Vance shook his head. It wasn’t much fun arguing with his grandmother about God, but it was better than hearing eternally about new electric cleaners from his mother, or about real estate from Mr. Weston, or the reorganization of school grades from his sister Pearl. Vance respected efficiency, and even admired it; but of late he had come to feel that as a diet for the soul it was deficient in nourishment. He wondered that Mrs. Weston, who was such an authority on diet, had never thought of applying the moral equivalent of the vitamin test to the life they all led at Mapledale. He had an idea they were starving to death there without knowing it. But old Mrs. Scrimser at least knew that she was hungry, and his mind wandered back more indulgently to what she was saying.
“The trouble is,” he began, groping about in his limited vocabulary, “I don’t seem to want anybody else’s God. I just want to give mine full swing.” And at this point he forgot his grandmother’s presence, and his previous experience of her incomprehension, and began to develop his own dream for his own ears. “And I don’t even want to know what he is—not by reasoning him out, I mean. People didn’t have to wait to learn about oxygen, and the way the lungs work, before they began to breathe, did they? And that’s the way I feel about what I call my god—the sort of something in me that was there before I’d ever thought about it, and that stretches out and out, and takes in the stars and the ages, and very likely doesn’t itself know why or how. What I want is to find out how to release that god, fly him up like a kite into the Infinite, way beyond creeds and formulas, and try to relate him to all the other … the other currents … that seem to be circling round you, a day like this … so that you get caught up in them yourself … and carried beyond Time and Space, and Good and Bad, to where the whole blamed thing is boiling over … Oh, hell take it, I don’t know!” he groaned, and flung his head back despairingly.
Mrs. Scrimser listened, beaming, benedictory, her arms extended. “Oh Vanny, when you talk like that I do feel your call so clearly! You surely have inherited your grandfather’s gift for speaking. You could fill the Alsop Avenue church clear away under the gallery, right now. ‘The boy preacher’—they can often reach right down into the soul where the older men can’t get a hearing. Don’t you think, dear, such a gift ought to make you decide to go straight to Jesus?” She lifted her clasped hands with a “Nunc dimittis” gesture full of devotional sublimity. “If I could only hear you in the pulpit once I’d lay me down so peacefully,” she murmured.
Vance’s dream dropped with a crash to the floor of the porch, and lay there between them in rainbow splinters. The Alsop Avenue church! The pulpit! The ministry! This familiar way of talking about “Jesus” as if He were somebody waiting round the corner at Mandel’s grocery for a telephone call—and this woman, who had listened for forty years to her husband’s windy eloquence and sanctimonious perfidies, and who was still full of faith in the power of words and the magic attributes of Biblical phraseology! It almost made Vance hate the Bible to hear her, though its haunting words and cadences were the richest of his mental possessions. … But why had he again let himself go, trying to carry her up with him to the dizzy heights of speculation, as if some tiny winged insect should struggle to lift the lawn mower down there in the path? Vance looked sulkily away at the straggling unkempt distances from which she had managed to brush all the magic, so that where he had seen flowers and heard birds he now beheld only a starved horizon imprisoned behind crooked telegraph poles, and partly blotted out by Mandel’s grocery.
“Vance—I haven’t said anything to offend you?” his grandmother questioned, laying her big hand on his.
He shook his head. “No. Only you don’t understand.”
She took off her moist spectacles and wiped them. “Well, I guess God created women so’s to give the men somebody to say that to,” she remarked, with a philosophic smile.
Her grandson smiled also. He never failed to appreciate her humour; but today he was still quivering from his vain effort at expression, and her misunderstanding of it; and he had nothing more to say.
“Well, I guess I’ll go along,” he said, getting up.
Mrs. Scrimser never argued with her own family, and she walked with him in silence down the path and halted at the barricade of the mowing-machine. From there they could look across a few vacant lots and, dodging Mandel’s grocery, bathe their eyes in the liquid gold of the sunset beyond the river.
“I used to think heaven was down there—on summer nights!” the boy broke out, pointing toward the budding maples by the river. In his own ears his words sounded sardonic, incredibly old and embittered; but the mention of heaven could evoke no such sensations in his grandmother’s soul.
“I guess heaven is wherever we love Nature and our fellow beings enough,” she said, laying her arm about his shoulder. It occurred to neither of them to remove the mower from the path, and they parted there, casually but fondly, as the habit was in Euphoria households, Vance bestriding the machine while his grandmother, arrested by it, stood gazing after him. “Only remember that, Vanny—that Love is everywhere!” she called after him. Large and full of benediction she stood between the lilac bushes and waved farewell.
Vance walked on in a fog of formless yearnings. His own words had loosened them, as the spring air and the yellow blossoms
