Chapter 16 The Prodigals Return
On the seventeenth day, Nathaniel went to the church.
Not on Sunday. On a Tuesday morning, before the town was fully awake, before his deputy arrived and the day's business began.
He went the way you went to places when you were not certain you were ready to go but had decided that certainty was not a prerequisite — directly, without ceremony, with the focused determination of a man who has made up his mind to do a thing and intends to do it before he can talk himself out of it.
Reverend Hobart was there. He was always there in the early mornings — the church was where he thought, he had explained to several people over the years, because the thinking was better in a space that was built for a specific purpose than in a space that was built for several purposes, which was the space of most rooms in most houses.
He looked up when Nathaniel came in. He did not look surprised. He had, by his own account, been waiting for this for eight years.
Nathaniel sat in the front pew. He had always sat in the back. He sat in the front today because the back was the safe choice and he was done with the safe choice.
Hobart came and sat beside him.
"I stopped praying at Gettysburg," Nathaniel said, without preamble.
"I know," Hobart said.
"I concluded that the evidence was insufficient," Nathaniel said. "For the proposition that God heard prayers and acted on them."
"That's a reasonable conclusion from a specific kind of evidence," Hobart said. He said this without challenge — the way a man who had heard this conclusion many times and had thought about it a great deal stated the true thing about it.
"Mercy Alcott says I was leaving out the presence," Nathaniel said. "That the absence of rescue is not the absence of presence."
Hobart was quiet for a moment. "Miss Alcott is not wrong," he said.
"It's not a comfortable theology," Nathaniel said.
"No," Hobart agreed. "The comfortable theologies are mostly wrong.
The ones that hold up under the serious situations are usually the ones that don't promise rescue.
They promise company." He looked at the altar.
"Company in the dark is not nothing, Nathaniel.
It's not what you wanted when you were twenty-two and believed God was going to intervene.
But it's real, and it's what's actually available. "
Nathaniel sat in the front pew of Pinecrest Community Church in the early morning of the seventeenth of December, 1884, and looked at the altar and thought about company in the dark.
He thought about Thomas Ely, who had been company in the dark until he wasn't. He thought about the twenty years after, which had been dark without company, which he had thought was sustainable and had discovered was not, quite.
He thought about Gettysburg and what he had concluded there and whether the conclusion had been correct or whether it had been the conclusion of a twenty-two-year-old who had been given a certain kind of evidence and had not yet understood that the evidence was incomplete.
He thought about Mercy sitting on a log reading her Bible while the stage wheel came off and the storm approached, and the serene quality of her face, and what that serenity was built on.
It was not ignorance. She was not serene because she had been sheltered from difficulty.
She was serene because she had been through difficulty and had concluded something specific about what was present in it.
"I sang," he said. "Sunday. The last hymn."
Hobart turned and looked at him. His face had the expression of a man receiving news that is better than the news he expected.
"Come Thou Long Expected Jesus," Nathaniel said. "Quietly. At the back. But I sang."
"Good," Hobart said. Simply that.
"I don't know how to come back to it," Nathaniel said. "After twenty years. I don't know what coming back to it looks like."
"You're doing it right now," Hobart said.
"Sitting here. That's what coming back to it looks like.
It's not a ceremony. It's a direction." He paused.
"You keep going in the direction. Some days you feel it and some days you don't, and the days you don't you keep going anyway, and eventually the going and the feeling are the same thing again. "
Nathaniel looked at the morning light coming through the church windows, the pale December light that was thin but specific, doing what it could with what it had. He thought: that is what I have been doing for twenty years. Going in a direction without feeling it. Functional without full.
He thought about what full felt like. He had been getting a preliminary sense of it over the past seventeen days, and it was, as Mercy had warned him, not tidy.
Things he had not thought about for years were arriving with unsolicited vividness.
Thomas Ely's laugh. The specific quality of the air on the morning of the second day at Gettysburg.
His father's farm and the way it had smelled in October.
The fact that he had not allowed himself to miss any of these things, because missing things was not compatible with the managed life, and the managed life had been what he had.
"It's not comfortable," he said.
"No," Hobart said. "Coming back to things rarely is. The things have been waiting, and they have a great deal to say." He put his hand briefly on Nathaniel's shoulder. "But they don't say it all at once. They're patient. Twenty years of patience teaches patience."
Nathaniel sat in the front pew until the morning was properly morning, and then he went to his office, and he had the best day's work he had had in a very long time — not because anything was different about the work but because the man doing the work was different, was more present, was less of himself held in reserve.
He thought: Thomas would say I told you so.
He thought: he was right.
* * *
That evening he went to Mrs. Connelly's and knocked on the door and asked if Mercy would like to walk.
She came out in her wool coat and the pine-green scarf and the hat that the wind was always making its best effort against, and they walked the main street in the December evening, which was cold and clear and full of the particular quality of the days before Christmas when everything was doing its ordinary thing and also simultaneously the extraordinary thing of being near Christmas.
He told her about the church. Not the entire account — he was not a man who gave entire accounts of interior events; he gave the essential parts and trusted the listener to understand what the essential parts contained.
He told her about sitting in the front pew, which she registered immediately.
He told her about what Hobart had said about direction versus feeling.
He told her about Thomas Ely's laugh arriving without invitation.
She listened the way she always listened — completely, without preparing the response while he was still speaking.
"How did it feel?" she said, when he was done.
"Not comfortable," he said.
"No," she said. "Did you expect it to?"
"No," he said. "You told me it wouldn't be."
"But you went anyway," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at him as they walked. The December dark was early and complete and the stars had come out in the way they came out here — fully, without the restraint of city light, the whole sky doing its work.
They were walking north toward the end of the main street, where the buildings stopped and the valley opened and the mountains were visible even in the dark as an absence of stars at the edges where the peaks rose.
"I want to tell you something," she said.
"Tell me," he said.
"I have been looking for a specific person for a long time," she said.
"Not consciously, for most of it. Consciously for the last three years, when I understood that what I was looking for in the right place was not just a geography but a geography and a person.
And I have not, until now, found the person who was both available and the one I was looking for.
" She was looking at the mountains' dark edges.
"I want to be clear that I am not speaking generally. I am speaking about you. Specifically."
He stopped walking.
She stopped beside him.
The main street of Pinecrest was behind them. The valley opened ahead. The mountains were enormous and invisible except where they interrupted the stars, and the stars were doing everything stars could do.
"Mercy," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"I have been — " He stopped. He turned to face her.
He was not managing his face, which had been happening more frequently over the past week.
"I have been the person who keeps everyone at a remove because the remove was safe.
I have been that person for twenty years and I'm finished being that person.
" He held her gaze in the dark. "I don't know what I'm starting instead.
I know it involves you and it involves Pinecrest and it involves the direction Hobart described.
I know those three things and the rest I am working out.
" He paused. "But I wanted you to know that I know those three things. "
She looked at him. The full attention, the complete receiving of him.
"That's enough to start with," she said.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
They stood in the dark for a moment, the stars above them and the mountains around them and the cold specific and clarifying, and then she put her arm through his, the way you put your arm through someone's when you intend to walk together and want the walking to say what the words have already said.
They walked back toward the lights of the main street, arm in arm, in the December dark.