Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  “It’s a good thing Homer’s paddling has improved,” Mary said, giving the canoe a big shove. “You should have seen him in the old days. Remember, Homer, the time we had to paddle with a lunchbox? Goodbye, you two.”

  “I remember the snapping turtle,” growled Homer. “See that?” He showed Joe his scarred thumb. “She thought it was funny. She laughed fit to kill.” Picking up his paddle, Homer turned the canoe silently in the shallow water and headed into the slow current. The mosquitoes pursued them. It was the night of the full moon. As the sun set downstream, the moon’s pale shield rose over the low hills behind them. Pulling out into the middle of the river, they rested their paddles and drifted, gazing at the ripples under the aluminum prow, at the fireflies flickering in a sloping field, at the jet trail high in the failing light, turning from rose to gray, at Venus, a spark above the sunset.

  Homer glanced over his shoulder at the moon. “There was a certain moment Thoreau used to watch for, the moment when the light of the rising moon took over from the setting sun. He tried to catch it, that little interval of time when night began. It’s too early right now, I guess.” Homer paddled steadily, lifting his blade straight out of the water, making purling seams that curled away behind them, while Joe talked about his day at the Divinity School.

  “The students were interested in something they call the life of the spirit,” he said bitterly. “The life of the spirit is really big there now. Of course it’s a good thing. I mean, when I was a student it was all rationalism and the social mission, and I was sort of odd man out. But now it’s spirituality they want. I don’t know, Homer, somehow it left me cold. They were all so radiant.” Joe’s paddle splashed and clanked against the metal side of the canoe. “I confess I felt more and more disgruntled.”

  The hospital loomed in front of them, its windows alight. “Well, maybe you’re on the right track,” said Homer. “Maybe disgruntlement is the correct attitude toward the universe.”

  Joe shook his head vigorously. “No, no, it’s not. I know the correct attitude. It’s plain as the nose on your face. The right attitude is Ed Bell’s. He comes into the hospital to see Claire and tell her funny stories and make her laugh, and once in a while he says something about the good Lord. He has this nice simple faith. He trusts in God in the most natural way, as though his good Lord were one of the family. Well, I believe in his God, but only for Ed, not for me. As soon as Ed leaves, his good Lord goes with him.” Joe dipped his paddle savagely, turning the canoe toward the shore. “The church would be a lot better off if I resigned and Ed Bell took over.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Homer, looking around at Joe in astonishment. “Besides”—Homer gesticulated excitedly with his paddle—”Ed Bell probably doesn’t know Leviticus from Exodus. He doesn’t know Noah from Nicodemus. He doesn’t know the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He doesn’t know the Defenestration of Prague from the Donation of Constantine. He doesn’t know—”

  “Look, Homer,” said Joe, gazing up at the sky, which had darkened to a deep greenish-blue around the high walls of the hospital. “It’s now, right now.”

  “So it is,” said Homer softly. “The moon’s in charge from now on.”

  15

  … these tabernacles of flesh are to be rent in pieces, these houses of clay are to be broken down by the hand of death.…

  Reverend Paul Litchfield

  first minister of Carlisle, 1781-1827

  When in doubt, throw it out. Rosemary Hill was cleaning the attic. She had spent days and days under the roof in the sweltering heat, bowed over on a low stool, sorting through papers and memorabilia, taking small respites downstairs in bed, then coming back up. Ruthlessly she tossed things into the wastebasket. What possible use to Jeffry and Amanda were her life-drawings from art school, thirty years back? Why would they care about these old yellowed copies of the Nashoba Bee? Out with them all, out, out.

  But Rosemary couldn’t throw away the cheap school photographs of Jeffry in the third grade, or the notes on parish visiting at the Concord Reformatory. Jeffry would want the pictures and the church might want the notes. Rosemary stacked them beside the attic stairs, then gazed around the attic.

  There was still such an awful lot of stuff. How much longer would she have the strength to keep on? How many weeks or months? She looked at her watch. She would have to stop in a little while for the second meeting of the group at Ed Bell’s house at three o’clock. There was time for just one more box. Undoing the string on a carton of old linens, Rosemary pulled out a dresser scarf. Would Amanda like a dresser scarf? Amanda’s own great-grandmother had made it, and nowadays this sort of thing was coming back in style.

