THE HEAT OF THE MORNING WOKE HER, SO SHE KNEW SHE had slept late. There were no sounds in the house, there was no smell of coffee. Jack and her father must still be sleeping. Good for them. She felt stiff, as if some physical exertion had wearied her, and it was only the thought that she might miss the morning mail that induced her to get up, wash, brush, dress, make herself presentable to whatever passerby or clerk might otherwise notice her and wonder what new drama had unfolded in the poor old preacher’s house. She had put the letter on her dresser the night before, in case Jack might have had second thoughts and chosen resignation over futile hope. She went down the stairs as quietly as she could and let herself out the door.
And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father’s hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?
In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.
She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her. Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
ROBBY AND TOBIAS WERE IN THE DRUGSTORE, EXTRACTING Fudgsicles from the smoking freezer chest. Each of them had a dime, earned pulling weeds in one of Lila’s gardens. They showed them to her. She dropped Jack’s letter in the slot, heard the clerk’s views on the weather, and started home again, the boys tagging along with her, skipping and circling and taking a few steps backward, not yet resigned to the tedium of merely walking. They split their Fudgsicles as they are meant to be split, and Tobias dutifully offered her the second half of his, and she said no, thank you, which pleased him. Robby said, “I’m saving mine for Mr. Boughton.”
Glory said, “You can call him Jack. He wouldn’t mind.”
Robby shook his head. “My dad says I have to call him Mr. Boughton.”
He walked along at her elbow, engrossed in the Fudgsicle, coping as he could when the ice slid down the stick. When they came to his corner, Tobias took off for home and Robby went on with her. He said, “My mom likes it when I help out. Well, my dad likes it, too, but he just watches. He sits on the porch.”
Lila had said to her once that the boy had to learn what it was to work. Glory knew she meant she would be his only support through most of his growing up, and life would be difficult for them. “We’ll be leaving sometime,” she said. “There’s nothing to do around here.” That was when they had been at the river for Ames’s birthday, and had walked down to rinse the plates, and had stopped to watch Robby and Tobias racing leaves through an eddy between two ribs of sand. She said, “We hope he’ll remember something of it.” Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child, and it was exactly that, the river broad and shallow, the intricacies of its bed making rivulets of the slow water, bloom on the larger little islands and butterflies everywhere. And the trees meeting high above it, shading it, making the bottom earthily apparent wherever there was calm. They all loved the river, in all generations, Jack, too. She bent and dipped her hands in the water and pressed them to her face, to conceal the embarrassment of tears, but more than that, because the river was simply manifest, a truth too seldom acknowledged. When she had been on her own, sometimes she had thought of it.
JACK WAS SITTING ON THE FRONT STEP, HIS ELBOWS ON his knees, waiting for her. When he saw the two of them, he stood up, tossed his cigarette, and went into the house. Robby said, “Well, you can give him this,” and handed her the half Fudgsicle, which had melted into its bag.
“He doesn’t feel too well today,” she said.
He nodded. “He wouldn’t want me to catch anything.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”
“Then my dad might catch it.”
“True,” she said. It was the thought of seeing Jack that had brought him along with her. Now he turned and waved and ran off toward home.
Jack was at the kitchen table, laying out a hand for solitaire.
“Sorry,” he said. “Not up to small talk.”
“He wanted me to give you this.”
“Great. Nice kid.”
She put the soggy packet in the sink.
He said, “I thought you might not have gotten the bottles out of the loft. So I couldn’t start working on the car till you came back.”
He followed her out to the barn and opened the door for her. “Stay here,” he said. Then he dragged an empty crate out from the wall, climbed up on it, took hold of the edge of the loft with one hand, and with the other brought down a ladder that had been lying on the floor of the loft, out of sight. When the base of it hit the floor, there was a painful sound of crotchety wood and pulled nails. He said, “This is where I was last night when you came looking for me. I meant to say something, but I—didn’t.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t out staggering the streets of Gilead, in case you were worried about that. I didn’t disgrace the family.”
He held the doubtful old ladder while she climbed up into the loft. It smelled airy, and like hay or burlap and desiccated wood, a place with a history of rain and heat, long abandoned by human intention. Her older brothers and sisters had stories of playing in it, but their father had forbidden them to play there years before she was born because of the splinters in the plank floor and the nails that had been driven through the shingles in the low roof, and he had taken away the ladder in order to baffle temptation. Nevertheless, from time to time the boys contrived to hoist one another up into that secret and forbidden place to act out stealth and ambush, an impulse too primordial for even Teddy to resist. It would never have occurred to them to bring her along, the baby sister whose indiscretions were notorious in the family for years after she had outgrown them. So this was the first time she was setting foot in that fabled space.
