Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  “Well, then, I hope you didn’t pay too much for it,” said Ed. “Might there be a jack in the trunk, by any chance?”

  “Ten bucks, that’s all it cost me. A steal. Of course I’ve got to replace everything. There’s this guy in Medford’s got a rebuilt engine. Only thing, I’ve got to find a used transmission and differential assembly.” The boy opened the trunk of the Mercedes, took out a jack, and followed Ed to the road.

  Maud had been nodding in the front seat of her car, but now she got out and watched eagerly as the good-looking Harris boy changed her tire.

  Squatting beside the car, the boy talked ceaselessly about his new automobile. “Trouble is, my mom says no way. I can’t work on it in the garage, she says. They need the space for their two cars. And I can’t do it in the driveway.” The boy looked up sorrowfully at Ed as he tightened the lug nuts. “The neighbors wouldn’t like it, she says.”

  Finished, he stood up and accepted Maud’s effusive gratitude in melancholy grandeur and stood beside the road with Ed as she drove away.

  “Listen here,” said Ed, his generous nature coming rashly to the fore.“Tell you what. You could work on your car in our backyard. Of course you’d have to get an okay from my wife.”

  The boy’s somber dignity gave way to excitement. “No kidding? Hey, that would be great.”

  “My name’s Bell,” said Ed. “Do you know where we live, on Acton Road? Perhaps you know my daughter Eleanor. She’s a freshman in the high school.”

  The Harris boy’s formal gravity returned. “Actually,” he said, “I’m a junior myself,” and he waved the jack solemnly as Ed drove away in the direction of the Buckys’ house.

  Betsy and Carl Bucky had bought their house on Lowell Road forty years ago with a G.I. mortgage. It was a small Cape Cod with a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the front yard. The shrine was an embarrassment to Carl Bucky. He thought it looked Catholic. Whenever visitors came to the house, he made jokes about mackerel-snappers, to make it plain that the Buckys were not in thrall to the Pope in Rome. Betsy liked the shrine because it was cute, in a sublime sort of way. Everything in Betsy’s house was cute in one way or another. Cuteness to Betsy was the same as the good in the dialogues of Plato.

  The shrine had been bought at a roadside stand, but most of the adornments in the Buckys’ house had been made by Betsy herself, embroidered, patchworked, knitted, crocheted, quilted, smocked, or tatted. Betsy was also a superb cook. Her highest competence, however, was for something else. Betsy was murdering her husband. She was killing him cleverly, skillfully, continuously. This morning she got to work on it right away by shrieking up the stairwell, “Carl Bucky, get up. It’s almost time for church. Your breakfast’s ready.”

  Silence upstairs, then a groan. The bed creaked as Carl rolled over.

  “You heard me, Carl Bucky. Get up this minute.”

  When Carl came down at last, he looked ill. “Listen, Betsy, I don’t feel so good.” Carl spread his big hand across his chest. “I’ve got a pain right here.”

  “Nonsense,” said Betsy, bustling him into his chair at the table. “You’re just hungry.”

  Carl looked doubtfully at the big pile of sausage fritters on his plate and the cup of pitch-black coffee. “Honest, Betsy, I think I ought to call the doctor.”

  “Carl Bucky,” scolded Betsy, “if you don’t eat those fritters after I made them special, I’ll never speak to you again. You just need your coffee, that’s all. You know how grouchy you are without your coffee.”

  As Ed Bell turned in to the Buckys’ driveway and drove up the steep hill to the house, he wondered if he should have called Betsy to tell her he was coming. But the truth was, Ed rather liked dropping in on people, finding them in their natural state, not all cleaned up and formal with the domestic mess cleared away. Besides, he knew there would be no mess at Betsy’s house. She could be dropped in on at any time, and her house would be spic-and-span. Betsy Bucky could be taken to her Maker any hour of the day, and the undertaker would find her in clean boiled panties.

  At the door, Ed gazed sideways at the shrine to the Virgin Mary, wondering mildly when the mother of Jesus” had become a Protestant. “Oh, Betsy,” he said as she opened the door, “I’ve brought you the piece you’re supposed to read this morning to welcome Joe Bold.”

  Betsy took the paper and her face assumed an expression of gleeful rapacity. Her button eyes sparkled. “Will Mrs. Bold be in church this morning? What will people think? What will they say?”

  Once again Ed made tactful noises. “They’ll think she’s a charming woman. They’ll want to help out. You’ll see.”

  The Shookys’ house, at the Concord end of Carlisle Road, was nearly surrounded by cyclone fences. The fences had once been cages for dogs, because Phil Shooky was a retired veterinarian. Now there were only two dogs left, Phil’s pets, a couple of big German shepherds.

  This morning there was no sign of the dogs, no barking welcome. And Deborah Shooky, answering the doorbell, was in great distress. “Oh, Ed, I’m glad you’re here. I can’t find Phil. He went out in his bathrobe to feed the dogs and he hasn’t come back. He isn’t anywhere.”

