Steeplechase: A Homer Kelly Mystery Part 18

Mary changed the subject. "Look, Homer, it's that time of day again. Th.o.r.eau's favorite time."

"What time do you mean?" groaned Homer.

"When the setting sun and the rising moon are equal and you can't tell whether it's day or night."

"Who the h.e.l.l cares?" Homer had said the same thing before, laughing in triumph. This time, he said it bitterly, not bothering to look east or west.

Fortunately, the celestial bodies themselves seemed to care. The sun went down in a fiery display of pink and crimson cloud and the moon rose slowly over Fairhaven Bay, majestic and serene, oblivious of human trouble, of books and disappointments, of churches and scandals and the miscellaneous sufferings of mortal flesh.

Homer's Steeplechase had failed, but the steeples themselves remained, parish churches all across the face of New England, with their Bible Sundays, knitting ministries, bicycle rides for hunger, Easter luncheons, globalization studies, intergenerational potlucks, and even their occasional hanging sermons. There they stood on a thousand village greens, wooden structures as simple as barns and as commonplace as gas stations, but of a timeless and surpa.s.sing beauty.

1868.

Three Trees.

I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear; The king of Spain's daughter came to visit me, And all for the sake of my little nut tree.

-Anonymous, nursery rhyme.

A Miscellaneous Harvest.

The first of the three trees had been real, but it was gone now, leaving only an enormous stump in a thicket of sprouted saplings at the foot of the burial ground. The second was the tree of Mr. Darwin, but it existed only in the head of Josiah Gideon. The third was also invisible, but, like a grafted tree in an orchard, it bore a miscellaneous harvest: The Origin of Species and the Book of Genesis, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Caesar's Gallic Wars and Jack and the Beanstalk, A Tale of Two Cities and Three Billy Goats Gruff, Cicero's Orations and Miss Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Surely some of the crucial events of the year 1868 in the town of Nashoba were the fruit of this latter tree. Perhaps they had been read into being.

It was late September in New England. Noisy flocks of wild geese flapped down on Quarry Pond and took off again, heading south. The gossamer egg sacs of spiders appeared in the corners of rooms. Cattle were driven to Brighton and apples carted to Boston. Pumpkins swelled in the fields and curtains of wild grapes hung on stone walls. Virginia creeper and poison ivy blazed on dead trees. Wood was corded, coal got in.

In Nashoba, there were funeral services in both churches. A lawsuit was dropped, and Josiah Gideon hired a firm of carpenters to repair his half-burned steeple.

But how does a five-year-old boy recover? In the house of Eudocia Flint, Horace did not speak. Night after night, he woke up screaming. Ida and Alexander took him into their bed, and in the morning he climbed into his grandmother's lap. All during that anxious week, he spoke only once-when Eudocia brought out the storybook. "No," said Horace, pus.h.i.+ng it away.

Nursery rhymes were safer, although Mother Goose sometimes reveled in dire events, like the fate of the three blind mice and the fall of Humpty-Dumpty. But the cat and the fiddle were harmless, and Horace smiled at the cow that jumped over the moon. He liked the blackbirds popping out of the pie and the fine lady with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. And when Eudocia told him stories about his own toes-"This little piggy went to market"-Horace laughed out loud.

In Nashoba, there were important changes. The Prudential Committee of the First Parish Church returned to its duty and chose Josiah Gideon as its new pastor. Then, since the newly built church was no longer needed, Josiah and his friends offered it for sale.

But who would be interested in an empty church? Through the rest of the fall and all winter and spring, it stood empty. The door blew open, dead leaves piled up in the corners, and bats hung from the rafters. In June, at long last, the property was acquired by two pairs of newlyweds. And before long, to everyone's surprise, a new enterprise appeared on the Acton Turnpike: a photographic studio a la mode. At once, it began doing a land-office business in cartes de visite, cabinet photographs, and touching images of deceased infants.

As for Ingeborg Biddle, she dawdled and delayed. Although the returning congregation lost no time in calling Josiah Gideon to the pulpit of the First Parish Church, Ingeborg was in no rush to vacate the parsonage. There were too many important things to do, such as the removal of her bathroom fixtures.

"What do you want we should do with them?" asked the plumber after wrenching free all the connections.

"Bury them," said Ingeborg, having vowed that no member of the Gideon family would ever enjoy their splendor.

"Well, all right, missus," said the plumber, "if you say so." But he wisely took them home to glorify his own domestic arrangements, while Ingeborg moved to Cambridge with the rest of her worldly goods.

