by Jane Langton
On the morning of Joseph Bold’s first service in Nashoba’s Old West Church, Mary had to keep going into the bedroom to badger her husband into waking up. But Homer only turned over in bed and made anguished stricken noises and insisted it wasn’t time yet, and why didn’t she go away because he was still sound asleep.
But even in his sleep Homer was fretfully aware that he had to get up, he had to get up, he had to get up and go to church. So heavily did this necessity loom over his dreams that the church itself burgeoned before him, swelling whitely, its edges knife-sharp, its clapboards smartly level, its tower ascending to the weathercock aloft. Something very odd was happening. Backing across the street, Homer stood on the misty grass of the Nashoba Common to stare upward at the tower. Two gigantic hands were removing it from the church, lifting it up and setting it down on the lawn. And now two huge thumbs were prying off the roof. The thumbs belonged to none other than God himself. He was grunting with effort, succeeding at last, setting the roof down beside the steeple. Now he was leaning over to peer at the congregation within, one long strand of gray whisker trailing over the pulpit wall. Homer was further astonished to observe something he had never noticed before, a large faucet attached to the pulpit. He watched in awe as God reached down to turn it on, releasing the gushing stopcocks of all their individual souls.
But the sharp squeak was really the sound of the faucet in the Kellys’ own bathroom, on the other side of the wall. Homer opened one eye as his wife came into the bedroom, fully dressed. “Okay, Homer, come on, get up,” she said firmly. Taking him by the shoulders, she bounced him up and down. “I mean it this time.”
The mattress jounced and twanged, and Homer protested loudly, but Mary took him by the ankles and dragged him off the edge. (Their connubial relation was more pugilistic than erotic.)
Soon they were zooming up their terrifying driveway and turning out on Route 2. Whizzing through the center of Concord, they made their way along Lowell Road in the direction of the town of Nashoba. Nashoba’s Old West Church was actually one of the offspring churches Homer was writing about. It had set itself off in 1760 because the Sunday journey to meeting had seemed so long and difficult to the farmers in the northern quarter of Concord. Nashoba was a town of swamps and glacial eskers, of low hills and arable fields, of brooks running into the Assabet River, the Concord, the Merrimack. As a village it had a quarrelsome history, perhaps because its citizen farmers had been so maddened by the clouds of mosquitoes breeding in the swamps. Remoteness and poverty had kept it unspoiled for a long time, but now the Subarus and Saabs and Toyotas of software engineers tore down the narrow ways where apple-laden carts had once lumbered to market. Along Nashoba’s winding roads there were still two-hundred-year-old farmhouses of supreme and simple beauty, but there were new houses as well, especially on Lowell Road and Heald Avenue and Blood Street. Homer and Mary passed one of the new developments on their way to church.
“Tsk-tsk, will you look at that,” said Homer, shaking his head in disapproval. “They’ve finished that Southern plantation. There’s the new owner in person, installing his birdbath.”
The man with the birdbath was Jerry Gibby, the newly arrived citizen of Nashoba, the proprietor of Gibby’s General Grocery. Homer and Mary didn’t know it, but Jerry and his wife, Imogene, were about to become the newest members of Old West Church. Imogene and Jerry had fallen in love with the beautiful old building on the green, with its charming domed tower. It was part of their image of their new life in the suburbs. Jerry wanted to become acquainted with the church members, hoping to bring new customers into his store. Imogene, too, wanted to know everybody. She wanted to find out if there was a women’s group in the church. She wanted to be part of the community right away.
This morning, as the Kellys’ Ford pickup sped past the Gibbys’ house, Jerry Gibby dumped his new birdbath beside one of the expensive boulders that were part of the flossy landscaping around his new house. Then, puffing with the effort, he went indoors to ask Imogene to come out and take a look. But Imogene was in the Jacuzzi. So, instead, Jerry wandered around the new kitchen, dazed with possessive pride, admiring the microwave oven, the trash compacter, the bar with its own little sink, the bay window with the maple table and the captain’s chairs.
