October 23, 2006

•  Dear Collie,
        
         I don’t know how long I will be able to write before I get carsick.   We are winding our way up Tioga Pass up the eastern escarpment of the Sierras when we areat the top of it, we will pass through an area called Tualeme Meadows.  Then, Kevin and I are going to look around because we are going to come back and camp for a few days.  After that we have reservations at Glacier Hotel for a few nights.  Lizzie says when you look out the windows there, you can see nothing but granite.  They traded their reservations at the Awahanee Hotel for one at Glacier Point.  The night before caught up with them.  Mariah asked them how they managed it and Violet says that nobody asks very many questions of women of their age.       I have seen so many pictures.  Lizzie says the main difference between Yosemite and Zions is that one is grey and the other pink.   The trees are different too, and ofcourse we don’t really have waterfalls.   Mariah said we have weeping rock.   It’s like trying to compare thunder and a child banging cymbols.   I’ve cried rivers.  I cried rivers when I found out I was pregnant with the twins.  I would have had an abortion but Evy wouldn’t let me.   She said all I had to do was have them and the rest would work itself out. 
          I feel so odd like I’m in some twilight world between crying and laughing.  Kevin said he would not have to stretch the point too much to say that Dan had raped me.   The emotions I felt afterwords were those belonging to that crime.   My father feels the same way and so does everyone, I think.  Daddy says that people in the world don’t have the same respect for women that we have, so when a woman is given away by her father, or even gets overwrought and not thinking clearly.   She is as much bought and sold.  To kindle desire in a woman is a much more delicate and protracted process.  Afterwords there is a melding of souls.  The woman takes on part of the man’s soul, and the man, part of the woman’s soul.  He is of Dan and Donald’s religion regarding this.
        Kevin does think it is a religion, but that doesn’t mean it’s a false one.   I am more inclined to belief now, for I think it is only now that I have lost my virginity.  Kevin thinks that in monogamy, women give up too much of their souls.  That does not mean that plurality is the only remedy for the problem.   Even less does it mean that one can avoid the problem by marrying a man with more than one wife.   Some women just go through their lives as dishrags, and what the Jungians call a soul is very weak in them. 
         I don’t think that it is just the changed sensation of my body, but I think I can feel him inside me.  Even now, as we are driving, I have a strange sensation of being part of the rocks of this place.  I don’t know if  mother nature left us any better temple than Yosemite unless it is the slickrock back home.  We do lay down parts of our souls there, the most burdensome parts and come away lighter.   
         Mariah says that Peg said that she felt like she was walking on air when she came out of the temple with Sampson.   Neither of us will ever get to know exactly what that is in this life.  Mariah says that the polygamy laws belong to big buildings with stone columns and divided chambers of Congress and Parliament.  They are the work of little bitter women who can fix nothing about their own lives and so take up the writing of letters as they might needlepoint or the working of tapestries.  So, our lives have been constrained.
         Mariah says that God cannot afford to have a weak people because He is unable to protect us.  So we suffer what we must suffer and do our best for own.  Now I really must stop or Kevin will have to stop the car.  I will write to you again before we get back home.  Vie and Lizzie embroidered some undershirts for Kathy on a tip from me.   Kevin and I are going to have her to the hotel tonight and the whole family there for lunch tomorrow.

                              With Love,
                                       
                                      Allie

  P.S.       I’m wondering if you remember Kathy.  She and her folks came down to Dixie to see the fireworks with us since we didn’t have time to get up and Charlie wanted to see Enoch back home and meet his family.   I think she was about ten then.   Lavelle didn’t know that Enoch’s family was polygamist, and almost took the children and left for fear of news of her being seen with us would get back to Cedar City.

          Dear Bubba,
                  Well, the old man, really the kingpin of what I have been doing with the papers here, after all the tomfoolery is over and done, and there has been tomfoolery about it, is dead.   We have been waiting three days for him to wake up, with plenty of food and drink and the like and he has not gotten it sufficiently in his head to return to us.  There has been music, but no funeral since Allie hates them.  The old man himself requested that we have no funeral so Allie would not be peeved.  Scotland Yard was called in at last.  They said it was like a Scot to think of them and the wee bit they’re given for proper fertilizer.  Their spokesman was a Scot himself.
        Kendrick was sleeping in the library with him when he died, though he did not note the time.  It seemed the best room that we had for the wake, and so we had in there.  He had eaten a good meal and taken a fair draught of ale before he died.  I asked him which of the poems Mr. Marshall brought back, he liked the best and he mentioned the one about the jadecutters.  Alan and Herb and Gary and Lawrence and Coe came up to finish off what was left of the goods.  They carried him from the truck and saw him lowered then we all shovelled the rest of the bit of Scotland in.  He had a coffin of yew wood made by one of the Brummet boys who liked to work wood.  He had a Mathesson crest carved and nailed to it with fine nails.  We all thought this a very good poem:

