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“Fine. Should I make some coffee?”

“Might as well.”

Jack filled the percolator. Then he leaned against the counter. “It’s your barn. Of course, if you had somebody work on the roof a little, it would last a few more years. That’s just a thought. Paint would help.”

She laughed. “So you want me to keep the barn. What else should I keep?”

“What else are you planning to get rid of?”

“Oh, the rugs, the drapes, the wallpaper, the lamps, the chairs and sofas — a few dozen of the souvenir plates. The figurines.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Some of the bookcases. And Grandpa’s old theology books. There must be five hundred of them.”

“You’ll keep the Edinburgh books, I suppose.”

“Yes, I will keep them.”

“Some of the rest of it you could just put in the attic. I could move things around to make more room up there.”

“That’s a thought.”

He went across the hall to the dining room and flipped on the light, and stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. “I see what you mean.”

“It looks like something out of The Old Curiosity Shop.”

“True.” But he kept looking around at it, the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors. The wall sconces that were lotus blossoms with lightbulbs where their stamens ought to have been. She thought, Dear Lord, he is missing it all in anticipation. She thought, As long as he is alive in the world, or as long as no one knows otherwise, I will probably have to keep all that sour, fierce, dreary black walnut. That purple rug. And if he dies I will still have to keep it, because I have seen him look at it this way.

She said, “You want it to stay the same.”

“What? No, no. It doesn’t matter to me. Maybe I’ll be back here sometime,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he doubted he would be. That he seemed to entertain doubt only for politeness’s sake. He said, “I’ve thought about this place now and then,” and he shrugged. The coffee was done and he gave her a cup and filled it and took one for himself.

She said, “No one will want me to change anything. When Papa’s gone they’ll come here twice a year or once a year or never, but they’ll want it all to be the same.”

He nodded. “You could sell it. Let someone else tear down the barn. Let the memory of Snowflake vanish once and for all. It would probably be best for everybody if you did that.” He knew he was proposing the unthinkable, and he smiled.

“Ah!” she said, and she rested her head on her arms. “I don’t want this to happen. Somehow I always knew this would happen to me.”

“It doesn’t have to. You could just light out, make a run for it. Let the others deal with it. No one would blame you. I wouldn’t, anyway.”

“No, I really couldn’t do that.”

“Sorry,” he said. And then he said, “It’s a relief to know you feel that way, Glory. I know I have no right to say this, but it is a relief to me. Of course, you can always change your mind.” He got the deck of cards and laid out a hand of solitaire.

WHEN SHE DID FINALLY GO UP TO HER ROOM AND LIE down as if to sleep, she fell to pondering the fact that she had almost promised him she would stay in Gilead and keep the house as it was, the grounds as they were, more or less weedy, more or less unpruned, but essentially the same. Even though he might never see it again. All that helpfulness of his, now that she thought about it, was restoration. Mother’s iris garden reclaimed, the Adirondack chairs repaired, the treads replaced on the back porch steps. It was a little like having the family come to life again to have him there, busy about the place the way her father used to be. When he had first come home, fearful as he was that he had become a stranger, he still came around to the kitchen door, that old habit.

She had thought of pulling down the barn because the worst hours of his life, surely, had passed in it. And she couldn’t walk into it without the thought of what might have happened, what she might have found, and then the terrible problem, the catastrophe it would have been for her father no matter what she could think of to say or do. Having to tell Teddy. It would have been the final insult, the most unpardonable desecration of everything they had somehow managed to cherish about him. Dear God in heaven. And then that hiding place he had made, comforting himself in concealment as he had always done. Or hiding his loneliness, or making his estrangement literal, visible. It was something a boy might do, that old game of hiding in the loft. He had done it as a boy and remembered, and maybe it made him feel at home. She should have pulled it apart herself, not left it for him to do. It was so profound a habit not to intrude on anything of his that she could hardly bring herself to do even what he had asked her. She wondered if he had taken it down, or if he might have left the house when she came upstairs and gone back to it again this very night. And then she wondered if he might not have another bottle hidden somewhere. In the DeSoto. She should have gone back to look around that afternoon, while he was sleeping. She hadn’t been thinking clearly.

What had changed, after all? He had shamed himself in front of her, making her cover for his awful helplessness, defenselessness. Not that she could hold that against him, but that he could never forget what she had seen. She knew this by the way he looked at her now, by the chastened softness of his voice. He had made a generous attempt to lie to his father and failed, and in trying had dropped a stone into a very deep well of sorrow. The report of terrible particulars coming to him after so long, and for no reason except that his poor father seemed to forget everything else while he remembered them more bitterly. Jack promised her that he would never again try to end his life, but then he also told her he had done it only because he’d been drinking, and that must mean that if he happened to have another bottle somewhere—

In the course of time the dim glow of the lightening sky paled the curtains, and she heard Jack stirring in his room. Then finally she fell asleep, and gradually awoke again to the smell of bacon, of coffee.

