Gilead: A Novel (22 page)

Here is what he wrote and what he said: Children When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He said, Free the captive. Preach good news to the poor. Proclaim liberty throughout the land. That is all Scripture, of course, and the words were already very familiar to me at the time. But it is clear enough why He would feel they needed special emphasis. No one lives by them, unless the Lord takes him in hand. Certainly I did not, until the day He stood beside me and spoke those words to me.

I would call that experience a vision. We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And now all those young men are old men, if they’re alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.

The President, General Grant, once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism. But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes. Scripture says the people perish, and they certainly do. It is remarkable. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His Hand is stretched out still. The Lord bless you and keep you, etc.

Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention. Those who did came very near taking offense at the notion that they were perishing even though the terrible drought had begun to set in that would bankrupt and scatter so many families, even whole towns. There was a little laughter of the kind you hear when the outlandishness of a thing is being generally agreed on. But that was the worst of it. My grandfather stood there on the stage in his buzzard-black preacher’s clothes, eyeing the crowd with the dispassionate intensity of death itself, with the banners flying around him. Then the band struck up, and my father went to him and put his hand on his left shoulder, and brought him down to us. My mother said, “Thank you, Reverend,” and my grandfather shook his head and said, “I doubt it did much good.”

I have thought about that very often—how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. You might think I am under some sort of obligation to try to “save” young Boughton, that by inquiring into these things he is putting me under that obligation. Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of
La Nausee
or
L’Immoraliste
, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief, when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible. And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them “proofs.” I just won’t do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

From the time my father began receiving those long letters from Germany, he began watching me more, or otherwise, than he ever had before. For the first time in my life we were not quite at ease with each other, my father and I. I had to be careful what I said to him, because he would note any possible tinge of heterodoxy and lecture me solemnly on the nature of the error my thinking might have brought me to. Even days later he would come to me with new refutations of. things I had not said. No doubt he was speaking to Edward; certainly he was speaking to me as, so it must have seemed, the next Edward. Then, too, he was clearly rehearsing for his own sake the defenses he could make of his beliefs. They had never till that moment struck me as vulnerable, nor him, I suspect.

Then, when he began reading those books I brought home, it was almost as if he wanted to be persuaded by them, and as if any criticism I made of them was nothing more than recalcitrance. He used phrases like “forward-looking.” You’d have thought a bad argument could be put beyond question by its supposed novelty, for heaven’s sake. And a lot of the newness of this new thinking was as old as Lucretius, which he knew as well as I did. In that letter he sent me which I burned he spoke of “the courage required to embrace the truth.” I never forgot those words because of the way they irritated me. He just assumed that his side of the question was “the truth” and only cowardice could be preventing me from admitting as much. All that time, though, I think he was just finding his way to Edward, and I can’t really blame him for it. He did try to take me along with him.

***

In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding “existence,” which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.

I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something;—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.

So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. “Let your works so shine before men,” etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

No sleep this night. My heart is greatly disquieted. It is a strange thing to feel illness and grief in the same organ. There is no telling one from the other. My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself—that same good weight worries me these days.

But the fact is, I have never found another way to be as honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all.

So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic.

Well, I close my eyes and I see Jack Boughton, and it seems to me that more than he has matured or aged he has wearied. And I think,
Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?

Well, that really is not a purely rhetorical question. This morning your mother gave me a note from him. It said, “I am very sorry that I offended you yesterday. I will not trouble you again.” He writes a good hand. In any case, I felt from her manner that your mother knew what lay behind the note. It was just a folded slip of paper, but she would never have read it if he had not shown it to her. Perhaps he told her what it said. Or simply that it was an apology. I heard them talking on the porch before she brought it in to me. She looked sorry and concerned for me, for him perhaps, or for both of us. They do talk, I know that. Not much and not often. But I sense a kind of understanding between them.

“Understanding” might be the wrong word, since I have never spoken to her about him, and it is precisely the fact of her knowing so little about him that worries me. Or “understanding” might be exactly the right word, no matter what she knows or does not know. I can’t decide which thought worries me more. Maybe neither one could worry me more.

