Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction
Edited by
Angela Hallstrom
Zarahemla Books
Provo, Utah
For Eugene England (1933–2001)
Copyright © 2010 by Zarahemla Books. Individual stories used with permission of the copyright holders. All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Zarahemla Books. Cover design by Jason Robinson. Smashwords Edition.
Table of Contents
Preface — Angela Hallstrom
Introduction — Margaret Blair Young
1. The Garden — Paul Rawlins
2. Obbligato — Lisa Madsen Rubilar
3. Brothers — Levi Peterson
4. Jumping — Mary Clyde
5. Christmas at Helaman’s House — Orson Scott Card
6. The Weather Here — Stephen Tuttle
7. Calling and Election — Jack Harrell
8. Salvation — Laura McCune-Poplin
9. Healthy Partners — Lewis Horne
10. Voluptuous — Helen Walker Jones
11. Measures of Music — Bruce Jorgensen
12. The Walker — Matthew James Babcock
13. Trusting Lilly — Coke Newell
14. Zoo Sounds — Margaret Blair Young
15. Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon — Larry Menlove
16. Out of the Woods — Karen Rosenbaum
17. Blood Work — Darrell Spencer
18. Clothing Esther — Lisa Torcasso Downing
19. Miracle — Eric Samuelsen
20. Bread for Gunnar — Phyllis Barber
21. The Care of the State — Brian Evenson
22. Light of the New Day — Darin Cozzens
23. White Shell — Arianne Cope
24. Hymnal — Lee Allred
25. Quietly — Todd Robert Petersen
26. Thanksgiving — Angela Hallstrom
27. Wolves — Douglas Thayer
28. Buckeye the Elder — Brady Udall
Preface
Angela Hallstrom
I was a twenty-year-old BYU English major in 1992, the year Eugene England’s seminal collection of Mormon short fiction, Bright Angels and Familiars, was published. At the time I had very little knowledge of—and, frankly, very little interest in—stories written by, for, or about Latter-day Saints. I had some familiarity with Mormon novels: Nephi Anderson’s 1898 classic Added Upon, Maureen Whipple’s 1941 polygamy novel The Giant Joshua, Jack Weyland’s adolescent romance Charly (required reading for Mormon teenage girls in the 1980s). But Mormon short stories? The only ones I’d ever read had been published in the church’s magazine for teens, the New Era, and while occasionally I found those stories entertaining or even instructional, nobody pretended they were great literature. No, if I wanted literary short stories, I looked to Flannery O’Connor or John Updike or Raymond Carver. I had no idea that vibrant, compelling, literary Mormon short fiction even existed.
Eugene England was my professor when Bright Angels was published, and out of respect for him I found some wiggle room in my college-student budget and bought the anthology. I remember my skepticism: if great short fiction was being written by Mormons or about Mormonism, why hadn’t I, an English major at Brigham Young University, heard about it? But as soon as I opened Bright Angels and started reading, my skepticism turned to excitement. These stories were good. And they were about my culture, my community, my belief system. They resonated in a way I’d never experienced before.
Although immersing oneself in a completely foreign place or time is one of the fundamental pleasures of reading good literature, recognizing oneself in a work of fiction is an exhilarating experience, too. Reading Bright Angels at that time in my life was a revelation to me. And, yes, “a revelation to me” is a hackneyed phrase, but I believe the term revelation contains a significance here beyond cliché. In the introduction to Bright Angels, England writes, “Mormonism insists that divinity continues to reveal [truths] to prophets and further understanding of [these truths] to all people. One crucial way such insight can come, I believe, is through the telling of stories, and the stories here are such revelations” (xix). As a Latter-day Saint, I believed then—and continue to believe today—in the revelation England describes, and my experience with Bright Angels expanded my understanding and opened up possibilities that hadn’t existed before I read those stories about my own people.
It has been seventeen years since the publication of Bright Angels and Familiars, and in that time the quantity and quality of Mormon literature has continued to increase. The genre of the short story, in particular, has seen tremendous growth, and dozens of writers with connections to Mormonism are publishing excellent short fiction in critically acclaimed collections, prestigious national literary journals, and high-quality magazines specific to the Mormon market. Some of these stories are written with a mostly LDS audience in mind and some of them are not, but no matter the intended readership, there’s no doubt that excellent fiction written by, for, or about Latter-day Saints is more available than ever before.
Unfortunately, most of this fiction hasn’t received the attention it deserves because it’s short fiction, and short fiction is often ignored. Of course, it’s not just Latter-day Saints who tend to ignore the short story. The publishing industry as a whole is leery of the genre—understandably, I suppose, since the average reader isn’t as inclined to pick up a short-fiction collection as he or she is to purchase a nice, fat novel. In a rejection I received for my own novel-in-stories, one potential publisher put it bluntly when he said, “Short stories are the kiss of death.” Speaking in terms of pure economics, that publisher has a point. Writing short fiction—or selling short fiction—can be a terrible way to try and make a buck. But in terms of sheer artistic pleasure, I find few things more life-affirming, more vital, than a finely wrought short story. And some of the best short stories I’ve ever read appear in this anthology.
The fiction in Dispensation represents a sample of the best Mormon short stories published in literary journals or short-fiction collections since the late 1990s. Chris Bigelow at Zarahemla Books and I agreed we should focus on contemporary fiction: Bright Angels and other anthologies have done a good job familiarizing readers with Mormon fiction’s past, but we wanted to emphasize the startling talent displayed by those currently writing. So, for almost a year, I immersed myself in LDS fiction. I filled my office with back issues of Mormon journals such as Sunstone, Dialogue, and Irreantum; I lined my personal bookshelves with award-winning short-story collections by authors I’d loved for years, as well as some I’d heard of but never read; I searched out the work of writers with established reputations, and dug around for lesser-known gems by young writers whose careers were just beginning. Although I ended up plowing through my fair share of mediocre fiction, I found so many stories that moved me or challenged me or thrilled me that my most difficult task became deciding which stories to include. I had to make some hard choices, and I wish we could have included every worthy story, but I believe Dispensation is representative of the best of the best in contemporary Mormon short fiction.
