Sam

  Sam

  Jack Weyland

  © 2004 Deseret Book Company.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter One

  You’re going to try it again?” the boy asked as I walked with my son Adam across the park, carrying my latest model airplane.

  “Just like last week,” I said.

  “Can you wait till I get my friends?” He stuffed an electronic calculator in his back pocket and ran toward a group of boys playing touch football.

  I put the plane down, filled it with fuel, laid out the guidewires, and sat down on the ground with sixteen-month-old Adam, who was eating blades of grass.

  “Adam, don’t eat the lawn. If everyone ate the grass, what would become of our city park?”

  “Some?” he offered, inviting me to share nature’s bounty on a warm October day.

  “If you eat grass, do you know what’ll become of you?” I asked, ruffling his hair. “You’ll grow big and strong like a Brahma bull. Is that what you want?”

  “Some?” he offered again, leaning toward me to place it in my mouth.

  I chewed and decided it wasn’t half bad.

  Far away, barely visible through the autumn leaves, I could see the bright reds and blues of the now-empty Ferris wheel where my wife and I began and ended our time together. I never went there anymore.

  Turning back, I saw a cloud of boys approaching. They stopped just outside the radius of the plane’s guidewires.

  The first boy came to help me launch. In case he’d forgotten from the week before, I showed him how to start the engine, then returned to the control handle and nodded a go-ahead.

  The plane was flying, drawing vanishing circles in the air and whining like an overgrown mosquito.

  In a month of practice, I’d learned to keep the plane in level flight. But level flight was not what I wanted.

  I banked the plane sharply upward in what was supposed to be a loop—then repeated the mistake of previous weeks. The plane went straight up, then straight down, and destroyed itself in a spectacular crash.

  “All right!” the boys cheered and laughed—and left to return to their game.

  The first boy lingered behind. “You do this every week, don’t you?”

  “Yes, every week.”

  “Have you ever read anything about flying model planes?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered, sifting through the debris to find salvageable parts.

  “They have books about it in the library,” he said as kindly as he could.

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “If you read ’em, you could learn and not wreck so many planes.”

  “Probably.”

  He nervously pursed his lips and looked at the wreckage. “It must take a lot of work to build a plane like this in a week.”

  “It does.”

  “When do you do it?”

  “At night—I build them at night.”

  “But when do you sleep?”

  “Between three and seven every morning.”

  He looked at me as if realizing for the first time that adults are mixed up too. “You can’t sleep at night?”

  I shook my head, at the same time dumping most of the shattered plane into a trash can. “That’s why I build model planes, because I can’t sleep at night.”

  “If you go to bed, maybe you’ll be able to sleep.”

  “I can’t go to bed,” I said, realizing the conversation would have to end soon. How do I explain that a bed terrifies me, because when I lie down, I remember my wife, Charly, who died five weeks before.

  “Why do you spend so much time building something and then come out and wreck it?”

  My voice had a bitter edge to it. “Nothing in life is permanent. Planes are no different.”

  He looked at me, trying to figure out what was wrong, and then gave up. “I’d better go now,” he said, walking slowly away.

  He caught up with one of his friends.

  “Did you ask him?”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t make any sense. You know what? I think he wants to wreck ’em.”

  On our way out of the park, we stopped and I pushed Adam in the swings.

  Then a family came—a husband wearing Levis, a University of Utah sweatshirt, and sneakers; a wife with long auburn hair in a ponytail that swayed when she moved, in bluejeans and a long-sleeved shirt; a child, a boy older than Adam with red sneakers and bib overalls and a Sesame Street sweatshirt.

  He stood protectively beside his son while she knelt in front of the swing. Each time the boy swung toward her, she reached for him, pretending she was trying to grab his foot.

  “Gonna get your toes!” she teased, just missing with her outstretched hand, causing the boy to howl with delight. “Gonna get your toes!”

  She repeated this several times, then paused while her boy calmed down a little. Brushing aside a few maverick strands of hair, she smiled at her husband as they shared the magic of the moment and the cascading laughter of their son.

  I realized I’d been staring at them only when it registered that Adam, strapped in his baby swing, was complaining that he needed a push. I took one last look and returned to my duties.

  “Nice day, isn’t it,” the husband said.

  “Warm for October,” I replied.

  It was their family outing—they were happy—and I had to get away.

  We stopped for ice cream on the way home. My boy gets plenty of ice cream from me, and too many toys from his grandparents—all that to make up for us burying his mother in a windswept grave in South Dakota.