I sent him a note. It said I was the one who should apologize, that my health has not been perfect lately, and so on, that I hoped we might have a chance to speak again soon. And your mother carried the note back to him.

I was thinking about the time when he was just ten or twelve and he filled my mailbox with wood shavings and set them on fire. He rigged up a sort of fuse of twine dipped in paraffin. At that time the mailbox was on a post by the gate. It was that loaf-shaped kind people use in the country. I was walking home from a meeting at the church in the dark of a winter evening. I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box. It gave me quite a turn. But I didn’t doubt for a minute whose prank it was.

That boy was always alone, always grinning, always intent on some piece of devilment. He wasn’t more than ten when he took off in a Model T he saw idling in the street downtown.

Cars were still pretty rare around here in those days, so his interest was understandable. He drove it straight west for a number of miles, until it ran out of gas, and then he just walked home. A couple of young fellows with a team of horses happened upon the car and towed it off to Wilkinsburg and traded it for a hunting rifle. I think half the people in the county owned the thing for a day or so over the couple of months it stayed missing. Then a good-sized family who had traded a heifer for it came sailing into Gilead to enjoy the Fourth of July and got themselves arrested. The authorities traced it back through any number of swaps and IOUs and poker games, but never found the original thief. As it turned out, there were so many people involved in minor criminality having to do with buying that car and selling it that the resources of the law were in no way sufficient, so the whole thing was forgotten officially and remembered for a long time afterward because it made such a good story. People clearly knew the car was stolen, but they couldn’t resist owning it for a little while, even though they didn’t have the nerve to keep it—which kept the price very reasonable and the temptation that much greater.

It was Jack himself who told me what he had done. He’d kept the handle from the glove box as a souvenir and he showed it to me, but I would have believed him anyway. Shrewd as he was even as a youngster, he knew I would never speak to anyone about it, and I never did. Of course, I thought his parents should know, and still, I never had the heart to say a word. I was always a little in awe of a child who could keep a secret like that, when it would have been the perfection of the tale to know that a ten-year-old boy had incriminated half a county.

There is a sadness in all this I do not wish to obscure. I mean a sadness in the child. I remember coming out of the house one morning and finding my front steps painted with molasses. The ants were so thick they were piling over each other. They were just absolutely solid. Now, you have to ask yourself, How lonely would a child have to be to have time to make such a nuisance of himself? He developed some method for breaking my study windows so that the whole pane would shatter altogether. It was remarkable. I will ask him how he did that, someday when our souls are at peace and we can laugh about it.

That is the sort of thing he did as a young boy, mischief only bordering on harm, generally speaking. That is my belief, though certain harmful things were done which I have never wished to ascribe to him but which, in the privacy of my thoughts, I always did. For example, there was a barn fire, and some animals were lost in it. I may be wrong in blaming him for that.

His transgressions were sly and lonely, and this became truer as he grew up. I believe I said earlier that he did not steal in any conventional sense, but by that I meant he stole things of no value except to the people he stole them from. There was no sense in what he did, unless his purpose was to cause a maximum of embarrassment and risk a minimum of retribution.

When he was fifteen or sixteen, he’d come into the house while I was at the church and pocket one thing or another. It was the most irritating trick you could imagine. Once, he took that old Greek Testament right off my desk. If ever there was a thing on earth so little worth the trouble of stealing I don’t know what it would be. Once, he stole my reading glasses. Once, I came in when he was standing right there in the parlor. He just laughed and said, “Hello, Papa,” cool and charming as you please. He made some small talk, in that precocious way he had, smiling as if there were a joke between us. It took me a while to figure out what was missing that time. Then I realized it was a little photograph in a velvet case of Louisa, taken when she was a child. I was as angry about that as I have ever been in my life just the sheer meanness of it. And how could I tell Boughton that he had done such a thing? How could I say the words?

Things would drift back sooner or later. The Greek Testament was left on the doormat. The photograph appeared on Boughton’s hall table, mysteriously, and was brought back to me. That penknife with the word “Chartres” pressed into the handle, which was made from a shell casing, was left on the kitchen table, plunged through an apple. I found that disconcerting at the time.