Gilead: A Novel (27 page)

He took a little leather case out of his breast pocket and opened it and held it in front of me. His hand was not steady, and I had to put on my reading glasses, but then I could see it fairly well. It was posed like a portrait photograph—himself, a young woman, and a boy about five or six. The woman was seated in a chair with the child standing next to her, and young Boughton was standing behind them. It was Jack Boughton, a colored woman, and a light-skinned colored boy.

Boughton looked at the picture and then he snapped the case shut and slipped it back into his pocket. He said, “You see,” and his voice was so controlled it sounded bitter, “you see, I also have a wife and child.” Then he just watched me for a minute or two, clearly hoping he would not have to take offense. “That’s a fine-looking family,” I said.

He nodded. “She’s a fine woman. He’s a fine boy. I’m a lucky man.” He smiled.

“And you’re afraid this might kill your father?”

He shrugged. “It came near enough killing her father. And her mother. They curse the day I was born.” He laughed and touched his hand to his face. “As you know, I have considerable experience antagonizing people, but this is on another level entirely.” I was thinking my own thoughts, so he said, “Maybe not.

Maybe that’s just how it seems to me—” and then he sat there studying his hands.

So I said, “Well, how long have you been married?” And regretted the question.

He cleared his throat. “We are married in the eyes of God, as they say. Who does not provide a certificate, but who also does not enforce anti-miscegenation laws. The
Deus Absconditus
at His most benign. Sorry.” He smiled. “In the eyes of God we have been man and wife for about eight years. We have lived as man and wife a total of seventeen months, two weeks, and a day.”

I remarked that we have never had those laws here in Iowa, and he said, “Yes, Iowa, the shining star of radicalism.”

So I asked him if he came here to be married.

He shook his head. “Her father doesn’t want her to marry me. Her father is also a minister, by the way. I suppose that was inevitable. And there is a good Christian man down there in Tennessee, a friend of the family, who is willing to marry my wife and adopt my son. They think this is very kind of him. I suppose it is. They believe it would be best for everybody.” He said, “And the fact is, I have had considerable difficulty looking after my family. From time to time they have gone back to Tennessee, when things were too difficult. That’s where they are now.” He said, “I can’t really ask her to make a final break with her family under the circumstances.” He cleared his throat.

We were just quiet. Then he said, “You know the chief thing her father has against me? He takes me for an atheist!

Delia says he thinks all white men are atheists, the only difference is that some of them are aware of it. Delia is my wife.”

I said, “Well, from certain things you have said, I have gotten the impression that you are an atheist.”

He nodded. “It is probably truer to say I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist, if you see what I mean. Of course this is a matter of concern to my wife, too. Partly for my sake. Partly for the boy’s. I lied to her about it for a little while. When I told her the truth, I believe she thought she could rescue me. As I said, when she first knew me, she took me for a man of the cloth. Many people make that mistake.” He laughed. “I generally correct them. I did her.”

Now, the fact is, I don’t know how old Boughton would take all this. It surprised me to realize that. I think it is an issue we never discussed in all our years of discussing everything. It just didn’t come up.

I said, “I take it you’ve talked to Glory.”

“No. I can’t do that. She’d just break her heart over it. She can tell there’s something on my mind. She probably thinks I’m in trouble. I believe my father thinks so, too.”

“I believe he does.”

He nodded. “He was crying yesterday.” He looked at me. “I have disappointed him again.” And then he said, controlling his voice, “I haven’t had any word from my wife since I left St. Louis. I have been waiting to hear from her. I have written to her a number of times—What is the proverb? ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’” He smiled. “I have even found myself turning to liquor for solace.”

I said, “So I understand,” and he laughed.

“‘Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto the bitter in soul.’ Isn’t that right?”

Word for word.

He said, “The first thing she ever said to me was ‘Thank you, Reverend.’ She was walking home in a rainstorm with an armful of books and papers—she was a teacher—and some of the papers fell onto the pavement, and the wind was scattering them, so I helped her gather them up, and then I walked her to her door, since I had an umbrella. I didn’t think about what I was doing, particularly. My impeccable manners.”