  It’s fun to watch him eat a dish of ice cream. He does it with gusto. We’ve worked out an agreement. As long as I keep it moving fast enough, he’ll let me use the spoon. But if things slow down, he takes things into his own hands, and the spoon isn’t necessary.

  What a handsome boy he is, even with ice cream dribbling down his chin. He has Charly’s eyes—two dark olives staring at me.

  Since returning to Salt Lake City I’d categorized each of his features into Hers and Mine, and had him marked off in my mind the way 4-H clubs do with cuts of meat from a beef carcass.

  We went home and had lunch. My mother rightfully accused me of spoiling his appetite.

  In the afternoon I helped my father clean out the garden, cutting down the cornstalks, pulling out the roots of the season’s crops, clearing the ground. That’s what we have to do when the harvest is over, when summer is gone, when winter descends. We have to pull out the old roots and think about next summer.

  But what if there are no more summers? What if all that is left are cold gray winters?

  A little later it was time for Adam’s nap. I went in and lay down with him. I fell asleep but he didn’t. He left me with only a stuffed beagle for company.<
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  When I awoke I drove to the hobby shop and bought another model plane. Next week would also be long.

  * * * * *

  The next day was Sunday. My father woke me up at seven as I lay curled up on an old sofa in the basement workroom where I build my planes. During the night I had made good progress on my newest model, meaning that I had been asleep for only three hours when he came to wake me. He had to shake me out of my dream. I always dreamed of Charly.

  I got ready and we walked to priesthood meeting.

  It is comforting to be with a group of priesthood holders and sense the strength in their lives. Priesthood is my favorite meeting now, maybe because nobody has his wife next to him there.

  After church Bishop Andrews called me into his office and asked how I was doing and what I would like to do in the ward. I told him I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Adam, but would be willing to be a home teacher.

  “Sam, one more thing. We have a single adult program in the ward. They have firesides and other activities. You should go to them.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.”

  “Well, maybe later then. And Sam—someday I hope you’ll want to find yourself another wife.”

  I stared at the floor. “You never met me wife, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Someone like her only comes along once every hundred years, so I have plenty of time before I need to start looking.”

  “Your boy needs a mother,” he suggested gently.

  “I don’t mind if he has a mother. In fact I want him to have a mother—as long as I don’t have to be related to her.”

  “Well, think about it,” he said, standing up to shake my hand on the way out. “And if you ever need any help, just call me. I’m as near as the phone, and I want to help.”

  “Do you know anything about flying model airplanes?” I asked as I left.

  After church Adam and I had lunch with Charly’s parents. The nice thing about grandparents is they think everything their grandchild does is cute, even when he knocks over his milk twice, drops his plate of food on the floor, and smears butter in his hair.

  After lunch the three of us went through a collection of photos of Charly. We were working on a book of remembrance, deciding what to put in.

  “And this is the good citizenship award she won in the sixth grade,” her mother proudly explained, showing me the thirty-cent piece of blue ribbon she’d saved for all those years.

  “It’s nice, Mom. Let’s put it in the book.”

  “Sam,” she said, holding up a picture of a skinny nine-year-old, “did I ever tell you about the time I baked a cake? She kept teasing me about licking off the frosting, sticking her tongue out. She got too near, and she did lick it. Of course I scolded her, but she said, ‘But Mom, my tongue slipped.’”

  “That sounds like her,” I smiled.

  The next picture was of a grown-up Charly, taken at a farewell party in New York before her family moved to Utah, just before I met her. She looked terrific.

  “May I have the picture?” I asked.

  “Of course—she was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “Very.” I put the picture in my wallet.

  “You miss her, don’t you?”

  “Very much,” I said quietly.

  “So do I, Sam, so do I.”

  * * * * *

  Monday I went to work. It was my third week on the computer center staff at the University of Utah, doing routine programming and spending a few hours a day as a program consultant. That means that frustrated students throw their printouts on my desk and complain the computer doesn’t work right. We slowly go through the error statements the computer so graciously kicks out and we clean it up.

  Actually I find great comfort dealing with the cold logic of computer languages. Taped on my desk at work is a quotation from Albert Einstein: “One of the strongest desires that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. . . .”

  And that is where I escape every day from eight to five.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Two

  I suppose it was obvious to everyone but me that sooner or later I would start dating. At first my mind formed vague images from old English novels in which I remained single and celibate as I devoted my life to raising my son as a memorial to my dead wife.

