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by Marilynne Robinson

  IN THE AFTERNOON SHE WENT OUT TO WORK IN THE GARden. She had planted peas and pole beans and tomatoes and squash and spinach. Rabbits were a problem, and groundhogs. Still, the futility of it all was not yet absolute. She would have had to ask someone to put up some sort of fence, and that would involve talking to someone, which she preferred not to do.

  And after a few minutes there was Jack, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the garden, smoking a cigarette. He said, “I thought maybe you could put me to work out here.”

  “Sure. I mean, you can put yourself to work. There’s so much that needs to be done. Well, you can see that. Mama had iris beds right up the hill—”

  “I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”

  “I just meant that might be a place to start. They’re so overgrown. Of course you used to live here.”

  “—Strange as it seems—” He said it as if he were completing her thought, or sharing it.

  They heard voices from the street, and a look of alarm or irritation passed over his face. Then he saw that it was a young man and a child passing by, taking no notice of them.

  She said, “That’s Donny McIntire’s son. And his grandson. You might remember him. He was Luke’s age.”

  “And good old Reverend Ames has a boy of his own, I understand.”

  “Yes, he does. And a wife. Marriage seems to agree with him.”

  He said, “What did people think of all that?”

  “I guess there was some talk. But who could begrudge him. Papa has felt a little neglected. He and Ames used to spend so much time together.”

  Jack dropped the butt of his cigarette and stepped on it. “I’d better make myself useful,” he said, and went off to stand among the irises in his urban shoes and a fairly respectable white shirt with the creases of folding in it and light another cigarette. Their father came out to his chair on the porch, a project for him, a painful business. Now, with Jack there, he avoided help when he could, toiling dangerously up the stairs to shave himself with an unsteady hand. There was nothing to be done except to listen for the sounds of emergency and pray, and ignore the scruff of hair at the back of his head where his comb didn’t reach. From his chair in the porch he could look out on the garden.

  Jack stooped to pull a clump of weeds and tossed it aside, and pulled another one and tossed it. Then he went to the shed behind the house to find a spade. When he came back, he said, “That DeSoto in the barn isn’t yours. It’s been there too long.”

  “No, one of the boys left it for Papa. But he never really did start driving. I guess he had a license for a while. Years ago.”

  “It looks like a decent car.”

  “I tried to start it once.”

  “You left the keys in the ignition.”

  She nodded. “No safer place in the world for them.”

  “Well,” he said, “a little gas in the tank might change that. A little water in the radiator. Some air in the tires. I wiped off the windshield to make the thing look less—humiliated. I thought I might roll it out into daylight for a couple of hours so I could get a better look under the hood. If that’s all right.”

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would object.”

  He nodded. “I wanted to be sure.” When he was done with his cigarette he began breaking up the ground.

  He used to live here, and he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and the pride of that life, by local reckoning. But he spaded between the rows of irises and he was businesslike about it, too. He had rolled up his sleeves.

  SHE HEARD HER FATHER CALL OUT, “SUPPER, JACK!” WHICH WAS an opinion he had formed on his own, since it was 4:15 and she had not begun to prepare anything. But Jack stood the spade in the ground and paused for a minute, looking at his hand. He walked to the porch, looking at it, and she heard her father say, “Let’s see! Oh yes, yes! Glory will take care of that! Glory? He has a splinter here. From that old spade handle! I don’t know how long we’ve had that spade! I should have said something! Glory?”

  Jack said, “If I can borrow a needle, I can take care of it, I think.”

  “No, no. That’s pretty deep, Jack!”

  Her father’s face was animated with concern. He held to the wrist of Jack’s upturned hand and almost hurried along beside him. “We’ll put some iodine on that!”

  Glory said, “You can wash up and I’ll disinfect a needle.”

  “I’ll get the iodine!” the old man said, and launched a determined assault on the staircase.

  Jack looked at her. “It’s just a splinter.”

  She said, “Not much happens around here,” and he laughed.

  She had made him laugh twice. She took a certain satisfaction in the joke about the towel, but in order to laugh at this little remark he must be feeling pretty kindly toward her, she thought. He was never one to laugh when you hoped he would, when other people would. In those old days, that is. He was a restless, distant, difficult boy, then twenty years passed with hardly a word from him, and now here he was in her kitchen, offering her his wounded hand, still damp with washing, smelling like lavender and lye. They sat at the table and she took his hand to steady it. A slender hand, still unsteady, with a few blisters rising on it from the work he had done that morning. Cigarette stains.

  He noticed her scrutiny. “Do you read palms?” he asked.

  “No. But if I did, I would say that you have a splinter through your lifeline.”

  He laughed. “I believe you may have found your calling.”

