June had been blessed with the gift of Vision—her mother had told her so since she was little. When the gift of Vision was upon her, her heart burned within and she saw with certainty of things to come. Her father did odd jobs, hung around with buddies in construction, drank a six-pack nightly, and periodically didn’t come home. One night, six-year-old Tanner, the third youngest brother, got into it with Trevor, the third-oldest brother. Trevor was always tormenting Tanner, and June was usually fast enough to get in the middle of them. Not this night, though, and Tanner had gotten a whipping. After the whipping, June brought him out back near the chicken coop. He was stammering and crying, his dirty blond hair an unkempt mess, snot pouring from his nose.
“I hate Dad,” he stammered. “Hate him. Hate, hate, hate.”
June was seventeen. She wore beat-up jean shorts, a loose peach T-shirt. She closed her eyes and thought, Heavenly Father, please help me to know what to say. Help me to see.
A series of images flashed in her mind—Dad listening to the missionaries, Dad in white in a baptismal font, Dad in white with all of them on the steps of a temple, all of them in white surrounded by endless numbers of people in white. Now she knew.
She hugged Tanner, then knelt and looked him in the eye. “Daddy’s not always gonna be like this. The Lord is gonna bring him back to us.”
“I hate Dad,” Tanner said again.
“You love him, and it hurts when he is mean to you. But Daddy is more than how he acts. The Lord will bring him back to us. I’ve seen it.”
“I don’t believe that,” Tanner said flatly. “I don’t think Jesus gives no kinda care about us.”
June felt her own tears well up. She hugged him again and said, “That’s not true, Tanner. Know how I know?”
“How?”
“Cuz He gave us you, for one.”
Tanner just sniffled, and when he pulled back, he was drying up. He looked at her and said, “I’m okay, now.” Then he went back inside to get ready for bed.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
June sat on a leather couch, left foot tucked under her right thigh. A middle-aged woman, brown hair with gray specks, sat on the leather sofa opposite her.
“Tell me more about that,” the doctor said.
“The pressure?”
“Yes. The pressure you felt.”
“I didn’t know it was pressure. I mean, it says in our scriptures ‘where much is given, much is required.’”
“Okay. But this bit about, what’s his name again? John Smith?”
“Joseph Smith.”
“Yes, Joseph Smith. You were supposed to be like him?”
June took a deep breath and looked around the room, her eyes resting on a flower arrangement on an end table. “Some of our scriptures say that no one except Jesus Christ has done more for the salvation of man in this world than Joseph Smith. So that’s what I grew up with.”
“Okay. And he’s the founder of your Church.”
“Yes. Well, I mean, allegedly Jesus is, but yes, Joseph was the prophet of the Restoration.”
“And your mother told you . . .”
“That my mission was as important as his.”
“What did she mean by that?”
June looked at the doctor again, then gazed out the window beyond her where a hummingbird approached a bird feeder. “You’d think my mother was, like, a polygamist pioneer woman type. Like, long braided hair, dowdy dresses, always honoring my Dad as the ‘head of the house.’ But we were picking strawberries once and she told me that the Lord had revealed to her that His plan for women had not yet been restored.”
“How so?”
“So there’s the priesthood for men. That’s allegedly the power and authority of God. The power the old prophets had. God restored it through Joseph Smith. But my mother told me that God had revealed to her that there was a priestesshood.”
“A priestesshood?”
“Yes. A similar power that came from our Heavenly Mother to Eve and was passed down to women of faith throughout the ages. And the Lord had told my mother He would restore that power in my lifetime and I would have a huge role in that.”
“I see. And what did you think about that?”
“I thought it was just how things were. I thought I always needed to be found doing exactly what God wanted so He could call upon me when He was ready to perform His will.”
“How so?”
“Well, for example, my mission.”
“What you did for the Church in Argentina.”
“Yes. We were so poor that our family couldn’t pay my way.”
“The Church doesn’t pay your way?”
“Not unless you can’t afford it.”
