“Thank you, dear. This is very good.” He leaned on his cane and gazed appraisingly at the DeSoto. “Yes. It’s a fine-looking car. I knew I must be saving it for some reason.” He chuckled. There was a barely restrained glee about him, as though he felt he had done something, or had done nothing, to excellent effect. “I had offers for it, you know. Several of them. Yes.” He regarded the gleaming DeSoto with something warmer than pride of ownership. “And now, look what you have done with it! Jack, this is wonderful!”
Jack was watching all this with his hands on his hips and a look of grave, distant pleasure, as if it were a moment proposed to him by imagination, an indulgence he could not finally allow himself. “It seems to run all right,” he said. “I suppose we could take a little drive.” He helped his father into the front seat. “I’ll go in and get a couple of dollars for gas, just in case.” He walked toward the house, then came back. He held out his cupped hands to Glory and she emptied the berries into them. “Two minutes,” he said. When he came back he had the berries in a cereal bowl, rinsed and glistening with water. He handed the bowl to Glory and climbed into the driver’s seat. He turned the key, turned it again, and the engine caught, and the three of them backed out and sailed off down the street. When a neighbor waved, the old man made the merest gesture of his hand in reply, as if this were all foreseen and intended, too perfect a vindication to be in any way remarkable. Jack laughed.
Glory said, “Have a strawberry.”
Jack took one and handed it to his father, then took one for himself. He popped it in his mouth and spat the stem out the window.
“Yes,” his father said, as they passed through the countrified outer reaches of Gilead into country itself, “this is the high life.”
The sky was blue, the terraced hills glittered with new corn, and in the pastures the cows were standing with their calves or lying in the mingled, muddied shade of oak trees. “Well, I’d almost forgotten it all,” the old man said. “It’s good to get out of the house from time to time. Ames will enjoy it.” He talked for a while about the old Gilead. It was the smell that reminded him. There used to be chicken coops and rabbit hutches behind every house almost, and people kept milk cows, and there was enough open land right in town to be plowed with a horse or a mule and planted in corn. You knew the animals around town just like you knew the children, and if some old she-goat was grazing in the flower garden, well, you knew her and she knew you and you could just walk her home. But the geese could be mean, and noisy. They’d follow you along and nip at you, pinch your heels. There was no sleeping through the racket all those roosters made in the morning. But at night you could hear the animals settling, and that was very comforting. Jack drove with such solemn caution that the dogs that ran out to the car were a long time in giving up the chase and falling back.
They turned onto another road, and then Glory and her father were silent for a while, watching the landscape grow uneasily familiar. Then Jack said, “Oh.” He said “I—” and pulled off onto the shoulder to turn the car around, so close to a shallow ditch that the rear wheels slid in the sand. A hundred yards ahead of them was the bridge across the West Nishnabotna, and a little way beyond it that small white house. Jack gunned the car and it lurched into the road and stalled. “Sorry. I can deal with this,” he said. “Give me a minute.” He put his hands to his face and took a breath. Then he put the car in gear and turned the key and touched the choke and it started, and he maneuvered it very carefully, reversing twice before he eased onto the right side of the road. “I guess it’s time to go home,” he said.
Through all this his father maintained a serene, high-minded expression, as he always did when he sensed emergency. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I have been keeping an eye on events in Egypt. In that one case I have felt that the policies of Eisenhower are appropriate to the situation. But time will tell.”
Jack said, “True.”
“Kenya is another matter.”
“That’s true, too.”
After another mile or so he pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. “Glory, would you mind driving the rest of the way? It isn’t far. I forgot to get gas. I’m not sure the gas gauge is working, and it distracts me to worry about it. And that worries me.” He laughed. “I haven’t driven a car in twenty years.”
So she changed places with him. He held the door for her, ceremoniously, smiling at her, wry and weary. “Thank you so much,” he said.
She looked to see where the pedals were, and the clutch, and then she put the car in gear and it lurched and died, and she tried again and it started. Jack said, “There’s still something wrong with the — with the blasted thing. It doesn’t sound right. This was stupid of me. I knew I should have stayed in town.” He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window.
Glory said, “We’ll be fine,” having no particular grounds for confidence except that as they approached town the houses were less scattered. Rural people might
