of course...
Professor
Able to leap tall buildings?

God
I suppose...
Professor
Run faster than a speeding locomotive?

God
Thats Superman...
Professor
And youre not?

God
No, Im God.
Professor
Youre not making this easy.

God
We are all, in our own way, God.

Professor
Just do something... divine something... transform water into wine...

pay off my gambling debts... anything...
God
This is difficult for you to understand, isnt it?

111

Professor
Its not me you should be worried about. It is the court system. Trust me, over
the course of my practice, Ive met more than a few of you... no disrespect
meant here, but meeting God is... well, a pretty common occurrence in my
line of work. Quite frankly...
God
... you thought Id be taller... more Charleton Heston as Moses looking?

Professor
This is my concern. You dont seem crazy to me. Other than your claim to be
God and your strange sense of humor, you seem pretty balanced.
God
Thank you.
Professor
Youre welcome... I suppose. Youre taking a big gamble here, God. Youre
going to have to pull some magic out of your hat on this one.
God
Like, abracadabra... Aces and eights.

Professor
A dead mans hand and the art of illusion. Gambling and magic. Youre
counting on that?
God
It should be enough.
Professor
Perhaps... but Id like to interview you one more time. Its about those
voices you hear. When did you first start hearing...
Scene 7
(Alta Club. The sound of clinking glasses.)
112

Bartender
Good evening, Professor. The Judge, the Coach, and the usual suspects await
you in the card room. They mentioned you might be interviewing God. You
know, the papers have started calling you The Grand Inquisitor.
Professor
Clever boys and girls those reporters. Think how good they could be with
real jobs. My usual please.
Bartender
Blantons or Hemlock?
Professor
Unless youre telling me, and dont, that my mother has joined the game...
Blantons.
Judge
Youre late. Working with God or, perhaps, overtime with Atwood...
Professor
As you know, Judge, the jury is still out on whether working with Atwood is
a gift from God or the wrath of God.
Judge
Well, what was the result of the interview?

Professor
All in good time. Deal me in.

(Sound of voices in a poker game.)
Voices
Call.
Ill call.
Ill raise $50.
113

Judge
I see the raise and add $150 on top, just to make it interesting. $200 to you,
Professor.
Professor
Ill see your $200 and raise you $300, Judge. And, by the way, God is sane.
Judge
God may be sane, Professor, but your hand isnt. Ill call. Lets see your hand.
Professor
Aces and eights. Read em and weep, boys! (The sound of poker chips being
raked in) Come to daddy!
Judge
Not so fast, Middleton. Appropriately a dead mans hand, no resurrection for

you, Professor. Three kings.
Professor
Three Kings? Well hidden, Judge. (a beat) Thank God the court fees will
cover this loss.
Judge
This is a pro bono, Professor.

Professor
I object.
Judge
Overruled.
Professor
Lennie, another.
Bartender
Professor, I have the unfortunate duty to inform you...

114

Professor
... that Im cut off?

Bartender
That your mother is on the phone, and she says its important.
(Card players tease Conrad)
Voice 1: Time
to come home, Connie?

Voice 2: Youre not gambling again, Conrad?
Voice 3: Mommy, please wire me some money...
Professor
Very funny boys... very funny. Lennie, tell my mother Im on my way.

Bartender
Yes, Professor.
Professor
But first lads, deal me in on one more hand. Im feeling lucky.
Scene 8
Professor
Mother, I got here as soon as I could.

Emma
You call thirty minutes soon? From the Alta Club on South Temple to our
home on 2nd Avenue and H Street... five minutes away at best... and
it took you thirty minutes? Isnt it time to get rid of the 1955 Studebaker,
Commander Connie?
Professor
Its a fine classic, just like you, Mother.

Emma
Enough, Conrad. (a beat) Im disturbed... every night Ive been having the
same strange and frightening dream...
115

Professor
Mother, relax. Come on... sit down... close your eyes... take a few slow
breaths... and tell me about it...
Emma
Well, every night since the incident on Main Street Plaza. It starts with two
men. One is screaming about freedom... the other man, the practice of
religion and forgiveness...
Professor
Can you describe the men and where you are?

Emma
Im in a crowd. I cant get out. One man is in rags but with a soft light that
surrounds him... the other, like a ghost, with a wand and silk scarves,
wearing a top hat, and holding a copy of The Salt Lake Tribune. Money just
disappearing . . .
Professor
Money disappearing. Are you certain?

Emma
Awake or asleep, Connie, I know money. Then a third man and blood everywhere... I see a knife and just as I am about to scream the name of the
killer... I wake up... Every night (a beat) every night.
Professor
Very interesting.
Emma (Petulantly)
Thats it? Your father and I spend $250,00 on your medical education and all
I get is... very interesting!
Professor
I must exercise the little gray cells to understand what you have told me.
116

Emma
Not that damn French upstart Poirot youre so fond of quoting.

Professor
Belgian upstart, Mother. Let me make you a Manhattan, Mother, and lets
start over...
Scene 9
Atwood
Good morning, Professor.

Professor
Good morning, Atwood.

Atwood
Hows your mother doing?

Professor
This entire business with the Main Street Plaza murder has mother incredibly
upset. I saw her last night after my monthly charitable cause night. Shes
having these reoccurring dreams.
Atwood
What charity event was that? I read the papers carefully, and I didnt notice
anything about an event in The Deseret News or The Tribune.
Professor (Awkward, wishing he hadnt started this)
Yes... well, you see, it was a small group... and I contributed a considerable amount to the legal system, a fund, if you will, to support... .
Atwood
... a judge who plays better poker than you do? Really, Professor. Close, but
no cigar.
117

Professor
Aces and eights. (a beat) Wait a minute... Aces and eights?

Atwood
A dead mans hand. And you bet on that? How do I get into the game?
Professor (Into his own thoughts and talking out loud, working the
problem)
And, abracadabra. He said . . . (We hear the Professor turning the pages in
his notebook) Here, right here. Listen, I said to him, Youre going to have to
pull some magic out of your hat on this one, and God said, Like, abracadabra... Aces and eights. Of course, how very bizarre!
Atwood
Abracadabra? As in magic?
Professor
And my mothers dream. She sees the demonstration in front of the Plaza.
Very much the way it was... and the man who was stabbed... before he
was murdered. Hes standing on a soapbox of sorts, holding a black box. Hes
got a top hat on and a magic wand. People come up to him with money...
large amounts of cash and place it on the black box. He covers the money
with a silk scarf, taps it once with the magic wand, and says...
Atwood
... abracadabra!... and the money disappears.

Professor
Exactly, Atwood... precisely.

Atwood
But the people kept coming... the fact that the money kept disappearing
made no difference at all... correct?
Professor
Yes, it was almost as if they were...

118

Atwood
Tricked? (a beat) Professor, do you remember... this would have been many
years ago... I remember reading about this in an Ethics Class... a bogus
stock deal... a scam... and one of the main players was nicknamed...
Professor
The Abracadabra Man! Atwood, youre a marvel. But in my mothers dream

the man in the top hat was holding a copy of the Trib... What could it mean?
Atwood
Ill do a search for every story in the Trib on the Abracadabra Man...
Professor
Yesbut we dont dream in text Atwood, we dream in...

Professor/Atwood
Pictures!
Professor
Get every story you can on the Abracadabra Man and every picture you can
find from both the Main Street Plaza murder and that old stock scam. I need
to show it to my mother... preferably after her second Manhattan.
Atwood
Why after her second Manhattan?

Professor
Everybodys memory is looser after their second Manhattan, Atwood. See

what youre missing? Now, get on that computer. Grab my mouse.
Atwood
Professor, I beg your pardon!

Professor (Embarrassed)
What I really meant to say was to Google yourself and see if you can find...
119

Atwood
... another job? One with a professor who lives in the twenty-first century?
One who owns a computer? Gladly...
Professor
See what you can find. Ive got a call to make.
Scene 10
(Sound of courtroom noise.)
Emma
Conrad, Im so nervous. I dont know why they would ever put me on the
stand.
Professor
Dont panic, Mother. God works in strange and wondrous ways. (a beat) At
least I hope so.
God (Whispering loudly to Zapata)
Were in trouble.
Zapata (Whispering loudly back)
Dont worry, Dad. I heard a voice last night.

Judge
Mr. Zapata, do you have any more witnesses?

Zapata
Yes, your honor. I have two witnesses: Ms. Emma Middleton. But first, I call
Silas Delgado to the stand.
(Courtroom noise as Delgado is sworn in. Gavel sounds.)
Zapata
Mr. Delgado, do you remember seeing Ms. Middleton on Main Street Plaza
on February seventh?
120

Delgado
I dont remember.
Zapata
Let me direct you to the elegant woman in the third row. Would you please
stand, Mrs. Middleton?
Delgado (Uncertain)
I dont think so...

Zapata (Sardonically)
Nothing, Delgado? Let me refresh your recollection. The Main Street

Plaza... February seventh? She remembers seeing you. The steel in your
hand and murder in you eyes. Dont look away Mr. Delgado. Look at her.
Now! You remember.
Delgado
I told you, I dont remember.

Zapata
You dont remember losing two million dollars in a business deal?

Delgado
I was in a lot of business deals.

Zapata
With the deceased... Arnold Hoffman aka the Abracadabra Man? Twenty
years ago... You dont remember that, Mr. Delgado?
Delgado
Leave me alone!
Zapata (Pounding home on Delgado)
So, for twenty years youve been plotting your revenge. You could think of
nothing else. It twisted in your gut... consumed you... day and night. You
stalked him... you followed him... you waited until the perfect moment.
121
And knowing that Hoffman had gone free drove you crazy! He took all your
money... you had nothing left. Tell the court Mr. Delgado... tell the court
how you got even with Hoffman.
Delgado (After a pause and in a crazed tone)
Yes, I knew Arnold Hoffman! Hoffman ruined my life! I hated Arnold

Hoffman! I killed Arnold Hoffman and I would do it again, as God is my
witness!
(Courtroom erupts into pandemonium.)
Judge
Bailiff, place that man under arrest! (The sound of a gavel banging) Case
dismissed!
Final Scene
(Professor Middletons office. The Judge, Atwood, Emma, Zapata, and
Middleton are all present. Prima music.)
Professor
Champagne for all! And a vintage apple juice for you, Atwood.
Judge
Thanks for the help, Middleton. Amazing courtroom performance by Zapata.

If I didnt know better I would think he had been coached. (In a mild conspiratorial tone) And Emma, your presence in the courtroom was the clincher.
What were you going to say?
Emma
Wouldnt you like to know, Judge?

Judge
(Judge laughs) Remind me, Emma, never to get into a poker game with you.
Your son, a horse of a different color. The color of money.
122

God
And the connection between abracadabra and the stock swindle? How did
you connect the dots?
Professor (Quite full of himself)
Elementary, my dear God. The private wound is deepest...

God
Two Gentlemen of Verona. Ah, yes, Revenge.

Professor
You know your Shakespeare?

God
Of course. Hes always been very stubborn concerning my suggestions about

that awful Timon of Athens... .
Professor
Well, anyway, it was Atwood who remembered the events so I just goggled...
Atwood (Correcting him)
Googled.
Professor
Precisely! I just cursed my mouse while I was googling...

Emma
Conrad, please, you are in mixed company...

Atwood
I think what the professor meant to say was that he searched in Google
for everything pertaining to abracadabra until he found the link into The
Tribune and The Deseret News and followed the trail. Isnt that so, Professor?
Professor
Exactly, Atwood.
123

(Phone rings)
Atwood
Professor Middletons office.

Professor
I couldnt have said it better myself.

