Dearest Friends,

    It is sad news to tell, but the worst news is sometimes best told the most directly.  Allie died this morning, just at dawn.  We had had a few inches of snow - she left a note that it reminded her of home, that she'd like to run up to watch the sun come up.
    We called Nan before the sherrif, Dan next, when she didn't come for breakfast.  It was such a drear feeling to think of our girl out there chilling and probably insensible.  She was so punctual in her returns that we knew something was very wrong.  I was praying for no worse than a broken leg.  It is hard to be old and useless.  She has gotten lost a few times, just got twisted in her directions when out a wandering.  If it had been that, she would have called or radioed in.  The last time that happened, she found a cabin by the smoke and it was an old fellow with a radio hooked to a generator.  He raised some man in Ukiah who called to let us talk to her.  She felt very stupid.
    Luck deserts us when we most need it.  
    Kevyn speculated cynically -- he was so like that when the matter had gone beyond hope that it quite cheered us during the wars --   that it was a virus he had collected in some foreign clime -- Nan thought probably so.  Nan thought exertion may have played some oblique role.  She has felt a cold coming on, or something like a cold.
    Nan did the autopsy, drove quite a few samples to Kenny.  The coroner looked on and said he would not have taken such pains though he blamed Dans' friends and went to a lot of trouble checking for drugs or poison.  Kenny checked for all of that as well so there could be no question of our girl's integrity. That he could suspect a young mother quite peeved me.  Vy, being new to Allie's dread secret, was quite incredulous.  It is not so rare where Allie is from.  There are an awfully lot of rare things that ought to be more rare there.  Uncle Sams' fireclouds look like pretty mushrooms from a distance.  They work subtle wonders on some who see them.  I told Vy that Allie was the tip of the iceberg, however untimely her death.  It seemed usual for them to take the young.  Our army of Pied Pipers. 
    Evy whistled up the Mustang.  Kevyn longs for the boy to wax and took the children home with a Brummet as chauffeur.  Dan was very distraught -- an Irish Blessing on all our hearts-- what is he to do now?  'Teach', I suggested-- and come up to help with our progress on the papers and on our London and war memoirs.  Allie left Evy her house to be held in trust by Kevyn while she is married to Dan.
    I am sorry she never bore Kevyn's child.  She was pregnant.  She did love him so.  It was an old enough baby that Nan slipped it out so we could dress it.  The wee little fairy elf.  I thought to dress it in green for there were, in the song, four little babies dressed in darling green.  This little girl would have been the fourth.  We dressed her in a little white gown, ofcourse as we do all tiny babies.
    I have written instead of called -- feeling sure Allie would not want her mother to break off her schooling for yet another funeral.   Ellie, I have heard you say that your attempts at school were all houses made of cards just waiting for another funeral to open the door with a gust of wind.  I am sure where she is she's already frustrated at being dead, knowing that she had interfered with your school would make it worse for her.
    I don't know what I think of the immortality of the soul, let alone of our own beliefs which Donald thought little more than an amalgum of Celtic folk belief.  I talked to a very religious old missionary once, a spinster who thought she might have known Kenny's native grandmother.  She said that missionaries often lose their faith in the field and go on less burdened without it.  I was moved by ___'s last letter to Allie.  Perhaps having to be Gods' hands, we can no longer see His face.  I don't know that I was ever that good or gentle.  I am thinking of Pearl Buck's mother as I write this.

                With all our love,
                                                                                                                                                                                       
                            Lizzie
 

        From His Wall

Lion, lion on my wall,
 subtle eyes, gentle call
Seek the heat of my cold breast
in my heart the dove at rest

Other lions there may be
not as good and clean as thee
If you hunger, needing meat,
fiercely come and my heart meet

We are born, great and small
into error sometimes fall
gentle mirror on our wall
with your eyes call and call.
           
