Gilead: A Novel (14 page)

Well, the authorities never did come to talk to them about that soldier, so my father thought he probably had died out there. He said, “The relief I suffered every day they didn’t come was horrible.” Of course the odds are fairly high that the day of a man’s death will be the worst day of his life. But my father said, “When he told me the horse had bolted, my heart sank.” So there we were, lying in the loft of somebody’s barn they’d abandoned, hearing the owls, and hearing the mice, and hearing the bats, and hearing the wind, with no notion at all when the dawn might come. My father said, “I never did forgive myself not going out there to look for him.” And I felt the truth of that as I have never felt the truth of any other human utterance. He said, “It was the very next Sunday the old devil preached in one of those shirts, with that gun in his belt. And you would not have believed how the people responded, all the weeping there was, and the shouting.” And after that, he said, his father would be gone for days sometimes. There were Sundays when he would ride his horse right up to the church steps just when it was time for service to begin and fire that gun in the air to let the people know he was back. They’d find him standing in the pulpit, with his eyes red and his face pale and dust in his beard, all ready to preach on judgment and grace. My father said, “I never dared to ask him what he’d been up to. I couldn’t risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions.”

I lay there against my father’s side with my head pillowed on his arm, hearing the wind, and feeling a pity that was far too deep to have any particular object. I pitied my mother, who might have to come looking for us and would never, never find us. I pitied the bats and the mice. I pitied the earth and the moon. I pitied the Lord.

It was the next day that we came to the Maine lady’s farmstead. I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I’m pretty sure they’ll build a new church once I’m gone. I don’t mean this unkindly—they don’t want to cause me grief, so they’re waiting to do what they want to do, and that’s good of them. They’ll pull the old church down and put up something bigger, sturdier. I hear them admiring what the Lutherans have done, and it is impressive, red brick and a porch with white columns and a fine big door and a handsome steeple. The inside is very beautiful, I’m told. I’ve been invited to the dedication, and I’ll go, if I’m still around and still up to that sort of thing. God willing, in other words. I’d like to see our new church, but they’re right, I’d hate to see the old one come down. I believe seeing that might actually kill me, which would not be such a terrible thing for a person in my circumstances. A stab of grief as coup de grace—there’d be poetry in it.

***

Am I impatient? Can that be? Today there has been no hint of a thorn in my flesh, of a thorn in my heart, more particularly. The thump in my chest goes on and on like some old cow chewing her cud, that same dull endlessness and contentment, so it seems to me. I wake up at night, and I hear it. Again, it says. Again, again, again. “For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment.” That is George Herbert, whom I hope you have read.

Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.

Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart

Meets in this frame,

To praise thy Name:

That, if I chance to hold my peace,

These stones to praise thee may not cease.

Yet awhile.

Well, if Herbert is right, this old body is as new a creation as you are yourself. I mean as you are now, playing under my window on the swing Dan Boughton put up for you. You must remember it. He tied fishing line to an arrow and shot it over the bough and then used the fishing line to hoist the rope, and so on. It took him the whole day, but he did it. He’s a clever, good-hearted young fellow. He was a great comfort to his father and mother. Now he’s teaching school somewhere in Michigan, I’m told. He didn’t choose the ministry, though for a long time he was expected to.

***

You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea. The ropes are long and you are light and the ropes bowlike cobwebs, laggardly, indolent. Your shirt is red—it is your favorite shirt—and you fly into the sunlight and pause there brilliantly for a second and then fall back into the shadows again. You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. And there is your mother. “Don’t go so high,” she says. You’ll mind. You’re a good fellow.

I did not mean to criticize the trustees. I do understand the reluctance to make any substantial investment in the church building at this point. But if I were a little younger, I tell you, I’d be up on that roof myself. As it is, I might drive a few nails into the treads on the front steps. I don’t see the point in letting the old place look too shabby in its last year or so. It’s very plain, but the proportions of it really are quite pleasing, and when it has a fresh coat of paint, it’s all the church anyone could need, in terms of appearance. It is inadequate in other ways, I recognize that.

I did remember to mention to them that that weather vane on the steeple was brought from Maine by my grandfather and stood above his church for many years. He gave it to my father on the day of his ordination. The people in Maine used to put those roosters on their steeples, he told me, to remind themselves of the betrayal of Peter, to help them repent. They really didn’t use crosses much at all in those days. But once I mentioned that there was a rooster on the steeple, which most of them had never noticed before, they became a little uneasy with the fact that there wasn’t a cross up there. I believe they will put one up, now that it’s on their minds. That’s the one thing they’ll get around to. They said they will mount the weather vane on a wall somewhere, in the foyer,” probably, where people can appreciate it. I don’t care what they do. I only mentioned it at all because I didn’t want it to be discarded with everything else. It is very old. This way at least you can get a good look at it.

It has a bullet hole at the base of its tail feathers. There were a good many stories about how it got there. I was told once that, since my grandfather had no bell or any other respectable way to call a meeting, and almost nobody had a working timepiece, he would fire a rifle in the air, and one time he wasn’t paying enough attention where he pointed it. There was a story, too, that a man from Missouri who was passing by just as the people were gathering fired one shot and set the rooster spinning around to try to dishearten them a little, since he knew they were Free Soilers. And there was a story that the church had taken delivery of a crate of Sharps rifles and somebody wanted to find out if they were really as accurate as they were said to be.

