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She called back, “No hurry,” sorry she had distracted him. He looked like a man full of that active contentment that makes even ordinary movement graceful. He looked at ease in sunlight. She hoped old Ames had indeed gazed down upon him. He might have seen him as his father did, for once.

After another half hour Jack came in through the porch. He smiled when he saw her. “That was all right,” he said. “What a funny kid. He’s a nice kid. I don’t think I’m grooming him for the majors, though. He wants to play for the Red Sox. I’m not saying he has no chance at all. You have to be black to have no chance at all.”

“There’s Jackie Robinson.”

“Ah yes. Jackie Robinson of Dodger fame. There’s Larry Dobie, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson. Roy Campanella, Ernie Banks. Satchel Paige. I’ll give you a nickel if you can tell me which one plays for Boston.”

“I confess, I haven’t given much thought to baseball lately.”

“Clearly. There are those in St. Louis who think of little else. I have had many earnest conversations on the subject.”

She looked at him. “With Della?”

“One or two of them with Della. She knows what matters in this world.”

Glory laughed. “Well, I’m pretty sure I don’t. Here I’ve been wasting my time worrying about radioactive fallout. About strontium 90.”

He said, “Believe me, she worries about that, too.”

JACK LET A DAY PASS, AND THEN IN THE AFTERNOON HE took his ball and glove and went to Ames’s again. When he came back he seemed pleased. “The kid’s shaping up. He actually caught one on the first bounce.” He said, “It was all right. They even asked me to stay for supper. Lila asked me. But I don’t think the Reverend objected. He didn’t seem to.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

He shrugged and smiled. “They were being polite.”

“Of course they were being polite. That doesn’t mean they weren’t really inviting you.”

After a moment he said, “I have learned, in the tedious course of my life, that it is safer not to presume on these courtesies. I have taken the bait often enough to know how it feels when the trap shuts. Better to forgo the pleasures of, you know, pot roast and mashed potatoes.”

She said, “You want to get yourself on better terms with Ames. How can you do that if you don’t let him — well — treat you like a friend? Ask you to supper? It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.”

He nodded. “There it is. My lifelong exile from the ordinary world. I have to learn the customs. And somehow persuade myself that they pertain to me.” He looked at her. “That’s where it gets tricky.”

“No, you just have to relax a little and remind yourself that you are dealing with a very kind old man.”

He said, “It really is more complex than that, Glory. The other day I gave his kid my glove to use, so he ran upstairs and took that old glove Ames keeps on his desk and brought it down to me. I guess it once belonged to the long-departed Uncle Edward. It seemed harmless enough to me to put it on. I mean, it wasn’t as if I were going to be catching anything with it. But, you know, I stole it once. Temporarily. I don’t know why. And Ames knew I had stolen it, because who else would bother. And I was the town thief. So today when he came up the road from church there I was with that thing on my hand and nothing to do but stand there. He looked at it and looked at me and he didn’t say anything about it and neither did I, but I could tell that he was reminded of all that, my troubled youth, and it was embarrassing. For him, too.”

“I think you forget how long ago all that happened.”

“Yes, and here I am today, John Ames Boughton, solid citizen. A miraculous transformation.” He laughed. He was thoughtful for a while, and then he said, “If I had it all to do over again, I mean adolescent criminality, I’d try to restrict myself to doing things that were explicable. Or at least appeared to be explicable. I’m serious. It’s the things people can’t account for that upset them. The old gent used to ask me, ‘Why did you do that, Jack?’ And I couldn’t even tell him I did it because I felt like it. Even that wouldn’t have been true. What did I want with an old baseball mitt? Nothing. But there wasn’t really much to steal in this town. It would have been hard to find anything to want, anything that might make it seem as though I had a motive. So all my offenses were laid to a defect of character. I have no quarrel with that. But it is a problem for me now.”

Glory said, “If the Ameses ask you to supper again, say yes. And stay. Promise me.”

He laughed. “Will do. On my honor.” He said, “You have a feeling for these things.”

AND THE VERY NEXT DAY, HAVING TOILED EARNESTLY IN the vegetable patch and the flower beds from dawn till noon, and having tightened the joints of the three Adirondack chairs that had always slouched together under the kitchen window as if to be indolently serviceable in the event that something in the yard between them and the barn should attract spectators, and having restrung the clothesline, he came into the house, ironed a shirt, and polished his shoes. “I’m feeling useful,” he said. “Productive. That’s good for morale. So is the tan.” He pushed up his sleeve to show her. “There’s a definite line there.”

“So there is.” She had learned to worry about these hectic outbursts of purposefulness, and to know there was no point in trying to damp them down.

He said, “I believe this is Thursday. So tomorrow is Friday, and Ames will probably be working on his sermon. He won’t welcome interruption.” He said, “I will probably go to church on Sunday. I can do that. My suit no longer smells combustible. Just slightly automotive. I wouldn’t want to alarm anyone.” He laughed.

So all this was in preparation for supper at the Ameses’, for which he had not been invited. But he left the house in the early evening, pausing in the door to look at her and shrug, as if to say, Wish me luck. When he was not home for supper, she told her father that she thought he might have been invited by Ames and Lila.

“Yes,” her father said. “I hope John will take some interest in him. That is a thing I wished for many years. When you give a man a namesake, you do expect a certain amount of help. Ames was a help to me, of course. Not to Jack so much. I don’t mean to criticize. I guess I wasn’t much help to him either, as far as that goes.”

The old man wanted to wait for him in the porch, so they sat there together in the mild night. “You can’t see the lightning bugs through these screens,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. But at least you get the breeze. You hear the crickets.”

After a little while he said, “Ames will need his rest. Old fellows can’t tolerate these late nights. I hope he will realize that.” And then they heard footsteps and Jack came up the walk and up the steps.

“Nice evening,” he said. His voice was soft and calm. Glory knew that her father noticed, too.

“Yes,” the old man said. “Yes, it is. A fine evening.”

Jack said, “They were very kind. The boy likes me. And Mrs. Ames seems to think I’m all right.”

“I suppose you talked a little politics, Jack?”

“Yes, sir. He says, ‘Stevenson is a very fine man, no doubt.’”

His father laughed. “There’s no persuading him. He’ll agree with anything you say. But when the chips are down, it’s Eisenhower. Yes, I know what it’s like, trying to reason with him where politics are concerned. He hasn’t been around so much lately. Maybe I’ve been trying too hard.”

Jack said, “He talked a little bit about his grandfather.”

“Yes, he likes to tell the old stories. The Boughtons weren’t here for most of that. We left Scotland in the fall of 1870, so we missed out on the war and the rest of it. There was a lot of what you might call fanaticism around here in the early days. Even among Presbyterians. That old fellow was right in the middle of it, from what I’ve heard. And then in his old age he was about as crazy as it’s possible to be and still be walking the streets. I would never have named you after that John Ames. We were used to him, of course. We felt sorry for him. But he was crazy when I knew him, and before that, too, I believe.”

Jack was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Ames seems to have a lot of respect for him.”

His father said, “The old settlers, you know, the old families, they used to tell stories they thought were just wonderful, and then I think they began to realize that the world had changed and maybe they should reconsider a few things. It’s taken them awhile. Ames was pretty embarrassed about the old fellow while he lived. Always talking with Jesus. I suppose he didn’t tell you about that.”

“He told me. He told me the story about his grandfather leaving Maine for Kansas because he had a dream that Jesus came to him as a slave and showed him how the chains rankled his flesh. I’d heard the story before, of course. I always thought it sounded enviable. I mean, to have that kind of certainty. It’s hard to imagine. Hard for me to imagine.”

“Certainty can be dangerous,” the old man said.

“Yes, sir. I know. But if Jesus is — Jesus, it seems as though he might have shown someone his chains. I mean, in that situation.”

“You might be right, Jack. I’m sure Ames would agree. But when you see where we are now, still trying to settle these things with violence, I don’t know. Live by the sword and die by the sword.”

Jack cleared his throat. “The protests in Montgomery are nonviolent.”

The old man said, “But they provoke violence. It’s all provocation.”

There was a long silence. Then Jack said, “This week I will go to church. I will definitely go to church.”

“That’s wonderful, Jack. Yes.”

He helped his father to bed, and then he came into the kitchen. “You were right,” he said. “It was fine. I said the grace. I’d practiced this time. I was polite, I believe, and I didn’t talk enough to get myself in trouble. I don’t think I did. I’m not saying anything changed, but it wasn’t a disaster. Macaroni and cheese. I cleaned my plate.” He laughed.

THEN JACK TOOK THE AMESES SOME EARLY APPLES, AND some plums he said could be ripened on a windowsill, and he played a little catch with the boy, and he even helped Lila move the Reverend’s desk and some of his books down to the parlor so that he would not have to deal with the stairs. “Very neighborly,” he said. “Friend-like.”

Glory had no reason for concern about all this, except that Jack was intent on it. He seemed to have invested so much calculation in it that it bordered on hope, now that the Reverend and his family had warmed to him a little. Dear God, she thought. They are the kindest people on earth. Why should I worry? She had talked him into trusting them, which would have been entirely reasonable in any other circumstance. But his reservations were the fruit of his experience, and his experience was the fruit of his being Jack, always Jack, despite these sporadic and intense attempts at escape, at being otherwise. Dear God in heaven, no one could know as well as he did that for him caution was always necessary.

Sunday came and Jack rose early, loitered in the kitchen drinking coffee, refused breakfast, brushed his suit and his hat. He came downstairs at a quarter to ten looking as respectable as he ever did, tipped his hat, and walked out the door. She got her father up and brought him into the kitchen, where he lingered over his eggs and toast, then over the newspaper, then over a Christian Century he had read weeks before, then over the Bible. Finally he fell into that sleep or prayer that was his refuge in times of high emotion. At two o’clock Jack still had not come home, so she told her sleeping father that she was going out to look around a little and he nodded, abruptly, as if to say it was high time. She couldn’t hunt her brother down as if he were a lost child, or an incompetent of some kind. There was nothing he, therefore she, dreaded more than the possibility that he might be embarrassed in any way that could be anticipated and avoided. Enough that there was an incandescence of unease about him whenever he walked out the door or, for that matter, whenever his father summoned him to one of those harrowing conversations. Or while he waited for the mail or watched the news.

She went to the barn and there he was, in the driver’s seat of the DeSoto, with his head tipped back and his hat over his eyes. She tapped on the window, and he roused himself and smiled at her, an effort. Then he reached over and opened the passenger door. “Hop in,” he said. “I was just collecting myself. Couldn’t face your papa quite yet.” Then he said, “Ah, little sister, these old fellows play rough. They look so harmless, and the next thing you know, you’re counting broken bones again.”

“What happened?”

“He preached. The text was Hagar and Ishmael, the application was the disgraceful abandonment of children by their fathers. And the illustration was my humble self, sitting there beside his son with the eyes of Gilead upon me. I think I was aghast. His intention, no doubt. To appall me, that is, to turn me white, as I am sure he did. Whiter.”

“Well,” she said, “I find this hard to believe. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“Yes, yes, such a kind old man. I don’t think I’ll be asking your advice any time soon, Pigtails.” He laughed. “I left through the chancel. I had half a mind to pull my jacket up over my head.” Then he said, “Sweet Jesus, I am tired. And now you’re crying. Don’t do that, please.”

“It’s just tears,” she said. “They don’t matter. I’ll leave you alone if you want me to.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t do that either. Maybe you can help me sort this out.”

There was a silence.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “I know he wouldn’t have mentioned you by name. He would never do that.”

“He didn’t say, ‘Jack Boughton, the notorious sinner in the first pew. The gasoline-scented fellow.’ That’s correct.”

“And he’d have prepared his sermon days ago. I’m sure he had no idea you would be there this morning.”

“Excellent point. In fact, I thought of that myself. But through the worst of it he wasn’t even speaking from notes, Glory. The old devil was extemporizing. Very effectively, I might add, for a man of his age. Anyway, I would have been on his mind while he worked on it. All that ingratiating behavior just beneath his window.” He laughed. Then he said, “Don’t cry.” He produced a handkerchief from the breast pocket in which he also carried the little leather case. One of her father’s beautiful handkerchiefs.

She said, “I’ll never forgive him.”

He looked at her. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

“I mean it. It could be senility, I suppose. I still won’t forgive him. He was always like a father to me.”

“It’s sad.”

“It’s terrible.”

Jack drew a long breath. “Consider our situation, Glory. Two middle-aged people in decent health, sane and civilized, generally well disposed toward the world — perhaps I am only speaking for myself here — sitting in an abandoned DeSoto in an empty barn, Snowflake not far from our thoughts, pondering one more thoroughly predictable and essentially meaningless defeat. Does this strike you as odd?”

She laughed. “It’s just ridiculous.”

“I had no plans when I left Gilead,” he said. “Survival on terms I could convince myself were tolerable. That was the pinnacle of my aspirations. I did not anticipate failure. I have awakened in the occasional gutter from time to time — figuratively speaking, of course — and I have thought to myself, Just a little effort would improve my situation dramatically. So there was that optimism. It may have been youth.”

“You were all right for ten years.”

“Almost ten. Seven and a half, if we are speaking of sobriety. Nine and a half, if the measure is a sometimes pleasurable engagement with life.”

“Della.”

“Della.”

They were quiet for a while.

He said, “I used to think we might slip into Gilead under cover of night, throw a little gravel at Ames’s window, say our I-do’s, get his blessing. Or at least his signature—”

“You’d have asked Ames to marry you?”

He shrugged. “He’s always awake at odd hours.”

“You’d have tipped your hat to the family homestead on the way out of town, I suppose.”

“No doubt. I never really thought through the fine points. I’m sure I would have tipped my hat.”

“That’s good to know.”

Then he said, “I came back thinking we might be able to make a life here, she and I. Why did I think that? I came here because everything had fallen to pieces and she had run off to her family.” He looked at her. “I wasn’t particularly at fault. I personally. Don’t get the wrong idea. But I was clutching at a straw, coming to Gilead. No doubt about that. I’ve had some experience with them. Straws.”

He looked at her sidelong. Bemused, worldly, sad, spent.

“You’ve never just talked to Papa about this.”

He laughed. “Some things are sacred, Glory. You’ve never talked to him about old Love Letters.” Then he said, “Our father is not a man of the world, shall we say, but he would no doubt assume that a nine-year relationship with my sullied self might have involved some degree of — cohabitation. I hope I haven’t offended you.” He glanced at her. “He might, never meaning to, only by implication, cast an aspersion. I don’t know how I would deal with that. I’m trying to stay sober.”

She said, “How do you know I didn’t do that? Cohabit.”

He said, very gently, “Call it a wild guess.”

Condescension, she thought. But kindly meant. Brotherly.

He said, “I don’t recommend it. There are laws. A person could end up with the cops at his door.” He smiled.

“Sorry.” Poor Jack.

The truth was, she wished there had been more to her endless supposed engagement. That there was not her fiancé’s extremely scrupulous respect for her to, in retrospect, embitter her sense of the fraudulence of it all. Still, she wished she had the letters back, and the ring. Sacred, she thought. Strange to think of it that way. Time and again she had read through the half dozen letters that moved her, and even they sometimes seemed so commonplace that it frightened her, as if a precious thing had been lost and she could not find it, search as she might. Then she would notice a phrase, something about loneliness or weariness or the view from a train window, the intimacy of the ordinary, and her heart would stir. She had ticked the margins beside these lines to spare herself the vertiginous sense that there was nothing in the letters at all worth cherishing, and then when she looked at them again she could not always see why she had chosen these passages, and again she would be frightened. He was at the center of her life, and who was he, after all? Why did it comfort her to trust him? The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for her, and that if she did not find it, she would read them again. When she thought of them, she put aside all bitterness and folly and disillusionment, as no one else ever could, no one who listened to her with compassion. Sympathy would corrupt something wonderful, which secrecy and a kind of shame kept safe for her.

She said, “I’ve wondered if it might not be easier to be somewhere else. Where my life would be my own, at least.”

“My thought, too. And I gave somewhere else a pretty good try. Now I’m home again in Iowa, the shining star of radicalism. It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.”

She said, “Well, Iowa is a pretty big state.”

He laughed. “Yes, why am I here when I might be in Ankeny? Ottumwa?”

“That strikes me as a fair question.”

“Maybe because I have no sister there.”

“I’d visit.”

He nodded. “Kind of you.” Then he said, “I knew I would need help. I thought the old gent might help me, but I didn’t realize — that he was so old. I couldn’t find work on my own. So I decided to place my hopes in the kindly Reverend Ames. Which brings us to the present moment.” Then he said, “And I just wanted to come home. Even if I couldn’t stay. I wanted to see the place. I wanted to see my father. I was — bewildered, I suppose.” He laughed. “I was scared to come home. It was as much as I could do to get on the bus. And stay on it. I was largely successful at that, all in all. Too bad. Too bad for the old man. It’s amazing to me that I can still disappoint him. I knew I would.” He touched the scar beneath his eye.

“Well,” she said, “he’s worried. I left him at the kitchen table. He’s probably uncomfortable. I should go inside.”

“What will you tell him?”

“What should I tell him?”

“Oh, let me think. Tell him my life is endless pain and difficulty for reasons that are no doubt apparent to anyone I pass on the street but obscure to me, and that I am flummoxed and sitting in the DeSoto but will probably be in for supper.”

“It would be simpler if you just came inside with me now.”

He sighed. “No doubt you’re right. And I do know why my life is the way it is, Glory. I was joking about that. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t. I’m fresh from a sermon on the subject.” He glanced at her.

Glory said, “I’ll never forgive him.”

