Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

  No doubt the request was urged on Mr. Viles by his daughter, Ella. At any rate, Ella insisted on driving her father to the Flint homestead in the Jenny Lind. As she halted the horse in front of the house, loud music poured from the window of the sitting room, where Eben’s mother was rollicking through a favorite hymn and accompanying herself on the organ.

  “O Lamb of God,” sang Eudocia, but she stopped abruptly when Eben shot past her to open the door.

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Flint,” said Potter Viles, settled on the sofa, “our committee has exhausted all the possibilities for speakers that we can think of.”

  “And we can’t bother dear Mr. Emerson again,” said Ella. “He has already favored us twice.”

  Eben was flattered. “Well, I could try my hand. We might go a little farther afield. I’ll see what I can do.”

  By suppertime, he had decided where to start. He left the rest of the family discussing the subject of public speaking and went upstairs to his room to write a letter.

  Around the table, the suggestions were plentiful. Even Sallie made a critical remark: “Why does the speaker always have to be a man? Why not a woman?”

  “Good for you, Sallie,” said Ida.

  “Second the motion,” cried Eudocia.

  But Alexander only laughed. “The Concord Lyceum had a woman last year, remember, Mother Flint? She wasn’t very good, but it was amazing she could do it at all.”

  “Alexander!” Ida was indignant.

  “My dear, I was only joking. I’m sure you could do a better job yourself.”

  “Not better, perhaps,” said Ida, “but I could certainly do it.” She smiled around the table. “What would I lecture about?”

  “I have it,” said Alexander. “‘Mrs. Alexander Clock will present a discourse on how to be an obedient and dutiful wife.’”

  “No, no.” Ida gathered her skirts and climbed up on her chair. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, waving her arms in elocutionary gestures, “for all those of you with ears to hear, I will now explain how to organize a harvest festival. I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, these important affairs require years of experience in supervising the labor of hundreds of willing hands.”

  Alexander laughed and said, “Hear! Hear!” and Sallie and Alice clapped noisily.

  Then it was Eudocia’s turn to mount a chair and present a brief disquisition on the spanking of naughty children. “Spare the rod,” she said, looking fiercely down at Horace, “and spoil the child.” Horace quailed, but when everyone laughed, he did, too.

  Then Sallie bounced up on her chair and delivered a fiery endorsement of the opinions of Mrs. Stanton on the enslavement of womankind by their husbands, fathers, and brothers. “Me, I’m never going to get married,” cried Sallie, jumping down.

  “Speaking as the only married man at this table,” said Alexander, “I am insulted.” Then he hoisted his nine-year-old sister-in-law up on her chair. “Your turn, Alice.” Alice looked blank and clutched her doll.

  “Tell us about Amelia, Alice dear,” said Ida.

  The laughter from the dining room drifted up through Eben’s open window. He was bent over his writing table, composing a letter to a possible future speaker. It was short and, in Eben’s opinion, too flowery.

  My dear sir,

  The undersigned writes to request the favor of a Lyceum lecture to be delivered in the Town Hall of Nashoba on the 15th of September on any topic you choose, the sum of $25 to be the honorarium.

  Sir, I am your obedient servant,

  Eben Flint,

  Sec’y, Nashoba Lyceum

  Next morning, by a stroke of astonishing good fortune, Horatio Biddle happened to enter the Nashoba post office just as Eben Flint slipped his letter under the bars of the postmaster’s window. Stepping forward to take his turn, Horatio could not help seeing the address on the envelope. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the young man open the door and step outside. Postmaster Phineas Wilder was hitching up his pants and looking the other way. Swiftly, without a twinge of conscience, Horatio reached out to retrieve Eben’s letter, because it was addressed to—

  Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Esq.

  164 Charles Street

  Boston, Massachusetts.

  A Pretty Fair Steeple

  Eben, too, had heard the rumor about Josiah’s sacred edifice, but he said nothing as he helped stack the boards behind Josiah’s barn. All six and a half thousand board feet of pale, sweet-smelling lumber had been carted into the back corner of Josiah’s lot and dumped in clattering heaps among the blackberry canes. Every single piece of milled wood must now be stacked, each layer separated from the next with sticks. The boards looked ready to go, but they were not. In order that they not warp and shrink, they had to dry for a couple of months.

