We looked so terrible when we finally got home that my mother just burst into tears at the sight of us. We'd both gotten thin, and our clothes were in bad shape. The whole journey didn't take quite a month, but we'd been sleeping in barns and sheds, and even on the bare ground, during the week or so that we were actually lost. It was a great adventure to look back on, and my father and I used to laugh about some fairly dreadful things. An old man even took a shot at us once. My father was, as he said at the time, intending to glean a few overgrown carrots out of a garden we passed. He'd left a dime on the stoop to
pay for whatever we could find to steal, which was always little enough. That was something to see, my father in his shirtsleeves straddling a rickety old garden fence with a hank of
carrot tops in his hand and a fellow behind him taking aim.
We took off into the brush, and when we decided he wasn't going to follow us, we sat down on the ground and my father
scraped the dirt off the carrot with his knife and cut it up into pieces and set them on the crown of his hat, which he'd put between us like a table, and then he commenced to say grace,
which he never failed to do. He said, 'For all we are about to receive,' and then we both started laughing till the tears were pouring down. I realize now that keeping us fed was a desperate concern for him. It actually drove him to something resembling crime. That carrot was so big and old and tough he had
to whittle it into chips. It was about like eating a branch, and there was nothing to wash it down with, either.
I really only realized afterward what trouble I'd have been 15
in if he had gotten shot, even killed, and I was left stranded on my own out there. I still dream about that. I think he felt the sort of shame you feel when you realize what a foolish chance you've taken after you've already taken it. But he was absolutely set on finding that grave.
Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning came easily, my grandfather told me about a man he knew when he first came to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, 'That fellow just was not confident of his Hebrew. He'd walk fifteen miles across open country in the dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation.
We'd have to thaw him out before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.' My father laughed and said, 'The strange part is, that may even be true.' But I remembered the
story at the time because it seemed to me we were doing something very similar.
My father gave up gleaning and went back to knocking on doors, which he had been reluctant to do, because when people found out he was a preacher they would sometimes try to give us more than they could spare. That was his belief, at least. And they could tell he was a preacher, rough-looking as we were a few days into our desert wanderings, as he called them. We offered to do some chores in exchange for food at a couple of houses, and the people asked him if he would just open a bit of Scripture or say a prayer. He was interested that they knew, and wondered a good deal what it was that gave him away. It was a matter of pride with him that his hands were hard, and that there was no spare flesh on him to speak of. I have had the same experience many times, and I have wondered about it, too. Well, we spent a good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years. It was always the worst parts that made us laugh. My mother was irked by it all, but she just said, 'Don't you ever tell me.'
16
In many ways she was a remarkably careful mother, poor woman. I was in a sense her only child. Before I was born she had bought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus. On its authority she tried to keep us from making any use of our brains for an hour after supper, or from reading
at all when our feet were cold. The idea was to prevent conflicting demands on the circulation of the blood. My grandfather
told her once that if you couldn't read with cold feet there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine, but she was very serious about these things and he only irritated her.
She said, 'Nobody in Maine gets much of anything to eat, so it all comes out even.'
When I got home she scrubbed me down and put me to bed and fed me six or seven times a day and forbade me the use of my brain after every single meal. The tedium was considerable.
That journey was a great blessing to me. I realize looking back how young my father was then. He couldn't have been much more than forty-five or -six. He was a fine, vigorous man into his old age. We played catch in the evenings after supper for years, till the sun went down and it was too dark for us to see the ball. I think he just appreciated having a child at home, a son. Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man, too, until recently. You know, I suppose, that I married a girl when I was young. We had grown up together. We were married during nry last year at seminary, and then we came back here so I could take my father's pulpit while he and my mother went south for a few months for the sake of my mother's health. Well, my wife died in childbirth, and the child died with her. Their names were Louisa and Angeline. I saw the baby while she lived, and I held her for a few minutes, and that was a blessing. Boughton 17
baptized her and he gave her the name Angeline, because I was over in Tabor for the day—the child was not expected for another six weeks—and there was no one to tell him what name
we had finally decided on. She'd have been Rebecca, but Angeline is a good name.
Last Sunday when we went to Boughton's for supper, I saw you looking at his hands.
They are so full of arthritis now that they're all skin and knuckles. You think he's terribly old, and he's younger than I am. He was best man at my first wedding, and he married me and your mother. His daughter Glory is home with him now. Her marriage failed, and that is a sad thing, but it is a blessing for Boughton to have her here. She came by the other day to bring me a magazine. She told me Jack might be coming home, too. It actually took me a minute to think who that was. You probably don't remember much about old Boughton. He is a little cross now from time to time, which is understandable considering his discomfort. It would be a pity if that is what you remembered of him. In his prime he was as fine a preacher as I ever heard.
My father always preached from notes, and I wrote my sermons out word for word. There are boxes of them in the attic,
a few recent years of them in stacks in the closet. I've never gone back to them to see if they were worth
