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Show 223 of heaven cast into hell and never privileged to be born. The head swam, but there was more. He had committed to memory the location, chapter and verse, of every detail, every fugitive utterance in the Old and New Testaments (indexed, of course, in his missionaries' guide) referring to modern-day revelation, in order to soften up his listeners to the realization that they must have believed in such a thing all along if they accepted the Bible. While they blinked and looked confused at learning that about themselves he could little by little introduce the possibility that the modern-day revelation they were talking about just might possibly already exist, and he and his companion just happened to have something in their attache cases that he would like to show them. He had become fairly proficient at dramatically riffling the pages of his Book of Mormon in their presence, looking at them sideways to whet their interest. He had learned the right combination of confidence and modest bemusement to lend his voice when he read aloud, from his Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith's 1832 prophecy of the Civil War and where it would break out, the better to enflame their desire to know more, because the nose did not always withdraw and the crack close. No, more than once he and his companion were let past the door by a worried housewife in curlers from whom they extracted an invitation to return in the evening when her husband would be there. He had also learned not to expect too much from such an invitation. The same housewife was a different person when they came back in the evening. She no longer wore curlers and the worry-lines around her eyes had hardened. Behind her they could see her husband reading the paper in his cracked naugahyde recliner and the children lying on the floor in the blue glare of the television screen. She had told her husband they were coming and he had told her to tell them |