God in Concord

by Jane Langton

  65

  … he has set his trap with a hair spring … and

  then … got his own leg into it.

  Walden, “Economy”

  Homer Kelly was fascinated by the multiple collapse. Jefferson Grandison’s descent was especially calamitous. Homer heard about it at second hand from Abigail Saltonstall—or rather, from Martha Jones, but even Martha hadn’t witnessed all of it.

  The day of reckoning was the Tuesday after Labor Day. Martha Jones heard the mounting noise on Huntington Avenue, she looked out the window and recoiled with shock, and then she burst into Grandison’s office without knocking.

  “Mr. Grandison, Mr. Grandison! It’s Lot Seventeen, Mr. Grandison! It’s here!”

  “Here?” Grandison looked up and started out of his chair. “What do you mean, here?”

  Martha’s hair was wild. Her white dress dragged where she had caught it in the door. She pointed at the window and tried to get the words out. “Look,” she cried, “just look!”

  Grandison strode to the window and looked. He couldn’t see the street directly below the seventy-story building, but he could see its approaches northeast and southwest, he could see the crossing streets and Massachusetts Avenue and the turnpike. They were all choked with trucks. Other traffic was at a standstill. Even from this height he could hear the lumbering roar of the diesel engines, the honking of furious cars, the shrilling of police whistles. There was gridlock as far as the eye could see.

  He turned with bulging eyes to Martha Jones. “Did you say it’s Lot Seventeen?”

  “That’s right. I just had a call. He warned us last week, remember? Mr. Pouch, he said they’d dump it at our front door. Well, that’s what they’re doing, they’re dumping it on the sidewalk.”

  Grandison was ashy pale. He staggered and clutched at a chair. Then he snatched up a phone. “I’ll get an injunction, a restraining order.”

  There was a pounding at the door.

  “What shall I do?” cried Martha Jones. “Mr. Grandison, what shall I do?”

  Grandison dropped the phone and ran heavily to another door, the one that opened on the stairway. Without a word he began hurrying down the stairs.

  Martha looked over the railing at his disappearing back, the bald top of his head. “Good-bye, Mr. Grandison,” she cried, knowing in her heart that she would never see him again. “Good-bye, good-bye!”

  Seventy flights of stairs were a great many flights. Jefferson Grandison descended the last of them in a state of collapse, slipping and sliding down whole staircases, losing track of where he was, ending at last on his back on the floor of the second basement, where a couple of men with sooty faces were cleaning one of the enormous furnaces.

  Heat buffeted him as he lay gasping, trying to catch his breath. The two men climbed out of the furnace and helped him to his feet. Choking, nearly fainting, he made his way up two flights to a service exit at the back of the building and stumbled outside.

  He could hear tumult in the street. Something came rolling around the corner of the building and knocked him down. It was a rubber tire. Grandison sat up dizzily and stared at it. Then he heaved himself to his feet and limped to the corner and peered around at the street.

  The noise was deafening. Fifteen-ton trucks were lined up for blocks, their diesel engines roaring. An entire squad of police officers shouted and pointed and blew their whistles, and one of them hung on to the cab of the truck that was now discharging its contents on the sidewalk. The policeman yelled at the driver, but the driver had a piece of paper, he was flourishing it. He had a permit, some sort of permit, and all the other drivers were waving their permits, and they were all taking turns backing their trucks into position and hauling on the levers that lifted the hydraulic cylinders so that the truck beds rose in the air and the contents slid out with the pull of gravity and piled higher and higher against the gleaming glass facade of the Grandison Building.

  It was tires, rubber tires, hundreds of thousands of automobile tires, truck tires, giant tires from eighteen-wheelers—they careened gaily down the street, they wobbled and rolled and bounced and collided and ricocheted against cars, and the cars honked their horns and tried to back up, and bumped into other cars that were trying to back up, while still more cars tried to go forward in the snarl of tires and trucks and entangled traffic. Whistles shrilled, the tires piled up on the sidewalk of Huntington Avenue and spilled over into the street and rolled and wallowed all over the intersection with Harcourt Street and tumbled up against the shimmering walls of Copley Place and pyramided in mountain ranges of rubber, choking the approaches to the Prudential Center, blocking traffic in the center of Boston for three solid days.

