was remarkable. And all the women did it, every Monday of the world. When the electricity first came in, they ran it before dawn and at suppertime, to help with the chores, and a few hours extra on Mondays, to help with the wash.
Well, my mother couldn't tolerate the state those pitiful
shirts were in. She had a strong sense that the population at large judged her character by what appeared on her clothesline, and I can't say she was wrong. But there was more in her mind than that. My father had a favorite verse of Scripture: "For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be for burning, for fuel of fire." That is Isaiah 9:5. My mother must have felt she knew what he meant to do and felt there was disrespect in it. In any case, 80
she took those shirts and scrubbed them and soaked them overnight and bleached them and rinsed them in bluing till they looked all right except for a few black stains she said were
India ink and the brown stains which were blood. She hung them under the grape arbor, where no one would see them. Then she brought them in and ironed them with enormous care, singing while she did it, and when she was done they
looked as respectable as their stains and their wounds would allow. Then she folded them—they were so white and polished
they looked like marble busts—and she slipped them into a flour sack, and she buried them out by the fence, under the roses. My parents were not always of one mind.
I should dig around a little and see if anything is left of
those shirts. It would be a pity if they were sometime just cast out like refuse, after all her hard work. I myself think it would have been the decent thing to burn them.
I got up the courage to ask my father once if my grandfather had done something wrong and he said, "The Good Lord will judge what he did," which left me believing there had been some kind of crime for sure. There is one photograph of my grandfather around the house somewhere, taken in his old age, that might help you understand why I thought this way. It is a good likeness. It shows a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it, staring down the camera as if it had accused him of something terrible very suddenly, and he is still thinking
how to reply and keeping the question at bay with the sheer ferocity of that stare. Of course there is guilt enough in the best
life to account for a look like that.
So I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing 81
the evidence and I was in on the secret, too—implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that's the human condition, I suppose. I believe I was implicated, and am, and would have been if I had never seen that pistol. It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach
and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. I believe my father was trying to
cover up for Cain, more or less. The things that happened in Kansas lay behind it all, as I knew at the time.
After that farmer was killed, all the kids I knew were
scared to do the milking. They'd do it with the cow between them and the door if the cow would oblige, but they're particular about that sort of thing and often would not. Little sisters
and brothers and dogs would be stationed outside the barn in the dark to watch for strangers. That went on for years, with the story passing down to the younger children, till whoever it was that did the murder would have been an old man. My father had to take over the milking because my brother was in
too big a hurry to strip the udder, so the cow stopped giving the way she did before. Then the story went around that someone had been hiding in a henhouse, so all the kids were afraid to gather eggs, and overlooked them or cracked them because they were trying to hurry. Then someone was seen hiding in a woodshed and a root cellar and an attic. It was remarkable what a change came over that place, and how it persisted among the children, especially the younger ones, who didn't remember the time before the murder and thought all that
fear was just natural. Chores really mattered in those days, and if every farm in three or four counties lost a pint of milk and a few eggs every day or two for twenty years, it would have added up. I do not know but what the children may still be hearing some version of that old story, and still be dreading their chores, still draining away the local prosperity.
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Every one of us had bolted out of a barn or a woodshed
when a shadow moved or there was a thump of some kind, so there were always more stories to tell. I remember once Louisa said we ought to pray for the man's conversion. Her thought was that it would be better to go to the source of the problem than to keep praying for divine intervention on behalf of each one of us in every situation of possible danger. She said it would also protect people who had never heard of him and would not think to pray before they did their milking. This struck us as wise and parent-like, and we did, indeed, pray for him concertedly, to what effect only the Lord knows. But if you or Tobias happen to hear this story, I can promise you that the villain is probably about one hundred by this time, and no longer a threat to anyone.
I did know a little about the shirts and the gun because of a quarrel my father and grandfather had had. My grandfather, who of course went to church with us, had stood up and walked out about five minutes into my father's sermon. The text, I remember, was "Consider the lilies, how they grow." My mother sent me to look for him. I saw him walking down the road and I ran to catch up with him, but he turned that eye on me and said, "Get back where you belong!" So I did.
