God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  “Only fourteen,” breathed Roger, congratulating himself. Leaning out again, he said, “Please convey our sincerest sympathy to Mr. Snow,” and backed his car out of Pond View.

  13

  The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in

  comparison with those which my neighbors have

  undertaken.…

  Walden, “Economy”

  Julian Snow’s two-week vacation was over. He was back at work at the landfill next to Pond View. His boss at Public Works had offered to extend his leave, but Julian said no. “I guess it takes his mind off his loss,” said the boss.

  So all day long in the mid-June heat, Julian sweltered in the cab of his big machine, sitting sideways, hurling his two mighty rollers at the heaped-up mounds of trash, driving them ahead of him. Plastic bags billowed and tumbled. The huge teeth of the rollers burst the thin coverings and crushed them flat. Flotsam and jetsam sailed through the air. A folder from Saint Bernard’s Catholic Church floated into the open window of the cab and landed in Julian’s lap. “FIRST FRIDAY,” it read, “MEDITATION AND PRAYER FOR THE SANCTITY OF LIFE.” A pizza box thudded against the windshield, and Julian could plainly read the penciled word Pepperoni on the cover before the box fell away. Craning his neck left, then right, he backed and filled while the householders of Concord drove their cars up to the working face and threw out their accumulations of rubbish.

  In the crawl dozer Eddie Tanner sped toward Julian with a bucketload of dirt raised high in the air. Sandy dust foamed around them. The air conditioner in the cab had stopped working two years ago. Sweat poured down Julian’s face. The back of his shirt was soaked. The two massive machines made a tremendous throbbing racket as they came together. Eddie dumped his dirt on the flattened trash and raced away for more.

  After lunch Eddie and Julian changed jobs. Now it was Julian’s turn to cover the trash with dirt excavated from the cliff face beside the landfill. It was a state law; everything had to be covered by nightfall. The Concord dump was a model landfill, operated strictly according to the rules laid down by the commonwealth. Deep down under the excavation a lining of clay prevented the contamination of ground-water. Effluent was pumped out every day.

  Julian took pride in the way the place worked. Sometimes, it was true, he imagined old Henry Thoreau standing in the line of trees beside the convenience area, looking out over the dumpsters full of newspapers and glass. But then he told himself that Henry Thoreau was dead and gone, while here he was, Julian Snow, doing the best he damn well could to keep the place clean.

  So he went home with a good conscience, as the sun disappeared behind the white pines in a transport of pink-and-orange cloud. Entering his mobile home, he was aware that his stomach muscles were not tightening with apprehension the way they usually did at this hour. Tonight there would be no asphyxiating fog of talk, no whimsical demands, no blare of television game shows.

  He took a shower, and then in blessed silence he made himself a pan of fried potatoes. After supper he got to work clearing out Alice’s stuff. He took down the ruffled curtains, he stuffed her flowered pillows into paper bags, he removed the picture of Willard Scott. He lifted off its hook the thing he detested most, the doll basket with its wicker skirt full of plastic flowers.

  Without the pillows and curtains, without Alice’s giddy afghans and sentimental pictures, the living spaces were bigger and dirtier. The rosy dusk of the summer solstice filled the trailer with warm light. Julian sat down at the kitchen table and looked around with satisfaction. Then he exclaimed and leaped to his feet, catching sight of a young man staring at him from the next room. But it was only Julian’s reflection. The fluffy curtains no longer hid the mirror.

  He stared at himself as if at a stranger. He didn’t really look all that young. It was just that his stoop was gone. He was sitting more erect.

  But when Julian crawled into bed, he missed Alice. At bedtime her motor had always run down. In the dark she stopped talking at last and lay quietly in his arms. Without her, the bed was too wide, too empty. Julian tried lying in the middle, spreading out his arms and legs, but he soon moved over again to his own side, missing his wife.

  Next day after work Julian distributed Alice’s stuff. Shirley Mills took the comforter. Mavis Buonfesto got the pillows. Honey Mooney was delighted with the ruffled curtains. Since Honey had been so especially kind since Alice’s death, Julian asked her to pick out anything else she would like. At once she chose the doll basket. “I’ve always loved it,” she said.

