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Show in my father's house/ 9 completely healed by now. The scriptures promise that we could grow limbs, like a lizard grows a tail --if only we had enough faith." I examined the cut on my hand which still hurt, and I wondered why I couldn't make it better. In the years to come, I was to think of Grandfather's scar again and again; that faint, ragged line seemed to symbolize everything I longed to believe about our way of life that was counterbalanced by the heavy promontories of reality. Perhaps a hundred feet from Grandmother's cottage loomed the white house, another of my father's homes. The rambling, two-story structure had been built by an early settler when polygamy was sanctioned by the official Mormon Church, before the Manifesto was signed and the Enabling Act passed to gain Utah's statehood. At one time, all my father's families lived in the white house, but as our household grew in quantum jumps, other dwellings became necessary. The front of the white house faced westward, a bland tree-shaded facade for the curiosity-seekers who stopped on the highway and even got out of their cars to try the gate. But its backside, seeming almost human, gazed at the rising sun through paint-speckled windows, benevolent, crinkled stucco smiling on our games of kick-the-can and tag. As we entered the cool, dark cave of the white house milk room, I heard Aunt Gerda banging pots in the kitchen. I wondered |