Marilynne Robinson - Home

Jack said, “There’s really nothing like a good dumpling.”

“Except a bad one,” she said.

He laughed. “True, they are pretty similar.” Then he looked at her. “Ah, tears.”

Their father said, sharply, “You shouldn’t tease your sister. You boys think it’s some sort of game, but I don’t like it. A gentleman is always considerate of women. I have said this many times. That means your sisters, too, even the little ones. This is very important. I hope you will reflect on it.” He did not appear to be asleep, though his eyes were closed.

Jack said, “Yes, sir,” to calm his irritation, and then he sat there gazing at him, taking in what the old man had said.

“I was remarking to your mother about it just the other night. We should not allow this teasing.”

Glory was aware suddenly that the weariness of the night and day had overwhelmed her, and her hope of comforting had not had anything to do with the way things really happen in the world. Her father was crouched in his chair, with his chin almost in his plate, drowsing and speaking from what she could only hope was a dream, and her brother was withdrawing into utter resignation, as if the old incandescence had consumed him before it flickered out. But he brought her a tea towel for her tears, and then he helped his father to his room.

THE HEAT OF THE MORNING WOKE HER, SO SHE KNEW SHE had slept late. There were no sounds in the house, there was no smell of coffee. Jack and her father must still be sleeping. Good for them. She felt stiff, as if some physical exertion had wearied her, and it was only the thought that she might miss the morning mail that induced her to get up, wash, brush, dress, make herself presentable to whatever passerby or clerk might otherwise notice her and wonder what new drama had unfolded in the poor old preacher’s house. She had put the letter on her dresser the night before, in case Jack might have had second thoughts and chosen resignation over futile hope. She went down the stairs as quietly as she could and let herself out the door.

And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father’s hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal , where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.

She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her. Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

ROBBY AND TOBIAS WERE IN THE DRUGSTORE, EXTRACTING Fudgsicles from the smoking freezer chest. Each of them had a dime, earned pulling weeds in one of Lila’s gardens. They showed them to her. She dropped Jack’s letter in the slot, heard the clerk’s views on the weather, and started home again, the boys tagging along with her, skipping and circling and taking a few steps backward, not yet resigned to the tedium of merely walking. They split their Fudgsicles as they are meant to be split, and Tobias dutifully offered her the second half of his, and she said no, thank you, which pleased him. Robby said, “I’m saving mine for Mr. Boughton.”

Glory said, “You can call him Jack. He wouldn’t mind.”

Robby shook his head. “My dad says I have to call him Mr. Boughton.”

He walked along at her elbow, engrossed in the Fudgsicle, coping as he could when the ice slid down the stick. When they came to his corner, Tobias took off for home and Robby went on with her. He said, “My mom likes it when I help out. Well, my dad likes it, too, but he just watches. He sits on the porch.”

Lila had said to her once that the boy had to learn what it was to work. Glory knew she meant she would be his only support through most of his growing up, and life would be difficult for them. “We’ll be leaving sometime,” she said. “There’s nothing to do around here.” That was when they had been at the river for Ames’s birthday, and had walked down to rinse the plates, and had stopped to watch Robby and Tobias racing leaves through an eddy between two ribs of sand. She said, “We hope he’ll remember something of it.” Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child, and it was exactly that, the river broad and shallow, the intricacies of its bed making rivulets of the slow water, bloom on the larger little islands and butterflies everywhere. And the trees meeting high above it, shading it, making the bottom earthily apparent wherever there was calm. They all loved the river, in all generations, Jack, too. She bent and dipped her hands in the water and pressed them to her face, to conceal the embarrassment of tears, but more than that, because the river was simply manifest, a truth too seldom acknowledged. When she had been on her own, sometimes she had thought of it.

JACK WAS SITTING ON THE FRONT STEP, HIS ELBOWS ON his knees, waiting for her. When he saw the two of them, he stood up, tossed his cigarette, and went into the house. Robby said, “Well, you can give him this,” and handed her the half Fudgsicle, which had melted into its bag.

“He doesn’t feel too well today,” she said.

He nodded. “He wouldn’t want me to catch anything.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“Then my dad might catch it.”

“True,” she said. It was the thought of seeing Jack that had brought him along with her. Now he turned and waved and ran off toward home.

Jack was at the kitchen table, laying out a hand for solitaire.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not up to small talk.”

“He wanted me to give you this.”

“Great. Nice kid.”

She put the soggy packet in the sink.

He said, “I thought you might not have gotten the bottles out of the loft. So I couldn’t start working on the car till you came back.”