“I see. Unusual but go ahead.”
“My dad died when I had been on my mission for six months.”
“That’s terrible. I’m sorry. What happened?”
“Heart attack. But they found evidence of cirrhosis of the liver, congestive heart failure, and all kinds of issues. He was kind of a ticking time bomb.”
“I see. Go ahead.”
“My mom didn’t really work outside the home. The only money we had came from Dad. I probably should have come home to take care of the family. But I didn’t. I didn’t even go home for the funeral.”
“Really.”
She nodded. A squirrel was now on the bird feeder, and the hummingbird had moved away. “Why didn’t you go home?”
She looked right at the doctor. “I had a mission to fulfill. As big as Joseph Smith’s.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
June had the gift of Energy. What Energy felt like to her was a jolt. It usually came as a shot of adrenaline, a tightening knot in her stomach, tingling in her hands and feet, and it almost always came with Vision. She could see what was to happen, what must happen, and what she should be doing to help bring it to pass. She remembered it first coming to her when she was young, just before her baptism when her mother took her walking along the canal running in back of their property. Her mother told Daddy that she wanted to explain baptism to June. But when they were clear of the house and under the shade of an oak, her mother turned and said, “Do you know why I named you June?”
June shook her head. “I spose you and Daddy agreed on it was all.”
“Your daddy ain’t got nothin to do with it. He ain’t never had nothin to do with y’all kids.” She breathed deeply, then said, “You’re named for Junia the apostle. The woman apostle in the Bible.”
“There’s a woman apostle?”
The light cut through the branches of the oak, illuminated her mother’s gold and gray hair, made it look like God was shining on what she was saying.
“There was. All the men, they ignored that and covered it up. ‘She weren’t no real apostle, just a disciple.’ But the Lord tole me they been lyin all these years. He said, ‘Your first born will be a girl. Thou shalt raise her up as a priestess unto me, and she will hold the rod in her hands, even the rod of Junia the apostle, and thou shalt call her name after mine apostle and witness, Junia.’”
That’s when Energy burst within June for the first time. A cold knot formed in her stomach, her fingers and toes tingled, her head felt light, and she could see. Her life spread out before her as though it were all happening in an instant, and she walked among people who clamored to listen to her. She held a copy of the Book of Mormon and proclaimed, “I will run to every house, to every woman of the covenant, as Abish of old.”
“Your baptism is the first step in this path that God ordained you for,” said Mother.
And June could see that it was so, for though she knew it not at the time, she had the gift of Vision.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“That seems like a lot for your mother to put on you,” the doctor said.
“I guess,” said June.
“Well, what do you think about it? Was it a lot?”
June took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. She looked at the floor, then at the doctor. “I suppose it depends on whether you believe that God Himself called a fourteen-year-old boy as a prophet.”
“And do you believe that?”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
June also had a thorn in her side. The Wraith first appeared the night she learned about her father’s death. She was in Leon, Argentina, a rural area that defied sense to her. She had been made a senior companion to Hermana Sanchez from Los Angeles. Hermana Sanchez was a second-generation citizen, born in the US to parents who had slipped across the Mexican border decades before. She spoke Spanish fluently but needed missionary training, while June knew all about missionary work but was just beginning to understand people in the streets.
For two weeks, June had pleaded with the Lord to give her the gift of tongues, to give her charity to love the people, and to help her inspire Hermana Sanchez to be more obedient. The rural area chafed at both of them—the roads were all dirt that people watered in the morning. Pointlessly, it seemed to both of them since the water dried in the heat within the hour, and dust plumes were kicked up by every car, truck, horse, and cow that went by. They showered out of a bucket each morning, and June was always working to clean her pores and nostrils of the ever-present dust. The Catholic Church in the area was the center of the community, and the priest had made it a point to tell parishioners not to be deceived by “false Christs among them.” So they spent a lot of time walking and not much time teaching.
