Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  Bowie waited. “Well?”

  “I just did it,” said Alvin. “I just put it back.”

  Bowie reached down to the sheath at his waist. It wasn’t empty. He drew out the knife. There was the blade, plain as day, not a whit changed.

  You’d’ve thought Bowie was handling his long-lost baby.

  “How’d you get the blade back on it?” he asked. “You never touched it.”

  “It was there all along,” said Alvin. “I just kind of spread it out a little.”

  “So I couldn’t see it?”

  “And so it wouldn’t cut nothing.”

  “But now it will?”

  “I think you’re bound to die, when you take on them Mexica, Mr. Bowie. But I want you to take some human sacrificers with you on the way.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Bowie. “Except for the part about me dying.”

  “I hope I’m wrong and you’re right, Mr. Bowie,” said Alvin.

  “And I hope you live forever, Alvin Maker,” said the knife-wielding killer.

  That morning Alvin and Arthur Stuart left the boat, as did Abe Lincoln and Cuz, and they made their journey down to Nueva Barcelona together, all four of them, swapping impossible stories all the way. But that’s another tale, not this one.

  NOTES ON “THE YAZOO QUEEN”

  Just as I was about to start writing The Crystal City, the penultimate book in the Alvin Maker series, Bob Silverberg told me that he had the go-ahead for a second anthology in the Legends series. Crystal City was going to take place in Nueva Barcelona—New Orleans; I had just read a book about Lincoln that told about his trips down the Mississippi, once with a cousin of his. Since I had to get Alvin and Arthur down the river to New Orleans anyway, I might as well have them meet Lincoln on the way.

  As I always do with the Tales of Alvin Maker, I cast about to see who else might have been on the river at that time, and found Jim Bowie, among others. With a cast of characters like that, I knew I couldn’t lose.

  But I found a way to really mess myself up. Because “Yazoo Queen” became so productive that I couldn’t bear to tear myself away. “Grinning Man” had stood completely alone—if you never read it, the novels would make perfect sense anyway. But after what happened in “Yazoo Queen,” I couldn’t just drop these characters. I realized that Crystal City needed to continue the story right where it left off.

  Which made “Yazoo Queen,” in effect, Chapter Zero of The Crystal City. Only it was under an exclusivity contract with Legends and so it couldn’t appear in the book. Nor could I make it available online.

  What I was doing was, in effect, making Crystal City the direct sequel of a story that those who owned all the Alvin Maker books nevertheless did not have. It would inevitably refer back to events on the river that they could not read about unless they bought Silverberg’s anthology—which, if I remember correctly, would not come out until considerably after The Crystal City was published.

  I did my best to play fair with the readers. In the opening chapter of Crystal City, I made sure that the key information was clearly presented so that the readers would not be completely lost. However, these clues were also tantalizing hints that there was a good story there that the readers were not being told. Which was the truth.

  The better solution would have been to make “Yazoo Queen” Chapter One of The Crystal City after all, and write something else about Alvin Maker for Legends. But the Legends deadline would not wait; nor would the Crystal City deadline. I had no other Alvin story that was ready to write.

  Thus is literature shaped by the calendar.

  So for those readers of Crystal City who were annoyed by the way the book opened, I agree with you completely. It was wrong of me. I apologize. But now you’ve got the missing story, along with a lot of others, so stop kvetching. I won’t do it again. I hope.

  V

  MORMON STORIES

  NOTES ON THE MORMON STORIES

  When I call these “Mormon stories” I don’t mean to imply that they are religious. Quite the contrary, they are most definitely not. I don’t write religious stories—I think real religion is far too serious to be put in the hands of fiction writers. If a religion has truth in it, that truth will not be helped by surrounding it with lies.

  I do, however, write stories that deal with characters who have religious faith. My Women of Genesis series (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah) and Stone Tables are about important figures from the first two books of the Bible. I take very seriously the responsibility to present them fairly, with the motives and beliefs the scripture assigns to them. My task in those books was to flesh them out, to make their lives seem more complete and real to the modern reader. But at no point did I try to deal with points of doctrine, or attempt to persuade people to believe as I believe, or give readers a “spiritual experience.”

  Indeed, I have contempt for artists who attempt, through their art, to convey spirituality. I believe they could undertake such an enterprise only because they have no idea what spirituality is; they have mistaken it for emotionalism. But emotionalism is a cheap effect. Any actor knows how to make an audience cry; to make them cry using those tricks and then label it a “spiritual experience” is, in my opinion, fraud.

  I’m a believer—I believe that God lives and touches our lives. I even believe that we have a responsibility to help each other find our way to faith and obedience to the things God teaches. But I think that should be done openly, the way I did it when I served as a missionary in Brazil in my early twenties, or the way I have conversed candidly about my faith with any individual who sincerely asked. But such conversations are private, and they have no place in my fictional writings.

  No, these stories are “Mormon” because they were written by a Mormon, about Mormon culture, for Mormon readers. They are culturally Mormon.

