Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

  Eben gazed at her for a startled moment, then backed away in confusion. Josiah struck a match and lighted a candle. He handed it to his wife, picked up the lantern, and gave her a flashing look. “We need it outside. Don’t wait up. We may be gone awhile.”

  Something in her husband’s face alarmed Julia, but she took the candle and said nothing. The floor creaked under two pairs of boots and the circle of light moved away, leaving only the candle.

  Soon there were noises from the shed, soft clinkings and clashings. James lifted his head and Julia went to the window with Isabelle. Moving the curtain aside, they saw Josiah and Eben emerge from the shed. The lantern in Eben’s hand made silhouettes of the long-handled tools on their shoulders.

  Shovels and spades. What were they doing out-of-doors in the dark of night with shovels and spades?

  Deacon Sweetser Moves North

  Perhaps Horatio Biddle had been born a clergyman, babbling sermons in his cradle and waving his little fists in declamatory gestures. Now as a grown man, he felt himself to be the natural lord of his congregation. Ever since the laying on of hands at the time of his ordination, he had been the spiritual master of his flock. In that instant, he had become the inheritor of an ancestral line of Christian preachers. Every hand that had lain upon his head had belonged to a clergyman who had himself received just such a laying on of hands by older men of God, and they, too, had been blessed by the hands of an earlier generation. The ceremony of ordination was a passing of spiritual authority from one age to the next, a solemn succession going back and back in time.

  But on the morning following the dark midnight when Josiah Gideon and Eben Flint had set off with their shovels and spades, Horatio Biddle woke up and beheld a horrid defiance of his inherited authority. As he pulled off his nightcap and yawned and glanced out the window, he saw something entirely unexpected. A tombstone was standing at the top of the burial ground in a place where no tombstone had stood before.

  Horatio threw up the sash and leaned out to stare down the hill to the place where the chestnut tree rose splendidly in the sweet morning air, its great limbs spreading far and high, its constellations of new leaves translucent in the light of the rising sun. He could see no trace of the resting place of Deacon Sweetser below the tree. There was no ugly pit in the ground, no visible scar. It was as though the venerable deacon had never slept at the foot of the chestnut tree.

  Outraged, Horatio threw on his clothes in such a hurry that his wife sat up in bed and complained, “Good gracious, Horatio, your shirt’s on inside out.”

  “No matter.” Her husband charged out of the bedroom, thundered down the stairs, threw open the door, and raced across the green through the dew-wet grass, then pounded along a quiet street, past a sleepy boy carrying a bucket into a cowshed and past the house of the widow Whittey, who was at that moment sweeping her front stoop. Miss Whittey looked up at Horatio and dropped her broom, but he charged past her without a word and rounded the corner to a path that meandered away from the road. The path led to an untidy yard full of sawbucks and to the shack that was the home of two brothers, Brendan and Daniel Fitzmorris. They were sawyers.

  Horatio sometimes pitied the foreign element in town, but the Fitzmorris brothers were not within his charge, since they were Irish Catholics. The kindly reach of parish charity did not extend to papists, no matter how needy they might be. Now, at least, they would be paid for laboring in a Protestant cause. Their saws and axes owed no allegiance to the Pope in Rome.

  “You there,” cried Horatio Biddle, pounding on the shanty door. “Wake up.”

  By ten o’clock in the morning of the same day, across Nashoba Brook in the town of Concord, Eudocia Flint and most of her family were up and about. Eben had come home at dawn, but after sleeping only a few hours, he had dragged himself out of bed to go back to Nashoba with Alexander. Baby Gussie was asleep. Ida, too, had been nodding off in the rocking chair until the loud singing voice of her mother jerked her awake.

  In the sitting room downstairs, Eudocia’s feet vigorously worked the treadles of the reed organ, her fingers bouncing on the keys and her knees thrusting sideways against the levers that sent more air into the bellows. Eudocia’s lungs expanded, too, as she gave tongue to a jolly song, “Oh, the bulldog on the bank! And the bullfrog in the pool!”

