Marilynne Robinson - Home

She said, “It’s good of you to clear this out. I had more or less decided to let it go back to nature.” He had even cleared the weeds out of the place by the fence where gourds reseeded themselves year after year.

“Well,” he said, “at least now it will be a lot easier for the birds to find the strawberries.” He had always had a kind of hectic high-spiritedness that came over him when he ought to have been sad, and there it was, the strange old glitter in his eyes, the old brusqueness in his manner. What could have made him sad? He brushed again at the smudge on his knee and shrugged and said, “‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’”

“But you do need some work clothes.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Bib overalls. I have always admired them.”

“You know what I mean. Something I could throw in the wash. Or you could.”

He nodded, and took out a cigarette and lighted it. He said, “I am a stranger in a strange land. I might as well look like one, don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. They’re your trousers.”

“Yes,” he said. “So they are. Good of you to point that out.” And he tossed his cigarette and went back to delving. That was a little flippant, she thought. She went into the kitchen to peel potatoes for a salad.

After a while he came into the porch and the kitchen and stood by the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“When we were talking just now. I think I may have seemed — flippant.”

“No. Not at all.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I can never be sure.” Then he went outside again.

When she went out to the garden for chives and parsley, she saw the Reverend Ames strolling up the street. Jack said, “I guess he’s decided I’ll be around for a while. No point trying to avoid me.”

Glory said, “Papa’s been storing up so many grievances against John Foster Dulles I was beginning to wonder if he could survive another day without Ames to grumble at.”

“Then he won’t expect us to contribute to the conversation. That’s good,” he said. “I’m filthy.”

GLORY WENT UP TO THE ATTIC, THE LIMBO OF THINGS that had been displaced from current use but were not in the strict sense useless. If civilization were to collapse, for example, there might be every reason to be glad for this hoard of old shoes and bent umbrellas, all of which would be better than nothing, however badly they might fare in any other comparison. Other pious families gave away the things they did not need. Boughtons put them in the attic, as if to make an experiment of doing without them before they undertook some irreparable act of generosity. Then, what with the business of life and the passage of time, what with the pungency of mothballs and the inevitable creep of dowdiness through any stash of old clothes, however smart they might have been when new, it became impossible to give the things away. From time to time their mother would come down from the attic empty-handed, brushing dust off herself, and write a check to the orphans’ home.

So, Glory thought, the shirts her father had worn before he began to lose weight and height were no doubt in the attic, too. She found them in a cedar chest, laundered and ironed as if for some formal event, perhaps their interment. They had changed to a color milder than white, and there was about them, besides the smell of time and disuse, of starch and lavender and cedar, a hint of Old Spice that brought tears to her eyes. She took six of them, the newest, to judge by the cut of the cuffs and collars, and brought them down to the kitchen, hoping to get them washed, at least, before Jack saw them. But he was there, in the kitchen, rummaging in a drawer. He closed it. He said, “I was just looking for a tape measure. I thought I might get some chicken wire and fence in that garden.” It made her uneasy that he always seemed to feel he had to make an account of himself to her.

“I found these shirts of Papa’s in the attic. I thought you could use them if you wanted to. Around the house. They’re good broadcloth.”

He stepped back and smiled. “What is that? Cedar? Starch? Lilies? Candle wax? Isn’t the phrase ‘the odor of sanctity’? I would not presume.”

She said, “I’m pretty sure the odor of sanctity will come out in the wash,” and he laughed. “I’ll try the effects of detergent and sunshine and then I’ll ask you again.”

“I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“It’s no trouble.”

He nodded. “You really are kind to me,” he said, almost objectively, as though he finally felt he could justify that conclusion.

“Thank you,” she said.

SHE DECIDED TO WALK TO THE GROCERY STORE WHILE THE shirts were in the washing machine and her father was content with the new issue of Christian Century . It was time she stopped avoiding ordinary contact with people. If Jack could brave it, certainly she could, too. It was a beautiful afternoon, bright, warm, and the leaves still had a glitter of newness about them. She had almost forgotten weather, between her father and her novels and her unaccountable insistence on reading them in the darkest room in the house, excepting only the dining room, beside that tedious radio. The store was almost empty, the cashier was cordial. She started home again through the radiant day with a brown paper bag in her arms, redolent of itself and the cabbage she had bought and the Cheddar cheese, thinking she had done herself a little good, just getting out. She decided to put Andersonville aside for a day or two.

Jack was standing on the pavement with his hands on his hips, looking in the window of the hardware store. There were always two television sets in the window, a portable and a console, and they ran all day, test pattern to test pattern. This had been true for years, from the time television was a curiosity. A woman stopped beside him and watched for a minute. She said something to him, and he nodded and spoke, and then she went on. Glory walked up to him and stood beside him. He touched his hat brim, never looking away from the screen.

She said, “Is that Montgomery?”

He nodded. “Yes, it is.” Then the screen showed a tube of toothpaste.

Glory said, “Lila told me their church was planning to get a TV set so that Ames can watch baseball. I suppose that means Papa will want one, too.”

He looked at her. “That’s an idea.” He took her package from her and they began to walk home. He said, “A portable is a couple hundred dollars. But you could ask him about it.”

“I could just have them deliver one to the house. If he doesn’t like it, they’ll take it back.”

He cleared his throat. “You could do that now.”

“Yes, I could. Do you want to help me choose one?”

“Not really. I’ll wait here.” He laughed. “I’ve already spent about an hour in there looking at them. They all seem to work.”

So she went back to the store and chose an eighteen-inch Philco with a rabbit-ear antenna. The clerk asked after her father and her brothers and sisters and after Jack, too. “Is he home for a visit, or is he thinking he might stay?”

Glory said, for brevity’s sake, “He’s just visiting for a while.” If she’d said she didn’t know what had brought him back to Gilead, the strangeness of his situation would have interested the clerk, and the owner of the store, who came out of the back room wiping machine oil from his fingers. Interested them more than it did already. She imagined Jack standing among the bins of nails and tool belts and the ranks of crowbars, unspoken to beyond the ordinary courtesies, seeming unaware of their awareness of him, watching flickering television in that cave full of the smells of leather and wood and oily metal, idle among all those implements of force and purpose, citified among the steel-toed boots and the work shirts. An odd place for a man to loiter who was so alive to embarrassment, so predisposed to sensing even the thought of rebuke. And when he did leave the store, standing on the pavement, looking in at the window, at the silently fulminating authorities and the Negro crowds.