Jack had run a length of clothesline from beam to beam and thrown a tarp over it to make a low tent in the angle of floor and roof. She knelt and looked into it. The edges were neatly nailed down. There was a floor of newspapers, a rumpled blanket and a pillow. He had set a wooden box on its side as a table and shelf.
A flashlight, a few books, a mayonnaise jar with a handful of her oatmeal cookies in it. The framed photograph of a river. A glass and an uncapped pint bottle, three-quarters empty. The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it like a dark spirit lurking in it, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh. She thought, What if he had succeeded in dying, and then she had found this, so neatly and intentionally made out of nothing anyone could want, with the fierce breath of his grief still haunting it, the blanket still tangled.
Jack said, “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you—”
She said, “I’m fine.” He would know from her voice that she was crying, but she had to say something, and he would expect her to cry, surely. She pulled the blanket out of the tent. An empty bottle dragged along with it. She put the bottle aside and folded and smoothed the blanket and put it back. Then she pulled the crate to her and took the bottle and the glass out of it and set them aside. The books were The Condition of the Working Class, The High and the Mighty, and a worn little Bible. The flashlight had burned itself out, but she turned it off and put it beside the books and slid the crate back into its place. It felt like piety and propitiation to calm the disorder this most orderly man had left in the confusions of his sorrow.
He said, “I think there are only two bottles up there. I’m pretty sure.”
That meant he thought she was taking longer than she needed to. He would be embarrassed that she had seen and touched his secretiveness, which was so like shame, so like affliction, that they could hardly be distinguished. She said, “I’m coming,” and stayed where she was, kneeling there, amazed at what was before her, as if it were the humblest sign of great mystery, come from a terrain where loneliness and grief are time and weather.
She held the bottles against her side with one arm and the glass in her hand, and with her free arm she held to the ladder and lowered herself onto it.
“I’m right here,” Jack said, and held it steady for her. Then he stepped away and stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her with the distant and tentative expression that meant he felt she might be making a new appraisal of him. He said, “A little strange, hmm? A little squalid? Sorry.”
“No matter,” she said. “I think this is everything.”
He nodded.
“I poured out the other bottles in the orchard.”
“Fine.” He said, “I made that to keep the bats off when I read with the flashlight. Bats are attracted by light, did you know that? Useful information. And it kept the rain off. That roof is just about worthless. So it made a kind of sense. To me.”
HE WAITED FOR HER, AND WHEN SHE CAME BACK FROM the orchard and the shed he walked to the house with her, a few steps behind. He said, “I’ll pull that down tomorrow. My shanty. I’ll clean things up around here before I go. I’ve let a lot of things slide.”
“It’s still much better than it was when you came.”
He opened the screen door for her. He said, “I’m going to try to get some of these stains off my hands. I can’t help much with the old fellow until I do. I think he’s scared of me, the way I look now.”
“No, he just hates the thought that you hurt yourself.”
He nodded. “You can hate thoughts. That’s interesting. I hate most of my thoughts.” He opened the cupboard under the sink and found a scrub brush.
Glory said, “You might rub your hands with shortening. That would probably dissolve the grease. Scrubbing will make them look inflamed.” She took the can from the cupboard, scooped out a spoonful, and put it in his palm. She said, “Remember when you talked to me about your soul, about saving it?”
He shrugged. “I think you may be mistaking me for someone else.”
“And I said I liked it the way it is.”
“Now I know you’re mistaking me for someone else.” He did not look up from the massaging of his hands.
“I’ve thought about what I should have said to you then, and I haven’t changed my mind at all. That’s why it embarrassed me, because it would have been so presumptuous of me—I’m not even sure what it means.” Then she said, “What is a soul?”
He looked up, smiled, studied her face. “Why ask me?”
“It just seems to me that you would know.”
He shrugged. “On the basis of my vast learning and experience, I would say—it is what you can’t get rid of. Insult, deprivation, outright violence—‘If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there,’ and so on. “‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.’”
“Interesting choice of text.”
“It came to mind. Don’t make too much of it.”
