"Though Like the Wanderer": Outside the Group in Mormon Short Fiction

Derk Michael Koldewyn

Then Jesus was led up of the Spirit, into the wilderness, to be with God. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, and had communed with God, he was afterwards an hungered, and was left to be tempted of the devil. (JST Matt. 4:1-2)

While there is a wide diversity of subject, theme, and treatment in the rapidly expanding circle of good Mormon fiction, and especially Mormon short fiction, there is a theme, or subtheme, really, that is common to many works. Simply put, it is an attempt to answer some of the harder questions Latter-day Saints are involved in. How do we deal with, and how do we feel about, the stranger within the gate--or for that matter, the stranger without the gate? How comfortable are we in the role of saviors on Mount Zion, or lights on the hillside? I think the answers to these questions, if not found in our literature, are at least broached there, in one of the few places outside our hearts where we discuss them openly.

My title, "Though Like the Wanderer," has much to do with this subtheme, or at least my apprehension of it. Our Mormon heritage and our mythological foundations are based on our identification with the stranger, with the Other. Virtually anywhere you look you'll find evidence that the Mormons treasure mobility more than almost anything. (Of course, we value upward mobility most of all.) We tend, especially, to cast our history in terms of scriptural parallels, most often parallels that reflect a wandering theme. Our favorite scriptural tales become also our favorite history. The movement west is retold as the Exodus; Brigham Young is the successful Moses, at last able to enter and preside in the Promised Land. The Promised Land itself is a physical retelling of Israel, with a conveniently dead inland sea. The Book of Mormon story of the rebellious sons of Mosiah who change their tune, leave their families, and work miracles of conversion in the land of the savages is retold continuously in our contemporary missionary program. Our most valuable religious ceremonies deal with the "how" and "why" of our being strangers in a strange land: how we entered the land and why we are strangers. All these stories, and countless others, try, I think, to explain our unusual penchant for wandering, our inner need to get away from the world in order to transcend it.

That need, our mandate to be participants in but not purveyors of the world, is what fuels this subtheme and its prominent character types. The more aloof we get, the more we identify with and typify the wanderer. Put more simply, the farther from the comfortable confines of the group we get, the more lost we seem. In contemporary Mormon fiction, the wanderer shows up in different but typical guises.

There are two fundamental types of wanderers, two ways of looking at the same individual or character, that determine our relationship to the wanderer. To borrow two figures from early Mormon folklore, the wanderer can either be Cain, doomed to wander aimlessly, looking for retribution, or one of the Three Nephites, who chose to wander but, we assume, with some sort of goal or guidance. That is, the stranger in a strange land can either be a lost outcast or a pioneer working toward a goal, depending mostly on our identification with him or her. Our identification is, after all, what makes the character a stranger or a friend.

Some evidence is, I think, in order. Those characters perhaps less obvious as wanderers are the ones on the brink--characters with one foot out of the group or recent dropouts. It is essential to point out here that by "group" I mean any community, not just the Mormon Church. A group could be anything from a friendship to a city. It is only when you differentiate yourself from the group that you become a wanderer.

In Michael Fillerup's short story "Family Plantation Day," we see a character who is forced, both by his own perceptions and the group's, outside the circle. The main focus of the story is Floyd Fairbanks, the "rock, the pillar, the foundation of steel and concrete" of his ward.² He is an ideal, the prototypic modern Mormon man, with only one exception: he and his wife are incapable of having children. While everything else is perfect, up to and beyond any Mormon social expectation, one of the fundamental expectations has been nullified.

While Fillerup could have seen this as ample material for satire, he sees it as, I think rightly, a breakdown of the group. Floyd Fairbanks is the ideal modern Mormon man, not just because he is affluent, successful in the outer world, but because he is successful in the Mormon group. The narrator, a portrait of the actual Mormon man, tells us that Floyd is first to sign up for every assignment and the first to sustain his leaders; he holds the largely unwanted position of elders' quorum secretary--the list goes on almost ad nauseam.

However, Floyd is a wanderer precisely because he has differentiated himself from the group. Fillerup's narrator, while unable to tell us Floyd's thoughts, does a good job discerning them:

My intentions were good when I leaned his way and whispered, "Is your wife expecting too?"

The tugging ceased. A smile moved across his face like a zipper. He did not look at me;

his eyes were on his hands. "Nope," he said, shaking his pompadoured head. "We're one of the exceptions."

