controlling anger. Nor have I found any way to apply it to present circumstance, though I have not yet abandoned the effort.
194
This afternoon I came back from a fairly discouraging meeting at the church—just a few people came, and absolutely nothing was accomplished. That is the kind of thing that wears me out. So I took a nap and slept through supper. It was dark when I woke up and the house was empty so I went out to the porch. You and your mother were sitting on the swing, wrapped up in a quilt. She said, 'This might be the last mild night.' She made room for me beside her and spread the quilt across my lap and rested her head on my shoulder. It was just as pleasant as could be. This summer she planted what she calls her owl garden, I being the owl in question. She read somewhere that white flowers are most fragrant at night, so she planted every white flower she could think of along the front walk. Now there are just a few roses left, and alyssum and petunias.
So we sat there in the dark together for a while, you asleep, more or less, with your mother stroking your hair. Then we heard footsteps in the road. And sure enough, it was lack Boughton. I believe he may have meant to say good evening and pass by, but your mother asked him to come visit a little, so he did. He came in the gate and sat down on the steps. I have noticed that toward her he is consistently obliging.
'We were just enjoying the quiet,' she said.
He said, 'No better place in the world to do that.' Then, as though he was afraid he might be misunderstood, or at any rate that he might give offense, he said, 'It really is good to be back for a while.' He laughed. 'There are people here now who don't know me from Adam. It's wonderful.'
Then he put his hand to his face, his eyes. It was dark, but I could recognize that gesture.
He has made it his whole life, I believe.
I said, 'It has been a great happiness to your father, having you here.'
He said, 'The man's a saint.' 195
'That might be true, but it was still good of you to come.' 'Ah,' he said, as a man might when a chasm has opened at his feet.
So there was a silence of a few minutes, and then your mother stood up and lifted you out of the quilt and carried you away to bed.
'I have been glad to see you, too,' I said, because I really was, for old Boughton's sake.
To that he made no reply. 'I say that quite sincerely.'
He stretched out his legs and leaned back against the porch pillar.
'No doubt,' he said. 'Stack of Bibles.'
He laughed. 'How high?' 'A cubit or so.'
'That'll do, I guess.'
'Would two cubits put your mind at ease?'
'Entirely.' And then, remembering his manners, 'It has been good seeing you again. And meeting your wife. Your famiiy-' Then we were quiet for a while.
I said, 'I'm impressed that you know Karl Barth.' 'Oh,' he said. 'From time to time I still try to crack the code.'
'Well,' I said, 'I admire your tenacity.'
He said, 'You might not, if you understood my motives.' Of all people on this earth he must be the hardest one to have a conversation with.
So I said, 'That's all right, I admire it anyway.' And he said, 'Thanks.'
So we were just quiet there for some time. Your mother came out with a pot of hot cider and cups, and she sat there 196
quiet right along with us, the dear woman. And I spent the time thinking how it would be if Jack Boughton were indeed my son, and had come home weary from whatever life he had, and was sitting there still and at seeming peace in that peaceful night. There was a considerable satisfaction in that thought. The idea of grace had been so much on my mind,
grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials. There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all
the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being. And a sensation came over me, a sort of lovely fear, that made me think of Boughton's fear of angels. Now, I may have been more than half asleep at that point, but a thought arose that abides with me. I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal
life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. 'For who among men knoweth the things of a
man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe
that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions
of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I
hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to
be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all
that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
