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by Marilynne Robinson

  Jack was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Ames seems to have a lot of respect for him.”

  His father said, “The old settlers, you know, the old families, they used to tell stories they thought were just wonderful, and then I think they began to realize that the world had changed and maybe they should reconsider a few things. It’s taken them awhile. Ames was pretty embarrassed about the old fellow while he lived. Always talking with Jesus. I suppose he didn’t tell you about that.”

  “He told me. He told me the story about his grandfather leaving Maine for Kansas because he had a dream that Jesus came to him as a slave and showed him how the chains rankled his flesh. I’d heard the story before, of course. I always thought it sounded enviable. I mean, to have that kind of certainty. It’s hard to imagine. Hard for me to imagine.”

  “Certainty can be dangerous,” the old man said.

  “Yes, sir. I know. But if Jesus is—Jesus, it seems as though he might have shown someone his chains. I mean, in that situation.”

  “You might be right, Jack. I’m sure Ames would agree. But when you see where we are now, still trying to settle these things with violence, I don’t know. Live by the sword and die by the sword.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “The protests in Montgomery are nonviolent.”

  The old man said, “But they provoke violence. It’s all provocation.”

  There was a long silence. Then Jack said, “This week I will go to church. I will definitely go to church.”

  “That’s wonderful, Jack. Yes.”

  He helped his father to bed, and then he came into the kitchen. “You were right,” he said. “It was fine. I said the grace. I’d practiced this time. I was polite, I believe, and I didn’t talk enough to get myself in trouble. I don’t think I did. I’m not saying anything changed, but it wasn’t a disaster. Macaroni and cheese. I cleaned my plate.” He laughed.

  THEN JACK TOOK THE AMESES SOME EARLY APPLES, AND some plums he said could be ripened on a windowsill, and he played a little catch with the boy, and he even helped Lila move the Reverend’s desk and some of his books down to the parlor so that he would not have to deal with the stairs. “Very neighborly,” he said. “Friend-like.”

  Glory had no reason for concern about all this, except that Jack was intent on it. He seemed to have invested so much calculation in it that it bordered on hope, now that the Reverend and his family had warmed to him a little. Dear God, she thought. They are the kindest people on earth. Why should I worry? She had talked him into trusting them, which would have been entirely reasonable in any other circumstance. But his reservations were the fruit of his experience, and his experience was the fruit of his being Jack, always Jack, despite these sporadic and intense attempts at escape, at being otherwise. Dear God in heaven, no one could know as well as he did that for him caution was always necessary.

  Sunday came and Jack rose early, loitered in the kitchen drinking coffee, refused breakfast, brushed his suit and his hat. He came downstairs at a quarter to ten looking as respectable as he ever did, tipped his hat, and walked out the door. She got her father up and brought him into the kitchen, where he lingered over his eggs and toast, then over the newspaper, then over a Christian Century he had read weeks before, then over the Bible. Finally he fell into that sleep or prayer that was his refuge in times of high emotion. At two o’clock Jack still had not come home, so she told her sleeping father that she was going out to look around a little and he nodded, abruptly, as if to say it was high time. She couldn’t hunt her brother down as if he were a lost child, or an incompetent of some kind. There was nothing he, therefore she, dreaded more than the possibility that he might be embarrassed in any way that could be anticipated and avoided. Enough that there was an incandescence of unease about him whenever he walked out the door or, for that matter, whenever his father summoned him to one of those harrowing conversations. Or while he waited for the mail or watched the news.

  She went to the barn and there he was, in the driver’s seat of the DeSoto, with his head tipped back and his hat over his eyes. She tapped on the window, and he roused himself and smiled at her, an effort. Then he reached over and opened the passenger door. “Hop in,” he said. “I was just collecting myself. Couldn’t face your papa quite yet.” Then he said, “Ah, little sister, these old fellows play rough. They look so harmless, and the next thing you know, you’re counting broken bones again.”