It was all a dream. Jerry couldn’t believe it. If only he had known about this house when he was a kid, growing up in Somerville with a mother who was always sleeping off a binge and a dad who was missing half the time, it would have made things easier. What if he had known that someday he would possess a house in a fancy suburb and a gleaming white Coupe de Ville and a supermarket franchise! Well, of course the bank owned the house and the car, and General Grocery owned most of the supermarket. After all, Jerry still owed General Grocery seven hundred thousand dollars. Oh, God. For a second Jerry panicked. Once again he told himself he had been a fool to build the house and buy the car at the same time he was going so far out on a limb to acquire the store.
Distracted by the grim statistics of his debts, Jerry stared at the trash compacter and tried to persuade himself things were going to be okay. He had a formula for comforting himself whenever he got in a tizzy, Everybody’s got to eat. Jerry had recited the formula to his brothers-in-law and his father-in-law—“Groceries! it’s a cinch. Everybody’s got to eat.” And they had all nodded their heads and agreed with him and loaned him the hundred thousand for the down payment on the supermarket. The car and the house had been spun out of air, somehow or other. Jerry himself wasn’t sure just how.
Worrying made him hungry. Looking in the refrigerator, Jerry found a piece of sausage left over from breakfast, and he ate it greedily, dripping grease on his lapel. Imogene saw the spot when she came flouncing into the kitchen in her pretty ruffled dress. Swiftly she scrubbed it off and kissed him. Then she got to work on the boys, straightening their ties, wetting down their cowlicks. The three fat little boys looked just like Jerry. They all wore identical suits. In the back of the Coupe de Ville they bounced on the seat, demanding to hear the stereo. They wanted to see the windows go up and down when Jerry pushed the buttons. They wanted to try the tape deck.
“Pipe down, guys,” said Jerry, backing cautiously out of the driveway. “Just shut up, okay?”
Imogene patted the white leather of the front seat with her plump hand. “I’m scared about church,” she said. “I won’t know when to kneel and when to stand up.”
“Kneel?” Jerry snickered. “You don’t kneel in a Protestant church. You just sit there. God lets the Protestants sit there on the seat of their pants. Everybody’s equal, you know? How do you do, God! Shake hands, okay, God?”
“Well, at least the minister will be new too,” said Imogene. “We won’t be the only ones walking into the church for the first time.”
4
Suppose two men, both in fear of drowning by water; one stands on a firme rock, the other on a quick-sand.…
Reverend Peter Bulkeley
Concord, 1646
Ed Bell was long overdue at home. On the way past the parsonage, he slowed down, wondering if he should stop in for a minute to encourage Joseph Bold. But then he pulled away and accelerated again, because he really didn’t have time. And anyway the man would be all right. He would handle his first service perfectly well. Confidently Ed drove home and apologized to his frantic wife and called upstairs to his daughter Eleanor, and soon the three of them were on their way to church.
As their car swept past the Bolds’ house, Ed didn’t even give it a second glance.
The parsonage of the Old West Church was a homely Victorian structure almost lost behind two enormous Norway spruce trees that threw the front porch into impenetrable shadow. Within the house, Ed Bell’s angelic confidence was not the mood of the morning. But Joe Bold was doing his best to seem poised and self-assured in front of the Shookys, who had stopped by for Claire. Then, gathering up his sermon from his desk and throwing his black robe over his arm, he said goodbye and stepped out on th
e back porch to walk up to the church.
Instantly his attention was assailed by the washing on the line in the yard. He had hung it out himself the day before, and he should have brought it in after supper, because there had been rain in the night. Now the sheets and towels were drenched, but they billowed in the morning breeze and subsided, and filled again with air and fell back. One of his shirts hung between him and the low streaking sunlight, lifting its arms, flinging them wildly, dancing, hurling itself outward. It was ridiculously like himself, but transfigured. There in the backyard hung this phenomenon, half natural, half polyester, seizing his attention.
But Joe was used to that. Everything everywhere beckoned him, crooked its finger at him; that was the trouble. Rocks and clouds plucked his arm, crumpled paper bags on the sidewalk called to him, every petal on a flowering bush had its own voice. It dizzied him, wore him out, to keep turning and looking and gasping politely, “Yes, yes, I see, I see.”