   

  ————————————————

  RECTITUDE

  Set your eye upon the river of ch’i
  slowly winding the sun casts back from the
  disorderly bamboo
  Haphazard green grace are its leaves-
  so many the talents of our lord

  Shaping the jade, cutting,
  filing, grinding, we do not yeild our purpose,
  on guard against those who carve kalumny

  The voice of the heart of our lord
  makes visible our hearts, oh, ours is a prince
  firm and gifted.
  When he has given his word, he continues
  in its way
                           
          I’d sure be pleased to see you if you come out this way,
                                  Dan
                                    

  Dear Mama and Rachie,
            
           Our dear Mariah has passed beyond the veil.  Lizzie thinks it was to stick up for Donald.  He certainly has been a good friend to us for many, many years and deserves a better lawyer than some would give him.  Vie and Lizzie have taken her down to Reno, packed in dry ice.  The Yosemite doctor signed the death certificate and wrote a very good letter so they would not hold her over too long.  Then they will go with her by train out east to Provo.  Willie and Josie want to have the funeral there.  Kevin would have been a good son to her and would want it remembered that he had done it.  Mariah was both aunt and mother to him and he loved her.  Now he thinks it just as well that she be remembered as Sampson’s wife.  I will be remembered as Peg and Lymon’s son.  Only the old now remember that Peg was Sampson’s first wife or that Emily was Sampson’s daughter. 
          Lizzie does not know quite what to do.  She wants to go to the funeral, but also wants to spend some time with the Yard of Scotland, her Donald being so newly gone.  If it were Kendrick, she would already be home having thrown herself on his grave and sobbing.  This is not her first husband and we are not in Morrocco where people are more at liberty to display their feelings.
              The swelling had not gone down on her leg as much as was advertised.  Either that or it had grown during our westward trip.  I thought so and had called Willie about it.  Willie had called Vi, not wanting to disturb Lizzie.  Vi decided to tell Donald who was almost too far in drink to know what she was saying.  That is why he took the pineapple juice in the morning, hoping to survive until Lizzie returned.  He had had three heart attacks before he had decided on the old Scotch remedy for the negligence of the angel of death.  Kenny did his best afterwords, but Donald just didn’t last. 
         Lizzie says she has no real regrets.  Donald admired Dans’ friends tremendously and thought they would be as important to poetry as the Hume/Pound/Elliot circle was in London.  I think he will be happy to have it remembered that he was put into the ground by them with Mavis, Kenny, Angelina, Emily, Sister Brummet, Fatima, and their prodgeny no one will have remembered it to be a small funeral.  They had up the pipes from the city and the old Scotts quaker to sing in his old, quavery voice.  He had too much to do with the clearances for my taste, but Donald said that he ought not to forget who he himself was.
        Mariah died at Glacier Point Hotel.  Mama, it is second only to heaven to lie in a bed there.  Mariah wanted to go to see them push the fire off the edge.  They have a firefall every night at Yosemite which looks like a beautiful waterfall of glowing orange with the stars all bright around it.  It must have joggled a clot loose that went to her lungs in the night.  We will miss her.  But she might have died in the car on the way home or in some tawdry little hospital with Vi and Lizzie arguing with the doctor about what should be done.  This way she went from one heaven into another.  I do not doubt that Donald will be the better for her promptness in following him.
          I know that there are some who will think Donald wrong for the way that he lived his life.  He saw only the horrors of the clearances and the wars.  If any new idea emerged, he hoped that it would bring a better world than the old one.  He was very dissappointed when the war started in Vietnam.  Kevin said that it will produce divisions among the Chinese which he hoped were beginning to heal.  He does not believe there will ever be two Chinas, but only war until they are integrated into a peaceful whole with nothing of a Pax Romana about it.
          Kevin has wrangled us a few more days in the Glacier Hotel by combining our reservations with Lizzie’s.  I have been crying a great deal.  I feel that Mariah took a piece of me with her.  We were so much alike, but because of the rheumatism, I never got to be the part of me that she was.  She had so many years of it that her love was everything to me.
             Kevin takes advantage of me when I cry which is very much to my good.  I am very much in a better spirit when we are through with the sort of thing that married people do.  One of our neighbors who became friends with Lizzie , Vi, and Mariah thought it wrong enough that she spoke about it in the corridor.  She offered to speak to Kevin if I felt that I could not.  I said that I felt very much comforted by my husbands’ attentions, but would try to be more discreet.  She said that it was not that sort of thing at all and that people never pay any mind to such things unless the circumstances are unusual and the people well known to them.  Please write me soon.  I will hope to find a letter when I get home.  We are going to Willets.  I will work on my house.  You must come soon and take the room that I was putting in for Mariah.  Kevin has an obligation to the Brummets.

