Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

  He laughed. “That’s how I was planning to spend this very evening.”

  There was a silence.

  “Well,” she said, and her voice was very gentle, “well, Jack, bless your heart.”

  And he said, “Why, I thank you for that, Lila.” Then he stood up. “Tell the reverend good night for me.” And he went away.

  I lay awake the whole night, except for the part of it I spent sitting at my desk, writing this all out and thinking it over. Of course I was touched by your mother’s pride in my tendency to 200

  avoid speaking evil. It is something I do in fact try to avoid, though you know very well what a struggle it has been for me in this case.

  But I could only be struck by young Boughton’s amazement that I had not yet, in his words, warned her about him. It was almost as if he thought I had been negligent. And who would be a better judge of that than he is? He might think I know things I don’t know, assuming Boughton confided in me more than he ever did, or that talk about him would have reached me, as in fact it did only rarely. I always suspected people of a good deal of tact where he was concerned.

  “The scene of the crime.” That was a joke, I’m pretty sure. But it does lead me to wonder how much of the misery I feel in him comes from the fact that he is here, where things went on that still might cause him suffering, maybe shame.

  I wish I could put my hand on his brow and calm away all

  the guilt and regret that is exaggerated or misplaced, or beyond rectification in the terms of this world. Then I could see

  what I’m actually dealing with.

  Theologically, that is a completely unacceptable notion. It just happened to cross my mind. I apologize for it.

  Since I am trying to tell the truth, there is one other thing. The edginess went out of his voice while he was talking with your mother. I would almost say he seemed to relax. He sounded like someone speaking with a friend. And so did she.

  I believe I am beginning to see where the grace is for me in this. I have prayed considerably, and I have slept awhile, too, and I feel I am reaching some clarity.

  I have never been to St. Louis, a fact I now regret. 201

  I have been looking through these pages, and I realize that for some time I have mainly been worrying to myself, when my intention from the beginning was to speak to you. I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he’s struggling with.

  I believe I may have found a way out of the cave of this tedious preoccupation, however. It’s worth a try. So:

  When I was sitting there on the porch last night more or

  less feigning sleep and your mother took my hand and held it

  in her hands, that was a great happiness to me. I see I did indicate this—”her two warm hands”—and I noted that at the

  same time she spoke of me much more kindly than I deserve. Only thinking back on it did I realize that she was speaking as

  if from that settled life she said she had always wanted and as

  if it could not be lost to her, though in every practical, material sense she knows it will be. That pleased me, too. Remembering when they said what they did about looking in windows and wondering about other people’s lives made me feel companionable with them. I could have said that’s three of us, because, as

  the Lord knows, for many years I did exactly the same thing. But in that moment, the way she spoke, it seemed that all the wondering about life had been answered for her, once and for all, and if that is true, it is wonderful. The notion is a source of peace for me.

  I had a dream once that Boughton and I were down at the river looking around in the shallows for something or other—when we were boys it would have been tadpoles-—and my grandfa202

  ther stalked out of the trees in that furious way he had,

  scooped his hat full of water, and threw it, so a sheet of water came sailing toward us, billowing in the air like a veil, and fell down over us. Then he put his hat back on his head and stalked off into the trees again and left us standing there in that glistening river, amazed at ourselves and shining like the apostles.

  I mention this because it seems to me transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life, and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving. This

  came to my mind as I was reflecting on the day I first saw your mother, that blessed, rainy Pentecost.

  That morning something began that felt to me as if my

  soul were being teased out of my body, and that’s a fact. I have never told you how all that came about, how we came to be married. And I learned a great deal from the experience, believe me. It enlarged my understanding of hope, just

  to know that such a transformation can occur. And it has greatly sweetened my imagination of death, odd as that may sound.

