Re: A Great and Dreadful Day - Part 1
Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 5:41 pm
- NINE -
Bishop Chuck Gladden lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision in the southwestern part of town, near the irrigation canal by Country Drive. The house looked like it was still being built; there was exposed, black tarpaper covered in chicken wire on part of the roof, and although there was a tidy, three-foot-high brick wall lining the property and a smooth concrete driveway leading up to the garage door, there was no grass, gravel, or any other kind of landscaping in the yard. It was just hard, muddy-looking clay.
When Sam arrived for dinner, both the Bishop and Sister Gladden met him at the front door. Behind the two of them lurked a pair of towheaded children. “We’re so glad you made it,” said Barbara Gladden, and the Bishop patted him on the shoulder and pumped his hand. They led him inside. There was some kind of rock and fountain installation in the foyer, and Barbara’s flats clicked on the smooth tile floor. Along the wall were hooks for coats and hats and a little shelf for shoes.
“We take our shoes off in the house,” Barbara said, “because the carpet’s new.” Her hair was cut close to her head, and she had a dry, steely gaze, even when she smiled. At her side, the Bishop was rolling his eyes.
“Oh, okay,” said Sam, and he slipped off his tennis shoes and set them on the rack. The Gladdens showed him around the house: the five bedrooms (a well-furnished guest room with a desk and a sofa-bed; three bedrooms for the Gladdens’ six children—“Six?” “Yes, six. Jarod, Jonas, Heather, Susie, Levi, and Charles, Jr.”—and a large master bedroom with a canopied, four-poster bed that had a floral print comforter on it and a lacy bedskirt. Then he was shown the bathrooms, which were marvelously clean and sparkling. “I wanted to put a urinal in here, but she wouldn’t let me,” said the Bishop. “Would you want to clean that?” was her response. On the walls throughout the house were frames filled with pictures, both of the Gladdens and their extended family, and of things that Sam assumed were related to Mormonism in some way—pictures of Jesus, of older men in dark suits, and of various, elaborate-looking buildings. One of these looked like a castle, and in the image, a much-younger Barbara and Chuck Gladden, wearing their wedding clothes, with Barbara clutching a bouquet, were kissing on a pedestal outside the looming building.
“Yep,” said the Bishop when he noticed Sam looking. “That’s us after we got married in the Salt Lake temple.”
“Oh,” said Sam.
They showed him the spacious kitchen, with its big, six-burner stove, double ovens, and large refrigerator. It was filled with warm smells: garlic, tomato sauce, bread. “I hope you like spaghetti,” said Barbara. “Don’t worry, I do,” said Sam. Then they took him into the living room, where he found three of the older Gladden children, along with Elders Miller and Cummings. They were all gathered in front of the TV, playing a game on the SuperNES.
“Oh! Brother Younger!” said Elder Miller, looking up from his game. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor, clad as usual in his short-sleeved white shirt, tie, and dark slacks. He handed off the controller to one of the Gladden kids and stood up to shake Sam’s hand. Elder Cummings did the same.
“Well,” said the Bishop. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable while Barbara and I finish getting supper on the table?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Sam.
He took a seat in one of the recliners and sat watching as the two oldest Gladden kids—a boy and a girl, probably around 14 and 12—played the video game while the other child and the two missionaries watched intently. Sam had owned one of the old, regular Nintendos back when they first came out several years ago, but he’d never developed that much interest in it. A couple of his friends in high school had gotten really into the games but he’d always seen it as being kind of a waste of time. The missionaries, he noticed, were so wrapped up in what was happening on the screen (the game involved some kind of hand-to-hand combat among the characters) that they barely acknowledged his presence.
“I take it you guys don’t get to play video games very much,” Sam said.
Elder Miller looked over at him: “Huh? Wha? Oh, yeah. Only if it’s at someone’s house and we’re invited,” he said.
“Yeah, things are pretty strict while you’re on your mission,” said Elder Cummings. “It all depends on your mission president. Some missions you’re not even supposed to read the newspaper. Like I said, it just depends on how the mission president is.”
“Do you mean the bishop?” Neither of them was looking at him as they answered.
Miller didn’t seem to understand; Cummings went on: “No, the bishop just oversees the local ward. The local congregation, like what you saw at church on Sunday. The mission president is a separate calling.”
“Yeah,” added Elder Miller. “He’s a totally separate person.”
“Oh.”
