Sister Watson moved first. She grabbed at the book, wrenching it from President Heck. By then, Briant Willpts was swinging his cane at Sister Watson. She dropped the book to put her hands up. The book had barely hit the table before Jerry Scotch clapped it up and turned to run. Sister Lando stuck one of her sturdy legs out and tripped Jerry. The book went flying though the air. It landed on Leo and CleeDee’s blanket. For a moment, everyone just stared at it lying there. Then in one collective grunt they dove for it. Hands flew, hair whipped, and legs kicked. I stood there speechless. I turned to Elder Staples to see what he was doing to help calm the situation. He was no help; he had Paul on the ground trying to pin him down. He wasn’t about to pass up this chance to wrestle an apostate.
“Elder!” I hollered.
I held up my hands foolishly, thinking it would help. And, just at that moment, Teddy surfaced from the pile of scrapping fighters with the book in hand. She only had a second. She had to get rid of it or get toppled. I guess she took my hands being up as a signal because she tossed it to me.
Frustrated and gunless, Pete Kennedy picked up a plate full of potato salad and launched it at me. Warm pieces of potatoes and eggs flew through the air.
“My salad!” Sister Yetch yelled, as if she had given birth to it. She broke from the pack and dove over the food table towards Pete. Everyone else dog-piled me. Hands, knees, elbows, and feet danced upon me like popping rocks. I was being kneaded like a ball of dough. Those who couldn’t get to me and the book started throwing food at me and each other. The air was thick with handfuls of casseroles, cookies, and homemade confections.
For a good five minutes food and feet trampled and flew over me. Then one by one people dropped from the fight, falling to the ground to lie by me in exhaustion. A few people crawled off and away from us all. I watched Digby get hit in the eye and Leo get tackled by Paul. Old Pap Wilson beaned Wad with a few franks, and Frank Porter nailed Geoff Titter with a tin of Patty Heck’s shortbread cookies. Eventually everyone was down.
I sat up and surveyed the scene. It looked like a battlefield, one big messy mound of people.
“Who has the Book of Mormon?” I asked looking around for it.
“Patty took it from me.”
“I saw Pap with it.”
“I never touched it.”
“Just great,” President Heck complained. “It could be anywhere now. I saw at least twenty people wander off when the food started to fly.”
“So then why worry?” I sighed. “It will show up.”
“Twenty-thousand dollars,” Sister Watson whined.
“Well, I don’t have it,” Paul insisted, trying to pull some frosting from his hair.
“Just great,” President Heck said again.
I lay back down and listened to the heavy breathing of my war-weary brothers and sisters.
“So Roswell’s not dead,” President Heck eventually said as he lay there recovering next to me.
“Nope.”
“I thought I had seen him a couple months back in the deep forest,” Toby muttered. “But I didn’t say anything out of respect.”
“He’s somewhere,” I replied.
Sister Watson was on her hands and knees looking for her wig. When she finally found it, it was covered in pudding. But the chocolate treat seemed to work well as an adhesive. So she slapped it back on her head and took a seat on one of the overturned cinder blocks. We all looked pretty ridiculous.
Sister Lando was the first to laugh.
I sat up and saw her body jiggle as she lay there violently snickering. Teddy laughed next, her old cackle filling the air like the food had previously. Ed joined in the jovial giggling, and then the rest of us.
We laughed for a good ten minutes, wiping our eyes and trying to catch our breath. We laughed and picked food off each other. Even Paul was enjoying the group snicker till Sister Watson shot him a wounding glance. It was okay for others to laugh at her hair, but not Paul.
We picked up the tables and cleaned up the meadow. I was wiping what looked to be some sort of jam off of my white shirt, looking down at the ground, when I noticed two beautiful feet step into my view. The feet were adorned by skimpy sandals that left little to the imagination.
Could it be?
