Gilead: A Novel (2 page)

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 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.

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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, 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 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 overmost 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 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 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 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.