Jack said, “Thank you. I’m touched.” Then he said, “I’ll forgive him. Maybe I’ve forgiven him already.” When she looked at him he shrugged and said, “He might take it as a sign of character. It might look like generosity or humility or something. Anyway, neither one of us can risk upsetting the old man by holding a grudge against Ames. I mean, one that he or Ames might be aware of.” He said, “I have thought this over pretty carefully. Either my manly pride insists that I confront him, which even I would not descend to. Or it obliges me to leave town — in a huff of some kind to avoid that whipped-cur impression even I dread. Or else I seize upon the only undamaging choice left to me. Which might also have the look of virtue, I believe.”

“Then I suppose I’ll have to forgive him, too.”

“I would appreciate that. It would make things easier.”

They walked up to the house together. Their father was still at the table, a little fierce with the tedium of his situation, which had compounded his anxiety. “Ah, there you are!” he said, as they came through the door. “I was beginning to think—” and then he saw Jack’s face.

Jack smiled. He said, “A powerful sermon. It gave me a lot to consider.”

“Well, that’s all right,” his father said. “No harm in that, I suppose. I’m sure he must have meant well. Nothing I would have expected. He seems to have squandered a wonderful opportunity.” His voice became softer and his gaze more fixed as realization settled in.

Jack said, “Please don’t worry about it. It really doesn’t matter,” and went up to his room.

Days passed without any word from Ames. Their father read and prayed and brooded, and every time the telephone rang he said, “If it’s Ames, tell him I’m dead.”

HER FATHER HAD SUFFERED A TERRIBLE SHOCK. IT WAS his habit to consider Ames another self, for most purposes. And here his son, for whose spiritual comfort and peace he had prayed endlessly, often enough in Ames’s kitchen, in his hearing, and in full confidence that his friend seconded his prayers — his son had made himself vulnerable to him and had been injured, insulted. That Jack was a wound in his father’s heart, a terrible tenderness, was as fully known to Ames, almost, as it was to the Lord. And here the boy had put on a suit and tie — he had borrowed one of his father’s ties — and gotten himself to church, for heaven’s sake, despite reluctance, despite even fear, to judge by the potency of his reluctance. Glory could read her father’s thoughts as they sat together over their breakfast that morning — the look of vindication, of confidence that things were miraculously about to come right. He had stood at the front of his own church year after year, hoping to be able to preach again about grace and the loving heart of Christ to his aloof, his endlessly lonely son. When he smiled to himself, he was certainly imagining himself in that pulpit, amazed and so grateful. Who better than Jack’s second father, his father’s second self, to say the words of welcome and comfort he could not say? It would never have occurred to him that Ames would not speak to the boy as if from his own heart.

Then this incomprehensible disappointment. The old man muttered and stared, his eyes flickering over the memory of the kindnesses he had done Ames through all those years, the trust he had placed in him. He frowned as he did when he was rehearsing grievance and rebuke. Never since the darkest storms of his retirement had she seen him so morose.

Over the decades there had been actual shouting matches between Ames and her father, set off by matters so abstruse no one dared attempt mediation. Once, when her mother tried to say something emollient about the communion of saints, her father, in the persisting heat of disputation, said, “That’s just foolish!” and she terrified them all by packing a bag. Sometimes the older children tried to soothe, to make peace, but in fact the friendship was not threatened but secured by a mutual intelligibility so profound it enabled them to sustain for days an argument incomprehensible to those around them, to drop it when they wearied of it and then to take it up again just where they had left it. No one could predict when the warmth of their pleasure in argument would kindle and flare into mutual irritation, though weariness and bad weather were factors.

But in all those years neither of them had ever done the other any harm. This particular injury, utterly unexpected, to the old man’s dearest affection — it was without question the costliest of them all, therefore most precious to him — was hardly to be imagined. Her father was in mourning, and Ames stayed away, no doubt waiting for a sign that he had not alienated the Boughtons forever. He would be in mourning, too.

SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. AMES ALREADY HAD THEIR copies of Life and The Nation, and he had his own subscriptions to Christian Century and the Post. So far as Glory knew, there were no books around the house that he had lent their father, or that he had said he would like to borrow. Every vegetable and flower they grew Lila grew more abundantly. Glory decided to make a batch of cookies. But Jack came downstairs with a faded copy of Ladies’ Home Journal. He tapped the note on the cover: Show Ames. “I’ve been up in the attic a few times. All sorts of things up there. I found an article in here about American religion. Pretty interesting.”

“Nineteen forty-eight. It’s so old he’s probably seen it.”

He nodded. “It’s so old he’s probably forgotten it.”

“Well, I think I’ll just make cookies.”

“Whatever you say.” Jack put the magazine on the table. Then he stood looking at it with his hands on his hips, as if he were relinquishing something that mattered. “Interesting article, though.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll need a minute to comb my hair.”

“Sure.” Then he said, “My idea was that you would give it to the old gent first, before you take it to Ames. Then they’ll have something to argue about. I mean, conversation might be strained. In the circumstances. So I thought this might help.” He shrugged.

She put away the mixing bowl and the measuring spoons. “Any further instructions?”

“Not at the moment. Well, he’s awake and dressed. I thought maybe you might read it to him over breakfast. I’ve eaten. I’m—” He made a gesture toward the door that suggested he had some sort of intention to act upon. Some hoe blade to whet. He had already oiled the horse collar.

“All right,” she said. “Should I tell him this is your idea?”

“Yes. Tell him that. Say I’m afraid I might have offended Ames, and I’d like to put things right.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself? I suppose he’d want the particulars.”

“Bright girl,” he said. “Thanks, Glory.” And he left.

HER FATHER TOOK INSTANTLY TO THE IDEA OF RECONCILiation. He relaxed visibly at the very word. There was nothing improbable in the idea that Jack was somehow at fault, though, after allowing himself the thought a few times, he still had no specific notion of how he could have been. A skeptical look, perhaps, but that was to be expected. Still, Jack was Jack, and there was nothing disloyal about accepting that Jack might be at fault in some degree, since forgiving him was deeper even than habit, since it was in fact the sum and substance of loyalty. Yes. The old man always interpreted any pleasing turn of events as if he were opening a text, to have a full enjoyment of all reassuring implications and all good consequences. “It’s very kind of Jack to recognize his part in this, and to want to make amends. Christian of him. I believe he may be doing this to please his old father, too. So I have something to think about that might not have been so clear to me otherwise.” He laughed. “That sermon was for my benefit. Yes. The Lord is wonderful.” He said, “Old Ames says he remembers me in skirts and a lace bonnet, and that could be true. My grandmother took my infancy in hand and she made it last as long as she possibly could. Longer, I guess. She meant well. My mother’s health failed after I was born. That was Mother’s opinion, anyway. But you just can’t give up a friendship that goes back as far as that!” He loved to reflect on the fact that grace was never singular in its effects, as now, when he could please his son by forgiving his friend. “That is why it is called a Spirit,” he said. “The word in Hebrew also means wind. ‘The Spirit of God brooded on the face of the deep.’ It is a sort of enveloping atmosphere.” Her father was always so struck by his insights that it was impossible for him to tell those specific to the moment from those on which he had preached any number of times. It had made him a little less sensitive than he ought to have been to the risk of repeating himself. Ah well.

So she read the article to her father, and he chuckled over the passages by which Ames was certain to be exasperated, his eyes alight with the pleasure of knowing he and the Reverend were, for Jack’s purposes, entirely of one mind. “Very thoughtful of him to find this for us,” he said.

When they had finished reading it, Glory took the magazine to Ames’s house and left it with Lila, since the Reverend was out calling. A day passed. Jack came in from the garden to ask if she had delivered it, then to ask if there had been any response. Finally, weary of all the anxiety, she went again without gift or pretext and found Ames at home. He opened the door, and when he saw her there, his eyes teared with regret and relief. “Come in, dear,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you. How is your father doing these days?”

“As well as can be expected. Jack helps me take care of him. Or I help Jack.” She said, “We’ve missed you.”

Ames rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “Yes. I know it has been wonderful for Robert to have him home again.” He looked tired and moved and as if he needed to recover himself, so she said that her father had asked her to look in but she really couldn’t stay.

“I haven’t been sleeping very well so I’m not worth much right now, but I’ll come by tomorrow or the next day.” He said, “Give Jack my regards.”

He seemed so robust beside her father that it was hard to remember Ames was old, too.

The next day Ames strolled up the street with Robby tagging after him, running ahead of him, pouncing at grasshoppers. “Like a puppy,” her father said. “Into everything.” Glory went inside to make lemonade and allow the two old gentlemen time to follow out the protocols of renewed cordiality. Jack came downstairs to the kitchen and leaned against the counter with his arms folded. Together they listened for a while to the voices, firmer as talk proceeded. There was laughter and the creaking of chairs, and there were silences, too, but there were always silences. When she was no longer afraid of disrupting any delicate work of reparation, Glory took them their lemonade and sat with them a while. Robby went to the garden and came back with a toy tractor he had brought on another visit and forgotten to take home with him. He drove it here and there around the porch floor, under his father’s chair and around his shoes.

The conversation turned to the article Jack had found, “God and the American People.” It was contemptuous of the entire enterprise of religion in the United States. But it was awkwardly reasoned, so the two old clergymen could enjoy refuting it. They had labored earnestly at propagating the true faith, which had never seemed to them to have national traits or boundaries. Nor did they feel directly implicated in whatever eccentricities and deficiencies in the local practice of it they might be obliged to grant.

Jack came out on the porch with a glass of lemonade and took a chair. There was a little silence. “Reverend,” he said.

Ames said, “Jack, it’s good to see you,” and he glanced away, at Boughton, at the glass in his hand.

Jack watched him for a moment. Then he said, “I heard you two laughing about that magazine. It’s pretty foolish, all in all. Could I see it for a second? Thanks. I thought he made one interesting point in here somewhere, though. He said the seriousness of American Christianity was called into question by our treatment of the Negro. It seems to me there is something to be said for that idea.”

Boughton said, “Jack’s been looking at television.”

“Yes, I have. And I have lived in places where there are Negro people. They are very fine Christians, many of them.”

Boughton said, “Then we can’t have done so badly by them, can we? That is the essential thing.”

Jack looked at him, and then he laughed. “I’d say we’ve done pretty badly. Especially by Christian standards. As I understand them.” Jack sank back into his chair as if he were the most casual man on earth and said, “What do you think, Reverend Ames.”

Ames looked at him. “I have to agree with you. I’m not really familiar with the issue. I haven’t been following the news as closely as I once did. But I agree.”

“It isn’t exactly news—” Jack smiled and shook his head. “Sorry, Reverend,” he said. Robby brought the tractor to show him, let him work the steering wheel, ran the tractor along the arm and over the back of his chair.

Boughton said, “I don’t believe in calling anyone’s religion into question because he has certain failings. A blind spot or two. There are better ways to talk about these things.”

Ames said, “Jack does have a point, though.”

“And I have a point, too. My point is that it’s very easy to judge.”

That was meant to end the conversation, but Jack, who was studying the ice in his glass, said, “True. Remarkably easy in this case, it seems to me.”

“All the more reason to resist that impulse!”

Jack laughed, and Ames looked at him, not quite reprovingly. Jack’s gaze fell.

Boughton said, “If there is one thing the faith teaches us clearly it is that we are all sinners and we owe each other pardon and grace. ‘Honor everyone,’ the Apostle says.”

“Yes, sir. I know the text. It’s the application that confuses me a little.”

Ames said, “I think your father has shown us all a good many times how he applies that text.”

Jack sat back and held up his hands, a gesture of surrender. “Yes, sir. Yes, he has. For which I have special reason to be grateful.”

Ames nodded. “And so have I, Jack. So have I.”

There was a silence. Her father averted his face, full as it was of vindication and conscious humility.

Lila came up the walk. Jack saw her first and smiled and stood. Ames turned and saw her and stood, also. When she came through the screen door, Boughton gestured toward his friend and his son and said, “I’d stand up, too, my dear, if I could.”

“Thank you, Reverend.” She said, “I can’t stay. I just come to tell John I fixed a supper for him. It’s cold cuts and a salad, so there’s no hurry about it.”

Boughton said, “Join us for a few minutes. Jack will get you a chair.”

Jack said, “Please take mine, Mrs. Ames. I’ll bring one from the kitchen.” And he seated her beside his father with that gallantry of his that exceeded ordinary good manners only enough to make one wonder what was meant by it.

Glory thought Jack might have made an excuse to have a word or two with her about how she thought things were going, so she went into the kitchen after him. She was ready to tell him it might be time to mention the weather, baseball, even politics. But he pointedly did not meet her gaze and went out to the porch again.

Ames said to his wife, “We were just talking about the fact that the way people understand their religion is an accident of birth, generally speaking. Where they were born.”

Jack said, “Or what color they were born. I mean, that is a subject of the article. Indirectly. It seems to me.”

Lila could never really be drawn into these conversations, though Ames tried to include her. She seemed more interested by the fact that people talked about such things than she was by anything they talked about, and she watched the currents of emotion pass among them, watchful when they were intent and amused when they laughed.

Boughton said, “Yes, that’s very interesting.” Then he fell back on his experience of Minneapolis, his closest equivalent to foreign travel. “Mother and I went up to the Twin Cities from time to time, and we saw Lutheran churches everywhere. Just everywhere. A few German Reformed, but the Lutherans outnumber them twenty to one, I believe. That’s an estimate. Minneapolis is a large city. There may be Presbyterians in areas we didn’t visit.”

Jack said, rather abruptly, “Reverend Ames, I’d like to know your views on the doctrine of predestination. I mean, you mentioned the accident of birth.”

Ames said, “That’s a difficult question. It’s a complicated issue. I’ve struggled with it myself.”

“Let me put it this way. Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?”

“I’m afraid that is the most difficult aspect of the question.”

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.

Ames said, “Yes, Reverend, that may well have been the case.”

Jack said, “Thank you. So the law can’t punish a child for his father’s sins, but the Lord will.”

His father said, “There is the passage in John, the ninth chapter, in which the Lord Himself says, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned.’ Speaking of the man born blind.”

“Yes, sir. But how do we know what He says is not specific to that case? Or that what He means is that sin can’t always be inferred from — misfortune? He doesn’t really say that if the parents had sinned, they would not be punished through the child. As I read it.”

Silence again. Then Ames, clearly irritated, said, “It is true that children suffer when their fathers aren’t good men. Anyone can see that. That’s common sense. It’s a grave error, I think, to interpret their suffering as an act of God, rather than as a consequence of their fathers’ own behavior.”

Boughton said, “We tried to do right by her. We should have done much more, I know that.”

Jack smiled. He said very softly, “I really am a sinful man. Granting your terms.” He shrugged. “Granting my terms.”

Boughton waved this off, a gesture that discouraged elaboration. There was a long silence. Then he said, “Nonsense. That had nothing to do with it.”

“And I don’t know why I am. There’s no pleasure in it. For me, at least. Not much, anyway.”

Boughton covered his face with his hands.

Ames said, “I think your father is tired.”

But Jack continued, very softly. “I’m the amateur here. If I had your history with the question I’d be sick of it, too, no doubt. Well I do have a history with it. I’ve wondered from time to time if I might not be an instance of predestination. A sort of proof. If I may not experience predestination in my own person. That would be interesting, if the consequences were not so painful. For other people. If it did not seem as though I spread a contagion of some kind. Of misfortune. Is that possible?”

Ames said, “No. That isn’t possible. Not at all.”

“No,” his father said. “It just isn’t.”

Jack laughed. “What a relief. Because that visiting of the sins, it seems to describe something. It works the other way, too. The sins of the sons are visited on the fathers.”

There was a silence. Then Ames said, “‘If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.’ That’s from the First Epistle of John.”

Jack nodded. “He is writing to the ‘beloved,’ the church. I do not enjoy the honor of membership in that body.”

“I don’t know why you want to insist on that,” his father said. “Why you want to set yourself apart like that. You were baptized and confirmed just like anybody else. How can you know all this Scripture when all you do is reject it?”

Ames said, “He doesn’t exactly reject it, Robert. He’s clearly given it a good deal of thought.”

“Still. It seems almost like pride to me.”

Jack said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be disrespectful. My question is, are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell?”

Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Scripture is not really clear on that point. Generally, a person’s behavior is consistent with his nature, which is to say that his behavior is consistent. The consistency is what I mean when I speak of his nature.”

Boughton chuckled. “Do I detect a little circularity in your reasoning, Reverend Eisenhower?”

Jack said, “People don’t change, then.”

“They do, if there is some other factor involved. Drink, say. Their behavior changes. I don’t know if that means their nature has changed.”

Jack smiled. “For a man of the cloth, you’re pretty cagey.”

Boughton said, “You should have seen him thirty years ago.”

“I did.”

“Well, you should have been paying attention.”

“I was.”

Ames was becoming irritated, clearly. He said, “I’m not going to apologize for the fact that there are things I don’t understand. I’d be a fool if I thought there weren’t. And I’m not going to make nonsense of a mystery, just because that’s what people always do when they try to talk about it. Always. And then they think the mystery itself is nonsense. Conversation of this kind is a good deal worse than useless. In my opinion.”

Glory said, “Your five minutes aren’t up yet.”

Jack glanced up at her blandly, not quite smiling, touching his fingertips together as if there were no such thing in the world as a hint. So she went into the parlor and turned on the radio and took up a book and tried to read, and tried to stop wanting to make sense of words she was doing her best not to hear. The Presbyterian Church. Redemption. Karl Barth. She read one page over three times without giving it enough of her attention to remember anything about it, and the radio was playing the William Tell Overture, so she set the book aside and went to stand in the doorway.