                            With all my love,
                                        your daughter Allie

   
    Chapter

           Blaine took the monorail  into Philly and a taxi from Penn Station to a west side address.  He had logged in the visit with his sister, who was married to a Brummet, as a hunt for one of the Brummet boys, Kevin’s favourite.  It was he who had carved the ancient Mathesson crest when the old bohemian had died in California in 1968.  It looked well against the black yew wood carved in California madrone. 
        Cory was not thought to be cut out to be a rancher and had gone to globetrotting with his father in that signal year.  Mariah Sutherland had followed her old friend, the Mathesson, by only a week.  That was to stick up for him at the bar of justice, some still said.  For it would be mercy the old reprobate would be wanting. 
          
         Cory had helped his father and his Aunt Collie, with some poets Kevin Mathesson had gotten for the price of paying their fares to Europe, pack up the London house and put it up for auction.  Cory Brummet was old, but living, praise God, as was Blaine himself.  He had gotten in the habit of tinkering in his own DNA, but it was more often said that storks have a special relationship with the angel of death as they must work so carefully with the ministering angels that arrange the bonding of spirit and body into human soul. 
          The old man met him at the door with his still pretty eighty-year old wife standing a little bit behind him.  His sole and singular wife had been an alto with the Boston camerata and had followed her around, carving whatever wood he found to be local.  “His whittling”, he called it.  He had had one child , a son.  Cory had also become pregnant that summer.  Cory had dubbed the baby ‘the freak of nature’ and carried the baby on his shoulders the summer he met Ezra Pound and the poets had chanted Buddhist mantras to him while beating old Chinese drums.  With Cory and his wife was his wife’s daughter, conceived by the stork in one of his famous test tubes.  The baby was the legal daughter of her father who had kept her in Eskdale in the heavenly Snake Valley to study music when his wife went on tour.  In time she met Cory and he confessed that he was more inclined to the affections of a local woman whose husband had died of cancer.  She lived  with her parents and a divorced daughter who had four children.  They had rebuilt the block after the big shake, joining several of the old townhouses into one narrow building.  The interior of the block they had left the same, but had removed the old fences.   Cory thought that the new epoxy putty gave the buildings an unnatural look but the old trees and flowerbeds and the paths running along between them were lovely. 
        It was a fall morning with the snap of apples in the air, Blaine’s favourite time to be east.  Cory’s oldest grandaughter had had a child die of leukemia and had never had any others.  She thought that she would like to have a clone of her father.  She had received Blaine’s lecture on the unneccessary nature of cloning and the delusionary nature that the child would bare any precise resemblance to the original beyond a crude physical one.  The woman said that  her reasons were personal and sentimental.  Since Blaine could do it, he really saw no reason not to.  He did not approve of cloning if he felt that unreasonable expectations would be placed on the child.  It was his work to clone bodies, not souls.  If she wanted someone to carve Mathesson crests for coffins after her father died, that  might be a practical one.  His father made lovely walnut coffins with red crests for Mathessons and other sentimental Scots.   