  “What happened?”

  “He preached. The text was Hagar and Ishmael, the application was the disgraceful abandonment of children by their fathers. And the illustration was my humble self, sitting there beside his son with the eyes of Gilead upon me. I think I was aghast. His intention, no doubt. To appall me, that is, to turn me white, as I am sure he did. Whiter.”

  “Well,” she said, “I find this hard to believe. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Yes, yes, such a kind old man. I don’t think I’ll be asking your advice any time soon, Pigtails.” He laughed. “I left through the chancel. I had half a mind to pull my jacket up over my head.” Then he said, “Sweet Jesus, I am tired. And now you’re crying. Don’t do that, please.”

  “It’s just tears,” she said. “They don’t matter. I’ll leave you alone if you want me to.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t do that either. Maybe you can help me sort this out.”

  There was a silence.

  “Well, for one thing,” she said, “I know he wouldn’t have mentioned you by name. He would never do that.”

  “He didn’t say, ‘Jack Boughton, the notorious sinner in the first pew. The gasoline-scented fellow.’ That’s correct.”

  “And he’d have prepared his sermon days ago. I’m sure he had no idea you would be there this morning.”

  “Excellent point. In fact, I thought of that myself. But through the worst of it he wasn’t even speaking from notes, Glory. The old devil was extemporizing. Very effectively, I might add, for a man of his age. Anyway, I would have been on his mind while he worked on it. All that ingratiating behavior just beneath his window.” He laughed. Then he said, “Don’t cry.” He produced a handkerchief from the breast pocket in which he also carried the little leather case. One of her father’s beautiful handkerchiefs.

  She said, “I’ll never forgive him.”

  He looked at her. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

  “I mean it. It could be senility, I suppose. I still won’t forgive him. He was always like a father to me.”

  “It’s sad.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  Jack drew a long breath. “Consider our situation, Glory. Two middle-aged people in decent health, sane and civilized, generally well disposed toward the world—perhaps I am only speaking for myself here—sitting in an abandoned DeSoto in an empty barn, Snowflake not far from our thoughts, pondering one more thoroughly predictable and essentially meaningless defeat. Does this strike you as odd?”

  She laughed. “It’s just ridiculous.”

  “I had no plans when I left Gilead,” he said. “Survival on terms I could convince myself were tolerable. That was the pinnacle of my aspirations. I did not anticipate failure. I have awakened in the occasional gutter from time to time—figuratively speaking, of course—and I have thought to myself, Just a little effort would improve my situation dramatically. So there was that optimism. It may have been youth.”

  “You were all right for ten years.”

  “Almost ten. Seven and a half, if we are speaking of sobriety. Nine and a half, if the measure is a sometimes pleasurable engagement with life.”

  “Della.”

  “Della.”

  They were quiet for a while.

  He said, “I used to think we might slip into Gilead under cover of night, throw a little gravel at Ames’s window, say our I-do’s, get his blessing. Or at least his signature—”

  “You’d have asked Ames to marry you?”

  He shrugged. “He’s always awake at odd hours.”

 
; “You’d have tipped your hat to the family homestead on the way out of town, I suppose.”

  “No doubt. I never really thought through the fine points. I’m sure I would have tipped my hat.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  Then he said, “I came back thinking we might be able to make a life here, she and I. Why did I think that? I came here because everything had fallen to pieces and she had run off to her family.” He looked at her. “I wasn’t particularly at fault. I personally. Don’t get the wrong idea. But I was clutching at a straw, coming to Gilead. No doubt about that. I’ve had some experience with them. Straws.”

  He looked at her sidelong. Bemused, worldly, sad, spent.

  “You’ve never just talked to Papa about this.”

  He laughed. “Some things are sacred, Glory. You’ve never talked to him about old Love Letters.” Then he said, “Our father is not a man of the world, shall we say, but he would no doubt assume that a nine-year relationship with my sullied self might have involved some degree of—cohabitation. I hope I haven’t offended you.” He glanced at her. “He might, never meaning to, only by implication, cast an aspersion. I don’t know how I would deal with that. I’m trying to stay sober.”

