The Latter Days by Judith Freeman

Author:Judith Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

The Turquoise Notebook

ONE

There was a woman in our ward named Annabel Stone. She lived on a street at the very edge of the subdivision where the land sloped down to the valley in a series of gradual steps. She was tall and thin and middle-aged—a woman with something very intense about her. She always looked at you as if you’d just committed some sin you may have managed to hide from others but you couldn’t hide from her. This look was made all the more unsettling by the fact that she always wore a faint smile on her face. It caused her to appear strangely scary.

Annabel Stone must have had a husband, but why can’t I remember him? No picture forms when I try. Nor can I see her children, though I know she must have had some of those too, tucked away in her split-level house that overlooked the valley.

I see only Annabel Stone, with her faint knowing smile. And I hear her voice, that slow, deliberate way she had of speaking that seemed to contain warnings.

She took in unwed pregnant teenagers, Mormon girls who needed a place to live outside their own communities until they could deliver their babies and return home, hopefully with no one the wiser. The babies were taken from the girls at birth, put up for adoption through a church agency and placed with Mormon families.

Sister Stone was fanatically religious. There was something malevolent about her fervor. Even my parents could feel this: I knew that from the way they talked about her. “Crazy” was a word that sometimes got used to describe her. But if she was crazy, she was crazy like a fox. Her cunning rose off her in an almost perceptible miasma.

I pitied the young girls who were sent to live with her, many of whom were my own age—just fifteen or so. They couldn’t possibly have known what they were getting into. But I knew, having had Sister Stone for a teacher in a Mutual class. Running beneath everything she said was some faint threat of hell, flames that licked up around her words and sent out warnings to anyone within range.

When I think of her now, I think of one particular Sunday, a fast and testimony day. On the first Sunday of every month the main sacrament meeting was given over to the congregation for the bearing of testimonies. On this day people were expected to fast until late afternoon when the meeting had finished. Technically you weren’t even supposed to take a sip of water, though I don’t remember our family being strict about this.

Fast and testimony meetings were always rather intense and unpredictable affairs. During the hour and a half in which they took place, people stood up spontaneously as the spirit moved them in order to bear their testimonies. There was always a certain frisson in the room: Who would stand up next? And what would they say?

Kids of all ages, as well as the

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