  Honey lived alone in the mobile home next to Julian’s. She was a widow, one of the youngest residents of the park. Her trailer was fixed up in a style very much like Alice Snow’s, so the ruffly curtains fitted right in. She found a place for the doll basket right next to the telephone on the wall beside the door. The plastic flowers in the wicker skirt looked dusty, so Honey plucked them out and threw them away. Something else came out with the last of the flowers—a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Oh,” said Honey, snatching it. At once she looked in the basket. It was stuffed with money. Pulling out all the bills, she counted them and tucked them in her pocketbook. The total came to sixteen hundred dollars.

  Next day she blew the whole wad. She drove to Waltham and bought an entertainment center. It was a multiunit set with a twenty-seven-inch TV, a stereo, a radio, and a CD player, all built into a piece of Spanish-style furniture.

  Delivery was prompt. Somehow the two men in the truck managed to wedge the bulky apparatus through Honey’s door and set it up in her living room. As soon as they left, Honey turned on the television set. She was just in time for “The Young and the Reckless.”

  Honey called Shirley and Mavis, and they came right over. Sitting down comfortably in front of the entertainment center, the three of them munched on Shirley’s date-nut squares and stared at Vanessa and Dirk, who filled the screen, twice life-size.

  “Oh, if only Alice could be here,” said Mavis tearfully.

  “Look,” said Shirley, “Vanessa’s pregnant. But her husband had a vasectomy, remember? Who do you suppose …?”

  Neither Mavis nor Shirley asked how Honey had acquired the money for her new entertainment center. Honey herself did not reveal that it was Alice Snow who had helped herself to the family savings and hidden it all in the doll basket. Nor did she explain that she had found the money and taken it for herself.

  As a matter of fact, Honey hardly bothered to remember the source of her good fortune. Julian had given her the doll basket. It belonged to her. She had found the money in it, she had taken it, and she had spent it. And that was that.

  And if anybody else at Pond View wondered how Honey Mooney could suddenly afford an expensive entertainment center, they never asked her about it. One didn’t question a neighbor’s extravagance.

  14

  Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and

  Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was

  already in existence, and even then breaking up

  in a gentle spring rain.…

  Walden, “The Ponds”

  “But how can there be a dump beside Walden Pond?” Ananda said innocently. “And a public beach? And a park for caravans?”

  “Oh, we get tired of our heroes in the United States,” said Homer dryly. “Granted, there was this man living in our town who wrote the best American prose of the nineteenth century, and it’s true he was the founder of the conservation movement, and he taught us how to live the good and simple life, and he preached a pure religion without cant, and he invented the idea of civil disobedience that would one day free the people of India and bring a measure of equality to American blacks, not to mention the fact that he was the best surveyor for miles around and made the finest pencils in the country—granted all those things, what do people say about him? He was a crank, that’s what they say. He stole Mrs. Emerson’s mince pies right off her windowsill.”

  “But surely they don’t say those things here? Not right here in C
oncord?”

  “Especially in Concord.”

  Ananda shook his head sadly. “Alas, I know it to be true. There was a man at the place called Pond View. He said Thoreau was a drunk, and he had sex with women in his cabin.”

  “There,” said Homer, laughing. “You see?”

  They were sitting on the front porch, looking out over Fair Haven Bay. Below them the little slope dropped to the spongy edge of the river. The water was high. Blue flags blossomed in the shallows amid a swarm of mayflies. Ananda jumped up as Mary came running out with a handful of knives and forks. “You must let me help,” he said eagerly.

  “It’s just spaghetti.” Mary looked at him curiously. “Can you cook?”

  “Cook?” It had never occurred to Ananda that he might ever be asked such a question. “Alas, I fear—”

  “That’s all right. Here, you can throw these around the table.” Mary disappeared, and Ananda fumbled with the cutlery while Homer went back to Thoreau.

  “Of course it isn’t everybody in town who thinks he was a careless hippie. There are a few of us enlightened souls. There’s the Thoreau Lyceum, for one thing, and the Thoreau Society. And there’s always Oliver Fry.”

