I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst.
So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
Your mother told you I'm writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record
for you? I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas, the son of John Ames and Martha Turner Ames, grandson of John Ames and Margaret Todd Ames. At this writing I have lived seventy-six years, seventyfour of them here in Gilead, Iowa, excepting study at the college
and at seminary.
And what else should I tell you?
When I was twelve years old, my father took me to the grave of my grandfather. At that time my family had been living in Gilead for about ten years, my father serving the church here. His father, who was born in Maine and had come out to Kansas in the 1830s, lived with us for a number of years after his retirement. Then the old man ran off to become a sort of itinerant
preacher, or so we believed. He died in Kansas and was buried there, near a town that had pretty well lost its people. A
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drought had driven most of them away, those who had not already left for towns closer to the railroad. Surely there was
only a town in that place to begin with because it was Kansas, and the people who settled it were Free Soilers who weren't really thinking about the long term. I don't often use the expression "godforsaken," but when I think back to that place, that word does come to mind. It took my father months to find where the old man had ended up, lots of letters of inquiry to churches and newspapers and so on. He put a great deal of effort into it. Finally someone wrote back and sent a little package with his watch and a beat-up old Bible and some letters,
which I learned later were just a few of my father's letters of inquiry, no doubt given to the old man by people who thought they had induced him to come home.
It grieved my father bitterly that the last words he said to his father were very angry words and there could never be any reconciliation between them in this life. He did truly honor his father, generally speaking, and it was hard for him to accept that things should have ended the way they did.
That was in 1892, so travel was still pretty hard. We went as far as we could by train, and then my father hired a wagon and team. That was more than we needed, but it was all we could find. We took some bad directions and got lost, and we had so much trouble keeping the horses watered that we boarded them at a farmstead and went the rest of the way on foot. The roads were terrible, anyway, swamped in dust where they were traveled and baked into ruts where they were not. My father was carrying some tools in a gunnysack so he could try to put the grave to rights a little, and I was carrying what we had for food, hardtack and jerky and the few little yellow apples we picked up along the road here and there, and our changes of shirts and socks, all by then filthy.
He didn't really have enough money to make the trip at 10
that time, but it was so much in his thoughts that he couldn't wait until he had saved up for it. I told him I had to go, too,
and he respected that, though it did make many things harder. My mother had been reading about how bad the drought was west of us, and she was not at all happy when he said he planned to take me along. He told her it would be educational, and it surely was.
My father was set on finding that grave despite any hardship. Never before in my life had I wondered
where I would come by my next drink of water, and I number it among my blessings that I have not had occasion to wonder since. There were times when I truly believed we might just wander off and die. Once, when my father was gathering sticks for firewood into my arms, he said we were like Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah. I'd thought as much myself. It was so bad out there we couldn't buy food. We stopped at a farmstead and asked the lady, and she took a little bundle down from a cupboard and showed us some coins and bills and said, "It might as well be Confederate for all the good it does me." The general store had closed, and she couldn't get salt or sugar or flour.
