. I want to tell him things look very black to me. When I think
how I felt over losing Selina James it seems to me as nothing compared
with the way I feel about the way the world is made. For it is all
uncertainty and 'most all pain. It seems to me it is not possible for
anything to be blacker than the earth is to me. I wake in the morning
with a cloud over me, and when I go to bed at night the cloud is there.
It settles down on me like--I don't know how to say what it is like--and
I call out, up here alone in the woods. I call to God. I remember how He
made the earth and I ask Him why He had to do it so. Over and over I ask
Him. He does not answer. He can't. I suppose that is what it is to be
God. You have to make a thing a certain way, and after it is done they
have to take it, the men and the animals, and do the best they can with
it. And one night when I was calling to God, there was a scream of an
animal--a little animal--just outside, and I knew an owl had got him.
And I covered my ears, for it seemed as if that was God's answer to me,
and I didn't want to hear any more. I even thought--and I tell the boy
this so that if he has thoughts that frighten him he will have the
comfort of knowing somebody has thought them before--I thought that
scream was God's answer. It was a good many months before I could pray
again, even to ask God why.

"Now about religion. A great many people go to church and find comfort
in it, and they come home and eat meat for their dinners, meat
killed--they don't know how it is killed. Sometimes it is killed the
best you can and sometimes not. They don't seem to think about that.
They have done their duty and gone to church, and they go out to feed
the animals they are going to kill when they are fat enough, and
sometimes the animals will be killed the best they can and sometimes
not. And if they think about their sins, they quiet themselves by
thinking Christ has taken them on His own shoulders. And so, unless
somebody they love has died, or they are poor or disappointed, they say
it is a very pleasant world, and they ask for another slice of beef and
plan what they will do Monday, now Sunday is so far along. Now if the
boy is that kind of a boy, let him be like those people who do the best
they can without questioning. Let him do the best he can and not
question. But if he is different, if he has to think--sometimes I am
sure he will have to, for I cannot help seeing he looks out of his eye