  “Oliver Fry?” Clumsily Ananda arranged the knives and forks here and there. He remembered the statuesque girl at the railroad station and her angry father. “Does Mr. Fry have a daughter?”

  “Hope Fry,” said Mary, coming out on the porch with the plates. “A grand girl.”

  “True,” said Homer, “but I don’t know if her father is a blessing or a curse. The trouble is, Oliver feels things too strongly. He gets mad and polarizes things.”

  “But he has a true heart,” said Mary stoutly, slapping down the plates.

  Ananda followed her back into the kitchen, anxious to be of service. Left in charge of stirring the spaghetti sauce, he burned it, and before the evening was over he broke a wineglass. “Alas,” he said while Mary squirted disinfectant on his cut finger, “I fear I am rather clumsy.”

  “You can’t be any clumsier than my husband,” said Mary comfortingly. “Tell me, is your bed comfortable? Is it what you’re used to back home?”

  “It is perfect,” said Ananda. “But the rent you have suggested is not enough. I will find work, and then I will pay you more. This is the best place to live in all the world.”

  Mary looked at him shrewdly as he struggled with a Band-Aid. His clothes were wrinkled and oddly assorted, half western, half Indian. The boy was obviously an impoverished student. His money wouldn’t last long. “No, no,” she said, “you won’t pay us a cent more.”

  Ananda Singh exclaimed and argued, but Mary was stubborn, and he went to bed without persuading her to raise his rent. It was true that his cash resources would not support him for long, but Ananda was not a poor student. His father was a wealthy sugar planter with thousands of acres of ancestral land in Himachal Pradesh in the high plains of northern India. Ananda’s father was also a celebrated cabinet minister in New Delhi. But Ananda’s compulsive flight to America had not had his parents’ blessing.

  “I will not pay for such a thing,” his father had said, and Ananda had retorted politely, “Of course not. I shall pay my own way.” And then he had shown his father his earnings as a clerk in a London shop.

  Ananda’s mother had been especially disappointed. Her eldest son was the apple of her eye, and she had in mind a list of clever Brahman girls of good family for him to choose among. They were all university women—a practicing physician in white coat and running shoes, a dietitian in sari and sandals, a social worker in gold bangles and salwaar-kameez. There would be a beautiful traditional wedding, with Ananda and his bride sitting together under the bridal canopy.

  Instead her austere young son had set aside such things. He had never joined the others of his set at the Green Room in Simla, he had not strolled with the crowd at Scandal Point. “He has his nose in those books of his,” his mother complained to his father.

  It was true. From the very beginning when Ananda had been captivated by his grandmothei’s stories of Krishna and the milkmaids, he had been lost in stories. Slowly he had spread the net of his interest farther and farther, from the Hindu sagas of the Mahabharata to the novels of Narayan and Naipaul, from the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare to those of Jane Austen and Melville and Faulkner. At the University of London he had taken a fancy to the mystics, from Tagore and Vivekananda to Thomas a Kempis and St. Francis of Assisi. And then one day his tutor introduced him to Henry Thoreau, and Ananda was stunned. It was the pinnacle of all that had been gathering in his mind. Here was a reverent mysticism based on the natural world, amazingly united with political idealism.

  “I will get a job,” Ananda repeated to Homer. “I can be a clerk in a shop. I can work in a library. I can sell books.”

  Homer looked at him doubtfully. “The bookstore is gone, unfortunately. That woman Pink replaced it with a store full of porcelain geegaws.”

  He glanced at Mary, and she too tried to imagine Ananda as a useful member of the working class. “Try the library,” she said firmly.

  Next day Homer and Ananda began with the Concord Library. It was one of Homer’s favorite places, and he was glad to see that Ananda too was pleased. While Homer asked for the head librarian, Ananda paid worshipful visits to the busts of Thoreau and Hawthorne and the great seated statue of Emerson.

  But there was no place there for Ananda. “The truth is, we’ve been letting people go,” said the head librarian. “And the squeeze is getting tighter all the time. I’m sorry.”

