Gilead: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
    In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened , and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed —when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge -. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.
    I am also inclined to overuse the word “old,” which actually has less to do with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity. It sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it suggests haplessness or vulnerability. I say “old Boughton,” I say “this shabby old town,” and I mean that they are very near my heart.
    I don’t write the way I speak. I’m afraid you would think I didn’t know any better. I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.
    I walked over to Boughton’s to see what he was up to. I found him in a terrible state of mind. Tomorrow would have been his fifty-fourth anniversary. He said, “The truth is, I’m just very tired of sitting here alone. That’s the truth.” Glory is there doing everything she can think of to make him comfortable, but he has his bad days. He said, “When we were young, marriage meant something. Family meant something. Things weren’t at all the way they are today!” Glory rolled her eyes at that and said, “We haven’t heard from Jack for a little while and it is making us a bit anxious.”
    He said, “Glory, why do you always do that? Why do you say us when I’m the one you’re talking about?”
    She said, “Papa, as far as I’m concerned, Jack can’t get here a minute too soon.”
    He said, “Well, it’s natural to worry and I’m not going to apologize for it.”
    She said, “I suppose it’s natural to take your worrying out on me, too, but I can’t pretend I like it.”
    And so on. So I came back home.
    Boughton was always a good-hearted man, but his discomforts weary him, and now and then he says things he really shouldn’t. He isn’t himself.
    ***
    I’m sorry you are alone. You are a serious child, with not much occasion to giggle, or to connive. You are shy of other children. I see you standing up on your swing, watching some boys about your age out in the road. One of the bigger ones is trying out a beat-up old bicycle. I suppose you know who they are. You don’t speak to them. If they seem to notice you, you’ll probably come inside. You are shy like your mother. I see how hard this life is for her that I’ve brought her into, and I believe you sense it, too. She makes a very unlikely preacher’s wife. She says so herself. But she never flinches from any of it. Mary Magdalene probably made an occasional casserole, whatever the ancient equivalent may have been. A mess of pottage, I suppose.
    I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time. How odd it is to have to say that after all these centuries. There is an