Lila said, “What about being saved?” She spoke softly and blushed deeply, looking at the hands that lay folded in her lap, but she continued. “If you can’t change, there don’t seem much point in it. That’s not really what I meant.”

Jack smiled. “Of course I myself have attended tent meetings only as an interested observer. I would not have wanted to find my salvation along some muddy riverbank in the middle of the night. Half the crowd there to pick each other’s pocket, or to sell each other hot dogs—”

Lila said, “—Caramel corn—”

He laughed. “—Cotton candy. And everybody singing off key—” They both laughed.

“—to some old accordion or something—” she said, never looking up.

“And all of them coming to Jesus. Except myself, of course.” Then he said, “Amazing how the world never seems any better for it all. If I am any judge.”

“Mrs. Ames has made an excellent point,” Boughton said, his voice statesmanlike. He sensed a wistfulness in Ames as often as he was reminded of all the unknowable life his wife had lived and would live without him. “Yes, I worried a long time about how the mystery of predestination could be reconciled with the mystery of salvation.”

“No conclusions?”

“None that I can recall just now.” He said, “It seems as though the conclusions are never as interesting as the questions. I mean, they’re not what you remember.” He closed his eyes.

Jack finally looked up at Glory, reading her look and finding in it, apparently, anxiety or irritation, because he said, “I’m sorry. I think I have gone on with this too long. I’ll let it go.”

Lila said, never looking up from her hands, “I’m interested.”

Jack smiled at her. “That’s kind of you, Mrs. Ames. But I think Glory wants to put me to work. My father has always said the best way for me to keep out of trouble would be to make myself useful.”

“Just stay for a minute,” she said, and Jack sat back in his chair, and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself. Then she looked up at him and said, “A person can change. Everything can change.”

Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He felt a sort of wonder for this wife of his, in so many ways so unknown to him, and he could be suddenly moved by some glimpse he had never had before of the days of her youth or her loneliness, or of the thoughts of her soul.

Jack said, very gently, “Why, thank you, Mrs. Ames. That’s all I wanted to know.”

THE NEXT MORNING THE MAIL CAME EARLY, SO SHE SAW it first. Jack was upstairs. Once he would have been waiting somewhere, lingering, even an hour before the usual time for it to come, but that sharp old hope seemed to have dulled a little. Notes to her from her sisters. And four of Jack’s letters, addressed to Della Miles in Memphis. They were unopened, and the words Return to Sender were written across each one, in bold print and underlined. She put the envelopes facedown on the hall table and went into the kitchen to collect herself.

Glory had begun to despise this Della. The woman had to have a fairly good idea of the misery she was causing, if she knew Jack at all. Granted that she had no obligation to be in love with him, simply because he was in love with her. Granted that his persistence must seem irksome, unwelcome as it was — by now she had certainly made that clear. But she had read French novels with him, and had embroidered his sleeve with flowers, for heaven’s sake. Don’t laugh while you’re smoking, he had said, if you’re carrying a birthday cake. He had showered himself with ashes. Then all that whimsical, meticulous embroidery, not mending but commemoration. What was it that had made them laugh? Whoever Della was, she knew him too well to treat him this way. She could ignore his letters if she wanted to. But this was cruelty.

Since Glory had seen the letters, she would have to tell him they had been returned. She thought of putting them back in the box and letting him find them himself. But what was the point of that? He might think he could keep them a secret from her, since that was always his first impulse, and then she couldn’t speak with him about them, which she thought she should do, at least to offer him comfort, if she could think of any comfort to offer. Four letters! If any more came back like that, she would burn them. The point was made. She thought she might take three of these, or two, and hide them somewhere and burn them when she had the chance, since two would be sufficient for this Della’s purposes. Two would be unambiguous but not quite so insulting.

She might say, How do you know it was Della who sent them back? It might have been her father. The printing was very bold, even allowing for the emphasis intended. Her impression of Della had been of someone with a lighter touch, a kind of delicacy she would not depart from if only because she herself was not quite aware of it. But what did she know about Della, except that Jack had courted her as if she were the virtuous lady in an old book? Poetry. Flowers, no doubt. All with a fresh shave and polished shoes and that air of mild irony he assumed whenever his sincerity embarrassed him.

Jack came down the stairs and went out to the mailbox, then came back in again. She went into the hallway. He found the letters lying where she had put them. His back was turned to her, but she could see the shock travel up his body. His weight on his heels, the setting of his knees, and then the recoil in his shoulders. He turned the letters over in his hands. He knew she was watching, and he said, “Have any more of these come back?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t keep it from me if they did.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that. I wish I could.”

He nodded.

She said, “I wanted to think a little before I gave them to you.”

He nodded. “Any ideas?”

“Well,” she said, “you haven’t told me much about all this, but from what you have told me, I thought it might not be Della who sent them back. I thought it might be her father or someone else in her family. You said she’s living with her family. This doesn’t really seem like her, my impression of her, anyway.”

He shook his head. “Mine either.” He dropped the letters on the table again. He turned around and smiled at her. “Not much to do, is there.”

Glory said, “I was wondering if you had a mutual friend you could write to. Maybe the friend could send a letter from you, and she would read it. I mean, if her father or someone is keeping her from reading your letters, that might be a way to reach her. It could be worth a try.”

He nodded. “I’ll give it some thought.” He said, “I don’t blame her, though. I don’t blame her father, if he did it. I understand it. They’re good people. I should just — respect her judgment. Or his. I’m pretty used to the idea by now.” He said, “I’ve sent a couple more letters. I suppose they’ll come back, too. If you’d burn them, I’d be grateful.”

“Should I burn these?”

He nodded. He touched the table as if it reminded him of something that had mattered once, and then he shrugged. “I don’t really know what to do with myself. Any suggestions?”

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS THREE MORE LETTERS CAME back. She made careful fires of small kindling in the fireplace and tended them until each of the letters was burned to ashes. Jack saw her kneeling there, Jack who had taken to wearing his suit again, jacket open and tie loose to acknowledge the late-summer heat. He watched from the door, smiled and nodded to her, and stepped away when she tried to speak to him. There was still courtesy, taken back to what was for him its essence, the dread and certainty of being unwelcome, a bother, out of place. He had fallen back on estrangement, his oldest habit. As if he knew his unease made him seem aloof, he left the house in the morning and stayed away until evening, too late for supper but in time to spare his father his darkest fears. She left biscuits on the counter with the thought that he might pocket a few of them, and he did. She set out oatmeal cookies and hard-boiled eggs. She left coffee for him in a thermos bottle and a cup beside it, which he washed and put away. While he was gone she was very careful to see to everything he might have helped her with, so that he would not have to choose between the embarrassment of imposing on her and the forced familiarity of her company. And she prayed for him and prayed for him, she and her father, in long, silent graces that were grateful in anticipation of their relief at hearing him come through the door.

At supper the third night her father said, “I don’t know what it is, Glory. I don’t know what has happened.”

She said, “He is in love with a woman he knew in St. Louis.”

“Well, I figured out that much. All those letters.”

“Yes. The last week she’s been returning his letters.”

“Oh.” He took off his glasses and blotted his face with his napkin. After a moment he said gruffly, “I thought that might happen. Something like that. He doesn’t have a job. I don’t believe he ever graduated from college. He’s not a young man, not likely to change his life, and I don’t think it’s been a very good life. I can see why a woman might—” He cleared his throat. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“He’s known her for years. Those ten good years he talks about. He says she has helped him.”

Her father looked at her. “And they were never married at all?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her father looked somber. A failed lie meant his suspicions were correct, and she had probably never lied to him successfully. In fact, lying in that family almost always meant only that the liar would appreciate discretion. So the transparency of a falsehood was very much to the point. She had cordoned off her own embarrassments from inquiry by means of a few explanations that were false on their face and never tested or returned to for that reason. As a matter of courtesy they treated one another’s deceptions like truth, which was a different thing from deceiving or being deceived. In fact, it was a great part of the fabric of mutual understanding that made their family close.

She told some truth in this case because she was offended for Jack’s sake by the suggestion that he had simply thrown himself at a woman and been rejected, as if he were not ruefully aware as anyone could be of his utter ineligibility. It must have been this Della who kept him safe despite everything they feared, who may have kept him alive, and in any case who had made the world a tolerable place for him for a while, as they had somehow never managed to do. Jack had said that he worried about the casting of aspersions on Della and on their relationship, told her about trying to defend her honor, and Glory knew even as she did it that she should not have mentioned those ten years. Still, Jack should not be made to seem like a fool. And Della, whoever she was, had not reckoned his worth in terms of his prospects, for heaven’s sake. That much had to be said for her.

She knew she had made a grave mistake in giving her father’s anxieties some grounding in fact. She said, “The woman is a minister’s daughter.”

Her father nodded. “And Jack is a minister’s son.” Then he said, “There are no children involved.” This was a statement of the kind that meant he did not want his hope contradicted.

“No,” she said. From time to time she had wondered, too.

His face settled into that grave look it took on when he felt some sort of moral intervention was required of him. It was a sad, even a bitter look, because only the lack or failure of other approaches could induce him to fall back on this one, and because he knew it had never yielded any wholly good result. It might be that Jack had obligations he could not meet. If he did, then the family must act on behalf of those to whom he was obligated. Especially since they were no doubt also family. The old man would have to know what he was dealing with here, even though Jack was sure to be offended. His questions would inevitably sound like accusation. Such misery, just to learn what he did not want to know.

IF JACK HAD MARRIED THAT FRECKLED CHILD, OR AT LEAST if they had managed to bring her and her baby into their household, then he could have gone back to college and the girl could have finished school and gone to college herself, if she wanted to. “She seems bright enough,” Glory’s mother had said. That was her interpretation of the precocious, intractable hostility toward the Boughtons that would not be moved or swayed by any kindness they could contrive. She was a hard, proud, unsmiling girl, and she may well have hated them all for their benevolent intentions, which were indeed condescending, reflecting as they did their awareness that her circumstances could be improved, that she might benefit from being gently instructed in the proper care of an infant even though this would involve overruling her mother.

Once, Glory had talked that freckled child into coming to her house to pick apples, she said, and bake a pie. Annie was her name. Annie Wheeler. She came out to the gate dressed the way schoolgirls dressed on Saturdays, in dungarees and an oversized shirt. She carried the baby on her hip. They sailed off to Gilead, the girl acknowledging no pleasure at all at having the top down on a bright afternoon, or at stopping for ice cream cones to eat as they drove. The baby gummed at the ice cream and put her hand in it, and her mother said, “Now look at you!” and licked a smear of ice cream off the baby’s chin and the palm of the baby’s hand.

It was all Glory’s idea. Her parents were gone for the day to a wedding in Tabor. She had not spoken to them about her plan. She drove very carefully.

They went out to the orchard, and the girl stood silently with the baby on her hip and watched Glory pick apples. When she said she had picked enough for the pie but would pick a few more for the girl to take home, she said, “We got apples.” Well, of course they would have them. There were apple trees everywhere anyone had ever thought to plant them, like lilac bushes and gooseberries and forsythia and rhubarb. She and the girl went into the house and set the baby in the sunlight on the kitchen floor. Her mother gave her a toy she pulled out of her pocket, buttons on a string, and said, “At home she’s got a milk bottle.” So Glory decanted a pint of cream into a drinking glass and rinsed it out and put it on the floor by the baby’s knee. The girl knelt beside her and poured the buttons from her hand into the bottle, then out again, and the baby laughed and did awkward and purposeful things for a while with her toys, and Glory started to make pastry, talking aloud as if to remind herself of the fine points of the process, the need for careful measurement. The girl sat at the table, sipping a root beer.

Then the baby’s back began to round with the weight of her head, and she pitched over on her side and began to kick and fuss. Glory said, “Oh, poor thing!” and took her up and swayed with her and kissed her teary cheek. And the baby struggled and wept and yearned away from her with a weight and strength that surprised her, holding out her arms to her mother. The girl took her and settled her on her hip, and the baby leaned her head against her shoulder, sucked her hand, and drew her breath in gasps of relief. “You just ain’t her mama,” the girl said. “No use crying about it.” She never gave any sign that Glory’s efforts at befriending her were more than an irritation till that morning when she called her and said, “I wish you’d come over to my house. My baby’s got something the matter with her.” She had walked three miles down the road to ask the use of a telephone.

It was an infection a little penicillin could have cured, but there was no penicillin then, or for years afterward. No one was at fault, really. Something like it could have happened even if those two children had come to live in Gilead. Every family had a story that would have ended differently if only there had been penicillin. Chimerical grief — now guilt, now blame, now the thought that it could all have been otherwise.

But how had Jack ever involved himself with that girl? That was where fault lay, impervious to rationalization, finally even to pardon. Such an offense against any notion of honor, her father had said, and so it still seemed to her, and to him, after all those years. She had followed her father’s thoughts back to that old bitterness, and bitterness simmered in his half-closed eyes as he reflected on the inevitability of his disappointment.

IT WAS LATE EVENING WHEN THEY HEARD JACK COME INTO the porch. He might have expected his father to be in the parlor, reading in his Morris chair. The other evenings he had spoken to Glory as he passed, called good night to his father, and gone up to his room. But this time the old man would not leave the table. “I’m going to wait for him. I’m going to stay right here.”

Finding the old man still in the kitchen when he came in, Jack paused, reading the situation as he had always done, aware of having fallen into some frail web of intention. He looked at Glory, then he simply stood there, hat in hand, and waited. Distant, respectful and tentative.

“Jack,” his father said.

“Sir.”

“I think we need to have a conversation.”

“A conversation.”

“Yes. I think you had better tell me how things stand with you.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m tired. I hope to sleep.”

The old man said, “You know perfectly well what I mean. I want you to tell me if there are — obligations that require the help of your family. Things that might have happened there in St. Louis that you haven’t told me about. That trouble you.”

Jack looked at Glory. There it was, however mild and kindly meant, the aspersion he dreaded. He put his hand to his face and said, very softly, “Another time.”

“Sit down, son.”

He smiled. “No.” Then he said, “My obligations are my problem, I’m afraid.” It was his sadness that made him so inaccessibly patient.

His father said, “Your obligations are your problem if you can meet them. If not, they become my problem. Things must be seen to. It’s only decent.”

Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety. He had drawn himself up so that his words would have the force and dignity of their intent, but his eyes were closed and his mouth had turned down and the rectitude of his posture exposed his narrowed shoulders and his fallen throat. Jack gazed at him as if his father were the apparition of all the grief and weariness he had cost him, still gallant in his weakness, ready to be saddened again, ready to be burdened again.

“No. No, sir. Another time.”

“You know there won’t be another time. You’re planning to leave now.”

“I might not be here much longer. I’m trying to make some decisions.”

His father’s head fell to the side. He said, “I hope very much you will decide to stay. Stay for a while.”

Jack said, “That’s very kind.”

“No, it is just a hope of mine. It will be kind of you to give it a little consideration, if you can. Now Glory will help me to bed.”

THE NEXT MORNING THE OLD MAN POKED HIS SPOON AT his cereal for a little while, and then he said, “I want to talk with Ames. You can take me there in the DeSoto.”

The car worked well enough for errands, and Glory had used it to drive the Ameses to the river for a birthday picnic. Her father had not felt comfortable enough to go along that day, and when she mentioned it to Jack, he laughed at the idea—“Et ego in Arcadia”—but at least everything had gone well enough with the car to encourage her to make more use of it. Her father thought often about the DeSoto. In his mind it was an open promise of mobility, a puissance that could also be a boon to his good friend. So his thinking about it was generous and agreeable, tonic. He had not, however, consented to ride in it since the day Jack took them out to the country.

“Mrs. Ames and the boy will be there,” he said.

“I’ll take them to the matinee.”

“Very good.”

Glory arranged the day to her father’s specifications, and after lunch she helped him down the stairs and into the car. There was a ringing loneliness in the house with Jack always away somewhere, and it felt good to her to leave it for a while, to take her father away from it. She drove him past the church and past the war memorial to let him admire the gardens and the trees, and then she took him to Ames’s house and helped him again, out of the car, up the walk, up the steps. Ames seemed startled to find him at his door.

“Yes,” the old man said, “I thought you and I could look after each other while the women are out at the movies. I came over here in the DeSoto.”

Ames pulled a chair away from the table. “Unless you would rather sit somewhere else.”

Boughton said, “No, this has always been my chair, hasn’t it. My pew.” He sat down and hung his cane from the edge of the table and closed his eyes. Lila and Robby came downstairs, Robby with his hair neatly parted and his cheeks pink with scrubbing. Glory took them off to the musty little movie theater, where they watched good triumph over evil by means of some six-shooters and a posse. “Say your prayers!” said the bad guy to the harmless citizen trapped against a canyon wall. And in the moment he so graciously allowed his captive, horses came clattering up from behind him and he was made to drop his gun. Robby was amazed and gratified by this turn of events, which was as much as Glory could hope for. With previews and newsreels and a cartoon, and a short second feature in which good triumphed once again, more than two hours had passed by the time they came blinking out into afternoon sun.

The old men were still sitting at the table, and Jack was with them. He looked at Glory and smiled. “There was no one at home, so I thought something must be the matter. I came here—” She had not seen him for three days, except when he walked past her on the way to the door, saying nothing, tipping his hat as he left, or walked through the kitchen on the way to his room, saying only good night. It had never crossed her mind that he would come looking for them. If they had been there, it might have been the beginning of better times. Just the thought gave her a twinge of blighted joy. She wanted to look at him, to see how he was, but his smile was cool. He might be angry. He must think she had betrayed him. Well, she had betrayed him. Dear God, she hadn’t meant to, and what did that matter, when her father was here confiding in Ames again, telling him under the seal of old friendship what he suspected and what he feared, just as he had done in the endless, excruciating past. It was bad enough last night, the way he spoke to Jack. And now this. If her brother had had one surviving hope, she knew it was that he could find some way to speak to Ames himself, in his own right. She was so glad to get her father out of the house, to give him the comfort of a visit to Ames’s kitchen — how long had it been? She hadn’t thought it through. Her father just sat there with his eyes closed.