  At the Bells’ house, on Acton Road, Ed was getting ready for his afternoon meeting, looking critically at the living room. It seemed comfortable enough, a little frowsy from the battering it had taken from five children and any number of dogs. But the chairs were too far apart. For a gathering like this one, people really needed to be closer together. He pushed one of the big upholstered chairs closer to the sofa and dragged the other one across the rug on its two back legs. His wife looked in as he crowded the desk chair against the coffee table.

  “Another one of those meetings?” said Lorraine. “Honestly, Ed, dear, it’s the craziest thing I ever heard of.” Lorraine had her pocketbook in her hand. “Illegal, immoral, and I don’t know what else.”

  “We just talk, that’s all we do,” said Ed. “You’re going for Ellabelle?”

  “Yes, and I’m late.”

  But late as she was at the copy center, Lorraine was still too early for Eleanor, who always found it hard to stop working. Eleanor had turned her job into a dance. Now she grinned at her mother, snatched the next customer’s sheet of paper, whirled around, tossed up the cover of the copy machine, slipped in the paper, snicked the cover down again, punched a row of buttons with quick dabs of her fingers, whirled again with tossing hair, to seize the ringing telephone and tuck it between ear and shoulder and josh with the boy in the office upstairs while she gathered up the copies from the bin, smacked them smartly into a pile, twirled to put the phone down, beamed at the customer and dropped his copies in front of him, all complete.

  Lorraine stood waiting, lost in admiration. What a girl that Eleanor was! She could do anything she set her mind to. In school she was a responsible student. In her modern-dance class she was nimble and quick: she could turn around in midair, she could stand on one leg and bring the other one up beside her ear. On the basketball court she could sink a ball in the basket every time she tried. She could swim fifty laps in the school swimming pool, she could run like a deer. Therefore it was all the more pitiful to see what was happening to her at home, snarled as she was in the toils of love. Lorraine watched her daughter and waited, gripping her pocketbook.

  This afternoon Bo Harris would be coming over again to work on his old car. And the new boy, Paul, would be arriving, moving into Stanton’s room. Eleanor, Bo, and Paul—how would the three of them get along? Darling Ed, he had taken Bo aside and asked him to encourage Paul to help with the replacement of the engine block. Eleanor would be mooning around the edges, abject, eager, trying to help, getting in the way. Poor Eleanor! She had thrown herself so passionately into Bo’s great enterprise. His resolute seriousness was hers as well. She was making a heroic effort to understand the workings of a gasoline engine. She was an authority on pistons, on the fatal delay of the spark. But it was all book-learning. She didn’t have the mechanical know-how Bo Harris seemed to have been born with.

  Dropping Eleanor off at home, Lorraine drove off to ransack Gibby’s General Grocery. Thus, when Eleanor came running downstairs in full cosmetic regalia, it was her father who took her: outside and introduced her to Paul Dobbs, and Paul to Bo Harris.

  Paul was a cheerful-looking sinewy boy with a bruised face. “Well, hey, there,” he said, grinning at Eleanor, whistling in admiration. Eleanor had washed her hair and blown it dry
so that it streamed forward around her face and then back at the tips as if the wind had changed direction in a hurricane.

  Eleanor said hi, then turned to glance at Bo, but he was looking at his car, which stood among them like a monument. Above it like a canopy rose the tree-trunk tripod and the new block and tackle. Eleanor’s father had paid for the block and tackle. He had always, he said, wanted a block and tackle.

  Then Bo turned to Paul and looked at him soberly. “You want to help me install the clutch? It’s a two-man job. It’s really tricky to line up the spline with the clutch plate.”

  Paul looked vaguely at the tripod and the block and tackle and the car. “You should see my brother’s Jag.” Leaning against the porch railing, Paul bragged about the Jag and about a couple of Suzukis and BMW bikes he had ridden in the past. Then he talked freely about his four brothers. Two were rich. The other two were locked up in houses of correction.

  Bo made another try. “Here, you want to grab the back end of the transmission?”

