Gilead: A Novel (28 page)

“When her father finally did come home, the room emptied and the house became completely still. I stood up, but be didn’t offer to shake hands. The first words he said to me were ‘I understand you are not a veteran.’ Ah. I told him some lie about my heart, and then I regretted it instantly, because I felt I had made myself sound feeble, but I needn’t have worried about that, because I could tell he didn’t believe a word. As I recall, Deuteronomy says cowardice forbids one from going to the army. ‘What man is there that is fearful and faint-hearted? Let him go and return unto his house, lest his brother’s heart melt as his heart.’ So I had scriptural warrant, though I chose not to mention it.

“He said, ‘I understand you are descended from John Ames, of Kansas.’ Of course anyone else would have put that right, but I thought there might be some advantage in letting him believe it—he was referring to your grandfather, of course. It was the first slightly positive thing he had ever said to me. He said he knew people whose families came north from Missouri before the war, and apparently they told some remarkable stories about him, about raids and ambushes. I told him I had heard stories about the old man while I was growing up, which is true. They were mainly stories about him running off with the laundry, but I didn’t tell him that. I remember my father said once when he was a boy the old man came to our church and sat in the back, and when the collection plate came to him he just emptied it into his hat.”

It’s a fact that my grandfather always did suspect the Presbyterians of hoarding, so that’s not at all unlikely. And he did make a world of use of that hat.

He said, “We had a few minutes of actual conversation, but I had to be cautious. I didn’t know enough about the old times to risk telling lies, so I said my family had turned pacifist after the war. And didn’t encourage discussion of it. That’s correct, I believe?”

Absolutely.

“He knew my full name because that is what Delia wanted to call the baby. I was so relieved when I heard that. Her father said, ‘She’s been waiting for you.’ And I just sat there beside her bed all that afternoon, talking a little when she felt like it. Looking at the baby now and then. The women would take him away if he cried. They brought in some supper. I thought maybe things were improving, but they were all just being Christian. In the evening her father told me it would be best if I went away. He said, ‘This time I make no appeal to your honor.’ I suppose he had the right to say that. They were looking after her and I didn’t see how I could, so my thought was to go back to St. Louis and find a decent job and save up some money and try to figure something out. Because she talked to me about bringing the baby home, and she meant St. Louis. “I left what I could of my father’s money with her. And three months later she came with her sister and the baby to the old place, Lorraine’s place, where she lived when I met her. I had a new room at the time, very clean and cheap, and also very respectable, which is to say I’d have been out on the street if I’d brought home a colored wife and child. I couldn’t afford the old squalor, if I was to save anything at all. As it is, I’ve never repaid my father. Not a dime.

“So over all these years we have been back and forth, with her going to Memphis when things were too difficult, for the boy’s sake. He is a wonderful boy. I believe he has never really lacked anything. He has uncles and cousins, and his grandfather dotes on him. Delia’s father.

“My son’s name is Robert Boughton Miles. He is very good to me, very respectful and polite. Not as much at ease with me as your boy is.

“I managed finally, about two years ago, to get a job that paid a little money. I made a down payment on a house in a mixed neighborhood, and Robert and Delia came. It isn’t much of a house, but I did some painting and found some rugs and chairs. And we had almost eight months there. But then we got careless and went to the park together, and my boss happened to be there with his family. And the next day he called me into his office and told me he had his good name to consider. I hit him, which was very stupid of me. I hit him twice. He fell against his desk and cracked a rib. I thought I had talked him out of going to the law, I promised to pay his doctor bills and something for his inconvenience, but that evening the police came to speak with us, to mention that law about cohabiting. It was humiliating, but I kept my head. I think it becomes a husband and father to stay out of jail when possible. I arranged to put my family on the bus to Memphis, rented the house. Gave the dog to a neighbor.

“And when I had sorted that out as well as I could, I came here, thinking I might find some way to live with my family here, I mean my wife and son. I have even thought it might be a pleasure to introduce Robert to my father. I would like him to know that I finally have something I can be proud of. He’s a beautiful child, very bright. And believe me, he’s being brought up in the church. He wants to be a preacher. But now I see how feeble my father is, and I don’t want to kill him. I really don’t. I have enough on my shoulders as it is.”

He said, “You will not tell me this is divine retribution.” “Furthest thing from my mind.”

“I was pretty sure I could trust you not to do that.” I said, “Thank you.”

He drew a long breath. He said, “You know my father so well.”

“But I can’t give you any assurances about this, one way or the other. I’d hate to be wrong. You’ll have to let me reflect on it.”

Then he said, “If it were you, and not my father—”

Now, I could see his point in putting that question, since Boughton and I are in general very much of one mind. But it was not so simple a question as he might have thought, and I paused over it.

