Gilead (2005 Pulitzer Prize)

by Marilynne Robinson

  I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time. How odd it is to have to say that after all these centuries. There is an earned innocence, I believe, which is as much to be honored as the innocence of children. I have often wanted to preach about that. For all I know, I have preached about it. When the Lord says you must "become as one of these little ones," I take Him to mean you must be stripped of all the accretions of smugness and pretense and triviality. "Naked came I out of my mother's womb,"

  and so on. I think I will preach on that during Advent. I'll make a note. If I can't remember speaking about it before, no one else is likely to remember. I can imagine Jesus befriending my grandfather, too, frying up some breakfast for him, talking things over with him, and in fact the old man did report several experiences ofjust that kind. I can't say the same for myself.

  I doubt I'd ever have had the strength for it. This is something that has come to my mind from time to time over the years, and I don't really know what to make of it.

  It has pleased me when I have thought your mother felt at home in the world, even momentarily. At peace in it, I should say, because I believe her familiarity with the world may be much deeper than mine. I do truly wish I had the means to

  spare you the slightest acquaintance with that very poverty the 30

  Lord Himself blessed by word and example. Once when I worried about this out loud, your mother said, "You think I don't

  know how to be poor? I done it all my life." And still it shames me to think that I will leave you and your mother so naked to the world—dear Lord, I think, spare them that blessing.

  I have had a certain acquaintance with a kind of holy poverty. My grandfather never kept anything that was worth giving away, or let us keep it, either, so my mother said. He would take laundry right off the line. She said he was worse than any thief, worse than a house fire. She said she could probably go to any town in the Middle West and see some pair of pants she'd patched walking by in the street. I believe he was a saint of some kind. When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, "I prefer to remember that I have kept one." My mother said it was good to know there was anything he could keep. He told me once he was wounded at Wilson's Creek, on the day of the death of General Lyon. "Now that" he said, "was a loss. "

  When he left us, we all felt his absence bitterly. But he did make things difficult. It was an innocence in him. He lacked patience for anything but the plainest interpretations of the starkest commandments, "To him who asks, give," in particular. I wish you could have known my grandfather. I heard a man say once it seemed the one eye he had was somehow ten times an eye. Normally speaking, it seems to me, a gaze, even a stare, is diffused a little when there are two eyes involved. He could make me feel as though he had poked me with a stick, just by looking at me. Not that he meant any harm to speak of. He was 3 1

  just afire with old certainties, and he couldn't bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging

  of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run. I don't say he was wrong. That would be like contradicting John the Baptist.

  He really would give anything away. My father would go looking for a saw or a box of nails and it swould be gone. My mother used to keep what money she had in the bodice of her dress, tied up in a handkerchief. For a while she was selling stewing hens and eggs because the times were very hard. (In those days we had a little land around this house, a barn and pasture and henhouse and a wood lot and woodshed and a nice little orchard and a grape arbor. But over the years the church has had to sell it all off. I used to expect to hear they were planning? to auction off the cellar next, or the roof.) In any case, times were hard and she had the old man to deal with, and he would actually give away the blankets off his bed. He did that severaltimes, and my mother was at a good deal of trouble to replace them. For a while she made me wear my church clothes all the time so he couldn't get at them, and then she never gave'me a moment's peace because she was sure I was going to go off and play baseball in them, as of course I did.

  I remember once he came into the kitchen while she was doing her ironing. He said, "Daughter, some folks have come to us for help."

  "Well','' she said, "I hope they can wait a minute. I hope

  they can wait till this iron is cool." After a few minutes she put the iron on the stove and went into the pantry and came out with a can of baking powder. She delved around in it with a

  fork until she drew up a quarter. She did this again until she had a quarter and two dimes lying there on the table. She 32

  picked them up and polished the powder off with a corner of

  her apron and held them out to him. Now, forty-five cents represented a good many eggs in those days—she was not an ungenerous

  woman. He took them, but it was clear enough he

  knew she had more. (Once when he was in the pantry he

  found money hidden in an empty can because when he happened to pick it up it rattled, so he took to going into the

  pantry from time to time just to see what else might rattle. So she took to washing her money and then pushing it into the lard or burying it in the sugar. But from time to time a nickel would show up where she didn't want it to, in the sugar bowl, of course, or in the fried mush.) No doubt she thought she could make him go on believing all her money was hidden in the pantry if she hid part of it there.

