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Show in my father's house/ 153 on the face of God." I poked my mother. "I don't want to see God yet," I whispered. She smiled sleepily and put her forefinger against her lips. My father's voice went on and on. After awhile I forgot about the plate of cookies on the dining room table, forgot about walking home through the sharp evening air. The world of my senses became another world --a world of popcorn balls and pheasants whistling while I was surrounded by a house of words, a great palace of words, each word mortared upon the other until they mounted far over my head and sealed me inside. My father's voice was a catapult for the words, flinging them into place. They were not his words, nor were they mine. They belonged to everyone and to no one, like the North Star. And like the songs my mother played on the piano, the words required no explanation, no understanding. Heard so long, repeated again and again, they became another song, another dance, another way of reaching out to touch life. And so, we had a cultivated sense of imminent doom, a precognition of what came crashing in on us just before Independence Day, 1955. My father received a call from our sympathetic policeman, Captain York, who told of a plot to raid us within the week: with the Church's spies in our group, and our houses under surveillance for a month or more, they'd have no difficulty arresting my father and perhaps the mothers, too. They planned to disperse the children to foster homes throughout the state, |