He watched me for a minute, and then he smiled and said, “You have made a somewhat—unconventional marriage yourself. You know a little bit about being the object of scandal. Unequally yoked and so on. Of course, Delia is an educated woman.” Those were his very words.

Now, that was just like him. That meanness. His remark was not even entirely to the point. And I never felt there was anything the least bit scandalous about my marriage. In her own way, your mother is a woman of great refinement. If a few people did make remarks, I just forgave them so fast it was as if I never heard them, because it was wrong of them to judge and I knew it and they should have known it.

But then that look of utter weariness came over him and he covered his face with his hands. And I could only forgive him. My thought when I hesitated was that since I was so long in the habit of seeing meanness at the root of everything he did, I might well have doubted his motives in involving himself with this woman he did not marry, and bringing me this child. I’d have been wrong, I believe, but his question was not how I should react but how I would be liable to react. “With Boughton this could be completely different, since he thought so much better of Jack, or so I had always believed.

I said, “I would love to know the child. Especially if you explained everything to me the way you just did.” And then I said, “He certainly took to that other child.”

Young Boughton gave me such a look as I have never seen in my life before. He went stark white. Then he smiled and said, “Children’s children are the crown of old men.”

I said, “You have to forgive me for that. That was such a foolish thing to say. I’m tired. I’m old.”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was very controlled. “And I have taken far too much of your time. Thank you. I know I can trust your pastoral discretion.”

I said, “We can’t let the conversation end here,” but I was just so weary and downhearted it was all I could do to get up from my chair. He stopped by the door and I went over to him and I put my arms around him. For a moment he actually let his head rest on my shoulder. “I am tired,” he said. I could just feel the loneliness in him. Here I was supposed to be a second father to him. I wanted to say something to him to that effect, but it seemed complicated, and I was too tired to think through its possible implications. It might sound as if I were trying to establish some sort of equivalency between his failings and mine, when in fact I would have meant he was a better man than I ever thought he could be. So I said, “You are a good man,” and he gave me a look, purely appraising, and laughed and said, “You can take my word for it, Reverend, there are worse.”

But then he said, “What about this town? If we came here and got married, could we live here? Would people leave us alone?”

Well, I didn’t know the answer to that one, either. I thought so.

He said, “There was a fire at the Negro church.”

“That was a little nuisance fire, and it happened many years ago.”

“And it has been many years since there was a Negro church.”

Of course there wasn’t much I could say to that. He said, “You have influence here.”

I said that might be true, but I couldn’t promise to live long enough to make much use of it. I mentioned my heart.

He said, “I had no right to weary you with my troubles,” which I took to mean there had been no point in it. I thought our conversation had been good, on balance, and I said that, and he nodded and said goodbye. And then after a minute he said, “No matter, Papa. I believe I’ve lost them, anyway.”

I just sat there with my head on my desk and went over this in my mind and prayed until your mother came looking for me. She thought I had had some sort of episode and I let her think that. It seemed to me as if I ought to have had one. And there was nothing I could say to her in any case.

You might wonder about my pastoral discretion, writing this all out. Well, on one hand it is the way I have of considering things. On the other hand, he is a man about whom you may never hear one good word, and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.

***

That was two days ago. Now it’s Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week. This morning I read from one of those old sermons your mother keeps leaving around for me. It was on Romans I: “They became vain in their reasonings and their senseless heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools,” and so on. The Old Testament text was from Exodus, the plague of darkness. The sermon was a sort of attack on rationalism and irrationalism, the point being that both worship the creature rather than the Creator. I had glanced over it a little, but as I read it, it surprised me, sometimes because it seemed right and sometimes because it seemed embarrassingly wrong, and always because it seemed like something someone else must have written. Jack Boughton was there in that weary suit and tie, sitting beside you, and you were very pleased, and I believe your mother was, too.

Now, it does not at all agree with my notion of preaching, to stand there reading from a stack of yellowed pages full of what I must have thought once, trying to play down the certainty I had written into the language some black night half a lifetime ago. And there in the second pew was young Boughton, who always seems to see right through me. And I, being newly persuaded that he might come into a church with some however cynical hope of encountering a living Truth, was obliged to mouth these dead words while he sat there smiling at me. I do think there was a point in associating rationalism and irrationalism, that is, materialism and idolatry, and if I had had the energy to depart from the text I could have made something of that. As it was, I just read the sermon, shook all those hands, and came home and took a nap on the couch. I did have the feeling that young Boughton might actually have been comforted by the irrelevance of my preachments to anything that had passed between us, anything to do with him at all, God bless the poor devil. The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I’d have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.

***

I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word “preacher” comes from an old French word,
predicateur
, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

Well, we didn’t ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn’t know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me. I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.

I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head and said, “I just can’t do it anymore.”