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by Marilynne Robinson

  Teddy said, “We’re here to apologize.”

  She nodded. “You trampled the field. I know that. He knows, too. I’ll tell him you have come.” She spoke up the stairs, perhaps in a foreign language, listened for a minute to nothing audible, and came back to them. “To destroy is a great shame,” she said. “To destroy for no reason.”

  Teddy said, “That is our field. I mean, my father does own it.”

  “Poor child!” she said. “You know no better than this, to speak of owning land when no use is made of it. Owning land just to keep it from others. That is all you learn from your father the priest! Mine, mine, mine! While he earns his money from the ignorance of the people!” She waved a slender arm and a small fist. “Telling his foolish lies again and again while everywhere the poor suffer!”

  They had never heard anyone speak this way before, certainly not to them or about them. She stared at them to drive her point home. There was convincing rage and righteousness in her eyes, watery blue as they were, and Jack laughed.

  “Oh yes,” she said, “I know who you are. The boy thief, the boy drunkard! While your father tells the people how to live! He deserves you!” Then, “Why so quiet? You have never heard the truth before?”

  Daniel, the oldest of them, said, “You shouldn’t talk that way. If you were a man, I’d probably have to hit you.”

  “Hah! Yes, you good Christians, you come into my house to threaten violence! I will report you to the sheriff. There is a little justice, even in America!” She waved her fist again.

  Jack laughed. He said, “It’s all right. Let’s go home.”

  And she said, “Yes, listen to your brother. He knows about the sheriff!”

  So they trooped out the door, which was slammed after them, and filed home in the evening light absorbing what they had heard. They agreed that the woman was crazy and her husband, too. Still, vengefulness stirred in them, and there was talk of breaking windows, letting air out of tires. Digging a pit so large and well concealed that the neighbor and his tractor would both fall in. And there would be spiders at the bottom, and snakes. And when he yelled for help they would lower a ladder with the rungs sawed through so that they would break under his weight. Ah, the terrible glee among the younger ones, while the older ones absorbed the fact that they had heard their family insulted and had done nothing about it.

  They walked into their own kitchen, and there were their mother and father, waiting to hear their report. They told them that they didn’t speak to the man, but the woman had yelled at them and had called their father a priest.

  “Well,” their mother said, “I hope you were polite.”

  They shrugged and looked at each other. Gracie said, “We just sort of stood there.”

  Jack said, “She was really mean. She even said you deserved me.”

  Her father’s eyes stung. He said, “Did she say that? Well now, that was kind of her. I will be sure to thank her. I hope I do deserve you, Jack. All of you, of course.” That tireless tenderness of his, and Jack’s unreadable quiet in the face of it.

  Mr. Trotsky planted potatoes and squash the next year, corn the year after that. A nephew of the rural cousin came to help him with his crop, and in time was given the use of the field and built a small house on one corner of it and brought a wife there, and they had children. More beds of marigolds, another flapping clothesline, another roof pitched under heaven to shelter human hope and frailty. The Boughtons tacitly ceded all claim.

  WITHIN WEEKS OF HER RETURN GLORY AND HER FATHER had settled into a tolerable life of its kind. The housekeeper, Mrs. Blank, who was a number of years older than her father, was happy to retire, now that she knew she was leaving the Reverend in good hands. Customary attentions to her father by neighbors and parishioners were bated, stealthy when they happened at all. Glory could feel how miraculous and temporary the cessation was. It was as if some signal had been given, as if a sea had parted and the waters were standing back like walls. Once when they were children her sister Grace, pondering at the dinner table, said she did not know how such a thing could have happened, that water could simply stand still like that, and Glory, who had turned this question over in her mind, said it would have been like aspic. She had not meant to explain the miracle, only to describe its effect. But everyone at the table laughed at her. Jack, too. She had sometimes felt he took more pity on her youth than the others did. So she noticed and remembered that he laughed. All the same, it had seemed to her, laugh as they might, that sticking a finger into a wall of stopped water could not differ essentially from sticking it into a molded salad—which she had occasion to do, being a minister’s daughter, any number of times. She was caught at it more than once. But she thought it was inevitable that out of all those multitudes one Israelite or Egyptian must have made the same experiment, and that touching a fish in those circumstances could not differ greatly from touching a slice of banana. What a strange thing to remember. It came with being home.

  Every day she swept and straightened—light work, since the house was virtually uninhabited. She did what little her father required to make him comfortable. He sat at the window, he sat in the porch, he ate crackers and drank milk and studied the newspaper and The Saturday Evening Post. She read them, too, and whatever else she could find. Sometimes she listened to the radio, if there was an opera or a drama, or if she just wanted to hear a human voice. The big old radio grew warm and gave off an odor like rancid hair tonic. It reminded her of a nervous salesman. And it made a sullen hiss and sputter if she moved away from it. It was the kind of bad companion loneliness makes welcome. A lesson in the success of clumsy courtship, the tenacity of bad marriage. She blamed and forgave it for its obsession with “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and Ravel’s “Boléro.” To appease the radio she sat beside it while she read. She even thought of taking up needlework. She might try knitting again, bigger, simpler things. Her first attempts were a baby sweater and bonnet. Nothing had come of that. It had alarmed her mother, though. She said, “Glory, you take things too much to heart.” That was what they always said about her. Hope was serene, Luke was generous, Teddy was brilliant, Jack was Jack, Grace was musical, and Glory took everything to heart. She wished they had told her how to do otherwise, what else she should have done.