Atwood
Just a moment please. Professor, its for you. (a beat) Theres a woman on the
line who claims to know you. She says her husband has disappeared and she
keeps having this dream... .
The End
S This play was conceived as the first of a series of radio plays featuring the
University of Utah psychology professor Dr. Conrad Middleton and his young
female office assistant Atwood. It was first performed in June 2004 on KUER, a
public radio station affiliated with the University of Utah.
124
Adventures in Romance:
Me, Mormonism, and Harlequin
Myrna Dee Marler
Picture this. A born compulsive reader with aspirations to
become a writer, stuck in a tiny house in Peoria, Illinois, with
four children, all boys, under the age of six, no car, and fifty
cents in her pocketbook. It is 1977. Outside is deep winter. Snow lies a foot
thick on the ground, iced over by several days of killing frost. The television
is broken. The kids are fine. They are running rampant through the tiny
house, slamming doors, climbing walls, inflicting bruises, breaking toys, and
generally having a normal day. But I, the compulsive reader, have nothing to
read, nothing to engage in but housework or staring out the window at the
neighbors garage, half hidden behind a snowdrift. Suddenly, I make a connection. My neighbor, a born capitalist, was selling books last August in her
annual, end-of-the-season, mother of all garage sales, the result of her and
her husbands summer activities spent picking through thousands of other
peoples belongings. Maybe she has some leftovers.
I either put the kids down for a nap or I abandon them, then I don my
coat and trudge through the snow to my neighbors door. She does indeed
have some books leftall Harlequin romances, books which before that
day I considered beneath my reading level. But I am desperate, and within
moments my neighbor has plucked the fifty cents from my hand in return
for a short stack of five books. I hurry home to discover a new world.
Before that day, my escape literature of choice had been mystery and
suspense novels: Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Daphne Du Maurier, Adela
Rogers St. John. But here was the romantic hero and the vulnerable heroine
without the messy distraction of a mystery to solve. I well remember the first
Harlequin Romance I read that snowy day.
An eighteen-year-old girl runs away from home to become a governess
employed by a thirty-six-year-old duke so masculine, hair virtually grows out
125
of the palms of his hands. He definitely has five-oclock shadow by 3:30 p.m.
every day. She is to educate his ward, probably his brothers orphaned child.
The child is not his own, as I later learned it is de rigueur for the hero to be
previously unmarried. In other words, he, too, has never previously found
true love. They are in Greece, in a castle. He is beyond her romantic reach,
but no matter, because they are at odds with each other from the beginning.
Yet for some reason he cannot leave her alone. He delights in tormenting her
and occasionally assaults her with his masculinity. Then he shows unexpected
tenderness when she is vulnerable. At some point, she stumbles on the stairs
and twists her ankle, and he carries her to her room nestled close to his broad
chest. At some point, she goes at night to find a book and discovers him in
the library, also book hungry and unaccountably moody. There in the dark,
after they spit and snarl at each other, he decides to teach her not to mess
with him, and he bruises her with a punishing but inescapably erotic kiss
that leaves them both panting for breath. However, they both hide their true
feelings until they are apart, and then the heroine slaps herself upside the
head and thinks, You fool! Youve fallen in love with him. She knows that
he is committed to The Other Woman: a woman much older, much more
sophisticated, probably rich, and often evil in her designs and ruthless in her
attempts to ensnare the hero. But throughout her trials, the heroine shows
spunk, feistiness, and pluck, all the standard weapons of the powerless. By
page 180, a couple more punishing but erotic kisses have been exchanged.
Moments of tenderness have passed between them as she glimpses his kinder,
gentler side, but eventually she must leave. She returns home to lick her
wounds. In a few weeks, he comes after hera disheveled, unshaven wreck,
he is no longer able to live without her. Whatever his reasons for denying
his helpless love for her, they have been resolved. He sheds his sophisticated
mask and proposes. They plan to get married within the next day or so. They
embrace passionately, no longer hindered by doubt as to what the other is
feeling. Fade to black and happy ever after.
Five novels and suddenly Im ensnared in a whole new culturethe culture of the Harlequin Romance Novel. Im back at my neighbors house begging for more. I am checking out every Harlequin romance novel I can find
from the library. I am scouring garage sales and the racks at Goodwill and the
Salvation Army for discarded books. I mention my new obsession to my seminary class, and one new convert reveals that her mother has subscribed to
Harlequin for years, gets twelve novels a month, reads them, and then stores
126
Marler S Adventures in Romance
them in the basement. She brings me six or seven huge boxes of Harlequin
romances dating back to the 1940s. For a while I am the Harlequin Romance
Queen. I can knock off two or three of these babies a day. I almost never have
to emerge for air except to do my housework, or feed the kids, or stop bodily
damage from taking place among my children.
I also discover that I am not the only woman in the ward obsessively reading Harlequins. Theres a group of us, and we quickly form a lunchtime bond,
where we get together and exchange novels we havent read. I sit in church
while the prelude music plays, herding my children into a semblance of
reverence, and suddenly a voice whispers in my ear while my husband takes
his dukelike throne on the stand, Theres a bag of books for you in the coat
closet. Great! I mutter. Theres a bag for you in my car. I call our group
the Harlequin Underground, because all this is taking place under the radar
of our prevailing Priesthood leadershipthat is, our husbands and bishops
and home teachers. Even the Relief Society president is unaware.
After a while, I take to grading the various romance novels, marking them
A or B+, or in some cases, even a C, because I realize that some of the novels
are far superior to o thers in terms of style, plot, suspense, characterization,
setting, and even irony. Some of my friends, who reread the books after
me, say they agree with my ratings. Its not a large step from that point to
realizing that I can write one of these novels myself. And why not? After all,
the heroines are virginal. Sex waits till marriage, and the implication is that
marriage accompanied by lust will last forever. One can imagine the couple
opening the door to a pair of Mormon missionaries a year or two down
theroad.
Thus, I begin, with a five-subject notepaper notebook. The entire novel is
written by hand. The plot is as improbable as any other Harlequin: A big-shot
trial attorney finds a girl unconscious on his doorstep and asks her to marry
him in name only so he can collect an inheritance although hes already rich,
of course. She is to run his house and be his hostess, but he doesnt want to
be emotionally involved. Little details like background checks and sanity are
left out of the equation. Over the course of the novel, these two fall madly
in love and go through 180 pages of miscommunication before they are able
to acknowledge that being married was a good choice for them after all. My
novel is different in that the setting is in America, Seattle, in factall these
former heroines having come from England, or if theyre really from the
hinterlands, Canada.
127
After I have completed the draft, ever mindful that the kissing scenes are
supposed to be sensual but not graphic, I realize that in order to submit my
manuscript to the editor gods of Harlequin, I must type it. This is a problem because we do not own a typewriter, and I am stuck at home with four
small children. I could go over to the community college where my husband
teaches and use a typewriter there, but we have only one car, which he takes
to work; and he is gone every night grading papers, home teaching in a ward
with a 200-mile perimeter, traveling to stake meetings 100 miles away, or
attending youth meetings, bishops courts, and so on. After shyly announcing to a few selected friends that I have written a novel, my bishop offersto
lend me his electric typewriterpossibly the first electric typewriter ever
toroll off the assembly line. It is a true antique. He tells me that it has been
broken for many years, but after a great deal of detective work and labor, he
has been able to find parts and restore it to usefulness. He brings it over and
I set to work. About a third of the way into transcribing and revising the
novel, the typewriter freezes and emits a low grade hum, keys locked firmly
into the no position. I am too humiliated to confess to the bishop that I
have destroyed his typewriter through overuse. I can imagine him moaning,
Thats not what I meant, not what I meant at all. Truly, his charity and
benevolence have been stretched to the limit. So, I discover Writer's Market
and find that the editors at Harlequin want only the first few chapters and
an outline anyway. So I do go over to the community college and laboriously type a fifty-page outline. My manuscript is so inspired that cutting it
into mere outline form is more than I can handle gracefully. I write a letter,
weigh it, buy double postage, send it off to the publishers, and wait for my
acceptance letter.
I do get an acknowledgement that theyve received my package. But several long months go by before the manuscript is returned to my doorstep. In
the meantime, I imagine that theyve changed the name of the author and
published it, and someone else is getting my royalty checks. When I receive
my pristine manuscript back, the difficulties of becoming a published writer,
along with my lack of funds to overcome them (including the lack of money
for stamped, self-addressed envelopes), overwhelm me, and I return to raising my childrenalthough the need to read Harlequin Romances seems to
havewithered.
Fast forward to 1982. I have had two more sons. We have moved to Hawaii.
Ive taken a couple of writing classes, one from Bruce Jorgensen. Ive actually
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had a few short stories published. Ive even joined a writers group. I have
access to a typewriter in my husbands office, just a block and half away. Our
ward only encompasses about three blocks, meaning my husband is actually
home from time to time in the evenings. Life is, in many respects, a whole
lot easier. Imagining that Harlequin heroines are still pure until their wedding day, I decide to try again, in my more experienced, mature, and writerly
voice, to write an American Harlequin Romance. By this time, an American
setting is no longer unique. Janet Daley (of future plagiarism fame) is making a million dollars a year setting her Harlequins in various states around
the union. So I write another novel, this time one thoroughly critiqued and
revised and critiqued and revised, until I feel it is perfect. The plot centers
this time around a young secretary harassed by her big-shot lawyer boss.
Ibelieve the title was A Savage Winter. The heros name is Martin Savage.
This time I obtain the name of an agent who is hungry for new clients, ones
who write romance novels, and I send her my package and wait.
The wait is not long. She writes back praising my writing style but telling
me the heroine is far too nave and virginal for the current market. Whoa!
Theres been a cultural shift since I first started reading Harlequins. Betty
Friedans The Feminine Mystique has had many unintended effects. I check
out a few romance novels from the library. The heroine is now older, experienced, educated, and blessed with an unconventional job such as photographer for National Geographic. I find she is not at all averse to hopping into
bed with the object of her desires halfway through the book. Oh, she lives to
regret it, of course, but only because the hero with whom she is so besotted
does not appear ready for commitment. Of course, by page 180 he still comes
around, and the heroine in regal fashion extends her hand to lift him up.
So what is a good Mormon woman to do at this point? My writing ability
has been affirmed, but in order to get published, I must have non-virginal
heroines. I must celebrate girls who do not wait for the wedding night, or
even for an engagement ring. I cannot think of any way to write a romance
novel and be true to my values. I cannot foist another loose fictional woman
upon the world even if I imagine the missionaries knocking successfully
on her door in the future. I am completely unfamiliar at this point with
the world of Mormon romance, which is probably good, because I might
attempte to write it. Instead, I confine myself to short stories and essays until
I discover, some years later, the world of young adult literature, which still
makes room for virginal heroines.
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I say its good that I did know the world of Mormon romance novels
because from my present vantage point, as I look back at the romance
novelsI inhaled, I see that the heroine and heros relationship was unhealthy.
Even if she is virginal, he is always experienced, which sometimes was the
cause of his hesitancy. Thus, the novels supported a double standard. Plus,
the hero and heroine did not operate on a level playing field. He had all the
power, money, good looks, and an amazing ability to be sardonic, ironic,
and sarcastic. The girl could only be plucky and innocent in response. In
fact, her innocence, combined with her pluck, was her only weapon. She
brought him to his knees through her previously unrealized sexual allure.
Questions about how long her allure could last once the two of them were
in the relationship for the long haul were not raised, certainly not addressed.
Pure love, it seemed, would conquer all, even when it was inevitably stained
with morning breath, stubbly beards, dental appointments, childbirth, runny
noses, worry about careers, wrinkles in inconvenient and public places, hair
loss in similar spots, potency issues, and offspring who become juvenile
delinquentsrealities that could well come to resemble the very ones good
Mormon housewives were reading to escape from. Since the two partners
were so unskilled at communicating, one cannot imagine that their marriage
would survive once the bloom was off the rose. Furthermore, these novels
strongly suggested that women wanted to be dominated by an overbearing,
controlling, albeit handsome, male. Those brutal kisses are little short of rape
reenactment. Perhaps some part of many women does want to be so dominated. Otherwise why would the novels sell so well? Why would so many of
us become ensnared in the world of Harlequin? On the other hand, if you
look at our real lives as Mormon women, we run to the rhythms of an often
absent male whose needs frequently supersede our own. Why would we need
to look into the world of fiction for that? Even Greece might come to seem
commonplace under these conditions.
Well, I havent read a romance novel in probably twenty years, so I dont
know whats new in the world of Harlequin, or Jove, or the host of other
romance publishers, or the historical bodice rippers that have sprung up to
fill the needs of the market. I do know theres a whole new genre of romance
fiction typified by Bridget Jones's Diary, Good in Bed, and, sorry to say, Sex
and the City, where bright young career girls search for true love, take many
a wrong turn under the sheets, find the handsome and powerful man is not
the ideal man, and then settle for the plainer but better man close to home.
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Perhaps this is a healthier trend, or perhaps it simply reflects the desire of

todays women to have it all: career, money, kids, and a satisfying sex life. The
traditional romance where the heroine is weakened and ravished by her lust
for the hero still continues, however. The difference is that shes apt to give
into it if it feels good. This suggests that some women in the culture still long
to be lifted out of the mundane into the seemingly exotic by the strength
of helpless passion, which is, the novels imply, the bedrock of true love.
Certainly these romance novels are the bastard children of a strong literary
tradition. Can we say Leda and the Swan? Can we say Pride & Prejudice?
Can we say Jane Eyre? True, theres a lot more going on in these works of art
than there is in the standard romance novel. Nevertheless, these works continue to captivate women, even in our liberated age. Mr. Darcy still inspires
sighs. Rochester still holds us with his burning, imperious gaze. The market
is still there. Go figure.
The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if the power of the
romance relies not on the need to be dominated or ravaged by lust but by
the romancethe seduction, the game, the dance these characters reenact,
all bound with the knowledge that on page 180 all will be well. We Mormon
housewives, who used to read Harlequin romances so avidly, and I, who
tried to create them, were living lives in which the big decisions already
seemed to have been made. We woke up every day to the result of our
choices. Those eighteen-year-old girls in the old-fashioned romance novels
still had all their choices, and by definition, their lives still held limitless
possibility. It just could be that there was a duke in their future. But our real
lives were bound up with childhood and old age and interlaced with diapers
and den meetings. True, real life had its ample share of satisfying, even joyous, moments, but high excitement? Not exactly. So, instead of living our
real lives, we romance novel addicts submerge ourselves in the fictional fantasies of the middle-aged women who woite the novels to make the money
to live their own lives of choices made and consequences accepted.
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Readers Write: Beginnings