  Homer and Ananda walked up Main Street and looked warily at the smart shops with their bright awnings. In Corporate Gifts on Walden Street they found Mimi Pink herself behind the counter.

  Mimi was charmed with Ananda’s romantic good looks and his beautiful accent. “You’re new in this country?” she asked him. “Do you know American money?”

  “Of course he does,” said Homer, inwardly vowing to take Ananda aside and explain nickels, dimes, and quarters.

  Ananda looked around, puzzled. “What is it you are selling here?” There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the odd objects in the shop. Today Mimi was featuring a large pillow shaped like a sports car, a nine-foot broadloom putting green, and a zebra-striped telephone. Ananda picked up a ceramic object masquerading as a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

  “It’s a bank,” said Mimi. “Isn’t it divine?”

  Ananda looked sad and put the object down.

  “I don’t know,” said Homer, taking him by the arm. “I suspect a disciple of Henry Thoreau wouldn’t do very well selling corporate gifts.”

  “Oh, you’re a Thoreau person, are you?” said Mimi, trying to rescue the situation. The boy was so yummy, she simply had to have him. She knew only one thing about Thoreau,. so she trotted it out. “Did you know he used to steal pumpkin pies from Mrs. Emerson?”

  Homer glanced at Ananda. “Mince,” he said to Mimi Pink.

  “Mince?”

  “The pies he didn’t steal. They weren’t pumpkin, they were mince.”

  Later that afternoon they found an opening for Ananda in the hardware store. Homer was surprised to see Charlotte Harris sitting in a corner under a goosenecked lamp, doing something with invoices and catalogs. “Well, hello there,” he said politely, and introduced Ananda.

  “Hello,” said Charlotte. Blood washed freely through the freckled skin of her face as she remembered her letter to Julian Snow. She pointed to the counter, where the owner of the store was puttying a window.

  The proprietor had been looking for a salesperson, and he hired Ananda at once.

  Ananda was delighted. “I will learn quickly,” he said ardently, picking up a tool from the counter. “Tell me, what is this?”

  “That?” Homer was dumbfounded. “It’s a screwdriver.” He picked up a hammer. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Of course. It is a hammer. You see, I will soon know everything.”

  “Well,
I can see that,” said the proprietor, somewhat taken aback.

  15

  What does the law protect? … If I avail myself

  of it, it may help my sin; it cannot help my virtue.

  Journal, March 16, 1842

  The Concord police were only mildly interested in the death of Alice Snow. The pathologist’s report that she had died from a traumatic injury to the back of her head accorded so well with the position of her body on the steps of her mobile home that they paid little attention to his insistence that the wound was a rounded cavity, whereas the edges of the steps were sharply right-angled.

  Homer made a fuss about it, too. “It didn’t happen on the steps, I tell you. I looked and you looked. There wasn’t any blood on the steps, just on the concrete where she was lying.”

  “But you people were all over the place,” said Chief James Flower. “You should have cleared the area. You ought to have known better than let people mill around like that.”

  “I suppose I should have. Listen, did you look for something round that somebody could have hit her with? That trailer was full of baubles. Oh, well, I suppose it was taken away by whoever was running across the hillside afterward. Did I tell you about that?”

  Flower listened politely to Homer’s description of the movement in the bushes at the time of Alice’s death, and he looked curiously at Ananda Singh when Ananda said he had seen the same thing. It was only when Julian Snow reported his missing two thousand dollars that Chief Flower called in a homicide detective from East Cambridge, who interviewed Ananda With cold courtesy. Had Mr. Singh really picked up his two thousand dollars at Logan Airport, or had he stolen it from Julian Snow?

  Fortunately the detective pursued the matter further. At Logan he found a woman teller who remembered the darling boy with the traveler’s checks from the bank in New Delhi.

  At once the Cambridge detective lost interest in Ananda Singh. Probably Alice Snow had tripped over her own feet on the trailer steps. Or maybe it had been a simple break-and-enter with accompanying homicide by some crazy person from Walden Pond, some kid looking for drug money. And how would you track down anybody like that?