Covenant would have been, those incendiary words, and flowers and flames around them and above them. I don’t know how those women managed to find the material for it, how much snipping and raveling of their few best clothes they’d have to
have done to make such a thing as that. And I’ve always wondered what happened to it. Material things are so vulnerable to
the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might
be spared. -~
One after another, when those women learned they were widows, they went back to their families in the East. Not all of them, but a good many. Some of them had buried their husbands and their children beside the church, so they felt they
couldn’t leave. And some of those who left came back, even years later. Still, that congregation dwindled away finally, and the Methodists bought the land and burned the old building down because it was past saving.
My father spoke once in a sermon about how he regretted the times after the war that he’d gone off to sit with the Quakers while his father struggled to find words of comfort to say to his poor remnant of a flock. He said in those days his father opened all the windows that still would open, so they could hear the Methodists singing by the river, and that some of the women would join in if the song was “The Old Rugged Cross” or “Rock of Ages,” even in the middle of the sermon, and he’d just stop preaching and listen to them. The wind, he said, smelled like turned earth because of the new graves, and yet people afterward remembered those Sunday mornings and those Wednesday evenings as something strangely wonderful. There was a tenderness in the way they told about them. My father said he had regretted and repented his whole life
since that time but never sufficiently, because at first staying away had seemed an act of principle almost. His father had 100
preached his people into the war, saying while there was slavery there was no peace, but only a war of the armed and powerful against the captive and defenseless. He would say, Peace
will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children. I came home for lunch today and found you playing catch in the street with Jack Boughton. You had his mitt, a fine new fielder’s mitt that reached almost to your elbow, and he had that old glove of Edward’s that I keep on my desk. No webbing at all, no pocket to speak of. It’s an oversight of mine that I haven’t gotten you a glove of your own. I’ll see to that.
Young Boughton was teaching you to scoop up grounders, probably to cover for the fact that you weren’t likely to actually catch anything on the fly. You were being very earnest about it all, running hither and thither on those clever child legs of yours, and he was saying, “Come on, come on,” and pounding his glove, and then, in a sportscaster’s voice, “He’s rounding second, folks. Will the throw be in time?” And you would lose the ball again, and he would say, “This is amazing, folks. The runner appears to have tripped on his shoelace! He’s down! He’s taking a while to catch his breath! Now he’s up, he’s headed for the plate!” He would say, “He’s dragging his left leg, folks, he’s hopping on one foot!” And by then you were giggling considerably, but you got the ball to him finally, and he said, “Well, folks, that runner’s out!” It was beautiful to watch you two in the flickering shade.
I remember watching Louisa skipping rope in that street in
a bright red coat with her pigtails jumping in the cold. It was early spring, so she didn’t raise any dust to speak of. The trees were just budding their leaves. They still had that slight, brave look young trees have. I don’t know whose idea it was to plant 101
all these elms around town, but whoever it was did us a world of good. Old Boughton and I used to toss the ball of an evening under those same trees, till his joints began to bother him,
which was before he was into his forties, as I recall. His health has been another great trial for him. This Jack Boughton could be his father, to look at him.
I’m trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I’m trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I
had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course,
it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he
broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn’t. His hands and his face were black with ashhe looked charred, like one of the old martyrs—and he
knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from inside his shirt, and he did break it, that’s true, and gave
half to me and ate the other half himself. And it truly was
the bread of affliction, because everyone was poor then. There had been drought for a few years and times were hard. Though we didn’t notice it so much when they were hard for everybody. And I guess that must have been why no one minded
the rain. There had been so little of it. One thing I do always remember is how the women let their hair fall down and their 102
skirts trail in the mud, even the old women, as if none of
it mattered at all. And then the singing, which was very beautiful as I remember it, though I’m pretty sure it could not
have been. It would just rise up with the sound of the rain. “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” All the lovely, sad old tunes. The bitterness of that morsel has meant other things to me as the years passed. I have had many occasions to reflect on it.
It is not surprising that I remember that day as if my father had given me communion, taking that bread from his side and breaking it for me with his ashy hands. But it is strange that I remember receiving it the way I do, since it has never been our custom for the minister to place the bread in the communicant’s mouth, as they do in some churches. I think of this
because, on the morning of communion when your mother brought you forward and said, “You ought to give him some of that,” I broke the bread and fed a bit of it to you from my hand, just the way my father would not have done except in my memory. And I know what I wanted in that moment was to give you some version of that same memory, which has been very dear to me, though only now do I realize how often it has been in my mind.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.
