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She looked at him. He was smiling. She knew him well enough to know that he smiled when he thought he might offend, whether intentionally or unintentionally. He could seem to be laughing at himself, or at her.

She said, “I’d be happy to oblige, but I have no idea how to go about it.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m willing to confess to a certain spiritual hunger. I think that’s usually the first step. So that’s out of the way.”

“And then?”

“Then I think it is usual to ponder great truths. That has been my experience.”

“Such as?”

“The fatherhood of God, for one. The idea being that the splendor of creation and of the human creature testify to a gracious intention lying behind it all, that they manifest divine mercy and love. Which sustains the world in general and is present in the experience of, you know, people whose souls are saved. Or will be.” After a moment he said, “It is possible to know the great truths without feeling the truth of them. That’s where the problem lies. In my case.” He looked at her.

She said, “I’m flummoxed. I’ll have to give this some thought.”

“Yes. Well, it is a lot to spring on you, I know. I always nourish the suspicion that pious folk are plotting my rescue. Now
and then it has been true. Not so often, really. But you are my sister. So it seemed worthwhile to inquire. Just to save time.” He smiled.

She said, “I think I like your soul the way it is.”

He looked at her and laughed, and his color rose. “Thanks, Glory. That’s no help at all, but I do appreciate it. I really do.”

G
LORY MADE UP A BATCH OF BREAD DOUGH
. B
ROWN BREAD
was her father’s preference. Something to lift the spirits of the household, she thought. The grocer brought her a roasting hen. She opened the windows to cool the kitchen and air out the dining room a little, and the breezes that came in were mild, earthy, grassy, with a feel of sunlight about them.

Jack came in from the barn, bringing with him a whiff of old straw and sweat and crankcase oil. He took a deep breath. “Ah! Bread!” She lifted the towel so he could see the speckled belly of the rising dough. Then he held up his hands to her, which were oily and grimy, and said, “Don’t touch those potatoes!” He went upstairs. There were sounds of haste and ablution, and then he came back down with his shirt half buttoned and his hair wet. He found a knife. “Blunt as a poker,” he said, but he set to paring. “It is art that keeps the demons at bay!” This was to bring home to her the significance of a long spiral of peeling he had removed intact.

“Amazing,” she said.

He said, “Practice.”

“Were you quoting?”

He nodded. “
La Sagesse de Jacques Bouton
. Bouton de la Rose, that is.
Poète maudit. Poète malgré lui
. Roué and—kitchen help. For some reason they didn’t teach the French for that in college.” He held up another spiral of peel. “Pity,” he said. “Things sound so much better in French—
pomme de terre
,
fait-néant
,
voleur
—” He smiled. “My intellectual lady friend was set on keeping up her French. So I summoned what little I could of mine. We read
L’Education sentimentale
. My enthusiasm for the project was almost unfeigned.”

“Your friends are more interesting than mine.”

“You must know where to find your friends,
ma petite
.”

“And where is that?”

“If you are very, very good I might tell you. Someday. But you must be exceptionally good.”

She laughed. “God knows I try.”

He said, “That’s a beginning, I suppose. Though not in every case.”

She raised the tea towel and punched the dough, and a great sigh of yeasty air breathed out of it. After a minute he said, “I’ve been into the cash drawer again. I bought some spark plugs and a tire pump. The old one leaked so much it was almost useless. And a fan belt.”

“You don’t have to tell me about these things.”

“And a baseball glove.”

“That money isn’t mine, either, Jack. And Papa doesn’t care about it.”

He nodded, delicately gouging out a potato’s eye. He smiled at her. “A diligent and humiliating search for employment has persuaded me that I have to look beyond Gilead,” he said. “I’ll need a car. If I’m ever to become a respectable family man.”

“So you’re thinking that woman friend might come here?”

He shook his head. “Only when I’m trying to find a way to make myself go out and shop my miserable aspirations around town one more time. Or keep tinkering with that damn car. She’d probably hate it here, anyway.”

“You’ve never told me her name.”

“Her name is Della.”