Then one night, they came home in their sweat and grime to find that the mission president had left a message to call him that evening. June did so, and when she heard the man’s voice explain her father’s passing, she felt she was outside her body . . . most of all, she knew she had failed. Daddy had never joined the Church, never even had the missionaries over. Nothing in her vision had come to pass, and he had died before she had completed her work in bringing it to pass.
That night, in the warmth and amid the buzzing of mosquitoes and the chirps of the crickets, the shadowy Wraith first approached her bed and hovered. As it did, she felt the compulsion to peel her skin off, to bleed for her own sins. Darkness consumed her, and she felt as though she were plummeting into an eternal pit. God does not fail, the Wraith said. Only people fail. You fail. You failed.
She had not worked hard enough, had not testified enough, had not been a good enough example, had not shown forth the great works that God can do. And now, her father might well suffer the pain of all his sins for failing to repent. Because of her failure. She thought of his drinking, the foul curses that flowed from his mouth at her mother, the boys, and even her. She could hear him sliding off his belt to whip one of the boys, the smack of his palm across her mother’s face.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, “let it all be on me, for I did not perform thy will.”
She did not sleep that night—the Wraith whispered to her, punished her, made her want to bleed from every pore. At 6:29, she was awake and said loudly to Hermana Sanchez, “Get ready quickly.”
“Why?” said Hermana Sanchez.
“We are not studying today. We are going to the fields where the campesinos are, and we are going to preach.”
Hermana Sanchez poked her head up. “Don’t you think you should talk to President? Maybe go see him? Call your family?”
“There’s no time to waste,” said June. “We must find the souls the Lord has set aside for us.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Vision returned to her after two full days and nights. She dragged Hermana Sanchez into the fields at 6:30 am those two mornings, and they did not stop preaching till 9:05 pm each night. And at night, the Wraith returned to her, whispering, Why are you working so hard? Saving these people will not save your father.
Finally, in the evening after two sleepless nights and two full days of exhaustion in the heat, she knelt beside her bed in prayer. Her head began to throb in pain, then felt as if it had been placed in a vice grip. Pinpricks of light shot across her vision, as she prayed. She began to tremble and felt as though her skull might split in half. She cried aloud, “Oh, God, have mercy on me! Spare me this darkness!”
As she said it, a blinding light filled her vision, and before her stood her father . . . he was dressed in white, surrounded by a countless number of people, some of whom she recognized from old photos and others of which were totally unfamiliar. He smiled at her, and a voice said, “Behold, all things are spiritual unto me. What I show unto one I show by the power of the Spirit, and its truth existeth outside time and space.” When she heard that, she collapsed to the floor, unconscious and exhausted.
And from those days of preaching, they baptized three people, which made this sister companionship the talk of the mission.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
It was a different day in the small office with the couches. Winter was everywhere with snow outside glistening in the mid-morning light. The trees were still, the bird feeders capped with snow and attended by nothing living.
“I want to go back to this mission you felt you had,” said the doctor.
“Sure,” said June.
“Have you accomplished it?”
“Oh no. Nowhere close.”
“Is it something you’re still working on?”
“Nah,” said June. She gazed out the window, thought of how still everything was in the snow.
“Why not?”
June sighed. “I didn’t turn out to be any of the stuff my mother said. I’m just a dude, so to speak. Or dudette, I guess is more appropriate.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just an average person working in a bank. Married to a nice guy. A couple of nice kids who seem perfectly average.”
“But that’s great success in and of itself.”
“Sure. But it’s not doing much for the salvation of humanity.”
“How did you expect all that to work out?”
She looked down at the beige carpet, saw her white sneakers contrasted against it. “I don’t know. I thought a combination of righteousness and the Lord’s blessings would put me in leadership within the Church and that would help me to effect various changes. I thought revelation would flow with it to all of us working on the Church’s challenges.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hard to explain,” she said. “Let’s pretend I was in the Relief Society General Presidency. Then I might be part of discussions with the apostles and the brethren where they talk about expanding women’s authority and roles. And I might get to ask about the concept of a priestesshood. That might trigger a flow of revelation. Most of what Joseph Smith revealed came because he asked questions.” She pulled a pen from behind her ear and began to spin it in her hand. “I thought maybe no one was even thinking to ask. I was incredibly naive.”
