Mission to America Read Online Free Page A

feminine features aside from a great wild mass of dyed dark hair that looked like it had sprung down from a branch, claws extended, and attacked her scalp.
    The meals she served had less flavor than the stale air. The Kimmels were fish people, their Maternal Foodway as determined more than a hundred years ago by Mother Lucy, our founder and first Seeress. The only fresh fish to be found in Bluff was trout, and Sarah's mother prepared it according to two main recipes in which I could taste her own mother's wrinkled hand: oven-baked trout fillets garnished with forest herbs and parboiled trout on stewed dandelion greens. This would be my diet once I married Sarah, so I tried to eat enthusiastically, even when my appetite was stifled by her wounding behavior at the table.
    It usually showed itself midway through the meal, after the Prayer and the Lesson. The Lesson was Paul's job. Paul, the little brother—a prim blond twelve-year-old whom I was expected to take an interest in by helping him with his math and science homework and admiring his collection of fossil insects dug from the shale deposits south of town—read to us from the Three Foundational Works in a high fearful voice familiar from my own school days. He lived in terror of mispronunciations, just as I had at his age. The teachers punished them harshly. “Be always incorruptible in intention,” he quoted from Mother Lucy's
Discourses,
“and indefatigable in execution. The Transcendent Immanence yields but slowly to the instrumentalities of will.”
    â€œHow did I do?” he asked, looking at his big sister, who functioned as the household magistrate and ruled on all of life's little daily questions. Her mother was too distracted, her father too tired, and her little brother too young and fretful.
    â€œModerately inadequately,” said Sarah.
    The crisp extra syllables were a cruelty. Paul's eyes fogged over with shame. His throat turned red.
    â€œBetter than I'd have done. That was hard,” I said.
    â€œMason?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œRespect,” said Sarah.
    â€œSorry.”
    â€œPaul, don't cry,” she said.
    â€œI'm not,” he sniffled.
    â€œYou were about to cry. Mason?”
    â€œYes?” I said.
    â€œEat. You're not eating.”
    â€œBecause we're talking now.”
    â€œAnd now we're finished talking. Eat,” she said.
    After supper the parents released us for a stroll into the hills along a raw dirt logging road that was a favorite spot for couples like us, their affections stretched thin between memories of pleasure and forebodings of commitment. Whenever we passed them, we lowered our heads to show we weren't interested in their conversations, but faint vibrations passed between us anyway: of sympathy for one another's awkwardness and—between the future husbands, at least—of mutual condolence.
    Sarah used our night walks to disclose to me her hopes and expectations for our life together. She planned to teach at the college once she graduated and put aside money for certain small luxuries that we might not be able to save for after she started having children. To me, the luxuries didn't sound small at all, though.
    â€œI'd like a nice car. A Saab.”
    I made her spell it. The word's outlandish foreignness annoyed me. Most AFA families owned two vehicles, the husband's pickup truck and the wife's sedan, both of them used and minimally equipped. The talk that a car such as Sarah described might cause would isolate us from our friends and neighbors.
    â€œMaybe. If it's a few years old,” I said.
    â€œI'd like a new one. The new ones are much cuter. I saw a nice red one in Missoula last August.”
    Sarah's grand notions all came from the same place. Because of her trips to the trade fair with her mother, who crafted cedar spoons and cooking tongs, she'd spent too much time, I felt, comparing herself to the vain free-spenders with poisonous diets whom the