I
Then I awoke. Sea the color of stone curled away in every direction, tucking itself beneath a bright mist that blotted out the sky. A tinge of lilac bleeding into the frosty air. A rocking, a lulling. Was this the celestial kingdom? I had believed I was dying into God’s glory. Now I was seeing through someone else’s eyes, and could but hope this was a passage, a way there. The ashen sea rocked on. I stared into the haze, longing to see it open upon a wide shore, a sacred light, the heavenly host.
But the mist did not part and no shore appeared and I remained behind the eyes of a stranger, a sailor on an armored warship, standing ready beside a big gun on the foredeck, a bigger gun than I had ever seen. I watched with him from the deck, and from his seat at the mess, and as he read his letters in his cramped bunk, sour water swishing on the floor below. It was no heaven and no hell, and soon I realized, from the letters, that he was no stranger. He was Rulon Warren, the son of a niece whom I had known only as a girl. And what was I? Angel or spirit? And what was my purpose?
When we returned from the war in Europe and all we had seen there, Rulon Warren wanted nothing but the silence no one would allow. He was assaulted by talk. Everyone called for an accounting. I wanted so much to help him then, to ease his way or strike down his enemies, but I held no such earthly powers.
His parents wanted to speak to him at all hours—his mother, my niece, about church services and socials, young women in town, his plans for the future; his father about the barley, canal weeds, young women in town. His mother could talk for hours, it seemed, while his father spoke only three and four words at a time, but they both wanted the same from him, a future parceled out in syllables.
At church on Sundays, the older men came up one by one, shy, like courters at a dance. Didn’t it make you seasick, all that time on the boat? How many of those Huns did you send into outer darkness? Rulon sometimes could not think of a single word. He would blush and shrug and look at the ward-house floor, and the men would do something similar, rebuked. They’d pat him on the shoulder and retreat. Other times the answers came as if from another place. He was never once seasick. “Best sea legs on the ship came from right here in Idaho,” he’d brag. And in his job on the ship, navigating the fixed gun on the foredeck, he’d probably helped kill thirty-five or forty of the kaiser’s boys. “My share,” he would say, and try to smile. “Maybe a few more.”
I could feel his temptation to tell them, the men with their fingernails cleaned and hair slick for Sunday, that he’d stood next to a gunner whose head had vanished in a pink mist, and that hours later, belowdecks and pulsing with adrenaline, he had found bits of skull clinging to the shoulder of his uniform. Or that he had watched as his fellow sailors fired on the survivors of the Gotthilf, the destroyer they’d sunk in the metal gray North Sea, the Germans bobbing in the water, waving their arms in surrender, and then jerking and sliding below the churning water while the sailors laughed. I could feel Rulon’s desire to unsettle the brethren, to terrify them—it was the selfsame desire I had brought to church during my own life, Sunday after Sunday, and in those early days of our coexistence it made me feel we were aligned.
And yet we were not. Rulon’s guilt boiled at him. He pitied those Huns, which had struck me as weak when he’d first felt it, out on the ship. Like the response of a child. I had only recently joined him then and was lost inside my new existence. I had died, bleeding onto the earth in the Tetons, killed by a posse, and then thirty-two years passed in a black instant and I awoke inside Rulon’s vision. We were sailing into a sea that spread in every direction into a cloak of fog. The bliss of death was already fading, and the first sensations of my new life were the salt air, the roll of the horizon, the anxiety burning within Rulon, and the fear that I had awakened to something never-ending.
Weeks later, after I had discovered, from his letters, the passage of time since my death, Rulon couldn’t let the deaths of those Huns go. He would pray at night for forgiveness, and he dwelled upon the souls of the Germans, pondering how their eternities would be affected by their foreshortened lives. What if they had died before they’d had the chance to achieve their full righteousness? He worried about his own sin as well, and I was there with him in all of it. I saw what he saw, and I sensed his thoughts and shared in the images that spun relentlessly through his mind. He thought back to the time, before he had shipped, when he’d asked the bishop whether it was a sin to kill an enemy in warfare. Bishop Lawton, a short, thin man who curved forward at the shoulders, had seemed surprised.
“You’re serving your country, son,” he said. “That’s no sin.”
Then the bishop cited the warfare in the Bible, the battles in the Book of Mormon between Nephites and Lamanites. The sixth commandment was a prohibition on murder, he said, not war. As Rulon brooded, I thought of my own life—my desire to be exalted for slaying the Lord’s enemies and my fear that I would be damned instead. I now doubted that either was true. Was this damnation? Exaltation? I could see no punishment in it, nor any reward. When Rulon prayed in his bunk at night, doubt hounded my thoughts. What was this life? Where was God’s hand?
When I had been alive, I prayed daily, over meals and with my parents and sister, and by myself before bed. I prayed before every decision. I prayed before asking Sally Bartram to marry, and then we prayed together once she said yes. I prayed before I bought my own cattle—the fifteen head my father told me I was a fool to purchase. The cattle sold at a profit, and I knew that I would discard the wisdom of my elders and listen only for the answers to my prayers. I prayed when I left the church and my parents and faithless Sally Bartram, and I received an answer, the knowledge that I was walking in the Lord’s light. I’d known it then the way I knew how to strike with a maul or knot a length of rope, but I did not know it any longer. Every new day showed me that I must have been wrong. Rulon would get no help from beyond but for me, and I pitied us both.
In his bunk on the ship, Rulon had often wondered why no one else was concerned about the killing. The whole town of Franklin, it seemed, had come to wish him farewell when he left for the navy. They had all appeared happy he was going, so proud. He fretted over these memories, unable to overcome his fear that everyone—the ward, the town, the whole country—was wrong about this: Thou shalt not kill, he thought. They had papered over sin with happy lies.
Now that he was back, the bishop was after him to give a talk to the ward. Rulon could share how the Lord had helped him through his times at sea. “Maybe not yet,” Rulon said, but what he did not say was that he had experienced no help from the Lord at sea. He had ridden on that ship beyond the sight of land and beyond the hand of the Lord, which he had not thought possible.
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