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CHAPTER TWO

    Waiting in a small private party room in the rear of the restaurant were two other men whom I did not recognize for a moment. At the small, white clothed table sat a large man with fair skin and red bloom of high health on his cheeks. I saw the glint of a gold capped tooth when he smiled and recognized Biff Doyle; athlete, family man and, I was soon to learn, Bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Alma Second Ward. He was still as handsome as Mel Gibson. There were only two wards--parishes--when I left Immigration Valley. One inferred there had not been a population explosion 180 miles to the north as had happened in Salt Lake City.

    The other man in the room stood up in a kind of jerky motion, wiry and bouncy, dressed in a western shirt, Levi’s, boots and a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate. Willard Smith. If I’ve ever seen a man who visibly gave off flashes of terror, like sparks, it was Willy. I’d seen it before. He gave my hand a quick shake, nodded, and then sat back down, nervously picking up a glass of ice water. I noticed Biff did not stand, nor did he make any attempt to acknowledge me other than with that quick flash of gold tooth.

    Max gestured me to a chair but I shrugged off my mufti overcoat and hung it on a rack before sitting. When I sat a waitress, a Denny’s special, who looked as if she probably moonlighted out on the street corner on State Street after her shift, sort of threw four menus at us, and hurried out.

    “It’s good to see you,” Max said at last after we were seated.

    “Biff. Willy,” I said. “You look–I bit off ‘prosperous’–well, Max,” I said.

    “You too, Andy,” Max said.

    “It’s Andrew,” I said.

    “Sure, uh, sorry. I guess the military goes for that formality,” he said. I could see he was stung by my correction. The waitress came back in sooner than I expected.

    “What’ll it be?” she asked, clutching her order book in ten red talons.

    “Coffee, please,” I said. I could not help but notice the discreetly raised eyebrows of my four companions in the room. I was momentarily puzzled. Oh, that, I thought wearily. The Word of Wisdom.

    “I’ll have a coke,” Willy said quickly.

    “Pepsi for me,” Biff grunted.

    “Water will be fine,” Max said.

    “What to eat?” she asked.

    “Why, I think I’ll have a piece of pie,” Willy said, and then looked, not at her, but at Biff, as if for approval. “Cherry,” he said, and then he began to wink broadly at the three of us before he seemed to remember the gravity of the occasion. I had noticed his bone white scalp and brow, under which was a straight horizontal line of deep brown tan from where his hat sat. It was the unmistakable signature of a rancher, or farmer, which he wore unselfconsciously. Some officers and men on the ships I served had the same tan lines and white brow always reminding me of Immigration Valley’s agricultural foundation.

    “Hamburger,” Biff said. “Fries.”

    “I believe I’ll have a dish of chocolate ice cream,” Max said. It was with some deep sense of futility that I had known what they would order. It made me kind of nauseous.

    “Just coffee,” I said.

    “I’ll leave you gents to your party,” the waitress said, trailing a wake of failed deodorant.

    When she left there was a long, acutely uncomfortable silence. Willy nervously toyed with a spoon. Biff, brush cut hair, no Grey, dressed neatly in coat and tie circa 1950, stared at the far wall. Max clasped his hands on the table before him and looked at me as if he expected me to say something. I had nothing to say.

    “And . . . Andrew, darn, Andrew, well, how’s the military life treatin’ you?” Willy asked as if I was just recently home on leave. It had been 30 years! He had that western twang in his voice, an unmistakable Utah Mormon accent, nasal, hillbilly, truncated. His nervousness was contagious.

    “Well enough,” I said. I looked at Max impatiently. “I dropped some very urgent matters to be here,” I said. “I fly out at four o’clock.”

    “Of course,” Max said. “Well, after Biff contacted me three days ago I thought it– prudent, that we meet. I saw Willy nod his head quickly, and Biff’s fair health blooms on his cheeks became bright patches.

    “Hank Shelton,” I said bluntly. At the mention of the name, Willy Smith nearly leapt from his chair. His agitation shook the glasses on the table. He looked to be near tears.

    “Yes,” Max said quickly, and dropped his head and I saw the swift, appraising glances between them, and sensed the unmistakable tension of fear as palpable as the stale air. “Perhaps you should know a little about the, ah, present situation,” he said. I wanted to know as little as possible. I just nodded. “I have a quite a successful practice in internal medicine here in Salt Lake,” Max said, and he began to turn a plain gold wedding band on his finger. Noticing it, he said, “I married Cynthia Anderson right after med school.”

    “Congratulations,” I said. I didn’t remember her. I had done my level best to erase every thought, every memory of every face from that place from my waking and sleeping self. And I had been successful. Until now. He did not notice my veiled sarcasm.

    “I was Bishop of the Salt Lake 23rd ward for five years, and recently,” he paused, as if considering the worth of his next statement, “I've been ordained and confirmed as First counselor to the Quorum of the Seventies.” Well, I thought. I wasn’t sure if he was bragging or reassuring himself. It meant nothing to me. I did remember that the Seventies was one of the higher levels in the Church’s leadership. In fact, to a Mormon, he was near to being one of God’s more-elect-than-most.

