“Anything? What do you mean?”
“Any story. Do you believe that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt?”
I just looked at him. I’d never really thought about whether I believed it. “I guess it probably happened,” I said. “I mean, some version of that.” But the two things, I realized, were hardly the same.
“The thing is, we’re only two centuries out from Joseph Smith, and we have actual artifacts. His stuff, and contemporary accounts. I mean, you can’t visit Moses’s actual tent in the desert and see the exact chair he sat in, and we don’t have a testament from his right-hand man, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not really about the evidence. At some point it becomes real to you in spite of evidence. You just … stake your life to one particular story.”
“Lewyn, you are making this sound very culty. You realize that.”
“Am I?” He seemed surprised. He took another bite of his sandwich. Then he wrapped up the rest. After a moment he said, “These people, they were so unbelievably kind. Even after they figured it out, they were very decent to me. They called me into the director’s office and they asked me, point-blank, was I a member of the church? I felt terrible. It was the worst I’d felt all that year, which was saying something. And they asked me why I was there and I honestly couldn’t say why. And they asked if I wanted to join the church, was that why, and I didn’t know that, either. And I ended up telling them about Dad, and how he died, and after that they couldn’t do enough for me, so I felt awful about that, in addition to everything else. I was a mess, basically.”
“Were you thinking of converting?” I asked. “I mean, at that point?”
Lewyn sighed. “I’m not sure. I was trying to be open to the possibility. Anyway, I had to drop out of the pageant, but they didn’t make me leave. They kept setting me up with people to talk to, and I spent the next couple of weeks up there, going to the historical sites and doing more reading. Do you know what the Sacred Grove is?”
I laughed. “Lewyn, do I look like a person who knows what a ‘Sacred Grove’ is?”
He smiled, but faintly. “The Sacred Grove is behind Joseph Smith’s house in Palmyra. It’s where he went to pray. It’s where he saw angels. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. The first time I went there I got lost in it, actually. I was looking for it, and I didn’t realize I was already in it. Very meta. Harrison would have found it hilarious.”
He was right about that, I thought.
“I’d never considered myself remotely spiritual, you know? But when I was in the Sacred Grove, I felt something. I did. I couldn’t have said, Wow, these supernatural things happened here, just as I’m being told. But there was something. Maybe it was just the stillness and the beauty, and that horrible year. I just kept going back to the Grove, and watching the pageant at night. And I met this family from Provo, and they were driving back home and planning to stop in Missouri and Illinois on their way back. You know, to places from Mormon history. And they invited me to go with them. So I did. I left New York with the Kimballs, and I went west.”
“Guess you didn’t miss your little sister.”
“I barely thought of my little sister. I barely thought of any of you. Something was working its way through me. I kept trying to bring my old identity together with whatever that was, but I could never get it to happen.”
A Black woman with a bulldog and a little boy came past, headed for the park and the pier at the bottom of Coffey Street. The boy turned back to stare at us as he walked.
“We stopped in Nauvoo on the way west. Nauvoo is where the Mormons were settled when Joseph Smith died. After that it was where the community set off to Zion, which eventually became Utah. We saw all the historical sites, like the jail where Smith died, and his house, and his grave, and that was all fine. You know, interesting, but not special. But then that evening, I took a walk down to the river. The Mississippi, by myself. And I was looking west into the sunset, and I just felt that same thing I’d felt in the Grove. I didn’t think This is God, or even The testimony is true. I didn’t know what it was. But the peace of it. I just wanted it all the time.”