Hail Columbia, happy land:

Baby shit in papa’s hand.

Surely this conjunction of Columbias means something.

With several other probationer ministers (a carpenter, a stone mason, a mathematician among them) my grandfather homesteaded fourteen acres there. They built a house for themselves. They built a chapel. They prayed, studied, farmed, exchanged techniques; they shared out among them the probationer’s circuit on the other side of the river and four years later were ordained together in Portland, Oregon, by the laying on of hands. After that they returned to Cathlamet, and the only change they made in their lives was to wear black broadcloth and dog collars when they went for supplies on the other side of the Columbia. When my grandfather was thirty-six years old and only two months into his ordination – he’d never even administered the Sacraments – this part of his life came to an end. Ever afterwards, he referred to it with grim contempt as ‘the idyll’.

A trip across the Columbia to Cathlamet, the standard trip except that he was alone this time: the grocer in Cathlamet (who wrapped the groceries in an old newspaper), the story (wrapped around his bacon, staring up at him): this is how it happened – the first word of George since he’d left him for dead beside the railroad tracks a lifetime ago. My grandfather saw the story – no more than an item – just as he took the last bite of the bread he was eating for his lunch. It was a misty mid-fall day. Almost before the meaning of the words registered on him, he felt the blood rush from his face. He stopped chewing and reread:

SEN. STOKE SPEAKS TO FARM WORKERS

There is reassurance for agrarian and urban workers from Senator George Stoke (Dem. Kan.) in a speech yesterday to the Farm Workers Union. Referring to next year’s presidential election and the Republican fight for a gold standard, Sen. Stoke said, ‘Not even an Eastern banker can eat gold. He eats wheat and labor like everybody else. And for that he needs silver, just like you do. Join us. If you do, we’ll win. This I swear to you.’

Jonathan spat out his bread to keep himself from choking.

In a daze he cast off. In a daze he rowed his small boat back out into the river. He was lucky to make it almost to the south shore before the fog closed in. One moment he could see the trees lining the bank; the next moment they were gone and there was nothing but featureless gray on all sides of him. Even the tips of his oars disappeared into it. The river lapped at the wooden boat like the water of a pond, all points of reference gone. A log rushed past and disappeared into the murk without a trace. When Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’, why didn’t Jesus answer? Was it because He didn’t know?

Jonathan had hardly been able to contain his excitement when he’d run across this question in the Bible, the first time in print, the first time since College had asked it that night in Lenssen. He’d been sitting at his desk in his pretty, pine-smelling study at Malloy’s Landing, reading calmly, a man at ease with his God: and there it was: no warning, either. His heart raced; his hands trembled; and the intensity of his disappointment at Jesus’s silence had been so great that he’d thrown his Bible into the corner of the room and broken its back. He stared into the gray mist of the present and sought for some sense of justice in things – some meaning – something—