“How so?”
“Well, first, about the fastest way to excommunication is to go around preaching that women should get authority or the priesthood.”
“Did you do that?”
“No. I just figured the Lord would keep His promises to me and to my mother in His own time. But they’ve excommunicated a lot of women and their supporters who had similar ideas. So even if I were called to some position like that, I don’t think anyone is saying, ‘Gee, thanks. We had never thought of that before. We’ll ask the Lord.’”
“How do you feel about that?”
June looked at the doctor. “Resigned. It is what it is.”
“If it means that much to you, why not split off and create your own Church? Isn’t that what Joseph Smith did?”
June shook her head. “That’s a tangled web I just can’t even get into. It’s way more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
June looked into the doctor’s hazel-gray eyes. “I don’t know.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
She did not listen to the old prophets about working outside the home. Before she married Allen, she warned him, “I will not be a stay-at-home mom.”
“Okay,” he had said, as they walked along a pathway near the Maeser Building at BYU.
“Do you want to know why?”
“I’m sure you have your reasons. If you want to tell them to me, it’s fine. If you don’t, it’s also fine.”
Allen had served in her mission, had been a zone leader—her zone leader for a while, even. He was quiet and reserved, majoring in finance while she was in accounting. They had not been close as missionaries and had only rediscovered each other in a religion class.
What she did not tell him that day but would in bits and pieces over the years is that her father’s death had left her mother totally exposed. She had no education, not even a high school diploma, so the best jobs she could get were menial. She stocked shelves over night at Sam’s Club so she could be home to get the kids off to school and could sleep while they were in school. The older boys who were still at home stopped playing sports so they could get jobs at Pizza Hut and KFC in town. Even so, they were still short of money. Their extended family lived several states away and had no involvement with them. So Mother went to the bishop. They filled out a form together wherein Mother listed every bill she could think of as well as every bit of income they had. When they reached the end of all that, the bishop said, “I can help you with a few things, but you’re not in a sustainable position. We can’t just pay your mortgage and taxes for you with no end in sight. You’re going to need to make some big changes.”
“The poor ye always have with you. Isn’t that right, Bishop?” Mother had said.
“What do you mean?”
“I appreciate your time with me. We’ll figure this out on our own.”
“Figuring it out” often meant skipping meals for one or more members of the family; it meant Tyler, the youngest, hawking eggs every day out on the rural road into town; it meant renting out a bedroom to visitors in the community and sometimes to longer-termed tenants, which put the whole family who were still at home into one bedroom. It meant Travis and Timmy hunting varmints on the property and then trying to fill deer tags every year. It meant throwing wood in the fireplace in the winter and only turning the heat on when temperatures might freeze the pipes. It meant a family of people who were wiry and skinny not because they exercised but because they were poor. June missed much of this because of being on her mission, then going to BYU when she got home. But at BYU, she knew she was on her own, so she held down two jobs—one as a janitor in the residence halls and another as a cashier at the CougarEat. If she had any spare money, even $10 or $15, at the end of a month, she mailed it home.
Mother said little about this. Every once in a while, she would tell June on the phone, “The Relief Society president was by.”
“Oh yeah?” June would say.
“Yeah. Asked us how we were, and I told her we get along. Asked us if there was anything they could do, and I told her no.”
June would not live like this. She would not be dependent entirely upon a husband and then entirely upon a bishop as her backup plan. The Church had indeed taught her self-reliance.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The doctor tapped a pad with a pen and looked at June. It was early August, so hot that the outdoors seemed to be shimmering. At least two hummingbirds kept rotating down to the feeders, sometimes fighting each other, then buzzing away.
“If there’s one thing you could change about you right now with a snap of your fingers, what would it be?” she said to June.