          Evy and I plan to come to see Mother after Allie is back and well settled in for the winter.  She is building herself a house where the twins will both have rooms.  That will mean that Evy and I will have more time on our own.  Lizzy very much wants to continue on the work on the papers as do Allie and Evy.  Lizzy was about the Pound-Hulme circle and was particularly fond of Hilda Doolittle.  She was far less deeply involved than Donald and is more likely to remember dresses that bloomed for a day like flowers then wilted, pregnancies and romances, not uncommonly in that order than she is to remember anything of the serious writing of men who afterward went to war and died.
        I think there is much to be done with the writing of the women who were in Allied countries at that time.  Lizzie wishes I would bother myself with this and perhaps I shall.
        Without Donald, I have lost heart for the Marshall papers.  Kevin says he will try to revive it when he has time.  I know of few men who watched the Asian war come on with the clarity of mind of Mr. Marshall.  Once it was well under steam he watched it progress with a grief and sorrow.  He felt that he had worked with a will for his span of days and was more interested in the bees in the garden and the young minds in his family than even the most momentous affairs of state.  I very much miss Enoch.  I wish we could do away with death and birth, both of them for they are a terrible bother.  Weddings are a bother too if you do not feel a like distaste.  You have not had a year like ours.  I envy you in your unencumbered state and do not really know why I am not in it with you.  I ought to have taken up condoms the first time you pilferred some from the apothecary.  I suppose that has made the difference. 
                  

                                      Dan

  Dear Mother,
         Ally and Evy, the golddust twins, wish to invite you to visit next August. They are doing this because I wish to invite you to visit in July. It took Evy three days to convey to me the complete impossibility of a July visit. She is leaving in April for the April conference in Salt Lake and be back in August. This is my devoted wife.
      She is a leaving in April so that she will be short of having the baby in Heaver City, Utah with her friend, Dr. Wilhemina and her granny friend Josie in attendance. Jolsie taught elementary school and moonlighted as a mid wife for women with the opdd disposition of marrying only one man together. They actually plan these births, Mother, so that the babies will come together. Then one of the women can pass them off as twins. My twins are quietly suspected to be the children of someone else, because, well, that is so very common you see.
      You do see, don’t you Mother, my Evy may or may not be back in August for her family does not think me good enough for her and have plenty of more amiable men to whom to attach her if Dr. Willy delievers the baby, then, well, I do not know whether I could afford to take off enough time to go to Utah and get my baby back.
      Ally assures that nothing of the kind will occur. That Evy will be back with the baby in August to visit with you whether see continues our marriage or not. Evy is not speaking with because of the business of me wanting her to be in California  in July. There is a time of a reunion that begins with the 4th when people parade their babies down the street to show off how many they have. They put them is cute little floats mounted on little red wagons and let them ride their bicycles and tricycles down the street. I’m afraid the federal legacy in Utah has resulted in an undersized 4th of July celebration.
      On the 24th of July all the Mormon wards get together and get a real fancy parade with twisted crepe paper flowers and covered wagons, even some hand carts that have been maintained by their original owners progeneters because no one wants to miss that. Everyone stays. Even if the men have to go back to work, the women and children stay. Evy says that she has given in and given in and given in to me until if she gives much more there won’t be much of her left to give in and she will get out instead. It is like one of those old fairy tales: I have three more wishes and I need to take care with them.
      I really think Ally likes me better than Evy now that she is married. We agree it is because she did not try to marry me. Evy tries to do the best thing for everyone all the time and has bitten off more than she can chew. I love Evy. Perhaps I will be some day I will be a man more solicitious to his wifes desires. I will never understand Mormons. If I ever thought I was cut out to be the President of Utah and bring them all in line, it was the arrogance of youth. I have repented this.
      Kevin says the mark of a good general is that he only gives orders that his troops with follow, and hence in the more able to cut a fine figure with his troops marching behind him. Kevin thinks it is the mark of a good husband and I wish Evy had married him. Perhaps she shall. Since there seems to be no end to his money they need not be any end to his wives, I suppose.
      I do not know what religion kevin is and he says he does not know either. He tries to be to evey end no religion and to be and do only what seems to be rational and right to him. His mother is the second wife if a man with four wives, now wandering in the third heaven with his first two.
         If I take another one when Evy has left me, which I think she will, this year or another, I will let Ally pick her out. Ally says I must do, for men are no geed at this sort of thing and I would only get myself in another muddle.
      Do please come in August. You will adore Lizzie and Vi. If you spent the summer seeing the west with them they would not be disappointed. They might even be able to arrange and earlier visit with their grandchildren and their mothers. You could send home postcards from color country. They are both good sweet women. If I were one of their people I think I would know how to love them, but I am not.

                          Your son,
                          Dan

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