As Lambs to His Fold

By Kurt F. Kammeyer

Nine-year-old cousins Bethany Markham and Leatrice Latimer are inspired to want to get to heaven. It should be easy for girls as righteous as them...
Meet the girls and their extended families and relations, including Doctor/Bishop Lindblum, Great-Aunt Salina May Roundtree Gillis, 98-year-old Brother Nickelbee, glamorous Aunt Francie, a pot of African Violets, and Mooey-Moocher the cow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kurt F. Kammeyer
• Release date: Feb 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301726240

Kurt F. Kammeyer

Kurt's career has been in the aerospace software industry. He is the author of twenty-one books and short stories. Kurt speaks French and has studied Hebrew, Russian, Icelandic and Hindi as background for his series of otherworld books, "The Clan of the Stone". He has always had an interest in science fiction and space travel. Kurt lives with his wife and family, a cat and a dog in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Book preview

AS LAMBS TO HIS FOLD

By

Virginia Maughan Kammeyer

Edited by Kurt F. Kammeyer and John E. Kammeyer

Copyright 2012 Kurt F. Kammeyer

Smashwords Edition

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AS LAMBS TO HIS FOLD

CENTRAL UTAH, THE SUMMER OF 1938:

Nine-year-old cousins Bethany Markham and Leatrice Latimer are inspired to want to get to heaven. It should be easy for girls as righteous as them…

Meet the girls and their extended families and relations, including Doctor/Bishop Lindblum, Great-Aunt Salina May Roundtree Gillis, 98-year-old Brother Nickelbee, glamorous Aunt Francie, a pot of African Violets, and Mooey-Moocher the cow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Virginia Maughan Kammeyer was born in Cedar City, Utah, in 1925, the second of five children. Her father was, at various times, a high school principal, college president, rancher, professor of agriculture, stake president and mission president. Her mother was a school teacher, and noted writer, poet and wit. Jinny graduated from BYU in 1946, and taught school for two years before marrying Fred T. Kammeyer in 1948. They had six children. She died in Bellevue, Washington, in August 1999.

She won many awards for her poetry, which was collected and published in The Joy Book, in 2001. The three novels in this series were among her last projects before she died.

FORWARD

This book was one of our mother’s last projects before she died. She worked on it off and on over several years, and it was in almost finished form when she died.

As Lambs to His Fold is a deceptively simple-sounding tale, and conceals how much craftsmanship went into her settings and characters. She wrote:

Do not be led astray by what you read, by the cheap and shoddy. Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean immoral, but rather that which is worth little. We can recognize the cheap and shoddy in religion — the pulpit thumpers, those who play upon people’s emotions. There are some traps in literature: those which appeal to the emotions you already have, and leave you just the same as before. Lazy writers will use readers this way; and the unthinking reader will not see it as a trap, but will say, Oh, wasn’t that wonderful" — because it says exactly what he was thinking.

There is too much of this in Mormon literature; the book with the predictable characters and the predictable ending, which pounds home a predictable moral. Because all our talks and all the lessons we teach in church are based on pointing out a moral and promoting faith, we think this is all we need in our literature. There is nothing wrong with this, if the characters are allowed to work out their problems themselves. Greek writers scorned the chariot of the gods coming down to rescue people. A careless Mormon writer will get his characters in a fix and then leave it to God to rescue them — by a miracle, or a revelation, or a visit from the Three Nephites. This is not only bad writing, it is false doctrine. We all know that miracles happen, but only after we have done everything we can to solve the situation.

Good fiction tends to take on a life of its own during the writing, and heads off in directions even the author didn’t anticipate. Bad fiction tends to be contrived, heading where the author intends, with the characters led around like puppets. My mother was scornful of historical fiction featuring actions impossible to the time or context of the story, or physically impossible. She wrote, addressing hack novelists:

WESTERN DAZE

Moving as rapidly as light

You type a novel in a night,

Then galloping at frantic pace

Over the hills your heroes race.