I looked up slowly, hoping beyond hope that these two feet were connected to who I thought they were. My eyes stopped at the face of Grace. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning, either. Everything continued to go on around us as we stared at each other. Folks cleaned up and picked at themselves, oblivious to the two of us.
“You,” I finally stated.
“Me,” she replied, her red hair pulled back into a tangled ponytail.
I didn’t know what else to say. She popped into my life at the most unusual times. I couldn’t believe she had just walked up to me, planted her feet, and stayed there to let me speak with her. I was almost convinced that the feelings I had had for Grace were one sided and unfounded. But here she stood, and the spring light made her appear more splendid than all the flowers nature could push forth. Her thin dress was long and blowing in the gentle wind. She looked taller than I had remembered. Her green eyes fluttered with the breath of life.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
Grace smiled by accident. She quickly corrected herself. “Why?” she asked.
“I just . . . well . . . I, you make me so nervous,” I said, leaking more honesty than I had intended.
Grace took a step back.
“I make you nervous?” she questioned, putting her hand to her chest.
Maybe it was the springtime. Maybe it was the teasing of warm weather. Maybe it was the knowledge that I wouldn’t be here for too much longer. Maybe it was Grace. Whatever the reason, for the first time in over twenty months, I felt completely alive. I had been relatively happy the last year or so. Thelma’s Way had even felt like home a couple of times. But completeness had been fleeting. At the moment, however, my soul was a sanctuary, and contentment was grazing on the fields of my heart. I was a peg that Grace had hammered into the landscape, making me fit.
“Grace, I . . . ”
I was too busy admiring the scenery to notice Elder Staples step up to us.
“So you must be Grace,” he smiled coyly, sticking out his hand and interrupting us. “Sport here has told me all about you.”
Grace’s smile disappeared.
“Only nice things,” I offered.
“The whole town knows he’s sweet on you,” Elder Staples blabbered.
I blushed responsibly.
Her green eyes let me know that she was on to me—in a good way.
“So, did you come to see the debate?” I asked, trying to sound sure of myself.
“No,” she replied beautifully. “I just dropped off a couple of costumes I made for the pageant at the boardinghouse.”
“Were they hard to make?” I asked, sounding like a fool.
“Not too bad,” Grace responded kindly.
“Oh,” was all I said.
“Like I said,” Elder Staples butted in, “he’s sweet on you.”
Grace smiled, then she turned and walked off. Just like that she was gone. I couldn’t tell if the conversation had ended well or weirdly. A little bit of both, I concluded.
“Way to go,” I scolded Elder Staples. “I’m not sweet on her.”
“What?” he asked. “I was just trying to help.”
We went back to helping with the meadow clean-up until it was done. President Heck was the only one to ask me how I had figured all this Roswell, Book of Mormon stuff out. So, when everyone was gone, my companion and I sat down with him on the rotting pioneer wagons and we talked.
I told him how Feeble had passed away with the figure of Martin Calypso in his hand, giving us the ultimate clue. It had been Grace who had first informed me of Martin Calypso. We had gone to the Virgil’s Find library that morning to research him out. It turned out that Martin Calypso was a gentle pig farmer who lived in the 18
00s. He was best known for the saying, “Let man and pig fight for freedom as brothers.”
“He wasn’t real smart,” I added. “Anyhow, Martin had been rather successful until his twin brother, Leonard, started gambling and depleting the family funds. In a desperate state, Leonard ended up stealing their rare family Bible and selling it to a Dutch sailor named Rugger. When Martin confronted Leonard, Leonard killed him.
“Well, I got to thinking how closely this resembled Roswell and Feeble,” I said. “And the pieces fell together. I remembered that Roswell had told me about his cousin Stubby who had a pawn shop in Virgil’s Find. I looked him up in the phone book. Elder Staples and I then went to visit him. I just wanted to find out if Roswell was still alive, and if Stubby by some chance knew where he was. I found out much more.
