Marilynne Robinson - Home

Jack nodded. “Me, too. Bone tired.” He looked at his father a minute longer, then bent and kissed his brow. He came back into the kitchen and picked up his suitcase. “So long, kiddo.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with the ball of his thumb.

“You have to take care of yourself,” she said. “You have to.”

He tipped his hat and smiled. “Will do.”

She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.

SO TEDDY ARRIVED AND SETTLED IN AND BECAME THE ONE to read in the porch, to bathe his father and feed him and turn him, and to help prepare for the others, going off to buy groceries. He didn’t ask much about their brother and she didn’t offer much about him, except to say that he had been helpful and kind. Jack was Jack. There was little enough to say that would not seem like betrayal, even though Teddy knew him well enough to have a fairly good idea of the terms he had made with the world. In time she would say more, when the sense of his presence had dimmed a little.

Once, Teddy knelt by his father’s chair to help him with his supper, and the old man reached out his hand to stroke his hair, his face. He said, “You told me goodbye, but I knew you couldn’t leave,” and there was a glint of vindication in his eyes.

THE SECOND DAY AFTER JACK HAD LEFT, GLORY WAS OUT IN THE garden clearing away the cucumber vines and gathering green tomatoes. There had been a sudden change of weather, a light frost. She noticed a car passing slowly on the farther side of the street. She watched it, thinking it must be someone from the church, some friend or acquaintance wondering if the rumors were true, that her father was indeed failing and the family were coming home. But the driver of the car was a black woman, and that was a curious thing. There were no colored people in Gilead. Glory bent to her work again, and the car came back on the near side of the street and stopped. She could see two colored women in the front seat and a child in the back. They looked at the house from the car for a few minutes, as if deciding what to do next, and then a woman stepped out of the passenger side and came up the walk. She was a dark, angular woman in a gray suit. Her hair was pulled back under a gray cloche. She looked very urban here in Gilead, and conscious of it, as if she felt the best impression she could make was one that would set her sharply apart. She turned and spoke to the child, “Robert, you stay in that car.” So the boy stood on the edge of the grass with one foot inside the car door. He was wearing church clothes, a blue suit and a red tie.

Glory came down out of the garden to meet the woman on the sidewalk. She said, “Hello. Can I help you?”

The woman said, “I’m looking for the home of Reverend Robert Boughton.” Her voice was soft and grave.

“This is his house,” Glory said, “but he’s very ill. I’m his daughter Glory. Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m sorry to hear your father is ill. Very sorry to hear it.” She paused. “It’s his son I was hoping to talk to, Mr. Jack Boughton.”

Glory said, “Jack isn’t here now. He’s been gone since Tuesday morning.”

The woman looked over her shoulder at the little boy. She shook her head and he leaned back against the car. She turned to Glory again. “Would you happen to know if he was planning to come back?”

“No, I don’t expect him to come back. Not any time soon. I don’t know what plans he had. If he had any. I don’t know where he was going to go.”

The woman smoothed her gloves, trying to hide her disappointment. Then she looked up at Glory. “I’d think he might be here, if his father is sick. I’d think he might be coming back, at least.” She looked at the house, with its tangled covert of vines and its high, narrow windows. Then she said, “Well, I thank you for your trouble,” and she turned back toward the car. The little boy wiped his cheeks with the heel of his hand.

There was an unconfiding gravity in the woman’s manner, a sense that she spoke softly across an immeasurable distance. Yet she had studied Glory’s face as if she almost remembered it.

Glory said, “Wait! Please wait,” and the woman stopped and turned. “You’re Della, aren’t you. You’re Jack’s wife.”

For a moment she did not speak. Then she said, “Yes, I am. I am his wife, and I sent him that letter! And now I don’t even know where to find him, to talk to him.” Her voice was low, broken with grief. She looked at the boy, who had taken a few steps from the car to lay his hand on the trunk of the oak tree.

Glory said, “I didn’t know — Jack didn’t trust me well enough to tell me much about anything that mattered to him. It’s always been that way. There’s a lot I didn’t tell him. Maybe that’s just how we are.”

“But he always said in his letters how kind you were to him. I want to thank you for that.”

“He was kind to me, too.”

Della nodded. “He is kind.” There was a silence. She said, “This place looks just the way he described it. That tree and the barn and the big tall house. He used to tell Robert about climbing that tree.”

“We really weren’t supposed to do that. Even the lowest branches are so high.”

“He said there were swings hanging from it, and he’d shinny up on the ropes and then climb up into the top branches. He’d hide up there, he said.”

“Well, I’m so glad our mother didn’t know that. She was always worrying about him.”

Della nodded. She looked past her at the orderly garden, at the clothesline, and again at the porch with its pot of petunias on the step. Her eyes softened. It was as if a message had been left for her, something sad and humorous and lovely in its intimacy. Glory could imagine that Jack might have drawn them a map of the place, orchard and pasture and shed. Maybe there were stories attached to every commonplace thing, other stories than she had heard, than any of them had heard. A mention of Snowflake. She said, “Would you like to come inside?”

“No, no, we can’t do that. Thank you, but we have to get back down to Missouri before dark. Especially the way things are now. We have a place to stay down there. That’s my sister driving the car, and I promised her I would only be a few minutes. We got lost looking for this place, and the days aren’t so long anymore. We have the boy with us. His father wouldn’t want us to be taking any chances.”

Glory said, “Jack told me he would call me, or send an address. That doesn’t mean he will. He might call his brother Teddy, so I’ll tell him you were here. This is so sudden. I hope I’m not forgetting anything.”

Della saw her tears and smiled. One more thing that was almost familiar to her.

“This happens to me,” Glory said, and wiped her cheeks. “But I can’t tell you how glad he’d have been to see you. Both of you. It would have been wonderful. If only I could have kept him here a little while longer.”

Della said, “We’ll go back to St. Louis. He might come there, to the old neighborhood.” Then she said, “Was it because of my letter that he left? Because, you know, I’d be very worried about that.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“It was hard for him. But he said the letter wasn’t unkind. And he was going to leave anyway. He had his own reasons. He didn’t blame you for anything.”

“Thank you. God bless you,” Della said. Then she said, “We’d better leave now. It was so kind of my sister to come up here with me, and I don’t want to upset her. She didn’t think it was a good idea. My whole family thought it was a bad idea.”