  But Paul had other things to do. He turned away importantly. “I got to go to Winthrop. My brother, he’s going to pick me up. He’s got this place right on the water.”

  So Bo had to fall back on Eleanor. “This shaft goes into that hole, see? You got it?”

  “Got it,” said Eleanor, and she took a firm hold. But she wasn’t strong enough. They couldn’t get the shaft lined up. Bo cursed and fumed. At last, in desperation, he poked around in the house until he found a broom in the kitchen. Then, bumping down the cellar stairs, he looked fora workbench with tools.

  There were two large obstructions in the cellar, a monstrous object with iron doors into which coal had once been shoveled and a modern oil-fired furnace. Mr. Bell’s workbench occupied an enclosed space behind the new furnace—the old coal bin, guessed Bo. He took Mr. Bell’s saw off the wall above the workbench and carried it outdoors with the broom. Resting the broom on the top step of the back porch, he braced it with his knee and sawed off a length of handle.

  It worked fine. It lined things up just right. Satisfied, Bo ate half a dozen of Eleanor’s fudge brownies, mounted his bicycle, and rode away.

  Eleanor stood in the driveway, gazing after his bare back as he coasted onto Acton Road. Then she had to move out of the way because Mr. Tarkington’s car was turning in to the driveway. It was rusty and dented. It looked almost as bad as Bo’s. And another car was slowing down. Eleanor recognized Mrs. Baxter at the wheel.

  What were all these people doing here? Eleanor held the screen door open for Mr. Boland, who came hurrying up from across the street. Then she looked for her father, to tell him he had company.

  She found him clattering glasses onto a tray in the kitchen. “What are all these people here for?” said Eleanor.

  “Oh, it’s just a meeting,” said her father, smiling at her.

  “What kind of a meeting?”

  Ed took a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator. “Just a friendly support group, Ellabelle.”

  “A support group? For what?”

  “For each other.” Ed Bell winked at his daughter, put the pitcher on the tray with the glasses, pushed open the swinging door, and carried the tray into the hall to greet his guests.

  The last arrival was Rosemary Hill. Eleanor saw Mrs. Hill climb the porch steps, holding her purse against her side in a queer sort of way. In a moment Mrs. Hill was in the living room with the others. Eleanor stood in the hall, staring at them, wanting to know what was going on, until her father winked at her and pulled at the heavy sliding doors. The doors rumbled together across the floor and shut off Eleanor’s view of the meeting. Shrugging her shoulders, she went upstairs to her room.

  When Lorraine Bell came back from her shopping expedition, the meeting was over. There were no other cars in the driveway, except of course Bo’s old wreck under the tripod.

  Ed helped his wife carry the groceries indoors. “Oh,” said Lorraine, stopping with a bag in her arms, gazing at the mutilated broom on the grass beside the back steps. “Look at that. What happened?”

  Ed’s new hacksaw lay on the driveway beside Bo’s Chevy. Ed picked it up. “Oh, careless youth,” he said, wiping the blade on his sleeve.

  16

  But, let me not forget to mention the worthy deeds of the fair sex of this loom.… Ladies, you have done virtuously, and have excelled.

  Dr. Ezra Ripley

  First Parish, Concord, 1792

  Next Sunday the morning service was to be followed by a nooning, the annual church picnic.

  “Do I have to come?” groaned Homer Kelly, who sometimes wearied of his studious, preoccupation with Old West Church, his Sunday mornings of sermons and hymn singing, his sleepy afternoons deciphering the handwriting of pious country parsons.

  Mary was frying chicken, turning it expertly with a pair of tongs. “Of course you have to come. Listen, Homer, it will be like those old noonings in the nineteenth century, those picnics between the two Sunday sermons when everybody visited with everybody else while they ate from their picnic baskets. It will give you a better understanding of the old days in the church. And anyway this is what it’s all about.”

  “What do you mean, what it’s all about?”

  “Getting together, being all in one place at the same time. Oh, of course they were all together inside the church, listening to the sermons, but then they had to be quiet and not talk to each other. At the nooning they could gossip and find out how people were, and learn about each other’s needs and minister to each other.”

