I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I’ve scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it seemed to me always rigorous and good. I believe it was recommended to me by Edward, and also by my reverend grandfather when he made his last flight into the wilderness. I may once have fancied myself such another tough old man, ready to dive into the ground and smolder away the time till Judgment. Well, I am distracted from that project now. My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.
Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.
Jack brought gourds, a whole sack of them. Your mother sent him back with green tomatoes. Oh, these late, strange riches of the summer, these slab-sided pumpkins and preposterous zucchinis.
Every wind brings a hail of acorns against the roof.
Still, it is mild. For a while the spiders were building webs everywhere, and now those webs are all blown to shreds and tatters, so I suppose we can imagine well-fed spiders tucked up in the detritus of old leaves, drowsing away the very thought of toil.
***
I remember once my father and my grandfather were sitting on the porch together cracking and shelling black walnuts. They loved each other’s company when they weren’t at each other’s throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.
My grandfather said, “The summer is ended and still we are not saved.”
My father said, “That is the Lord’s truth.”
Then silence again. They never looked up from their work. It was the drought they were speaking of, which had already set in and which would go on for years, a true calamity. I remember a sweet, soft wind like there is today. There is no work more tedious than shelling black walnuts, and the two of them did it every autumn of the world. My mother said they tasted like furniture, and I’m not sure anyone disagreed. But she always had them, so she used them.
***
You and Tobias are on the porch steps sorting gourds by size and color and shape, choosing favorites, assigning names. Some of them are submarines and some of them tanks, and some of them are bombs. I suppose I should be expecting another visit from T.’s father shortly. All the children play at war now. All of them make those sounds of airplanes and bombs and crashing and exploding. We did the same things, playing at cannon fire and bayonet charges.
There is certainly nothing in that fact to reassure.
Cataract that this world is, it is remarkable to consider what does abide in it.
I fell to thinking about a sermon my father gave, after the breach with Edward had become known and he had had a little while to reflect on it. It was not at all like him to refer to anything private or personal except in the most abstract terms. But that morning he thanked the Lord for letting him know finally in some small degree what defection was, for allowing him to understand what it was he himself had done to his father in those days after the war when he had gone off to the Quakers and left his father to carry his terrible burden alone. He said a thing I had never heard before, that his mother, though she had been too ill and in too much pain to come to church for months, did come when she learned that he was staying away. His sisters, who by then were always with her, carried her in their arms, one and then the other, up the road, which must have seemed very long to them. They were late because it was only that morning their mother had asked them to bring her, and they were hot and unkempt with haste, haste in the slow work of gentleness, because by then their mother could hardly bear to be touched. Their mother was white and shorn, much too small for the dress they had to ease her into with such painful care. They walked in in the middle of the sermon in their wash dresses, sweaty and unbonneted, Amy, the eldest, carrying their mother in her arms as she might have carried a half-grown child. My father said the old reverend stopped preaching and stood looking at them, then took up his text again, which was about the profound mystery of suffering for others, as all his sermons were in those days. He preached a few minutes and prayed a few minutes and said the benediction, and then he went to his wife and took her up in his arms and kissed her forehead and carried her home, leaving his