  Jefferson Grandison disappeared. He simply vanished, along with his wife, Annie. There were sightings, rumors that he had been seen pumping gas in Illinois or running a casino in Las Vegas. The cost of the cleanup of the tires and their storage in temporary emergency facilities here and there around the countryside was absorbed by the city of Boston and charged against the sale at auction of the assets of Grandison Enterprises.

  The final destiny of the tires was unknown too, since burning them had become illegal and depositing them in a landfill was illegal and shipping them to Bolivia was out of the question. The disposal of Lot Seventeen became an election issue for the mayor of Boston—but that is another story.

  Of course it was to be expected that Grandison’s undertakings in the town of Concord would now be broken off. No proposal to change the zoning of the high school land would ever come before Town Meeting. Jack Markey’s charming mixed-use commercial village, Walden Green, with its toy church and mock Town Hall, its condominiums and its underground parking lot for a thousand cars, would never be brought into being. The backhoe was trundled away, the survey stakes were removed, and before long the high school kids on the lacrosse team returned to their old playing field and raced up and down on the grass and scooped up the ball in their rackets and flung it at the goal.

  The other Grandison project in Concord was scuttled, too, the one in which Jack Markey and Mimi Pink and Lee-Ann Mooney had been so heavily involved. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Even if the land had suddenly become available, even if all the remaining residents of Pond View had died peacefully in their beds, it was doubtful that the place could ever have become an annex to the landfill, a disposal site for Lot Seventeen, with a deep cement-covered pit for a hundred thousand rubber tires. Even with an expert on his payroll—a famous technical adviser on the protection of groundwater—even with Roger Bland in Grandison’s pocket and the director of public parks in the State House very much in his debt, it was doubtful that he could have brought off this last, worst insult to Walden Pond.

  Surely, thought Homer Kelly, surely this time there would have been a genuine uproar in the town of Concord, a protest too overwhelming even for the likes of Jefferson Grandison. “It couldn’t possibly have passed Town Meeting,” said Homer to Oliver Fry.

  Oliver wasn’t so sure. “All it takes to persuade the people of Concord to do something stupid is a few town fathers calling it sound fiscal policy. Then they keel over and vote for it, every single time.”

  Poor Oliver was in a dejected state of mind. He had been defeated at the polls, and he was taking it hard.

  He had not been licked by Roger Bland. Both Oliver and Roger lost the selectman’s post to a woman named Betsy Beaumont, the mother of eight children. Betsy was neither a rapt saint like Oliver nor a cautious middle-of-the-roader like Roger. She was a down-to-earth woman of conviction. “Anyone who’s brought up eight children without any of them landing in jail,” she said firmly—it was her winning argument—“can handle anything that comes along.”

  Defeated candidate Roger Bland was in worse shape than Oliver Fry. At least Oliver was going to get his job back, through the mysterious magnanimity of an anonymous philanthropist, whose gift to the high school was to be expended solely for the teaching of natural science.

 
“Isn’t it wonderful,” said Hope. “Who do you suppose it could possibly be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ananda, smiling wisely at his future wife, keeping his own counsel.

  Roger Bland was in serious trouble. Not only did he lose the local election, he lost the hoped-for seat on the Board of Harvard Overseers as well. Bleakly he examined the pictures of the winning candidates. They were a mixed collection of men and women who had somehow juggled their autobiographies so that they looked like compassionate people with their feet solidly on the ground—Boy Scout leaders who were investment analysts, full-blooded native American insurance executives. Roger’s timid curriculum vitae never had a chance.

  But these two blows to his self-esteem were not the worst. In September Roger received a statement from his broker, informing him that his account was worth five hundred thousand dollars less than it had been the previous month. Roger was sure there must be some mistake. He called up the broker and learned the truth.

