Falling for Grace

by Robert Farrell Smith

  One evening after a particularly heavy teasing day I returned home crying. My father sat with me on the front porch and tried to cheer me up. He told me not to worry about what others said, and that my big bike was actually faster than any of my friends’.

  Dad was right. The next day I discovered that I could outride any of the neighborhood kids. There wasn’t a single bike that could touch me. In one afternoon, everything changed. I went from “Tricycle Trust” to “Trucking Trust, the Fastest Kid on the Block.”

  As we walked, I told Grace about my bike and how she sort of reminded me of it. What had once been viewed as out of place became the envy of the town.

  Grace stopped walking. It was so quiet and so dark.

  “You know, you’re a weird guy,” she said. “You really are.”

  It wasn’t quite the reaction I had been hoping for.

  Then she kissed me, setting things right.

  We walked a while longer. Half an hour later when we finally spotted headlights, we were both a little disappointed. Two teenagers in a beat-up pickup stopped and gave us a ride. We rode in back with a big dog named Glue. They dropped us off at a gas station on the edge of town. It was past eleven o’clock. When I called my mother, she acted bothered but agreed to come get us after she went to the trouble of getting dressed again.

  As Mom drove us home, she went on and on about how Elder Minert and Elder Nicks had been by to schedule a time to teach Grace the second discussion. Mom asked Grace if Wednesday evening at around seven would be okay.

  “That would be fine,” Grace answered.

  “Oh, and Trust,” my mother chimed, “I volunteered you to help Sister Barns set up the stage for the auction on the ninth. I hope that’s okay.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “When does she need me?”

  “I told her you’d be at the church Wednesday around 6:45.”

  I should have guessed.

  Grace squeezed my hand and offered her condolences in the form of a long stolen kiss. Mom spotted us in the rearview mirror and coughed wildly. We then listened to her talk about morality the rest of the ride home.

  20

  Sinking

  The big empty house made Lucy even more depressed. She listened to the clicking of the clock and the barking of a dog somewhere far away. Things were only getting worse. It seemed to take everything she had simply to crawl out of bed in the mornings.

  She had called her parents in France, desperate for some counsel and compassion. But Lucy’s mom and dad were far too busy traveling to pick up on the dire straits their daughter had coasted into. They seemed to have little advice. They told her to buck up and move on.

  Life had turned into one giant bruise.

  Lucy had been pleading with God to help her. She had even tossed out her standard prayer phrases in exchange for words so honest they made her weep. Her knees were tired and her head was throbbing. She didn’t want to be alone anymore with who she used to be. She didn’t want to go on.

  She would have called her parents’ home teacher to ask him for a blessing, but their home teacher was Leonard Vastly, and according to the lifestyle section in the local paper, he had sealed himself up in plastic sheeting for the time being. Lucy didn’t know where to turn. She glanced over the ward list, looking for someone whom she would feel comfortable getting a blessing from. Truth be told, she had not actually been the kindest person to most of the names in front of her.

  Abraham, Ronald and Lynn

  Lucy had made fun, more than once, of Sister Abraham’s choice in clothing. Her wardrobe made it so easy. The white shoes after Labor Day had been too much for Lucy to overlook.

  Aston, Kim and Mary

  Lucy had been fairly clear about how she felt concerning a man having the name “Kim.”

  Baull, RoyAnn

  Lucy had talked both behind and in front of RoyAnn’s back. Words like “spinster,” “old maid,” and “loser” came to mind.

  The list went on.

  Lucy had been such an awful neighbor. She pushed her head into her pillow. The expensive cover and imported goose feathers did little to comfort her crumbling self-esteem. A small twinge of inspiration fell upon her as she wept. She sat up and turned to page three of the directory.

  Williams, Roger and Marilyn

  In God she would trust.

  21

  Bio-Doom

  November 30th

  Tuesday morning I got up early and went to pick up our stalled car. I gassed it up and drove it home for my mother to use. With no employment yet, and little will to look, I decided to go pay Leonard Vastly a visit. My mother had already gone for the day and I couldn’t find my father’s car keys, so I decided to take the bus—it seemed so socially conscious. Grace had been using the bus on and off for the past week, and if it could take her where she was needed, then I felt certain it could serve me just fine.

  I found a few dollars and walked down the road to the bus stop. Fifteen minutes later, I was almost to Brother Vastly’s place. Brother Vastly lived about five miles straight up the street from us. But his home was about a half mile away from where any bus would go, so I had to make the last leg of my journey on foot.

  Leonard lived on the edge of an upscale subdivision. He owned the only mobile home in this part of town. He had brought his single-wide in about fifteen years back, inspiring the locals to make more restrictive zoning laws. Luckily for Brother Vastly, such laws couldn’t touch what was already in place. His single-wide stayed, making him the king of the only factory-manufactured castle anywhere in the area.

  When I first spotted his place I was amazed. The entire mobile home looked like a huge wad of trash. It was wrapped in plastic and streaked with duct tape. I spotted the bay window and the open curtains through the cloudy plastic. It looked as if Brother Vastly were sitting at a desk typing something. I watched a couple cars pass and stare. Someone honked, prompting Leonard to raise his hand and wave politely.

