Gilead: A Novel (16 page)

If he continues to come around, I believe I’ll do that.

I have not been writing to you for a day or two. I have passed some fairly difficult nights. Discomfort, a little trouble breathing. I have decided the two choices open to me are: (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don’t care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting me watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.)

Your mother has sent you off to the neighbors, so you won’t pester me, she says, but it makes me wonder about the impression I must be making on her this morning. The poor woman is very pale. She has not slept any better than I have. They put the television set in the parlor yesterday and spent the afternoon scrambling around on the roof rigging up an antenna.

The young men are terribly interested in these things. It makes them happy to do a kindness so perilous and exotic in nature. I remember, I remember.

Your mother has brought down my writing materials and the books she found on my desk, and someone has brought in a TV tray for my pills and spectacles and water glass. In case this is as serious as everyone seems to think. I don’t believe it myself, but maybe I’m wrong.

I fell asleep in my chair and woke up feeling so much better. I missed eight and a half innings, and nothing happened in the bottom of the ninth (4 to 2, Yankees), but the reception was good and I look forward to watching the rest of the season, if God wills. Your mother was asleep, too, kneeling on the floor with her head against my knees. I had to sit very still for a long time, watching a movie about Englishmen in trench coats who were up to something morose involving Frenchmen and trains. I didn’t really follow it. When she woke up, she was so glad to see me, as if I had been gone a long time. Then she went and fetched you and we ate our supper in the parlor—it turns out that whoever brought the trays brought one for each of us. Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.

We had a fine time, we three, watching television. There were jugglers and monkeys and ventriloquists, and there was a lot of dancing around. You asked for bites off my plate so you could decide’ which casserole and salad you wanted—you have the child’s abhorrence of mingling foods on your plate. So I gave you a bite of one after another, (guessing) Mrs. Brown, Mrs. McNeill, Mrs. Pry, then Mrs. Dorris, Mrs. Turney, feeding you with my fork. You would say, “I still can’t decide!” and we’d do it all again. That was your joke, eating it all up. It was a wonderful joke. I thought of the day I gave you communion.

I wonder if you thought of it also.

I went up to the church for a few hours this morning, and when I came home I found a great many of my books moved into the parlor, with my desk and chair, and the television set moved upstairs. This was your mother’s idea, but I knew it was young Boughton who did the lifting and carrying for her, or helped her with it. I am not angry about this. At my time of life, I refuse to be angry. It was kindly meant. And it had to be done sooner or later. It’s true that if I have to spend my twilight stranded with somebody or other, I’d prefer Karl Barth to Jack Benny. Still. I have my study. I don’t feel I need to give it up yet. Jack Boughton in my study. He may have carried this very journal down the stairs. After some fairly anxious looking around, which involved two trips upstairs, I found it down here, in the bottom drawer of my desk, where I never put it. That seemed like a sort of taunt, as if he had made a point of hiding it from me. I know I am not being reasonable.

I gave the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael today. I departed from my text a little more than I do ordinarily, which may not have been wise, since sleep was a struggle last night. Not that I couldn’t sleep. I would have very much preferred to have been awake. I just lay there, helplessly subject to my anxieties. A good many of them I could have put out of my mind, if I’d had the use of my mind. But as it was, I had to endure a kind of dull paralysis. To struggle within paralysis is a strange thing—I doubt I stirred a limb, but when I woke up I was exhausted, weary at heart.

Then young Boughton came to the service. That was nothing I would have expected. You saw him and waved and patted the pew next to you, and he came down the aisle and sat with you. Your mother looked at him to say good morning, and then she did not look at him again. Not once.

I began my remarks by pointing out the similarity between the stories of Hagar and Ishmael sent off into the wilderness and Abraham going off with Isaac to sacrifice him, as he believes. My point was that Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons, and that the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham’s extreme old age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

I noted that Abraham himself had been sent into the wilderness, told to leave his father’s house also, that this was the narrative of all generations, and that it is only by the grace of God that we are made instruments of His providence and participants in a fatherhood that is always ultimately His.

At this point I departed from my text to say that an old pastor’s anxiety for his church is likewise a forgetfulness of the fact that Christ is Himself the pastor of His people and a faithful presence among them through all generations. I thought this was a good point, but it started some of the women crying, so I tried to change the subject. I put the question why the Lord would ask gentle Abraham to do two things that were so cruel on their face—sending a child and his mother into the wilderness, and taking a child to be bound on an altar as if for sacrifice. This came to my mind because I had often wondered about it. Then I had to attempt an answer.

It had occurred to me that these were the only two instances in Scripture where a father is even apparently unkind to his child. The Lord can ask, “What man of you, if his son asked for bread, would give him a stone?” and it is a rhetorical question. Anyone knows from experience that among us there are a good many fathers who mistreat their children, or abandon them. And it was at that point I noticed young Boughton grinning at me. White as a sheet, and grinning. The text was one I would never have chosen if I’d thought he might be there, though if I’d kept to the sermon as I wrote it, everything would have been better.

About the cruelty of those narratives I said that they rendered the fact that children are often victims of rejection or violence, and that in these cases, too, which the Bible does not otherwise countenance, the child is within the providential care of God. And this is no less true, I said, if the angel carries her home to her faithful and loving Father than if He opens the spring or stops the knife and lets the child live out her sum of earthly years.

I don’t know how sufficient that is to the question. It is such a difficult question that I hesitate to raise it at all. My only preparation for dealing with it has been the many times people have asked me to explain it to them. Whatever they may have thought, I have not succeeded to my own satisfaction even once.

