One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore. If I have any wisdom to offer, this is a fair part of it.
You have blessed our house not quite seven years, and fairly lean years, too, so late in my life. There was no way for me to make any changes to provide for the two of you. Still, I think about it and I pray. It is very much in my mind. I want you to know that.
***
We’re having a fine spring, and this is another fine day. You were almost late for school. We stood you on a chair and you ate toast and jam while your mother polished your shoes and I combed your hair. You had a page of sums to do that you should have done last night, and you took forever over them this morning, trying to get all the numbers facing the right way. You’re like your mother, so serious about everything. The old men call you Deacon, but that seriousness isn’t all from my side of the family. I’d never seen anything like it until I met her. Well, putting aside my grandfather. It seemed to me to be half sadness and half fury, and I wondered what in her life could have put that expression in her eyes. And then when you were about three, just a little fellow, I came into the nursery one morning and there you were down on the floor in the sunlight in your trapdoor pajamas, trying to figure a way to fix a broken crayon. And you looked up at me and it was just that look of hers. I’ve thought of that moment many times. I’ll tell you, sometimes it has seemed to me that you were looking back through life, back through troubles I pray you’ll never have, asking me to kindly explain myself.
“You’re just like all them old men in the Bible,” your mother tells me, and that would be true, if I could manage to live a hundred and twenty years, and maybe have a few cattle and oxen and menservants and maidservants. My father left me a trade, which happened also to be my vocation. But the fact is, it was all second nature to me, I grew up with it. Most likely you will not.
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.
So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Your mother told you I’m writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you? I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas, the son of John Ames and Martha Turner Ames, grandson of John Ames and Margaret Todd Ames. At this writing I have lived seventy-six years, seventy-four of them here in Gilead, Iowa, excepting study at the college and at seminary.
And what else should I tell you?
When I was twelve years old, my father took me to the grave of my grandfather. At that time my family had been living in Gilead for about ten years, my father serving the church here. His father, who was born in Maine and had come out to Kansas in the 1830s, lived with us for a number of years after his retirement. Then the old man ran off to become a sort of itinerant preacher, or so we believed. He died in Kansas and was buried there, near a town that had pretty well lost its people. A drought had driven most of them away, those who had not already left for towns closer to the railroad. Surely there was only a town in that place to begin with because it was Kansas, and the people who settled it were Free Soilers who weren’t really thinking about the long term. I don’t often use the expression “godforsaken,” but when I think back to that place, that word does come to mind. It took my father months to find where the old man had ended up, lots of letters of inquiry to churches and newspapers and so on. He put a great deal of effort into it. Finally someone wrote back and sent a little package with his watch and a beat-up old Bible and some letters, which I learned later were just a few of my father’s letters of inquiry, no doubt given to the old man by people who thought they had induced him to come home.
***
It grieved my father bitterly that the last words he said to his father were very angry words and there could never be any reconciliation between them in this life. He