  She said, “How do you know I didn’t do that? Cohabit.”

  He said, very gently, “Call it a wild guess.”

  Condescension, she thought. But kindly meant. Brotherly.

  He said, “I don’t recommend it. There are laws. A person could end up with the cops at his door.” He smiled.

  “Sorry.” Poor Jack.

  The truth was, she wished there had been more to her endless supposed engagement. That there was not her fiancé’s extremely scrupulous respect for her to, in retrospect, embitter her sense of the fraudulence of it all. Still, she wished she had the letters back, and the ring. Sacred, she thought. Strange to think of it that way. Time and again she had read through the half dozen letters that moved her, and even they sometimes seemed so commonplace that it frightened her, as if a precious thing had been lost and she could not find it, search as she might. Then she would notice a phrase, something about loneliness or weariness or the view from a train window, the intimacy of the ordinary, and her heart would stir. She had ticked the margins beside these lines to spare herself the vertiginous sense that there was nothing in the letters at all worth cherishing, and then when she looked at them again she could not always see why she had chosen these passages, and again she would be frightened. He was at the center of her life, and who was he, after all? Why did it comfort her to trust him? The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for her, and that if she did not find it, she would read them again. When she thought of them, she put aside all bitterness and folly and disillusionment, as no one else ever could, no one who listened to her with compassion. Sympathy would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe for her.

  She said, “I’ve wondered if it might not be easier to be somewhere else. Where my life would be my own, at least.”

  “My thought, too. And I gave somewhere else a pretty good try. Now I’m home again in Iowa, the shining star of radicalism. It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.”

  She said, “Well, Iowa is a pretty big state.”

  He laughed. “Yes, why am I here when I might be in Ankeny? Ottumwa?”

  “That strikes me as a fair question.”

  “Maybe because I have no sister there.”

  “I’d visit.”

  He nodded. “Kind of you.” Then he said, “I knew I would need help. I thought the old gent might help me, but I didn’t realize—that he was so old. I couldn’t find work on my own. So I decided to place my hopes in the kindly Reverend Ames. Which brings us to the present moment.” Then he said, “And I just wanted to come home. Even if I couldn’t stay. I wanted to see the place. I wanted to see my father. I was—bewildered, I suppose.” He laughed. “I was scared to come home. It was as much as I could do to get on the bus. And stay on it. I was largely successful at that, all in all. Too bad. Too bad for the old man. It’s amazing to me that I can still disappoint him. I knew I would.” He touched the scar beneath his eye.

  “Well,” she said, “he’s worried. I left him at the kitchen table. He’s probably uncomfortable. I should go inside.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  “What should I tell him?”

  “Oh, let me think. Tell him my life is endless pain and difficulty for reasons that are no doubt apparent to anyone I pass on the street but obscure to me, and that I am flummoxed and sitting in the DeSoto but will probably be in for supper.”

  “It would be simpler if you just came inside with me now.”

  He sighed. “No doubt you’re right. And I do know why my life is the way it is, Glory. I was joking about that. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t. I’m fresh from a sermon on the subject.” He glanced at her.

  Glory said, “I’ll never forgive him.”

  Jack said, “Thank you. I’m touched.” Then he said, “I’ll forgive him. Maybe I’ve forgiven him already.” When she looked at him he shrugged and said, “He might take it as a sign of character. It might look like generosity or humility or something. Anyway, neither one of us can risk upsetting the old man by holding a grudge against Ames. I mean, one that he or Ames might be aware of.” He said, “I have thought this over pretty carefully. Either my manly pride insists that I confront him, which even I would not descend to. Or it obliges me to leave town—in a huff of some kind to avoid that whipped-cur impression even I dread. Or else I seize upon the only undamaging choice left to me. Which might also have the look of virtue, I believe.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to forgive him, too.”

