by Shawn Vestal
SEMINARY
September 8–12, 1975
Monday
On the first morning of his senior year, Jason pulls up to his grandfather’s house in the LeBaron, crackling slowly on the gravel, and honks. It is 6:45 A.M., cool and lilac-gray. Jason’s stomach pulses, a nervous fist clenching in time with his clash of emotions. All night he planned what to say to Loretta. He will ask her a brash, direct question, a question one of the jocks at school, the popular thugs, would ask. Because he has no idea how to talk to girls, and the popular thugs clearly do, and what the popular thugs do is flirt aggressively. Take liberties. Poke, poke, poke. He will ask her a question as if she were just an ordinary teenager: “Aren’t you pissed that Dean’s making you go to seminary?”
Gauge her response. Get a read.
He spent last night poring over his Evel Knievel scrapbook, the cutout quotes from newspapers and magazines, trolling for bravado and inspiration. “You come to a point in your life when you really don’t care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.” “If you fall during your life, it doesn’t matter. You’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.” He built a reservoir of confidence that has leaked away. Loretta needs saving, saving from Dean and all of it, and he feels that it has been arranged for him to save her.
If he could just be the right guy.
As soon as he sees her coming out of the side door, though—dressed like a normal girl, more or less, in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, hair pulled into a ponytail, features fine and smooth and tensed and lovely—Jason begins cursing himself, knowing that he is not the right guy.
She climbs in. Says hello very, very quietly. Looks off across the desert, showing him the pale pillar of her neck. He backs out of the driveway.
“Excited for your first day of seminary?” he warbles lamely.
“I don’t know,” she says, not turning from the window.
She is less perfectly beautiful this morning. A little drawn and sleepy eyed. Jason notices a strange sloping bulge on the bridge of her delicate nose. Which is fine with him. She is a lot better looking than he is, and anything that closes the gap will be helpful.
They ride without speaking for seven minutes. It is much harder than he guessed it would be, sitting alone with her and trying to think of things to say. Then, as the abandoned TB hospital on the edge of town comes into sight, she releases a deep breath—a lush, weary sound—and says, “I hope it’s not too weird.”
“It won’t be,” Jason says.
He is so wrong. It is too, too weird. They arrive at the church as sunrise blares through the tops of the trees, burnishing rooftops, power lines, and steeples. They park and walk in behind two freshman boys and a girl. The freshmen don’t say a thing, don’t look at them. Jason and Loretta follow them in and down the hallway of cool tile into the seminary classroom. Three rows of folding chairs face a blackboard and a little mini-pulpit on a table. Brother Kershaw stands there, reading from a workbook and chewing a pencil, belly straining outward above skinny legs. On the blackboard, three words are whitely chalked: Remorse, Repentance, Restitution.
“Brother Harder,” Kershaw says. “Good to see you looking bright eyed and bushy tailed.”
And then he looks to Loretta and his jovial energy lurches to a stop. Jason flushes anew, introduces Loretta as Ruth’s niece, who is visiting for a while or maybe longer, and sees the blood is hot in her face, too. Loretta takes the seat in the far back corner by herself, and Jason sits in front of her, not next to anyone, and they each avoid the eyes of the others. There are fifteen other kids there; half the seats are full. A cloud of assumptions fills the room. Loretta sits quietly, filling a notebook page with an expanding spore of tiny squares. Kershaw calls on her just once, after reading a passage from the Pearl of Great Price:
“‘Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence.’ Why must all men repent?” Kershaw asks. “Loretta?”
She says, in a hushed, glorious voice, “I don’t know.”
Afterward, she takes the LeBaron back home. Jason catches a ride to school with Ben Jenkins and Jed Story. The two talk football. Ben’s a fullback and linebacker, and Jed plays wide receiver, and they look like variations on a theme: wide-legged jeans, short-sleeved terry-cloth shirts, helmety haircuts parted down the middle and feathered. They tune in the rock station from Twin Falls, Z103 FM, blasting “Ballroom Blitz.”
Jason is happy to be left out of their conversation. But as they pull into the high school parking lot, Ben says, “Hey, Harder,” with the sneer that lets him know he’s in for it.
“What?”
“Your cousin’s hot.”
Jed snorts.
“She’s not my cousin.”
“What is she?”
“My aunt’s niece.”
Jed says, “I think that makes her your cousin.”
“You can’t fuck her, anyway,” Ben says.
Jed cackles. A brush fire breaks out in Jason’s upper intestine. A knife blade pierces his side. Jed slaps his open palm on the dashboard. “You’d make a retarded baby.”
“One of us could fuck her, though,” Ben says, waggling his thumb between himself and Jed. “Maybe you could set that up.”
A vial of acid bursts in Jason’s stomach. Ben and Jed laugh and laugh, gasping and clutching themselves in glee.
“Knock it off,” Jason says, puny.
“Fine,” Ben says. “Make a retarded baby.”
Jason walks into school alone. He goes to first-period biology and doesn’t talk to anyone. He goes to second-period trig, where his only words are an awkward and ignored hello to Corinne Jensen, the former girl of his dreams. He goes to third and fourth periods and doesn’t talk to anyone.