Gambled and lost! I tried to console him....He clutched a clutched a handful of reddish hair just

above the wrist and ripped it from his skin. (Fillerup, 6)

Floyd is obviously disturbed by this problem, and it is his pained awareness that removes him from the group. In a later episode, he tries fruitlessly to stop the elders' quorum president, Bill Paxton, the perennial family man, from turning a service project into a family day, the "Family Plantation Day" of the title. While his arguments are sound (the project would be completed faster, leaving time for individual family togetherness), they hide Floyd's reasons for wanting it an elders-only project. The presence of Floyd's absence is too much for him to bear.

The story's focus on "what happened to Floyd" is extremely important. The story begins by telling us up front that Floyd had gone somehow berserk, driving "a rented John Deere tractor across the ward garden, through the picket fence, across Brother Guillermo's weed field, through another fence, across the dirt highway, and into the irrigation canal," (Fillerup, 3) and then attempts an explanation through understated analysis of Floyd and the events beforehand.

As we progress step by step through Floyd's crisis, we see how removed Floyd has become from the normal, the status quo. That distance, at the beginning only a barely obvious mental or spiritual distance, becomes more physical as the story progresses until Floyd realizes in actual, physical terms his removal from the group. He veers away in a totally unforeseen direction and breaks through the picket fence that marks the outer bounds of the group.

Independence is the issue here, and our reading of Floyd's final state, stopped by the irrigation ditch from complete independence, depends on our own degree of attachment to the group. That is, we can either be shocked by the act, as Floyd's ward--his group--is, or we can mourn his apparent failure to escape, his fruitless attempt to go over the wall. Our reaction to Floyd betrays our own place in or out of the group.

I am not suggesting that groups are somehow bad and that independence the only true state of being. However, this story is a critique of the modem Mormon group, pointing out some of the critical gaps it does not fill. As the narrator says of Floyd and his wife, "The married childless have no special programs in the church, no satellite broadcasts, no dinners or roadshows strictly for their kind. They occupy an unacknowledged limbo." (Fillerup, 6)

All wanderers outside the group occupy some sort of personal, private limbo. To say that it is the same space for all is to place all wanderers in a group of their own, make the wanderer a "Them" to our "Us." Limbo is much more complicated than that, as the next story, John Bennion's "Jenny, Captured by the Mormons," shows us.

Tim Behrend, reviewing this story in Sunstone, criticizes the narrative for "exploit[ing] the exoticism rather than the humanity of its characters and so fail[ing] to engage the reader.^"3 It is the characters' exoticism that makes this story an ideal candidate for an exploration of wandering.

The title character, Jenny, is explicitly linked several times to the general biblical type of the wanderer. Although baptized a Mormon, Jenny still thinks "`of them as the Mormons--the others"⁴ Jenny is trapped because she is poor, and her on again/off again husband, Peter, has become a fundamentalist Mormon, a fanatic. The story follows Jenny's attempts to pool enough money to fix her car and liberate herself and her children. Like any nomad, Jenny is incredibly resourceful. Bennion takes several pages just to enumerate her varied scams and petty dishonesties. Following a young man off a bus, marking him as an easy target for a handout, Jenny becomes not the recipient of cash, but a pamphlet for the Salt Lake Baptists. The young man "thought himself a stranger in a strange land. Like me, thought Jenny" (Bennion, 122).

The relationship Jenny and Peter share exposes just how diverse wanderers can be, how wide an expanse limbo is. Even the way they met shows the diversity of method employed by different character types. Jenny crashes an Institute dance, hoping to capitalize on the free food. After she meets Peter, she anticipates that they will make love that night. However, Peter and his "house full of young men . . . repressing their sexuality until married properly in the temple," teach her the first discussion (Bennion, 129). Peter's motives are Mormon motives, motives aimed at spiritual survival, while Jenny's are earthy, intensely practical motives.

While Jenny is the principal, the explicit wanderer in this story, Peter is as much a wanderer as she. His split from the group, from his family of "stable, conservative, middle-class farmers and businessmen," people who are "staid as clay," (Bennion, 136) is as important as Jenny's perceived separation from the greater whole of the Salt Lake community.

