God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  All three of these dangerous interferences pointed to the kind of skill that was second nature to most men. But these days, Homer reminded himself, there were plenty of handy women as well.

  One glance at Eugene Beaver was enough to eliminate him from the running. He was too old and frail to have managed feats requiring stealth and nimble fingers.

  Honey Mooney was different. She was young and quick. But Honey professed a total inability to handle tools. “I always have to get Julian or Porter to help me when anything stops working,” she said, retreating into coy helplessness.

  “Do you have any equipment in the house?” said Homer. “A toolbox, or anything like that?”

  “Oh, well, there’s my husband’s old set of tools,” admitted Honey. She pulled it out from under the sink, and Homer looked at it. There were the usual hammers, pliers, and screwdrivers. There was also a new-looking pair of wire strippers and an electric drill. Homer held up the drill and examined the bit. It looked just about the right size to fit the hole in Julian’s gas line. “Do you mind if I borrow this?” he said. And when he took it to Julian’s place and thrust it into the hole, it fitted precisely.

  But so did the bit in Porter McAdoo’s drill. It too was an eighth of an inch in cross section. So was the bit in Julian Snow’s. Homer suspected that his own drill at home sported the same size bit. It was a useful size, the one you were apt to choose to make a miscellaneous hole in something.

  The fact that Stuart LaDue and Pete Harris didn’t own any drills at all didn’t eliminate them. Surely any sensible murderer would get rid of the incriminating weapon.

  On his way back to Fair Haven Bay, Homer began thinking once again about reasons. Why would anybody want to hasten the end of the Pond View Trailer Park?

  He could think of only one answer, and it pained him. It would have to be someone who wanted to see Thoreau’s Walden Pond cleared of insults like the sanitary landfill and the trailer park and the public beach and the bathhouse. The beach was ancient history and unassailable, and the landfill would require long-term political action, but the old folks at Pond View were vulnerable. Once they were gone—dead from natural or unnatural causes—the place would probably be returned to nature once again.

  Who would like to see that happen? Oliver Fry for one, and a lot of other people Homer admired and respected.

  Not to mention that arch-transcendentalist, Homer Kelly.

  35

  … most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,

  and office-holders … rarely make any moral

  distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil,

  without intending it, as God.

  Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

  The first August hearing of the Concord Planning Board was held on the hottest night of the summer. As Homer waited for Oliver Fry on the steps of the town hall, his shirt was already clinging to his back.

  He was early. He looked out at the Civil War obelisk rising above the round green trees of Monument Square. The trees were hazy with humidity. Their leaves hung limp. The flag on the traffic island drooped on its lofty pole. The long view down Main Street was striped with sun and shadow.

  Turning, Homer saw an apparition speeding toward him down Lexington Road. It was Oliver Fry on his bicycle. Even from here there was a sinewy cantankerousness in Oliver’s outline against the evening air. Nobody but Oliver Fry would pump a bicycle so furiously forward and drive down the pedals with such violence. Homer grinned, appreciating from afar the essence of his old and valued friend. After the easy laxity of polite ties with other people, there was excitement in the tug of the vibrating string that was Oliver Fry.

  Together they mounted the stairs to the public hearing room on the second floor. When Oliver paused on the landing to catch his breath, Homer pressed him gently on the subject of Pond View. Had Oliver heard about the fire?

  Oliver didn’t seem interested. He had no wrath to spare for anything but the new dragon that was spitting fire and threatening the sanctity of Walden Woods.

  Thankfully Homer dropped the notion of Oliver Fry as murderer and arsonist. But there were other earnest conservationists in Concord who might harbor in their breasts a deadly eagerness to see the abrupt end of the trailer park. Homer vowed to track down a few and talk to them.

  The hearing room was a high and handsome chamber. Surely, thought Homer, it was the very room in which American eloquence had reached its peak, when Thoreau delivered his oratorical defense of John Brown. He looked around reverently and took off his jacket. The place was hot. Some of the sweltering heat rose to the ceiling, but no cooling breeze wafted through the tall open windows. A standing fan turned and droned, failing to stir the sodden air. Under the windows the board members arranged themselves behind a long table. Chairman Roger Bland sat in the middle. It was clear to Homer that there would be no eloquence this evening.

