Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

“Yes. Probably. But we couldn’t be sure. The meteor might have been just a meteor.”

  “If you say so. My father would say that a sparrow isn’t just a sparrow. Because its fall means something, cosmically speaking. I’m not sure what. He is certain of it, though.”

  “My father would say that, too.”

  “So, consider the sparrows your meteor brought down, the lilies it pulverized. How could it be just a meteor?”

  “If the people thought they knew how to understand it. I mean, if they believed that it meant something, they’d assume there were rules, and they’d probably think they were the rules they were already used to. Only they’d be a whole lot more serious about keeping to them. Some of them. For a while. Which wouldn’t be interesting.”

  “And if they decided it didn’t mean anything—”

  “That’s hard for me to imagine. I can’t really think about that. But if they didn’t know one way or the other, they’d be like we are. I mean like people are. That’s more interesting.”

  “Maybe. But meaninglessness also has its pleasures. As an idea.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve tried to imagine it and I just can’t. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”

  He said, “That’s kind of you. To leave a little space for nihilism. Most people don’t.”

  “I know.”

  “At least my father didn’t.”

  “Mine either.”

  “How could we know whether the nihilists were right? A voice from nowhere that had never spoken before and would never speak again—‘It was just a meteor! Calm down! Interpretation is not appropriate!’ That would keep the conversation going for the next two thousand years.”

  She said, “Meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn’t be meaningless. That’s where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.”

  They walked along through the ranks and clusters of the dead. Forever hoisting their stony sails, waiting for that final wind to rise. Here lies Wanda Schmidt, her breathless, perpetual “Remember me!” spelled out as Beloved Mother. He actually felt he knew some of them, in their posthumous and monumental persons, that is, and he could not stroll past them without the little courtesy of a nod. Yes, I am here this evening with a lady on my arm. Quite a surprise, I agree.

  He said, “Let me guess. Long arguments over Sunday dinner.”

  “Endless. We’d go around the table. We were supposed to be able to think and express our thoughts, my father said. Girls, too.”

  “I suppose predestination came up?”

  “Not much. We’re Methodists.”

  “I forgot. Yes. We also had those dinners. Was the Almighty free to limit what He could know. If He wasn’t free to, He wasn’t omnipotent. If He did limit what He could know, He wasn’t omniscient. Unless He could know what He didn’t know. In which case—and so on.”

  “Why would He want to limit what He could know?”

  “Well, my father suffered considerably over the doctrine of foreknowledge. He was uneasy with the thought that there might be dark certainty in the universe somewhere, sentence passed, doom sealed, and a soul at his very dinner table lost irretrievably before it had even stopped outgrowing its shoes, so to speak. If the Lord chose not to know, then—that eased the Reverend’s mind. Though it would in no way alter the facts of the case. Once, I pointed this out to him, and he just looked at me, tears in his eyes. Everyone else left the table. No more arguments for weeks after that.”

  “Were you that bad? I mean, that he was afraid for your soul?”

  “Pretty bad. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Quiet.

  So he said, “Pious people do worry about me. This makes conversation difficult. I can only assure you, as we two strangers wander through this solemn night, that I have not quite fulfilled my early promise. In case you’re worried about that.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  Then, even while he thought better of it, he asked her, “Why not?”

  “There are just some people you trust.”

  “You could think of me as a thief if you wanted to.”

  “So I must not want to.”

  “Would it be better to be alone, or to be alone with a thief? I think that’s an interesting question.”

  “I think you’re trying to worry me. Anyway, it would depend on the thief.”

  “Right. And you and I have things in common. Fine families and so on.” He said, “If there’d been only one thief at the crucifixion, whichever one it was, good or bad, it would have made a big difference, don’t you think? In the story? As it is, we have the complex nature of criminality to consider. In the crucial moment. That’s also very interesting.”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe you flatter yourself. If you really were a criminal, I think you’d have cost me more than three dollars. And some irritation. And my copy of Oak and Ivy, which you’d better bring back, by the way. It’s a hard book to find. My father gave it to me. His mother gave it to him. It was signed.”

  “What can I say? More to regret. I meant to bring it back with Hamlet. But one page has a sort of coffee stain on it. Not coffee, actually. It will be on your doorstep immediately. Such as it is.”

  “Did you write in it?”

  “Hardly at all.”

  “How can you do that? How can you just write in somebody else’s book?”

  “In pencil.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My father said that I never quite learned to distinguish mine and thine. He had the Latin for it.”

  She laughed. “I love your father. You never talk about your mother.”

  “Yes. I don’t.” She was quiet. So he said, “My father thought my deficiencies might be physiological. He hoped they were. He laid them to my difficult birth.”

  “Predestination.”

  “Strictly speaking, no.”

  “Well, I won’t follow you into the swamps of Presbyterianism.”

  “It’s all pretty straightforward. Salvation by grace alone. It just begins earlier for us than for other people. In the deep womb of time, in fact. By His secret will and purpose.”