        Donald Matheson

  Dear Lawrence,

    This is a poem written by my friend Donald, as it would seem.  He said that he so admired a painting of a lion that hung in Yeat's study that W.B. gave it to him (probably for a price).
    Donald said that the poem was really written by Lord Llyman Jeffries, who admired the painting only after Donald brought it home.
    You have, I beleive, respected the quality of some of the deceased Lords' Scotch and Brandy.  There is still quite a lot of wine left if you want a weekend out of town.  I have my own weekend cottage for the moment though if they return , I must vacate.  It appears that I am being divorced.  If I pressed for custody of Allies' twins, I would not be certain to see them again.   Since Evie has relatives on both sides of the Utah/Arizona border.  I don't even know in which state she will sue for divorce.  I doubt that I will even answer.  I loved Allie.  Evie was always sort of an understudy and felt it.  She will have a good living from what she can get out of my wages.  I think if the case were tried in California, she would get more.  Some of her family holds land in common there so there may be no rent.  Only such work as she is able to do now. 
    I wish I could keep her, but I cannot.  You are not tripping.  I struggle to say it one more time in all its' brutal plainness.  Allie has died of a respiratory condition she contracted in college.  Evie has taken the children and gone away in the turquoise Mustang, Allie's Solomonic, very fair Morroccan husband kept in the Brummet shed in the care of the Brummet boys.  They slopped seawater on us at the wedding, if you remember.

        It would be kind of you to come,
                            Dan
                   
    

My Dear Mrs. Matheson,
    Thank you for the letter you sent to tell us of the sorrowful and sudden death of my sister Ally. We have all been weeping. If weeping could bring her back we would weep more. Ellie says that if she could bring her back to life by going to the funeral, she would crawl on her hands and knees there as you often see people doing in the country of Mexico if they want some good thing from God.
    In our country, in Nepal, the Tibetan families do things differently. The body remains still and the soul is undisturbed for three days. Everything is arranged for visiting. If the soul lingers or returns it finds everything agreeably arranged for its visit, loving and peaceful and composed.
    I do not understand the cutting of my sisters body and the contention about it. We take more care not to draw the body back into samsara--the dream that we call life. I know that the man is a scientist and that Ally loved her. If examination of her tissue brought her peace, I would not want her to think my displeasure great.
    My heart poses questions-- did my sister attain the ridge? Did it appear that she had attained her immediate goal? If she wished to see the sun rise it would seem a good thing, if it were her karma to die, to have died in surroundings so likely to refresh the soul. Thank you for the book that you sent from Mr. Marshall's library. Rachel says that if it has not been translated into Spanish it would please her to work with me on it a few pages a night.
    I will meditate for the peace of my sister. We do not believe that a return to Earth is a good fate in Tibet. There are some who return for unfortunate reasons, and some in order to teach. We look to be taught, as you call it, beyond the veil by wiser souls as we hunger for their knowledge here. I will pray some kind and wise master to take Ally’s hand. There have been wise teachers in my family who we think of at these times. It is hard for a mother of young children to die, and I think my sister will be very distressed. I feel distressed that my wise friend Kendrick is so certain that this war forbids that I should return before its end. I have a good young wife and we would be pleased to help with my young cousins. I have written Dan about it. He knows a great deal about the buisiness of students. I will think upon my Ally’s Jesus. If it be her Jesus who comes to comfort her, I know that this will please her much. Always your friend and  at your service.

Khanti Ebeneezer Snow

Dear Mother,

    I know you detest being asked for advice. I thought, however, i should at the least appraise of recent events. I have talked to Evy, who probably is divorcing me and filing for custody of all three children based on Ally's will. Perhaps I am superstitious, but I think Ally quite capable of haunting me if I contest this.
    I had an intriguing call from Kevin, Ally's bereived widower. Evy is staying on the Arizona strip, as they call it, and they still match make there one might, in a contentious mood, say they arrange marriages, but there is never any compultion of which I have ever known.
    The favored match for Evy would certainly be to my advantage were I to welcome it. I am sure Evy is tempted to accept. The widower is offering to marry Evy and absolve me of any future financial responsibility for the children. At the same time, if Evy will agree, I may see them often. It may for awhile be at the price of a drive. Having no one but myself to support, I can certainly spring for a new car. If I will promise not to contest the divorce Evy will move to Elko in order to divorce me sooner and to investigate the future prospects of the marriage. Kevin owns a ranch there.
    Kevin has not met you and thinks to motor up, as he calls it, from NYC. He will probably be in the company of his friend Collie. They were to have a large family once but Collie developed female trouble and lacks the proper equipment. She has devoted her life to literature instead and has written under psuedonyms for the Times and Post, the Globe, and other papers. She is interested in Ezra's views about your Dante book.I really think that you should not dread this visit at all or insist on answers to unnecessary personnal questions. I like these people, they are my friends, and they are certain to have a great deal to do with the prospects of your grandchildren. Kevin asked if he might have your phone number. Unless you call me immediately I will give it to him.

