Gilead: A Novel (5 page)

Looking back over what I have written, it seems to me I’ve described my grandfather in his old age as if he were simply an eccentric, and as if we tolerated him and were respectful of him and loved him and he loved us. And all that is true. But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief. And I believe my father on his side was angry, too, at the accusations he knew he could see in his father’s unreposefulness, and also in his endless pillaging. In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.

They had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness was about to flare up.

“Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?” my father would ask.

And his father would say, “No, Reverend, you have not offended me in any way at all. Not at all.”

And my mother would say, “Now, don’t you two get started.”

***

My mother took a great deal of pride in her chickens, especially after the old man was gone and her flock was unplundered. Culled judiciously, it throve, yielding eggs at a rate that astonished her. But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens. My mother and I saw it happen, because when she smelled the rain coming she called me to help her get the wash off the line.

It was a general disaster. When the roof hit the fence, which was just chicken wire nailed to some posts and might as well have been cobweb, there were chickens taking off toward the pasture and chickens taking off toward the road and chickens with no clear intentions, just being chickens. Then the neighborhood dogs got involved, and our dogs, too, and then the rain really started. We couldn’t even call off our own dogs. Their joy took on a tinge of shame, as I remember, but the rest of them didn’t even pay us that much attention. They were having the time of their lives.

My mother said, “I don’t want to watch this.” So I followed her into the kitchen and we sat there listening to the pandemonium and the wind and the rain. Then my mother said, “The wash!” which we had forgotten. She said, “Those sheets must be so heavy that they’re dragging in the mud, if they haven’t pulled the lines down altogether.” That was a day’s work lost for her, not to mention the setting hens and the fryers. She closed one eye and looked at me and said, “I know there is a blessing in this somewhere.” We did have a habit sometimes of imitating the old man’s way of speaking when he wasn’t in the room. Still, I was surprised that she would make an outright joke about my grandfather, though he’d been gone a long time by then. She always did like to make me laugh.

When my father found his father at Mount Pleasant after the war ended, he was shocked at first to see how he had been wounded. In fact, he was speechless. So my grandfather’s first words to his son were “I am confident that I will find great blessing in it.” And that is what he said about everything that happened to him for the rest of his life, all of which tended to be more or less drastic. I remember at least two sprained wrists and a cracked rib. He told me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true etymologically, in English but not in Greek or Hebrew. So whatever understanding might be based on that derivation has no scriptural authority behind it. It was unlike him to strain interpretation that way. He did it in order to make an account of himself, I suppose, as most of us do.

In any case, the notion seems to have been important to him. He was always trying to help somebody birth a calf or limb a tree, whether they wanted him to or not. All the regret he ever felt was for his unfortunates, with none left over for himself however he might be injured, until his friends began to die off, as they did one after another in the space of about two years. Then he was terribly lonely, no doubt about it. I think that was a big part of his running off to Kansas. That and the fire at the Negro church. It wasn’t a big fire—someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it, and someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel. (The Negro church used to be where the soda fountain is now, though I hear that’s going out of business. That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. By then it was down to three or four families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them.)

You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child. You seem to be spending half your time at his house. We think that is very good for you, but we miss you something terrible. Tonight you are camping out in his backyard, which is just across the street and a few houses down. Supper without you tonight, a melancholy prospect.

***

You and Tobias came trudging home at dawn and spread your sleeping bags on your bedroom floor and slept till lunchtime. (You had heard growling in the bushes. T. has brothers.) Your mother had fallen asleep in the parlor with a book in her lap. I made you some toasted cheese sandwiches, which I cooked a little too long. So I told you the story you like very much, about how my poor old mother would sleep in her rocker by the kitchen stove while our dinner smoked and sputtered like some unacceptable sacrifice, and you ate your sandwiches, maybe a little more happily for the scorch. And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loves them and won’t buy them for herself. I doubt she slept at all last night. I surprised myself—I slept pretty soundly, and woke out of a harmless sort of dream, an unmemorable conversation with people I did not know. And I was so happy to have you home again.