He appeared at the house after dinner. He walked into the kitchen where my mother and I were clearing things away and cut himself a piece of bread and was about to leave again without a single word to us. But my father came up the porch steps
just then and stood in the doorway, watching him. "Reverend," my grandfather said when he saw him. My father said, "Reverend."
My mother said, "It's Sunday. It's the Lord's Day. It's the Sabbath."
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My father said, "We are all well aware of that." But he didn't step out of the doorway. So she said to my grandfather, "Sit down and I'll fix a plate for you. You can't get by on a piece of bread."
And he did sit down. So my father came in and sat down across from him. They were silent for some time.
Then my father said, "Did my sermon offend you in some way? Those few words you heard of it?"
The old man shrugged. "Nothing in it to offend. I just wanted to hear some preaching. So I went over to the Negro church."
After a minute my father asked, "Well, did you hear some preaching?"
My grandfather shrugged. "The text was 'Love your enemies.'
"
"That seems to me to be an excellent text in the circumstances," my father said. This was just after somebody set that
fire behind the church that I mentioned earlier. The old man said, "Very Christian."
My father said, "You sound disappointed, Reverend."
My grandfather put his head in his hands. He said, "Reverend, no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment. I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it."
My father's lips were white. He said, "Well, Reverend, I know you placed great hope in that war. My hopes are in
peace, and I am not disappointed. Because peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification."
My grandfather said, "And that's just what kills my heart,
Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips—"
My father stood up from his chair. He said, "I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt 84
with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing. And I was, and I am, as certain of t
hat as anyone could ever be of any so-called vision. I defer to no one in this. Not to you, not to Paul the Apostle, not to John the Divine. Reverend."
My grandfather said, "So-called vision. The Lord, standing there beside me, had one hundred times the reality for me that you have standing here now!"
After a minute my father said, "No one would doubt that, Reverend."
And that was when a chasm truly opened. Not long afterward my grandfather was gone. He left a note lying on the
kitchen table which said:
No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace.
Without vision the people perish. The Lord bless you and keep you.
I still have that note. I saved it in my Bible.
But I would watch my father preaching about Abel's blood crying out from the ground, and I'd wonder how he could speak
about that the way he did. I had so much respect for my father.
I felt certain that he should hide the guilt of his father, and
that I should also hide the guilt of mine. I loved him with the strangest, most miserable passion when he stood there preaching about how the Lord hates falsehood and how in the end all
our works will be exposed in the naked light of truth.
In course of time I learned that my grandfather was involved pretty deeply in the violence in Kansas before the war.
8 5
And as I've said, it was a source of contention between the two of them, to the point that they had agreed never to speak of Kansas anymore at all. So I believe my father was disgusted to find that those souvenirs, so to speak, had been left in his house. That was before we went to Kansas to find the old man's grave. I think that fierce anger against him was one of the things my father felt he truly had to repent of.
But my father did hate war. He nearly died in 1914, from pneumonia, the doctors said, but I have no doubt it was mainly from rage and exasperation. There were big celebrations all
over Europe at the start of the war, as if the most wonderful
thing were about to happen. And there were big celebrations
here when we got involved. Parades and marching bands. And
we already knew what a miserable thing it was we were sending our troops off to. I didn't read a newspaper for four years
without pitying my father. He saw that trouble in Kansas, and then his father went off to the army. He did, too, finally, just before it ended. He had four sisters and a brother younger than he
was, and his mother wasn't well. She died young, in her forties, and left all those children to care for themselves and to be cared for by their father and my father and the neighbors and the kindlier souls in his congregation, or what remained of it. His brother, my uncle Edwards, ran off, or so they hoped. At least
he disappeared, and in the confusion of the times they never found him. He was named after the theologian Jonathan Edwards, who was much revered in my grandfather's generation.
And Edward was named after my uncle, with the final s, but he
never liked it, and he dropped it when he left for college.
Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home. He is having supper in his father's house this very night. He will come
by to pay his respects, she said, in the next day or two. I am 86
grateful for the warning. I will use the time to prepare myself. Boughton named him for me because he thought he might not have another son and I most likely would not have any child
at all. It was very kind of him. As it happened, in fourteen months he was blessed with another boy, Theodore Dwight Weld Boughton, who has a medical degree and a doctorate in theology and runs a hospital for the destitute somewhere in Mississippi. He is a great credit to the family. Jack said once he was glad not to be the only one of them who ever got his name in the newspaper. That was a pretty bitter joke, considering how hard his parents took the embarrassments he exposed them to. And it was harder for them because of that way they have of printing the entire name. It was always John Ames Boughton.
While we two were wandering around lost in Kansas, my father told me a great many things, partly to pass the time, I
suppose, and partly to explain as he could why he thought his father had come back there, and partly to explain why we needed to find him, that is to say his grave. My father said that in those days after he came back from the war, he used to go off and sit with the Quakers on the Sabbath. He said his father's church was half empty, and most of the people there
were widows and orphans and mothers who had lost their sons. Some of the men brought sickness home from the camps"camp fever," they called it—and their families went down with it. Some of the men had been in Andersonville and came back almost beyond saving. He said half the graves in the churchyard were new. And there was his father, preaching every Sunday on the divine righteousness manifested in it all. That would set the old women to weeping, he said, and then the children would start in. He couldn't bear it.
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Now, I've tried to imagine myself in my grandfather's
place. I don't know what else he could have said, what else he could have taken to be true. He did preach those young men into the war. And his church was hit terribly hard. They joined up first thing and stayed till it was over, so the Confederates got off a good many shots at them. He went with them, too, even though he'd have been well into his forties. And he lost that eye, and came back finally with it as healed as it was going to be. He was already so used to the loss of it that he
seemed to have forgotten to send word to his family about it. It was commonplace, though, to have an injury or a scar of some kind after that war. So many amputations. When I was a boy, there were lots of old fellows around who were missing arms or legs. At least they seemed old to me then.
It was an honorable thing that my grandfather came back
to his congregation and stayed with it, to look after those widows and orphans. The Methodists were gathering a church;
they'd bought a piece of land just down the road, so his flock need not have stayed with him. And some did leave. I know this from one of those sermons my father buried and took out of the ground again. It remarked on the great attractiveness of Methodist preaching, and the youthfulness of the new minister, who had seen brief but honorable service in the Union
cause. I've read that sermon a good many times. The ink ran on most of the others.
The new people and the young people were turning to the Methodists, who were holding outdoor meetings by the river, hundreds of them from all over the countryside, fishing and cooking and washing out their clothes and visiting with one another until about evening. Then there'd be torchlight and preaching and hymn singing into the night. My grandfather went down there, too, and he enjoyed it all very much. On Sundays he would open the doors and windows so that his peo88
pie could hear the singing that came up from the river. He respected the Methodists because they had borne a great part of
the burden of the war. He didn't believe they were the kind of people who would consent to put up with bishops for very much longer.
I suspect he knew he couldn't preach life back into a church that had lost as much as his had. He was hiring himself out as
a sort of man of all work, repairing roofs and stoops, tutoring children, butchering hogs—everything you can think of, because what was left of his congregation couldn't pay him anything. Most people couldn't pay him more than a stewing hen
or a few potatoes for the choring he did, either. Most of the time he did work just because it needed doing. He'd be splitting kindling at one house, chopping weeds at the next, "relieving the fatherless and widow," my father said (that's Psalm
146). And he wrote any number of letters to the War Department, trying to get the veterans and the widows their bounties
and pensions, which came never or slowly. There was an irony in this, because, my father said, he and his sisters were, in a manner of speaking, left fatherless during this t
ime, which was a great hardship because it was clear that their mother would not live long.
He was a grown man by then, in his early twenties, and two of his sisters would have been nearly grown. They would have managed well enough if it hadn't been for their mother's poor health and her considerable suffering. I believe she must have had cancer of some kind. They'd had a doctor in that town, but he went off with the army and never came back. Whether he was killed or not no one knew, though there was a story told around that he caught a shell fragment at the side of his head and was never right afterward. In any case, doctors in those days weren't good for much. It was poultices and cod liver oil and mustard plaster or splints or stitches. Or brandy.
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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
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