“The rage,” said June without hesitation.
“Tell me about that.”
June bounced her right leg, glanced around the room, and breathed in deeply. “I’ve told you about the high times, where everything seems right and anything I do will work.”
“You have.”
“And I’ve told you about the flipside. The depths I can go to, the darkness that descends on me. I mean, I know now that it’s going to pass, but it’s awfully hard to live with myself and for people to live with me.”
“We’ve talked about that.”
“I was praying once. Fasting actually. Fasting and praying. I wanted to understand why the Lord didn’t always bring to pass all the things I saw in Vision. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, longsuffering, etc. That’s what Galatians says. And in those visionary moments, I feel all those things, and I just know that God is speaking to me, and I can see things. But then, many of those things haven’t come to pass. Many things where I feel directed to do something end up being pointless. So I was fasting about that, trying to understand it, and I had read an ad for something, and I woke the morning I was fasting and I knew the answer.”
“What was that?”
“What the Spirit feels like is also what hypomania feels like,” June said.
“Interesting,” the doctor said, and she looked down at her pad and wrote some notes.
“I would like to tell you there is a difference. I would like to tell you that hypomania is irrational and the Spirit is rational, and you should be able to tell the difference. But then you have Biblical prophets who feel inspired to set up challenges between their God and the gods of the people—and they call down fire from heaven that consumes water. Which isn’t rational. You have a Book of Mormon prophet who tells his brothers that if they touch him, they will die. That isn’t rational. But that certainty . . . knowing exactly what will happen even if it defies all human logic . . . that’s what both those things are. The Spirit. Hypomania.”
“Do you think you’re bipolar?” said the doctor. “You make a pretty good argument, and your downswings fit really well.”
“Probably,” said June.
“We can try some anti-psychotics for that.”
“No,” said June.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to lose who I am.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
There was a night about three months after the birth of June’s first child that she was not proud of. Josh had nursed and nursed and nursed, and when he wasn’t nursing, he was fussy. Allen had tried to help, tried taking him out of the room to walk him around and settle him, but Josh wasn’t having it. Around 3:30 am, he had finished nursing again when he pushed out a poo that went up his back and down his legs. June took him to the changing table in their room. As she pulled off his clothes, Josh screamed as loud as he ever had. June stared down at his taut, red face, his balled-up fists, his tiny feet stretched as far as they could go. The changing table was next to a window they had cracked open to take in the early fall cool air. They were on the second floor.
Go ahead, whispered the Wraith. Push him through the screen.
“Allen,” June said quietly.
“Hmm,” he murmured still half asleep.
“I’m going for a walk. Take the baby.”
“At this time of night?” he said popping his head up.
“It’s me or him,” she said, and she grabbed her keys from their bureau and headed out into the night.
There were other times, as Josh and Tanya aged. Times where she would lock each in their rooms with them screaming, and then she would walk outside. Sometimes, she would talk to them like her mother used to talk to her and the boys: “Keep it up and I’ll take your two heads and hit them together.” Unlike her mother, June never followed through on the threat.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
June confessed these feelings to the doctor, told her about those times and others when she had been close, when the Wraith had been whispering.
“Do you all hit your kids?” the doctor said. “For discipline, I mean.”
“No,” said June.
“Why not?”
“Cuz it doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
It was peak leaf season now, and the colors behind the doctor and through her window were their seasonal stunning selves—gold, orange, and red.
“We read a lot of books on parenting. One or two tell you some form of corporal punishment can work, but most are against it. So we decided not to. We use timeouts, writing sentences, that sort of thing.”
“How do you feel about that? How your decision is working out.”
“Fine. It’s not easy. And obviously I have those moments. I don’t judge anyone either. I mean, my mom hit me every day.”
“Really?” said the doctor. “I thought it was your dad who hit you all.”
“My dad was abusive. He whipped us and beat us. He left marks and bruises. My mom just punished us.”
The doctor leaned toward her. “Do you not hit your kids because your mom hit you?”
