Gilead: A Novel (4 page)

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.