And my grandfather was ambling along toward home with that big gun in his belt and those two bloody shirts under his arm, which was very foolish. And he was bare-chested under his coat, since he had swapped his own shirt for the two he had brought back with him. But he was never really a practical man again after that day, my father said. I would not have known where to find the origins of his impracticality, but I am certainly willing to vouch for the fact of it. In any case, a lone soldier did approach him and did hail him down, and he was indeed riding a chestnut horse that could have been the neighbor's. The soldier began to question him, and my grandfather was caught without a lie. But he had that gun, and the gun was loaded.
"Well, I did, I winged him," my grandfather said. "Then his horse bolted. He took quite a spill." And he left him there on the ground. "Old Brown asked if I'd be willing to cover their retreat if occasion arose. I said I would, and I did." He said, "What was I to do with him, bring him back here?" His point was that the congregation had put a lot of thought and effort into hollow walls and hidden cellars in their various cabins and outbuildings, tunnels that started from false-bottomed potato bins and opened up under haystacks a hundred yards away and so forth. There was a false-bottomed coffin they
kept in the church, and an open grave with a floor of burlap stretched over a couple of boards and covered with dirt, opening on a tunnel that came up in the woodshed. All that effort
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was for freeing the captives, and it had to be protected for their sake. The soldier could only have concluded that my grandfather was in serious cahoots with John Brown, and attention of
that kind could destroy everything.
The old man told my father what had happened only because my father told him about finding the soldier in the
church. "Dark fellow, you say? Kind of a drawl to his speech?" He told my father that it was a mortally serious business, life and death. He should never speak a word about it to anyone,
and he should be ready with a lie in case someone came inquiring. So, waking and sleeping, he thought about that
wounded soldier by himself out there on the plains, and tried to imagine himself saying he had not seen such a man, had not spoken to him.
Well, the authorities never did come to talk to them about that soldier, so my father thought he probably had died out there. He said, "The relief I suffered every day they didn't come was horrible." Of course the odds are fairly high that the day of a man's death will be the worst day of his life. But my father said, "When he told me the horse had bolted, my heart sank." So there we were, lying in the loft of somebody's barn they'd abandoned, hearing the owls, and hearing the mice, and hearing the bats, and hearing the wind, with no notion at all when the dawn might come.
My father said, "I never did forgive myself not going out there to look for him." And I felt the
truth of that as I have never felt the truth of any other human utterance. He said, "It was the very next Sunday the old devil preached in one of those shirts, with that gun in his belt. And you would not have believed how the people responded, all the weeping there was, and the shouting." And after that, he said,
his father would be gone for days sometimes. There were Sundays when he would ride his horse right up to the church steps
just when it was time for service to begin and fire that gun in 109
the air to let the people know he was back. They'd find him standing in the pulpit, with his eyes red and his face pale and dust in his beard, all ready to preach on judgment and grace. My father said, "I never dared to ask him what he'd been up to. I couldn't risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions."
I lay there against my father's side with my head pillowed on his arm, hearing the wind, and feeling a pity that was far too deep to have any particular object. I pitied my mother, who might have to come looking for us and would never, never find us. I pitied the bats and the mice. I pitied the earth and the moon. I pitied the Lord.
It was the next day that we came to the Maine lady's farmstead. I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I'm pretty sure they'll build a new church once I'm gone. I don't mean this unkindly—they don't want to cause me grief, so they're waiting to do what they want to do, and that's good of them. They'll pull the old church down and put up something bigger, sturdier. I hear
them admiring what the Lutherans have done, and it is impressive, red brick and a porch with white columns and a fine
