Gilead: A Novel (11 page)

My grandfather shrugged. “The text was ‘Love your enemies.’“

“That seems to me to be an excellent text in the circumstances,” my father said. This was just after somebody set that fire behind the church that I mentioned earlier. The old man said, “Very Christian.”

My father said, “You sound disappointed, Reverend.”

My grandfather put his head in his hands. He said, “Reverend, no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment. I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it.”

My father’s lips were white. He said, “Well, Reverend, I know you placed great hope in that war. My hopes are in peace, and I am not disappointed. Because peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification.”

My grandfather said, “And that’s just what kills my heart, Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips—”

My father stood up from his chair. He said, “I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing. And I was, and I am, as certain of that as anyone could ever be of any so-called vision. I defer to no one in this. Not to you, not to Paul the Apostle, not to John the Divine. Reverend.”

My grandfather said, “So-called vision. The Lord, standing there beside me, had one hundred times the reality for me that you have standing here now!”

After a minute my father said, “No one would doubt that, Reverend.”

And that was when a chasm truly opened. Not long afterward my grandfather was gone. He left a note lying on the kitchen table which said:

No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace.

Without vision the people perish. The Lord bless you and keep you.

I still have that note. I saved it in my Bible.

But I would watch my father preaching about Abel’s blood crying out from the ground, and I’d wonder how he could speak about that the way he did. I had so much respect for my father.

I felt certain that he should hide the guilt of his father, and that I should also hide the guilt of mine. I loved him with the strangest, most miserable passion when he stood there preaching about how the Lord hates falsehood and how in the end all our works will be exposed in the naked light of truth.

In course of time I learned that my grandfather was involved pretty deeply in the violence in Kansas before the war.

And as I’ve said, it was a source of contention between the two of them, to the point that they had agreed never to speak of Kansas anymore at all. So I believe my father was disgusted to find that those souvenirs, so to speak, had been left in his house. That was before we went to Kansas to find the old man’s grave. I think that fierce anger against him was one of the things my father felt he truly had to repent of.

But my father did hate war. He nearly died in 1914, from pneumonia, the doctors said, but I have no doubt it was mainly from rage and exasperation. There were big celebrations all over Europe at the start of the war, as if the most wonderful thing were about to happen. And there were big celebrations here when we got involved. Parades and marching bands. And we already knew what a miserable thing it was we were sending our troops off to. I didn’t read a newspaper for four years without pitying my father. He saw that trouble in Kansas, and then his father went off to the army. He did, too, finally, just before it ended. He had four sisters and a brother younger than he was, and his mother wasn’t well. She died young, in her forties, and left all those children to care for themselves and to be cared for by their father and my father and the neighbors and the kindlier souls in his congregation, or what remained of it. His brother, my uncle Edwards, ran off, or so they hoped. At least he disappeared, and in the confusion of the times they never found him. He was named after the theologian Jonathan Edwards, who was much revered in my grandfather’s generation.

And Edward was named after my uncle, with the finals, but he never liked it, and he dropped it when he left for college.

Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home. He is having supper in his father’s house this very night. He will come by to pay his respects, she said, in the next day or two. I am grateful for the warning. I will use the time to prepare myself. Boughton named him for me because he thought he might not have another son and I most likely would not have any child at all. It was very kind of him. As it happened, in fourteen months he was blessed with another boy, Theodore Dwight Weld Boughton, who has a medical degree and a doctorate in theology and runs a hospital for the destitute somewhere in Mississippi. He is a great credit to the family. Jack said once he was glad not to be the only one of them who ever got his name in the newspaper. That was a pretty bitter joke, considering how hard his parents took the embarrassments he exposed them to. And it was harder for them because of that way they have of printing the entire name. It was always John Ames Boughton.

***

While we two were wandering around lost in Kansas, my father told me a great many things, partly to pass the time, I suppose, and partly to explain as he could why he thought his father had come back there, and partly to explain why we needed to find him, that is to say his grave. My father said that in those days after he came back from the war, he used to go off and sit with the Quakers on the Sabbath. He said his father’s church was half empty, and most of the people there were widows and orphans and mothers who had lost their sons. Some of the men brought sickness home from the camps ”camp fever,” they called it—and their families went down with it. Some of the men had been in Andersonville and came back almost beyond saving. He said half the graves in the churchyard were new. And there was his father, preaching every Sunday on the divine righteousness manifested in it all. That would set the old women to weeping, he said, and then the children would start in. He couldn’t bear it.

Now, I’ve tried to imagine myself in my grandfather’s place. I don’t know what else he could have said, what else he could have taken to be true. He did preach those young men into the war. And his church was hit terribly hard. They joined up first thing and stayed till it was over, so the Confederates got off a good many shots at them. He went with them, too, even though he’d have been well into his forties. And he lost that eye, and came back finally with it as healed as it was going to be. He was already so used to the loss of it that he seemed to have forgotten to send word to his family about it. It was commonplace, though, to have an injury or a scar of some kind after that war. So many amputations. When I was a boy, there were lots of old fellows around who were missing arms or legs. At least they seemed old to me then.

It was an honorable thing that my grandfather came back to his congregation and stayed with it, to look after those widows and orphans. The Methodists were gathering a church; they’d bought a piece of land just down the road, so his flock need not have stayed with him. And some did leave. I know this from one of those sermons my father buried and took out of the ground again. It remarked on the great attractiveness of Methodist preaching, and the youthfulness of the new minister, who had seen brief but honorable service in the Union cause. I’ve read that sermon a good many times. The ink ran on most of the others.

