FOREWORD BY LINDA SILLITOE

"YOU CAN SEE," VIRGINIA SORENSEN ENDED her December 1988 letter to me, "that I really wanted to gossip with you about Everything." She typed with a faded ribbon on both sides of stationery that featured a sketch of her home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Her daughter, Beth Hepburn, had signed the ink sketches at the top center and lower left of the page. Since it was December, Virginia colored an evergreen near the house and added a gold star, complete with rays, on top.

This was the well published and awarded author I had read voraciously in the late 1970s. We met when she came to Utah in October 1988. 1 can think of no better way to introduce her to readers than with her poignant, singing, wise, triumphant The Evening and the Morning. When you close its pages, 1 suspect you'll want more time with the author.

The photograph of Virginia Sorensen on the back of the faded and slightly tattered dust jacket of my first edition copy of The Evening and the Morning remarkably resembles the sketch on the front cover. Each woman wears her hair upswept. Each gazes into the distance as if perceiving possibilities others might not notice. Each seems determined to find what is there.

For more than four decades after The Evening and the Morning was published, Virginia Sorensen traveled far, literarily and geographically. Born Virginia Eggertson in Provo, Utah, on February 17, 1912, she graduated from Brigham Young University, did graduate work at Stanford University, and received two Guggenheim fellowships, one to Mexico and one to Denmark. The blurb below her photograph on The Evening and the Morning roots her in time (1949) and place: "Mrs. Sorensen, whose first three novels, A Little Lower than the Angels, On This Star, and The Neighbors, won wide critical acclaim and a host of readers, was born in Utah of Mormon extraction. She is living today in Alabama where her husband teaches at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute."

The husband lending Virginia's second credential was Fred Sorensen. They married in 1935 when Virginia was twenty-three, produced a son, Fred, and daughter, Beth, then later divorced. In the 1950s Virginia became a successful children's author. Miracles on Maple Hill won the John Newbery Award in 1957, and Plain Girl won the National Study Award a year later. She wrote the manuscripts simultaneously during two months at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Also in the 1950s Virginia married noted British writer Alec Waugh. They lived in Morocco and traveled extensively, semi-annually visiting her children and grandchildren in the States. All those years, from her mid-forties through her sixties, Virginia was too engrossed in travel and life to write much, except for the "little books" she penned for Alec's birthdays. After he died in 1981, she settled in Hendersonville for her final decade.

In claiming Virginia Sorensen (who, for half her life, answered to Virginia Waugh), we tend to forget how far and high she flew from her Utah County nest. She speaks so intimately through her novels, portrays so accurately themes we still find vibrant. Virginia's characters resonate because they "resist easy mythification," critics wrote in 1978.1 Likewise Virginia resonates and should not become our myth, for she lived fully, within and beyond her works.

Virginia seemed pleased and somewhat bemused when, in the 1980s, she found acclaim in the Mormon literary fold. Between 1942 and 1960, when her novels dealing with LDS themes appeared, the encouragement came from New York publishers. "Everybody wanted me to do novels about Mormons," she reminisced in December 1988. She recalled this as her "Indian Period," when she was eager to move on. She placed The Proper Gods in a Yaqui community, justifying the novel by her short story about Yaquis collected in The Best Stories of 1948.

"I remember Mr. Eugene Reynal saying, 'My God! Mexican Indians, when we can't even sell the American ones!'" Virginia continued in her letter. "It was just when Reynal and Curtice N. Hitchcock [of Reynal and Hitchcock Publishing Company] were selling out to Harcourt, and I must have been listed with the liabilities. Everybody was very good to me, and I knew all the important people ... I remember Alfred Knopf sending a copy of 'The Water' s In' [published in Harper's, May 1941; reprinted in Reader's Digest, June 1941], and asking me if he should grab this Juanita Brooks," who had applied for a Knopf fellowship.

The authors springing from Mormonism and "grabbed" by New York publishers in that era lived out varieties of the universal conflict between individual and community even as they created it on the page. Virginia turned the conflict various ways in her novels and remained sensitive to its complexity. In April 1989 she commented on a story

that touches on my old question about how young liberal intellectuals go on working in the church, believing. Anybody can go on in unbelief; double lives are rather usual, after all. But how to believe and bear testimonies honestly and teach children and instruct sinners and even administer important punishments, while reading seriously in history and world literature and philosophy. ... Makes my old head rumble with an old song, "Great Godamighty Babe, Don t Deny My Name."

In the late 1970s, as the women's movement swelled and as I read Mormon novels, I became curious about the outcome of the heroines who challenged patriarchy. Did they all end up dead-but-faithful or alive-but-ruined? An unscientific survey brought me only one exception to both possibilities—Kate Alexander in The Evening and the Morning. Weaving past and present as seamlessly as they live in our minds, Sorensen returns Kate to the small Utah town where Kate had loved, married, reared children, and met calamity, not entirely in that order. Using the motif of the seven days of creation, Sorensen creates Kate's inner and outer worlds, and we venture inside.

