Keeper of Dreams (88 page)

Bowie waited. “Well?”

“I just did it,” said Alvin. “I just put it back.”

Bowie reached down to the sheath at his waist. It wasn’t empty. He drew out the knife. There was the blade, plain as day, not a whit changed.

You’d’ve thought Bowie was handling his long-lost baby.

“How’d you get the blade back on it?” he asked. “You never touched it.”

“It was there all along,” said Alvin. “I just kind of spread it out a little.”

“So I couldn’t see it?”

“And so it wouldn’t cut nothing.”

“But now it will?”

“I think you’re bound to die, when you take on them Mexica, Mr. Bowie. But I want you to take some human sacrificers with you on the way.”

“I’ll do that,” said Bowie. “Except for the part about me dying.”

“I hope I’m wrong and you’re right, Mr. Bowie,” said Alvin.

“And I hope you live forever, Alvin Maker,” said the knife-wielding killer.

That morning Alvin and Arthur Stuart left the boat, as did Abe Lincoln and Cuz, and they made their journey down to Nueva Barcelona together, all four of them, swapping impossible stories all the way. But that’s another tale, not this one.

Just as I was about to start writing
The Crystal City
, the penultimate book in the Alvin Maker series, Bob Silverberg told me that he had the go-ahead for a second anthology in the
Legends
series.
Crystal City
was going to take place in Nueva Barcelona—New Orleans; I had just read a book about Lincoln that told about his trips down the Mississippi, once with a cousin of his. Since I had to get Alvin and Arthur down the river to New Orleans anyway, I might as well have them meet Lincoln on the way.

As I always do with the Tales of Alvin Maker, I cast about to see who else might have been on the river at that time, and found Jim Bowie, among others. With a cast of characters like that, I knew I couldn’t lose.

But I found a way to really mess myself up. Because
“Yazoo Queen”
became so productive that I couldn’t bear to tear myself away. “Grinning Man” had stood completely alone—if you never read it, the novels would make perfect sense anyway. But after what happened in
“Yazoo Queen,”
I couldn’t just
drop
these characters. I realized that
Crystal City
needed to continue the story right where it left off.

Which made
“Yazoo Queen,”
in effect, Chapter Zero of
The Crystal City
. Only it was under an exclusivity contract with
Legends
and so it couldn’t appear in the book. Nor could I make it available online.

What I was doing was, in effect, making
Crystal City
the direct sequel of a story that those who owned all the Alvin Maker books nevertheless did not have. It would inevitably refer back to events on the river that
they could not read about unless they bought Silverberg’s anthology—which, if I remember correctly, would not come out until considerably after
The Crystal City
was published.

I did my best to play fair with the readers. In the opening chapter of
Crystal City
, I made sure that the key information was clearly presented so that the readers would not be completely lost. However, these clues were also tantalizing hints that there was a good story there that the readers were not being told. Which was the truth.

The better solution would have been to make
“Yazoo Queen”
Chapter One of
The Crystal City
after all, and write something else about Alvin Maker for
Legends
. But the
Legends
deadline would not wait; nor would the
Crystal City
deadline. I had no other Alvin story that was ready to write.

Thus is literature shaped by the calendar.

So for those readers of
Crystal City
who were annoyed by the way the book opened, I agree with you completely. It was wrong of me. I apologize. But now you’ve got the missing story, along with a lot of others, so stop kvetching. I won’t do it again. I hope.

When I call these “Mormon stories” I don’t mean to imply that they are religious. Quite the contrary, they are most definitely not. I don’t write religious stories—I think real religion is far too serious to be put in the hands of fiction writers. If a religion has truth in it, that truth will not be helped by surrounding it with lies.

I do, however, write stories that deal with characters who have religious faith. My Women of Genesis series (
Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah
) and
Stone Tables
are about important figures from the first two books of the Bible. I take very seriously the responsibility to present them fairly, with the motives and beliefs the scripture assigns to them. My task in those books was to flesh them out, to make their lives seem more complete and real to the modern reader. But at no point did I try to deal with points of doctrine, or attempt to persuade people to believe as I believe, or give readers a “spiritual experience.”

Indeed, I have contempt for artists who attempt, through their art, to convey spirituality. I believe they could undertake such an enterprise only because they have no idea what spirituality is; they have mistaken it for emotionalism. But emotionalism is a cheap effect. Any actor knows how to make an audience cry; to make them cry using those tricks and then label it a “spiritual experience” is, in my opinion, fraud.

I’m a believer—I believe that God lives and touches our lives. I even believe that we have a responsibility to help each other find our way to faith and obedience to the things God teaches. But I think that should be done openly, the way I did it when I served as a missionary in Brazil in my early twenties, or the way I have conversed candidly about my faith with any individual who sincerely asked. But such conversations are private, and they have no place in my fictional writings.

No, these stories are “Mormon” because they were written by a
Mormon, about Mormon culture, for Mormon readers. They are
culturally
Mormon.

Because the Mormon religion requires all adult members of the Church to be ministers to each other in one “calling” or another, it consumes an enormous amount of our time. We go to ordinary schools in the nations where we live; we hold ordinary jobs; we vote (or don’t vote) like ordinary citizens, and are obliged to obey the same laws as everyone else. But in our private lives, we are thrust together in small communities called “wards” (parishes, more or less), consisting of about sixty to a hundred households, and there we spend a lot of our time, fulfilling our callings by teaching each other and helping each other live as better Latter-day Saints.

