But the fact is, I have never found another way to be as honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all.
So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic.
Well, I close my eyes and I see Jack Boughton, and it seems to me that more than he has matured or aged he has wearied. And I think, Why must I always defend myself against this sad old youth? What is the harm I fear from him?
Well, that really is not a purely rhetorical question. This morning your mother gave me a note from him. It said, “I am very sorry that I offended you yesterday. I will not trouble you again.” He writes a good hand. In any case, I felt from her manner that your mother knew what lay behind the note. It was just a folded slip of paper, but she would never have read it if he had not shown it to her. Perhaps he told her what it said. Or simply that it was an apology. I heard them talking on the porch before she brought it in to me. She looked sorry and concerned for me, for him perhaps, or for both of us. They do talk, I know that. Not much and not often. But I sense a kind of understanding between them.
“Understanding” might be the wrong word, since I have never spoken to her about him, and it is precisely the fact of her knowing so little about him that worries me. Or “understanding” might be exactly the right word, no matter what she knows or does not know. I can’t decide which thought worries me more. Maybe neither one could worry me more.
I sent him a note. It said I was the one who should apologize, that my health has not been perfect lately, and so on, that I hoped we might have a chance to speak again soon. And your mother carried the note back to him.
I was thinking about the time when he was just ten or twelve and he filled my mailbox with wood shavings and set them on fire. He rigged up a sort of fuse of twine dipped in paraffin. At that time the mailbox was on a post by the gate. It was that loaf-shaped kind people use in the country. I was walking home from a meeting at the church in the dark of a winter evening. I heard a poof and looked up, and just then flames came pouring out of the mouth of that box. It gave me quite a turn. But I didn’t doubt for a minute whose prank it was.
That boy was always alone, always grinning, always intent on some piece of devilment. He wasn’t more than ten when he took off in a Model T he saw idling in the street downtown.
Cars were still pretty rare around here in those days, so his interest was understandable. He drove it straight west for a number of miles, until it ran out of gas, and then he just walked home. A couple of young fellows with a team of horses happened upon the car and towed it off to Wilkinsburg and traded it for a hunting rifle. I think half the people in the county owned the thing for a day or so over the couple of months it stayed missing. Then a good-sized family who had traded a heifer for it came sailing into Gilead to enjoy the Fourth of July and got themselves arrested. The authorities traced it back through any number of swaps and IOUs and poker games, but never found the original thief. As it turned out, there were so many people involved in minor criminality having to do with buying that car and selling it that the resources of the law were in no way sufficient, so the whole thing was forgotten officially and remembered for a long time afterward because it made such a good story. People clearly knew the car was stolen, but they couldn’t resist owning it for a little while, even though they didn’t have the nerve to keep it — which kept the price very reasonable and the temptation that much greater.
It was Jack himself who told me what he had done. He’d kept the handle from the glove box as a souvenir and he showed it to me, but I would have believed him anyway. Shrewd as he was even as a youngster, he knew I would never speak to anyone about it, and I never did. Of course, I thought his parents should know, and still, I never had the heart to say a word. I was always a little in awe of a child who could keep a secret like that, when it would have been the perfection of the tale to know that a ten-year-old boy had incriminated half a county.
There is a sadness in all this I do not wish to obscure. I mean a sadness in the child. I remember coming out of the house one morning and finding my front steps painted with molasses. The ants were so thick they were piling over each other. They were just absolutely solid. Now, you have to ask yourself, How
