The neighbor women dosed his mother with tea of red clover blossoms, which probably didn’t do her any harm, my father said. They also cut off her hair, because they thought it was draining away her strength. She cried when they showed it to her, and she said it was the one thing in her life she was ever proud of. My father said she was weary with the pain and she wasn’t herself, but those words lingered with him, and with his sisters, too. In those days, and even when I was a child, women kept their hair long because they felt the Bible said they should (I Corinthians 11:15). But it would be cut off if they were sickly, and that was always a sad thing, a kind of shame for them, along with everything else they had to go through. So it hit her very hard. When my father spoke to his father about how low her spirits were, his father said, “You came back and I came back and we both have our health and the use of our limbs.” My father took this to mean that since her grief was not in excess of the average in that region, he could not take any special time for it.
I believe the old reverend’s errors were mainly the consequence of a sort of strenuousness in ethical matters that was to be admired finally. He did have many visions over the years, all very demanding of him, so he was less inclined than others to slack off. He lost his Greek Testament in a frantic retreat across a river, as I have said. I always felt there was a metaphor in that. The waters never parted for him, not once in his life, so far as I know. There was just no end to difficulty, and no mitigation of it. Then again, he always sought it out.
The Testament was mailed to him years afterward, from Alabama. Apparently some Confederate had gone to the bother of retrieving it and then finding out which company of which regiment they’d been chasing that day, and who the chaplain of it was. There might have been a bit of a taunt in the gesture, but it was appreciated anyway. The book was pretty well ruined. I hope you have it. It’s the sort of thing that might appear to have no value at all.
I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth.
***
Today John Ames Boughton paid a call. I was sitting on the porch with the newspaper and your mother was tending her flowers and he just came walking through the gate and up the steps with his hand held out and a smile on his face. He said, “How are you doing, Papa?”—a name he called me in his childhood, because his parents encouraged it, I believe. I have preferred to think so. He had a precocious charm, if that is the word, and it would not have been beyond him to come up with it himself. I have never felt he was fond of me.
It did shock me how much he takes after his father, though of course in everything that matters they’re like night and day. When he introduced himself to your mother as John Ames Boughton, she was visibly surprised, and he laughed. He looked at me and said, “I gather bygones are not bygones yet, Reverend.” What a thing to say! It was an oversight, though, not to have told her such a creature existed, that is, a namesake, a godson, more or less. You were out in the bushes somewhere looking for Soapy, who packs her bags every so often and takes off for parts unknown and worries the life out of you and your mother. You just happened to come around the house then, holding that old cat under the armpits. Her ears were flattened back and her eyes were patiently furious and her tail was twitching. It’s so long you might have stepped on it otherwise. It was clear enough she would bolt if you put her down, but you did and she did and you didn’t seem to notice because you were about to shake hands with John Ames Boughton. “So good to meet you, little brother!” he said, and you were very pleased with that.
I had no idea you and your mother would be so fascinated by his having my name. I’d have warned you otherwise. He came up the steps, hat in hand, smiling as if there were some old joke between us. “You’re looking wonderful, Papa!” he said, and I thought, after so many years, the first words out of his mouth would have to be prevarication, but I was