  But it was a crucial meeting of the planning board. Homer had seen the agenda. Would the board members support Walden Green? Would they urge the board of appeals to look on it with favor? Would they speak for it in Town Meeting? Homer feared the worst.

  Oliver and Homer settled down on two of the folding chairs. “There’s the enemy,” said Oliver, nudging Homer, glowering at a crowd gathering on the other side of the room. “The young one’s Jack Markey.”

  “I see,” murmured Homer. He didn’t need an introduction to the bearded older man taking a chair next to Jack’s. Jefferson Grandison had a celebrated face. He was accompanied by eager lackeys. They gathered around him and whispered in his ear like the mob of lesser angels buoying up Michelangelo’s Jehovah.

  Other petitioners were fluttering in, alighting in murmuring flocks on the folding chairs. Homer recognized Mimi Pink as she paused in the doorway, raked the room with a chilly eye, and found a seat behind the numinous sublimity surrounding Jefferson Grandison.

  Did she know those people? Homer watched as Jack Markey turned his head and glanced at her. Was that a nod of recognition? Now Jack was leaning forward again, while Mimi put her big pocketbook on her lap and crossed her legs. She seemed unaffected by the heat. Probably she was coated with some sort of lacquer that protected her like a space suit.

  Then Homer caught a glance between two opposites. Roger Bland’s mild eye, exploring the audience, encountered the scowling stare of Oliver Fry. What a mistake! Roger winced and looked away. A sob of laughter rose in Homer’s throat. How Roger must fear poor old Oliver! And rightly so. In a fair contest Oliver Fry would devour him like a python swallowing an egg. Homer closed his eyes and tried to control himself, imagining the cracking shell, the breaking of the tissued bones, the pitiful wriggling on the way down.

  The meeting was about to begin. The board members leaned toward each other, joking among themselves. Some were dressed in proper business shirts, but they had rolled up their sleeves and wrenched loose their ties. Others wore short-sleeved polo shirts and shorts. Big sneakers shifted under the table. One member of the board, Isabelle Moseley, was late. She came hurrying in and sat down, her face red, her breast heaving with the effort of running upstairs in the heat. The recording secretary opened her notebook. Roger Bland glanced up at the clock over his head and called the hearing to order.

  “Mr. Markey? Would you like to begin your presentation?”

  Jack came forward and unzipped a portfolio. He removed a large plot plan of Walden Green, set it up on an easel, and began to talk.

  He was smooth and brisk, but there was a smiling excitement in his manner. Homer guessed that the whole layout was his. The access road through the farm off Fair Haven Road and the bridge over the railroad track, all, all were his. It was a Grandison enterprise but a Jack Markey project from beginning to end.

  “Am I right in thinking, Mr. Markey,” said Roger Bland, “that the site you propose is now a high school playing field?”

  “That’s true,” said Jack, “but as you will hear in a moment from Mrs. Bowman of the school committee, we have the
ir blessing. She will demonstrate that the present lacrosse field is unnecessary to the high school athletic program. The playing fields nearer to the school buildings have been declared perfectly adequate. I must point out that the tennis courts here”—Jack touched the chart with his pointer—“will remain just as they are.”

  Homer glanced at Oliver. The man was choking. He was beside himself. Homer remembered Mary’s cautious suggestion that he do his damnedest to keep Oliver in check. He patted Oliver’s knee.

  The plot plan disappeared and was replaced by a handsome watercolor rendering of Walden Green, an oblong sward of grass surrounded by white houses. Sunlight slanted through the pale spring foliage, making long strokes of shadow across the grass. Concord citizens strolled in twos and threes along the circling paths of this land of Beulah.

  Swiftly Jack ran through his list of promises—the low-income housing units, the day-care center, the extension of the sewage line, the gifts of the transfer station and Titcomb’s Bog and the Burroughs farm, and last but not least, the perpetual flow of tax dividends into the town treasury.