“I’d like to know her.”

He said, “Would you be kind to her?”

“What a question!”

“Swear to God?”

“Of course! I’d be a sister to her!”

He laughed. “I’m going to hold you to that someday. If my wildest hopes are fulfilled. Which they won’t be.”

After a minute she said, “Jack, there’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

“Hmm?”

“What do you act like when you’re happy?”

He laughed. “I forget.”

“Seriously. When you came in just now, I thought something good must have happened.”

“Oh. How to account for the high spirits. Gasoline fumes? And I have replaced so much of that engine that I must be closing in on the problem by now. With any luck. When I turned the key this time it—chortled. And that triggered a fantasy of charging off in my father’s DeSoto to rescue my lady love from a smoldering Memphis.”

“I thought she was in St. Louis.”

He shrugged. “I’m a little tired of St. Louis. I’d rather rescue her from Memphis.”

“I see.”

“On second thought, her father is in Memphis. He’s very protective, and he has a car that actually runs. And he thinks I’m damn near worthless—‘damn near,’ because he’s professionally obligated to take a charitable view. She has three brothers in Memphis. So I guess I’d better rescue her from St. Louis.” He began to peel another potato. “Joking aside, maybe she would come to Gilead for a while, to give it a try. It’s possible.”

They had an early supper. She had meant to serve the chicken cold, but she decided it was better to serve the bread while it was still warm, and what difference did it make when they did anything, anyway. Her father enjoyed the warm bread and the chicken, too, and the peas with potatoes in cream sauce. He grew voluble, talking about his own boyhood in Gilead, how, he said, he couldn’t even draw water from the well to his grandmother’s satisfaction,
let alone split kindling, so he didn’t have as many chores as other children did. “She never trusted me to bring the eggs in, either,” he said. “It was her way of spoiling me. Yes. I used to go over to Ames’s and help him out a little, and then we’d have the whole day, in the summer. The whole day by the river. I don’t know how we passed all that time. It was wonderful. Sometimes his grandfather would be down there, fishing and talking to Jesus, and then we’d be pretty quiet, or we’d wade upstream a little way. He was a strange old fellow, but he was just a part of life, you know. Like the birds singing.”

Jack said, “I spent time at the river. I liked to do that.”

His father nodded. “I always thought this was an excellent place to be a child. Not that I had anything to compare it with.”

“It is a good place.”

“Well, Jack, I’m glad you think so. Yes. Some things might have worked out better than they did, I know that. But there was always a lot to enjoy. That was my feeling, at least. And there still is. I watch the children, and they seem happy to me. I think they should be happy.”

A
FTER SUPPER
J
ACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS WITH THE NEW
baseball mitt, flexing it and folding the pocket. He said, “I thought I’d see if the Ames kid would like to play a little catch. Is that a good idea? He’s old enough. He seemed interested.”

She said, “I think it’s a good idea.”

He went out to the porch and stood there for a while, and then he came into the kitchen again. “No,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m disreputable. I forget that from time to time. But I have it on excellent authority.” He smiled. “The good Reverend wouldn’t approve. I’m pretty sure they’ll give you your money back.” He handed her the glove. “Those high spirits,” he said. “They can get me in trouble.”

She said, “I don’t understand any of this. I think you worry too much. I’ll keep the glove until you want it.”

“You have to help me think things through, Glory.”

“Does that mean remembering that you’re disreputable?”

“’Fraid so.”

“I think you’re imagining.”

“It is the central fact of my existence,” he said. “One of three, actually. The one you have to help me keep in mind.”

“Well, really, Jack. How on earth am I supposed to do that?”

He laughed. “Don’t be so kind to me,” he said.

