I really only realized afterward what trouble I’d have been in if he had gotten shot, even killed, and I was left stranded on my own out there. I still dream about that. I think he felt the sort of shame you feel when you realize what a foolish chance you’ve taken after you’ve already taken it. But he was absolutely set on finding that grave.
Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning came easily, my grandfather told me about a man he knew when he first came to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, “That fellow just was not confident of his Hebrew. He’d walk fifteen miles across open country in the dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation.
We’d have to thaw him out before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.” My father laughed and said, “The strange part is, that may even be true.” But I remembered the story at the time because it seemed to me we were doing something very similar.
My father gave up gleaning and went back to knocking on doors, which he had been reluctant to do, because when people found out he was a preacher they would sometimes try to give us more than they could spare. That was his belief, at least. And they could tell he was a preacher, rough-looking as we were a few days into our desert wanderings, as he called them. We offered to do some chores in exchange for food at a couple of houses, and the people asked him if he would just open a bit of Scripture or say a prayer. He was interested that they knew, and wondered a good deal what it was that gave him away. It was a matter of pride with him that his hands were hard, and that there was no spare flesh on him to speak of. I have had the same experience many times, and I have wondered about it, too. Well, we spent a good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years. It was always the worst parts that made us laugh. My mother was irked by it all, but she just said, “Don’t you ever tell me.”
In many ways she was a remarkably careful mother, poor woman. I was in a sense her only child. Before I was born she had bought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus. On its authority she tried to keep us from making any use of our brains for an hour after supper, or from reading at all when our feet were cold. The idea was to prevent conflicting demands on the circulation of the blood. My grandfather told her once that if you couldn’t read with cold feet there wouldn’t be a literate soul in the state of Maine, but she was very serious about these things and he only irritated her. She said, “Nobody in Maine gets much of anything to eat, so it all comes out even.” When I got home she scrubbed me down and put me to bed and fed me six or seven times a day and forbade me the use of my brain after every single meal. The tedium was considerable.
That journey was a great blessing to me. I realize looking back how young my father was then. He couldn’t have been much more than forty-five or — six. He was a fine, vigorous man into his old age. We played catch in the evenings after supper for years, till the sun went down and it was too dark for us to see the ball. I think he just appreciated having a child at home, a son. Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man, too, until recently. You know, I suppose, that I married a girl when I was young. We had grown up together. We were married during my last year at seminary, and then we came back here so I could take my father’s pulpit while he and my mother went south for a few months for the sake of my mother’s health. Well, my wife died in childbirth, and the child died with her. Their names were Louisa and Angeline. I saw the baby while she lived, and I held her for a few minutes, and that was a blessing. Boughton baptized her and he gave her the name Angeline, because I was over in Tabor for the day — the child was not expected for another six weeks — and there was no one to tell him what name we had finally decided on. She’d have been Rebecca, but Angeline is a good name.
Last Sunday when we went to Boughton’s for supper, I saw you looking at his hands. They are so full of arthritis now that they’re all skin and knuckles. You think