The missionaries settled back into their zombie-like fixation on the game. On the table beside Sam’s recliner were a lamp and a thick book that had a dark, pebbly, leathery cover similar to the Book of Mormon he’d been given. He picked it up and looked at the spine: Holy Bible – Book of Mormon – Doctrine & Covenants – Pearl of Great Price. Did this mean there were additional scriptures in addition to the Bible and the Book of Mormon? He flipped through the pages and found that they looked more or less the same: very thin, delicate pages with text divided up into brief verses and chapters. In the Pearl of Great Price section he came across a set of drawings that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was a pair of human figures doing something near an altar of some kind. Sam didn’t understand what it meant. The caption mentioned something about a facsimile, and it puzzled him. He closed the book and set it back down on the table and folded his hands in his lap.
It wasn’t but a few more minutes before Chuck Gladden poked his head around the corner and called everyone to the table for dinner. Sam got up and followed the kids and the missionaries into the dining room, where the table was piled with food. There was a big bowl filled with buttered spaghetti noodles and a separate bowl filled with meat-and-tomato sauce. There were two baskets filled with garlic bread, a giant, clear bowl of salad and three plastic bottles with different kinds of salad dressing. There was a bowl of what looked like canned green beans and a Pyrex baking dish filled with something that looked like whipped-cream-covered green Jello. Everyone piled into the chairs around the tables.
“Did you guys wash your hands?” said Barbara to the two youngest kids, and they nodded.
“Okay, everyone. I’ll go ahead and say the blessing,” said Bishop Gladden. “Dear Father in Heaven, we ask thee to bless this food so that it will nourish and strengthen our bodies. We are grateful to thee that thou has given us such delicious things to eat. We’re thankful, too, dear Lord, that Brother Younger is joining us tonight at our table, and we pray that he enjoys the time he spends with our family tonight, and that the Spirit will be with him. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
“Amen!”
With that, everyone, notably the two missionaries, began piling food onto their plates. As the bowls made their way around the table, Sam helped himself to servings of each of the items, including the strange, green Jello casserole thing. The Bishop stood and poured milk into everyone’s glasses. The noise of the dining room progressed: it had begun with the prayer, and its intimate quietude, to the bustle of plates being laden with food, to the moist sound of chewing and eating, until at last Barbara began to speak.
“So, are you from this area originally, Sam?”
“No,” he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “I actually grew up in a town over near Sacramento. It’s called Auburn,” he said.
“I think I’ve driven through there a few times,” said the Bishop.
“What do your folks do?” Barbara asked. The two missionaries looked uncomfortable.
“Well, nothing anymore, since they’re both dead. But when they were alive, my father was a long-haul trucker, and my mom was an RN.”
“Oh, I see,” said Barbara. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Yeah, I have a sister. She lives down in San Diego. I don’t really see or talk to her that much, though.”
“Huh.”
“And what do you do for a living, Brother Younger?” asked the Bishop.
Sam drew in a deep breath. “Well, I’m actually between jobs right now. I put in my two weeks notice at this—” he was looking at the two younger children “at this club where I was working. I’m ready to move on to something else.”
“A clean slate,” said the Bishop.
“Yeah, exactly.”
Heather, the older Gladden daughter, a girl with reddish blond hair, sparse acne, and braces, pointed across the table at Sam’s knuckles. “Is that a tattoo?” she asked.
He reflexively covered it with his hand. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Back during my wild youth.”
“Can I see it?” said Heather.
“Yeah, sure.” He held his hand out for her to see.
“Are those letters? What does it stand for?”
“Nothing in particular. It’s nothing special.”
“You just got random letters on your hand for no reason?”
“I guess you could say that,” he said. Everyone was staring at him. “Like I said, I got that during a kind of wild time in my life.” He looked around and waited a moment for people to return to eating. Luckily, the missionaries didn’t miss a beat, as they were now helping themselves to seconds. “I guess you guys don’t get tattoos in the Mormo—I mean LDS Church?”
The Bishop blinked his eyes slowly and shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “The body is a temple.”
“I think your tattoos are cool,” said Heather, and her eyes were darting back and forth from Sam’s knuckles to his face. It made him uncomfortable and he looked away. Barbara Gladden’s jaw muscles were tensing, like she was gritting her teeth.
“To tell you the truth,” said Sam, “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment later in the week to look into getting them removed.”
“Why would you want to do that?” said Heather.
“You shut up now,” said Barbara, and Heather set her face in a pout.
“It’s like I said, it’s just something left over from a part of my life that I’m not all that proud of. I just think I’d be happier without the old tats.”
“I’ve heard that it’s super painful to get them removed, like they have to burn them off or something.” This was Jonas, the eldest son.
“I guess I’ll have to let you know,” said Sam.
“Any-how,” said Barbara, her tone rising. “My husband and these two young Elders here have said that you’ve been giving some thought to joining the Church. Of taking the next step and getting baptized.”
