Gilead

by Marilynne Robinson

  You might wonder about my pastoral discretion, writing

  this all out. Well, on one hand it is the way I have of considering things. On the other hand, he is a man about whom you

  may never hear one good word, and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.

  That was two days ago. Now it’s Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week. This morning I read from one of those

  old sermons your mother keeps leaving around for me. It was on Romans I: “They became vain in their reasonings and their senseless heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools,” and so on. The Old Testament text was from Exodus, the plague of darkness. The sermon was a sort of attack on rationalism and irrationalism, the point being that both worship the creature rather than the Creator. I had

  glanced over it a little, but as I read it, it surprised me, sometimes because it seemed right and sometimes because it

  seemed embarrassingly wrong, and always because it seemed like something someone else must have written. Jack Boughton was there in that weary suit and tie, sitting beside you, and you were very pleased, and I believe your mother was, too.

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  Now, it does not at all agree with my notion of preaching,

  to stand there reading from a stack of yellowed pages full

  of what I must have thought once, trying to play down the certainty I had written into the language some black night half a lifetime ago. And there in the second pew was young Boughton, who always seems to see right through me. And I,

  being newly persuaded that he might come into a church with some however cynical hope of encountering a living Truth, was obliged to mouth these dead words while he sat there

  smiling at me. I do think there was a point in associating rationalism and irrationalism, that is, materialism and idolatry,

  and if I had had the energy to depart from the text I could

  have made something of that. As it was, I just read the sermon, shook all those hands, and came home and took a nap on the couch. I did have the feeling that young Boughton might actually have been comforted by the irrelevance of my preachments

  to anything that had passed between us, anything to do

  with him at all, God bless the poor devil. The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I’d have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.

  I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is

  in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetimethe droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word “preacher” comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?

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  Well, we didn’t ask the question, so the question was just

  taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn’t know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward

  and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me. I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.

  I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and

  for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious climate, and that was kind of him, because her

  rheumatism became severe as she got older. The idea was that they would spend a year down there getting settled in, and then they would come back again to Gilead and only go south for the worst of the winter until my father retired. So I took

  his pulpit for that first year. And then they never did come back, except twice to visit, the first time when I lost Louisa and the second time to talk me into leaving with them. That second time I asked my father to preach, and he shook his head

  and said, “I just can’t do it anymore.”

  He told me that it had not been his intention to leave me stranded here. In fact, it was his hope that I would seek out a 234

  larger life than this. He and Edward both felt strongly what

  excellent use I could make of a broader experience. He told me that looking back on Gilead from any distance made it seem a relic, an archaism. When I mentioned the history we had here, he laughed and said, “Old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago.” And that irritated me. He said, “Just look at this place. Every time a tree gets to a decent size, the wind comes along and breaks it.” He was expounding the wonders of the larger world, and I was resolving in my heart never to risk the experience of them. He said, “I have become aware that we here lived within the limits of notions that were very old and even very local. I want you to understand that you do not have to be loyal to them.”

  He thought he could excuse me from my loyalty, as if it

  were loyalty to him, as if it were just some well-intended mistake he could correct for me, as if it were not loyalty to myself

  at the very least, putting the Lord to one side, so to speak, since

  I knew perfectly well at that time, as I had for years and years, that the Lord absolutely transcends any understanding I have

  of Him, which makes loyalty to Him a different thing from loyalty to whatever customs and doctrines and memories I happen to associate with Him. I know that, and I knew it then.

  How ignorant did he think I was? I had read Owen and James and Huxley and Swedenborg and, for heaven’s sake, Blavatsky, as he well knew, since he had virtually read them over my shoulder. I subscribed to The Nation. I was never Edward, but I was no fool either, and I almost said as much.

  I don’t recall that I actually said anything, taken aback as I was. Well, all he accomplished was to make me homesick for a place I never left. I couldn’t believe he would speak to me as if I were not competent to invest my loyalties as I saw fit. How

  could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me? Those were my thoughts at the time. What a

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  day that was. Then in a week or so I got that letter from him. I have mentioned loneliness to you, and darkness, and I thought then I already knew what they were, but that day it was as if a great cold wind swept over me the like of which I had never felt before, and that wind blew for years and years. My father threw me back on myself, and on the Lord. That’s a fact, so I find little to regret. It cost me a good deal of sorrow, but I learned from it.

  Why is this on my mind, anyway? I was thinking about the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many. I haven’t been entirely honest with you about that.

  This morning I went over to the bank and cashed a check, thinking to help Jack out a little. I thought he probably needed to go to Memphis, not right away necessarily, but at some time. I went over to Boughton’s and waited around, talking about nothing, wasting time I couldn’t spare, till I had a chance to speak to him in private
. I offered him the money and he laughed and put it in my jacket pocket and said, “What are you doing, Papa? You don’t have any money.” And then his eyes chilled over the way they do and he said, “I’m leaving. Don’t worry.” I took your money, your mother’s money, of which there is a truly pitiful amount, and tried to give it away, and that is how it was received.

  I said, “Are you going to Memphis, then?”

  And he said, “Anywhere else.” He smiled and cleared his throat and said, “I got that letter I’ve been waiting for.” My heart was very heavy. There was Boughton sitting in his Morris chair staring at nothing. Glory told me the only

  words he had said all day were “Jesus never had to be old!” Glory is upset and Jack is wretched and they were making polite talk with me about nothing, probably wondering why I

  didn’t leave, and I was wishing to goodness I could just go 236

  home. Then the moment came when I could do Jack the little kindness I had come for, and all I did was offend him.

