A Song for Issy Bradley (6 page)

BOOK: A Song for Issy Bradley
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Al didn’t care about his responsibilities, he just wanted Brother Campbell to shut up and stop treating Mum like an idiot. “Who did you want to say it, Mum?”

“I was going to ask Brother Campbell,” she said.

“Brother Campbell, would you say the closing prayer, please?” Al asked.

Brother Campbell was totally owned! He had no choice but to say the prayer. And afterward, when the Home Teachers had gone, Al followed Mum into the kitchen.

“I’m on your side,” he said, half expecting her to thank him. She lifted the dishes out of the dish drainer and into the cupboard. The plates scraped each other as she forced them into a stack. When she’d finished she turned round and said, “Alma, there aren’t any
sides
in this family.”

Al strokes the bump of money through his pocket.

Borrowing, that’s what he’s doing. He heads back to his room and
Bad Guys of the Book of Mormon
, the worst of whom happens to be his namesake.

I
SSY IS LYING
in a cold bath of bone hurt.

She wants Mum.

There is music—
“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, dear Jacob”
—but it is far away, like underwater singing.

There were four candles on her last birthday cake. She blew them all out at once and Mum said, “Make a wish, Issy.”

She wishes now, for Mum to come. Where is Mum?


5

Happy Is the Man That Hath His Quiver Full

Ian sings along to a Tabernacle Choir CD as he drives home from Liverpool.
“Though deep’ning trials throng your way, Press on, press on, ye Saints of God!”
His voice is loud and quite tuneful. He likes to pretend the Tabernacle Choir is accompanying him as he keeps his own time and adds extra vibrato to the longer notes like a soloist.

Driving along the dock road makes him feel small, an insignificant speck of humanity alongside the looming structures and machinery of industry. He passes the empty, crumbling acropolis of the tobacco warehouse, Goliathan container cranes, and industrial buildings. The railway line, a fire station, car dealerships, and a Chinese supermarket graze his peripheral vision, but the arc of his imagination is occupied by the docks. By soot-streaked red bricks, the crisscross of colored and corrugated metals, iron railings, concrete, and occasional snapshot slices of ships.

Ian is a pioneer. He drives a Toyota Estima, but if the situation arose he knows he would be equally at home with a covered wagon, or even a handcart. Brother Rimmer’s got a handcart in his garage. He constructed it in the seventies in preparation for the trek to Zion, back when people still talked about fleeing to Jackson County, Missouri, and it seemed like the Second Coming was just around the corner; before the Brethren told everyone to stay put and build Zion in their own communities. When Ian was a small boy, Brother Rimmer used to pull his handcart to church activities and give the
children rides around the parking lot while they sang pioneer songs
—“Westward ho, Westward ho
!”—and pretended to shoot Indians. The pleasure of this memory makes Ian sing louder. He wishes he’d been born two hundred years ago, when the docks were the gateway to Zion and the first Mormon missionaries landed in Liverpool. He would like to wind back time and begin his pioneer journey with baptism in the River Mersey. Imagine crossing the sea to America and embarking on the thousand-mile trek to Utah! The pioneers made enormous sacrifices and they endured tremendous trials—their persistence and faith will surely guarantee their exaltation in the highest degree of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom. His own life has been disappointingly easy by comparison. He was baptized indoors, and although the water in the font was lukewarm because the heating wasn’t working properly and he shivered a bit as he changed out of his wet clothes, it was certainly no hardship. There was a party afterward with a big cake that said, “Happy 8th Birthday—Welcome Ian!” in white chocolate buttons and he felt as if his life had finally started, as if everything up to that point had been just a practice, a dry run for the moment when he would begin playing for keeps. He has been fortunate—blessed, in fact. He has barely suffered at all. He has a happy marriage, four children, a satisfactory job, and, for just over a year, he has served the Church in his role as Bishop of the local congregation, an enormous responsibility.

He was called to be Bishop on Father’s Day. After he took his place on the stand, behind the pulpit, the Primary children sang a song about fathers and family with a special second verse addressed entirely to the Bishop—to him. As he listened to their singing, Ian made a silent promise always to be there for the Primary children and their families. Since that time there have been frequent opportunities to make small sacrifices, such as the ones he has made today. It’s a shame to have missed Jacob’s birthday breakfast and party, but these things don’t begin to compare to the things the pioneers
gave up. The gospel is all about serving people, it’s what Jesus would do if he were here; Sister Anderson needed help and as one of His representatives on Earth, Ian gave it.

