When Boughton nodded off, Ames came into the kitchen. There seemed to be nothing he wanted to say to them, but he took a chair at the table when it was offered to him and he accepted a cup of coffee. His care of their father, bringing the Sacrament, would have been an enhancement of the sad quiet of the day. But he stayed, and he attempted conversation. Jack leaned back in his chair with his arms folded and watched him, too weary to help sustain it. Glory went to see that her father was comfortable, and brought his quilt, and when she came back, Ames was letting himself out the door, looking a little embarrassed and dejected.
She said, “What happened?”
“Well, he tried to give me money. To leave. I told him I was leaving anyway, he needn’t bother.”
“Ah, Jack.”
“You know he wants me out of here. He can see what I’ve done. To my father.”
“Did he say that?”
“Good Reverend Ames? Of course not. He said he thought I might want to go to Memphis.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he think that? You and I have talked about going to Memphis.”
He reflected a moment, and then he laughed. “We did, didn’t we. That seems like a million years ago. Another life.” He said, “You’re right. Poor old blighter. Trying to give away money he doesn’t have. What a fool I am.” He rubbed his eyes. “That was friendliness, wasn’t it. I should have thought of that. He was starting to like me, I suppose.”
The day passed. Glory wanted to value it, though of course she could not enjoy it. She would probably never see her brother again — in this life, as Teddy had said. Sweet Jesus, she thought, love this thief, too. After a while Jack roused himself and went about the work he had set for himself, putting things in order. He nailed a loose plank in the shed wall, and he cut some dead canes out of the lilac hedge. He split a pile of kindling. Then he came in and asked her for the car keys. He said, “I think I’ve got it back together well enough. I’ll try to start it.” She went to the porch and heard the engine start and idle. Jack opened the barn doors, and then he backed the DeSoto into afternoon light. He pushed the door on the passenger side open. “I was thinking we might go for a spin, take the old gent along.” So they went into the house and Jack took their father up in his arms and carried him out to the car. And then he drove them past the church, which was, to their father’s mind, the place where the old church had stood. And he drove them past the house where Mrs. Sweet had lived, and past the Trotskys’ old house, and past the high school and the baseball field, and then out to the peripheries, where town gave way to countryside and the shadows of late day were blue between the rows of corn and on the evening side of trees and the swells of pasture and in the clefts of creek. The smell of ripe fields and water and cattle and evening came in on the wind. “Yes,” their father said. “It was wonderful. I remember now.”
When they came back to the house again, Jack smiled and handed her the keys. They settled their father for the night, sat together in the kitchen trying to read, then trying to play Scrabble. It was a habit of hers to stay up as long as Jack did, thinking he would be more reluctant to leave the house if he knew she was aware of his leaving. Finally he went upstairs, and in half an hour she did, too. She spent the night listening and worrying, dreading his absence, because the thought of it made her life seem intolerably long. She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because