Once again, all eyes were on him: “Yeah, it’s true. I’ve been thinking about it.”
“That’s right,” said Elder Miller. “He’s been meeting with us, taking the discussions, and reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it.” He gestured pointingly towards the other end of the table. “Uh, could you please pass the Italian dressing? Thanks.”
“I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, but… Something just seems right and true about it.”
Every last head at the table smiled and nodded with approval.
“There is so much to love about the Church,” said Barbara. “For me personally, it just gives me such a sense of peace and certainty. I just don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have a priesthood holder to lead our family.” She and the Bishop and clutched hands atop the table.
“And we owe our beautiful family to the teachings of the Church,” said the Bishop. “Just look at these smiling, shining faces. We truly are lucky that our Heavenly Father sent these precious children down to us.”
Sam didn’t quite know what to say to this. So he just shrugged and agreed, “You really do have a nice family,” he said.
Levi, the second youngest, piped up and added in his two cents: “Yeah, and we get to play games and have family home evening and everything!”
Everyone chuckled.
“The point we’re trying to make to you, Sam, is that we wouldn’t have the lives that we do if it weren’t for the Church. It fills our whole house and all of our lives with love, and with the guidance of the priesthood and the Spirit. And, so, as the Bishop, I just hope you keep that in mind.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” he said.
Sam went back to his plate, but he silently agreed with everything that Bishop Gladden had said. He, too, wanted what they had: the nice house, the close family. Sam’s own family had been fractured, with his parents constantly at work, or bickering during the times when they were all together. And then they each got sick one after the other and he watched them waste away into living corpses. The Gladdens, on the other hand, seemed like they would go on being a family into the next lifetime. At the very least, they all believed that this is what would happen.
After dinner, Sam helped Barbara and Heather clear the table until Barbara shooed him away. In the living room, Elder Miller told him stories about an old mission companion who’d had a terrible B.O. problem. “He would stink right as soon as he got out of the shower. It was like that kid Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, with all the dust floating around him. It was like that. I know it’s mean, but we all called him that—Elder Pig Pen. Not to his face or anything, but it was a nickname. I don’t know what it was, or if it was a disease or whatever, but he just stunk.” A bit later, Heather and Barbara brought out dishes of ice cream for dessert. As they finished, Heather sat down at the piano and played songs for all of them. Some were strictly instrumental, but others were songs that everyone but Sam seemed familiar with, and so they sang along. One had something to do with popcorn that was growing on apricot trees. “Spring has brought me such a nice surprise,” went one of the lyrics.
When Heather had finished, she set her hands in her lap and smiled while everyone clapped. “Such a good job,” said Barbara. “It sure was, it sure was,” added Elder Cummings.
The three youngest Gladden children—Susie, Levi, and Charlie—began arguing over which game they would play on the SuperNES, and whose turn it would be. “Knock it off you three,” said the Bishop. “I don’t think there needs to be any of that right now. You guys put those video games away. You guys get down a board game that everyone can play.”
“Do you guys have Pictionary?” asked Elder Miller.
“Yeah, we do,” said Jonas, all gangly and lurpy in his jeans and his Weber State T-shirt as he got up to get it down from the closet.
“Sam, could I have a word with you?” said the Bishop, and he took Sam aside and led him back to a room that apparently served as an office. Inside was a big, heavy desk and a bookshelf filled with a variety of books, many of which, as far as Sam could tell, were Church-related. There was also a framed diploma, though he couldn’t make out what it was for. “Have a seat, young man,” the Bishop said, and Sam sat down in the chair opposite the desk. “I couldn’t help but think about what you said earlier about putting in your two-weeks notice at your job. Now, I approve of your decision. I don’t think that any respectable person should be working at a place like that. And we don’t need to get into all the piddling details, but I think we both know what kind of a place you were talking about. The point is that I can see that you’re serious about turning your life around, and I just have a feeling about you. What I wanted to ask you was this. I don’t know what kind of new work you’ve got lined up for yourself, but I wanted to go ahead and offer to call my first counselor, Glen, who owns a contracting business here in town. He does framework and roofing and that sort of thing, and I know he has a lot of turnover. But for his regular, long-term guys, I know he offers real fair wages and benefits. So, if you’re committed and interested, I can go ahead and give him a call.”
Sam felt something like shock. “That would be pretty fantastic,” he said. “And I have a little bit of construction experience. I did some framing work back home a few years ago.”
“Even better,” said the Bishop, and he picked up the phone and dialed. As it rang, he pressed the button for the speaker phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello there, Glen?”
“Yeah, sure. This is Glen.”
“It’s Bishop Gladden.”
