Gilead: A Novel (7 page)

I ask myself the same question.

A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she’s made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn’t know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.” So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation.

***

I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar. Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk. You remember Soapy. I don’t really know why you should. She is a very unremarkable animal. I’ll take a picture of her.

So there we were, sipping honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother brought out the camera, so maybe you will have some pictures. The film ran out before I could get a shot of her. That’s just typical. Sometimes if I try to photograph her she’ll hide her face in her hands, or she’ll just walk out of the room. She doesn’t think she’s a pretty woman. I don’t know where she got these ideas about herself, and I don’t think I ever will know, either. Sometimes I’ve wondered why she’d marry an old man like me, a fine, vital woman like she is. I’d never have thought to ask her to marry me. I would never have dared to. It was her idea. I remind myself of that often. She reminds me of it, too.

***

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

There’s a shimmer on a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They’re in the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin. Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not prettier than most children. You’re just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well-scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.

The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.” That’s a fact.

While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine—not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly, even while I do long to see what it will mean to have wife and child restored to me, I mean Louisa and Rebecca. I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.

***

I have a few pictures of Louisa, but I don’t think the resemblance is very good. Considering that I haven’t seen her in fifty-one years, I guess I can’t really judge. When she was nine or ten she used to skip rope like fury, and if you tried to distract her, she would just turn away, still jumping, and never miss a lick. Her braids would bounce and thump on her back. Sometimes I’d try to catch hold of one of them, and then she’d be off down the street, still skipping. She would be trying to make it to a thousand, or to a million, and nothing could distract her. It said in my mother’s home health book that a young girl should not be allowed to make that sort of demand on her strength, but when I showed Louisa the very page on which those words were printed, she just told me to mind my own business. She was always running around barefoot with her braids flying and her bonnet askew. I don’t know when girls stopped wearing sunbonnets, or why they ever did wear them. If they were supposed to keep off freckles, I can tell you they didn’t work.

I’ve always envied men who could watch their wives grow old. Boughton lost his wife five years ago, and he married before I did. His oldest boy has snow-white hair. His grandchildren are mostly married. And as for me, it is still true that I will never see a child of mine grow up and I will never see a wife of mine grow old. I’ve shepherded a good many people through their lives, I’ve baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.

You and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes. Half an hour ago you were on my lap and Soapy was on her belly in the square of sunlight. And while you were on my lap you drew—so you told me—a Messerschmitt 109. That is it in the corner of the page. You know all the names from a book Leon Fitch gave you about a month ago, when my back was turned, as it seems to me, since he could not, surely, have imagined I’d approve. All your drawings look about like that one in the corner, but you give them different names—Spad and Fokker and Zero. You’re always trying to get me to read the fine print about how many guns they have and how many bombs they carry. If my father were here, if I were my father, I’d find a way to make you think that the noble and manly thing would be to give the book back to old Fitch. I really should do that. But he means well. Maybe I’ll just hide the thing in the pantry. When did you figure out about the pantry? That’s where we always put anything we don’t want you getting into. Now that I think about it, half the things in that pantry were always there so one or another of us wouldn’t get into them.

I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I’m very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.

Then when your mother did come, when I still hardly knew her, she gave me that look of hers—no twinkle in that eye—and said, very softly and very seriously, “You ought to marry me.” That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was to love another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before. Not even my parents. Not even Louisa. I was so startled when she said that to me that for a minute I couldn’t find any words to reply. So she walked away, and I had to follow her along the street. I still didn’t have the courage to touch her sleeve, but I said, “You’re right, I will.” And she said, “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” and kept on walking. That was the most thrilling thing that ever happened to me in my life. I could wish you such a moment as that one was, though when I think of everything that came before it, for me and for your dear mother, too, I’m not sure I should.

Here I am trying to be wise, the way a father should be, the way an old pastor certainly should be. I don’t know what to say except that the worst misfortune isn’t only misfortune-—and even as I write those words, I have that infant Rebecca in my mind, the way she looked while I held her, which I seem to remember, because every single time I have christened a baby I have thought of her again. That feeling of a baby’s brow against the palm of your hand—how I have loved this life. Boughton had christened her, as I said, but I laid my hand on her just to bless her, and I could feel her pulse, her warmth, the damp of her hair. The Lord said, “Their angels in Heaven always see the face of my Father in Heaven” (Matthew 18:10).