Claire finds sacrifice difficult, she often needs a little encouragement—next time he sees one of those retro
“Keep Calm and Carry On”
posters, he’ll buy one and stick it on the fridge. It’d be good if they also made posters with General Kitchener pointing,
“Your Husband Needs You
!”—she could do with one of those, too! It’s for Claire’s sake that he tries to offset each small sacrifice by making the most of every minute he has at home. One of the apostles died a couple of years ago and in his obituary it said that although he was too busy to spend time with his children either before or after dinner, he used every mealtime wisely, talking about the gospel. It made Ian realize he had been wasting teaching opportunities, and he resolved to make mealtimes an occasion for both physical and spiritual feasting. It’s good to chat about gospel-related matters at the table instead of who said what at school, or the latest episode of whatever it is the children watch on television.

They were having a family discussion about the importance of tithing last Sunday when the telephone rang. Ian answered it.

“Bishop Bradley!” exclaimed the voice at the other end.

“Hello, President Carmichael.” Ian stepped out of the dining room and into the living room. “How are you?”

“I’m fantastic, Bishop!”

President Carmichael is always fantastic. His inability to be anything else cheers Ian.

“What can I do for you, President?”

“There’s going to be a special missionary meeting on Saturday at the Stake Center.”

“This Saturday?”

“Yes.”

Ian’s response—“I’ll be there, President”—was automatic. Back in the dining room, he changed the subject of his discourse. “Who
knows what obedience is?” he asked. Issy’s hand shot up like a steeple and she held her breath in anticipation of being selected, something she’d learned during her first week of school. “Yes, Issy.”

“Doing as you’re told,” she said.

“Well done! How important is obedience?”

“Very important,” she said.

“Yes! Obedience is the first law of heaven. Do you know why? Obedience to the commandments makes us free. Free from sin and free to receive blessings from Heavenly Father. The key to freedom is obedience. Now, that was President Carmichael on the phone.”

“Was he fantastic?” Zipporah asked.

“He was.”

“So what did Captain Fantastic want?”

“Don’t be disrespectful, Alma. He’s asked me to go to a missionary meeting on Saturday morning.”

“But it’s my birthday party,” Jacob protested.

“It’s a small sacrifice when you think about it,” Ian said gently.

Claire sighed, stood up, and began to stack the dirty plates. She started to walk toward the kitchen but stopped in the doorway, holding the tower of dishes like a waitress. She opened her mouth, appeared to think better of it, and closed it again.

“Let me help you with those.” He got up from the table and followed her into the kitchen.

“It’s no sacrifice for you,” she said as she dumped the dirty plates in the sink and began rinsing the gravy away. “You just got out of supervising fifteen seven-year-olds at a party. I only organized it because you promised you’d help.”

He leaned against the counter next to the sink and nodded sympathetically while she adjusted to the news.

“Nothing I say will make any difference, will it?” she asked, staring out the kitchen window and into the back garden.

He reached out a tentative hand and stroked the soft flesh of her arm.

“Right, then,” she said, and she dried her hands on a towel and padded back into the dining room. “Who wants rhubarb crumble?” he heard her ask. There were shouts of “me,” and when he returned to the dining room a moment later she was fine.

Ian glances at his watch as the dock road bridges, merges, and stretches into the suburbs. The missionary meeting ran overtime and he is later than promised. Claire will be upset. A spurt of acid burns his esophagus. He holds the steering wheel with one hand and rummages in his suit pocket for the little plastic box of indigestion tablets. He can’t reach past the wad of missionary pass-along cards, so he tugs them out of the pocket and places them between his knees. He has promised to distribute them as part of the Church’s new advertising campaign. He isn’t very good with nonmembers, but the missionary meeting has inspired him to be bolder. President Carmichael challenged all the bishops to a competition to see who could give the cards out the quickest. Then he shared a story about a General Authority who sat next to Mick Jagger on a plane in the 1980s and told him he’d go to hell if he didn’t turn his life around. That’s boldness for you! Ian finds the box and when he stops at traffic lights he flicks it open and knocks back a couple of capsules.

