My Grandmother's Underlining

It came to Pearl in a carrier bag with a bag of clothes pegs and a tin of buttons, which is how things came out of that house.

The spine is gone. It is held together with a rubber band and it has been for so long that the rubber has printed a line into the leather. There are pressed flowers in Isaiah and a bus ticket in Job and a photograph of a dog.

And there is underlining on nearly every page.

Not neat. Some in pencil, some in blue biro, one whole passage gone over three times in different years so the paper has furred. There are notes in the margins in a hand that got shakier over about sixty years, and most of them are one or two words, and some of them are just a date.

Pearl has had it eleven years and she has read in it perhaps four times.

She is forty-nine, and the reason is not that it is fragile, though it is.

The reason is that her grandmother left school at thirteen and worked in a laundry, and never in her life sat under anything you could call teaching, and the church she went to had a man who did his best and who Pearl remembers as kind and not much else.

And Pearl went to college and did two years of it and knows, in a general way, that a lot of what people underline is underlined because of what it sounded like rather than what it said.

So there is a question she has never let herself finish, and it goes: was any of that right?

And under that question there is a worse one, which arrived about four years ago and which she has told nobody.

Because that woman prayed her through a divorce. She sat in a hospital corridor with Pearl's mother for nine hours. She was, by any measure Pearl can find, the least frightened person Pearl has ever known.

And whatever produced that came off those pages, with the pencil and the biro and the furred paper.

Pearl does not know how to hold both of those at once, so mostly she keeps the book on the shelf.

And you may have one of those on a shelf. And you may have opened it less often than you would like to admit.

Moses says where the word is, and it is not up a ladder

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it eleven years and it was never yours.

You do not need clearance to read it. You never did. Scripture goes out of its way, in a whole paragraph, to say the word is not somewhere you have to be qualified to reach, and it says where it is instead, and it is the Holy Spirit, not two years of college, who puts it in a person. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it came in a carrier bag.

Now hear it, and notice how much trouble the passage goes to.

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it? Nor is it beyond the sea... No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Not too difficult for you.

It says it plainly and then it says it three more ways, because it is answering an objection people were expected to raise. Up in heaven. Beyond the sea. Somebody will have to go and get it and bring it back to us.

And the answer is that it is already here. In your mouth. In your heart. Which is where your grandmother had it, in a laundry, with no training and no ladder.

The word is near you and it always was. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who puts it in a mouth and a heart, and He has never once posted it somewhere a person would need help reaching.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says your two years were wasted. They were not. What you learned is real and it has kept you out of things, and Scripture praises people who checked what they were told against the text.

And nothing here says every line she underlined was correctly understood. Some of it probably was not, and that is true of every reader who ever lived including the ones with the letters after their name, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The point is only about where the word is kept, and Scripture says it is near, in the mouth and in the heart, and His Spirit is the one who put it there in a woman who left school at thirteen.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You already know the answer to your own question.

You watched it work for sixty years in a corridor and a laundry and a divorce. His Spirit was on those pages with the pencil and the biro, and He has never once needed you to certify the underlining before you were allowed to open it.