That’s why Boughton named her Angeline. Many, many people have found comfort in that verse.

***

I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial if you remember them—and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

***

Lacey Thrush died last night. Isn’t that a name? Her mother was a Lacey. They were an old family here, but she was the last of the Laceys, and the Thrushes went on to California. She was a maiden lady. She died promptly and decorously, out of consideration for me, I suspect, since she has been concerned about my health. She was conscious half an hour, unconscious half an hour, and gone. We said the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, then she wanted to hear “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” one last time, so I sang and she hummed a little, and then she started nodding off. I am full of admiration for her. She’s given me a lot to live up to, so to speak. At any rate, she didn’t keep me awake past my bedtime, and the peacefulness of her sleep contributed mightily to the peacefulness of mine. These old saints bless us every chance they get.

Here is a story my grandfather and his friends used to tell, and chuckle over. I can’t vouch for it entirely, since, talking among themselves the way they did, I doubt they’d have thought embellishing a story was quite the same thing as departing from the truth.

In any case, in some forgotten little abolitionist settlement around here, as soon as the people had set up a dry-goods store on one side of the road and a livery stable on the other, they set about building a tunnel between them. Tunneling was a popular activity at that time, and a great deal of ingenuity went into devising hiding places and routes of escape. The topsoil in Iowa goes down so deep that more and larger tunnels were possible here than in less favored regions, say in New England. In this part of the state the soil is also very sandy, of course.

Now, these were sensible and well-meaning people. But they became so absorbed in making this tunnel that they lost sight of certain practical considerations. They put so much zeal into it that it became a sort of subterranean civic monument. One of the old men said the only thing missing was a chandelier. Very simply, they made it too large, and too near the surface of the ground, and they couldn’t brace it, either, since wood was so scarce on the prairie in those days that the lumber for such buildings as they had was carted in from Minnesota. Even thoughtful people have lapses of judgment from time to time.

“When they had just about finished their digging, a stranger on a big black horse came through town. He paused in exactly the wrong spot to ask the name of the place, and he and his horse sank right through the road into that tunnel. When the dust settled, the horse was standing more or less shoulder deep in a hole. The man climbed off him and walked around and around him in a kind of wonderment, not drawing any conclusions at all, try as he might. And when the people came out to ponder this calamity, and took note of his bewilderment, they thought it best to be bewildered, too. So they just stood there with their arms folded, saying, “If that’s not the dangedest thing,” or words to that effect, and they discussed among themselves the risks that went with owning such a large horse. The poor thing began to struggle, of course, so somebody got a bucket of oats and poured a couple of bottles of whiskey over them, and the horse ate them and pretty soon it nodded off. Then the mood of the stranger became desolate, because the horse was not only standing in a hole but was also unconscious. This latter might not have seemed to crown his afflictions the way it did if he had not himself been a teetotaler. As it was, that snoring horse with its head lying there in the road was a spectacle of gloom for which he truly struggled to find words. Now, settlements of that kind were the work of people of high religious principle, and they would have taken no pleasure at all in watching this unoffending stranger tear his beard and throw his hat at the ground. Well, of course they took a little pleasure in it. But it did seem best to them to get the fellow out of town as quickly as possible so they could deal with that horse, since any Bushwhacker coming up from Missouri or any slave hunter passing through would be liable to interpret the spectacle by the light of his own grudges and suspicions. So one of them offered to trade his horse for the one in the hole. You might think the fellow would have considered this trade advantageous, but in fact he sat on the stoop of the dry-goods store and weighed it for some time. The horse he was offered was a mare, smallish, which the stranger did allow was an advantage. He tried to look at her teeth and got nipped and cursed the luck that had brought him to that town, and asked to borrow a shovel so he could dig up his horse. So the preacher told him, solemnly, that they had lost all their shovels in a terrible fire. “We’ve got the blades all right, and you’re welcome to the use of them,” he said. “It’s really just the handles we’re missing.” That was a lie, of course, but it was compelled by the urgency of the situation.