My father said his lips were so numb he couldn’t move them to speak. The soldier said, “I’ll just get myself a drink at your well.” And he walked out of the church and got his drink and walked away up the road, favoring that one leg a little. My father hated to believe he was the man my grandfather shot, but he did believe it. I don’t mean to suggest that he killed him outright, but in those days in that place a man could die of a whole lot of things besides a bullet wound.
He had walked to the next farm and requisitioned their horse and taken off in the general direction he thought his platoon had gone, though, if it was the same man, he drifted somewhat to the south of it. Brown and the others had circled back and to the south, knowing they would be followed and making for the hills. And my grandfather was ambling along toward home with that big gun in his belt and those two bloody shirts under his arm, which was very foolish. And he was bare-chested under his coat, since he had swapped his own shirt for the two he had brought back with him. But he was never really a practical man again after that day, my father said. I would not have known where to find the origins of his impracticality, but I am certainly willing to vouch for the fact of it. In any case, a lone soldier did approach him and did hail him down, and he was indeed riding a chestnut horse that could have been the neighbor’s. The soldier began to question him, and my grandfather was caught without a lie. But he had that gun, and the gun was loaded.
“Well, I did, I winged him,” my grandfather said. “Then his horse bolted. He took quite a spill.” And he left him there on the ground. “Old Brown asked if I’d be willing to cover their retreat if occasion arose. I said I would, and I did.” He said, “What was I to do with him, bring him back here?” His point was that the congregation had put a lot of thought and effort into hollow walls and hidden cellars in their various cabins and outbuildings, tunnels that started from false-bottomed potato bins and opened up under haystacks a hundred yards away and so forth. There was a false-bottomed coffin they kept in the church, and an open grave with a floor of burlap stretched over a couple of boards and covered with dirt, opening on a tunnel that came up in the woodshed. All that effort was for freeing the captives, and it had to be protected for their sake. The soldier could only have concluded that my grandfather was in serious cahoots with John Brown, and attention of that kind could destroy everything.
The old man told my father what had happened only because my father told him about finding the soldier in the church. “Dark fellow, you say? Kind of a drawl to his speech?” He told my father that it was a mortally serious business, life and death. He should never speak a word about it to anyone, and he should be ready with a lie in case someone came inquiring. So, waking and sleeping, he thought about that wounded soldier by himself out there on the plains, and tried to imagine himself saying he had not seen such a man, had not spoken to him.
Well, the authorities never did come to talk to them about that soldier, so my father thought he probably had died out there. He said, “The relief I suffered every day they didn’t come was horrible.” Of course the odds are fairly high that the day of a man’s death will be the worst day of his life. But my father said, “When he told me the horse had bolted, my heart sank.” So there we were, lying in the loft of somebody’s barn they’d abandoned, hearing the owls, and hearing the mice, and hearing the bats, and hearing the wind, with no notion at all when the dawn might come. My father said, “I never did forgive myself not going out there to look for him.” And I felt the truth of that as I have never felt the truth of any other human utterance. He said, “It was the very next Sunday the old devil preached in one of those shirts, with that gun in his belt. And you would not have believed how the people responded, all the weeping there was, and the shouting.” And after that, he said, his father would be gone for days sometimes. There were Sundays when he would ride his horse right up to the church steps just when it was time for service to begin and fire that gun in the air to let the people know he was back. They’d find him standing in the pulpit, with his eyes red and his face pale and dust in his beard, all ready to preach on judgment and grace. My father said, “I never dared to ask him what he’d been up to. I couldn’t risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions.”
I lay there against my father’s side with my head pillowed on his arm, hearing the wind, and feeling a pity that was far too deep to have any particular object. I pitied my mother, who might have to come looking for us and would never, never find us. I pitied the bats and the mice. I pitied the earth and the moon. I pitied the Lord.
It was the next day that we came to the Maine lady’s farmstead. I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I’m pretty sure they’ll build a new church once I’m gone. I don’t mean this unkindly — they don’t want to cause me grief, so they’re waiting to do what they want to do, and that’s good of them. They’ll pull the old church down and put up something bigger, sturdier. I hear them admiring what the Lutherans have done, and it is impressive, red brick and a porch with white columns and a fine big door and a handsome steeple. The inside is very beautiful, I’m told. I’ve been invited to the dedication, and I’ll go, if I’m still around and still up to that sort of thing. God willing, in other words. I’d like to see our new church, but they’re right, I’d hate to see the old one come down. I believe seeing that might actually kill me, which would not be such a terrible thing for a person in my circumstances. A stab of grief as coup de grace — there’d be poetry in it.
***
Am I impatient? Can that be? Today there has been no hint of a thorn in my flesh, of a thorn in my heart, more particularly. The thump in my chest goes on and on like some old cow chewing her cud, that same dull endlessness and contentment, so it seems to me. I wake up at night, and I hear it. Again, it says. Again, again, again. “For Preservation is a Creation, and more, it is a continued Creation, and a Creation every moment.” That is George Herbert, whom I hope you have read.
Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Yet awhile.
Well, if Herbert is right, this old body is as new a creation as you are yourself. I mean as you are now, playing under my window on the swing Dan Boughton put up for you. You must remember it. He tied fishing line to an arrow and shot it over the bough and then used the fishing line to hoist the rope, and so on. It took him the whole day, but he did it. He’s a clever, good-hearted young fellow. He was a great comfort to his father and mother. Now he’s teaching school somewhere in Michigan, I’m told. He didn’t choose the ministry, though for a long time he was expected to.
***
You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea. The ropes are long and you are light and the ropes bowlike cobwebs, laggardly, indolent. Your shirt is red — it is your favorite shirt — and you fly into the sunlight and pause there brilliantly for a second and then fall back into the shadows again. You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. And there is your mother. “Don’t go so high,” she says. You’ll mind. You’re a good fellow.