JACK HAD BROUGHT IN HIS SUIT FROM THE PORCH, WHERE she had hung it to air, and he was brushing and pressing it. There were no really noticeable grease marks except one above a trouser pocket and a few on the underside of the lapels where he had held them closed with his hand. His solicitude for that suit must have sunk so far into him that he had been a little careful of it even in extremis. If he remembered to keep the jacket closed to hide the smudge on the trousers, it would be about as presentable as it ever was. This was clearly a relief to him. He asked her for a needle and thread and secured a hanging button. She enjoyed the wry seriousness with which he went about such things, these unlikely shifts and competences she knew she was privileged to witness. Still, there was something slightly hectic about it this morning, something disturbingly purposeful.

He hung the suit on the door frame and stood back to look at it. “Not too bad, considering. Hmm?”

“Not bad at all.”

“There’s toast in the oven. And I fried some bacon. I could scramble an egg for you.”

“You’re being very nice.”

He nodded. “I called Teddy.”

It took her a moment to understand what he had said. “You called Teddy?”

“Yes. I woke him up. But I thought I’d better make the call before my resolve faded.”

“Just toast will be fine,” she said.

“As you wish.” He stacked toast on a plate and set it in front of her, and jam, and butter, and a cup of coffee. He said, “I went in to check on the old gent this morning, and he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know who he was, either. No idea. He was very polite about it.” He propped himself against the counter. “So I thought I’d better talk with Teddy. He’s calling the others. He said he could be here by Tuesday.” It was the first time he had looked at her directly, met her eyes.

“All right. I’ll have to get the house ready. Make up the beds. I’ll need some groceries.”

Jack said, “I’ll be here to help you with that. Until Tuesday. Then I’ll be out of your way.”

“What? But you said you’d be staying, let’s see, ten more days. To wait for that letter.”

He smiled. “There won’t be a letter. I don’t know what that was — a joke. Don’t ask me to stay here, Glory, when all this is happening. You know I can’t trust myself. I could do something — unsightly. I could make everything much worse.” He said softly, “I really can’t deal with the thought that he will die.” Then he said, “Tears and more tears. But I won’t be leaving you here by yourself. Teddy said he would call from the road, from Fremont, and I’ll stay until he does. You won’t be alone.”

“Ah,” she said, “but who will look after you?”

“It will be fine. Better for me, anyway. Better for everyone. You know that.”

“But we won’t even know where you are, Jack.”

He said, “What does it matter?”

“Oh, how can you ask? How can you possibly ask? I can’t deal with— I know what it is you’re afraid of. It breaks my heart.”

He shrugged. “You really shouldn’t worry so much. I have an impressive history of failure. For what that’s worth. And people can be surprisingly decent about it. Cops. Nuns. The Salvation Army. Vulnerable women.”

She said, “Don’t you dare joke with me.”

He smiled. “I was pretty well telling you the truth just then.”

“Then don’t tell me the truth. You’ve worried us almost to death. You’ve scared us almost to death. But this really is your masterpiece.”

Then he looked at her, his face pale and grave and regretful, and she knew there was no more to be said, that she should not have said what she did say, because the grief he always carried with him was as much as he could bear. He said, “I took care of him. I made oatmeal and fed it to him. I cleaned him up and changed his sheets and turned him over, and I think he went back to sleep. Last night was too hard for him. My fault.”

“No. You were trying to comfort him. And this was coming. We all knew it would happen.”

He nodded. “I suppose so. Thanks. Thank you, Glory. I’m going to go take care of that thing in the loft. It won’t take long.”

Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.

SHE WENT TO SPEAK WITH AMES, TO TELL HIM THE FAMily was being asked to come home. He hugged her and gave her his handkerchief and said, “I see, I see, yes. I’ll be by to look in on him when he’s had his sleep. I have a few things to take care of at the church first. And how is Jack?” So she told him, though she had not meant to, that Jack was leaving. She said it was so hard for her that he should leave just then, and she said it with all the passion of her worry and grief, but she did not let herself violate the secrecy she had been sworn to, more or less. She did not mention his dread of doing something unsightly. Ah, Jack.

“Yes,” Ames said, “his father would want him there with his family. It would be a pity for him to leave now.”

“It would,” she said.

There are very few comforts to be had from half-confiding, and Glory thanked him and went away before she could find herself giving in to habit and sadness and divulging her fears about Jack, the thing most offensive to him that they had done all through their childhood and his. That her father had done once again no doubt on his last visit to Ames’s kitchen. She had left Ames with the impression, she knew to her deep chagrin, that Jack was just behaving badly, a scoundrel disappointing the standards of civility. Ah well. Nothing to do but go home and start preparing for the brothers and sisters.

She came into the kitchen and found Jack there, wearing his suit and tie, brushing at a smudge on the brim of his hat. He said, by way of explanation, “I have one last glimmer of hope, a merest spark of optimism. I want to make sure it is extinguished before I leave this town.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I mean, I doubt that there’s any life in it, but I thought, you know, I’d inquire, just to be sure. I’m going to go speak with Reverend Ames again. I thought I’d give it one last try.” He shrugged.

Glory said, “Yes, fine. I just saw him. I told him about Papa. He said he would be at the church this morning, and then he would come by here. So you could wait and talk to him then.”