He’ll make up for his lateness by stopping at McDonald’s. He’ll buy a milkshake for Jacob and they can have a nice father-and-son chat. Afterward he’ll make notes for the talk he will deliver at church tomorrow, a talk he has been mentally preparing for the past few days. He’ll speak about sacrifice, he’ll mention missing Jacob’s party as an illustration, and he’ll also tell a story about the children that will go some way toward making up for not seeing much of them this weekend. He likes to use real-life stories in his talks because they have a greater impact on the congregation. Plus, he looked up self-sacrifice on the Internet last week during his lunch hour and all that came up was a list of tattoo and body-piercing providers.

The children will pretend to be embarrassed, but he knows they’ll be secretly pleased to have been mentioned. He’ll tell the
story of the time the tall ships came to Liverpool and he bundled the family into the car and drove them to the docks.

It felt as if they had just emerged from a time machine as they walked along the Salthouse Dock that day. The water was swimming with square-riggers and brigs, ketches and cutters. The schooners looked like they had sailed to Liverpool straight from the set of
Treasure Island
, the pylon structures of their masts strewn with bunting.

“Look,” he said to the children, sweeping both arms in an attempt to conduct their reactions. “Let’s imagine we’re about to get on a boat to travel to America. We’re going to be pioneers and we’ve got to leave behind everything we can’t carry. When we get to America, we’re going to walk a thousand miles to Utah. Imagine how exciting it would be.”

At first no one responded. But everyone was hungry and he’d been clutching the shopping bag of brown-bread sandwiches. Holding the lunch as ransom proved to be an imagination activator.

“I’m sure it would be exciting at first,” Zipporah said, “but I bet we’d be seasick.”

“Yes! That shows you’re really thinking about it!”

“Me, Daddy?” Issy called from the buggy.

“Yes, you’d come too, Issy.”

“Could I take my Legos with me?” Jacob asked.

“No,” Ian explained. “You’d have to make sacrifices. You know what a sacrifice is, don’t you, Jacob? It’s when you give up something good for something better.”

“So I’d get more Legos in America?”

“No. You’d get something much better than Legos: blessings for being obedient and Eternity with your family.”

Everyone waited for Alma to say something.

“I’m excited,” he finally conceded. “Can I have a sandwich?”

“In a minute,” Ian said. “First, I’d like it if we could sing a pioneer song.”

They’d all groaned, even Claire. But it was a groan laced with
affection, a groan telling him that, even though they didn’t want to admit it, they were enjoying themselves and didn’t mind singing on the dockside like an English version of the Von Trapp family.

“Let’s do ‘Whenever I Think About Pioneers,’ ” he said. “Just think about what they sacrificed so we can have the gospel today. After three; one, two, three.”

It had been a special moment. He’d felt the reassuring warmth of the Spirit in his heart as they sang the simple words in honor of the sacrifices of their pioneer forebears. The bunting on the tall ships flapped applause at them, and although they’d sung quietly, Ian’s heart filled with gratitude as he looked at the children and Claire. They probably looked like an ordinary family standing on the dockside. But they weren’t, they aren’t. They’re an Eternal family, sealed to one another by the power and authority of the priesthood forever and ever. Like the pioneers, they’ll be called upon to make sacrifices for the sake of their beliefs and, like the pioneers, they won’t falter. He will describe that special, faith-enhancing moment in Sacrament Meeting tomorrow, a moment so perfect it hadn’t been spoiled even by Alma’s improvised second verse, which began, “I would like to have died of frostbite.”

He turns the Tabernacle Choir CD down as he drives into the McDonald’s parking lot. He can’t remember what flavor milkshake Jacob likes—strawberry, banana, vanilla, chocolate. He reaches into the pocket of his suit jacket for his phone and realizes he forgot to switch it back on when he left the meeting. Chocolate, that’s it—much better to remember than disturb Claire while she’s busy tidying up. He drops the phone on the passenger seat and edges closer to the drive-through intercom.

BOOK: A Song for Issy Bradley
7.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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