He imagines the cloud of knowledge from seminary following him, spreading into every corner of the school. At lunch, Boyd asks him how things are going with the pioneers.
“Hunky-dory,” Jason says.
“They say there’s a new girl.”
“A new girl?” Jason returns this with a hard, sarcastic spin. “What does that mean?”
“Hey, this is me,” Boyd says. “You know what it means. And you know what everyone is saying it means.”
“She’s my aunt’s niece,” Jason says.
Boyd gazes at him. Jason studies the tater tot casserole on his lunch tray: it is a creamy prehistoric ocean, mushroomy and thick, with tawny islands of potato for the swimmers, the strivers, to cling to while they rest and regain their strength. Jason imagines he is on one of those islands, and Loretta is on another one. And everybody else—family, school, church, town, state, nation, world—is the gray, gloopy sea.
Boyd says, “Dude,” and shakes his head.
“It’s weird,” Jason says. “I think she doesn’t belong with them.”
“People from the twentieth century don’t belong with them.”
Tuesday
Loretta feels lit from within. Neon. Like no one can stop looking at her, aglow in the dark, like she is made of fine glass tubes, easily shattered. Since she walked into that church, every moment since, even at home in her bed, she feels watched and judged and known.
She hates it more than she hates Ruth’s bulgur meat loaf. She hates it more than she hates sleeping with Dean. She hates it because it has tainted the best thing in her life—her future, the magical time that is supposed to arrive when she enters the outside world, the world of pink Mustangs and matching Tussy lipstick—by announcing the truth about the way she will be in that outside world.
Ruth says she can’t quit. Not yet. They have not figured out their relationship to this community. If Bradshaw were up here, Loretta would leave with him, go anywhere, sleep under bridges, under sagebrush, eat jackrab
bits, eat grass, eat dirt, eat bugs. She is brave enough, if only she had someone to share it with, she knows she could be brave enough. But Bradshaw is in Short Creek, running the business, while Dean scouts for customers up here.
Jason picks her up in the morning, all corny and nervous. He reminds her of the children—alternately endearing and aggravating.
“Hello again,” he says.
“Good morning.”
She does not like how much he likes this. Three minutes expire. On the glove box is a word in script: LeBaron. She thinks of Ervil LeBaron, the polygamist leader down in Mexico with thirteen wives who broke with the Short Creek brethren. Mr. Blood Atonement—the guy had his own brother killed. Dean once told her, Ervil’s methods are extreme, but his beliefs are sound.
She yawns. She could go right back to sleep. In her future, Loretta will never rise before the sun and grog through the gray hours. She will not do chores or make biscuits. She will not live so close to cattle that it is all she can smell, all the time, the shit of cattle.
Jason says, “How’d you like your first day of seminary?”
“Another joy sent by the Lord,” she says. Caught by surprise, he snorts moistly, then looks away, ears scarlet. She feels one ounce better.
At seminary, she sits in the back corner. She averts her gaze from the eyes of others—on the floor, over their shoulders, at their feet—and no one speaks to her, not even Brother Kershaw, and she can tell by the insistence with which they try to show her they aren’t noticing her that it’s all they are doing, noticing her.
She thought that among the Mormons here there would be some bit of kinship. Some similarity. But these kids are utterly worldly. The girls wear jeans high on their hips, snugged up their cloven rears, and their hair parts into cascading waves. They all wear makeup, and even the homely girls dress like whores. And the boys are like monkeys, in their bell-bottoms and T-shirts, all except for the three who are farm boys, in Wranglers and boots and purple FFA jackets, the closest thing to Short Creek style she has seen here. These three boys are clearly the lowest caste. Jason and a few of the others are somewhere above them, and the top caste consists of the two largest monkeys, the two with the biggest bodies, the square-jawed, acne-scarred football player boys. Ben and Jed cut looks at her constantly, and elbow each other, and show their interest more plainly than the rest.
• • •
It is Dean’s night. She finds it more unbearable than usual. He smells like a sour washcloth, and the mole on his neck is grotesque and wrinkled, and his face is contorted into a twisted grimace that lacks all self-consciousness, all reserve, and she knows she will never be able to be someone who has not experienced this. He is marking her.
Afterward, she says, “I was wondering, since we’re not going to church here, if it makes sense for me to be going to seminary. I mean, will it make sense to them?”
Dean seems stumped. He lies on his back in his garments. The prickly black hair that covers his body presses against the sheer white material in swirls and eddies. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, starts to speak, rubs them again.
“Huh,” he says. “Well, little sister, you may be right there. You may be.”
He falls silent. He drums his fingers on his chest, gazes at the ceiling. Something washes over him afterward, some lassitude. Loretta wonders whether he’ll come at her again. He’s frustrated that she isn’t yet pregnant, because he believes himself so fertile. His fertility is an expression of his righteousness. She has kept her methods a secret, and yet she understands that it is starting to be taken in the household as a failure, a failure of righteousness and belief and commitment, a failure for which blame will be located and assigned.
“Maybe I should stop going,” she says, grazing his beard with her fingertips.