“No, I think I’ll stroll up to the church,” he said. “That’s more or less as I imagined it. It will be that kind of conversation. There will be a certain element of confession in it. I can do that.” He smiled. “Don’t look so worried. I won’t let him hurt my feelings this time. I mean, at least he won’t catch me off guard. For what that’s worth.”

Oh, she thought, dear God, let that be true! How to warn him. How to warn either of them. Jack would be walking into an embarrassment she had prepared for him. When Ames said to her, It would be a pity, his voice had a hint of that taut patience with which he had always heard out tales of Jack’s scoundrelism. And Jack had a way of conceding ground he could not defend, taking on a manner of evasive deference when he felt he might be seen as a shady character, which meant that he certainly would be seen that way, however bright the shine on his shoes. That weary smile of his, as if he knew that between him and anyone he spoke to there was none of the trust that sustained the most ordinary conversation, as if between them there was an uneasy mutual understanding that almost obviated words. The jaded intimacy in his assuming so much seemed to startle people. Still, he had to assure himself that his last spark of hope was extinguished, so he checked the knot of his tie and tipped his hat, and went off to find Ames at his church.

Glory looked in on her father, and finding him still asleep, she went up to her room, got down on her knees, and prayed fervently in the only words that came to her—“Dear God in heaven, help him. Dear God in heaven, protect him. Please don’t let him suffer for my stupidity, dear God, please.” Then she lay on her bed and thought. More precisely, she fell to remembering something she had almost forbidden herself to remember. Something it seemed she had now fully and finally given up, though it had never been hers. A modest sunlit house, everything in it spare and functional, airy. Nothing imposing about it at all. In front a picture window looking out on a garden, a patio in back. The kitchen would be spacious and sunlit, with a white painted table, no, a breakfast nook, where morning light would fall on it. Sometimes she had talked about this house with the fiancé, and they had been in such agreement, they were so much of one mind, that it was amazing to them. No gilt frames, no beetling cornices. She had mentioned children, and he had said they would have to be very practical the first few years, there was time enough to think about children. So she imagined the children playing quietly, tiptoeing in from the patio now and then to whisper a secret or open a hand to show her an interesting pebble, then back out the door again so quietly, because Papa must not be disturbed. He must not know they were there at all. She had names for them, which drifted among them, and changed, as did certain of their attributes, ages, gender, number. For a few weeks one or another of them had a stammer, because she had spoken with a child at school who stammered, a sweet child. But then they were infants again, no traits particular to them yet, happy to lie in her arms. They wore flannel pajamas every cool night, and in her fantasies she sang to them the ballad of lost children. “The robins so red brought strawberry leaves and over them spread.” They would weep in her arms and love her more, since she would keep them safe forever from abandonment and all bitter loss. She might have had doubts about dropping this tincture of sorrow into their hearts if they had been real children, though for herself she never could regret that her sisters had sung to her, making her feel so sharply the steadfast and effectual care of her family, while the great wind roared in the trees and rattled the windows. That wind, they all knew, could sweep up a town and scatter it hither and yon, houses and cattle and children. Robins so red. The words were bright as a prick of blood.

The fiancé had a habit of sitting with his heels together and his toes pointing outward. This was truer when he wished to seem content or ingratiating. She could never help feeling this meant something disheartening about him that would not be fixed even if she sometime mentioned to him that he might arrange his feet more gracefully and he complied. If she gave him a cup of coffee, he would lean there, elbows on his knees, holding the saucer under the cup, and he would grin at her, and those feet would seem to mimic the grin, which was excessive in itself. He told her she was a snob about her family, and that was true. And not without reason. They were all graceful people after their shambling style, and they did not grin.

The fact was, all the same, that she would have married him, that for years she had had no other intention, except when doubts emerged that reduced intention to hope. How miserable that was to remember, and how miserable the relief when a letter came, the phone rang, she heard his knock at the door. He was a pleasant-looking man, robust and ruddy, with clear blue eyes and red hair that crinkled against his scalp. If in person he did not altogether answer to the idea of him she took from his letters, he was agreeable enough. Sometimes he made her laugh. She would almost like to know how much money she had given him, only to be able to gauge the depth of an infatuation that seemed so remote to her now. It was for the children and the sunlit house that she had been diligent at discerning virtues and suppressing doubts, ready to give up mere money if it could put aside the obstacles to her happiness, or if it could keep the thought of happiness safe from disruption. God bless him, Jack had understood it all and laughed, a painful but companionable laugh, as if they’d been whiling away perdition together, telling tales of what got them there, to forestall tedium and the dread of what might come next. The sweet thought of sunlight and children she had cherished in secret was now utterly dispelled. No, she wanted to tell Jack about them, to dispel them, as if they were spirits of the kind that perish in daylight. But for that reason she could not and never would betray them. Let some sleep of oblivion overtake them, finally.

So Glory would live out her life in a place all the rest of them called home, a place they would mean to return to more often than they did. If she spoke discreetly to the high school principal about the fact that the marriage she intended had not in fact taken place, the information would pass through town and be absorbed and cease to be of particular interest. She could start teaching again.

She heard Jack walk into the kitchen, put his hat on the refrigerator. She heard him go down the hall, speak to his father, then come back to fill a glass with water and take it to him. After a few minutes, he went to the piano and began to play a hymn. “‘When all my trials and troubles are o’er, and I awake on that beautiful shore.’” Things must have gone well enough, thank God. So she went downstairs.

