Jack laughed. “People must ask you about this all the time.”
“Yes, they do.”
“And you must have some way of responding.”
“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God — omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”
“You say it in those very words.”
“Yes, I do. More or less those very words. It’s a fraught question, and I’m careful with it. I don’t like the word ‘predestination.’ It’s been put to crude uses.”
Jack cleared his throat. “I would like your help with this, Reverend.”
Ames sat back in his chair and looked at him. “All right. I’ll do my best.”
“Let’s say someone is born into a particular place in life. He is treated kindly, or unkindly. He learns from everyone around him to be Christian, say. Or un-Christian. Might not that have an effect on his — religious life?”
“Well, it does seem to, generally. There are certainly exceptions.”
“On the fate of his soul?”
“Grace,” his father said. “The grace of God can find out any soul, anywhere. And you’re confusing something here. Religion is human behavior. Grace is the love of God. Two very different things.”
“Then isn’t grace the same as predestination? The pleasanter side of it? Presumably there are those to whom grace is not extended, even when their place in life might seem suited to — making Christians of them.” He said, “One way or the other, it seems like fate.”
Jack had put his glass down and sat slumped, with his arms folded, and he spoke with the kind of deferential insistence that meant he had some intention in raising the question.
His father said, “Fate is not a word I have ever found useful.”
“It is different from predestination, then.”
“As night and day,” his father said authoritatively. Then he closed his eyes.
Glory thought she saw trouble looming. Ames and her father had quarreled over this any number of times, her father asserting the perfect sufficiency of grace with something like ferocity, while Ames maintained, with a mildness his friend found irksome, that the gravity of sin could not be gainsaid. Could Jack have forgotten? She stood up. She said, “Excuse me. I hate this argument. I’ve heard it a thousand times and it never goes anywhere.”
Her father said, “I hate it a good deal, too, and I’ve never seen it go anywhere. But I wouldn’t call it an argument, Glory.”
She said, “Wait five minutes.” She looked pointedly at her brother. He smiled. She went into the house. Then she heard him say, “I was thinking about your sermon last Sunday, Reverend. A fine sermon. And it seemed to me another text very relevant to your subject would have been the story of David and Bathsheba.”
Glory thought, Dear God in heaven.
There was a silence while the old men pondered this. Then Ames said, “Robby, you’d better run along. Go find Tobias. Take your tractor now, and run along.”
There was another silence. Jack cleared his throat. “As I read that story, the child died because his father committed a sin.” Glory thought she heard an edge in his voice.
Ames said, “He committed many grave sins. Not that that makes the justice of it any clearer.”
“Yes, sir. Many grave sins. Still. I’m not asking about the justice of it. I’m asking if you believe a man might be punished by the suffering of his child. If a child might suffer to punish his father. For his sins. Or his unbelief. If you think that’s true. It seems to me to bear on the question we were discussing before. Predestination. The accident of birth.” Jack spoke softly, carefully, touching the tips of his fingers together in the manner of a man whose reasonableness approached detachment. Glory thought, Either he has forgotten that Ames also lost a child all those years ago, or he is implying that Ames was being punished when he lost her, that he was a sinner, too. Jack’s impulse to retaliate when he felt he had been injured was familiar enough, and it always recoiled against him. She coughed into her hand, but he did not look up.
After a moment Ames said, “David’s child returned to the Lord.”
Jack said, “Yes, sir. I understand that. But you do hope a child will have a life. That is what David prayed for. And you hope he will be safe. You hope he’ll learn more than — bitterness. I think. You hope that people will be kind.” He shrugged.
Ames said, “That is true. In the majority of cases.” His words seemed pointed.
There was a silence.
Then her father said, “Oh!” and covered his face with his hands. “Oh! I am a very sinful man!”
Lila made a low sound of commiseration. “Dear, dear.”
Jack said, “What? No, I—” He looked up at Glory, as if she could help him interpret the inevitability, the blank certainty, of painful surprise.
His father said, “The night you were born was such a terrible night! I prayed and prayed, just like David. And Ames did, too. And we thought we’d pulled you through, saved your life, didn’t we? But there’s so much more to it than that.”
Jack smiled with rueful amazement.
Ames leaned over and patted Boughton’s knee. “Theology aside, Robert, if you are a sinful man, those words have no meaning at all.”
Boughton said, from behind his hands, “You don’t really know me!”
This made Ames laugh. He thought it over and he laughed again. “I think I know you pretty well. I remember when your granny still pushed you up the road in a perambulator. Of course your arms and legs might have been hanging out of it. You might have been ten or twelve at the time. With that lace bonnet sitting on the top of your head. My mother used to say it would make more sense if the old lady was in the perambulator and you were pushing.”
“Oh, now, it wasn’t as bad as all that. I think I climbed out of that contraption when I was about six. I used to run when I saw it coming. God bless her, though. She meant well.”
The two old men sat for a moment gazing at nothing in particular, as they did when memory arose between them. Jack watched them, the privilege of ancient friendship enclosing them like a palpable atmosphere. “We pulled him through, Robert, and he’s here with you. He’s back home.”
Boughton said, “Yes. So much to be grateful for.”
After a moment Jack said, “‘Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so the soul of the son is mine; the soul that sinneth, it shall die.’ That’s Ezekiel. But Moses says the Lord ‘will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation.’ I wondered if you could explain that to me. It seems like a contradiction.”
There was a silence. Then Boughton said, “He knows his Scripture.”
“Yes, he does.”
Boughton cleared his throat. “If you look at the Code of Hammurabi, I believe that’s Davies—”
Ames nodded. “Davies.”
“—you will find that if a man kills another man’s son, then his own son will be killed. That was the punishment. Ezekiel was writing in Babylon, for the people living there in exile. So I think he was probably referring to the way things were done in that country, by the Babylonians.”
Ames said, “Ezekiel does mention the proverb among the Israelites, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and so on.”
“But the language of the proverb does not by itself imply anyone should exact a punishment of the sons. I believe at the time Ezekiel wrote, that proverb must have been interpreted in a way that justified the Babylonian practice.” Boughton rallied when he made arguments of this kind, spoke in the language of the old life, and wearied even to crankiness if the discussion went on very long.