Nothing is simple in these worlds despite the small town conformity that hails convention as God. Judgment is the weapon of choice, as freely and lethally drawn as guns among gangbangers. Everyone knows the rules; everyone privately adapts them. Love, intermixing passion with compassion, compels Kate whether or not she can fit it to the form. Ultimately her enemies use the form to squash the content, and Kate loses her home. The secret of her disgrace, rather than the disgrace itself, silently erodes her daughter s family until Kate s return resolves it. Now the next generation must move on. In fiction Sorensen shows us that far more is real than the surfaces we acknowledge with others. She frees human complexity to war with society's deep and self-serving need to simplify, regulate, and perpetuate. She explores the delicate intersections between women and men, between mothers and daughters and granddaughters.

Fiction is especially needed, Virginia wrote me, for "Saints, who else would get the Teachers and Testimonies and Doing, Doing, Doing—" In reading such words, all our days , weeks , months , and years accomplishments (that we list and stack and recite to one another) can crumple. Someone like Virginia arouses hunger—for what? To travel somehow?—to reach, to feel, to contemplate, to express? At least to know intensity, to live in beauty, to evade the drugs of dogma and doing. Virginia imposed no direction but consoled, "And do tell the Mormon Letters people they should stay alive if only to encourage old authors—and young ones ... To en-courage—to give courage, as depicted in The Evening and the Morning, not only to act, but to take responsibility, to confront, to resolve, to outlive.

The book's last haunting image of Kate seeing her reflection in a train window raises frightening images for some in a communal society, suggesting isolation, outer darkness, apostasy, even excommunication. Yet the sentence, like so many of Sorensen s, is lovely: "She watched herself moving beside herself, out there alone." Kate bought her own train ticket. In her lap she cradles the head of her sleeping granddaughter. She glimpses not just herself, but her selves—mobile, sensate, unique, and ongoing.

When our family met Virginia Sorensen in 1988, she claimed our daughter Cynthia as being "in her age group" and visited her sixth grade class to discuss her children's books. A budding novelist, Cynthia was thrilled to correspond. In January 1992 we picked up a sad ninth-grader to attend Virginia's memorial service; she had passed away on December 24, 1991. In November 1992 Cynthia became ill. In 1997 oxygen treatments allowed her once again to read fiction, after more than four years in the mental fog of chronic fatigue syndrome. At twenty, Cynthia plunged through weeping. She cried, she said later, because the writing was so beautiful; because Virginia was so present; because Virginia was gone; because Cynthia knew her so briefly; because she had been too young to converse as one adult talks with another. Yes, I told her, I feel just that way.

Virginia left long before most of us knew her, yet we claim her in these pages. In her last years, decades after writing The Evening and the Morning, Virginia returned to Utah, much as Kate Alexander did. Like Kate, Virginia returned for closure, for connections, and to claim her due. Like Kate, she left again for the home she made and cherished alone. Reflected in the starry skies, she travels still.

Note

1. L. L. Lee (Western Washington University) and Sylvia B. Lee (Whatcom Community College), Virginia Sorensen, Boise State University Western Writers Series: Number 31 (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1978), 8.

THEY SAT ON THE BACK PORCH STEPS AS EVENING began to come, the grandmother whose name was Kathleen but who was known as Kate, and her grandchild, Jean. Supper was just behind them, and Dessie, daughter of Kate and mother of Jean, was making the final sounds of her day in the house, washing the dishes. "No help!" she had said to them. "I want you two to go out on the porch and get acquainted. Mother, you need cooling off after the train; nothing's as hot as a train on a hot day."

In the front of the house, Lou, the bigger girl, was practicing her piano lesson, one, two, three, four, mechanically, with conscious virtue, counting time until the dishes should be finished.

Jean and Kate panted together with July. But the sun was setting and among the mountains this meant immediate coolness. A small wind was already stirring, coming from the west. Dumped confidingly at their feet, the dog moved only his eyes, hot and waiting in his hair. Cherries hung, sour and firm, in the trees of the yard, and a blurred fragrance of ripe raspberries behind the house woke in Kate a memory she shook back into herself deliberately. But Jean had no memories, only a great appetite, for the moment quieted by supper, and a great curiosity never yet satisfied by anything.

"But it's funny to call you Kate instead of Grandma," Jean said with ten-year-old conservative wisdom.

"My name was Kate," the grandmother said, turning her mouth without smiling, "a long time before it was Grandma." She was thinking: "I had almost forgotten how barns are clustered at the hearts of the blocks and how the houses face the streets in front of their barnyards. I can hear the animals. Chickens flutter in the coops the way they always did, and I can remember how it used to be just like this when I finished the dishes and came out on the porch of an evening."

"Mamma said she called you Kate until she got big enough to know she ought to call you Mother," Jean said positively. "She wants me to call her Mamma like everybody calls their mammas."

Absurd, Kate thought, how this granddaughter possessed so young the concern of the others. She had inherited wild red hair and busy eyes; who had planted behind these the preposterous notion of whatever-is-is-right? Probably, given a child so quick, there would be enough inconvenient racket later on, however; Kate looked down into the life of the small face. "Call me whatever you want to," she said. "It doesn't make any difference any more."