  She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family. When she was four she had wept for three days over the death of a dog in a radio play. Every time she teared up a little, her brothers and sisters remembered how she had sobbed over Heidi and Bambi and the Babes in the Woods. Which they read to her dozens of times. As if there were any other point to those stories after all but to elicit childish grief. It really was irritating, and there was nothing to be done about it. She had learned to compose her face, so that from a distance she would not necessarily seem to be weeping, and then they made a little game of catching her at it—tears, they would say. Ah, tears. She thought how considerate it would have been of nature to allow the venting of feeling through the palm of a hand or even the sole of a foot.

  When she was small she had confused, in fact fused, the words “secret” and “sacred.” In church you must not even whisper. There are words you must never say. There are things that will be explained to you when you are old enough to understand. She had whispered compulsively, in church and out. Her big sisters would say, This is a secret. You must never ever tell, promise you’ll never tell. Cross your heart. Then they would murmur in her ear something meaningless or obvious or entirely untrue and watch her suffer with the burden of it for ten or fifteen minutes. The joke was that she could not keep a secret, that she would whisper behind a cupped hand into the first obliging ear whatever remained of the nonsense confided to her. But “hope to die” and “if I die before I wake” also became linked in her mind, aware as she was that she broke her vows constant
ly. Once, when she was still too young for school and Jack ought to have been in school but was not, she saw him out in the orchard, and she went to him, weeping with what had become an unbearable fear. He looked at her and smiled and said, “Damnit, kid, grow up.” Then he said, “Are you going to tell on me? Are you going to get me in trouble?” She did not. That was the first secret she kept. It seemed to her she had learned honor then, perhaps simply because she was of an age and predisposed. Perhaps in the whole of her life she had never really distinguished the secret from the sacred, and loved tact and discretion better than she should. Well, in all this she may only have been a Boughton, after all.

  But at thirty-eight she was still wary of country songs and human interest stories. She was wary indeed of certain thoughts, certain memories, because her father could not bear her unhappiness. His face fell when he saw any sign of it. So she did not permit herself to brood, strong as the urge was sometimes. It would make him miserable.

  Her parents had watched her and worried over her in the days of what were, insofar as they might ever know, Jack’s crowning disgrace, and they considered her feelings with a seriousness that interested her. Her feelings were largely untried then. She was about to enter her sixteenth year of gentle life in a quiet place, which meant only that her passions and convictions were uncomplicated and potent, that they strove together like figures in allegory. Truth must be stalwart, Loyalty absolute, Generosity unstinting, while Appearance and Convention were children of the giant Hypocrisy and must be put to flight. She had not had time or occasion to think far into the implications of loyalty or generosity. She really had no idea what she was thinking about, sheltered as she was. How it had happened that Jack had a child, for example. It seemed to her to be a fairly delightful thing, though this was an opinion she kept to herself. She knew from books and also from fragments of rumors on the same general subject that she was wrong to take so simple a view of the matter. Her parents really were the last people on earth to weep and whisper over the birth of a grandchild, and she knew she needed to find some way to take their sorrow into account. So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this was sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism. But the chain of transmission was broken when Grace left to live with Hope in Minneapolis, and her parents had forgotten the problem, having so long depended on their children to startle one another with this information.

  Her parents were, in their way, fully as innocent as she was, having put aside their innocence on practical grounds, not in the belief that it had been discredited, but because they accepted the terms of life in this world as a treaty to be preferred to conflict, though by no means ideal in itself. Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. They had learned that excessive devotion to even the highest things seemed and probably was sanctimonious, and that the one sufficient measure of excess was that look of annoyance, confirmed in themselves by a twinge of embarrassment, that meant the line had been crossed. They recognized grace in the readiness of the darkest sinner to take a little joke, a few self-effacing words, as an apology. This was something her father in particular, who was morally strenuous but sociable, too, had learned to appreciate cordially. Truly there were perils on every side in the pastoral life, and her father was wary of them all. With the dreadful rigor of an upright child Glory had noted and pondered his accommodations, however minor or defensible. This was in part an effect of her finding herself in a suddenly quiet house with only her parents to think about.