When he had finished the hymn he turned and looked at her. “It wasn’t bad,” he said softly. “He was very kind. He couldn’t do anything for me, but he was kind. It was all right. Better than I expected, really. Ames’s heart is failing, he said, so he won’t be around much longer. I thought he might, I don’t know, vouch for me. Help me overcome my reputation. But I have to leave here anyway. I don’t know why I bothered him.” He shrugged.

She said, “I’m glad it was a good conversation.”

He nodded. “I called him Papa, and this time I think it may even have pleased him a little.” He smiled to himself, and then he said, “I told him almost everything, and when I was done he said, ‘You are a good man.’ Imagine that.”

“Well, I could have told you you are a good man. I’ve said it in so many words, surely.”

He laughed. “You’re a miserable judge of character. Mine, especially. No objectivity at all.”

WHEN THEY HEARD THEIR FATHER STIR AND WAKE, JACK carried him to his chair on the porch and settled the quilt around him and read to him from the newspaper while Glory made potato soup almost the way he had always liked it, without onions but with butter melted into it and crackers crumbled on top. Jack fed him, held his cup for him. The old man accepted these attentions without comment. Then Jack changed into his work clothes and went out to the garden, where his father could watch him, as it seemed he did until he began to doze off. After a little while Jack came back and found him asleep and carried him to bed again, slipping the crooked body out of the robe with great care. It seemed to her there was a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined. He worked on the DeSoto, then sat in the porch and read till the sun went down. He went out for a stroll, just to look at the place, he said, and came back in an hour, stone sober. It may have been the saddest day of her life, one of the saddest of his. And yet, all in all, it wasn’t a bad day.

THEN IT WAS SUNDAY AND JACK WENT TO CHURCH. THIS was to show Ames his respect and, he said, appreciation. He asked her for two dollars for the offering, since he had made her put all money away out of sight, and had even, despite their sentimental value, given her dollar bills he had hidden years before in the pages of the Edinburgh books, the proceeds of youthful thefts, which he had put where he knew no one would find them. Twelve dollars scattered through The Monstrous Regiment of Women and nineteen in On Affliction. From The Hind Unloos’d, which their father had told them to revere as a great work, he took a few desolate report cards and a note to his father from a civics teacher who saw only the darkest clouds on his moral and educational horizon and asked urgently for a conference. He shook his head. “I guess I was a pretty cynical kid,” he said, and laughed. Glory suggested he put the money in the collection plate as a sort of penance, but he thought the amount was large enough to arouse suspicion. “Coming from me it would be, anyway.”

She stayed with her father, who she thought had reacted to the news that Jack was at church with a brief and tentative cheerfulness. Jack came home as calm as he was when he left, to his father’s apparent relief, and when she asked him what the sermon was about, he laughed and said, “It wasn’t about me.” Then he said, “Well, it was about idolatry, about the worship of things, on one hand the material world, in the manner of scientific rationalism, and on the other hand — chairs and tables and old purple drapes, in the manner of Boughtons and totemists. It did cause me to reflect.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t change a thing.”

“If you want to, feel free.”

“Of course.”

She made a beef roast and dinner rolls while Jack worked in the attic, clearing space for whatever in her hardness of heart she might decide to put out of sight. Again he was purposeful. The picture of the river was back in its old place, so she glanced through the open door of his room and saw the volumes of Kipling on his dresser between the Lincoln bookends. Nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Her father, who hardly spoke at all, watched their comings and goings with irritation and distrust. She served dinner in the kitchen, careful not to stir memories if she could avoid it. When they were seated and she had said the grace, her father sat impatiently with his hands folded in his lap until Jack offered to feed him his mashed potatoes and gravy. These last few days his gentleness had been especially striking to her, and why should it be? She had always known he could be gentle. She would tell the others in case they had forgotten, so that they would all hope someday to know him as well as she did. Then if he ever came to any of them he would be deeply and immediately welcome, however disreputable he might seem or be. Finally her father gestured at the meal she had made and said, “I guess this is goodbye.”

Jack said, “Not quite yet.”

The old man nodded. “Not yet,” he said bitterly. “Not yet.”

“Teddy will be here soon.”

“I’m sure of that.” His head fell. “With his stethoscope. As if that solved anything.”

Jack cleared his throat. “It’s been good to be home. It really has.”

The old man raised his eyes and studied his son’s face. “You’ve never had a name for me. Not one you’d call me to my face. Why is that?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know, myself. They all seemed wrong when I said them. I didn’t deserve to speak to you the way the others did.”

“Oh!” his father said, and he closed his eyes. “That was what I waited for. That was what I wanted.”

