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Show 118 story about his great-grandmother that he would have liked to see Paul or anyone else match. Lorin had admired his great-grandmother immensely when she was alive even though her wrinkled bristly little face had put him off. She was a doughty Yorkshirewoman who had converted in her teens and emigrated to Utah where she had married her sister's husband and had lots of children and had still mowed her own lawn at ninety. Her life had been governed by gritty practicalities. She had scrubbed floors in county school houses and taken in boarders. She was not fanciful, and had no patience with people who were, and on a wet spring morning in 1904 she had come out of the bedroom in the house she shared with her husband on alternate weeks and had seen her oldest daughter, dead seven years, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Lorin liked tuning into that part directly, without preliminaries, because it reinforced the shock of the arbitrary. There had been no signs or portents, no dimming of the moon or flutterings of ash in the coal stove to set that day apart from the thousands. His great-grandmother did not scream or faint, but her grip loosened on the thundermug she was carrying out to empty, which dropped to the floor, and a startled neck of water sprang from its mouth onto the carpet, which absorbed it before it could run to the nearest baseboard and collect in a pool where two walls joined, because nothing was quite in plumb in Randolph. Theground froze every winter and foundations split with the thaw. Her husband came by a few minutes later from the adjacent house (he had built both, one for each wife, and they were separated by the pump and a large cottonwood; when the lilacs bloomed dense around both kitchen windows the wives couldn't see each other), and found her on her knees scrubbing the carpet while a half-circle of night-shirted children stood watching her like owls. She told him about the thundermug, and then-after sending the children back to their |