Ames was visibly relieved to see the three of them. Robby scrambled into his lap full of the unspent energy the movie had summoned up in him. “You should’ve gone, Papa. You should’ve seen it.” He slapped the bottom of his Cracker Jack box and a few sticky morsels fell out on the table in front of his father. “I’m saving some for Toby.” Then he said, “Here,” and slid off his lap and went to Jack and dug out a few morsels for him. “There’s supposed to be a prize in here,” he said. “Do you see any prize?”

Jack took the box and tilted it to the light and looked into it. He said, “I believe you must have eaten it.”

Robby laughed. “No, I didn’t.”

“You were so interested in that movie you didn’t notice. It could have been a silver dollar and I bet you wouldn’t have noticed it.”

“Oh yes, I would. I’d notice a silver dollar!”

“It was probably a rubber snake. I bet it was a tarantula.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Robby said. “Let me see,” but Jack held the box away from him, peered into it, then extracted something between two fingers. “You’re a pretty lucky kid,” he said. “I’d like to have one of these.”

“What is it? What?”

Jack laid the little toy on the table. “That,” he said, “is a magnifying glass.”

Robby looked at it. “It isn’t very big.”

“Well, you have to start somewhere.”

“Start what?”

“Looking for clues. Here. I think I have a spot on the cuff of my shirt. What does it look like to you?”

Robby peered at it through the little lens. “It just looks like a spot.”

Jack shrugged. “Well, there you are. Case closed.”

Robby laughed, and so did Lila.

Ames said, “Robby, why don’t you run off and find Tobias. He’ll want to see what you’ve got there. Maybe you can find a bug to look at. Now run along.” The boy hesitated, and then he left.

Jack turned to look at Ames, a bland, weary look that meant, “I understand why you do that, why you send your child away.” No doubt Ames and Boughton had just prayed for his soul, probably slandering before heaven whatever life he had had, and had lost, the life he mourned. Deploring it under the name of sin, or some milder word they had agreed on. Transgression. Dishonor. Unmet obligation. He had walked in upon this conjuration of himself in the bleak light of his father’s suspicions, which were innocent and uninformed and therefore no doubt exaggerated to ensure the sufficiency of his intercession. Jack had walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair.

“Mrs. Ames,” he said, “did you enjoy the movie? I’ve seen it a few times myself. The newsreel was interesting. A little strange for a matinee, I thought.”

Lila said, to Boughton and Ames, “The newsreel was terrible. It showed an atom bomb going off, and all the buildings that would have been burned down by it. There were dummies inside, like families eating their supper. They shouldn’t be showing that to children.”

“They shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Boughton said. “They love those mushrooms. All that racket.” He still had not opened his eyes. “Dulles.”

Jack said, “Yes, Dulles. A Presbyterian gentleman, as I understand.”

Boughton snorted. “So he says.”

Jack had settled back in his chair and folded his arms, as he did when he wanted to seem at ease. He said, “They make it hard to bring up children these days. Hard to protect them. I suppose. Fallout in the milk they drink. You’d expect a Presbyterian gentleman to give these things a little more thought. In St. Louis they did a study of what they called ‘deciduous teeth.’ Baby teeth. There was radioactive material in them. It was alarming. To people trying to bring up children. So I have read.”

Ames looked at Jack, a little reprovingly. “Your father certainly has no brief to offer for John Foster Dulles. Neither have I.”

Boughton muttered, “But he’ll vote for Eisenhower.”

After a moment Jack cleared his throat. “Granting that responsibility is not a standard I myself have adhered to, particularly—”

His father opened his eyes.

“Granting that I have been a disappointment. Worse than a disappointment. Still.”

His father looked at him. “No, you haven’t. What’s your point?”

Lila said, “I know what he means. Things don’t make much sense. It’s hard to know who you’re supposed to look up to. That’s true.”

“Yes. No disrespect intended. I just feel I should put in a word for the reprobate among us. For their relative harmlessness. Being their sole representative, of course.” He smiled. “I’m not making excuses. But those of us who take a moment from our nefarious lives to read the news can find it all a little disorienting. Our fault, no doubt.” Then he said, “Reverend Ames, I would appreciate any insight you could give me.”

Ames glanced at him to appraise his sincerity, as if surprised by the possibility that it might be genuine. He said, “That’s a lot to think about.”

“It comes up fairly often. Among people I know. People living at close quarters, with time on their hands—” He laughed.

There was a silence. Boughton had closed his eyes again. His head fell. After a moment Glory said, “I think Papa must be getting tired.”

“I’m right here. You can ask me. I still exist in the first person.”

“Are you tired?”

“Yes, I am. I will want to go home soon. Not just yet.” No one said anything for a minute, and then the old man lifted his head. “Yes, we should be going home.”

Glory would have expected Jack to come with her, hoped he would, but he stayed where he was, as if at ease in his chair, and did not meet her eyes. She walked her father to the car and helped him into it, with Lila, who went along to help him out of the car and up the steps of his own house. After she had settled the old man for a nap, Glory phoned Ames to tell him that Lila would stay and help her make dinner. Robby was having supper with Tobias. Dinner would be ready in an hour or so, but he and Jack could walk over whenever they felt like it. In half an hour Ames came in by himself. He said Jack would be along in a little while, and they waited dinner until it was slightly ruined, and ate in silence.

Her father asked, “Did you and Jack have any kind of talk, the two of you?”

Ames said, “Not really. I think he wanted to talk, but he couldn’t bring himself to say what he had on his mind. He only stayed for a few minutes after you went home.”

“He didn’t give any indication where he might be going?”

“He said he might be late.”

GLORY LISTENED ALL NIGHT FOR THE SOUND OF THE DOOR opening. Twice she put on her robe and shoes and went outside to look in the barn, in the car, the shed, the porch, but her father heard her and called out, called to Jack, thinking, no doubt, that it was Jack he heard. Better to let him think so. She crept upstairs and stayed in her room until morning.

Her father told her not to bother with breakfast, but she made coffee for him and put toast and jam on the lamp table next to his chair. And the newspaper, as if this were an ordinary morning. She did what she could to make him comfortable. He was irritated by the delay.

“I’ll be gone a little while,” she said, and he nodded. He asked nothing, which meant he knew everything.

He said, “You’d better go.”

She dressed and brushed her hair. Then she looked into Jack’s room. The bed was neatly made, his books and clothes were still there, and his suitcase. She found the car keys where she had left them, on the windowsill in the kitchen.

She thought Jack might have found his way out of town somehow, hitched a ride with someone passing through, and if she did not find him in Gilead, she would drive to Fremont to look for him, just to see if he might be on the street. If she was delayed, she would telephone Lila and ask her to look in on her father. Two hours there and back, at best. Her father would be as patient as he could, knowing as he clearly did why she had to leave him.

She put the keys in her pocket and walked out to the barn. She opened the door and stepped into the humid half-darkness. And there he was, propped against the car, with the brim of his hat bent down, holding his lapels closed with one hand. He held the other out to her, discreetly, just at the level of his waist, and said, “Spare a dime, lady?” He was smiling, a look of raffish, haggard charm, hard, humiliated charm, that stunned her.

“It’s your brother Jack,” he said. “Your brother Jack without his disguise.”

“Oh dear Lord! Oh dear Lord in heaven!” she said.

He said gently, “No reason to cry about it. Just a little joke. A kind of joke.”

“Oh, what are we going to do?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. He can’t see me like this. I know that much.”

“Well, where is your shirt?”

“I believe it’s with my socks. I seem to have stuffed them into the tailpipe. The shirt is hanging out of it, the sleeves. Not much good to me now.”

She said, “I have to sit down.” She could hear herself sobbing, and she couldn’t get her breath. She leaned against the car with her arms folded and resting on the roof and wept, so hard that she could only give herself over to it, though it kept her even from thinking what to do next. Jack hovered unsteadily at a distance from her, full of drunken regret.

“You see, I was right to give you the key,” he said. “I guess I tried to start the car without it.” He gestured toward the open hood. “It looks like I did some damage. But I’m glad I didn’t bother you for the key. I’m not always thoughtful. When I’m drinking.”

She said, “I’m going to put you in the backseat, and then I’m going to get some soap and water and a change of clothes, so we can get you back into the house. You can lie down here and wait for me. Stay here now. I’ll be right back.”

He was docile with embarrassment and weariness and relief. He lay down on the seat and pulled up his knees so she could close the door.

When she went into the house her father called to her, “Is Jack here?”

“Yes, Papa, he’s here.” She could not quite control her voice.

There was a silence. “Then I suppose we’ll see him for supper tonight.”

“Yes, I think we will.” Another silence. The old man was giving them time, a reprieve, restraining curiosity and worry and anger and relief, too, while she tended to whatever the situation required. She took a sheet and a blanket and a washcloth and towel from the linen closet at the top of the stairs, and she took a pail from the broom closet, rinsed it out, and filled it with hot water. She had worried about her father’s hearing all this haste and urgency, but clearly he had mustered the courage of patience — yet again, dear Lord, she thought. She dropped the bar of laundry soap into the water and carried the things she had gathered out to the porch step.

Now what. She dragged an Adirondack chair from the side yard to the back of the barn. It was concealed from the neighbors by the lilac bushes. The sunlight was full there, but it was mild enough. She took the sheet with her into the barn through the side door.

“Jack,” she said, “Jack, I want you to take off your clothes and wrap yourself in this sheet and come outside. We’re going to get you clean. Did you hear what I said?”

He moaned and roused himself and squinted up at her.

She said, “I’ll help you. I’ll get you a change of clothes. You’ll feel so much better.”

He shook his head. “I think I ruined my clothes.”

“I’ll take care of that. But you have to give them to me. Then I can try to clean them up.”

He looked at her. “You’re still crying.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry. Terribly sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She took his arm and helped him up, leaned him against the side of the car. “Give me your coat.” Under his coat he was bare-chested. He crossed his arms and laughed with a bitter sort of embarrassment.

“Maybe I should get a little more sleep.” He started to open the car door.

She pushed it shut again. “I don’t have all day. I have Papa to think about. He’s worried half to death. Hold this.” She gave him a corner of the sheet and bundled the rest around him, just under his arms. “Now, I’ll wait for you outside. I have a chair for you out there where no one will see you.”

“I managed to smell like death, at least,” he said. “This seems a little too — appropriate. What is it called? A winding sheet.”

“Oh!” she said. “What should I do with you? Tell me what to do!”

“I wish you wouldn’t cry,” he said. “Give me a minute here. I know you want to help me, Glory.”

She went outside and waited, and in a little while he emerged, barefoot, wincing, abashed by daylight, startlingly white and thin. He lowered himself into the chair and she brought the bucket and the soapy water and the cloth and began to wash him down, starting with his hair and face and neck and shoulders, wringing out the cloth again and again, scrubbing his arms and his hands, which were soiled with grease and were injured, marred. Her father would notice that.

“Lavender,” he said.

She leaned him forward to wash his back. His head lolled on her shoulder. He said, “I once worked in a — mortuary. Briefly.”

“That’s fine,” she said.

“Yes. I didn’t mind. It was quiet.”

“You don’t have to talk.”

“Then a citizen came in. Wrapped in a sheet. Complete stranger. There was a piece of paper tied to his toe, tied on with a red ribbon. It was an IOU with my name on it. My — signature. People sell those for a — fraction of their value.” He looked at her. “Have you ever heard of that? Someone else has your note. You don’t know who to be afraid of.”

“That’s a shame,” she said, since he seemed to hope she would share his sense of injury.

He laughed. “I never even knew how much I owed. On those notes. I never wrote one when I was sober. Couldn’t have been much. I wasn’t, you know, a good risk.”

“Probably not.” She would have to try to shave him. His beard made his face look pallid, and his pallor made his beard look dingy.

“I think they just liked to see me jump,” he said. “I’m highstrung. Never let people know that about you. They figure it out anyway.”

She said, “You should have come home.”

He laughed. “Maybe.” He said, “I failed as a lowlife. But not for want of — application.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

She settled him back against the chair and toweled him down and bundled the blanket around him. She put one of his feet and then the other into the soapy bucket. “That’s the best I can do for now. Are you comfortable? Does the light bother you?”

“I’m all right. Much better. Maybe a glass of water?”

“Yes. I’ll find some clothes for you. I’ll have to go into your room. Is that all right?”

He seemed to drift off and then to startle awake. “My jacket—” he said.

“It’s right here.” She brought it out and hung it on the back of the chair. Then she took the slim leather case out of the breast pocket and, being careful first to dry the place very thoroughly, put it down on the arm of the chair.

“Thank you, Glory,” he said, and he covered it with his hand and closed his eyes again.

“I’ll just get some clothes out of your room. If you don’t mind.”

He said, “You might notice a bottle or two in there.” He laughed. “I’ve been getting into the piano bench lately.”

“You stay right here. I’ll be back.”

She had stopped crying, but she had to sit down in the porch. She put her head on her knees. She imagined him in that bleak old barn in the middle of the night, stuffing his poor socks into the DeSoto’s exhaust pipe, and then, to make a good job of it, his shirt. He’d been wearing his favorite shirt, the one with the beautiful mending on its sleeve. All the drunken ineptitude and frustration, his filthy hands, everything he could reach in the engine pried at, pulled loose. She couldn’t leave him alone for more than a few minutes, but her father needed her, too. She might call Lila. Not yet. Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture. If Jack’s notions of privacy were generally indistinguishable from furtiveness, there was only more reason to be cautious about offending them.

Was this what they had always been afraid of, that he would really leave, that he would truly and finally put himself beyond the reach of help and harm, beyond self-consciousness and all its humiliations, beyond all that loneliness and unspent anger and all that unsalved shame, and their endless, relentless loyalty to him? Dear Lord. She had tried to take care of him, to help him, and from time to time he had let her believe she did. That old habit of hers, of making a kind of happiness for herself out of the thought that she could be his rescuer, when there was seldom much reason to believe that rescue would have any particular attraction for him. That old illusion that she could help her father with the grief Jack caused, the grief Jack was, when it was as far beyond her power to soothe or mitigate as the betrayal of Judas Iscariot. She had been alone with her parents when Jack left, and she had been alone with her father when he returned. There was a symmetry in that that might have seemed like design to her and beguiled her with the implication that their fates were indeed intertwined. Or returning herself to that silent house might simply have returned her to a state of mind more appropriate to her adolescence. A lonely schoolgirl at thirty-eight. Now, there was a painful thought.

She recalled certain moments in which she could see that Jack had withdrawn from her and was looking through or beyond her, making some new appraisal of her trustworthiness, perhaps, or her usefulness, or simply and abruptly losing interest in her, together with whatever else happened just then to be present and immediate. She found no consistency in these moments, nothing she could interpret. He was himself. That is what their father had always said, and by it he had meant that Jack was jostled along in the stream of their vigor and purpose and their good intentions, their habits and certitudes, and was never really a part of any of it. He had eaten their food and slept beneath their roof, wearing the clothes and speaking the dialect of their slightly self-enamored and distinctly clerical family and, for all they knew, intending no parody even when he was old enough to have been capable of it, and to have been suspected of it. A foundling, she thought, even though he had been born in that house at memorable peril to himself and their mother, alarming her two older sisters so severely that for years they had forsworn the married life. Oh, it was the loneliness none of them could ever forget, that wry distance, as if there were injury for him in the fact that all of them were native to their life as he never could be. She was almost disappointed that she couldn’t be angry at him. He had very nearly brought a terrible conclusion to his father’s old age. It would have been an inexpressible, unending grief to the whole family to have the old man’s patience and his hope recoil on him so mercilessly. How resigned to Jack’s inaccessible strangeness she must be to forgive him something so grave, forgive him entirely and almost immediately. They all did that, and he had understood why they did, and he laughed, and it had frightened him. She thought, I will not forgive him for an hour or two.

She took Jack his glass of water. He was dozing in the sunlight, lacquered with sweat. He opened his eyes, only a little, but she saw a glimmer of his familiar, wry despair at himself. “I’d forgotten how much I sweat,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”

She set his feet on the towel and dumped the filmy water out of the pail and went into the house and filled it. She found a sponge. She took them outside and began to bathe him again, his hair, which looked surprisingly thin when it was wet, and his face, his beloved and lamented face. Ah, Jack, she thought. He looked like destitution. He looked like the saddest fantasy she had ever had of the worst that might have become of him, except that he was breathing, and sweating, and a little tense under her touch.

“I can do this,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

So she handed him the sponge and went inside and brought back a razor and shaving cream. “Excuse me,” she said, and lifted his chin. She squirted the foam into her hand and lathered his jaw.

He studied her face. “You’re furious.”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t say I blame you.”

“Don’t talk.”

He looked away. There was grief in his expression, a kind of bewilderment. Could he be surprised? Or was it only the shock of finding himself back in the world, with all his defenses ruined and his one friend lost to him?

She said, “Do that thing with your lip.” So he pulled his lip taut over his teeth and she shaved it. “Now your chin.” And he did the same. She lifted his chin and shaved his throat. Then she wiped away the foam with the sponge and inspected him.

“Good enough,” she said. It was a relief to see him looking more like himself. She smoothed his hair away from his brow. The gentleness of the gesture seemed to come as a relief to him. So she kissed his cheek.