  It was the signal for Horace’s music lesson. But when Horace did not run into the room and climb into her lap, Eudocia stood up and called for her grandson, “Horace? Where are you?”

  Ida laid Gussie in her cradle and ran downstairs, telling herself that she should have been keeping track of Horace. Any day now, her clever little boy would learn how to draw the bolts on the doors.

  “Horace, Horace,” called Ida. But at the foot of the stairs, she whispered, “Oh no,” because the bolt had been drawn and the door stood wide open.

  Eudocia and Ida looked everywhere. Sallie and Josh and Alice scattered to look for the missing boy in the henhouse, the stable, the barn, and the orchard. Naughty Horace was nowhere to be found.

  But when the Reverend Horatio Biddle made his way back to the chestnut tree at the foot of the burial ground, accompanied by two men armed with axes and saws, he saw the lost boy high in the branches of the tree, looking down at him and laughing.

  The Bulldog and the Bullfrog

  Horace lived at full tilt. His behavior was not the naughtinesss of a neglected child. In running out the door, he was not escaping from a cruel stepfather or an unloving mother. It was Horace’s nature to head for the horizon. Every morning, he woke up eager to discover what lay beyond the washstand and the cupboard, beyond the house and the barn and the pasture fence. His mother was exhausted by the effort of keeping her five-year-old son in check, but Ida was secretly proud of his wanderlust. Someday, somehow, she was sure it would take him far.

  To the three big men staring up at the small boy sitting high in the chestnut tree, Horace presented a quandary.

  Brendan Fitzmorris had seen the boy before, and therefore when he caught sight of Dr. Clock and Eben Flint emerging from the house of Josiah Gideon, he shouted at them and pointed up at Horace.

  Horatio Biddle watched with satisfaction as the heads of Alexander and Eben swiveled to follow Brendan’s pointing hand. Gratified, he saw them cross the road and climb over the wall.

  “Is that your boy?” thundered Horatio. He, too, pointed skyward (it was a favorite pulpit gesture).

  Alexander and Eben looked up at the chubby object sitting high overhead in the famous chestnut tree. Looking down, they saw the Fitzmorris brothers with their mighty axes and long two-handled saws. Alexander exchanged a glance with Eben, and then, instead of shouting up at Horace and ordering him to come down, he swung himself up on a low branch and began climbing. Eben grinned and followed him. Hand over hand, they went up easily. The branches were like stair steps. Horatio Biddle watched them climb higher and higher, and he smiled at the thought of the scolding the mischievous boy was about to receive.

  Horace waited cheerfully for his uncle and stepfather. “I’m all right, Papa,” he called down as they came nearer. “I’m all right, Uncle Eben.”

  There was an angry shout from below: “Get that boy down.”

  “Of course you’re all right, Horace.” Alexander smiled at his small stepson and stepped sideways to settle down beside him and hold him firmly with one arm. Eben found a nearby branch, and at once he piped up with a favorite song of his mother’s—Eudocia had brought up a singing family. “Oh, the bulldog on the bank!”

  At once, Horace and Alexander chimed in with the next line. “And the bullfrog in the pool!”

  With the last lines, they were joined by a deep bellow from below. “And the bulldog called the bullfrog a green old water fool!”

  Looking down, they saw Josiah Gideon leaping up into the tree. They watched him climb higher and higher, his strong hands grasping branch after branch, his beard streaming sideways and his great laugh booming all over the graveyard.

&
nbsp; Soon there were four birds nesting in the top of the tree. Gazing around the horizon from their lofty perch, Josiah, Eben, Alexander, and Horace could see eight church steeples pointing skyward above the treetops in villages to the east, west, north, and south.

  Far below at the foot of the tree, the Fitzmorris brothers were grinning from ear to ear, but the bullfrog was beside himself with rage.

  The Perching Birds

  Across the street, James Shaw twitched aside the curtain with the hook of his right arm and saw his mother-in-law run out the door to the gate. He made a sound in his throat, and Isabelle came hurrying to him from the kitchen. Looking out, she saw her dignified mother hoisting her skirts and clambering over the stone wall. In the burying ground, three men were looking up into the chestnut tree.

