October 23, 2006

  • W.PI,BBB4. 7.SIN.EATER

        Dear Collie,

        We found the letter from Evy waiting for us at the inn. It appears that Dan is to inflict his likeness upon another of Adam's posterity. The letter was Angelina  called this morning for Allie to confirm that the rabbit died. I shall have to help bring the poor child up. I fear a debt to humanity in providing the man an oppurtunity to reproduce. What a silly girl I was to try to go around the back of the barn for what was to come to me in time. I have had enough of blithesome carnality this week, and shall have enough of it for the next two. Kevyn does not take quite the toll on my body that Dan thought obligatory. Dan said some very unkind things to me about it and so upset me that men offered me an abortion just so I could avoid the man for life.

    The truth is that once they were conceived I found motherhood appealing. The bishop said that because of Dan's behavior in proceeding without my consent the church had minimal interest in my decision.

    Dan has a Catholic notion of consent. The bishop did not feel that laying down on a couch with a man, or even dressing down to a slio, constituted consent to full intercourse, if I had
    asked him to stop.  Strange that an English teacher could not define the word no.

     I really tsupposed the  man quite kind. I did so at first. However, he knows that we carry the scent of poligamy in our family and asked me some unreasonable questions . I told him that some of our old people lived their lives in the principle respectably.

    That was when I began to cry, thinking of Mama and Moe and Rachie, dear Moriah, Willie, Josie, and Uncle Raymond most of all; Patch and her sister. Some of these are scarcely very old. Did I have sympathies? Was my love for them beyond sense and reason? May I always love my own beyond sense and reason. I was at the time a spinster.

    He raised a spirit of rebellion in me that has born sweet fruit with time in my rememberance of my love for Kevin.

    The closest semblence I have seen with Kevyn to being in the saddle with Dan was our equestrian adventure of yesterday. Mariah wanted to go riding . All we could do was kiss her on the forehead and ask young Richard, one of the sons of the house, to answer her bell and take her lunch to her room.

    She has been paying him for reqests on the piano.He can work out just about anything that she can sing to him twice in less than a quarter of an hdur,and his repitoire is allready quite broad.Unfortnatly the lad beleives he can base his career on the old chesnuts.And unfortunatly the world created only one Bing Crosby  for a reason,Kevin asked him if he had ever heard of A Train. The most he could offer in that genre was a bit of ragtime. Kevin sat down and played it for him. His mother heard it and offered us our rooms free in return for a few hours of piano lessons a day. Kevin told her that she might find somebody to jump at the offer, but that the money wasn't enough to him that he was likely to return for that reason. He said he would work with the boy while he was there, quite gladly.

    Richard's mother told Kevin that the boy plays wildman music, when he thinks the house empty, bringing sounds out of the box of the piano that one might expect to hear issuing from beneath the crumbling and moss eaten logs of a swedish bog.They can hear him from the dock. When he hears them on the stairs he stops.
        Kevin gave Mariah the assignment of coaxing a little of it out of him whenever we are all away.We have three rooms and pretty much fill up the place.I would love to sleep all night with Kevin,all wound around one another without pain, as other married couples do. Kevin says some other destiny has been carved out for us. Perhaps I would never had left the ranch if I hadn't lost my strength and muscles gotten so sore.
        As for my dear Evy's happier fate in this regard, at least. I am going to try to never say poor Evy ever again. It is true that if I had not gone up north she would certainly not have ever met Dan. She stopped of at cousin Junes and attacked him repeatedly with her fists in fun. I remember him asking me why we allow our children to regard adults as punching bags. He said that where he comes from it is more often the other way around and no one thinks of them. I told him that I had never thought about it. Dan so ofter asked me about things that I had never thought about before that I found him interesting. He did not paint an appealing picture of the outside world. I was the sort of mare that jumps the fence when she can. When Harlem got the ranch I was off and gone.

