“Occasionally someone would think about the condition that the corpse was now in, boxed up and below-ground, at the bottom of the hill…”
For most of her long, nearly-finished life, Evelyn Benson has lived as the ideal Mormon mother and wife, spending her days in the shadow of the Millbury’s old grist mill, already a decayed, creaking thing in her youth. She has borne witness to the Mill’s settlings and splinterings, its groans, its rotted floorboards and broken windows while, below, the world as she has so long known it has undergone its own kind of transformation: the sound of the highway through Evelyn’s open window is new, bringing people (and change) from the City; so, too, are the rows of townhouses cropping up each spring at the edge of town; and new, and most alarming, is the feeling of love she feels for a young Bishop a fraction of her age, and so soon after the death of her husband. And then there are other splinterings, other groans in the foundation: her sister’s sudden marriage after a life resolved to happy spinsterhood, awakening a decades-old feeling in her for the boy she once rejected; her daughter’s uncertainty that the sacrifice she made in an effort to erase her son’s mistake was the right one; the granddaughter-in-law whose past is a mystery to her, but who Evelyn knows carries griefs deeper even that those that linger from the baby boy that died unexpectedly; and the grandson who is a mystery of a different kind, who tries to go unseen, which only makes Evelyn look even harder.
Set against a backdrop of contemporary Mormon culture, Grist explores the ways that one group of women challenges (and is challenged by) religious obedience, the trappings of gender, and the secrets so often kept in the name of faith and family.
Goddfrey Hammit. 