Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Page B

they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely. It was a big old pistol, as I have said, with ornaments on the handle sort of like you see on cast-iron radiators. It seems I can remember the cold of it and the weight of it and the smell of iron it would have left on my hands. But I know my father never did let me touch it. I suppose it would have been nickel, anyway. Frankly, I thought there must have been some terrible crime involved in all this, because my father had never really told me the substance of his quarrel with his father.
    He rinsed out those two old shirts at the pump and hung them up by their tails on my mother’s clothesline, preparing to burn them, I was sure. They were stained and yellow, miserable-looking things, with the wind dragging their sleeves back and forth. They looked beaten and humiliated, hanging there head down, so to speak, the way you’d hang up a deer to dress it. My mother came out and took them right back down.
    In those days there was a lot of pride involved in the way a woman’s wash looked, especially the white things. It was difficult work. My mother couldn’t have dreamed of an electrical wringer or an agitator. She’d rub the laundry clean on a washboard. Then it would all be so beautiful and white. It really was remarkable. And all the women did it, every Monday of the world. When the electricity first came in, they ran it before dawn and at suppertime, to help with the chores, and a few hours extra on Mondays, to help with the wash.
    Well, my mother couldn’t tolerate the state those pitiful shirts were in. She had a strong sense that the population at large judged her character by what appeared on her clothesline, and I can’t say she was wrong. But there was more in her mind than that. My father had a favorite verse of Scripture: “For all the armor of the armed man in the tumult, and the garments rolled in blood, shall be for burning, for fuel of fire.” That is Isaiah 9:5. My mother must have felt she knew what he meant to do and felt there was disrespect in it. In any case, she took those shirts and scrubbed them and soaked them overnight and bleached them and rinsed them in bluing till they looked all right except for a few black stains she said were India ink and the brown stains which were blood. She hung them under the grape arbor, where no one would see them. Then she brought them in and ironed them with enormous care, singing while she did it, and when she was done they looked as respectable as their stains and their wounds would allow. Then she folded them—they were so white and polished they looked like marble busts—and she slipped them into a flour sack, and she buried them out by the fence, under the roses. My parents were not always of one mind.
    I should dig around a little and see if anything is left of those shirts. It would be a pity if they were sometime just cast out like refuse, after all her hard work. I myself think it would have been the decent thing to burn them.
    I got up the courage to ask my father once if my grandfather had done something wrong and he said, “The Good Lord will judge what he did,” which left me believing there had been some kind of crime for sure. There is one photograph of my grandfather around the house somewhere, taken in his old age, that might help you understand why I thought this way. It is a good likeness. It shows a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it, staring down the camera as if it had accused him of something terrible very suddenly, and he is still thinking how to reply and keeping the question at bay with the sheer ferocity of that stare. Of course there is guilt enough in the best life to account for a look like that.
    So I was predisposed to believe