Saints by Orson Scott Card

Author:Orson Scott Card [Card, Orson Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2001-03-14T06:00:00+00:00

“Read to me,” Dinah said.

“It’s near midnight,” Charlie answered.

Dinah stood and held him by the force of her need. Read to me, Charlie, she said silently, put some words into my head or I’ll have no sleep tonight.

“All right,” Charlie said. He shuffled through his box and came up with four volumes. He shuffled them, trying to decide which to read. “What do you want? Tennyson? Wordsworth?”

“Charlie, I’m afraid,” Dinah said.

“Of what? How can you be afraid? We had a wonderful time tonight, I’m going to Springfield tomorrow on the Prophet’s errand, the Prophet’s brother is the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, this is the happiest we’ve ever been.”

Dinah could not answer him. Charlie was too damnably content. Either he would not understand her, which would make her feel even lonelier than now, or he would, which would break the fragile crystal of his perfect day. I have two little children in England, Charlie, and I haven’t embraced them in months, and today I saw the Prophet of God brutally embrace another man and break him, I saw the Prophet boasting like a street bully, I saw the Prophet of God look at me with eyes that wanted to own me—

“Read, Charlie.”

“Coleridge? ‘Recollections of Love’?”

“I don’t care.”

“‘How warm this woodland wild recess! Love surely hath been breathing here; and this sweet bed of heath, my dear!—’”

“No! Not that!” Dinah knew she was baffling the boy, knew that he could not satisfy her tonight, what she wanted was beyond human power to give; that was the problem, she knew, that there was no living man who could be what she wanted. “Never mind, Charlie. Go to bed.”

“I can read something else,” he said.

Now I’ve worried him. He thinks I’m losing my mind. Well, I am. “Go to bed.”

Charlie did not leave his chair. Dinah knew he was studying her, trying to understand her. You cannot understand me, Charlie. Understanding people isn’t your gift.

And then, to make a liar of her, he began to read another poem. “It reminds me somehow of Nauvoo,” Charlie said. “But I don’t know why.” He began to read about a strange city of beauty and pleasure beside the river Alph, with walls and towers, and blossoms on incense-bearing trees, and forests ancient as the hills. It was not by any means the shabby town of Nauvoo or the ragged woods that spotted the prairie land or thickly bent over the Mississippi. And the mud of that river was surely not sacred.

Yet as Dinah listened, her eyes closed, she began to hear Charlie’s voice as if it came from Joseph Smith, standing there in the late afternoon sunlight slanting in under the clouds, his naked chest covered with mud and sweat, not hairy like animal men, like Matthew, but clean and strong as a god, and Joseph said to her, with those eyes that owned her,

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