Home (43 page)

“Will do.” He picked up his suitcase, and then he set it down again and went into the parlor, where his father was sitting in the Morris chair. He stood there, hat in hand. The old man looked at him, stern with the effort of attention, or with wordless anger.

Jack shrugged. “I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye.” He went to his father and held out his hand.

The old man drew his own hand into his lap and turned away. “Tired of it!” he said.

Jack nodded. “Me, too. Bone tired.” He looked at his father a minute longer, then bent and kissed his brow. He came back into the kitchen and picked up his suitcase. “So long, kiddo.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with the ball of his thumb.

“You have to take care of yourself,” she said. “You have to.”

He tipped his hat and smiled. “Will do.”

She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.

S
O
T
EDDY ARRIVED AND SETTLED IN AND BECAME THE ONE
to read in the porch, to bathe his father and feed him and turn him, and to help prepare for the others, going off to buy groceries. He didn’t ask much about their brother and she didn’t offer much about him, except to say that he had been helpful and kind. Jack was Jack. There was little enough to say that would not seem like betrayal, even though Teddy knew him well enough to have a fairly good idea of the terms he had made with the world. In time she would say more, when the sense of his presence had dimmed a little.

Once, Teddy knelt by his father’s chair to help him with his supper, and the old man reached out his hand to stroke his hair, his face. He said, “You told me goodbye, but I knew you couldn’t leave,” and there was a glint of vindication in his eyes.

T
HE SECOND DAY AFTER
J
ACK HAD LEFT
, G
LORY WAS OUT IN THE
garden clearing away the cucumber vines and gathering green tomatoes. There had been a sudden change of weather, a light frost. She noticed a car passing slowly on the farther side of the street. She watched it, thinking it must be someone from the church, some friend or acquaintance wondering if the rumors were true, that her father was indeed failing and the family were coming home. But the driver of the car was a black woman, and that was a curious thing. There were no colored people in Gilead.
Glory bent to her work again, and the car came back on the near side of the street and stopped. She could see two colored women in the front seat and a child in the back. They looked at the house from the car for a few minutes, as if deciding what to do next, and then a woman stepped out of the passenger side and came up the walk. She was a dark, angular woman in a gray suit. Her hair was pulled back under a gray cloche. She looked very urban here in Gilead, and conscious of it, as if she felt the best impression she could make was one that would set her sharply apart. She turned and spoke to the child, “Robert, you stay in that car.” So the boy stood on the edge of the grass with one foot inside the car door. He was wearing church clothes, a blue suit and a red tie.

Glory came down out of the garden to meet the woman on the sidewalk. She said, “Hello. Can I help you?”

The woman said, “I’m looking for the home of Reverend Robert Boughton.” Her voice was soft and grave.

“This is his house,” Glory said, “but he’s very ill. I’m his daughter Glory. Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m sorry to hear your father is ill. Very sorry to hear it.” She paused. “It’s his son I was hoping to talk to, Mr. Jack Boughton.”

Glory said, “Jack isn’t here now. He’s been gone since Tuesday morning.”

The woman looked over her shoulder at the little boy. She shook her head and he leaned back against the car. She turned to Glory again. “Would you happen to know if he was planning to come back?”

“No, I don’t expect him to come back. Not any time soon. I don’t know what plans he had. If he had any. I don’t know where he was going to go.”

The woman smoothed her gloves, trying to hide her disappointment. Then she looked up at Glory. “I’d think he might be here, if his father is sick. I’d think he might be coming back, at least.” She looked at the house, with its tangled covert of vines and its high, narrow windows. Then she said, “Well, I thank you
for your trouble,” and she turned back toward the car. The little boy wiped his cheeks with the heel of his hand.

There was an unconfiding gravity in the woman’s manner, a sense that she spoke softly across an immeasurable distance. Yet she had studied Glory’s face as if she almost remembered it.

Glory said, “Wait! Please wait,” and the woman stopped and turned. “You’re Della, aren’t you. You’re Jack’s wife.”

For a moment she did not speak. Then she said, “Yes, I am. I am his wife, and I sent him that letter! And now I don’t even know where to find him, to talk to him.” Her voice was low, broken with grief. She looked at the boy, who had taken a few steps from the car to lay his hand on the trunk of the oak tree.

Glory said, “I didn’t know—Jack didn’t trust me well enough to tell me much about anything that mattered to him. It’s always been that way. There’s a lot I didn’t tell him. Maybe that’s just how we are.”

“But he always said in his letters how kind you were to him. I want to thank you for that.”

“He was kind to me, too.”

Della nodded. “He is kind.” There was a silence. She said, “This place looks just the way he described it. That tree and the barn and the big tall house. He used to tell Robert about climbing that tree.”

“We really weren’t supposed to do that. Even the lowest branches are so high.”

“He said there were swings hanging from it, and he’d shinny up on the ropes and then climb up into the top branches. He’d hide up there, he said.”

“Well, I’m so glad our mother didn’t know that. She was always worrying about him.”

Della nodded. She looked past her at the orderly garden, at the clothesline, and again at the porch with its pot of petunias on the step. Her eyes softened. It was as if a message had been left for her, something sad and humorous and lovely in its intimacy.
Glory could imagine that Jack might have drawn them a map of the place, orchard and pasture and shed. Maybe there were stories attached to every commonplace thing, other stories than she had heard, than any of them had heard. A mention of Snowflake. She said, “Would you like to come inside?”

“No, no, we can’t do that. Thank you, but we have to get back down to Missouri before dark. Especially the way things are now. We have a place to stay down there. That’s my sister driving the car, and I promised her I would only be a few minutes. We got lost looking for this place, and the days aren’t so long anymore. We have the boy with us. His father wouldn’t want us to be taking any chances.”