He said, “I’d never have done that if I’d been sober. I don’t even remember — anything about it.” He looked at his hands, as if to confirm to himself that it had happened.

“It’s over now.”

He smiled at her as if to say, No, it isn’t, and it won’t be. “I’m sorry you saw me like that,” he said.

“I’m glad it wasn’t worse.”

He nodded. “Now you know me — some other aspects of my character.”

She said, “Let’s not talk.”

“All right.”

“I still haven’t brought clothes for you. You’ve made me nervous about going into your room. Do I have your permission?”

He laughed. “Yes, you have my permission.”

SO HE WENT INTO THE BARN AND DRESSED HIMSELF AND came out in his father’s dark pants and beautiful old shirt, the sleeves rolled for lack of cuff links. It bothered her that she had forgotten to bring him socks. They walked together up the path to the porch, he behind her, the two of them no doubt looking very unlike two ordinary people who had not passed through fearful and wearying hours together. If anyone saw them, which God forbid. She could hear Jack’s breathing and his footsteps in the grass, neither of which she could take for granted anymore, if she ever had.

They heard voices from the road. He stopped. It was as if he turned to face some last, unimaginable trial. But she said, “It’s nothing to do with us,” and he nodded and followed her again, up the step, into the porch.

“Is that Jack with you?” their father called, and she said, “Yes, Papa,” and Jack smiled at her and shook his head. He was sober enough to know that speech was not a thing he could risk. They went up the stairs, and she drew his blinds and brought a glass of water to set on the night table. She found a ball of socks in the dresser and put it beside the water. He rolled onto his stomach and hugged the pillows to his face. He was relieved to lie down on his own bed, as if he had been too long away from home and had come back again to a kind of rest that meant, That’s all over now, or Now at least I know it will be over sometime.

She washed her face, brushed her hair, and changed her dress and went downstairs to tend to her father. She said, “He’s getting some rest.”

The old man was rigidly wakeful. She knew he had been sitting there, interpreting noises, interpreting her haste and her strained assurances, then Jack’s slow steps on the stairs behind her. He would have interpreted her reddened eyes, too, if he had looked at her. “He’s all right,” he said.

“Yes, he’s all right.”

He closed his eyes. He was as still as if he had expended all the life that remained to him composing himself to accept this cross. His jaw slackened a little, and she thought for a terrible moment that he might have died, but then his hands adjusted themselves on the quilt and she knew it was only sleep.

TIRED AS SHE WAS, SHE COULD NOT POSSIBLY SLEEP. SHE felt lonely, lonely. She found a wire coat hanger in the front closet and straightened it, and went out to the barn. She pulled Jack’s shirt out of the exhaust pipe. He had managed to jam in the tails of it only. The body and the sleeves were lying on the ground, a greasy clay of perpetual dank and animal waste and vehicle seepage, old life and old use whose traces outlasted the memory of them. She caught one sock and then the other with the hanger. So, the proof of what he had intended was removed, and that was a comfort to her, as if she could now stop believing it entirely herself. She put the socks in the fireplace on a pyre of kindling. They made a smoldering fire. Then she filled the sink with water and scrubbed at the shirt, careful of the embroidery. It might be best to let it soak for a while. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and into Jack’s room. She found two pints of whiskey in the bottom drawer, as he had said. He stirred and raised his head and looked at her, irritated, but it was troubled sleep, not awakening. She took the bottles out to the orchard and emptied them on the ground, and put the empty bottles in the shed. Then she went back to the silent house. That shirt. It had to be put out of sight. She squeezed the water out of it and put it on a hanger, carried it out to the shed, and hung it from a nail in the wall behind the door.

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.

She wished it mattered more that the three of them loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little. There was a nice young hen in the refrigerator, and there were carrots. There were bay leaves in the cupboard. Baking powder. Lila would send Robby over with whatever she lacked, knowing better than to ask why Glory or Jack didn’t go to the store themselves. Good Lila. She might know some simple, commonplace treatment for hangover, some cool hand on the brow that would wake Jack from his sweaty sleep, as if penance were swept aside by absolution. If there were such a thing, Jack would know and would have asked for it, unless misery was the way he spoke to himself, unless he had meant to recruit his whole body to the work of misery. There would be a rightness in his grieving in every nerve. However slight her experience, she did know that. And she knew he would sleep for hours, and awake vague and somber.

So she bathed the hen and set it in water with the carrots and an onion and the bay leaves. Some salt, of course. And she turned on the heat. Poor little animal. This life on earth is a strange business.

SHE HAD SAT BY THE SPUTTERING RADIO, TRYING TO INterest herself in The High and the Mighty. She went into the kitchen to turn the little hen onto her belly, and she saw that a blue Chevrolet had pulled into the driveway. Teddy. Of course, Teddy would come just now. Glory felt anxiety, and relief, and resentment. If he had come even a week earlier, he’d have found everything much better, another atmosphere in the house. Instead, he was walking in on failure and shame. She should have called him weeks ago, asked him to come while her father was still a little sprightly and Jack was still all right, even, she had thought, healthy. At least not unhealthy, not miserable. She had felt, she knew now, that she was sustaining a familial peace — fragile, certainly, and only more remarkable for that. Jack, who had never trusted any of them, trusted her. Not always, not wholly, not without reservations of a kind he did not divulge and she could not interpret. Still, even Teddy would have envied the talking and joking and the moments of near-candor, the times they were almost at ease with each other. She had been so proud of all that, pleased to believe it was providential that she should be there, having herself just tasted the dregs of experience, having been introduced to something bleaker than ordinary failure — it was a sweet providence that sent her home to that scene of utter and endless probity, where earnest striving so predictably yielded success, and Boughton success at that, the kind amenable to being half-concealed by the rigors of yet more earnest striving. Not that she could entirely forget the bitterness of her chagrin, not that she preferred the course her life had taken to the one she had imagined for it. But she did feel she had been rescued from the shame of mere defeat by the good she was able to do her brother.

Teddy walked into the porch, into the kitchen, threw his arms around her, and kissed her forehead. “Hiya, babe,” he said, making a brief study of her face, noting and ignoring the weariness of it. “Good to see you! How’s it going? Do you mind if I make a few phone calls?”—all this in a very soft voice, since he knew his father was probably asleep. He leaned in the hallway, giving advice and assurance, making three attempts to reach someone who didn’t answer. Then he hung up the phone and came back and hugged her again, comforting her, though he said nothing. Teddy used to be just Jack’s height, a slightly sturdier version of him, without the tentativeness that made Jack always seem to be taking a step back. Now Teddy was taller, she thought, no doubt the effect of quiet purposefulness on the one hand and evasiveness and generalized reluctance on the other. Once again he studied her face. She had been frightened so recently, and she was sad, and so tired, and it was all surely visible to him. “I hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” he said. “It’s been hard to stay away. I finally gave in.”

“This is a good time. As good as any, I suppose.” What excuse was there for keeping him, all of them, away while their father dozed through whatever time remained to him, even though the old man himself did not ask her to send for them? Teddy could have blamed her for letting things get worse without calling him. It was pride, or it was shame that had made her hope Jack would recover himself enough to let the others see that things had been good between them. Though there was their father, too. But she saw nothing of anger or accusation in Teddy’s manner. A calm, affable man who went about his doctoring with scrupulous detachment and a heavy heart, he saw enough misery in the ordinary course of his life to avoid adding to it, except when compelled to on medical grounds.

“Is he here?”

She said, “He’s upstairs.”

“Would he mind if I said hello to him?”

She said, “Why should he mind?” and they laughed, ruefully. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

JACK WAS LYING ON HIS BACK WITH AN ARM ACROSS HIS face, to shield his eyes from the light that came through the drawn blinds. When he heard her at the door he rolled away from her.

“What,” he said. “What is it.”

“Teddy’s here.”

He laughed. “I wondered when you were going to get around to that. Calling Teddy.”

“I didn’t ask him to come. He just came on his own, as far as I know.”

He turned to look at her. “You’re whispering. So he must be downstairs.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t hear his car. I guess I was asleep.”

“Well, he’d like to see you.”

“Have you told him?”

“No. Should I?”

“Please don’t. Don’t, Glory. It will never happen again, I swear.” He rubbed his face. “I’ll have to wash up. I shouldn’t have slept in this shirt. I could use an aspirin.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “Where did I leave my shoes?” He rubbed his eyes. “Teddy,” he said. “That’s just what I need right now.”

She brought him the bottle of aspirin and a glass of water. Then she brought him a washcloth and a towel.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I’ll tell him you’ll be down in a few minutes. I’ll start some coffee.”

“Yes, coffee,” he said, scrubbing his face and his neck, then his face again. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry about all this.”

She went down to the kitchen. Teddy was standing in the porch looking out at the garden. “You’ve been busy,” he said.

“Jack did most of it.”

He looked at her, to gauge the ratio of truth to loyalty in what she said, ready to be pleased with either of them, just wanting the information. “Then he must be doing all right.”

“He was for a while.”

“I see.” Teddy with his crisp hair and his groomed hands, his soft brown sweater and his tortoiseshell glasses. He was mild and reassuring in every way he could be, by nature, habit, and intention. There was something of the scent of rubbing alcohol about him, so faint that he must have known it suggested illness or emergency and have scrubbed it off as carefully as he could. That would account for the cologne he wore, his only departure from decorous simplicity. After a few minutes he said, “I can leave, if that’s what he wants. I knew he wouldn’t be too happy to see me. You can tell him I won’t stay long.”

“Give him a few more minutes. He’ll be down. He probably wanted to clean up a little.”

Teddy laughed. “And polish his shoes, I suppose. Has he changed a lot?”

“I didn’t know him as well as you did. He’s still Jack.”

“Dad told me you and he get along. He worried about that.”

Jack came down the stairs in his stocking feet, wearing one of his own shirts, still trying to button a sleeve. He stopped by the door, glanced at Glory, and smiled. He folded the cuff over twice, then unbuttoned the other sleeve and rolled it up, too.

His brother said, “Jack.”

Jack said, “Teddy.”

“How are you, Jack? It’s good to see you.”

Jack propped himself against the counter and folded his arms. It was fairly obvious how he was. Still, Glory wished he were not so thin, that he’d put on a better shirt, that it was not so hard for him to raise his eyes. “I’m all right,” he said. He smiled and shrugged. “I’ve been looking for work.”

Teddy drew a breath. He said, “I’m your brother, Jack! Jesus Christ!”

Jack laughed.

“I mean, it’s fine if you’re looking for work. But it’s none of my business, is it.” Then he said, “Hey, Jack. Can we shake hands, at least?”

Jack shrugged. “Of course.”

Teddy went to his brother and took Jack’s hand in both his hands and held it. “So it’s true. You’re really here. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve hardly been able to believe it.”

Jack laughed. “I could show you the wound in my side if you like.” Then, “Sorry.” And his head fell, and it was real regret. He was so tired of himself.

Teddy didn’t study him, exactly, though there was always something of the doctor in his kindest attention. They teased him about it. Once, when he had looked too intently into Hope’s eyes, she pulled down a lower lid to accommodate his scrutiny. Now he could not help but notice Jack’s color, notice how thin his hand was, that it trembled. How could he help but notice these things, and how could Jack not step back from him, with a smile of irritation?

“You’re a good man, Teddy. I remember you said that time I talked with you in St. Louis that you wouldn’t come looking for me again. I appreciated that.”

“Well, the fact is, I did. I just didn’t find you. I came back six times altogether. The last time was about two years ago.” He said, “Once, I thought I’d found your hotel. The fellow at the desk said you were staying there. That was a long time ago. My third trip, I think. I left an envelope with a note in it and some money. I guess it never got to you.”

Jack shook his head. “No.” Then he said, “Did the fellow have a bad eye?” He touched his face.

“Terrible,” Teddy said. “Did he ever see anybody about it?”

Jack smiled. “I wouldn’t know. The bastard evicted me. Sorry.”

“Well, I promised to leave you alone, and then I made a pretty good try at going back on my word. Sometimes I’d just get the feeling I had to see you again, and I’d take off for St. Louis. A couple of times I called home from the road to tell them where I was. I’d think I was going to get a tank of gas and I’d find myself headed for Missouri.”

Jack said, “I’ve put you to a lot of trouble.”

“No, no. Looking for you was sort of the next best thing to finding you. It made me feel like we were still brothers, I suppose.”

Jack said, “If we’re being honest — I saw you there once. You were getting out of your car. It was a black Chevy. You were wearing a brown sweater that day, too. I stepped into a cigar store and waited until you drove away. I had to buy a magazine because I’d read most of it. That didn’t make sense to me, but it did to the clerk. It took my last quarter.”

Teddy laughed. “Okay,” he said, and tears started down his cheeks. “I guess that doesn’t surprise me.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

Jack said quietly, “I don’t want you to give a damn about me. Any of you. I never did.” He looked at Glory as if he might apologize, and then there was a silence. He laughed. “What an asinine remark that was. I’m really sorry. It sort of makes a point, though.”

Teddy nodded. “There is clearly a good deal of truth in it.”

“I’m not sure I understand it myself. I don’t know why you’d put up with it. Me.”

Teddy said, “That is an interesting question. For another time.”

Jack laughed. He stood up. When they both looked at him he said, “Getting coffee. Would you like some more, Glory? Teddy? He took up Glory’s cup and saucer, but they chattered in his hand so he put them down. “I’ll get the pot.” When he had finished serving them he propped himself against the counter again.

“I’m doing all right, too,” Teddy said. “Hanging together. No major problems at the moment. So far as I know.”

Jack said, “Glad to hear it.”

Then their father called, “Is that Teddy! I believe I hear Teddy!” His voice was urgent with relief and joy.

Teddy said, “Here I am, Dad. I’m coming.” He went into the old man’s room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and took him up in his arms. The old man put his arms around him, rested his head on his shoulder, and wept. “I’m so glad you’re here, Teddy!” he said. He tried to speak in his reasonable, fatherly voice, but it was broken by sobs. “It’s been hard, Teddy. I knew it would be. But it’s been very hard!” And he wept. “I’m so old!” he said.

Teddy stroked his back and his hair. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.”

Jack looked at Glory and smiled. He was very pale. “What the hell have I been doing?” He said, “What a fool—” And he went upstairs. She heard his door close.

The old man said, “Glory has been such a help. He doesn’t talk to me, but he talks to her. Sometimes I hear them laughing, and that’s very good, but I don’t think she can reason with him. I know I can’t.”

Teddy said, “I left my bag in the car. I’ll get it and check you over a bit, listen to your chest, and then we can worry about Jack.” He was the only doctor their father would allow anywhere near him, since the local fellow had suggested that brandy might ease his discomfort a little, and then had given him a tonic which the old man swore was concocted of whiskey and prune juice.

“No, no, Teddy, I don’t care about my heart, that’s very kind. What I want is just to see the two of you together. Is Jack here? I hope you find him, because it seems like I never even get a clear look at him. If you could just stand there beside him, I believe that might help me. I rest all the time, but I can’t get my strength up. So I thought you might help me.”

“Sure, Dad.” Teddy came out to the hallway and called up the stairs, “Jack, would you come here for a minute.” When there was no response, he raised his voice. “Hey, Jack, get down here. Dad wants to see you.” A minute passed and Jack came down the stairs. Teddy said, “He wants to see us together.”

Jack said, “You coming, Glory?” and paused to let her go ahead of him. He had that cautious, distant look, absent the calculation she had learned to recognize as hope. Her father seemed to have forgotten her, and Jack wanted her there, as if she could somehow support him or defend him. But there was a respect in the gesture that Teddy noticed, too, and he set the chair for her by her father’s bed, as if to show that he had not meant to slight her.

“Yes,” their father said, “this is wonderful. Could you stand a little closer, Jack?”

He shrugged. “Sure. If you say so.”

“Yes, now I can see all of you.” He glanced at Jack’s face, then glanced away. “I want a picture of you in my mind, together like that.” After a moment he said, “I have thought so often of when you were boys, and sometimes people would ask if you were twins. There was such a resemblance. That changes over time, of course.”

Jack laughed.

Teddy said, “Somehow I got all the gray hair.”

“Responsibility does that,” the old man said. “You were always the one to take responsibility. Much more than your share.”

“I was always the one to worry,” Teddy said.

“Yes, it comes to the same thing. I’ve worried, myself, the Good Lord knows. That took a great part of my life, I realize, looking back on it.”

Jack rested his hand on the back of Glory’s chair.

“Now I have to put all that aside and stop tormenting myself with the thought that I can do anything about — anything. Yes. But the Lord does work through human beings, through families.” He cleared his throat. “Part of it is giving care and another part is accepting it. That second part is difficult and very important. I know I’ve been a burden to everybody for years and years, and you have all been very good to me. And I’ve enjoyed that, even though I never enjoyed the suffering and the general uselessness that made it necessary. And I hope I have made it clear that I thank God for you, that you have been a great blessing to me. In the time he has been home, Jack has shown great kindness to me. Glory, too, of course. Yes.”

He closed his eyes, and frowned with the carefulness he brought to forming his conclusion.

“That’s what the family is for,” he said. “Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it. As if it came from the Lord Himself. Which it does. So I want you boys to promise me you will help each other.”

Jack laughed.

“And accept help, too. I want you to shake hands and promise me that, too.”

Teddy held out his hand, and Jack took it and released it.

Teddy said, “I promise.”

Jack said, “All right.”

His father looked at him. “What was that, Jack? I thought I heard you say ‘All right.’ I’m sorry, but that seems a bit evasive.”

Jack said, “Yes, sir, I guess it was. I just don’t see how I’m supposed to keep up my side of it. How I could help Teddy.”