“Maybe,” he says. “We’ll see.”
Wednesday
Waiting in the LeBaron for Loretta, Jason spots a jackrabbit perched on a rock at the back of the yard, spindly ears high. His duff color blends with the morning twilight. He’s barely visible, and he doesn’t move as Loretta scuttles out and slides in.
“Look at that guy,” he says. “Just watching us. He’s not even scared.”
“Dean says we’ve got to do something drastic.”
“We were using carrots before.”
“What—feeding them?”
“Yeah. You cut them up, soak them in strychnine, and then lay out a line of them along the edge of the field. You’ve got to start with some nonpoison ones first. Works pretty good. We were hauling eight or ten a day out of there for a while.”
She doesn’t answer.
He says, “We tried some other poisons, too. In barley.”
“Dean says you can’t shoot ’em or poison ’em fast enough.”
They’re actually talking. Okay, Jason, he thinks. Keep it going.
He says, “Yeah, that’s what my grandpa said, too.”
“He wants to have a drive.”
A drive. A bunny bash. Herd the rabbits into a circle of men, who club them to death. Regular people had stopped doing them. The New York Times had written up the last one, over in Mud Flats, and run a photo of a bloody-shirted father-and-son bashing team. It became a big deal, and everyone got defensive. The gas stations sold bumper stickers with a cartoon image of a hippie hugging a bunny, set inside a gun sight. The local papers ran editorials about big-city animal lovers, and the letters were full of righteous indignation about liberals, hippies, environmentalists, the media. Jason had never seen a drive, and he didn’t care about jackrabbits. Sometimes he and Boyd would take .22s out and try to shoot them in the desert, though the rabbits mostly bounded away untouched. But if there is anything he doesn’t want right now, it’s more weird attention at the farm.
“Great,” he says, sarcastically. “That’ll be super cool.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “They’re just a bunch of stupid rodents. Gotta get rid of ’em somehow. Dean says they ate up about half the crops.”
A revelation sprints across Jason’s mind, illuminated by her defensiveness: She would be having sex with Dean, of course. She would be—What? Every other night? On some kind of schedule?—welcoming Dean into her room. His creepy uncle would climb on and get to it, grunting and farting, probably, and covered with moles and bristly hairs. Holy goddamn shit. Jason thinks he will puke. She would hate Dean, of course. She must. Jason could think of her only that way. But even so, she would find herself aligned with him against others.
Loretta reaches over and turns on the radio. Jason notices her knuckles are large and red for such trim, tapered fingers. Like she pops them too much. He welcomes every unflattering detail. The radio is set at his dad’s AM country station, KART. They listen to that awful music—“Grandma’s Feather Bed,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the hideous sound track to his life—all the way to town, while she hums along.
• • •
At lunch, Jason doesn’t say anything to Boyd about Loretta, and Boyd doesn’t ask. Boyd says he’s thinking about seeing if his mom would let him borrow her car to drive to South Dakota for a demonstration in support of Jonathan Raincounter.
“Dude’s getting hosed,” Boyd says.
“Who’s he again?”
“Man, you have got to pay some goddamn attention.”
Boyd reminds him: Jonathan Raincounter was an Oglala Sioux, unjustly imprisoned for shooting two FBI agents. Most people Jason knows take a different view of the case than Boyd; most people he knows see the case—Indians shooting FBI agents!—as one more sign that they have entered the last days, that the sinful world is tinder dry and ready to burn with apocalyptic fire, that the approach to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh, and that the righteous will soon be heaved upward by the Lord, for that reason and many others, including the following:
Nudity and sex talk in movies
Filthy rock and roll
Women’s lib
The Equal Rights Amendment
Tight blue jeans
Rampant sexual perversion and immorality
Unshaven men with long hair
Roe v. Wade
The fall of Saigon
Jackrabbits eating farmers out of house and home
Queers and hippies marching in the streets of the cities
Liberals attacking the family
The end of the gold standard
Drugs
Oil shock
Creeping federalism
Communists
It is the entire context for Jason’s people. Their atmosphere. They are the Lord’s chosen, saved for the last days, when wickedness will overrun the planet until Christ returns and cleanses the earth for a millennium—a thousand years of fire—followed by the three-tiered afterlife, in descending order of glory. It is coming, it is nearer every day, it is all around them.
What Jason always wonders is: If we’re living in the last days, why are we living like this? School, work, church, chores, bills, striving, arguments, chastity, oil changes, milking cows, cutting hay? He wants to live like time is running out. Like the hippies at the Snake River Canyon. Like Evel Knievel. Like driving to South Dakota to raise forbidden hell. Like falling in love with his uncle’s second wife. Like precious time is really, actually running out instead of plodding along forever.
“What do you think you can you do about it?” Jason asks.
“Not a thing.”
“Then why go?”
“Fun. Adventure. Freedom. Just to be on the right side of things for once.” He waves his fork around, a gesture that encompasses not just the cafeteria, with its folding tables in the space between the auditorium seating and the stage, but their entire universe. “This place. The fucking Indian jokes. The retarded politics. I mean, people here still like Nixon, man.”