Every story in this anthology is Mormon in some way. Each writer, as well, has either religious or cultural ties to Mormonism, enabling him or her to write from personal experience about a theology and a people that remain mysterious to so many. Most stories feature overtly Mormon characters or Mormon settings, and every story, in my opinion, contains Mormon themes. What constitutes a “Mormon theme” is an open question, of course, and some readers might be surprised to find stories in this collection that deal frankly with doubt and sadness and sin. While many of the stories in Dispensation explore the conflict inherent in mortal life, I believe hope threads its way throughout the book, perhaps because so many stories acknowledge the influence of a world beyond the troubled one in which we live.
But even though a story’s “Mormonness” influenced whether or not I felt it belonged in Dispensation, more than anything I wanted these stories to represent quality writing. As one who writes and edits fiction with Mormon elements, I’m keenly aware of the genre’s lackluster reputation. LDS fiction is often maligned as trite or clumsy or lacking in sophistication, and sometimes with good reason. But I believe this anthology can stand as an emphatic example of the excellence—brilliance, even—that is possible when writing with Mormonism in mind.
The stories in Dispensation deserve a wide readership, beyond the small cadre of loyal readers of Mormon literature. I hope these stories will reach Mormons who love good books but have steered clear of LDS fiction due to doubts about its quality. I also hope this anthology extends beyond the borders of Mormonism, and that those unfamiliar with the Latter-day Saints will come away from these stories convinced of the universality of human experience. Ultimately, though, I don’t care too much about why these stories are read. I’m just glad they will continue to be. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Introduction
Margaret Blair Young
This is simply a splendid anthology of short fiction. The fact that it’s written by Mormons or writers coming from the Mormon tradition makes it intriguing as a cultural representation, but it stands on its own as a collection of fine literature. It continues the vision and efforts initiated by Neal Lambert and Richard Cracroft, when they published Twenty-Two Young Mormon Writers (poetry and short stories) in 1975. Greening Wheat, edited by Levi Peterson, followed in 1983, featuring fifteen excellent Mormon-themed stories. Then, in 1992, Eugene England, the great champion of Mormon literature (and founder of courses on the subject at Brigham Young University and at Utah Valley University), edited the sweeping anthology Bright Angels and Familiars, which included stories spanning the distance from the “Lost Generation” (Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen) to LDS writers just coming onto the scene, such as John Bennion and Phyllis Barber. Orson Scott Card and David Dollahite gathered good Mormon fiction on family life in their 1994 anthology, Turning Hearts. And now, in Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, Angela Hallstrom has assembled twenty-eight gems—each a star in a brilliant constellation. This particular collection is a pinnacle. Metaphorically speaking, it represents the harvest of that greening wheat which Levi Peterson bundled twenty-five years ago.
The temptation for writers working within a religious framework is to let a dogmatic agenda form the story, rather than allowing fleshed-out characters to guide it to a conclusion which is rarely tidy and never preachy. Too often, Mormon writers resolve hard questions with a prayer and a paragraph, rather than allowing characters their inalienable right to grapple with their choices and their conflicts. Not one of these stories falls for such easy outs. In each, the language flows; the characters ring true; the plots pull us into the story’s core; and the structure satisfies. We easily suspend our disbelief because we love the people who inhabit these stories, we believe what they say and enjoy how they say it, and we find that their circumstances are familiar—even if the fiction takes us beyond earth or includes episodes we haven’t ourselves imagined. Thus disarmed of any resistance to cliché, predictability, or strained dialogue, we are led to contemplate new possibilities and to plumb our compassion. And we are constantly, delightfully surprised by the fresh touches in each story: a word we wouldn’t have expected but which is simply the perfect choice; a plot point we wouldn’t have anticipated but which makes sense and invites us to deeper examination of the story and of ourselves; dialogue so true to what we hear in our day-to-day lives that we must pay attention—not only to the story, but to the voices we think we already know. I am especially pleased that several of the stories take us beyond the center of Mormonism in the U.S. West and into distant lands.
Paul Rawlins, for example, takes us to South Africa during the turbulent years made inevitable by apartheid. A Mormon missionary, separated from his companion, finds himself in the garden of a black farmer. The farmer’s own son has been killed by whites, and his grandson wants the missionary to suffer. The missionary looks at his surroundings. “Streets and houses full of people whom he loved and feared, an alien world of stupefying want where he could labor but could not live, where some would kill him and some would call him angel, and he, with his imperfect heart, could not tell one from the other and probably could not love both.” The quandary he faces suggests the most probing and intimate questions any person of faith must answer. And the climactic epiphany is among the most beautiful I’ve ever read.
Also set in South Africa is Todd Robert Petersen’s “Quietly.” Petersen gives us an intense, provocative piece about John, a Zimbabwean, who goes into South Africa to dedicate a grave. The violence and the possibility of violence provide an undercurrent throughout the story: “Marie had found her husband hanging upside down in a tree three days earlier, fastened by his ankles to the limbs with yellow and black electrical wire. She told the branch president that Immanuel had been gone all night, that they were both newly baptized after having met two American missionaries in Pretoria.” In “Quietly,” Petersen insists that we consider stories we might want to ignore—but which, in many ways, define our humanity and give us a pattern for hope.
Laura McCune-Poplin’s “Salvation” takes us to France, where sister missionaries (one a compulsive list maker) try to adjust to the country and to each other. Juxtaposed, a French woman deals with her husband—who is also a compulsive list maker. The little details of life—even troubled life—make the stories of both companionships compelling and convincing.