We want to inspire you.
Readers Write includes essays on a preannounced topic that our
readers can address in a short form. If, as Mary Lythgoe Bradford
suggests (in citing Eugene England), the personal essay for Mormons is
a variation on the testimony as literary genre, then we hope you will find
inspiration here akin to what can be found in the best of testimony meetings: personal edification, a sense of community, and the fortitude to share
your own story. Submissions may address the topic from any perspective, but
should be thoughtful and honest. Submission deadline for the February 2005
issue is December 15.
Our first collection of Readers Write essays comes from AML board members and Irreantum staff, both past and present.
SSS
Beginnings. Everyones had at least one. And many of us like to think of

ourselves as having manya marriage, a divorce, a graduation, a conversion,
an illness, a healing, a new idea, a promotion, a new car, a brand new child.
Each narrative, each poem, each song or play or film has a beginning which,
one could argue, constrains and enables the middle and endif there is an
ending, which is perhaps just another portal (and another beginning) to
something else. Sort of like our lives. And sort of not. In honor of the beginning of the new generation of Irreantum, tell us about your beginning(s) and
consider what it might mean to construct something as a starting.
A Moebius Trip
Ive been thinking about beginnings. I almost wrote beginnings and endings,
but remembered a literary pilgrimage my father sent me on. It was a sentence
about how surfiction like John Barths Lost in the Funhouse questions even the
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comfort of form, the comfort of assumptions that art must have form and
that the form itself is a saving grace no matter what the embodied challenge
and how the narrative voice keeps insisting on the formlessness of what we
are experiencing.
I found The Funhouse in my fathers library and brought it home. And
whatever Barth may say, it begins with a form: Cut on dotted line. Twist end
once and fasten AB to ab and CD to cd, a Moebius strip. Take a trip with
Dr. Moebius. Whatever side or edge of the paper you start on your finger
ends up on the other side or edgepassing from one to the other seamlessly.
By the time you reach the seam where the ends join your finger is already on
the other side.
So Ive been thinking about beginnings.
AB
In July, Ben Susov, our neighbor across the street, stood in testimony
meeting and said that the month before he had done two things hed been
planning on, longing for. Hed gone through the temple and seen Spider
man2. Three times he saw it. He had promised his friends he would wait
for Spiderman 2 to come out. What if this doesnt work? I asked when
his younger brother Brock came home from the mission field for a week to
do more blood work, having already given bone marrow for a transplant.
Iguess Ill die, Ben said.
CD
When our niece-almost-a-daughter lost a six-month preemie, Karen Susov

told us Ben had been a preemie and spent his first few weeks hooked up to
similar machines. A small photo album showed him hooked up, then growing up, then lying on his back, oxygen mask on his mouth, a corrugated tube
rising to the ceiling like the tube thats supposed to drop out of the airplanes
ceiling, the tube youre supposed to put on the childs face first. Or like the
refueling tube passing between planes at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove, or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love . . . , love what? Bounteous leukocytes multiplying and replenishing their earth? The radiation supposed to
stop the leukocytes from fulfilling the divine command?
His life ended much as it began, Karen said, with oxygen tubes and
many blessings.
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ab
He was given a blessing and told if he wanted, he would be permitted to

remain, Richard Susov said of his son. I figured, Well there you are. Things
will be fine. But a few days later a little voice said, Not necessarily. It was
his choice. Maybe he was shown things. It was his choice.
Hes probably swapping cancer stories with Elder Maxwell, older brother
Chris told mourners. My wife said Bens probably sitting on the casket
swinging his legs and wondering why were crying. I think hes sitting up
here with us. He may have ridden in on the casket, though. (The Relief
Society president, herself a cancer survivor, had given Ben a copy of Neal A.
Maxwells All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience.)
Twist
A couple hours after the funeral, we left for Idaho. Ollie had died. She
was the mother of one of Donnas sisters, but never her fathers wife. Every
Memorial Day in Challis, Ollie told us, I wont be here much longer. Im
going to a home in Blackfoot. It was a joke for me. I couldnt see such a
strong personality surrendering her independence. Then in June she broke
her foot. We went to the nursing home in Ammon to see her. And one
night Donna hung up the phone, crying. Ollie died. She called the family. One sister, Marie, came, driving down from Washington. We met in the
Blackfoot Wal-Mart parking lot.
You lost another of your apostles this morning about 4 a.m., Maries
husband, Joe, told me. The one that was ninety-four. Driving across Idaho
he had found a KSL repeater.
That would be President Hinckley.
No, it wasnt President Hinckley.
Elder Haight, then, but he was ninety-eight (ninety-seven, actually).
Three witnesses. No, four.
For the three deaths, the four deaths, in Israel . . .
cd
At Bens funeral his autistic youngest brother, Conner, said Ben had partaken of the forbidden fruit and gone back into Gods presence. I know that
one day Ill partake of the forbidden fruit and go back into Gods presence.
With desire have I desired to eat this Passover.
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Yet to pass over to our Parents, we must surely die. And before our fingers
trace the seam in the veil, we are already on the other side and the voice that
welcomes us through the veil tells us Joy and Life come in the morning.
Harlow Clark, Pleasant Grove, UT
Most of the People, All of the Time

A strange burden of human consciousness is its occasional intrusion at a
beginning. For our new daughter, poised at the quintessential beginning,
there is only (as far as we can tell) grunting and suckling, sighing and hiccupping. For us, there is the strange novelty of our mixed seed, the fruit of
our collective loins, the repository of our genealogy, our historical fate. There
is also the overwhelming potential of a new human life. Our first daughter
trained us to delight in change, to anticipate each new skill, word, affectation,
sleeping pose as if it were a fresh revelation of immanent divinity.
Now this quiet, new, exhausted life that rouses primarily to drink and
stretch is a testament to both the universal and idiosyncratic. The life that
has been lived ten billion times and that will never be lived again, not this
way, not as our Lucia.
While we will justly be accused of clich in comparing the reincarnation
of Irreantum to the wonder of our daughters new life, this once (recognizing
and respecting the anathema in literary circles) we would like to indulge. For
clich is little more than an easy, even natural borrowing of the experience
and approaches of innumerable humans. Ideas, comparisons, strings of words
become clich because they work without requiring much toil for a large portion of humanity. They are the phrases that can soothe most of the people all
of the time. They soothe us right now, as we watch our baby sleep.
That anxious and exciting tension between the familiar and the foreign,
the anticipated and the realized, the generically human and the specifically
real informs both our parenthood and our editorial contributions to this rebeginning literary quarterly. We also believe that it informs our faith, based
as it is on our belief in a universal Savior incarnated in the body of a homeless
carpenter-cum-prophet from Galilee.
While our editorial assignments will forever be less significant than either
our family or our faith, we believe that they all participate in the grand magic
of beginning, of instantiating archetypes and histories, heroes and sagas, in
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the minutely specific reality of a given life, narrative, or encounter. We look

forward to participating with you in the ongoing creation of inimitable lives
from the vast and contoured ether of the human imagination.
Kate Holbrook and Sam Brown, Cambridge, MA
Stepping on Shoulders
Is there really such a thing as a beginning? If beginning means starting something totally new, then I dont think Ive ever experienced onenot that I
can remember, anyway.
Im the new AML webmaster, but someone else was webmaster before me.
We have a new Irreantum, but there was an Irreantum before it. Instead of new,
what we have is re-new, and thats a good thing. We benefit from the efforts
of those who have gone before us, who have prepared the way. We dont have
to reinvent the wheel because we can learn from what they already did.
A time will come when someone else will be beginning, and we will be
ending. If we are committed to giving them all they need to go on from
ourendings, then they will be that much farther ahead, and they will thank
us in their hearts for our efforts.
So, of course we shall go forward in this great cause, but we will go by
stepping on the shoulders of our predecessors, by learning all we can about
what they did and how and why, by adding our own insights and our own
talents and our own ideas to the synergism that we will create as we, too,
begin to move toward our own endings and someone elses beginnings.
Kathleen Dalton Woodbury, Salt Lake City, UT
From Charly to Paradise Lost

My best friend once told me that we are the sum of sights and sounds and
peoplethis right before she swept me up in the months-long preparation
of her marriage, which created a new sum.
I feel the same way about literature. My beginnings were in the Jack
Weyland novels I checked out of the local library. I quickly graduated to the
classicsAusten, Shakespeare, and then Eliot, Orwell, and Salingerwhich
in turn pushed me toward my English major, where I found myself again
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interested in Mormon literature. Everything I now read builds on what I read

before, from Beowulf to Stargirl, creating new sums unique to my experience.
The same is true of Mormon literature, from the impressive foundation of the
Book of Mormon, to the Home Literature period we sometimes dismissbut
how many of us have our beginnings in Added Upon and other works?
The Mormon culture has created its own sum, its own experience, and its
from this sum that Orson F. Whitneys prophesied Miltons and Shakespeares
of our own will appear.
Even if we have to start with Charly.
Sarah Jenkins, Provo, UT
A New Journal
I started a new journal today, a ritual start to every school year. I sat in the
chaos of my bedroom, new school supplies scattered around my feet and
riffled through the fresh pages. Each was white and pristinelike a new
brides dress, unspoiled. I pictured cascades of words upon those pages, and
wondered what Id say.
At first, nothing came. Then, as if the Hoover Dam itself had crumbled,
emotion came flooding out, sweeping, swirling, weaving, and heaving onto
the first clean page. I groped fruitlessly for more than the brief glimpses my
heart was throwing at my head.
A year ago today I was lost, unprepared, and completely bewildered. My
friend Cheryl called, and in an unnaturally small voice thanked me for being
her friend. I asked her if there was anything else I could do. She said no and
assured me that she was going to work through things with her parents. I
told her Id see her on Sunday and she hung up. As much as I wanted to,
I heaved no sigh of relief. Her life may have been spared for a day, but her
struggle was nowhere near over.
Unfortunately, I never gained a fair foothold last year as a high school
junior. I floated through each day, wonderful to the outside world, all the
while refusing to admit that my life was out of control. I stopped caring
about grades, teachers, and activities. I took advantage of people, knowing
theyd forgive me later. I now doubt they did. I know I wouldnt have.
That year ended just as abruptly as it startedwith the same little child
in the middle, not knowing where to turn. At my birthday party, the annual
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event marking the end of school and the beginning of summer for so many
of my peers, I felt myself relax for the first time in over nine months. I had
absolutely no time to dwell on it, though, as Girls Camp started bright and
early the next Monday morning. Camp has always had a special place in my
heart; it has the innate ability to change and soften my existence. Needless to
say, I came from the forest at the end of the week with fresh perspective on life.
I could make such a difference in my world if only I would try a bit harder.
As this summer passed by, I slowly but surely marked items off my list of
mistakes to rectify. By mid-July, I was well on my way to recovering myself.
One particularly poignant day still stands out in my mind. My father and I
were having a celebratory lunch, and in the middle of the conversation, the
most relaxing feeling came over me. It was in that moment I knew I was
ready for school. No, I did not want it to start just yet. I had some unfinished
business, but I knew that when it did start up again, I would be ready.
Since that time I have taken a job as a copyeditor, been called as Laurels
president, finished my drivers education course, and had the opportunity
to photograph two weddings. I even threw a back-to-school party. During a
quiet moment before too many people arrived, Cheryl caught me by the arm.
We talked a bit about how things were going. Then she said, Vanessa, Iwant
you to know that this is going to be an important event for me. I guess it
signifies all that Ive worked for this summer and all I intend to carry on this
school year. Very symbolic.
For me, too, it is the end to a good summer but an even better beginning.
Vanessa Oler, Spring, TX
Starting Over
When I first started writing fiction I had a terrible time with revision. My
problem wasnt with editing: I loved tinkering with sentences, changing this
word or that, inserting commas and deleting adjectives. What I couldnt do
was revise in the truest sense of the word. I couldnt start over.
One root cause of this aversion to starting over was guilt. I would spend
hours and hours on a particular story, and the thought of throwing out ten
or fifteen or twenty pages made me sick to my stomach. As a new writer,
Ialready felt guilty about indulging in my writing hobby at the expense of
other, more practical, responsibilities. But if I threw out the offending pages
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and started again, not only would the laundry still be waiting in a pile on my
bed, but, at the time, I believed this meant I wouldnt have anything concrete
to show for all the hours Id spent in front of the computer.
Even more powerful than my supposed guilt over time misspent (I mean,
I still found time to watch Seinfeld and read the occasional People magazine,
so who was I kidding?), was my misunderstanding of the way the creative
process works. In my world, I had been taught to take careful steps toward
well-defined goals. For example, the Personal Progress program in Young
Womens taught me that I should (1) come up with a project (say, making a
quilt), (2) take steps toward the completion of said project (picking out fabric, measuring, laying out the squares, sewing) and, (3) present the finished
product (maybe to a sweet young mother in the ward who would reward me
with a nice thank you note and a plate of brownies).
Beginning, middle, end, then on to the next goal on the list. While these
skills helped me zip pretty quickly through college, I hadnt quite developed
the ability to let the winds of creativity blow me where they might.
I dont know that its fair to blame my rigid understanding of goal-setting
and project-completion solely on my Mormon upbringing. Even outside the
churchin school, at work, at homeI found myself in situations where
starting over was rarely desirable. If I did need to go back and begin againif
the metaphorical quilt didnt look the way Id imagined it wouldthis usually indicated some kind of failure on my part. Id measured wrong, or cut
the squares crooked, or, horror of horrors, I was just a really bad seamstress
who should give up any hope of quilting success. Beginning again wasnt
a good thing; instead of giving me insight or opportunity or new ideas, it
meant I had messed up, and now I was paying for it.
Ironically, as a writer, my fear of starting over meant that I didnt finish
many stories. In this beginning phase of my writing life, I would start and
start and start, and then, faced with a tight corner Id written myself into or
a block in my creative flow, I would simply give up. Instead of working with
my creative impulses, allowing them to guide me and nudge me and turn
me completely around, if need be, I was fighting against them. I wanted my
ideas, my characters and stories to march along in a neat little line toward a
tidy conclusion.
As any real writer would have told me (and probably did), this kind of
attitude toward the creative process meant almost certain death. But I had to
figure it out for myself. Faced with dozens of beginnings and no real endings,
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I had to acknowledge that my writing, if it was going to be successful at all,

