God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  The detective’s interest flagged, and he went back to the Middlesex County Courthouse, opened a new file in his bulging file drawer, and forgot about Alice Snow.

  So Ananda was off the hook. He spent a sparkling Sunday afternoon helping Homer comb the hillside behind Julian Snow’s mobile home. They were looking for a round object that could have been used to kill Alice Snow. They found nothing, only a small tube-shaped piece of rubber. “What is this?” said Ananda, holding it up for Homer to see.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Homer was amused. “You want me to explain?”

  “Oh, oh, I see.” Embarrassed, Ananda dropped the rubber object and covered it with last year’s leaves. “Perhaps someone made love here,” he said bravely.

  “People make love everywhere. In cemeteries, in coal bins, at the North Pole, even on the steep slopes of glacial kettle holes.”

  Ananda went on thrashing in the bushes, turning away from Homer. What an innocent child the boy was, thought Homer.

  Afterward he passed along to Jimmy Flower the news that he had found nothing on the hillside below Julian Snow’s trailer. Jimmy didn’t pay much attention. Like the Cambridge detective, he too had filed away Alice Snow.

  It wasn’t that Jimmy wasn’t interested in her case, it was just that so many other things kept coming up. On the day the final report from East Cambridge came in, there was a four-car accident at Crosby’s corner with three fatalities. There was also a theft from a parked motor vehicle on Walden Street, possession of a class-D substance at the high school, a woman driving under the influence on Route 2, and a runaway horse on Main Street.

  The horse was Marjorie Bland’s, and she was deeply apologetic. “Poor old Carmencita, she’s so old, I think she’s senile. She charges at me whenever I open the gate. This time she got away from me. I’m terribly sorry.”

  And then there was an embarrassing episode right there on the Milldam, involving a respectable tradesman accused of verbal assault. It was Taylor Baylor, whose shoe store had been part of Concord’s commercial community for thirty years. Taylor’s accuser was the sharp cookie who was buying up the town, the woman called Pink.

  “I was walking quietly down the street,” Mimi Pink told the arresting officer indignantly, “when this wild man came up to me and began shouting, accusing me of destroying the town of Concord. He shook me. If my assistant hadn’t come to my rescue, I don’t know what would have happened next.”

  And then Taylor Baylor shouted some more and ranted and raved. Officer Shrubsole might have added a charge of resisting arrest, if Taylor hadn’t been an old pal of his from way back. He let the charge go at verbal assault, and Taylor had to appear in court, fuming and unrepentant.

  But the thing that was most distracting to the Concord Police Department was the announcement by the Concord Finance Committee that they would not endorse the department’s request for two new cruisers and a ten percent pay increase for everybody in Public Safety.

  “It’s the financial crisis in the state,” the chairperson of FinCom explained to Chief Flower. “Local aid has been cut to the bone. At the special town meeting in October we’re going to recommend cuts across the board, in every single department.”

  Chief Flower was angry. His retort was barely polite.

  “Oh, I don’t blame you,” said the long-suffering chairperson. “Everybody else is mad at us, too. It’s a fiscal crisis in the commonwealth. Of course our local problem is worse because our town holds so much land in conservation. As you know very well, conservation land yields no taxes to support town services. What this town needs is some giant corporation to take over half the open land and start paying taxes through the nose. Just kidding, of course.”

  “Jesus,” said Jimmy Flower. “I suppose it’s Henry Thoreau, right? Bunch of starry-eyed idealists want to save some swamp Henry Thoreau stood in up to his neck once upon a time. Well, I wish to hell he’d drowned in it. Damn Henry Thoreau anyway. Pretending to be so independent there at Walden Pond, when all the time he was stealing squash pies from Mrs. Emerson.”

  “Apple,” said the chairperson of the finance committee gloomily. “It was apple pies he stole.”

  “Apple? It was? I thought it was squash.”

