Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

  So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic.

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  Well, I close my eyes and I see Jack Boughton, and it seems

  to me that more than he has matured or aged he has wearied. And I think, Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?

  Well, that really is not a purely rhetorical question. This morning your mother gave me a note from him. It said, “I am very sorry that I offended you yesterday. I will not trouble you again.” He writes a good hand. In any case, I felt from her manner that your mother knew what lay behind the note. It

  was just a folded slip of paper, but she would never have read it if he had not shown it to her. Perhaps he told her what it said. Or simply that it was an apology. I heard them talking on the

  porch before she brought it in to me. She looked sorry and concernedfor me, for him perhaps, or for both of us. They do

  talk, I know that. Not much and not often. But I sense a kind of understanding between them.

  “Understanding” might be the wrong word, since I have never spoken to her about him, and it is precisely the fact of

  her knowing so little about him that worries me. Or “understanding” might be exactly the right word, no matter what she

  knows or does not know. I can’t decide which thought worries me more. Maybe neither one could worry me more.

  I sent him a note. It said I was the one who should apologize, that my health has not been perfect lately, and so on, that

  I hoped we might have a chance to speak again soon. And your mother carried the note back to him.

  I was thinking about the time when he was just ten or twelve and he filled my mailbox with wood shavings and set them on fire. He rigged up a sort of fuse of twine dipped in paraffin. At that time the mailbox was on a post by the gate. It

  was that loaf-shaped kind people use in the country. I was 180

  walking home from a meeting at the church in the dark of

  a winter evening. I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box. It gave me quite a turn. But I didn’t doubt for a minute whose prank

  it was.

  That boy was always alone, always grinning, always intent on some piece of devilment. He wasn’t more than ten when he took off in a Model T he saw idling in the street downtown.

  Cars were still pretty rare around here in those days, so his interest was understandable. He drove it straight west for a number

  of miles, until it ran out of gas, and then he just walked

  home. A couple of young fellows with a team of horses happened upon the car and towed it off to Wilkinsburg and traded

  it for a hunting rifle. I think half the people in the county owned the thing for a day or so over the couple of months it stayed missing. Then a good-sized family who had traded a heifer for it came sailing into Gilead to enjoy the Fourth of

  July and got themselves arrested. The authorities traced it

  back through any number of swaps and IOUs and poker

  games, but never found the original thief. As it turned out, there were so many people involved in minor criminality having to do with buying that car and selling it that the resources

  of the law were in no way sufficient, so the whole thing was forgotten officially and remembered for a long time afterward because it made such a good story. People clearly knew the car was stolen, but they couldn’t resist owning it for a little while, even though they didn’t have the nerve to keep it—which kept the price very reasonable and the temptation that much greater.

  It was Jack himself who told me what he had done. He’d

  kept the handle from the glove box as a souvenir and he showed it to me, but I would have believed him anyway. Shrewd as he was even as a youngster, he knew I would never 18 1

  speak to anyone about it, and I never did. Of course, I thought his parents should know, and still, I never had the heart to say a word. I was always a little in awe of a child who could keep a secret like that, when it would have been the perfection of the tale to know that a ten-year-old boy had incriminated half a

  county.

  There is a sadness in all this I do not wish to obscure. I

  mean a sadness in the child. I remember coming out of the house one morning and finding my front steps painted with molasses. The ants were so thick they were piling over each other. They were just absolutely solid. Now, you have to ask yourself, How lonely would a child have to be to have time to make such a nuisance of himself? He developed some method for breaking my study windows so that the whole pane would shatter altogether. It was remarkable. I will ask him how he did that, someday when our souls are at peace and we can laugh about it.

  That is the sort of thing he did as a young boy, mischief

  only bordering on harm, generally speaking. That is my belief, though certain harmful things were done which I have never wished to ascribe to him but which, in the privacy of my thoughts, I always did. For example, there was a barn fire, and some animals were lost in it. I may be wrong in blaming him for that.

  His transgressions were sly and lonely, and this became

  truer as he grew up. I believe I said earlier that he did not steal in any conventional sense, but by that I meant he stole things of no value except to the people he stole them from. There was

  no sense in what he did, unless his purpose was to cause a maximum of embarrassment and risk a minimum of retribution.

  When he was fifteen or sixteen, he’d come into the house while I was at the church and pocket one thing or another. It was the most irritating trick you could imagine. Once, he took that old 182

  Greek Testament right off my desk. If ever there was a thing

  on earth so little worth the trouble of stealing I don’t know

  what it would be. Once, he stole my reading glasses. Once, I came in when he was standing right there in the parlor. He

  just laughed and said, “Hello, Papa,” cool and charming as you please. He made some small talk, in that precocious way he

  had, smiling as if there were a joke between us. It took me a while to figure out what was missing that time. Then I realizedit was a little photograph in a velvet case of Louisa,

  taken when she was a child. I was as angry about that as I have ever been in my life. lust the sheer meanness of it. And how could I tell Boughton that he had done such a thing? How could I say the words?