Several of the stories (including my own contribution, “Zoo Sounds”) show us pieces of family life, often examining the relationships between mothers and their children, as well as women’s choices—sometimes firmly placed within Mormonism and sometimes rubbing against it.
In “Out of the Woods,” Karen Rosenbaum introduces us to Carma, a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, who ponders the ways her illness and decisions—including the decision to not participate in Mormonism—have impacted her family. She watches her gifted daughter perform in Into the Woods and thinks about her other daughter—who has chosen the faith Carma rejected and married in a ceremony Carma could not witness. The narrator invites us into Carma’s world: “Eight years ago now. That whole year the arthritis flared and nothing helped and nobody slept well. . . . Dan was shocked when Carma asked if he wanted to divorce her and find someone who could believe as he believed, who could join him in that hierarchical hereafter. And she was grateful that he protected her, as he must have done, from visits by those who wanted to persuade her that she was ruining her family’s chances for salvation.”
Lisa Madsen Rubilar’s “Obbligato” is another tender piece about a woman’s choices. A successful musician comes home to her mother and finds her life a lovely obbligato to the gifts her mother, a “lover of gardens,” has given her. The narrative invites contemplation: “And you realize that your kitchen’s still spotless, despite all the cooking Mother’s done in there, and you know she’s keeping it that way, and she’s doing it for you, out of love for you, like when she washed dishes at midnight because you were tired; because you were practicing; because you had a gift. And a gift takes precedence. But you have to pay. If your mother taught you anything, she taught you that.”
Further exploring women’s choices, Helen Walker Jones writes about an opera-loving teenager with an attractive but floundering mother in “Voluptuous.” The voices in the story are pitch-perfect. “I never want to be fifty-two years old, divorced, and bopping at the disco with my pathetic, face-lifted girlfriends,” says the daughter—and we can hear her easily. This is an initiation story, full of complex and beautifully explored relationships.
One of my favorites in this collection is “Clothing Esther” by Lisa Torcasso Downing. It is the moving tale of a woman (Mary) dressing her mother-in-law’s dead body and reflecting on the journey the two of them have shared, from the time of Mary’s unplanned pregnancy and quick wedding to the end of the mother-in-law’s life. It is a story evocative of Ruth and Naomi and depicts a relationship as tender as the biblical one.
Following the theme of mother-child relationships, Eric Samuelsen (best known as a playwright but gifted in all literary genres) gives us “Miracle”—the often humorous and always intriguing story of an elderly woman and her forty-three-year-old daughter who invite a bum to dinner. Is it a miracle that circumstances have converged to let them feast together, or is this unusual Sunday meal the beginning of something cataclysmic? Samuelsen amuses his reader with wonderfully realized characters as he unfolds the story with dramatic irony: the reader can see beyond what the characters themselves are seeing.
Working within a similar circumstance but with very different characters, Darin Cozzens gives us “Light of the New Day,” in which an aging mama’s boy (Hewell) conducts a subtle courtship with a Mexican meter checker—covertly leaving her gifts and eventually exchanging notes. Hewell, vaguely reminiscent of Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, invites not only the meter checker but the reader to fall in love with him. I found the invitation irresistible.
Other stories explore dimensions of marriage. Bruce Jorgensen’s “Measures of Music” is, as the title promises, a lyrical composition, the measured story of a marriage, of growing comfort and strange discomfort. Jorgensen’s writing is as musical as the title suggests: “She watched the stream. She saw it toss small boulders into the air, heard it mumble. She thought of the empty houses under Thistle Lake and the stripped rooms with water gliding through windows and doors, secret along halls, up stairwells on obscure errands. . . . The voice of water and silt and stones fluttering on her skin, strumming her tendons, jarring the beat of her blood.” The story lingers in the mind like the last chords of a cantata.
“Who Brought Forth This Christmas Demon” by Larry Menlove leads us into the despair of a seller of Christmas trees whose wife has left him at the height of tree-selling season. He hires a young man, Brick, and soon realizes that Brick has his own sins and heartbreak to negotiate. Surely speaking for both men, Brick says, “I am in the process of forgiveness or of damnation. I often wonder which path I am on.” The story unfolds with perfect pacing toward a fully satisfying conclusion.
Mental illness, also a reality which demands acknowledgment, is Angela Hallstrom’s subject in another work about marriage: “Thanksgiving.” Through multiple points of view, Hallstrom masterfully crafts the story of Beth and her bipolar husband, Kyle. Beth agonizes over her choice to leave Kyle, and Kyle contemplates snowflakes as a Thanksgiving feast winds down and guests leave—or appear, uninvited. “Thanksgiving” is a devastatingly beautiful, heart-wrenching work.
Lewis Horne likewise talks about guests—invited by some, categorically uninvited by others. Horne, whose stories have been selected for The Best American Short Stories series, shows his skill in “Healthy Partners.” The story is about Bruden, a down-on-his-luck panhandler who accepts an invitation for a home-cooked meal from a good Mormon man. At the home, he meets an apparently ideal family—unaware that his presence has ignited old conflicts about privacy versus the Christian call to compassion. Ultimately, Bruden himself will have to choose between opposing calls for loyalty. We have a sense that there’s an entire novel within the tight prose of this piece.
Since this anthology is a Mormon one, the theme of polygamy must come up somewhere amidst the family stories. Thanks to Phyllis Barber, it does. In “Bread for Gunnar,” Barber explores a plural marriage with her characteristic incisiveness and empathy. Anna, Gunnar’s first wife, contemplates the upcoming change in their family, which insinuates itself into her dreams: “The Principle, I said to myself all night as I tried to find a place in the bed where sleep would bless my churning mind. After a time, the words became a rhythm in my head: prin-ci-ple, prin-ci-ple, like the wheels on the train I could hear on clear nights. I finally dropped into a restless sleep where I saw a crowd of women keeping me from Heber. They pushed me away and held his hands in vise grips. He’s ours now, they said. He’s mine, I shouted back, he’s mine! I shouted all night in my dreams.”