would have to be messy before it could be clean. I would have to learn to
begin not with the end in mind, but with faith in the joy of the journey, and
hope in the energizing power of surprise.
This epiphany of sorts hasnt made writing easy. I still get blocked and
frustrated. I still pick up stories I thought I liked and, after reading through
them once again, decide theyre hollow or shallow, and I wonder what I was
thinking. The difference is that, now, these stories arent condemned to die
ina lonely filing cabinet. I understand that if I kick them around a little,
pickthem up and shake them, maybe something worthwhile will come
rattling out.
A nugget. A seed. Perhaps a whole new beginning.
Angela Hallstrom, White Bear Township, MN
Making an Entrance
Its strange how often beginnings in my life have started with doorsschool
doors, church doors, the doors of unfamiliar houses in new towns. My college life began, not with the first day of classes, but when I entered my new
basement apartment, through a door of yellow wood. All the doors there
were like that. It was like living in a hallway forested by No.2pencils.
I was the second to arrive. My first roommate was open-faced, sweetvoiced, and as eager to get along as I was. I think we were both away from
home for the first time and uncertain about living with strangers. I remember talking too loudly and laughing too quickly out of adrenaline-fueled
nervousness.
Then she walked in. Black shades, black jacket, hair to her waistI
thought, by the way she walked as though gliding on wheels, that she must
have been a model once, and she certainly had the face for it. She exchanged
only a few cool words with us, mostly about which room was hers and could
she change for the larger room at the end of the hall. When she was gone,
my new friend and I just gaped at each other. It was like a random encounter
with royalty, except that instead of the urge to bow we had to suppress our
desire to laugh. It was ridiculous and awesome at the same time. It wasan
entrance, like an actress sweeping on to a stage, and its a beginning I have
never forgotten.
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Only after weeks of living with her did we all discover that it had been an
act. The sunglasses were to hide the fact that she normally wore very thick
glasses; the cool manner was to keep us at a distance until she knew whether
we were worth getting close to. Its easier to become friendly than it is to
cool off, she said later, something her father had taught her, and a lesson
that failed because those of us who were present for the big act never could
fully trust her afterward.
I have made enough new beginnings to realize that every move to a new
town, every change of community is an opportunity to leave behind old
mistakes and start fresh. But every beginning ends with a question: And
what comes next? If no one knows anything about me, I can be whomever I
choosebut I think it should be someone Ill still want to be in Chapter Two.
Melissa Proffitt, Salt Lake City, UT
Miles to Go
Learning to walk is harder the second time around. At five-and-a-half feet I
have a long way to fall if I miss a step. Its hard to believe that after twentyfive years of putting one foot in front of the other, I could have forgetten how
in just two months. The bones in my foot feel brittle and stiff. I wonder how
long it will take for them to remember how to flex fluently beneath my skin.
Five bones is a lot to break. Five bones buys three hours of surgery, two
months in a cast, and fear with every step afterward. But not forever. I believe
in miracles. The scar will fade, the feeling will come back. Healing is like that.
Its amazing what a person can adjust to, how much strength is inside of us
when we face change.
When it gets hard I try to remember some of this. I try to remember that I
know about change. Sometimes I forget how far Ive come. How many miles
I have behind me. Im two thousand, three hundred twenty-eight miles from
where I started in Boston. I came two thousand three hundred twenty-eight
miles to build a new life.
Some days it feels like I walked the whole way. So I try to remember Ive
taken harder steps than these. That Ive had longer, more painful journeys.
Ive come farther than my feet could carry me. I know how to start over.
Iknow how to begin again.
Sarah Maitland, Provo, UT
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In the Hive
When I was twelve, a new Beehive, the Young Womens Mutual Improvement
Association held an opening social. It was September, shortly after my first
few weeks of school. Junior High was already a new worldthe freedom
of moving from class to class without a home-room teacher to watch over
us like a mother hen; the fashion sensibilities that emerged with feathered
haircuts, HASH jeans, and, for the daring, pierced ears; and a social swirl of
older boys looking at you, girlfriend secrets about who was a fox, who was
caught making out, or who was going with whom.
At the youth opening social, all young women in the ward were invited to
a sleepover held at the church. We brought pajamas, sleeping bags, toiletries,
and whatever else we needed for our entertainment and edification. The
eight-track tape player which one slightly wild and rebellious girl brought
was especially edifying. She had quite a collection of music. I had heard of
Donny Osmond, of course, but little about Sean Cassidy, Chicago, Olivia
Newton John, or Fleetwood Mac.
We raced across the slick gym floor in our stockinged feet, held secret
conversations behind the curtains of the stage, and even wandered outside
in our nighties, only to return to the gym to make eight-track requests. But
it was when Mitzi Bennett, a Laurel, introduced herself to me with grace
and poise as I was sitting on my sleeping bag on one side of the gym, that I
knew I was entering a new world. This was the first time I remember being
taken seriously as a person, not because I was somebodys daughter, or the
oldest one who got to set an example for my five siblings, or because I made
straight As and always knew the answer in class. I was worth talking to
because I was there.
Mitzi set the stage for me to understand that the time we girls spent
together to become young women of the Idaho Falls 23rd Ward was something ofimport.
Laraine Wilkins, Salt Lake City, UT
The Agnostics Prayer

It was the summer of 1959 and I was fifteen, living literally in the woods in
western Washington. One day while paging through the magazine section
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of the Sunday Seattle Post Intelligencer, I came upon an article featuring a

bearded, sandle-shod, cigarette-smoking young man who owned the Subtle
Game Art Gallery on Pine Street in Seattle. He identified with the Beats but
also said, I am a Christian, first, last, and always. My own Church of Christ
Sunday School Christianity was definitely in question at the time; for two
years I had been moving deeper and deeper into adolescent spiritual crisis
and searching for my life. As I read the gallery owners story and looked at
his photograph, I thought, This is me. Before long my life became one of
coffeehouses, poetry readings, cool Jazz, abstract expressionist art, peyote
(unavailable in my home town in 1959), and consorting with like-minded
women.
This meant, of course, that I needed to know something about art, and it
just happened that later that summer, as I exited the science fiction section of
my home towns Carnegie Library, a new book on display presented itself to
me: Understanding Modern Art. I opened it quite by accident to the chapter
on Surrealism with a photo of the fur-covered tea set, and my life changed.
Walking the five miles from the library to home in the woods, I started into
the book and found, as demonstrating the nature of Surrealism, a few fragments from the Illuminations of Rimbaud, and the change in my life set even
deeper. By the time I had finished reading the book, I had undergone the first
of my three great conversions: to the life of art and literature.
By Christmas of that year, I was in the furthest depth of my dark night,
in a state of mind and soul not unlike what I found described years later in
Sartres Nausea. I had found some solace in the art and poetry of the surrealists which hinted of meaning behind the faade of mundane existence, but I
despaired of finding that meaning.
On a drizzly night in January, 1960, I dreaded going to sleep because I
dreaded waking the next morning to face the abyss again. So I went into the
trees outside the family cabin and knelt to pray what I learned later was the
agnostics prayer: If there is a God and some plan for this life, please show
me because I cant go on like this. I didnt know what to expect, certainly not
what then happenedsomething like an electric shock inside my breast, as
if someone had reached out to touch a finger to me. I stood up, astonished. I
knew that what had just come to me had come from outside. And I felt large,
disintegrating pieces of my self shifting perceptibly back toward a center.
I walked about in the dark under the trees for a while, pondering what
had happened, and then I stopped and looked toward the low, raining clouds.
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Readers Write
Idont know what the truth is, I said, but I know now that there is a truth,
and I will search for it till I find it, and when I find it I will do whatever it
requires of me.
Many years later, I came to understand that that night in the rain I had
undertaken the covenants of obedience and sacrifice, and less than a year later
messengers with the covenant of the gospel found me.
In those conversionsto art and literature and to the restored gospel
were two of my most important beginnings. (The third conversion, for the
record, was a political one which I wont detail here.) A large theme of my life
has been the task of working out a unity of those two aspects of experience.
They both came partly together in the twenty years I spent as an editor in the
Church Curriculum Department. (I have consoled myself for the paucity of
my own literary output with the thought that Sartre remained in his nausea
and became the intellectual leader of Europe, but I found Christ and became
a Church editor.)
Joseph Campbell wrote, When you reach an advanced age and look back
over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as
though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had
seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensible
factors in the composition of a consistent plot.
Though events described here did not seem to me accidental or of little
moment, I can put an amen to Campbell.
Colin Douglas, Magna, UT
SSS
Readers Write Topic for the Next Issue: Folklore

It has been said that the function of folklore is to reconstruct the spiritual
history of the human race. Not only oral but written forms of folklore occur
in myths, legends, riddles and proverbial sayings. Holmans Handbook to
Literature lists charms, spells, omens, popular ballads, and cowboy songs,
among other forms of folklore. Mormon folklore ranges from frontier magic
to a mix of Indian and pioneer mysticism, from the Manti riff to sightings of
the Three Nephites, from other-side-of-the-veil stories told around a campfire to the vaulting testimonies of true believers in sacrament meeting. Tell
145
us about folklore. Tell us about the spiritual history of the Mormon people
as told through their common stories.
Submissions of 200800 words for the February issue must be received
by January 6, 2005. Please send to submissions@irreantum.org; include
Readers Write in the subject line. We accept only electronic submissions.
146
Saints and Soldiers:

Why Its the Best, and Why No
One Will Bother Trying to Beat It
Eric D. Snider
Saints and Soldiers is the best Mormon cinema film made so
far, and one of the best films of any kind to be released in 2004.
It is intelligent, mature and thoughtful, characteristics that put
it in exclusive company regardless of genre.
It stands apart for other reasons, too. It was marketed differently from
most Mormon-cinema filmsit has no overt references to The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within it, and its subject matter is gray
and heavy. This distinguishes it from other entries in the genre, which have
tended toward the light-hearted (or at least have had moments of levity amid
the drama) and which have generally been heavy on the Mormonism, as
filmmakers were staking out the LDS-cinema territory and did not want any
confusion as to their intended audience.
And though unusual or groundbreaking films, both in the Mormon genre
and in American cinema generally, often do well with critics but poorly with
audiences, Saints and Soldiers has proven a financial success, too, recouping
more than $700,000 of its $800,000 budget and still going strong.
All of this makes the film worth examining more closely, to see why it has
succeeded where others have failed, and to determine what lessons can be
learned from it in regard to this tricky, still-developing genre.
The Film
On December 17, 1944, German soldiers opened fire on a group of unarmed
American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy, killing eighty-six
of them. Saints and Soldiers opens with this massacre and follows a handful ofU.S. soldiers who escape into the woods. There is Sgt. Gunderson
147
(Peter Asle Holden), now the de facto commanding officer of the little
group; Louisiana boy Kendrick (Larry Bagby), who is going through serious
nicotine withdrawal; Brooklyn native Gould (Alexander Niver); and Greer
(Corbin Allred), nicknamed Deacon for his religious practices.
Director Ryan Little does something unusual almost immediately: He does
not say that Deacon is a Mormon, yet he gives enough code for Mormon
audiences to identify him as one of their own, while non-LDS viewers figure
he is simply a Christian of some kind. Deacon is from Snowflake, Arizona
a town populated almost entirely by Mormonsand he does not drink or
smoke. He did missionary work in Germany before the war.
He also carries a book around with him that another character refers to as
his Bible. Mormons who have served missions will recall the many times
the Book of Mormon was referred to, both innocently and derisively, as
your Bible. Non-Mormon viewers take the dialogue literally, while Mormon
viewers smile and realize its probably a Book of Mormon.
While hiding from the Germans and still deciding on a course of action,
the band finds Oberon Winley (Kirby Heyborne), a British paratrooper who
has landed in their midst. He has critical information that he must get to
the nearest Allied command post before the Germans cross the Meuse River.
And so the plan is set: Get there before the bad guys do.
Through snow and cold and under the constant threat of being found by the
Germans, the group trudges toward safety. But Deacon, the best marksman in
the group, hasnt slept in several days, and he is haunted by something, remembrances he keeps having of an earlier miscalculation. Gould, in particular, is
mistrusting of Deaconnot just because of his fatigue and hallucinations, but
because of his previous association with and affinity for the German people.
The performances are solid all around, particularly from LDS actor
Corbin Allred as the tormented Deacon, and non-LDS Alexander Niver
(who played the little boy on Charles in Charge in the 80s) as Gould. None
of the performances are maudlin or melodramatic, even when the events are
dire; the tendency to overact in highly dramatic situations is repressed.
Geoffrey Panos and Matt Whitakers screenplay is tightly written, drawing the characters with enough strokes to give them personality but not
weighingthe thing down with needless exposition or backstory. It explores
the inherent conflict between religion and war, and the idea that one must
sometimes give up ones own desires in order to fight for something bigger,
even if it means doing things one is normally opposed to.
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Snider S Saints and Soldiers
Ryan Little, the director, acts as cinematographer, too. Saints and Soldiers
is a highly polished, visceral film in that regard. Other Mormon films have
been serious (Brigham City, notably), but this is the first one to make its seriousness a palpable, distinct part of the films visual aspect. The bleak, wintry
scenes are shot to reflect the gravity of the situation, with tricks like lighting
and film manipulation evoking still more feeling. This is the first LDS film to
realize that a movies look can be as important to its message as the action
and dialoguethe benefit, perhaps, of having an experienced cinematographer act as director.
The Marketing
In the past, most LDS films have followed the same general pattern: Open in
a handful of Utah theaters, then slowly spread out from there, the speed and
extent of the spreading contingent on how well you do in the core m
arket.
You test the waters in the heartland of Mormonism, then venture out to where
there are pockets of Mormons. But in either case, you go where the saints are.
Saints and Soldiers, however, followed an entirely different course. It first
played at film festivals all around the country, picking up top prizes at more
than a dozen of them before it opened in regular theaters. This was a brilliant
move. Rather than spending money to reserve theaters for press screenings
or public sneak previews, hoping to generate word-of-mouth in that manner,
Little and company racked up one positive blurb after another from those
festivalsand for free. Put the logos of thirteen film festivals, along with
Winner, Best Picture, on your movie poster, and your potential audience is
already impressed (probably more so than they would be if all you had was
a quote from some no-name movie critic).
Ryan Little already knew the value of film festivals. His fourteen-minute
short The Last Good War, also about World War II, won prizes at some
ofthe twenty-plus festivals it screened at in 1999. There is seldom a postfestival theatrical release for short films, but with a feature, festivals can be a
stepping-stone.
Another reason to adopt a different game plan for Saints and Soldiers
was Littles recent experience. His debut feature film, Out of Step, opened to
positive reviews, yet flopped miserably at the box office, in large part because
it opened just two weeks after The Singles Ward and in the middle of the
2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. A frustrating experience like that is
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bound to inspire out-of-the-box thinking next time around.

Saints and Soldiers got more free publicity when its violent content
prompted the Motion Picture Association of America to give it an R rating.
The filmmakers protested, thus giving the clearest indication that, despite its
lack of overt Mormon content and its varying from the established model for
releasing Mormon films, this was, after all, still an LDS movie, aimed at an
LDS audience. If that werent the case, an R rating would have been reasonable, especially for a war film. But an R rating for a film that youre hoping
will be viewed by your fellow Mormonsthats suicide.
There was some debate on whether the film deserved an R rating, and this
reviewers opinion is that it was too close to call. Certainly there have been
movies with far more violence (not to mention other objectionable content)
that squeezed by with PG-13 ratings, so if were grading on the curve, Saints
and Soldiers got a bum rap. But disregarding what ratings other films may
have gotten, Saints and Soldiers does have some strong violence in it. Nothing
gratuitous, but enough to give one pause. At any rate, Little re-edited the film,
replacing a few of the more graphic shots with alternate angles or different
distances (e.g., a medium shot instead of a close-up) and got his PG-13 rating.
Excel Entertainment, which is distributing the film, has done the right
thing by not marketing it as a Mormon film. Not only would this have
been disingenuous, given the movies lack of hardcore LDS content, but it
would have been self-destructive. A movie advertised as an LDS film will
usually only be viewed by LDS people, whereas one billed simply as a war
drama might appeal to general audiences. Unfortunately, at this writing,
Excel has only opened the film in LDS areas anyway, so the point is moot.
The Impact
Fifteen theatrical releases fitting the category of Mormon cinema have
appeared on screens since Richard Dutcher began the genre with Gods
Army in 2000, and Saints and Soldiers is better than all of them. It is so
superior on almost every level, especially in its technical aspects, that it puts
hastily assembled drivel like Handcart and The Home Teachers to even further
shame.
The bar thus raised for LDS filmmakers (which is to say, LDS directors
who are making LDS-themed films) is at once exciting and disheartening
tocontemplateexciting because here is a film that other directors can
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Snider S Saints and Soldiers
lookat as an example of effective, compelling storytelling on a shoestring

budget, and which they could emulate; disheartening because in most cases,
they wont.
Movie-making is a business, and even if directors dont pay attention to
the bottom line, their investors do. Kurt Hales The Singles Ward, while artistically bankrupt and technically embarrassing, grossed $1.2 million, four times
its reported budget. Hales follow-up, The R.M., did approximately the same
thing. Number 3, The Home Teachers, flopped at just over the $200,000 mark,
but aside from that one glitch, Hales modus operandi of broad jokes and
poorly developed characters is working just fine. Why change anything?
Richard Dutchers Brigham City didnt do well enough at the box office
to finance his next project, a Joseph Smith biopic called Prophet. So Dutcher
finally had to shoot a Gods Army sequel, due in 2005, in the hopes that it
would make enough profit to fund Prophet. When Prophet finally does get
made, he would do well to consider the film-festival route that helped Saints
and Soldiers so much. But Dutcher is still considered the godfather of LDS
cinema. Do godfathers take cues from young upstarts?
(I wouldnt blame Dutcher for being somewhat disillusioned, if in fact he
is. Brigham City was almost as good as Saints and Soldiers, yet it barely made
$
900,000 after nineteen weeks of release, a mark Saints and Soldiers will pass
sometime in November, around its thirteenth week. It was only the second
film in the genre, and audiences werent yet ready for a PG-13 spiritual drama/
murder mystery. If Brigham City were released today, I suspect it would gross
$
2million.)
Another narrow perspective that will prevent some filmmakers from learning what Saints and Soldiers has to teach them is the what Im doing is special mentality. Gary Rogers Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1: The Journey
only grossed $1.6 million on a reported $2 million budget, but Rogers will
continue to make the sequels as long as he can dig up the money to do so,
because he believes so strongly that the Book of Mormon should be brought
to the screen. He may be right about that, but shouldnt they be brought to
the screen well? Rogers seems to believe just making the films is the important
thing, even if the sets, acting and dialogue are laughable.
Saints and Soldiers was made for the small sum of $800,000 yet looks far
better than the $2 million Book of Mormon Movie. The upcoming Work and
the Glory film, due at Thanksgiving, cost $7 million to make and will be an
absolute disaster at the box office, mark my words. Even if it is spectacularly
151
acted, directed, and produced; even if it receives nothing but glowing reviews
and positive word of mouth; even then, theres no way it will make $7 million. The most so far for any LDS film was $4.7 million for The Other Side of
Heaven, but that movie had much wider distribution and went easy enough
on the Mormonism to appeal to some non-Mormon audiences. The nexthighest gross was $2.6 million for Gods Army, a film that had the advantage
of being the first of its kind, in addition to being very good.
The Work and the Glory is pegged not as a religious film but as a romance
set against the backdrop of the Restoration. Still, having Joseph Smith as a
character, even a minor one, and having main characters who are Mormon,
will frighten away non-LDS audiences, who will assume the film wants to
proselytize them. Generally speaking, LDS-cinema films are viewed only
by LDS people, and there simply arent enough LDS people who would be
interested in the film, and who live in areas where it will play, to add up to
$
7 million. Saints and Soldiers is proof that outstanding work can be done on
a shoestring budget; The Work and the Glory ought to have done the same.
Conclusion
Saints and Soldiers earned its success not just by being a quality film, but
through shrewd marketing and careful storytelling (e.g., not hitting the
viewer over the head with Mormonism). This is not the only way to make a
successful LDS film, of course, but so many LDS films have failed financially
because of poor marketing, poor timing, or just plain poor filmmaking that
its worth examining the success of Saints and Soldiers and considering its
methodology. It is my hope that this film will inspire other filmmakers to
take better care of their own work.
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From the Archives

Introduction
Considered to be the first Mormon short story, Dialogue between
Joe Smith and the Devil was written by Parley P. Pratt and published in the New York Herald on January 1, 1844. About the story,
Pratt wrote:
Visiting North Bridge, a short distance from Boston, and having a days leisure,
I wrote a dialogue entitled "Joe Smith and the Devil," which was afterwards
published in the New York Herald, and in various papers in America and
Europe. It was finally published and republished in pamphlet form, and had a
wide circulation; few persons knowing or mistrusting who was the author.
In the introduction to the LDS short story collection Bright Angels and
Familiars (Signature Books, 1992), Eugene England describes Dialogue
between Joe Smith and the Devil as witty, imaginative in setting and dialogue and, though clearly pro-Mormon, aimed at a non-Mormon audience.
Like much other early Mormon literature, it is a combination of apologetic
and satire, committed to a perfect Zion and fiercely critical of the perishing
Babylon everywhere else (xii).
In keeping with our theme of beginnings, Irreantums editors felt this
piece to be an appropriate choice to launch our new section called From
the Archives. This section is dedicated to reprinting Mormon poetry and
prose, either old classics or forgotten gems, allowing them to stand side-byside with the more contemporary work found elsewhere in the magazine. We
hope you enjoy this example of early Mormon fiction, and look forward to
reacquainting our readers with some of their literary forbearers.
153
A Dialogue between Joe Smith and the Devil

Parley P. Pratt
(Enter Devil with a bundle of hand bills, which he is in the act of pasting up)
wanted immediately!
All the liars, swindlers, thieves, robbers, incendiaries, murderers, cheats, adulterers, harlots, blackguards, gamblers, bogus makers, idlers, busy bodies,
pickpockets, vagabonds, filthy persons, and all other infidels and rebellious,
disorderly persons, for a crusade against Joe Smith and the Mormons! Be
quick, be quick, I say or our cause will be ruined and our kingdom overthrown
by the dd fool of an imposter and his associates, for even now all earth
and hell is in a stew.
Joseph Smith happens to be passing and hails his majesty:

Smith: Good morning, Mr. Devil. How now, you seem to be much engaged;
what news have you got there?
Devil: [Slipping his bills into his pocket with a low bow] Oh! good morning
Mr. Smith; hope you are well sir. Why, II was just out on a little business
in my line. Or, finally, to be candid I was contriving a fair and honorable
warfare against you and your imposition, wherein piety is outraged and religion greatly hindered in its useful course. For, to be bold, sirand I despise
anything under-handedI must tell you to your face that you have made
more trouble than all the ministers or people of my whole dominion have
for ages past.
Trouble! What trouble have I caused your majesty? I certainly have