  The list was impressive. But not to Oliver Fry. Leaping to his feet, Oliver thundered in a voice of doom, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” warning of Greeks bearing gifts. He shook his fist at Jack.

  But the planning board members had not read their Virgil. Roger Bland frowned. “Oliver, I must ask you to refrain from such outbursts. Later on there will be an opportunity for comments from the floor.”

  Fuming, Oliver sat down, his chest heaving. At the table where the board members sat, Isabelle Moseley modestly kept her eyes down. She was drawing a portrait of Oliver Fry on the pink cover of her zoning bylaws. Her fellow board member Brad Woodrow glanced at it and tried to control an outburst of laughter. The picture was Oliver Fry to the life. The burning eyes! The wild hair! The shaking fist!

  Homer Kelly pitied his friend. He was beginning to see Oliver Fry and Jack Markey and Roger Bland and the entire planning board in their relation to something Thoreau had said about snowflakes. They were the product of enthusiasm, he had said, the children of ecstasy.

  The product of enthusiasm! Well, here it was in real life, surrounding Homer on all sides—enthusiastic Oliver on the one hand, the child of ecstasy, tempestuous for the right, and Jack Markey on the other hand, enthusiastic in the pride of his creation, eager for the wrong.

  And there in the middle sat Roger Bland, neither right nor wrong, the soul of moderation, stroking his chin.

  What good did moderation ever do in this world? wondered Homer bitterly, sensing the passionate throb of Oliver’s heart as he shuffled his feet under his chair. You had to go whole hog if you wanted to accomplish anything, and clash with the hogs on the other side. It was passion that built things up and tore them down. To hell with moderation.

  36

  We have built for this world a family mansion, and

  for the next a family tomb.

  Walden, “Economy”

  Ananda bought himself a secondhand car, an enormous old boat of an Chevy Impala. Its parts were in doubtful health. It vibrated at rest and shook in motion, and the muffler fell off the day after inspection.

  It had cost him the rest of his nest egg, but he was making enough money at the hardware store to live modestly on his earnings. His father had written to inform him that on his twenty-first birthday he would receive a monthly income from a trust fund established at his birth, but Ananda didn’t really believe in it. He expected nothing.

  Mary Kelly instructed him in the fine points of driving on the right side of the road, and he drove with extreme caution on his way to Oliver Fry’s house to rent a room.

  To his pleasure, the house reminded him of his family’s summer home in Simla. That house, too, had been wrapped in verandas, it had been gloomy with the same stygian darkness. Ananda recognized the fireplace of glazed brick and the window seats and the meandering back halls through which bearers carried trays of nimboo-pani and iced tea.

  But there were no bearers in this house, no cook, no gardeners, no chauffeur, no chowkidar to guard the premises—only Hope Fry in the kitchen, making a sandwich. Hope licked a dab of mayonnaise from her finger and turned in surprise as Oliver ushered Ananda through the pantry with a courtly, “After you.”

  Oliver had been too cowardly to ask his daughter what she would think about renting a room to Ananda Singh. Now he looked at her guiltily and explained. “All those empty bedrooms,” he said, flapping his hand in the direction of the hall stairs, “which one do you think …?”

  Hope thought with horror of the bedrooms upstairs, bleak chambers that hadn’t been freshly painted since the Second World War. They were brown with dark-varnished doors and closets, dreary with Mission rockers and swaybacked beds in which great-aunts had died. “Wait,” she said, panic-stricken, “just let me take a look,” and she rushed upstairs.

  The only possible choice was the south bedroom with the bay window bulging out over the driveway. Hope threw open the door, plunged past the bed, snatched up the drying rack on which bras and panties were hanging, and hurried it into her own room. Then she hoisted up her pretty upholstered chair and lugged it back across the hall. On the return journey she carted away the sewing machine. Next she whisked off the bedspread, which was gray where the cat had been sleeping, and replaced it with the clean white one from her own bed.