                    Your son,
                    Dan 

    Dearest Dan,
        I went to dinner in the city with Allie's sister Ferrin and her roomate Collie.  I thought you said that Collie had gone to Morrocco and evinced some suprise at her call and invitation.  I asked her if she had just come back on a whim or had returned for some purpose.  She said that they would be glad to discuss that at dinner if their desire to know was sincere and not simply a polite inquiry. 
        There was something in Collie's voice that seemed to call for more than convention.  Bubba's girl had given him a shove.  I called him and told him I knew of a prettier one and asked him if he'd like to drive me down to New York to give me an opinion on whether I am going dotty or not.
        Any moviegoer would know that Ferrin is prettier than the sort of Prattsburg girl likely to go with Bubba at his age.  You were likewise lucky in your Allie, but, rushed it.  You were always the boy to burn your hamburgers on the outside and leave them raw in the middle.  Willie told me about Allie's trouble.  She assured me that there was nothing that could be done without making Allie absolutely miserable.  There was an earthquake that diverted the Mississippi in the last century.  Willie said that that's the sort of thing the rheumatism did to Allie's life.  A quiet suburban housewife would have adjusted with more grace. 
        Well, however pretty, Ferrin has gone the way of so many of her people.  No, she is not going to marry the dashing Kevyn.  If she had wanted to, she might have done so long since.  She is waiting to see whether her cancer comes back.  When I was visiting the canyon country so glorified on the silver screen, I thought that if I heard, " And all they could do was close him up again." I would take to biting my knuckles as I did when I was wondering whether your father was going to propose to me.  They are to take another look at Ferrin in an additional month.  Ferrin thinks that she reported the lump in her breast because she had never found that her native modesty and reserve furthered her life of arranging feathers for girls in nylon bodystockings.  She hoped to save money for her old age.  Now she is hoping to have one.  Collie planned to stay with her.  I think, if all goes well, she might as well go back to Morrocco and take Ferrin's mother with her.  If there is pain at the end, she can smoke kif for it.  I remember from my trip to Morrocco many years ago, that there was a great deal of kif smoked or put in milk and that the custom was not unknown to the Nazarenes, as they call Christians, who winter there like a flock of sun-hungry birds.  There are very many of them unwell. 
        It seems a worthy plan for Evy to go to Kevyn's wild tribe in Enoch with her triplets.  I suppose that a man in Kevyn's profession will know whether it is suitable for Evy to go on trying to take Allie's place in everything.  With her in Elco, Vie and Lizzzie can continue on to Mexico and you will be left there, my dear son, to make sure that none of the family cellulose takes to molding.
        When I called, Lizzie said that you had found old Llyman's Scott's Prestigious Pump and the bottle of whiskey put up the year that Llyman was born.  Lizzie said you had an urge to take down all the books and unscrew the bookcases in order to get at the hidden door.  I am sure you were hoping to find something more interesting than an old man's hope to recover the capacities of his youth.  I think the Ginsberg boy deserves a share for going to visit old Ezra to beat his drum and chant with him.  Mary said it cheered him enough that he was willing to take another shot at the rescuer .  It was always a trial to a man of his energy. 
        There is a great deal of evil being said of the Tibetans, particularly in French.  Collie said that that might make it a good time to look for the French books that you asked about.  She thinks that Enoch would fear a worsening of the situation there.   Artaud started it but the poor man had been tortured so during the was... he hoped that his recantations would gain him freedom.  Instead, they kept on with him until he was dead.  I suppose they succeeded in flushing the remaining Jews out of France.  Gertrude had a great sorrow for him.
        The influence of the Chinese emigre community in France is strong in China.  The French have had such a bitter time over their relaxed morals that they feel a need to overdo when there is anyone else to be criticized.  The more distant victims, the more bitter their rhetoric.  One thinks of the ardance of Mrs. Montague on the subject of the haremes of Araby and of a few other things let the triplets never think that their grandmama is made of such stuff.  I have done this, I thought right, let others do as they may.
        Vi said that she did not think that Allie would like flowers unless they were planted in the ground.  Ferrin agreed and thought my garden might be as good as any for the planting of them.  Collie said they might, at last, get a window box. 