  Even though I told myself I had hardly noticed her that

  first morning, I spent the whole next week hoping she would come back. I rebuked myself considerably for forgetting to ask her name as she went out the door, thinking about it in terms of my obligations to “strayed sheep” and “lost souls,” which are expressions I never do use, even in my thoughts, and which

  I would certainly never have applied to her. One interesting aspect of the whole experience was that I simply could not be

  honest with myself, and I couldn’t deceive myself, either. It was terrible. I felt like such a fool. But you see, I was mindful of her youth and of my age, and I knew nothing about her, whether she might be married or not. So I couldn’t admit to myself that I simply wanted to see her, to hear her voice again. She said, “Good morning, Reverend,” that was all. But I re203

  member trying to retain the sound of it, trying to hear it again in my mind.

  I’ll tell you, if my grandfather did throw his mantle over

  me, so to speak, he did it long before I came into this world. The holiness of his life imputed a holiness to mine, or to my vocation, that I have tried to diminish as little as I could. I have tried to be careful of my reputation and also of my character. I have tried to keep the Gospel before me as a standard for my life and my preaching. And yet there I was trying to write a sermon, when all I really wanted to do was try to remember a young woman’s face.

  If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have

  been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say “I know, I know” when I urged a little reasonableness on them, and why it meant “It doesn’t matter, I just don’t

  care.” That’s what the saints and the martyrs say. And I know

  now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations. I might seem to be comparing something great and

  holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don’t see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery. I realized many things I am at a loss to express. And of course those feelings become milder with time, which is a mercy.

  Louisa and I were expected to marry almost from childhood. So nothing had prepared me to find myself thinking day 204

  and night about a complete stranger, a woman much too young, probably a married woman—that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk. I had never felt before that everything I thought I was amounted to the clothes on my back and the books on my shelves and the ca
lendar I kept full of obligations waiting and obligations fulfilled. As I have said, it was a foretaste of death, at least of dying. And why should that seem strange? “Passion” is the word we use, after all.

  Well, it got much worse. She was there every Sunday but

  one, and I wrote all those sermons, I confess, with the thought of pleasing her, impressing her. I struggled not to look at her too often or too long, but I would convince myself nevertheless that I saw disappointment of some kind in her face, and then I would spend the next week praying, right down on my knees, that she would give me another chance. I felt so ridiculous. But I would speak to the Lord about it just the same, asking Him to strengthen me in exercising my pastoral responsibilities, and not a word I said was true, because I was really just a foolish old man asking the Almighty to indulge his foolishness and I knew it at the time. And my prayers were answered, beyond anything I could have thought to ask. A wife, and a child. I would never have believed it.

  There was the one terrible Sunday that she wasn’t there.

  How dead and sad and airless that morning was, how shabby we all seemed, and the church, too. Of course my sermon that day was about welcoming the stranger because you might be welcoming “an angel unawares.” I hated reading it. I felt

  everyone in the room knew I was standing there making a confession of my folly. It seemed inevitable to me that she would

  never come back again. So I spent a dreadful week resigning myself to the smallness of my life, the drabness of it, and

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  thanking the Lord that I had never made a complete fool of myself, had never held her by the hand at the door and attempted conversation, though I had rehearsed in my mind

  what I might say to her and had even written it out. It must be

  said also that I hated myself for a fool that I had not held her

  hand, had not spoken to her. I spent that week trying to make myself describe what it was that attracted me to her so strongly—somehow thinking that because I could not, the attraction would be dispelled. And I spent the week missing her

  as if she were the only friend I had ever had on earth. (And I also gave some thought to the practical problem of learning her name and finding out where she lived, thinking to excuse this as a pastoral concern. What humiliation.)

  The next Sunday there she was again. I was miserable with relief, afraid I might laugh for no reason, afraid I might look at her too long, trying to remind myself she was a stranger, though she had been my dearest and most inward thought for weeks, and that I must not startle her with some unaccountable familiarity. I had been to the barber and I was wearing a

  new shirt, since it seemed only prudent to suppose that my

  constant, passionate, and most unworthy prayers might be answered. And I’d made a little experiment with hair tonic.

  Boughton met me in the road, as he often did in those days, and he looked at me and chuckled, and I thought, What an utter and transparent fool I am.