        Yes Kevin did talk me into going riding yesterday. It was so good to be back in the saddle again that we made Richard play the song when we got back. He has most of Will Rogers and Dale Evans commited to memory. Kevin and I were much the worse for wear. Kevin has a few vials of morphine in his first aid kit, for fear of a lonely accident. He does get quite sleepy on the road from Salt Lake to Elko. We each required a shot when we came back from our ride.
        Lord Jefferies believed that Kevyn got rhumetism from his mother, Peg, while at breast or at some other time. She lost her milk for a time when he was still wanting it due to a flare of her trouble. When she recovered and then took both Kevin and Angelina to breast. Emily had to be weaned too when Peg got sick and did not like it. However he got it we are the odd couple. It is curious that the atomic testing brings it on. Nan says the radiation sterilizes the immunities.
        I loved the ride. Lizzy did not keep her own horses, except for breeding. Circulating English horses being as common as circulating English library books. I wonder how you will find it there now.
        Moriah has tolerated the trip well. She has gone into a kind of focused withdrawal one somtimes sees in the very old. We will  have to give her her airplane ride when we get home. Those who lie in the Lilingford Kirkyard will come to pull her off to some merryment, I fear, ere long.

    Love Allie

        
                  Dearest Kenny ;

         Itrust that you have cajoled uncle donald out of the old  scotts' remedy for the slowness  of the work of the least competentand most gruesome of the angelic  hoard, meaning that, ofcourse of death.  I will inquire as to his mortality, briefly, when I drop Allie and Ma off at the house.  I say briefly because I know how these things go.I will say that I can stay but a few hours and then have to draw the line at a fortnight.

           There has been a development in Dans plan that Collie and I show the Marshall Letters to the confucion mistress and hopefully to her father who was so long  in  our care at St. Elizabeth's Chestnut Ward.  The trouble is that someone continually made too much of my having know him when I was a lad.
         I believe the only one he remembered was Lizzy. He regarded her as a misplaced cowgirl. She wrote him during the first war as she did Lyman and Jeff, feeling that news sent to them would receive the broadest circulation and plaints the surer remedy.I would certainly like to retreive some of these letters. All I have seen of Lizzy's wartime penmanship has been that scrawled on abbreviated requisitions for green soap and linens from family funds..
           I know that she wrote numerous letters to American papers to publicize the need for nurses behind the lines.  That there were American nurses already endangered, abbreviated the debate whether American girls were stout enough to face such dangers and for that their brothers ought not to join them.  That's a fact.  Jeff did not like to send Lizzy and Samson away, but felt that, it being his campaign ,  he could not exempt anyone known to be one of his household.