  “Oh, right, right—well, all right,” said Homer grudgingly.

  So once more the pickup ground its way up the bluff beside the river, out onto Route 2, through the center of Concord and along Lowell Road to Nashoba, to the parish house of Old West Church, the clumsy building of green-painted shingles that had once housed the Unitarians.

  The nooning had taken over the huge gymnasium-like room in the front of the parish house. The pews had long since been removed, but the organ was still there, enclosed in paneling, and the homely stained glass still glowed green and yellow high in the wall. The acoustics were bad. In the clapboarded building to the west, it. was sunlight that rebounded from walls and ceiling, but here it was noise, recoiling, reverberating, colliding, smearing together the voices of the picnickers as they scraped their folding chairs across the floor and hurried back and forth to the kitchen and talked across the tables. Children’s high staccato voices echoed and re-echoed.

  Battered by discord, Homer stood in the doorway, wondering if the building could have been constructed at a more terrible moment in the architectural history of the nation. In the year 1882, only the mightiest intellects had manipulated the ponderous style with an understanding for the requirements of its massive proportions. The parish house was large without grandeur, its ornamentation graceless and sparse. Homer couldn’t help comparing it with the church down the street where they all met on Sunday mornings, the little edifice the dissenting Congregationalists had built for themselves in 1836. They had merely thrown it together like a barn. The result was perfection.

  Homer’s wife, Mary, pulled out a chair and sat down at a table where there were two empty places between Carl Bucky and Joe Bold. Homer took the seat beside her, accepted a heaped-up paper plate, and lifted a chicken leg to his mouth.

  But Mary was jogging his arm, whispering, “Wait, Homer.”

  “What for?” said Homer loudly.

  “Shut up, you ninny. They’re saying grace.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Homer lowered his chicken leg, and the noise in the hall died away, except for the clatter in the kitchen, where Betsy Bucky and Mollie Pine were still shouting gaily at each other. Then they, too, abruptly stopped, and Joe said grace; there was a little pause, and then the noise rose again to full volume, and hands that had paused in mid-gesture went on unpacking baskets of food and handing out bowls of potato salad and plates of sandwiches.

  Betsy Bucky flew out of the kitchen to unveil her own
contribution. For Betsy, the nooning was an opportunity for showing off. It was a platform for the display of her culinary genius. This morning she had loaded Carl down with two heavy baskets. Now she opened them and brought out her pinnacle achievement, a platter of her famous sausage fritters, fried in deep fat. There were cries of “Oooh, Betsy,” and groans of wonder as the fritters were passed around and tasted. Betsy’s sausage fritters were her specialty, something she had invented herself. They were flaky and delicate, seeming to have no relation to the slaughterhouse in Fall River where the original hogs had been knocked on the head, boiled, flayed, and ground into sausage. Out of Betsy’s baskets came more fritters, then half a dozen butterscotch pies.

  Lorraine Bell had prepared a simpler meal, bean salad and thin slices of roast beef. “I brought extra,” she said to Joe Bold, piling some of it on his empty plate.

  “Have some of our cherry tomatoes?” said Mary Kelly, filling in the gaps. “A piece of chicken?”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” said Joe in confusion as Maud Starr piled a mountain of marinated mushrooms on top of everything else. Then Maud squeezed her chair in close and leaned sideways, engaging joe in a huddle of serious talk. Mary watched, thinking about Joe’s wife, Glaire, remembering Claire as she had been at school. Compared to Claire Bold as she had once been, Maud Starr was nothing. She wasn’t in the game at all. But that was before the rules had radically changed, before Claire’s cards had fallen to the floor. Now any fool could play against her, any bitch who was alive and well, whose breasts and bones were whole, whose body was not riddled with disease. Mary cringed as she thought of yesterday, when Maud had come running into the hospital to visit Claire. Maud had chuckled a greeting at the pallid face on the pillow. “Oh,” she had squealed, “what a darling bed jacket,” and then she had dashed away with a flick of her scrawny skirt. Now the damned woman was deep in sympathetic conversation with Claire’s husband about his wife’s condition. It gave Mary a pain.