Murdock goes to the auction

Like happiness, Burdick’s Institution for the Care of the Sick was a secondary product, got hold of by Tot and Serapta Burdick, spinster sisters, in a roundabout way on account of the path their brother Murdock started down when he and his drinking friend Francis went to the auction at Camp Floyd and came home loaded down with cots, Army blankets and a pile of monstrously large kettles and pans he not only had no use for but no place to store except in the spare room at his sisters’ house. Because of this (though for other reasons too), his wife Alice became quite intemperate in her harangue against him. All that pile of useless stuff!

            Useful enough, though, Murdock knew, if she would listen to reason and he could sit down and talk with her man to man about God’s idea of matrimony, which, set forth by the Prophet Joseph Smith before they killed him, was not just the condition of being husband and wife, though that had its virtues too, but more like prevailing as a shepherd and his flock. Murdock tried to explain this to Alice during their honeymoon nine years before, but she went into such paroxysms of fainting, hysteria and lunacy that he was deprived of ardor ever to bring the subject up again.

            Could he have done so, however, and met with the understanding that would have privileged him to move between two, three or four households instead of just one measly cottage, think how practical these pallets, covers and big cooking utensils would be! The tenderness! You dear old sweetheart, you angel husband. (Instead of always being ripped up one side and down the other.) He often thought that what he should have done, while he was over there in England on his mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where he met Alice, was try to find out more about the true nature of the English before throwing in with one of them.

            --From Variation West