  I sauntered up to the window and knocked on the glass. Leonard turned and peered out at me with excitement.

  “Hello, Trust,” he hollered through the plastic layer covering his window. His muffled voice was hard to make out.

  “I came to visit you!” I hollered back.

  “I’m sealed in,” he signaled.

  “Me, your home teacher.” I motioned to myself.

  The heavy plastic made Brother Vastly look distorted and fuzzy, but I could see him scratching his head as if in thought. Then he looked out the window to see if anyone else was around.

  The coast was clear.

  Leonard signaled for me to come around the back side of his trailer. I walked around, finding nothing but a sealed-up single-wide. I looked about as if I were missing something. I was just about to return to the window when I felt someone pulling on my ankle. I looked down to see one of Brother Vastly’s arms reaching out from under the plastic at the bottom of his home. He pushed apart a metal section of the underskirting and stuck his head out.

  “Brother . . .” I started to say.

  “Shhhhh,” he said quickly. “Crawl in here where we won’t be observed.”

  Happy no one was around to see, I got onto my knees and crawled under the plastic and through the skirting. We scooted on our stomachs for a few feet, and then popped up through a trapdoor that Leonard had made out of a huge linoleum square in the center of his kitchen floor. Once we were up into the house I looked around at all the food rations he had stored. I had never seen so much food and supplies crammed into one place. It looked like the complete inventory of at least two grocery stores. And the place smelled like garlic mixed with kitty litter.

  “Whoa,” was all I could say.

  “I’ve spent years getting things just right.” He beamed.

  I looked around and once again settled with just, “Whoa.”

  “Now, in here we’re a fully functioning sphere,” he began to inform. “Break your leg? I got you covered. There’s a fully stocked infirmary in the master
bathroom and two satellite first aid kits located in here.” Leonard pointed to the cabinet above his refrigerator as if he were a stewardess giving safety instructions, “and here.” He signaled to a drawer underneath his kitchen bar. “Hungry?” he continued. “Enjoy one of thirteen kinds of grain I’ve got stitched into the fabric of the couch.”

  I looked over at the lumpy sagging couch and tried to act impressed.

  “You think Noah Taylor’s thought of things like that?” he asked determinedly.

  “No,” I replied in all honesty.

  “Thank you. Now, say the government’s gone mad,” he spat, “the computers are down, and there’s a foreigner with a hungry family at the back door.”

  Brother Vastly caught his breath.

  “Open the oven,” he demanded.

  I was actually scared to.

  “Just open it,” he insisted. “The energy’s off. I stopped being a victim to electricity days ago.”

  I slowly opened the big oven door to discover that he had removed all the insides and hollowed the entire thing out back into the cabinets. I could see a couple of boxes of crackers and a small pillow in there.

  “It’s my hiding place,” Leonard explained. “Who’d ever think to look in the oven?”

  “Don’t you . . .” I began to ask.

  “Save the praise for later,” he said, holding his hands up. “There’s more to see.”

  Brother Vastly led me down the hall to the master bedroom.

  “So you’ve got a house full of food, your couches are stuffed with grain, your walls insulated with soup mix, and most of the crawl space beneath your abode is filled with dehydrated bananas and apricots.”

  Brother Vastly paused for effect.

  “Big deal. What separates the men from the morons in the competitive field of food storage is water. That soup mix is going to go down awful dry unless you have some H20 to bring it to life. Look away,” Leonard instructed. “Look away.”

  I turned my head, but I could hear him punching in a code on the door lock leading to the master bedroom. I thought it rather silly to have an expensive door lock on a cheap particleboard door. A chime sounded and he opened up the door. I turned to find myself staring at a big, above-ground swimming pool. The pool was filled with water, the weight of which was so great it had broken the flooring out beneath it and was sitting a good foot and a half beneath the rest of the mobile home foundation.

  “She’s resting on cases of apricots,” he informed me. “Floor gave way right after I filled her up. Luckily I had already put my cans underneath it. God cares for the sparrow.”

  “That’s a lot of water,” I said, expecting he’d like me to say so.

  “Think Noah Taylor’s got that kind of liquid holed up?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Well then, let me do it for you. No. Plus, we’re on a well here. Water’s pumped into this pool, continually restocking me. If times get real hard I can even bathe in it. Don’t tell a soul about this,” he insisted.

  “I won’t.”

  “I’d hate to have people begging me for sips.”

  I figured he could put an end to that just telling them he swam in it.

  “What kind of water storage do you and your family have?” Leonard asked me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said ignorantly. “If we have any I’m sure my mom’s storing it with Brother Taylor.”

  Leonard shook his head sadly. “Our ward is wading into some dangerous territory. I’d hate to have the lights go out and my fruit and date bars be ten miles away.”

  “Wouldn’t we all,” I tried to joke.

  “I like you, Trust,” Leonard approved. “I like your attitude. Your good looks make me a little skittish, but you seem to have a solid head. Although I must admit I don’t care for the radical hairstyle,” he said, referring to my shaved head. “Come here,” he continued, waving me back down the hall.