  “Then why was your father so worried? If it was true, what could he have done about it, anyway?”

  “He saw signs of reprobation in me, hard as he tried not to. Reasonably enough. I kept him pretty well supplied with them. Of course, I knew about, you know, those signs. From his sermons. We all did. I may have been listening more carefully than the others. Or listening differently. He who has ears to hear, and so on. It wasn’t so much the situation that he hoped to change. He just wanted a less drastic understanding of it. So he comforted himself with my difficult birth, which could not have disfigured my eternal soul, that most elusive thing. However it might have depraved the rest of me.” Naked came I from my mother’s womb.

  “Well,” she said, “this is all very interesting. But don’t quote Scripture ironically. It makes me very uneasy when you do that.”

  “I am the Prince of Darkness.”

  “No, you’re a talkative man with holes in his socks.”

  “You saw them?”

  “No, I just knew they were there.”

  After a minute, he said, “I’ll try not to be ironic if you take back what you just said. I am not talkative.”

  “All right.”

  “These are special circumstances.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “I hardly say a word for weeks on end. Months.”

  “I couldn’t know that.”

  “That’s because you make me nervous. I talk when I’m nervous. Sometimes.”

  “You say you’re a thief, you say you’re disreputable, you say you’re the Prince of Darkness, and you object to the word ‘talkative.’”

  He said, “It’s a matter of personal dignity.” She laughed.

  “It is.”

 
; “I understand. I know what you mean. I would feel the same way, I suppose.”

  “Well, you hardly talk at all. You leave it to me. Then you draw conclusions.”

  Quiet.

  So he said, “That sounded harsher than I meant it to. That was the wrong word. I didn’t mean to be harsh at all. I just meant to say I appreciate it when you talk.”

  After a minute, she said, “You know what I think? I think Polonius misreads that letter, the vile phrase. I think Hamlet wrote ‘beatified.’ Not ‘beautified.’ But there’s no way to know.”

  “True. Yes. High-minded conversation. Nothing more about socks or shirt buttons. Fraying of the cuffs. Holes in the pockets. Those three dollars.”

  Silence.

  “Besides,” he said, “Hamlet didn’t write the letter. I mean, there was no letter. There’s only what Polonius says it says.”

  “Shakespeare could have wanted the audience to know Polonius gets it wrong. He gets things wrong all the time. But I said there’s no way to know.”

  “Yes. That isn’t quite the same.” That sounded cross.

  Silence.

  He had let himself feel concealed by the darkness, as if only a rough sketch of him, so to speak, the general outline of a presentable man, would be walking along beside her. But she knew what he was and nothing was concealed, and there was the night to get through, an ordeal now. She took her hand from his arm.

  She said, “Have you ever thought of using a word like ‘listening,’ or ‘murmuring,’ in that couplet? Instead of a one-syllable word?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have.”

  Silence. Then she said, “I offended you. I’m sorry.”

  These sensitivities of his. He might have said goodbye and walked away if they had not been together in a cemetery in the middle of the night. He was at least too much a gentleman to leave her there, or even to suggest that he might leave her there, or to remind her that she was indebted to his good nature in keeping her company, though the thought did occur to him. Easy enough to disappear among the headstones. The looming obelisks. That thought occurred, too. He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things ever are when there is nothing else to do but live with them. So he said, “I’m not offended. I don’t want to be. I’ll get over it in a minute.” Then he said, “I’m going to ruin this.”

  That made her pause. “How, exactly?”

  “The way I ruin things. It’s a little different every time. I actually surprise myself. Except that it’s inevitable. That’s always the same, I suppose. One thing I can count on.”

  “I suppose I’m the one who ruined it, if it’s ruined. I’m really sorry. It’s been nice, considering everything. Walking barefoot in the dark. I wouldn’t expect to enjoy that.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m all right. For a minute there I was plunged back into the land of the living. Terrible experience! Did you say ‘enjoy’?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, that helps.”

  “And we are not in the land of the living. We’re ghosts among the ghosts. They’d be jealous. The two of us out here in the sweet air, just talking for the pleasure of it.” She took his arm.

  “Yes, two spirits. Invisible. Nothing else to say about us. I mean, in terms of our measuring up to expectations. Until the Last Judgment, anyway. The outward man perisheth and so on. Then again, if the outward man needs a haircut, that’s a problem that can be solved, in theory. The inward man—renewed day by day—the same blasted nuisance every time. Sometimes I wish I were just a suit of clothes and a decent shave. Uninhabited, so to speak.”

  Quiet.

  He said, “That must have sounded strange.”

  “Not really. My father had a word or two to say about the immortal soul. Poor, vulnerable thing that it is.”

  After a while, she said, “Remember, I mentioned that there seemed to be stories behind Hamlet? That weren’t told and weren’t hidden? A letter behind the one Polonius reads would go along with that idea, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so. And why would Horatio have been around for months without letting Hamlet know he was there?”

