Marilynne Robinson - Home

He laughed. “Oh, please no. Not pancakes. You have to let me work up to this.”

“French toast. Oatmeal. Eggs and toast.”

“Now I’m Raskolnikov. Just yesterday I was Cary Grant.”

“You don’t eat and you don’t sleep. That’s what happens. I’ll make French toast.”

“Yes. I have to keep my strength up, I suppose. I have to try to look employable.”

She said, “So you really are thinking of staying here?”

He shrugged. “The thought has definitely crossed my mind.”

“Well. I’m surprised.”

“And you want to leave.”

“Yes, I do. I hate this town.”

“Why?”

She said, “Because it reminds me of when I was happy.”

“Oh. So I suppose there isn’t much chance that you might reconsider.”

“Probably not. Should I?”

He laughed. “I believe you may be the only friend I have in the world at the moment, Glory. Nobody else would bother to force breakfast on me. So my motives are selfish. As always.”

She stirred the milk and eggs and heated the griddle. “I know that could be charm,” she said. “I’ll believe you if you actually do what I tell you to do. Eat, primarily. And stop worrying about everything.”

“I’ll do my poor best. Seriously. I will.”

“Then I might reconsider, after all.”

“It’s kind of you to say that, Glory. Everything would be so much harder if you weren’t here. Impossible, in fact. I know that doesn’t put you under any kind of obligation—”

Their father called from the next room, “Something smells very good. Yes, a late breakfast. That will be wonderful.”

“Coming, Papa,” Glory said. She helped the old man pull himself together and brought him into the kitchen. Jack had set the table and was standing, waiting for them. That deference, that guardedness. The newspaper was nowhere in sight.

“So, Jack. Up and about early today. Yes.”

“Yes, sir. I had a letter I wanted to get in the mail.”

“Well, that’s fine.” Then he said, “Could you say the grace for us, Jack? I think I’m not quite awake yet. Not up to it.”

“Perhaps Glory—”

“No, no, Jack. I want to hear you say the grace. Humor an old fellow.”

“All right.” He cleared his throat. “For all we are about to receive, help us to be truly thankful. Amen.”

His father looked at him. “That will do, I suppose. I have heard that grace any number of times. ‘Bless these gifts to our use and us to Thy service’—that’s another one. Perfectly all right. And the Lord is forgiving. So we can start our breakfast now.”

Jack said, “Sorry.”

“Yes, it doesn’t matter. Prayer, you know, you open up your thoughts, and then you can get a clear look at them. No point trying to hide anything. There is a great benefit in anything the Lord asks of us, especially in prayer. I should have done more to encourage that habit in you.”

Jack said, “You did a great deal, as I remember.”

“Not enough, I’m afraid.”

Jack smiled. “So it would seem.” He glanced at Glory.

She said, “Would you like syrup on your toast, Papa? We also have honey and blackberry jam.”

“Syrup is fine. Here I am trying to sort out things I should have seen to forty years ago. Well, just take it as fatherly wisdom, Jack. Prayer is a discipline in truthfulness, in honesty.”

Jack said, “Yes, sir. I will bind those words for a sign upon my hand. They shall be for frontlets between my eyes.”

His father looked at him. “That may be sarcasm, but at least you know your Scriptures.”

“I didn’t intend it as sarcasm, really.”

“Very good. But here is the other thing I want to see to. It came to me in my prayer this morning. There is an account at the bank, some money from your mother’s side of the family. I was going to just leave it there for all of you to share when I died. But I will tell the bank to give the two of you access to it. There is no reason why you should want for money. No need for problems of that kind.”

Jack blushed darkly. He put his hands to his face.

“Yes,” his father said. “We’re Boughtons because my father’s grandfather was an Englishman, but except for him we’re Scots. You know about all that. But I mention it because I was always told by my grandmother, and my father, too, that you can’t be too careful with money. But I think you can be, and I think maybe I have been a little too careful with it. My father, you know, he was a man of God, a very good man, but he was shrewd in ways I thought were not always becoming to him. My intention was to be openhanded, especially toward my children. As I could have been, because my poor old father left me the farm and this house and the furnishings. But I think I may have been more like him than I realized. I have money that just sits there in the bank, year after year.”

Jack said, “You’ve always been generous.”

“But not like I could have been. So I want to change that now.”

“I don’t think there’s any real need.”

“Reason not the need, Jack. Yes. If it lightens your burden a little, that’s reason enough. I hate to think that any trouble might have come to you because your father was a tight-fisted old Scotsman!”

“I can reassure you on that point, sir.”

“Good. That’s fine. But there is that other vice of the Scots, you know. Drink.”

Jack smiled. “So I understand.”

“It is a plague among them, my grandmother said. They have no defense against it. She said she had seen many a good man wholly destroyed by it.”

“Remarkable.”

“Yes, it is. It is. When you’re old like me you will understand. These are serious things, with grave consequences.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend any disrespect. I really didn’t.”

His father looked at him. “I know that, Jack. And I see that the fault here is mine. I have been speaking to you as if you were a very young man, and you are not young at all.”

Jack smiled.

“I’ve been saying things to you I should have said many years ago.”

“You did say them, sir.”

The old man nodded. “I thought perhaps I had.”

Glory said, “Neither one of you has eaten a bite. You are both wasting away before my eyes, and the dogs in this neighborhood are getting too fat to walk. It is ridiculous.”

“Yes, Glory, well, I’m very tired now.”

“I’m sorry, Papa, but no one is leaving this table until he has eaten breakfast.”

Jack smiled and stretched and looked at her as if to say she had no idea of the difficulty of what she was asking of him, but then he took a few bites. “Excellent, Glory. Thank you.” He pushed back his chair.

“You haven’t finished yet.”

“That’s true,” he said, and he rested his head on his hand and ate what she had put on his plate, mock docile. “There,” he said. “Now may I be excused?”

“No. You can wait for Papa to finish. Where are your manners?”

“A full-fledged domestic tyrant,” her father said. “You see what I have had to put up with.”

“Stop grumbling and eat.”

Her father said, “I wouldn’t mind if you cut this up a little for me, Glory. You could help me out here.”

“I’m sorry. I should have thought of that.”

“Too busy barking orders!” he said, and laughed.

Jack sat back with his arms folded and watched the old man struggle to close his hand on his fork. The scar under his eye was whiter, as it was, she knew by now, when he was weary.

WHEN SHE HAD SETTLED THE OLD MAN FOR SLEEP, SHE went out to the garden. Jack was at work already, chopping weeds. He stopped to watch the mailman pass on the other side of the street, then he lighted a cigarette.

She said, “Beware the Thane of Fife.”