By David G. Pace
It lies on my desk at home, an old copy of Shakespeare’s plays: its binding brittle, the pages yellowed with age. Frank gave it to me in the summer of 1981.
His old house stood atop a slight hill on Grove Street Extension in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He had spent his life as a carpenter, and many of his old tools rusted away in dark corners of his barn, attached to the house New England-style. Inside there were at least a hundred feet of shelved books; everything from Milton to Dreiser and from old Sears catalogues to engineering manuals. I often stopped to admire the collection.
We had tracted into Frank one day while making our rounds in a town where Brigham Young had once converted an entire Baptist congregation to Mormonism, moving it in toto out West. But while I was there, the Massachusetts Boston Mission was the lowest-baptizing mission in the States. So when Frank let us in the door, we were grateful. Since Frank had suffered a stroke three years earlier, Elder Moore and I had to help him move up or down the stairs and around the house. He couldn’t speak or even hold a book.
We didn’t have anything else to do, so we quickly fell into a habit of visiting Frank every morning for half an hour to read the Book of Mormon to him. We logged the visit as part of our study time. They were strange mornings, two twenty-year-olds reading to an old man who hadn’t spoken a single comprehensible word to us—emitting only coughs and wheezes.
And in that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness. And the meek also shall increase, and their joy shall be in the Lord, and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. (2 Nephi 27:18)
We often wondered if we were wasting our time—not to mention Frank’s. Did he even understand what we were reading? We tried explaining to him that the Book of Mormon was scripture, like the Bible, but that it was an ancient record of the Americas. He would only nod and stare at us with the wide eyes of a person locked in intractable fear. Could he comprehend that we were reading to him about an alleged visit of Jesus to the ancestors of the American Indians? We didn’t know. But still, we kept going back, and he would always be waiting.
Most of the house was closed off, except for the kitchen, Frank’s upstairs bedroom, and Bill’s room. Bill was Frank’s housekeeper, hardly younger than Frank though much abler—a husky, slow man whose life of hard manual labor seemed to show in the deep creases of his face and in his tired movements. Bill cared for Frank, cleaned the house, and prepared meals in exchange for his room and board. He seemed happy to have Frank off his hands for a half hour every morning.
Soon after our visits began, Elder Moore and I were mentioning Frank in our companionship prayers before leaving our apartment for the day’s work. We brought him foreign postage stamps that came from our missionary buddies stationed around the world. Frank accepted them for his collection which he showed us, mutely as always but, despite the wild eyes, with a smiling sense of pride.
While mounting the stairs, we would hear him clumping around, turning off the radio, straightening the bed, slowly opening the door to let us in. The room became familiar to us that spring and summer—the battered TV in the corner, the crumpled, yellowing newspapers on the floor next to the chair I always sat in, the smell of dirty blankets and stale air. When we finished, Frank would always stand and shake our hands. It is hard to forget the feel of a hand with only three and a half fingers—a reminder of the man’s past vocation.
There was something about reading the verses aloud—the way they filled the old house with an authoritative cadence—it conjured an assurance I hadn’t felt before: that the book was a good one; that it was speaking to me. One day, the words expanded rich and full in the still bedroom, and my voice trembled under their weight. But Frank would only whimper now and again, his expression still stunned by a paralyzed face.
Outside of prayers, Elder Moore and I rarely mentioned our early morning meetings with Frank. Perhaps we felt as if our acts there were sacred, like doing temple work or dressing a body for burial; it seemed irreverent to talk much about it.
During one of our visits, we were startled to hear approaching footsteps. Not Bill’s shuffling steps—lighter ones. We stopped reading. The door opened. A middle-aged woman stood in the doorway. Frank couldn’t introduce us, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I could tell from her suspicious look at our name tags, white shirts, and trademark short hair that we were not welcome.
“Uncle Frank, are these men bothering you?” she asked. She wore a business suit; her dark hair coyly framed her face and belied her forceful manner.
“My name is Elder Moore, and this is Elder Pace. We’re missionaries . . . “
“I know who you are. And I need you to leave now.”
We excused ourselves, said goodbye to Frank, and left.
“Susan is Frank’s niece,” Bill told us on our way out the front door. “She makes it up from Nashua about once a month.”