“When we entered Stubby’s shop I simply asked him where Roswell was. He said he hadn’t seen him in a couple of days, realizing immediately after he had spoken that he shouldn’t have told me. It was too late. I knew Roswell was alive. I asked Stubby if he knew anything about an old book that Roswell might have had. Feeling that he had already said too much, he told us more. Yes, he knew about the book. He even gave us the address of the woman he had sold it to, there in town.
“I couldn’t believe it. We headed over to her place, and she gladly sold it back to us, claming that it didn’t look as snooty as some of her other old books. She gladly took my out-of-state check. She obviously didn’t know the value of the book.
“I was ecstatic.
“We raced back here, stopping only at the boardinghouse to check if the rest of Feeble’s ‘Great Men of the World’ pewter set was still there. Of course, the figures were all gone. Roswell had probably been sneaking in and out of the boardinghouse, taking them to sell. I bet if we checked all the other Virgil’s Find pawn shops, we’d find a few with a number of little metal men on hand.”
“But why?” President Heck asked.
“For the same reason he stole the Book of Mormon. I guess it’s like Martin Calypso,” I said. “Remember how much Roswell liked to bet everyone?”
“I guess,” he answered.
“Think,” I said. “He was constantly saying ‘I’ll bet you ten bucks this, or that, will happen.’”
President Heck nodded.
“All I can figure is that he lost more bets than he won. He must have needed the money. And when Feeble caught on to the fact that Roswell had stolen the book, he probably threatened to turn him in. Feeble was pretty honest and, unlike his brother, an active Mormon. Maybe Feeble had a heart attack running after or away from Roswell that morning. Something must have happened.”
“So he killed his brother,” President Heck said, scratching his head.
“I don’t know the whole story,” I pointed out.
“Where’s Roswell now?” President Heck asked.
“He can’t be too far away,” I said. “I figure he stole that P.I.G. money because he needed something to live on, or maybe he needed to pay some other debts. He must be pretty good at slipping in and out without being noticed.”
Elder Staples yawned, bored with it all. “This is one goofy town,” he commented.
“So Paul’s innocent,” President Heck said incredulously.
“Yep,” I replied.
“Of course, he’ll use all of this to build up his own religion again,” President Heck pointed out. “He’ll talk on and on ’bout how he was persecuted for the real gospel.”
“Probably so,” I agreed.
“We’re right back where we started from,” President Heck mourned.
The thought was thoroughly depressing. Any contentment I had felt earlier from the presence of Grace was suddenly gone. We got up from the old pioneer wagon and went home. Feeling that things were worse now than when I had entered the valley made me sick. I had turned this place back into what it always had been. Confused.
What was I thinking?
31
Half Baked
Sister Watson wasted no time. After getting permission from Ed’s mother, she cast Ed Washington as Parley and called an emergency meeting to get him acquainted with the cast. Some folks thought she ought to have given the part to Paul after all, seeing as he didn’t really steal the Book of Mormon or the P.I.G. money. But Sister Watson held her ground. Thief or no thief, anyone who claimed to have seen the finger was trouble. Besides, Paul had besieged her with hundreds of handwritten memos demanding changes to the script—changes that would emphasize similarities between Parley P. Pratt and Paul himself. They were both visionary leaders persecuted for their testimonies. They had both traveled to far away lands, that sort of thing. It didn’t work. Paul was banned from the planning committee for good.
The morning of the emergency meeting, everyone awoke to find a giant loaf of bread sitting right outside the boardinghouse, in the meadow. It was at least seven feet long and four feet wide. The sight of it was rather creepy and surreal. Having served in Thelma’s Way for so long, I thought that there were few things that would surprise me anymore. This did.
No one knew where it had come from. Some speculated that it had dropped out of a plane.
“A really big bakery plane,” CleeDee said.
Leo suggested that it was an alien loaf.
“Maybe other species travel in bread,” he said, his eyes getting wide.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” President Heck said.
But Sister Watson was a voice of reason.
“It probably came from Teddy,” she said. “Teddy’s always making new things. I’m sure it’s just her way of helping with the pageant. We should be right grateful, it seems to me.”