“Oh, hey, Chuck. What’s going on?”
“Nothing much old buddy. I got you on speaker phone here.”
“All right.”
“I’m sitting here with Brother Younger. You know him, right? He’s that big guy that the missionaries have been giving the lessons to. That investigator I told you was coming over for dinner.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure, sure.”
“Well, Glen, I’m calling you because I think he’s interested in the spot that opened up on your crew. Isn’t that right, Brother Younger?”
“Yeah, definitely,” said Sam.
“And he’s got experience doing frame work,” said Bishop Gladden.
“Well, that’s just terrific,” said Glen. “How soon can you start?”
“How about Monday?”
“Great! I’ll see you then,” and with that, the Bishop picked up the phone and spun in his chair and said a few more words to his first counselor: “Okay. Yeah, good. Thanks a lot, Glen. Yeah, yeah. Thursdee night. Sure. Okay, you too, good bye.”
Sam sat there, practically reeling. A part of him wondered if the Bishop wanted something from him. Was this a way of pressuring him into getting baptized? And if it was, so what? Especially given the fact that he would apparently at the very least be getting a good job out of it?
“Well, if you want it, it looks like you got the job,” said the Bishop.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How about ‘Thank you’?”
“Oh, yeah—thanks. Thank you very much. It’s just weird, you know, to have someone just up and offer you a job out of nowhere.”
“You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to!”
“No, no—I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t want it. It’s just, you know—the generosity. I guess I’m not used to it, is all.”
“Well, Sam, that’s what we’re all about,” he said, and it wasn’t clear whether he was referring to himself and his “first counselor,” to his family, or to Mormons in general. But, as Sam was coming to realize, it wasn’t altogether clear where the three groups ended and began. It was as if they were all interlocking parts of something larger.
The Bishop took a pad of paper and a pen from his desk and wrote down the directions to Glen’s office. “Or,” he said, “you can just talk to him in church on Sunday,” he said with a wink. Sam just smiled.
They got up and went back into the living room, where everyone was deeply enmeshed in a boisterous game of Pictionary. Heather was trying unsuccessfully to get her sister Susie to guess the word, “Contagious.” After the timer ran out, Elder Cummings offered his sympathies: “Ooh, wow. That was a tough one.”
Sam and the Bishop stood off near the little alcove by the foyer. “Well, everyone,” said Bishop Gladden, I think Brother Younger is going to head off.
“It was really nice meeting all of you,” said Sam. The two missionaries got to their feet and shuffled over in their dress socks. Barbara Gladden came over, too.
“So,” said Elder Miller, “can we meet with you in a couple of days to give you the next discussion? Would that be all right?”
“Yeah, that sounds fine.” Then he shook everybody’s hands.
“It was so good to have you over,” said Barbara. “Hopefully you’ll come again.” She turned to the children in the living room: “Everyone tell Brother Younger goodbye!”
“Goodbye!”
“I’ll see you again soon,” said Bishop Gladden, and he firmly shook Sam’s hand a final time.
He went out and got in his truck and the Bishop and his wife watched from the front steps. As he drove home, Sam thought about what he’d just seen, and what had just happened to him. There was something about it that was unreal. Everyone seemed just a tiny bit too happy, as if they were all clinging to some invisible force that allowed them to maintain the Leave it to Beaver façade, and yet it didn’t quite see inauthentic. And what might the invisible force be? Their faith? Maybe, Sam thought, there was nothing unreal or strange about it at all, and he was just letting his cynicism get the better of him. Maybe his own sense of rightness and reality was flawed in some way. After all, he was the one who’d done time. He was the one who’d spent a decent chunk of his life smoking dope, drinking, and working in a strip club.
When he got home, he hung up his coat and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he sat in his easy chair and read the Book of Mormon for an hour, after which he said a prayer, asking once again for confirmation as to the truthfulness of the LDS Church. Like a subdued echo of his earlier experience, he felt a warm sensation in his chest and his lips began to tremble, though he didn’t shed any tears. He just felt good. He felt right, and he felt good, as if the world was beginning to turn in his favor.
He got up from where he’d been kneeling on the floor. For whatever reason, he noticed an old glass ashtray peeking out from an open cupboard below the end table. He bent down and picked it up and went to drop it in the trash. It was hard, solid, and heavy in his hand as he carried it to the trashcan in the kitchen, and he would always remember how it felt. It was one of those strange, unaccountable details—the sort of thing he would have surely forgotten if not for the fact that, later that night, as he lay in bed, he made up his mind to be baptized, and to formally join the LDS Church.
...Next time: the final chapter of Part 1 - Sam makes a decisive move....
