They had been to Lane and Oberlin, and they knew their Hebrew and their Greek and their Locke and their Milton. Some of them even set up a nice little college in Tabor. It lasted quite a while. The people who graduated from it, especially the young women, would go by themselves to the other side of the earth as teachers and missionaries and come back decades later to tell us about Turkey and Korea. Still, they were bodacious old men, the lot of them. It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.
***
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
I ask myself the same question.
A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she’s made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn’t know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.” So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation.
***
I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light — pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar. Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk. You remember Soapy. I don’t really know why you should. She is a very unremarkable animal. I’ll take a picture of her.
So there we were, sipping honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother brought out the camera, so maybe you will have some pictures. The film ran out before I could get a shot of her. That’s just typical. Sometimes if I try to photograph her she’ll hide her face in her hands, or she’ll just walk out of the room. She doesn’t think she’s a pretty woman. I don’t know where she got these ideas about herself, and I don’t think I ever will know, either. Sometimes I’ve wondered why she’d marry an old man like me, a fine, vital woman like she is. I’d never have thought to ask her to marry me. I would never have dared to. It was her idea. I remind myself of that often. She reminds me of it, too.
***
I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
There’s a shimmer on a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They’re in the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin. Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not prettier than most children. You’re just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well-scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.” That’s a fact.
While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine — not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly, even while I do long to see what it will mean to have wife and child restored to me, I mean Louisa and Rebecca. I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.
***
I have a few pictures of Louisa, but I don’t think the resemblance is very good. Considering that I haven’t seen her in fifty-one years, I guess I can’t really judge. When she was nine or ten she used to skip rope like fury, and if you tried to distract her, she would just turn away, still jumping, and never miss a lick. Her braids would bounce and thump on her back. Sometimes I’d try to catch hold of one of them, and then she’d be off down the street, still skipping. She would be trying to make it to a thousand, or to a million, and nothing could distract her. It said in my mother’s home health book that a young girl should not be allowed to make that sort of demand on her strength, but when I showed Louisa the very page on which those words were printed, she just told me to mind my own business. She was always running around barefoot with her braids flying and her bonnet askew. I don’t know when girls stopped wearing sunbonnets, or why they ever did wear them. If they were supposed to keep off freckles, I can tell you they didn’t work.
I’ve always envied men who could watch their wives grow old. Boughton lost his wife five years ago, and he married before I did. His oldest boy has snow-white hair. His grandchildren are mostly married. And as for me, it is still true that I will never see a child of mine grow up and I will never see a wife of mine grow old. I’ve shepherded a good many people through their lives, I’ve baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches.
You and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes. Half an hour ago you were on my lap and Soapy was on her belly in the square of sunlight. And while you were on my lap you drew — so you told me — a Messerschmitt 109. That is it in the corner of the page. You know all the names from a book Leon Fitch gave you about a month ago, when my back was turned, as it seems to me, since he could not, surely, have imagined I’d approve. All your drawings look about like that one in the corner, but you give them different names — Spad and Fokker and Zero. You’re always trying to get me to read the fine print about how many guns they have and how many bombs they carry. If my father were here, if I were my father, I’d find a way to make you think that the noble and manly thing would be to give the book back to old Fitch. I really should do that. But he means well. Maybe I’ll just hide the thing in the pantry. When did you figure out about the pantry? That’s where we always put anything we don’t want you getting into. Now that I think about it, half the things in that pantry were always there so one or another of us wouldn’t get into them.