Dispensation also contains superb speculative fiction. Stephen Tuttle’s “The Weather Here” is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, a sparely written masterpiece set in a post-apocalyptic world. The prose is stark: “He said that we needed the rain to cleanse ourselves, that it was a metaphor for something, and that the fleas were also a metaphor but that he wasn’t sure what they stood for.” Tuttle creates a world and a pervasive mood in this story.
Set in a far more distant place, Lee Allred’s “Hymnal” is a story which Ray Bradbury would surely be proud to include in any anthology he might edit. This work depicts the end of the universe, juxtaposed with redemptive words from Tennyson as the few remaining survivors take “one last look.” One line from this story could well be the justification for the anthology as a whole: “They’re just words strung together. And yet, there’s a power in them that could light up a night sky. Find some way to save the words.”
Certainly, the words in Darrell Spencer’s “Blood Work” are worth saving and savoring. Spencer, a renowned wordsmith, provides pleasant verbal jolts and fresh takes on language—and especially Mormon language—throughout his story. On the surface, “Blood Work” is simply about a jogger, J. J., who is told by a faithful Mormon woman that she’ll “put his hamstring in the temple” for healing (meaning that she’ll put his hamstring on the prayer rolls). In fact, the story is about many kinds of running and compels the reader to run with the language, sentence by sentence. Spencer’s stories always do.
Many writing instructors tell their students that there are really only two stories: A man goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. Of course, both stories are really the same story—with the perspective switched. In Matthew James Babcock’s “The Walker,” the stranger and the man on the journey merge brilliantly. Babcock takes us into the mind of a man awaiting the results of his wife’s biopsy and longing to repeat the many “firsts” he has lived (“First once again, we want to kiss someone beautiful who loved us outside the high school Valentine Formal . . .”), sometimes catching a glimpse of an evanescent figure who seems to have been observing him throughout his life.
Coke Newell gives us a classic, wonderfully crafted journey story in “Trusting Lilly,” as a traveler meets and falls in love with a Mormon girl. She, too, is on a journey, and leaves him when “Sangre de Cristo”—a place named for the blood of Christ—beckons her home. “At some point,” says the protagonist, “I realized I was digging in Mormon soil, planting a piece of my heart. I didn’t know much else, but by then I’d had some time to look at life with a long lens, and so I sniffed the wind, threw a few pebbles in the creek, and headed back to the rail yard as lonely as I’ve ever been.”
Other stories in this anthology have unusual takes on Mormon themes, issues, or settings. Jack Harrell’s “Calling and Election” will undoubtedly start conversations about righteousness and deception. In it, a man is informed that his “calling and election” have been made sure—but he must sign a paper accepting everything such elevation entails. The consequences prove incalculable. “Even your goodness is your enemy,” he is told—and the reader is left to ponder, and almost certainly to discuss.
Arianne Cope’s “White Shell” is important not just because of its quality, but because it addresses a time in recent Mormon history which is being quickly forgotten. Cope takes us to the beginnings of the Indian placement program, wherein white, Mormon families fostered Native American children, removing them entirely from their own culture. Mary, a seven-year-old Navajo, tries to adjust to a world in which she is a “Lamanite.” The narrator describes the cultural conflicts felt even by one so young in passages like this: “Mary does not understand why her new mother is acting uncomfortable for her. Mary’s skin color is commonplace on the reservation. Of course there were certain places off the reservation that would not serve Navajos, but that was as much for fear of fleas as skin color.” For those of us old enough to remember the placement program, this story lets us better understand how “placement” felt to those coming from another world.
In “Christmas at Helaman’s House,” Orson Scott Card (the most commercially successful of Mormon authors) presents a conflict felt by many returned missionaries as they come home from poverty-stricken lands to almost unthinkable wealth in “Zion.” In this story, the returned missionary who is visiting Helaman’s house is also a potential suitor of Helaman’s daughter. But the extravagance of the domain drives him away: “I just don’t belong here,” he says. “Enjoy your new house, really, it’s beautiful. It’s not your fault that I taught so many people whose whole house was smaller than your bathroom. But the Spirit dwelt there in their little houses, some of them, and they were filled with love. I guess I just miss them.” The homeowners are left to decide how they will justify their extravagance. Can they possibly keep the most sacred promises they’ve made and still live in a mansion?
Fans of Brian Evenson won’t be surprised that his story opens with a tantalizing mystery. In “The Care of the State,” a Mormon bishop (Prater) has apparently and secretly been institutionalized for years during his service, and has simply left “the care of the state” each week to cover his ecclesiastical responsibilities, ultimately taking his life after being released from the calling. Evenson’s narrator describes the suicide: “Prater apparently stepped out of this stand of aspens, knelt, and placed his head on one of the rails. None of the newspaper accounts I subsequently tracked down indicated whether Prater’s head was positioned so as to look toward the oncoming train or away from it.” How has the bishop, while surely listening to others’ confessions, managed to hide his own secret so well? This is Brian Evenson at his best.
Mary Clyde’s “Jumping” takes us into the mind of a woman who can’t quit thinking about an accident she witnessed in her youth, wondering about many what ifs and trying to make sense of the senseless. “You know, some good came of it,” says her distant friend years later, and the first-person narrator muses on the religious context from which the friend is speaking: “She means something spiritual. Mormons hope tragedy improves the soul. But for me, what I’d like is for the accident not just to have mattered but to surrender some kind of meaning.” Clyde’s details are characteristically rich, and the story’s structure beautifully woven, spanning decades with ease. “They fell to their deaths,” says the narrator. “We jumped to life. Instead of meaning, there is only that fact.” In this work, all of Clyde’s characters “jump to life.”