Glory said, “Jack told me he would call me, or send an address. That doesn’t mean he will. He might call his brother Teddy, so I’ll tell him you were here. This is so sudden. I hope I’m not forgetting anything.”

Della saw her tears and smiled. One more thing that was almost familiar to her.

“This happens to me,” Glory said, and wiped her cheeks. “But I can’t tell you how glad he’d have been to see you. Both of you. It would have been wonderful. If only I could have kept him here a little while longer.”

Della said, “We’ll go back to St. Louis. He might come there, to the old neighborhood.” Then she said, “Was it because of my letter that he left? Because, you know, I’d be very worried about that.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“It was hard for him. But he said the letter wasn’t unkind. And he was going to leave anyway. He had his own reasons. He didn’t blame you for anything.”

“Thank you. God bless you,” Della said. Then she said, “We’d better leave now. It was so kind of my sister to come up here with me, and I don’t want to upset her. She didn’t think it was a good idea. My whole family thought it was a bad idea.”

“If you could just wait another minute, though. I should give
you something to take with you, since you’ve come all the way here—please wait.” She went into the house, and there were all the books, there was the everlasting jumble of small things. She had meant to take anything at all. She had seen the little boy pocketing acorns. Anything would be a memento. A pagoda. A swan. But all the knickknacks were so odd and ridiculous. None of the big old books would do. She went upstairs to the room Jack had had as a boy and took the framed photograph of a river off its nail and brought it downstairs. When she gave it to Della she said, “Jack always liked this. I don’t know why, really. But he kept it in his room.”

Della nodded. “Thank you.” The boy came up the walk to see what it was his mother had been given. She gave it to him and he studied it. She said, “It’s a picture of the river.”

Glory bent to the child and offered her hand and he took it. “You’re Robert,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Glory. I’m your father’s sister.”

“Yes, ma’am.” And then a long look, as if he were remembering, or preparing to remember.

Jack had a beautiful child, a beautiful son, who would some time turn Boughton, no doubt, and lose his prettiness to what they called distinction.

“Are you a baseball player, too?” she asked.

He smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I play some ball.”

His mother said, “He thinks he’s going to be a preacher,” and she stroked his hair. The sister opened the door on the driver’s side and stood out of the car to stare across the roof at them. Della said, “We have to be leaving now.”

“Yes. Will Jack know how to reach you? If he does call here.”

Della put the boy in the backseat, and then she took an envelope from the glove compartment and wrote on it, some numbers and some names. Her sister had started the car. Della handed her the letter. “It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope your father will
be feeling better. If you have a chance to get this to Jack, I’d be grateful.” Then she closed the door, and the car pulled away.

G
LORY SAT DOWN ON THE PORCH STEPS
. S
HE THOUGHT, IF
Jack had been here, he’d have felt that terrible shock of joy—no, worse than joy, peace—that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling—humiliating as she remembered it, because she had been so helpless against it. But that was the fiancé. Della was Jack’s wife, she said so herself, and it made all the difference. Della had looked at the world of his old life tenderly, all the particulars there to confirm themselves, proof of his truthfulness, which always did need proof. I used to live here, I wasn’t always gone, I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. So Jack had said, and how could he have seemed so estranged to them? And how cruel it was that he loved the place anyway. His little boy touching that tree, just to touch it. The tree that sounded like the ocean. Dear Lord in heaven, she could never change anything. How could she know what he had sanctified to that child’s mind with his stories, sad stories that had made them laugh. I used to wish I lived here, he said. That I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did.

And they would not walk in the door. They had to hurry, to escape the dangers of nightfall. The boy was with them, and his father would not want them to take chances. She knew it would have answered a longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had passed through that strange old house. Just the thought of it might bring him back, and the place would seem changed, to him and to her. As if all that saving and keeping their father had done was providence indeed, and new love would transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful.

Della had met Jack on a rainy afternoon. He was just out of prison, and he was wearing the suit—almost new, he said—he
had bought with the money that was supposed to have brought him home for his mother’s funeral. The suit he sold because it made him look like a minister. And he had come by an umbrella somehow. Just the terror of his release into the world, certain he had lost his family for good and all this time, would have made him wry and incandescent, and so would the inadvertent respectability of a dark suit and a working umbrella. And there before him was a lady in need of assistance. She had said, “Thank you, Reverend.” Such mild eyes, such a gentle voice. He had forgotten that, the pleasure of being spoken to kindly. Finally he told her he was not a man of the cloth. So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.

She has forgiven so much, he said. You can have no idea. And how would she forgive this, that she felt she had to come into Gilead as if it were a foreign and a hostile country? Did anyone know otherwise? Worn, modest, countrified Gilead, Gilead of the sunflowers. She carried herself with the tense poise of a woman who felt she was being watched, wondered about. Jack could hardly bring himself to dream she would come here, and there was reason enough to doubt, though he could not stop himself from dreaming of it, either. They had the boy with them, Jack would be frightened for the boy, so they had to be back to Missouri before it was dark. They had a place to stay in Missouri.

She thought, Maybe this Robert will come back someday. Young men are rarely cautious. What of Jack will there be in him? And I will be almost old. I will see him standing in the road by the oak tree, and I will know him by his tall man’s slouch, the hands on the hips. I will invite him onto the porch and he will reply with something civil and Southern, “Yes, ma’am, I might could,” or whatever it is they say. And he will be very kind to me. He is Jack’s son, and Southerners are especially polite to older women. He will be curious about the place, though his curiosity will not override his good manners. He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank
me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father’s house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment.