Gilead: Pages 94-99 Summary & Analysis

Speaking of visions, John remembers that when he was a young child, his father helped tear down a Baptist church building that had been struck by lightning and burned. He remembers playing with other small boys while watching the men search through the rubble, and everyone singing while they worked in the warm rain. He remembers eating a biscuit that had soot on it and thinking of “the bread of affliction,” a phrase that’s not used too often these days.

Sometimes, late at night, John loses track of his surroundings and thinks he’s back in those harder times, and “there’s a sweetness in the experience which I don’t understand.” He says that his point is that we never understand “the actual nature even of your own experience.” This memory seems to sum up John’s life somehow, when he “took communion” from his father’s soot-stained hand. That memorable day put “many things […] altogether beyond question” for John.

The family was always careful about approaching his grandfather from his right side—the side with the missing eye—since that seemed to be where his visions came from. Sometimes John would come home from school and his mother would warn him, “The Lord is in the parlor,” and he’d peek into the other room to see his grandfather looking “sociable and gravely pleased,” while making occasional remarks to his unseen guest. One day he said the Lord had suggested that he “just go home and be old.” Later, John’s father said he didn’t think there was anything they could have done to dissuade his father from going to Kansas, but John doubts that he really believed that.

One day while walking to school, John saw some kids teasing his grandfather while he was picking blackberries, tugging on his coat and running away. While John stood there trying to decide what to do, his grandfather suddenly whirled around and stared at him, and John felt like a betrayer. John admits that he did feel some embarrassment about his grandfather, and his grandfather knew it but didn’t give him any credit for trying to be better. He adds that they were all hurt by his grandfather’s departure; they knew it was a judgment.