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by Marilynne Robinson

  AMES STROLLED OVER THAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER, FOR a game of checkers, he said, but he and their father sat in the porch with the board between them and talked quietly together, the way they did when advice of some kind was being sought and given. Glory brought them ice water and left them to themselves. It was a courtesy Ames paid to his friend to seek out pastoral wisdom even though he must have had wisdom of his own to spare after so many years, and since he was, by temperament, the more obliging of the two and therefore seldom in particular need of wisdom, his own or Boughton’s. All the same, he would offer up some soul to her father’s contemplation and then they would consider together, as they did in the old days, how to mollify, comfort, instruct. Boughton had resigned his pulpit ten years earlier, under circumstances that made Ames especially careful to respect his views. The Sunday-school children were marrying, and the married couples had settled into difficult, ordinary life, and the grave old men and women who had taught the Sunday-school children about bands of angels and flying chariots were themselves crossing over Jordan one by one. So he helped Ames think through whatever question might have arisen among the Congregationalists, whom he knew better than his own former flock now, through these murmured consultations. “Yes,” he would say, “a good deal of tact will be called for in dealing with that fellow,” and Ames would say, “That’s for sure.” During these conversations her father’s expression assumed its old sagacity, that gentle shrewdness of the practiced shepherd of souls. “But I’d tell him where matters stand. I’d be frank about it.” His eyes would kindle with the thought of firmness and candor, the memory of those old pleasures. Ames always watched him with a kind of bemused and wistful respect, as if he were now the younger man and his friend had aged past him into a venerability he might never attain. “Yes,” he would say, “I will certainly be frank.”

  Jack came upon them there, talking together. She heard them greet him, and a word or two, and then he came into the kitchen with cucumbers from the garden. His shirt bloused and his pants gathered a little under his belt, but she was pleased all in all with the way he looked and she could tell he was, too. He managed to seem a little dapper, somehow, a thing his pride required. She knew this was a relief to him. He washed the cucumbers. “Cucumbers smell like evening,” he said. “Like chill. Need any help?” When she said no he went to the piano and sat down and began to play “Softly and Tenderly,” a favorite hymn of his father’s. He played it softly, and, she thought, very tenderly. She went into the hallway to listen, and he glanced up at her sidelong, as if there were an understanding between them, but he played on pensively, without a hint of detachment or calculation. “Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home.” The old men fell silent. “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.” Her father sang, Ames with him. Then “Rock of Ages,” then “The Old Rugged Cross,” and when that song was over, it was night. It had begun to thunder and rain, one of those storms that come after dark and change the weather. The old men sat there, silent for a long time. She brought Ames an umbrella, and after a while she heard him take his leave. She was afraid the damp might make her father uncomfortable, but he asked her, very kindly, to leave him alone for a little while. He said, “Tell Jack that was wonderful. I was proud of him.”

  She found Jack in his room, the door open, lying on his bed reading a book. She said, from the doorway, “Jack, Papa told me to tell you it was wonderful that you played for them. He said he was proud of you.”

  He considered. “Was Ames still here when he said that?”

  “Not when he said it to me. Ames would have known it anyway.”

  Jack nodded. “I suppose he would. Good. Thanks, Glory.”

  IT RAINED SOUNDLY AND SATISFACTORILY OVERNIGHT. There was talk of drought, and one good rain would not end the worry, but it did make a beautiful morning, a mild and fragrant wind and shimmering trees loud with birds. Jack had left the house early. Glory heard the creak of the screen door before the sun was well up. His restlessness took on the aspect of virtue, rousing him out of bed in the dark and sending him out into the garden to expend the sour energies of failed sleep. She went down to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, and sat in the porch while it brought itself to the kind and degree of fragrance her family had always preferred. Then she poured a cup for Jack. She found him out by the clothesline. He pulled a line down and released it, and raindrops flew up, brilliant in the morning light. He did the same with the next one, and the next.

  “Thanks,” he said, as he took the cup from her. She saw that he had brought the gasoline can out of the barn. He said, “Back in a minute,” and went into the house, and came out again with his suit on hangers and a dishtowel over his shoulder. “I’m going to do a little dry cleaning.” He poured gasoline into an empty coffee can and soaked the cloth in it, and then sponged the sleeve of his jacket, saturated the bulge at the elbow and the creases at the inside of the elbow, and pulled it straight. He glanced at her. “This sort of works,” he said. “After a while the smell goes away. Here,” he said, and handed her his cigarettes and his matches. “I can be absentminded.”

  She said, “I’ve heard that people did this. I’ve never actually seen anyone do it before.”

  He said, “Sheltered life.”

  The whole of that morning he worked at his suit. She saw him stand back finally and study it as it swung there in the wind and apparently decide it was good enough, since he emptied the coffee can out on the ground and carried the gasoline back to the barn. She went out to see for herself, and it did look to her as if it had fewer of the signs of hard use than it had had before, that it looked more impersonal, less conformed to one particular life. In the breeze there was something game about it, even a little jaunty. No wonder he was pleased.