I have always worried that when I say the insulted or the downtrodden are within the providence of God, it will be taken by some people to mean that it is not a grave thing, an evil thing, to insult or oppress. The whole teaching of the Bible is explicitly contrary to that idea. So I quoted the words of the Lord: “If anyone offend these little ones, it would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he were cast into the sea.” That is strong language, but there it is. Young Boughton just sat there grinning. That’s one thing that has always been strange about him. He treats words as if they were actions. He doesn’t listen to the meaning of words, the way other people do. He just decides whether they are hostile, and how hostile they are. He decides whether they threaten him or injure him, and he reacts at that level. If he reads chastisement into anything you say, it’s as if you had taken a shot at him. As if you had nicked his ear.

Now, as I have said, I did not expect him to be at that service. Furthermore, there are plenty of people whose behavior toward their children falls far short of what it should be, so, even when I departed from my text, and even though I will concede that my extemporaneous remarks might have been influenced by his sitting there with that look on his face, right beside my wife and child, still it was considerable egotism on his part to take my words as directed at him only, as he clearly did.

Your mother looked anxious. That might have been because I seemed to her to be talking about my own situation, and hers and yours, or it might have been because I did struggle a little to organize my thoughts, or it might have been because my emotions ran higher than they normally do. And if I looked at all the way I felt, even half as weary, there’d be grounds for concern in that, too.

But the thought occurred to me that young Boughton had told her some version of events, enough so she saw the implications, from his point of view, of my sermon. I don’t know when he might have spoken to her. If he wanted the opportunity, he could have found it, I suppose. It did strike me as strange that she didn’t look at him even one time. If she wished not to seem at all to recognize him in the sermon, that would explain it. I felt perhaps others in the congregation might have thought the sermon was directed at him. It was all most unfortunate. I must hope some good can come of it. I just don’t know why he isn’t worshipping with the Presbyterians. Now I will pray. First I think I’ll sleep. I’ll try to sleep.

***

Another morning, thank the Lord. A good night’s sleep and no real discomfort to speak of. A woman in my flock called just after breakfast and asked me to come to her house. She is elderly, recently a widow, all by herself, and she has just moved from her farm to a cottage in town. You can never know what troubles or fears such people have, and I went. It turned out that the problem was her kitchen sink. She told me, considerably amazed that a reversal so drastic could occur in a lawful universe, that hot water came from the cold faucet and cold water from the hot faucet. I suggested she might just decide to take C for hot and / / f o r cold, but she said she liked things to work the way they were supposed to. So I went home and got my screwdriver and came back and switched the handles. She said she guessed that would do until she could get a real plumber. Oh, the clerical life! I think this lady has suspected me of a certain doctrinal sloughing off, and now she will be sure of it. The story made your mother laugh, though, so my labors are repaid. Last night I finished The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. It gave me a sort of turn there for a while. The old man sees the girl with someone her own age and remarks how well suited they are, and then he starts getting old and shabby and broke, and she’s still very beautiful, of course. But it all turns out fine. She loves him only and forever. I doubt the book would have kept my interest if that particular matter had not arisen. And then I did want to know what there was in it your mother liked so much. God bless her, she’s a dear woman. I read most of it yesterday evening, and then I couldn’t sleep, wondering about it, so I crept off to my study and read till almost dawn. And then I went up to the church to watch the dawn come, because that peace does restore me better than sleep can do. It is as though there were a hoard of quiet in that room, as if any silence that ever entered that room stayed in it. I remember once as a child dreaming that my mother came into my bedroom and sat down in a chair in the corner and folded her hands in her lap and stayed there, very calm and still. It made me feel wonderfully safe, wonderfully happy. When I woke up, there she was, sitting in that chair. She smiled at me and said, “I was just enjoying the quiet.” I have that same feeling in the church, that I am dreaming what is true.

It strikes me that your mother could not have said a more heartening word to me by any other means than she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me.

I wish I could be like one of the old Vikings. I’d have the deacons carry me in and lay me down at the foot of the communion table, and then torch the old ship, and it and I would sail into eternity together. Though in fact I hope they will save that table. Surely they will.

Even the Holy of Holies was broken open. The deep darkness vanished into ordinary daylight, and the mystery of God was only made more splendid. So my dear hoard of silence can be scattered, too, and the great silence will not be any poorer for it. And yet thank God they are waiting till I die. Sometimes I almost forget my purpose in writing this, which is to tell you things I would have told you if you had grown up with me, things I believe it becomes me as a father to teach you. There are the Ten Commandments, of course, and I know you will have been particularly aware of the Fifth Commandment, Honor your father and your mother. I draw attention to it because Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine are enforced by the criminal and civil laws and by social custom. The Tenth Commandment is unenforceable, even by oneself, even with the best will in the world, and it is violated constantly. I have been candid with you about my suffering a good deal at the spectacle of all the marriages, all the households overflowing with children, especially Boughton’s—not because I wanted them, but because I wanted my own. I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don’t have. From the point of view of loving your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18), there is nothing that makes a person’s fallenness more undeniable than covetise—you feel it right in your heart, in your bones. In that way it is instructive. I have never really succeeded in obeying that Commandment, Thou shalt not covet. I avoided the experience of disobeying by keeping to myself a good deal, as I have said. I am sure I would have labored in my vocation more effectively if I had simply accepted covetise in myself as something inevitable, as Paul seems to do, as the thorn in my side, so to speak. “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep. I don’t mean that as a joke, but it is kind of funny, when I think about it.