  The stacking had to be accomplished in the long twilight of June evenings. During working hours, Eben was busy supervising the construction of a Baptist church in Waltham. And Josiah Gideon was kept on the move in response to crisis after crisis in the almshouses under his jurisdiction. An overseer in the town of Bexley reported the maltreatment of feebleminded women by a matron, and there had been an urgent letter from the superintendent of an asylum in Hudson, where one insane inmate had attacked another with a knife. Therefore, only Julia, Isabelle, and James were at home in the Gideon household during the day. The two women sometimes left the house to do errands here and there, but James was always at home.

  One noonday, alone in the house, James stood in the high open doorway at the back of the barn, looked out at the heaps of lumber waiting to be stacked, and stepped out into the sunlight.

  Isabelle’s errands and Julia’s visiting kept them away half the afternoon. When Isabelle came home at last, she went at once to the kitchen to put down her basket. Hearing a clatter from outside, she glanced out the window and was surprised to see a familiar-looking man working among the towers of boards in the backyard. Who was it? Then with a lurch in her breast, she recognized the fine head and strong back of her husband, James. It was James as he had been before going off to war.

  With confused longing, Isabelle watched him lift one board after another with his iron hooks and drop them neatly into place on one of the stacks. But the sunny backyard was not screened by a line of trees. Isabelle worried that James might be seen by inquisitive passersby on Quarry Pond Road. When her mother came to stand at the window beside her, Isabelle murmured, “He should come in.”

  Julia watched for a moment in silence and then said, “Let him be.”

  Later in the afternoon, when Josiah and Eben walked into the backyard, they found someone else stacking boards, not James, but Dickie Doll. “Thank you kindly, Dickie,” said Josiah, throwing off his coat.

  Dickie winked at Eben. “Sorry, boys, but I ain’t doing this for nothing. You got to pay me. A few leftover bits and pieces of these fine chestnut boards, that’s all I want. Say, Reverend Gideon, there was a little birdie whispered something in my ear.”

  “Never mind little birdies,” said Josiah, grinning at him.

  “Oh, but there was two little birdies. One birdie told me what you intend to manufacture with this here wood.”

  Josiah picked up a board and shifted his hands until it balanced. “What did the other birdie say?”

  Dickie laughed so hard, he had to wipe his face with his neckerchief. “It was pastor’s wife. Miz Biddle says there won’t never be another steeple in the town of Nashoba.”

  Dickie went away chuckling. Josiah smiled at Eben and lifted his board to the top of a stack. Eben picked up a wood chip, tossed it high, caught it in his hat, and said, “Sir, I could draw you a pretty fair steeple.”

  Their Masterpiece

  No good, Jack,” said Jake, lifting the curtain and coming out of the darkness with a dripping glass plate. “Balloon, she was whipping along too fast.”

  The aerial view of Concord’s Milldam was a blur. “Too bad, Jake,” said Jack.

  Jake ducked back into the darkness, dro
pping the curtain behind him. Five minutes later, he came out with another plate in his hand and a broad smile on his face. “Looky here, Jack,” he said, holding it up in the sunlight.

  Jack gazed at it with his artist’s eye. “Truly beauteous, Jake. What town is that? I forget.”

  “That there’s Nashoba, Jack. See the big tree stump? Remember that there stump?”

  “I sure do, Jake. Biggest old stump I ever beheld.”

  Jake took back the plate and looked at it proudly. “This here’s our masterpiece, Jack. We got to spread it around.”

  “Mayors and selectmen, they got to see it, Jake. City councillors and so on. They take one look, they’ll all want aerial views of their own premises, courtesy of Jack and Jacob Spratt.”

  “What about newspapers, Jack? Evening Transcript? Boston Advertiser? Whoopsie, I forgot. This here’s a photograph.”

  “I’ll copy it, Jake. An engraving. Newspapers, they’ll print an engraving.”