  16

  … we live thick and are in each other’s way.…

  Walden, “Solitude”

  Oliver Fry didn’t know what to do about his daughter Hope. He felt helpless in the grip of some violent natural force, an avalanche, a tidal wave. Hope was a man-eating tiger, she was eating him alive, spitting out his belt buckle and wrist-watch. Sometimes to his relief there seemed to be a truce. She would bring him breakfast in bed, or come up behind him and put her arms around him, or watch television with him and laugh when he laughed. But much of the time she resisted him at every turn, arguing furiously or retreating into angry silence.

  “She makes the house shake,” said Oliver, complaining to Mary Kelly. “Metaphorically, I mean. She doesn’t fit through doorways. She’s a grandfather clock, a grand piano. Some moving man should jack her up and take her away.”

  “She’s a dear girl,” said Mary.

  “Oh, I know she is, of course I know.” Oliver smiled fatuously. “But we don’t get along. She’s pitted herself against me.”

  Mary told Homer that the trouble with Hope and Oliver Fry was that they were really so much alike. “She’s her father’s daughter. When she comes into the room you know something extraordinary is going to happen. Maybe not sensible, but you’ll remember it afterward.”

  “Just like Oliver,” agreed Homer.

  On the last day of June Hope was alone in the house. Her father had gone off on his bike to the high school to spend the morning making a list of lab materials he would need in the fall. Hope felt giddily free. She frisked down the porch steps and walked barefoot in the cool grass. It was a delicious feeling. She was weightless, released from gravity. Remembering her old ballet class, she ran past the forsythia bushes, took a huge leap, turned around in midair, and came down facing the other way.

  Someone clapped and cheered. Hope turned in surprise. It was Jack Markey.

  “Oh, hi there,” said Hope, grinning at him. “Come on in.”

  “Nice place,” said Jack, looking up at the porches and the moon-shaped opening in the lattice and the keyhole window in the peak of the roof and the onion-domed turret. The house had been built in 1895. On this street of simple center-entrance four-square houses it was a piece of Victorian fantasy.

  “I’m moving out as soon as I can,” said Hope, dismissing the home of her ancestors with a wave of her hand.

  They sat at the kitchen table, deep in conspiracy. Around them the walls of the kitchen towered in dark varnished woodwork. Beyond the kitchen a lofty pantry was fitted with a slate sink. Matched sets of dishes lined the high shelves, all chipped except the soup plates. There were teapots shaped like Cotswold cottages, drawers of tangled string, closets with old croquet sets and dusty golf bags. Upstairs four of the six bedrooms were unoccupied. An old canvas hammock dating from 1938 hung on the sleeping porch. Family pictures lined the staircase wall—grandparents, uncles, aunts, Hope’s mother on her wedding day, her train a swirl of tulle. Another picture was a holy icon, Hope’s mother with baby Hope in her arms. She had died when Hope was a small child, and afterward Oliver Fry had done a loving but clumsy job of bringing up his daughter by himself.

  Hope sometimes wondered what the dead people in the pictures would say if they could see the house now. Would they be surprised to find it so much the same? Her father had wanted everything to stay just as it had been when his wife was alive. Hope suspected that her mother too had inherited a sentimental fixity in household arrangements.

  She didn’t care. She was going to leave as soon as she finished her last year at Boston University, where she was concentrating on the history of art. The history of art! What art history was there in Concord, Massachusetts? What was this barren little provincial town compared with Florence
and Venice and Rome? What was the First Parish Church compared with Kings College Chapel, or Chartres Cathedral, or St. Peter’s Basilica? Concord, Massachusetts! How rustic could you get?

  Hope felt a withering scorn for her father’s native village. She was ready to give Jack Markey all the advice she could think of. Her father didn’t have to know. Nervously Hope put her father out of her mind. Leaping up from the table, she looked for the town report.

  She found it among the cookbooks. Like them, it was a little sticky. “Here we are.” Hope flung herself back onto her chair and opened the report at the beginning. “Look, here’s a complete list of the town boards.”

  “Jesus, how many are there?” Jack moved his chair closer until their shoulders touched. Together they pored over the pages listing the town officers.

