Open the scroll of conch and find the text
That lies behind the priestly susurrus.
There wasn’t anything else in it worth remembering. One of Boughton’s boys traveled to the Mediterranean for some reason, and he sent back that big shell I have always kept on my desk. I have loved the word “susurrus” for a long time, and I had never found another use for it. Besides, what else did I know in those days but texts and priestliness and static? And what else did I love? There was a book many people read at that time, The Diary of a Country Priest. It was by; a French writer, Bernanos. I felt a.lot of sympathy for the fellow, but Boughton said, “It was the drink.” He said, “The Lord simply needed someone more suitable to fill that position.” I remember reading that book all night by the radio till every station went off, and still reading when the daylight came.
***
Once my grandfather took me to Des Moines on the train to see Bud Fowler play. He was with Keokuk for a season or two. The old man fixed me with that eye of his and he told me there was not a man on this round earth who could outrun or out-throw Bud Fowler. I was pretty excited. But nothing happened in that game, or so I thought then. No runs, no hits, no errors. In the fifth inning a thunderstorm that had been lying along the horizon the whole afternoon just sort of sauntered over and put a stop to it all. I remember the groan that went up from the crowd when the heavy rain began. I was only about ten years old, and I was relieved, but it was a terrible frustration to my grandfather. One more terrible frustration for the poor old devil. I say this with all respect. Even my father called him that, and my mother did, too. He had lost that eye in the war, and he was pretty wild-looking generally. But he was a fine preacher in the style of his generation, so my father said.
That day he had brought a little bag of licorice, which really did surprise me. Whenever he put his fingers into it, it rattled with the trembling of his hand, and the sound was just like the sound of fire. I noticed this at the time, and it seemed natural to me. I also more or less assumed that the thunder and the lightning that day were Creation tipping its hat to him, as if to say, Glad to see you here in the stands, Reverend. Or maybe it said, Why, Reverend, what in this grieving world are you doing here at a sporting event? My mother said once that he attracted terrible friendship — using “terrible” in the old sense, of course, and meaning only respect. When he was young, he was an acquaintance of John Brown, and of Jim Lane, too. I wish I could tell you more about that. There was a kind of truce in our household that discouraged talk about the old times in Kansas, and about the war. It was not long after the trip to Des Moines that we lost him, or he lost himself. In any case, a few weeks later he took off for Kansas.
I read somewhere that a thing that does not exist in relation to anything else cannot itself be said to exist. I can’t quite see the meaning of a statement so purely hypothetical as this, though I may simply lack understanding. But it does remind me of that afternoon when nothing flew through the air, no one slid or drifted or tagged, when there was no waltz at all, so to speak. It seems to me that the storm had to put an end to it, as if it were a fire to be put out, an eruption into this world of an alarming kind of nullity. “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” It seems a little like that as I remember it, though it went on a good deal longer than half an hour. Null. That word has real power. My grandfather had nowhere to spend his courage, no way to feel it in himself. That was a great pity.
As I write I am aware that my memory has made much of very little. There was that old man my grandfather sitting beside me in his ashy coat, trembling just because he did, sharing out the frugal pleasures of his licorice, maybe with Kansas somehow transforming itself from memory to intention in his mind that very afternoon. (It was Kansas he went back to, not the town where his church used to be. That’s why we were so long finding him.) Bud Fowler stood at second base with his glove on his hip and watched the catcher. I know he liked to play bare-handed, but that is what I remember, and it’s all I ever could remember about him, so there is no point trying to put the memory right. I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him.
I was a fairly decent pitcher in high school and college, and we had a couple of teams up at the seminary. We’d go out on a Saturday to toss the ball around. The diamond was just worn in the grass, so it was anybody’s guess where the baselines were. We had some good times. There were remarkable young men studying for the ministry in those days. There are now, too, I’m sure.
***
When my father and I were walking
