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CHAPTER ELEVEN
I sat in the cold house making catalogues of my misery. The Bishop counseled me for a time afterward, and praised me for my action, but could not absolve me of my guilt, or my fury at having Cain’s mark written on my forehead with ashes and blood red as neon.
After the funeral, Clay Bostwick sidled up to me and whispered that I was to be arrested for the murder of Buck Buxton. It was nonsense, of course, but it was one additional layer of terror annealed to my consciousness. The solicitous stares of my classmates in the high school when the electric news got out that I’d pushed a man to his death mortified me. They said I’d saved the life of my mother and grandmother. That may be, but it was also made known to me that I was condemned to all hell’s fires for that act. The church was without mercy in their mercy.
One thing I remember with clarity. It was a simple gesture of friendship that I’ve never forgotten. Maxwell Taylor, who had been in the hotel, and had seen the gore the night of the– deaths– said to me the next day, while I was wrapped in the soft wool of shock; “It’s all right, Andy. I’ll share my dad with you for as long as you want.”
Clay and Willy and Biff took the tragedy in a longer stride, mumbling echoes of parents’ sympathy. In their innocence, they saw to it that I was endlessly distracted with the affairs of growing up, leaving tragedy in the hands of those whom knew best how to deal with it. As much on the surface as I appeared to adjust, they could never know the loss, the fear, and the unrelenting anger which had no real target. God had surely abandoned me.
My mother was still in the hospital three weeks later, living in a fog of neon and blood. She had been unable to attend the funeral. My grandmother held my hand. I remember nothing of that day. My father’s family, the few Lattimore’s were now free to scorn the two widows. My mother’s temporary retreat from the horror confirmed the weakness of those who came to the faith out of love for another man, and were not born to it.
My grandmother, in her grief, was the rock. It was impossible for her to stay in Immigration Valley; there was another burial, her job, and the business to sell. She escorted Buck’s body on the Portland Rose. My mother adamantly refused to allow us to be moved to Pocatello. Whether it was out of loyalty to her husband’s family, or some vague notion that Immigration Valley was more conducive to a healthy childhood, I don’t know. Grandma Rada then said she would sell the bar and quit her job and come to Immigration Valley to be with me as soon as she could. In the interim, with my mother in a catatonic oblivion, a Mrs. Bolton was hired to tend the house, and I was alone.
When my mother came home from the hospital large parts of her were missing, as if she’d had radical surgeries. She had left the world with my father’s leaving. Her behavior was diagnosed as traumatically induced senility. She was 32. Eventually, the habitual motions that were housework reasserted themselves, ingrained deeper than her insanity. So in time, there was a semblance of normality.
Jonathan Winthrop Lattimore, when he was alive, was a carpenter, as silent as the wood he worked. There was no possibility that we would ever live in a new house with a ship’s wheel on my bedroom ceiling. We remained in the old Victorian house with its shabby lace curtains and coal smoke furnace. The rent took a good share of the meager social security my mother received. We ate from the church storehouse until Pete Olson rescued us from abject poverty by giving me employment. We sold the lot, and lived on the income for a year. The house was filled with stolid pioneer furniture of native pine, chintz curtains, linoleum, wood stove, the Lives of the Saints, Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics Illustrated.
My father’s legacy, other than his silence, was the large hole in a building lot. My father had made our furniture with his own hands. It was years after his death before rolled and tucked nylon monstrosities my mother got by saving trading stamps gradually replaced it. What was left of my father’s handiwork was covered with such a patina of memory I avoided sitting on the chairs. Carefully selecting a different chair than the one I had used a previous meal, I ate at a different place at the table each meal, as if those minor adjustments could ease the pain. It drove my mother to a rag of distraction as I developed these small eccentricities, but I had passed to the position of man of the house, and there was little she could do. She would obey her son as she had obeyed my father.
We waited for the snow, mere harbinger of other, equally natural disasters that could not be identified. Winter was a blunt reality in that high mountain country; a thing to be respected as much as the Church and a blameless life. The course of life was dictated by preparation for winter. The brevity of the sunflower summers made one almost uneasy for the balance of the year.
My father’s small cabinet shop was sold, and we slipped into a poverty that had no edges of gentility. I tried to dream away the nightmare. I could not join the steady slings of Canadian geese that were continually shooting from horizon to horizon heading south. South. A mystic place of no winter.
I had come to realize, since my father’s death, that being of the purest Mormon pioneer stock, in these latter days, faith’s well had its source more in habit than reality on the part of Jonathan Winthrop Lattimore. My father, I realized, had been a churchgoer only from fear of censure. The cruelty of social censure in a small Mormon town equaled that of a pariah in hell. Just ask Jesse Sizemore and a few of the other derelicts that hung out at the Red Rooster Cafe and the Idaho Billiards every day of their adult lives.
My father’s death grieved my Mother deeply for years, but very slowly it became only a vague, undefined absence, or so it seemed to me. Her life soon became even more of an agony of duty to the church. The Doctrine of Faith that works brought Salvation made her religious fervor blaze.
The Relief Society was her chief obligation and interest. Relief Society, in my eyes, was nothing more than a gaggle of married women trying to figure out how to demean themselves before the works of their men folks. Which is to say it was the only means of collecting self-esteem before the towering authority of men. Their collective suffering also demanded an audience. Widowhood was a badge of honor. There was no better place in this world than the Relief Society to elicit endless, treacle sympathy. Relief Society was a clutch of clucking and gabbling and quilting and exchanging recipes and gossiping about whom was the latest dependent upon the Bishop’s storehouse. The Lattimores, mother and son, were dependent upon the Bishop’s storehouse for food and clothing until I got a job at Pete Olson’s service station.
It was my father’s death that released me from the church. After he died whatever interest I ever had in the Lord’s work died that day with him for the simple reason that I went to church under threat of his displeasure. The inconsistencies confused me. His death disclosed to me with clarity that these droning laymen were merely mouthing endless clichés, the emptiest of formalities, an insular, bigoted piety, motion without substance, like an architect’s blueprint when the builders had neither materials nor skills.
With Jonathan Lattimore’s death whatever authority my mother had, as well as that of the cold-eyed, droning, prosaic Bishopric, quickly eroded before my eyes to a dust of contempt. My mother’s grief lingering in unendurable dolorous sighs and lamentations, so that I began to suspect that it was a bogus, empty emotion. The exhaustion of widowhood in Mormondom was worn like some kind of merit badge that was to be flaunted, or concealed, depending upon the advantage to be gained from the posture.
I came to hate her.
The fist of death my father’s death smashed me. I hated God. I hated man. The only thing I loved were my three friends, and maybe Pete Olson, whom I was coming to depend on more and more for pithy nudges toward correct and manly decisions. We discussed which classes were best, why girls behaved so oddly, whether or not I should join the Navy after high school, go to a vocation school to learn mechanics or try for college. But Pete could never explain why death had utter dominion. It was his only failing in my increasingly worshipful eyes.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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