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Show IV Grandfather and Grandmother Evelyn were discreetly silent; Charlotte, her eyes red and face grey, continually dabbed inside her sunbonnet with a handkerchief. Grandfather reported in his journal that the only words she spoke all day were those required by the marriage-rite: When Ivins asked "Do you, Charlotte, willingly give this sister in eternal marriage to your husband?" and Charlotte murmured, "I do." As if stricken by realization of his undue haste, Grandfather became ill on the journey home. When able to travel again, he invited Charlotte to vacation with him in the verdant mountains southwest of Dublan, while Evelyn spent her honeymoon tending the children at home. A few months later, the last part of Charlotte's dream came true. In the typhoid-stricken community, despite a priesthood promise that the boy would survive, Grandfather buried his oldest son, Ezra. Losing the bookends of his family shook Grandfather's faith in the Church as deeply as the tragedies shook Charlotte's faith in her husband. Grandfather had been promised by a trusted Church elder that the boy would live, and now Ezra rotted six feet beneath the shifting sands of Chihuahua. "I was wild and dumbfounded," Grandfather wrote. I wished I could have died without witnessing this. Had God broken His Word? Was there really a God? Were those who claimed to hold His Priesthood imposters?" Grandfather, reared to believe in divine revelation from God to man and to trust the Church and its authorities, quaked |
