(I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.)
This morning I did a foolish thing. I woke up in the dark, and that put me in mind to walk over to the church the way I used to. I did leave a note, and your mother found it, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, I suppose. (The note was an afterthought, I admit.) She seemed to think I’d gone off by myself to breathe my last — which would not be a bad idea, to my way of thinking. I have worried some about those last hours. This is another thing you know and I don’t — how this ends. That is to say, how my life will seem to you to have ended. That’s a matter of great concern to your mother, as it is to me, of course.
But I have trouble remembering that I can’t trust my body not to fail me suddenly. I don’t feel bad most of the time. The pains are infrequent enough that I forget now and then.
The doctor told me I had to be careful getting up from a chair. He also told me not to climb stairs, which would mean giving up my study, a thing I can’t yet bring myself to do. He also told me to take a shot of brandy every day, which I do, in the morning, standing in the pantry with the curtain drawn for your sake. Your mother thinks that’s very funny. She says, “It’d do you a lot more good if you enjoyed it a little,” but that’s how my mother did her drinking, and I’m a traditionalist. The last time she took you to the doctor, he said you might be more robust if you had your tonsils out. She came home so sick at the thought he could find any fault with you that I gave her a dose of my medicinal brandy.
She wants to move my books down to the parlor and set me up there, and I may agree to that, just to spare her worry. I told her I could not add a moment to my span of life, and she said, “Well, I don’t want you to go subtracting one from it, either.” A year ago she would have said “neither.” I’ve always loved the way she talks, but she thinks she has to improve for your sake. I walked up to the church in the dark, as I said. There was a very bright moon. It’s strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. When I was a young boy I used to get up before every dawn of the world to fetch water and firewood. It was a very different life then. I remember walking out into the dark and feeling as if the dark were a great, cool sea and the houses and the sheds and the woods were all adrift in it, just about to ease off their moorings. I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door. This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it has passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.
In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road to the church and let myself in and sit there in the dark waiting for the dawn to come that I forgot all about the worry I might be causing your mother. It is actually hard for me to remember how mortal I am these days. There are pains, as I said, but not so frequent or even so severe when they come that I am as alarmed by them as I should be.
I must try to be more mindful of my condition. I started to lift you up into my arms the other day, the way I used to when you weren’t quite so big and I wasn’t quite so old. Then I saw your mother watching me with pure apprehension and I realized what a foolish thing to do that was. I just always loved the feeling of how strongly you held on, as if you were a monkey up in a tree. Boy skinniness and boy strength.
But I have strayed a little from my subject, that is to say, from your begats. And there is a good deal more to tell you. My grandfather was in the Union Army, as I think I have said. He thought he should go as a regular soldier, but they told him he was too old. They told him Iowa had a graybeard regiment he could join, for old fellows, which wouldn’t go into combat but would guard supplies and rail lines and so on. That idea didn’t please him at all. He finally talked them into letting him go as a chaplain. He hadn’t brought along any sort of credentials, but my father said he just showed them his Greek New Testament and that was good enough. I still have that somewhere, what remains of it. It fell into a river, as I was told, and never got dried out properly till it was fairly ruined. As I remember the story, he was caught up in a disorderly retreat, in a rout, in fact. That is the same Bible that was sent to my father from Kansas, before
