2
My thanks to Ellen Levine, and to Katharine Stall and Earle McCartney.
—M.R.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Praise for Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
ALSO BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON
About the Author
Copyright Page
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For John and Ellen Summers,
my dear father and mother
5
I TOLD YOU LAST NIGHT THAT I MIGHT BE GONE sometime, and
you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why,
and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you
put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled
it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life
you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many
ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then
you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You
reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in
my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious
pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my
eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.
It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything. If you’re a grown
man when you read this—it is my intention for this letter that you will read it
then—I’ll have been gone a long time. I’ll know most of what there is to
know about being dead, but I’ll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be
the way of things.
I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like,
sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for
themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now
would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old
milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell
them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I
used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make
myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when
I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think
you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I’ve lived in this one most of my
life, and I’ve visited in a good many others, because my father’s friends and
most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in
those days, which wasn’t too often, I thought this was the worst of them all,
the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It’s
a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it
seem strange to me. I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a
fact. Now I do.
And now they say my heart is failing. The doctor used the term “angina
6
pectoris,” which has a theological sound, like misericordia. Well, you expect
these things at my age. My father died an old man, but his sisters didn’t live
very long, really. So I can only be grateful. I do regret that I have almost
nothing to leave you and your mother. A few old books no one else would
want. I never made any money to speak of, and I never paid any attention to
the money I had. It was the furthest thing from my mind that I’d be leaving a
wife and child, believe me. I’d have been a better father if I’d known. I’d
have set something by for you.
That is the main thing I want to tell you, that I regret very deeply the hard
times I know you and your mother must have gone through, with no real help
from me at all, except my prayers, and I pray all the time. I did while I lived,
and I do now, too, if that is how things are in the next life.
I can hear you talking with your mother, you asking, she answering. It’s
not the words I hear, just the sounds of your voices. You don’t like to go to
sleep, and every night she has to sort of talk you into it all over again. I never
hear her sing except at night, from the next room, when she’s coaxing you to
sleep. And then I can’t make out what song it is she’s singing. Her voice is
very low. It sounds beautiful to me, but she laughs when I say that.
I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on
the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage.
They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young
fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped
against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re
always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why
they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth
the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed
beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort
of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in
church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I
wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till
you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much
more easily spent.
When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see
they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost
heard them say.
I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have
been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it’s not a
7
thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart. I felt
like saying, I’m a dying man, and I won’t have so many more occasions to
laugh, in this world at least. But that would just make them serious and polite,
I suppose. I’m keeping my condition a secret as long as I can. For a dying
man I feel pretty good, and that is a blessing. Of course your mother knows
about it. She said if I feel good, maybe the doctor is wrong. But at my age
there’s a limit to how wrong he can be.
That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry.
People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes
those very same people come into your study and tell you the most
remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows
that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you
wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.
My mother’s father was a preacher, and my father’s father was, too, and his
father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn’t hesitate to
guess. That life was second nature to them, just as it is to me. They were fine
people, but if there was one thing I should have learned from them and did
not learn, it was to control my temper. This is wisdom I should have attained
a long time ago. Even now, when a flutter of my pulse makes me think of
final things, I find myself losing my temper, because a drawer sticks or
because I’ve misplaced my glasses. I tell you so that you can watch for this in
yourself.
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more
than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. “Behold how
much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire”—that’s
the truth. When my father was old he told me that very thing in a letter he
sent me. Which, as it happens, I burned. I dropped it right in the stove. This
surprised me a good deal more at the time than it does in retrospect.
I believe I’ll make an experiment with candor here. Now, I say this with all
respect. My father was a man who acted from principle, as he said himself.
He acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way
he went about it made him disappointing from time to time, and not just to
me. I say this despite all the attention he gave to me bringing me up, for
which I am profoundly in his debt, though he himself might dispute that. God
rest his soul, I know for a fact I disappointed him. It is a remarkable thing to
8
consider. We meant well by each other, too.
Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand,
as the Lord says. I can’t claim to understand that saying, as many times as
I’ve heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious
fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely
ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be
nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of
regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see
anger in what you do, even if you’re just quietly going about a life of your
own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases,
can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had
understood much earlier than I did. Just to reflect on it makes me a little
irritated. Irritation is a form of anger, I recognize that.
One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate. It
gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you
might as well ignore. If I have any wisdom to offer, this is a fair part of it.
You have blessed our house not quite seven years, and fairly lean years,
too, so late in my life. There was no way for me to make any changes to
provide for the two of you. Still, I think about it and I pray. It is very much in
my mind. I want you to know that.
We’re having a fine spring, and this is another fine day. You were almost late
for school. We stood you on a chair and you ate toast and jam while your
mother polished your shoes and I combed your hair. You had a page of sums
to do that you should have done last night, and you took forever over them
this morning, trying to get all the numbers facing the right way. You’re like
your mother, so serious about everything. The old men call you Deacon, but
that seriousness isn’t all from my side of the family. I’d never seen anything
like it until I met her. Well, putting aside my grandfather. It seemed to me to
be half sadness and half fury, and I wondered what in her life could have put
that expression in her eyes. And then when you were about three, just a little
fellow, I came into the nursery one morning and there you were down on the
floor in the sunlight in your trapdoor pajamas, trying to figure a way to fix a
broken crayon. And you looked up at me and it was just that look of hers.
I’ve thought of that moment many times. I’ll tell you, sometimes it has
9
seemed to me that you were looking back through life, back through troubles
I pray you’ll never have, asking me to kindly explain myself.
“You’re just like all them old men in the Bible,” your mother tells me, and
that would be true, if I could manage to live a hundred and twenty years, and
maybe have a few cattle and oxen and menservants and maidservants. My
father left me a trade, which happened also to be my vocation. But the fact is,
it was all second nature to me, I grew up with it. Most likely you will not.
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward
that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the
yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat,
such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of
opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some
of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two
were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly
endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and
you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together
with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much
laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Your mother told you I’m writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased
with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you? I, John Ames, was
born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas, the son of John
Ames and Martha Turner Ames, grandson of John Ames and Margaret Todd
Ames. At this writing I have lived seventy-six years, seventy-four of them
here in Gilead, Iowa, excepting study at the college and at seminary.
And what else should I tell you?
When I was twelve years old, my father took me to the grave of my
grandfather. At that time my family had been living in Gilead for about ten
years, my father serving the church here. His father, who was born in Maine
and had come out to Kansas in the 1830s, lived with us for a number of years
after his retirement. Then the old man ran off to become a sort of itinerant
preacher, or so we believed. He died in Kansas and was buried there, near a
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town that had pretty well lost its people. A drought had driven most of them
away, those who had not already left for towns closer to the railroad. Surely
there was only a town in that place to begin with because it was Kansas, and
the people who settled it were Free Soilers who weren’t really thinking about
the long term. I don’t often use the expression “godforsaken,” but when I
think back to that place, that word does come to mind. It took my father
months to find where the old man had ended up, lots of letters of inquiry to
churches and newspapers and so on. He put a great deal of effort into it.
Finally someone wrote back and sent a little package with his watch and a
beat-up old Bible and some letters, which I learned later were just a few of
my father’s letters of inquiry, no doubt given to the old man by people who
thought they had induced him to come home.
It grieved my father bitterly that the last words he said to his father were
very angry words and there could never be any reconciliation between them
in this life. He did truly honor his father, generally speaking, and it was hard
for him to accept that things should have ended the way they did.