GLORY HAD DEVELOPED A NEW APPRECIATION FOR THE SABBATH because it was the day when no mail came. That Sunday had passed in sad tranquillity, her father a little stronger, she thought, and Jack full of solicitude for them both, regretful but not at all in doubt, embarrassed by his own undeviating will to be gone. Monday morning she heard him in his room, sorting through his dresser, putting aside, she was sure, everything of her father’s she had given him, to suit his strangely rigorous notions of what indeed belonged to him. She had never known another thief, so she could not generalize, but she thought thievishness might involve some subtle derangement of the sense of mine and thine. Some inability to find the bounds of scrupulousness. That would account for his refusal to leave the house with a pair or two of his father’s socks. The austerity of it all broke her heart. The handkerchiefs he had borrowed were washed and pressed and back in their father’s drawer. He was becoming once again the Jack who had turned up at the kitchen door claiming to have lost a suitcase.

No, there was that other thief, the one who had kept an account of the money she gave him, perhaps even believing he might pay her back. Time enough to think about children, he said, and she had nodded, knowing it wasn’t true. He needed a little money, a little more money, because he was going into business with an old army buddy of his. He couldn’t wait for the two of them to meet, she would love him — in a manner of speaking, ha ha. She gave him the money so he would stop talking, maybe even so he would go away. He might have known this. He would go away and leave her with her thoughts of him. Those few things it still moved her to remember, how he took her hand. Luke and Daniel and Faith had all been there in the parlor waiting, the day she brought him home. They were perfectly cordial, not visibly surprised. She was fairly sure nothing sardonic would have passed among them when she and the fiancé left the room. There was no hint that they had any particular doubts about his character or his intentions. Still, there was a flicker of nerves in the glance he gave her. Then he took her hand.

She was thinking about all this when the mail came. Letters to her from Luke and Hope and a letter to Jack from Della Miles. She went into the kitchen and sat down. She had become used to the idea that nothing more of consequence would happen after the last of the letters Jack had sent came back to him. But if the woman named Lorraine — Glory had addressed the envelope — telephoned Della and read Jack’s letter to her — no, this still would have arrived too quickly. It was sent from Memphis, not by air mail. She was light-headed. It is terrible that letters can matter so much. She thought of burning it. She even thought of opening it. Then she would burn it if need be. No, some things are sacred, even, especially, this wounding thing — wounding, how did she know that? She knew. She went to the stairs and called to Jack to come down, which he did very promptly. He would think she needed help with their father. When he saw her he said, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. This letter came for you.”

She had left it lying on the table. He picked it up and looked at it. “Jesus,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Would you like me to leave you alone?”

“Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind. Thank you.”

So she went into the parlor and sat down next to the radio, and waited for any sign that she might be wanted or needed. There was only silence. Finally she went to the kitchen door. Jack looked up at her and smiled. He said, “It doesn’t really change anything.” He cleared his throat. “It isn’t unkind. I’m all right.” Then he said, “Cry if you want to, chum. Feel free.”

Glory sat there with him, ready to go away if he gave any sign that she should. From time to time he looked up at her, as if there were something he thought of saying and did not, or as if he knew she was of one mind with him though neither of them spoke. Finally he said, “I’m still planning to stay around until Teddy calls. I won’t be good for much.” And he said, “Anyone in the world would want a drink right now.” When they heard their father stir he went with her to tend to him. The old man blinked at Jack and said, “Now she’s crying. I don’t know what to do about it. Jesus never had to be old.” But he let them bathe him and dress him and shave him, and he let Glory brush his hair. Jack brought the Old Spice and touched it to his cheeks. They helped him to the parlor, to his Morris chair. Glory poached an egg, and Jack leaned in the door and watched while she fed him.

Then there was a knock at the kitchen door, and Ames came in, carrying the little case he brought with him when he visited the sick. Their father’s eyes found it and remained on it while Ames said his hellos and remarked on the weather. Glory knew they were conspicuously miserable, the three of them, and that Ames would acknowledge this only by the gentleness of his voice. Her father tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, as he did when he was impatient. Ames said to him, “Robert, I was hoping I might share communion with you,” and the old man nodded. So he put the little case on the mantel and opened it and took out a silver cup. He filled the cup from a flask, and then he asked Glory for a bit of bread. She brought him a roll from their Sunday dinner on a linen napkin. He set the elements on the broad arm of Boughton’s chair. He was silent for a while, and then he said, “‘The Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed, took bread and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, This is my body, which is for you, this do in remembrance of me.’” Boughton said, “Yes. ‘In like manner the cup.’ Yes. ‘You proclaim the Lord’s death until he come.’” And the two old men fell silent. They had said those words so many times. Ames broke the bread and gave a piece of it to Boughton, and to Glory, and offered it to Jack, who smiled and stepped away. Then he held the cup to Boughton’s lips, gave it to Glory, drank from it himself. The two old men were silent together for some time.

When Boughton nodded off, Ames came into the kitchen. There seemed to be nothing he wanted to say to them, but he took a chair at the table when it was offered to him and he accepted a cup of coffee. His care of their father, bringing the Sacrament, would have been an enhancement of the sad quiet of the day. But he stayed, and he attempted conversation. Jack leaned back in his chair with his arms folded and watched him, too weary to help sustain it. Glory went to see that her father was comfortable, and brought his quilt, and when she came back, Ames was letting himself out the door, looking a little embarrassed and dejected.

She said, “What happened?”

“Well, he tried to give me money. To leave. I told him I was leaving anyway, he needn’t bother.”

“Ah, Jack.”

“You know he wants me out of here. He can see what I’ve done. To my father.”

