And he did sit down. So my father came in and sat down across from him. They were silent for some time.
Then my father said, “Did my sermon offend you in some way? Those few words you heard of it?”
The old man shrugged. “Nothing in it to offend. I just wanted to hear some preaching. So I went over to the Negro church.”
After a minute my father asked, “Well, did you hear some preaching?”
My grandfather shrugged. “The text was ‘Love your enemies.’“
“That seems to me to be an excellent text in the circumstances,” my father said. This was just after somebody set that fire behind the church that I mentioned earlier. The old man said, “Very Christian.”
My father said, “You sound disappointed, Reverend.”
My grandfather put his head in his hands. He said, “Reverend, no words could be bitter enough, no day could be long enough. There is just no end to it. Disappointment. I eat and drink it. I wake and sleep it.”
My father’s lips were white. He said, “Well, Reverend, I know you placed great hope in that war. My hopes are in peace, and I am not disappointed. Because peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification.”
My grandfather said, “And that’s just what kills my heart, Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips—”
My father stood up from his chair. He said, “I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing. And I was, and I am, as certain of that as anyone could ever be of any so-called vision. I defer to no one in this. Not to you, not to Paul the Apostle, not to John the Divine. Reverend.”
My grandfather said, “So-called vision. The Lord, standing there beside me, had one hundred times the reality for me that you have standing here now!”
After a minute my father said, “No one would doubt that, Reverend.”
And that was when a chasm truly opened. Not long afterward my grandfather was gone. He left a note lying on the kitchen table which said:
No good has come, no evil is ended. That is your peace.
Without vision the people perish. The Lord bless you and keep you.
I still have that note. I saved it in my Bible.
But I would watch my father preaching about Abel’s blood crying out from the ground, and I’d wonder how he could speak about that the way he did. I had so much respect for my father.
I felt certain that he should hide the guilt of his father, and that I should also hide the guilt of mine. I loved him with the strangest, most miserable passion when he stood there preaching about how the Lord hates falsehood and how in the end all our works will be exposed in the naked light of truth.
In course of time I learned that my grandfather was involved pretty deeply in the violence in Kansas before the war.
And as I’ve said, it was a source of contention between the two of them, to the point that they had agreed never to speak of Kansas anymore at all. So I believe my father was disgusted to find that those souvenirs, so to speak, had been left in his house. That was before we went to Kansas to find the old man’s grave. I think that fierce anger against him was one of the things my father felt he truly had to repent of.
But my father did hate war. He nearly died in 1914, from pneumonia, the doctors said, but I have no doubt it was mainly from rage and exasperation. There were big celebrations all over Europe at the start of the war, as if the most wonderful thing were about to happen. And there were big celebrations here when we got involved. Parades and marching bands. And we already knew what a miserable thing it was we were sending our troops off to. I didn’t read a newspaper for four years without pitying my father. He saw that trouble in Kansas, and then his father went off to the army. He did, too, finally, just before it ended. He had four sisters and a brother younger than he was, and his mother wasn’t well. She died young, in her forties, and left all those children to care for themselves and to be cared for by their father and my father and the neighbors and the kindlier souls in his congregation, or what remained of it. His brother, my uncle Edwards, ran off, or so they hoped. At least he disappeared, and in the confusion of the times they never found him. He was named after the theologian Jonathan Edwards, who was much revered in my grandfather’s generation.
And Edward was named after my uncle, with the finals, but he never liked it, and he dropped it when he left for college.
Glory has come to tell me Jack Boughton is home. He is having supper in his father’s house this very night. He will come by to pay his respects, she said, in the next day or two. I am grateful for the warning. I will use the time to prepare myself. Boughton named him for me because he thought he might not have another son and I most