  He came inside, washed up, and made himself a peanut butter sandwich. “Want one? I’ll give you half of mine. All of it. I washed my hands.” He said, “What is the French for sandwich?”

  “I’m pretty sure the French for sandwich is sandwich.”

  He nodded. “I was afraid of that. So I am at a loss to make this slightly gaseous object more appealing to you. To me, for that matter.”

  “Jelly?”

  “Hate the stuff. It can be good in doughnuts.” He lifted the top slice of bread and looked under it. “An ugly food, peanut butter. If I struck a match, perhaps I could serve it to you flaming, madame. As they do in the finer restaurants. Mademoiselle.”

  “No, thanks. I’m having soup. Want some?”

  He shook his head. “I am hungry in general. It is the particulars that discourage me.”

  “Then you might as well just eat your sandwich.”

  “True.” He said, “Do we still have that baseball mitt?”

  “Yes, we do. I put it in my closet. I was afraid you might find some way to swap it for a hair shirt.”

  He nodded. “That was prudent of you. I was thinking, if you still had it, I might borrow it back.”

  She said, “Sure. As soon as you finish your sandwich.”

  “I do this,” he said, “only because I trust you to have my best interests at heart.” He ate it in eight bites and washed it down with a glass of water. “Well, now I’ve fed the beast,” he said. “It should stagger through till supper. It is an oddly patient beast, my carnal self. I call it Snowflake. For, you know, its intractable whiteness. Among other things. A certain lingering sentiment attaches to it. It reminds me of my youth.”

  She brought him the mitt. He said, “Kids his age are always losing things, so I bought another baseball. I mean, I was always losing things. At his age.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He put the mitt on his hand and popped the ball into the pocket with a flick of his wrist. That ancient gesture. “I thought Ames might appreciate—A kid ought to learn how to play catch. I was good at baseball. I thought he might remember that.”

  “It’s a good idea, Jack. I don’t think you need to worry so much about what Ames thinks
of you.”

  “I know what he thinks of me. It can’t get much worse. So that doesn’t worry me.”

  “Then what does?”

  “You’re right. Deranged by hope. I guess I thought he might look down upon me from his study window and say to himself, ‘He’s a cad and a bounder, but I appreciate his attention to my son.’” He laughed. “That won’t happen. No need to worry about that. What a stupid idea.”

  Glory said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you to take the new Life and The Nation over to the Ameses’. They don’t subscribe. Ask Lila if Robby might like to play a little ball. If she says yes, the Reverend won’t object.”

  He nodded. “All right. I’ll do it. Nothing ventured and so on.”

  AFTER HALF AN HOUR SHE WALKED OUT JUST FAR ENOUGH to see Jack and Robby in the road in front of Ames’s house, Robby encumbered with the big stiff glove, scrambling after the ball when Jack tossed it and throwing it back halfway and in something like the right direction. “That’s the idea!” Jack called. The child squared off and punched his mitt, ready for anything. The next toss bounced off his shoe. Jack laughed, very kind laughter that she had not heard for decades if she had ever heard it. He ran forward to field Robby’s throw, and when he turned around he saw her. He waved. “Home soon,” he called.

  She called back, “No hurry,” sorry she had distracted him. He looked like a man full of that active contentment that makes even ordinary movement graceful. He looked at ease in sunlight. She hoped old Ames had indeed gazed down upon him. He might have seen him as his father did, for once.

  After another half hour Jack came in through the porch. He smiled when he saw her. “That was all right,” he said. “What a funny kid. He’s a nice kid. I don’t think I’m grooming him for the majors, though. He wants to play for the Red Sox. I’m not saying he has no chance at all. You have to be black to have no chance at all.”

  “There’s Jackie Robinson.”

  “Ah yes. Jackie Robinson of Dodger fame. There’s Larry Dobie, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson. Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks. Satchel Paige. I’ll give you a nickel if you can tell me which one plays for Boston.”

  “I confess, I haven’t given much thought to baseball lately.”

  “Clearly. There are those in St. Louis who think of little else. I have had many earnest conversations on the subject.”

  She looked at him. “With Della?”

  “One or two of them with Della. She knows what matters in this world.”

  Glory laughed. “Well, I’m pretty sure I don’t. Here I’ve been wasting my time worrying about radioactive fallout. About strontium 90.”

  He said, “Believe me, she worries about that, too.”

  JACK LET A DAY PASS, AND THEN IN THE AFTERNOON HE took his ball and glove and went to Ames’s again. When he came back he seemed pleased. “The kid’s shaping up. He actually caught one on the first bounce.” He said, “It was all right. They even asked me to stay for supper. Lila asked me. But I don’t think the Reverend objected. He didn’t seem to.”

  “Why didn’t you stay?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “They were being polite.”

  “Of course they were being polite. That doesn’t mean they weren’t really inviting you.”

  After a moment he said, “I have learned, in the tedious course of my life, that it is safer not to presume on these courtesies. I have taken the bait often enough to know how it feels when the trap shuts. Better to forgo the pleasures of, you know, pot roast and mashed potatoes.”