  Because the Mormon religion requires all adult members of the Church to be ministers to each other in one “calling” or another, it consumes an enormous amount of our time. We go to ordinary schools in the nations where we live; we hold ordinary jobs; we vote (or don’t vote) like ordinary citizens, and are obliged to obey the same laws as everyone else. But in our private lives, we are thrust together in small communities called “wards” (parishes, more or less), consisting of about sixty to a hundred households, and there we spend a lot of our time, fulfilling our callings by teaching each other and helping each other live as better Latter-day Saints.

  The result is that almost every Latter-day Saint—every Mormon—lives in a tiny village. That village might be right in the middle of a huge city or spread out over a wide stretch of countryside, but we all belong to a community about the size of a nomadic tribe or a decent-size medieval village. We are familiar with every face; we know which children belong to which parents; many of us know every single person’s name.

  Not only that, but because the organization of the Church is the same in every ward, we can move into a new ward and immediately know people—at least by their job description. The top man is the bishop; the top woman, the Relief Society president. Name the calling, and we know what role that person serves in this particular small town. It’s like moving from town to town and knowing that every single one of them will have exactly one butcher, one baker, and one candlestick maker; all you have to do is find out which face goes with which job and you know something about them. You know what you can expect of them; and as soon as you are given a calling, they know what to expect of you.

  Of course, the callings change. The bishop this year might be teaching children in Primary the next; no calling in the ward is permanent. So there is a hidden social system, too, one that you don’t begin to learn until you’ve lived in a ward for some time. Regardless of calling, there are certain people who can be counted on to help and take part in every-thing, and others who are of only shaky reliability. There are those who are deeply knowledgeable about the gospel, and those whose understanding is superficial. There may also be poisonous gossips or ambitious c
limbers. Gradually, over time, you come to know the true order of the town.

  Then one day the people even higher up will decide that the ward has grown too big and divide it into two separate congregations, so the whole thing starts over again as two new villages take shape and discover who they are together.

  This way of organizing our lives is so foreign to the experience of most Americans that it doesn’t even occur to them how different Mormons’ lives are. We don’t dress like the Amish or Chassidim (though we do try to dress modestly), so it’s not plainly visible, but we experience church life in a radically different way from any other group of Christians. It is safe to say that for most of us—for those of us who are actively engaged in the life of the ward—we live in Mormonism and only visit American culture.

  Mormon life thus has a religious intensity that most others don’t have, simply because of the amount of time and attention we put into our church activities. I have lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, for nearly a quarter of a century—almost half my life—but in truth, it is only since I started writing a column for a local weekly (“Uncle Orson Reviews Everything” in The Rhinoceros Times) that I felt like I actually became a part of Greensboro. Before that, I was driving around Greensboro and shopping in Greensboro and sending my kids to school in Greensboro but I lived in the Guilford Ward for seven years and then the Summit Ward ever since.

  Mormons reading this will know exactly what I’m talking about. Non-Mormons may just shake their heads and mutter, “Weird.”

  But you have to understand this in order to understand what’s going on with these four stories—and why they even exist.

  Because within Mormon culture there are subcultures. For instance, Mormon life in the “Mormon Corridor”—Eastern Idaho, Utah, and parts of Arizona, where many a town is half Mormon or more—is very different from Mormon life in, say, California, where Mormons are common but not predominant, or in the East and South, where Mormons are relatively rare and we are awash in a sea of Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians or Catholics.

  There are many Mormons who refer to Utah as “Zion,” and really believe that it’s only there, in valleys sheltered by the Rocky Mountains, and surrounded by communities consisting almost entirely of fellow Latter-day Saints, that the Mormon religion reaches its true fruition.

  Then there are others, like me, who believe that Mormonism is at its best where we are not in the majority, where the differences between our lives and the lives of unbelievers are clearly drawn, where it’s not “good business” to be seen in church meetings and hold prominent callings, and where the kids dealing drugs in the high school are not the same teenage boys blessing the sacrament on Sunday.

  Here in North Carolina, our teenagers need each other in order to help sustain each other’s identity as Latter-day Saints; adults depend on each other and are tolerant of variations. If you show up and do your calling, then we don’t care what political party you belong to, you’re one of us. Also, wards are spread out over large stretches of cities and country-side, so that people of every walk of life and every income level gather together to worship.

  In the Mormon Corridor, by contrast, members are expendable—there are so many Mormons you can afford to ostracize those who don’t believe exactly the way you do. And wards are so bunched together that zoning laws shape the church to a dysfunctional degree—everybody in the ward makes pretty much the same amount of money and lives in pretty much the same-size house, and never has to deal with anyone markedly poorer or different from themselves. When wards are smaller than Zip Codes, it’s easy to forget that it’s faith and obedience that bind us together, not the superficial similarities of income and career.

  In other words, in “Zion,” Mormons are far more likely to get confused about where worldly values leave off and religious values begin. Whereas in places where Mormons are a small minority, the lines are clear and everyone can see them. Of course there are good and bad Mormons in all different situations, and there are sick and healthy wards both in and out of “Zion.” Maybe it’s just a matter of preference.

  As a fiction writer, my stories serve as social commentary, whether I mean them to or not (and usually I don’t). I faithfully report the kinds of things that real people do, and explain as best I can the reasons why they do them. That’s what fiction is for.