Everyone agreed that seemed to make sense.
Lupert Carver walked right up to it and pinched off a piece.
“It’s good,” he declared, and that’s all it took.
President Heck went to get his tree saw and stood there at the butt of the bread cutting off chunks for people. CleeDee fetched some honey.
After everyone had eaten, it was time for the meeting to begin. There was still about three-fourths of the loaf left, and people began talking about freezing the rest, and questioning each other as to who had a freezer. President Heck was about to start dividing the thing into sections when Teddy Yetch showed up.
“Thanks for the breakfast, Teddy,” Ed Washington chimed. Everyone smiled and applauded until Teddy interrupted.
“I didn’t make that enormous thing. Never been one much for baking bread.”
“I wonder who baked it?” Toby asked.
Suddenly it was quiet. Sister Watson spat out the wad of bread she had in her mouth.
“What if it’s Paul?” she said nervously. “What if it’s poisoned?”
“It ain’t poison,” Toby said. “Poison tastes sour. Besides, if Paul had made a giant loaf of poison bread, you can bet he’d be around to watch us eat it.”
Everyone looked about quickly, then all at once every eye, except for Tindy’s lazy one, glanced back at the bread. People began stepping away from it.
“Paul, you in there?” Brother Heck yelled.
The bread remained silent.
Teddy Yetch took a stick and drove it into the center of the bread. Everyone gasped. Teddy pulled it out and positioned herself to do it again.
“Wait,” I yelled. “If Paul is in there, you don’t want to kill him.”
Teddy thought about this for a second.
“Paul’s not smart enough to bake himself in a loaf of bread,” Sister Watson shouted. “Jab it again, Teddy!”
“Wait a second,” President Heck said, holding his hands up. “Elder Williams is right.”
President Heck walked up to the bread and jammed both his fists into it. He felt around in the middle for a few moments and then struck something. He looked like a breadenarian about to deliver a litter of loaves. He yanked hard and pulled out an ankle. Muffled protest began to emanate from inside the bread. Toby stepped up and helped Brother Heck pull Pa
ul completely from the bread.
Paul lay on the ground coughing up bread for a few moments. He was completely covered in crumbs and mad about being discovered. He stood up and pointed at all of us.
“You and your secret meetings,” he said. “I’ve a right to know what you’re saying about me. I’ve a right to know about the pageant. But the joke is on you. I spent the last few months building a big hidden oven over beyond Lush Point. I knew it would come in handy. I wheeled this loaf out here and crawled up from the bottom and into it. And it would have paid off, too, if you’da just started your meeting on time ’stead of eating first. Greedy gluttons,” he shouted, shaking his fist. He wiped some more bread crumbs from his face, turned around, and stormed off toward the Girth River.
We all just stood there. But Sister Heck was thinking clearly.
“Is the bread poisoned?” she called after him.
Paul turned back around and shook his head no before continuing on.
Elder Staples and I each had another slice before Sister Watson started her read through.
The pageant was coming.
32
Practice Makes . . . If At First You Don’t Succeed
About a week before the much-anticipated pageant, Elder Staples and I helped Toby finish the stage. This was no tiny structure. Toby had gone all out. The stage was on the far end of the meadow facing the boardinghouse. It was tall, wide, and fairly impressive. It had taken him almost the entire twenty months to design and construct it, but because of that, it looked as good as any church house stage I had ever seen.
With the stage completed, Sister Watson decided to do the first dry run of “All Is Swell,” up on it. Elder Staples and I stayed around to watch. The play started with Thelma coming into the valley and settling. It then went on to tell the story of Parley P. Pratt coming to Thelma’s Way and getting sick after eating the bad ham. A lot of the play focused on a woman named Drusa who helped nurse Parley back to health. Sister Watson also wrote the play to tell the full story of the missing Book of Mormon. She had even added the recent debate scene.
All Is Swell Page 16
