Gilead: A Novel (12 page)

It is so strange. One moment I’m a respectable citizen reading up on the political views of Estes Kefauver while his lovely young wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his fine young son comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing. The flies were bothering a little, but the light was ripe and pure and there was much of interest in the newspaper. Granted I was in my bedroom slippers on account of a little arthritis in my toe. It was pretty nearly a perfect morning.

Then here comes Jack Boughton, who really is the spitting image of his father in terms of physical likeness, with that same black hair and the same high color. He’s just about your mother’s age. I remember when she lifted her dear face to me to be baptized—lifted it into winter morning light, new-snow light—and I thought, She is neither old nor young, and I was somehow amazed by her, and I could hardly bring myself to touch the water to her brow because she looked a good deal more than beautiful. Sadness was a great part of it, it was. So she has grown younger over the years, and that was because of you. But I have never seen her look so young as she did this morning.

Well, the light was fine, and she was in her garden and you were chasing around in your bare feet with your shirt off and freckles all over your shoulders. Your mother had put a piece of hot dog on a string and tied it to a stick for you to use in luring Soapy. She called it your catting pole, which is just the kind of silliness you love, and so you had spent the morning catting in the bushes and around the house while I read up on the election campaign. One of the pleasures of these days is that I notice them all, minute by minute, and this was a fine one, until I found myself being hoisted to my feet by that Jack Boughton. Then I caught a look on your mother’s face and on yours, too, which I know could not have been because of the contrast we made. You didn’t wait till this morning to realize that I am old. I don’t know what it was I saw, and I’m not going to think about it anymore. It didn’t set well with me.

He couldn’t stay for coffee. Things went well enough. Then he was off.

If I live, I’ll vote for Eisenhower.

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

***

I was speaking of visions. I remember once when I was a young child my father helped to pull down a church that had burned. Lightning struck the steeple, and then the steeple fell into the building. It rained the day we came to pull it down.

The pulpit was left intact, standing there in the rain, but the pews were mostly kindling. There was a lot of praising the Lord that it happened at midnight on a Tuesday. It was a warm day, a warm rain, and there was no real shelter, so everybody ignored it, more or less. All kinds of people came to help. It was like a camp meeting and a picnic. They unhitched the horses, and we younger children lay on an old quilt under the wagon out of the way and talked and played marbles, and watched the older boys and the men clamber over the ruins, searching out Bibles and hymnals. They would sing, we would all sing, “Blessed Jesus” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” and the wind would blow the rain in gusts and the spray would reach us where we were. It was cooler than the rain was. The rain falling on the wagon bed sounded the way it does in an attic eave. It never rains, but I remember that day. And when they had gathered up all the books that were ruined, they made two graves for them, and put the Bibles in one and the hymnals in the other, and then the minister whose church it was—a Baptist, as I recall—said a prayer over them. I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

The women put the pies and cakes they had brought and the books that could still be used into our wagon and then covered the bed with planks and tarps and lap robes. The food was all pretty damp. No one seems to have thought there might be rain. And harvest was coming, so they’d have been too busy to come back again for a good while. They put that pulpit under a tree and covered it with a horse blanket, and they salvaged whatever they could, which amounted mainly to shingles and nails, and then they pulled down everything that was still standing, to make a bonfire when it all dried out. The ashes turned liquid in the rain and the men who were working in the ruins got entirely black and filthy, till you would hardly know one from another. My father brought me some biscuit that had soot on it from his hands. “Never mind,” he said, “there’s nothing cleaner than ash.” But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it’s rather forgotten now.

“Strange are the uses of adversity.” That’s a fact. When I’m up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so .joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.

I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me. I can’t tell myself what it has meant to me. But I know how many things it put altogether beyond question, for me.

Now all the old women have their hair cut short and colored blue, which is fine, I suppose.

***

Whenever I have held a Bible in my hands, I have remembered the day they buried those ruined Bibles under the tree in the rain, and it is somehow sanctified by that memory. And I think of the old reverend himself preaching in the ruins of his church, with all the windows open so the few that were there could hear “The Old Rugged Cross” drifting up the hill from the Methodist meeting. And my own church is sanctified by the story that was told to me. I remember my father said when the two of them first came home, they found the roof of the church in such disrepair that there were buckets and pans set in the aisle and on the benches. He said the women had planted climbing roses against the building and along the fence, so it looked prettier than it had ever looked before. Prairie had come into the fields and the orchards again, and there were sunflowers growing in the roads between the ruts. The women had their prayer meetings and their Bible studies even though the church was falling into ruin around them. I think about that, and it is strong and lovely in my mind. I truly believe it is waste and ingratitude not to honor such things as visions, whether you yourself happen to have seen them or not. That said, we were always a little careful about approaching the old man from the right side. It was his right eye he was missing, and we had the impression that it was on that side his visions came to him. He never spoke to us about them very much, since he felt our attitude on the subject was more or less entirely wrong. Nevertheless, we tried to be properly respectful. Sometimes when I came home from school my mother would meet me at the back porch and whisper, “The Lord is in the parlor.” Then I’d come creeping in in my socks and I’d just glance in through the parlor door and there my grandfather would be, sitting on the left end of the sofa, looking attentive and sociable and gravely pleased. I would hear a remark from time to time, “I see your point,” or “I have often felt that way myself.” And for a few days afterward the old man would be radiant and purposeful and a little more flagrant in his larcenies. Once he told us at supper, “This afternoon I met the Lord over by the river, and we fell to talking, you know, and He made a suggestion I thought was interesting. He said, ‘John, why don’t you just go home and be old?’ But I had to tell him I wasn’t sure I was up to the traveling.”