  What were they staring at? Isabelle lifted her eyes to the broad green canopy and saw three men and a child perched in it like birds. One of the men was her father. The second was Dr. Clock. The third was Eben Flint. The child was Eben’s small nephew, Horace. Quickly, Isabelle kissed James and ran out the door after her mother.

  Other women came, too. The news was spreading like wildfire. Someone had notified Eudocia, and now she came racing along the Concord Road in the spring wagon, accompanied by Ida with baby Augusta bouncing in her arms. Stepping down, Eudocia and Ida left Mab nosing at buttercups. Taking the baby in turns, they helped each other over the wall.

  The nature of the melodrama unfolded at once—the men with their axes, the endangered tree, and the fury of the Reverend Horatio Biddle, gazing up at the defiance in the top of the tree.

  “Hello, Mama,” shouted Horace, waving joyfully. “Hello, Grandmaw.”

  “Oh, Horace dear,” cried Ida, “hang on tight.”

  “You hear that, Horace?” shouted Eudocia.

  “It’s all right,” called Alexander. “I’ve got him.”

  Julia Gideon stared up anxiously at Josiah. She did not call out, but Isabelle shouted, “Father, are you all right?”

  Was he all right? Josiah could hardly contain his joy. The tree on which he stood was the embodiment of the great metaphorical tree “that fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.” Now, standing at the summit of both at once, the symbolic as well as the actual tree, he could see its long fingering branches reach out beyond the woods and fields and houses of Nashoba and the enclosing horizon of villages and steeples to enclose all the mountains and valleys and seas of the earth, the whole luxuriant terrestrial globe of trees and flowers, birds and beasts. Therefore, instead of answering his daughter, he stretched out one arm in a gesture of exaltation.

  Isabelle and Julia, looking up fearfully from below, could see his shining face. Eben, too, seemed transported. Horace crowed with delight, and even sober Alexander was laughing aloud.

  Within the hour, a crowd was gathered around the base of the tree, and seventeen eager climbers had mounted into the upper branches. Even Ella Viles tried to join Eben, but when she tore her pretty sash, she descended timidly.

  The tree dwellers chattered and sang. Baskets of tidbits were hoisted up, empty baskets let down. When Horace whispered something to his stepfather in distress, Alexander turned him around to face the other way and undid his buttons. Horace let fly eastward, giggling at the pattering noise on the leaves below.

  Meanwhile, Horatio Biddle had been joined by his wife. From the bedroom window of the parsonage, Ingeborg had surveyed the scene in a state of alarm, but now she whispered in his ear, “Over here, Horatio,” and led him a little way apart.

  Their domestic dialogue did not last long. Soon Ingeborg retreated, smiling. Her husband approached the tree and called up to Josiah and Alexander and Eben and all the others, “All right, gentlemen, you’ve won. You can all come down.”

  There were whoops of joy in the high branches overhead. Eben stood up on his branch, reached for Horace, and followed Alexander down, and then all the other tree dwellers came down, too, laughing and calling, appearing and disappearing in the bright universe of sunlit leaves. Only Josiah Gideon remained aloft a moment longer to gaze around at the spreading view of field and woodland, steeple and rooftop. He was the last to set foot on the ground.

  Eudocia gathered up Horace and kissed his beaming face, Ida kissed Alexander, Alexander kissed the baby, Ella Viles threw her arms around Eben, and Isabelle hugged her father.

  Julia was the only one who thought of thanking Horatio Biddle, but he had strolled away with the Fitzmorris brothers.

  “Later,” he said to Brendan Fitzmorris. “I’ll need you boys later on.”

  NOW

  Another Steeple

  Little of all we value here

  Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year

  Without both feeling and looking queer.

  In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,

  So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes,

  “The Wonderful One

  Hoss-Shay”

  The Weirdness of the Past

  Homer had begun to doubt the entire meaning of his life’s work. There had been a slippage of faith. What if everything he thought he knew about the past was wrong? What if the present moment slipped into a well as soon as it was over, a well so deep and bottomless that his bucket could only clatter against the stones and come up empty?