That was in 1892, so travel was still pretty hard. We went as far as we
could by train, and then my father hired a wagon and team. That was more
than we needed, but it was all we could find. We took some bad directions
and got lost, and we had so much trouble keeping the horses watered that we
boarded them at a farmstead and went the rest of the way on foot. The roads
were terrible, anyway, swamped in dust where they were traveled and baked
into ruts where they were not. My father was carrying some tools in a
gunnysack so he could try to put the grave to rights a little, and I was carrying
what we had for food, hardtack and jerky and the few little yellow apples we
picked up along the road here and there, and our changes of shirts and socks,
all by then filthy.
He didn’t really have enough money to make the trip at that time, but it
was so much in his thoughts that he couldn’t wait until he had saved up for it.
I told him I had to go, too, and he respected that, though it did make many
things harder. My mother had been reading about how bad the drought was
west of us, and she was not at all happy when he said he planned to take me
along. He told her it would be educational, and it surely was. My father was
set on finding that grave despite any hardship. Never before in my life had I
wondered where I would come by my next drink of water, and I number it
among my blessings that I have not had occasion to wonder since. There
were times when I truly believed we might just wander off and die. Once,
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when my father was gathering sticks for firewood into my arms, he said we
were like Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah. I’d thought as
much myself.
It was so bad out there we couldn’t buy food. We stopped at a farmstead
and asked the lady, and she took a little bundle down from a cupboard and
showed us some coins and bills and said, “It might as well be Confederate for
all the good it does me.” The general store had closed, and she couldn’t get
salt or sugar or flour. We traded her some of our miserable jerky—I’ve never
been able to stand the sight of it since then—for two boiled eggs and two
boiled potatoes, which tasted wonderful even without salt.
Then my father asked after his father and she said, Why, yes, he’d been in
the neighborhood. She didn’t know he had died, but she knew where he was
likely to have been buried, and she showed us to what remained of a road that
would take us right to the place, not three miles from where we stood. The
road was overgrown, but as you walked along you could see the ruts. The
brush grew lower in them, because the earth was still packed so hard. We
walked past that graveyard twice. The two or three headstones in it had fallen
over and it was all grown up with weeds and grass. The third time, my father
noticed a fence post, so we walked over to it, and we could see a handful of
graves, a row of maybe seven or eight, and below it a half row, swamped
with that dead brown grass. I remember that the incompleteness of it seemed
sad to me. In the second row we found a marker someone had made by
stripping a patch of bark off a log and then driving nails partway in and
bending them down flat so they made the letters REV AMES. The R looked
like the A and the S was a backward Z, but there was no mistaking it.
It was evening by then, so we walked back to the lady’s farm and washed
at her cistern and drank from her well and slept in her hayloft. She brought us
a supper of cornmeal mush. I loved that woman like a second mother. I loved
her to the point of tears. We were up before daylight to milk and cut kindling
and draw her a bucket of water, and she met us at the door with a breakfast of
fried mush with blackberry preserves melted over it and a spoonful of top
milk on it, and we ate standing there at the stoop in the chill and the dark, and
it was perfectly wonderful.
Then we went back to the graveyard, which was just a patch of ground
with a half-fallen fence around it and a gate on a chain weighted with a
cowbell. My father and I fixed up the fence as best we could. He broke up the
ground on the grave a little with his jackknife. But then he decided we should
12
go back to the farmhouse again to borrow a couple of hoes and make a better
job of it. He said, “We might as well look after these other folks while we’re
here.” This time the lady had a dinner of navy beans waiting for us. I don’t
remember her name, which seems a pity. She had an index finger that was off
at the first knuckle, and she spoke with a lisp. She seemed old to me at the
time, but I think she was just a country woman, trying to keep her manners
and her sanity, trying to keep alive, weary as could be and all by herself out
there. My father said she spoke as if her people might be from Maine, but he
didn’t ask her. She cried when we said goodbye to her, and wiped her face
with her apron. My father asked if there was a letter or a message she would
like us to carry back with us and she said no. He asked if she would like to
come along, and she thanked us and shook her head and said, “There’s the
cow.” She said, “We’ll be just fine when the rain comes.”
That graveyard was about the loneliest place you could imagine. If I were
to say it was going back to nature, you might get the idea that there was some
sort of vitality about the place. But it was parched and sun-stricken. It was
hard to imagine the grass had ever been green. Everywhere you stepped, little
grasshoppers would fly up by the score, making that snap they do, like
striking a match. My father put his hands in his pockets and looked around
and shook his head. Then he started cutting the brush back with a hand scythe
he had brought, and we set up the markers that had fallen over—most of the
graves were just outlined with stones, with no names or dates or anything on
them at all. My father said to be careful where I stepped. There were small
graves here and there that I hadn’t noticed at first, or I hadn’t quite realized
what they were. I certainly didn’t want to walk on them, but until he cut the
weeds down I couldn’t tell where they were, and then I knew I had stepped
on some of them, and I felt sick. Only in childhood have I felt guilt like that,
and pity. I still dream about it. My father always said when someone dies the
body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore. But there
we were, half killing ourselves to find a grave, and as cautious as we could be
about where we put our feet.
We worked a good while at putting things to rights. It was hot, and there
was such a sound of grasshoppers, and of wind rattling that dry grass. Then
we scattered seeds around, bee balm and coneflower and sunflower and
bachelor’s button and sweet pea. They were seeds we always saved out of our
own garden. When we finished, my father sat down on the ground beside his
father’s grave. He stayed there for a good while, plucking at little whiskers of
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straw that still remained on it, fanning himself with his hat. I think he
regretted that there was nothing more for him to do. Finally he got up and
brushed himself off, and we stood there together with our miserable clothes
all damp and our hands all dirty from the work, and the first crickets rasping
and the flies really beginning to bother and the birds crying out the way they
do when they’re about ready to settle for the night, and my father bowed his
head and began to pray, remembering his father to the Lord, and also asking
the Lord’s pardon, and his father’s as well. I missed my grandfather mightily,
and I felt the need of pardon, too. But that was a very long prayer.
Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I
tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little.
And this is something I remember very well. At first I thought I saw the sun
setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the
horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was
a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing
on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you
could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and
forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I
wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his
prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his hand and kissed it.
And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until
the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon
for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t
get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly
between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given
much thought to the nature of the horizon.
My father said, “I would never have thought this place could be beautiful.
I’m glad to know that.”
We looked so terrible when we finally got home that my mother just burst
into tears at the sight of us. We’d both gotten thin, and our clothes were in
bad shape. The whole journey didn’t take quite a month, but we’d been
sleeping in barns and sheds, and even on the bare ground, during the week or
so that we were actually lost. It was a great adventure to look back on, and
my father and I used to laugh about some fairly dreadful things. An old man
even took a shot at us once. My father was, as he said at the time, intending
14
to glean a few overgrown carrots out of a garden we passed. He’d left a dime
on the stoop to pay for whatever we could find to steal, which was always
little enough. That was something to see, my father in his shirtsleeves
straddling a rickety old garden fence with a hank of carrot tops in his hand
and a fellow behind him taking aim. We took off into the brush, and when we
decided he wasn’t going to follow us, we sat down on the ground and my
father scraped the dirt off the carrot with his knife and cut it up into pieces
and set them on the crown of his hat, which he’d put between us like a table,
and then he commenced to say grace, which he never failed to do. He said,
“For all we are about to receive,” and then we both started laughing till the
tears were pouring down. I realize now that keeping us fed was a desperate
concern for him. It actually drove him to something resembling crime. That
carrot was so big and old and tough he had to whittle it into chips. It was
about like eating a branch, and there was nothing to wash it down with,
either.
I really only realized afterward what trouble I’d have been in if he had
gotten shot, even killed, and I was left stranded on my own out there. I still
dream about that. I think he felt the sort of shame you feel when you realize
what a foolish chance you’ve taken after you’ve already taken it. But he was
absolutely set on finding that grave.
Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning
came easily, my grandfather told me about a man he knew when he first came
to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, “That fellow just was not
confident of his Hebrew. He’d walk fifteen miles across open country in the
dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation. We’d have to thaw him out
before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.” My father laughed
and said, “The strange part is, that may even be true.” But I remembered the
story at the time because it seemed to me we were doing something very
similar.
My father gave up gleaning and went back to knocking on doors, which he
had been reluctant to do, because when people found out he was a preacher
they would sometimes try to give us more than they could spare. That was his
belief, at least. And they could tell he was a preacher, rough-looking as we
were a few days into our desert wanderings, as he called them. We offered to
do some chores in exchange for food at a couple of houses, and the people
asked him if he would just open a bit of Scripture or say a prayer. He was
interested that they knew, and wondered a good deal what it was that gave
15
him away. It was a matter of pride with him that his hands were hard, and
that there was no spare flesh on him to speak of. I have had the same
experience many times, and I have wondered about it, too. Well, we spent a
good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years. It
was always the worst parts that made us laugh. My mother was irked by it all,
but she just said, “Don’t you ever tell me.”
In many ways she was a remarkably careful mother, poor woman. I was in
a sense her only child. Before I was born she had bought herself a new home
health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more
particular than Leviticus. On its authority she tried to keep us from making
any use of our brains for an hour after supper, or from reading at all when our
feet were cold. The idea was to prevent conflicting demands on the
circulation of the blood. My grandfather told her once that if you couldn’t
read with cold feet there wouldn’t be a literate soul in the state of Maine, but
she was very serious about these things and he only irritated her. She said,
“Nobody in Maine gets much of anything to eat, so it all comes out even.”
When I got home she scrubbed me down and put me to bed and fed me six or
seven times a day and forbade me the use of my brain after every single meal.
The tedium was considerable.
That journey was a great blessing to me. I realize looking back how young
my father was then. He couldn’t have been much more than forty-five or -six.
He was a fine, vigorous man into his old age. We played catch in the
evenings after supper for years, till the sun went down and it was too dark for
us to see the ball. I think he just appreciated having a child at home, a son.
Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man, too, until recently.
You know, I suppose, that I married a girl when I was young. We had grown
up together. We were married during my last year at seminary, and then we
came back here so I could take my father’s pulpit while he and my mother
went south for a few months for the sake of my mother’s health. Well, my
wife died in childbirth, and the child died with her. Their names were Louisa
and Angeline. I saw the baby while she lived, and I held her for a few
minutes, and that was a blessing. Boughton baptized her and he gave her the
name Angeline, because I was over in Tabor for the day—the child was not
expected for another six weeks—and there was no one to tell him what name
we had finally decided on. She’d have been Rebecca, but Angeline is a good
16
name.
Last Sunday when we went to Boughton’s for supper, I saw you looking at
his hands. They are so full of arthritis now that they’re all skin and knuckles.
You think he’s terribly old, and he’s younger than I am. He was best man at
my first wedding, and he married me and your mother. His daughter Glory is
home with him now. Her marriage failed, and that is a sad thing, but it is a
blessing for Boughton to have her here. She came by the other day to bring
me a magazine. She told me Jack might be coming home, too. It actually took
me a minute to think who that was. You probably don’t remember much
about old Boughton. He is a little cross now from time to time, which is
understandable considering his discomfort. It would be a pity if that is what
you remembered of him. In his prime he was as fine a preacher as I ever
heard.
My father always preached from notes, and I wrote my sermons out word for
word. There are boxes of them in the attic, a few recent years of them in
stacks in the closet. I’ve never gone back to them to see if they were worth
anything, if I actually said anything. Pretty nearly my whole life’s work is in
those boxes, which is an amazing thing to reflect on. I could look through
them, maybe find a few I would want you to have. I’m a little afraid of them.
I believe I may have worked over them as I did just to keep myself occupied.
If someone came to the house and found me writing, generally he or she
would go away, unless it was something pretty important. I don’t know why
solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me
in those days, and people respected me for all those hours I was up here
working away in the study, and for the books that used to come in the mail
for me—not so many, really, but more than I could afford. That’s where
some of the money went that I could have put aside.
There was more to it, of course. For me writing has always felt like
praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel
that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean,
considering that you’re only a little fellow now and when you’re a man you
might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any
of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have
suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed.
That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.
17
Your mother is respectful of my hours up here in the study. She’s proud of
my books. She was the one who actually called my attention to the number of
boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a
year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have
been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average
thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. Can that be
right? I guess it is. I write in a small hand, too, as you know by now. Say
three hundred pages make a volume. Then I’ve written two hundred twentyfive books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity.
That’s amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction.
Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true.
And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful. I’m grateful for all those dark
years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was
answered finally. Your mother walked into church in the middle of the prayer
—to get out of the weather, I thought at the time, because it was pouring.
And she watched me with eyes so serious I was embarrassed to be preaching
to her. As Boughton would say, I felt the poverty of my remarks.
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like
standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent
and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on
it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows,
and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain. At
times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to
whatever I have to say, because I know what their thoughts are. Then if some
stranger comes in, that very same peace can seem like somnolence and like
dull habit, because that is how you’re afraid it seems to her.
If Rebecca had lived, she’d be fifty-one, older than your mother is now by
ten years. For a long time I used to think how it would be if she walked in
that door, what I would not be ashamed, at least, to say in her hearing.
Because I always imagined her coming back from a place where everything is
known, and hearing my hopes and my speculations the way someone would
who has seen the truth face-to-face and would know the full measure of my
incomprehension. That was a sort of trick I played on myself, to keep from
taking doctrines and controversies too much to heart. I read so many books in
those days, and I was always disputing in my mind with one or another of
them, but I think I usually knew better than to take too much of that sort of
thing into the pulpit. I believe, though, that it was because I wrote those
18
sermons as if Rebecca might sometime walk in the door that I was somewhat
prepared when your mother walked in, younger than Rebecca would have
been in fact, of course, but not very different from the way I saw her in my
mind. It wasn’t so much her appearance as it was the way she seemed as if
she didn’t belong there, and at the same time as if she were the only one of us
all who really did belong there.
I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost
like a kind of anger. As though she might say, “I came here from whatever
unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to
oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.” My
sermon was like ashes on my tongue. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t worked on
it, either. I worked on all my sermons. I remember I baptized two infants that
day. I could feel how intensely she watched. Both the creatures wept when I
touched the water to their heads the first time, and I looked up, and there was
just the look of stern amazement in her face that I knew would be there even
before I looked up, and I felt like saying quite sincerely, “If you know a
better way to do this, I’d appreciate your telling me.” Then just six months
later I baptized her. And I felt like asking her, “What have I done? What does
it mean?” That was a question that came to me often, not because I felt less
than certain I had done something that did mean something, but because no
matter how much I thought and read and prayed, I felt outside the mystery of
it. The tears ran down her face, dear woman. I’ll never forget that. Unless I
forget everything, as so many of the old people do. It appears I at least won’t
live long enough to forget much I haven’t forgotten already, which is a good
deal, I know. I have thought about baptism over the years. Boughton and I
have discussed it often.
Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of
the subject, but I truly don’t feel it is. We were very pious children from
pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior
considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn
cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their
anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at
all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we
were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny
their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play as we were. It
19
occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll’s dress—there was
only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a
moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were
christened in any case. I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full
Trinitarian formula.
Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek
and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then
another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some
of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and
that worried us a good deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand
way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say,
baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and
regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn’t really an answer to my
question. We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of
those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until I was
ordained.
Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into
fairly respectable house cats. Louisa took a yellow one. She still had it when
we were married. The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from
their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell. She called her
cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead. It disappeared finally. I
suspect it got caught stealing rabbits, a sin to which it was much given,
Christian cat that we knew it to be, stiff-jointed as it was by that time. One of
the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle. He was a Baptist, a firm
believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was
not. He told us no effect at all could be achieved by our methods, and we
could not prove him wrong. Our Soapy must be a distant relative.
I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my
hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure
intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For
years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to
them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing,
which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it
acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me,
so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really
feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I
don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to
20
it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that
you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more
likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you. I
don’t know why there is so little about this aspect of the calling in the
literature.
Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked.
He says, “Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural
character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short,
water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural
quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So
far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural
significance.” Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the
joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he
thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and
undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous on
the subject of joy, and also on its religious expressions.
Boughton takes a very dim view of him, because he unsettled the faith of
many people, but I take issue as much with those people as with Feuerbach. It
seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.
That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so. My brother
Edward gave his book to me, The Essence of Christianity, thinking to shock
me out of my uncritical piety, as I knew at the time. I had to read it in secret,
or so I believed. I put it in a biscuit tin and hid it in a tree. You can imagine,
reading it in those circumstances gave it a great interest for me. And I was,
very much in awe of Edward, who had studied at a university in Germany.
I realize I haven’t even mentioned Edward, though he has been very
important to me. As he is still, God rest his soul. I feel in some ways as if I
hardly knew him, and in others as if I have been talking to him my whole life.
He thought he would do me a favor, taking a bit of the Middle West out of
me. That was the favor Europe had done for him. But here I am, having lived
to the end the life he warned me against, and pretty well content with it, too,
all in all. Still, I know I am touchy on the subject of parochialism.
Edward studied at Göttingen. He was a remarkable man. He was older than
me by almost ten years, so I didn’t really know him very well while we were
children. There were two sisters and a brother between us, all carried off by
21
diphtheria in less than two months. He knew them and I, of course, did not,
so that was another great difference. Though it was rarely spoken of, I was
always aware that there had been a crowded, cheerful life the three of them
remembered well and I could not really imagine. In any case, Edward left
home at sixteen to go to college. He finished at nineteen with a degree in
ancient languages and went straight off to Europe. None of us saw him again
for years. There weren’t even many letters.
Then he came home with a walking stick and a huge mustache. Herr
Doktor. He must have been about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He had
published a slender book in German, a monograph of some kind on
Feuerbach. He was smart as could be, and my father was a little in awe of
him, too, as he had been since Edward was a small boy, I think. My parents
told me stories about how he read everything he could put his hands on,
memorized a whole book of Longfellow, copied maps of Europe and Asia
and learned all the cities and rivers. Of course they thought they were
bringing up a little Samuel—so did everyone—so they all kept him supplied
with books and paints and a magnifying glass and whatever else came to
mind or to hand. My mother sometimes regretted out loud that they hadn’t
really required him to do much in the way of chores, and she certainly didn’t
make the same mistake with me. But a child as wonderful as he was is not a
thing you see often, and the belief was general that he would be a great
preacher. So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and
then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That’s what he
always claimed to be, at any rate.
He took a position at the state college in Lawrence teaching German
literature and philosophy, and stayed there till he died. He married a German
girl from Indianapolis and they had six little towheaded children, all of them
well into middle age by now. He was a few hundred miles away all those
years and I hardly ever saw him. He did send back contributions to the church
to repay them for helping him. A check dated January 1 came every year he
lived. He was a good man.
He and my father had words when he came back, once at the dinner table
that first evening when my father asked him to say grace. Edward cleared his
throat and replied, “I am afraid I could not do that in good conscience, sir,”
and the color drained out of my father’s face. I knew there had been letters I
was not given to read, and there had been somber words between my parents.
So this was the dreaded confirmation of their fears. My father said, “You
22
have lived under this roof. You know the customs of your family. You might
show some respect for them.” And Edward replied, and this was very wrong
of him, “When I was a child, I thought as a child. Now that I am become a
man, I have put away childish things.” My father left the table, my mother sat
still in her chair with tears streaming down her face, and Edward passed me
the potatoes. I had no idea what was expected of me, so I took some. Edward
passed me the gravy. We ate our unhallowed meal solemnly for a little while,
and then we left the house and I walked Edward to the hotel.
And on that walk he said to me, “John, you might as well know now what
you’re sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater—you must be aware of
that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance.” I suppose the
neighbors saw us leaving the house just at dinnertime that first day, Edward
with one arm bent behind his back, stooped a little to suggest that he had
some use for a walking stick, appearing somehow to be plunged in thought of
an especially rigorous and distinguished kind, possibly conducted in a foreign
language. (Only listen to me!) If they saw him, they’d have known instantly
what they had long suspected. They’d have known also that there was rage
and weeping in my mother’s kitchen and that my father was in the attic or the
woodshed, in some hidden, quiet place, down on his knees, wondering to the
Lord what it was that was being asked of him. And there I was with Edward,
trailing along after him, another grief to my parents, or so they must have
thought.
Besides those books I mentioned, Edward also gave me the little painting of a
marketplace that hangs by the stairs. I must be sure to tell your mother it
belongs to me and not to the parsonage. I doubt it’s worth anything to speak
of, but she might want it.
I’m going to set aside that Feuerbach with the books I will ask your mother
to be sure to save for you. I hope you will read it sometime. There is nothing
alarming in it, to my mind. I read it the first time under the covers, and down
by the creek, because my mother had forbidden me to have any further
contact with Edward, and I knew that would include my reading an atheistical
book he had given me. She said, “If you ever spoke to your father that way, it
would kill him.” In fact, my thought was always to defend my father. I
believe I have done that.
There are some notes of mine in the margins of the book which I hope you
23
may find useful.
That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early
one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a
young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up
brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On
some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught
hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the
two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water
off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t.
It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why
I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such
moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily
for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to
it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are,
really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give
it.
In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more
than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could
have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water
just poured out of it and the girl just laughed—when it’s used that way it
does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of
the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing
existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any
rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me
at the moment. There is something real signified by that word “just” that
proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret
that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.
I am also inclined to overuse the word “old,” which actually has less to do
with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity. It sets a thing apart
as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it
suggests haplessness or vulnerability. I say “old Boughton,” I say “this
shabby old town,” and I mean that they are very near my heart.
I don’t write the way I speak. I’m afraid you would think I didn’t know any
24
better. I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it.
That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I
think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the
more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I
guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.
I walked over to Boughton’s to see what he was up to. I found him in a
terrible state of mind. Tomorrow would have been his fifty-fourth
anniversary. He said, “The truth is, I’m just very tired of sitting here alone.
That’s the truth.” Glory is there doing everything she can think of to make
him comfortable, but he has his bad days. He said, “When we were young,
marriage meant something. Family meant something. Things weren’t at all
the way they are today!” Glory rolled her eyes at that and said, “We haven’t
heard from Jack for a little while and it is making us a bit anxious.”
He said, “Glory, why do you always do that? Why do you say us when I’m
the one you’re talking about?”
She said, “Papa, as far as I’m concerned, Jack can’t get here a minute too
soon.”
He said, “Well, it’s natural to worry and I’m not going to apologize for it.”
She said, “I suppose it’s natural to take your worrying out on me, too, but I
can’t pretend I like it.”
And so on. So I came back home.
Boughton was always a good-hearted man, but his discomforts weary him,
and now and then he says things he really shouldn’t. He isn’t himself.