  “He’s probably just picking up firewood or something,” said Ed comfortingly, but he set off with Deborah into the woods behind the house to look for her husband. Soon distant barking put them on the right trail. They found Phil standing in a clearing with his dogs. His face was ashen.

  “Phil, dear,” said Deborah, taking his arm. “Come on home. What are you doing out here in the woods?”

  Shivering with cold, Phil huddled into his bathrobe. “I don’t know. I was just starting to pour chow into the dogs’ dishes, I remember that. I don’t know how I got here. I just don’t remember.”

  “Now, now, old man,” said Ed, “let’s go back.” Together they made a parade, three people and two dogs, walking to the house. “Listen,” said Ed, thinking about the massive heart attack Phil had suffered last year, “don’t you think you ought to stay home from church? You don’t have to read this stuff I brought you. We’ve got plenty of other people on the committee who can do it.”

  “No, no,” said Phil. “I’ll be there. I’ll just sit down for a minute. I’ll be okay.”

  But as Ed said goodbye to the anxious Deborah, he could see Phil behind her, dropping exhausted into a chair. His face was gray with dread.

  Rosemary Hill was having a bad morning too, but she didn’t tell Ed when he appeared on her doorstep. Rosemary lived on Carlisle Road in the house she and Rob had moved into with their first baby after Rob finished law school. Now Rob was dead and the children were grown and Rosemary was rattling around in the big Victorian all by herself. Sometimes she wondered if she ought to move into a condominium like her widowed friends Jill Marx and Marigold Lynch.

  This morning Rosemary had felt a heavy dull pain in her abdomen as she lay flat on her bedroom rug doing her exercises. She had felt it before, at Christmastime, but she had been too busy at Christmas to go to the doctor, and after that the pain had gone away and she had forgotten about it. Here it was again. What did it mean?

  When the doorbell rang, Rosemary got up carefully, wincing, and went downstairs.

  “Oh, Ed, it’s you.” Rosemary took Ed’s typed sheet and looked at it blankly. The pain was goading her again.

  “I’ll see you in church,” said Ed, turning away, wondering why Rosemary was so brusque this morning. It wasn’t like her at all.

  The next to last member of Ed’s committee was Joan Sawyer. Joan’s house on Hartwell Road was newer and grander than the Buckys’ or the Shookys’ or Rosemary Hill’s. It was a handsome structure with redwood decks and big sliding glass doors.

  As Ed pulled into the driveway, Joan Sawyer was dressing for church. Joan was glad to be going out, grateful to be escaping from Howie for an hour or two, relishing the thought of a break in the interminable togetherness of the weekend.

  Pulling on her left shoe, she tensed, hearing Howie’s heavy step on
the stair. Ten more seconds to myself, five more seconds …

  Howie was surprised to see Joan in her good clothes. “What’s up, sweetie-pie?” he said loudly.

  “Going to church,” said Joan calmly, pushing the strap into her shoe buckle.

  “No kidding?” boomed Howie. “Is this Sunday?”

  Joan glanced at him. He looked genuinely puzzled. “Of course it’s Sunday. Yesterday was Saturday.”

  “Well, say, why don’t I come to church too?”

  “Fine,” said Joan, standing up quickly, whirling around, whipping open a drawer.

  When Ed Bell knocked on the big glass door and handed Joan her typed sheet of paper, he couldn’t fail to see how tense she was. But then Joan had always been like a wire in the twisting grip of a turnbuckle. She looked at him now without speaking, then said, “Won’t you come in?” Her voice was soft and quick. She was thinking a thousand things, decided Ed, rushing them through her mind but saying none of them aloud.

  “No, no, thank you. No, no, I guess not.” Ed could feel himself dithering. It was the effect on him of Joan’s tingling pauses. He smiled foolishly and turned away.

  Joan closed the door silently as Howie came downstairs in his brown suit.

  “Ready, hon?” he said.

  “Yes, of course,” said Joan, swinging the door open again, walking stiffly out to the car ahead of Howie.

  Ed still had one last rumpled sheet of paper to deliver. Swiftly he raced his car up the road in the direction of the Upshaws’ house. But he didn’t need to hurry. Parker W. Upshaw was coming to meet him, pounding down the road in his sweatpants, the drawstrings tied in neat bows at waist and ankle. Pound, pound, pound, ran Parker W. Upshaw, clocking off the miles of country road, recording them meticulously in his mental record book. When Ed Bell got out of his car and waved a piece of paper at him, Parker didn’t stop running. He merely galloped past Ed, put out his hand, and grabbed the paper from Ed’s fist like an express train roaring up the track and snatching a mailbag without slowing down.

  Ed’s surprised hand stayed aloft for a few seconds as he gazed after Upshaw, but Parker didn’t look back. His morning run was a sacred thing, a serious matter. Some people just didn’t understand the importance of a steady pace and absolute regularity. And anyway he didn’t have time to stop and pass the time of day. If he didn’t get home in a hurry and change clothes, he’d be late for church. He wanted to be there when Claire Bold came in. He wanted to see people’s faces. He wanted to behold their reaction, to feel their shock.