  Things would drift back sooner or later. The Greek Testament was left on the doormat. The photograph appeared on

  Boughton’s hall table, mysteriously, and was brought back to

  me. That penknife with the word “Chartres” pressed into the handle, which was made from a shell casing, was left on the kitchen table, plunged through an apple. I found that disconcerting at the time.

  Then he started doing the things that got his name in the newspaper, stealing liquor and joyriding, and so on. I’ve known young fellows who spent time in jail or got themselves sent off to the navy for behavior that wasn’t any worse. But his family was so well respected that he got away with it all. That is to say, he was allowed to go right on disgracing his family.

  I notice I have said he seemed lonely. That was one very strange thing about him, because, as I have said also, the Boughtons really loved him. All of them did. His brothers and sisters would stand up for him no matter what. When he was little, he’d slip out, run off, and they’d come by looking for 183

  him, anxious beyond their years, all business, hoping to find

  him and exert their respectable influence on him before he could get into too much trouble. I remember one summer I had planted a row of sunflowers along the back fence. There must have been twenty of them: One afternoon the other little Boughtons came to the door asking for Johnny, as they called him in those days. I went out to help them look around a little, and darned if those sunflowers hadn’t been pulled back, bent ov
er the fence so their heads were hanging down on the other side of it. Glory said, “It could have been the wind that did that.” I said, Yes, maybe it was the wind.

  If I had to choose one word to describe him as he is now,

  it might be “lonely,” though “weary” and “angry” certainly

  come to mind also. Once during the time I was missing

  Louisa’s picture I went over to Boughton’s to borrow a book,

  and we sat on the porch and talked awhile, and that boy sat on the steps, fiddling with a slingshot, I remember, and listening

  to every word, and from time to time he would look up at me and smile, as if we were in on a joke together, some interesting conspiracy. I found that extremely irritating. He almost provoked me into mentioning the photograph then and there. I

  had to leave to stop myself. He said, “Goodbye, Papa!” I went home just trembling. Maybe you can see why, when the business with the young girl came up, I was chiefly struck by the meanness of it.

  I don’t think I do my heart much good by remembering these things. My point is that he was always a mystery, and that’s why I worry about him, and that’s why I know I can’t judge him as I might another man. That is to say, I can’t assign a moral valuation to his behavior. He’s just mean. Well, I don’t know that that is true of him now. But I do see what he might 184

  injure. That is very clear to me. While I was standing there in the pulpit, the thought came to me that I was looking back from the grave and there he was, sitting beside you, grinning up at me

  This is not doing me any good at all. I’d better pray.

  I woke up this morning to the smell of pancakes, which I dearly love. My heart was a sort of clayey lump midway up my esophagus, and that after much earnest prayer. Your mother found me sleeping in my chair and slipped my shoes off and put a quilt over me. I do sometimes sleep better sitting up these days. Breathing is easier. I was careful to put this diary away before I turned the light out last night. I know I still have thinking to do on this matter of Jack Boughton.

  It is my birthday, so there were marigolds on the table and

  my stack of pancakes had candles in it. There were nice little sausages besides. And you recited the Beatitudes with hardly a hitch, two times over, absolutely shining with the magnitude of the accomplishment, as well you might. Your mother gave a sausage to Soapy, who slunk off with the unctuous thing and hid it who knows where. She is beyond doubt the descendant

  of endless generations of vermin eaters, fat as she is, domesticated as she ought to be.

  I hate to think what I would give for a thousand mornings

  like this. For two or three. You were wearing your red shirt and your mother was wearing her blue dress.

  And your mother has found that sermon I was wondering about, that Pentecost sermon, the one I gave the first time I saw her. It was beside my plate, wrapped in tissue paper, with a ribbon on it. “Now, don’t you go revising that,” she said. “It 185

  don’t need revising.” And she kissed me on the top of the head,

  which, for her, was downright flamboyant. So now I am seventy-seven.

  Yesterday was very fine altogether. Glory came by in her car and took us for a picnic over by the river. Tobias came along, Tobias the good. There were balloons and even firecrackers,

  and there was a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. The river was low but pretty, with the first yellow leaves drifting down to it. I was sorry I had not slept better the night before, that there was so much unease in the region of my heart. But

  the party went on cheerfully enough anyway. Glory and your mother are good friends now, and you and T. would have happily spent forever racing leaves down that river and generally puddling around in it.

  Last night I slept fairly well.

  It bothers me to think I might be bothered to death, if you see what I mean. Jack Boughton is home, to the delight of his father, my dear friend. For all I know, he has done no harm, and

  for all I know, he intends no harm. And yet the mere fact of him troubles me.

