Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Read Free Book Online

Chicago. By then it was down to three or four families. The pastor came by with a sack of plants he’d dug up from around the front steps, mainly lilies. He thought I might want them, and they’re still there along the front of our church, needing to be thinned. I should tell the deacons where they came from, so they’ll know they have some significance and they’ll save them when the building comes down. I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them.)
    You have begun palling around with a chap you found at school, a freckly little Lutheran named Tobias, a pleasant child. You seem to be spending half your time at his house. We think that is very good for you, but we miss you something terrible. Tonight you are camping out in his backyard, which is just across the street and a few houses down. Supper without you tonight, a melancholy prospect.
    ***
    You and Tobias came trudging home at dawn and spread your sleeping bags on your bedroom floor and slept till lunchtime. (You had heard growling in the bushes. T. has brothers.) Your mother had fallen asleep in the parlor with a book in her lap. I made you some toasted cheese sandwiches, which I cooked a little too long. So I told you the story you like very much, about how my poor old mother would sleep in her rocker by the kitchen stove while our dinner smoked and sputtered like some unacceptable sacrifice, and you ate your sandwiches, maybe a little more happily for the scorch. And I gave you some of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggle of white frosting across the top. I buy those for your mother because she loves them and won’t buy them for herself. I doubt she slept at all last night. I surprised myself—I slept pretty soundly, and woke out of a harmless sort of dream, an unmemorable conversation with people I did not know. And I was so happy to have you home again.
    I was thinking about that henhouse. It stood just across the yard, where the Muellers’ house is now. Boughton and I used to sit on the roof of it and look out over the neighbors’ gardens and the fields. We used to take sandwiches and eat our dinner up there. I had stilts that Edward had made for himself years before. They were so high I had to stand on the porch railing to get onto them. Boughton (he was Bobby then) got his father to make him a pair, and we pretty well lived on those things for several summers. We had to stay on the paths or where the ground was firm, but we got to be very much at ease on them, and we’d just saunter all over the place, as if it were quite a natural thing. We could sit right down on the branch of a tree. Sometimes wasps were a problem, or mosquitoes. We took a few spills, but mainly it was very nice. Giants in the earth we were, mighty men of valor. We would never have thought that coop could fold up the way it did. The roof was covered in raggedy black tar paper, and it was always warm even when the day was chilly, and sometimes we’d lie back on it to get out of the wind, just lie there and talk. I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn’t come to him, and then he’d have to find another kind of life, and he couldn’t really think of one. We’d go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren’t many.
    Boughton was slow getting his growth. Then, after a short childhood, he was taller than me for about forty years. Now he’s so bent over I don’t know how you’d calculate his height. He says his spine has turned into knuckle bones. He says he’s been reduced to a heap of joints, and not one of them works. You’d never know what he once was, looking at him now. He was always wonderful at stealing bases, from grade school right through seminary.
    I reminded him the other day how he’d said to me, lying there on that roof watching the clouds, “What do you think you