“Well, that’s what I mean about receiving help. Teddy took a world of responsibility for you, every way you’d let him do it, and it was because his happiness depended on yours. So the greatest kindness you could ever have shown him was to accept the good he intended for you. You owed him that much. And I mean spiritual help, too. Particularly spiritual help.”

Teddy smiled at Jack and shrugged, sorry for their father’s candor and helpless to bring an end to it. He said, “I just liked Jack. I liked to spend time with him. He doesn’t owe me anything.”

“Oh!” their father said. “I am not in the mood to argue.” His voice broke. “I asked Jack to promise, and he wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to hear you making excuses for him. That has happened far too often, in my opinion.” He was weeping.

Jack said, “No, I was just asking a question. I’ll promise. I mean, I do promise.”

His father did not open his eyes, but he said with great dignity, “I believe I anticipated your question, Jack, and I believe I answered it. Now I’m tired.” And he turned toward the wall.

Teddy went to him and smoothed his hair away from his face, and very gently and casually he laid his fingertips on his brow and his temple and the artery in his neck. He took a handkerchief from the drawer where his father kept them and touched the tears off the old man’s face, lifting his head to dry the wetter, downward side. Then, still holding his head, he turned the pillow to make it dry and cool. He lifted the blanket and sheet to straighten them, and glanced at his father’s slight and crooked body.

“Where’s your stethoscope?” the old man asked.

“It’s in the car.”

“A good place for it. My heart will do whatever it wants to, and it has my permission. Same for my lungs.” Then he said, “You might look in on Ames.”

Teddy stood there, lightly caressing the old man’s hair and face with the handkerchief. “How about some aspirin?”

“No harm in it, I suppose.”

Jack said, “I think I just used it up. I mean, I used it up.”

“I keep it in my bag. So that’s no problem. I’ll leave a bottle here for you.”

Jack put his hands to his face and laughed. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“No matter.” He glanced at Jack, took note of his color, the tremor in his injured hands. “There’s plenty for everybody.”

Glory went to the car, found the pebbly black bag in the passenger seat, and brought it into the kitchen. Opened, it smelled strongly of leather and rubbing alcohol. There were cotton balls and tongue depressors in glass bottles, and thermometers, and assorted pills and salves and syrups and the stethoscope and several bottles of aspirin. When Glory brought the glass of water and two tablets, Teddy looked at them and said, “Three.” He watched her prop her father up to help him swallow. Then he tucked him in again and said, “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some sleep.”

He went into the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and set it on the table with three aspirin tablets next to it. “I use a lot of the stuff myself,” he said, and held up his right hand. The fingers had begun to enlarge at the knuckles and twist out of line.

Jack said, “That’s hard.”

Teddy nodded. “I wish it was only my hands. You’re okay?”

“So far.”

“Glory?”

“I seem to be.”

“Well,” he said, “at least I know how tough the old fellow has been all these years. It’s no wonder he gets cross. How’s he eating?”

Glory said, “Not very well lately.”

Teddy nodded. “What are you making, Glory? Chicken and dumplings? He’ll enjoy that, if there’s anything in the world he can still enjoy.” He said, “It smells great. I’m sorry I can’t stay for supper. I have another doctor covering for me, but when people are in trouble they like to see a familiar face. So I’d better get back to work.” He hugged Glory, and he held out his hand to Jack. “It’s been wonderful to see you,” he said. “It really has.”

Jack said, “Yes. Thanks.” Then, “Teddy, you know, I’d like to ask you something, if you could spare a few more minutes. It’ll probably be a waste of your time. I know you have to leave.”

Teddy set his bag by his chair and sat down again at the table. “Are you kidding? I can spare the time! I see patients every day of my life. Seeing you is — very exceptional.” Then he said, “I’ll just make a few phone calls.”

JACK SAT DOWN AT THE TABLE, NEXT TO HIS BROTHER, SO he could speak softly. He said, “What does he want me to tell him? I mean, I know what he wants, but how do I say it?” He looked at Teddy. “The problem is, I’ll be lying. I thought that mattered. Well, I suppose it does matter. I’d know what to say otherwise.” He laughed. “I flattered myself that I had a scruple. But I was just making the poor old devil miserable for no reason. Except that I didn’t know how to end it. I realize that now. Glory said it would be all right. If I tried to, you know, talk to him.”

Teddy took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “So you want to put him at ease about the state of your soul. That’s a good idea, I think.”

Jack laughed. “That may be more than I can hope for. I’d like to tell him I believe in — something. Maybe not the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. But something.”

“Well.” Teddy toyed with his glasses. Then he sat back. “You know, I thought about the ministry for a while. Very seriously. But I had to face the fact that I wasn’t good at talking about these things. It wasn’t my calling, as they say. Have you spoken with Ames?”

Jack said, “I’ve tried, a couple of times. It doesn’t matter. I just thought I’d ask.”

“No, I don’t mean we should give up on this. I’m just reminding you of my limitations. This will take some effort.”

“You have to go.”

Teddy shook his head. “This is for the old fellow’s comfort. A legitimate medical concern.”

“All right. Thanks.”

There was a silence.

Teddy said, “It might help to take a few notes.” He reached up under his sweater and took a pen and a prescription pad from his shirt pocket. He put his glasses back on. Another silence. Then he wrote, in the upper-left-hand corner, Beliefs: Jack leaned over to read what he had written, and he laughed. Teddy tore off the page and crushed it into a little ball. “My thought was,” he said, “that if we found something you could say to him honestly, we could go on from there. We’d have something to start with.”

Jack said, “That’s a thought.” Then he said, “What would you say if you were in my situation? I mean, he has never asked you to — give him any assurances. Has he?”

Teddy shook his head. “I never left the church. I guess that was assurance enough.”

“But you still, I mean, you do—”

“Sure. I have patients in the polio hospital. Sometimes I pray about as often as I breathe.”

“That helps—”

“It helps me. I can do my work.”

Jack nodded.

Teddy said, “These past few years have been pretty hard. There aren’t many new cases anymore, thank God.”

“Yes, I’ve read about that vaccine they have now.”

Glory said, “Lila’s afraid of it. She saw an article that said it sometimes causes polio.”

“Well, in a few cases it has. It’s probably safe for her to wait a year, till they’ve improved it. I haven’t vaccinated my own kids yet. I send them to the country in the summer, to Corinne’s folks. That’s where they are now.”

Jack said, “So the safest thing is just to get them out of the city.”

“I think so. For the time being.”

Jack picked up the crumpled page and twisted it, pondering.

Teddy said, “But we’ve gotten off the subject here.”

“Oh. Sorry. I guess my mind wandered.”

“Do you want to go on?”

Jack said, “Yes. Let’s go on.” Glory could see that look of calculation in his face again, that oddly illusionless hope.

After a minute Teddy said, “I’ll have to have some help with this.”

“Sorry.” Jack cleared his throat. “Have you thought of bringing your kids to Gilead? Would this be a good place for them?”

“Sure. It’s just not a good situation, with Dad the way he is.”

Jack nodded. He seemed to reflect a minute. Then he stretched and ran his fingers through his hair. “I do wish to God I were religious, Teddy. That’s the Lord’s truth.”

Teddy said, “Well, that seems like a beginning.”

“Yes. If I were religious some things might be easier. Possible, at least.”

Under Wishes to be religious, Teddy wrote to make things easier.

Jack looked at the pad and laughed. “I’m not so sure that is a beginning. It looks to me like a heresy of some sort.”

Teddy tore off the page and balled it up. “I didn’t know we’d be worried about that. Interesting.” Jack smiled and shrugged. “Okay,” Teddy said. “What things would be easier?”

“Well, it’s hard to talk to people. Religious people.”

“Dad, for example.”

“For example.”

“Me.”

Jack laughed. “Another example. Ames.”

“Yes. Can you tell me why it’s hard? I’ve never really understood.”

Jack said, “Sometimes it seems as though I’m in one universe and you’re in another. All of you.” He shrugged. Then he glanced at Glory, as if he might want to apologize.

Teddy considered him for a moment with gentle objectivity. “How long have you felt that way?”

“Well, Dr. Boughton, I may always have felt that way. If I can trust the tales of my stormy infancy.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. There are things I think it may have helped me with. Helped me understand a little.” He said, “There are separate universes, you know. I happen to have mine to myself. There are others. At least I know that.”

After a moment Teddy said, “Well, when we began the conversation you said you intended to lie to the Reverend. That was your word, ‘lie.’ And I said I respected that decision, in the circumstances. And I also respect the fact that it was a hard decision for you to make. I really do. Then I complicated things by suggesting that we might find something for you to say that would be — not altogether false. Now I think it might just be best to tell him you believe in God. That you’ve given the matter serious thought, and you are persuaded of the truth of Scripture. Something like that. Short and to the point.”

Jack nodded. “Do you think there’s any chance he’ll believe me?”

“I know he’ll want to believe you.”

Jack smiled. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. I don’t exactly look like I’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb recently, do I? He probably knows — the state I was in a few hours ago. He probably has some idea.”

“Well, I think we have to remember, you know, that time is short. In a few more weeks he might not even hear what you say to him.”

Jack said, “All right. Yes. I believe in God and I am persuaded of the truth of the Scriptures. After serious thought. I can do that. When I’ve had some rest.”

Teddy stood up. “I don’t know if I’ve been any help. But I really should go. If there’s nothing more we need to talk about.”

“It helps to know you think it’s all right. If I lie to him.”

Teddy nodded. “I think it’s kind of you to do it, in the circumstances. I put an envelope on the refrigerator with my addresses and telephone numbers. Home and office. If you want to stay in touch. Pay us a visit.”

“So you want old Uncle Jack to turn up on your doorstep someday.”

“Nothing would make me happier.”

Jack looked at Glory and smiled. “Maybe.”

“I know you won’t,” Teddy said. He studied his brother’s face. “I suspect I’ll never see you again. In this life. I’d say take care of yourself, but I’m afraid you won’t do that, either. Well, never hesitate—” He held out his hand. When Jack took it, he touched his shoulder, then embraced him.

Jack was patient with the familiarity. He said, “I wish things could have been better between us all these years. I do. There’s a lot I regret.”

“I know,” Teddy said. “It’s okay. Now you can get some sleep.”

Jack went out to the porch with him. He stayed there after Teddy’s car had turned into the street. Then he said to her, “Do you think that’s what the ocean sounds like?” The wind was tossing the leaves of the oak tree, which were dense and heavy enough to roar and ebb and then roar again. “When I was a kid I liked to think so.”

“Luke says it is.”

He nodded. “Luke would know.”

JACK TOOK TEDDY’S ENVELOPE DOWN FROM THE REFRIGERATOR. He held it up to show her the thickness of it. “What do you think is in here? Want to guess?” He lifted the flap and showed her the edges of a stack of bills. He went to the piano bench, lifted the lid, and dropped the envelope into it. “Now we’re even. I mean, where money is concerned. He’s right, I have to get out of here. I will.” He paused on the stairs. “But now I am going to write a letter.” Then he said, “Glory, I know I haven’t even begun to — I had no right to do that to you. You’ve been kind to me, and I — But you have to get those bottles out of my dresser. Now, if you don’t mind. The bottom drawer. You should put that money somewhere, too. All of it.”

Glory said, “Wait, Jack. Did Teddy say you should leave?”

“He said the old fellow doesn’t have much more time. So he’ll be back here in a few weeks, you know he will. They’ll all be here. And he said he will never see me again. It adds up.” Jack looked at her. “If I send this letter to the mutual friend, she sends it on to Della and Della writes to me here, that could take — twelve days, maybe two weeks. So I’m going to stay here for another two weeks, and then you’ll be rid of me.”

“Will you give me your address, in case I need to forward something to you?”

He laughed. “When I have an address, little sister, you’ll be the first to know.”

AFTER A WHILE JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS WITH HIS LETTER, took an envelope and stamp from the drawer, and pulled a chair away from the table.

“Mind?” he asked. His eyes were still reddened, and the flesh of his face looked a little like wax, or like clay, creasing deeply when he smiled. If she had not known him she’d have thought, wistful and unsavory. He looked at her, as if he knew he did not seem the same to her, as if he had made some terrible confession and been forgiven and felt both shame and relief.

“Of course I don’t mind.”

He said, “My hands aren’t very steady. That might make the wrong impression. I want her to open it, at least.” So she wrote the address as he told it to her. He licked the flap of the envelope and winced. “Snowflake,” he said, and she laughed, and he laughed. He placed the stamp carefully. Then he took a folded paper from his shirt pocket and put it on the table. He said, “That’s for you.”

She took the paper up and opened it. A map. There was the river, and a road, and between them, fences, a barn, woods, an abandoned house, all of them sketched in and carefully labeled, and in the woods a clearing, and at the upper edge of the clearing an X and the word “morels.” In the lower-left-hand corner there was a compass, and a scale in hundreds of paces, and in the upper-right-hand corner a dragon with a coiled tail and smoking nostrils.

She said, “This is very pretty.”

He nodded. “More to the point, it is accurate. I made it when I was stone sober. It was the work of several days, a number of drafts.”

She said, “Now we really are even.”

He laughed. “That’s right.” His face was mild and his voice was soft with weariness, but he was clearly moved and relieved to be joking with her.

“Except it doesn’t say where these woods are. There are lots of fences and barns around here.”

“My, my,” he said. “What an oversight.” And he smiled at her.

“Well, I’m going to ignore that. It’s pretty. I’m going to frame it.”

“You’re a good soul, Glory.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Chicken and dumplings.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you probably needed some rest. I can keep an eye on things if you want to get a little sleep.”

“No. I’m all right. If you don’t mind the company.”

“I’m grateful for the company, Glory.” He laughed. “You have no idea.”

She said, “Do you want the newspaper? I’ve done the puzzles. I’m grateful for the company, too.”

He nodded. “That’s kind of you to say.”

Then they heard a stirring of bedsprings, then the lisp lisp of slippered feet and the pock of the cane. After a moment their father appeared in the doorway in his nightshirt, pale, with his hair rumpled, but solemnly composed. He looked first at Glory, then at the window, then finally, as if he had nerved himself, at Jack. “Oh,” he said, a regretful, involuntary sound. Then he rallied. “I thought I might enjoy a little conversation. I heard the two of you talking out here and I’ve come to join you. Yes.”

Jack helped him with his chair and sat down again.

The old man took his hand. “I think I was cross,” he said.

Jack said, “I had it coming.”

His father said, “No, no, it isn’t how I wanted things to be. I promised myself a thousand times, if you came home you would never hear a word of rebuke from me. No matter what.”

“I don’t mind. I deserve rebuke.”

The old man said, “You ought to let the Lord decide what you deserve. You think about that too much, what you deserve. I believe that is part of the problem.”

Jack smiled. “I believe you may have a point.”

“Nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It’s all grace. If you accepted that, you might be able to relax a little.”

Jack said, “Somehow I have never felt that grace was intended for me, particularly.”

His father said, “Oh nonsense! That is just nonsense!” He closed his eyes and withdrew his hand. Then he said, “I was cross again.”

Jack laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Dad.”

After a moment the old man said, “Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t like it at all. Dad. It sounds ridiculous. It’s not even a word.”

“I’ll never say it again.” Jack stretched and smiled at Glory, eyebrows raised, as if to say, Help would be appreciated.

So she said, “Would you like me to get your robe, Papa?”

“I’m fine as I am. You’d think we were living in the Klondike.” Then he said, “I came out here for a little conversation and you’ve both stopped talking.”

There was a silence. “Well,” Glory said, “I’m making chicken and dumplings. Mama’s recipe.”

He said, “That can be very good, if the dumplings aren’t wet. Heavy. I’ve had to eat some terrible dumplings in my life.” Then, his eyes still closed, he said, “I can’t look at Jack’s hands. I don’t want to know what he did to them.”

Jack cleared his throat. “It’s mostly just engine grease I haven’t scrubbed off yet. I scraped them up a little, I guess.” He folded his arms to conceal them, and he smiled.

His father looked at him, sharply. “I don’t know what happened. Something happened last night.”

“Nothing good. You really don’t want to know. No point in it. Sir.”

“So, are we going to have the sheriff coming around here?”

“No, sir,” he said. “I have done nothing that would interest the sheriff.” His voice was soft and sad.

“Papa, Jack’s all right. Everything’s all right. But he’s tired now,” Glory said. “I think we should talk about something else.”

The old man nodded. “We’re all tired now.” Then he said, “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much. I never got anywhere with it, but I tried. I’d say, He doesn’t care a thing about us. He needs a little money now and then, that’s the extent of it. Still, I thought you might come home for your mother’s funeral. That was a very hard time for me. It would have been a great help. Why did I think you might come home? That was foolish of me. Your mother always said, You imagine some happiness is going to come out of all this, all this waiting and hoping, but it never will. So I tried to put an end to it. But I couldn’t.”

Jack smiled and cleared his throat. “Maybe now you can. Maybe I should tell you what I was up to all those years. That might put an end to it.”

The old man shook his head. “It couldn’t be worse than what I’ve imagined. I’ve thought of every dreadful thing, Jack. Lying awake nights. But it only made me grieve for you. And for myself, since there was no comfort I could give you.”

Jack said, “Well, I wouldn’t want you to think — I mean, ‘dreadful’ is a strong word. There are worse lives than mine. I know that’s not much to be proud of. But still.”

Glory said, “We all loved him, Papa, all of us, and there were reasons why we did. Why we do.”

“Could you expand on that a little, Glory?” Jack said. “I’d be interested.”

His father said, “Well, it’s just natural. What I’d like to know is why you didn’t love us. That is what has always mystified me.”