  “But it’s not my fault,” complained Roger bitterly. “Somebody must have broken into my software. It was those people who occupied my house last month. One of them must have bought all that worthless stock and sold my blue chips. It wasn’t me.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, we were only obeying the orders that came over the line. It isn’t our problem if someone other than yourself is permitted to use your private account and personal identification numbers.”

  “Permitted!” Roger’s mild nature was incapable of responding adequately to this catastrophe. He didn’t know how he was going to tell Marjorie that they would have to sell their heavily mortgaged house and live more simply.

  Poor Marjorie! When she learned the truth, her niceness was sorely tested. It turned out, as might have been expected, that vitriol accumulates in nice people like poisonous sediment in the bottom of a jar. Marjorie had sour words to say to Roger. She was no longer happy as the day was long. When Mary Kelly came to her with the suggestion that Sarah Peel should keep the horse called Pearl, which was at that moment cropping the weedy grass around the Kellys’ house, Marjorie said furiously, “Honestly, I don’t give a damn what happens to the goddamned horse,” which didn’t sound like Marjorie at all.

  As for Sarah herself and her phalanx of homeless friends —Palmer Nifto and Audrey Beamish and Almina Ziblow and Bridgie Sorrel and Bobbsie Low and Doris Harper and Carl Browning and Dolores Marshall and Dolores’s daughter, Christine—all of them landed more or less on their feet.

  Homer Kelly was their advocate in court. Most of them turned up for sentencing. Only Palmer and Audrey jumped bail and took off for parts unknown. The rest humbly pleaded nolo contendere, with Homer looming protectively alongside.

  The judge didn’t know what the hell to do with these perpetual indigents, one of whom was a small child, and he let them go with a severe talking-to.

  66

  Ah, bless the Lord, O my soul! bless him for

  wildness, for crows that will not alight

  within gunshot!

  Journal, January 12, 1855

  It was mid-autumn in Concord. Sugar maples flamed along Walden Street. The swamp maples had already lost their leaves, revealing on the ends of their bare branches the dirty clotted handkerchiefs of tent caterpillars. Petunias disappeared, chrysanthemums came on strong. Yellow buses lumbered to and fro, carrying the children of Concord to schools called Alcott and Thoreau and Sanborn, Willard and Pea-body. Along Route 2 the farm stands were colorful with baskets of red apples and mountains of orange pumpkins. Flocks of red-winged blackbirds settled in the trees around Gowing’s Swamp, just passing through, and one day the myrtle warblers stopped over in Concord, fluttering between branches, soaring in dipping arcs, lacing the trees together, then rising all in a body to migrate farther south. And all over town the Canada geese flew back and forth from pond to pond, keeping up a restless shout, informing each other that winter was coming.

  If it was coming for the Canada geese, it was coming for Sarah Peel and her friends. Something had to be done about them right away, but what? Like the judge in the county courthouse, Homer Kelly didn’t know what the hell to do, but he threw himself into the task of figuring it out. While Sarah and Dolores and Christine and Doris and Almina and Carl and Bobbsie and Bridgie were passed around among the Kellys’ long-suffering friends, Homer made a study of the Hugh Cargill land, a large triangular parcel near the center of town.

  “It used to be the Concord poor farm,” he told his wife. “Hugh Cargill left it to the town in 1798 for the benefit of the poor.”

  “I remember the house before it was torn down,” said Mary. “It was right there on Walden Street across from the police station.”

  “Right. And you remember what happened. The trustees sold off most of the property and used the profits to build affordable housing elsewhere, because most of the Cargill parcel is wetland. But look at this.” Homer unfolded one of the maps he had been using in his explorations of Thoreau country. “This little piece right here, that’s not wetland. Why couldn’t they put a bunch of house trailers right there?”

  “House trailers?” Mary gasped. Then she laughed.

  Homer looked at her in surprise. “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s Roger Bland and all those other people. People like us, good conservationist types, you have to admit we’ve been looking forward to the eventual closing down of Pond View, which is the trailer park we’ve already got.” Mary went off into another gale of laughter. “And here you are, putting another one right in the middle of everything. I tell you, Homer, it won’t be easy.”

