“I was pretty sure I could trust you not to do that.” I said, “Thank you.”
He drew a long breath. He said, “You know my father so well.”
“But I can’t give you any assurances about this, one way or the other. I’d hate to be wrong. You’ll have to let me reflect on it.”
Then he said, “If it were you, and not my father—”
Now, I could see his point in putting that question, since Boughton and I are in general very much of one mind. But it was not so simple a question as he might have thought, and I paused over it.
He watched me for a minute, and then he smiled and said, “You have made a somewhat — unconventional marriage yourself. You know a little bit about being the object of scandal. Unequally yoked and so on. Of course, Delia is an educated woman.” Those were his very words.
Now, that was just like him. That meanness. His remark was not even entirely to the point. And I never felt there was anything the least bit scandalous about my marriage. In her own way, your mother is a woman of great refinement. If a few people did make remarks, I just forgave them so fast it was as if I never heard them, because it was wrong of them to judge and I knew it and they should have known it.
But then that look of utter weariness came over him and he covered his face with his hands. And I could only forgive him. My thought when I hesitated was that since I was so long in the habit of seeing meanness at the root of everything he did, I might well have doubted his motives in involving himself with this woman he did not marry, and bringing me this child. I’d have been wrong, I believe, but his question was not how I should react but how I would be liable to react. “With Boughton this could be completely different, since he thought so much better of Jack, or so I had always believed.
I said, “I would love to know the child. Especially if you explained everything to me the way you just did.” And then I said, “He certainly took to that other child.”
Young Boughton gave me such a look as I have never seen in my life before. He went stark white. Then he smiled and said, “Children’s children are the crown of old men.”
I said, “You have to forgive me for that. That was such a foolish thing to say. I’m tired. I’m old.”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice was very controlled. “And I have taken far too much of your time. Thank you. I know I can trust your pastoral discretion.”
I said, “We can’t let the conversation end here,” but I was just so weary and downhearted it was all I could do to get up from my chair. He stopped by the door and I went over to him and I put my arms around him. For a moment he actually let his head rest on my shoulder. “I am tired,” he said. I could just feel the loneliness in him. Here I was supposed to be a second father to him. I wanted to say something to him to that effect, but it seemed complicated, and I was too tired to think through its possible implications. It might sound as if I were trying to establish some sort of equivalency between his failings and mine, when in fact I would have meant he was a better man than I ever thought he could be. So I said, “You are a good man,” and he gave me a look, purely appraising, and laughed and said, “You can take my word for it, Reverend, there are worse.”
But then he said, “What about this town? If we came here and got married, could we live here? Would people leave us alone?”
Well, I didn’t know the answer to that one, either. I thought so.
He said, “There was a fire at the Negro church.”
“That was a little nuisance fire, and it happened many years ago.”
“And it has been many years since there was a Negro church.”
Of course there wasn’t much I could say to that. He said, “You have influence here.”
I said that might be true, but I couldn’t promise to live long enough to make much use of it. I mentioned my heart.
He said, “I had no right to weary you with my troubles,” which I took to mean there had been no point in it. I thought our conversation had been good, on balance, and I said that, and he nodded and said goodbye. And then after a minute he said, “No matter, Papa. I believe I’ve lost them, anyway.”
I just sat there with my head on my desk and went over this in my mind and prayed until your mother came looking for me. She thought I had had some sort of episode and I let her think that. It seemed to me as if I ought to have had one. And there was nothing I could say to her in any case.
You might wonder about my pastoral discretion, writing this all out. Well, on one hand it is the way I have of considering things. On the other hand, he is a man about whom you may never hear one good word, and I just don’t know another way to let you see the beauty there is in him.
***
That was two days ago. Now it’s Sunday again. When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night. You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week. This morning I read from one of those old sermons your mother keeps leaving around for me. It was on Romans I: “They became vain in their reasonings and their senseless heart was darkened, professing themselves to be wise they became fools,” and so on. The Old Testament text was from Exodus, the plague of darkness. The sermon was a sort of attack on rationalism and irrationalism, the point being that both worship the creature rather than the Creator. I had glanced over it a little, but as I read it, it surprised me, sometimes because it seemed right and sometimes because it seemed embarrassingly wrong, and always because it seemed like something someone else must have written. Jack Boughton was there in that weary suit and tie, sitting beside you, and you were very pleased, and I believe your mother was, too.
Now, it does not at all agree with my notion of preaching, to stand there reading from a stack of yellowed pages full of what I must have thought once, trying to play down the certainty I had written into the language some black night half a lifetime ago. And there in the second pew was young Boughton, who always seems to see right through me. And I, being newly persuaded that he might come into a church with some however cynical hope of encountering a living Truth, was obliged to mouth these dead words while he sat there smiling at me. I do think there was a point in associating rationalism and irrationalism, that is, materialism and idolatry, and if I had had the energy to depart from the text I could have made something of that. As it was, I just read the sermon, shook all those hands, and came home and took a nap on the couch. I did have the feeling that young Boughton might actually have been comforted by the irrelevance of my preachments to anything that had passed between us, anything to do with him at all, God bless the poor devil. The fact was, standing there, I wished there were grounds for my old dread. That amazed me. I felt as if I’d have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own.
***
I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone’s. I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars. It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word “preacher” comes from an old French word, predicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?
Well, we didn’t ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us. We became like the people without the Law, people who didn’t know their right hand from their left. Just stranded here. A stranger might ask why there is a town here at all. Our own children might ask. And who could answer them? It was just a dogged little outpost in the sand hills, within striking distance of Kansas. That’s really all it was meant to be. It was a place John Brown and Jim Lane could fall back on when they needed to heal and rest. There must have been a hundred little towns like it, set up in the heat of an old urgency that is all forgotten now, and their littleness and their shabbiness, which was the measure of the courage and passion that went into the making of them, now just look awkward and provincial and ridiculous, even to the people who have lived here long enough to know better. It looks ridiculous to me. I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back.