Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [71]
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 herjust one weekV 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