Mission to America Read Free

there.”
    â€œPersistence?”
    â€œForward-leaningness. Focus. Mental drive.” Lauer gazed off through the widest of his tall windows, the one with the stained-glass border of stars and suns. “Once you're out there, Mason, you won't miss her. Maybe at first, but then you'll be absorbed. The place has a pull, you'll discover. It hums. It hops. Death thinking does that to people. It peps them up. To be frank with you, Bluff could use a dose of that.”
    â€œI like it the way it is now.”
    â€œI don't,” said Lauer. “We need to put some muscle on. This faith has turned into an endless ladies' tea that starts with a prayer and closes with a séance and accomplishes precisely nothing except to turn Tuesday into Wednesday and February into March. As long as the flowers bloom, they like to tell us. As long as our friend mister robin sings his songs. They're touched in the head, these women.”
    â€œThey're our mothers.”
    â€œSo they enjoy reminding us,” said Lauer.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    My first full experience of physical love, like that of most young men in Bluff, took place at an annual religious festival known as the Sanctified Midsummer Frolic. I was twenty-two that month, a trainee forester battling Asian beetles in the lodgepole pine stands north of town. My partner, chosen by our families, was one year my junior, a girl named Sarah Kimmel, studious, severe, and very thin, whose fingertips smelled of Scotch tape and Magic Marker ink as she reached for my face and neatly shut my eyes.
    â€œYou're going to like this, and it's okay to like it, but try not to like it too much,” Sarah said. “You have to contain yourself.”
    â€œI know,” I said.
    â€œNot every time, but this time. Can you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBecause you've done the exercise?”
    â€œI have.”
    Sarah looked worried. Accidents happened. I wondered if I should be equally concerned. I'd kissed girls, I'd held them, I'd roamed inside their clothes, and a few times I'd let them touch me under my clothes, but those were sneaky, unauthorized encounters, hampered by fear and circumscribed by conscience, while this one was authorized, open, and encouraged. I might explode. My whole body might fly apart.
    My father had tried to prepare me for the Frolic by taking me out on a drive the previous week in his Chevrolet cruiser and speaking frankly for hours, even drawing a couple of sketches in his citation log as we idled at the edge of Martyr's Pond, the site of the 1880 hacking death of a runaway polygamous wife by a posse of vengeful Mormon patriarchs. There had been three other murders in Bluff's history, but none of them so momentous and galvanizing, perhaps because the victims were all men and at least two of them were drunken men. The dead woman's name was Eliza Wofford Bingham, and we honored her with a two-day September holiday that was my least favorite weekend of the year. From dawn on the first day to sundown on the second, all AFA males had to stay inside their houses while the women of Bluff paraded in the streets drinking from flasks of elderberry spirits and—in imitation of Eliza fleeing her killers through the thorny brush—casting off their clothing as they went. The holiday ended here, at Martyr's Pond, with a ceremony I'd never seen but once heard described as “rambunctious naked splashing.”
    After hastily going over the mental exercise meant to arrest my pleasure at the last moment, my father recalled the Frolic of thirty years ago, when he'd first enjoyed contact with my mother. He said he'd been tired that evening from staying up late kidding around with his buddies, and he regretted it. He was drowsy and inattentive during the ritual, while my mother, he said, was alert and fresh and avid. He told me that he feared he'd hurt her permanently and compromised their marriage before it started. He advised me to go to bed