Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

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  The neighbor women dosed his mother with tea of red

  clover blossoms, which probably didn’t do her any harm, my father said. They also cut off her hair, because they thought it was draining away her strength. She cried when they showed it to her, and she said it was the one thing in her life she was ever proud of. My father said she was weary with the pain and she wasn’t herself, but those words lingered with him, and

  with his sisters, too. In those days, and even when I was a child, women kept their hair long because they felt the Bible said they should (I Corinthians 11:15). But it would be cut off if they were sickly, and that was always a sad thing, a kind of shame for them, along with everything else they had to go through. So it hit her very hard. When my father spoke to his father about how low her spirits were, his father said, “You came back and I came back and we both have our health and the use of our limbs.” My father took this to mean that since her grief was not in excess of the average in that region, he could not take any special time for it.

  I believe the old reverend’s errors were mainly the consequence

  of a sort of strenuousness in ethical matters that was to

  be admired finally. He did have many visions over the years, all very demanding of him, so he was less inclined than others to slack off. He lost his Greek Testament in a frantic retreat across a river, as I have said. I always felt there was a metaphor in that. The waters never parted for him, not once in his life, so

  far as I know. There was just no end to difficulty, and no mitigation of it. Then again, he always sought it out.

  The Testament was mailed to him years afterward, from Alabama. Apparently some Confederate had gone to the bother of retrieving it and then finding out which company of which regiment they’d been chasing that day, and who the chaplain of it was. There might have been a bit of a taunt in the gesture, but it was appreciated anyway. The book was pretty well

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  ruined. I hope you have it. It’s the sort of thing that might appear to have no value at all.

  I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only

  in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.

  Today John Ames Boughton paid a call. I was sitting on the porch with the newspaper and your mother was tending her flowers and he just came walking through the gate and up the steps with his hand held out and a smile on his face. He said, “How are you doing, Papa?”—a name he called me in his childhood, because his parents encouraged it, I believe. I have preferred to think so. He had a precocious charm, if that is the word, and it would not have been beyond him to come up with it himself. I have never felt he was fond of me.

  It did shock me how much he takes after his father, though of course in everything that matters they’re like night and day. When he introduced himself to your mother as John Ames Boughton, she was visibly surprised, and he laughed. He looked at me and said, “I gather bygones are not bygones yet, 91

  Reverend.” What a thing to say! It was an oversight, though,

  not to have told her such a creature existed, that is, a namesake,

  a godson, more or less. You were out in the bushes somewhere looking for Soapy, who packs her bags every so often and

  takes off for parts unknown and worries the life out of you and your mother. You just happened to come around the house

  then, holding that old cat under the armpits. Her ears were flattened back and her eyes were patiently furious and her tail was twitching. It’s so long you might have stepped on it otherwise. It was clear enough she would bolt if you put her down,

  but you did and she did and you didn’t seem to notice because you were about to shake hands with John Ames Boughton. “So good to meet you, little brother!” he said, and you were very pleased with that.

  I had no idea you and your mother would be so fascinated by his having my name. I’d have warned you otherwise. He came up the steps, hat in hand, smiling as if there were

  some old joke between us. “You’re looking wonderful, Papa!” he said, and I thought, after so many years, the first words out of his mouth would have to be prevarication, but I was sort of struggling out of the porch swing at the time, which would be no great problem except of course there’s nothing steady about

  a porch swing to grab on to, and standing up from a seated position is a considerable strain on my heart, the doctor says, and

  I know from experience how true that is. I thought it best not to die or collapse just there with you two watching, leaving old Boughton to ponder the inevitability of it all, the poor codger. So there was Jack Boughton with that look on his face, lifting me onto my feet by my elbow. And I swear it was as if I had stepped right into a hole, he was so much taller than I than he’d ever been before. Of course I knew I’d been losing some height, but this was downright ridiculous.

  It is so strange. One moment I’m a respectable citizen read92

  ing up on the political views of Estes Kefauver while his lovely young wife tends her zinnias in the mild morning light and his fine young son comes fondly mishandling that perpetually lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being, to what would have been general rejoicing. The flies were bothering a little, but the light was ripe and pure and there was much of interest in the newspaper. Granted I was in my bedroom slippers on account of a little arthritis in my toe. It was pretty nearly a perfect morning.

