I should dig around a little and see if anything is left of those shirts. It would be a pity if they were sometime just cast out like refuse, after all her hard work. I myself think it would have been the decent thing to burn them.
I got up the courage to ask my father once if my grandfather had done something wrong and he said, “The Good Lord will judge what he did,” which left me believing there had been some kind of crime for sure. There is one photograph of my grandfather around the house somewhere, taken in his old age, that might help you understand why I thought this way. It is a good likeness. It shows a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it, staring down the camera as if it had accused him of something terrible very suddenly, and he is still thinking how to reply and keeping the question at bay with the sheer ferocity of that stare. Of course there is guilt enough in the best life to account for a look like that.
So I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing the evidence and I was in on the secret, too — implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose. I believe I was implicated, and am, and would have been if I had never seen that pistol. It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. I believe my father was trying to cover up for Cain, more or less. The things that happened in Kansas lay behind it all, as I knew at the time.
After that farmer was killed, all the kids I knew were scared to do the milking. They’d do it with the cow between them and the door if the cow would oblige, but they’re particular about that sort of thing and often would not. Little sisters and brothers and dogs would be stationed outside the barn in the dark to watch for strangers. That went on for years, with the story passing down to the younger children, till whoever it was that did the murder would have been an old man. My father had to take over the milking because my brother was in too big a hurry to strip the udder, so the cow stopped giving the way she did before. Then the story went around that someone had been hiding in a henhouse, so all the kids were afraid to gather eggs, and overlooked them or cracked them because they were trying to hurry. Then someone was seen hiding in a woodshed and a root cellar and an attic. It was remarkable what a change came over that place, and how it persisted among the children, especially the younger ones, who didn’t remember the time before the murder and thought all that fear was just natural. Chores really mattered in those days, and if every farm in three or four counties lost a pint of milk and a few eggs every day or two for twenty years, it would have added up. I do not know but what the children may still be hearing some version of that old story, and still be dreading their chores, still draining away the local prosperity.
Every one of us had bolted out of a barn or a woodshed when a shadow moved or there was a thump of some kind, so there were always more stories to tell. I remember once Louisa said we ought to pray for the man’s conversion. Her thought was that it would be better to go to the source of the problem than to keep praying for divine intervention on behalf of each one of us in every situation of possible danger. She said it would also protect people who had never heard of him and would not think to pray before they did their milking. This struck us as wise and parent-like, and we did, indeed, pray for him concertedly, to what effect only the Lord knows. But if you or Tobias happen to hear this story, I can promise you that the villain is probably about one hundred by this time, and no longer a threat to anyone.
I did know a little about the shirts and the gun because of a quarrel my father and grandfather had had. My grandfather, who of course went to church with us, had stood up and walked out about five minutes into my father’s sermon. The text, I remember, was “Consider the lilies, how they grow.” My mother sent me to look for him. I saw him walking down the road and I ran to catch up with him, but he turned that eye on me and said, “Get back where you belong!” So I did.
He appeared at the house after dinner. He walked into the kitchen where my mother and I were clearing things away and cut himself a piece of bread and was about to leave again without a single word to us. But my father came up the porch steps just then and stood in the doorway, watching him. “Reverend,” my grandfather said when he saw him. My father said, “Reverend.”
My mother said, “It’s Sunday. It’s the Lord’s Day. It’s the Sabbath.”
My father said, “We are all well aware of that.” But he didn’t step out of the doorway. So she said to my grandfather, “Sit down
