The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks

Author:Joanna Brooks [Brooks, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

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I have not seen them, but I know they are there: millions upon millions of files entombed deep in the granite mountainside at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, just southeast of Salt Lake City. I have seen the narrow driveway that leads up from the canyon road to the parking lot carved into the mountainside; I have seen granite boulders the size of buildings split in half, a few neat drill marks remaining at the top where early last century our tireless ancestors dynamited a vault in the ancient gray canyon, a vault strong enough to withstand war, weather, even the end of time. I do not know whether the files are paper, computer tape, or digital, but I know they are there: millions upon millions of names rescued from census records and baptismal registries by Mormon genealogists, saved from oblivion, these names, the names of our ancestors. Wearing all white, we have carried their names on little paper slips through our holy temples. We have stepped into giant golden fonts resting on the back of twelve life-size golden statues of oxen, and we have been baptized, fully immersed in the shimmering turquoise water, maybe a dozen times in a row, for a dozen ancestors, in one day. By our labors, our ancestors are baptized again and married to each other once again, but this time for the eternities: beyond the scuttle of drying leaves, and the clouds of fruit flies, and the musky warmth of bodies in bed in the morning, they are sealed up against chaos and perdition. We are sealed to one another back through the generations. Our names are safe in the granite vault, and they will stay there until Jesus comes back and the stone is rolled away.

From end to end, everyone who has ever lived must be identified, baptized, and married again, either in the living flesh or by proxy, in one of our Mormon temples. Everyone who has ever lived—trillions upon trillions of them—their inscrutable names whirring before our eyes on reels of microfilm, or dissolving into paper powders in damp European sacristies, or dessicated like husks of scarab beetles and scattered out into the great deserts of the world, numberless as the sands of the beach or the stars of the skies, names of the dead forgotten even by the dead.

They are not forgotten by us. In time, the story goes, all the names will be fished out one by one by Mormon genealogists like my mother, who rise each morning in a thousand orange grove and alfalfa field suburbs across the American West, step into their sacred undergarments and modest workaday clothes, and with only a simple breakfast of milk and cereal, without even so much as a cup of coffee to steel them, set to work again at a task that will take the rest of time: the bureaucratic reorganization of chaos into order.

It used to hurt my head, when I was a kid, thinking about the impossibility of the work.

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