  “Well, the important ones are the board of selectmen and the planning board and the board of appeals and—what else?—the natural resources commission, the housing authority, the finance committee. Oh, and the school committee. And maybe the refuse disposal task force and the historical commission. Each one is powerful in its own bailiwick. All those people are volunteers, but there’s also a paid town manager and town planner. You’ve got to line up support among them all. Somehow or other you’ve got to make them all happy.”

  “Well, the taxes we pay should certainly make them happy, right?”

  “Of course. But I’ll bet you can do a lot more.” Hope’s mind buzzed with ideas. “How about buying another pretty piece of land somewhere and giving it to the town for conservation? You know, sort of an exchange?”

  Jack nodded. His employer, Jefferson Grandison, was well accustomed to quids pro quo.

  Hope jumped up again and vanished, then returned with a map. Spreading it out on the table, she weighted down the corners with four jars of slimy brown liquid.

  “My God,” said Jack, “what’s that stuff?”

  “Gunk from Gowing’s Swamp, I think. For my father’s biology class. They were looking at algae under the microscope.” Briskly Hope smoothed the map and explained. “All these green pieces are already in conservation.”

  Jack was used to maps. He stood up and spread his hands flat on the table and let his eyes rove over the winding roads and rivers and the contour lines of hills, the imprint of the town of Concord on the white paper. He had seen the map before. “What’s this, right near the center? The Hugh Cargill land, what’s that?”

  “The old poor farm. Hugh Cargill left it for the use of the poor a long time ago. They’ve sold off most of it, I think, to get money for affordable housing someplace else. Forget the Hugh Cargill land. It’s mostly wetland anyway.” Then Hope pounded the table, and the jars of swamp water bounced. “Wetland, that’s how you can win over the natural resources commission. Offer them a swamp. If there’s anything those people love, it’s a swamp. There must be one you could buy.”

  They stared at the map, looking for the little pattern of tufted lines that meant wetland.

  “Here’s one,” said Jack. “Gowing’s Swamp, where these jars of bilge came from. How about that?”

  Hope’s nose wrinkled. “Oh, ugh, Gowing’s Swamp. It’s a quaking bog. You could be sucked down. Father told me people used to bury animals in Gowing’s Swamp. They took horses there and shot them, so they dropped in the hole and disappeared forever. But it’s already in conservation. Forget Gowing’s Swamp.”

  They were sitting down again, shoulder to shoulder, yellow hair grazing brown, when Oliver Fry bumped his bicycle up the steps of the back porch and burst into the kitchen, shouting, “Hopey?”

  The caged owl screeched. The snakes writhed in their tank. The shrews burrowed deeper in their nest of shavings.

  Oliver was in a transport of rage. At the high school he had encountered the chairperson of the school committee, Judy Bowman, and Judy had told him about the percolation tests on the lacrosse field, the possible sale of the land to a development company. Oliver was boiling over. It was unheard of, intolerable, abominable. He had to explode to somebody.

  But he stopped short at the sight of Jack Markey and gaped at the map on the table.

  Jack sprang to his feet and grinned his sunshiny grin. Hope stood up too and introduced him to her father. In spite of herself, she felt awful. Father, meet the Devil incarnate.

  “I was just telling Jack about the town,” she explained lamely. “He’s new around here.”

  “Oh, you’ve just moved here?” said Oliver, trying to sound jocular and failing utterly.

  Jack sensed the tension in the air. “No, no, I wish I had. It’s such a wonderful little historical community.” Jack pawed around in his mind for something to say to the old man who was staring at him with such terrible eyes. “I understand, sir, you’re a real Thoreau buff.”

  Buff? A Thoreau buff? Oliver’s brow darkened. He was a disciple, an apostle, a worshiper at the shrine, not a buff.

  “Of course he is,” said Hope, feeling flustered, aware of the heavy-handed mistake. “My father’s a pillar of the Thoreau Society.”

  In his ignorance of anything intelligent to say about Henry Thoreau, Jack tried a light touch. “Is it true he stole pies from Ralph Waldo Emerson?”

