Read Online Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson - Free Book Online
Authors: Marilynne Robinson
Tags: Family & Relationships, civil war, Christianity, Fiction - Drama, Faith & Religion, Kansas, 1950s
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experience, and he seemed to want to assure me I need not fear that the Lord would come to me with His sorrows. And I took comfort in the assurance. That is a remarkable thing to consider.
My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends. All of them could sit on their heels into their old age, and they’d do it by preference, as if they had a grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church still waiting to judge the angels. There was one old fellow whose blessing and baptizing hand had a twist burned into it because he had taken hold of a young Jayhawker’s gun by the barrel. “I thought, That child doesn’t want to shoot me,” he would say. “He was five years shy of a whisker. He should have been home with his mama. So I said, ‘Just give me that thing,’ and he did, grinning a little as he did it. I couldn’t drop the gun I thought that might be the joke—and I couldn’t shift it to the other hand because that arm was in a sling. So I just walked off with it.”
They had been to Lane and Oberlin, and they knew their Hebrew and their Greek and their Locke and their Milton. Some of them even set up a nice little college in Tabor. It lasted quite a while. The people who graduated from it, especially the young women, would go by themselves to the other side of the earth as teachers and missionaries and come back decades later to tell us about Turkey and Korea. Still, they were bodacious old men, the lot of them. It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.
***
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
I ask myself the same question.
A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she’s made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn’t know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.” So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation.
***
I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old
My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew, except for certain of his friends. All of them could sit on their heels into their old age, and they’d do it by preference, as if they had a grudge against furniture. They had no flesh on them at all. They were like the Hebrew prophets in some unwilling retirement, or like the primitive church still waiting to judge the angels. There was one old fellow whose blessing and baptizing hand had a twist burned into it because he had taken hold of a young Jayhawker’s gun by the barrel. “I thought, That child doesn’t want to shoot me,” he would say. “He was five years shy of a whisker. He should have been home with his mama. So I said, ‘Just give me that thing,’ and he did, grinning a little as he did it. I couldn’t drop the gun I thought that might be the joke—and I couldn’t shift it to the other hand because that arm was in a sling. So I just walked off with it.”
They had been to Lane and Oberlin, and they knew their Hebrew and their Greek and their Locke and their Milton. Some of them even set up a nice little college in Tabor. It lasted quite a while. The people who graduated from it, especially the young women, would go by themselves to the other side of the earth as teachers and missionaries and come back decades later to tell us about Turkey and Korea. Still, they were bodacious old men, the lot of them. It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire.
***
Just now I was listening to a song on the radio, standing there swaying to it a little, I guess, because your mother saw me from the hallway and she said, “I could show you how to do that.” She came and put her arms around me and put her head on my shoulder, and after a while she said, in the gentlest voice you could ever imagine, “Why’d you have to be so damn old?”
I ask myself the same question.
A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she’s made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn’t know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh and say, No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.” So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation.
***
I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old
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