  You asked if he was not coming along on the birthday

  jaunt. You were disappointed. Glory made some sort of excuse, and your mother said nothing. The tact was audible. I have to wonder what they know, what they have talked about. How could they not pity him? I pity him. I regret absolutely that I cannot speak with him in a way becoming a pastor, knowing as I do what an uneasy spirit he is. That is disgraceful.

  It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to 186

  them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.

  He has not replied to the note I sent him.

  I wrote another note, telling him how deeply I felt any fault

  lay with me, and so on, and carried it over to Boughton’s myself. I was just going to slip it in the mailbox, but Jack was out

  in the garden and he saw me and so I took it over to him. He actually seemed to shy from it a little. I told him it was another apology, more considered than the first one had been, and then he thanked me for it, and I am sure I saw genuine relief in his expression. I suspect he had not read the earlier note, perhaps thinking there might be some sort of rebuke in it. He did open the one I handed him and he read it over and then he thanked me again.

  I said, “If you would like to talk, I would be happy to see you anytime.”

  And he said, “Yes, I do want to talk with you, if you’re sure it’s all right.” So we’ll see what comes of that.

  I was pleased that it all fell out so agreeably. It took a weight from my heart. I’ll admit it was one part of my motive

  in writing the second note that I didn’t want your mother pitying him for any hurt I had done him. Still, I felt good about it.

  I enjoyed seeing his face change the way it did then. He looked young for a moment.

  Again no sleep. I have been thinking of the morning I baptized Jack Boughton. I had one of the deacons begin the service without me so that I could be there in Boughton’s church.

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  We’d talked it over. The child’s name was to be Theodore Dwight Weld. I thought that was an excellent name. My grandfather had heard Weld preach every night for three

  weeks until he had converted a whole doughface settlement to abolitionism, and the old man numbered it among the great experiences of his life. But then when I asked Boughton, “By what name do you wish this child to be called?” he said, “John Ames.” I was so surprised that he said the name again, with the tears running down his face.

  It simply was not at all like Boughton to put me in a position like that. It was so un-Presbyterian, in the first place. I

  could hear weeping out in the pews. It took me a while to forgive him for that. I’m just telling you the truth.

  If I had had even an hour to reflect, I believe my feelings would have been quite different. As it was, my heart froze in me and I thought, This is not my child—which I truly had never thought of any child before. I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.

  That’s interesting. There is certainly a sermon there.

  “Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.” That would be the primary text. I hope I have time to think it through.

  I’ll tell you a perfectly foolish thing. I have thought from time to time that the child felt how coldly I went about

  his christening, how far my thoughts were from blessing him. Now, that’s just magical thinking. That is superstition. I’m ashamed to have said such a thing. But I’m trying to be honest. And I do feel a burden of guilt toward that child, that man, my namesake. I have never been able to warm to him, never.

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  I am glad I sa
id that. I am glad to see it in my own words, in my own hand. Because now I realize it isn’t true. And that is a great relief to me.

  I do wish I could christen him again, for my sake. I was so distracted by my own miserable thoughts I didn’t feel that sacredness under my hand that I always do feel, that sense that

  the infant is blessing me. Now that is a pity.

  John Ames Boughton is my son. If there is any truth at all

  in anything I believe, that is true also. By “my son” I mean another self, a more cherished self. That language isn’t sufficient,

  but for the moment it is the best I can do.

  I fell to thinking about the passage in the Institutes where it says the image of the Lord in anyone is much more than reason enough to love him, and that the Lord stands waiting to

  take our enemies’ sins upon Himself. So it is a rejection of the reality of grace to hold our enemy at fault. Those things can only be true. It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their Father loves them. I have probably preached on that a hundred times.

  Not that I mean to call young Boughton my enemy. That is more than I know. Calvin is simply making the most extreme

  case: a fortiori, how much more readily should I forget transgressions which generally amounted to nothing more than annoyances,

  insofar as they even affected me? Jack has grieved

  his father terribly and he has been forgiven always, instantly, and I have only grieved Boughton myself when he has felt I was slow to forgive Jack, too. I believe most of that grief was just old Boughton’s loneliness for the boy, who has been such a stranger to him and to all of us.

  Now here is the point I wish to make, because this is the thought that came to me as I was putting all this before

  the Lord. Existence is the essential thing and the holy thing.

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  If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgressions, then they are nothing. Or whatever reality they have is trivial and conditional beside the exquisite primary fact of existence. Of course the Lord would wipe them away, just as I wipe dirt from your face, or tears. After all, why should the Lord bother much over these smirches that are no part of His Creation? Well, there are a good many reasons why He should. We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep. I am aware that significant confusion enters my thinking at this point. I’m tired—that may be some part of the problem. Though I recall even in my prime foundering whenever I set the true gravity of sin over against the free grace of forgiveness. If young Boughton is my son, then by the same reasoning