They brought me back to the meadow.

I suppose there is a poetry in that if you are the kind of man who finds poetry in such things.

I am not. I am the kind of man who notices the grass. It has grown back thick.

Twenty years and the meadow has healed itself in the way that meadows do, quietly

without anyone's permission. The spring is running. The sage still smells the same when the sun

warms it. A man could look at this valley and think nothing ever happened here. A man could lay down a

blanket and eat his supper and sleep sound.

But I know what is under that grass.

I helped put it there.

They have set my coffin in the dirt, and I am sitting on it.

Pine box.

Good enough for the purpose.

There are five men with rifles standing thirty feet south of me,

and they are trying not to look at my face, which I understand. I have been told I will be given

time to speak, and I intend to use it, because I have been silent for 20 years, and silence has purchased

me nothing but this seat. The United States Marshal is here, a photographer, some soldiers,

a Methodist minister I did not ask for, and the mountains, which were here before any of us and will be here after and which have never

once offered an opinion on the matter. I am 64 years old. I have 19 wives and 56 children. I was

baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the year of

our Lord 1838, and I have served that church with every faculty of my body and soul for 39 years.

I built its settlements. I fed its poor. I carried its messages through hostile country in the

dead of winter. I was the adopted son of Brigham Young, prophet, seer and revelator, governor of

...