  “I would appreciate that. It would make things easier.”

  They walked up to the house together. Their father was still at the table, a little fierce with the tedium of his situation, which had compounded his anxiety. “Ah, there you are!” he said, as they came through the door. “I was beginning to think—” and then he saw Jack’s face.

  Jack smiled. He said, “A powerful sermon. It gave me a lot to consider.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” his father said. “No harm in that, I suppose. I’m sure he must have meant well. Nothing I would have expected. He seems to have squandered a wonderful opportunity.” His voice became softer and his gaze more fixed as realization settled in.

  Jack said, “Please don’t worry about it. It really doesn’t matter,” and went up to his room.

  Days passed without any word from Ames. Their father read and prayed and brooded, and every time the telephone rang he said, “If it’s Ames, tell him I’m dead.”

  HER FATHER HAD SUFFERED A TERRIBLE SHOCK. IT WAS his habit to consider Ames another self, for most purposes. And here his son, for whose spiritual comfort and peace he had prayed endlessly, often enough in Ames’s kitchen, in his hearing, and in full confidence that his friend seconded his prayers—his son had made himself vulnerable to him and had been injured, insulted. That Jack was a wound in his father’s heart, a terrible tenderness, was as fully known to Ames, almost, as it was to the Lord. And here the boy had put on a suit and tie—he had borrowed one of his father’s ties—and gotten himself to church, for heaven’s sake, despite reluctance, despite even fear, to judge by the potency of his reluctance. Glory could read her father’s thoughts as they sat together over their breakfast that morning—the look of vindication, of confidence that things were miraculously about to come right. He had stood at the front of his own church year after year, hoping to be able to preach again about grace and the loving heart of Christ to his aloof, his endlessly lonely
son. When he smiled to himself, he was certainly imagining himself in that pulpit, amazed and so grateful. Who better than Jack’s second father, his father’s second self, to say the words of welcome and comfort he could not say? It would never have occurred to him that Ames would not speak to the boy as if from his own heart.

  Then this incomprehensible disappointment. The old man muttered and stared, his eyes flickering over the memory of the kindnesses he had done Ames through all those years, the trust he had placed in him. He frowned as he did when he was rehearsing grievance and rebuke. Never since the darkest storms of his retirement had she seen him so morose.

  Over the decades there had been actual shouting matches between Ames and her father, set off by matters so abstruse no one dared attempt mediation. Once, when her mother tried to say something emollient about the communion of saints, her father, in the persisting heat of disputation, said, “That’s just foolish!” and she terrified them all by packing a bag. Sometimes the older children tried to soothe, to make peace, but in fact the friendship was not threatened but secured by a mutual intelligibility so profound it enabled them to sustain for days an argument incomprehensible to those around them, to drop it when they wearied of it and then to take it up again just where they had left it. No one could predict when the warmth of their pleasure in argument would kindle and flare into mutual irritation, though weariness and bad weather were factors.

  But in all those years neither of them had ever done the other any harm. This particular injury, utterly unexpected, to the old man’s dearest affection—it was without question the costliest of them all, therefore most precious to him—was hardly to be imagined. Her father was in mourning, and Ames stayed away, no doubt waiting for a sign that he had not alienated the Boughtons forever. He would be in mourning, too.

  SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. AMES ALREADY HAD THEIR copies of Life and The Nation, and he had his own subscriptions to Christian Century and the Post. So far as Glory knew, there were no books around the house that he had lent their father, or that he had said he would like to borrow. Every vegetable and flower they grew Lila grew more abundantly. Glory decided to make a batch of cookies. But Jack came downstairs with a faded copy of Ladies’ Home Journal. He tapped the note on the cover: Show Ames. “I’ve been up in the attic a few times. All sorts of things up there. I found an article in here about American religion. Pretty interesting.”