  “Yes. And Henry the Eighth said he’d broken biblical law when he married his brother’s widow. The audience would know that. Claudius does exactly the same, worse, and only Hamlet is bothered by it. Isn’t that odd?”

  He laughed. “I can’t keep up. I hung around college for a while and let my brother take my classes for me. If the subject of English kings came up, he never mentioned it. You should be talking to Teddy.”

  Her cheek brushed his shoulder. “You’ll do.”

  Quiet. That would be embarrassment. Well, uneasiness at forgetting for a moment just who was walking beside her. Next she would mention Timbuktu. The dark side of the moon.

  She said, “I believe we have souls. I think that’s true.”

  He could deal with that. “Interesting,” he said. “Yes, I suppose I agree. A pretty thought, in any case. Basically. Depending.” Reprobation. Then he thought, You be my soul. But at least he didn’t say it. “Are there things you don’t believe, Miss Miles? I mean, that your father said you ought to believe? Are you at peace with the tenets of Methodism?”

  “I like my church. I don’t really like tenets, I suppose.”

  “The communion of saints? The forgiveness of sins?”

  “Well, I do like those. I’m not so sure what they mean, though.” She was quiet, and then she said, “I wonder sometimes if there would be such a thing as sin if God didn’t exist.”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose sinning is doing harm. Agreed? And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It’s kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.” He laughed. “Maybe it wouldn’t be called sin. And I suppose there wouldn’t be such a thing as forgiveness. Which would be a relief, frankly.” Then he said, “In my opinion,” wishing he hadn’t laughed, and really wishing he hadn’t mentioned tantalizing fragility. When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might even mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all. She held his arm and he guided her steps, skirting the places where the shadows of the burr oaks would have been and their acorns would have fallen for so many years. Any spirit looking on might have thought they had come there from days or years of dear friendship, passing through the graveyard on their way to the kind of futures people have ordinarily, heartbreak or marriage or something, when in fact they were not only strangers but estranged, she talking with him only to make the time pass, the long few hours.

  Finally she said, “Sometimes I do wonder. If we were the only ones left after the world ended, and we made the rules, they really might work just as well. For us, at least.”

  “Us. So you think we could agree? We could come up with a new set of commandments, between the two of us? We’ll still remember the Sabbath, I suppose.”

  She shrugged. “It would be pretty hard to forget it.”

  “I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve made the experiment.”

  “No luck?”

  “I’ve forgotten one or two. They’re hard to forget—no liquor, no cigarettes. All those bells. I’ve tried to plan ahead, to get through the day, but it’s not really in my nature. If I’ve got ’em, I smoke ’em. Et cetera. Anyway, that’s remembering. You just start a little early.”

  She said, “No, we’d have to keep the Sabbath. My father couldn’t survive without it.”

  “Hmm. I thought the world had ended.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I have to object, Miss Miles. If we’re going to keep honoring our fathers and our m
others, you know there won’t be any new rules. So we have to let the world really come to an end. Hypothetically. If this is going to be interesting.”

  “I guess I don’t want to imagine the world with them gone. It seems like tempting fate.”

  “All right. Tempting fate. So even fate can be lured away from its intentions.”

  It was true enough, though. The old gent gone, and the pious worry that fretted the edge of every thought he had almost gone as well. You will hurt yourself, why do you make things hard for yourself? You must take care of yourself, say your prayers, Jack. His prayers! What would they be? If I die before I wake. If I wake before I die. Much less likely. But he thought he might go home one last time. Last but one. Pull himself together and get on a bus.

  She said, “Hypothetically, then. Let’s say the world has ended, and we don’t have to be loyal to the way things were before. What would we do that was different?”

  He laughed. “Not a thing! We’d do just what we’re doing now. If I could get you to go along with me.”

  “When morning comes, I mean.”

  “Oh. So there’d still be morning?”

  “Yes, there would. The evening and the morning. We ended the world. Not the solar system.”

  “All right, I guess. But I’m beginning to wonder if ending the world was worth the trouble.”

  “How can you know? You won’t try it out. You keep raising objections.”

  She said, “You have to relax a little bit. We won’t do any harm just talking about it.”

  “Is your father out of the picture?”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Mine, too, I suppose.”

  “Well yes, he is.”

  “Then what?”

  “You first.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I think maybe you’ve already thought about things this way. More than I have, at least. I don’t think I wondered about it much until tonight. You know, wondered about it in so many words.”

  “I’ll give it a try, I guess. What kind of rules are we talking about? Thou shalt not steal or The years of a man’s life are threescore years and ten?”

  “I guess you’re right, stealing would be more like gleaning. But the years of a man’s life—most people haven’t lived that long, ever, so far as I know. That’s just the best you can hope for. Generally. So it can’t actually be a rule. My father had a great-aunt who lived to a hundred and one.”