sorted out one way or another, as any clergyman can tell you.
In this instance, however, there were aggravating circumstances. For one thing, the girl was very young. For another, her
family situation was desolate, even squalid. In other words, to say the least, she enjoyed none of the protections a young girl needs. How Jack Boughton even found her has never, been clear to me. She and her family lived in an isolated house with a lot of mean dogs under the porch. It was a sad place and
she was a sad child. And there he was with his college airs and his letter sweater and that Plymouth convertible he got somewhere for a song, he said, when he was asked about it.
(Boughton had so many children to educate, they all had to work, Jack too, and a car was out of the question even for old Boughton. His congregation gave him a used Buick in 1946, because by then it was too hard for him to walk anywhere.) Jack Boughton had no business in the world involving himself with that girl. It was something no honorable man would
have done. However I turn it over in my mind, that fact remains. And here is a prejudice of mine, confirmed by my
lights through many years of observation. Sinners are not all dishonorable people, not by any means. But those who are dishonorable never really repent and never really reform.
Now, I
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may be wrong here. No such distinction occurs in Scripture. And repentance and reformation are matters of the soul which
only the Lord can judge. But, in my experience, dishonor is recalcitrant. When I see it, my heart sinks, because I feel I have
no help to offer a dishonorable person. I know the deficiency may be my own altogether.
In any case, young Boughton never acknowledged the
child, to make any provision for it at all. But he did tell his father about it. As if confessing a transgression, as his father saw it, though to me it seemed like pure meanness, because he must have known that grandchild would weigh on old Boughton's mind something terrible, as it did. He even told Boughton where the young girl lived, and Glory drove the
old man out there in that foolish convertible. Boughton hoped to baptize the child—it was a little girl—or at least to satisfy himself that she would be baptized, but the people were hostile to him, as if he were the one at fault. So he left some money and went away, very dejected and humiliated. He was so obviously miserable that Mrs. Boughton made Glory tell her what the problem was, and then she was so miserable that Glory drove them both out in the country. Mrs. Boughton had to see the baby, and she had to hold her. It was probably unwise for her to do that. Well, I held her, too.
Where wisdom could have found a place in a situation like that one I don't claim to know.
They brought diapers and clothes and they left money.
This went on for a long time. It went on for several years, in fact. Glory used to come to me and cry about it, because nothing ever got better. The baby was always too dirty and too
small.
She took me out to see the situation for myself, and I can tell you it was very bad. People have a right to live as they see fit, but that was no place for an infant. There were tin cans and broken glass all over the yard and dirty old mattresses on the 157
floor, and who knows what all. Dogs everywhere. How could young Boughton have taken advantage of that girl? And then to have abandoned her? Glory said when she asked her brother if he planned to marry the girl he just said, 'You've seen her.' On the way there Glory told me how I must try to persuade the family to let the girl and her baby come into town and live in a nice Christian family. I tried that, but her father spat on the floor and said, 'She's already got a nice Christian family.' Then all the way home Glory described a plan she had
come up with to kidnap the child. The baby, that is. She knew some stories about the old days when they used to smuggle fugitives up from Missouri, and she thought one small infant would be a much easier thing to conceal. Several houses in town have hidden cellars or cabinets where people could be put out of sight for a day or two. The church has one in the attic. I'll have to remember to show it to you. It will involve climbing a ladder. Well, we'll see.
I told her that in the old days towns like ours were a conspiracy. Lots of people were only there to be antislavery by any
means that came to hand. Persuading someone to take a child from her mother, to steal it, was a very different thing, especially since Glory had no evidence of any claim on the child.
She said she had written again and again to young Boughton asking him to acknowledge the child for his parents' sake. She had washed the baby and dressed her up and sent him smiling photographs. She had photographed the baby in his father's arms. Jack sent Glory cards on her birthday and boxes of chocolate and made no reference whatever to his child or to the misery he had caused in their household. She was crying so hard she had to pull off the road. 'They're so sad!' she said. 'They're so ashamed!' (Young Boughton did have the decency to leave his convertible and take the train back to school, so that Glory could drive her parents out to see that poor croupy, rashy child every week or so.) 158
Well, here is the end of the story. The little girl lived about three years. She was turning into a spry, wiry little thing, a source of sullen pride to her mother and her nice Christian family. But she cut her foot somehow and died of the infection. The last time they visited her, they saw she was in bad shape.
So Glory went and found a doctor, but by then there was nothing to be done. The grandfather said, 'Her lot was very hard,'
and Glory slapped him. He threatened to press charges, but I guess he never got around to it. He let the Boughtons bury the little girl in their family plot, since they agreed to pay the expenses and a little more beside. So there she is. The stone says Baby, three years (her mother had never really settled on a name), and then: 'Their angels in Heaven always see the face of My Father in Heaven.'