    With the usual salutations,                Mother

 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

   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

Dear Mama,
      We have had such a lovely fall here.  There aren't many trees that color up the way the trees and scrub do back home.  We've had a nice cold snap though, and the planted trees in town are sure nice.
        Dan's mother was sorry to miss you.  Lizzie and Vi tried to talk her into a trip down Mexico way.  I think she is glad to be back on terra firma.  She was interested by us and our ways and particularly fascinated by her visit with Evies' people.  Lizzie took her over to supper with your mother.  She took a semester of anthropology in college and thought it of great use.  I stayed up with Willie and Josie that week.  I do not want her to know about Kevin and we were likely to run into someone who would wish to be the first to congratulate me.  It would only take one.  I did call her at Grandma's to ask her how she was enjoying her visit.  She said that Grandma had fed her an excellent bread omelette with raspberry jam and fresh milk... weedy as all get out if I know our cows.  I have made their acquaintance and I like my milk that way.  She had asked for a supper typical of our region and got one.   Grandma likes maple syrup but she figured Dan's mom probably gets enough of that back home.
      We had a nice Halloween.  Dan was up at Lizzie's.  I took the three littluns and Lizzie and Vi made an orange and black cake.  We dressed Dan's creche up like leprechauns and they were quite endearing.  Evie did not want to see Dan and so sulked up at our house and called it waiting for trick-or-treaters. 
      Dan read a rambling Halloween piece.  Donald read between his first stroke and his second stroke.  The first was after his attempting the old Scots remedy and the second was within the week.  He could not move one hand and it was hard to hear but Kendrick took down his dream anyway.  It was good to read it and feel him among us.  Angelina had not heard it before and wept a little for Donald's mother was also her grandmother and she never as much saw her face.  Kevin asked me to send him a copy and I have just written one out for him.  You will have to see it when you come to see us and stay for a while, Mama.  Evie and I have plenty of room for you here.
        What you and Rachael have been doing with the songs Dad collected in Spain and from the vacqueros sounded interesting.  Dan, in particular, wishes we had copies of more of that here.  We have only the letters Dad sent Aunt Rennie.  I was teaching Marcella how to make pancakes with whipped up egg whites.  That's Dan's favourite way, and I asked her if she knew any songs.  She said they knew lots at home and we each sang bits and pieces of things and tried to match them up.  Tell Rachael she may not stay in Mexico to get folk songs.  I do hope she will come to see us before she goes off to India.  It is far away.
       The war is on the tv every night when we get it.  Dan brought up a big aerial from the city so we could watch.  If communism is so bad I don't know why we have to fight so hard against it.  Maybe Kevin will know when he comes home.  Dan says some of his friends are getting paid by the army to convince people that it is strategic.  I wish Dad were alive and could tell me what it is about.  It isn't that I am stupid or that I don't read the newspapers.  I just don't see why we should try to run other countries when we can barely run our own.
       I love you, Mama.  Rachael says you are having fun and I am glad,
                      
                             Allie

Dear Kevin,
        I miss you so much I could cry and don't want to talk about it.  Annie wrote me such a sweet letter and asked me for Christmas since it is her turn.  She said that she thought I would find it hard to be so generous but that's natural, I being so newly married.  I have sent this to Collie's so it will be nearly Christmas when you get it.  I hope that your visit with Ezra Pound's daughter has been as interesting as you hoped and that Dans' friends got a lot of chanting and drumming done and got to ring their bells in the old gentleman's face. 
      I will fly to Elco or bring Evie or a Brummet to drive if the weather is bad.  Lizzie and Vi can help him with the babies.  I can't drive in ice.  Next Christmas, I want to have with you at Harlan's.

