Maybe I should have said we are like planets. But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us. I am old enough to remember when we used to go out in the brush, a lot of us, and spread out in a circle, and then close in, scaring the rabbits along in front of us, till they were trapped there in the center, and then we would kill them with sticks and clubs. That was during the Depression, and people were hungry, and we did what we could. I am not finding fault. (We didn’t take the jackrabbits, only the cottontails. We all knew there was something objectionable about jackrabbits, though I don’t remember anyone saying just what it was.) There were people eating groundhogs. The children would go to school with nothing in their lunch buckets but a boiled potato or a scrap of bread with lard smeared on it. In those days the windows of the church used to get so pelted with dust that I’d get up on a ladder and sweep them down with a broom so there would be light enough inside for people to read their hymnals.
The times were dreadful, but it was just how it was, and we got very used to it. That was our civilization. The valley of the shadow. And it might as well be Ur of the Chaldees for all people know about it now. For which I thank God, of course, though, since it had to happen, I don’t regret having been here for it. It gives you another look at things. I have heard people say it taught them there is more to life than security and the material comforts, but I know a lot of older people around here who can hardly bear to part with a nickel, remembering those hard times. I can’t blame them for it, though it has meant that the church is just now beginning to come out of its own Depression. “There is that scattereth, and increaseth yet more, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want.” Much in this very town proves the truth of that proverb. Well, the church is shabby for the same reason it’s still standing at all. So I shouldn’t really complain. It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.
I believe they thought I had nodded off, as I do with fair frequency, I know. They began to talk. Your mother said, in a lowered voice, “Have you decided how long you will be staying here?”
He said, “I’m afraid it’s already begun to seem long — not to me so much.”
There was a silence, and then she said, “You’ll be going back to St. Louis?”
“That’s possible.”
Another silence. He struck a match. I could smell the smoke of a cigarette.
“Would you care for one?”
“No, thank you.” She laughed. “Sure I would. It just isn’t seemly in a preacher’s wife.”
” ‘It just isn’t seemly’! I guess they’ve been after you.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Somebody had to tell me a few things sooner or later. Now I been seemly so long I’m almost beginning to like it.”
He laughed.
She said, “It did take me a while to get used to this place. That’s a fact.”
“Well, for me that’s not the problem. It feels familiar to me, all right. It feels a little like returning to the scene of the crime.”
After a moment she said, “Everybody speaks about you very kindly, you know.”