“You were well brought up.”

“I was indeed.” He said, “Her father told me that if I were a gentleman I’d have left her alone. I understand why he feels that way. She had a good life. And I am not a gentleman.” He wouldn’t let me object to that. “I know what the word means, Reverend. Though I can now say that the influence of my wife worked a change in me for the better, at least temporarily.” Then he said, “I don’t want to tire you with this. I know I’ve interrupted you. I’ll tell you why I have kept trying to talk to you.”

I told him he was welcome to take all the time he wanted.

He said, “That’s very kind.” And then he just sat there for a little while. “If we could find a way to live,” he said, “I think she would marry me. That would answer her family’s most serious objections, I believe. They say I can’t provide a decent life for my family, and that has in fact been the case to this point.” He cleared his throat. “If you can really spare me the time, I will explain. Thank you. You see, I met Delia during a fairly low point in my life. I won’t go into that. Delia was very nice to me, very pleasant. So I found myself now and then walking down that street at that hour, and sometimes I saw her and we spoke. I swear I had no intentions at all, honorable or otherwise. It was just pleasant to see her face.” He laughed. “She would always say, ‘Good afternoon, Reverend.’ I was not at that time accustomed to being treated like a respectable man. I must say I enjoyed it. It got so that I would walk along her street with no thought of seeing her, just because there was a kind of comfort in being reminded of her. And then one evening I did meet her, and we spoke a little, and she asked me in for tea. She shared rooms with another woman who taught at the colored school. It was pleasant. We had our tea together, the three of us. I told her then I was not a minister. So she knew that. I believe she invited me in in the first place because she was under that impression, but I was honest with her. About that. It didn’t seem to matter too much.

“I don’t know just how it happened—I stopped by to lend her a book I had bought in order to lend it to her—as if from my library—I even dog-eared a few pages—and she invited me to come for Thanksgiving dinner. She knew I wasn’t on excellent terms with my family, and she said she couldn’t have me spending the holiday by myself. I said I was uncomfortable with strangers, and she promised me it would be all right. Still, I had a couple of drinks before I came and I was later than I had intended. I thought I would walk in on a gathering of some kind, but she was there all by herself, looking terribly unhappy.

“I apologized as well as I could and offered to go away, but she said, ‘You just sit down!’ So we sat there eating, neither one of us saying anything. I told her the dinner was delicious and she said, ‘It probably was once.’ Then she said, ‘Two hours late, liquor on your breath—’ speaking to me as if I were, well, what I was, and it came over me that I had no business there, I was no one she could respect, and the grief I felt was amazing to me. I stood up to thank her and excuse myself, and then I left.

“But when I had walked a few blocks I realized she was following along behind me. She came up beside me and she said, ‘I just wanted to tell you not to feel so bad.’

“And I said, ‘Now I will have to walk you back to your door.’

“And she laughed and said, ‘Of course you will.’

“So I did. And then the other woman came home, Lorraine, the one who shared her rooms. There was a dinner at their church, but Delia had made some excuse about not feeling well and having to stay home. I should have been long gone by then, but there we were, eating our pumpkin pie. What could have been more compromising?”

He laughed. “It was all so respectable. But word got to Tennessee somehow and her sister came to visit, with the clear intention of scaring me off. I’d come in the evenings with a book of poetry and we’d read to each other, while her sister sat there glaring at me. It was ridiculous. It was wonderful. But when the school year ended, her brothers came and took her back to Tennessee. She left a note for me with Lorraine, saying goodbye.

I knew her father couldn’t be hard to find, since he was a minister, so I went there, to Memphis, and I found his church, a very large African Methodist Episcopal church, and the next morning being Sunday, I went to hear him preach. Knowing Delia would be there, of course. And I hoped to speak to him. I thought it might recommend me to him, if I could manage to seem forthright and manly, you know. I got my shoes shined and my hair trimmed.

