Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

  “Thoreau was clean,” objected Homer primly. “At Walden, he bathed in the pond every day.”

  “Well, good for Henry, but what about the others? We look at these great icons from afar, but what if we came close, really close, very, very close? What would they be like? Think of the foul latrines and the greasy bedding. Think of the dirty feet and the unwashed bodies. Think of the bad breath and the spitting, the stinking underwear, the rotting garbage and the excrement thrown into the street. Think of the privies! You know, Homer, there were still a few privies in Concord when I was a little girl.”

  Homer flinched. “I see what you mean. The great and glorious unwashed.” Shuddering, he changed the subject. “Guess what? I’ve slipped again.”

  “Slipped? Oh, you mean—”

  “The bestseller list. I’ve sunk to fifth place.”

  “Well, fifth place isn’t so bad. You just have to get the new book out in a hurry. Wait a sec, Homer; you’ve got to see this.” Mary reached for her notebook and flapped the pages back and forth. “It’s sort of mysterious and exciting. Maybe you could work it in. Did you ever hear of a lost church around here anywhere?”

  “A lost church?” Homer grinned. “How could a church get itself lost?”

  She sucked her pencil. “I know it sounds strange.”

  “You mean it just pointed its steeple at the horizon and took off, galumphing away in the night?”

  “Heaven knows. I was bumbling around in the archives of the Concord Library and I found something strange. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to one crazy letter, but there were two of them. Look, here’s the first one. It was just a wisp of torn paper in a file. No date, no return address, no signature. I made a copy. Look.”

  Homer looked. The handwriting was old-fashioned but precise. It started in the middle of a sentence:

  … picnicking with my dear friends from Concord, Honoria and Mary Ann. Now Mother you know what alwayz happens at picnics it began to pore pitchforks so we went into the empty church and I found a hym book under a bench so I took it because nobody comes there now.

  Homer shook his head. “This is your lost church? But, Mary, it could be anyplace. Her dear friends were from Concord, but maybe the letter was written from someplace else entirely. And maybe it was the other Concord, the one in New Hampshire.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought. But then I found this.” Mary turned a page. “This one has a date.”

  July 17, ’69

  Dearest Honey,

  Our Poetry Social met yesterday and my little offering was well received! In fact (forgive me, dearest, for bragging) our President praised it as worthy of Oliver Wendell Holmes himself! Think of that!

  THE LOST CHURCH

  Deep in the forest primeval

  And shrouded in shrubbery,

  A prey to woodworm and weevil,

  The empty church stands.

  No sermon of good or of evil

  Resounds from that pulpit.

  No minister’s eloquent hands

  Are lifted in blessing.

  How many a swift grain of sand

  Has drained from the glass

  Since last these walls echoed

  With hymn music grand?

  Lost, lost is the music! Lost

  All the prayers and the people!

  Lost, tempest-tossed

  And forever abandoned,

  The little lost church and the steeple.

  “What do you think?” said Mary. “Isn’t it sweet?”

  “The little lost church,” said Homer dreamily. “Maybe it was the church of churches, the temple of temples, the perfect union of truth and majesty. I’ll bet it was translated.”

  “Translated? Oh, you mean—”

  “Swept up to heaven.” Homer lifted his hands in wonder. “It was too good for this world, so now it’s up there in paradise, an alabaster cathedral, with Socrates and Jesus taking turns in the pulpit.”

  1868

  The News from Fairyland

  The Mind of Horace

  When Alexander, Ida, and Horace came home from Nashoba, Eudocia was waiting with baby Gussie in her arms. Ida stepped down from the buggy and took the baby. Eudocia lifted Horace down and said, “Were you my good boy?”

  “Of course he was,” said Ida.

  “I saw a big tree,” said Horace. He spread his arms wide. “As big as a giant.”

  “Oh, yes,” said his grandmother, unbuttoning his jacket. “I know that big tree.”

  Jake peered over the side of the basket as the balloon wafted over Walden Pond. “You see Hector anyplace, Jack?”