    “Biff now runs a highly successful insurance and real estate business in Alma,” Max said, nodding at Biff. I thought Biff looked typically like a smugly self-satisfied Mormon businessman whose model, I’ve always thought, is a corpulent German Burgher. But he was handsome which mitigated, or at least allowed him to escape the consequences of most of the sins in his life. I’d always marked him for an early end. He’d raised hell to new heights when we were kids if one notes that Hell’s floor is shallow and fairly level in a place like Immigration Valley was in the late 1950s. Real hell must be living as a teenager these past two decades.

    “He has also served as Stake President, and is presently acting in his capacity as Bishop of the Second Ward,” Max added. How quickly I was being brought to brook by the recitation of their Church offices. Those offices were power, purely and simply, both temporal and spiritual. This information infuriated me, giving rise to the gorge of some guilt, which I thought I’d expunged from my very being. I was beginning to get a glimmering, at last, of the power that the Catholic Church held on its writers and intellectuals through the ages. I had always known this, but had single-mindedly determined to erase every vestige of the LDS Church whose authority touched with great intimacy every aspect of life in rural Utah. In thirty years that, apparently, had not changed even with the advent of cable television and the cultural revolutions that had taken place since I’d left Immigration Valley, or Alma, more properly. Being at sea many years, and at foreign stations, I was as much an exile from the United States as I was from Immigration Valley– Alma. I merely shrugged at Max’s deliverance of their own sense of importance. I had to check my sarcasm and my rage.

    “Willard,” Max paused. Willy had his head lowered, and he was flipping over little pats of butter on squares of paper as if they were checkers. Then he raised his head to hear Max’s opinion of him. “Has served in various capacities.” This was pure code for a backslid Jack Mormon. “He owns a large ranch, you remember the Roberts’ place?  Well, it's Willy’s now. What do you have now, Willy?” Max asked. I glanced at Willard’s fawning face. The opinion of anyone in church authority is crucial to one’s well being. It is the only estimate of worth. What God may think of a man is entirely irrelevant. Without the blessing of the church, one is simply made to feel as if God has turned his away His face.

    “Aw, he . . . heck,” Willy said sheepishly. “Guess I got near to a fifteen hundred acres of bottom land, maybe a thousand head of cows. Damn Government.” He looked at me. I whistled aloud, impressed. I saw the immense pleasure my acknowledgment gave him.

    “That is something, Willy,” I said. What that meant was that Willy could probably buy and sell both Biff and Max with enough left over to buy me my own destroyer.

    “Old valley’s been good to me, Andy,”" he said. I let it go. I would never let it go with Max and Biff, I vowed, and they seemed to know it.

    “This is all very interesting,” I said. “Hank Shelton?” I think my brusque, but natural sense of command mildly intimidated them. Perhaps that was why they were citing their church offices. I had been a Naval officer for so long that I was unaware, at first, that I was not the Officer in Charge of this little gathering. One does not suffer fools gladly in the wardroom of a fighting ship. I had to tell myself to temper my impatience and irritability with this dispensation of my time.

    “I think Biff could best describe, the, ah, situation,” Max said with a deferring nod. Biff sat up in his chair, and tugged the knot of his tie more firmly around his throat. I thought for a moment he was going to stand up to deliver himself of an invocation.

    “Clayton Booth is dying,” Biff said. There was another acute silence.

    “I’m sorry to hear that,” I finally said.

    “Cancer of the stomach,” Max volunteered his voice briskly diagnostic. “Advanced.”

    “Doc Rich only gives him a month, maybe two, depending,” Willy said.

    “Doc Rich is still alive?” I asked with amazement.

    “No, you remember Bob, his son? Sophomore when we were seniors?” I did not. “He took over his father’s practice stethoscope and penicillin and all.” We smiled at the little inside joke. Old Doc Rich prescribed penicillin for everything from the sniffles to broken arms.

    “He is in my ward, is Clayton,” Biff said. “His wife is substituting for Clay at the Safeway. He’s been ill for some time.”

    “Yes?” I said.

    “As Bishop of the ward, I sit with him sometimes, as is my duty. Three days ago, his wife called me and said he urgently wanted to see me. I went over about 8 in the evening. He looked to be in a great deal of pain, and I asked him about it. He said he had not taken any pain medication for several hours as he wanted to have a clear mind when he spoke with me.”

    “It concerns all of us,” Max said grimly.

    “Hank Shelton,” I said.

    “Oh, Jesus,” Willy blurted, and I looked up at him across the table from me and saw tears beginning to well in his light green eyes. I was so surprised I almost didn’t hear what Biff was saying next. Biff looked at Willy with nothing like sympathy, more like contempt. Bishops are allowed small measures of sympathy but great quantities of contempt, I’d always thought. It is effective discipline. And then I looked at Biff’s eyes and saw an abyssal fear. It was at that moment that I began to loose my sense of my self; a 55-year-old Naval Captain, twice decorated, twice divorced, and thrice dammed.

“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.