Peter's wandering is more the type of wandering that springs from the concretization of the Mormon group. In a sense, so are these stories I'm discussing. Because we identify strongly with wanderers but we now find ourselves firmly entrenched in a Franklin-carrying, correlated society, we find other avenues, namely the intellectual and the spiritual, to wander in. Peter's departure, more theological than spiritual, represents the potential separation of any member of the Mormon society. As Jenny says,

He had taken that which was latent in [his Mormon relatives], the oddness from a hundred years earlier, polygamy, mysticism, the darkness in every person, and amplified it a hundredfold, becoming crazy.(Bennion, 136)

The great danger of the group is this potential for aberration. Peter's lack of diversity, his earlier sexual repression, most of all the closing of most avenues of expression, make his eventual escape all the more dangerous.

I'd like to make clear that Peter's limitations, though perhaps influenced by the Mormon group, are by no means sponsored by it. His problems are real because he has created them. At one point Jenny says that the most important idea of her life is "that the creations of the imagination are indistinguishable from the creations of the senses" (Bennion, 133).

This concept is vital to understanding not only Peter, but all wanderers and their perceived problems. Their limbo is a real world. If, like Jenny, your spouse wants you to jump off the Church Office Building in order to "be transformed from flesh to fight and flame" (Bennion, 155), you are not dealing with just a silly idea, but with hard reality. Our intellectual and spiritual wanderings have just as much weight, just as many consequences as our pioneer forefathers and foremothers' actions and decisions did. We can stray as far as the Donner Party (or the Iron County Militia) or we can stick as closely as E. T. Benson and Erastus Snow. What I'm arguing for, I suppose, is an admission that intellectual wandering, mental exploring, is as valid an avenue of exploration as physical wandering.

With that said, we turn our attention away from the mental wanderers, those characters like Jenny, Peter and Floyd who find escape, as we do, through largely intellectual exercise. The most profound wanderers are the ones the group can't understand, those so physically removed from the group that their presence is taken as a mystery, their actions somehow mystical or incapable of being known, those, in short, whose limbo is so complete we can't begin to access even a part of it. There are several good stories whose extreme characters fit this description and would be excellent subjects in this search. Among them are Neil Chandler's "The Last Nephite," Phyllis Barber's "Wild Sage," Michael Fillerup's "Hozhogoo Nanina Doo," Levi Peterson's "Night Soil" and "The Christianizing of Coburn Heights," Douglas Thayer's "Dolf" and "Mr. Wahlquist in Yellowstone," John Bennion's "Dust," and Linda Sillitoe's "Coyote Tracks."

The story I've chosen is Levi Peterson's "The Last Nephite," mainly because it has many of the same features of these stories, and because it manages to rewrite the Three Nephite genre. Those of you familiar with the titles I've mentioned may have noticed that they all have one or two things in common. They deal with individuals who have left the Same for the Other, and/or they deal with interfaces between the Same and the Other, i.e., between the group and the Three Nephites, or some kind of otherworldly-guided character.

The otherworldly-guided character in "The Third Nephite" is Simpson, a hitchhiker. The main character, Otis Wadby, picks him up between Junction and Circleville, Utah. Otis has been sleeping nights at his son's house in Junction, "his wife having expelled him... because he had taken up with Fundamentalist notions.^"s Simpson, like many of Peterson's characters, is a grotesque:

The hitchhiker was a runty fellow: hollow chest; scrofulous neck; Adam's apple big as somebody's elbow; yellow moustache running from nose to ears like a shaggy hedgerow dividing his face into plowed, pitted properties; bleary eyes with gummy corners. He said he was a Mormon. (Peterson, 19)

What's more, he claims to be one of the Three Nephites. Otis, since his association with Connor Stuart, a self-styled Fundamentalist prophet, is profoundly cynical of anything that smacks of the official church. He immediately writes Simpson off as a lunatic, drives through Circleville, and lets him off outside of town. Simpson, however, isn't that easy to dismiss. He shows up at the feed store Otis and his brother Angus run, ostensibly to help clear a sewer line.