    I will mail this from the Ahwanee Hotel when we arrive.  Mother wanted to see some waterfalls before her tardy master takes her home she and Donald seem to be more inclined to play tag with death Ithan to maintain any serious will in that direction.  If he really wants them I fear he will have to ring for one of the higher-ups.
        When I beat Dan at chess the last time, he said that he was more interested in whether I remembered Ezra than whether Ezra remembered me. Morman children regarding men as playground equipment .  He told me once that he thought us rather aggregious. specimens of western Americana.   I have thought that some of his reputation for eccentricity may have come from his removal from the wild society of his age-mates. at just the wrong age.  They would have simmered down together if he had remained in Halily.  Ezra just stayed Ezra.  Idon't think even Hitler cowed him much.  Disease inflicts a tortuous attrition. The shock of never being allowed to live at his ease on the American mainland did its' work.
           The trouble is, now that he thinks someone is coming  he is likely to become peevish if we do not arrive soon.   He is one of our trickiest battle fatigue cases.  The abduction from his daughters' home in the Alps and his being called on the carpet by Hitler ' did not help him nor did the confinement in the guerilla  cage at Pisa .  And that bloody dust storm that no one would credit for the subsequent fever and delirium.  Ofcourse it seemed to Ezra that his world caved in on him.  It had.  On the other hand , they had a tent city of insubordinate soldiers.  The most common insubordination was either falling out of formation, or being incapable of following orders.  I think it would have seemed a bizarre farce to any physician with experience in a North African practice.  It was a few months before medical order was restored.  By then, poor Ezra had had his case elaborately done up.  This was why Carlos Williams was always for a treason trial.  The man had gotten a bloody bug out of the dust which was little better than dried excrement.  I think what Dr. Williams was after was a definition of treason, of degrees of treason, of the role of duress, and of the role of types of duress.  A speedy trial could have had a clarifying effect on Nurembourg.  A Mormon officer who was the court reporter at Nurembourg, was one of Rennys' cousins.  He copied out transcripts of the trial after hours and was very disturbed by it.  He did not feel that she should have been hung and had questions about the other propagandists hung there.  The business required the type of time that we would have had in America with Ezra to any physician not a close boy hood friend and not leaving him physically ill  yet would have seemed too great a burden to place on a man of his stature.  Mr. Marshall thought him guilty but not unusually guilty.  He thought his mother and her circle guilty of an unusual form of mass homicide and worse to his last day.  He hoped to have a chance to tell her so.
        I do remember Ezra from when I was a boy.                      
    At our house we called Ezra King Ez. I thought it a token of his station that he was allowed to keep his cane and wear his hat indoors. This made him tower over Lymie and Uncle Donald. Dan will have noticed that Donald has in his collection, poems not written in his hand. Lymie did not want the notice that his poems would have received so Donald was assigned credit for all of them.
    This seamed a matter of great consequence to me as a young boy, like cheating at lessons. I do not think that King Ez ecer slowed down enough to want to make comment. Perhaps he thought that all the poems where written by Lymie. Samson thought that it kept them writing too much alike and would have preferred them to diverge in their styles and topics more. Perhaps in your digging you will find such poems, or I will find them in the old house. The library has been sealed off for some time.
    I have engaged a few of Dans friends to help me get the old place ready for auction. Collie will be fine company as always, but I wish that you or Emily or Angelina could be there with me. Doctors of my sort are not supposed to cry, but I'm sure I will.
    Ask them to write down any questions he has for King Ez and I will be sure to ask them.
    There have been some very unsuccessful visits with him. The most remarked being that of Yates. I really think that he just caught Ez when he was very tired and asked far too much of him, thus raising his ire and putting him in a fit of pique. The best way is to take a room near by and wait for his energy to rise. As with Donald this sometimes comes at night, so I have written Mary that I will plan to work with her and let Ez participate as he is able.
    I do not know what to think of the Mussolini business. I think that Ezra belonged in China and would have liked to have seen him in the base area in the North.There usually was fifty percent and there were no Jews to rail against. He might have kept to the court of the emperor being kept as innocent of attrocities as he was in Italy. Perhaps there he would have been too close to the troops and been beheaded for what he would not say.
    I'm rather glad that he did not kill himself during the war. I think he thought of it and tried other means of escape. He wrote some pretty vile letters before the war but there is quite a difference between this and speaking over the radio and I know that Ezra knew this.
    I have liked spending time with him at the hospital and have done what I have been able to  arrange my work so that I could keep an eye on him and keep his visitors from being frightened away.
    Ally wants to stop and stretch so I will drop this in the next mailbox we pass. Do give my love to Donald and I hope that he will hold on until we arrive. Unfortunately the old scotch remedy if followed with consistency is likely to succeed. If it has given him a bit of relief I am glad. I am of Sophie's opinion with regard to the giving of too much morphine. He is very partial to pineapple and the specimens that make it up to Willetts are a sorry lot. Tell Donald that I will bring him a who;le case of fresh ones and if anyone else is coming up you might get them to bring some too. They are nice with coconut. Tell my girls to can some for him for next winter, with love, Kevin

