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Show 7o7 T had inherited something of her passion for cleanliness and order. Perhaps this was a major reason why I must write - not'the result of some artistic impulse toward unity and light, but for the cleanliness and order of mind, to try to organize the confusions of my generation, of my people, of my church into something understandable and humanized and meaningful.... OJUL A e * ^ . The frayed Bible Stories book that had occupied me during my mother's treatments when I was a child still rested on the magazine stand beside the old National Geographies - those without pictures of bare-breasted native women. The faces of patients bent over books or staring into space even seemed familiar to me: The grey-haired woman with the pinched, unhappy face must be Mrs. Morgan, the hypochondriac who sometimes called my father three or four times a night to insist that she was dying, until my father relented and went - to find that she had worked herself into a frenzy over simple indigestion or wry neck. Still she would not let him leave until he had examined her completely and declared her to be some distance from death's door. She had been his patient since before I was born. And Sister Whitmore and her daughter, Nellie - members of a northern Utah group of fundamentalists who came to my father for treatments and blessings - had been coming to him as long as I could remember. The daughter had been crippled by Polio, but held herself with an almost regal expression. She claimed that my father, working as an instrument of God, had made her walk again. He was their shaman, a holder ^ -j-v, i-p not the Patriarchy itself, healing arts and of great faith, if not tne *on we left Utah in 1955. They had warned him of insurrection when |