Good old Isaac Watts. I’ve thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
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A thousand ages in Thy sight Are like ah evening gone …
No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do
end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admire, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.
I will tell you some more old stories. So much of what I know about those old days comes from the time my father and I spent wandering around togethe
r lost in Kansas. I don’t know if I ever actually cried, but I know I spent a lot of time trying not to. The soles of my shoes wore through and the dust and sticks and gravel came in and wore out my socks and got
to work on my feet. O the filth! O the blisters! Time weighs on children. They struggle just to get through church, as
you know. And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be. Once or twice I did sit down. I just sat there in the heat and the weeds with the grasshoppers flying around my head and watched him walk 104
away, and he’d keep walking till he was almost out of my sight, which is a long way in Kansas. Then I’d go running to catch up. He’d say, “You’re going to make yourself thirsty.” Well, it seemed to me I’d been thirsty half my life.
But the pleasant thing was that when I did stay alongside
him he would tell me remarkable things I’m pretty sure he would never have told me otherwise. If there was supper he’d tell stories to celebrate, and if there wasn’t supper he’d tell stories to make up for the lack of it. Once, some owls woke us
with that caviling they get into sometimes, and he told me the story of being awakened by sounds in the night and of walking outside and seeing old John Brown’s mule coming out through the doors of his father’s church, being coaxed down those wooden steps in the dark of the moon. He heard the noise of balking and a sad, grave voice saying, “Doing fine now. Doing just fine.” Then four horses after it, abrupt and agile, all with their saddles already cinched on. The men mounted, two men on one horse leading the other horse along behind them—one of the men was wounded and had to be held—and they
rode away without a word. Then, in a few minutes, he heard the barn door open and he heard their horse breathing and stepping and his father speaking to it, and then his father rode away, too.
He told me that he went up to the church and sat there in the dark, wondering what he should do. He wasn’t even ten years old at the time. He said the church smelled like horses and gunpowder and it smelled like sweat. (In those days they didn’t have bullets like the ones we have, so they’d have been using the time to load up their weapons with powder and shot.) They’d pushed the benches and the communion table against the walls to make room for the animals. No doubt the men had slept on the benches. Certainly the wounded man had, because there was a good deal of blood on one of them, 105
and on the floor beside it. My father said, “That was the first thing I saw when the light began to come.”
So he dragged that bench out back of the church and stood
it on end so it would fall into the deep grass on its side. That was to trouble the surface of the grass as little as possible. Then he took a shovel and a broom and cleaned up after the horses as well as he could. He got a bucket of water and a piece of soap to scrub down that bloodstain, but that just made it bigger. So he ended up sloshing water over the whole floor to make that spot less conspicuous. His thought was that if the men who slept in the church were being pursued, their pursuers might come at any time and they would be looking for
things like mule droppings in a church or blood on a pew. And of course they were things that would have to be seen to in any case, and especially since that was a Saturday.
But those same pursuers would surely be curious to find
him scrubbing out a church before the sun was well up. Then
it occurred to him how unlike his father it was to leave at such
a time, making no arrangements whatever for putting things right, leaving no instructions whatever for how they should be put right, leaving him to wander from his bed into this ridiculous situation, in which it seemed there was no right thing to
be done. He was thinking these things and lugging a bucket of water up into the church, and he saw a man in a U.S. Army uniform sitting there in the twilight on a bench against the wall, with his hat in his hands and his gun lying on the bench beside him.
“You’ve got it looking right nice in here,” the soldier said. Then he plucked at the ripped knee of his trousers and said, “My dang horse bolted on me. An owl hooted or something,
and off she went. You folks wouldn’t have a horse I could requisition. It would only be for a day or two.”
“You’d have to speak to my father.” 106
The soldier said, “Your father isn’t here. I’d guess he’s ridden off somewhere on the very horse I was hoping to borrow.” Then he said, “You heard of Osawatomie John Brown? Of course you have. Everybody has. I can see you’re a fine boy. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you go telling lies right here in a church, little brother. You know the kinds of things John Brown has been up to.”