  But he was never fooled. I believe he may have been a little unbalanced at that time, but he could see through anyone and anything. Except, my mother said, drunkards and ne'er-dowells. But that wasn't really true either. He just said, "Judge

  not," and of course that's Scripture and hard to contradict.

  But it must be said that my mother took a great deal of

  pride in looking after her family, which was heavy work in those days and especially hard for her, with her aches and pains. She kept a bottle of whiskey in the pantry for her rheumatism. "The one thing I don't have to hide," she said. But he'd walk off with a jar of her pickled beets without so much as a by-your-leave. That day, though, he stood there with those three coins in his drastic old mummified hand and watched her with that terrible eye, and she crossed her arms right over the handkerchief with the hidden money in it, as he clearly knew, and watched him right back, until he said, "Well, the Lord bless you and keep you," and went out the door.

  My mother said, "I stared him down! I stared him down!" She seemed more amazed than anything. As I have said, she 33

  had a good deal of respect for him. He always told her she ought not to worry about his generosities, because the Lord would provide. And she used to say that if He weren't put to so much trouble keeping us in shirts and socks, He might have time to provide a cake now and then, or a pie. But she missed him when he was gone, as we all did.

  Looking back over what I have written, it seems to me I've described my grandfather in his old age as if he were simply an

  eccentric, and as if we tolerated him and were respectful of

  him and loved him and he loved us. And all that is true. But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the

  tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief. And I believe my father on his side was angry, too, at the accusations he knew he could see in his father's unreposefulness, and also in his endless pillaging. In a spirit of Christian forgiveness very becoming to men of the cloth, and to father and son, they had buried their differences. It must be said, however, that they buried them not very deeply, and perhaps more as one would bank a fire than smother it.

  They had a particular way of addressing each other when the old bitterness was about to flare up.

  "Have I offended you in some way, Reverend?" my father would ask.

&nb
sp; And his father would say, "No, Reverend, you have not offended

  me in any way at all. Not at all."

  And my mother would say, "Now, don't you two get started."

  My mother took a great deal of pride in her chickens, especially after the old man was gone and her flock was unplun

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  dered. Culled judiciously, it throve, yielding eggs at a rate that astonished her. But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens. My mother and I saw it happen, because when she smelled the rain coming she called me to help her get the wash off the line.

  It was a general disaster. When the roof hit the fence,

  which was just chicken wire nailed to some posts and might as well have been cobweb, there were chickens taking off toward the pasture and chickens taking off toward the road and chickens with no clear intentions, just being chickens. Then the neighborhood dogs got involved, and our dogs, too, and then

  the rain really started. We couldn't even call off our own dogs. Their joy took on a tinge of shame, as I remember, but the rest of them didn't even pay us that much attention. They were having the time of their lives.

  My mother said, "I don't want to watch this." So I followed

  her into the kitchen and we sat there listening to the pandemonium and the wind and the rain. Then my mother said,

  "The wash!" which we had forgotten. She said, "Those sheets must be so heavy that they're dragging in the mud, if they haven't pulled the lines down altogether." That was a day's work lost for her, not to mention the setting hens and the fryers. She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know

  there is a blessing in this somewhere." We did have a habit sometimes of imitating the old man's way of speaking when he wasn't in the room. Still, I was surprised that she would make an outright joke about my grandfather, though he'd been gone a long time by then. She always did like to make me laugh.

  When my father found his father at Mount Pleasant after

  the war ended, he was shocked at first to see how he had been wounded. In fact, he was speechless. So my grandfather's first 35

  words to his son were "I am confident that I will find great blessing in it." And that is what he said about everything that happened to him for the rest of his life, all of which tended to be more or less drastic. I remember at least two sprained wrists and a cracked rib. He told me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true etymologically, in Englishbut not in Greek or Hebrew. So whatever understanding might be based on that derivation has no scriptural authority behind it. It was unlike him to strain interpretation that way. He did it in order to make an account of himself, I suppose, as most of us do.

  In any case, the notion seems to have been important to

  him. He was always trying to help somebody birth a calf or limb a tree, whether they wanted him to or not. All the regret he ever felt was for his unfortunates, with none left over for himself however he might be injured, until his friends began to die off, as they did one after another in the space of about two years. Then he was terribly lonely, no doubt about it. I think that was a big part of his running off to Kansas. That and the fire at the Negro church. It wasn't a big fire—someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it, and

  someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel. (The Negro church used to be where the soda fountain is now, though I hear that's going out of business. That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. By then it was down to three or four families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he'd dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they're still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they'll know they have some significance and they'll save them when the building comes down. I didn't

  know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew 36

  my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them.)

