A few years ago while visiting a used bookstore in the Old City (Gamla Stan) section of Stockholm, I asked the proprietor whether he had any materials about Mormons. He brought out a small and likely unique (3 1/2″ x 5 1/2″) 39-page pamphlet titled, “Om Mormonerne” (About the Mormons), by S. B. Hersleb Walnum, a “Prison Priest,” published in Bergen, Norway, in 1852.
I am Ron involved in me now Norma’s gone.
Norma knew me more than my mind only.
I know me only in eyes gone dead as mirrors.
More than I Norma knew me in my eyes.
[1]Describing her research for The Proper Gods, a novel about the Yaqui Indians and their culture, Virginia Sorensen said her work had been “an excursion into cultural anthropology” that she thought would continue the rest…
Much has been written about the heroines in Virginia Sorensen’s adult fiction, their real-life counterparts, and inspirations. By contrast, relatively little attention has been given to her male characters and the family figures on whom many were based. As a self-proclaimed family chronicler, Sorensen found in her male forbears, indeed all members of the Eggertsen family, a significant source of information and ideas for her fiction.
Many years ago Virginia Sorensen wrote me a prophetic letter. She had just read my article, “Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots.” She sounded breathless: “For years and years/’ she wrote, “I have believed—for what reason, I wonder, since I never really lived in the houses where the true tradition was but could only visit a while, and listen, and pause always by the gate where I could hear and see it?—that I was the one to tell this story you speak of. Almost I have heard The Call!”
—for Beth Rich
She was seventy-one, moving on. Her five-foot-two
leukemia-lessened to eighty pounds, only
her hands the same, large, fanned storehouse of comfort, her
vitaligo, the brown pattern of taking on
the sun to map the journeys:
Dad doctors Rudy’s leg,
torn and jagged
just above the hoof
enmeshed in barbed wire.
This is the saddest story I have ever told. Not because The Chevrolet is gone, but because it probably is not.
This much is known. During the Christmas season of 1973, Gene and Charlotte England traveled to Salt Lake City from Northfield, Minnesota. They made the trip in The Chevrolet—a brown stationwagon of uncertain origin.
Musky as the cedar drawer
in Grandmas’ standing metal trunk,
a genie scent, improbable and
distant as the sound of hooves on sand
I. October 8, 1908: A Train
Pulled out of Green River, Wyoming, heading
West toward Salt Lake City. The Mormon prophet,
Joseph F. Smith, was going home from a visit
to Boston, with his traveling companion.