My father said he had heard stories.
The soldier nodded. “There are decent folks around here who’d help him any chance they got. Ministers of the Gospel. They’d let him bring his old mule right into their church if
he asked them to. They’d deem it an honor. I find that remarkable. Those fugitives would come in with their weapons
and their wounds and their dirty boots, they’d come in bleeding on the floor, and that would be just fine. Then a soldier of
the United States government comes along looking for them, as he is paid to do, and nobody even offers him a cup of coffee.”
My father said, “We have coffee. I’m pretty sure we do.” The soldier stood up. He said, “My platoon left me about
two miles from here and took off east. They knew where those fellows would likely be off to next as soon as the moon was down. They didn’t have to find those road apples you left out there on the front step to get a general sense of the situation. So if your father’s gone with them, he might be seeing a world of trouble right about now.” He said, “I thought I should tell you that before I drank your coffee.”
My father said his lips were so numb he couldn’t move
them to speak. The soldier said, “I’ll just get myself a drink at your well.” And he walked out of the church and got his drink and walked away up the road, favoring that one leg a little. My father hated to believe he was the man my grandfather shot, but he did believe it. I don’t mean to suggest that he killed him 10 7
outright, but in those days in that place a man could die of a whole lot of things besides a bullet wound.
He had walked to the next farm and requisitioned their
horse and taken off in the general direction he thought his platoon had gone, though, if it was the same man, he drifted somewhat to the south of it. Brown and the others had circled back and to the south, knowing they would be followed and making for the hills. And my grandfather was ambling along toward home with that big gun in his belt and those two bloody shirts under his arm, which was very foolish. And he was bare-chested under his coat, since he had swapped his own shirt for the two he had brought back with him. But he was never really a practical man again after that day, my father said. I would not have known where to find the origins of his impracticality, but I am certainly willing to vouch for the fact of it. In any case, a lone soldier did approach him and did hail him down, and he was indeed riding a chestnut horse that could have been the neighbor’s. The soldier began to question him, and my grandfather was caught without a lie. But he had that gun, and the gun was loaded.
“Well, I did, I winged him,” my grandfather said. “Then
his horse bolted. He took quite a spill.” And he left him there
on the ground. “Old Brown asked if I’d be willing to cover
their retreat if occasion arose. I said I would, and I did.” He
said, “What was I to do with him, bring him back here?” His point was that the congregation had put a lot of thought and effort into hollow walls and hidden cellars in their various cabins and outbuildings, tunnels that started from false-bottomed potato bins and opened up under haystacks a hundred yards away and so fort
h. There was a false-bottomed coffin they
kept in the church, and an open grave with a floor of burlap stretched over a couple of boards and covered with dirt, opening on a tunnel that came up in the woodshed. All that effort
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was for freeing the captives, and it had to be protected for their sake. The soldier could only have concluded that my grandfather was in serious cahoots with John Brown, and attention of
that kind could destroy everything.
The old man told my father what had happened only because my father told him about finding the soldier in the
church. “Dark fellow, you say? Kind of a drawl to his speech?” He told my father that it was a mortally serious business, life and death. He should never speak a word about it to anyone,
and he should be ready with a lie in case someone came inquiring. So, waking and sleeping, he thought about that
wounded soldier by himself out there on the plains, and tried to imagine himself saying he had not seen such a man, had not spoken to him.
Well, the authorities never did come to talk to them about that soldier, so my father thought he probably had died out there. He said, “The relief I suffered every day they didn’t come was horrible.” Of course the odds are fairly high that the day of a man’s death will be the worst day of his life. But my father said, “When he told me the horse had bolted, my heart sank.” So there we were, lying in the loft of somebody’s barn they’d abandoned, hearing the owls, and hearing the mice, and
hearing the bats, and hearing the wind, with no notion at all when the dawn might come. My father said, “I never did forgive myself not going out there to look for him.” And I felt the
truth of that as I have never felt the truth of any other human utterance. He said, “It was the very next Sunday the old devil preached in one of those shirts, with that gun in his belt. And you would not have believed how the people responded, all the weeping there was, and the shouting.” And after that, he said,
his father would be gone for days sometimes. There were Sundays when he would ride his horse right up to the church steps
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