He said, “I had no right to weary you with my troubles,” which I took to mean there had been no point in it. I thought our conversation had been good, on balance, and I said that, and he nodded and said goodbye. And then after a minute he said, “No matter, Papa. I believe I’ve lost them, anyway.”
I just sat there with my head on my desk and went over this in my mind and prayed until your mother came looking for me. She thought I had had some sort of episode and I let her think that. It seemed to me as if I ought to have had one. And there was nothing I could say to her in any case.
You might wonder about my pastoral discretion, writing this all out. Well, on one hand it is the way I have of considering things. On the other hand, he is a man about whom you may never hear one good word, and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.
***
That was two days ago. Now it’s Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week. This morning I read from one of those old sermons your mother keeps leaving around for me. It was on Romans I: “They became vain in their reasonings and their senseless heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools,” and so on. The Old Testament text was from Exodus, the plague of darkness. The sermon was a sort of attack on rationalism and irrationalism, the point being that both worship the creature rather than the Creator. I had glanced over it a little, but as I read it, it surprised me, sometimes because it seemed right and sometimes because it seemed embarrassingly wrong, and always because it seemed like something someone else must have written. Jack Boughton was there in that weary suit and tie, sitting beside you, and you were very pleased, and I believe your mother was, too.
Now, it does not at all agree with my notion of preaching, to stand there reading from a stack of yellowed pages full of what I must have thought once, trying to play down the certainty I had written into the language some black night half a lifetime ago. And there in the second pew was young Boughton, who always seems to see right through me. And I, being newly persuaded that he might come into a church with some however cynical hope of encountering a living Truth, was obliged to mouth these dead words while he sat there smiling at me. I do think there was a point in associating rationalism and irrationalism, that is, materialism and idolatry, and if I had had the energy to depart from the text I could have made something of that. As it was, I just read the sermon, shook all those hands, and came home and took a nap on the couch. I did have the feeling that young Boughton might actually have been comforted by the irrelevance of my preachments to anything that had passed between us, anything to do with him at all, God bless the poor devil. The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I’d have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.
***
I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word “preacher” comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?
Well, we didn’t ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn’t know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me. I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.
I have mentioned that my father and my mother left here. Well, they certainly did. Edward bought a piece of land down on the Gulf Coast and built a cottage for his own family and for them. He did it mainly to get my mother away from this ferocious