From cattle ranch, to gambling room,

To mesa bluff and back they zoom.

How can you, writing at such rate,

Keep places, plots, and people straight?

Your marshal, now — I fear that he

May someday meet catastrophe,

(A mix-up by some typing elf)

And handcuff, jail, then hang — himself.

Good historical fiction is difficult to write, and it’s easy for little things to go wrong when meshing the real with the imagined, even for a period as recent as sixty years ago. I don’t know if Mom ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic essay On Fairy Stories. If she didn’t, then she was familiar with his theories from other sources. Tolkien held that if a writer is to win a readers’ temporary suspension of disbelief in the imagined setting, then the story must have perfect internal consistency, however normally implausible the setting. (One thinks of Chris Heimerdingers’ beguiling Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites series.) My mother was of Tolkien’s opinion, and tended to do meticulous background research — she left an unfinished novel set in Manhattan in the 1880’s, and her research included maps showing the location of prominent landmarks, and pictures of what these looked like. She had an ear for voices — go through this book, for example, and count how many Western American dialects she employs.

To maintain consistency, she created detailed backgrounds for her major characters, regardless of whether the reader was aware of this. This biographical material became the third book in this series, A Bright Particular Star. She was aware of the unpredictability of real life, and attempted to simulate this in her writing. There is plenty of pathos and sentimentality in my mother’s novels, but it is invariably mixed with sorrow and loss.

John Kammeyer

Sammamish, Washington

February 2002

CHAPTER ONE

I think, when I read

That sweet story of old,

When Jesus was here among men,

How he called little children

As lambs to His fold,

I should like to have been

with Him then.

— Jemima T. Luke

Flourishing the curling iron and attempting to make me look like Shirley Temple, Mamma spoke with some difficulty around a mouthful of bobby pins. What does the weather look like?

Going to the window, Daddy observed gathering clouds and remarked, Well, you know what they say: ‘When the Mormons meet, the heavens weep.’

Paul! Mamma took the bobby pins out of her mouth and looked reproachful. Who would say a thing like that?

It’s a joke, dear. It means it’s going to rain.

Well! I still don’t think it’s very nice!

Mamma pushed in the bobby pins and tied a bow atop my crowning glory. I knew it would be a brief glory, at best. I had the stubborn Markham hair, and, stubbornly, it would soon reassert itself. But, one way or another, I was ready for Sunday school.

I strolled out on the porch to wait for Leatrice.

__________

We were nine that summer of 1938, Bethany Markham and Leatrice Latimer, cousins and best friends. My brown hair was cut Dutch-boy style. Leatrice’s hair was dark blonde and wispy-fine. It was always escaping from the ribbon that was supposed to hold it back. I was short, she was tall; Uncle Jack called us Mutt and Jeff.

We shared something else in addition to kinship and friendship, a large and lofty ambition — not to go to Hollywood, although that ranked a close second, but to go to heaven. How had we arrived at this desire? We had been hit, each of us, with a wonderful revelation.

However, someone forgot to warn us how difficult the way to glory would be. We supposed that we had merely to continue as we were — two perfect little Mormon girls. We would find, to our shock and dismay, that it was not so.

__________

We sat in our best dresses and black, patent-leather slippers, listening to our Sunday school teacher, Sister Tattersall, tell us the story of The Iron Rod: of how the Prophet Lehi had a dream that showed him a beautiful tree with delicious fruit on it. To get to the tree you had to grasp the Iron Rod that went along by a filthy river. Those who didn’t keep a tight hold on the Iron Rod would slip off into the filthy river.

Now, said Sister Tattersall, looking popeyed with earnestness and a tight girdle, did any of us know what the Iron Rod represented? We all shook our heads.

It was, she said, the Word of God; and we must stick to it like glue if we wanted to get to heaven, which was represented by the tree and the delicious fruit. Only the faithful would make it.

It was then that the heavens resounded with good news for Leatrice and me. The faithful! That was us! We were as faithful as all-Billy-heck; and we never did anything wrong.

