Jack (Gilead #4)(82)

“Yes,” he said, “I know there would be problems.”

By then they were sitting side by side, their backs against the wall, their knees drawn up, sharing his blanket and her coat. She said, “I do want children, though. Not right away, of course.”

“You’ll lose your job. You’ve got a good job.”

“That’s happening already. It’s all right. There must be something else I can do. Maybe I could work for a newspaper. You know, one of the colored papers.”

“And I’ll be looking around.”

“Yes.”

None of this sounded like optimism. It sounded like two people saying the kind of thing they thought they should say, though they were too comfortable to rouse themselves to any serious intention. All losses are restored and sorrows end. What more could be needed. Then there were voices in the street. He lit a match so she could see her watch, they pulled themselves together, kissed in the darkness, and he watched her walk away down the street in the near-dawn, close to the curb, away from doorways and the mouths of alleys.





* * *





So Della went back to Memphis, to the embrace of her family, to dinners made sentimental by favorite dishes and old stories and smiles of abiding love. She will be an impostor of sorts, to all appearances herself and inwardly a stranger to them all, patient with their insistent kindness, waiting to be gone. She will come back to her unmarriage to her unhusband and live as she can, her vocation lost to what they will call turpitude. Eminent Domain will make rubble of the house she lives in, rubble of her church. The world around her falling away, she will still be gracious, her voice still soft. It was almost a habit with him to imagine her loveliness, the same through every change, rarefied, not vanishing, the very idea of loveliness. While I think of thee, dear friend, my heart breaks.

He went to church that Sunday, took his place in the last pew, listened to the hymns, listened to the prayers, heard out the sermon, left before the benediction. The topic had been “the least of these.” Three infants were named and blessed, to applause and rejoicing. Then the minister said, “We all know these verses in the Gospel of Matthew, in the Parable of the Great Judgment. The Lord says that every kindness you do to ‘the least of these,’ you do to the Lord Himself. So these babies give us a thousand chances to wipe away holy tears, and also to hear holy laughter, and to see those creeping things that creep on the face of the earth as the wonders they were on the day the Lord called them good. Yes. Jesus wasn’t speaking of children particularly. We get old and ugly and maybe disappointed, and we don’t see much of the Lord in ourselves or in our brothers and sisters. But the Lord does. This is something we always have to remember. The world can make you feel so small, the very least among society, humanity. And it is just then that the Lord is with you, loving you, saying, ‘I know your heart just as well as I know my own! Stranger, prisoner, I know your heart!’ Just think of that!

“But today I’m going to talk about these little ones we just welcomed into our church and into our life. We know that they will need special care. We know they will need the best teaching we can give them, to make good lives in a world that can be hard and cold, a world made difficult in order—in order—to keep them at a distance. We know they won’t learn much we don’t teach them, here in the church and in the schools we have struggled to provide for them. Not many are teachers, the Apostle says. Teaching is a sacred vocation, right up there with preaching and prophesying, according to the Apostle. This would have been true for the early church, when any sort of heathen might have wandered in just looking for a plate of beans, a kind word or two. In need of teaching. And it is still true for us. It wasn’t so long ago that a man had to anchor a raft in the middle of the Mississippi River to teach our children at the high-school level, because it was illegal to do that in Missouri and in Illinois. That was a sacred work he did. Now we have Sumner High School, where this very sacred work goes on today. It is a rare thing among us to enjoy a real education, and it is a heavy burden on us that schooling is what we lack. So those among us who are teachers are like pearls and rubies, the best help we can find for our children. Our teachers must be honored and assisted in this sacred work—”

It was actually at this point that Jack stood up and slipped out the door and out into the street. No one had glanced at him. Hutchins kept his eyes on the front pews. Arnold seemed to be studying his hymnal. A discipline of kindness had set in that made Jack as self-conscious, almost, as if he were sweltering under a collective stare.

Of course, of course. His errors were so obvious when realization dawned. Did the preacher tell him anything he didn’t already know? And yet it was as if a great light had found him in a guilty act, one of those deeds of darkness that seemed so much less nefarious in the dark. Here was consequence again, a gigantic, censorious presence showing him diminished lives, children robbed in their cradles by one Jack Boughton. He had been a little afraid to wonder why he felt implicated in the imminent destruction, and now he knew. If he were an honorable man, he’d have left her alone.

He had one twenty left. He went by the old rooming house to see if Teddy had left money for him lately, and an envelope was there waiting. He went back to his room and put Teddy’s two tens into his pillow with the twenty through a gap in the seam which he closed with a few stitches to keep feathers from floating out and defeating his stealth. Then he began work on a letter.