A Sharps is a very fine rifle, but I suspect the first story is the true one, because in my experience that degree of precision is only achieved accidentally. My grandfather could be very quiet about his embarrassments, so he might just have let people speculate, invent. I told my committee the story about the Missourian because it has a certain Christian character dinging the weather vane would have been an act of considerable restraint, because feelings ran high in those days. That story has the most historical interest, too, I think, and it could well be true, for all I know to the contrary. It is hard to make people care about old things. So I thought I should do what I could for that poor old rooster.

Often enough these settlers’ churches were only meant to keep the rain off until there were time and resources to put up something better. So they don’t have the dignity of age. They just get shabby. They were never meant to become venerable. I remember that old Baptist church that my father helped to pull down, all black in the rain, looking ten times as formidable as it would have before the lightning struck. That was always a major part of my idea of a church. When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning. I thought they must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me. Then I read some history, and I realized after a while that not every church was on the ragged edge of the Great Plains, and not every pulpit had my father in it. The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it is not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. That biscuit ashy from my father’s charred hand. It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift. I am not speaking here of the ministry as such, as I have said.

***

I did a strange thing this morning. They were playing a waltz on the radio, and I decided I wanted to dance to it. I don’t mean that in the usual sense. I have a general notion of waltzing but no instruction in the steps, and so on. It was mostly a matter of waving my arms a little and spinning around a little, pretty carefully. Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it. Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!

So I decided a little waltzing would be very good, and it was. I plan to do all my waltzing here in the study. I have thought I might have a book ready at hand to clutch if I began to experience unusual pain, so that it would have an especial recommendation from being found in my hands. That seemed theatrical, on consideration, and it might have the perverse effect of burdening the book with unpleasant associations. The ones I considered, by the way, were Donne and Herbert and Barth’s Epistle to the Romans and Volume II of Calvin’s Institutes. Which is by no means to slight Volume I.

There’s a mystery in the thought of the re-creation of an old man as an old man, with all the defects and injuries of what is called long life faithfully preserved in him, and all their claims and all their tendencies honored, too, as in the steady progress of arthritis in my left knee. I have thought sometimes that the Lord must hold the whole of our lives in memory, so to speak:. Of course He does. And “memory” is the wrong word, no doubt. But the finger I broke sliding into second base when I was twenty-two years old is crookeder than ever, and I can interpret that fact as an intimate attention, taking Herbert’s view.

This morning I strolled over to Boughton’s. He was sitting in the screened porch behind the trumpet vines, dozing. He and his wife were fond of those vines because they attract hummingbirds. They’ve pretty well taken over now, so the house looks sort of like a huge duck blind. Boughton corrected me when I told him that. “A hummingbird blind,” he said. “There are times when a little bird shot would bring down a thousand of them.” But, he says, since that’s not enough yet to season a cup of broth, he’s going to bide his time.

All his gardens have more or less gone to brush, but as I came up the road I saw young Boughton and the daughter Glory clearing out the iris beds. Boughton owns his house. I used to think that was an enviable thing, but there’s been no one but him to see to it, and things have gotten a little out of hand these last years.

He seemed in excellent spirits. “The children,” he said, “are putting things to rights for me.”

I talked to him some about the baseball season and about the election, but I could tell he was listening mainly to the voices of his children, who did sound very happy and harmonious. I remember when they played in those gardens with their cats and kites and bubbles. It was as pretty a sight as you’re likely to see. Their mother was a fine woman, and such a one to laugh! Boughton says, “I miss her something dreadful.” She knew Louisa when they were girls. Once, I remember, they put hard-boiled eggs under a neighbor’s setting hen.

What the point was I never knew, but I remember them laughing so hard they just threw themselves down on the grass and lay there with the tears runnings down into their hair. One time Boughton and I and some others took a hay wagon apart and reassembled it on the roof of the courthouse. I don’t know what the point of that was, either, but we had a grand time, working under cover of darkness and all that. I wasn’t ordained yet, but I was in seminary. I don’t know what we thought we were up to. All that laughter. I wish I could hear it again. I asked Boughton if he remembered putting that wagon on the roof and he said, “How could I forget it?” and chuckled to please me, but he really wanted to sit there with his chin propped on the head of his cane and listen to the voices of his children. So I walked home.

You and your mother were making sandwiches with peanut butter and apple butter on raisin bread. I consider such a sandwich a great delicacy, as you are clearly aware, because you made me stay on the porch until everything was ready, the milk poured and so on. Children seem to think every pleasant thing has to be a surprise.

Your mother was a little upset because she didn’t know where I was. I didn’t tell her I might go to Boughton’s. She’s afraid I’ll just drop dead somewhere, and that’s reasonable enough. It seems to me worse things could happen, actually, but that’s not how she looks at it. Most of the time I feel a good deal better than the doctor led me to expect, so I ‘m inclined to enjoy myself as I can. It helps me sleep.