But I have trouble remembering that I can't trust my body not to fail me suddenly. I don't feel bad most of the time. The pains are infrequent enough that I forget now and then.
The doctor told me I had to be careful getting up from a chair. He also told me not to climb stairs, which would mean giving up my study, a thing I can't yet bring myself to do. He also told me to take a shot of brandy every day, which I do, in the morning, standing in the pantry with the curtain drawn for your sake. Your mother thinks that's very funny. She says, 'It'd do you a lot more good if you enjoyed it a little,' but that's how my mother did her drinking, and I'm a traditional73
ist. The last time she took you to the doctor, he said you might be more robust if you had your tonsils out. She came home so sick at the thought he could find any fault with you that I gave her a dose of my medicinal brandy.
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 74
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 75
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 to say. He didn't like mention of those times, and that did cause some hard feelings between him and his father.
I've read up on those events considerably, and I've decided my father was right. And that's just as well, because people have forgotten. Remarkable things went on, certainly, but there has been so much trouble in the world since then it's hard to find time to think about Kansas.
We came to this house when I was still a small boy. We had no electricity for years, just kerosene lamps. No radio. I was remembering how my mother used to love her kitchen.
Of
course it was very different then, with an icebox and a pump sink and a pie safe and a woodstove. That old table is about all that is the same, and the pantry. She had her rocker so close to the stove that she could open the oven door without getting up. She said it was to keep things from burning. She said we couldn't afford the waste, which was true. She burned things often enough anyway, more often as the years passed, and we ate them anyway, so at least there wasn't any waste. She loved the warmth of that stove, but it put her to sleep, especially if she'd been doing the wash or putting up preserves. Well, bless her heart, she had lumbago, and she had rheumatism, too, and she did take a little whiskey for it. She never slept well during the nights. I suppose I got that from her. She'd wake up if the
cat sneezed, she said, but then she'd sleep through the immolation of an entire Sunday dinner two feet away from her. That
would be on a Saturday, because our family was pretty strict on Sabbath-keeping. So we'd know for an entire day beforehand 76
what we had to look forward to, burned peas and scorched applesauce I remember particularly.
Your mother was startled the first time I mentioned to her that she might as well not do the ironing on a Sunday evening. It's such hard work for her to stop working that I don't know what I have accomplished by speaking to her about the day of rest. She wants to know the customs, though, and she takes them to heart, the Good Lord knows. It was such a relief to her to find out that studying didn't count as work. I never thought it did, anyway. So now she sits at the dinner table and copies out poems and phrases she likes, and facts of one sort and