“Papa,” my mother said, “you are home. He probably just meant you should ease up on yourself a little.”

“Well,” the old man said, ” well…, ” and sank back into his radiance, thinking whatever it was he thought.

My father would say afterward that if the old man was persuaded the Lord wanted him back in Kansas, nothing we said would have any influence one way or another. It was important to him to believe that, though I doubt he ever really did.

Once when I was walking to school I saw some children teasing my grandfather, as if he were just any scrawny old fellow picking blackberries into his hat, nodding a little and talking a little as he did it. They were coming up to him on that right side and touching his arm, tugging his coat. When they did, it would set him to nodding and talking, and they would clap their hands over their mouths and run away.

Now, I was astonished at this. I realize how much I did, in some sense, believe that there was a sort of sacredness just to the right of him, and it really shocked me that those children could violate it as they were doing. I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. How he knew I was there I don’t know, and why he looked at me that way is a thing I never have understood, as if I were the betrayer. It felt unfair to me at the time, but I never could dismiss it. I never could tell myself that it was just an error, that there was nothing in it.

Well, I’ll confess I did feel a certain embarrassment about him. It may even have been shame. And it was not the first time I had felt it, either. But I was a child at the time, and it seems to me he might have made some allowance. These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well-meant and deserving of some little notice.

I might as well say this, too. It hurt us all something dreadful that he left the way he did. We knew there was judgment in it, and whatever we might say for ourselves, for our reasonableness and our good intentions, we knew they were trivial by his lights, and that made them a little bit trivial by our lights. He took so much away with him when he left.

My father said when he walked into his father’s church after they came back from the army the first thing he saw was a piece of needlework hanging on the wall above the communion table. It was very beautifully done, flowers and flames surrounding the words “The Lord Our God Is a Purifying Fire.” I suppose that is why I always think of my grandfather’s church as the one struck by lightning. As in fact it was.

My father said it was that banner that had sent him off to sit with the Quakers. He said the very last word he would have applied to war, once he had had a good look at it, was “purifying,” and the thought that those women could believe the world was in any way purer for the loss of their own sons and husbands was appalling to him. He stood there looking at it, visibly displeased by it, apparently, because one of the women said to him, “It’s just a bit of Scripture.”

He said, “I beg your pardon, ma’am. No, that is not Scripture.” “Well,” she said, “then it certainly ought to be.”

And of course that was terrible to his mind, that she could have thought such a thing. And yet if those precise words don’t occur in the Bible, there are passages they could be said to summarize fairly well. That may have been all she meant.

I have always wished I could have seen it, that tapestry they made, if that’s what it was. He said there were cherubim to either side of it, with their wings thrown forward the way they are in the old pictures, and then, where the Ark of the Covenant would have been, those incendiary words, and flowers and flames around them and above them. I don’t know how those women managed to find the material for it, how much snipping and raveling of their few best clothes they’d have to have done to make such a thing as that. And I’ve always wondered what happened to it. Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

One after another, when those women learned they were widows, they went back to their families in the East. Not all of them, but a good many. Some of them had buried their husbands and their children beside the church, so they felt they couldn’t leave. And some of those who left came back, even years later. Still, that congregation dwindled away finally, and the Methodists bought the land and burned the old building down because it was past saving.

***

My father spoke once in a sermon about how he regretted the times after the war that he’d gone off to sit with the Quakers while his father struggled to find words of comfort to say to his poor remnant of a flock. He said in those days his father opened all the windows that still would open, so they could hear the Methodists singing by the river, and that some of the women would join in if the song was “The Old Rugged Cross” or “Rock of Ages,” even in the middle of the sermon, and he’d just stop preaching and listen to them. The wind, he said, smelled like turned earth because of the new graves, and yet people afterward remembered those Sunday mornings and those Wednesday evenings as something strangely wonderful. There was a tenderness in the way they told about them. My father said he had regretted and repented his whole life since that time but never sufficiently, because at first staying away had seemed an act of principle almost. His father had preached his people into the war, saying while there was slavery there was no peace, but only a war of the armed and powerful against the captive and defenseless. He would say, Peace will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children. I came home for lunch today and found you playing catch in the street with Jack Boughton. You had his mitt, a fine new fielder’s mitt that reached almost to your elbow, and he had that old glove of Edward’s that I keep on my desk. No webbing at all, no pocket to speak of. It’s an oversight of mine that I haven’t gotten you a glove of your own. I’ll see to that.