  Jake laughed and slapped his brother on the back. It was clear that the inborn talents of the Spratt brothers—Jake’s mechanical genius and Jack’s nimble artistic fingers—were complementing each other once again.

  It took Jack a week to turn the darks and lights of Jake’s masterful photograph into spidery cross-hatchings. Then it was another week before the masterpiece of the Spratt brothers appeared on the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript, under the heading, ASTONISHING AERIAL VIEW.

  The roof and steeple of the Nashoba church showed clearly in the engraving and so did the burying ground, with the great white disk of the fallen tree among the tombstones.

  The Transcript was an evening paper. Not till midafternoon did a newsboy hustle down Charles Street and toss a copy on the doorstep of number 164. The thump was a signal for the master of the house to hurry downstairs from his study, throw open the door, pick up the paper, and learn, to his horror, of the death by willful murder of his favorite chestnut tree. With an exclamation of disgust, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, medical man, poet, raconteur, and worshiper of gigantic trees, stared at the engraved view of the lopped stump in the Nashoba burying ground.

  The atrocity called for action. Dr. Holmes ran upstairs, sat down at his desk, moved aside his microscope, sharpened his pen, and dipped it in the inkwell. At once, the furious lines came freely, as if flung down by themselves. Stanza after savage stanza streamed out of his pen in perfect alternating beats of four and three.

  Within the hour, the deed was done. Smiling at the facility of his genius, Holmes waited only a moment for the ink to dry. Then he folded his rhymed revenge upon the slayer of the great Nashoba chestnut and thrust it into an envelope addressed to “Josephus Gill, Editor, Boston Evening Transcript.” Josephus was an old friend. He would not cavil at this unasked-for submission from a celebrated contributor. The clever verses would appear within the week, doubtless on the very first page.

  Far away among the outlying villages to the west, delivery of the Transcript was delayed, since it had to be carried by railroad. At the depot in Concord, it was tossed out of the mail car into a waiting wagon. Newsboys snatched up bundles for delivery to Cutler’s store on the Milldam and to individual subscribers on Main Street and all the way out the North Road. Bundles destined for Carlisle, Acton, and Nashoba went by coach.

  Therefore, the Nashoba parsonage did not receive a copy of the paper that had so scandalized Dr. Holmes until the next morning. Horatio Biddle unfolded the paper at the breakfast table and gasped at the masterpiece of the brothers Spratt. There it was in black and white, their aerial view of the Nashoba churchyard. The glaring round spot in the center was the stump of the murdered tree.

  NOW

  Bedford Steeples

  I do not propose to discuss here the movements that led to the separation.… Much there was that was painful.

  —Bedford memoir, 1879

  A Great Tidal Wave

  There were two old Protestant churches in the town of Bedford. Mary and Homer visited both. Neither of the churches disgorged any morsels of controversial (or perhaps even scandalous) history, but it was an interesting day on the whole.

  In the Congregational church, nobody was on hand but a middle-aged man pushing a trolley of folding chairs. “How do you do?” he said graciously, pulling the trolley to a stop with a thudding of chair against chair. “Name’s Baker, church sexton.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Baker,” said Homer. “We’re Mary and Homer Kelly. We’re looking into the histories of churches around here.”

  “Well, I’m sorry nobody’s around but me,” said the sexton.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Baker,” said Homer, “you’re a history buff yourself?”

  The sexton shook his head. “Sorry, folks. My spiritual home is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

  Mary said thank you, and so did Homer, but he was disappointed. How could he write the damned book without more information of a fairly sizzling nature? “Mr. Baker,” he said, refusing to give up, “I don’t suppose you know whether this church had a connection with the poet Oliver Wendell Holmes?” The sexton looked blank. “Or a big tree of some sort?” Mr. Baker shook his head. “Or a lost church? Did you ever hear a story about a lost church in the town of Bedford?”

  “Come to think of it,” said Mr. Baker, “I saw one just last week.”

  “You did!” said Mary.

  “Where?” said Homer.

