Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

Why is this on my mind, anyway? I was thinking about the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many. I haven’t been entirely honest with you about that.

***

This morning I went over to the bank and cashed a check, thinking to help Jack out a little. I thought he probably needed to go to Memphis, not right away necessarily, but at some time. I went over to Boughton’s and waited around, talking about nothing, wasting time I couldn’t spare, till I had a chance to speak to him in private. I offered him the money and he laughed and put it in my jacket pocket and said, “What are you doing, Papa? You don’t have any money.” And then his eyes chilled over the way they do and he said, “I’m leaving. Don’t worry.” I took your money, your mother’s money, of which there is a truly pitiful amount, and tried to give it away, and that is how it was received.

I said, “Are you going to Memphis, then?”

And he said, “Anywhere else.” He smiled and cleared his throat and said, “I got that letter I’ve been waiting for.” My heart was very heavy. There was Boughton sitting in his Morris chair staring at nothing. Glory told me the only words he had said all day were “Jesus never had to be old!” Glory is upset and Jack is wretched and they were making polite talk with me about nothing, probably wondering why I didn’t leave, and I was wishing to goodness I could just go home. Then the moment came when I could do Jack the little kindness I had come for, and all I did was offend him.

Then I came home and your mother made me lie down and sent you off with Tobias. She lowered the shades. She knelt beside me and stroked my hair for a while. And after a little rest I got up and wrote this, which I have now read over.

Jack is leaving. Glory was so upset with him that she came to talk to me about it. She has sent out the alarm to the brothers and sisters that they must all desist from their humanitarian labors and come home. She believes old Boughton can’t be long for this world. “How could he possibly leave now!” she says. That’s a fair question, I suppose, but I think I know the answer to it. The house will fill up with those estimable people and their husbands and wives and their pretty children. How could he be there in the midst of it all with that sad and splendid treasure in his heart? — I also have a wife and a child.

I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother’s face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord. That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world — your mother excepted, of course — and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face. Those kind Boughton brothers and sisters would be ashamed of the wealth of their lives beside the seeming poverty of Jack’s life, and he would utterly and bitterly prefer what he had lost to everything they had. That is not a tolerable state of mind to be in, as I am well aware.

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant.

That is a thing I would love to see.

As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house — even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

I think I’ll put an end to all this writing. I’ve read it over, more or less, and I’ve found some things of interest in it, mainly the way I have been drawn back into this world in the course of it.

The expectation of death I began with reads like a kind of youthfulness, it seems to me now. The novelty of it interested me a good deal, clearly.

This morning I saw Jack Boughton walking up toward the bus stop, looking too thin for his clothes, carrying a suitcase that seemed to weigh almost nothing. Looking a good deal past his youth. Looking like someone you wouldn’t much want your daughter to marry. Looking somehow elegant and brave.

I called to him and he stopped and waited for me, and I walked with him up to the bus stop. I brought along The Essence of Christianity, which I had set on the table by the door, hoping I might have a chance to give it to him. He turned it over in his hands, laughing a little at how beat up it is. He said, “I remember this from — forever!” Maybe he was thinking it looked like the kind of thing he used to pocket in the old days. That thought crossed my mind, and it made me feel as though the book did actually belong to him. I believe he was pleased with it. I dog-eared page 20—”Only that which is apart from my own being is capable of being doubted by me. How then can I doubt of God, who is my being? To doubt of God is to doubt of myself.” And so on. I memorized that and a good bit more, so I could talk to Edward about it, but I didn’t want to ruin the good time we’d had that one day playing catch, and the occasion really never arose again.

There were two further points I felt I should have made in our earlier conversations, one of them being that doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo , which is usually translated “saved,” can also mean healed, restored, that sort of thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in a way that can create false expectations. I thought he should be aware that grace is not so poor a thing that it cannot present itself in any number of ways. Well, I was also making conversation. I knew he must have heard more or less the same things from his father any number of times. My first thought was that nobody ought to be as lonely as he looked to me walking along by himself. And I believe he was glad of the company. He nodded from time to time, and his expression was very polite.

As we walked he glanced around at the things you never really look at when you live in a town-the fretting on a gable, the path worn across an empty lot, a hammock slung between a cottonwood and a clothesline pole. We passed the church. He said, “I’ll never see this place again,” and there was a kind of sad wonder in his voice that I recognized. It gave me a turn. So I said, “You take care of yourself. They could need you sometime.” After a minute he nodded, conceding the possibility.

Then he stopped and looked at me and said, “You know, I ‘m doing the worst possible thing again. Leaving now. Glory will never forgive me. She says, ‘This is it. This is your masterpiece.’” He was smiling, but there was actual fear in his eyes, a kind of amazement, and there might well have been. It was truly a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would forgive him for.