endeavored to treat you and all other persons in a friendly manner, even my
worst enemies, and I always aim to fulfil the Mormon Creed, and that is, to
mind my own business exclusively. Why should this trouble you, Mr.Devil?
Smith:
Ah, your own business, indeed! I know not what you may consider
your business, it is so very complicated; but I know what you have done and
what you are aiming to do. You have disturbed the quiet of Christendom,
overthrown churches and societies, you have dared to call into question
the truth and usefulness of old and established creeds, which have stood
the test of ages, and have even caused tens of thousands to come out in
Devil:
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Pratt S Dialogue between Joe Smith and the Devil
open rebellion, not only against wholesome creeds, established forms and
doctrines, well approved and orthodox, but against some of the most pious,
learned, exemplary and honorable clergy whom both myself and all the
world love, honor and esteem, and this is not all. But you are causing many
persons to think who never thought before and you would fain put the whole
world a thinking and then where will true religion and piety be? Alas! They
will have no place among men, for if men keep such a terrible thinking and
reasoning as they begin to do, since you commenced your business, as you
call it, they never will continue to uphold the good old way in which they
have jogged along in peace for so many ages, and thus, Mr. Smith, you will
overthrow my kingdom and leave me not a foot of ground on earth, and this
is the very thing you aim at. But I, sir, have the boldness to oppose you by
all the lawful means which I have in my power.
Really, Mr. Devil, your majesty has of late become very pious. I think
some of your Christian brethren have greatly misrepresented you. It is generally reported by them that you are opposed to religion. But
Smith:
It is false; there is not a more religious and pious being in the world
than myself, nor a being more liberal minded. I am decidedly in favor of all
creeds, systems and forms of Christianity, of whatever name and nature; so
long as they leave out that abominable doctrine which caused me so much
trouble in former times, and which, after slumbering for ages, you have
again revived; I mean the doctrine of direct communication with God, by
new revelation. This is hateful, it is impious, it is directly opposed to all the
divisions and branches of the Christian church; I never could bear it. And
for this very cause, I helped to bring to condign punishment all the prophets and apostles of old, for while they were suffered to live with this gift of
revelation, they were always exposing and slandering me, and all other good
pious men in exposing our deeds and purposes, which they called wicked,
but we considered as the height of zeal and piety; and when we killed them
for these crimes of dreaming, prophesying, and vision-seeing they raised the
cry of persecution, and so with you miserable, deluded Mormons.
Devil:
Smith: Then, your most Christian Majesty is in favor of all other religions
but this one, are you?
Devil: Certainly, I am fond of praying, singing, church-building, bell ringing, going to meeting, preaching, and withal, I have quite a missionary zeal.
155
Ilike, also, long faces, long prayers, long robes, and learned sermons; nothing
suits me better than to see people who have been for a whole week opposing their neighbor, grinding the face of the poor, walking in pride and folly,
and serving me with all their heart. I say nothing suits me better, Mr. Smith,
than to see these people go to meeting on Sunday with a long religious face
on, and to see them pay a portion of their ill-gotten gains for the support of
a priest, while he and his hearers with doleful groans and awful faces, saying:
Lord, we have left undone the things we ought to have done, and done the
things we ought not; and then when service is ended see them turn to their
wickedness and pursue it greedily all the week and the next Sabbath repeat
the same things. Now, be candid, Mr. Smith, do you not see that these and
all others, who have a form and deny the power, are my good Christian children, and that their religion is a help to my cause?
Certainly, your reasoning is clear and obvious as to these hypocrites,
but you would not be pleased with people getting converted either at camp
meeting or somewhere else, and then putting their trust in that conversion
and in free grace to save them-would you not be opposed to this?
Smith:
Devil: Why
should I have any objections to that kind of religion, Mr. Smith?

I care not how much they get converted, nor how much they cry Lord! Lord!
nor how much they trust to free grace to save them, so long as they do not
do the works that their God has commanded them. I am sure of them, at
last, for you know all men are to be judged according to their deeds. What
does their good old Bible say? Does it not say, not every one that saith Lord,
Lord, shall enter into my kingdom, but he that doeth the will of My Father
which is in heaven. No, no, Mr. Smith, I am not an enemy to religion, and
especially to the modern forms of Christianity, so long as they deny the
power, they are to help to my cause; see how much discord, division, hatred,
envy, strife, lying, contention, blindness, and even error and bloodshed
[have] been produced as the effect of these very systems. By these means I
gain millions to my dominion while at the same time we enjoy the credit
of being pious Christians; but you, Mr. Smith, you are my enemy, my open
and avowed enemy; you have dared, in a sacriligious manner, to tear the veil
from all these fine systems, and to commence an open attack upon my kingdom, and this even when I had almost all Christendom together with the
clergy and gentlemen of the press in my favor. How dare you venture thus
156
to commence a revolution, without reverse and without aid or succor and in

the midst of innumerable hosts of my subjects?
Smith: Why sir, in the first place, I knew that I had the truth on my side, and
that your systems and forms of Christianity were so manifestly corrupt that
one had only to lift the veil from your foileries on one side and to present
plain and reasonable truth on the other, and the eyes of the people could
at once distinguish the difference so clearly that except they chose darkness
rather than light, they would leave your ranks and come over to truth. For
instance, what is easier than to show from the history of the past, that a
religion of direct revelation was the only system ever instituted by the Lord,
and the only one calculated to benefit mankind? What is easier than to show
that this system saved the church from flood, famine, flames, wars, division,
bondage, doubt and darkness, many times, and that it is the legitimate way
and manner of Gods government of his own peculiar people in all ages and
dispensations.
Devil: To be candid with you, Mr. Smith, I must own that what you have now
said, neither myself nor my most able ministers have been able to gainsay by
any argument or fact. But then you must recollect that tradition and custom,
together with fashion and popular clamor, have in all ages had more effect
than plain fact, and sound reason. Hence, you see we are yet safe so long as
we continue to cry from press and pulpit, and in Sunday Schools, that all
these things are done away and no longer needed. In this way, though God
may speak, they will not hear; angels may minister and they will not believe,
visions may reveal, and they will not be enlightened; Prophets may lift their
voice, and their warnings pass unheeded; so you see we still have them as safe
as we had the people in olden times. God can communicate no message to
them which will be examined or heard with any degree of credence or candor.
So, for all the good they get from God, all communications being cut off,
they might as well be without a God. Thus, you see, I have full influence
and control of the multitude by a means far more effectual than argument or
reason, and I even teach them that it is a sin to reason, think or investigate, as
it would disturb the even tenor of their pious breathings and devout groans
and responses. Smith, you must be extremely ignorant of human nature, as
well as of the history of the past to presume that reason and truth would have
much effect with the multitude. Why, sir, look how effectually we warded
off the truth at Ephesus when Paul attempted to address them in the t heatre.
157
Strange that with all these examples before you, you should venture to raise
the hue and cry which has so oft been defeated and this with no better weapons on your side than reason and truth. Indeed, you touch my Christian
spirit of forbearance that you have escaped so far without a grid-iron; but
take care for the future, I may not always be so mild.
But why is your majesty so highly excited against me and my plans
of operation, seeing that you consider that you have the multitude perfectly
safe; and why so enraged and so fearful of the consequences of my course
and the effect of my weapons, while at the same time you profess to despise
them as weak and powerless? Alas, it is too true that you have the multitude
safe to all appearance at present, and that truth can seldom reach them; why
not then be content and leave me to pursue my calling in peace? I can hardly
hope to win to the cause of truth any but the few who think, and these have
ever been troublesome to your cause.
Smith:
Devil: True,
but then you are in spite of all my efforts, and that of my fellows,
daily thinning our ranks by adding to the number of those who think, and
such a thinking is kept up that we are often exposed in some of our most
prominent places, and are placed in an awkward predicament, and who
knows what defeat, disgrace and dishonor may befall the pious cause if you
are suffered to continue your rebellious course.
But, Mr. Devil, why, with all these other advantages on your side do
you resort to such mean, weak and silly fabrications as the Spaulding Story?
You profess to be a gentlemen, a Christian and a clergyman, and you ought,
for your own sake, and for the sake of your cause, to keep up outward appearances of honor and fairness. And now, Mr. Devil, tell the truth for once; you
know perfectly well that your Spaulding story, in which you represent me as
an impostor, in connection with Sidney Rigdon, and that we were engaged
in palming Solomon Spaulding's romance upon the world as the Book of
Mormon, is a lie, a base fabrication, without a shadow of truth and you
know that I found the original records of the Nephites and I translated and
published the Book of Mormon from them, without ever having heard of
the existence of Spaulding, or his romance, or of Sidney Rigdon either. Now,
Mr. Devil, this was a mean, disgraceful and underhanded trick in you, and
one of which you have reason to be ashamed.
Smith:
158

Devil: Well, Mr. Smith, to be candid, I acknowledge that what you say is true,
and that it was not the most honorable cause in the world, but it was you
who commenced the war, by publishing that terrible book which we readily
recognized as a complete expos of all our false and corrupt Christianity not
even keeping back that fact that we had continued during the dark ages to
rob the scriptures of their plainness, and we feel the utmost alarm and excitement, and without much reflection, in the height of passion, we called a hasty
council of the clergy and editors, and other rascals in Painesville, Ohio, and
thinking that almost any means was lawful in war, we invented the Spaulding
story, and fathered it upon the poor printer, Howe of Painesville, although
Dr. Hurlburt (thanks to my aid) was its real author. But Mr. Smith, mark
one thing; we had not a face so hard nor a conscience so abandoned as to
publish this Spaulding story at the first as a positive fact; we only published
it as a conjecture, a mere probability, and this you know we had a right to do;
without once thinking of the amount of evil it would eventually accomplish.
But, Sir, it was some of my unfortunate clergymen, who more reckless, hardened, and unprincipled than myself, have ventured to add to each edition of
this story, till at last, without my aid or consent, they have set it down for
a positive fact that Solomon Spaulding, Sidney Rigdon, and yourself, have
made up the Book of Mormon out of a romance. Now, Mr. Smith, I am glad
of this interview with you, as it gives me the opportunity of clearing up my
character. I acknowledge with shame that I was guilty of a mean act in helping to hatch up and publish the Spaulding story as a probability, and that I
associated with rascals far beneath my dignity either as a sovereign prince or a
religious minister, or even as an old honorable and experienced Devil, and for
this I beg your pardon. But really I must deny the charge of having assisted in
making the addition which has appeared in the later editions of that story, in
which my power probabilities and mean conjectures are set down for positive
facts. No! Mr. Smith, I had no hand in a trick so low and mean; I despise it
as the work of priests and editors alone, without my aid or suggestion, and
I dont believe that even the meanest young devils in our dominion would
have stooped to such an act.
Smith: Well I must give your majesty some credit for once at least, if what you
say is true, but how can you justify your conduct in dishonoring yourself so
far as to stoop to the level of the hireling clergy and their followers, in still
159
making use of this humbug story (which you affect to despise), in order to still
blind the eyes of the people in regard to the origin of the Book of Mormon?
Devil: Oh! Mr. Smith, it does take so readily among the pious of all sects
that it seems a pity to spoil the fun, and I cannot resist the temptation of
carrying out the joke, now it is so well rooted in their minds. And you cant
think how we devils shake our sides with laughter when we get up in the
gallery in some fine church, put on our long face, and assist in singing and in
thedevout responses; this done, the Spaulding story is gravely told from the
pulpit, while the pious old clergyman wears a face as long as that of Balaams
beast. All is swallowed down for solid truth by the gaping multitude, while
we hang our heads behind the screen and laugh and wink at each other in
silence, as anything overheard would disturb their worship, and as bad as I
am, I never wish to disturb those popular modes of worship, which decency
requires us to respect. So, you see, Mr. Smith, we have our fun to ourselves
at your expense; but after all we do not mean any hurt by it, although I must
acknowledge, upon the whole, it serves our purpose.
Smith: Well, we will drop this subject, as I want to inquire about some of
your other stories which have had an extensive circulation by means of your
editors and priests. For instance, there is the story of my attempting to walk
on the water and getting drowned, the numerous stories of my attempting to
raise the dead, as a mere trick of imposition, and getting detected in it; and
the stories of my attempting to appear as an angel, and getting caught and
exposed in the same; and, besides this, you have me killed by some means
every little while. Now, you old hypocrite, you know that none of these things
ever happened, or any circumstance out of which to make them; and that
so far from this I deny the principle of mans working miracles, either real or
pretended as a proof of his mission and contend that miracles if wrought at
all, were wrought for benevolent purposes, and without being designed to
convince the unbeliever, why, then, do you resort to such silly stories in your
opposition to me, seeing that you have many other advantages? Not that I
would complain of such weak opposition, as if it were calculated to hinder
my progress, but rather to mention it as something well calculated to injure
your own cause, by betraying your weakness, folly and meanness.
Devil: Ha, ha, ha, eh, eh! Oh, Mr. Smith, I just put out these stories for a
joke, in order to have my own fun, and without the more distant idea that
160
any being on earth would be so silly as to give any credence to them; but
judge my surprise and joy when I found priests, editors, and people so ready
to catch at everything against their common enemy, as they call you, that
these jocose stories of ours actually took in their credulous craniums for
grave truths, and were passed about by them and sought after and swallowed
by the multitude as greedily as a young robin swallows a worm when it is
dropped into its mouth which is stretched at full width, while its eyes are
closed. So you see Mr. Smith, that without meaning any particular harm to
you, I have my fun, and am, besides, so unexpectedly fortunate as to reap
great advantage from circumstances where I had neither expected nor calculated. So I hope you will at least bear my folly, nor set down aught in malice
where no malice was intended. You know we devils are poor, miserable creatures at best, and were it not for our fun, and our gambling, and our religious
experiences, we would have nothing to kill time.
Well I see plainly you will have to creep out some how or other,
rather than hear the disgrace and stigma which your conduct would seem to
deserve. But forgetting the past, let me inquire what course you intend to
pursue in the future and whether this warfare between you and me will still
be prosecuted? And if so, what course do you intend to pursue hereafter? You
know my course. I have long since taken the field at the head of a mere handful of brave patriots, who are true as the polar stars, and firm as the Rock of
Gibraltar. They laugh at and despise your silly stories, and with nothing but a
few plain, simple weapons of truth and reason, aided by revelation, we boldly
make war upon your whole dominion and will never quit the field, dead or
alive, till we win the battle, and deprive you of every foot of ground you possess. This is our purpose, and although your enemy, I am bold and generous
enough to declare it. So, you see, I am not, for taking any unwary advantage,
notwithstanding all your pious tricks upon me and the public.
Smith:
Mr. Smith, I am too much of the gentleman not to admire your generous frankness and your boldness, and too much of a Christian not to appreciate your honesty; but, as you commenced this war, and I only acted at first on
the defensive, with the pure motive of defending my kingdom, Ithink this
ought, in some degree at least, to excuse the means I have made use of; and,
that you may have no reason to complain in the future, I will now fully open
to you the place of my future campaign. Here (pulling out his bundle of
handbills) is what I was doing this morning when by chance we met, and by
Devil:
161
the reading of which you will see my course. Heretofore I have endeavored
to throw contempt upon your course in hopes to smother it and to keep it
under, as something beneath the notice of us well informed Christians. For
this cause I have generally caused it to be represented that you were a very
ignorant, silly man, and that your followers were made up of the unthinking and vulgar, and not worthy of notice. But the fact is, you have made
such rapid strides and have poured forth such a torrent of intelligence and
gathered such a host of talented and thinking men around you, that I can
no longer conceal these facts under a bushel of burning lies, and therefore I
now change my purpose and my manner of attack. I shall endeavor to magnify you and your success from this time forward and to make you appear as
much larger than the reality as you have heretofore fallen short. If my former
course has excited contempt and caused you to be despised and thus kept
you out of notice, my future course will be to excite jealousy, fear and alarm,
till all the world is ready to arise and crush you as though you were a legion
of scapegoats commanded by Bonaparte. This I think will be more successful in putting you down than the ignoble course I have heretofore taken, so
prepare for the worst.
Smith: I care as little for your magnifying powers as I have heretofore done for
your contempt; in fact, I will endeavor to go ahead to that degree that what
you will say in regard to my great influence and power, though intended by
you for falsehood, shall prove to be true, and by so doing I shall be prepared
to receive those whom you may excite against me, and to give them so warm
a reception, that they will never discover your intended falsehood, but will
find all your representations of my greatness to be a realityso do your
worst. I defy you.
Well time will determine whether the earth is to be governed by a
prophet and under the sway of truth, or whether myself and my Christian
friends will still prevail; but remember, Smith, remember, I beseech you, for
your own good, beware what you are doing. I have the priests and editors
with a few exceptions, under my control, together with wealth, popularity
and honor. Count well the cost before you again plunge into this warfare.
Goodbye, Mr. Smith, I must be away to raise my recruits and prepare for
acampaign.
Devil:
Smith:
162
Goodbye to your Majesty. (They both touch hats and turn away)

