still, in my wretched heart, I thanked the Lord.
So I instructed your mother in the doctrines of the faith, and in due course I did indeed baptize her, and I became happily accustomed to the sight of her, her quiet presence, and I began to give thanks that I had lived through the worst of my passion without making a ruin and a desolation of my good name, without running after her in the street, as I nearly did once when I saw her step out of the grocery store and walk away. I 207
scared myself so badly that time I broke into a sweat. That's how strong the impulse was.
And I was sixty-seven. But I did always act consistently with my great respect for her youth and her loneliness, I can promise you that. I took great care about it. I thought it best to recruit some of the kindest older women to sit through her instruction with her, and I believe that made her shy about speaking, which I regretted very much.
Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake
to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry
and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. But even that was for the best, because one of the ladies,
Veda Dyer, got herself into a considerable excitement talking about flames, that is, perdition, so I felt obliged to take down the Institutes and read them the passage on the lot of the reprobate, about how their torments are 'figuratively expressed to us by physical things,' unquenchable fire and so on,
to express 'how wretched it is to be cut off from all fellowship with God.' I have the passage in front of me. It is alarming, certainly, but it isn't ridiculous. I told them, If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don't hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.
They all did ponder a good while, and I did, too, listening to the evening wind and the cicadas. I came near alarming myself with the thought of the loneliness stretching ahead of me,
and the new bitterness of it, and how I hated the secretiveness and the renunciation that honor and decency required of
me and that common sense enforced on me. But when I looked 208
up, your mother was watching me, smiling a little, and she touched my hand and she said,
'You'll be just fine.'
How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace.
She began to come to the house when some of the other
women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, 'How can I repay you for all this?'
And she said, 'You ought to marry me.' And I did.
Here is my thought: If I were to put my hand on her brow and bless her purely, as if I were indeed and altogether a minister of the Lord, I would hope just such an experience for her as that
one of mine. Oh, I know she is fond of me, and very loyal. But I could hope that sometime the Song of Songs would startle her,
as if it spoke from her own heart. I cannot really make myself believe that her feelings could have been at all like mine. And why do I worry so much over this Jack Boughton?
Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. I might well be leaving her to a greater happiness than I have given her, even granting every difficulty.
Sometimes I think I have seen the beginnings of it in her. If the Lord is letting me momentarily be witness to a grace He intends for her, I should find in this a great kindness toward myself. This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep 209
into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven——one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather's grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.
'Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond.' While I'm thinking of it—when you are an old man like I
am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency
to make one's sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.
Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in
your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing—only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.
This has been a strange day, disturbing. Glory called and invited you and your mother to the movies. Then, when she
came for you, she had old Boughton with her, and she helped him out of the car and up the walk and up the steps. He so rarely leaves his house now that I was really amazed to find him at my door. We sat him down at the kitchen table and gave him a glass of water, and then the three of you left. All the
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bother seemed to have worn him out, because he just sat there with a more or less sociable expression but with his eyes closed, clearing his throat from time to time as if he was about to speak but then thought better of it.
