"And I fell on my knees by the bed and said: 'Let us pray.' And I prayed, in what words I don't know, but my hand was on his, and when I said Amen, he said Amen, too, and when I looked at him all the trouble was smoothed out of his face and he said, 'Jesus Christ!' as he never could have said it in his life before. It was as if you were speaking to your mother or your friend (yet not just a friend, but a heavenly friend) and shortly he died. And I had told him a lie. But I was not sorry. I was glad. What was my keeping my poor soul clean to old Billy Jones's dying in peace? It was the last thing I could give him, and he was welcome to it.
"It was in the early morning he died, and I did what I knew about making him right for his coffin, and then went down to get one of the neighbors that knew more, and all that day I was busy. The next day he would be taken away and lie in the Methodist church at the Ridge, and the third day he would be buried. And nobody had ever taken any interest in him except to call him a poor good-for-nothing creature—nobody except your mother (she is a good woman) but it looked as if he would have a well-attended funeral. I was glad of that, for I knew he would be pleased. He was laid out in the bedroom of the hut and the window was open and the cold air blowing on him, and I lay down on the couch in the large room. I didn't take my clothes off, for at such times it is respectful to have watchers about the dead. It may not be necessary, but it is the custom, and I wanted old Billy to have everything that was fitting and right. I did not mean to go to sleep, but lie there a spell and then get up and put on more wood and go into his cold room and let him feel as if he was being taken care of to the last. And I lay there thinking how I had heard there was diphtheria over beyond the mountain and I would take a day or two to rest me and then I'd go over there and help. I laughed a little to myself, and I see now it wasn't a very pleasant kind of laugh, for I thought the people would begin to like me again because I was free to do for them.
"And I did go to sleep, being, as I said, very tired, and how long I slept I don't know. But suddenly I waked up, just as wide awake as I am this minute, and I knew as well as I ever knew anything, that Billy Jones was in the room. I didn't see him. I didn't hear him. I didn't hear anything, outside or in. It was a very still night, and there wasn't even the creaking of the branches against each other. But Billy Jones was in the room. I wasn't afraid, but I felt queer. I had a kind of prickly feeling all over me. The hair on my head moved somehow, according to the feeling it gave me. Perhaps that was being afraid, only I don't take it so. The reason I think differently is that I didn't want it to stop. If Billy Jones was there, I didn't want him to go away. If he had anything to say, I wanted to hear it. And I was as sure as ever I was of anything in my life that there was something to say. If this was the beginning of something that was going to happen, it was only the beginning. There was more to come. And I wanted to know what. I lay there as still almost as Billy's body in the next room. I was afraid of missing something. If there was something for me to hear I'd got to keep still to hear it. But I said that before. I have to keep saying it, it took such hold of me. The fire hadn't wholly died down. I could tell by that I hadn't been asleep long. But I didn't dare to get up and put on another stick. I was afraid if I moved I might jar something and it would break. And I couldn't have it break till the end—the end of my knowing what it was.
"And now the boy must remember that what follows, if I live to write it, is faithful and true. That is what the Bible says about things like that: they are faithful and true. And mine are just as true. It seemed to me as if the ceiling of the room raised up and the walls opened out and the room was as if it was not. Whether I looked through it or whether it was gone, I do not know. But I looked into a great space. And it was dark and at one side of it there was a great light. And the light was not angry, as a sunset looks when it flames and flares. It was steady, and I knew it was to light the world. And there came into my head some words: 'And the darkness comprehended it not.' When I waked up, I found the words in the Bible, but that night it seemed to me they were said for the first time. The boy must remember Billy Jones was in all this. He was the chief part of it. As to the words, it was as if Billy Jones said them. I was in the darkness, and I was to be made to comprehend. And when I looked lower through the darkness—and I cannot tell how, but I seemed to be in it and yet at the same time I was above it, so that I looked down and saw what was going on—I saw multitudes of men and women, trying to get through it. Sometimes they walked slowly, as if it was hard to walk, and sometimes they jostled each other and sometimes stopped to push one another about, and sometimes when some were down the others stamped on them. But they were all going somewhere, and it was toward the light. And as I say, I was in the darkness though I could see through it, and I wondered if I was going, too.
"And then I understood. I couldn't tell the boy how I understood, not if he was here to ask me; but it was as if a voice spoke and told me in two or three words, and few as they were, I took them in and I knew. Perhaps there was a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of Billy Jones. There is no reason why not. The minute after he got out of his body, he might have known everything: I don't mean everything, I mean the one thing that would explain it all. And he had a kindness for me, and if he learned anything that smoothed out his trouble and turned it into joy, he would want me to know, too. And this is it, though now I have got to the place for telling it, I don't know how. It is like a dream. You have to tell it the minute you wake, or it is gone. I saw that creation had been a long time going on. I saw that although we have minds to think with, we haven't really, in comparison with the things to be thought out. I saw that we are so near the dust that we can no more account for the ways of Almighty God than the owl hooting out there in the woods can read the words I am writing here. I saw that nothing is to be told us. We are to find out everything for ourselves, just as we have found electricity and the laws of physics. And poisons—we have found out those, some of them, even if we had to die to do it. And God lets us die trying to find out. He doesn't care anything about our dying. And if He doesn't care anything about our dying, He doesn't care anything about the rabbit broken by the owl, or the toad struck by the snake.
