Free The Mormon Candidate - a Novel by Avraham Azrieli Page B

childcare , and pay our bills . They took Palm y ra and Paul o n trips to the museums in DC and on vacations to Florida . And they set up a hospital rotation . After every one of my numerous surgeries , I found a ward member sitting by my bed , smiling at me, squeezing my arm with affectionate encouragement . Even my mental ups and downs at the hospital did not scare them, or the hellish months of forcing my legs to carry my weight again, or when nightmares left me trembling from horror and in a cold sweat. It was during those awful months of physical pain and mental agony that I truly understood why we, the Mormons, call each other brother and sister.
    A year later I was honorably discharged from the service and moved back into our small apartment . Ou r second child, Martha , arrived without a hitch, and I started taking computer science classes at the University of Maryland in College Park. I was finally back to normal life, enjoying my wife and adorable children. My pain level was manageable, I worked out to regain stre ng th , and my mind grew calmer. Having earned top grades in my first term, I registered for a full load as a regular student, aiming to graduate in less than three years.
    Meanwhile, like all men in the Mormon C hurch, I resumed my priesthood duties, taking part in ward activities, such as teaching, officiating at children’s baptisms, and ministering to families in distress.
    Once a week, I volunteered at the Washington DC Mormon Temple, serving as a proxy in receiving endowments for the dead—the second part of the sacred process of baptizing into the church . The first part—the immersion in the great baptism al bath —was usually assigned to young men who had enough stamina to submerge repeatedly as proxy for the dead, whose names were called by the officiating Saint . The lists were prepared by church investigators —experts who roamed the world to find and extract identities of deceased persons who had been deprived of knowledge of the True Church during their mortal lives on E arth . At that time, in the early nineties, the Lord rewarded our efforts with discover i es of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims’ names in neglected records. It gave me a wonderful feeling to help save those poor souls through baptism s and ordinances so that they could accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the afterlife and win admi ssion to the Celestial Kingdom of God .
    Studying full-time at the university was especially rewarding. It gave me structure , which I had gotten used to in the Marines and, before that, during my New York mission. I enjoyed the mental and intellectual focus , which substitute d for the distressing memories that continued to haunt me. It also helped to be surrounded by young men and women who had not experi enced war, who had not felt the stunning punch of a nearby explosion or smelled the nauseating stench of rotting human flesh.
    But during a family dinner at my in-laws, Palmyra’s dad took me aside and suggested that I drop out of school and take a full-time job. He had already taken the liberty of asking a colleague at the US Attorney General ’s Office to contact a Saint who held a high position at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, where a job had opened in the records division that “involved computers.”
    Because my father-in-law presented th is as merely an opportunity for m e to consider, I declined for the simple reason that studying computer science had been my aspiration even before enlisting in the Marine Corps, and now that the government was paying my tuition , there was every re ason for me to stay the course.
    When I told Palmyra about the conversation and my decision to stay in school , she surprised me by urging me to reconsider . A well-paying job with full benefits was a good idea in her opinion, while she took care of our home and kids . “You’re smart,” she said, “you can fig ure out computers by yourself.”
    I spent a