Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [104]
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