Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

  my physical life.

  In any case, and you may remember this, when almost everyone had left and the elements were still on the table and the candles still burning, your mother brought you up the aisle to me and said, “You ought to give him some of that.” You’re too young, of course, but she was completely right. Body of

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  Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Your solemn and beautiful child face lifted up to receive these mysteries at my hands. They are the most wonderful mystery, body

  and blood.

  It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it. The light in the room was beautiful this morning, as it often is. It’s a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint.

  But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don’t know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at

  peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimesthe Depression, the wars. That was a lot of misery for

  people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

  In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I’d think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It’s a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can’t feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it.

  I know they’re planning to pull it down. They’re waiting me out, which is kind of them.

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  People are always up in the night, with their colicky babies and their sick children, or fighting or worrying or full of guilt. And, of course, the milkmen and all the people on early shifts and late shifts. Sometimes when I walked past the house of one of my own families and saw lights on, I’d think maybe I should stop and see if there was a problem I could help with, but then I’d decide it might be an intrusion and I’d go on. Past the Boughtons’ house, too. It was years before I really knew what was troubling them, close as we had always been. It was on the nights I didn’t sleep at all and I didn’t feel like reading that I’d walk through town at one or two o’clock. In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and

  whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren’t mine were Boughton’s. And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I’d go into the church and pray some

  more and wait for daylight. I’ve often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

  Trees sound different at night, and they smell different, too.

  If you remember me at all, you may find me explained a little by what I am telling you. If you could see me not as a

  child but as a grown man, it is surely true that you would observe a certain crepuscular quality in me. As you read this, I

  hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort—grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.

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  Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them

  over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of

  them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair. We sat on the steps a good while in

  the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.

  There has been a telephone call from Jack Boughton, that is, from John Ames Boughton, my namesake. He is still in St. Louis, and still planning to come home. Glory came to tell me about it, excited and also anxious. She said, “Papa was just so thrilled to hear his voice.” I suppose he’ll appear sooner or

  later. I don’t know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone any grounds for hope.

  Man, I should say, since he’s well into his thirties. No, he must be forty by now. He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved. I suppose I might tell you a story about him, too, or as much of it as behooves me. Another time. I must reflect on it first. When I’ve had a little opportunity to talk with him, I might decide all that trouble is well forgotten and write nothing about it.

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  Old Boughton is so eager to see him. Perhaps anxious as

  well as eager. He has some fine children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart. The lost

  sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a

  point on it. I have said at least once a week my whole adult life that there is an absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little.

  (I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.)

  This morning I did a foolish thing. I woke up in the dark, and

  that put me in mind to walk over to the church the way I used to. I did leave a note, and your mother found it, so it wasn’t as

  bad as it might have been, I suppose. (The note was an afterthought, I admit.) She seemed to think I’d gone off by myself

  to breathe my last—which would not be a bad idea, to my way of thinking. I have worried some about those last hours. This is another thing you know and I don’t—how this ends. That is to say, how my life will seem to you to have ended. That’s a matter of great concern to your mother, as it is to me, of course.

  But I have trouble remembering that I can’t trust my body not to fail me suddenly. I don’t feel bad most of the time. The pains are infrequent enough that I forget now and then.

  The doctor told me I had to be careful getting up from a chair. He also told me not to climb stairs, which would mean giving up my study, a thing I can’t yet bring myself to do. He also told me to take a shot of brandy every day, which I do, in the morning, standing in the pantry with the curtain drawn for your sake. Your mother thinks that’s very funny. She says, “It’d do you a lot more good if you enjoyed it a little,” but that’s how my mother did her drinking, and I’m a traditional73

  ist. The last time she took you to the doctor, he said you might be more robust if you had your tonsils out. She came home so sick at the thought he could find any fault with you that I gave her a dose of my medicinal brandy.

  She wants to move my books down to the parlor and set me

  up there, and I may agree to that, just to spare her worry. I told her I could not add a moment to my span of life, and
she said, “Well, I don’t want you to go subtracting one from it, either.” A year ago she would have said “neither.” I’ve always loved the way she talks, but she thinks she has to improve for your sake. I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It’s strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to

  fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark

  were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

  In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road to the church and let myself in and sit there in the dark waiting for the dawn to come that I forgot all about the worry I might be causing your mother. It is actually hard for me to remember how mortal I am these days. There are pains, as I said, but not 74

  so frequent or even so severe when they come that I am as alarmed by them as I should be.

  I must try to be more mindful of my condition. I started to

  lift you up into my arms the other day, the way I used to when you weren’t quite so big and I wasn’t quite so old. Then I saw your mother watching me with pure apprehension and 1 realized what a foolish thing to do that was. I just always loved the feeling of how strongly you held on, as if you were a monkey

  up in a tree. Boy skinniness and boy strength.

  But I have strayed a little from my subject, that is to say, from your begats. And there is a good deal more to tell you. My grandfather was in the Union Army, as I think I have said. He thought he should go as a regular soldier, but they told him he was too old. They told him Iowa had a graybeard regiment

  he could join, for old fellows, which wouldn’t go into combat but would guard supplies and rail lines and so on. That idea didn’t please him at all. He finally talked them into letting

  him go as a chaplain. He hadn’t brought along any sort of credentials, but my father said he just showed them his Greek

  New Testament and that was good enough. I still have that somewhere, what remains of it. It fell into a river, as I was told, and never got dried out properly till it was fairly ruined. As I remember the story, he was caught up in a disorderly retreat,

  in a rout, in fact. That is the same Bible that was sent to my father from Kansas, before we set out to find the old man’s grave.

