OCR Text |
Show 126 with her grim and curlered mother at the door to the dining room)-but he disliked hearing a hymn sung to the wrong tune. It was taking liberties with something immutable; it was like reading scripture with modern pronouns or mocking the sacrament. "Fine, Earl," he said. "Where did you learn it?" "I'm not going to tell you," said Lorin's great-uncle, and pushed past him and went out the door. The story, however, spread through the town like a stain over the next few days. Lorin's great-uncle, his affable self once again, was found back at work, humming his strange tune as he clipped hair or measured out jellybeans, the thick veins on his nose bright with the complacency of a secret he would share only if you asked him nicely. He went with his wife to church the following Sunday for the first time in years, and when the sacrament hymn proved to be "Though Deepening Trials Throng Your Way," as it was every fourth Sunday, he sang his melody against the congregation's. He did this again on the next Sunday he was present, four weeks later; and then, having discovered that the tune fit several other hymns as well, he began appearing every Sunday, at priesthood meeting and Sunday school in the morning, and at sacrament meeting in the evening. His voice was the clearest, most forceful and ringing in the ward, so each meeting was blighted at least once before it was over. Angry looks did no good, nor did expostulation nor sweet reason. His triumph consisted in the evidence that angels appeared to scoffers, and he would not be moved. And he never was. Drink finally rotted his brain, and Lorin remembered him as a very old man, drooling in a nursing home in Salt Lake before he died, his one touch with the other world the last light to fade, or at least the last thing he could still talk about, or at least the last thing |