  Homer got out of the car in the parking lot of Nashoba’s Old West Church and stood for a moment on the pavement, staring up at the low dome of the steeple. What exactly was the truth about his own life only a moment ago? Five minutes ago, having forgotten how to find the town green, he had been driving along Quarry Pond Road from the direction of Route 2A, and then he had blundered around Gideon Circle and turned the wrong way on Flint Street, or had it been Gideon Street and Flint Circle? There, you see? You dip your hand in the past and the truth runs through your fingers like water.

  So the whole thing was hopeless. The past was weird and unknowable. How could he presume to know anything whatever about a time when every gesture of a hand, every habit of talk, every simple unconscious action was shrouded by the curtains of the years that lay between, each a darker and thicker veil, until everything was blotted out?

  Then Homer cheered up, for it occurred to him that architecture was dependable. Buildings hung on comfortably while generations came and went. Infants were carried in to be baptized and eighty years later their coffins were carried out, while the building continued to stand. Old West Church was itself a chunk of the nineteenth century. This solid collection of wood and stone, plaster and glass had been part of Nashoba in the past and it was part of it still.

  Mulling over this truism, Homer walked past a sign inviting him to a lecture on “The Archetype of Healing” and found himself in a basement corridor. Here the floorboards were so solid under his feet and so old at the same time that Homer wondered if he might find a wizened deacon entombed in a broom closet or an ancient choirmistress pressed like a flower in a hymnbook.

  The Reverend Joseph Bold was very much alive. When Homer knocked on his office door and walked in, the present-day shepherd of Nashoba’s Old West Church looked pink and healthy, if slightly harassed. Joe was an old friend, and it didn’t take him long to understand the nature of Homer’s stumbling questions.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Joe. “You’re looking for dirt, is that it?”

  Homer was embarrassed. “Well, I wouldn’t call it ‘dirt’ exactly. Say the sort of gossip that everybody knows at the time, only it never gets into the history books.”

  “Sorry, Homer,” said Joe. “I wish I knew gossip like that. Sometimes it’s the best kind of history. The trouble is, I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know much at all about our background, except that we used to be known as the First Parish of Nashoba. That is, until the Universalists set up shop around the corner in the 1880s. So after that, this one’s been Old West, even after we joi
ned forces.”

  Homer was distracted by the framed photograph on the wall. He jumped up to take a look. “Who’s this old guy?”

  “Some pastor from days gone by. I forget his name.” Joe stood up, too, and peered at the spidery writing under the photograph. “The Reverend Horatio Biddle. Oh, sure, I remember him. He’s got a tombstone out there in the graveyard.”

  “Well, it’s too bad,” said Homer, sinking back in his chair. “I gather you don’t have any juicy scandals for me. But that’s all right. In fact it’s just as well. I’m ashamed of myself for asking. It’s not me, Joe, honest it isn’t. It’s my editor. That’s the kind of stuff he wants.”

  “Now wait a minute, Homer. Hold your horses.” Joe frowned. “I think there was a scandal about a tree.”

  “A tree? A scandal about a tree?”

  “Well, maybe. It sounds unlikely. I’m probably wrong.”

  “Well, how about a lost church?”

  “A lost church?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous, but—”

  “No, wait.” Joe stared fiercely at Homer’s whiskers. “A lost church. It strikes a chord.”

  “It does?” Homer pulled a folder out of his bag and handed Joe the letter with the sentimental poem, the verses about the mysterious church that was “lost, tempest-tossed and forever abandoned.”

  Joe read the poem aloud. “Deep in the forest primeval and shrouded in shrubbery, a prey to woodworm and weevil, the empty church stands.” At the end, he looked up at Homer and said, “Goodness me.”

  “Oh, it was just some amateur poetry group, way back in 1869,” said Homer, feeling foolish. “They told this woman it was worthy of Oliver Wendell Holmes. See at the top where it says that?”

  “Mmm, yes.” Joe stared at the poem and murmured, “‘Lost, lost is the music!’” Looking up dreamily, he said, “Oliver Wendell Holmes, that’s right. There was something about Oliver Wendell Holmes.”