I’m sorry you are alone. You are a serious child, with not much occasion to
giggle, or to connive. You are shy of other children. I see you standing up on
your swing, watching some boys about your age out in the road. One of the
bigger ones is trying out a beat-up old bicycle. I suppose you know who they
are. You don’t speak to them. If they seem to notice you, you’ll probably
come inside. You are shy like your mother. I see how hard this life is for her
that I’ve brought her into, and I believe you sense it, too. She makes a very
unlikely preacher’s wife. She says so herself. But she never flinches from any
of it. Mary Magdalene probably made an occasional casserole, whatever the
ancient equivalent may have been. A mess of pottage, I suppose.
25
I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as
someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His
mortal time. How odd it is to have to say that after all these centuries. There
is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the
innocence of children. I have often wanted to preach about that. For all I
know, I have preached about it. When the Lord says you must “become as
one of these little ones,” I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the
accretions of smugness and pretense and triviality. “Naked came I out of my
mother’s womb,” and so on. I think I will preach on that during Advent. I’ll
make a note. If I can’t remember speaking about it before, no one else is
likely to remember. I can imagine Jesus befriending my grandfather, too,
frying up some breakfast for him, talking things over with him, and in fact
the old man did report several experiences of just that kind. I can’t say the
same for myself. I doubt I’d ever have had the strength for it. This is
something that has come to my mind from time to time over the years, and I
don’t really know what to make of it.
It has pleased me when I have thought your mother felt at home in the
world, even momentarily. At peace in it, I should say, because I believe her
familiarity with the world may be much deeper than mine. I do truly wish I
had the means to spare you the slightest acquaintance with that very poverty
the Lord Himself blessed by word and example. Once when I worried about
this out loud, your mother said, “You think I don’t know how to be poor? I
done it all my life.” And still it shames me to think that I will leave you and
your mother so naked to the world—dear Lord, I think, spare them that
blessing.
I have had a certain acquaintance with a kind of holy poverty. My
grandfather never kept anything that was worth giving away, or let us keep it,
either, so my mother said. He would take laundry right off the line. She said
he was worse than any thief, worse than a house fire. She said she could
probably go to any town in the Middle West and see some pair of pants she’d
patched walking by in the street. I believe he was a saint of some kind. When
someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he
said, “I prefer to remember that I have kept one.” My mother said it was good
to know there was anything he could keep. He told me once he was wounded
at Wilson’s Creek, on the day of the death of General Lyon. “Now that,” he
26
said, “was a loss.”
When he left us, we all felt his absence bitterly. But he did make things
difficult. It was an innocence in him. He lacked patience for anything but the
plainest interpretations of the starkest commandments, “To him who asks,
give,” in particular.
I wish you could have known my grandfather. I heard a man say once it
seemed the one eye he had was somehow ten times an eye. Normally
speaking, it seems to me, a gaze, even a stare, is diffused a little when there
are two eyes involved. He could make me feel as though he had poked me
with a stick, just by looking at me. Not that he meant any harm to speak of.
He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience
that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the
forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be
living at a dead run. I don’t say he was wrong. That would be like
contradicting John the Baptist.
He really would give anything away. My father would go looking for a
saw or a box of nails and it would be gone. My mother used to keep what
money she had in the bodice of her dress, tied up in a handkerchief. For a
while she was selling stewing hens and eggs because the times were very
hard. (In those days we had a little land around this house, a barn and pasture
and henhouse and a wood lot and woodshed and a nice little orchard and a
grape arbor. But over the years the church has had to sell it all off. I used to
expect to hear they were planning to auction off the cellar next, or the roof.)
In any case, times were hard and she had the old man to deal with, and he
would actually give away the blankets off his bed. He did that several times,
and my mother was at a good deal of trouble to replace them. For a while she
made me wear my church clothes all the time so he couldn’t get at them, and
then she never gave me a moment’s peace because she was sure I was going
to go off and play baseball in them, as of course I did.
I remember once he came into the kitchen while she was doing her ironing.
He said, “Daughter, some folks have come to us for help.”
“Well,” she said, “I hope they can wait a minute. I hope they can wait till
this iron is cool.” After a few minutes she put the iron on the stove and went
into the pantry and came out with a can of baking powder. She delved around
in it with a fork until she drew up a quarter. She did this again until she had a
27
quarter and two dimes lying there on the table. She picked them up and
polished the powder off with a corner of her apron and held them out to him.
Now, forty-five cents represented a good many eggs in those days—she was
not an ungenerous woman. He took them, but it was clear enough he knew
she had more. (Once when he was in the pantry he found money hidden in an
empty can because when he happened to pick it up it rattled, so he took to
going into the pantry from time to time just to see what else might rattle. So
she took to washing her money and then pushing it into the lard or burying it
in the sugar. But from time to time a nickel would show up where she didn’t
want it to, in the sugar bowl, of course, or in the fried mush.) No doubt she
thought she could make him go on believing all her money was hidden in the
pantry if she hid part of it there.
But he was never fooled. I believe he may have been a little unbalanced at
that time, but he could see through anyone and anything. Except, my mother
said, drunkards and ne’er-do-wells. But that wasn’t really true either. He just
said, “Judge not,” and of course that’s Scripture and hard to contradict.
But it must be said that my mother took a great deal of pride in looking
after her family, which was heavy work in those days and especially hard for
her, with her aches and pains. She kept a bottle of whiskey in the pantry for
her rheumatism. “The one thing I don’t have to hide,” she said. But he’d walk
off with a jar of her pickled beets without so much as a by-your-leave. That
day, though, he stood there with those three coins in his drastic old
mummified hand and watched her with that terrible eye, and she crossed her
arms right over the handkerchief with the hidden money in it, as he clearly
knew, and watched him right back, until he said, “Well, the Lord bless you
and keep you,” and went out the door.
My mother said, “I stared him down! I stared him down!” She seemed
more amazed than anything. As I have said, she had a good deal of respect
for him. He always told her she ought not to worry about his generosities,
because the Lord would provide. And she used to say that if He weren’t put
to so much trouble keeping us in shirts and socks, He might have time to
provide a cake now and then, or a pie. But she missed him when he was gone,
as we all did.
Looking back over what I have written, it seems to me I’ve described my
grandfather in his old age as if he were simply an eccentric, and as if we
28
tolerated him and were respectful of him and loved him and he loved us. And
all that is true. But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were
thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the
tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief. And I
believe my father on his side was angry, too, at the accusations he knew he
could see in his father’s unreposefulness, and also in his endless pillaging. In
a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to
father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however,
that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a
fire than smother it.
They had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness
was about to flare up.
“Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?” my father would ask.
And his father would say, “No, Reverend, you have not offended me in
any way at all. Not at all.”
And my mother would say, “Now, don’t you two get started.”
My mother took a great deal of pride in her chickens, especially after the old
man was gone and her flock was unplundered. Culled judiciously, it throve,
yielding eggs at a rate that astonished her. But one afternoon a storm came up
and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens
came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens. My
mother and I saw it happen, because when she smelled the rain coming she
called me to help her get the wash off the line.
It was a general disaster. When the roof hit the fence, which was just
chicken wire nailed to some posts and might as well have been cobweb, there
were chickens taking off toward the pasture and chickens taking off toward
the road and chickens with no clear intentions, just being chickens. Then the
neighborhood dogs got involved, and our dogs, too, and then the rain really
started. We couldn’t even call off our own dogs. Their joy took on a tinge of
shame, as I remember, but the rest of them didn’t even pay us that much
attention. They were having the time of their lives.