After a moment Jack said, “I did. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was hard for me to be here. I could never — trust myself. Anywhere. But that made it harder to be here.”

His father nodded. “Drink,” he said.

Jack smiled. “That, too.”

“Yes, well, maybe it’s a joke, I don’t know. Last night was about as bad a night as I have passed on this earth. And I kept thinking to myself, asking the Lord, Why do I have to care so much? It seemed like a curse and an affliction to me. To love my own son. How could that be? I have wondered about it many times.”

Jack said, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry. But at least you know why I stayed away so long. I had no right to come home. I shouldn’t be here now.”

“No right to come home!” his father said, and his voice broke. “If I’d had to die without seeing your face again, I’d have doubted the goodness of the Lord.” He looked at Jack. “That was a fear I had. So I was very happy, you know, there for a while.”

Jack said, “What are your feelings now, about the goodness of the Lord?” He said, “I really don’t think the Lord’s good name should depend on my behavior. I’m not equal to the responsibility.”

The old man shook his head. “Nobody is. I’m not equal to it, either, the way I’ve been talking to you here—”

“No matter. I knew most of it anyway.”

His father pondered for a while. “You knew it, and it didn’t make a bit of difference. I should have realized that. I suppose I did.”

Jack pushed back his chair and stood up. “Yes, well, if you’ll excuse me—”

Glory said, “No, Jack, you sit down. We’ve worried about you enough.”

His glance at her was weary, even bewildered. “I just thought I’d go up to my room.”

“No.” She touched his shoulder. She could see him make the decision to trust her, at least not to offend her. He sat down again.

His father said, “Kindness takes more strength than I have now. I didn’t realize how much effort I used to put into it. It’s like everything else that way, I guess.”

Jack said, “I can’t leave quite yet. But I’ll leave as soon as I can.”

“Oh yes, you came for your own reasons, and you’ll leave for your own reasons. And it just happened that I was here, I wasn’t dead yet.”

Glory said, “I’m sorry, Papa, but this has gone on long enough.”

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength — patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”

Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except”—he shrugged and laughed—“except what you can’t be rid of.”

His father said, “I’m sorry you’ve had to know about that, Jack. And now we’ve got Glory crying.”

Jack shrugged and smiled at her. “Sorry.”

Glory said, “Don’t worry. There’s no harm in it.”

Her father sighed. “Yes, well, I wish I could take it all back, everything I’ve just said. But I suppose you did know it already. Still, it’s different when you say things like that out loud. It already seems like I didn’t mean it. Now I know I’m going to just lie on my bed and worry about it, and wish I’d held my peace. I did that for so long.”

Jack said, “You did. You were always very kind.”

The old man nodded. “I hope that still counts for something.”

“It’s the only thing that counts.”

“Thank you, Jack. And I know you want to be done with me now. I’ve worn us out, both of us. I’ll just let the two of you get back to your conversation.”

Glory helped him to his room and into his bed, and when she came back, Jack was slouched in his chair with his ankles crossed, laying out cards for solitaire.

He said, “Has a day ever passed when you haven’t thought of him?”

“Who?”

“Whom. The old gent. Whom did you think I meant? Mr. 452 Love Letters?”

She said, “You’re so jealous!”

He laughed. “True. It isn’t fair. I never got even one. Just the other day in the Post I noticed a poem by Mrs. Lindbergh that I wouldn’t mind getting in the mail. Much better than nothing. Though I’ve learned that nothing also has charms. It’s more nuanced than ‘return to sender,’ for example.”

She said, “I doubt I’ve gone a whole day without thinking of Papa. I’m sure there have been hours here and there.”

“I’ve thought about this place so many times. When I was a kid I used to wish I lived here. I used to wish I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did and, you know, sit down at the table and do my homework or something.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He shrugged. “I actually tried it out once or twice.” Then he said, “I know why people watched me. I’m not even sure that was what made me uneasy. I think it made me feel safer sometimes. I used to test it, stir up a little trouble to make sure the old fellow was still keeping an eye on me. Sometimes I’d be out in the barn, in the loft, listening to the piano, you all singing ‘My Darling Clementine,’ and I’d think, Maybe they’ve forgotten all about me, and it felt like death, in a way.” He said, “I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. Where he didn’t look for me.” He glanced at her. “Don’t cry, please. I’m just telling you how it was.” He laughed. “How it is.” Then he said, “There are a couple of bottles in the loft. If you want to get them down, I’ll hold the ladder.”

“I get tears. I can’t help it. They don’t mean anything.”

“They’re nice, actually. To be honest, I think I tell you my sad stories to see if they really are sad. And sure enough, the tears start, and I can relax about it. I mean, there’s nothing sad about getting what you deserve. So I’ve been told. I feel a little vindicated when you cry.”

“I don’t know. Maybe getting what you deserve is the saddest thing in the world.”

“Really? I think about little Annie Wheeler, the non-bride of my non-youth.” He looked at her. “That’s sad. You see, I just mention her name and here come the tears.” Then he said, “I’m really sorry. I should have known better.”

After a while Glory said, “I wouldn’t mind talking about her. I think about her, too.”

He cleared his throat. “Do you know where she is? You don’t have to tell me. I mean, I don’t think she’d have any use for me. There are plenty of bums in Chicago. I just wondered if you knew.”

“If her family knew, they wouldn’t tell us. Papa talked to them about it a number of times, thinking they might hear from her. He has worried about her.”

Jack said, “I really shamed him.”

“It was a hard time.”

He fiddled with the deck of cards, cutting it and squaring it and cutting it. “That last time I spoke to him, before I left, I knew I had done something he couldn’t forgive. He thought he could. He said he had, but he’s a terrible liar. It shocked me that I could hurt him so badly. It scared me. It was what I expected, but it scared me. It was like stepping off a cliff. And it was a relief, too. I thought, It’s finally happened, I knew it would.” He laughed. “I believe I was drunk for the next three years. Teddy found his vocation keeping me alive. The poor devil, when I think of what he went through with me. When he was nineteen, trying to study, trying to make varsity baseball, trying to get me to class. He was caught cheating once. Teddy. He took my place at an exam. I believe my sense of decency must have stirred briefly, because that was when I went off to St. Louis. Apparently the dean decided Teddy violated the honor code for honorable reasons, I don’t know. But it could have kept him from finishing. It could have been a blot on his record, kept him out of medical school.” He said, “St. Louis was stepping off another cliff. And that was a relief, too.”

He shuffled the cards, laid them out, swept them up, and shuffled again. “None of this makes sense,” he said. “It’s all pretty ugly. For a while I thought I might have come to the end of it. No, I knew better than that. I knew better.” He said, “Della’s father asked around. He wanted — character references.” He smiled.

“I’m sorry.”

“He told me some things about myself I’d forgotten. He showed me a letter he had written to Della. He said he wouldn’t give it to her if I let her alone. I couldn’t do that. But she stuck with me. That was hard.”

“But you were all right then, when you were with Della.”

“‘Can the Scotsman change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil.’ He was just trying to look out for his daughter. I respect that. He’s a lot like our reverend father, in fact. Always trying to look after everybody.” He laid out the cards. “Anyway, I feel more like myself now. Wanting, hoping — it’s like the old fellow said, those things take a lot out of you. But this — this I can do.”

“You are going to send the letter.”

He nodded. “There’s no point in sending it. On the other hand, why waste a stamp?” He glanced at her. “Gloria Dolorosa. It’s good of you to take it all so hard, chum. It really is.”

She made up the dumpling batter and dropped it onto the stewed chicken. She, also, had eaten some terrible dumplings. It occurred to her to wonder if they were ever good in the ordinary sense, if at best they were not just familiar, inoffensive. They really were too inoffensive. It might have been the word “dumpling” she liked rather than the thing itself.

She said, “I have an idea, Jack. I could go to Memphis. I could talk to her. If you fix the car, we could drive down together. We’ll call Teddy, and he’ll come here to look after Papa for a few days. He would do that if you asked him to. And then I’d just go to her house. Or to her church. No one would notice me, and maybe I could get a chance to talk to her.”

“That’s kind. But let’s just say they don’t notice you.” He laughed. “I’m pretty sure they would. But if they didn’t. What would you say to her? That no one will give me a job, and I’m drinking again, and I recently failed to fire up the DeSoto and sail off to perdition? That I am metaphysically responsible for the floweriest little grave in all Gilead?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“What would you say, though, Glory? You see my point.”

“I’d say you were waiting in the car.”

“With a dozen roses. And the engine running.”

“And a box of chocolates.”

Jack looked away and smiled. Then he said, very softly, “Don’t, Glory. I have to deal with reality. Or at least accept the fact that reality is dealing with me.” He touched his face. “I’m a rougher-looking bastard now than I was when I came here. And even then I was surprised that you’d let me in the door. I don’t think I’d want her to see me now.”

“You’ll be better in a day or two. Then you can decide.”

He laughed. “This is a terrible plan. I can’t tell you how bad it is.”

“Well, you can think about it.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is nice to think about. I’d like to show them what good people I come from. If I could get the radio working, we’d hear some music on the way to Memphis. I might as well take a look at that engine, anyway. You were getting some use out of the old crate. I’ll try to get it running again.” Then he said, “Is my shirt still out there?”

“No, I brought it in this morning. I tried laundry soap and that didn’t do much. I doubt bleach would, either. I thought I might ask Lila. But that sleeve isn’t stained very badly.” She said, “Your suit is hanging in the porch. I burned your socks.”

He looked at her. “Tears again.” He laughed. “Regret is wasted on me, Glory. I do the damnedest things, and there’s no help for it. I kept that shirt for a long time. I don’t often manage to keep things.”

She said, “I haven’t given up yet. If I can’t get those stains out, I’ll sew the sleeve into your other shirt. That wouldn’t be hard.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Let me get used to things the way they are. That’s the biggest favor you can do me, Glory.” He smiled. “But thanks. You’re a good kid.”

“Yes. In the morning I’m going to take your letter to the post office.”

“All right.” He said, “You did get those bottles out of my dresser?”

“While you were asleep.”

“Good. It would be a mistake to trust me. I’m sorry about that.”

While she looked after her father, Jack set the table. She brought the old man out to the kitchen and seated him. He said, “Yes,” and bowed his head and said no more for a little while, then, “If you wouldn’t mind, Glory.”

“All right. Dear Lord, bless these gifts to our use and us to Thy service, and keep us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen.”

“Yes, I’ve always objected to that prayer. If it were only a little easier to know what they are. The needs of others. A good deal more is required than just being mindful. That has certainly been my experience.”

Jack served the chicken and dumplings with something of the wry decorum of former days, but quietly, calmly, the old suspense gone now. The dumplings were tacky on the outside and doughy on the inside, but that might just be how they are, she thought. How they have always been. Her father said, “Excellent,” and ate half of one.

Jack said, “There’s really nothing like a good dumpling.”

“Except a bad one,” she said.

He laughed. “True, they are pretty similar.” Then he looked at her. “Ah, tears.”

Their father said, sharply, “You shouldn’t tease your sister. You boys think it’s some sort of game, but I don’t like it. A gentleman is always considerate of women. I have said this many times. That means your sisters, too, even the little ones. This is very important. I hope you will reflect on it.” He did not appear to be asleep, though his eyes were closed.

Jack said, “Yes, sir,” to calm his irritation, and then he sat there gazing at him, taking in what the old man had said.

“I was remarking to your mother about it just the other night. We should not allow this teasing.”

Glory was aware suddenly that the weariness of the night and day had overwhelmed her, and her hope of comforting had not had anything to do with the way things really happen in the world. Her father was crouched in his chair, with his chin almost in his plate, drowsing and speaking from what she could only hope was a dream, and her brother was withdrawing into utter resignation, as if the old incandescence had consumed him before it flickered out. But he brought her a tea towel for her tears, and then he helped his father to his room.

THE HEAT OF THE MORNING WOKE HER, SO SHE KNEW SHE had slept late. There were no sounds in the house, there was no smell of coffee. Jack and her father must still be sleeping. Good for them. She felt stiff, as if some physical exertion had wearied her, and it was only the thought that she might miss the morning mail that induced her to get up, wash, brush, dress, make herself presentable to whatever passerby or clerk might otherwise notice her and wonder what new drama had unfolded in the poor old preacher’s house. She had put the letter on her dresser the night before, in case Jack might have had second thoughts and chosen resignation over futile hope. She went down the stairs as quietly as she could and let herself out the door.

And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father’s hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.

She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her. Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

ROBBY AND TOBIAS WERE IN THE DRUGSTORE, EXTRACTING Fudgsicles from the smoking freezer chest. Each of them had a dime, earned pulling weeds in one of Lila’s gardens. They showed them to her. She dropped Jack’s letter in the slot, heard the clerk’s views on the weather, and started home again, the boys tagging along with her, skipping and circling and taking a few steps backward, not yet resigned to the tedium of merely walking. They split their Fudgsicles as they are meant to be split, and Tobias dutifully offered her the second half of his, and she said no, thank you, which pleased him. Robby said, “I’m saving mine for Mr. Boughton.”

Glory said, “You can call him Jack. He wouldn’t mind.”

Robby shook his head. “My dad says I have to call him Mr. Boughton.”

He walked along at her elbow, engrossed in the Fudgsicle, coping as he could when the ice slid down the stick. When they came to his corner, Tobias took off for home and Robby went on with her. He said, “My mom likes it when I help out. Well, my dad likes it, too, but he just watches. He sits on the porch.”

Lila had said to her once that the boy had to learn what it was to work. Glory knew she meant she would be his only support through most of his growing up, and life would be difficult for them. “We’ll be leaving sometime,” she said. “There’s nothing to do around here.” That was when they had been at the river for Ames’s birthday, and had walked down to rinse the plates, and had stopped to watch Robby and Tobias racing leaves through an eddy between two ribs of sand. She said, “We hope he’ll remember something of it.” Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child, and it was exactly that, the river broad and shallow, the intricacies of its bed making rivulets of the slow water, bloom on the larger little islands and butterflies everywhere. And the trees meeting high above it, shading it, making the bottom earthily apparent wherever there was calm. They all loved the river, in all generations, Jack, too. She bent and dipped her hands in the water and pressed them to her face, to conceal the embarrassment of tears, but more than that, because the river was simply manifest, a truth too seldom acknowledged. When she had been on her own, sometimes she had thought of it.

JACK WAS SITTING ON THE FRONT STEP, HIS ELBOWS ON his knees, waiting for her. When he saw the two of them, he stood up, tossed his cigarette, and went into the house. Robby said, “Well, you can give him this,” and handed her the half Fudgsicle, which had melted into its bag.

“He doesn’t feel too well today,” she said.

He nodded. “He wouldn’t want me to catch anything.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“Then my dad might catch it.”

“True,” she said. It was the thought of seeing Jack that had brought him along with her. Now he turned and waved and ran off toward home.

Jack was at the kitchen table, laying out a hand for solitaire.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not up to small talk.”

“He wanted me to give you this.”

“Great. Nice kid.”

She put the soggy packet in the sink.

He said, “I thought you might not have gotten the bottles out of the loft. So I couldn’t start working on the car till you came back.”

He followed her out to the barn and opened the door for her. “Stay here,” he said. Then he dragged an empty crate out from the wall, climbed up on it, took hold of the edge of the loft with one hand, and with the other brought down a ladder that had been lying on the floor of the loft, out of sight. When the base of it hit the floor, there was a painful sound of crotchety wood and pulled nails. He said, “This is where I was last night when you came looking for me. I meant to say something, but I — didn’t.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t out staggering the streets of Gilead, in case you were worried about that. I didn’t disgrace the family.”

He held the doubtful old ladder while she climbed up into the loft. It smelled airy, and like hay or burlap and desiccated wood, a place with a history of rain and heat, long abandoned by human intention. Her older brothers and sisters had stories of playing in it, but their father had forbidden them to play there years before she was born because of the splinters in the plank floor and the nails that had been driven through the shingles in the low roof, and he had taken away the ladder in order to baffle temptation. Nevertheless, from time to time the boys contrived to hoist one another up into that secret and forbidden place to act out stealth and ambush, an impulse too primordial for even Teddy to resist. It would never have occurred to them to bring her along, the baby sister whose indiscretions were notorious in the family for years after she had outgrown them. So this was the first time she was setting foot in that fabled space.

Jack had run a length of clothesline from beam to beam and thrown a tarp over it to make a low tent in the angle of floor and roof. She knelt and looked into it. The edges were neatly nailed down. There was a floor of newspapers, a rumpled blanket and a pillow. He had set a wooden box on its side as a table and shelf. A flashlight, a few books, a mayonnaise jar with a handful of her oatmeal cookies in it. The framed photograph of a river. A glass and an uncapped pint bottle, three-quarters empty. The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it like a dark spirit lurking in it, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh. She thought, What if he had succeeded in dying, and then she had found this, so neatly and intentionally made out of nothing anyone could want, with the fierce breath of his grief still haunting it, the blanket still tangled.

Jack said, “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you—”

She said, “I’m fine.” He would know from her voice that she was crying, but she had to say something, and he would expect her to cry, surely. She pulled the blanket out of the tent. An empty bottle dragged along with it. She put the bottle aside and folded and smoothed the blanket and put it back. Then she pulled the crate to her and took the bottle and the glass out of it and set them aside. The books were The Condition of the Working Class, The High and the Mighty, and a worn little Bible. The flashlight had burned itself out, but she turned it off and put it beside the books and slid the crate back into its place. It felt like piety and propitiation to calm the disorder this most orderly man had left in the confusions of his sorrow.

He said, “I think there are only two bottles up there. I’m pretty sure.”