We listened to her voice, rising and falling above us. I was troubled; certain that she viewed us as insensitive at best, conniving and manipulative at worst. In spite of the reputation that certainly preceded us—to baptize as many as we could for the glory of the kingdom—we weren’t here for a convert, were we? Frank, that sick, seemingly lonely man ready to pass on? But then, why were we there? To warm ourselves in the dry heat of the wood stove Bill stoked downstairs? To be anywhere but in the cold, drab missionary apartment across town with the teaching pool poster on the wall that had no other name but Frank’s? We weren’t technically teaching Frank . . . just reading from a book that we were boldly proclaiming to be scripture to a world that didn’t seem to care.
Despite Susan, we walked back to Frank’s house the next day, not because we were fearless or unembarrassed, but because our daily visit had become a reassuring habit. Morning studies, prayers, breakfast, then Frank for thirty minutes before trudging from door to door for the rest of the day.
As we rounded the corner of Grove Street Extension, we saw Frank peering out at us through his bedroom window, his white hair reflecting the light of the morning sun.
And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul. (Jacob 2:8)
The cold spring molted into summer, and the days became long and uncomfortably humid. Soon the gypsy moths were out, wreaking their havoc on the New England foliage. I could actually hear the steady crunching of the millions of devastating larvae as we walked door-to-door along the sparsely populated Peterborough streets and the outlying roads that burrowed through tall trees.
Once when we were out, I tried to convince Elder Moore, who was from Ohio—flat, compared to my mountainous Utah—to climb a tree. “You can’t tell where you are out here,” I argued, “You have to get up high.”
“Then why don’t you climb the tree?” he retorted.
“I think I might be afraid of heights,” I replied, lamely. “At least the ones in New Hampshire.”
Elder Moore gave me his stack of tracts to hold and tucked his tie protectively inside his short-sleeved white shirt. The gypsy moths munched in an unrelenting monotone all around us. Occasionally, one would drop from its thread to the ground where I would mash it underfoot as if it were a minion of Satan. When my companion had climbed up about thirty feet, he shouted down. “Too many trees. Can’t see anything.”
We didn’t report much to mission headquarters in Boston. And we never reported on Frank. He didn’t fit in any category on our spreadsheet, not even as someone to whom we provided a “Teach and Testify” (fifty per week being the quota).
Even so, we kept going back.
And one day, I went back to say goodbye.
“I’m being transferred tomorrow to a different area.” I told him. “They don’t give us much time, you know; just twenty-four hours is all.” I heard Bill downstairs cleaning up the breakfast dishes and wondered what I should say next. “I’d like to leave you my card, if that’s all right,” I continued, handing him my personalized Articles of Faith card, which seemed impersonal for the situation—tacky, even. He lifted it to his eyes, turned, and then clumped painfully down the stairs.
He must have heard me mention my love of Shakespeare, or perhaps he remembered how often I admired his collection of antique books, because he decided that the 19th-century Complete Works would be an appropriate gift. It was. I clung to it for weeks before mailing the heavy volume of contraband home to Utah.
He held my hand a bit longer than usual, and then shuddered as we picked up our books to go. Elder Moore promised to return with his new companion. We left Frank standing at the upstairs window as usual, his hand pressed against a small rectangular pane. As we rounded the corner of Grove Street Extension, I looked back for a moment, but he was gone.
We never finished reading the Book of Mormon to Frank, and Elder Moore was transferred the month after I left.
More than ten years later, I visited Peterborough as a journalist to cover a 60th anniversary production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the famous play supposedly based on this quaint, southern New Hampshire hamlet. I found the street and parked my rental car in front of what used to be Frank’s house, the bright yellow paint on the clapboards now covered over with something more subdued. Frank was likely dead by now, and things had certainly changed for me. I had been through a divorce and a wrenching separation from orthodox belief that had left me angry and lost. I now read more from Shakespeare than from the Book of Mormon, which I was more inclined to regard as a fabulously crude, 19th-century document from the brilliant mind of an American prophet than as a factual account of the ancient Americas.
Still, as I sat there that summer night on Grove Street Extension, I wished that someone had read one of the final passages of this book of scripture to Frank before he passed on—a passage that, to me, transcends both orthodoxy and disbelief.
I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you. (Moroni 8:3)
I like to think Frank would understand.