“Well, your soul seems fine to me. I don’t know what that means, either. Anyway, it’s true.”
He said, “Thanks, chum. But you don’t know me. Well, you know I’m a drunk.”
“And a thief.”
He laughed. “Yes, a drunk and a thief. I’m also a terrible coward. Which is one of the reasons I lie so much.”
She nodded. “I’ve noticed that.”
“No kidding. What else have you noticed?”
“I’m not going to mention vulnerable women.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Very generous in the circumstances.”
She nodded. “I think so.”
He said, “I am unaccountably vain, despite all, and I have a streak of malice that does not limit itself to futile efforts at self-defense.”
“I’ve noticed that, too.”
He nodded. “I guess there’s nothing subtle about it.”
She brought a washcloth and began gently to soap away the dingy shortening from his hands. He took the cloth from her.
“So,” he said, “we have made a list of my venial sins.”
“Presbyterians don’t believe in venial sins.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not described by the word ‘Presbyterian.’”
“Oh, hush!”
He laughed. “All right. My lesser sins. Not that Presbyterians believe in them, either. Do you want a list of the grave ones? The mortal ones?”
“Not really.”
“That’s good.” He said, “Reverend Miles, Della’s father and my biographer, told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing.” He looked at her. “Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe.” He said, “It’s why I keep to myself. When I can. Ah. And now the tears.”
“Don’t you think everybody feels that way sometimes, though? I certainly have. While you had Della you didn’t feel that way. If you weren’t alone so much, I mean, Papa’s right about that. If you’d just let us help you.”
He said, “When Mama died I’d been out of jail for a couple days. So I could have come home. Strictly speaking. But it takes awhile to shake that off, you know. Wash it off. To feel you could blend in with the Presbyterians. And the old fellow doesn’t miss anything. I wouldn’t have wanted him to see me. I was terrified at the thought. So I used his check to buy some clothes. I knew what he’d think of me when he saw I’d cashed it.” He smiled at her. “I was grateful for the check, I really was. I hadn’t been at that hotel where he sent it for quite a while. I was surprised the letter found me. But the desk clerk was impressed by the black border, so he brought it to me. He hadn’t even opened it. I spent part of the money in a bar. What was left of it.”
Glory said, “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. Not that it matters. I don’t care if you’ve been in jail.”
He said, “No? It made quite an impression on me. I believe it’s as congenial a place to be nothing as I could ever hope to find.” He laughed. “In jail, they call it good behavior. Not a thing I’ve often been accused of.” He said, “Jail reinforced my eccentricities. I’
m pretty sure of that.”
“Mama died more than ten years ago. So you were all right after you got out of jail.”
“Yes, I was. And now I know it was an aberration. Nothing I can sustain on my own. I’ve found out I still can’t trust myself. So I’m right back where I started.” He smiled. “You forgive so much, you’ll have to forgive that, too. Well, I guess you won’t have to.”
“You know I will.”
After a moment he said, “You probably wonder what kind of woman Della is, shacking up with the likes of me.”
“She reads French. She embroiders. She sings in a choir.”
“There are things I haven’t told you about her.”
She shrugged. “Some things are sacred.”
He laughed. “Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly.” He wiped his hands on the dishtowel and looked them over. “Not too bad,” he said. He held them up to her inspection. “He should be able to stand the sight of my hands, at least. I wish there were something I could do about my face.”
“You could get a little sleep.”
“Not a bad idea. If you don’t mind. There are a few things I meant to get done today.”
“Sleep for an hour or two first.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll do that. Thanks.” He stopped halfway up the stairs. “I told you a minute ago that I was in jail. I should have said prison. I was in prison.” Then he watched her to appraise her reaction.
She said, “I don’t care if you were in prison,” but the words cost her a little effort, and he heard it and smiled at her for a moment, studying her to be sure that she meant them.
He said, “You’re a good kid.”
IT WAS SUPPERTIME WHEN JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS AGAIN. He said, “I slept a lot longer than I planned to. Sorry.” He did look more like himself, she thought. An odd phrase, since he was always himself, perhaps never more so than he had been in the last two days. He was wearing his father’s old clothes and the blue striped necktie, and he was conspicuously kempt and shaved. Old Spice. He buttoned the top button of the jacket, unbuttoned it again, then took the jacket off. “This is better, I think,” he said, and looked at her for confirmation.
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