OCR Text |
Show M 0f hell lay before us. I didn't express my distaste for doctrines based on fear, for I couldn't discount the possibility - even likelihood - that the apocalyptic predictions would transpire. I still dreamed about earthquakes, nuclear disasters and floods. But I yearned for, prayed for peace. Sometimes he simply took up a book - whatever he was reading, usually something on doctrine - and read aloud to whoever was in the room. When he had finished, he closed the book without comment, glanced at his watch, struggled into his suit coat and grabbed his medical grip. "I must go," he said, kissing me on the forehead. The old sense of deflation returned. Didn't he want to know what I : ^=- felt about what he had just read, the words like stones rippling my thoughts/ No - another patient or wife or child waited for him to share a few precious moments. Besides, to him there was no arguing the truth. He disappeared through the front door, no longer afraid of neighbors' rancor. The world had become permissive, and polygamy was now only another deviation from a dissipating norm. Sometimes it seemed that my father and his group of followers were the last bastions of strict principle, of clear definition. Ahe had relaxed in another way, too. In the spring of 1976, he had been spokesman for the Mormon fundamentalists in a televised documentary about modern-day polygamy. He had seemed thin and old in - black-and-white. But his voice reverberated with authority. "There is nothing sinister about the truth," he declared to the world. Then he explained that the Principle is very demanding for all concerned, and that he and his group were not proselyting |