  “How’s the carpet feel?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said, although I realized for the first time that it was a tad lumpy.

  Back in the kitchen, Leonard leaned over and pulled back a section of the carpet where it met the linoleum. I could see hundreds of Ziploc baggies filled with what looked to be red licorice.

  “A lot of people are saying to themselves, ‘I’ve got twenty cases of wheat, and four cans of elbow macaroni, I’ll live off of that,’” he said dramatically. “More power to them. But what good is living if you can’t soothe the sweet tooth every so often?”

  “Pointless,” I said, playing to his vanity.

  “Pointless indeed. That’s why I’ve lined the entire low-traffic areas of my carpet with red licorice. Don’t like the black, never have, leaves a real pasty taste in my mouth.” Brother Vastly smacked his lips, acting as if he had just ingested something pasty.

  “Now, the heavy-traffic areas are lined with beef jerky,” he continued. “Your walking around is actually tenderizing my beef. Of course, I got turkey jerky in the laundry nook, but the traffic isn’t as heavy in there.”

  Leonard’s wrinkly, dirty clothes stood as witnesses to the truthfulness of his last statement.

  “Any questions?” he asked.

  “Where do you sleep?” I wondered, knowing that the master bedroom was filled with a pool, and the other bedroom was the bedless bay window room I had stared through from the outside.

  “Sleep,” he guffawed. “Sleep is nothing but a weak man’s mandolin.”

  I had no idea what that meant, but I left it alone, asking only, “So you don’t sleep?”

  “I take fatigue prevention every three hours. I sprawl out on the bags of wheat flour I have stored next to the couch there.”

  “Why don’t you just sleep—”

  “Fatigue prevention,” he corrected.

  “Why don’t you prevent fatigue by lying on the couch?”

  “Trust, you’ve got a lot to learn,” he said, shaking his head. “Why, even a tenderfoot must know that flour is softer than grain. Better back support too.”

  “Well, you certainly have gotten prepared,” I complimented.

  “The way I see it is there are no real emergencies for those who are fanatic,” he espoused. “I read that somewhere. Any other questions?” he asked.

  “Actually, do you have a bathroom I could use?”

  “I’d love to let you, but I took the toilet out of the master bathroom to make room for the infirmary, and I’ve unhooked the guest room toilet so that I could plant wheat in the bowl.”

  “So where do you . . .”

  “I’ve got a solar compost behind the fire wall in the infirmary.”

  I didn’t want to know any more, so I said nothing.

  “So then I guess you have a message for me?” Leonard said, changing the subject.

  I could think of lots of things I would like to tell him, but I had no prepared message.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  “Didn’t you say you were my home teacher?”

  “That’s true, and—”

  “Have a seat then. I’m spiritually weak due to the fact that I can’t come out to attend church. I asked Bishop Leen if I could get someone to bring the sacrament to me, but he said no. It’s a real shame when people who stand for a cause get overlooked.”

  “Pity.”

  “I gotta do what I gotta do,” he insisted.

  “So how long do you really plan to stay in here?”

  “However long is necessary.”

  “And what determines that?”

  “Noah Taylor. If his December seventeenth doom date is accurate, then maybe I’ll come out soon after the carnage and destruction die down. But if he’s wrong, which I’m thinking he is, I’ll just stay here for a spell to prove my point.”

  “And your point is?”

  “People don’t need people.”

  “So would you rather I leave?”

  “Actually it’s kinda nice to have someone around.”

  “Well, if it makes you
feel any better, I think everyone is wrong to put so much stock in what Noah Taylor is saying. He’s just a man like you or me. He has no right or privilege to know the future for us.”

  “Sister Cravitz told me you’d fly off on him,” Leonard said.

  “What?”

  “She radioed me a while back and told me about you being jealous of Noah.”

  “I’m not—”

  “We’re the only ears here,” he said, pointing to his.

  “Really, I’m not—”

  “Listen, Trust, lying to yourself is the same as lying to another.”

  I was being chastened by a man with licorice-lined carpet.

  “I guess this Grace girl you brought to town is really stirring things up,” he went on. “You know, Southdale really needs a little mixing. Especially the members here. We get a little stale stuck out here away from all the other western Mormons. It’s nice to have Grace waking us up a bit.”

  “She’s not really doing anything,” I said, baffled.

  “Exactly,” he replied. “Exactly.”

  “No really, she just works for Noah.”

  “You know, I used to have a sister-in-law with red hair,” he reminisced. “She was the most exasperating person. She was all about money. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Her husband, my brother, was working three jobs and had an adult paper route. That’s different than a juvenile route. The adult routes usually cover a large area and require a car. Anyhow, she left my brother about three years back, no, no I take that back. It was right after Ned had that work done on his teeth, so it would have to have been about six years ago. My goodness, how time flies.”

  I was glad he thought so.

  “Left him for a car salesman,” he went on. “I’m sure she drives a nice vehicle, but does she have the amount of food security I do? I don’t think so. So, Trust, what’s your message?”

  “Well, I really just wanted to make this first visit a get-to-know-you kind of thing. I actually didn’t think I’d be allowed to come into your ‘Bio-Doom.’”