And it did not. Not now. Names and numbers had a way of sinking out of mind. The smell of raspberries came again, almost imaginary, so quickly gone like the smell of pine in mountains in early morning, and the hairs in her nose stiffened as they might with frost. "Oh, my darling," she thought, and beyond the child, before her time began, it was all there. One day in July they were by a window and Peter said: "Kate, I can tell by the smell the berries are dead ripe," and she said: "Yes, the children are out picking them." And he said: "Will they be busy out there long enough?" and she was frightened and said: "No!" But they were.

She felt the motion of her mouth doing something odd and altered this into a smile and returned to Jean. "I keep smelling raspberries," she said. "They must be ripe."

"I'll get you some," Jean said, and ran toward the patch but returned at once to say: "It's still light enough to see the really red ones," and was gone and returned to say: "They ll be buggy; I'll wash 'em under the hose," and was gone again.

Familiarly evening plunged down from the peaks. Coming back here was coming back to many things good to remember but, of course, best to forget. Kate did not love this place now. Its past was intimate, troubles she had worried over were as inseparable as its air, hatred darkened the whole air as certainly, as awfully, as the evening. And now no more was to be expected, here or anywhere. Yet one expected—even hoped—as long as breath went in and out and strength remained to go one place from another. If she had denied hope even while the miles were lessening, those hours on the train, she was recognizing it now.

Nothing was between her and Peter now, not even the wall he had built for his wife, Helga, around their house. It came to Kate how once, at the height of love and despair, she had said to Peter: "There might be a time when our lives are our own and nobody left to be hurt. Then we will make everything right." Afterward it had occurred to her that if such a time should come, she might well be past strength and power for building new, and realized she had spoken foolishly. Yet she had spoken in the midst of a love with so much creation in it, so much future, that for a while she had seemed immortal, had truly believed she might be young and strong forever.

Her thoughts were young enough tonight, for she was actually thinking in terms of what ought to be rather than what was. There ought to be a time of peace to live what has been learned. Something is stored up for the end. Thinking of this and seeing Jean's shadow almost lost among the tall bushes, she thought how Jean was storing up, and how she would not put all her strength into fruit which would break from the stem of her existence to be itself and not of her any longer. She was a whole one already, sure enough, not her grandparents or her parents or any who had been before any of these. Yet her hair was the color of iron and copper in the mountains, Peter's hair, carried again like a banner.

Kate wondered suddenly if Peter had seen Jean. This had not mattered before she came back; now thoughts of the two of them came together. But not as he had seen his own child, not like that. Jean was returning with the berries cool in the cup of her hands.

"This is the best fruit in the world," Kate said, and wondered what Jean would have thought if she added that it tasted of peace, peace being a ripe fullness after all. Cunning composite fruit lay in cunning composite fingers from which she took the berries one by one.

A bee went angling into the sunset. Jean said with cruel importance: "I know how to catch bees, all I want to catch."

"Why should you want to catch bees?"

"Oh, it's fun. You do it in a hollyhock. When the bee gets busy, you take hold outside and twist. If you want you can tie it with a string. You should hear the buzz, then."

"I see." But the bee squirmed in Kate. She felt it, the flower being twisted and the embarrassment of being caught at honey-sucking so that suddenly, when it was a prison of sucking honey, the bee did not want to do it any longer and began to make a huge humming of objection.

She made no moral, however. Morals were never to be made except within, for one's self, where they were accurate enough to be useful. And especially never for children. At her own age it seemed that morals were in everything; every word and every sound and evening and summer itself and the taste of berries in her mouth were all exhorting about what should be done and thought, and what should never be done or thought.

"May I eat some of that pomegranate now?" Jean asked.

"Of course. Whenever you want. Who told you you had to wait?" Kate had brought the pomegranates from California herself, without any rules about when or how they should be eaten.

"Mamma said to be careful. Sometimes new things give me hives. Strawberries do all the time, and new things."

"Pomegranates won't," Kate said. "You get such a little fruit, actually. It s mostly idea with a pomegranate—sweet, of course, but mostly color." And when Jean came to her again with the fruit, she asked curiously: "Do you really like it? I didn't for a long time because all I knew about was apples and cherries and raspberries, things like that. It's hard to like new things. Persimmons and mangoes are puckery, for instance, and it's hard to like puckering things."

"I do like it," Jean said, and smacked, proving. She was young enough to like new things.

"I guess I stayed one place too long," Kate said.

The presence of mountains over the town made her mind feel shadowed and heavy; she wondered why she did not find quiet in their presence as she once had. Their protection had been illusory, of course, and now she knew it.

"Somebody's coming," Jean said. They could hear gravel scrunching around the curve of rosebushes that led to the front door.

"Oh, dear, the Teachers!" Lou spoke from the doorway in a hushed voice. "Jean, Mamma says for you to bring 'em around to the porch. If they come in—"

Dessie said suddenly behind her: "Lou, I said for you to do it. Imagine, you two arguing now," and gave Lou an impatient push. "It's just the coffee, Mother; I made it on account of you liking it with your shortcake. Who'd think they'd come tonight?"

