Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [33]
She wants to move my books down to the parlor and set me up there, and I may agree to that, just to spare her worry. I told her I could not add a moment to my span of life, and she said, "Well, I don't want you to go subtracting one from it, either." A year ago she would have said "neither." I've always loved the way she talks, but she thinks she has to improve for your sake. I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It's strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.
In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road to the church and let myself in and sit there in the dark waiting for the dawn to come that I forgot all about the worry I might be causing your mother. It is actually hard for me to remember how mortal I am these days. There are pains, as I said, but not so frequent or even so severe when they come that I am as alarmed by them as I should be.
I must try to be more mindful of my condition. I started to lift you up into my arms the other day, the way I used to when you weren't quite so big and I wasn't quite so old. Then I saw your mother watching me with pure apprehension and 1 realized what a foolish thing to do that was. I just always loved the feeling of how strongly you held on, as if you were a monkey up in a tree. Boy skinniness and boy strength.
But I have strayed a little from my subject, that is to say, from your begats. And there is a good deal more to tell you. My grandfather was in the Union Army, as I think I have said. He thought he should go as a regular soldier, but they told him he was too old. They told him Iowa had a graybeard regiment he could join, for old fellows, which wouldn't go into combat but would guard supplies and rail lines and so on. That idea didn't please him at all. He finally talked them into letting him go as a chaplain. He hadn't brought along any sort of credentials, but my father said he just showed them his Greek New Testament and that was good enough. I still have that somewhere, what remains of it. It fell into a river, as I was told, and never got dried out properly till it was fairly ruined. As I remember the story, he was caught up in a disorderly retreat, in a rout, in fact. That is the same Bible that was sent to my father from Kansas, before we set out to find the old man's grave.
My father was born in Kansas, as I was, because the old man had come there from Maine just to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote, because the constitution was going to be voted on that would decide whether Kansas entered the Union slave or free. Quite a few people went out there at that time for that reason. And, of course, so did people from Missouri who wanted Kansas for the South. So things were badly out of hand for a while. All best forgotten, my father used