That meant he thought she was taking longer than she needed to. He would be embarrassed that she had seen and touched his secretiveness, which was so like shame, so like affliction, that they could hardly be distinguished. She said, “I’m coming,” and stayed where she was, kneeling there, amazed at what was before her, as if it were the humblest sign of great mystery, come from a terrain where loneliness and grief are time and weather.

She held the bottles against her side with one arm and the glass in her hand, and with her free arm she held to the ladder and lowered herself onto it.

“I’m right here,” Jack said, and held it steady for her. Then he stepped away and stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her with the distant and tentative expression that meant he felt she might be making a new appraisal of him. He said, “A little strange, hmm? A little squalid? Sorry.”

“No matter,” she said. “I think this is everything.”

He nodded.

“I poured out the other bottles in the orchard.”

“Fine.” He said, “I made that to keep the bats off when I read with the flashlight. Bats are attracted by light, did you know that? Useful information. And it kept the rain off. That roof is just about worthless. So it made a kind of sense. To me.”

HE WAITED FOR HER, AND WHEN SHE CAME BACK FROM the orchard and the shed he walked to the house with her, a few steps behind. He said, “I’ll pull that down tomorrow. My shanty. I’ll clean things up around here before I go. I’ve let a lot of things slide.”

“It’s still much better than it was when you came.”

He opened the screen door for her. He said, “I’m going to try to get some of these stains off my hands. I can’t help much with the old fellow until I do. I think he’s scared of me, the way I look now.”

“No, he just hates the thought that you hurt yourself.”

He nodded. “You can hate thoughts. That’s interesting. I hate most of my thoughts.” He opened the cupboard under the sink and found a scrub brush.

Glory said, “You might rub your hands with shortening. That would probably dissolve the grease. Scrubbing will make them look inflamed.” She took the can from the cupboard, scooped out a spoonful, and put it in his palm. She said, “Remember when you talked to me about your soul, about saving it?”

He shrugged. “I think you may be mistaking me for someone else.”

“And I said I liked it the way it is.”

“Now I know you’re mistaking me for someone else.” He did not look up from the massaging of his hands.

“I’ve thought about what I should have said to you then, and I haven’t changed my mind at all. That’s why it embarrassed me, because it would have been so presumptuous of me — I’m not even sure what it means.” Then she said, “What is a soul?”

He looked up, smiled, studied her face. “Why ask me?”

“It just seems to me that you would know.”

He shrugged. “On the basis of my vast learning and experience, I would say — it is what you can’t get rid of. Insult, deprivation, outright violence—‘If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there,’ and so on. “‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.’”

“Interesting choice of text.”

“It came to mind. Don’t make too much of it.”

“Well, your soul seems fine to me. I don’t know what that means, either. Anyway, it’s true.”

He said, “Thanks, chum. But you don’t know me. Well, you know I’m a drunk.”

“And a thief.”

He laughed. “Yes, a drunk and a thief. I’m also a terrible coward. Which is one of the reasons I lie so much.”

She nodded. “I’ve noticed that.”

“No kidding. What else have you noticed?”

“I’m not going to mention vulnerable women.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Very generous in the circumstances.”

She nodded. “I think so.”

He said, “I am unaccountably vain, despite all, and I have a streak of malice that does not limit itself to futile efforts at self-defense.”

“I’ve noticed that, too.”

He nodded. “I guess there’s nothing subtle about it.”

She brought a washcloth and began gently to soap away the dingy shortening from his hands. He took the cloth from her.

“So,” he said, “we have made a list of my venial sins.”

“Presbyterians don’t believe in venial sins.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not described by the word ‘Presbyterian.’”

“Oh, hush!”

He laughed. “All right. My lesser sins. Not that Presbyterians believe in them, either. Do you want a list of the grave ones? The mortal ones?”

“Not really.”

“That’s good.” He said, “Reverend Miles, Della’s father and my biographer, told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing.” He looked at her. “Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe.” He said, “It’s why I keep to myself. When I can. Ah. And now the tears.”

“Don’t you think everybody feels that way sometimes, though? I certainly have. While you had Della you didn’t feel that way. If you weren’t alone so much, I mean, Papa’s right about that. If you’d just let us help you.”

He said, “When Mama died I’d been out of jail for a couple days. So I could have come home. Strictly speaking. But it takes awhile to shake that off, you know. Wash it off. To feel you could blend in with the Presbyterians. And the old fellow doesn’t miss anything. I wouldn’t have wanted him to see me. I was terrified at the thought. So I used his check to buy some clothes. I knew what he’d think of me when he saw I’d cashed it.” He smiled at her. “I was grateful for the check, I really was. I hadn’t been at that hotel where he sent it for quite a while. I was surprised the letter found me. But the desk clerk was impressed by the black border, so he brought it to me. He hadn’t even opened it. I spent part of the money in a bar. What was left of it.”

Glory said, “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. Not that it matters. I don’t care if you’ve been in jail.”

He said, “No? It made quite an impression on me. I believe it’s as congenial a place to be nothing as I could ever hope to find.” He laughed. “In jail, they call it good behavior. Not a thing I’ve often been accused of.” He said, “Jail reinforced my eccentricities. I’m pretty sure of that.”

“Mama died more than ten years ago. So you were all right after you got out of jail.”

“Yes, I was. And now I know it was an aberration. Nothing I can sustain on my own. I’ve found out I still can’t trust myself. So I’m right back where I started.” He smiled. “You forgive so much, you’ll have to forgive that, too. Well, I guess you won’t have to.”

“You know I will.”

After a moment he said, “You probably wonder what kind of woman Della is, shacking up with the likes of me.”

“She reads French. She embroiders. She sings in a choir.”

“There are things I haven’t told you about her.”

She shrugged. “Some things are sacred.”

He laughed. “Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly.” He wiped his hands on the dishtowel and looked them over. “Not too bad,” he said. He held them up to her inspection. “He should be able to stand the sight of my hands, at least. I wish there were something I could do about my face.”

“You could get a little sleep.”

“Not a bad idea. If you don’t mind. There are a few things I meant to get done today.”

“Sleep for an hour or two first.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll do that. Thanks.” He stopped halfway up the stairs. “I told you a minute ago that I was in jail. I should have said prison. I was in prison.” Then he watched her to appraise her reaction.

She said, “I don’t care if you were in prison,” but the words cost her a little effort, and he heard it and smiled at her for a moment, studying her to be sure that she meant them.

He said, “You’re a good kid.”

IT WAS SUPPERTIME WHEN JACK CAME DOWNSTAIRS AGAIN. He said, “I slept a lot longer than I planned to. Sorry.” He did look more like himself, she thought. An odd phrase, since he was always himself, perhaps never more so than he had been in the last two days. He was wearing his father’s old clothes and the blue striped necktie, and he was conspicuously kempt and shaved. Old Spice. He buttoned the top button of the jacket, unbuttoned it again, then took the jacket off. “This is better, I think,” he said, and looked at her for confirmation.

“In this heat,” she said.

“Yes, but the tie’s all right.”

“It looks fine.”

He had some intention, clearly. That was probably a good thing, all in all. There was a kind of tense composure about him that seemed like morale. He said, “What’s for dinner?”

“Creamed chicken on toast. Leftovers. No dumplings this time. I made a peach cobbler, though.”

“Well,” he said, “I thought we might eat in the dining room. If that’s all right. With candles. The light seems so bright in here. To those of us who fear the light and love the darkness.” He laughed.

She thought, He doesn’t want Papa to be pained by the sight of him. Of course. She said, “Whatever you like. I’ll open the windows and put the fan in there. It gets stuffy in this weather.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

She went into her father’s bedroom and found the old man lying there pensively awake. When she spoke to him, he said, “I love hearing all the voices. Your mother says this house is like an old fiddle, what it does with sound, and I think that’s true. It is a wonderful house.” He was still worn from that long night, she thought, still half asleep.

“Would you like to get up now, Papa? I’ve made supper. Jack got some rest this afternoon, and he’s up and setting the table.”

He looked at her. “Jack?”

“Yes. He’s feeling a lot better.”

“I didn’t know he was ill. Yes, I’d better get up.” His concern was such that he seemed to have forgotten the recalcitrance of his body and to be surprised to find himself struggling to sit upright.

“Here, I’ll help you,” she said.

He looked at her with alarm. “Something’s happened.”

“It’s over now. We’re all right.”

“I thought the children were here. Where are they?”

“They’re all at home, so far as I know, Papa.”

“But they’re so quiet!”

She said, “Just a minute. I’ll ask Jack to play something while we get you ready for supper.”

“So Jack’s here.”

“Yes, he’s here.”

She stepped into the dining room and asked Jack to play, and then she went back to help her father. “‘Softly and Tenderly,’” the old man said. “A very fine song. Is that Gracie?”

“No, it’s Jack.”

The old man said, “I don’t believe Jack plays the piano. It might be Gracie.”

She brought her father down the hallway. He stopped at a little distance from the piano, released her arm, and stood looking at Jack with puzzled interest. He whispered, “The fellow plays very well. But why is he here in our house?”

Glory said, “He’s come home to see you, Papa.”

“Well, that’s very nice, I suppose. No harm in it.”

Jack played the hymn to the end, then he followed them into the dining room. He had put the jacket back on. He helped his father with his chair, Glory with hers, then seated himself by his father. The old man looked at him as if he had taken a liberty, not offensive but surprising just the same, in sitting down with them. He said, “Glory, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes. All right.” She closed her eyes. “Dear God in heaven, please help us. Dear God, please help everyone we love. Amen.”

Jack looked at her and smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

The old man nodded. “That pretty well sums it up.”

Her brother leaned out of the candlelight while she served. He pushed back his hair and settled his tie down the front of his shirt, and then folded his hands in his lap, as if remembering to keep them out of sight. His father glanced at him from time to time, sidelong. Glory cut up her father’s toast, and then they ate in silence, except when Glory asked if they would like more of anything. She hadn’t read a newspaper in days or turned on the television set or the radio, so she could not think of a way to bring up Eisenhower or Dulles or baseball or Egypt, the things that focused her father’s attention, lured him out of his dreams. At least he and Jack were eating.

Finally, Jack cleared his throat. Still, his voice was a throaty whisper. “Sir,” he said, “there are some things I’ve wanted to say to you. If this is a good time. I thought it might be as good as any.”

His father smiled at him kindly. “No need to be so formal. I have been retired for a number of years. Just call me Robert.”

Jack looked at her.

She said, “Papa, can I get you some coffee?”

“Not for me, thanks. Our friend might want some.”

After a moment Jack said, “If I could talk to you about something. I wanted to tell you that after considerable reflection, after giving the matter some careful thought—” He looked at Glory and smiled.

His father nodded. “Are you considering the ministry?”

Jack took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “No, sir.”

“There’s quite a return to the ministry these days. Many young men are drawn to it now. It’s wonderful. You might want to think about it.”

Jack said, “Yes, sir.” He toyed with his water glass, reflecting. Then, “I’ve made an effort, for a number of reasons. To believe in something. I’ve read the Bible I don’t know how many times. And I’ve thought about it. Of course I have been in situations where it’s the only book they let you have, where there isn’t much else to think about. That you’d want to think about.” He looked at Glory. “I have tried, though. Maybe that just makes me — obdurate. Isn’t that the word? I don’t know why I am what I am. I’d have been like you if I could.”

His father looked at him, solemnly uncomprehending.

Jack said, “I meant to tell you that I had — after careful thought, I had become persuaded of the truth of Scripture. Teddy said it would be all right to say that. I wanted you to stop worrying about me. But all I can really say is that I’ve tried to understand. And I did try to live a better life. I don’t know what I’ll do now. But I did try.”

The old man looked at him intently. Then he said, “That’s fine, dear. Have we talked before? I don’t believe so. I may be wrong.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked at Glory and smiled. He said softly, “Tears!”

Glory said, “Jack wants to talk to you, Papa. He’s trying to tell you something.”

“Yes, you said Jack is here. That would be very surprising. He’s never here.”

After a long breath, “I’m Jack.”

The old man turned stiffly in his chair to scrutinize his son. He said, “I see a resemblance.” He reached out painfully and took hold of the candlestick, to move it closer to Jack, who put his hand to his face and laughed. His father said, “There is a resemblance. I don’t know.” He said, “If you could take your hand away—”

Jack dropped his hand into his lap and suffered his father’s scrutiny, smiling, not raising his eyes.

The old man said, “Well, what did I expect. His life would be hard, I knew that,” and he fell to brooding. “I was afraid of it, and I prayed, and it happened anyway. So here is Jack,” he said. “After all that waiting.”

Jack smiled at her across the table and shook his head. Another bad idea. Nothing to be done about it now.

Glory said, “It’s been hard for him to come here. You should be kinder to him.”

A moment passed, and her father stirred from his reverie. “Kinder to him! I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow — and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was—” He said, “It’s like watching a child die in your arms.” He looked at Jack. “Which I have done.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. I didn’t—” He put his hands to his face.

Glory said, “No. This is terrible. I won’t let this happen.”

“Let it happen,” Jack said softly. “I don’t have anything to lose.” And he dropped his hands, like a man abandoning all his defenses.

The old man was groping for his napkin, which had slipped to the floor. Jack gave him his. “Thank you, dear,” he said, his voice ragged with tears, and he blotted his face with it.

“That wasn’t Jack’s fault,” Glory said. “You know it wasn’t.”

Her father said, “Then why did you slap old Wheeler’s face? She did, she slapped him. Because his house was no fit place for a child, that’s why. Broken things, rusted things on the ground everywhere. Just everywhere! We could have brought her home! If Jack had owned up to her at all. He knew what kind of place it was,” he said bitterly. “He’d been there.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and shielded his eyes with his hand.

Glory said, “That was so long ago. Can’t we put it aside, Papa?”

“Have you put it aside? We thought you never would get over it. It nearly scared your mother to death the way you mourned for that child.”

She said, “But Jack is here now. His life has been hard. It’s been sad. And he’s home now. He’s come home.”

“Yes,” the old man said, “and he’s telling us goodbye. You know he is. He says he’s read the Bible. Well, any fool could see that. He knows it better than I do. Why would he bother to say that to me? So I’ll think maybe he’s been working out his salvation. Well, maybe he has. I hope he has. But that isn’t why he spoke to me about it. He doesn’t think he should leave me here worrying about his soul. He has a few chores to finish up around the place. He’s going to toss the old gent an assurance or two, and then he’s out the door.”

Jack laughed. He said, very softly, “That’s not quite the way I thought of it.” He cleared his throat. “But I probably will be leaving. That’s true.”

Her father hung his head. “All of them call it home, but they never stay.”

After a moment Jack said, “You don’t want me hanging around here. Reminding you of things you’d rather forget.” His voice was still barely more than a whisper.

“I never forget them. Hard as I try. They’re my life.” He looked up at his son. “And so are you.”

Jack shrugged and smiled. “Sorry.”

His father reached over and patted his hand. “It worries me sometimes. I don’t know what’s become of my life.” Then he said, fingering Jack’s sleeve, in a tone of rueful admission, “I lost my church, you know.”

Jack said, “Well, I knew you were retired.”

The old man nodded. “That’s one way to look at it.” The candles had begun to flicker in an evening wind. The wind toyed with the crystal droplets on the light fixture. He said, “I lost my wife.”

Jack shifted away as if he expected another rebuke, but his father just shook his head. “Why did I ever expect to keep anything? That isn’t how life is. I’m”—he said—“I’m awfully worried about Ames. There he’s got that little boy. I don’t know.” After a moment he looked up. “I’ve left the house to Glory. All the rest of them are settled. There’s some money you’ll each get a share of, and some for the Ames boy. It’s not much. I know Glory will be glad to see you if you ever feel like coming home again.”

Jack smiled at her across the table. “That’s good to know.”

The old man closed his eyes. “I can’t enjoy the thought of heaven like I should, leaving so much unattended to here. I know it’s wrong to think your mother’s going to ask me about it.” He was silent for a while, and then he said, “I was hoping I would be able to tell her that Jack had come home.”

Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it. Finally he said, whispered, “I hope you will give her my love.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. I will certainly do that.”

AFTER HE HAD PUT HIS FATHER TO BED JACK CAME OUT TO the kitchen. He said, “Feel like a few games of checkers? I really can’t imagine going to sleep right now.”

“Neither can I.”

He said, “I’m sorry about that, Glory. These things never go the way I expect them to. You’d think I’d have learned by now. Not to expect.”

“You meant well.”

“I believe I did.”

“You did.”

“Yes,” he said, and nodded, as if he had steadied himself against this minor certainty. “I checked with Teddy. And it was your idea to begin with.”

“We both thought it was worth a try.”

“I didn’t try, though. Did you notice that? To lie to him. I lost my nerve.”

“That’s probably just as well.”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

They played three wordless games, Jack so distractedly that Glory won despite her best efforts. She thought, There ought to be a name for this. Boughton checkers. Gandhi checkers.

He said, “You probably want to get some sleep.”

“Well, Jack, I just found out that I will inherit this house. I never meant to stay in Gilead. I mean I positively intended to leave Gilead. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m—‘horrified’ is too strong a word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. So I doubt I could sleep if I wanted to.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and looked around him, almost objectively. “It’s a pretty decent house. Free and clear. You could do worse.”

She said, “This is a nightmare I’ve had a hundred times. The one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house full of ridiculous furniture and unreadable books, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing and come back for me. And nobody does.”

He laughed. “Poor Pigtails.” Then he said, “When I have that dream, I’m hiding in the barn hoping someone will find me, and nobody does.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m going to get that barn torn down. If I inherit this place, that’s the first thing I’m going to do.”