    Dear Rachel
         Kevy is driving for a little while so I thought I would write.The wedding was pretty plain pudding.Everyone was pleased exept the ones who bristked.That number one and number two were not there.Tell mamma she did not miss much.I have my dislike of formal occasions from her.My friend Darla was pleased.It was rash of me to promise she could be my bridesmaid.I would never have thought to follow in the family tradition.They would have made us wait until winter if Darla would not have been there than too.
            Dan would not let Evy come;we fought about it until the last plane she could have gotten on was in the air.Kevin said that Dan could be his best man and if he were afraid of being recognized we"d buy him a real stage mustache.I said this way I was going to walk into the Trib buildind with a sign saying Sgt. Dan hughes would have come to my wedding but he was chickenshit--Miss A of abercrombie and Fitch.One of the kids heard me and made the sign.Then they had to earn bus money to take it downtown.Then they had to write it over because they hadn't said the former.Then it got too dark.I don"t know whether it got there or not.
            The next day was like trying to ride herd on astampede-exept you dont you don't eat white cake at a stampede.And there is no brumite cousin having to ladle out punch since it is mostly brumit kids who want to come back for thirds after being told that water is just as good for you.  Who but a Brumit could tell them apart.
            How much did you know about what Dad was doing?  I have been wondering since Kevin has been telling us about it.  Mariah is quite shocked.  Dad said he had to help Dr. Fletcher out or it would be said the only way to get to be his secretary was to sleep with him.  Dad was such a sorry rangey looking cuss that if you'd known he was going to turn out to look that bad,you might not have either.
    Ebesneezer came to the wedding and was over- sweet about everything.  He came mostly hoping to conclude a bet with his college roommate.He wouldn"t beleive that Ebesneezer had a Jewish dad whose parents were polygamists.  So the wedding looked like he had payed a bunch of people to say they were polygamist and they weren't coming through.  How does one prove it?   His roomy is quite rich and if Eb  loses,  he will never be able to pay up.   They got their student deferrments easy as pie.  Eb is glad that his brother is in Mexico with you.
          What Kevin says is that Dr. Fletcher was trying to develop a philosophy of psychiatry to make it more like anthropology.  I remember something about Professor Berkeley kicking a rock to prove that the rock was real.  Dr. Fletcher said that all that it proved was that he experienced pain when he kicked the rock.  I had come in with a badly stubbed toe at Albyon.  I asked him if it proved anything that my toe was turning blue.  He said that proved that something in my body knew that I had stubbed my toe.  If it was my brain, then all my toe knew was that my brain believed that I had stubbed my toe when I thought I had.  I asked him if there was any way to lie to my toe. 
           He said that there was, but that he didn't know what it was.  He said his toe turned blue when he stubbed it too, but that people in the Pacific could walk on hot coals and not get burned, presumably by lying to their toes or their brains or both or by doing something else. 
              I asked him if he believed in miracles.  He said 'probably' but that he doubted firewalking was a miracle.  He also doubted that other things that he had seen were---like old crippled up ladies dancing like young girls when in an intense state of spiritual passion.  They weren't miracles because it almost always happened that way when they tried to make it happen that way. 
           I said that even Jesus couldn't heal everybody.  He almost got thrown over the wall of a city because he tried to heal somebody and couldn't.  Dr. Fletcher said that was quite a common practice in the old world and even in China, he said that it kept the number of doctors down to the ones who could tell their patients the truth. 
          I said that now it's the patients that get punished like the Hiroshima doctor Nan made me see in the city.  She told Nan a lot that was interesting but she made me feel like a worm.  Dr. Fletcher said that was typical.  He said the only answer was to marry a psychiatrist.  Then all my doctors would figure that everything possible was being done.  Kevin thinks that is very funny.  I told him that I married him because he beat Dan at chess.  Dan thinks that now everything possible will be done for me.  It all has something to do with being humped on like a mare which the mares don't always like either.  I like horses. 
           Kevin says that it is all very muddled up and that Fletcher was trying to help him to get it unmuddled by trying to figure out what the brain had to say to itself.  They used  drugs for this.  I asked him how that helped to get things unmuddled.  He said that it helped him prove that people who were delirious had something physically wrong with them.  Everybody knew this before penicillan.  Then they could not forget it fast enough.  Penicillan convinced some people because it made some delirious people better.  That made it worse for the people that it didn't make better.
          I hate doctors and Kevin knows it.  He says we don't have to talk about it if I don't want to.  He never talks about it with Sister Brummet.  All she wants to talk about are the accounts for the ranch and getting the checks written out for her folks in Short Creek.  Sometimes they fight over her always wanting to look so poor and corny.  She says it makes more money to send home.  It's how she grew up and she is used to it.  The problem is that I always want to talk about it.  Kevin is going to put some money on Harlan's ranch for my share of the work.  Otherwise Raymond  will try to talk him into marrying Ellie so he can put the money on the ranch and call it Ellie's share.  Kevin says he wouldn't mind marrying Ellie, but thinks that Ellie likes being on her own just fine, or at least pretending to be and he thinks that Raymond loves Ellie more than he ever would.  That is all a joke.  I have never heard Uncle Raymond and Ellie argue even once in my whole life.  Rachie said that she had never heard them argue before I was born.  Mama says that she married Raymond because Enoch thought she would if he didn't come back.  Mama had too much fire in her when she was young to just go on not being married.  She wanted the legal papers to go to Patch because she loved Patch and nobody was gong to bother her about Raymond at her age.
          We just pulled into the motel in Laverkin and  I can go back and unstrap Maudie.  We had a little to do to keep her from sliding when we came down out of the Sierras but we got our trusty rope and jerry rigged something. We are going to take a loaner car out to Mono Lake tomorrow so that I can see the seagulls and Tufa.  Kevin is going to hire a real mechanic to put in safety straps.  There is really pretty country around here which we will get to see if we have to wait for them to come in the mail. I don't mind, what do people do on honeymoons anyway?
            Mariah says that very old people pretty much do the same thing wherever they are too. So we are pretty much a matched set. She does like to get out, but then she has to sleep it off.
     Sliding down makes Moes' legs weak.  Write soon and let me know how you really are and my brother and sister too.      
          

