He visits Boughton, who is in good spirits. He plans to waltz in the study, and grabs a book to hold if he starts to feel strange pain and collapses while dancing perhaps that book will gain significance by being clasped in his dying hand.
He realizes how much he will miss the world. It is a rooster with a bullet hole at the base of its tail feathers, which he heard came from his grandfather shooting his rifle in the air to call the meeting to order.Ī waltz comes on the radio and Ames decides he wants to dance to it. His grandfather gave the weather vane on the steeple to his father. Ames’s father always regretted not looking for the soldier.Īmes thinks about his church, wishing he could make the improvements to it himself. He told his son this was life and death business and he ought to never say anything. When his father came home he told him that John Brown and the others were fleeing, and he was coming home with a gun and bloody shirts, and shot at a soldier. He realized the man was shot and his father may have done it. The man tried to talk to him but he did not know much. He left and came back and then saw a U.S. He went into the church and cleaned up after the horses and scrubbed down a bloodstain. One is the time when his father woke up in the middle of the night and saw John Brown’s mule coming out of his father’s church and other men all riding away. He tells his son a few more stories he heard from his childhood. He wonders if the memory of sorrow will last after death sorrow “seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life” (104). It seems like it was a communion of sorts, and when he gave his own son some bread he did it in the way his memory made his father do it. The taste of the ash on the biscuit seems to be important because of the context of the drought and the rain and the women with their hair down and the singing. He wants to impart the things that are important but it is hard to tell. He is trying to make the best of this situation, he writes, and trying to tell his son things he would have told him if he got to bring him up. That congregation whittled away, the Methodists bought the land, and the church was torn down.Īmes’s father knew his own father had “preached his people into the war” (101).Īmes comes home and sees his son playing catch with Jack Boughton, which he finds very beautiful to watch. He was shocked and questioned the women, telling them that that was not from the Bible. The day Ames’s father returned home from the army he saw a piece of needlework put up in the church that said, “The Lord Our God is a Purifying Fire”. It hurt him and the family when the old man left. One time he saw local kids making fun of his grandfather and was completely surprised. His grandfather’s right eye was missing, and the family always felt like the visions came from that side. Ames will never forget burying the burned Bibles, the sounds of the singing, the women holding Bible studies as the church fell into ruin around them.
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