  She said, “You want to get yourself on better terms with Ames. How can you do that if you don’t let him—well—treat you like a friend? Ask you to supper? It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.”

  He nodded. “There it is. My lifelong exile from the ordinary world. I have to learn the customs. And somehow persuade myself that they pertain to me.” He looked at her. “That’s where it gets tricky.”

  “No, you just have to relax a little and remind yourself that you are dealing with a very kind old man.”

  He said, “It really is more complex than that, Glory. The other day I gave his kid my glove to use, so he ran upstairs and took that old glove Ames keeps on his desk and brought it down to me. I guess it once belonged to the long-departed Uncle Edward. It seemed harmless enough to me to put it on. I mean, it wasn’t as if I were going to be catching anything with it. But, you know, I stole it once. Temporarily. I don’t know why. And Ames knew I had stolen it, because who else would bother. And I was the town thief. So today when he came up the road from church there I was with that thing on my hand and nothing to do but stand there. He looked at it and looked at me and he didn’t say anything about it and neither did I, but I could tell that he was reminded of all that, my troubled youth, and it was embarrassing. For him, too.”

  “I think you forget how long ago all that happened.”

  “Yes, and here I am today, John Ames Boughton, solid citizen. A miraculous transformation.” He laughed. He was thoughtful for a while, and then he said, “If I had it all to do over again, I mean adolescent criminality, I’d try to restrict myself to doing things that were explicable. Or at least appeared to be explicable. I’m serious. It’s the things people can’t account for that upset them. The old gent used to ask me, ‘Why did you do that, Jack?’ And I couldn’t even tell him I did it because I felt like it. Even that wouldn’t have been true. What did I want with an old baseball mitt? Nothing. But there wasn’t really much to steal in this town. It would have been hard to find anything to want, anything that might make it seem as though I had a motive. So all my offenses were laid to a defect of character. I have no quarrel with that. But it is a problem for me now.”

  Glory said, “If the Ameses ask you to supper again, say yes. And stay. Promise me.”

  He laughed. “Will do. On my honor.” He said, “You have a feeling for these things.”

  AND THE VERY NEXT DAY, HAVING TOILED EARNESTLY IN the vegetable patch and the flower beds from dawn till noon, and having tightened the joints of the three Adirondack chairs that had always slouched together under the kitchen window as if to be indolently serviceable in the event that something in the yard between them and the barn should attract spectators, and having restrung the clothesline, he came into the house, ironed a shirt, and polished his shoes. “I’m feeling useful,” he said. “Productive. That’s good for morale. So is the tan.” He pushed up his sleeve to show her. “There’s a definite line there.”

  “So there is.” She had learned to worry about these hectic outbursts of purposefulness, and to know there was no point in trying to damp them down.

  He said, “I believe this is Thursday. So tomorrow is Friday, and Ames will probably be working on his sermon. He won’t welcome interruption.” He said, “I will probably go to church on Sunday. I can do that. My suit no longer smells combustible. Just slightly automotive. I wouldn’t want to alarm anyone.” He laughed.

  So all this was in preparation for supper at the Ameses’, for which he had not been invited. But he left the house in the early evening, pausing in the door to look at her and shrug, as if to say, Wish me luck. When he was not home for supper, she told her father that she thought he might have been invited by Ames and Lila.

  “Yes,” her father said. “I hope John will take some interest in him. That is a thing I wished for many years. When you give a man a namesake, you do expect a certain amount of help. Ames was a help to me, of course. Not to Jack so much. I don’t mean to criticize. I guess I wasn’t much help to him either, as far as that goes.”

  The old man wanted to wait for him in the porch, so they sat there together in the mild night. “You can’t see the lightning bugs through these screens,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. But at least you get the breeze. You hear the crickets.”

  After a little while he said, “Ames will need his rest. Old fellows can’t tolerate these late nights. I hope he will realize that.” And then they heard footsteps and Jack came up the walk and up the
steps.

  “Nice evening,” he said. His voice was soft and calm. Glory knew that her father noticed, too.

  “Yes,” the old man said. “Yes, it is. A fine evening.”

  Jack said, “They were very kind. The boy likes me. And Mrs. Ames seems to think I’m all right.”

  “I suppose you talked a little politics, Jack?”

  “Yes, sir. He says, ‘Stevenson is a very fine man, no doubt.’”

  His father laughed. “There’s no persuading him. He’ll agree with anything you say. But when the chips are down, it’s Eisenhower. Yes, I know what it’s like, trying to reason with him where politics are concerned. He hasn’t been around so much lately. Maybe I’ve been trying too hard.”

  Jack said, “He talked a little bit about his grandfather.”

  “Yes, he likes to tell the old stories. The Boughtons weren’t here for most of that. We left Scotland in the fall of 1870, so we missed out on the war and the rest of it. There was a lot of what you might call fanaticism around here in the early days. Even among Presbyterians. That old fellow was right in the middle of it, from what I’ve heard. And then in his old age he was about as crazy as it’s possible to be and still be walking the streets. I would never have named you after that John Ames. We were used to him, of course. We felt sorry for him. But he was crazy when I knew him, and before that, too, I believe.”