“Did he say that?”

“Good Reverend Ames? Of course not. He said he thought I might want to go to Memphis.”

“Well, why wouldn’t he think that? You and I have talked about going to Memphis.”

He reflected a moment, and then he laughed. “We did, didn’t we. That seems like a million years ago. Another life.” He said, “You’re right. Poor old blighter. Trying to give away money he doesn’t have. What a fool I am.” He rubbed his eyes. “That was friendliness, wasn’t it. I should have thought of that. He was starting to like me, I suppose.”

The day passed. Glory wanted to value it, though of course she could not enjoy it. She would probably never see her brother again — in this life, as Teddy had said. Sweet Jesus, she thought, love this thief, too. After a while Jack roused himself and went about the work he had set for himself, putting things in order. He nailed a loose plank in the shed wall, and he cut some dead canes out of the lilac hedge. He split a pile of kindling. Then he came in and asked her for the car keys. He said, “I think I’ve got it back together well enough. I’ll try to start it.” She went to the porch and heard the engine start and idle. Jack opened the barn doors, and then he backed the DeSoto into afternoon light. He pushed the door on the passenger side open. “I was thinking we might go for a spin, take the old gent along.” So they went into the house and Jack took their father up in his arms and carried him out to the car. And then he drove them past the church, which was, to their father’s mind, the place where the old church had stood. And he drove them past the house where Mrs. Sweet had lived, and past the Trotskys’ old house, and past the high school and the baseball field, and then out to the peripheries, where town gave way to countryside and the shadows of late day were blue between the rows of corn and on the evening side of trees and the swells of pasture and in the clefts of creek. The smell of ripe fields and water and cattle and evening came in on the wind. “Yes,” their father said. “It was wonderful. I remember now.”

When they came back to the house again, Jack smiled and handed her the keys. They settled their father for the night, sat together in the kitchen trying to read, then trying to play Scrabble. It was a habit of hers to stay up as long as Jack did, thinking he would be more reluctant to leave the house if he knew she was aware of his leaving. Finally he went upstairs, and in half an hour she did, too. She spent the night listening and worrying, dreading his absence, because the thought of it made her life seem intolerably long. She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.

She came downstairs at dawn and Jack was in the kitchen already, in his suit and tie, with his suitcase by the door. He said, “I hope I haven’t been too much trouble. There’s a lot I regret.” He said it the minute she came into the room, as if it were the one thing he was determined to have said, the one thing he wanted her to know.

She said, “Ah, Jack,” and he laughed.

“Well, I haven’t been the perfect houseguest. You have to grant me that.”

“All I regret is that you’re leaving.”

He nodded. “Thank God,” he said. “I could have given you a lot more to regret. And myself. You’ve really helped me.”

“Now you know where to come when you need help.”

“Yes. Ye who are weary, come home.”

“Very sound advice.”

He said, “I’m not sure you should stay here, Glory. Promise me you won’t let anyone talk you into it. Don’t do it for my sake. I shouldn’t have talked to you about it the way I did.”

“Don’t worry. If you ever need to come home, I’ll be here. Call first, just to be sure. No, you won’t have to do that. I’ll be here.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

He helped her bathe their father and dress him and feed him, and then it was eight o’clock and the phone rang. Teddy had driven the whole night to make up for an emergency call and a late start. He was in Fremont, where he had stopped for coffee. Jack said, “I’m going to have to ask you for some traveling money. Not enough to get me in trouble. Just enough to get me out of town.” She had set aside Teddy’s envelope and put into it the ten-dollar bill Jack gave her when he had just arrived, and the money hidden in the Edinburgh books.

Jack hefted the envelope and handed it back to her. “Too much. You know how much liquor this would buy me? Perdition for sure. Unless I got lucky and somebody rolled me for it.”

“Oh dear God in heaven, Jack. How much can I give you, then? Sixty? It’s all your money. You won’t owe me a dime.”

“Forty will do. No need to worry. There are always more dishes to be washed, more potatoes to be peeled. Except in Gilead.”

“I’ll keep the rest for you. Call me. Or write to me.”

“Will do.” He picked up his suitcase, and then he set it down again and went into the parlor, where his father was sitting in the Morris chair. He stood there, hat in hand. The old man looked at him, stern with the effort of attention, or with wordless anger.

Jack shrugged. “I have to go now. I wanted to say goodbye.” He went to his father and held out his hand.

The old man drew his own hand into his lap and turned away. “Tired of it!” he said.

Jack nodded. “Me, too. Bone tired.” He looked at his father a minute longer, then bent and kissed his brow. He came back into the kitchen and picked up his suitcase. “So long, kiddo.” He wiped a tear from her cheek with the ball of his thumb.

“You have to take care of yourself,” she said. “You have to.”

He tipped his hat and smiled. “Will do.”

She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.

SO TEDDY ARRIVED AND SETTLED IN AND BECAME THE ONE to read in the porch, to bathe his father and feed him and turn him, and to help prepare for the others, going off to buy groceries. He didn’t ask much about their brother and she didn’t offer much about him, except to say that he had been helpful and kind. Jack was Jack. There was little enough to say that would not seem like betrayal, even though Teddy knew him well enough to have a fairly good idea of the terms he had made with the world. In time she would say more, when the sense of his presence had dimmed a little.