“The church was full and I sat near the back, but I was the only white man there, and people noticed me. Delia’s sister was in the choir, so of course she saw me. And I could tell her father suspected who I was, by the way he watched me. He preached about those who come among you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves. He also spoke about whited tombs, which inwardly are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Looking at me the whole time, of course. “But I still made myself speak to him at the door. I said, T only want to assure you that my friendship with your daughter has been entirely honorable.’ And he said, ‘If you were an honorable man, you would leave her alone.’

“I said, ‘Yes, I will do that. I came here to assure you of that.’ Which was a lie, of course. I did intend to stop seeing her, but it was an intention I had formed in his church that very morning. I thought that Delia’s standing with her family might be helped if I impressed him as a plausibly decent man, and my only chance of doing that was by going away. And I could see what a very good life she had. I’m not sure what my intentions had been in going there. Certainly I never thought I would leave without saying even one word to her. But I did. I left for St. Louis that same evening. I’m not sure he was impressed by my gallantry, but I do know it impressed Delia. Then the fall came, and I happened to be walking down her street, as I happened to do every week or so, and there she was. I tipped my hat and she burst into tears. And from that moment we have considered ourselves man and wife.

“Word got back to Tennessee and she was more or less disowned, and then she got pregnant and the school dismissed her. I was selling shoes at the time—there’s very little money in it, but you don’t get arrested for it, either. So her mother came a few weeks before the baby was due and found us in a state of something like destitution, living in a residential hotel in an unpleasant part of town. It was humiliating. But of course we couldn’t find respectable accommodations, and the hotel clerk where we got a room charged me a good deal extra for turning a blind eye, or words to that effect. He had a phrase for the law we were breaking—-‘pernicious cohabitation? ‘lascivious cohabitation’? Lewd. For some reason I always forget that word. You can’t imagine how many ways they make things difficult.

“Then her father came and her brothers, and the five of us had an earnest talk about Delia’s well-being, which began with her father saying, ‘You should be very glad that I am a Christian man.’ He is an imposing figure. And he persuaded me that I should tell Delia to go home where she could be cared for. I did that, and she went away with them. Ah, the desolation!

The relief! I was so scared by the thought of that baby. I knew in my miserable heart that something would go wrong and I would be to blame for it. I tried to hide my relief from her, but she could see it, and she was hurt by it, I knew she was. I told her I would come to Memphis as soon as I had saved up the money. It took me weeks, because I had some debts and the fellows found me. I expected they would, and that was another reason I was glad to let her go, but of course I couldn’t explain that to her. Finally, I wrote to my father and told him I needed money—he hadn’t heard from me in a year at least—and he sent me three times as much as I asked for. And there was a note telling me that you were getting married.

“During those weeks there was a revival, a tent meeting, down by the river. I used to walk over there every night because there were crowds and noise and there wasn’t much alcohol. One night a man standing just beside me, as close to me as you are, went down as if he’d been shot. When he came up again, he threw his arms around me and said, ‘My burdens are gone from me! I have become as a little child!’ I thought, If I’d been standing two feet to the left, that might have been me. I’m joking, of course, more or less. But it’s a fact that if I could have traded places with him, my whole life would be different, in the sense that I might have been able to look Delia’s father in the eye, maybe even my father. That I would no longer be regarded as quite such a threat to the soul of my child. That man was standing there with sawdust in his beard, saying, ‘I was the worst of sinners!’ and he looked as if that might well be true. And there he was weeping with repentance and relief while I stood watching with my hands in my pockets, feeling nothing but anxiety and shame. And a certain amusement, if you will forgive me. But the next day my father’s letter came and I got a decent coat and a bus ticket and I was all right then.

“When I got to Memphis the baby had just been born the day before, and the house was full of aunts and women from the church, coming and going. They let me come in and sit in a corner. I don’t think anyone knew what to do with me till her father came home, so they just went on with their business. If the day had been warmer, I think I’d have been sitting on the stoop. One woman said to me, ‘They’re both just fine. They’re sleeping.’ And she brought me a newspaper, which was kind of her. It eased my embarrassment to have something to look at.