Kate had to laugh. "Oh, dear, I'm sorry," she said. "I'd forgotten. Maybe when people go away they forget those little things and only remember the mountains." But something, the true agitation of Dessie's face and hands, arrested her laughter. She turned her toes together nervously on the step. Now Dessie was going around the house also, after Lou, and Kate could hear her company voice, very bright. She noticed how dark things were now, how dark lay under each step, around her shoes, in branches, along the barn and granary out back so their bulk increased and rivaled the mountains beyond them. A robin foolishly betrayed himself among the cherries and Jean cried out and ran and shook the boughs to dislodge him.

"You'll remember my mother," Dessie was saying, and Kate rose in her place. "Mrs. Alexander. Sister Karl Alexander. She's just come from California for a visit. Mother, this is Brother Shumaker and Brother Atchisen."

"Yes. I'm sure I remember them both," Kate said.

Sister Alexander. Of course, yes, yes, the Teachers were saying. They were genial, harmless, elderly, homely men. Kate knew them in the dusk as she would have in the light. She knew the awkward joviality of their voices. "Karl Alexander s widow—Karlie's stepmother—yes, of course," Brother Shumaker said. He was piecing things together, making a place in his mind to put her. "We'll be going on to Karlie's tonight. He'll be proud, showing you his family. Eight now he's got, ain't it?" He appealed to Brother Atchisen and to Kate, and Kate said, feeling something familiar and old rising in her throat: "I'm sure I don't know." She could have added that she had heard nothing from Karlie since he took everything his father had left, fifteen years ago. But Dessie was speaking quickly.

"Do sit down. It's so much cooler on the porch than inside tonight." And to Lou in a most motherly, I'm-doing-my-full-duty tone: "Lou, go back and practice for a few more minutes. You've done no more than half an hour all day, and with a holiday coming this week—" She smiled at the Teachers. "Keeping them at it is a big job," she said.

"But well worth it in the end," said Brother Shumaker, nodding happily at having contributed a precept so soon after his arrival.

Back in the tree again, the robin fluttered, scolded, choked off-key as if surprised by a stone. It might seem, Kate thought, but for the stars, that mountains to east and barn to west had met at the peak in darkness. In a proper voice Dessie said, "It's been a hot day," and fondled Jean's hair against her knee.

They always came, Kate thought, staring at the sky, the good Brethren to teach in the evening once a month, the good Sisters by day as often. She remembered how her hands had been folded politely in her lap as Jean's were now; she had learned to fold her hands for the whole length of the visits by the time she was able to sit alone. She remembered they had come most often to her mother, Martha's, room because she was usually sickabed, and the other three wives would sit in this room also, each with an eye to the propriety of her particular brood. It had seemed natural then, as much a part of the monthly routine as the moon, for the Teachers came on duty bound and in the name of Authority to greet each brother, each sister, each little child. It was many years before she had become outraged that they informed a brother how to vote as often and as naturally as they advised him in his prayers; and even now she knew they were innocent tools, as the Sisters were. Brother Shumaker was saying, "So you live in California now. Well, that's nice. Of course it's not like it is here, whatever those people say." He laughed to show her that he knew what the joke was about Californians. "I notice the Saints always come back home." He was obviously the spokesman of these two; Brother Atchisen only nodded and nodded.

"I like California very much," Kate said. "Much better than here, I think, as a place to live." She folded coldness with truth into a small envelope of voice, and thought how foolish this was and yet could not help it.

Dessie cried in quick embarrassment, "Mother always would be honest." Then she stopped short in a most curious way, having said that honesty interferes with ease and manners and kindness, not having meant to say it.

Brother Atchisen cleared his throat, but Brother Shumaker thought sooner of something to say. "When you left here, you lived in Thistle awhile, if I remember? My brother-in-law was an engineer on the Rio Grande, used to tell us he ate at your boardinghouse once in a while. Taylor his name was. Bud Taylor."

Kate saw that Dessie was belittled by the boardinghouse, and she felt her own cheeks coloring. "Your sister was Amie, the tall, thin one?"

"No, Beulah was Bud's wife, but she's tall and thin too. Our whole family was tall and thin." He paused and rocked briskly in his chair. "Then, if I recall, you lived in Tintic awhile—your boys were mining? Wasn't it one of your boys that—"

"Was hurt in a mine—yes. So we left Tintic." Perhaps he would be cut off by the pain in her voice, before he should really use his memory and say: Wasn't something said of you when you left here? Didn't you leave here suddenly after your husband died?

"Then you went to California? I never did hear where you went after Tintic," he said, keeping the talk going very well.

"Farther and farther away," Kate said.

A crowd of children was clamoring at the front of the house. Lou came to the door; Jean was standing up. A small, pretty girl came rushing around the path and said, panting, "The Gang's playing with us tonight. Most of 'em—"

Jean said, "Mamma, can we?" with a curious and sudden passion.

"On our street?" Dessie asked. Then, reassured: "Well, all right, then, if you stay on our block. And put sweaters on, you two!"

Brother Atchisen said, thrusting his voice out in a determined way, "California is where my sister went on her mission. In San Francisco. There's a fine big branch of the Church in San Francisco."