Once, Teddy knelt by his father’s chair to help him with his supper, and the old man reached out his hand to stroke his hair, his face. He said, “You told me goodbye, but I knew you couldn’t leave,” and there was a glint of vindication in his eyes.

THE SECOND DAY AFTER JACK HAD LEFT, GLORY WAS OUT IN THE garden clearing away the cucumber vines and gathering green tomatoes. There had been a sudden change of weather, a light frost. She noticed a car passing slowly on the farther side of the street. She watched it, thinking it must be someone from the church, some friend or acquaintance wondering if the rumors were true, that her father was indeed failing and the family were coming home. But the driver of the car was a black woman, and that was a curious thing. There were no colored people in Gilead. Glory bent to her work again, and the car came back on the near side of the street and stopped. She could see two colored women in the front seat and a child in the back. They looked at the house from the car for a few minutes, as if deciding what to do next, and then a woman stepped out of the passenger side and came up the walk. She was a dark, angular woman in a gray suit. Her hair was pulled back under a gray cloche. She looked very urban here in Gilead, and conscious of it, as if she felt the best impression she could make was one that would set her sharply apart. She turned and spoke to the child, “Robert, you stay in that car.” So the boy stood on the edge of the grass with one foot inside the car door. He was wearing church clothes, a blue suit and a red tie.

Glory came down out of the garden to meet the woman on the sidewalk. She said, “Hello. Can I help you?”

The woman said, “I’m looking for the home of Reverend Robert Boughton.” Her voice was soft and grave.

“This is his house,” Glory said, “but he’s very ill. I’m his daughter Glory. Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m sorry to hear your father is ill. Very sorry to hear it.” She paused. “It’s his son I was hoping to talk to, Mr. Jack Boughton.”

Glory said, “Jack isn’t here now. He’s been gone since Tuesday morning.”

The woman looked over her shoulder at the little boy. She shook her head and he leaned back against the car. She turned to Glory again. “Would you happen to know if he was planning to come back?”

“No, I don’t expect him to come back. Not any time soon. I don’t know what plans he had. If he had any. I don’t know where he was going to go.”

The woman smoothed her gloves, trying to hide her disappointment. Then she looked up at Glory. “I’d think he might be here, if his father is sick. I’d think he might be coming back, at least.” She looked at the house, with its tangled covert of vines and its high, narrow windows. Then she said, “Well, I thank you for your trouble,” and she turned back toward the car. The little boy wiped his cheeks with the heel of his hand.

There was an unconfiding gravity in the woman’s manner, a sense that she spoke softly across an immeasurable distance. Yet she had studied Glory’s face as if she almost remembered it.

Glory said, “Wait! Please wait,” and the woman stopped and turned. “You’re Della, aren’t you. You’re Jack’s wife.”

For a moment she did not speak. Then she said, “Yes, I am. I am his wife, and I sent him that letter! And now I don’t even know where to find him, to talk to him.” Her voice was low, broken with grief. She looked at the boy, who had taken a few steps from the car to lay his hand on the trunk of the oak tree.

Glory said, “I didn’t know — Jack didn’t trust me well enough to tell me much about anything that mattered to him. It’s always been that way. There’s a lot I didn’t tell him. Maybe that’s just how we are.”

“But he always said in his letters how kind you were to him. I want to thank you for that.”

“He was kind to me, too.”

Della nodded. “He is kind.” There was a silence. She said, “This place looks just the way he described it. That tree and the barn and the big tall house. He used to tell Robert about climbing that tree.”

“We really weren’t supposed to do that. Even the lowest branches are so high.”

“He said there were swings hanging from it, and he’d shinny up on the ropes and then climb up into the top branches. He’d hide up there, he said.”

“Well, I’m so glad our mother didn’t know that. She was always worrying about him.”

Della nodded. She looked past her at the orderly garden, at the clothesline, and again at the porch with its pot of petunias on the step. Her eyes softened. It was as if a message had been left for her, something sad and humorous and lovely in its intimacy. Glory could imagine that Jack might have drawn them a map of the place, orchard and pasture and shed. Maybe there were stories attached to every commonplace thing, other stories than she had heard, than any of them had heard. A mention of Snowflake. She said, “Would you like to come inside?”

“No, no, we can’t do that. Thank you, but we have to get back down to Missouri before dark. Especially the way things are now. We have a place to stay down there. That’s my sister driving the car, and I promised her I would only be a few minutes. We got lost looking for this place, and the days aren’t so long anymore. We have the boy with us. His father wouldn’t want us to be taking any chances.”

Glory said, “Jack told me he would call me, or send an address. That doesn’t mean he will. He might call his brother Teddy, so I’ll tell him you were here. This is so sudden. I hope I’m not forgetting anything.”

Della saw her tears and smiled. One more thing that was almost familiar to her.

“This happens to me,” Glory said, and wiped her cheeks. “But I can’t tell you how glad he’d have been to see you. Both of you. It would have been wonderful. If only I could have kept him here a little while longer.”

