The Early Stories by John Updike

some of summer’s heat. Already the fringes of weeds at the edges of the road were bedraggled with dust. From the reviving grass and scruff of the fields that he walked between, insects were sending up a monotonous, automatic chant. In the distance a tiny figure in his father’s coat was walking along the edge of the woods. His mother. He wondered what joy she found in such walks; to him the brown stretches of slowly rising and falling land expressed only a huge exhaustion.
    Flushed with fresh air and happiness, she returned from her walk earlier than he had expected, and surprised him at his grandfather’s Bible. It was a stumpy black book, the boards worn thin where the old man’s fingers had held them; the spine hung by one weak hinge of fabric. David had been looking for the passage where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, “Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” He had never tried reading the Bible for himself before. What was so embarrassing about being caught at it was that he detested the apparatus of piety. Fusty churches, creaking hymns, ugly Sunday-school teachers and their stupid leaflets—he hated everything about them but the promise they held out, a promise that in the most perverse way, as if the homeliest crone in the kingdom were given the prince’s hand, made every good and real thing, ball games and jokes and big-breasted girls, possible. He couldn’t explain this to his mother. There was no time. Her solicitude was upon him.
    â€œDavid, what are you doing?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œWhat are you doing at your grandfather’s Bible?”
    â€œTrying to read it. This is supposed to be a Christian country, isn’t it?”
    She sat down beside him on the green sofa, which used to be in the sun parlor at Olinger, under the fancy mirror. A little smile still lingered on her face from the walk. “David, I wish you’d talk to me.”
    â€œWhat about?”
    â€œAbout whatever it is that’s troubling you. Your father and I have both noticed it.”
    â€œI asked Reverend Dobson about Heaven and he said it was like Abraham Lincoln’s goodness living after him.”
    He waited for the shock to strike her. “Yes?” she said, expecting more.
    â€œThat’s all.”
    â€œAnd why didn’t you like it?”
    â€œWell—don’t you see? It amounts to saying there isn’t any Heaven at all.”
    â€œI don’t see that it amounts to that. What do you want Heaven to be?”
    â€œWell, I don’t know. I want it to be
some
thing. I thought he’d tell me what it was. I thought that was his job.” He was becoming angry, sensing her surprise. She had assumed that Heaven had faded from his head years ago. She had imagined that he had already entered, in the secrecy of silence, the conspiracy that he now knew to be all around him.
    â€œDavid,” she asked gently, “don’t you ever want to rest?”
    â€œNo. Not forever.”
    â€œDavid, you’re so young. When you get older, you’ll feel differently.”
    â€œGrandpa didn’t. Look how tattered this book is.”
    â€œI never understood your grandfather.”
    â€œWell, I don’t understand ministers who say it’s like Lincoln’s goodness going on and on. Suppose you’re not Lincoln?”
    â€œI think Reverend Dobson made a mistake. You must try to forgive him.”
    â€œIt’s not a
question
of his making a mistake! It’s a question of dying and never moving or seeing or hearing anything ever again.”
    â€œBut”—in exasperation—“darling, it’s so
greedy
of you to want more. When God has given us this wonderful April day, and given us this farm, and you have your whole life ahead of you—”
    â€œYou think, then, that there is a God?”
    â€œOf course I do”—with deep relief, that smoothed her features into a reposeful