Almost at once, Kate thought, she could follow the children's game by its sounds and silences. Hiding ones soon began to slide across the yard under trees, vanishing; seeking ones moved silently. Presently a can, kicked under the street lamp on the corner of the block, brought laughter and shouting.

"My sister said one time the whole Church was supposed to go to California," Brother Atchisen was saying. "It was a Mormon helped build San Francisco—took the New England Saints around the Horn and landed there. An aunt of my mother s came that way—we've still got a warming pan she brought on the ship and over the Snowy Mountains."

"How nice," said Kate.

Brother Atchisen went on, more sure of himself now, and anxious to let folks know what he knew. "But that Mormon that run the ship around the Horn, he left the Church. Wouldn't pay his tithing, they say, even when he was the richest man in California. But then, money got him. And drink. He died a drunkard's death down in Mexico."

"So I've heard," Kate said. She couldn't help but smile, because this Californian he spoke of had been a favorite rebel of hers for years and she had found some interesting things about him in a number of books in California libraries. "It was bad of him not to pay his tithing, especially when Brigham could have used a tenth of the Gold Rush."

Brother Atchisen sat up straighter, while she went on, smiling out into the dark. "Helways said he would have paid it all right if Brigham had sent a receipt signed by the Lord. And I never saw why Brigham wouldn't do it."

"Well, I—" said Brother Shumaker, puzzled, and Dessie thought: "Oh, dear ..." but Kate's voice was low and kind. "His name was Sam—you probably knew that," she said. "Sometimes I go and visit his grave down in San Diego, and I say, 'Well, Sam, if you'd stayed with them and given them everything you had, maybe you'd still be above ground, over a hundred years old now and telling them all how to live. '"

Nobody spoke for a moment. Children's voices came beautifully through darkness like bell strokes: In! In! In!

Brother Shumaker cleared his throat. "I've heard the Church wouldn't have been the same if it'd gone on to California," he said. "All that mining and railroading. I've heard Authorities say it. We needed time to work to build the Kingdom without outside folks to interfere." He paused, triumphant and breathless. "Brigham knew," he said.

"Yes, Brigham knew." Kate nodded. "And here is the Kingdom, sure enough." She began to quote one familiar phrase after another. "Like the Kingdom of Heaven. In the midst of the mountains. This is the place. Rameumptom, the Holy Stand."

Recognizing this word from the Book of Mormon, Brother Shumaker cleared his throat again, for he had, as always, brought with him a message to the people. He began to turn the pages of a book he held, leaning to the light which came from the kitchen door, and when he spoke again his voice was heavy with responsibility. Kate was half listening, but remembering also how her own children had run on this same street, so that past and present night flowed together marvelously. Something from Moroni, Chapter 3, Verse 3, about ordination of Teachers and Priests whose duty was to preach repentance and remission of sins through Jesus Christ by the endurance of faith on his name to the end, amen. There was a connection somehow—these were the Teachers given the solemn duties they spoke of, and the Sisters who also came, but by day, came also to see whether faith endured and that sins were remitted. Marya Olgood—who lived down the block from Dessie's to this day, at the end of this very street—Marya, who was Peter's sister-in-law and therefore invested with a Special Responsibility—it had happened that Marya was one of the Sisters who came that summer day. Peter must have kept some of his fright on his face and in his hands as he fumbled to pick up his fiddle, to put on his hat and get into his coat.

"Well, Peter," Marya had said, "I didn't know you were here—"

And a day or so afterward, Marya had come alone and with another message.

Brother Shumaker closed his book and leaned over the step to peer at the sky. "Well, it looks like it'll be clear for the celebration, don't it?" he said.

"If it should rain it would ruin all the paper flowers we've made for the float," Dessie said. She looked at Kate, explaining in a nervous voice: "I'm chairman of the Relief Society float, Mother."

Kate saw her dimly, for Dessie had leaned back into shadow. She certainly had not meant to pick the Sisters, the Relief Society, from her mother's mind.

"We are doing the 'Utah's Best Crop' float," Dessie was saying. "It always was my favorite. The children are the best crop, after all."

"Before we go," Brother Shumaker said, "it is our duty to answer any questions—any we can answer." He spoke awkwardly now, but he was determined in his duty, having come out of his house to do it. If he went out to plow, he plowed, if to reap, he reaped. He was tired evenings, being a farmer with much hard work to do in summer. As he sat he trailed around the calluses of his right hand with the blunt fingernails of his left, and an ache at the permanent bend of his back made him squirm on the porch chair in which he sat as upright as possible. Kate could not see him very well now, only the weary outline of his shoulders against the kitchen screen.

"There's a question you can answer for me, I think," she said in a gentle voice. "About who might help me do what I came back to do."

"You see, Mother never just comes for a visit," Dessie said. "It's because of the pensions the government is giving now—for veterans of the Black Hawk War and their widows. You've heard about it, probably. Three affidavits from some of the men who knew what Father did."

"Yes, yes—a lot of them are getting their papers," Brother Shumaker said. "They're the ones you want to help with yours. Chapman is getting his, and Ottosen, just off City Park. There'll be a lot of the old ones at the celebration."

