be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who
feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did. Just to reflect on it makes me a little irritated. Irritation is a form of anger, I recognize that.
One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore. If I have any wisdom to offer, this is a fair part of it.
You have blessed our house not quite seven years, and fairly lean years, too, so late in my life. There was no way for me to
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make any changes to provide for the two of you. Still, I think about it and I pray. It is very much in my mind. I want you to know that.
We're having a fine spring, and this is another fine day. You were almost late for school.
We stood you on a chair and you ate toast and jam while your mother polished your shoes and I combed your hair. You had a page of sums to do that you should have done last night, and you took forever over them this morning, trying to get all the numbers facing the right way. You're like your mother, so serious about everything. The old men call you Deacon, but that seriousness isn't all from my side of the family. I'd never seen anything like it until I met her. Well, putting aside my grandfather. It seemed to me to be half sadness and half fury, and I wondered what in her life could have put that expression in her eyes. And then when you
were about three, just a little fellow, I came into the nursery one morning and there you were down on the floor in the sunlight in your trapdoor pajamas, trying to figure a way to fix a
broken crayon. And you looked up at me and it was just that look of hers. I've thought of that moment many times. I'll tell you, sometimes it has seemed to me that you were looking back through life, back through troubles I pray you'll never have, asking me to kindly explain myself.
'You're just like all them old men in the Bible,' your mother tells me, and that would be true, if I could manage to live a hundred and twenty years, and maybe have a few cattle and oxen and menservants and maidservants. My father left me a trade, which happened also to be my vocation. But the fact is, it was all second nature to me, I grew up with it. Most likely you will not.
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I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.
So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Your mother told you I'm writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record
for you? I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas, the son of John Ames and Martha Turner Ames, grandson of John Ames and Margaret Todd Ames. At this writing I have lived seventy-six years, seventyfour of them here in Gilead, Iowa, excepting study at the college
and at seminary.
And what else should I tell you?
When I was twelve years old, my father took me to the grave of my grandfather. At that time my family had been living in Gilead for about ten years, my father serving the church here. His father, who was born in Maine and had come out to Kansas in the 1830s, lived with us for a number of years after his retirement. Then the old man ran off to become a sort of itinerant
preacher, or so we believed. He died in Kansas and was buried there, near a town that had pretty well lost its people. A
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drought had driven most of them away, those who had not already left for towns closer to the railroad. Surely there was
only a town in that place to begin with because it was Kansas, and the people who settled it were Free Soilers who weren't really thinking about the long term. I don't often use the expression 'godforsaken,' but when I think back to that place, that word does come to mind. It took my father months to find where the old man had ended up, lots of letters of inquiry to churches and newspapers and so on. He put a great deal of effort into it. Finally someone wrote back and sent a little package with his watch and a beat-up old Bible and some letters,
which I learned later were just a few of my father's letters of inquiry, no doubt given to the old man by people who thought they had induced him to come home.
It grieved my father bitterly that the last words he said to his father were very angry words and there could never be any reconciliation between them in this life. He did truly honor his father, generally speaking, and it was hard for him to accept that things should have ended the way they did.
That was in 1892, so travel was still pretty hard. We went as far as we could by train, and then my father hired a wagon and team. That was more than we needed, but it was all we could find. We took some bad directions and got lost, and we had so much trouble keeping the horses watered that we boarded them at a farmstead and went the rest of the way on foot. The roads were terrible, anyway, swamped in dust where they were traveled and baked into ruts where they were not. My father was carrying some tools in a gunnysack so he could try to put the grave to rights a little, and I was carrying what we had for food, hardtack and jerky and the few little yellow apples we picked up along the road here and there, and our changes of shirts and socks, all by then filthy.
He didn't really have enough money to make the trip at 10
that time, but it was so much in his thoughts that he couldn't wait until he had saved up for it. I told him I had