I was thinking about that henhouse. It stood just across the yard, where the Muellers’ house is now. Boughton and I used to sit on the roof of it and look out over the neighbors’ gardens and the fields. We used to take sandwiches and eat our dinner up there. I had stilts that Edward had made for himself years before. They were so high I had to stand on the porch railing to get onto them. Boughton (he was Bobby then) got his father to make him a pair, and we pretty well lived on those things for several summers. We had to stay on the paths or where the ground was firm, but we got to be very much at ease on them, and we’d just saunter all over the place, as if it were quite a natural thing. We could sit right down on the branch of a tree. Sometimes wasps were a problem, or mosquitoes. We took a few spills, but mainly it was very nice. Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor. We would never have thought that coop could fold up the way it did. The roof was covered in raggedy black tar paper, and it was always warm even when the day was chilly, and sometimes we’d lie back on it to get out of the wind, just lie there and talk. I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn’t come to him, and then he’d have to find another kind of life, and he couldn’t really think of one. We’d go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren’t many.

Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he’s so bent over I don’t know how you’d calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he’s been reduced to a heap of joints, and not one of them works. You’d never know what he once was, looking at him now. He was always wonderful at stealing bases, from grade school right through seminary.

I reminded him the other day how he’d said to me, lying there on that roof watching the clouds, “What do you think you would do if you saw an angel? I’ll tell you what, I’m scared I’d take off running!”

Old Boughton laughed at that and said, “Well, I still might
want
to.” And then he said, “Pretty soon I’ll know.”

***

I’ve always been taller than most, larger than most. It runs in my family. When I was a boy, people took me to be older than I was and often expected more of me—more common sense, usually—than I could come up with at the time. I got pretty good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill which has served me through life. I say this because I want you to realize that I am not by any means a saint. My life does not compare with my grandfather’s. I get much more respect than I deserve. This seems harmless enough in most cases. People want to respect the pastor and I’m not going to interfere with that. But I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.

Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness, and when bad company was much better than no company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. “The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That’s a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it’s also the Lord’s truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience.

Often enough when someone saw the light burning in my study long into the night, it only meant I had fallen asleep in my chair. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to them all, every significant aspect of it, and they were tactful. I’ve spent a good share of my life comforting the afflicted, but I could never endure the thought that anyone should try to comfort me, except old Boughton, who always knew better than to talk much. He was such an excellent friend to me in those days, such a help to me. I do wish you could have some idea of what a fine man he was in his prime. His sermons were remarkable, but he never wrote them out. He didn’t even keep his notes. So that is all gone. I remember a phrase here and there. I think every day about going through those old sermons of mine to see if there are one or two I might want you to read sometime, but there are so many, and I’m afraid, first of all, that most of them might seem foolish or dull to me. It might be best to burn them, but that would upset your mother, who thinks a great deal more of them than I do—for their sheer mass, I suppose, since she hasn’t read them. You will probably remember that the stairs to the attic are a sort of ladder, and that it is terribly hot up there when it is not terribly cold.

It would be worth my life to try to get those big boxes down on my own. It’s humiliating to have written as much as Augustine, and then to have to find a way to dispose of it. There is not a word in any of those sermons I didn’t mean when I wrote it. If I had the time, I could read my way through fifty years of my innermost life. What a terrible thought. If I don’t burn them someone else will sometime, and that’s another humiliation. This habit of writing is so deep in me, as you will know well enough if this endless letter is in your hands, if it has not been lost or burned also.

I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment, really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking,
That’s
what I should have said! or
That’s
what he meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of them long gone from the world, past any thought of my putting things right with them. And then I do wonder where my attention was. If that is even the question.

***

One sermon is not up there, one I actually burned the night before I had meant to preach it. People don’t talk much now about the Spanish influenza, but that was a terrible thing, and it struck just at the time of the Great War, just when we were getting involved in it. It killed the soldiers by the thousands, healthy men in the prime of life, and then it spread into the rest of the population. It was like a war, it really was. One funeral after another, right here in Iowa. We lost so many of the young people. And we got off pretty lightly. People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They’d sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that the Germans had caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask me how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He
didn’t
allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared.

Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing. It was just like a biblical plague, just exactly. I thought of Sennacherib.

It was a strange sickness—I saw it over at Fort Riley. Those boys were drowning in their own blood. They couldn’t even speak for the blood in their throats, in their mouths. So many of them died so fast there was no place to put them, and they just stacked the bodies in the yard. I went over there to help out, and I saw it myself. They drafted all the boys at the college, and influenza swept through there so bad the place had to be closed down and the buildings filled with cots like hospital wards, and there was terrible death, right here in Iowa. Now, if these things were not signs, I don’t know what a sign would look like. So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord’s judgment when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.