Read Online Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson - Free Book Online Page A

sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar. Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk. You remember Soapy. I don’t really know why you should. She is a very unremarkable animal. I’ll take a picture of her.
    So there we were, sipping honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother brought out the camera, so maybe you will have some pictures. The film ran out before I could get a shot of her. That’s just typical. Sometimes if I try to photograph her she’ll hide her face in her hands, or she’ll just walk out of the room. She doesn’t think she’s a pretty woman. I don’t know where she got these ideas about herself, and I don’t think I ever will know, either. Sometimes I’ve wondered why she’d marry an old man like me, a fine, vital woman like she is. I’d never have thought to ask her to marry me. I would never have dared to. It was her idea. I remind myself of that often. She reminds me of it, too.
    ***
    I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.
    There’s a shimmer on a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They’re in the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin. Your hair is straight and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not prettier than most children. You’re just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well-scrubbed and well mannered. All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye.
    The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.” That’s a fact.
    While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine—not waiting for you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing bitterly, even while I do long to see what it will mean to have wife and child restored to me, I mean Louisa and Rebecca. I have wondered about that for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then I’ll know.
    ***
    I have a few pictures of Louisa, but I don’t think the resemblance is very good. Considering that I haven’t seen her in fifty-one years, I guess I can’t really judge. When she was nine or ten she used to skip rope like fury, and if you tried to distract her, she would just turn away, still jumping, and never miss a lick. Her braids would bounce and thump on her back. Sometimes I’d try to catch hold of one of them, and then she’d be off down the street, still skipping. She would be trying to make it to a thousand, or to a million, and nothing could distract her. It said in my mother’s home health book that a young girl should not be allowed to make that sort of demand on her strength, but when I