Devil: (Recollecting himself and suddenly turning back) Oh! say, Mr. Smith, one
word more if you please, (in low and confidential tone, with his mouth to his
ear) after all, what is the use of parting enemies, the fact is, you go in for the
wheat and I for the tares. Both must be harvested; are we not fellow laborers?
I can make no use of the wheat, nor you of the tares even if we had them;
we each claim our own, I for the burning, you for the barn. Come then, give
the poor old Devil his due, and lets be friends.
Agreed; I neither want yours, nor you minea man free from prejudice will give the Devil his due. Come, here is the right hand of fellowship,
you to the tares, and I to the wheat. (They shake hands cordially)
Smith:
Well, Mr. Smith, we have talked a long while, and are agreed at last
you are a noble and generous fellow, and would not bring a railing accusation
against even a poor old Devil, nor cheat him one cent. Come, it is a warm
day, and I feel as though it is my treat. Let us go down to Mammy Brewers
cellar and take something to drink.
Devil:
Smith:
Agreed, Mr. Devil, you appear very generous now. (They enter the
cellar together)
Devil: Good morning, Mrs. Brewer, I make you acquainted with my good
friend, Mr. Smith, the prophet.
Why Mr. Devil, is that you? Sit down, youre tired; but you dont
say that this is Mr. Smith, your mortal enemy? I am quite surprised; what
will you have, gentlemen, for if you can drink together, I think all the world
ought to be friends.
Landlady:
As we are both temperance men and ministers, I think perhaps a glass

of spruce beer apiece will be alright; what say you Mr. Smith?
Devil:
Smith: As you please your majesty. (They take the beer)

Devil: (Holding up glass)
Come, Mr. Smith, your good health. I propose we
offer a toast.
Smith:
Well proceed.
Devil: Heres to my good friend, Joe Smith, may all sorts of ill-luck befall him,
and may he never be suffered to enter my kingdom, either in time or eternity,

163
for he would almost make me forget that I am a devil, and make a gentleman
of me, while he gently overthrows my government at the same time that he
wins my friendship.
Smith: Here to his Satanic Majesty; may he be driven from the earth and be
forced to put to sea in a stone canoe with an iron paddle, and may the canoe
sink, and a shark swallow the canoe and its royal freight and an alligator swallow the shark and may the alligator be bound in the northwest corner of hell,
the door be locked, key lost, and a blind man hunting for it.
end
164
Book Reviews
Honest as Plain Wood
A Review of Larene R. Blaines Backtracks: Growing up in the
Depression (Xlibris, 2003)
Reviewed by Janean Justham
I read this 500-page book in a day and a half. And I work full time. Enough
said? If not, heres more.
This is the evocative story of a Mormon womans Utah childhood. Even
though the author could be a young grandmother to me, her experience
became mine as I read. Blaine has the remarkable ability to remember and
illustrate life through the eyes of a small child. Painful misunderstandings;
struggles to understand language, relationships, and situations; and childlike hope and disappointments are illuminated. The 1920s and 30s become
fresh history through her narrative. This is a time when quarters, washing
machines, and sweet treats are hard to come by.
Honest as plain wood, Blaines voice recalls events and people as they must
have been. She brings her family back to life. It seems they could have lived
next door or been in your ward. It is a good thing she tells us up front that
her mother and brother die. By the time I got there, I was so in love with
the characters that I found myself mourning. I walked around all evening
grieving and missing Carman, almost as if hed been my little brother, or my
little boy. The grief is multidimensional, as Blaine skillfully leads the reader
to understand and feel the sorrow of each family member, individually, and
feel the enormous burden a five-year-old girl silently shoulders.
Every family member is solid. Despite the parents imperfections, the
reader can understand and love them, and understand the childrens childish
view of them. The complexity of real family life is not minimized, as in many
family history accounts. Her brother Marion draws both admiration and
disapproval. Brother Lorimer sympathy and frustration. Little Larene wins
hearts through honest expression of her emotions, thoughts, selfish desires,
165
actions both good and misguided, struggles, and triumphs. She tends to be
hard on herself, but an honest reader will see many of her traits reflected in
his or her own nature and will love her all the more for her self-doubts. Most
poignantly drawn is the heroic mother, apparently not much to look at and
practically unable to function, but whose spirit is the most beautiful the
poverty-laden family has ever come in contact with.
The book grew out of twin seedsthe desire to publish a book and obedience to the directive to write a personal historylying so close together in
Blaines heart that the intertwined product is an amazing true story that reads
almost like fiction:
Sometimes it is hard for the poor to be meek or so it seemed to me. I must
have been selfish to have felt the way I did. I hated not having things. I hated
being poor, and I hated being the only girl in my school who had an invalid
mother. Of course, I loved my mother, but I felt a confused shame when
people looked at her with pity and asked how our family was getting along.
I often felt that we were not getting along but were swamped in humiliating
stagnation. I wanted to change that. I asked myself, and God too, why other
girls had plump bustling mothers who looked after them, saw that they didnt
skip breakfast, wore clean underpants and polished shoes, parted their hair
straight and rolled curls up in papers at bedtime. I didnt have that. My mother
did none of those things. She couldnt. She was in pain all of the time and
too frail to assert much authority over us. If we were disrespectful to her, she
couldnt spank us. She could only look sad and make us feel guilty. (9)
The highest praise I can give this book is that everything in it feels real.
Nothing is sanctimonious, sugarcoated, glossed over, stilted, pat, nor clich.
Good is not always rewarded, nor evil punished.
There are a couple of times when Blaine comes out of the narrative to
comment briefly as the reminiscing adult author, a problem which could
easily have been avoided. The main fault of the book, published by Xlibris,
is with numerous typos and punctuation errors. These, however, cannot be
heard when the one-story-per-chapter book is read aloud, an activity my
teenage son and I are enjoying. There are good lessons to be learned from
the poverty-induced humility of the children. My son can only imagine the
difficulties of such a life, but the stories are so amusing and captivating that
he hasnt noticed them. There is no material to make even the most fastidious
LDS parent squirm.
Blaines early attempts to get the book published nationally failed, presumably because no one would be interested in anyone growing up in Utah.
166
Book Reviews
This is all the more reason local readers of all ages should explore and embrace
this extraordinary book. Backtracks can be obtained from Amazon.com or
ordered through a local bookstore.
A Nutty Novel
A Review of Marilyn Arnolds The ClassmatesA Mystery Novel
(Bonneville Books, 2003)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Needle
Yucca Flats, Nevada, is a pretty desolate place. One casino graces the town,
but thats about it. Its a place where people bake in the heat and mind each
others business.
In this curious story, we meet five women who first met as youngsters but
had grown apart over the years. Theyre now seniors, and some had moved
away from the humdrum little town, but all five have now found themselves
back in Yucca Flats.
When one of them, Theona Worley, is found murdered in her home, the
incompetent oaf of a sheriff begins a cursory investigationhes clearly in
above his head, but the boob cant admit this, even to himself. And when a
second of the five women dies, panic sets in as it becomes clear that someone
is targeting the five women.
Valdean Purdy is one of these five women. A part-time real estate agent and
full-time busybody, she, along with a detective from a neighboring county,
push the investigation forward. Valdean is sure that there is something to be
learned in Theonas house, some clue that will blow this case wide open. And
you dare not stand in Valdeans wayyeah, shes that kind of person.
With each chapter, we learn more about the eccentrics of Yucca Flats. In
fact, it seems that everyone is eccentric in this town. Theres barely a normal
person in the group. From the gardener to the sheriff to the postmaster,
theyre all a little screwy. And, I suppose, this is one way to describe this
booka little screwy.
The narrator of the story haunts the reader to the very endyoure never
quite sure who he is or how he knows this story at all. This adds a bit to the
suspense. And the resolution of the mystery is very satisfying. I should have
seen it coming, but I didnt.
167
The Classmates is an engaging, enjoyable read, with enough weirdness to

keep the story moving and the reader engaged. And although the editing
and production of the book are generally good, an editor should have caught
references to Agatha Christies Miss Marple as Miss Marpole and to TVs
NYPD Blue as NYPD Blues. Very odd mistakes in an otherwise nicely produced volume.
There seems to be enough character development in this book to keep the
story going. Will Arnold keep the ball rolling? I dont know. But I do know
that I wouldnt mind revisiting the nutty world of Yucca Flats.
An Emotional Legacy
A review of Anita Stansfields The Silver Linings (Covenant, 2003)
Reviewed by Katie Parker
Break out the tissues; this ones a tearjerker. If youve never read an Anita
Stansfield book because you couldnt stomach the romance, you might like
this one. The Silver Linings doesnt have aromance at the heart of its story.
There are, however, plenty of emotional and touching moments as the
Hamilton family faces one of its greatest t rialsyet.
The Silver Linings is book 3 of the Gables of Legacy series of Stansfields
Hamilton family saga. The male protagonist is Jess, who is the only surviving son of Michael and Emily Hamilton, whose story touched countless
readers in Stansfields first published book, First Love and Forever. Jess has
gone through trials of his own, as detailed in the first two volumes of the
Gables of Legacy series, but now finally marries his sweetheart Tamra and
lives withher at the Hamilton family ranch in Australia. Just when their
newly wedded bliss should be at its best, a bombshell is dropped on the
family: Michael has cancer.
The rest of the story largely shows how the family deals with the news and
with the knowledge that Michael will eventually succumb to his condition.
There are lots of prayer, family fasts, and special times together that may
never come again. An added irony is that just as Michael is slipping from this
life, Jess and Tamras baby boy (also named Michael) enters the world. Some
of the events of the older Michaels final days are shown in painful detail,
enough to get readers very emotionally involved. And there are always those
teaching moments that Stansfield often does so well, such as when two family
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Book Reviews
embers fast and pray for a resolution to a minor crisis. The answers they
m
believe theyve received conflict with each other, and Emily says something
like, Then one of you isnt really listening.
All in all, its a pleasant read and a good emotional ride.
Tensions from Within and Without