  She put the needle down. “I’m afraid to do this. It might actually hurt. And your hand is trembling.”

  “Well, if that one is, so is the other one. I could do myself harm if I tried it, I suppose.”

  “All right. Stay as still as you can.” She thought, If he really were a stranger, this would not seem so odd to me. She could hear his breathing. She could see the blue traces of blood under the white skin of his wrist. “Just a second—there.” She extracted the splinter easily enough.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The cane and the creaky railing and the hard, slippery shoes, and their father hurried into the kitchen with a bottle of iodine and a spool of gauze.

  “Yes, you’ll want to wash it and dry it again,” he said. Then he daubed iodine here and there, finally where it should have been.

  Jack said, “Ow,” for old times’ sake, by the sound of it.

  “Yes, but it is very effective!” Her father was afire with solicitude. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door and stood there, purposive. “Supper!” he said. “I believe the pies are missing!”

  Glory said, “They were so old I put them over the fence for the Dahlbergs’ dogs.”

  “You did? The way things go around here, it might be time to invest in a dog of our own!”

  Jack laughed, and his father smiled at him and patted his arm and said, “Well, that’s wonderful! That’s what I like to hear!”

  Someone had left sliced ham and a macaroni salad in the porch the day before, one of those kindly reminders that nothing passed in their household unnoticed. The grace was exuberant—“Our hearts are much too full!” the old man said, and sank into that reverie prayer had become for him.

  Through supper Jack was patiently restless, hearing out his father’s attempts at conversation—“Yes, this was a very different town at one time, when we were still on the main road! There were people passing through. You wouldn’t remember the old hotel. We thought it was very fine. It had a big veranda and a ballroom—” He grew ruefully excited, pondering the Gilead that was, and Jack watched him with the expression of mild impassivity he wore now that the embarrassments of his arrival were more or less behind him. She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to Jack. So l
ittle in his childhood and youth could be mentioned without discomfort, his twenty-year silence was his to speak about if he chose to, but they were prepared to appreciate his discretion if any account of it might have caused more discomfort still. Then there was the question “Why are you here?” which they would never ask. Glory thought, Why am I here? How cruel it would be to ask me that.

  When his father began to weary with the effort of talk—“Yes, yes,” he said, “yes”—Jack cleared away the dishes and then he said, “Sir,” and took his father’s arm and helped him up from the table, a thing the old man never let Glory do, and he took him to the chair in his room where he napped. He helped him out of his jacket and opened his collar and loosened his tie. Then he knelt and removed his shoes. “That old quilt—” his father said, and Jack took it from the foot of the bed and spread it over him. The manner of his doing all these things, things she had done every day for months, suggested courtesy rather than kindness, as if it were a tribute to his father’s age rather than a concession to it. And she could see how her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind.

  She did her best.

  THE BOYS CALLED THEIR FATHER SIR, BUT THE GIRLS never did. Behind his back the boys called him the Reverend, or the Old Gent, but the girls always said Papa. Jack, can you tell me why you have done whatever you did, acted however you did? No, sir. You can’t explain it, Jack? No, sir. That courtesy was his shield and concealment. It was his courage. His father would never raise a hand against it, would seldom raise his voice. You do understand that what you did was wrong. Yes, sir, I understand that. Will you pray for a better conscience, better judgment, Jack? No, sir, I doubt that I will. Well, I’ll pray for you then. Thank you, sir.

  When Jack helped his father from his chair, it was with that same courtesy, and she could see that his father’s pleasure was partly in the surprise of recognition, as of an old promise kept, an old debt remembered. Mama had said, “That boy has you wrapped around his finger!” And her father had said, “I just don’t want us to lose him.” That was before her parents realized she listened and, after a fashion, understood. Hearing words like these between her parents had nerved her to say to him, “What right do you have—” and had given her that glimpse of fear she still remembered. He must have thought he knew where she had learned that question, that inflection. She remembered standing there feet planted, arms akimbo. Poor, stupid child. Because she was the youngest, they forgot she was too old to be allowed to overhear. Then whenever he was gone she knew they might have lost him. “Go away, Glory,” he would say if she tried to tag after him. “Please just go away.”

  While Jack settled his father for his nap, Glory stood in the hall, watching. It was beautiful to see, the old man making not one sound of discomfort, soothed by the gracefulness of Jack’s attention, tucked in like a weary child.

  AT DUSK JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS IN HIS SUIT AND TIE. “Back in a bit,” he said. He paused on the steps to put his hat on and adjust it, and then he walked down the road toward town. Her father stirred when he heard the door closing. He called, “Did Jack go out?”