  “He’s a-comin’, Jake,” said Jack. “See him down there in the wagon, galloping that old horse? Whoopsie, Jake! Look at that. Wheel fell off the wagon.”

  Jake looked down at the disaster on the Walden Road and said mildly, “It’s all right, Jack. Horse ain’t dead. Hector’ll catch up by and by.”

  “You do love him a little?” Ida whispered to Alexander as she lay beside him in the big bed that had once belonged to her mother and father.

  “Of course,” said Alexander, “just as I love his mother. And after all, who was it who helped bring Horace into the world?”

  Ida smiled as she rested in the crook of her husband’s arm. It was true that Horace had been born in the Patent Office hospital in Washington, where Alexander Clock had been chief surgeon. Ida had gone looking for her husband, Seth, missing after the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, she had found her sixteen-year-old brother, Eben, deathly ill with typhoid fever. Then instead of going home to Concord to have her baby, she had stayed to help care for her brother. And therefore when her pains began, the head nurse had been forced, willy-nilly, to find her a bed.

  But was it true that Alexander had helped with the baby’s birth? No, of course it wasn’t true. Although army surgeon Alexander Clock had been acquainted with every kind of wartime casualty, he had known nothing whatever about babies. He had seen the infant born and he had watched with relief as baby Horace was handed to his mother, and then he had visited the pretty pair every day for the next week, while Eben recovered in another part of the hospital. And when the little family had packed up its belongings and left for home, Dr. Clock had written to Ida every day. Her search for Seth had ended with the news of his death, and now it was Alexander who lay beside her in the bed in which she had been born.

  But Horace was no longer an only child. He had a half sister, Augusta, who was still nursing at her mother’s breast. Everyone fussed over Gussie. Nobody fussed over Horace. Every night, the house was loud with Gussie’s cries. Every day, it steamed with Gussie’s washing. There were kettles boiling on the stove, set tubs sloshing with soapy water, hands rough and red from rubbing small garments on scrubbing boards, and on wet days Gussie’s laundry stretched across the kitchen and flapped in Horace’s face. And yet, after causing all this trouble, Gussie was the one who was kissed and cooed over, not Horace.

  It was clear to his grandmother that Horace’s small nose was out of joint. Therefore, Eudocia adopted him as her special charge. “Come, Horace dear,” she would say when he was scolded for misbehaving, “I’ll read you the story of Goldilocks and the three bears.” Or sometimes it was nursery rhymes—“Humpty-Dumpty” and “Little Boy Blue” and all the rest. Horace sopped them up. He lived in them; they filled his head with pictures.

  So for five-year-old Horace Morgan, the world was populated by elves and fairies, gnomes and trolls, storekeepers on the Milldam, giants and goose girls, white rabbits and the spotted cow, the man in the moon, his mother and grandmother, Little Jack Horner, and the horses in the stable.

  Therefore, when the hot-air balloon of the brothers Spratt drifted over the apple orchard, Horace was not surprised. The fantastic spectacle was all of a piece with the floating gossamer of dandelions and the news from fairyland.

  The Tinkerer

  In the busy household of Eudocia Flint on the road to Barrett’s mill, Horace was surrounded by young aunts
and uncles. Josh and Alice were still children, but Sallie was seventeen and Eben older still. At twenty-one, he was his mother’s right-hand man. Eben’s brother-in-law was older, of course, but Alexander was often miles away, attending a sickbed.

  Therefore, Eben was in charge of the heavy chores around the place. It was no longer a working farm, unless two horses, a cow, and miscellaneous poultry made it a farm, but like every boy brought up in the country, Eben could handle just about anything, from daily chores to unexpected calamities like the one last week: a raid on the henhouse by a fox. He had been forced to drop everything and mend the fence, while his mother wept over the carcass of the Toulouse goose, then got to work plucking and roasting it and rendering the fat in a kettle.