  But I did start to date. The only problem was that my friends and relatives decided before I did that it was time to begin my life over again.

  “It’s just a fireside,” my mother argued. “I promised her aunt you’d take her.”

  “I don’t do firesides,” I said, carefully gluing a strut for another plane.

  “Her name is Mary Beth Rogers, and she’s from Kansas. She’s just here for a week. She’s the niece of the Williamses across the street. She’s a dental hygenist.”

  “Oh good,” I smirked. “She’ll teach me the right way to floss.”

  “She wants to go to the fireside.”

  “Mom, can you take her? I’m in the middle of a wing.”

  “Sam!” my mother warned in the voice she had used only when I robbed the cookie jar after school. “If you just keep coming down here night after night, wasting your time on these planes, I’m going to be very upset with you! Now I want you to take that girl to the fireside.”

  It wasn’t too bad. The fireside talk was nice, the cookies homemade. Five minutes after it was over, we were in the car.

  “Will you take me to the temple?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “I’d like to get some pictures before I go home tomorrow.”

  We drove to Temple Square, parked the car, and walked around.

  “I want to get married in the temple,” Mary Beth said as she gazed at its spired.

  “That’s nice—do you have a special person in mind?” I asked.

  “No, do you?” she replied, looking at me very seriously.

  “Do I what?” I asked.

  “Do you have someone in mind?”

  A long pause followed while I tried to sort out the conversation.

  “For you?” I asked.

  “No, for you.”

  “Oh, you mean, if I were to remarry, do I have someone in mind?”

  “Yes, do you?”

  At that point I started to sweat.

  “No.”

  “Neither do I,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I came to Utah.”

  “I see,” I said blandly. “Well, good luck.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the main reason for dating. Don’t you agree?”

  She was touching my elbow. I looked down to where she was touching, and then back to her. She smiled. I backed away.

  Undaunted she continued. “What kind of a person are you looking for in a prospective wife?”

  “I’m not looking.”

  “It’s a commandment.”

  “To look?” I asked.

  “No—marriage is a commandment.”

  “Well, as your aunt must’ve explained, I’ve kept the commandment once.”

  “But it’s selfish of you not to get married again when there are so many worthy women.”

  “Oh, look!” I said, grasping for straws. “There’s the Seagull Monument! Let’s go see it.”

  I hurried to the monument, and she followed. “Mary Beth, you’re going to love this story. The first year Mormons were in Utah, millions of crickets descended on the valley and began to eat the crops.”

  “I sew and cook,” she said.

  “The pioneers,” I continued, talking faster, “faced certain disaster and so they prayed and soon the seagulls came and ate the crickets. Historians tell us they ate until their little seagull stomachs were full, then they vomited and went back for more.”

&
nbsp; “I’m good with children. I’ve been a Primary chorister.”

  “Mary Beth, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that the seagulls kept eating, vomiting, and eating again. What if they’d just had a little snack and flown away?”

  “I know how to budget.”

  “Mary Beth, where would we be, I ask you, as a church and as a people, were it not for the gluttony of seagulls?”

  She just looked miserably at me.

  “Mary Beth, the members of the Church chipped in money for this monument to the seagulls. And look what that bird just did to it.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  She was about ready to cry. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  She stood there. Any kind word from me would have helped. But I was no more comfort to her than the bronze seagull was.

  “I’ll take you home.” I numbly told her.

  We didn’t talk again until I pulled in front of her aunt’s house I walked with her up the walk.

  “I’ll go back to Kansas tomorrow,” she said dejectedly. “I guess I expected too much of one week here.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help, but I’m empty. I’m on rock bottom and don’t have anything to give. I’m sorry.”

  * * * * *

  The second date, a few weeks later, was also arranged. An old missionary companion, Dave Whittier, invited me down one Saturday to play some racquetball at BYU. We were finished by noon, then I bought him lunch in the Wilkinson Center. All through the meal, he kept talking about his cousin.

  “An absolute knockout—get this, runner-up in the Miss Peach Blossom contest.”

  “Do you want any ice cream?” I asked.

  Even through the ice cream he talked about her. I had managed to tune him out until I heard, “So I told her you’d pick her up at five for dinner and a movie. I was going to double with you, but I have to work tonight in the lab.”

  “I need to go home now. I’ve got a lot of things lined up for today.”

  “Like what?”

  “Model planes. There’s one waiting for me now. Besides, my parents expect me for supper.”