Helaman 3

Year 43: Mostly calm. A few ripples of dissent in the church. But what’s a church without some? A block of granite. Cold and dead.

Year 44: Granite.

Year 45: Warm granite.

Year 46: Now we’re talking. Hoardes of dissenters left the church-state to stake claims in the north. Pioneers in thought and travel. They saw huge lakes and fat rivers no one knew about. They scattered across this fresh land. Untapped soil. Skimpy on timber, though, so they had to build houses with rock and clay. Or just wing it in tents. But they spread out, as they put it, “from sea to shining sea.”

The timber shortage did create an industry, though. On one hand, people cultivated trees, letting them mature and grow tall and strong enough before cutting them down for wood. On the other hand, they imported lumber from the logging towns to the south. Pretty pricey. But everyone needs wood—even to make paper with. Which is why we keep scratching our history on these metal sheets. (Couldn’t we have built with the metal and used the timber for paper? Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves.)

When it was clear the land was livable, other migrants showed up. Strays always follow the pioneers. In this case, it was the Ammonites. They kept a lot of their own records, which are consultable for the people with the patience to dig through the mountains of plates. There you can find

—war records: musters, maps, casualty lists

—police records: crime statistics, mug shots, evidence

—shipping records: inventories, weight tables, more maps

If you want that stuff, you might as well skip the rest of this book. Not interested. There are plenty of rival books, if you can find them. (Most are out of print.) The perspectives differ, of course, since you not only have winners and losers—in commerce as in combat—but competing tribes, who sometimes intermix so much you don’t know who you’re talking to or about. So who, for instance, is “wild” anymore? Depends on how you define “wild.” And no one agrees. That’s just one term that books use promiscuously but no one sees clearly.

But I digress. To recap: Nephites were in big kerfuffles about God and government. That was Year 46.

Years 47 and 48: More of the same. Are details really necessary? We’ve all been there.

I will say, though, that Hj was a good judge. (I would have said “fair,” because he was, but I didn’t want that to sound like he was not “good.”) One drawback: he was always quoting scripture in his decisions. But you have to understand the times and circumstances. Theocracy in the name of democracy always has a seismic rumble under it.

Hj had two sons: Nephi and Lehi. (I’m not making this up.) Good kids, a.k.a. goody-goody kids. More about them later.

Also, ideological “wars,” we called them. Trust me, they were a whole lot better than real war. And even they simmered down by the end of Year 48.

Year 49: People every where had taken to flashing the peace sign. The Year-of-the-Judges-of-Love we called it. Under the radar, though, Gadianton’s mobsters were running more than one show.

The church proper had a good year too. Convert baptisms soared, partly because the church got richer, flashier. It was a time of wealth-worship and wealth seemed to go along with business connections that church activity brought with it. Even longterm priestly types started dropping jaws at how big the church and business were getting.

We’re not ones to look gift horses in the mouth. Tens of thousand of converts? We’ll take ‘em. Tens of thousands of senines? We’ll take ‘em.

The lesson of tandem prosperity: God hands out treats to people who come to his door. And he leaves his gate open so you can get to his porch.

These bizarre mixed metaphors keep clanging in my head: God’s word is like a sword that slices open conniving plots but also points directions like a compass and gauges the wind like a weathervane then lets us down into heaven like a spoon, where we sit and eat with Abraham and all the rest, forever, with no discernible weight gain since (a) we’re made of air and (b) there’s no gravity anyway.

It was a manic time in Zarahemla and its suburbs. This lasted through Years 49 and 50.

Year 51: Finally self-assurance mutated into cockiness. The church—the best of church, I should say—stayed true to its core traits: passing on good fortune to the unfortunate, overlooking deviant clothing or homeliness. But the “church” got obsessed with “personal prosperity” as a sign of saintliness. That led to a snotty tone in conversations and stiffing the less “prosperous.”

The latter took solace in their enforced humility. They denied themselves food as a sign of self-discipline. They meditated, chanted, prayed in every conceivable way. Their emotional state was neither manic nor depressed but in a blissful mid-ground—or a “no-ground” that they called transcendence. Their hearts seemed cordoned off from the mundane.

Year 52. More of the same, meaning “the same, but worse,”

Year 53: Hj died and his older son took over the family judge business. Everyone thought he looked like and acted like his dad. And his Dad. (Sorry for the pun. I get so punchy scratching out these synopses.)