The next Sunday there she was again. I was miserable with relief, afraid I might laugh for no reason, afraid I might look at her too long, trying to remind myself she was a stranger, though she had been my dearest and most inward thought for weeks, and that I must not startle her with some unaccountable familiarity. I had been to the barber and I was wearing a new shirt, since it seemed only prudent to suppose that my constant, passionate, and most unworthy prayers might be answered. And I’d made a little experiment with hair tonic.
Boughton met me in the road, as he often did in those days, and he looked at me and chuckled, and I thought, What an utter and transparent fool I am.
When she left the church that day I did hold her hand and I did say a few words—”We missed you last week, it’s good to have you here again.”
“Oh,” she said, and she blushed and looked away, as if the kindness had surprised her, though it was only the most basic and routine preacherly kindness, that being all I felt I could allow myself under the circumstances.
“I am sick with love.” That’s Scripture. It makes me laugh to remember this — I turned to the Bible in my crisis, as I have always done. And the text I chose was the Song of Songs! I might have learned from it that such miseries as mine were beautiful in the Lord’s sight, if I had been younger and if I had known that your mother was not a married woman. As it was, the beauty of the poems just hurt my feelings.
Oh, but the next week I held her hand and I told her we had a Bible study that met on Sunday night and she would be most welcome. Then I went home and prayed that my wiliness would be rewarded, and shaved again, and tried to read until evening. I walked up early to the church, and there she was, waiting for me by the steps, hoping she might have a word with me. At that point I began to suspect, as I have from time to time, that grace has a grand laughter in it. She confided to this unworthy old swain with perfume in his hair that she came to me seeking baptism.
“No one seen to it for me when I was a child,” she said. “I been feeling the lack of it.” Oh, the sad, stark purity of her look.
I said, “Well, my dear, we will take care of you,” and then, very conversationally, I asked her if she had family in the area. She shook her head and said, very softly, “I don’t have family at all.” I felt a surge of sadness for her, and still, in my wretched heart, I thanked the Lord.
So I instructed your mother in the doctrines of the faith, and in due course I did indeed baptize her, and I became happily accustomed to the sight of her, her quiet presence, and I began to give thanks that I had lived through the worst of my passion without making a ruin and a desolation of my good name, without running after her in the street, as I nearly did once when I saw her step out of the grocery store and walk away. I scared myself so badly that time I broke into a sweat. That’s how strong the impulse was. And I was sixty-seven. But I did always act consistently with my great respect for her youth and her loneliness, I can promise you that. I took great care about it. I thought it best to recruit some of the kindest older women to sit through her instruction with her, and I believe that made her shy about speaking, which I regretted very much.
Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. But even that was for the best, because one of the ladies, Veda Dyer, got herself into a considerable excitement talking about flames, that is, perdition, so I felt obliged to take down the Institutes and read them the passage on the lot of the reprobate, about how their torments are “figuratively expressed to us by physical things,” unquenchable fire and so on, to express “how wretched it is to be cut off from all fellowship with God.” I have the passage in front of me. It is alarming, certainly, but it isn’t ridiculous. I told them, If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.
They all did ponder a good while, and I did, too, listening to the evening wind and the cicadas. I came near alarming myself with the thought of the loneliness stretching ahead of me, and the new bitterness of it, and how I hated the secretiveness and the renunciation that honor and decency required of me and that common sense enforced on me. But when I looked up, your mother was watching me, smiling a little, and she touched my hand and she said, “You’ll be just fine.”
How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace.
She began to come to the house when some of the other women did, to take the curtains away to wash, to defrost the icebox. And then she started coming by herself to tend the gardens. She made them very fine and prosperous. And one evening when I saw her there, out by the wonderful roses, I said, “How can I repay you for all this?”
And she said, “You ought to marry me.” And I did.
Here is my thought: If I were to put my hand on her brow and bless her purely, as if I were indeed and altogether a minister of the Lord, I would hope just such an experience for her as that one of mine. Oh, I know she is fond of me, and very loyal. But I could hope that sometime the Song of Songs would startle her, as if it spoke from her own heart. I cannot really make myself believe that her feelings could have been at all like mine. And why do I worry so much over this Jack Boughton? Love is holy because it is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. I might well be leaving her to a greater happiness than I have given her, even granting every difficulty.
Sometimes I think I have seen the beginnings of it in her. If the Lord is letting me momentarily be witness to a grace He intends for her, I should find in this a great kindness toward myself. This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven — one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.
“Thou wast in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond.” While I’m thinking of it — when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.
Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing — only myself to blame. And I hope you will have read some of my books. And God bless your eyes, and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.