                              Your Allie

P.S.
      Here is what Kendrick wrote down for Donald in the night that was almost his last.  It was summer, of course, but the dream was one of All Souls Eve.

                      Samhain Fragment
        Love is no arbour,
        no deep chestnut shade
        enamoured of what it
        concealed.

        But a bloody tempest,
        a sudden raging flood
        of displaced sand
        from stone that plays
        as it embraces.

       
And whether false or true,
or perilous and peregrine,
deaths' sunken eyes,
        hooded, pale-skulled
        and little peeping
        cherubs teasing about
the corners or the deeper darkness of my evil room,
        excluded,
welcome nothing can stop their
        endless peeping.
indifferent voyeurs
of mind and flesh
       
        And you, old man-
        Yea, old-
        have you plumbed the
        depths of the shade
        you arch over me
        while the leaves
        splatter on the ground
        by Samhaim
        will  they this year       
        That one golden storm that
        brings them down
        I will not even know when
        it is.
        I have no shelter
        but what you extend.

        Those days when the moon
        shines full in the skylight
        and southeast window
        at sunset, a season,
        though mine,
        stripped away.

        And so you offer a certain
        kind of pillow, a shoulder
        muscled as beef, perfumed
        breath, giddy and delicious
        some mom thing
        about keeping kin together
        though we'd be naught in God talk
        but cousins.
          As though we carve our fates.
        As though the cholera might
        not breeze through  everything again
        rendering it more threadbare
        it even now eats through the fabric
        of our promises
        like woolworms nesting and shredding
        death pee-peeing and spitting
        above doors that stay ravaged
        swinging on their hinges as they will do
        once burned the blackened cot
        still screaming with fire
        nothing made anew or brought
        to an end.

        All Souls:  Catechism to a Lost Son

        How many are the seasons,
`        my laddie?
        Four, Minnie.

        How many the worthy
        days of notice?
        Four,or eight as a man
        craves to count them, Minnie.

        How many the tears shed
        by the Christ for Lazarus?
        Fewer than they might have been
        had he not been Christ.
        And what was Lazarus risen
        but a common man again?
        Saved in the flesh, my Minnie,
        to rise at the last trumpet.
   

    It was so long ago that Donald's mother was born that I can't even think.  The saints were being burned out of Missouri and Sutherland, a park for sheep and large white deer.   
       