  My father was born in Kansas, as I was, because the old man had come there from Maine just to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote, because the constitution was going to be voted on that would decide whether Kansas entered the Union 75

  slave or free. Quite a few people went out there at that time for that reason. And, of course, so did people from Missouri who wanted Kansas for the South. So things were badly out of hand for a while. All best forgotten, my father used to say. He didn’t like mention of those times, and that did cause some hard feelings between him and his father. I’ve read up on those events considerably, and I’ve decided my father was right. And that’s just as well, because people have forgotten. Remarkable things went on, certainly, but there has been so much trouble in the world since then it’s hard to find time to think about Kansas.

  We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene lamps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen. Of

  course it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. That old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn’t afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn’t any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she’d been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She’d wake up if the

  cat sneezed, she said, but then she’d sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That

  would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we’d know for an entire day beforehand 76

  what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.

  Your mother was startled the first time I mentioned to her that she might as well not do the ironing on a Sunday evening. It’s such hard work for her to stop working that I don’t know what I have accomplished by speaking to her about the day of rest. She wants to know the customs, though, and she takes them to heart, the Good Lord knows. It was such a relief to her to find out that studying didn’t count as work. I never thought it did,

  anyway. So now she sits at the dinner table and copies out poems and phrases she likes, and facts of one sort and another. This is mainly for you. It is because I’ll be gone and

  she’ll have to be the one to set an example. She said, “You’d better show me what books I got to read.” So I pulled down old John Donne, who has in fact meant a lot to me all these years. “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” There are some

  very fine lines in Donne. I hope you will read him, if you have not read him yet. Your mother’s trying to like him. I do wish, though, that I could afford to own some new books.

  I have mostly theology, and some old travel books from before the wars. I’m pretty sure a lot of the treasures and monuments I like to read about now and then don’t even exist

  anymore.

  Your mother goes to the public library, which has been

  down on its luck for a long time, like most things around here. Last time she brought back a copy of The Trail ofthe Lonesome Pine that was worn ragged, all held together with tape.

  She just sank into it, though, she just melted into it. And I made scrambled eggs and toasted cheese sandwiches for our supper so she wouldn’t have to put the book down. I read it

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  years ago when everyone else did. I don’t remember enjoying it particularly.

  When I was a boy I knew of a murder out in the country

  where the weapon, a bowie knife, was said to have been thrown into the river. All the children talked about it. An old farmer was attacked from behind in his barn while he was milking. The main suspect was known to have had a bowie knife, because he was proud of it, always showing it around. So they came near hanging him, I guess, since he couldn’t produce that knife and nobody else could find it. They thought he

  must have thrown it in the river. But his lawyer pointed out that someone, maybe a stranger, could have stolen it from him and done the crime and thrown the knife in the river, or just walked off with it, which seemed reasonable enough. Besides, he was certainly not the only man in the world with a knife of that kind. And no one could come up with any sort of motive. So they let him go, finally.

  Then nobody knew whom to be scared of, which was terrible. The man who had owned the knife just drifted away.

  There were rumors from time to time that he was in the area, and he may well have been, poor devil, since he had a sister there and not another soul in the world. The rumors usually circulated right around Christmas.

  I worried about all this a great deal, because once m
y father took me with him to throw a gun into the river. My grandfather had a pistol he’d picked up in Kansas before the war.

  When he took off west, he left an old army blanket at my father’s house, a bundle rolled up and tied with twine. When we

  learned he’d died out there, we opened it. There were some old 78

  shirts that had been white once and a few dozen sermons and some other papers wrapped with twine, and the pistol. Of course it was the pistol that interested me most. And I was a good deal older than you are now. But my father was disgusted. These things my grandfather had left were just an offense to him. So he buried them.

  The hole he dug must have been four feet deep. I was impressed at the work he put into it. Then he dropped that bundle

  into the hole and started filling it in. I asked him why he

  was burying the sermons, too—at the time I naturally thought anything with handwriting on it was probably a sermon, and this did turn out to be the case. There were some letters, too. I know because not an hour after he’d put it in the ground my father went out and dug it all up again. He put the shirts and the papers aside and buried that gun again. Then a month or so later he dug it up and threw it in the river. If he had left it in the ground, it would be just about under the back fence, maybe a foot or two beyond it.

  He didn’t say anything to me. Well, he said, “You leave that be,” when he dropped that big old gun back into the hole. Then he gave me the sermons to hold while he shook out those shirts and folded them up. He told me to carry the papers into the house, which I did, and he filled in the hole again. He stamped it down and stamped it down. Then about a month later he dug the pistol up again and set it on a stump and broke it up the best he could with a maul he had borrowed and he tied it up in a piece of burlap, and he and I walked to the river, a good way downstream from where we usually went to fish, and he flung the pieces of it as far as he could into the water. I got the impression he wished they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely. It 79