  “You shoulda been there. Earth opened up and swallowed it right before my eyes.”

  Homer’s face fell. Mary grinned politely and said, “Oh sure.”

  “Say, Mr. Kelly,” said the sexton, “you’re not the writer, are you? Did you write that book about chickens?”

  “Well, yes, I did.” Homer was pleased as usual, but in his wife’s presence, he had to avoid vainglory. “You’ve read it? My Hen and Chicks?”

  “Well, no, but I just happen to raise a little poultry myself, Plymouth Rocks mostly. I guess I don’t need another how-to book.”

  “Oh, Mr. Baker,” said Mary quickly, “may we help ourselves to some of these nice pamphlets?”

  The other Protestant church in Bedford was only a few blocks away. They stood on the lawn, staring up at the tall, bluff facade of Bedford’s First Parish, a Unitarian house of worship.

  “Handsome,” said Homer.

  “They’re all handsome,” said Mary.

  This time, they were met by an old gentleman in whiskers who introduced himself as Robert Tucket. “But please, dear people, call me Bob.”

  “Well, good, Bob. My name’s Homer. This is my wife, Mary.” Then Homer added ignobly, hoping his name might ring a bell, “Kelly, that is. We’re Mary and Homer Kelly.”

  Ah! It did! Bob looked dazzled. His whiskers trembled with awe as he stuttered, “You’re not—”

  Mary stuck an elbow in Homer’s side, but he couldn’t help grinning and saying smugly, “Well, yes, I guess I am.”

  “My God, I never thought I’d have the honor of meeting you in person.”

  Homer would have said, Aw, shucks, but it was soon apparent that Bob had an entirely different great man in mind.

  “That hundred-yard dash back in ’65? End of fourth quarter, Scranton a goal behind, then, glory be!” Bob raised his hands in ecstasy.

  There was a bewildered pause, and then Mary said dryly, “I think, Bob, you’re talking about Harry Kelly. It was Harry who was the football star, not Homer.”

  “Oh my God, excuse me.”

  But after delivering this crushing blow, Bob turned out to be a knowledgeable tour guide. He led them into every corner of the elegantly appointed church and explained its early history in elaborate detail, precisely quoting bits and pieces of significant sermons.

  Once again, it was the same old story. The original eighteenth-century parish had split in two when the Unitarian heresy came along to shock the orthodox with its strange notions, while the adherents of Calvinism insisted on the old root-and-branch doctrines of divine predestinatio
n, human depravity, limited atonement, visible saints, and irresistible grace—and therefore there were now two church steeples in the town of Bedford.

  “Which side kept the original building?” asked Homer, flipping over a page of his notebook.

  “We did,” said Bob. “Congregationalists, they moved down the street.”

  “I see,” said Homer. “How—um—do the two congregations get along now?” Hopefully, he added, “Any lingering bitterness? Any—um—discord?”

  “Of course not. Oh, in the beginning, sure.” Bob stroked his whiskers and recited a passage by heart: “‘Much there was that was painful, but it was the result of a great tidal wave of changing opinions sweeping over this whole region.’ I mean, that’s the way they saw it.”

  “‘A great tidal wave,’ of course,” said Mary. “Homer knows all about that kind of thing, don’t you, Homer?”

  “You see, I wrote a book all about it,” said Homer, eager to brag at last.

  “No kidding,” said Bob. In the vestry, he swept up a heap of pamphlets and thrust them at Homer. “I just happen to have written some of these myself. Take them with my compliments.”

  The Knitting Ministry

  Homer took the wheel on the way back to Concord while Mary riffled through the papers in her lap. To her surprise, they turned out to be as revealing of the nature of the two Bedford churches as their ancient histories. She was fascinated. “You know what, Homer, this is what we’ve been looking for all the time. Here they are, these two congregations, naked and exposed.”

  “Naked!” Homer glanced quickly at the glossy pamphlets and the stapled sheaves of green and pink paper. “You don’t mean—”

  “Oh, Homer, don’t be disgusting. I mean they display the attitudes of the two congregations, their points of view, their whole entire—”