Well, the authorities never did come to talk to them about that soldier, so my father thought he probably had died out there. He said, “The relief I suffered every day they didn’t come was horrible.” Of course the odds are fairly high that the day of a man’s death will be the worst day of his life. But my father said, “When he told me the horse had bolted, my heart sank.” So there we were, lying in the loft of somebody’s barn they’d abandoned, hearing the owls, and hearing the mice, and hearing the bats, and hearing the wind, with no notion at all when the dawn might come. My father said, “I never did forgive myself not going out there to look for him.” And I felt the truth of that as I have never felt the truth of any other human utterance. He said, “It was the very next Sunday the old devil preached in one of those shirts, with that gun in his belt. And you would not have believed how the people responded, all the weeping there was, and the shouting.” And after that, he said, his father would be gone for days sometimes. There were Sundays when he would ride his horse right up to the church steps just when it was time for service to begin and fire that gun in the air to let the people know he was back. They’d find him standing in the pulpit, with his eyes red and his face pale and dust in his beard, all ready to preach on judgment and grace. My father said, “I never dared to ask him what he’d been up to. I couldn’t risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions.”
I lay there against my father’s side with my head pillowed on his arm, hearing the wind, and feeling a pity that was far too deep to have any particular object. I pitied my mother, who might have to come looking for us and would never, never find us. I pitied the bats and the mice. I pitied the earth and the moon. I pitied the Lord.
It was the next day that we came to the Maine lady’s farmstead. I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I’m pretty sure they’ll build a new church once I’m gone. I don’t mean this unkindly — they don’t want to cause me grief, so they’re waiting to do what they want to do, and that’s good of them. They’ll pull the old church down and put up something bigger, sturdier. I hear them admiring what the Lutherans have done, and it is impressive, red brick and a porch with white columns and a fine big door and a handsome steeple. The inside is very beautiful, I’m told. I’ve been invited to the dedication, and I’ll go, if I’m still around and still up to that sort of thing. God willing, in other words. I’d like to see our new church, but they’re right, I’d hate to see the old one come down. I believe seeing that might actually kill me, which would not be such a terrible thing for a person in my circumstances. A stab of grief as coup de grace — there’d be poetry in it.
***
Am I impatient? Can that be? Today there has been no hint of a thorn in my flesh, of a thorn in my heart, more particularly. The thump in my chest goes on and on like some old cow chewing her cud, that same dull endlessness and contentment, so it seems to me. I wake up at night, and I hear it. Again, it says. Again, again, again. “For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment.” That is George Herbert, whom I hope you have read.
Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Yet awhile.
Well, if Herbert is right, this old body is as new a creation as you are yourself. I mean as you are now, playing under my window on the swing Dan Boughton put up for you. You must remember it. He tied fishing line to an arrow and shot it over the bough and then used the fishing line to hoist the rope, and so on. It took him the whole day, but he did it. He’s a clever, good-hearted young fellow. He was a great comfort to his father and mother. Now he’s teaching school somewhere in Michigan, I’m told. He didn’t choose the ministry, though for a long time he was expected to.
***
You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea. The ropes are long and you are light and the ropes bowlike cobwebs, laggardly, indolent. Your shirt is red — it is your favorite shirt — and you fly into the sunlight