  Still, Glory’s view of things had an authority for them precisely because it was naïve. A baby is a splendid gift of God, after all. Her father had never christened one without saying those words. And if Jack had behaved disgracefully toward its mother—“She is so young, so young!” her father whispered—this did not alter the basic fact that the infant was a child of the family, deserving of welcome and embrace. Glory had really not understood why misery was any important part of her parents’ response to the situation. The girl could not have been much younger than Glory herself, and she was fairly sure she would not have minded having a baby. Imbecile as she was then with loneliness and youth, and far as she was from understanding why her father should feel that arrogance had a part in it all, or cruelty. Or why he whispered those words with such bitter emphasis. Every Sunday when the boys were home her father would stand at the front of the church, waiting for the pews to fill. Her brothers would file in, three of them, and her father would wait a moment more, watching the doorway, glancing up at the balcony. Then his head would fall to one side, regret and forgiveness in one gesture. Sometimes, rarely, he would nod to himself and smile, and then they knew that Jack was there, and that the sermon would be about joy and the goodness of God no matter what the text was. She had never heard her father say such hard words—the cruelty of it! the arrogance!—and she had never seen him brood and mutter for days at a time, as if he were absorbing the fact that some transgressions are beyond a mere mortal’s capacity to forgive. How often those same hard, necessary words had come to her mind.

  But in those days their lives were lived so publicly, it had seemed to her they might as well just acknowledge what everyone would have known in any case. She had never had any reason to think her parents had other intentions, but she might have helped them, she thought, by giving them herself to worry about. They both believed firmly in the power of example. This would be a great act of moral instruction. They must act consistently with their faith. They must consider all its applications in the present circumstance. Yes! She watched as her father mustered his courage. “The Lord has been very good to me!” he said, reminding himself that his obligations were correspondingly great, in fact limitless. This was a thought he always found exhilarating. Jack had left his car keys on the piano and taken the train back to college. She was almost old enough to drive, and she was fairly sure she knew how it was done. So she took her father out into the country to see that baby. It was disturbing to remember how happy she had been then, in the very middle of his deepest grief.

  It was being home that made her remember, being alone in all that silence, or sitting beside the irksome radio trying to read the book she had chosen as possibly least unreadable among the hundreds of old books in the scores of shelves and bookcases that narrowed the overfurnished rooms. “Saber Dance,” of course. “The 1812 Overture.” This is Gabriel Heatter with the news. Her father would rouse himself from time to time for a game of checkers or Monopoly. This was for her sake. In her childhood, when she was kept home in bed by chicken pox, measles, and mumps, or by the flu, her father came up to her room with a bag of mints and a bottle of ginger ale and the Monopoly set, and played a brief and hilarious game with her, pulling get-out-of-jail cards from his sleeves, losing his token in the bedspread and finding it behind her ear. Now from time to time he cheated for her benefit. He would slyly stop just short of landing on Boardwalk, when he had plenty of money to buy it and already owned Park Place. It made her sad. On the same grounds he was not to be trusted with the bank.

  When he sat on the porch in the afternoons she worked in the garden. Those hours passed pleasantly. She cleared out patches she could break up well enough to plant with peas and lettuce.

  But oh, the evenings were long. I am thirty-eight years old, she would say to herself, as she tidied up after supper. I have a master’s degree. I taught high school English for thirteen years. I was a good teacher. What have I done with my life? What has become of it? It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house. Of course plain, respectable dresses hung in her closet, suitable for the classroom. There were the cardigans and low-heeled shoes of that other life. No reason not to wear them.

  She dreamed sometimes that she was back in school. She was a child pretending to teach, or a teacher who realized to her
embarrassment that she was turning into a child. In both dreams she had no idea what she was talking about and invented desperately. She sensed smirking and resentment in the room, murmurs and odd looks. The students would all walk out, ignoring her, and there was nothing to say to them to make them stay. Such humiliation! She would shout over the laughter and the clash of locker doors and wake herself up in crickety, black Gilead. Better in its way than waking up in Des Moines, knowing she would be in her classroom again when morning came. Her dreams reminded her that she did not altogether love teaching, though by daylight she thought she did. That stab in the heart she felt when she woke, and the panicky doubt that her life was in her grasp, not fraud or failure, not entirely—that was a brief misery and one she could set aside by putting the light on and reading for a while. She used to ask herself, What more could I wish? But she always distrusted that question, because she knew there were limits to her experience that precluded her knowing what there was to be wished.

  If she had been a man she might have chosen the ministry. That would have pleased her father. Luke had followed him, but only after it became clear that Dan would not. Jack was by then Jack, and Teddy was too young to shoulder anyone’s hopes, however willingly he might have made the attempt. She seemed always to have known that, to their father’s mind, the world’s great work was the business of men, of gentle, serious men well versed in Scripture and eloquent at prayer, or, in any case, ordained in some reasonably respectable denomination. They were the stewards of ultimate things. Women were creatures of a second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored. This was not a thing her father would ever have said to her. It was Hope who told her that clergy were only and always men, excepting Aimee Semple McPherson, who proved the rule. But she knew how things were before she was told. No bright child could fail to know. None of this had mattered much through all the years of her studies and her teaching, but now, in the middle of any night, it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness. Darkness visible. That was Milton.