Bishop Chuck Gladden lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision in the southwestern part of town, near the irrigation canal by Country Drive. The house looked like it was still being built; there was exposed, black tarpaper covered in chicken wire on part of the roof, and although there was a tidy, three-foot-high brick wall lining the property and a smooth concrete driveway leading up to the garage door, there was no grass, gravel, or any other kind of landscaping in the yard. It was just hard, muddy-looking clay.
When Sam arrived for dinner, both the Bishop and Sister Gladden met him at the front door. Behind the two of them lurked a pair of towheaded children. “We’re so glad you made it,” said Barbara Gladden, and the Bishop patted him on the shoulder and pumped his hand. They led him inside. There was some kind of rock and fountain installation in the foyer, and Barbara’s flats clicked on the smooth tile floor. Along the wall were hooks for coats and hats and a little shelf for shoes.
“We take our shoes off in the house,” Barbara said, “because the carpet’s new.” Her hair was cut close to her head, and she had a dry, steely gaze, even when she smiled. At her side, the Bishop was rolling his eyes.
“Oh, okay,” said Sam, and he slipped off his tennis shoes and set them on the rack. The Gladdens showed him around the house: the five bedrooms (a well-furnished guest room with a desk and a sofa-bed; three bedrooms for the Gladdens’ six children—“Six?” “Yes, six. Jarod, Jonas, Heather, Susie, Levi, and Charles, Jr.”—and a large master bedroom with a canopied, four-poster bed that had a floral print comforter on it and a lacy bedskirt. Then he was shown the bathrooms, which were marvelously clean and sparkling. “I wanted to put a urinal in here, but she wouldn’t let me,” said the Bishop. “Would you want to clean that?” was her response. On the walls throughout the house were frames filled with pictures, both of the Gladdens and their extended family, and of things that Sam assumed were related to Mormonism in some way—pictures of Jesus, of older men in dark suits, and of various, elaborate-looking buildings. One of these looked like a castle, and in the image, a much-younger Barbara and Chuck Gladden, wearing their wedding clothes, with Barbara clutching a bouquet, were kissing on a pedestal outside the looming building.
“Yep,” said the Bishop when he noticed Sam looking. “That’s us after we got married in the Salt Lake temple.”
“Oh,” said Sam.
They showed him the spacious kitchen, with its big, six-burner stove, double ovens, and large refrigerator. It was filled with warm smells: garlic, tomato sauce, bread. “I hope you like spaghetti,” said Barbara. “Don’t worry, I do,” said Sam. Then they took him into the living room, where he found three of the older Gladden children, along with Elders Miller and Cummings. They were all gathered in front of the TV, playing a game on the SuperNES.
“Oh! Brother Younger!” said Elder Miller, looking up from his game. He was sitting crosslegged on the floor, clad as usual in his short-sleeved white shirt, tie, and dark slacks. He handed off the controller to one of the Gladden kids and stood up to shake Sam’s hand. Elder Cummings did the same.
“Well,” said the Bishop. “Why don’t you make yourself comfortable while Barbara and I finish getting supper on the table?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Sam.
He took a seat in one of the recliners and sat watching as the two oldest Gladden kids—a boy and a girl, probably around 14 and 12—played the video game while the other child and the two missionaries watched intently. Sam had owned one of the old, regular Nintendos back when they first came out several years ago, but he’d never developed that much interest in it. A couple of his friends in high school had gotten really into the games but he’d always seen it as being kind of a waste of time. The missionaries, he noticed, were so wrapped up in what was happening on the screen (the game involved some kind of hand-to-hand combat among the characters) that they barely acknowledged his presence.
“I take it you guys don’t get to play video games very much,” Sam said.
Elder Miller looked over at him: “Huh? Wha? Oh, yeah. Only if it’s at someone’s house and we’re invited,” he said.
“Yeah, things are pretty strict while you’re on your mission,” said Elder Cummings. “It all depends on your mission president. Some missions you’re not even supposed to read the newspaper. Like I said, it just depends on how the mission president is.”
“Do you mean the bishop?” Neither of them was looking at him as they answered.
Miller didn’t seem to understand; Cummings went on: “No, the bishop just oversees the local ward. The local congregation, like what you saw at church on Sunday. The mission president is a separate calling.”
“Yeah,” added Elder Miller. “He’s a totally separate person.”
“Oh.”
