had, smiling as if there were a joke between us. It took me a while to figure out what was missing that time. Then I realizedit was a little photograph in a velvet case of Louisa, taken when she was a child. I was as angry about that as I have ever been in my life. lust the sheer meanness of it. And how could I tell Boughton that he had done such a thing?
How could I say the words?
Things would drift back sooner or later. The Greek Testament was left on the doormat.
The photograph appeared on
Boughton's hall table, mysteriously, and was brought back to me. That penknife with the word "Chartres" pressed into the handle, which was made from a shell casing, was left on the kitchen table, plunged through an apple. I found that disconcerting at the time.
Then he started doing the things that got his name in the newspaper, stealing liquor and joyriding, and so on. I've known young fellows who spent time in jail or got themselves sent off to the navy for behavior that wasn't any worse. But his family was so well respected that he got away with it all. That is to say, he was allowed to go right on disgracing his family.
I notice I have said he seemed lonely. That was one very strange thing about him, because, as I have said also, the Boughtons really loved him. All of them did. His brothers and sisters would stand up for him no matter what. When he was little, he'd slip out, run off, and they'd come by looking for 183
him, anxious beyond their years, all business, hoping to find him and exert their respectable influence on him before he could get into too much trouble. I remember one summer I had planted a row of sunflowers along the back fence.
There must have been twenty of them: One afternoon the other little Boughtons came to the door asking for Johnny, as they called him in those days. I went out to help them look around a little, and darned if those sunflowers hadn't been pulled back, bent over the fence so their heads were hanging down on the other side of it. Glory said, "It could have been the wind that did that." I said, Yes, maybe it was the wind.
If I had to choose one word to describe him as he is now, it might be "lonely," though "weary" and "angry" certainly come to mind also. Once during the time I was missing
Louisa's picture I went over to Boughton's to borrow a book, and we sat on the porch and talked awhile, and that boy sat on the steps, fiddling with a slingshot, I remember, and listening
to every word, and from time to time he would look up at me and smile, as if we were in on a joke together, some interesting conspiracy. I found that extremely irritating. He almost provoked me into mentioning the photograph then and there. I had to leave to stop myself. He said, "Goodbye, Papa!" I went home just trembling.
Maybe you can see why, when the business with the young girl came up, I was chiefly struck by the meanness of it.
I don't think I do my heart much good by remembering these things. My point is that he was always a mystery, and that's why I worry about him, and that's why I know I can't judge him as I might another man. That is to say, I can't assign a moral valuation to his behavior. He's just mean. Well, I don't know that that is true of him now. But I do see what he might 184
injure. That is very clear to me. While I was standing there in the pulpit, the thought came to me that I was looking back from the grave and there he was, sitting beside you, grinning up at me
This is not doing me any good at all. I'd better pray.
I woke up this morning to the smell of pancakes, which I dearly love. My heart was a sort of clayey lump midway up my esophagus, and that after much earnest prayer. Your mother found me sleeping in my chair and slipped my shoes off and put a quilt over me. I do sometimes sleep better sitting up these days. Breathing is easier. I was careful to put this diary away before I turned the light out last night. I know I still have thinking to do on this matter of Jack Boughton.
It is my birthday, so there were marigolds on the table and my stack of pancakes had candles in it. There were nice little sausages besides. And you recited the Beatitudes with hardly a hitch, two times over, absolutely shining with the magnitude of the accomplishment, as well you might. Your mother gave a sausage to Soapy, who slunk off with the unctuous thing and hid it who knows where. She is beyond doubt the descendant
of endless generations of vermin eaters, fat as she is, domesticated as she ought to be.
I hate to think what I would give for a thousand mornings like this. For two or three. You were wearing your red shirt and your mother was wearing her blue dress.
And your mother has found that sermon I was wondering about, that Pentecost sermon, the one I gave the first time I saw her. It was beside my plate, wrapped in tissue paper, with a ribbon on it. "Now, don't you go revising that," she said. "It 185