  Hope closed her eyes. Her father reeled and spluttered. “Thoreau was not a thief, he was a gentleman, devoted to abstinence. He said he could live on board nails.”

  “I stand corrected,” Jack said politely.

  “Oh, Father, please.” Hope rolled her eyes at Jack. “I told you he’d quote Thoreau.”

  Oliver’s mouth clamped shut. A man forbidden to quote Thoreau was a man struck dumb.

  17

  Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

  “Life Without Principle”

  The battle was joined. The news was out.

  DEVELOPER EYES

  HIGH SCHOOL PROPERTY

  announced the Concord Journal. And there was a subheading:

  Grandison Seeks

  Zoning Change

  The land in question lay still. The backhoe was parked at the edge of the lacrosse field, awaiting the ultimate decision of the town. Crows cawed in the tops of the white pines and flapped their black wings, but they could not call a meeting of protest. A mockingbird sang all day long, warbling and twittering, composing impulsive arias and recitatives, but it could make no enduring claim to the dead tree on which it was perched. And the red-tailed hawk that glided above the high school and soared over Route 2, gazing down at the sweet-rocket blooming pink and white on the edge of the woods, had no inherited deed of ownership, no binding contract guaranteeing possession to its heirs and assigns forever.

  The human citizens of Concord were taking sides. Feeling ran especially high in the breasts of all the Thoreauvians, who had fought the good fight so many times before. They were worn out. They couldn’t believe they were in for another battle.

  “Look,” said Oliver Fry, chivying them unmercifully, urging them to action, “we’ve got to do something.”

  “But it’s hopeless,” said his old friend Elizabeth Bates. “How many times can you fight City Hall?”

  Other people in town were tired, too. They didn’t want to hear another word about Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Oliver’s daughter, Hope, they were sick of the way those Thoreau people were always hauling out their dead heroes, displaying the mummified bodies in their moldering greatcoats, propping up the grinning skulls. This was the present, it was here and now, they were poised on the brink of a new millennium. The nineteenth century was buried in the dust of the past.

  The town was clenched like a fist. And yet there were still a lot of people who hadn’t made up their minds one way or another. After all, the matter wouldn’t come up until the special town meeting in October. It was now only the first week of July. There would be plenty of time to decide how to vote later on.

  Poor Oliver Fry was suffering keenly on another count. His daughter was nursing a viper in her breast. The healthy-looking kid with the gold
en hair and pink cheeks, the one who had been sitting with Hope in Oliver’s very own kitchen, was Jefferson Grandison’s representative. He was the enemy.

  Against his own better judgment Oliver confronted his daughter with her apostasy. “How can you talk to somebody who’s threatening to build all that garbage in Walden Woods?”

  Hope was chagrined. She had hoped her father wouldn’t find out who Jack Markey was. But now Jack’s name was all over town. She put her hand to her stomach, where there was a sudden pain, and blustered back at him. “Walden Woods! It’s just a scrawny piece of land next to Route Two. Who cares what happens beside a highway? I bet it will look a lot better with Jack’s development on it than it does now. And he’s including affordable housing. You’re just being snobbish, not letting lower-income people live in Concord.”

  “Affordable housing!” Oliver looked at his daughter in disbelief. “Affordable for whom? We couldn’t afford the rents they’ll be charging, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  The Concord Planning Board was not surprised by the news in the Concord Journal. Chairman Roger Bland had already been consulted by Judy Bowman of the school committee.

  “We’re letting them dig test holes, that’s all we’re doing,” said Judy. “But between you and me, it would be a blessing to have some money coming in right now. As it is, we’re going to cut back on the language program and slash the biology budget, and if things don’t improve, we may have to eliminate football altogether.”

  “Football!” Roger was shocked. He promised to listen carefully to the Walden Green proposal when it came before the board.

  At breakfast the next morning he told his wife Marjorie all about it. Marjorie was not the sort of helpmeet to give Roger sound advice, but she could be depended on to express the opinion of the town’s average citizen.