                                       Allie

    Dear Mama,

           Please read Rachie's letter so I don't have to write it over again and I'll start here where I left off. 

    Kevin called up to the hotel to tell them that we weren't going to be using our rooms for a week and that they might as well rent them out until we get there. They said that the remainder of our party had arrived and had taken one of the rooms. He said there must be some mistake and the lady at the desk said that one of our party had just gone in to dinner and she could easily tell her that he was on the phone.
            It was Violet who Kevin had not seen since he was a young man home from school. She had to remind him that he knew her at all. This did not quite explain how she managed to get our hotel reservations. She said that there was no limit what an old lady might think of if she had a mind and it certainly was an expensive room. She had never slept in such a bed in her life. Lizzie had to rescue him by taking the phone. I don't know whether they intend to crash our party or only thought to see Mariah. Lizzie is a little worried about her leg and wants to check her clotting time. Kendrich gave her instructions. There is also a doctor at the park if she needs him.
            Lizzie said that Donald eventually passed out from the remedy. He wrote down the last song that Donald sang before he passed out. I know the song. The last verse is:

    ' And the Laird has a smile for the makers of graves
    For the builders of empires and the keepers of slaves
    For he kept his great home losing nothing but pride
    Though his kinsmen lay huddled along the shoreside.

    They were fine words for the last words of a Scot of our Matesons parentage though he was raised in a cukoos nest. The trouble is that there were brumments about. In the night they mixed some of the yard of Scotland with some white paint and painted the ceiling having to cover Donald with a sheet to keep from splattering him. He thought it so funny when he did wake up that he consented to take a little pineapple juice with his whiskey, then a little apple juice in the pineapple juice and then a little more pineapple juice. He finally had to admit that the Scotch remedy failed entirely as it sometimes does unless actually persued on Scotch soil and the very Northern part of it. Seeing that her dearest was no longer in need of her organizational skills in getting the putrid Quaker minister up from  the city and everything and everyone notified that she and Vi decided to come up here. Honeymoons are much more entertaining than funerals except possibly for Scotch ones.
            I suppose that one purpose for the remedy is that it allows time to notify the family but life is good and given time and a bit of luck most people want to drag it out to the last. Maybe if the end were a sensible and comfortable one we'd go on to the next world wanting to do nothing but complain about how rotten it had been. Mariah has surprised herself in how much she has wanted to hold on to hers. No one payed her much mind in Linlingford and it would have been easy to go lay down besid Sampson. No one much notices if old ladies take their meals properly in north country inns.

