We took off into the brush, and when we decided he wasn’t going to follow us, we sat down on the ground and my father scraped the dirt off the carrot with his knife and cut it up into pieces and set them on the crown of his hat, which he’d put between us like a table, and then he commenced to say grace, which he never failed to do. He said, “For all we are about to receive,” and then we both started laughing till the tears were pouring down. I realize now that keeping us fed was a desperate concern for him. It actually drove him to something resembling crime. That carrot was so big and old and tough he had to whittle it into chips. It was about like eating a branch, and there was nothing to wash it down with, either.
I really only realized afterward what trouble I’d have been in if he had gotten shot, even killed, and I was left stranded on my own out there. I still dream about that. I think he felt the sort of shame you feel when you realize what a foolish chance you’ve taken after you’ve already taken it. But he was absolutely set on finding that grave.
Once, to make the point that I should study while I was young and learning came easily, my grandfather told me about a man he knew when he first came to Kansas, a preacher newly settled there. He said, “That fellow just was not confident of his Hebrew. He’d walk fifteen miles across open country in the dead of winter to settle a point of interpretation.
We’d have to thaw him out before he could tell us what it was he had on his mind.” My father laughed and said, “The strange part is, that may even be true.” But I remembered the story at the time because it seemed to me we were doing something very similar.
My father gave up gleaning and went back to knocking on doors, which he had been reluctant to do, because when people found out he was a preacher they would sometimes try to give us more than they could spare. That was his belief, at least. And they could tell he was a preacher, rough-looking as we were a few days into our desert wanderings, as he called them. We offered to do some chores in exchange for food at a couple of houses, and the people asked him if he would just open a bit of Scripture or say a prayer. He was interested that they knew, and wondered a good deal what it was that gave him away. It was a matter of pride with him that his hands were hard, and that there was no spare flesh on him to speak of. I have had the same experience many times, and I have wondered about it, too. Well, we spent a good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years. It was always the worst parts that made us laugh. My mother was irked by it all, but she just said, “Don’t you ever tell me.”
In many ways she was a remarkably careful mother, poor woman. I was in a sense her only child. Before I was born she had bought herself a new home health care book. It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus. On its authority she tried to keep us from making any use of our brains for an hour after supper, or from reading at all when our feet were cold. The idea was to prevent conflicting demands on the circulation of the blood. My grandfather told her once that if you couldn’t read with cold feet there wouldn’t be a literate soul in the state of Maine, but she was very serious about these things and he only irritated her. She said, “Nobody in Maine gets much of anything to eat, so it all comes out even.” When I got home she scrubbed me down and put me to bed and fed me six or seven times a day and forbade me the use of my brain after every single meal. The tedium was considerable.
That journey was a great blessing to me. I realize looking back how young my father was then. He couldn’t have been much more than forty-five or — six. He was a fine, vigorous man into his old age. We played catch in the evenings after supper for years, till the sun went down and it was too dark for us to see the ball. I think he just appreciated having a child at home, a son. Well, I was a fine, vigorous old man, too, until recently. You know, I suppose, that I married a girl when I was young. We had grown up together. We were married during my last year at seminary, and then we came back here so I could take my father’s pulpit while he and my mother went south for a few months for the sake of my mother’s health. Well, my wife died in childbirth, and the child died with her. Their names were Louisa and Angeline. I saw the baby while she lived, and I held her for a few minutes, and that was a blessing. Boughton baptized her and he gave her the name Angeline, because I was over in Tabor for the day — the child was not expected for another six weeks — and there was no one to tell him what name we had finally decided on. She’d have been Rebecca, but Angeline is a good name.
Last Sunday when we went to Boughton’s for supper, I saw you looking at his hands. They are so full of arthritis now that they’re all skin and knuckles. You think he’s terribly old, and he’s younger than I am. He was best man at my first wedding, and he married me and your mother. His daughter Glory is home with him now. Her marriage failed, and that is a sad thing, but it is a blessing for Boughton to have her here. She came by the other day to bring me a magazine. She told me Jack might be coming home, too. It actually took me a minute to think who that was. You probably don’t remember much about old Boughton. He is a little cross now from time to time, which is understandable considering his discomfort. It would be a pity if that is what you remembered of him. In his prime he was as fine a preacher as I ever heard.
My father always preached from notes, and I wrote my sermons out word for word. There are boxes of them in the attic, a few recent years of them in stacks in the closet. I’ve never gone back to them to see if they were worth anything, if I actually said anything. Pretty nearly my whole life’s work is in those boxes, which is an amazing thing to reflect on. I could look through them, maybe find a few I would want you to have. I’m a little afraid of them. I believe I may have worked over them as I did just to keep myself occupied. If someone came to the house and found me writing, generally he or she would go away, unless it was something pretty important. I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days, and people respected me for all those hours I was up here working away in the study, and for the books that used to come in the mail for me — not so many, really, but more than I could afford. That’s where some of the money went that I could have put aside. There was more to it, of course. For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you’re only a little fellow now and when you’re a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.
Your mother is respectful of my hours up here in the study. She’s proud of my books. She was the one who actually called my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages. Can that be right? I guess it is. I write in a small hand, too, as you know by now. Say three hundred pages make a volume. Then I’ve written two hundred twenty-five books, which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity. That’s amazing. I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I’ll tell you frankly, that was wonderful. I’m grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally. Your mother walked into church in the middle of the prayer — to get out of the weather, I thought at the time, because it was pouring. And she watched me with eyes so serious I was embarrassed to be preaching to her. As Boughton would say, I felt the poverty of my remarks.