Gilead

Lila has told their son that John is writing his “begats,” which pleased the boy, so John thinks about where to begin. He, John Ames, was born in 1880 in Kansas; his father and mother were John and Martha Turner Ames, and his grandfather and grandmother were John and Margaret Todd Ames. As he writes, he is 76 years old, 74 of which he has spent here in Gilead, Iowa.

When John was 12, his father took him to his grandfather’s grave. At this point, the family had been living in Gilead for about 10 years. John’s grandfather had been born in Maine and moved to Kansas in the 1830s. As an old man, his grandfather had gone off and become some kind of traveling preacher, they thought. Then he died and was buried in Kansas, near a town that had been almost abandoned due to drought. The town had been settled by Free Soilers.

It took months for John’s father to figure out where his father was buried. After many letters of inquiry, somebody sent John’s father a package containing the grandfather’s watch and old Bible. John’s father grieved that his last words to his father had been angry ones and that they’d never reconciled. John and his father traveled to his grandfather’s grave by train and wagon, and eventually on foot over dusty, rutted roads. Because of the drought, it was a laborious, thirsty journey, and at times, John believed they would die.

With directions from a lady on a farmstead, they eventually found the remote, overgrown graveyard. Finally they found a grave with “REV AMES” marked on it in bent nails. As evening fell, they walked back to the lady’s farm to sleep and got up early to do chores to thank her for feeding them. Then they walked back to the graveyard and repaired its falling-down fence and graves as best they could. When they said goodbye to the farm lady for the last time, she cried, but when they offered further help, she insisted that she’d be fine once the rain came.

John couldn’t imagine a lonelier place than the drought-blighted graveyard. He still dreams about the childish guilt he felt when he accidentally stepped on small graves obscured by weeds. When they finished cleaning up, they scattered wildflower seeds they’d saved from their own garden. Then his father sat silently by John’s grandfather’s grave for a long time.

Finally, John’s father stood up and prayed a long prayer, remembering his own father before God and asking God’s pardon. The prayer was so long that John eventually opened his eyes and looked around, noting the full moon rising in the east as the sun set in the west. Not wanting to startle his praying father, John kissed his hand and told him to look at the moon. They admired the sight for a long time, and at last his father said he was glad to know that such a place could be beautiful.

When they got home less than a month later, they were so much thinner and their clothes so tattered that John’s mother wept at the sight of them. John and his father, though, looked back on it as a great adventure—even the time an old farmer shot at them for stealing some carrots so they wouldn’t starve (though his father left a dime on the front stoop of the farmer’s house). Once they’d escaped and began to say grace over the tough, tasteless carrots, they both started laughing until they cried. It was only later that John thought about how disastrous it would’ve been if his dad had been shot and killed, leaving him stranded.

After that incident, John’s father stopped gleaning from people’s farms and started knocking on doors instead. He didn’t like doing this because when people found out he was a preacher—which they invariably did, because he somehow looked like one—they’d sometimes offer more food than they could spare. When his father would offer chores in exchange for food, they’d often ask for prayer instead. Later on, John and his father would always laugh about the worst parts of their wanderings, and his mother, annoyed by this, just told them never to tell her the details of what they went through.

John recalls that in some ways he was his mother’s only child. Before he was born, she’d bought a home health care book, “a good deal more particular than Leviticus,” and she took it very seriously. When John returned home, his mother put him straight to bed and fed him six or seven meals a day, which was tedious. But John looks back on the journey with his father as a great blessing. He remembers his father being vigorous into old age; every day they played catch after supper until dark. Of course, John remembers being a vigorous old man, too, until recently.