"Now, why doesn't He care? For the first time, I knew there was a reason that was not a cruel reason. I knew His reasons were all good. And I saw that though He could not break the rules of His plan by telling us things, He could give us a kind of a something inside us that should make us work it out ourselves. We had hungers. We had one hunger for eternal life. We had to believe in it, to help us bear this present life. We believed it so hard that men rose up and said it was so, and we said God had put the words into their mouths. And out of our sufferings, pity was born, and now and then a man would be raised up so full of pity that other men believed in him and followed everything he said and even called him a god. And this was well, because if they had not thought he was a god, they might not have followed him. And I seemed to be told that a great many men were born who were sent from God, but I have not read many books and how can I prove whether it is true?
"But Jesus Christ came, and His story is the story of the will of God. For men believed His father was God. That is to keep in our minds always the fatherhood of God. And his mother was believed to be a virgin. I do not know how to say this, but I was given to believe that that was no more true than I had thought, but still that it was the truest of all. It is one of the things we are to believe. We are to learn from it—how can I say?—that there is a heavenly birth out of purity and light. It is a symbol. That is the word: a symbol. And His death for mankind is the everlasting symbol of man's duty: to die for one another. And He went into the grave, and ascended into heaven, and so shall we all die and live again. But every observance of every church is a symbol—nothing more. And the man that was a god is a symbol and nothing more. But nothing could be more. For to find a symbol that has lasted, in one form or another, since the beginning of the world is to learn that it is something the world itself is built on. It is the picture book we are given before we can read print. And it means that something is working out—and is not yet—and the eye of man hath not seen or the ear of man heard. And about fear—that is the most wonderful of all and the hardest to tell. It is our friend. At first everything fed upon everything else; and so it does now, for how shall I say the animal has fear and the growing plant has not? And our fear tells us what to turn away from, and it fits us for the fight of the mortal life. But in the end will our fear be only the fear of evil? Fear is our counselor. It is our friend.
"Now perhaps I have done wrong in trying to write this out. Perhaps I have not helped the boy or anybody he tells. Perhaps I have offended them. I know the sound of what I must have heard and the sight of what I saw was clearer to me before I tried to tell about them. At first I kept them back somewhere in my mind and didn't try to see them or hear them too close. And when I did that, the great light was always there and I was running toward it. But now I have tried to tell, I see it is no more than words. They darken counsel. And I have put it back into my mind, not so much to be thought about as to have at hand. And all my trouble has gone. It has been a long trouble. I am over sixty now. But I am not afraid of anything and I am not in doubt. When I see men suffering, I know they are suffering for a reason. When I find the bird with a broken wing or the rabbit bit by the trap I know God knows about them, and if I cannot know, it proves it is not necessary I should. For there is the great light. (But it is not likely the boy will see this account of it at all, because I shall try to write it over—to write it better—and if I make it clearer this will be destroyed.)
"Another thing: about the worship of God. He does not want us to worship Him as we understand it, to crawl before Him as if He were an idol we had set up to get us victories over our enemies and to fill us with food. He wants us—what shall I say?—to open our hearts and our minds and our ears and eyes to what He wants us to know. He is not an idol. He is God. And all the way to Him, the horrible way through burnt offerings, the blood of lambs and goats—blood, blood, all the way—is the way that climbs up to the real sacrifice, the last of all: the man's own heart.
"One thing more: the greatest thing that ever happened to me was old Billy Jones. Was it because I was sorry for him? Was it because I could do something for him? I don't know. But I tell the boy that the man or the woman that makes him shed his blood in pity for them, that is the man or woman that will open his eyes to what we call Eternal Life. What is Eternal Life? Is it living forever? I do not know. But the words—those two words—stand for the great light ahead of us, the light I truly saw. And what the light is, still I do not know. But this I know: God is. He lives. And He is sorry. The boy may tell me this is no more than the words about His caring for the sparrow that falleth. But I tell him it is more to me, for this I have found out for myself. And I have found it out through great tribulation. But the tribulation is not now. It has stopped. It stopped with the sound of old Billy Jones's voice I heard—somehow I heard it—when his body lay in there dead. And I am not afraid. I am not afraid of fear—even for the little animals—and that is more than for myself. And that is my legacy to the boy. He must not be afraid."