"There's an old man lives by the mill, in the canyon," Dessie said. "I was telling Mother. He talked to Jean's class at school and he mentioned Father."

"Brother Tucker. Yes, he'd be good. He speaks Thursday, too, after the parade. You could see him there."

Kate noticed that Brother Atchisen was looking strangely at Brother Shumaker, seeking his face curiously and clearing his throat as one who brings bad news. "At the conference," he said, "the Church came out against old-age pensions. I was just thinking—I wouldn't be able to say how we feel—"

This was so familiar it made Kate smile—the thoughts and feelings determined at conference. "Against pensions?" she asked. "Why, I'm sure I don't see—"

"It takes the responsibility from children, lets them put it on the state," he said. "Children should be willing to take responsibility for their aging parents, after years of work and sacrifice. He paused; she felt some personal experience bitter behind his words, as if he held himself to the light suddenly and his blood became visible. "Constant loving care," he said. And then, mixing his relationships: "In sickness and in health."

Kate's voice was not angry; it was seeking humor, even. "I can't say that I see what parents do that we should be looked after the rest of our lives. We bring our children into the world without their asking. I've never understood what they should owe us for that."

Dessie's face turned entirely toward the dark trees now, but when she spoke there was a high, nervous primness in her voice: "You were always more independent than most people, Mother." It was not an important thing she said, yet her voice ceased in a caught breath as if this simple statement had brought her to a private chasm of some kind into which she feared to fall. It was wicked to hate one's mother because of things only half remembered, to feel frightened against her, yet to love the very sound of her voice and the strong feeling of her hands. "Go out with Tecna, that's a good girl," Kate was saying. "Tracy will take you on his pony . . . don't cling so, Dessie!" As if she too were saying: "No! No!" and would finally go away entirely. And so she did go. First Father Karl was buried and put out of sight. And then Kate said, truly this time as in a thousand dreams she had said it: "I am going away; you will stay here and be a good girl until I come for you."

"The Authorities explain it," Brother Shumaker was saying, "that the idea is to keep folks grateful, to teach gratitude as to Our Father in Heaven."

Kate's voice was sharp and firm: "I think it's a very clever way to deprive everybody of good energy for doing free things, generation after generation. Very moral, of course. People enslaving themselves dutifully for their children so the children will be obliged to enslave themselves in turn." She made a little snort of disgust, thinking of the old dependent ones about the houses of their children, childishly asserting their maturity even after they had gone full circle and were themselves childlike again.

Helplessly Brother Atchisen said: "Well, now—" for he had somehow started all this. And Brother Shumaker took severe charge, seeing that the time had come for something to be firmly quoted. "Duty and responsibility," he said. "People have to be taught to be grateful to earthly parents and heavenly parents."

"Then let them be grateful for being free," Kate said.

His mouth opened to speak again, more firmly, but Dessie turned her head suddenly and spoke in a clear and automatic tone, changing the subject and at the same time explaining Kate somehow to these kind old men: "Mother has been doing some social work in Los Angeles. I really think it's very interesting. She meets so many different people—interesting people—"

A train whistled, a thin flutelike whistle from the direction of the railroad station where Ike, Dessie's husband, worked every day. Kate lifted her face, listening, and asked: "Dessie, is that the old Sanpete engine whistling? Old Bull of the Woods?" She laughed, but her laughter ended abruptly as the whistle had, sharp and seeming unfinished.

"No, not until after nine," Dessie said. "That's just a freight, I think—probably whistling out a flag." She listened. It came again. One long, two short, putting a flagman out at west.

"Takes the Sanpete a day for the run down-country and back, with the stopover," said Brother Atchisen. "She comes later than this."

"Fruit this time of year," said Brother Shumaker. "The plaster mill's running."

"The same, then," Kate said. She used to know when the train would come, by the very minute, for there was always a possibility Peter would come with it. It was narrow-gauge then, passengers and baggage riding on the single car, but Ike had said it was standard now. The people on the train always wanted Peter to play the fiddles he was delivering and he always obliged as he had that one night she rode with him. He used to say he had his best audience on the Peavine, because nobody could get away short of jumping out the window. He never pretended to make good music, only good fiddles, after all. Sometimes, when he came, she expected him, as often as not because of a note to Karl: "I ll be in town Friday"—or Wednesday or whenever it was—"and would like seeing you folks if you'll not make a fuss about dinner." He had been Karl's friend long after she had ceased to pretend friendship with Helga, his wife, long after Helga's sister, Marya, found it strange that Peter should go to see Karl before he came to see his own relatives.

Four long whistles brought the flagman in. Kate remembered how clear a whistle always was in this thin, high air.

"I hear they're taking the Peavine off," Brother Shumaker said. "It's never made its way."

"Of course everything must make its way," said Kate.

Why didn't they go now? Dessie thought. The visit had been long already; probably Ike would have said it was their natural missionary spirit keeping them—as when he was at home. They could smell out anybody in need of salvation, without even the help of a coffeepot. Brother Shumaker was actually starting to go.