  “He said he’d be right back.” After an hour Glory went up to his room, just to see if by some means he had gathered his few effects and slipped them out of the house, but they were there where he had put them, shirts in the closet, books on the dresser. Of course she did not turn on the light, since he might see it from the road. And of course she heard the front door open as she stood there. She crept down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the water. He came up the stairs and paused in the hallway. Then she heard him flip on the light in his room. The door had been standing ajar, she remembered. And had she left it open? Did he look for signs that someone had come into his room? He did that when they were children. Someone! Who could it be but me, she thought.

  All those years ago her father had said, “I’m afraid we might lose him.” And here he is again, leaving the house for an hour, and by the end of it the old man is too anxious to sit still and she is prowling in his room, intruding on his privacy—when if there was one thing on earth she was eager to concede to him or to anyone it was privacy! It was amazing. Her whole life long that house was either where Jack might not be or where he was not. Why did he leave? Where had he gone? Those questions had hung in the air for twenty years while everyone tried to ignore them, had tried to act as if their own lives were of sufficient interest to distract them from the fact that few letters came, that at Christmas there was again no phone call, that their father seemed bent under the weight of an anxiety time only increased. They were so afraid they would lose him, and then they had lost him, and that was the story of their family, no matter how warm and fruitful and robust it might have appeared to the outside world.

  What had she thought? That he had dropped his suitcase out the window, absconding like someone trying to cheat the landlord? Why would he do that? But why did he do anything—come home, for example? She heard him go downstairs again, and she heard her father say, “Yes, yes, we were beginning to miss you, Jack! Glory’s around here somewhere—” So she went down to the kitchen and there he was, studying the wound in his hand.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  “Mending nicely, thanks.” His glance was mild, unreadable. “I was out looking the place over. What do people do for work around here?”

  “Well, that’s a good question,” she said. “Aside from farming, there’s the grocery store and the dry-goods store and the barbershop and the gas station and the bank.”

  “Teachers are always needed!” the old man shouted from his chair, and Jack said, “I guess I’d better bring him in here, hadn’t I.”

  His father was already halfway down the hall, but he let Jack take his arm. He even handed him his cane, as if all caution and struggle ended when he had Jack to lean on. “Yes!” he said. “I have never known it to be true that an educated man could not find work as a schoolteacher! There are more children every day! I notice them everywhere!” Jack helped him into his place at the table. “They pass by in the street!” he said, as if he thought he might have weakened his case by overstating it.

  Jack gave him a glass of water. “I don’t really think I’m cut out to be a schoolteacher,” he said.

  “Well, I hope you’ll give it some thought!”

  “Yes, sir, I will. Is this today’s newspaper?”

  His father said, “Yesterday’s, I believe. Not that it makes much difference. I put it aside because I didn’t quite finish the crossword puzzle.”

  “Good. I’ll read my horoscope. I’ve sort of forgotten what I did yesterday. Here. It says new enterprises are favored. I guess I missed my chance.”

  “That’s the only thing it ever says! That’s probably what mine says!”

  “Yes, sir, it is. We have the same sign. And here’s yours, Glory. ‘Curiosity is not always welcome. Consider self-restraint.’” He smiled at her, folded the paper, and tucked it under his arm.

  She felt herself blush hotly and, she knew, visibly. But he looked away from her quickly enough, almost, to make her believe he had not meant to embarrass her. Maybe the horoscope was real after all. She decided it was better to assume it was real, because if she took offense she would be confessing, and seeming to confess to worse by far than she had done, not that there was anything wrong with what she had done. And if she found out it was not real, that he was taunting her, everything would only be harder. That was the decision of the moment, and when she considered it afterward, she was grateful to herself for having made it. Consider self-restraint indeed, when she bit her tongue twenty times a day. All she had wanted when she stepped into his room was to know whether she had to begin hinting to her poor old father that Jack was gone again. It was not her fault that so ridiculous a fear was justified. And she did not intend to notice now that nothing suggested he had been drinking.

  “I believe I’ll go out for a little walk,” she said. It was late enough to have mad
e her father worry, if he had been paying attention. But he was consulting with Jack about the crossword puzzle.

  She was afraid to be angry, and that made her angry. What right did he have to take over the house this way? Granting he had as much claim to it as she did, the only difference being that she had spent some months caring for the house and her father before he arrived. Now he seemed inclined to help with the old man, too, and he did it well, and as if something were communicated in it that made it more a gracious ceremony than the acting out of duty or obligation. A tacit agreement had formed between the two men that Jack would help his father with the bathing and changing that had been the uneasiest part of her caring for him, and that was a great relief, since he had been reluctant to accept the attention he needed. The fact was that she had taken comfort from the thought that her duty was plain and that a sense of obligation was becoming in anyone and so on. But things were better with Jack in the house.