No Mormon short-fiction collection would be complete without stories by Levi Peterson and Douglas Thayer—who are both at the top of their game and show why we Mormon writers (and others who appreciate fine literature) revere them so much. Peterson’s “Brothers” is a stunning piece about brothers recognizing where life and religion have divided them and at what points they are bound in an unearthly sealing. The story, set in mountain trails and peaks, suggests a fugue on the theme of brotherhood in all its meanings and layers. And though Douglas Thayer’s “Wolves” might surprise some readers by its subject and violence, he has, in this work, fulfilled the literary destiny started in his first collection, Under the Cottonwoods (1976). His writing is, as always, concise and precise; the dialogue spare and sometimes disturbingly believable—especially at moments we hate to acknowledge as possibilities, as when a young man is about to be violated. “Wolves” is a haunting story.
The last story in Dispensation is Brady Udall’s “Buckeye the Elder”—a probing work full of compelling characters caught between their best and their worst selves. Buckeye, a Mormon convert, comes to town and courts a Baptist girl—and mostly hangs out with the girl’s brother, whom he initiates into beer drinking. Buckeye the Elder doesn’t know his own strength—or his own weakness. “Over the past couple of weeks,” says the story’s narrator, “I’ve begun to see the struggle that is going on with Buckeye, in which the Lord is surely involved. Buckeye never says anything about it, never lets on, but it’s there. It’s a battle that pits Buckeye the Badger against Buckeye the Mormon.”
There are many “battles” in this anthology—most internal. Some show us marriages at risk, minds in turmoil, faith in shreds. Most show redemption—or promises of it. All honor the characters, the plots, the language, and literature itself, presented under a Mormon sky—which holds both familiar and sometimes surprising lights, includes unexpected flashes, and suggests the promise of something amazing on the horizon.
Chapter 1
“The Garden”
by
Paul Rawlins
The taste of grapes was the taste south of his grandmother’s garage back home. Small as marbles, green and sour skinned—when you bit them, the skins split and squirted the globe of flesh into your mouth, smooth and soft; if there were any sweetness, this is where you would find it. He could not define the taste, the wildness, something shocking and undomesticated, that set the hard little fruits off from the sweet Thompson seedless in the grocery stores, which were oblong and swollen with watery pulp. He ate without thinking, plucking the fruit from the stems and pushing it through his lips, not hungry, but taking comfort from the automatic motion, something to do.
He had been in shock; he was sure of that, hadn’t known exactly what he was doing, where he was running to. His companion, Elder Porter, had been with him, but not for very long; whether they had split up out of instinct, whether they had gotten separated or disagreed over a turn to the left or right, or if he had simply sprinted on ahead, he did not know. He had thrashed through yards of trash, flung himself over fences, run through weeds and over the hard-packed ground where children played, past doors where young men stood abruptly and shouted or stared, or sometimes they gave chase, but he weaved and scrambled. He had no plan, didn’t know where he was going, so there was little advantage for those chasing him who might have known the alleys and footpaths, all the tricks and dangers of the township. All the sounds were shouts; all he felt was fear. Elder Porter might be dead. Unless the Lord had come down and plucked him up or parted the way for him, he was certainly dead, dead as Stephen, stoned under the hands of the incensed mob, a martyr sure of heaven.
While he had been the faster runner.
Maybe it was the Spirit that had brought him here, maybe those had been the wings that had lifted him over this wall, the top sown with jagged teeth of broken glass, and into this garden of well-kept rows. It was February, late summer, and there were the leafy tops of potato plants; tomato bushes hung with small red bulbs; two short rows of corn, dry leaved, mostly husk and stalk; grapes that dangled from the vine that had been trained along the wall; tiny water ditches scooped between the rows. His hands weren’t shredded—weren’t even cut—from the glass atop the wall. He must have thrown his satchel up first. He didn’t know.
He had wet himself somewhere along the way, and he tugged his pants down his hips now, tried to peak them in the front to keep the damp cloth away from his skin. Somewhere, too, he had slipped and ripped the left leg of his pants, where a bloody rash showed through. He must stay here until dark at least. But even in the dark, how was he to find his safe way out? How was he supposed to make it home? He heard shouts from the street and pushed himself deeper into the vines.
For any chance he had, he might as well be on the moon.
They had turned a corner, he and Elder Porter. They had not heard any news that day; they had not been paying attention, missed the clues. They were coming from a good appointment; a family named Vis was going to be baptized. There were six of them, three of them over eight years old, the age of accountability required for the ordinance. The Vises had come to church, they called the elders engeltjies, little angels, who had brought them the truth from God. He had been excited, jabbering with his companion about the upcoming baptismal service, enjoying for the first time success in the work, the sheaves they were gathering in. The whites, among whom he had labored for his first eight months, seemed limp and apathetic, but amongst the blacks and the coloureds, they had found good ground, softened and thirsty for the refreshing of the latter rain.
They hadn’t been paying attention. They turned down a side street and drove into a riot. And then they had done everything wrong.
He couldn’t remember if the car had stopped, if they couldn’t back up, how or why they had gotten out of the front seats. They had seen it, though. The necklace, the burning tire forced down around the arms of a black policeman. The man—the body—was tipped on its side, knees together, the flesh charred and crumpled, the skull laid against the road, the body smoldering. The mob was a pulsing, thick-muscled whip, coiling in on itself and stretching out. They had seen this, he and Elder Porter, and the people had seen them, two white boys on the edge of the crowd. There was pointing and shouting, and the elders had run.
He had run. He thought he remembered Elder Porter running.
He caught himself whimpering and grabbed his ankles, beating his head against his knees while he prayed to God until his heart stopped shuddering and he could distract himself with thoughts of home, remembering the vines behind his grandmother’s garage, the oxidized paint that came off the tin siding onto your hands, your shirt and pants, so he and his cousins couldn’t play around the garage without someone knowing where they had been, out among the grapevines and the money plants, or farther back, into the weeds that grew up around the stump of what had once been a red maple tree, with a split trunk that made two seats, rotted a bit, favored by box elder bugs and spiders that spun webs in intricate octagons and tetrahedrons, patterns he had had no names for then. There was shade there, the long stalks of sunflowers, and the weeds and scrubby suckers that shielded the tree stump from the low back windows of the house.
