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 calendar 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 unworth
y 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.
This has been a strange day, disturbing. Glory called and invited you and your mother to the movies. Then, when she
came for you, she had old Boughton with her, and she helped him out of the car and up the walk and up the steps. He so rarely leaves his house now that I was really amazed to find him at my door. We sat him down at the kitchen table and gave him a glass of water, and then the three of you left. All the
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bother seemed to have worn him out, because he just sat there
with a more or less sociable expression but with his eyes closed, clearing his throat from time to time as if he was about to speak but then thought better of it. I found something on the radio, and we listened awhile to that. He'd chuckle a little if anything interesting happened. I believe he had been there most of an hour before he started to speak.
Then he said, "You know, Jack's not right with himself yet. Still not right." And he shook his head.
I said, "We've talked about that."
"Oh yes, he talks," Boughton said. "But he's never told me
why he's come back here. Never told Glory either. He was supposed to have some kind ofjob down in St. Louis. I don't know
what's become of that. We thought he might be married. I believe he was, for a while. I don't know what became of that, either.
He seems to have a little money. I don't know anything about it." He said, "I know he talks to you and Mrs. Ames. I know that."
Then he closed his eyes again. The effort of speaking
seemed to have been considerable, and I think it was because he hated to have to say what he had just said. I took it as a warning. I don't know another way to look at it. And I took his coming to the house as a way of underscoring his words, as it certainly did. And now I am persuaded again that I must speak to your mother.
Young Boughton came walking up the porch steps while we were still sitting there. I said, Come in, and pushed a chair out for him, but he stood by the door for a minute or two taking us in and drawing conclusions, which were pretty near the mark, as I could see by his expression. He seems always to suspect that people are in some sort of league against him. And no 211
doubt that's true, oft
en enough, just as it was true at that moment. And there is an element of frustration and embarrassment
in his manner, when he looks past the pretense, as he
seems always to do, that makes me feel ashamed to be a part of it, and sorry for him, too. There is also anger, and that concerns me.
Jack said, "I came home and there was no one there. It was a bit of a shock."
Boughton said, in that hearty voice he can still muster
when he wants to sound as though he's telling the truth, "I'm sorry, Jack! Ames and I have been looking after each other while the women are out at the movies! We thought you would be gone a little longer!"
"Yes. Well, no harm done," he said, and he sat down when
I asked him to again, and he kept his eyes on me, with that half-smile he has when he wants you to know he knows what's really going on and he can't quite believe you persist in trying
to fool him. Boughton sort of nodded off then, as he does when conversations get difficult, and I can't blame him, though I do have my heart to consider, too. Because it was a considerable strain on me to think what to say to Jack, as it always is and always has been, it seems to me. I felt sorry for him, and that's a
fact. It seems almost a curse to me the way he can see through people. Of course, I couldn't be honest with him, so there I was being dishonest with him, and there he was watching me as if I were the worst liar in the world, as if I were insulting him, as I suppose in fact I was.
"Your father felt like he needed to get out of the house," I said.
He said, "Understandable."
In fact, that was a ridiculous thing for me to have said, considering
that it's about all Boughton can do to walk from his bed to his chair on the porch.
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I said, "I suppose he wanted to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts."
"I'm sure he did."
"Well," I said, after a minute, "this is some year for
acorns!" which was perfectly pitiful. Jack laughed outright. "The crows have made an impressive showing," he said.
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