My mother said, “I don’t want to watch this.” So I followed her into the
kitchen and we sat there listening to the pandemonium and the wind and the
rain. Then my mother said, “The wash!” which we had forgotten. She said,
“Those sheets must be so heavy that they’re dragging in the mud, if they
29
haven’t pulled the lines down altogether.” That was a day’s work lost for her,
not to mention the setting hens and the fryers. She closed one eye and looked
at me and said, “I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.” We did have a
habit sometimes of imitating the old man’s way of speaking when he wasn’t
in the room. Still, I was surprised that she would make an outright joke about
my grandfather, though he’d been gone a long time by then. She always did
like to make me laugh.
When my father found his father at Mount Pleasant after the war ended, he
was shocked at first to see how he had been wounded. In fact, he was
speechless. So my grandfather’s first words to his son were “I am confident
that I will find great blessing in it.” And that is what he said about everything
that happened to him for the rest of his life, all of which tended to be more or
less drastic. I remember at least two sprained wrists and a cracked rib. He told
me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true
etymologically, in English—but not in Greek or Hebrew. So whatever
understanding might be based on that derivation has no scriptural authority
behind it. It was unlike him to strain interpretation that way. He did it in order
to make an account of himself, I suppose, as most of us do.
In any case, the notion seems to have been important to him. He was
always trying to help somebody birth a calf or limb a tree, whether they
wanted him to or not. All the regret he ever felt was for his unfortunates, with
none left over for himself however he might be injured, until his friends
began to die off, as they did one after another in the space of about two years.
Then he was terribly lonely, no doubt about it. I think that was a big part of
his running off to Kansas. That and the fire at the Negro church. It wasn’t a
big fire—someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it,
and someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel. (The
Negro church used to be where the soda fountain is now, though I hear that’s
going out of business. That church sold up some years ago, and what was left
of the congregation moved to Chicago. By then it was down to three or four
families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around
the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still
there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the
deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance
and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the
Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He
told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great
30
deal to them.)
You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly
little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child. You seem to be spending half
your time at his house. We think that is very good for you, but we miss you
something terrible. Tonight you are camping out in his backyard, which is
just across the street and a few houses down. Supper without you tonight, a
melancholy prospect.
You and Tobias came trudging home at dawn and spread your sleeping bags
on your bedroom floor and slept till lunchtime. (You had heard growling in
the bushes. T. has brothers.) Your mother had fallen asleep in the parlor with
a book in her lap. I made you some toasted cheese sandwiches, which I
cooked a little too long. So I told you the story you like very much, about
how my poor old mother would sleep in her rocker by the kitchen stove while
our dinner smoked and sputtered like some unacceptable sacrifice, and you
ate your sandwiches, maybe a little more happily for the scorch. And I gave
you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting
across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loves them and won’t
buy them for herself. I doubt she slept at all last night. I surprised myself—I
slept pretty soundly, and woke out of a harmless sort of dream, an
unmemorable conversation with people I did not know. And I was so happy
to have you home again.
I was thinking about that henhouse. It stood just across the yard, where the
Muellers’ house is now. Boughton and I used to sit on the roof of it and look
out over the neighbors’ gardens and the fields. We used to take sandwiches
and eat our dinner up there. I had stilts that Edward had made for himself
years before. They were so high I had to stand on the porch railing to get onto
them. Boughton (he was Bobby then) got his father to make him a pair, and
we pretty well lived on those things for several summers. We had to stay on
the paths or where the ground was firm, but we got to be very much at ease
on them, and we’d just saunter all over the place, as if it were quite a natural
thing. We could sit right down on the branch of a tree. Sometimes wasps
31
were a problem, or mosquitoes. We took a few spills, but mainly it was very
nice. Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor. We would never have
thought that coop could fold up the way it did. The roof was covered in
raggedy black tar paper, and it was always warm even when the day was
chilly, and sometimes we’d lie back on it to get out of the wind, just lie there
and talk. I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He
was afraid it wouldn’t come to him, and then he’d have to find another kind
of life, and he couldn’t really think of one. We’d go through the possibilities
we were aware of. There weren’t many.
Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he
was taller than me for about forty years. Now he’s so bent over I don’t know
how you’d calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle
bones. He says he’s been reduced to a heap of joints, and not one of them
works. You’d never know what he once was, looking at him now. He was
always wonderful at stealing bases, from grade school right through
seminary.
I reminded him the other day how he’d said to me, lying there on that roof
watching the clouds, “What do you think you would do if you saw an angel?
I’ll tell you what, I’m scared I’d take off running!” Old Boughton laughed at
that and said, “Well, I still might want to.” And then he said, “Pretty soon I’ll
know.”
I’ve always been taller than most, larger than most. It runs in my family.
When I was a boy, people took me to be older than I was and often expected
more of me—more common sense, usually—than I could come up with at the
time. I got pretty good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill
which has served me through life. I say this because I want you to realize that
I am not by any means a saint. My life does not compare with my
grandfather’s. I get much more respect than I deserve. This seems harmless
enough in most cases. People want to respect the pastor and I’m not going to
interfere with that. But I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by
ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books,
by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very
tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth
of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.
Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was
32
most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was
much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or
pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human,
which I devoutly hope you never will have. “The full soul loatheth an
honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” There are
pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That’s a bit of
fatherly wisdom, but it’s also the Lord’s truth, and a thing I know from my
own long experience.
Often enough when someone saw the light burning in my study long into
the night, it only meant I had fallen asleep in my chair. My reputation is
largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not
to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would
bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to
them all, every significant aspect of it, and they were tactful. I’ve spent a
good share of my life comforting the afflicted, but I could never endure the
thought that anyone should try to comfort me, except old Boughton, who
always knew better than to talk much. He was such an excellent friend to me
in those days, such a help to me. I do wish you could have some idea of what
a fine man he was in his prime. His sermons were remarkable, but he never
wrote them out. He didn’t even keep his notes. So that is all gone. I
remember a phrase here and there. I think every day about going through
those old sermons of mine to see if there are one or two I might want you to
read sometime, but there are so many, and I’m afraid, first of all, that most of
them might seem foolish or dull to me. It might be best to burn them, but that
would upset your mother, who thinks a great deal more of them than I do—
for their sheer mass, I suppose, since she hasn’t read them. You will probably
remember that the stairs to the attic are a sort of ladder, and that it is terribly
hot up there when it is not terribly cold.
It would be worth my life to try to get those big boxes down on my own.
It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then to have to
find a way to dispose of it. There is not a word in any of those sermons I
didn’t mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through
fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought. If I don’t burn them
someone else will sometime, and that’s another humiliation. This habit of
writing is so deep in me, as you will know well enough if this endless letter is
in your hands, if it has not been lost or burned also.
I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs.
33
They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment,
really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds
and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them,
not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still
wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he
meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of
them long gone from the world, past any thought of my putting things right
with them. And then I do wonder where my attention was. If that is even the
question.
One sermon is not up there, one I actually burned the night before I had
meant to preach it. People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza,
but that was a terrible thing, and it struck just at the time of the Great War,
just when we were getting involved in it. It killed the soldiers by the
thousands, healthy men in the prime of life, and then it spread into the rest of
the population. It was like a war, it really was. One funeral after another, right
here in Iowa. We lost so many of the young people. And we got off pretty
lightly. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit
as far from each other as they could. There was talk that the Germans had
caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to
believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it
might have.
The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask me how the
Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would
have to do to tell us He didn’t allow something. But instead I would comfort
them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared.
Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard
gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing. It
was just like a biblical plague, just exactly. I thought of Sennacherib.
