Marilynne Robinson - Home

Jack came in from the barn, bringing with him a whiff of old straw and sweat and crankcase oil. He took a deep breath. “Ah! Bread!” She lifted the towel so he could see the speckled belly of the rising dough. Then he held up his hands to her, which were oily and grimy, and said, “Don’t touch those potatoes!” He went upstairs. There were sounds of haste and ablution, and then he came back down with his shirt half buttoned and his hair wet. He found a knife. “Blunt as a poker,” he said, but he set to paring. “It is art that keeps the demons at bay!” This was to bring home to her the significance of a long spiral of peeling he had removed intact.

“Amazing,” she said.

He said, “Practice.”

“Were you quoting?”

He nodded. “ La Sagesse de Jacques Bouton . Bouton de la Rose, that is. Poète maudit. Poète malgré lui . Roué and — kitchen help. For some reason they didn’t teach the French for that in college.” He held up another spiral of peel. “Pity,” he said. “Things sound so much better in French— pomme de terre, fait-néant, voleur —” He smiled. “My intellectual lady friend was set on keeping up her French. So I summoned what little I could of mine. We read L’Education sentimentale . My enthusiasm for the project was almost unfeigned.”

“Your friends are more interesting than mine.”

“You must know where to find your friends, ma petite .”

“And where is that?”

“If you are very, very good I might tell you. Someday. But you must be exceptionally good.”

She laughed. “God knows I try.”

He said, “That’s a beginning, I suppose. Though not in every case.”

She raised the tea towel and punched the dough, and a great sigh of yeasty air breathed out of it. After a minute he said, “I’ve been into the cash drawer again. I bought some spark plugs and a tire pump. The old one leaked so much it was almost useless. And a fan belt.”

“You don’t have to tell me about these things.”

“And a baseball glove.”

“That money isn’t mine, either, Jack. And Papa doesn’t care about it.”

He nodded, delicately gouging out a potato’s eye. He smiled at her. “A diligent and humiliating search for employment has persuaded me that I have to look beyond Gilead,” he said. “I’ll need a car. If I’m ever to become a respectable family man.”

“So you’re thinking that woman friend might come here?”

He shook his head. “Only when I’m trying to find a way to make myself go out and shop my miserable aspirations around town one more time. Or keep tinkering with that damn car. She’d probably hate it here, anyway.”

“You’ve never told me her name.”

“Her name is Della.”

“I’d like to know her.”

He said, “Would you be kind to her?”

“What a question!”

“Swear to God?”

“Of course! I’d be a sister to her!”

He laughed. “I’m going to hold you to that someday. If my wildest hopes are fulfilled. Which they won’t be.”

After a minute she said, “Jack, there’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

“Hmm?”

“What do you act like when you’re happy?”

He laughed. “I forget.”

“Seriously. When you came in just now, I thought something good must have happened.”

“Oh. How to account for the high spirits. Gasoline fumes? And I have replaced so much of that engine that I must be closing in on the problem by now. With any luck. When I turned the key this time it — chortled. And that triggered a fantasy of charging off in my father’s DeSoto to rescue my lady love from a smoldering Memphis.”

“I thought she was in St. Louis.”

He shrugged. “I’m a little tired of St. Louis. I’d rather rescue her from Memphis.”

“I see.”

“On second thought, her father is in Memphis. He’s very protective, and he has a car that actually runs. And he thinks I’m damn near worthless—‘damn near,’ because he’s professionally obligated to take a charitable view. She has three brothers in Memphis. So I guess I’d better rescue her from St. Louis.” He began to peel another potato. “Joking aside, maybe she would come to Gilead for a while, to give it a try. It’s possible.”

They had an early supper. She had meant to serve the chicken cold, but she decided it was better to serve the bread while it was still warm, and what difference did it make when they did anything, anyway. Her father enjoyed the warm bread and the chicken, too, and the peas with potatoes in cream sauce. He grew voluble, talking about his own boyhood in Gilead, how, he said, he couldn’t even draw water from the well to his grandmother’s satisfaction, let alone split kindling, so he didn’t have as many chores as other children did. “She never trusted me to bring the eggs in, either,” he said. “It was her way of spoiling me. Yes. I used to go over to Ames’s and help him out a little, and then we’d have the whole day, in the summer. The whole day by the river. I don’t know how we passed all that time. It was wonderful. Sometimes his grandfather would be down there, fishing and talking to Jesus, and then we’d be pretty quiet, or we’d wade upstream a little way. He was a strange old fellow, but he was just a part of life, you know. Like the birds singing.”

Jack said, “I spent time at the river. I liked to do that.”

His father nodded. “I always thought this was an excellent place to be a child. Not that I had anything to compare it with.”

“It is a good place.”

“Well, Jack, I’m glad you think so. Yes. Some things might have worked out better than they did, I know that. But there was always a lot to enjoy. That was my feeling, at least. And there still is. I watch the children, and they seem happy to me. I think they should be happy.”

AFTER SUPPER JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS WITH THE NEW baseball mitt, flexing it and folding the pocket. He said, “I thought I’d see if the Ames kid would like to play a little catch. Is that a good idea? He’s old enough. He seemed interested.”

She said, “I think it’s a good idea.”

He went out to the porch and stood there for a while, and then he came into the kitchen again. “No,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m disreputable. I forget that from time to time. But I have it on excellent authority.” He smiled. “The good Reverend wouldn’t approve. I’m pretty sure they’ll give you your money back.” He handed her the glove. “Those high spirits,” he said. “They can get me in trouble.”

She said, “I don’t understand any of this. I think you worry too much. I’ll keep the glove until you want it.”

“You have to help me think things through, Glory.”

“Does that mean remembering that you’re disreputable?”

“’Fraid so.”

“I think you’re imagining.”

“It is the central fact of my existence,” he said. “One of three, actually. The one you have to help me keep in mind.”

“Well, really, Jack. How on earth am I supposed to do that?”

He laughed. “Don’t be so kind to me,” he said.

SHE THOUGHT ABOUT THE THING JACK HAD SEEMED TO ask of her, some attempt to save his soul. Dear Lord. How could that idea haunt her with a sense of obligation, when she really did not know what it meant. There are words you hear all your life, she thought. Then one day you stop to wonder. She would not bring it up again, but if he did, she should have some way to answer him. She was not at all sure that he had been serious, that he was not teasing her. She might even have taken offense at the time, if there had seemed to be any point in it. A genteel project for a pious lady with time on her hands. How condescending. But that was what he did whenever he felt vulnerable — he found some way to sting, to make it clear that vulnerability was not all on one side. Poor man. But he was so practiced at reciting what he was also practiced at rejecting. He might have meant to draw her into some sort of argument and reject it, too, just to show her he could do it. He was uneasy. That was natural enough. And in fact he had made her embarrassed about that pleasant old habit of hers. Now she had to read the Bible in her room to avoid feeling like a hypocrite, like someone praying on a street corner. When Jack came out to the porch with his newspaper the next day and found her reading The Dollmaker he gave her a wistful, inquiring look, but he said nothing.