It’s where he and his cousin Peta would sit and tell each other dreams and remarkable things they had seen. When there was nothing remarkable, they made things up. He once said he had seen the ghost of their grandfather in the back hall standing near the pantry when he had been on his way to the bathroom. Peta once poked out her belly and told him she was going to have a baby. Until he was old enough to know better, and to like other girls, he had thought he would grow up to marry his cousin Peta.
She had written him once since he had been here. They had grown apart. She’d come to be a small, sort of stoop-shouldered girl who played the clarinet in the band and had no aspirations he knew of after high school. She was white haired, and when he had last seen her, at the farewell lunch held in his honor back home, she wore large, plastic glasses with translucent pink in the frames. Something about her made him think of a rabbit.
A low coop of some sort, empty, pieced together of scrap, shielded the far corner of the garden from the house. He shifted farther into the tiny wedge of shade created by the corner, folded his arms over the top of his head to deflect the searing heat from the top of his skull. Peta the rabbit. He was going crazy, that was all. Under the circumstances, it was to be expected.
He did not hear the old man soon enough even to get his feet beneath him. He started to move only after he saw him, unsure of whether he should go back over the wall or attack or perhaps just talk. The man looked to be sixty or more—gray dust in his hair, shirt hung open over his belly—carrying a hoe with a thin, worn blade and a broken handle. A black man, of course, the old man who kept this garden. He had come home from work or back from the riots. He had had himself a bottle of lager or a carton of beer, had eaten his dinner, probably putu and maybe some chicken, and now he had come out to work in the garden, where he found a white boy, nineteen years old, muddy white shirt and torn pants, amongst his grapevines. The elder held out a hand in front of him, as though he were signaling stop, opened his mouth to speak, but the man had only gaped at him—he had the beginnings of a grizzled beard, white brows above his eyes—then turned and walked away.
Now the elder’s stomach began to shake. He did not follow the man toward the house. He shoved a fist into his mouth to keep from making noise, but he cried anyway because now he had been found, and now he was going to die. The mob would beat him, they would puncture and shred his body with makeshift pangas, they would burn him while he was still alive. The fear finally made him heave, and he knelt in the dirt on his hands and knees, retching up the sour grapes. He pulled his satchel to him, but he did not scale the wall. It was still light out; the streets around him rocked with chants and shouting, and he did not know where he was. Perhaps it was the voice Elijah heard, small and still, that told him to stay, but he could do nothing else. He squeezed his satchel between his knees while he prayed, his mortal need pressed into words. No one came. Not the old black man, not a crowd of hostile boys, not an angel or a vision. He prayed, and no one came.
Spent finally, he lay down on the earth, uncertain, as the night hours came, whether he had given up or he was safe. He was not sure. Beyond the wall, he did not know which way to go. Tomorrow, he would fast because his situation was perilous. But he would not leave the garden.
Simon Bob had been shocked near dead to find a white boy in his garden. There was a woman in the congregation where he went sometimes with his wife who claimed she saw the souls of the dead. They came to her in her house, standing by her stove or behind her where she could glimpse them in a window or a mirror. He had thought of what a fright that would give him; he had no interest in ghosts. But seeing the white boy in his garden, he thought that’s what seeing a ghost would be like; in fact, he believed, or would have before, that he had a better chance of seeing a ghost at his bedside than he did a white man, other than the police or army, sitting in his garden. One was unlikely, the other impossible.
He wondered what the boy was doing there, and he thought many times during the night that he should go out and talk to him, to see where he had come from and what he was planning. But he did not. Only trouble could come from that. He stayed in the tiny house, worried the boy might knock on his door; then, when that did not happen, he knew that the boy had gone.
The next day he learned who the white boy had been, a young minister from America, lost, feared dead within the township that shook still with chants and songs and burning busses. People said the army was coming; they would drive the streets in armored cars, the boys would throw them with stones, and a few might be shot, but they would not find the boy they were looking for. They would never find him here, not if President Reagan and America declared war.
Others would. When they did, the young men would run him down in the streets like a frightened buck and kill him.
But that, anyway, was who the boy had been.
When Simon Bob came to his garden the next evening, the boy was still there, huddled in the dirt amongst the leaves and stalks. This he had not dreamed. Vines crackled as the boy pushed himself to his feet. Simon Bob stood looking a moment, then jabbed at him with his hoe.
“Go, you,” he said. “Voetsak.”
The boy shook his head.
Simon Bob brandished the hoe in front of him like he might shake it at a dog.
“Go.”
“Help me,” the boy said. The voice came out like old paper unfolding. The boy had been sitting here all day, scoured by the sun. Simon Bob wrinkled his forehead.
“You have to help me,” the boy said again. His hands bent like claws toward his chest.
Simon Bob shook his head. “Go, before my grandson finds you here.” He pointed with his hoe. As if to mimic him, the boy shook his head in turn.
Simon Bob struck him a light blow across the shoulder with the hoe’s handle. The boy curled his back, putting his arms above his head, trying to tuck his whole self between his knees. Simon Bob poked and hit, striking the boy across the back and arms, jabbing at his stomach, legs. The boy started to cry, but he would not move. He burrowed himself amongst the grapevines, pressed to the garden wall, until the heat passed from Simon Bob, and he stopped striking with the hoe and left him.
The elder waited, after the man left, for the sounds of feet, the grumble of the mob. They did not come. The sun dipped lower in the west, and a shadow grew from the wall at his back, covering his head, his knees, and finally his feet. He felt safer at night, as though he were invisible in the dark, though he could discern that the blocks outside the garden grew restless, keen with sound: calls for children, hollering between neighbors, greetings and farewells, profanity, threats, trouble, violence. He wondered what had happened to Elder Porter, if he was in the same mess somewhere, if he could be nearby, hearing the same sounds, whether anybody even knew they were gone.