A Review of Harold K. Moons The Leah Shadow (Authorhouse, 2004)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Needle
The Leah referred to in the title is the Leah of the Old Testament, the same
Leah married off to Jacob before he could be married to his beloved Rachel.
The Shadow is the continuing influence that first wives have on husbands,
children, and sister-wives in the Mormon polygamy story.
The tale opens with John Glendrake, a Mormon farmer in pre-Manifesto
days, being urged by his bishop to take a second wife. John is reluctant; hes
very much in love with his wife, Catherine, and doesnt want to hurt her.
When, however, he receives her permission to take a second wife, he marries
Sheila, a women to whom he is very much attracted.
The two women develop a loving relationship, but Catherine realizes that,
however much she tries, she cannot share her husband with another woman.
She blames neither John nor Sheila, but rather herself, for her lack of faith,
and her church, for making such a demand on its women.
When a federal marshal comes to town to prosecute the cohabs, John
feels he has no choice but to flee to Mexico. He wants both wives to come
with him, but Catherine insists on staying in Utah, raising their children,
and freeing John to pursue his marriage with Sheila. This marshal, Ferrill
McLellin, is out to make a name for himself. Hes no friend of the Mormons,
and realizes he needs to arrest some of the cohabs in order to justify his job.
He is joined by Manny Forbes, Jr., an alcoholic neer-do-well who grew up
with the Mormons, and thus able to identify those living the Principle and
earn himself some money.
McLellin and Forbes emerge as thoroughly distasteful characters. There is
no good side to either of them. In the end, one is violently slaughtered by
the other, each ending badly a very bad life.
The author is the product of a polygamous background, and thus has
some familiarity with the subject. There is much here to interest the reader
169
some good insights into the difficulties that accompanied the polygamous
lifestyle. Tensions from within and withouttheres no relief for those trying to follow the counsel of their priesthood leaders.
And here is where some of the tension really comes to the surface. There
is little indication as to whether the author approves of the lifestyle. The
conflict is enfleshed in the person of Catherine. She knows in her heart that
this is wrong, that a man should have only one wife. But she also believes
that the Churchs teaching is true, and must be obeyed. She sublimates her
own feelings and chooses the path of obedience.
As Johns new family establishes itself in Mexico, there is a good deal of
discussion about the acceptance of Mormon polygamists south of the border.
Some of the Mexicans are not welcoming of the newcomers. Access to land
and water are restricted; only the hardy will survive this new challenge.
Meanwhile, back in Utah, Catherines family is encountering their own
challenges. Without a father figure, Catherine must depend on adult kin
to help keep her children in line. But as the adults age and pass away,
Catherine finds herself in more difficult straits, which has taken its toll on
her health.
Catherine is anemic, and she realizes she doesnt have much time left. As
mentioned, the book reaches its heights in Catherine. She refuses to die
before she can once again embrace her husband; she waits for Sheila to
visitbefore she takes her last breath. Whats going on here? To me, it was an
affirmation of the spirit of commitment and familial love so often lacking
inliterature about plural marriage. Catherine never learned to hate Sheila.
On the contrary, she found herself loving Sheila with a love she scarcely
thought possible. Whatever residual bitterness she felt about her life situation
disappeared when she realized shed breathe her last in the presence of those
she loved.
I could sense no pro- or anti-polygamy agenda in this book. It reads very
much like a family chronicle, detailing the lives of its protagonists, reporting
as would an objective reporter observing the story, delving only rarely into
the actors inner thoughts about the practice.
One of the problems in this book is that I couldnt quite figure out in what
direction it was headed. As a rule, a work of fiction will propel the reader
from one setting to the next with a bit of intrigue, a plot twist, something to
keep your interest. Instead, Moon relies on an ongoing interest in the larger
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Book Reviews
story to keep you reading. This is chancy stuff and risks losing the attention
of the reader.
Im glad I read it all the way through. At the end, we discover the ultimate
aim of the story. And the ending is very satisfactory; it ties together disparate
elements of the story and provides a framework, if only in retrospect, for the
tale. Catherine becomes the end of the story, and it is in her life and death
that we find the spirit of the Mormon pioneer woman.
In short, this is one book I enjoyed less during the reading than I did when
thinking back on the story. The intensity of the last forty pages or so supplies
a timely and gripping ending to a rather ordinary tale and makes the reading
of the book worthwhile.
Perhaps it was Moons intention to present a story of a polygamous family
in terms of normalcy and familial love, rather than the sensationalistic tomes
that have come from the presses. Is there really such a thing as a normal
polygamous family? Can there be real love between a man and two women,
and can the women learn to love and accept each other? This is a side of the
plural marriage story that is not often told.
This book will be of interest to those with a curiosity about the practice
of polygamy in early Mormonism. It will offer up a view of such families
not often presented in modern literature. And, in the end, it will satisfy the
reader with a compelling denouement, a testament to the pioneer spirit.
Promising New Childrens Series

A review of Michele Ashman Bells Latter-day Spies: Spyhunt (Covenant
Communications, 2004)
Reviewed by Katie Parker
This book promises to be first in a series by popular LDS romance author

Michele Ashman Bell. Its written for grade school children and has adventure as well as spiritual lessons.
American twins Seth and Sadie are children of a diplomat living in
Germany. One of their favorite games is Spyhunt, in which one team races
to an agreed-upon spot in town and the other team tries to catch them before
they arrive. It requires swift, covert travel and sharp minds. It sounds like a
lot of fun, though I dont know that Id want to send my eleven-year-olds
running all over Frankfurt by themselves. Fami, a friend of theirs from India,
171
is sent to live with them for a while. Although he is blind he has an inner
sense that makes him a very good Spyhunt player.
Unfortunately, theres a mysterious man with black eyes who seems to be
following them. At first the children try to brush off his presence, but they
eventually are uneasy enough to tell their parents. Their parents protective
measures arent effective, however, and the three children are kidnapped. Now
they are involved in a real-life version of Spyhunt as they try to escape from
their captors. They remember a family home evening lesson about prayer, and
they rely on prayer to help them through their dangerous circumstances.
The story does not become interesting until about the second half when
the children are kidnapped. Up till then, relationships are established, and
there are several scenes where the plot does not really move forward. Mean
while, its obvious that the man with the scary dark eyes is trouble and they
should tell their parents, but for several chapters they do nothing and go on
with their lives. The prayer motif, on the other hand, is handled well; it was
subtle but very much a part of their escape plan.
The writing, unfortunately, does not represent Bell at her best. For
example, the beginning is overloaded with details. Heres a selection from the
first two paragraphs:
From their hiding spot in the thick stand of evergreens inside the cemetery,
eleven-year-old twins Sadie and Seth crouched low as voices came their direction. Sadies stomach tightened. They couldnt get caught. They had to make
it safely to the tower. They just had to.
They were in the Sachsenhausen area of Frankfurt, Germany, a suburb known for
its delicious apple cider and apple wine. (1)
This is enough to make anyone trained in fiction writing lose their bratwurst. Does it matter to the story that their city is known for its delicious
apple cider and apple wine? Is it likely that either of the protagonists is
thinking about apple cider and apple wine right now? Is this a good way to
hook an audience?
On the other hand, does it matter? My fourth-grade son Kevin is the age
of the audience Bell is targeting with this story, and I thought his opinion
of it might carry more weight than mine. I handed him the book and told
him to read for twenty minutes. He moaned and groaned and complained
that it was a waste of twenty perfectly good minutes that he could use to play
video games. Two hours, nineteen minutes, and thirty-seven seconds later, he
172
Book Reviews
finally put the book down. If the story can hold his attention like that, there
must be something good about it.
The book wasnt written for old fogies like me, but the true test of this
book is how much children enjoy it. Overall, I deem it a fun read for kids if
they can make it through the first half of the book, and a good example for
them to help them remember to pray.
173
Contributors
Lisa Bickmores book Haste was published by Signature Books. She
teaches writing at Salt Lake Community College.

Robert Bird teaches nineteenth-century American literature and philosophy at
Brigham Young UniversityIdaho. He lives in Rexburg, Idaho, with his wife,

Rebecca, and their five children.
has two books, on keeping things small and Cheat
Grass. Individual poems appear in Comstock Review, Iris, Earths Daughter,
Dialogue, BYU Studies, Ellipsis, and others. She is an artist-in-residence with
the Utah Arts Council and lives with her husband Blaine in Draper, Utah.
Marilyn Bushman-Carlton
lives in Rexburg, Idaho, with his wife Cindy and their three
teenage children, Anjanette, Daniel, and Jessica. He teaches English at
BYUIdaho. His first novel, Vernal Promises, was published by Signature
Books last year.
Jack Harrell
is a lifetime (virtually a founding) member and a past president (1990) of AML. At the 2004 conference he was awarded an Honorary
Lifetime Membership, which seems a slight demotion from reality. He
teaches English at Brigham Young University.
Bruce Jorgensen
Janean Justham lives in Salt Lake with her husband and children. She has a
bachelors degree in English from BYU and a masters degree in social work
from the University of Utah.
was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and now lives in Salt Lake

City with his wife, Terry. He has three adult children doing various things
(all legal). He holds two law degrees, practiced for twenty-five years, chaired a
NASDAQ company, and was the cofounder of two drinking establishments:
Howard S. Landa
174
Contributors
the Dead Goat Saloon and the Haggis. He is currently working on a novel
while listening to Louie Prima.
Lance Larsen is the author of Erasable Walls (New Issues, 1998), a collection of
poems. He teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University.

Myrna Dee Marler holds a PhD in English from the University of Hawaii. She
teaches at BYUHawaii.
Heather Marx,
a graduate of Wellesley College and Boston University, lives

with her family in the Boston area.
teaches in the English department at the University of Utah. He

has received awards from Writers at Work and for his teaching in the public
schools. His writing has appeared in Salt Lake City Magazine, Bloomsbury
Review, and Ellipsis.
Jeff Metcalf
lives in Southern California with his books and his computer

and spends far too much time reading. A self-described Jewish Gentile, he
remains on the outskirts of Zion, despite the elders best efforts to get him
under the water.
Jeff Needle
Katie Parker lives and writes in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Her first novel is slated
for publication by Spring Creek Books in the near future. Her work has also
appeared in the New Era and Westview.
is an Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University.
His poetry has appeared in The Anthology of New England Writers and
Interdisciplinary Humanities, among other places. Currently, he is working on
a collection of poems, Of Fin and Beak, and a book-length narrative poem,
Haggadah, which focuses on Mormon cosmology.
Jared Pearce
is a freelance writer and critic based in Salt Lake City. Since

1999, he has published more than twelve hundred film reviews in The (Provo)
Daily Herald and various movie-related websites, including http://efilmcritic
.com/ and his own site, http://ericdsnider.com/.
Eric D. Snider
175
Association for Mormon Letters

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William A. Wilson
If the Book of Mormon were a novel, we might not find it a

goodone.
from B. W. Jorgensens What If the Book of Mormon Were
a Novel?Which of Course It Is Not
Kneeling down, feeling empty, I began to gather the dank

leaves into bags. As my gloveless fingers raked through the
decaying leaves, a thought arose, as if from the soil itself.
What would it be like, I thought, to be Adam, the first
man, on a lonesome autumn night?
from Jack Harrells October Soil
Plus Robert Bird on Jack Harrells novel Vernal Promises,

first place fiction contest winner Heather Marx, Jeff Metcalf
and Howard Landas murder mystery radio play, Myrna Dee
Marler on the Harlequin romance, and Eric D. Snider on the
film Saints andSoldiers
Poetry by Lisa Bickmore, Marilyn Carlton-Bushman,
Lance Larsen, and Jared Pearce
Regular features: Readers Write, From the Archives, Reviews
Official publication of
the Association for Mormon Letters

Irreantum, Volume 6, No. 2, 2004

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Irreantum

A Review of Mormon Literature and Film

A Review of Mormon Literature and Film

Alan Rex Mitchell

Association for Mormon Letters Board

From the Editor

Reel Observations: Saints and Soldiers Eric D. Snider 147

Irreantum: A Review of Mormon Literature and Film is

Letter to the Editor

Irreantum S October 2004

The Christening of Irreantum

The original founders of Irreantum chose well when they

The many waters of Nephis narrative are not geographically specific,

Irreantum S October 2004

Wilkins S From the Editor

a shining new convert or a tenth-generation member, appear as a matter

Irreantum S October 2004

What If the Book of Mormon

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

a novel. (Consider it came to pass: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles sometimes

Irreantum S October 2004

miraculous power of God preserved them from death (57:26). Miracle or

In his essay Specific Continuous Forms in The Anatomy of Criticism

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

One of Givenss most persuasive though briefly discussed instances is

I have begun here, I think, to read parts of the Book of Mormon in a

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

statement in words is a fiction of the fact it states. So long as we and God

Irreantum S October 2004

Jorgensen S If the Book of Mormon Were a Novel

Irreantum S October 2004

A Material Religion in Harrells

Although Jacobs tale appears to be a confession of hedonism, it is, instead, a

Irreantum S October 2004

Bird S Material Religion in Vernal Promises

As a transcendentalist, Jacob is repelled by all forms of materialism. Marty,

Irreantum S October 2004

church building. Wherever God was, whatever he was, he had to understand

Bird S Material Religion in Vernal Promises

Jacobs mother, Regina, has certainly been influenced by the material

Irreantum S October 2004

Bird S Material Religion in Vernal Promises

Irreantum S October 2004

Bird S Material Religion in Vernal Promises

Pearce S Two poems

up under such pressure as Sarah or Eve, after thirty

A Case for Loneliness

Irreantum S October 2004

fingerprints seem vital: the illusion

Irreantum S October 2004

Marx S Brother Singh

Intrigued by the Book of Mormonby the emigration of Lehi to the Promised