Free The Noah Confessions by Barbara Hall Page A

relationship to our family remained sporadic. We saw him when we drove to the farm to see my grandparents every other Sunday. He stayed with us now and then and always at Christmas. But by the time I was seven he was married (he married very young) and in seminary. After that, he moved around a lot because that’s how a preacher’s life works. He was handsome and charming and charismatic (he looked a little like you, to be honest) and I adored him, but we just didn’t have much of a relationship. It took some time, but eventually I understood why, mostly through Suzanne’s stories. He has a lot of anger toward my mother, but that’s because he doesn’t know the whole story. For some reason, I’m the person in possession of the whole story. Maybe that burden always falls on the youngest. And it’s a very heavy burden.
    Here is what I know of the next part of my parents’ lives, after they met in the bowling alley. Some of it I’m guessing at and most of it is culled from family dinners after Suzanne had had too much wine and started to talk, but only to me. Maybe she thought I was too young to remember or understand. But I’ve always been able to retain things.
    My father began to court my mother in the usual way. After several dates, she revealed that she had been married before and had a son. He might have cared about that in the beginning, but by this point he was taken with her and he was willing to accept her history. She took him home to meet her parents and they mostly approved. They saw that he was not exactly their class (laborer versus wealthy landowners again), but he was handsome and had a decent job and, unlike a lot of men in that era, he was willing to take her on. My mother’s parents were a little bit nervous because by now Gregory was seven and they had gotten used to having him and secretly had no plans to give him up. He was their son. I can imagine that my grandpa Will had sized my father, Clyde, up and decided that he was too weak to put up much of a fight. Possibly they had had some walks in the backyard and Grandpa Will had let him know that Gregory was not part of the deal. My father must have known that Fern had every intention of taking her son into the equation. But there was probably a part of my father that didn’t want to take on a ready-made family. So there was a complicit agreement. Such an agreement, however, didn’t make Grandfather Will entirely comfortable. He was examining his arsenal and preparing for a fight, but as it turned out, the ultimate weapon appeared out of nowhere.
    About a month before my parents’ wedding took place, a woman in Union Grade came forth, claiming to be pregnant by my father. It was a scandal on a plate. Getting a woman pregnant in those days was a dark deed, something that mainly occurred among the lower classes, and this only served to remind my father that he wasn’t one of the elite. Suddenly he saw the whole thing slipping away—he stood to lose the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, along with the social status that her family could afford him. It’s not clear if my mother ever knew about this. She was very proper and proud, and she had already left one man for cheating on her. But her parents were intent on this marriage taking place, if for no other reason than to get this wayward daughter off their hands, not to mention keeping her son in their home.
    Then a backyard talk definitely took place. It went like this: My grandfather had money, and money could make anything disappear. He was willing to write a check to this troublesome young woman and make the whole issue go away. But there would be a certain price attached. One was that my father would go ahead and marry my mother and take her off their hands once and for all. The bigger price tag was that there would be no discussion of taking Gregory from them. Grandfather Will probably threw in some other perks, such as helping