“No. We don’t hit our kids because we researched it.”
“Not because your mom hit you?”
“No. We worked that out together.”
“I think you need to think about that more.”
June shifted on the couch, her eyes falling to the floor then coming back up to meet the doctor’s gaze. “What do you mean?”
“Your mom hit you every day. You didn’t like it. You don’t do that with your kids. But you say it has nothing to do with your mother. You’ve done all this research. You’ve created this whole narrative to protect her. I think you should think about that.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said June. “I know my mother isn’t perfect. She had a tough childhood. My dad was an abusive, miserable bastard. The Church left her high and dry. She went through a lot.”
“No one is saying otherwise,” said the doctor. “But you cannot admit that she hit you, it hurt you, and that’s why you don’t hit your children. You’ve created an entire alternative narrative to protect your memory of her. I think you need to think about that.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
When June arrived home, emails were piled up in her inbox with half a dozen spreadsheets to review. But her mind could not decipher the words, so she set the computer aside and wandered out back. Their New England home backed up to a hundred acres of woods.
June eased past some scraggly pine branches and heard pine cones bounce off higher branches before landing on the leaf carpet with a crunch. She moved onto the trail that would take her deep into the woods and paused.
The leaves were brilliant, but they were also falling. June thought of her mother two thousand miles away in the woodlands of East Texas. She still lived on the land but in a trailer; she rented out the house to a family that basically paid her mortgage with a little leftover for some of her expenses. The boys had all left home and were scattered across the continent with one so far away that he was a logger in British Columbia. June had been home once to see her mother after the trailer had gone in on the property. It was nestled among some trees to keep shade on it and lower the need for air conditioning. June knew that at this time of year the acorns were falling off those trees, plinking loudly on the metal roof.
Just a few hours drive from here was Palmyra, New York, where it had all started for Joseph Smith. According to the myth, he had walked out into a grove of trees like this one. It had been a beautiful spring morning. He had knelt to ask God which of all the churches he should join, and he had nearly been overcome by his own personal wraith, a power that threatened to destroy him. But he had persisted in his prayer, and then God and Jesus had appeared to him. Or maybe just Jesus. Or maybe it was angels, depending on the account you read. Or maybe you could synthesize the accounts and believe he had given slightly different versions to different audiences for different reasons and that they were mostly harmonious.
Here, it was not spring but fall, and June watched as the woods noisily castoff their pine cones, acorns, and leaves. Here and there, she heard acorns and pine cones chipping branches as they as were falling. The leaves sometimes made soft crunches as they were falling. Trees were central to all the metaphors of the great plan of salvation. Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and had fallen. They were prevented from eating from the tree of life lest they live forever in their sins. Lehi and Nephi both had seen a tree whose fruit was more desirable than that of all other fruit, fruit that was said to be the love of God. Numberless concourses of people pressed toward that tree, but mists of darkness would overtake them and they would fall away. When Moroni visited Joseph Smith, he quoted a passage of Malachi, but said it differently from how it read in the King James Version: For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall burn as stubble; for they that come shall burn them, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. June thought of her father, pondered on the feeling of failure she had had when he died, realized she had never mourned or even missed him . . . had felt almost nothing for him except the sense that she was responsible for him, for her brothers, for her mother, for the women of the Church and of the world. She was waiting for a call that had not come and would not come, and in front of her, the leaves and the acorns and the pine cones and the pine needles continued to fall, to land softly on the bed of other dead leaves, needles, and pine cones that had built up over the years. There they lay, fallen, yet next to their respective trees, ever so close and yet forever cut off from their roots, trunks, and branches. June felt herself spinning, her eyes welling with tears, sensed that there was no such thing as time or place or being or existence.
And then, she heard a voice whisper, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Gordon Laws lives in Massachusetts and works in higher ed curriculum development. He is husband to Lauren Laws, and they are the parents of two boys and two girls. His fiction has appeared recently in Irreantum and in The Wrath-Bearing Tree.