On the whole, she was not sorry to leave Nashoba. For one thing, she had no intention of being whispered about as poor Widow Biddle, whose late husband-here, dear, I'll whisper it in your ear. For another, she was tired of country smells, country noises, and country society. Her new friends in Cambridge were so much more sophisticated. Soon, Ingeborg established a new series of conversaziones. From the start, they were more successful than her pitiful afternoons among the provincial ladies of Nashoba.

When the parsonage was empty at last, Josiah and Julia moved in, leaving their widowed daughter, Isabelle, in possession of the house at the corner of Quarry Pond Road and the Acton Turnpike.

A year later, Eben Flint bought the house from his new father-in-law. On the night of their wedding, Eben fell on his knees before Isabelle. She knelt, too, and wrapped him in her loose long hair. Not until noon of the next day did they rouse themselves because sunlight was falling through the window at a scandalous angle. The sun was so high above the town of Nashoba that even the tall tombstone of Deacon Sweetser in the burial ground cast no shadow, nor did the stone soldier on his pedestal, nor even the steeple of the First Parish Church.

Within the year, Isabelle gave birth to a baby boy. Eventually, five children-Bartholomew, William, Eudocia, Julia, and Ebenezer-made the house ring with the noise of their games and their laughter and their fighting.

Eben set up his drafting table in the room where James had spent the last summer of his life. His architectural practice went well, but sometimes he had to rear up out of his chair and shout, "Pipe down," although it didn't do much of any good.

As time went by, Eben often thought about Isabelle's first husband, whose place he had taken. Sometimes he told himself that there was a sort of poetical connection between the chestnut tree and James Jackson Shaw. Perhaps by his heroic action the lopped man had been made whole, just as the lopped and fallen tree had been born again. Sometimes Eben believed in this n.o.ble parallel, and sometimes he didn't.

Author's Note.

The ideas for the four central elements in this novel-the tree, the church, the wounded veteran, and the tempestuous nature of Josiah Gideon-came from other books.

The tree is an American chestnut (Castanea dentata), but it was inspired by an ancient British chestnut (Castanea sativa) in Thomas Pakenham's Meetings with Remarkable Trees.

There are photographs of many simple rural churches in Wooden Churches: A Celebration, by Rick Bragg, including a church turned movie house in Woodville, Mississippi.

A magnificent volume of medical history, Plastic Surgery of the Face, by Sir Harold Gillies, is a photographic record of this surgeon's heroic efforts to repair facial injuries suffered by British soldiers in World War I. It provided painful information about cases like that of James Jackson Shaw.

Anthony Trollope's pugnacious clergyman, Josiah Crawley, was kidnapped from the pages of The Last Chronicle of Ba.r.s.et, set down in a New England village, and renamed Josiah Gideon.

The photographs of the nineteenth-century characters in this book came from the collection of Henry Deeks in Maynard, Ma.s.sachusetts. Finding their likenesses was like moving through throngs of men, women, and children, looking for the right faces. Three of them had to resemble the characters in an earlier book but seem five years older. Amazingly, they turned up. I recognized Ida at once, and pulled her out of the crowd, along with Alexander and Eben.

As for Jack and Jacob Spratt, the only research for their aerial adventures was a breathtaking flight over the town of Queechee, Vermont, in Gary Lovell's hot-air balloon.

The town of Nashoba is fictional, forcibly squeezed into the map of Middles.e.x County. And although Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes often wrote about very large trees, he had nothing whatever to say about the great chestnut of Nashoba.

For advice and counsel about trees, I'm grateful to Dr. Anne Myers, who sent me a photograph of a small North Carolina church built in 1913 of American chestnut, proving that such a building was possible. Other knowledgeable advisers about trees and sawmills were Dr. Willard Weeks of Amherst, Tom Kelleher of Old Sturbridge Village, Norman Levey of Lincoln, archivist Sheila Connor of the Arnold Arboretum, Dennis Collins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, Lincoln's Ted Tucker with his axes and grindstone, and Kim Johnson with his backyard sawmill.

Professor Robert Gross of the University of Connecticut loaned important chapters from his forthcoming book, The Transcendentalists and Their World. Another Th.o.r.eauvian, Professor Nikita Pokrovsky of the University of Moscow, chivvied my computer files into shape. Peggy Marsh and Ellen Raja of Lincoln improved my fragmentary understanding of nineteenth-century ways of doing things, Lincoln reference librarian Jeanne Bracken found books far and near, and my old friend Wendy Davis invited me to a Quaker meeting in the venerable Friends Meeting House of Henniker, New Hamps.h.i.+re. Her daughter, Marcia Davis, drove us from one New Hamps.h.i.+re church to another, all of them as simple as barns and commonplace as gas stations, but of a timeless and surpa.s.sing beauty.

end.