old fellow picking blackberries into his hat, nodding a little and talking a little as he did it. They were coming up to him on that right side and touching his arm, tugging his coat. When they did, it would set him to nodding and talking, and they would clap their hands over their mouths and run away.
Now, I was astonished at this. I realize how much I did, in some sense, believe that there was a sort of sacredness just to the right of him, and it really shocked me that those children could violate it as they were doing. I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. How he knew I was there I don't know, and why he looked at me that way is a thing I never have understood, as if I were the betrayer. It felt unfair to me at the time, but I never could dismiss it. I never could tell myself that it was just an error, that there was nothing in it.
Well, I'll confess I did feel a certain embarrassment about him. It may even have been shame. And it was not the first time I had felt it, either. But I was a child at the time, and it seems to me he might have made some allowance. These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.
I might as well say this, too. It hurt us all something dread98
ful that he left the way he did. We knew there was judgment in it, and whatever we might say for ourselves, for our reasonableness and our good intentions, we knew they were trivial by
his lights, and that made them a little bit trivial by our lights. He took so much away with him when he left.
My father said when he walked into his father's church after they came back from the army the first thing he saw was a piece of needlework hanging on the wall above the communion table. It was very beautifully done, flowers and flames surrounding the words 'The Lord Our God Is a Purifying Fire.' I suppose that is why I always think of my grandfather's church as the one struck by lightning. As in fact it was.
My father said it was that banner that had sent him off to sit with the Quakers. He said the very last word he would have applied to war, once he had had a good look at it, was 'purifying,' and the thought that those women could believe the
world was in any way purer for the loss of their own sons and husbands was appalling to him. He stood there looking at it, visibly displeased by it, apparently, because one of the women said to him, 'It's just a bit of Scripture.'
He said, 'I beg your pardon, ma'am. No, that is not Scripture.' 'Well,' she said, 'then it certainly ought to be.'
And of course that was terrible to his mind, that she could have thought such a thing. And yet if those precise words don't occur in the Bible, there are passages they could be said to summarize fairly well. That may have been all she meant.
I have always wished I could have seen it, that tapestry they made, if that's what it was. He said there were cherubim to either side of it, with their wings thrown forward the way they are in the old pictures, and then, where the Ark of the 99
Covenant would have been, those incendiary words, and flowers and flames around them and above them. I don't know how those women managed to find the material for it, how much snipping and raveling of their few best clothes they'd have to have done to make such a thing as that. And I've always wondered what happened to it.
Material things are so vulnerable to
the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared. -~
One after another, when those women learned they were widows, they went back to their families in the East. Not all of them, but a good many. Some of them had buried their husbands and their children beside the church, so they felt they couldn't leave. And some of those who left came back, even years later. Still, that congregation dwindled away finally, and the Methodists bought the land and burned the old building down because it was past saving.
My father spoke once in a sermon about how he regretted the times after the war that he'd gone off to sit with the Quakers while his father struggled to find words of comfort to say to his poor remnant of a flock. He said in those days his father opened all the windows that still would open, so they could hear the Methodists singing by the river, and that some of the women would join in if the song was 'The Old Rugged Cross' or 'Rock of Ages,' even in the middle of the sermon, and he'd just stop preaching and listen to them.
The wind, he said, smelled like turned earth because of the new graves, and yet people afterward remembered those Sunday mornings and those Wednesday evenings as something strangely wonderful. There was a tenderness in the way they told about them.
My father said he had regretted and repented his whole life since that time but never sufficiently, because at first staying away had seemed an act of principle almost. His father had 100
preached his people into the war, saying while there was slavery there was no peace, but only a war of the armed and powerful against the captive and defenseless. He would say, Peace
will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children. I came home for lunch today and found you playing catch in the street with Jack Boughton. You had his mitt, a fine new fielder's mitt that reached almost to your elbow, and he had that old glove of Edward's that I keep on my desk. No webbing at all, no pocket to speak of. It's an oversight of mine that I haven't gotten you a glove of your own. I'll see to that.
Young Boughton was teaching you to scoop up grounders, probably to cover for the fact that you weren't likely to actually catch anything on the fly. You were being very earnest about it all, running hither and thither on those clever child legs of yours, and he was saying, 'Come on, come on,' and pounding his glove, and then, in a sportscaster's voice,
'He's rounding second, folks. Will the throw be in time?' And you would lose the ball again, and he would say, 'This is amazing, folks. The runner appears to have tripped on his shoelace! He's down! He's taking a while to catch his breath! Now he's up, he's headed for the plate!' He would say, 'He's dragging his left leg, folks, he's hopping on one foot!' And by then you were giggling considerably, but you got the ball to him finally, and he said, 'Well, folks, that runner's out!' It was beautiful to watch you two in the flickering shade.
I remember watching Louisa skipping rope in that street in a bright red coat with her pigtails jumping in the cold. It was early spring, so she didn't raise any dust to speak of. The trees were just budding their leaves. They still had that slight, brave look young trees have. I don't know whose idea it was to plant 101