  When she left the church that day I did hold her hand and

  I did say a few words—”We missed you last week, it’s good to have you here again.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she blushed and looked away, as if the kindness had surprised her, though it was only the most basic and routine preacherly kindness, that being all I felt I could allow myself under the circumstances.

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  “I am sick with love.” That’s Scripture. It makes me laugh to remember this—I turned to the Bible in my crisis, as I have always done. And the text I chose was the Song of Songs! I

  might have learned from it that such miseries as mine were beautiful in the Lord’s sight, if I had been younger and if I

  had known that your mother was not a married woman. As it was, the beauty of the poems just hurt my feelings.

  Oh, but the next week I held her hand and I told her we

  had a Bible study that met on Sunday night and she would be most welcome. Then I went home and prayed that my wiliness would be rewarded, and shaved again, and tried to read until evening. I walked up early to the church, and there she was, waiting for me by the steps, hoping she might have a word with me. At that point I began to suspect, as I have from time to time, that grace has a grand laughter in it. She confided to this unworthy old swain with perfume in his hair that she came to me seeking baptism.

  “No one seen to it for me when I was a child,” she said. “I been feeling the lack of it.” Oh, the sad, stark purity of her look.

  I said, “Well, my dear, we will take care of you,” and then, very conversationally, I asked her if she had family in the area. She shook her head and said, very softly, “I don’t have family at all.” I felt a surge of sadness for her, and still, in my wretched heart, I thanked the Lord.

  So I instructed your mother in the doctrines of the faith, and in due course I did indeed baptize her, and I became happily accustomed to the sight of her, her quiet presence, and I began to give thanks that I had lived through the worst of my passion without making a ruin and a desolation of my good name, without running after her in the street, as I nearly did once when I saw her step out of the grocery store and walk away. I 207

  scared myself so badly that time I broke into a sweat. That’s how strong the impulse was. And I was sixty-seven. But I did always act consistently with my great respect for her youth and her loneliness, I can promise you that. I took great care about it. I thought it best to recruit some of the kindest older women to sit through her instruction with her, and I believe that made her shy about speaking, which I regretted very much.

  Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake

  to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry

  and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. But even that was for the best, because one of the ladies,

  Veda Dyer, got herself into a considerable excitement talking about flames, that is, perdition, so I felt obliged to take down the Institutes and read them the passage on the lot of the reprobate, about how their torments are “figuratively expressed to us by physical things,” unquenchable fire and so on,

  to express “how wretched it is to be cut off from all fellowship with God.” I have the passage in front of me. It is alarming, certainly, but it isn’t ridiculous. I told them, If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand

  in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.

  They all did ponder a good while, and I did, too, listening to the evening wind and the cicadas. I came near alarming myself with the thought of the loneliness stretching ahead of me,

  and the new bitterness of it, and how I hated the secretiveness and the renunciation that honor and decency required of

  me and that common sense enforced on me. But when I looked 208

  up, your mother was watching me, smiling a little, and she touched my hand and she said, “You’ll be just fine.”

  How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace.

  She began to come to the house when some of the other

  women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one

  evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, “How can I repay you for all this?”

  And she said, “You ought to marry me.” And I did.

  Here is my thought: If I were to put my hand on her brow and bless her purely, as if I were indeed and altogether a minister of the Lord, I would hope just such an
experience for her as that

  one of mine. Oh, I know she is fond of me, and very loyal. But I could hope that sometime the Song of Songs would startle her,

  as if it spoke from her own heart. I cannot really make myself believe that her feelings could have been at all like mine. And why do I worry so much over this Jack Boughton? Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. I might well be leaving her to a greater happiness than I have given her, even granting every difficulty.

  Sometimes I think I have seen the beginnings of it in her. If the Lord is letting me momentarily be witness to a grace He intends for her, I should find in this a great kindness toward myself. This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep

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  into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven——one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.

  “Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God; every precious

  stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond.” While I’m thinking of it—when you are an old man like I

  am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency

  to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

  Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in

  your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing—only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.