the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared. -~
One after another, when those women learned they were widows, they went back to their families in the East. Not all of them, but a good many. Some of them had buried their husbands and their children beside the church, so they felt they couldn't leave. And some of those who left came back, even years later. Still, that congregation dwindled away finally, and the Methodists bought the land and burned the old building down because it was past saving.
My father spoke once in a sermon about how he regretted the times after the war that he'd gone off to sit with the Quakers while his father struggled to find words of comfort to say to his poor remnant of a flock. He said in those days his father opened all the windows that still would open, so they could hear the Methodists singing by the river, and that some of the women would join in if the song was "The Old Rugged Cross" or "Rock of Ages," even in the middle of the sermon, and he'd just stop preaching and listen to them.
The wind, he said, smelled like turned earth because of the new graves, and yet people afterward remembered those Sunday mornings and those Wednesday evenings as something strangely wonderful. There was a tenderness in the way they told about them.
My father said he had regretted and repented his whole life since that time but never sufficiently, because at first staying away had seemed an act of principle almost. His father had 100
preached his people into the war, saying while there was slavery there was no peace, but only a war of the armed and powerful against the captive and defenseless. He would say, Peace
will come only when that war ends, so the God of peace calls upon us to end it. He said all this with that gun in his belt. And everyone there always shouted amen, even the littlest children. I came home for lunch today and found you playing catch in the street with Jack Boughton. You had his mitt, a fine new fielder's mitt that reached almost to your elbow, and he had that old glove of Edward's that I keep on my desk. No webbing at all, no pocket to speak of. It's an oversight of mine that I haven't gotten you a glove of your own. I'll see to that.
Young Boughton was teaching you to scoop up grounders, probably to cover for the fact that you weren't likely to actually catch anything on the fly. You were being very earnest about it all, running hither and thither on those clever child legs of yours, and he was saying, "Come on, come on," and pounding his glove, and then, in a sportscaster's voice,
"He's rounding second, folks. Will the throw be in time?" And you would lose the ball again, and he would say, "This is amazing, folks. The runner appears to have tripped on his shoelace! He's down! He's taking a while to catch his breath! Now he's up, he's headed for the plate!" He would say, "He's dragging his left leg, folks, he's hopping on one foot!" And by then you were giggling considerably, but you got the ball to him finally, and he said, "Well, folks, that runner's out!" It was beautiful to watch you two in the flickering shade.
I remember watching Louisa skipping rope in that street in a bright red coat with her pigtails jumping in the cold. It was early spring, so she didn't raise any dust to speak of. The trees were just budding their leaves. They still had that slight, brave look young trees have. I don't know whose idea it was to plant 101
all these elms around town, but whoever it was did us a world of good. Old Boughton and I used to toss the ball of an evening under those same trees, till his joints began to bother him,
which was before he was into his forties, as I recall. His health has been another great trial for him. This Jack Boughton could be his father, to look at him.
I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I
had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course,
it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all. I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the bread and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn't. His hands and his face were black with ashhe looked charred, like one of the old martyrs—and he knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from inside his shirt, and he did break it, that's true, and gave
