Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [36]
Well, my mother couldn't tolerate the state those pitiful shirts were in. She had a strong sense that the population at large judged her character by what appeared on her clothesline, and I can't say she was wrong. But there was more in her mind than that. My father had a favorite verse of Scripture: "For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be for burning, for fuel of fire." That is Isaiah 9:5. My mother must have felt she knew what he meant to do and felt there was disrespect in it. In any case, she took those shirts and scrubbed them and soaked them overnight and bleached them and rinsed them in bluing till they looked all right except for a few black stains she said were India ink and the brown stains which were blood. She hung them under the grape arbor, where no one would see them. Then she brought them in and ironed them with enormous care, singing while she did it, and when she was done they looked as respectable as their stains and their wounds would allow. Then she folded them—they were so white and polished they looked like marble busts—and she slipped them into a flour sack, and she buried them out by the fence, under the roses. My parents were not always of one mind.
I should dig around a little and see if anything is left of those shirts. It would be a pity if they were sometime just cast out like refuse, after all her hard work. I myself think it would have been the decent thing to burn them.
I got up the courage to ask my father once if my grandfather had done something wrong and he said, "The Good Lord will judge what he did," which left me believing there had been some kind of crime for sure. There is one photograph of my grandfather around the house somewhere, taken in his old age, that might help you understand why I thought this way. It is a good likeness. It shows a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it, staring down the camera as if it had accused him of something terrible very suddenly, and he is still thinking how to reply and keeping the question at bay with the sheer ferocity of that stare. Of course there is guilt enough in the best life to account for a look like that.
So I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing the evidence and I was in on the secret, too—implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that's the human condition, I suppose. I believe I was implicated, and am, and would have been if I had never seen that pistol. It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. I believe my father was trying to cover up for Cain, more or less. The things that happened in Kansas lay behind it all, as I knew at the time.
After that farmer was killed, all the kids I knew were scared to do the milking. They'd do it with the cow between them and the door if the cow would oblige, but they're particular about that sort of thing and often would not. Little sisters and brothers and dogs would be stationed outside the barn in the dark to watch for strangers. That went on for years, with the story passing down to the younger children, till whoever it was that did the murder would have been an old man. My father had to take over the milking because my brother was in too big a hurry to strip the udder, so the cow stopped giving the way she did before. Then the story went around that someone had been hiding in a henhouse, so all the kids were afraid to gather eggs, and overlooked them or cracked them because they were trying to hurry. Then someone was seen hiding in a woodshed and a root cellar and an attic.