all these elms around town, but whoever it was did us a world of good. Old Boughton and I used to toss the ball of an evening under those same trees, till his joints began to bother him,
which was before he was into his forties, as I recall. His health has been another great trial for him. This Jack Boughton could be his father, to look at him.
I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I
had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course,
it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn't. His hands and his face were black with ashhe looked charred, like one of the old martyrs—and he knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from inside his shirt, and he did break it, that's true, and gave
half to me and ate the other half himself. And it truly was the bread of affliction, because everyone was poor then. There had been drought for a few years and times were hard. Though we didn't notice it so much when they were hard for everybody. And I guess that must have been why no one minded the rain. There had been so little of it. One thing I do always remember is how the women let their hair fall down and their 102
skirts trail in the mud, even the old women, as if none of it mattered at all. And then the singing, which was very beautiful as I remember it, though I'm pretty sure it could not
have been. It would just rise up with the sound of the rain. 'Beneath the Cross of Jesus.'
All the lovely, sad old tunes. The bitterness of that morsel has meant other things to me as the years passed. I have had many occasions to reflect on it.
It is not surprising that I remember that day as if my father had given me communion, taking that bread from his side and breaking it for me with his ashy hands. But it is strange that I remember receiving it the way I do, since it has never been our custom for the minister to place the bread in the communicant's mouth, as they do in some churches.
I think of this
because, on the morning of communion when your mother brought you forward and said,
'You ought to give him some of that,' I broke the bread and fed a bit of it to you from my hand, just the way my father would not have done except in my memory. And I know what I wanted in that moment was to give you some version of that same memory, which has been very dear to me, though only now do I realize how often it has been in my mind.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.
Good old Isaac Watts. I've thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
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A thousand ages in Thy sight Are like ah evening gone ...
No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admire, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.
I will tell you some more old stories. So much of what I know about those old days comes from the time my father and I spent wandering around together lost in Kansas. I don't know if I ever actually cried, but I know I spent a lot of time trying not to. The soles of my shoes wore through and the dust and sticks and gravel came in and wore out my socks and got
to work on my feet. O the filth! O the blisters! Time weighs on children. They struggle just to get through church, as
you know. And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be. Once or twice I did sit down. I just sat there in the heat and the weeds with the grasshoppers flying around my head and watched him walk 104
away, and he'd keep walking till he was almost out of my sight, which is a long way in Kansas. Then I'd go running to catch up. He'd say, 'You're going to make yourself thirsty.' Well, it seemed to me I'd been thirsty half my life.
But the pleasant thing was that when I did stay alongside him he would tell me remarkable things I'm pretty sure he would never have told me otherwise. If there was supper he'd tell stories to celebrate, and if there wasn't supper he'd tell stories to make up for the lack of it. Once, some owls woke us with that caviling they get into sometimes, and he told me the story of being awakened by sounds in the night and of walking outside and seeing old John Brown's mule coming out through the doors of his father's church, being coaxed down those wooden steps in the dark of the moon. He heard the noise of balking and a sad, grave voice saying, 'Doing fine now. Doing just fine.' Then four horses after it, abrupt and agile, all with their saddles already cinched on. The men mounted, two men on one horse leading the other horse along behind them—one of the men was wounded and had to be held— and they rode away without a word. Then, in a few minutes, he heard the barn door open and he heard their horse breathing and stepping and his father speaking to it, and then his father rode away, too.
He told me that he went up to the church and sat there in the dark, wondering what he should do. He wasn't even ten years old at the time. He said the church smelled like horses and gunpowder and it smelled like sweat. (In those days they didn't have bullets like the ones we have, so they'd have been using the time to load up their weapons with powder and shot.) They'd pushed the benches and the communion table against the walls to make
