They knocked at the door of the small brown house and the wife opened it. She seemed happy enough to see them, and not at all surprised. She asked them in, mentioning with a kind of regret the smell of cooking cabbage. The house was sparsely furnished and crowded with books, magazines, and pamphlets, the arrangements having a provisional feeling though the couple had lived there for years. There were pictures pinned to the walls of bearded, unsmiling men and women with rumpled hair and rimless glasses.
Teddy said, “We’re here to apologize.”
She nodded. “You trampled the field. I know that. He knows, too. I’ll tell him you have come.” She spoke up the stairs, perhaps in a foreign language, listened for a minute to nothing audible, and came back to them. “To destroy is a great shame,” she said. “To destroy for no reason.”
Teddy said, “That is our field. I mean, my father does own it.”
“Poor child!” she said. “You know no better than this, to speak of owning land when no use is made of it. Owning land just to keep it from others. That is all you learn from your father the priest! Mine, mine, mine! While he earns his money from the ignorance of the people!” She waved a slender arm and a small fist. “Telling his foolish lies again and again while everywhere the poor suffer!”
They had never heard anyone speak this way before, certainly not to them or about them. She stared at them to drive her point home. There was convincing rage and righteousness in her eyes, watery blue as they were, and Jack laughed.
“Oh yes,” she said, “I know who you are. The boy thief, the boy drunkard! While your father tells the people how to live! He deserves you!” Then, “Why so quiet? You have never heard the truth before?”
Daniel, the oldest of them, said, “You shouldn’t talk that way. If you were a man, I’d probably have to hit you.”
“Hah! Yes, you good Christians, you come into my house to threaten violence! I will report you to the sheriff. There is a little justice, even in America!” She waved her fist again.
Jack laughed. He said, “It’s all right. Let’s go home.”
And she said, “Yes, listen to your brother. He knows about the sheriff!”
So they trooped out the door, which was slammed after them, and filed home in the evening light absorbing what they had heard. They agreed that the woman was crazy and her husband, too. Still, vengefulness stirred in them, and there was talk of breaking windows, letting air out of tires. Digging a pit so large and well concealed that the neighbor and his tractor would both fall in. And there would be spiders at the bottom, and snakes. And when he yelled for help they would lower a ladder with the rungs sawed through so that they would break under his weight. Ah, the terrible glee among the younger ones, while the older ones absorbed the fact that they had heard their family insulted and had done nothing about it.
They walked into their own kitchen, and there were their mother and father, waiting to hear their report. They told them that they didn’t speak to the man, but the woman had yelled at them and had called their father a priest.
“Well,” their mother said, “I hope you were polite.”
They shrugged and looked at each other. Gracie said, “We just sort of stood there.”
Jack said, “She was really mean. She even said you deserved me.”
Her father’s eyes stung. He said, “Did she say that? Well now, that was kind of her. I will be sure to thank her. I hope I do deserve you, Jack. All of you, of course.” That tireless tenderness of his, and Jack’s unreadable quiet in the face of it.
Mr. Trotsky planted potatoes and squash the next year, corn the year after that. A nephew of the rural cousin came to help him with his crop, and in time was given the use of the field and built a small house on one corner of it and brought a wife there, and they had children. More beds of marigolds, another flapping clothesline, another roof pitched under heaven to shelter human hope and frailty. The Boughtons tacitly ceded all claim.
WITHIN WEEKS OF HER RETURN GLORY AND HER FATHER had settled into a tolerable life of its kind. The housekeeper, Mrs. Blank, who was a number of years older than her father, was happy to retire, now that she knew she was leaving the Reverend in good hands. Customary attentions to her father by neighbors and parishioners were bated, stealthy when they happened at all. Glory could feel how miraculous and temporary the cessation was. It was as if some signal had been given, as if a sea had parted and the waters were standing back like walls. Once when they were children her sister Grace, pondering at the dinner table, said she did not know how such a thing could have happened, that water could simply stand still like that, and Glory, who had turned this question over in her
