Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

I told her that in the old days towns like ours were a conspiracy. Lots of people were only there to be antislavery by any means that came to hand. Persuading someone to take a child from her mother, to steal it, was a very different thing, especially since Glory had no evidence of any claim on the child.

She said she had written again and again to young Boughton asking him to acknowledge the child for his parents’ sake. She had washed the baby and dressed her up and sent him smiling photographs. She had photographed the baby in his father’s arms. Jack sent Glory cards on her birthday and boxes of chocolate and made no reference whatever to his child or to the misery he had caused in their household. She was crying so hard she had to pull off the road. “They’re so sad!” she said. “They’re so ashamed!” (Young Boughton did have the decency to leave his convertible and take the train back to school, so that Glory could drive her parents out to see that poor croupy, rashy child every week or so.)

Well, here is the end of the story. The little girl lived about three years. She was turning into a spry, wiry little thing, a source of sullen pride to her mother and her nice Christian family. But she cut her foot somehow and died of the infection. The last time they visited her, they saw she was in bad shape.

So Glory went and found a doctor, but by then there was nothing to be done. The grandfather said, “Her lot was very hard,” and Glory slapped him. He threatened to press charges, but I guess he never got around to it. He let the Boughtons bury the little girl in their family plot, since they agreed to pay the expenses and a little more beside. So there she is. The stone says Baby, three years (her mother had never really settled on a name), and then: “Their angels in Heaven always see the face of My Father in Heaven.”

It is a bitter story, and left us all with much to regret. I suppose we really should have stolen her. The fact is, though, that Glory’s scheme would probably have ended with her and some of the rest of us in jail, the baby back with its mother, and young Boughton under a tree somewhere, reading Huxley or Carlyle, his convertible at last restored to him. I don’t know the right and wrong of a situation like that. I suppose we could have bought the child if we’d somehow managed to raise the money. But that’s a crime, too. And those people had a sort of blackmail situation, with the baby as hostage. If the Lord hadn’t taken her home, it could have gone on for decades. Glory said, “If we could have had her just one week.” Then what, I wonder. I know exactly why she would say that, but I wonder what it means. I have often thought the same about that other child of mine.

Now they have penicillin, and so many things are different.

In those days you could die of almost anything, almost nothing. “We brought her shoes,” Mrs. Boughton said. “Why was she barefoot?” The girl said, “Savin’ ‘em.” The poor little girl, her mother. She was white and sullen, about to die of sadness, by the look of her. What to do with all the frustration and regret that builds up in this life? She had left school, and all we ever knew of her was that she ran off to Chicago.

That’s all I think I need to tell you about Jack Boughton. When his mother died he didn’t come home, as I have said. Maybe he wanted to spare us all having to deal with him.

They loved that baby the way they did because they loved Jack so much. She looked just like him. And now here he is at home, and Glory as glad to be with him as if no shadow had ever fallen between them at all. I have no idea why he is at home. Nor do I know what reconciliation they have worked out among themselves. If my sermon had disturbed it, I would not feel equal to the regret that would have cost me.

Twenty years is a long time. I know nothing about those years, and I believe that I would know — if anything had happened that redounded at all to his credit. He doesn’t have the look of a man who has made good use of himself, if I am any judge.

***

I found a couple of my sermons under the Bible on the night table, which I take to mean that your mother recommends them to my attention. She has brought down a number of those sermons, fetched them down in the laundry basket, and she really is reading them. She says that I should use some of them, to spare myself effort that I might otherwise spend writing to you. That is a much more persuasive notion than her earlier one, that I should use them to spare myself effort. If I really thought I wasn’t up to writing a sermon, I’d have to resign my pulpit. But the thought of having more time with you is a different thing altogether.

One of the sermons is on forgiveness. It is dated June 1947.

I don’t know what the occasion was. I might have been thinking of the Marshall Plan, I suppose. I don’t find much in it to regret. It interprets “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” in light of the Law of Moses on that subject. That is, the forgiveness of literal debt and the freeing of slaves every seventh year, and then the great restoration of the people to their land, and to themselves if they were in bondage, every fiftieth year. And it makes the point that, in Scripture, the one sufficient reason for the forgiveness of debt is simply the existence of debt. And it goes on to compare this to divine grace, and to the Prodigal Son and his restoration to his place in his father’s house, though he neither asks to be restored as son nor even repents of the grief he has caused his father.

I believe it concludes quite effectively. It says Jesus puts His hearer in the role of the father, of the one who forgives. Because if we are, so to speak, the debtor (and of course we are that, too), that suggests no graciousness in us. And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

That still seems right to me. I think it is a sound reading of the text. Well, in 1947 I was almost seventy, so my thinking should have been fairly mature at that point. And your mother would have heard me preach that sermon, come to think of it. She first came to church on Pentecost of that year, which I think was in May, and never missed a Sunday after it except the one.

It rained, as I have said, but we had a good many candles lighted, which has always been our custom for that service, when we could afford them. And there were a good many flowers. And when I saw there was a stranger in the room, I do remember feeling pleased that the sanctuary should have looked as cheerful as it did, that it should have been such a pleasant place to step into out of the weather. I believe that day my sermon was on light, or Light. I suppose she hasn’t found it, or she doesn’t remember it, or she doesn’t think it was especially good. I’d like to see it, though.

I do enjoy remembering that morning. I was sixty-seven, to be exact, which did not seem old to me. I wish I could give you the memory I have of your mother that day. I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

Once, I went out with Glory to take some things to that little baby. The family lived just across the West Nishnabotna, and when we came to the bridge we saw the two children, the baby and her mother, playing there in the river. We drove on to the house and set the food we had brought by the fence. We didn’t approach the house, because that pack of dogs came roaring out to the gate and no one appeared to call them off — we always brought canned ham, canned milk, and so on, things the dogs couldn’t get into. The little girl must have heard the car passing and the dogs barking and known that we had come to her house, since it was a Monday. She would have ignored us if she did. She loyally reflected her father’s view of us. She was offended by our concern and our helpfulness and let us know as much by ignoring us as often as we gave her the chance.