       
My dear sister,

     My father's wife has told me of your marraige to your dear friend Kevin.  I have thus made you this flute.  It is like the one I have which you so admired.
     I hope the children are very well and hearty.  If they are not, call me at our rooms and I will pray for them.
     The classes here are good, but Rachael or Ellie must come with me to write notes in English or I would know nothing of what was being said.  I am learning Spanish quickly.  When we are not doing university work, no one will speak English to me.  It brings loneliness to my heart, but I know it is neccessary.
    We have not told the school _______'s age and they have not made inquiries.  I think they know she is young.  If she can do the work, they are pleased with her.  I think she will be a good teacher.  Your mother may enter the teacher's college next term.  She wishes to teach in Mexico where she has much family.
    This term she writing out melodies to the songs Enoch or Rachael collected in Spain.  They have the words in the library here, but less often the music.  Sometimes they have different music.
    It is strange music to me.  In Tibet we think of this world as full of shadows of the real world and that we pass into this brighter world of clearer impressions at our deaths.  It was not until the Chinese came that anyone understood grief.  Rachael says that the sinuous mourning of the Spanish and Jewish songs is because there has been so much suffering.  There is beauty and love.  Then the enemy
comes.   Easier to pretend that it is a skeleton on a horse than the immense cruelty of human glory in barbarism.
    My friend Kendrick did me a great kindness when he sent me on to Mexico.  I might have fought the Chinese.  And thought good of what I did.  Our father was a soldier.  I do not understand this war.  In it I would be a phantom.  It seems to me that we go as the Chinese come to Tibet. 
    My opinion of it worsens.  I wonder if I might have the address of my father's friend, Dr. Fletcher.  I would like to know more of it.
    You are in my fondest thoughts, my sister.  Kiss the babies for me and give them this Mexican chocolate.  Tell them it has come from their Uncle _____.  I am sorry that your friends Moriah and Donald  are dead.  It is good to love.  We may still receive impressions from those who are gone but unless they are great souls, it is better for them to attend to the business of higher worlds and greater light where they may be taught.  It is best not to call too much after them if they were much loved.
    Our esteemed Kenyon called last night to make some matters more clear and it seems that we will be able to return for a time before taking leave of our dear families and our friends.
    When I entered the country it was with Rachael and she gave my age to the immigration authorities and owned me as her son.  The official seemed harried and tired - indifferent if perhaps there was a breach of custom committed on his part.
    Our father ought have sworn out some unit as to the time and circumstances of my birth, ie., that I was born to a Tibetan woman while he was missing in action and too ill to return to duty or travel to any duty station.   Because I entered a 9th form course of study at 17 and was studying in San Francisco with boys of military age and was unmarried, black as well.  Kendrick preferred a change of venue.  Kevyn said that as a married student with a child, I might cast away fear and return.
    There is good news, my sister. You are to be the Aunt of a tiny creature, part Mexican Indian and part Tibetan Nepalese, and part Mormon from Utah and American.  We shall return.  My wife is too young to be taken from her family without need.  I am teaching her Tibetan, though I can scarcely do so without failing upon occasion to speak Spanish.  When my Spanish is improved, we will for a time, speak only Tibetan.  Many of our people are no longer in our country.  They need the education to succeed in Nepal and India.  Otherwise, I fear for those of my faith who have hereto for been so terribly used.
    We will go to India or Nepal.  I would speak to you more of this war and what I said of the communists.  There have been many Europeans in Chinese with grand ideas to do one thing or another -- lay waste provinces in order to move in farmers, for instance.  This idea, that food and land should be shared is not the worst of these ideas.  It was not this idea that invaded Tibet -- it was the cruel notion that we should have only the existence of slaves for our own.  The making of slaves from the people is an hideous process.  Dan told me it has before involved the destruction of libraries -- in Alexandria and Mexico.  That, having suffered this, I should the more wish to assist in the invasion of Viet Nam I could not see, even when a professor, on the draft board, attempted to persuade me at length.
    We aided the communists in China against Japan and they fought with rectitude and ferocity.  If they felt obligated to assist a country through which their rail access ran, at Haiphong, and in which they had many expatriots who had so burdened them?  I cannot think they have sought this war.
    Is a militarized China in the interest of India or Nepal - this I doubt.  Kevyn says that if I return to America as a near father, it would be better for me to keep complete silence with regard to the war.
    If I do not return it will be because I fear that I cannot.  I am of my father's kindred and must always be having opinions.  My mother, Rachael, says that she is glad that she is too old to go to this war, as she is glad to have missed the first war.  I have thought that valor must seek its' purpose and she thought it a worthy thought.

            I love you, my dear sister.

                        Khanti Ebenezer Snow

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   
 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 Ellie,

These are the plans as recieved via Kendrick last night. The fellow with the Jeep will perform the wedding. Kendrick and Lorena's mother are getting on the plane on Wednesday. Kendrick wants pictures of the wedding. LOrena's mother will stay, and go to Mexico with Lorena and ____. She will see that they are set up, and try to teach the boys Spanish. Lorena was teaching them Spanish, but everyone was worried about what they were saying. Kendrick needs a break and will run around with me in the truck that wee borrow sometimes. We want to look for other trumple blocks, or the remains thereof.

In the spring-- it is nearly spring, Moriah will fly back to Salt Lake. Allie is going to fly to Salt Lake , so that Willie and Josie don't abscond with her. There is something about taking her skiing in Park City. After they have had thier fun, and Moriah and Ellie are on the plane, Ellie will fly to me in Kansas City. Our most recent plan is to take a tour of what is left of the Riech--train stations,gas chambers, incinerators, the usual sort of cheerfull stuff. Then Rachael will fly on to Ouziel and Benezeer, when Enoch's son and little Lorena meet her there. I am planning a long stay in Morrocco. I do not know when Ellie will plan to fly back.