  Then here comes Jack Boughton, who really is the spitting image of his father in terms of physical likeness, with that same black hair and the same high color. He’s just about your mother’s age. I remember when she lifted her dear face to me to be baptized—lifted it into winter morning light, new-snow light—and I thought, She is neither old nor young, and I was somehow amazed by her, and I could hardly bring myself to touch the water to her brow because she looked a good deal more than beautiful. Sadness was a great part of it, it was. So she has grown younger over the years, and that was because of you. But I have never seen her look so young as she did this morning.

  Well, the light was fine, and she was in her garden and you were chasing around in your bare feet with your shirt off and freckles all over your shoulders. Your mother had put a piece of hot dog on a string and tied it to a stick for you to use in luring Soapy. She called it your catting pole, which is just the kind of silliness you love, and so you had spent the morning catting in the bushes and around the house while I read up on the election campaign. One of the pleasures of these days is that I notice them all, minute by minute, and this was a fine one, until

  I found myself being hoisted to my feet by that Jack Boughton. Then I caught a look on your mother’s face and on yours, too, which I know could not have been because of the contrast we 93

  made. You didn’t wait till this morning to realize that I am old. I don’t know what it was I saw, and I’m not going to think about it anymore. It didn’t set well with me.

  He couldn’t stay for coffee. Things went well enough. Then he was off.

  If I live, I’ll vote for Eisenhower.

  How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

  I was speaking of visions. I remember once when I was a young child my father helped to pull down a church that had burned. Lightning struck the steeple, and then the steeple fell into the building. It rained the day we came to pull it down.

  The pulpit was left intact, standing there in
the rain, but the pews were mostly kindling. There was a lot of praising the Lord that it happened at midnight on a Tuesday. It was a warm day, a warm rain, and there was no real shelter, so everybody ignored it, more or less. All kinds of people came to help. It was like a camp meeting and a picnic. They unhitched the horses, and we younger children lay on an old quilt under the wagon out of the way and talked and played marbles, and watched the older boys and the men clamber over the ruins, searching out Bibles and hymnals. They would sing, we would all sing, “Blessed Jesus” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” and the wind would blow the rain in gusts and the spray would reach us where we were. It was cooler than the rain was. The rain falling on the wagon bed sounded the way it does in an attic eave. It never rains, but I remember that day. And when they had gathered up all the books that were ruined, they made two graves for them, and put the Bibles in one and the hymnals in the other, and then the minister whose church it was—a Baptist, as I recall—said a prayer over them. I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know 94

  what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

  The women put the pies and cakes they had brought and

  the books that could still be used into our wagon and then covered the bed with planks and tarps and lap robes. The food was

  all pretty damp. No one seems to have thought there might be rain. And harvest was coming, so they’d have been too busy to come back again for a good while. They put that pulpit under a tree and covered it with a horse blanket, and they salvaged whatever they could, which amounted mainly to shingles and nails, and then they pulled down everything that was still standing, to make a bonfire when it all dried out. The ashes turned liquid in the rain and the men who were working in the ruins got entirely black and filthy, till you would hardly know one from another. My father brought me some biscuit that had soot on it from his hands. “Never mind,” he said, “there’s nothing cleaner than ash.” But it affected the taste of

  that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it’s

  rather forgotten now.

  “Strange are the uses of adversity.” That’s a fact. When I’m

  up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in

  my hands and it’s nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it’s as though I’m back in hard times for a minute or two, and there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand. But that only enhances the

  value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old

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  Rugged Cross” while they,saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no

  grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so .joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned

  me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was.

  I can’t tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me. I can’t tell myself what it has meant to me. But I know how many things it put altogether beyond question, for me.

  Now all the old women have their hair cut short and colored blue, which is fine, I suppose.