          What they mined in LaVerkin is wherther city fools breakdown in the desert where nobody goes out there much , Mariah said we were anthing but cities fools . The  woman at the desk believed Mariah but was sceptical about Kevin . There is a family here that keeps a boat out at the lake for bird watchers and biologists. They have two strong boys , so we had them row us out and leave us till after twlight  they use a rowboat because the motor scares the birds.  We told them to come back when the moon was well up.
         
           Mama you never saw such a thing in your life. We could have bought a bird book but Kevin never likes to spend a penny .His mother seemed like that , By Utha standards, she was extravagant. Just at sunset the birds spiralled up so that it looked like that wonderful picture in the surillious pip where he is flying up and all of the birds ahead of him to the moon.  It was a beautiful full moon. 

     

           When the boys came to get us, they said that the birds who spiral up are phalaropes.  I didn't know that we had phalaropes in America.  Kevin said we had seen ours just in time.   Do you remember that book by Alan Paton?  Where the old aunt who nobody thinks knows anything about anybody knows everything about everybody.  The book is called TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE I think.  The nephew has a coloured mistress who is very poor and the police give her a seashell and pay her to put it in the nephew's pocket so that they can arrest him and retreive the shell.  She tries to think where everyone went wrong and remembers how the boy and his father were interested in birds when he was young. 
    They always wanted to see a phalarope but never spent enough time together.
             One of Kendrick's children brought the book home from junior high and they read a chapter after dinner.  The part where the son is arrested made Kendrick cry.  Some of the children wanted to go back to Mexico and the older people to Morrocco.  There isn't much difference between South Africa and Oakland. 
          I hope you will come to Willets and live with us for awhile when you come back from wherever you are going to go before you come home.  You can help me with Mariah when she needs more help, if it goes that way.  Kevin says he doesn't know if they ever build FHA houses that big but I can have my house that way if I like the architecture.  He'd build on to Sister Brummet's house, but she said that it would have to come out of the money that she sends back home.  I don't know what he'd do if he would just send a building crew over.
           I t was Lizzie who made the reservations for Yosemite.  Donald was afraid he would die while she was gone.  Neither Nan nor Kendrick could say that it was just the sort of funny notion that old Scots have from time to time.   The extra room was for Angelina.  Charles and  Lavelle were staying in the housekeeping camp.  Everything got so changed around that we didn't find out what number their reservation was for.
           Lizzie and Vi went and hunted them down and then Kay and Kathy and the twins hiked up to Vernal Falls where they have a real nice view of Half Dome.   The twins took it like little troupers.  Can you imagine hiking a mile and a half where every step is up past your knees.  Kathy and Kay had to carry them part of the way, but they did most of it themselves.
           Kathy loved the hike, but the decision to go occurred after she had put a white shirt on and you get quite wet hiking up to the falls.  Kathy will get a t-shirt or brassiere when Lavelle is ready and not one day before.  She is like the woman who cannot accept that they are grandmothers and then reject the children in order to feel younger.  Lavelle is not ready to be the mother of a young woman. 
             I know all of this because Vi and Lizzie drove down early this morning so they could go out on the boat and see the birds.  They are going to figure a way to take Mariah out tomorrow.  We are thinking about rigging the bed and awning for her.  She says that if we had a river she could go to Samson as the Lady of Shalot went to sea.  Kevin and I are going up tp the hotel for a week starting the day after, and Lizzie and Vi will stay with Mariah if she's not up to the ride or if they don't like the way that her blood is.  It's pretty much like home down here.  It would be fun to live here but there is work to do at home.
    I need to help Dan with the papers.
             I really don't 'hate' hate him.  I think Sophie might have had the sight when she thought it best I write him.  She couldn't have seen it all.  One often doesn't.  It is often that way with the sight.  If she did see it all and thought it best, then I hope that I don't live to be one hundred and six.  Such wisdom would be a terrible burden.

                                   with all my love,

                                            Allie