S
HE THOUGHT ABOUT THE THING
J
ACK HAD SEEMED TO
ask of her, some attempt to save his soul. Dear Lord. How could that idea haunt her with a sense of obligation, when she really did not know what it meant. There are words you hear all your life, she thought. Then one day you stop to wonder. She would not bring it up again, but if he did, she should have some way to answer him. She was not at all sure that he had been serious, that he was not teasing her. She might even have taken offense at the time, if there had seemed to be any point in it. A genteel project for a pious lady with time on her hands. How condescending. But that was what he did whenever he felt vulnerable—he found some way to sting, to make it clear that vulnerability was not all on one side. Poor man. But he was so practiced at reciting what he was also practiced at rejecting. He might have meant to draw her into some sort of argument and reject it, too, just to show her he could do it. He was uneasy. That was natural enough. And in fact he had made her embarrassed about that pleasant old habit of hers. Now she had to read the Bible in her room to avoid feeling like a hypocrite, like someone praying on a street corner. When Jack came out to the porch with his newspaper the next day and found her reading
The Dollmaker
he gave her a wistful, inquiring look, but he said nothing.

She did not know what it meant to be pious. She had never been anything else. Remember also thy creator in the days of thy youth. She had done that. She could hardly have done otherwise.
Her father never let a day pass without reminding them that all goodness came from the Lord, all love, all beauty. And failure and fault instructed us in the will of God in the very fact of departing from it. Then there were grace and forgiveness to compensate, to put things right, and these were the greatest goodness of God after creation itself, so far as we mortals can know. Her father’s rapt delight in this belief put it beyond question, since it was so intrinsic to his nature, and they loved and enjoyed his nature, and laughed about it a little, too. Yes! He would achieve some triumph of extenuation and emerge from his study, eyes blazing, having solved the riddle, ready to forgive heroically, to go that extra mile. True, the slights and foibles for which he found extenuation necessary may have been minor or even questionable in some cases, evidence of a certain irritability on his part. But the gallantry of his response to them was no less handsome on that account.

As for herself, she did still pray on her knees. She also said or heard or thought a grace at every meal, even at a lunch counter or when she was with the fiancé. Train up a child in the way he should go and even when he is old he will not depart from it. The proverb was true in her case. And being at home only reinforced every habit that had been instilled in her there. Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence. She was pious, no doubt, though she would not have chosen that word to describe herself.

M
AYBE SHE KEPT THE
B
IBLE OUT OF SIGHT BECAUSE SHE
was afraid that if he spoke to her that way again she would have
to tell him she had no certain notion what a soul is. She supposed it was not a mind or a self. Whatever they are. She supposed it was what the Lord saw when His regard fell upon any of us. But what can we know about that? Say we love and forgive, and enjoy the beauty of another life, however elusive it might be. Then, presumably, we have some idea of the soul we have encountered. That is what her father would say.

Maybe she had never before known anyone who felt, or admitted he felt, that the state of his soul was in question. Whatever might transpire in her father’s study, there had been only calm and confidence among his flock, to all appearances. Granting the many perils of spiritual complacency, and her father did grant them as often as Pharisees figured in the text, complacency was consistent with the customs and manners of Presbyterian Gilead and was therefore assumed to be justified in every case. Christian charity demanded no less, after all. Among the denominations of Gilead, charity on this point was not granted by all and to all in principle, but in practice good manners were usually adhered to, and in general the right to complacency was conceded on every side. Even her father’s sermons treated salvation as a thing for which they could be grateful as a body, as if, for their purposes at least, that problem had been sorted out between the Druids and the centurions at about the time of Hadrian. He did mention sin, but it was rarefied in his understanding of it, a matter of acts and omissions so commonplace that no one could be wholly innocent of them or especially alarmed by them, either—the uncharitable thought, the neglected courtesy. While on one hand this excused him from the mention of those aspects of life that seemed remotest from Sabbath and sunlight, on the other hand it made the point that the very nicest among them, even the most virtuous, were in no position to pass judgment on anyone else, not on the sly or the incorrigible, not on those who trouble the peace of their families, not on those who might happen to have gotten their names in the newspaper in the past week. The doctrine of total
depravity had served him well. Who, after all, could cast that first stone? He could not, he least of all. But it was hard to get a clear view of something so pervasive as to be total, especially if, as her father insisted, it was epitomized in his own estimable person.