  Whenever I have held a Bible in my hands, I have remembered the day they buried those ruined Bibles under the tree in

  the rain, and it is somehow sanctified by that memory. And I think of the old reverend himself preaching in the ruins of his church, with all the windows open so the few that were there could hear “The Old Rugged Cross” drifting up the hill from the Methodist meeting. And my own church is sanctified by the story that was told to me. I remember my father said when the two of them first came home, they found the roof of the church in such disrepair that there were buckets and pans set in the aisle and on the benches. He said the women had planted climbing roses against the building and along the fence, so it looked prettier than it had ever looked before. Prairie had come into the fields and the orchards again, and 96

  there were sunflowers growing in the roads between the ruts. The women had their prayer meetings and their Bible studies even though the church was falling into ruin around them. I think about that, and it is strong and lovely in my mind. I truly believe it is waste and ingratitude not to honor such things as visions, whether you yourself happen to have seen them or not. That said, we were always a little careful about approaching the old man from the right side. It was his right eye he was missing, and we had the impression that it was on that side his visions came to him. He never spoke to us about them very much, since he felt our attitude on the subject was more or less entirely wrong. Nevertheless, we tried to be properly respectful. Sometimes when I came home from school my mother

  would meet me at the back porch and whisper, “The Lord is in the parlor.” Then I’d come creeping in in my socks and I’d just glance in through the parlor door and there my grandfather would be, sitting on the left end of the sofa, looking attentive and sociable and gravely pleased. I would hear a remark from time to time, “I see your point,” or “I have often felt that way myself.” And for a few days afterward the old man would be radiant and purposeful and a little more flagrant in his larcenies. Once he told us at supper, “This afternoon I met the Lord

  over by the river, and we fell to talking, you know, and He made a suggestion I thought was interesting. He said, ‘John, why don’t you just go home and be old?’ But I had to tell him I wasn’t sure I was up to the traveling.”

  “Papa,” my mother said, “you are home. He probably just meant you should ease up on yourself a little.”

  “Well,” the old man said, ” w e l l … , ” and sank back into his radiance, thinking whatever it was he thought.

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  My father would say afterward that if the old man was persuaded the Lord wanted him back in Kansas, nothing we said

  would have any influence one way or another. It was important to him to believe that, though I doubt he ever really did.

  Once when I was walking to school I saw some children teasing my grandfather, as if he were just any scrawny old fellow picking blackberries into his hat, nodding a little and talking a little as he did it. They were coming up to him on that right

  side and touching his arm, tugging his coat. When they did, it would set him to nodding and talking, and they would clap their hands over their mouths and run away.

  Now, I was astonished at this. I realize how much I did, in some sense, believe that there was a sort of sacredness just to the right of him, and it really shocked me that those children could violate it as they were doing. I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. How he knew I was there I don’t know, and why he looked at me that way is a thing I never have understood, as if I were the betrayer. It felt unfair to me at the time, but I never could dismiss it. I never could tell myself that it was just an error, that there was nothing

  in it.

  Well, I’ll confess I did feel a certain embarrassment about

  him. It may even have been shame. And it was not the first time I had felt it, either. But I was a child at the time, and it seems to me he might have made some allowance. These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deser
ving of some little notice.

  I might as well say this, too. It hurt us all something dread98

  ful that he left the way he did. We knew there was judgment

  in it, and whatever we might say for ourselves, for our reasonableness and our good intentions, we knew they were trivial by

  his lights, and that made them a little bit trivial by our lights. He took so much away with him when he left.

  My father said when he walked into his father’s church after they came back from the army the first thing he saw was a piece of needlework hanging on the wall above the communion table. It was very beautifully done, flowers and flames surrounding the words “The Lord Our God Is a Purifying Fire.” I suppose that is why I always think of my grandfather’s church as the one struck by lightning. As in fact it was.

  My father said it was that banner that had sent him off to

  sit with the Quakers. He said the very last word he would have applied to war, once he had had a good look at it, was “purifying,” and the thought that those women could believe the

  world was in any way purer for the loss of their own sons and husbands was appalling to him. He stood there looking at it, visibly displeased by it, apparently, because one of the women said to him, “It’s just a bit of Scripture.”

  He said, “I beg your pardon, ma’am. No, that is not Scripture.” “Well,” she said, “then it certainly ought to be.”

  And of course that was terrible to his mind, that she could have thought such a thing. And yet if those precise words don’t occur in the Bible, there are passages they could be said to summarize fairly well. That may have been all she meant.

  I have always wished I could have seen it, that tapestry

  they made, if that’s what it was. He said there were cherubim to either side of it, with their wings thrown forward the way they are in the old pictures, and then, where the Ark of the 99