The missionaries settled back into their zombie-like fixation on the game. On the table beside Sam’s recliner were a lamp and a thick book that had a dark, pebbly, leathery cover similar to the Book of Mormon he’d been given. He picked it up and looked at the spine: Holy Bible – Book of Mormon – Doctrine & Covenants – Pearl of Great Price. Did this mean there were additional scriptures in addition to the Bible and the Book of Mormon? He flipped through the pages and found that they looked more or less the same: very thin, delicate pages with text divided up into brief verses and chapters. In the Pearl of Great Price section he came across a set of drawings that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was a pair of human figures doing something near an altar of some kind. Sam didn’t understand what it meant. The caption mentioned something about a facsimile, and it puzzled him. He closed the book and set it back down on the table and folded his hands in his lap.
It wasn’t but a few more minutes before Chuck Gladden poked his head around the corner and called everyone to the table for dinner. Sam got up and followed the kids and the missionaries into the dining room, where the table was piled with food. There was a big bowl filled with buttered spaghetti noodles and a separate bowl filled with meat-and-tomato sauce. There were two baskets filled with garlic bread, a giant, clear bowl of salad and three plastic bottles with different kinds of salad dressing. There was a bowl of what looked like canned green beans and a Pyrex baking dish filled with something that looked like whipped-cream-covered green Jello. Everyone piled into the chairs around the tables.
“Did you guys wash your hands?” said Barbara to the two youngest kids, and they nodded.
“Okay, everyone. I’ll go ahead and say the blessing,” said Bishop Gladden. “Dear Father in Heaven, we ask thee to bless this food so that it will nourish and strengthen our bodies. We are grateful to thee that thou has given us such delicious things to eat. We’re thankful, too, dear Lord, that Brother Younger is joining us tonight at our table, and we pray that he enjoys the time he spends with our family tonight, and that the Spirit will be with him. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
“Amen!”
With that, everyone, notably the two missionaries, began piling food onto their plates. As the bowls made their way around the table, Sam helped himself to servings of each of the items, including the strange, green Jello casserole thing. The Bishop stood and poured milk into everyone’s glasses. The noise of the dining room progressed: it had begun with the prayer, and its intimate quietude, to the bustle of plates being laden with food, to the moist sound of chewing and eating, until at last Barbara began to speak.
“So, are you from this area originally, Sam?”
“No,” he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “I actually grew up in a town over near Sacramento. It’s called Auburn,” he said.
“I think I’ve driven through there a few times,” said the Bishop.
“What do your folks do?” Barbara asked. The two missionaries looked uncomfortable.
“Well, nothing anymore, since they’re both dead. But when they were alive, my father was a long-haul trucker, and my mom was an RN.”
“Oh, I see,” said Barbara. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Yeah, I have a sister. She lives down in San Diego. I don’t really see or talk to her that much, though.”
“Huh.”
“And what do you do for a living, Brother Younger?” asked the Bishop.
Sam drew in a deep breath. “Well, I’m actually between jobs right now. I put in my two weeks notice at this—” he was looking at the two younger children “at this club where I was working. I’m ready to move on to something else.”
“A clean slate,” said the Bishop.
“Yeah, exactly.”
Heather, the older Gladden daughter, a girl with reddish blond hair, sparse acne, and braces, pointed across the table at Sam’s knuckles. “Is that a tattoo?” she asked.
He reflexively covered it with his hand. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Back during my wild youth.”
“Can I see it?” said Heather.
“Yeah, sure.” He held his hand out for her to see.
“Are those letters? What does it stand for?”
“Nothing in particular. It’s nothing special.”
“You just got random letters on your hand for no reason?”
“I guess you could say that,” he said. Everyone was staring at him. “Like I said, I got that during a kind of wild time in my life.” He looked around and waited a moment for people to return to eating. Luckily, the missionaries didn’t miss a beat, as they were now helping themselves to seconds. “I guess you guys don’t get tattoos in the Mormo—I mean LDS Church?”
The Bishop blinked his eyes slowly and shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “The body is a temple.”
“I think your tattoos are cool,” said Heather, and her eyes were darting back and forth from Sam’s knuckles to his face. It made him uncomfortable and he looked away. Barbara Gladden’s jaw muscles were tensing, like she was gritting her teeth.
“To tell you the truth,” said Sam, “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment later in the week to look into getting them removed.”
“Why would you want to do that?” said Heather.
“You shut up now,” said Barbara, and Heather set her face in a pout.
“It’s like I said, it’s just something left over from a part of my life that I’m not all that proud of. I just think I’d be happier without the old tats.”
“I’ve heard that it’s super painful to get them removed, like they have to burn them off or something.” This was Jonas, the eldest son.
“I guess I’ll have to let you know,” said Sam.
“Any-how,” said Barbara, her tone rising. “My husband and these two young Elders here have said that you’ve been giving some thought to joining the Church. Of taking the next step and getting baptized.”
Once again, all eyes were on him: “Yeah, it’s true. I’ve been thinking about it.”
“That’s right,” said Elder Miller. “He’s been meeting with us, taking the discussions, and reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it.” He gestured pointingly towards the other end of the table. “Uh, could you please pass the Italian dressing? Thanks.”
“I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, but… Something just seems right and true about it.”
Every last head at the table smiled and nodded with approval.
“There is so much to love about the Church,” said Barbara. “For me personally, it just gives me such a sense of peace and certainty. I just don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have a priesthood holder to lead our family.” She and the Bishop and clutched hands atop the table.
“And we owe our beautiful family to the teachings of the Church,” said the Bishop. “Just look at these smiling, shining faces. We truly are lucky that our Heavenly Father sent these precious children down to us.”
Sam didn’t quite know what to say to this. So he just shrugged and agreed, “You really do have a nice family,” he said.
Levi, the second youngest, piped up and added in his two cents: “Yeah, and we get to play games and have family home evening and everything!”
Everyone chuckled.
“The point we’re trying to make to you, Sam, is that we wouldn’t have the lives that we do if it weren’t for the Church. It fills our whole house and all of our lives with love, and with the guidance of the priesthood and the Spirit. And, so, as the Bishop, I just hope you keep that in mind.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” he said.
Sam went back to his plate, but he silently agreed with everything that Bishop Gladden had said. He, too, wanted what they had: the nice house, the close family. Sam’s own family had been fractured, with his parents constantly at work, or bickering during the times when they were all together. And then they each got sick one after the other and he watched them waste away into living corpses. The Gladdens, on the other hand, seemed like they would go on being a family into the next lifetime. At the very least, they all believed that this is what would happen.
After dinner, Sam helped Barbara and Heather clear the table until Barbara shooed him away. In the living room, Elder Miller told him stories about an old mission companion who’d had a terrible B.O. problem. “He would stink right as soon as he got out of the shower. It was like that kid Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, with all the dust floating around him. It was like that. I know it’s mean, but we all called him that—Elder Pig Pen. Not to his face or anything, but it was a nickname. I don’t know what it was, or if it was a disease or whatever, but he just stunk.” A bit later, Heather and Barbara brought out dishes of ice cream for dessert. As they finished, Heather sat down at the piano and played songs for all of them. Some were strictly instrumental, but others were songs that everyone but Sam seemed familiar with, and so they sang along. One had something to do with popcorn that was growing on apricot trees. “Spring has brought me such a nice surprise,” went one of the lyrics.
When Heather had finished, she set her hands in her lap and smiled while everyone clapped. “Such a good job,” said Barbara. “It sure was, it sure was,” added Elder Cummings.
The three youngest Gladden children—Susie, Levi, and Charlie—began arguing over which game they would play on the SuperNES, and whose turn it would be. “Knock it off you three,” said the Bishop. “I don’t think there needs to be any of that right now. You guys put those video games away. You guys get down a board game that everyone can play.”
“Do you guys have Pictionary?” asked Elder Miller.
“Yeah, we do,” said Jonas, all gangly and lurpy in his jeans and his Weber State T-shirt as he got up to get it down from the closet.
“Sam, could I have a word with you?” said the Bishop, and he took Sam aside and led him back to a room that apparently served as an office. Inside was a big, heavy desk and a bookshelf filled with a variety of books, many of which, as far as Sam could tell, were Church-related. There was also a framed diploma, though he couldn’t make out what it was for. “Have a seat, young man,” the Bishop said, and Sam sat down in the chair opposite the desk. “I couldn’t help but think about what you said earlier about putting in your two-weeks notice at your job. Now, I approve of your decision. I don’t think that any respectable person should be working at a place like that. And we don’t need to get into all the piddling details, but I think we both know what kind of a place you were talking about. The point is that I can see that you’re serious about turning your life around, and I just have a feeling about you. What I wanted to ask you was this. I don’t know what kind of new work you’ve got lined up for yourself, but I wanted to go ahead and offer to call my first counselor, Glen, who owns a contracting business here in town. He does framework and roofing and that sort of thing, and I know he has a lot of turnover. But for his regular, long-term guys, I know he offers real fair wages and benefits. So, if you’re committed and interested, I can go ahead and give him a call.”
Sam felt something like shock. “That would be pretty fantastic,” he said. “And I have a little bit of construction experience. I did some framing work back home a few years ago.”
“Even better,” said the Bishop, and he picked up the phone and dialed. As it rang, he pressed the button for the speaker phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello there, Glen?”
“Yeah, sure. This is Glen.”
“It’s Bishop Gladden.”