  She was charging across the hall with a floor lamp when her father appeared at the top of the back stairs with Ananda in his wake.

  “This way,” said Hope breathlessly, pointing with the floor lamp.

  Ananda was charmed with the room. “It is perfect,” he said.

  “The bathroom’s right across the way,” said Oliver proudly.

  “Oh, whoops,” cried Hope, remembering the state of the bathroom, feeling trapped in the midst of domestic disorder. “Don’t go in there yet.” Having yanked open the linen closet, she grabbed out an armful of clean towels and lunged into the bathroom to hang them up. Swiftly she dabbed at certain grubby corners. “Okay,” she said, gasping, “you can come in now. Oh, I’m afraid you can’t take a bath if the dishwasher’s on. What you do is, you tell everybody you’re going to take a bath, and then we’re careful not to use any water at the same time.”

  “I see,” said Ananda humbly, delighted with everything.

  Hope left them and went downstairs, her head in a whirl. Life had taken a dizzying upswing, and she was filled with tremulous excitement. What would happen now?

  37

  Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoa!”

  to mankind?

  “Walking”

  Sarah Peel had vowed to return to Concord, and return she did. Counting up the money Marjorie Bland had thrust at her as she got on the train, Sarah bought ten one-way tickets to Concord and passed them out freely at the Women’s Lunch Place on Newbury Street in Boston.

  They were like the seed scattered by the sower in the parable. Some fell on stony ground and withered away, and some fell amid thorns and the thorns choked them, but some fell on good ground and brought forth fruit a hundredfold.

  Francie Morris, for example, was stony ground. Francie was sleeping off some kind of trip, with her head down on her folded arms. When she woke up, she stumbled out without noticing the ticket Sarah had put beside her plate.

  Eloise Wordsworth simply wandered away, befuddled, and afterward Sarah retrieved her ticket from the floor.

  But Dolores Marshall took two tickets, one for herself and one for her eight-year-old daughter, Christine.

  The silent woman, Audrey Beamish, always sat in the corner with her back turned. She wouldn’t look at Sarah, but she accepted the ticket when Sarah put it in her hand.

  The hysterical Bridgie Sorrel took one.

  Almina Ziblow took one. Almina was an elderly black woman who wore a checkered woolen cape even in the heat of summer.

  Bobbsie Low didn’t take off her earphones, but she looked with interest at the ticket in Sarah’s
hand and accepted it.

  Poisonous Doris Harper looked at hers suspiciously and demanded to know what the fuck Sarah was trying to do, get her the fuck out of town? What was all this shit? So Sarah took the ticket away, and then Doris shouted at her, “Asshole! That’s mine!” So Sarah gave it back.

  When she gathered her flock together on Dartmouth Street, Sarah still had two tickets left. On the sidewalk she handed them to a couple of men, Carl Browning and Palmer Nifto.

  Carl was an old man who had never been able to get the hang of the welfare system, but Palmer was something else altogether. Palmer was a forty-year-old college-educated engineer who had lost his job, his wife, and his children, and vanished into the street to live by his wits, avoiding child support, taxes, and alimony. Looking at the ticket Sarah offered him, Palmer took it cheerfully.

  “We’ll have to go to Porter Square,” he said. “Come on, we’ll take the Green Line to Park Street, okay? Nothing to it.”

  They made a long parade up Dartmouth Street, carrying with them their life-support systems, their emergency arrangements for camping out in strange places as unwelcoming as the Arabian desert. On the plush seats of the Boston and Maine train they all sat back and enjoyed the ride, looking out at the back streets of Cambridge and Belmont and Waltham and the rural landscape of Weston and Lincoln, glimpsing the blue water of Walden Pond through the trees.

  Sarah’s excitement mounted as she approached closer and closer to Pearl, her own beautiful horse, but as the train pulled into the Concord depot the others felt the return of uncertainty, the challenge of fashioning each day out of nothing, nothing at all.

  On the platform they all stood silent for a moment, watching the train disappear around the curving track in the direction of Fitchburg. Then Sarah said, “This way,” and led them around the depot to Thoreau Street.