"I hope you get the pension," he said to Kate. "It's probably all right, a war pension. The government never did pay the militia for the Black Hawk. My father was in it for a while, and he didn't get a penny and neither did any of his wives."

Kate stood up with them and walked, with Dessie, after them toward the front gate. "The fighting was a mistake, of course," Kate said. "But if there are pensions to be drawn from mistakes we didn't make ourselves—"

At the gate Brother Shumaker said, "We try to get the young men to do the Teaching—too late nights for us old ones. But don't seem to be any young ones around this season. Fishing's too good." His laugh hollowed out flat and sounded tangled as if his beard had caught in it. He said good night, and Brother Atchisen said good night, and they all shook hands over the gate. Walking stiffly off together like a pair of matched steppers, both men held their knees too high and righteously in their unpressed pants. Kate and Dessie stood watching while they turned into another place. Beyond, at the end of the street, was Marya's. Would they say at Marya's: Kate Alexander is back again?

Kate felt as if pepper had been sprinkled in the air, and Jean came running and sprang upon the fence. "Grandma, come play. Please! Mamma said you used to when she—" She began to sneeze suddenly as if the pepper in the air came to her, hanging on to the fence with her two hands, rocking and sneezing, "Ra boo! Ra hoo!"

"Why do you say 'ra hoo' when you sneeze, Jean?" Kate asked. "All respectable people say 'ka choo'—you should know that."

"Ra hoo!" Jean said again, and rocked with mirth.

"Jean," Dessie said severely, "you're getting cold. Where's your sweater? I told you and Lou to put your sweaters on."

"We were running and it's hot."

"Put it right back on. And Mother can't play with you tonight. She's tired from the train."

"Another night," Kate said. "I'd love to play."

Jean was gone again. Kate and Dessie saw where she went, into the "prison" which was the light of the street lamp on the corner. A bright circle lay on the ground with lines through it like an immense spider web; it was the net of wire around the lamp which caused this, Kate saw, and the settling of moths upon it made moving shadows. The children who were caught and the restless moths moved together upon the ring of light, the children gazing outward into the dark where the Its were searching for others to imprison.

"They are good men," Dessie said abruptly, and Kate saw the Teachers at another door.

"Very good men," she said. Indeed they were; she thought how she had walked close to them on the path, smelling onions they had pulled this day, and manure on their shoes, and milk and cow-smell they carried with them always, and faint odors of horses and grass—and earth, yes, and strong soap. Heaven could be entrusted to them, if to anybody, these descendants of giants who used high snows to do the service of rain all summer, who dealt with seeds and growth and milk most beautifully and were constant in all things. In belief. In common virtue. In duty. Especially in duty. Tonight they had worn clean shirts and ties and carried tenderly beside them their scrubbed, lined hands.

Now the children were calling, running, starting a new cycle of the game.

Dessie said: "Ike isn't home yet. It seems to be a long meeting, doesn't it? I hope they don't have any of that home brew. He gets silly; he's not used to it."

"There's only one way to get used to something."

"I'd as soon he didn't!" Her passion seemed odd and overdone, for Ike was substantial and solid in a way Kate had recognized at once; already he had treated her with intelligent kindness. Dessie was walking along the path, through the gate, saying restlessly: "Let's walk to the corner. We might see him coming. And it's such a nice night—to be out—" Did this worry her? Kate moved to her side. "I wanted you to know," Dessie went on in the same tone, "it wasn't just the coffee that worried me tonight; it was that last time the Teachers came, Ike and a friend of his were having wine in the kitchen."

As they walked slowly, Kate heard a train whistle, perhaps the one she had expected before. It seemed very late, perhaps because she was so tired. On the porch, on the corner, she saw the two Teachers—entertained on someone else's porch, she noticed with a smile. And she knew the couple who lived in that place, who sat now side by side on their customary rocking chairs. She could bear the chairs moving and the murmur of their voices. These people had shared their quiet life and now had all the resources of their common memories and their understanding to live with. It could have been so with her and Karl, had he lived—perhaps—had there not been a different agitation. She listened to the contented motion of the rockers. But now the sound ceased, and the talk also, as she and Dessie walked slowly by.

"Let's go back," Dessie said. "I don't see him coming." Her restlessness stirred the night as if a new small wind had begun blowing. They did not speak again; they were still silent when they sat again upon the steps. Kate felt distance and silence with a pang that was old and deep and bitter. She should not have let it happen. Sometimes, as tonight, she was sure there must have been a better way, no matter what it might have cost. And even if she could not tell the truth, she should have found the money somehow to keep the girls close to her. She had been weak and alone; now it seemed to her she must have been very sick. Her sisters had seemed right about keeping Dessie and Martha, everybody had seemed right but herself. Thistle was not a good place for girls—a railroading town—that was true enough. It had seemed amusing that Dessie married a railroad man, after all. But of course not a brakeman or a conductor or an engineer or any of those kinds flipping back and forth forever and always working nights; Ike was the kind that stayed in one place. In his first job, Kate remembered, he had second trick, and Dessie had written how she went to his station with him every night until young Karl was born. And ever since then Ike had worked days.