It was a strange sickness—I saw it over at Fort Riley. Those boys were
drowning in their own blood. They couldn’t even speak for the blood in their
throats, in their mouths. So many of them died so fast there was no place to
put them, and they just stacked the bodies in the yard. I went over there to
help out, and I saw it myself. They drafted all the boys at the college, and
influenza swept through there so bad the place had to be closed down and the
buildings filled with cots like hospital wards, and there was terrible death,
34
right here in Iowa. Now, if these things were not signs, I don’t know what a
sign would look like. So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say,
that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of
their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before
they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that
their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war
would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough
to protect us from the Lord’s judgment when we decide to hammer our
plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the
will and the grace of God.
It was quite a sermon, I believe. I thought as I wrote it how pleased my
father would have been. But my courage failed, because I knew the only
people at church would be a few old women who were already about as sad
and apprehensive as they could stand to be and no more approving of the war
than I was. And they were there even though I might have been contagious. I
seemed ridiculous to myself for imagining I could thunder from the pulpit in
those circumstances, and I dropped that sermon in the stove and preached on
the Parable of the Lost Sheep. I wish I had kept it, because I meant every
word. It might have been the only sermon I wouldn’t mind answering for in
the next world. And I burned it. But Mirabelle Mercer was not Pontius Pilate,
and she was not Woodrow Wilson, either.
Now I think how courageous you might have thought I was if you had
come across it among my papers and read it. It is hard to understand another
time. You would never have imagined that almost empty sanctuary, just a
few women there with heavy veils on to try to hide the masks they were
wearing, and two or three men. I preached with a scarf around my mouth for
more than a year. Everyone smelled like onions, because word went around
that flu germs were killed by onions. People rubbed themselves down with
tobacco leaves.
In those days there were barrels on the street corners so we could
contribute peach pits to the war effort. The army made them into charcoal,
they said, for the filters in gas masks. It took hundreds of pits to make just
one of them. So we all ate peaches on grounds of patriotism, which actually
made them taste a little different. The magazines were full of soldiers
wearing gas masks, looking stranger than we did. It was a remarkable time.
Most of the young men seemed to feel that the war was a courageous thing,
and maybe new wars have come along since I wrote this that have seemed
35
brave to you. That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague
was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and
since then we have had war continuously.
I’m not entirely sure I do believe that. Boughton would say, “That’s the
pulpit speaking.” True enough, but what that means I don’t know.
My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life,
as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking
of it. The time passed so strangely, as if every winter were the same winter,
and every spring the same spring. And there was baseball. I listened to
thousands of baseball games, I suppose. Sometimes I could just make out half
a play, and then static, and then a crowd roaring, a flat little sound, almost
static itself, like that empty sound in a seashell. It felt good to me to imagine
it, like working out some intricate riddle in my mind, planetary motion. If the
ball is drifting toward left field and there are runners on first and third, then—
moving the runners and the catcher and the shortstop in my mind. I loved to
do that, I can’t explain why.
And I would think back on conversations I had had in a similar way, really.
A great part of my work has been listening to people, in that particular
intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening, and it has been very
interesting to me. Not that I thought of these conversations as if they were a
contest, I don’t mean that. But as you might look at a game more abstractly—
where is the strength, what is the strategy? As if you had no interest in it
except in seeing how well the two sides bring each other along, how much
they can require of each other, how the life that is the real subject of it all is
manifest in it. By “life” I mean something like “energy” (as the scientists use
the word) or “vitality,” and also something very different. When people come
to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in
them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose
object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the
loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick,
emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and
avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry
which is seldom mentioned.
36
A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard
in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the
most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that
acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is
a remarkable thing to consider.
I am trying to describe what I have never before attempted to put into
words. I have made myself a little weary in the struggle.
It was one day as I listened to baseball that it occurred to me how the moon
actually moves, in a spiral, because while it orbits the earth it also follows the
orbit of the earth around the sun. This is obvious, but the realization pleased
me. There was a full moon outside my window, icy white in a blue sky, and
the Cubs were playing Cincinnati.
That mention of the sound of a seashell reminds me of a couple of lines of a
poem I wrote once:
Open the scroll of conch and find the text That lies behind the
priestly susurrus.
There wasn’t anything else in it worth remembering. One of Boughton’s boys
traveled to the Mediterranean for some reason, and he sent back that big shell
I have always kept on my desk. I have loved the word “susurrus” for a long
time, and I had never found another use for it. Besides, what else did I know
in those days but texts and priestliness and static? And what else did I love?
There was a book many people read at that time, The Diary of a Country
Priest. It was by a French writer, Bernanos. I felt a lot of sympathy for the
fellow, but Boughton said, “It was the drink.” He said, “The Lord simply
needed someone more suitable to fill that position.” I remember reading that
book all night by the radio till every station went off, and still reading when
the daylight came.
Once my grandfather took me to Des Moines on the train to see Bud Fowler
37
play. He was with Keokuk for a season or two. The old man fixed me with
that eye of his and he told me there was not a man on this round earth who
could outrun or outthrow Bud Fowler. I was pretty excited. But nothing
happened in that game, or so I thought then. No runs, no hits, no errors. In the
fifth inning a thunderstorm that had been lying along the horizon the whole
afternoon just sort of sauntered over and put a stop to it all. I remember the
groan that went up from the crowd when the heavy rain began. I was only
about ten years old, and I was relieved, but it was a terrible frustration to my
grandfather. One more terrible frustration for the poor old devil. I say this
with all respect. Even my father called him that, and my mother did, too. He
had lost that eye in the war, and he was pretty wild-looking generally. But he
was a fine preacher in the style of his generation, so my father said.
That day he had brought a little bag of licorice, which really did surprise
me. Whenever he put his fingers into it, it rattled with the trembling of his
hand, and the sound was just like the sound of fire. I noticed this at the time,
and it seemed natural to me. I also more or less assumed that the thunder and
the lightning that day were Creation tipping its hat to him, as if to say, Glad
to see you here in the stands, Reverend. Or maybe it said, Why, Reverend,
what in this grieving world are you doing here at a sporting event? My
mother said once that he attracted terrible friendship—using “terrible” in the
old sense, of course, and meaning only respect. When he was young, he was
an acquaintance of John Brown, and of Jim Lane, too. I wish I could tell you
more about that. There was a kind of truce in our household that discouraged
talk about the old times in Kansas, and about the war. It was not long after
the trip to Des Moines that we lost him, or he lost himself. In any case, a few
weeks later he took off for Kansas.
I read somewhere that a thing that does not exist in relation to anything
else cannot itself be said to exist. I can’t quite see the meaning of a statement
so purely hypothetical as this, though I may simply lack understanding. But it
does remind me of that afternoon when nothing flew through the air, no one
slid or drifted or tagged, when there was no waltz at all, so to speak. It seems
to me that the storm had to put an end to it, as if it were a fire to be put out,
an eruption into this world of an alarming kind of nullity. “There was silence
in heaven for about half an hour.” It seems a little like that as I remember it,
though it went on a good deal longer than half an hour. Null. That word has
real power. My grandfather had nowhere to spend his courage, no way to feel
it in himself. That was a great pity.
38
As I write I am aware that my memory has made much of very little. There
was that old man my grandfather sitting beside me in his ashy coat, trembling
just because he did, sharing out the frugal pleasures of his licorice, maybe
with Kansas somehow transforming itself from memory to intention in his
mind that very afternoon. (It was Kansas he went back to, not the town where
his church used to be. That’s why we were so long finding him.) Bud Fowler
stood at second base with his glove on his hip and watched the catcher. I
know he liked to play bare-handed, but that is what I remember, and it’s all I
ever could remember about him, so there is no point trying to put the memory
right. I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up
the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him.