Della said, “We’ll go back to St. Louis. He might come there, to the old neighborhood.” Then she said, “Was it because of my letter that he left? Because, you know, I’d be very worried about that.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“It was hard for him. But he said the letter wasn’t unkind. And he was going to leave anyway. He had his own reasons. He didn’t blame you for anything.”

“Thank you. God bless you,” Della said. Then she said, “We’d better leave now. It was so kind of my sister to come up here with me, and I don’t want to upset her. She didn’t think it was a good idea. My whole family thought it was a bad idea.”

“If you could just wait another minute, though. I should give you something to take with you, since you’ve come all the way here — please wait.” She went into the house, and there were all the books, there was the everlasting jumble of small things. She had meant to take anything at all. She had seen the little boy pocketing acorns. Anything would be a memento. A pagoda. A swan. But all the knickknacks were so odd and ridiculous. None of the big old books would do. She went upstairs to the room Jack had had as a boy and took the framed photograph of a river off its nail and brought it downstairs. When she gave it to Della she said, “Jack always liked this. I don’t know why, really. But he kept it in his room.”

Della nodded. “Thank you.” The boy came up the walk to see what it was his mother had been given. She gave it to him and he studied it. She said, “It’s a picture of the river.”

Glory bent to the child and offered her hand and he took it. “You’re Robert,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Glory. I’m your father’s sister.”

“Yes, ma’am.” And then a long look, as if he were remembering, or preparing to remember.

Jack had a beautiful child, a beautiful son, who would some time turn Boughton, no doubt, and lose his prettiness to what they called distinction.

“Are you a baseball player, too?” she asked.

He smiled. “Yes, ma’am. I play some ball.”

His mother said, “He thinks he’s going to be a preacher,” and she stroked his hair. The sister opened the door on the driver’s side and stood out of the car to stare across the roof at them. Della said, “We have to be leaving now.”

“Yes. Will Jack know how to reach you? If he does call here.”

Della put the boy in the backseat, and then she took an envelope from the glove compartment and wrote on it, some numbers and some names. Her sister had started the car. Della handed her the letter. “It was a pleasure to meet you. I hope your father will be feeling better. If you have a chance to get this to Jack, I’d be grateful.” Then she closed the door, and the car pulled away.

GLORY SAT DOWN ON THE PORCH STEPS. SHE THOUGHT, IF Jack had been here, he’d have felt that terrible shock of joy — no, worse than joy, peace — that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling — humiliating as she remembered it, because she had been so helpless against it. But that was the fiancé. Della was Jack’s wife, she said so herself, and it made all the difference. Della had looked at the world of his old life tenderly, all the particulars there to confirm themselves, proof of his truthfulness, which always did need proof. I used to live here, I wasn’t always gone, I was usually closer to home than he thought I was. So Jack had said, and how could he have seemed so estranged to them? And how cruel it was that he loved the place anyway. His little boy touching that tree, just to touch it. The tree that sounded like the ocean. Dear Lord in heaven, she could never change anything. How could she know what he had sanctified to that child’s mind with his stories, sad stories that had made them laugh. I used to wish I lived here, he said. That I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did.

And they would not walk in the door. They had to hurry, to escape the dangers of nightfall. The boy was with them, and his father would not want them to take chances. She knew it would have answered a longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had passed through that strange old house. Just the thought of it might bring him back, and the place would seem changed, to him and to her. As if all that saving and keeping their father had done was providence indeed, and new love would transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful.

Della had met Jack on a rainy afternoon. He was just out of prison, and he was wearing the suit — almost new, he said — he had bought with the money that was supposed to have brought him home for his mother’s funeral. The suit he sold because it made him look like a minister. And he had come by an umbrella somehow. Just the terror of his release into the world, certain he had lost his family for good and all this time, would have made him wry and incandescent, and so would the inadvertent respectability of a dark suit and a working umbrella. And there before him was a lady in need of assistance. She had said, “Thank you, Reverend.” Such mild eyes, such a gentle voice. He had forgotten that, the pleasure of being spoken to kindly. Finally he told her he was not a man of the cloth. So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.

She has forgiven so much, he said. You can have no idea. And how would she forgive this, that she felt she had to come into Gilead as if it were a foreign and a hostile country? Did anyone know otherwise? Worn, modest, countrified Gilead, Gilead of the sunflowers. She carried herself with the tense poise of a woman who felt she was being watched, wondered about. Jack could hardly bring himself to dream she would come here, and there was reason enough to doubt, though he could not stop himself from dreaming of it, either. They had the boy with them, Jack would be frightened for the boy, so they had to be back to Missouri before it was dark. They had a place to stay in Missouri.

She thought, Maybe this Robert will come back someday. Young men are rarely cautious. What of Jack will there be in him? And I will be almost old. I will see him standing in the road by the oak tree, and I will know him by his tall man’s slouch, the hands on the hips. I will invite him onto the porch and he will reply with something civil and Southern, “Yes, ma’am, I might could,” or whatever it is they say. And he will be very kind to me. He is Jack’s son, and Southerners are especially polite to older women. He will be curious about the place, though his curiosity will not override his good manners. He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father’s house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment.

That he has answered his father’s prayers.

The Lord is wonderful.