As he turned out on the road, for example, he couldn’t help noticing the way the drops falling from the high trees were plummeting straight down, glittering as they fell. He couldn’t help hearing the bird in the branches overhead make a tentative light remark before it flew away.
As usual, Joe was strongly affected. Ever since he could remember, his senses had been more intensely vulnerable than other people’s. His first memories were of sharp visions, the blue sky above his playpen, ants on blades of grass, shadows tumbling on a blanket. Later on, walking to school, he had been transfixed by the sleek furry coats of dogs, by weedy thickets in a brushy field, by sandwich wrappers blowing across the playground. His teacher had complained to his mother: “Joseph always seems to be somewhere else. I can’t get the boy’s attention.” Then, in adulthood, Joe had discovered the transcendentalists, and learned that these airy manifestations were metaphors, mystical pedagogical remarks by God, who never stopped talking in a language composed of the droplets in a cloud or the sap running up a tree, or the willful behavior of the elements of a dividing cell. It was a garrulous communication that never ceased, a gabble of molecules, a continuous proclamation by cobblestones and the bark of trees, by constellations of stars and by cracks in the sidewalk, an endless monologue of Visual splendors.
Now Joe was thirty-eight—too old, it seemed to him, for what he had accomplished. Six years of his life had been wasted as a student of zoology, attempting to transform the ignorant rapture of his childhood into a useful profession. For two long years in graduate school, he had been mired down in the examination of the skeletal differences among blowfish. When at last he had come to his senses, he had simply walked across the dingy parking lot from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Divinity School. There he had spent another four years, preparing for ordination as a clergyman.
His new career had seemed satisfactory, the right one for Joseph Bold. Until recently, the ministry had seemed his true calling. Throughout his years in the big Congregational church in Pittsburgh, he had spoken from a reservoir that seemed unfailing. His ecstatic apprehension of his surroundings had been like Henry Thoreau’s intoxication with the song of the wood thrush. Like Thoreau, he had been Drunk, drunk, drunk, dead drunk. For Joe, Thoreau’s wonder at a nutshell in his hand had become a talisman—I looked at a walnut shell this morning, and saw that it was made for joy.
For joy? Bitterly, Joe walked under the dripping trees in the cool, moist air. In his own hand Thoreau’s shell had broken open to reveal a worm, and now the worm was rearing up like some dread creature of the jungle, swaying and coiling itself around Claire. All Thoreau’s transcendent joy had been merely self-delusion. How could anyone be such a fool as to believe in it?
Above him now as he walked to church, the telephone wires looped from pole to pole, shining in the sunlight like strands of spiderweb. The tall grass beside the pavement was a mass of delicate parallels straining upward. Joe was compelled to see it, but he no longer had faith in it.
“You promise and promise and never deliver,” he told the grass resentfully. Walking past the Civil War memorial on the Common, he crossed Farrar Road and entered the church.
5
An humble spire, pointing heavenward from an obscure church, speaks of man’s nature, man’s dignity, man’s destiny, more eloquently than all the columns and arches of Greece, and Rome, the mausoleums of Asia, and the pyramids of Egypt.
William Ellery Channing
Of all the white wooden spires pointing skyward from the green commons of suburban villages in Massachusetts, from the public squares of cities, from rural crossings surrounded by shopping malls, from abandoned parishes where deer and foxes ran in the woods, the small-domed tower of the Old West Church of Nashoba was among the most demure. It housed a single bell and a family of barn owls. The bell rang only on Sunday mornings, but the owl came and went every night through a broken slat in the shutter, carrying live mice and voles for her downy young to dismember.
It was called Old West because it lay a few hundred yards west of the church from which its disgruntled orthodox founders had detached themselves in 1836, shocked by the way the church of their fathers was drifting into the Unitarian heresy. A century later, the two churches had joined forces once again, and now the united parish paid dues both to the Congregational United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. The reunion was not a matter of philosophical tolerance so much as a recognition of their mutual poverty in the Great Depression.
