Free Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

Rebecca in my mind, the way she looked while I held her, which I seem to remember, because every single time I have christened a baby I have thought of her again. That feeling of a baby’s brow against the palm of your hand—how I have loved this life. Boughton had christened her, as I said, but I laid my hand on her just to bless her, and I could feel her pulse, her warmth, the damp of her hair. The Lord said, “Their angels in Heaven always see the face of my Father in Heaven” (Matthew 18:10).
    That’s why Boughton named her Angeline. Many, many people have found comfort in that verse.
    ***
    I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial if you remember them—and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.
    I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
    ***
    Lacey Thrush died last night. Isn’t that a name? Her mother was a Lacey. They were an old family here, but she was the last of the Laceys, and the Thrushes went on to California. She was a maiden lady. She died promptly and decorously, out of consideration for me, I suspect, since she has been concerned about my health. She was conscious half an hour, unconscious half an hour, and gone. We said the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm, then she wanted to hear “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” one last time, so I sang and she hummed a little, and then she started nodding off. I am full of admiration for her. She’s given me a lot to live up to, so to speak. At any rate, she didn’t keep me awake past my bedtime, and the peacefulness of her sleep contributed mightily to the peacefulness of mine. These old saints bless us every chance they get.
    Here is a story my grandfather and his friends used to tell, and chuckle over. I can’t vouch for it entirely, since, talking among themselves the way they did, I doubt they’d have thought embellishing a story was quite the same thing as departing from the truth.
    In any case, in some forgotten little abolitionist settlement around here, as soon as the people had set up a dry-goods store on one side of the road and a livery stable on the other, they set about building a tunnel between them. Tunneling was a popular activity at that time, and a great deal of ingenuity went into devising hiding places and routes of escape. The topsoil in Iowa goes down so deep that more and larger tunnels were possible here than in less favored regions, say in New England. In this part of the state the