Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.
Good old Isaac Watts. I’ve thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like ah evening gone …
No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admire, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.
I will tell you some more old stories. So much of what I know about those old days comes from the time my father and I spent wandering around together lost in Kansas. I don’t know if I ever actually cried, but I know I spent a lot of time trying not to. The soles of my shoes wore through and the dust and sticks and gravel came in and wore out my socks and got to work on my feet. O the filth! O the blisters! Time weighs on children. They struggle just to get through church, as you know. And there I was, trudging through the same old nowhere, day after day, always wanting to slow down, to sit down, to lie down, with my father walking on ahead, no doubt a little desperate, as he had every right to be. Once or twice I did sit down. I just sat there in the heat and the weeds with the grasshoppers flying around my head and watched him walk away, and he’d keep walking till he was almost out of my sight, which is a long way in Kansas. Then I’d go running to catch up. He’d say, “You’re going to make yourself thirsty.” Well, it seemed to me I’d been thirsty half my life.
But the pleasant thing was that when I did stay alongside him he would tell me remarkable things I’m pretty sure he would never have told me otherwise. If there was supper he’d tell stories to celebrate, and if there wasn’t supper he’d tell stories to make up for the lack of it. Once, some owls woke us with that caviling they get into sometimes, and he told me the story of being awakened by sounds in the night and of walking outside and seeing old John Brown’s mule coming out through the doors of his father’s church, being coaxed down those wooden steps in the dark of the moon. He heard the noise of balking and a sad, grave voice saying, “Doing fine now. Doing just fine.” Then four horses after it, abrupt and agile, all with their saddles already cinched on. The men mounted, two men on one horse leading the other horse along behind them — one of the men was wounded and had to be held — and they rode away without a word. Then, in a few minutes, he heard the barn door open and he heard their horse breathing and stepping and his father speaking to it, and then his father rode away, too.
He told me that he went up to the church and sat there in the dark, wondering what he should do. He wasn’t even ten years old at the time. He said the church smelled like horses and gunpowder and it smelled like sweat. (In those days they didn’t have bullets like the ones we have, so they’d have been using the time to load up their weapons with powder and shot.) They’d pushed the benches and the communion table against the walls to make room for the animals. No doubt the men had slept on the benches. Certainly the wounded man had, because there was a good deal of blood on one of them, and on the floor beside it. My father said, “That was the first thing I saw when the light began to come.”
So he dragged that bench out back of the church and stood it on end so it would fall into the deep grass on its side. That was to trouble the surface of the grass as little as possible. Then he took a shovel and a broom and cleaned up after the horses as well as he could. He got a bucket of water and a piece of soap to scrub down that bloodstain, but that just made it bigger. So he ended up sloshing water over the whole floor to make that spot less conspicuous. His thought was that if the men who slept in the church were being pursued, their pursuers might come at any time and they would be looking for things like mule droppings in a church or blood on a pew. And of course they were things that would have to be seen to in any case, and especially since that was a Saturday.
But those same pursuers would surely be curious to find him scrubbing out a church before the sun was well up. Then it occurred to him how unlike his father it was to leave at such a time, making no arrangements whatever for putting things right, leaving no instructions whatever for how they should be put right, leaving him to wander from his bed into this ridiculous situation, in which it seemed there was no right thing to be done. He was thinking these things and lugging a bucket of water up into the church, and he saw a man in a U.S. Army uniform sitting there in the twilight on a bench against the wall, with his hat in his hands and his gun lying on the bench beside him.
“You’ve got it looking right nice in here,” the soldier said. Then he plucked at the ripped knee of his trousers and said, “My dang horse bolted on me. An owl hooted or something, and off she went. You folks wouldn’t have a horse I could requisition. It would only be for a day or two.”
“You’d have to speak to my father.”
The soldier said, “Your father isn’t here. I’d guess he’s ridden off somewhere on the very horse I was hoping to borrow.” Then he said, “You heard of Osawatomie John Brown? Of course you have. Everybody has. I can see you’re a fine boy. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you go telling lies right here in a church, little brother. You know the kinds of things John Brown has been up to.”
My father said he had heard stories.
The soldier nodded. “There are decent folks around here who’d help him any chance they got. Ministers of the Gospel. They’d let him bring his old mule right into their church if he asked them to. They’d deem it an honor. I find that remarkable. Those fugitives would come in with their weapons and their wounds and their dirty boots, they’d come in bleeding on the floor, and that would be just fine. Then a soldier of the United States government comes along looking for them, as he is paid to do, and nobody even offers him a cup of coffee.”
My father said, “We have coffee. I’m pretty sure we do.” The soldier stood up. He said, “My platoon left me about two miles from here and took off east. They knew where those fellows would likely be off to next as soon as the moon was down. They didn’t have to find those road apples you left out there on the front step to get a general sense of the situation. So if your father’s gone with them, he might be seeing a world of trouble right about now.” He said, “I thought I should tell you that before I drank your coffee.”