He was tired now, hurting from the old man’s beating. He had not eaten that day nor drunk, though the air felt hot enough to burn if you struck a match, and he sat amongst the leaves and bushes and ripening fruit with a hat he had made of leaves to keep the sun off his scalp. He imagined that his proximity to temptation and his resistance would add power to his fasting. Much of the day, as best he could as he circled and squirmed to keep out of the sun, he had spent in prayer: an hour cataloging and begging forgiveness for his sins, ceaseless cries for deliverance. No thoughts had come to him, no answer, no way, and he thought now, if the situation did not change, he may do as Jesus had done, go forty days in the wilderness without the taste of bread. And when Satan came to sit him on the pillar of the temple, he would go with him as far as the edge of the location, to the first white streets of town, and then he would turn and run from the devil.
Matches for the lamp lay on the wood-topped table beside him, but Simon Bob sat in the growing darkness of his house, the hoe laid across his lap, drinking beer after beer brought to him from a shebeen by a young boy he had hollered at from his open door. He could be killed for hitting a white man. He could be killed by others for letting him go. He could be killed for many other things as well—or for nothing at all. It was best here to live without being seen. The police didn’t see you and harass you about your papers. The tsotsis didn’t see you and knife you in the street.
His son had been seen, and in detention the Afrikaans policemen had made him stand for hours on top of bricks; they beat the backs of his legs and the soles of his feet, touched the bare wires from the end of a lamp cord to his penis, shocked him until he shat on the floor, then cursed him and made him clean it up. His daughter, a man looked at her, and she had her first baby at fifteen. No, that was not the worst thing. She lived far away now, in Natal, but she was still with her man, who still promised to finish paying her bride price, the lobola Simon Bob knew he may never see.
But there was friction that came from living so close, every man rubbing against his neighbor. There was friction, and friction, he knew from the machines he worked on, generated heat, and with heat things expanded. That was what was happening in the world now, in the bristling streets of the township: friction, heat, a growing pressure—a new law, a new arrest, a new song, a new killing, a new baby, a new shack, all onto the little plot of land inside the fence where already there had been no room. Always, since the white man and the black man had come to live together, it had been like this. “They won’t let me be a man.” Simon Bob remembered him saying that, his son, before he was killed one night in the road. “They won’t let me be a man.”
Simon Bob set an empty bottle on the floor without looking down in the dark. Now there was a white boy in his garden—not just a white boy, an evangelist, a minister. What would God say about this? Love thy neighbor? Pray for the one who uses and who persecutes you? Give him your other cheek to strike you there as well?
Simon Bob did not know what the boy preached, but he had lived long enough with little to find the truth of small things: his papers were in order; he had a place for his garden, no trouble with his wife. The Christians told him that his son was alive somewhere with Jesus. That was good enough for Simon Bob. That was all.
Everyone—his friends, his brothers and cousins, the girls—was all excited when he told them what the letter from Salt Lake City had said: Africa. They all knew boys being sent as missionaries to Europe or South America, the Philippines. But Africa—he had pictured himself rumbling through the bush in a Land Rover. Ignorant. On the news, the place was on fire, Winnie Mandela telling the crowd that with their matchbooks and their necklaces they would set the country free. His mother was going to write the church, tell them they couldn’t send her son into a war zone. There was always a war, his father had told her. Their son was enlisting in the army of God; he was already at war with the world.
He had come, bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed after the long flight across the Atlantic. The jet lag, the difference of a dozen time zones dogged him for a week. His companion bent the rules, let him sleep late, find his feet. For nine months, he saw no war here. He tracted, knocked on doors in the white cities and the suburbs, asked the black maids who answered for glasses of water, promising to come back when the missus was at home. The people weren’t interested in their message. The people had their own church. The people didn’t care, and sometimes his companions didn’t care much either. He talked very little about the gospel in those first months. He was homesick. He grew despondent, then indifferent himself and lazy. He learned about surfboards, diamonds, politics: The blacks fought amongst themselves. They were superstitious. They had no education. They stole. Ja, apartheid; there would be hell to pay someday. Ja, the Americans didn’t understand it, didn’t know their blacks. It was going to take time, that’s all, time to bring them along.
There were riots—but they happened in the townships, the locations, the growths that attached themselves by asphalt veins and a ceaseless string of PUTCO busses to the cities. There were killings there, necklacings; there was danger. The townships, that’s where the war was.
And that’s where the elders wanted to go, where he had been transferred after nine months. They could not live there, but the township was their field of labor, a field black and ready to harvest. He had not been sent as a reward for faithful service, but perhaps as a project for reclamation. Here the world was different. Here his companion was Elder Porter, nervous and willing. Here they did not knock on endless doors like salesmen; here they served, struggling to look after the needs of their people. They taught in homes where one convert invited a half-dozen friends to share what he had found. Their car served as taxi, supply wagon, ambulance. Here he had begun to find a sweet taste to the work. He had begun to hurry, had making up to do, lost time. They had first met with the Vis family only three weeks ago. This was what it was supposed to be like, that’s what he was getting ready to say to Elder Porter when they had turned that corner. This, a family brought to God—brought to God, whom he, for perhaps the first time in his life, was coming to know himself.
He leaned against the garden wall. He had been waiting on God. He had been waiting for the old man in the house to come back with a policeman or an army sergeant. He had been waiting for God to pluck him up and spirit him away. To sleep, wake, and find himself miraculously somewhere else. To feel the assurance that he could rise up and walk unnoticed through the streets, the eyes of his enemies holden, and pass through the crowds like Jesus did through the Pharisees at the temple. Every shout on the street, every passing footstep on the other side of the wall brought him to a crouch or to huddle closer in the cornstalks or the vines. He had thought of going to the house; he had crept up last night, to the door, knocking, whispering as loudly as he dared, but no one came. Then he had heard voices on the street, a light flared up in the house next door, and he scrabbled back to the garden plot, where he tried again to clear his mind, to sift through anxious thought for reason or inspiration amongst the pounding worry.