  But when I’m writing for the general audience, I can’t address issues that exist only in Mormon culture. So, from time to time—and you can see that it is comparatively rarely—I find it useful to write a fiction that is set within Mormon culture, or within the Mormon belief system. Knowing that non-Mormons probably will never read it, I don’t bother to explain cultural elements that Mormons all recognize immediately. In these cases I am writing fiction that is “inside.”

  Usually, in such cases, my purpose is satire. In the classic sense: I am humorously and ironically calling attention to flaws in society with the idea that these flaws should be corrected. My book Saintspeak: The Mormon Dictionary has precisely that purpose—by defining terms that Mormons use in ways peculiar to ourselves, I can also comment on Mormon life and suggest ways that, as a people, we might do better.

  So if you are not a Mormon, and you read these stories, you may find them boring, because the issues at stake mean little to you; or you may find them strange and vaguely exotic, like reading Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana novels. Or you may recognize the similarities as well as the differences and find some value for your own understanding of the place of people within their culture.

  “Christmas at Helaman’s House” was written many years ago and was intended to be the first chapter of a novel; it still may become that. Mormons have—or had, and in my opinion should have—a deep suspicion of capitalism and the markers of wealth. Too often in Mormon communities wealth is taken as a sign of God’s favor. But I’ve learned through many conversations and much correspondence that I am far from being the only one in the Church who thinks we’ve gone too far and need to recover Joseph Smith’s insistence that there should be—and is—a better way. So no matter how many Mormons you hear talking like free-market capitalists, remember that there are also a lot of Mormons whose loathing for the competitive economy is a tradition older than Marxism.

  “Neighbors” was created as a retelling of the story of Christ, as if he had been born to a couple from a Mormon ward. On one level it’s an anti-gossip satire, but on another level it’s a take on the way we all safely interpret dangerous things in ways that don’t require us to change our lives.

  “God Plays Fair Once Too Often” is probably too much of a parable to really work as fiction. I had intended it for publication in a Mormon journal, but realized that it would probably be too offensively jocular for many Latter-day Saints. The problem is that I don’t take the book of Job seriously as doctrine or scripture. The account of God making a bet with the devil is not just ludicrous but offensive to me—it’s not how the universe works. And I find none of the explanations of why bad things happen to good people even remotely useful. So for me it’s fair game for satire, but many other Mormons are bound to think I’m making light of sacred things. As a result, the only publication this received was in the program book for a Dutch science-fiction convention in Rotterdam many years ago. What they made of it I don’t know, but they wanted to publish something that hadn’t been published before, this was all I had, and they accepted it.

  “Worthy to Be One of Us” was created for an anthology of LDS fiction edited jointly by me and my friend David Dollahite (Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life). Dave is a scientist working in family studies, particularly fatherhood studies, and we wanted to create an anthology of useful fiction that would show family life from a Mormon perspective. What I was dealing with in my story was the issue of status in the Mormon Church. The leaders of the Church fill important roles, and those I have known personally are usually very good men who can be trusted to fill those roles wisely and well. But surrounding them is too often
a penumbra of social class derived from rank. In the Church Office Building they are surrounded, as often as not, by toadies and sycophants who are nauseating in a Uriah Heep kind of way; it makes me wonder how the Church leaders can bear it. I can only assume they are mostly unaware of how they are exploited, fawned over, misrepresented, and lied to by so many of their underlings.

  A few generations ago, however, the social aspects of the situation were even worse. Salt Lake City high society was absolutely dominated by those who were called to be General Authorities of the Church, with social rank completely determined by the station and seniority of your family’s MRGA—Most Recent General Authority.

  Early in Kristine’s and my marriage we ran into one of the surviving examples of this pernicious attitude. My great-grandfather (my father’s mother’s father) was George F. Richards, who for a while was the President of the Quorum of the Twelve, making him the senior Apostle and the designated successor to the President of the Church. He died too soon and never succeeded to the presidency, but his ranking was very high.

  Kristine and I were living in Salt Lake when the time for the annual George F. Richards Family Reunion rolled around. George F. and his wife had had fifteen children, twelve of whom lived to have children of their own, so the gathering would be huge. The reunion was to be held at Sugarhouse Park, and my grandmother asked Kristine and me, since we were living close by, to take charge of providing the name tags.

  We thought of the bright idea of color-coding the name tags to identify which of George F.’s dozen children each person was descended from. As people approached the reunion, we would ask their names, write them on the right color tag, and then everybody would know something about them. It was very genealogical, very Mormon, and rather fun, Kristine and I thought.

  Until we ran into the LeGrand Richards problem. Uncle LeGrand was the only child of George F. who also became an Apostle, and since he was still alive at the time of this reunion, he was the only Living General Authority at the gathering. I had met him several times, and in fact he had performed Kristine’s and my wedding ceremony (though we did not expect him to remember). When he came near our table, we called out (as we had to everyone), “Come and get your name tags!” He waved us off, and, rather snappishly, remarked, “I don’t need a name tag.” Well, of course he didn’t. Everyone knew who he was. So Kristine and I laughed it off, though it would have been nice if his own descendants could have been visibly linked to him by the color-coded tags.