  Then I came home and your mother made me lie down and

  sent you off with Tobias. She lowered the shades. She knelt beside me and stroked my hair for a while. And after a little rest

  I got up and wrote this, which I have now read over.

  Jack is leaving. Glory was so upset with him that she came

  to talk to me about it. She has sent out the alarm to the brothers and sisters, that they must all desist from their humanitarian labors and come home. She believes old Boughton can’t

  be long for this world. “How could he possibly leave now!” she says. That’s a fair question, I suppose, but I think I

  know the answer to it. The house will fill up with those estimable people and their husbands and wives and their pretty

  children. How could he be there in the midst of it all with that sad and splendid treasure in his heart?—I also have a wife and a child.

  I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and

  she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother’s face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord. That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world—your mother excepted, of course—and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face. Those kind Boughton brothers and sisters would be ashamed of the wealth of their lives beside the seeming poverty of Jack’s life, and he would utterly and bitterly prefer what he 237

  had lost to everything they had. That is not a tolerable state of mind to be in, as I am well aware.

  And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out

  of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with

  a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton

  could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant.

  That is a thing I would love to see.

  As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak,

  the one who never left his father’s house—even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

  It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

  I think I’ll put an end to all this writing. I’ve read it over, more or less, and I’ve found some things of interest in it, mainly the way I have been drawn back into this world in the course of it. 238

  The expectation of death I began with reads like a kind of youthfulness, it seems to me now. The novelty of it interested me a good deal, clearly.

  This morning I saw Jack Boughton walking up toward the bus stop, looking too thin for his clothes, carrying a suitcase that seemed to weigh almost nothing. Looking a good deal past his youth. Looking like someone you wouldn’t much want your daughter to marry. Looking somehow elegant and brave.

  I called to him and he stopped and waited for me, and I walked with him up to the bus stop. I brought along The Essence of Christianity, which I had set on the table by the door, hoping I might have a chance to give it to him. He turned it over in his hands, laughing a little at how beat up it is. He said, “I remember this from—forever!” Maybe he was thinking it looked like the kind of thing he used to pocket in the old days. That thought crossed my mind, and it made me feel as though the book did actually belong to him. I believe he was pleased with it. I dog-eared page 20—”Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself.” And so on. I memorized that and a good bit more, so I could talk to Edward about it, but I didn’t want to ruin the good time we’d had that one day playing catch, and the occasion really never arose again.

  There were two further points I felt I should have made in

  our earlier conversations, one of them being that doctrine is

  not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo, which is usually translated “saved,” can also mean healed, restored, that sort of

  thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in a way that can create false expectations. I thought 239

  he should be aware that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways. Well, I was also making conversation. I knew he must have heard more or less the

  same things from his father any number of times. My first thought was that nobody ought to be as lonely as he looked to me walking along by himself. And I believe he was glad of the company. He nodded from time to time, and his expression was very polite.

  As we walked he glanced around at the things you never really look at when you live in a town-—the fretting on a gable,

  the path worn across an empty lot, a hammock slung between a cottonwood and a clothesline pole. We passed the church. He said, “I’ll never see this place again,” and there was a kind of sad wonder in his voice that I recognized. It gave me a turn. So

  I said, “You take care of yourself. They could need you sometime.” After a minute he nodded, conceding the possibility.

  Then he stopped and looked at me and said, “You know,

  I ‘m doing the worst possible thing again. Leaving now. Glory

  will never forgive me. She says, ‘This is it. This is your masterpiece.’ ” He was smiling, but there was actual fear in his eyes, a

  kind of amazement, and there might well have been. It was truly a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would

  forgive him for.

  So I said, “Glory talked to me about all that. I told her not to judge, that there might be more to the situation.” “Thank you.”

  “I understand why you have to leave, I really do.” That was

  as true a thing as I have ever said. And I will tell you, remarkable as it seemed to me, at that moment I felt grateful for all

  my o
ld bitterness of heart.

  He cleared his throat. “Then you wouldn’t mind saying goodbye to my father for me?”

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  “I will do that. Certainly I will.”

  I didn’t know how to continue the conversation beyond that point, but I didn’t want to leave him, and in any case, I had to sit down on the bench beside him on account of my heart. So there we were. I said, “If you would accept a few dollars of that money of mine, you’d be doing me a kindness.”

  He laughed and said, “I suppose I could see my way clear.” So I gave him forty dollars and he kept twenty and gave twenty back. We sat there for a while.

  Then I said, “The thing I would like, actually, is to bless you.”

  He shrugged. “What would that involve?”

  “Well, as I envisage it, it would involve my placing my hand on your brow and asking the protection of God for you. But if it would be embarrassing—” There were a few people on the street.

  “No, no,” he said. “That doesn’t matter.” And he took his

  hat off and set it on his knee and closed his eyes and lowered his head, almost rested it against my hand, and I did bless him to the limit of my powers, whatever they are, repeating the benediction from Numbers, of course—”The Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: The Lord

  lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” Nothing could be more beautiful that that, or more expressive of

  my feelings, certainly, or more sufficient, for that matter. Then, when he didn’t open his eyes or lift up his head, I said, “Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father.” Then he sat back and looked at me as if he were waking out of a dream.

  “Thank you, Reverend,” he said, and his tone made me

  think that to him it might have seemed I had named everything I thought he no longer was, when that was absolutely the furthest thing from my meaning, the exact opposite of my