I was a fairly decent pitcher in high school and college, and we had a
couple of teams up at the seminary. We’d go out on a Saturday to toss the
ball around. The diamond was just worn in the grass, so it was anybody’s
guess where the baselines were. We had some good times. There were
remarkable young men studying for the ministry in those days. There are
now, too, I’m sure.
When my father and I were walking along the road in the quiet and the
moonlight, away from the graveyard where we’d found the old man, my
father said, “You know, everybody in Kansas saw the same thing we saw.”
At the time (remember I was twelve) I took him to mean the entire state was a
witness to our miracle. I thought that whole state could vouch for the
particular blessing my father had brought down by praying there at his
father’s grave, or the glory that my grandfather had somehow emanated out
of his parched repose. Later I realized my father would have meant that the
sun and moon aligned themselves as they did with no special reference to the
two of us. He never encouraged any talk about visions or miracles, except the
ones in the Bible.
I can’t tell you, though, how I felt, walking along beside him that night,
along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I
felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us. I am glad I didn’t understand,
because I have rarely felt joy like that, and assurance. It was like one of those
dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never
have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn
from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you
39
have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need. Who
would have thought that the moon could dazzle and flame like that? Despite
what he said, I could see that my father was a little shaken. He had to stop
and wipe his eyes.
My grandfather told me once about a vision he’d had when he was still living
in Maine, not yet sixteen. He had fallen asleep by the fire, worn out from a
day helping his father pull stumps. Someone touched him on the shoulder,
and when he looked up, there was the Lord, holding out His arms to him,
which were bound in chains. My grandfather said, “Those irons had rankled
right down to His bones.” He told me that as the saddest fact, and eyed me
with the one seraph eye he had, the old grief fresh in it. He said he knew then
that he had to come to Kansas and make himself useful to the cause of
abolition. To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for
themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. I have a lot of respect for
that view. When I spoke to my father about the vision he had described to
me, my father just nodded and said, “It was the times.” He himself never
claimed any such experience, and he seemed to want to assure me I need not
fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows. And I took comfort in
the assurance. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was,
like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness
about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic
alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human
being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends. All of them could sit on
their heels into their old age, and they’d do it by preference, as if they had a
grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the
Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church
still waiting to judge the angels. There was one old fellow whose blessing
and baptizing hand had a twist burned into it because he had taken hold of a
young Jayhawker’s gun by the barrel. “I thought, That child doesn’t want to
shoot me,” he would say. “He was five years shy of a whisker. He should
have been home with his mama. So I said, ‘Just give me that thing,’ and he
did, grinning a little as he did it. I couldn’t drop the gun—I thought that
might be the joke—and I couldn’t shift it to the other hand because that arm
was in a sling. So I just walked off with it.”
40
They had been to Lane and Oberlin, and they knew their Hebrew and their
Greek and their Locke and their Milton. Some of them even set up a nice
little college in Tabor. It lasted quite a while. The people who graduated from
it, especially the young women, would go by themselves to the other side of
the earth as teachers and missionaries and come back decades later to tell us
about Turkey and Korea. Still, they were bodacious old men, the lot of them.
It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather’s grave would
look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a
little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I
could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and
put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice
you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
I ask myself the same question.
A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where
you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the
place. And I hear she’s made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman.
You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the
blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me,
and I pretended I didn’t know how to go about it, and I would put the whole
flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it
were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh
and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my
mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I grabbed
you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as
though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and
then you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put
your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and
carefully, and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.”
So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was
your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in
creation.
41
I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal
of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the
feeling of a weight of light—press—ing the damp out of the grass and
pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and
burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of
light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar.
Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk. You remember
Soapy. I don’t really know why you should. She is a very unremarkable
animal. I’ll take a picture of her.
So there we were, sipping honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother
brought out the camera, so maybe you will have some pictures. The film ran
out before I could get a shot of her. That’s just typical. Sometimes if I try to
photograph her she’ll hide her face in her hands, or she’ll just walk out of the
room. She doesn’t think she’s a pretty woman. I don’t know where she got
these ideas about herself, and I don’t think I ever will know, either.
Sometimes I’ve wondered why she’d marry an old man like me, a fine, vital
woman like she is. I’d never have thought to ask her to marry me. I would
never have dared to. It was her idea. I remind myself of that often. She
reminds me of it, too.
I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It
still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that
if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder
sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more
than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem
to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a
shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to
tell you.
There’s a shimmer on a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors
in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew
sometimes. They’re in the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin.
Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not
prettier than most children. You’re just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well
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scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love
you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that
could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in
the twinkling of an eye.
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve
thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little
incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or
the humor of it. “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.” That’s a fact.
While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have
ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read
the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than
any dream of mine—not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear
perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I
somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly, even while I do long to see
what it will mean to have wife and child restored to me, I mean Louisa and
Rebecca. I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is
about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.
I have a few pictures of Louisa, but I don’t think the resemblance is very
good. Considering that I haven’t seen her in fifty-one years, I guess I can’t
really judge. When she was nine or ten she used to skip rope like fury, and if
you tried to distract her, she would just turn away, still jumping, and never
miss a lick. Her braids would bounce and thump on her back. Sometimes I’d
try to catch hold of one of them, and then she’d be off down the street, still
skipping. She would be trying to make it to a thousand, or to a million, and
nothing could distract her. It said in my mother’s home health book that a
young girl should not be allowed to make that sort of demand on her strength,
but when I showed Louisa the very page on which those words were printed,
she just told me to mind my own business. She was always running around
barefoot with her braids flying and her bonnet askew. I don’t know when
girls stopped wearing sunbonnets, or why they ever did wear them. If they
were supposed to keep off freckles, I can tell you they didn’t work.
I’ve always envied men who could watch their wives grow old. Boughton
lost his wife five years ago, and he married before I did. His oldest boy has
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snow-white hair. His grandchildren are mostly married. And as for me, it is
still true that I will never see a child of mine grow up and I will never see a
wife of mine grow old. I’ve shepherded a good many people through their
lives, I’ve baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as
though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like
Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting
by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.
You and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are
on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes. Half an
hour ago you were on my lap and Soapy was on her belly in the square of
sunlight. And while you were on my lap you drew—so you told me—a
Messerschmitt 109. That is it in the corner of the page. You know all the
names from a book Leon Fitch gave you about a month ago, when my back
was turned, as it seems to me, since he could not, surely, have imagined I’d
approve. All your drawings look about like that one in the corner, but you
give them different names—Spad and Fokker and Zero. You’re always trying
to get me to read the fine print about how many guns they have and how
many bombs they carry. If my father were here, if I were my father, I’d find a
way to make you think that the noble and manly thing would be to give the
book back to old Fitch. I really should do that. But he means well. Maybe I’ll
just hide the thing in the pantry. When did you figure out about the pantry?
That’s where we always put anything we don’t want you getting into. Now
that I think about it, half the things in that pantry were always there so one or
another of us wouldn’t get into them.
I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to
have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law
in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I’m very grateful for whatever reluctance it
was that kept me alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it
seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am
right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence,
even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.
Then when your mother did come, when I still hardly knew her, she gave
me that look of hers—no twinkle in that eye—and said, very softly and very
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seriously, “You ought to marry me.” That was the first time in my life I ever
knew what it was to love another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people
before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before. Not even my
parents. Not even Louisa. I was so startled when she said that to me that for a
minute I couldn’t find any words to reply. So she walked away, and I had to
follow her along the street. I still didn’t have the courage to touch her sleeve,
but I said, “You’re right, I will.” And she said, “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,”
and kept on walking. That was the most thrilling thing that ever happened to
me in my life. I could wish you such a moment as that one was, though when
I think of everything that came before it, for me and for your dear mother...
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