  The care of the apple trees had been abandoned, “at least for now,” said Eudocia regretfully, remembering an orchard cloudy with blossoms and heavy with fruit. But there was still a great deal to do. Hay had to be cut with a reaping machine borrowed from Mr. Hosmer, and stored in the hayloft. Trees had to be felled in the woodlot, carted home, and split for the stove, and now and then a few cedars from the farthest field were hewn into fence posts. The cow had to be milked twice a day and taken to the bull once a year, and her calf safely delivered in the spring. Of course, some supplies had to be brought from town, oats and flour from the grain merchant, lamp oil, sugar and soap from Cutler’s store, as well as luxuries from all over the world—raisins from the Levant, tea from China, oranges from Spain.

  Eben’s mother did most of the cooking and the laundry, although Ida handled her baby’s washing and Sallie helped with the shirts, slamming down one heavy iron on the stove and picking up another. Little Alice helped out in the kitchen, obeying the sharp commands of the whirlwind that was her mother, as Eudocia darted from flour bin to bread board, pried up stove lids to poke at the fire, disemboweled a hen, slammed a butcher knife down on a side of pork, or jerked open an oven door to pull out a loaf pan, her hand bunched in her apron.

  Eben took his household chores for granted, but Josh was apt to use bad words while shoveling out the slimy heaps plopped in the gutter by the cow. Sallie had been known to burst into tears at the sight of the laundry piled high in the basket, and Alice sometimes dropped dishes on purpose.

  As for Horace, Eben’s five-year-old nephew never complained about his chore of finding new-laid eggs in the hen-house, although he often broke as many as he carried safely inside to his grandmother.

  Eben’s real employment was away from home. Six days a week, he took the cars to Waltham, where he was employed as a draftsman for a firm of church architects. His school days were over, but Eben’s two years of study at the college in Cambridge had included not only orations in Latin and Greek but chemical experiments—inflating bubbles with hydrogen, making light with phosphorus, as well as the precise recording of the results. Now he was equally precise in the drafting of architectural plans and elevations, although he didn’t much care for the fussy designs of his employer. He was eager to try his hand at something of his own.

  It was a common saying, Every farmer a mechanic. It was certainly true of Eben, who had a Yankee knack for tinkering. His boyish perpetual-motion machine had failed to work, but his waterwheel had turned an axle that twirled a paper bird. Now he took on a project for his wounded friend James Shaw.

  “The trouble with these hooks of yours,” he told James, “is that they don’t grip. You need to pick things up and hold them.” When James made a mournful sound and shook his head, Eben said, “No, James, truly. I swear I can do it.”

  And within the week, he was back with a gadget that squeezed and let go, and squeezed again. James lifted his hooked stumps in despair.

  “Please, James,” said Isabelle. “Let Eben try it.”

  “It isn’t perfect yet,” said Eben, opening and shutting the contraption. “You’ll need help at first. But once it closes on a spoon, you’ll be able to feed yourself. Or hold a pen tightly enough to write.”

  “Oh, yes, James,” said Isabelle eagerly. “Here, let’s try.”

  But the first holding device refused to be attached to the stump of James’s right arm. “No matter,” said Eben cheerfully. “I can see what’s wrong. I’ll try again.”

  At the door, Isabelle took his hand. “You are a such a good friend to James. He would thank you if he could.”

  Eben had known Isabelle at school, where she had been the shyest girl in the seventh grade. His mother and father had known Isabelle’s mother and father. But now, although it no longer troubled Eben to look at James, he was afraid to look at Isabelle. The crisis was too great and her trouble too crushing to give him any right to look at her. Turning away, he put on his hat. “I’ll be back on Sunday, if it’s no trouble.”

  “Of course not,” said Isabelle, and she went back to James.

  “Where were we, James?” she said, picking up A Tale of Two Cities. “Oh, I remember.” Sitting down beside him, she began to read. “‘Good night, citizen,’ said Sydney Carton. ‘How goes the Republic?’” Isabelle paused before reading the sawyer’s response.

  “‘You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount to a hundred soon.’”

