“It’s nothing personal.”
“All right.”
“Say you do something terrible. And it’s done. And you can’t change it. Then how do you live the rest of your life? What do you say about it?”
“Do I know what terrible thing we’re talking about?”
He nodded. “Yes. You do know. When I was out walking the other day I took a wrong turn and ended up at the cemetery.” He said, “I’d forgotten she was there.”
“She was part of the family.”
He nodded.
“All I can tell you is what Papa would say. He’d say repent, and then — you can put it aside, more or less, and go on. You’ve probably heard him say that as often as I have.”
“More often.” Then he said, “Regret doesn’t count, I suppose.”
“I don’t claim to know about these things. It seems to me that regret should count. Whatever that means.”
“But if you just found out about it, no matter whether I regretted or repented — what would you think of me?”
“What can I say? You’re my brother. If I were someone else, and I knew you and thought you were all right, then that would matter more to me than something that happened so many years ago.”
“Even though I had never told you about it. And I should have told you.”
“I think so.”
He nodded. “You’re not being kind.”
“I don’t really know.”
“Well, I might have a chance. Things could work out.” He said, “It will be bad at best. A miserable thing to have to hope for. Pain all around. Ah, little sister. It’s no wonder I can’t sleep.”
The television set stayed on the lamp table. Jack turned it on for the morning, noon, and evening news, and turned it off again if there was nothing about Montgomery. His father ignored it completely.
FOR YEARS, BEFORE GLORY CAME HOME AND WITHOUT regard to the occasional pious attentions of family returned for holidays, Lila had gone up to the cemetery to look after the Boughtons as well as the Ameses. Glory noticed a special tenderness toward the first Mrs. Ames and her child, who had passed from the world together so long ago, and toward the other little girl about whom, in that gentle, worldly way of hers, Lila seemed neither to know nor to wonder. Snowdrops, crocuses, jonquils. Jack might have seen late tulips or creeping phlox. That was probably good, Glory thought. She would tell him, if he asked, that the flowers were Lila’s, so he would not think they meant endless mourning so much as the wish to somehow compensate a child for missing seventy springs, or perhaps to offer delight to her perpetual childhood — she wondered if Lila would ever tell her what all the flowers meant, except kindness, and love of the lives, past and present, into which she had chosen to adopt herself, as if finally at home. She would probably smile and say, The soil is better there, or That spot gets more sun. But Glory was pleased that Jack must first have thought how pretty the place was, and then have looked to see who was cared for so lovingly. It must have been some comfort to him, though she knew no comfort was ever sufficient.
Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. His crime was his punishment, which had to mean he wasn’t such a villain after all. She might mention this to Jack sometime, if it ever seemed to her a conversation had arrived at a point where she could dare, could summon delicacy enough, to compare him to Cain. She laughed at herself. What a thought.
GLORY HAD KEPT MOST OF THE HABITS OF HER PIOUS youth. Morning and evening she took her Bible out to the porch and read two or three chapters. When the others were at home for the holidays, they would sit around the table in the dining room and one of them would read aloud from the Psalms or the Gospels. Like most of their obligations and many of their pleasures, this was, whatever else, a performance meant to please their father, to assure him that they loved the old life, that they had received all the good he had intended for them. To please him was so potent a motive that it displaced motives of her own, which no doubt would have included piety. During the years she lived alone she had read the Bible morning and evening with the thought that her father would be pleased if he knew, and also to remember who she was, to remember the household she came from, to induce in herself the unspecific memory of a comfort she had not really been conscious of until she left it behind. Now, back in her father’s house, as she read she remembered that same comfort, and remembered as well the privilege of distance and solitude, the satisfactions of that other life.
What a strange old book it was. How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance. “I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.” Yes, there it was, the parable of manna. All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in this flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
What does it mean to come home? Glory had always thought home would be a house less cluttered and ungainly than this one, in a town larger than Gilead, or a city, where someone would be her intimate friend and the father of her children, of whom she would have no more than three. Then she could learn what her own tastes were, within the limits of their means, of course. She would not take one stick of furniture from her father’s house, since none of it would be comprehensible in those spare, sunlit rooms. The walnut furbelows and carved draperies and pilasters, the inlaid urns and flowers. Who had thought of putting actual feet on chairs and sideboards, actual paws and talons?
She had dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies, and the fiancé, a home very different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent. She knew, she had known for years, that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold, never scoop up a pretty child and set it on her hip and feel it lean into her breast and eye the world from her arms with the complacency of utter trust. Ah well.
Once, Jack had come into the porch and found her sitting there reading the Bible. He seemed pleasantly embarrassed and asked pardon for interrupting, and she said he was more than welcome to stay if he liked, so he took the chair next to hers and opened the newspaper. But he leaned over to see where she was reading. “Psalms,” he said. “An excellent choice.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“I’m almost finished.” She could feel that he was aware of her, restless enough to distract her, so she put the ribbon to mark her place and closed the book. He recrossed his ankles and rustled the paper. So she said, “What is it?”
“Oh. Sorry. Really just a sort of interest, I suppose. In the fact that you still do that sort of thing. That you always used to do. Not that I wouldn’t expect you to. I don’t mean that. In fact, I’m always a little surprised by things I would have expected. When they happen. If that makes sense.”
“I think it does.”
“Do you still, um, pray”—he gestured at the floor—“down on your knees?”
She laughed. “None of your business.”
“I remember when you were little, you’d kneel by your bed and close your eyes and whisper things into your hands. Secrets. Hope’s cat threw up on the rug. Johnny said a bad word. And we would sit there and listen to it all and try to be very serious about it.” He laughed.