When my father found his father at Mount Pleasant after the war ended, he was shocked at first to see how he had been wounded. In fact, he was speechless. So my grandfather's first 35
words to his son were 'I am confident that I will find great blessing in it.' And that is what he said about everything that happened to him for the rest of his life, all of which tended to be more or less drastic. I remember at least two sprained wrists and a cracked rib. He told me once that being blessed meant being bloodied, and that is true etymologically, in Englishbut not in Greek or Hebrew. So whatever understanding might be based on that derivation has no scriptural authority behind it. It was unlike him to strain interpretation that way. He did it in order to make an account of himself, I suppose, as most of us do.
In any case, the notion seems to have been important to him. He was always trying to help somebody birth a calf or limb a tree, whether they wanted him to or not. All the regret he ever felt was for his unfortunates, with none left over for himself however he might be injured, until his friends began to die off, as they did one after another in the space of about two years. Then he was terribly lonely, no doubt about it. I think that was a big part of his running off to Kansas. That and the fire at the Negro church. It wasn't a big fire—someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it, and
someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel. (The Negro church used to be where the soda fountain is now, though I hear that's going out of business.
That church sold up some years ago, and what was left of the congregation moved to Chicago. By then it was down to three or four families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he'd dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they're still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they'll know they have some significance and they'll save them when the building comes down. I didn't know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew 36
my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them.)
You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child. You seem to be spending half your time at his house. We think that is very good for you, but we miss you something terrible. Tonight you are camping out in his backyard, which is
just across the street and a few houses down. Supper without you tonight, a melancholy prospect.
You and Tobias came trudging home at dawn and spread your sleeping bags on your bedroom floor and slept till lunchtime. (You had heard growling in the bushes. T. has brothers.) Your mother had fallen asleep in the parlor with a book in her lap. I made you some toasted cheese sandwiches, which I cooked a little too long. So I told you the story you like very much, about
how my poor old mother would sleep in her rocker by the kitchen stove while our dinner smoked and sputtered like some unacceptable sacrifice, and you ate your sandwiches, maybe a little more happily for the scorch. And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loves them and
won't buy them for herself. I doubt she slept at all last night. I surprised myself—I slept pretty soundly, and woke out of a harmless sort of dream, an unmemorable conversation with people I did not know. And I was so happy to have you home again.
I was thinking about that henhouse. It stood just across the yard, where the Muellers'
house is now. Boughton and I used 37
to sit on the roof of it and look out over the neighbors' gardens and the fields. We used to take sandwiches and eat our dinner up there. I had stilts that Edward had made for himself years before. They were so high I had to stand on the porch railing to get onto them. Boughton (he was Bobby then) got his father to make him a pair, and we pretty well lived on those things for several summers. We had to stay on the paths or where the ground was firm, but we got to be very much at ease on them, and we'd just saunter all over the place, as if it were quite a natural thing. We could sit right down on the branch of a tree. Sometimes wasps were a problem, or mosquitoes. We took a few spills, but mainly it was very nice. Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor. We would never have thought that coop could fold up the way it did. The roof was covered in raggedy black tar paper, and it was always warm even when the day was chilly, and sometimes we'd lie back on it to get out of the wind, just lie there and talk. I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn't come to him, and then he'd have to find another kind of life,
and he couldn't really think of one. We'd go through the possibilities we were aware of.
There weren't many.
Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he's so bent over I don't know how you'd calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he's been reduced to a heap ofjoints, and not one of them works. You'd never know what he once was, looking at him now. He was always wonderful at stealing bases, from grade school right through seminary.
I reminded him the other day how he'd said to me, lying there on that roof watching the clouds, 'What do you think you would do if you saw an angel? I'll tell you what, I'm scared I'd take off running!' Old Boughton laughed at that and said, 38
'Well, I still might want to.' And then he said, 'Pretty soon I'll know.'
I've always been taller than most, larger than most. It runs in my family. When I was a boy, people took me to be older than I was and often expected more of me—more common sense, usually—than I could come up with at the time. I got pretty
good at pretending I understood more than I did, a skill which has served me through life.
I say this because I want you to realize that I am not by any means a saint. My life does not compare with my grandfather's. I get much more respect than I deserve. This seems harmless enough in most cases. People want to respect the pastor and I'm not going to interfere with that. But I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading
more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.
Thank God for them all, of course, and for that strange interval, which was most of my life, when I read out of loneliness,