  You have begun palling around with a chap you found at

  school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant

  child. You seem to be spending half your time at his house. We think that is very good for you, but we miss you something terrible. Tonight you are camping out in his backyard, which is

  just across the street and a few houses down. Supper without you tonight, a melancholy prospect.

  You and Tobias came trudging home at dawn and spread your sleeping bags on your bedroom floor and slept till lunchtime. (You had heard growling in the bushes. T. has brothers.) Your mother had fallen asleep in the parlor with a book in her lap. I made you some toasted cheese sandwiches, which I cooked a little too long. So I told you the story you like very much, about

  how my poor old mother would sleep in her rocker by the

  kitchen stove while our dinner smoked and sputtered like some unacceptable sacrifice, and you ate your sandwiches, maybe a little more happily for the scorch. And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loves them and

  won't buy them for herself. I doubt she slept at all last night. I surprised myself—I slept pretty soundly, and woke out of a harmless sort of dream, an unmemorable conversation with people I did not know. And I was so happy to have you home again.

  I was thinking about that henhouse. It stood just across the yard, where the Muellers' house is now. Boughton and I used 37

  to sit on the roof of it and look out over the neighbors' gardens and the fields. We used to take sandwiches and eat our dinner up there. I had stilts that Edward had made for himself years before. They were so high I had to stand on the porch railing to get onto them. Boughton (he was Bobby then) got his father to make him a pair, and we pretty well lived on those things for several summers. We had to stay on the paths or where the ground was firm, but we got to be very much at ease on them, and we'd just saunter all over the place, as if it were quite a natural thing. We could sit right down on the branch of a tree. Sometimes wasps were a problem, or mosquitoes. We took a few spills, but mainly it was very nice. Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor. We would never have thought that coop could fold up the way it did. The roof was covered in raggedy black tar paper, and it was always warm even when the day was chilly, and sometimes we'd lie back on it to get out of the wind, just lie there and talk. I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn't come to him, and then he'd have to find another kind of life,

  and he couldn't really think of one. We'd go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren't many.

  Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he's so bent over I don't know how you'd calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he's been reduced to a heap ofjoints, and not one of them works. You'd never know what he once was, looking at him now. He was always wonderful at stealing bases, from grade school right through seminary.

  I reminded him the other day how he'd said to me, lying

  there on that roof watching the clouds, "What do you think you would do if you saw an angel? I'll tell you what, I'm scared I'd take off running!" Old Boughton laughed at that and said, 38

  "Well, I still might want to." And then he said, "Pretty soon I'll know."

  I've always been taller than most, larger than most. It runs in

  my family. When I was a boy, people took me to be older than

  I was and often expected more of me—more common sense, usually—than I could come up with at the time. I got pretty

  good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill which has served me through life. I say this because I want you to realize that I am not
by any means a saint. My life does not compare with my grandfather's. I get much more respect than I

  deserve. This seems harmless enough in most cases. People

  want to respect the pastor and I'm not going to interfere with that. But I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading

  more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.

  Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness,

  and when bad company was much better than no

  company. You can love a bad book for its haplessness or pomposity or gall, if you have that starveling appetite for things

  human, which I devoutly hope you never will have. "The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." There are pleasures to be found where you would never look for them. That's a bit of fatherly wisdom, but it's also the Lord's truth, and a thing I know from my own long experience.

  Often enough when someone saw the light burning in my study long into the night, it only meant I had fallen asleep in

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  my chair. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms. Well, my life was known to them all, every significant aspect of it, and they were tactful. I've spent a good share of my life comforting the afflicted, but I could never endure the thought that anyone should try to comfort me, except old Boughton, who always knew better than to talk much. He was such an excellent friend to me in those days, such a help to me. I do wish you could have some idea of what a fine man he was in his prime. His sermons were remarkable, but he never wrote them out. He didn't even keep his notes. So that is all gone. I remember a phrase here and there. I think every day about going through those old sermons of mine to see if there are one or two I might want you to read sometime, but there are so many, and I'm afraid, first of all, that most of them might seem foolish or