Heaven? A piece of cake. We had been hearing about heaven all our lives. But, until now, going to heaven had held no more appeal than going to Provo. Now, suddenly, we realized that there was something in it for us.

Men are that they might have joy. There it was, right in the scriptures: 2nd Nephi 2:5.

Up until now we had missed the significance of that promise. Now we had a vision of what it meant: that tree with the luscious fruit on it; and under its spreading branches there would be a picnic, with fried chicken, and lemonade, and potato salad, and cookies to go with the fruit.

Who could ask for anything more? And it was ours, because we deserved it. We went to church, and we paid our tithing: four cents each month to the bishop, ten percent of our allowance. We also didn’t lie, steal, cuss, drink bad stuff, smoke, or spit on the sidewalk. Sister Tattersall hadn’t told us very much about the particulars of heaven. But that very evening we were to be wonderfully enlightened.

__________

By late afternoon, the rain had stopped, and the air was cool and pleasant. Daddy had said, It’s a fine evening. Let’s walk to church.

So, there we were, on our way to Sacrament meeting. Daddy and Mamma were ahead of us, Daddy walking with long strides, Mamma trotting beside him. It was the end of May, and Daddy was wearing his summer seersucker suit and straw hat. Mamma had on her go-to-meeting dress, a pretty flowered rayon.

Right behind Mamma and Daddy came my sister, Irene, and Leatrice’s sister, Dorajean. They were both fifteen and a great trial to Leatrice and me. They were wearing their first high heels — platform pumps; and the way they were wobbling and staggering, their feet must have been killing them. But they would have staggered to the end of town, just so people could see them.

Leatrice and I brought up the rear. I was scuffling my feet and complaining at having to walk eight blocks to church — although, at other times, I trotted all over town with Leatrice and thought nothing of it. But, Sunday ought to be different. Wasn’t that the day you were supposed to rest?

Most of the time, we rode to church in the car, going around to pick up dear, old Brother Nickelbee, who was ninety-eight years old and our particular friend. But, Brother Nickelbee was in bed with a cold; so Daddy had said, Let’s walk.

Now he turned his head and addressed me in a tone of mild reproof.

Beth, when I was a boy we walked three miles to church and three back. My father believed in living the Laws of the Lord very strictly, including the one about letting your animals rest on the Sabbath. So our horses stayed in the barn on the Lord’s Day, and we walked.

I didn’t want a lecture, so, forgetting that a moment ago I had complained of being tired, I raced ahead with Leatrice to get to the tabernacle, so we could climb up in the balcony, where we were allowed to sit — if we behaved ourselves.

Our tabernacle was a handsome building standing in the middle of the tree-adorned town square. It had arched and leaded windows and was built of noble, gray limestone. The double front doors were of solid oak with hand-wrought iron hinges and handles. Two grand spires pointed at the sky. Inside, the ceiling of the chapel was arched and beamed, like the upturned hull of a ship. And, indeed, the master builder, from England, had at one time built ships.

The chapel contained a pipe organ with golden pipes. Everyone said it sounded every bit as good as the one in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. And, between the pipes, was a stained-glass window showing Jesus holding a lamb.

I loved to look at it. I wondered, however, why it was called stained glass. To me that meant something ugly; and this was beautiful.

Another reason for pride: Our tabernacle was the first and only one in the Welcome Valley. Let the town of Hope, ten miles to the north of us, make jokes that we were beyond Hope; let Prosperity, ten miles to the south, make teasing remarks that we would never reach Prosperity. They worshiped in plain, ordinary meeting houses. We had the tabernacle, large enough to hold all the Saints in the valley desirous of attending stake conference every three months — when General Authorities would come down from Salt Lake to speak to us.

Our town of Welcome would undoubtedly have been the county seat, we said, if the railroad hadn’t passed us right by and put in a station down at Prosperity. If we had gotten the station, we said wistfully, we could have put up a beautiful sign that said, Welcome.

__________

We climbed the circular stairs to the balcony. It was hot up there, but we