  One of the Noblest Works of God

  The giant tree that straddled the stone wall at the bottom of the Nashoba burial ground had already been growing on this hillside when the tribe of Nipmucks came from the north to fish at the junction of the rivers and hunt in the forest of the countryside known as Nashoba. Some of them had been “praying Indians,” but all of them, whether converted to Christianity or not, would have seen the branches of the chestnut tree hung with fragrant yellow flowers in summer. And they would have gathered the harvest of nuts that rained down in the fall, just as throngs of children did now, appearing like magic under the tree to fill pockets and baskets and pails.

  The chestnut tree was massively broad and tall, rising from its gnarled platform like a monument from a pedestal. Some of its branches were dead and bare, but new shoots had sprung up to become part of the whole, and now the entire tree was sprightly with fresh green leaves. Whenever Josiah Gideon left his front door, he gave it an admiring glance.

  This morning as he came out to prime the pump and fill a pitcher, Josiah looked across the road and saw Horatio Biddle standing under the tree. Josiah set the pitcher on the doorstep, walked across the road, and climbed over the wall to say good morning. Then the two clergymen, neighbors on this hillside and—whatever Ingeborg Biddle might say—colleagues in the ministry, stood side by side under the tree, contemplating the magnificent spread of leaf and branch over their heads. As always, the sight exhilarated Josiah. He wanted to exclaim, but he refrained.

  Then the man beside him made a remark. “See there, it’s cracked the monument to Deacon Sweetser.”

  Josiah lowered his eyes down and down, through layer after green layer, to the foot of the tree, where the slate tombstone of old Deacon Sweetser stood tall and tilted, heaved to one side by the thick mass of interwoven roots.

  “It won’t do,” said Horatio Biddle. “And anyhow, that tree’s too old. Next big wind, the whole thing will fall down.”

  Josiah looked at him keenly. “It hasn’t fallen yet.”

  “No, but it’s bound to happen.” Horatio whistled for a moment, then clapped his hands and made a pronouncement. “That tree must be removed.”

  “You’re jesting,” said Josiah.

  “No, no, it must come down.”

  “Come down?” Josiah was dumbfounded. “Surely you don’t mean it? Look here, Horatio, I have a better idea. Why not move Deacon Sweetser instead?”

  “Move Deacon Sweetser? Profane a Christian burial?” Horatio Biddle was shocked in his turn. “Remove a casket from the place where it was reverently interred a century ago? My dear Josiah, have you no respect for the dead? That is an abominable suggestion.” Horatio dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, turned away, and said once again, “The tree must come down.”

  �
��No,” cried Josiah. “Horatio, you wouldn’t do anything so outrageous.”

  Pausing to look back, Horatio said patiently, “Calm yourself, Josiah,” and glanced up again at the tree. “Lord God in heaven, that trunk must be eight or nine feet across.”

  “Because it’s so old,” shouted Josiah. “That tree’s a lot older than Deacon Sweetser. What about respect for one of the noblest works of God?”

  “Nonsense,” said Horatio, stalking away up the hill. “I’ve made up my mind.” He did not tell Josiah his next resolve, which was to act promptly, before the fool had time to arouse sympathy among the other members of the congregation.

  True, the chestnut tree was old, but it was only a tree after all. What mattered a tree compared with the long and upright life of that pious old father of the Nashoba church, Deacon Joseph Sweetser? Through all the ages to come, his old bones would remain where they were, until the Last Day and the thundering knock on the coffin lid.

  Shovels and Spades

  Julia Gideon was reading aloud by lantern light. “Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.” Raising her eyes from the book, Julia looked across the room. Had James fallen asleep?

  No, he was turning his head on the pillow to look at her. His single eye was dark and brilliant in the lantern light, but once again he pulled the sheet over the rest of his ruined face. Julia remembered the way her old father had covered his mouth to hide his toothless jaw. She murmured, “Can you sleep now, James?”

  He nodded, but she guessed it was a lie. When Isabelle came into the room in her nightdress, her hair falling down her back, Julia laid the book on the table, whispered good night, and turned to go. But then she had to stand aside for her husband and Eben Flint.

  In the lantern light, their faces loomed up out of the dark hall. “Hello, Eben,” said Isabelle, feeling her cheeks grow warm.