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
2 55
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 E
ssence 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 old bitterness of heart.
He cleared his throat. "Then you wouldn't mind saying goodbye to my father for me?"
240
"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
241
meaning. Well, anyway, I told him it was an honor to bless him. And that was also absolutely true. In fact I'd have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment. He just studied me, in that way he has. Then the bus came. I said, "We all love you, you know," and he laughed and said, "You're all saints." He stopped in the door and lifted his hat, and then he was gone, God bless him.
I made it as far as the church, and went inside and rested there for a long time. I believe I saw in young Boughton's face, as we walked along, a sense of irony at having invested hope in this sad old place, and also the cost to him of relinquishing it. And I knew what hope it was. It was just that kind the place was meant to encourage, that a harmless life could be lived here unmolested. "There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for every age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof." That is prophecy,
a vision of the prophet Zechariah. He says it will be marvelous
in the eyes of the people, and so it might well be to people almost anywhere in this sad world. To play catch of an evening,
to smell the river, to hear the train pass. These little towns
were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace. Your mother seems to want every supper to be my favorite sup^ per. There is often meat loaf, and always dessert. She puts candles on the table, since dark is coming early now. I suspect she
has brought them from the church, and that's all right. Often she wears her blue dress. You have outgrown your red shirt. Old Boughton's family have gathered, except the one his heart yearns for. They pay their respects and invite us for dinner, but 242
these days we three love to be at home. You come in reeking of evening air, with your eyes bright and your cheeks and fingers pink and cold, too beautiful in the candlelight for my old eyes. The cold has silenced all the insects. The dark seems to make us speak softly, like gentle conspirators. Your mother says the grace and butters your bread. I do wish Boughton could have seen how his boy received his benediction, how he bowed his head. If I told him, if he understood, he would have been jealous to have seen it, jealous to have been the one who bestowed
the blessing. It is almost as if I felt his hand on my hand. Well, I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realization—"This is why we have lived this life!" There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
I promised young Boughton that I would say goodbye to his father for him, so I strolled over there after dinner when I knew
the old fellow would be asleep, and when the room was empty I whispered a few words. My good friend is so nearly gone
from the world that the clouds have settled over his mortal understanding. And his hearing has been doubtful for years. I
knew if I spoke that name to him while he was awake he
would struggle to gather himself, he would be avid to understand, and I'd have created an eagerness in him that I could not
then, co
uld never in my life, by any means placate. As if anything I could say could resolve any part of his great mystery
for him. He would be alone in the confusions of his grief, and I just did not have the strength to witness that.
I thought how good it would be if he could be like ancient Jacob, the cherished son who had been lost to him bringing for his blessing the splendid young Robert Boughton Miles—"I had not thought to see thy face, and, lo, God hath let nie see 243
thy seed also!" There was a joy in the thought of how beautiful that would have been, beautiful as any vision of angels. It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth, which starts me thinking again about heaven. Well, I do that much of the time, as you know. Poor Glory put a chair for me beside Boughton's bed and I
sat with him a good while. I used to crawl in through the window of that room in the dark of the morning to wake him up
so we could go fishing. His mother would get cross if we woke her, too, so we were very stealthy. Sometimes he would just not want to quit sleeping, and I'd pull on his hair and tug on his
ear and whisper to him, and if I thought of something ridiculous to say sometimes he'd wake up laughing. That was so long
ago. There he was yesterday evening, sleeping on his right side as he always did, in the embrace of the Lord, I have no doubt, though I knew if I woke him up he'd be back in Gethsemane. So I said to him in his sleep, I blessed that boy of yours for you.
I still feel the weight of his brow on my hand. I said, I love him as much as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are finally answered, old fellow. And mine too, mine too. We had to wait a long time, didn't we?
When I left I saw Glory standing in the hallway, looking in on all the quiet talk there was in the parlor, her brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and their children, grown
and half grown. Trading news and talking politics and playing hearts. There were more of them in the kitchen and more upstairs. As I was leaving I met five or six who had been out for a
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