Peterson wisely leaves our interpretation of Simpson wide open throughout the story. Events that can be interpreted as miraculous or even a little too coincidental are described matter-of-factly, leaving the reader to fill in any assumption of divine intervention. For example, Otis is informed by Connor that he is to take Marva Brinkerheisly, a "spinster school teacher of thirty-five or forty," a woman "whom even a sex fiend wouldn't have thought of molesting," as his second wife (Peterson, 32). When Otis tries to summon some sort of divine confirmation of this mismatch, he gets a wounded magpie--which he first thinks is a dove--down the stove pipe at the feed store. When Otis throws the bird outside, he sees Simpson "at the comer of the building with an air rifle in his hands" (Peterson, 33).

Though the sign has been given in a hilariously perverse way, Otis decides to talk to Marva anyway. Again, when things seem to be working out for Otis to ask Marva to become wife number two, there is an abrupt disruption: "A man, wildly waving a shovel, broke around the corner of the schoolhouse. It was Simpson. The dog [he was chasing] resumed its flight" (Peterson, 35). The moment for Otis to make his move passes. Otis goes back to the feed store, fills an order for his current wife, Polly, and begins to miss her company again. As she leaves, we are told that Otis "could have cried, she looked so nice" (Peterson, 37). On his sad way back to Junction, Otis sees Simpson again, hitchhiking on the road ahead. When Otis tries to drive past, a tire blows out. We have reached the climax of the story in Otis's showdown with Simpson, who tries to help Otis change the tire. Simpson reveals to a furious Otis that his mission in Circleville is "to kick [Otis] out of [his] orbit around that pestiferous, piratical Connor Smart" (Peterson, 37-38). And after some harsh words about the condition of Otis's eternal soul, he disappears.

This brings up an interesting aspect of this most extreme of wanderer types. In terms of my earlier theorizing, it's downright paradoxical. If, indeed, we are both attracted to the wanderer--or, more truthfully, to the idea of the quest--and repulsed by the strangeness of the Other, why is it that we somehow expect the wanderer to return us to the group? Otis Wadby, convinced finally by Simpson's vanishing act, burns his Fundamentalist books and goes home to Polly. The same urge, the same (more or less) resolution occurs in almost every Three Nephite story, be it fiction or pure folklore. The stranger, whose otherness is not even fathomable, causes reconciliation within the group.

There could be--and are, I suppose--many different interpretations about why this happens. Perhaps in a world of subjects and objects this is inevitable; the stranger serves as a definer of the group's borders by standing sentry just outside them. In this sense, the wanderer is redefined, as Peterson redefines the Three Nephites, as the trickster, whose antics serve as a teaching tool. The trickster tales of the Native Americans have long been used to teach initiates where the group's ideals of appropriateness are.

However, this limits our lirnitless, limbo-dwelling wanderer too much, defines the type so closely that the character becomes stereotypic. Many mystical, outside-the-group characters, despite their worldliness, are--paradoxically---stereotypes. However, with "The Third Nephite," we have been given a character who breaks the traditional helpful Nephite stereotype yet enforces the ultimately useful Nephite stereotype. However much we try to access the wanderer's limbo, we still end up molding him or her to the group's ideals, the group's mores.

In any case, though, the wanderer is a valid, dynamic character type. Our own experiences in a strange land fuel this subtheme of breaking boundaries, becoming independent, losing sometimes that independence, getting lost, getting found; in short, this subtheme speaks about the human experience, ties, us back into the continual struggle each of us face between our urge for independence and our reliance on the group.

Since our beginnings, when we were expelled from the divine group, we have been wandering around, trying to find--what? Our way back? Some sort of magical king's highway that negates the necessity of losing our way occasionally? I think the wandering, the exploring, serves more of a purpose than that. Though we may have a good idea, we don't know where or when, in what land of our journey we will find truth. In our wandering, it is vital to know that truth can be found anywhere, even (or especially) among the Other. Until we have found all truth, we will, like these characters, be wanderers, explorers. All we have to know is that truth is what we seek. It doesn't really matter, then, where we start. Ifs where we end up that counts.

Notes

¹Derk Michael Koldewyn delivered this paper at the annual meeting of the Association for Mormon Letters, 25 January 1992 at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

²Michael Fillerup, Visions and Other Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 3. Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by author and page number.

³"Grit and Insight." Sunstone 15, no. 4 (September 1991): 57.

⁴John Bennion, "Jenny, or Captured by the Mormons,^" in his Breeding Leah and Other Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1991), 119. Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by author's name and page number.

⁵ Levi S. Peterson, Night Soil: New Stories (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 19. Additional quotations from this work are cited parenthetically by author's name and page number.