Back in 1836, when the present edifice was built, tricky points of theology had counted for much more. God was three, not one. Bang! went the hammers. Three, not one! Bang, bang, bang! Christ the Son was coequal to God the Father, not subordinate. But, even so, the carpenters had not carried the cross of Christ up the ladder to the top of the steeple. A cross would have been suspect, smacking of popery. Instead they had crowned the building with a rooster weathervane.
This morning, after a century and a half of pointing to the four corners of God’s vast creation, the same rooster was sweeping around on his creaking iron axle in the thrust of the brisk wind that tossed the bare tops of the maples and drove white clouds like puffy sofas across the cold blue sea of air.
When Homer Kelly’s big pickup slowed down in front of the church, early comers were thronging across the road. “I’ll drop you off here,” he said to his wife.
“I’ll save you a place as long as I can,” promised Mary.
Driving up the hill beyond the church, Homer found a parking place in front of the parish house, the old building that had once housed the Unitarians. Opening the car door, stretching out his long leg to the pavement, he looked at his big oxford and imagined instead the high laced shoe of a Kibbe or a Farrar or a Blood descending from a buggy or a rockaway or a buckboard, or the worn boot of a Heald or a Russell or a Hutchinson stepping down from a cutter or a sleigh in the winter snow. This morning the snow was gone, the sun was shining, the grass at the edge of the green was gouged with tire tracks. Homer hurried along the dry asphalt of the road and joined the press of fellow parishioners moving up the wooden planks that had been set down on the lawn last fall.
The vestibule was crowded. People were shuffling toward the two doors, peering past each other, craning their necks. There were extra ushers this morning, dodging up and down the aisles, opening the little pew doors, handing people their orders of service, packing six bodies to a bench instead of five. Charlie Fenster crooked his finger at Homer and wedged him in beside Mary in a rear pew. Homer settled himself in the narrow space, Mary squeezed up against Joan Sawyer, Joan prodded her husband, Howie, to move over, Howie shoved massively against George Tarkington, and George crowded still closer to his wife, Hilary. There was a sense of expectation in the murmured greetings, the rustle of coats, the flutter of orders of service, the wooden noise of pew doors sticking, opening, shutting, the sound of whispering from the choir in the balcony, a blundered bass note from the organ.
The choir was a world unto itself. On the l
ong varnished benches, the singers sat jammed together in their black robes, separated from the congregation, enjoying an undercurrent of hushed hilarity. “I can’t find the damned hymn,” muttered one of the baritones, Percy Donlevy, riffling through his hymnbook. “It’s the punishment of an angry God,” explained Bob Ott, and there was a burst of subdued laughter from the other tenors.
But then they didn’t rehearse the hymn, after all. Glancing over her shoulder at the packed church, choir mistress Augusta Gill shrewdly forbore. “It’s too late,” she said. “We should have started earlier.” Then Augusta rearranged her music, took a deep breath, and launched into the prelude. Her fingers rippled on the two keyboards, swell and great, her feet ran up and down the pedals. The music pealed out over the congregation, and the sense of anticipation increased.
In the last pew on the south side, Homer was butted up against the shutter of the window. His back was stiff. The sun warmed his neck. From the three south windows, the light poured into the chamber, filling the hollow volume of the church, ricocheting from the white walls, the white pews, the white ceiling, multiplying itself in white upon white, losing itself in overlying white shadows in the crevices of the classical moldings behind the pulpit, in the carvings of the Corinthian capitals, in the slats of the shutters. It was a cheerful light, devoid of mystery. It said “Wake up,” rather than “Adore.” Homer thought of the forefathers and their pious teachings on original sin and total depravity and atonement and eternal punishment and predestination and the covenant of grace—mighty fallacies, sublime hallucinations, exalted errors. What was there in this sunlit space to equal them in majesty, in solemn grandeur? How did the church survive when it no longer believed in a God who heard the cry of every heart, who listened with fervent interest to the prayers rising like steam, who never failed in his earnest seeking of lost souls? Would the Reverend Joseph Bold measure up to the stature of the devoted and misguided men who had stood in the several pulpits of Old West in the past? Or would he be only a flea on the back of the last elephant in that long and ponderous parade, hopping up and down, emitting an insect whine? Well, they would soon find out.