I do miss Enoch. I am leaving Ferry with the lease on my apartment in New York. She has gotten spectacula reviews in the Las Vegas of the East. It has something to do with the girls coming out with thier backs to the slavering crowd, in what appears to be evening dress, then swinging about, so it appears thatthey are wearing nothing. She had to use stage glue on this one, and delicate little chains accross the front. Next, the girls come in from the oppostite direction, in formal evening dress from the front. They swing about, revealing that they are wearing nothin in the back, except the afforementioned stage glue, and a little fabrick around the edges. The rest has been up to the choreographer, who is said to be brilliant. He must be, because it all sounds sort of silly so far. I'm not sure anyone would want front row seats on this one. They have them done up in silk stockings of some kind. What do I know about any of it, I'm just an old lady. Collie

Dear Collie,

I was glad to hear that Kendrick, Enoch's boy and Lorena's mother all arrived safely. It sounded to me like they had a bit of rough weather. I do not enjoy flying, personally. It is a bother to be in a familly where so many do, and never even really know what your talking about, if you worry. I'm glad you liked the letters we copied out for you. Here are two more.
My Dearest love,

We are in Singapore. I was saddened to fail to find a letter here from you. I suspect our Ruth to be at fault, and not that your affections for me have failed. Ruth is a queer girl, much afflicted with her times as a kind of ague. The esteemed doctors have set it in her mind that her frailties must be laid to someones charge. It is not of course only the doctors, but Polly and Opal and mother and the magazines. She is enraged that it could be suggested that her failures of body could be regarded by you and I as being the fault of her dearly departed angel mother Nan. They are not Nan's fault, or so far as I can see, anyones fault. Why must anyone be at fault? If I had taken upon myself some part of Nan's frailty, which I do not regard as anything more than an inconvienience and obstacle. It could not be from regular and intimate marital congress with my departed dear one.

Ruth has been convinced by the doctors that it is your fault. You, in having once been married to a polygamist with whom she is sure you are in more than common conversation now, are the victim of base and unnatural carnal desire, which causes ancient and feral tumors to arise from your body to afflict the innocent. These are reincarnations of the medical notions of the sixteenth century. I think no better of them. Ruth has belabored me with the notion she regards as obligatory, and I have proved a stupid father indeed for not adopting them as a credo. If I wanted young frail girls, I certainly could have indulged these tastes in Utah , as others did. Complicated and high minded designs for obtaining release of this type, and enjoyment of the both pretty and vulnerable are not lacking in the world. I have met women in my wanderings, whoi were badly lamed and doomed to a life of infection and pain, for fear that they would not otherwise be able to obtain a husband at all.

In such sad condition, are still many of the women of China. Even in the countryside they labor in the fields and on the threshing floor, with feet only fit for a nine year old. If the Brittish had passed laws against it, it was to some measure only so that they might have enjoyment of such helpless creatures themselves.

I have taken to gorging myself. Having reached a level of initiation more suitable to detail. Ordinary men of our class are most often fat. If we attempt our purpose in possesion of too little, it will not appear that we are stopping at monastaries in a random fashion as any traveler might do.
Our caution is not without reason. In 1891, curiously, the time, or very near the time that the federal matter came to it's first resolution in Utah, tens of thousands of Daiosts were murdered by Nanchu mercenaries, having been found out by one means or another.

What are mens thoughts, and what remidiation is there when history proves them a plauge in many ports at once? Was it Victoria, with her base to launch a thousand ships, who led the lofty to such high minded carnage? If there are secrets among men, and thier kindreds, can it be said that any fair face may rule supreme?

There were signs that the worst was coming. It was as always the poor and unluckywho fell under the knife. The rich leave early and establish themselves elsewhere. Mr. Han had a first uncle, a brother to his father, and a third aunt, a sister to his father, who fell with some of thier familly to the Manchus at the end of thier reign. Thus I eat, and try to understand the people among whom I am traveling. They are rightly bereaved. Your friend,
J.M.

