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Show in my father's house/ 4 2 dark, bottomless places -- secrets that were never told or never understood, but became darker and bigger as time went on. Like the secret of Aunt Karen. Like the secrets inside me. When Danny was snoring, I knelt, hunched inside the covers, and prayed to go to the North Star where there would be no secrets, and a long, long way from the Gulf of Mexico. It was even harder to keep the secrets than I had expected, for I always felt their black, bulky weight inside me. However, the mothers and my father often chuckled about the stories they arranged for nosy neighbors and prying strangers -- especially my mother and Aunt Helga. "You're my brother-in-law," my mother laughed, "so you must be my children's uncle." And then my father instructed us to tell anyone who asked that the man tending horses or raking leaves was our uncle and we had no idea where our father might be. So came my initiation into the torsion of "Mormon logic" a process of rationalization evolved in the early, polygamous years of the Church to deflect persecution. The trick with "Mormon logic" was to obscure the truth without actually lying. Unfortunately, we sometimes had to tell outright lies, for as children we'd not yet learned to guile words into subtle meanings. One day, as I picked grapes from the vines weaving through the driveway fence, a man in a dark blue suit and hat drove up |