“Oh, hey, Chuck. What’s going on?”
“Nothing much old buddy. I got you on speaker phone here.”
“All right.”
“I’m sitting here with Brother Younger. You know him, right? He’s that big guy that the missionaries have been giving the lessons to. That investigator I told you was coming over for dinner.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure, sure.”
“Well, Glen, I’m calling you because I think he’s interested in the spot that opened up on your crew. Isn’t that right, Brother Younger?”
“Yeah, definitely,” said Sam.
“And he’s got experience doing frame work,” said Bishop Gladden.
“Well, that’s just terrific,” said Glen. “How soon can you start?”
“How about Monday?”
“Great! I’ll see you then,” and with that, the Bishop picked up the phone and spun in his chair and said a few more words to his first counselor: “Okay. Yeah, good. Thanks a lot, Glen. Yeah, yeah. Thursdee night. Sure. Okay, you too, good bye.”
Sam sat there, practically reeling. A part of him wondered if the Bishop wanted something from him. Was this a way of pressuring him into getting baptized? And if it was, so what? Especially given the fact that he would apparently at the very least be getting a good job out of it?
“Well, if you want it, it looks like you got the job,” said the Bishop.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How about ‘Thank you’?”
“Oh, yeah—thanks. Thank you very much. It’s just weird, you know, to have someone just up and offer you a job out of nowhere.”
“You don’t have to take it if you don’t want to!”
“No, no—I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t want it. It’s just, you know—the generosity. I guess I’m not used to it, is all.”
“Well, Sam, that’s what we’re all about,” he said, and it wasn’t clear whether he was referring to himself and his “first counselor,” to his family, or to Mormons in general. But, as Sam was coming to realize, it wasn’t altogether clear where the three groups ended and began. It was as if they were all interlocking parts of something larger.
The Bishop took a pad of paper and a pen from his desk and wrote down the directions to Glen’s office. “Or,” he said, “you can just talk to him in church on Sunday,” he said with a wink. Sam just smiled.
They got up and went back into the living room, where everyone was deeply enmeshed in a boisterous game of Pictionary. Heather was trying unsuccessfully to get her sister Susie to guess the word, “Contagious.” After the timer ran out, Elder Cummings offered his sympathies: “Ooh, wow. That was a tough one.”
Sam and the Bishop stood off near the little alcove by the foyer. “Well, everyone,” said Bishop Gladden, I think Brother Younger is going to head off.
“It was really nice meeting all of you,” said Sam. The two missionaries got to their feet and shuffled over in their dress socks. Barbara Gladden came over, too.
“So,” said Elder Miller, “can we meet with you in a couple of days to give you the next discussion? Would that be all right?”
“Yeah, that sounds fine.” Then he shook everybody’s hands.
“It was so good to have you over,” said Barbara. “Hopefully you’ll come again.” She turned to the children in the living room: “Everyone tell Brother Younger goodbye!”
“Goodbye!”
“I’ll see you again soon,” said Bishop Gladden, and he firmly shook Sam’s hand a final time.
He went out and got in his truck and the Bishop and his wife watched from the front steps. As he drove home, Sam thought about what he’d just seen, and what had just happened to him. There was something about it that was unreal. Everyone seemed just a tiny bit too happy, as if they were all clinging to some invisible force that allowed them to maintain the Leave it to Beaver façade, and yet it didn’t quite see inauthentic. And what might the invisible force be? Their faith? Maybe, Sam thought, there was nothing unreal or strange about it at all, and he was just letting his cynicism get the better of him. Maybe his own sense of rightness and reality was flawed in some way. After all, he was the one who’d done time. He was the one who’d spent a decent chunk of his life smoking dope, drinking, and working in a strip club.
When he got home, he hung up his coat and went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he sat in his easy chair and read the Book of Mormon for an hour, after which he said a prayer, asking once again for confirmation as to the truthfulness of the LDS Church. Like a subdued echo of his earlier experience, he felt a warm sensation in his chest and his lips began to tremble, though he didn’t shed any tears. He just felt good. He felt right, and he felt good, as if the world was beginning to turn in his favor.
He got up from where he’d been kneeling on the floor. For whatever reason, he noticed an old glass ashtray peeking out from an open cupboard below the end table. He bent down and picked it up and went to drop it in the trash. It was hard, solid, and heavy in his hand as he carried it to the trashcan in the kitchen, and he would always remember how it felt. It was one of those strange, unaccountable details—the sort of thing he would have surely forgotten if not for the fact that, later that night, as he lay in bed, he made up his mind to be baptized, and to formally join the LDS Church.
...Next time: the final chapter of Part 1 - Sam makes a decisive move....