Martha had gone to teach in a small Mormon settlement in Mexico. She had married a Mormon boy, a son in one of those huge polygamous families, and had remained there; she wrote how she had all her housework done by Indians for practically nothing. Her letters frightened Kate, with their provincial, settled tone. She had no desire, somehow, to go down for a visit.

Dessie rose presently, in that puzzling and distressed restlessness, and said, "I'll call the girls in. It's getting late."

"Oh, not yet. Not just yet!" Kate s voice burst out like a child's, and she noticed this and deliberately deepened it to calmness and to age. "It's so lovely tonight, Dessie."

"And summer, of course, no school tomorrow." Dessie sat down again, but she was looking toward the street. "They can sleep all morning if they need to, I guess. Maybe it'll be good if they do, tomorrow, so you'll get to sleep later yourself. There's no sleeping in this house after Jean's awake, I can tell you."

Their voices were distant and cool between them, as plain and ordinary, Kate thought, as Dessie s sprigged gingham on the step.

Dessie said: "You never know what to expect of Jean. I never worried about young Karl much—he's always been a good, quiet boy, and so talented and bright. You've never seen a boy give less trouble. And he does everything. His teachers say he's not only bright but a wonderful worker too. He's always being an officer in his class, and at Mutual." This, Kate knew, was the Mutual Improvement Association, the Church organization for the young. "Women tell me they've never seen such a polite boy," Dessie went on. "And Lou. She's a regular little lady. So neat. But Jean—"

Kate only listened, but smiled.

"She's so advanced, in a way, but you never know what she'll do," Dessie said. "I actually think she thinks she's in love—if you can imagine—at her age. It's the paper boy, Clay Johnson. She watches for him to go by."

"Maybe Lou had the same notions as early," Kate said, feeling personally defensive in an absurd way. "Maybe she's the kind to keep things in better."

"Maybe." Dessie sighed. "Jean cries easily. And gets awfully excited. Over nothing."

Night swung over from mountaintop to mountaintop in a way Kate remembered. As she remembered the feel of grass and the smell of water running. A mother called and her voice seemed very close, its tones clear and sharp, as if it had come directly over their heads and hung impaled among the cherries.

"Millie Snow's calling her kids in," Dessie said. "I'll let Lou and Jean play one more game."

Just then, loud quarreling began out by the street lamp.

"I kicked it before you hit me twice! I did! Didn't I, kids? You kids saw—"

"They'd say so. They're on your side! I got you twice before you were past there. Maybe you didn't know. Maybe! I hit you twice!"

"You're an old liar, Clay Johnson. You didn't even give me one good hit—you were clear to the fence when I came in—if you d hit me I'd have felt it."

He was shouting defiantly over her voice: "Come in, kids! All caught, all caught!"

"All free! It's our turn out again—all free!" She tried to drown him out.

Was Jean going to cry? Kate hoped not, but the voice was certainly broken and hysterical enough. It wasn't very sporting to quarrel in a game and then cry. It didn't seem like her idea of Jean. Now the whole bunch was quarreling, and Dessie rushed out to the gate and called: "Lou! Jean! Stop that and get in here!"

Other mothers began to call, hearing trouble.

"I don't care!" Jean cried. "1 kicked it before he got me, I did. Lou—you saw me, Lou, didn't you?"

Clay said in a bitter and superior tone: "We shouldn't come over here and play. Come on, you guys." He was shouting to others of the Gang.

"Jean!" cried Dessie at the gate.

They were scattering, disappearing into the neighborhood houses. Doors slammed. Then again Kate heard leaves moving, an owl from somewhere—was it there in the barn? She listened. She would tell the children there must be an owl in the barn. And Dessie, who would remember the owl in their own barn when she was little. Dessie was trying to settle the children, but Jean was still quarreling the quarrel, panting: "He didn't touch me, I tell you. He's an old liar."

"Jean, don't say things like that. What difference does it make? It was just a game."

"I don't care. But he said—If he'd touched me, I'd have known. Wouldn't I? I'd have known." And within, Jean thought: "He'll be mad at me now," and her heart sank and in a little while, having kissed her mother good night, she wept in the dark. "Tomorrow, when he passes, I'll go out and say I'm sorry. Because he touched me. He touched me and I said he didn't but he did. I even told Mother he didn't. He knew he touched me." Now she would never get to play with the Gang, she'd never get asked if she lived to be a hundred. "They asked that girl that visited the Eliason's. I wish I was pretty like that."

She became fascinated, after the light was out, with the way her tears were going hot down either cheek and into the pillow, but as soon as she noticed them they ceased and she could not force them back again. "Well, on the Twenty-fourth he'll see me on that float in the parade, sitting in the sego lily in my new white dress. My hair will be curls, with a ribbon. He'll think, ?Maybe she did kick that can before I touched her. "She would look so good and pretty—in white, even white ribbons, in a white lily—that he would stop believing maybe that she told lies to get her side in free. Yet this was silly and she knew it—yet not—girls who visited and wore pretty clothes—

She slept. Now, the children in, night truly settled down. Dessie stood up, relieved to see Ike's familiar figure coming home along the street.

[note: Chapter 2 ends on page 18; the novel continues for another 323 pages.]