The result is that almost every Latter-day Saint—every Mormon—lives in a tiny village. That village might be right in the middle of a huge city or spread out over a wide stretch of countryside, but we all belong to a community about the size of a nomadic tribe or a decent-size medieval village. We are familiar with every face; we know which children belong to which parents; many of us know every single person’s name.

Not only that, but because the organization of the Church is the same in every ward, we can move into a new ward and immediately know people—at least by their job description. The top man is the bishop; the top woman, the Relief Society president. Name the calling, and we know what role that person serves in this particular small town. It’s like moving from town to town and knowing that every single one of them will have exactly one butcher, one baker, and one candlestick maker; all you have to do is find out which face goes with which job and you know
something
about them. You know what you can expect of them; and as soon as you are given a calling, they know what to expect of you.

Of course, the callings change. The bishop this year might be teaching children in Primary the next; no calling in the ward is permanent. So there is a hidden social system, too, one that you don’t begin to learn until you’ve lived in a ward for some time. Regardless of calling, there are certain people who can be counted on to help and take part in every-thing, and others who are of only shaky reliability. There are those who are deeply knowledgeable about the gospel, and those whose understanding is superficial. There may also be poisonous gossips or ambitious
climbers. Gradually, over time, you come to know the true order of the town.

Then one day the people even higher up will decide that the ward has grown too big and divide it into two separate congregations, so the whole thing starts over again as two new villages take shape and discover who they are together.

This way of organizing our lives is so foreign to the experience of most Americans that it doesn’t even occur to them how different Mormons’ lives are. We don’t dress like the Amish or Chassidim (though we do try to dress modestly), so it’s not plainly visible, but we experience church life in a radically different way from any other group of Christians. It is safe to say that for most of us—for those of us who are actively engaged in the life of the ward—we
live
in Mormonism and only
visit
American culture.

Mormon life thus has a religious intensity that most others don’t have, simply because of the amount of time and attention we put into our church activities. I have lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, for nearly a quarter of a century—almost half my life—but in truth, it is only since I started writing a column for a local weekly (“Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” in
The Rhinoceros Times
) that I felt like I actually became a part of Greensboro. Before that, I was driving around Greensboro and shopping in Greensboro and sending my kids to school in Greensboro but I
lived
in the Guilford Ward for seven years and then the Summit Ward ever since.

Mormons reading this will know exactly what I’m talking about. Non-Mormons may just shake their heads and mutter, “Weird.”

But you have to understand this in order to understand what’s going on with these four stories—and why they even exist.

Because within Mormon culture there are subcultures. For instance, Mormon life in the “Mormon Corridor”—Eastern Idaho, Utah, and parts of Arizona, where many a town is half Mormon or more—is very different from Mormon life in, say, California, where Mormons are common but not predominant, or in the East and South, where Mormons are relatively rare and we are awash in a sea of Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians or Catholics.

There are many Mormons who refer to Utah as “Zion,” and really
believe that it’s only there, in valleys sheltered by the Rocky Mountains, and surrounded by communities consisting almost entirely of fellow Latter-day Saints, that the Mormon religion reaches its true fruition.

Then there are others, like me, who believe that Mormonism is at its best where we are not in the majority, where the differences between our lives and the lives of unbelievers are clearly drawn, where it’s not “good business” to be seen in church meetings and hold prominent callings, and where the kids dealing drugs in the high school are not the same teenage boys blessing the sacrament on Sunday.

Here in North Carolina, our teenagers need each other in order to help sustain each other’s identity as Latter-day Saints; adults depend on each other and are tolerant of variations. If you show up and do your calling, then we don’t care what political party you belong to, you’re one of us. Also, wards are spread out over large stretches of cities and country-side, so that people of every walk of life and every income level gather together to worship.

In the Mormon Corridor, by contrast, members are expendable—there are so many Mormons you can afford to ostracize those who don’t believe
exactly
the way you do. And wards are so bunched together that zoning laws shape the church to a dysfunctional degree—everybody in the ward makes pretty much the same amount of money and lives in pretty much the same-size house, and never has to deal with anyone markedly poorer or different from themselves. When wards are smaller than Zip Codes, it’s easy to forget that it’s faith and obedience that bind us together, not the superficial similarities of income and career.

In other words, in “Zion,” Mormons are far more likely to get confused about where worldly values leave off and religious values begin. Whereas in places where Mormons are a small minority, the lines are clear and everyone can see them. Of course there are good and bad Mormons in all different situations, and there are sick and healthy wards both in and out of “Zion.” Maybe it’s just a matter of preference.

As a fiction writer, my stories serve as social commentary, whether I mean them to or not (and usually I don’t). I faithfully report the kinds of things that real people do, and explain as best I can the reasons why they do them. That’s what fiction is for.

But when I’m writing for the general audience, I can’t address issues
that exist only in Mormon culture. So, from time to time—and you can see that it is comparatively rarely—I find it useful to write a fiction that is set within Mormon culture, or within the Mormon belief system. Knowing that non-Mormons probably will never read it, I don’t bother to explain cultural elements that Mormons all recognize immediately. In these cases I am writing fiction that is “inside.”