The new people and the young people were turning to the Methodists, who were holding outdoor meetings by the river, hundreds of them from all over the countryside, fishing and cooking and washing out their clothes and visiting with one another until about evening. Then there’d be torchlight and preaching and hymn singing into the night. My grandfather went down there, too, and he enjoyed it all very much. On Sundays he would open the doors and windows so that his people could hear the singing that came up from the river. He respected the Methodists because they had borne a great part of the burden of the war. He didn’t believe they were the kind of people who would consent to put up with bishops for very much longer.

I suspect he knew he couldn’t preach life back into a church that had lost as much as his had. He was hiring himself out as a sort of man of all work, repairing roofs and stoops, tutoring children, butchering hogs—everything you can think of, because what was left of his congregation couldn’t pay him anything. Most people couldn’t pay him more than a stewing hen or a few potatoes for the choring he did, either. Most of the time he did work just because it needed doing. He’d be splitting kindling at one house, chopping weeds at the next, “relieving the fatherless and widow,” my father said (that’s Psalm 146). And he wrote any number of letters to the War Department, trying to get the veterans and the widows their bounties and pensions, which came never or slowly. There was an irony in this, because, my father said, he and his sisters were, in a manner of speaking, left fatherless during this time, which was a great hardship because it was clear that their mother would not live long.

He was a grown man by then, in his early twenties, and two of his sisters would have been nearly grown. They would have managed well enough if it hadn’t been for their mother’s poor health and her considerable suffering. I believe she must have had cancer of some kind. They’d had a doctor in that town, but he went off with the army and never came back. Whether he was killed or not no one knew, though there was a story told around that he caught a shell fragment at the side of his head and was never right afterward. In any case, doctors in those days weren’t good for much. It was poultices and cod liver oil and mustard plaster or splints or stitches. Or brandy.

The neighbor women dosed his mother with tea of red clover blossoms, which probably didn’t do her any harm, my father said. They also cut off her hair, because they thought it was draining away her strength. She cried when they showed it to her, and she said it was the one thing in her life she was ever proud of. My father said she was weary with the pain and she wasn’t herself, but those words lingered with him, and with his sisters, too. In those days, and even when I was a child, women kept their hair long because they felt the Bible said they should (I Corinthians 11:15). But it would be cut off if they were sickly, and that was always a sad thing, a kind of shame for them, along with everything else they had to go through. So it hit her very hard. When my father spoke to his father about how low her spirits were, his father said, “You came back and I came back and we both have our health and the use of our limbs.” My father took this to mean that since her grief was not in excess of the average in that region, he could not take any special time for it.

I believe the old reverend’s errors were mainly the consequence of a sort of strenuousness in ethical matters that was to be admired finally. He did have many visions over the years, all very demanding of him, so he was less inclined than others to slack off. He lost his Greek Testament in a frantic retreat across a river, as I have said. I always felt there was a metaphor in that. The waters never parted for him, not once in his life, so far as I know. There was just no end to difficulty, and no mitigation of it. Then again, he always sought it out.

The Testament was mailed to him years afterward, from Alabama. Apparently some Confederate had gone to the bother of retrieving it and then finding out which company of which regiment they’d been chasing that day, and who the chaplain of it was. There might have been a bit of a taunt in the gesture, but it was appreciated anyway. The book was pretty well ruined. I hope you have it. It’s the sort of thing that might appear to have no value at all.

I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.

***

Today John Ames Boughton paid a call. I was sitting on the porch with the newspaper and your mother was tending her flowers and he just came walking through the gate and up the steps with his hand held out and a smile on his face. He said, “How are you doing, Papa?”—a name he called me in his childhood, because his parents encouraged it, I believe. I have preferred to think so. He had a precocious charm, if that is the word, and it would not have been beyond him to come up with it himself. I have never felt he was fond of me.

It did shock me how much he takes after his father, though of course in everything that matters they’re like night and day. When he introduced himself to your mother as John Ames Boughton, she was visibly surprised, and he laughed. He looked at me and said, “I gather bygones are not bygones yet, Reverend.” What a thing to say! It was an oversight, though, not to have told her such a creature existed, that is, a namesake, a godson, more or less. You were out in the bushes somewhere looking for Soapy, who packs her bags every so often and takes off for parts unknown and worries the life out of you and your mother. You just happened to come around the house then, holding that old cat under the armpits. Her ears were flattened back and her eyes were patiently furious and her tail was twitching. It’s so long you might have stepped on it otherwise. It was clear enough she would bolt if you put her down, but you did and she did and you didn’t seem to notice because you were about to shake hands with John Ames Boughton. “So good to meet you, little brother!” he said, and you were very pleased with that.

I had no idea you and your mother would be so fascinated by his having my name. I’d have warned you otherwise. He came up the steps, hat in hand, smiling as if there were some old joke between us. “You’re looking wonderful, Papa!” he said, and I thought, after so many years, the first words out of his mouth would have to be prevarication, but I was sort of struggling out of the porch swing at the time, which would be no great problem except of course there’s nothing steady about a porch swing to grab on to, and standing up from a seated position is a considerable strain on my heart, the doctor says, and I know from experience how true that is. I thought it best not to die or collapse just there with you two watching, leaving old Boughton to ponder the inevitability of it all, the poor codger. So there was Jack Boughton with that look on his face, lifting me onto my feet by my elbow. And I swear it was as if I had stepped right into a hole, he was so much taller than I than he’d ever been before. Of course I knew I’d been losing some height, but this was downright ridiculous.