It saddens me that Sophie never saw this letter while she was alive. Lizzy wishes she had known of them. Ruth could not have kept them if either had spoken. Kevyn knew. He says that Mr. Marshall said that Ruth had probably burned them. For hers was the kind of spirit that burned the books of Germany in the war. He said this only once. Keeping the letters was a part Ruth played in her morality play. Mr Marshall thought it more likely that Ruth still had the letters and hoped to be asked. Not being asked had setled into her silent bitterness as backdrop.

Kevyn said that Mr. Marshall believed that Ruth had been taught to see herself entirely from the outside. Pshycological improvement could only come from an alteration of the external situation. He thought it true that Ruth's inner life would have been easier without her persuasion that she was diminished as Ruth's unfortunate view of her mothers religion. She was, in her eyes, a tragic heroin, victimized by the unfortunate beliefs of another.

She bore her fathers connections as a stigmata. A kind of scarlet letter. Nan said it was often the first thing Ruth had wanted aquaitences to know about herself. Kevyn had asked her once why anyone need know at all. Both his mothers had been Mormon, and he rarely mentioned it. Ruth seemed to fear that she would be rejected if people found out about the Mormonism after forming an impression about her, or they might not understand why she had so many problems, and like her the less for that. Mr. Marshall thought that she talked to too many doctor for too high a price. They were like this, and hoped to create the world again in thier own image. We had Kevyn over for tomales, and the guessing game about the secret ingredients. Mariella's new secret ingredient is accent. She dumps it in everything. Emilie's brought her brood too, and we had to make quite a lot of tomles and Jello. Lizzy added a Morroccan salad made with mint. We played board games, and Kevyn beat Dan at scrabble.

Ally and Dan continued the arguement about Jung, and Kevyn tried to referee while donald worked at placating them with tidbits.

Kevyn said that Mr, Marshall believed that Jung had never understood the East, but tried to throw it in as mumbo-jumbo to stop the early raids of the Nazi's on hospitalized patients. The idea was that an entirely new imperical science was being formed and so no one should jump to hasty conclutions. John did not think that the use of the East had anythingto do with science at all. He thought that it's wisdom lay in the quieting of the constant obsession of the West in finding something new to be important about, or more important than. He mentioned often an anceint text that said that when a master of the house was at peace, all knew thier tasks and went about thier work willingly. We thought we might have a god of this type, and that is why we heard so little from him.

Kevyn remembered a day when he had aasked the old man, why then, did not people go about thier business quietly. Mr. Marshall had said that it might only work when the master of the house was visible. That was why Christians and Jews prayed for the messiah to come.

If Amy had taken her master, perhaps his study of Eastern wisdom would have helped her.She sought athourity in the recognition of others. Kevyn said that it was Amy's bewildering accounts of the accounts that she had recieved of herself that had wanted him to study the phenomenon of the modern malaise.

Kevyn and Emilly have not been around very much, and it seemed to help Dan to have them here. He does not know what to make of Papa and his wives. That kevyn and Emily think it is silly to bother about it, boggles him. It pleases Dan to be boggled, and he leaves off attempting to boggle me.

Kevyn and Emilly aren't trying to boggle Dan. Dan is trying to get my goat. I think it's mean, and that it is mean to Papa. I think sometimes to go live in New York with Ferron, but will not leave while Donald and Lizzy are alive. Ferron must need someone to keep house for her. Dan likes the papers and likes Donalds money. I don't think it is just that. I think he is afraid that I will leave him if he tries to keep me in the city. Then he would lose the twins entirely to Ally, and Ally would have the better of him. He is only just beginning to view them as human, for they have just begun to speak. I liked them just as well berfore.

Kendrick says you must go to Mexico, for no one else knows the proper use of a Jeep.
It will have to be you in the Jeep.

Your friend,
Evy

Bye-Bye, Bunny,

Book Three:    Dad's War

Kathleen Matheson Weber,
Kathleen Weber, all rights reserved

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