  And it wasn’t. While Sarah and her friends were gently shifted from house to house, and Doris Harper wore out her welcome with one hostess after another, Homer befriended the Hugh Cargill trustees, he pleaded with the affordable housing commission, he pressured the planning board and the board of appeals, he hounded the finance committee, he pestered the Concord Public Works Department. As a result of his efforts a new zoning change was inserted in the warrant for the April town meeting, along with an article for a change in the bylaws to permit subsidized housing in the shape of mobile homes.

  The town meeting was stormy. “What about sewage?” demanded Roger Bland, rising from the audience to protest. “Those trailers will contaminate the town well.”

  “If you will examine the rest of the warrant,” said Homer, speaking from the rostrum, “you’ll see another article requesting that the town sewer be extended across Walden Street from the courthouse. That will take care of the town well.”

  Roger was on his feet again, waving his hands, hardly able to express his outrage. “What’s to prevent all the homeless people in Boston from coming out to Concord and expecting to be housed?”

  “What indeed?” murmured the chairman of the finance committee to Selectwoman Betsy Beaumont.

  Oliver Fry leaped up. “If all the suburban towns around Boston act as responsibly as we’re doing, that won’t happen.” There was huge applause. One of Betsy’s eight children was old enough to vote at Town Meeting, and he whistled through his teeth.

  The sewage proposal passed. So did the change in the bylaws, by a narrow margin. The zoning change was the trickiest, since it required a two-thirds vote. Homer Kelly gave an impassioned speech. People shot out of their seats and waved their arms to be recognized and spoke with irrefutable logic on both sides. The discussion went on and on. When the moderator at last called for a voice vote, there was a tremendous clamor of ayes, followed by a huge chorus of nays.

  The moderator frowned around the hall and declared himself in doubt. “Will the aye voters please stand? Tellers, will you record the vote?”

  It was a near thing, but it squeaked by. “The motion is passed,” thundered the moderator, whamming down his gavel and moving on to the next item on the warrant. “Article fourteen, public works, the purchase of a snowplow. Does anyone wish to speak to this motion?”

  67

  There are no larger fields than these, no worthi
er

  games than may here be played.

  Walden, “Baker Farm”

  Sarah Peel and her friends were homeless no longer. Seven trailers were quickly set up on the Hugh Cargill land, the sewer pipe was rushed across the street, and on the first day of May everybody moved in. Next morning little Christine walked right across the field to the Alcott School, where all the fourth-graders in Concord were gathered under one roof. Sarah’s horse, Pearl, began nibbling the grass on acres of pasture.

  The only one who was dissatisfied with the new living arrangements was Doris Harper. “What the fuck?” she said angrily, after inspecting her brand-new mobile home. “Sarah, she’s got wall-to-wall carpeting. What’ve I got? Shitty hardwood floor.”

  “But, Doris,” said Sarah mildly, “you’ve got a cathedral ceiling and a bow window. Do you want to trade with me?”

  “Oh, now I get it,” responded Doris, “you’re trying to get my cathedral ceiling. Well, fuck you.”

  So everybody stayed put.

  At Pond View, the other Concord location for mobile homes, only four were left. They belonged to Charlotte Harris, Julian Snow, Stu LaDue, and Eugene Beaver. When Stu died of apoplexy in August, there were only three. Then Eugene went to live with his son in Atlanta. That left only Charlotte and Julian.

  Pond View looked moribund. Bird-watchers and environmental enthusiasts congratulated themselves on the approach of the day when this trailer park, at least, would be no more. Roger Bland was one of those who was counting down. Keeping track of the shrinking of Pond View was one of the few satisfactions left in his diminished life. Coming home every day to his small rented cottage in West Concord was depressing. Marjorie was grumpy. The house was dark and inconvenient.

  But Pond View was petering out. “There’s only a couple of them left,” Roger told his wife. “Surely those people can’t last long.”