He did not sleep. He examined his faith, weighed his doubts, found himself somewhere in the middle, the fulcrum on which the scale balanced. It seemed pointless to give up on his faith now, for then he would both be alone and know it. He decided that if his enemies came, he would stand before them and declare the word of God as though he had been sent for that very purpose. Perhaps he had. Maybe all of this would yet be turned to good. He opened the scriptures and read stories of deliverance: Daniel from the den of lions; Meshach, Shadrach, and Abed-Nego from the fiery furnace; Alma and Amulek from death and prison; David from the hand of Saul.
The New Testament, though, he found full of martyrs: James, Stephen, the saints who were stoned or sawn asunder, even Peter and Paul in time. His legs cramped from sitting, so he stood to stretch them, though he could not stand straight or his head would appear above the wall. His stomach grumbled, and his bowels were loose. A martyr to the cause was assured his place in heaven.
The thought gave him no comfort.
“You have to help me,” the elder said.
Simon Bob had hoped, though he had not been so certain this time, that the boy would creep off during the night, and then it would never have happened. But the boy did not go. He had peeked early in the morning and had seen him there still, and the thought of this troubled him that day. His wife would not come until the weekend. Daniel, son of his own dead son, did not come around home much. If he did and found the boy, that would be the end of the trouble.
“I did not put you here,” Simon Bob said. “You climbed my wall to get in—climb it tonight and get away.”
“I’ll never get away. I don’t even know where I am.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“What am I going to do?”
“Call the police. They’ll come get me.”
“No.” Simon Bob shook his head. “I want nothing to do with police.”
“The army, then. There’s somebody you can tell.”
“You do not want to be on the wrong side here,” the old man said. The worst thing was to be thought a traitor, and there were so many sides, so many to be offended.
“Nobody will know if you just call the police.”
“Everyone will know. It is two miles to the police station, and then I must bring them back here, to my house, and then I must bring them to you in my garden, and all the neighbors will say, ‘What are you growing back there, Simon?’” The old man rubbed at his scalp. The boy’s face was dirty, and his hands. His eyes were tired and red. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“I was running.”
“You’re an American. What are you doing in South Africa? Won’t they make all the Americans go home soon?”
“I’m a missionary,” the elder explained. “We come here to tell people about the church of Jesus Christ.”
“You’re a Christian,” Simon Bob said.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Yes. The name of the church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
The old man said nothing.
“Do you believe in God?” the elder said. Automatically, he reached for his bag.
Still Simon Bob stared down at the elder. He did not look as though he had heard a word.
“Don’t you think God would want you to help me? Maybe God brought me here because you’re the only one who could help.”
“Is your God in that book?” Simon Bob said. He pointed to the binder the boy had drug from his satchel.
The elder tipped up the cover, then thumbed through the pages. Simon Bob waited. Finally, the boy turned a page toward him. There were three people in the picture: two men, with white hair and white beards, floating in the air with a glow around them, and beneath them another on the ground, his arm tipped up as though to shield his face.
“Your God is white,” Simon Bob said.
“Jesus was an Arab, I think. Something like that,” the elder said, fudging.
Simon Bob smiled.
“Then he must stay over in the Indian township. We need many gods here. The Afrikaner’s god says we are the cursed children of Ham. The Englishman’s god—he says many different things. The Indians, they need many gods, too, because theirs is a land like ours of many people.”
“We believe there’s one God, and one Jesus.”
“I think so, too,” Simon Bob said. “Who is this?” He pointed to the third man in the picture.
“Joseph Smith,” the elder said. “God’s prophet.”
“Do you have any black prophets in that book?” Simon Bob said. The boy was not from here, and Simon Bob enjoyed cheeking him, giving him grief. What could the boy do?
The elder closed his book.
“Why don’t you get the police?”
The old man wrung his hands around the handle of his hoe, scraping at his top lip with his bottom teeth.
“They’ll kill me,” the elder said.
“They might kill me, too,” Simon Bob said. “There is no leaving for me.”
“I wish you could,” the elder said.
Simon Bob looked at him. “That way is east,” he said, pointing behind the elder’s shoulder and past the wall. “You must go that way.”
This time, the boy followed toward the house. Simon Bob did not go inside, but walked through the narrow gap between his house and the one to the west, toward the street, where the boy would not go. He reached the street himself and stopped. There were few people out on the block. Tomorrow, that would change. The busses would be running again. The mood was calming, people would be going back to work, the flow of bodies that pulsed like a wave, flooding into the white city, where the boy in his garden belonged, sucking back out again to fill the black one. What was he supposed to do? Fly? Carry the boy back to the city in a sack? He leaned the hoe against the wall of the house, feeling the heat stored up from the day radiating from the blocks.
His grandson, his grandson’s friends, they would kill the boy. They would run him in the street for sport, maybe. They would necklace him, maybe. They would do worse, worse than the policemen had done to his own son—though that was bad enough, and in the end, Simon knew in his heart, it had killed him, not the drink, not the car. This boy seemed very young, young in a manner his own son, his grandson, had not been for very long. He was taller than Simon Bob, with a narrow waist, sloping shoulders, blonde hair matted and greasy from three days in his garden. He was not from here.
The boy was a Christian. Simon would give him over to the Christians. God, then, could do with him what he would. He set off walking toward the church. It would be out of his hands.
“The lost boy, the white boy, he is in my garden.” Simon Bob explained it to his pastor.
“Does anyone know he is there?”
“If anyone knew, he would be dead. He was alive when I left him, and if he is alive there still, then nobody knows.”