  From across the street, Flo Terry watched Parker Upshaw disappear around the bend as Ed Bell climbed back into his car. Parker and Ed were parishioners at Old West Church, and Flo was reminded of the fact that the new minister was about to meet his congregation for the first time.

  “It’s a big morning for Old West,” Flo told her husband, Pete. “I wonder how the new man will turn out.”

  Flo was not a member of the Old West congregation, nor was she a parishioner in the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, nor did she take communion in the Catholic church of St. Barbara’s. But Flo was a keen observer and a sharp critic of all these religious societies just the same, keeping track of their ups and downs, priding herself on her nimble perception and on a judgment that was so quick and accurate it was almost extrasensory. Actually, Flo’s conclusions about life in the town of Nashoba were due to the careful way she did her homework and to her long practice as a highly trained reference librarian.

  It was strange that her husband didn’t share his wife’s cleverness in judging his fellow citizens. You would think a chief of police would have a sharper understanding of what was going on in his own bailiwick, but poor Peter Terry seldom had a clue.

  “I have a funny feeling about that new man Joseph Bold,” said Flo, narrowing her eyes, preparing one of her famous predictions. “Have you heard the rumor about his wife?”

  “Oh, go on, Flo,” said Pete, chopping up his breakfast egg, “you and your funny feelings.”

  “He’s headed for disaster,” said Flo. “That’s what I think. I wonder if the church will live through it.”

  But in Old West itself there was no such premonition of evil days to come. In the basement common room, George Tarkington was already at work, preparing for a possible overflow of the congregation from the floor above. He was setting up chairs and testing the public-address system. The choir was practicing upstairs, but their singing wasn’t coming through the loudspeaker. “Rats,” said George, fiddling with it some more.

  Up in the balcony, Bob Ott, the choir’s prize tenor, gave another pull on the bell rope. The rope scraped against the sides of the narrow hole in the ceiling, and in the steeple the small bell rang with a tinny clang, summoning the congregation, calling the new minister to his task.

  3

  The bell that has sounded from this steeple over field and hill has reminded men of higher realities than crops and herds, and has called them to the pursuit of imperishable riches.…

  Reverend Edward E. Bradley

  First Parish, Lincoln, 1898

  The clang of Nashoba’s Old West Church was inaudible to Homer and Mary Kelly, because their house was not in Nashoba at all. The Kellys lived in neighboring Concord, right on the shore of Fairhaven Bay where the river turned the corner on its way to the Old North Bridge.

  Homer Kelly was one of the three good men listed in the first chapter of this book—that is, until he was eliminated on sober second thought because of the blemishes and defects in his character. In spite of these inadequacies, Homer was a man of considerable accomplishment, first as a lieutenant detective in East Cambridge and then as an associate professor of American literature at Harvard University. Mary Kelly, too, was a professor there. In fact, Homer and Mary together taught a famous course in Memorial Hall.

  Right now Homer was spending his days in the storage basements of old churches and the reference rooms of local libraries among the locked cabinets where precious materials were stored. He was pursuing his latest colossal project. It was a book he called Hen and Chicks, a study of the spread of daughter churches from the First Parish in Concord, and of the further separation of granddaughter parishes farther away. If he ever finished the undertaking, it would be a model of the growth of New England, but Homer doubted it would ever be done. He would die, he told himself pathetically, in the freezing vault of some library, and his last glimpse of the world would be the pothooks and flourishes of some eighteenth-century parson’s crabbed hand.

  On the morning of Joseph Bold’s first service in Nashoba’s Old West Church, Mary had to keep going into the bedroom to badger her husband into waking up. But Homer only turned over in bed and made anguished stricken noises and insisted it wasn’t time yet, and why didn’t she go away because he was still sound asleep.

  But even in his sleep Homer was fretfully aware that he had to get up, he had to get up, he had to get up and go to church. So heavily did this necessity loom over his dreams that the church itself burgeoned before him, swelling whitely, its edges knife-sharp, its clapboards smartly level, its tower ascending to the weathercock aloft. Something very odd was happening. Backing across the street, Homer stood on the misty grass of the Nashoba Common to stare upward at the tower. Two gigantic hands were removing it from the church, lifting it up and setting it down on the lawn. And now two huge thumbs were prying off the roof. The thumbs belonged to none other than God himself. He was grunting with effort, succeeding at last, setting the roof down beside the steeple. Now he was leaning over to peer at the congregation within, one long strand of gray whisker trailing over the pulpit wall. Homer was further astonished to observe something he had never noticed before, a large faucet attached to the pulpit. He watched in awe as God reached down to turn it on, releasing the gushing stopcocks of all their individual souls.

  But the sharp squeak was really the sound of the faucet in the Kellys’ own bathroom, on the other side of the wall. Homer opened one eye as his wife ca
me into the bedroom, fully dressed. “Okay, Homer, come on, get up,” she said firmly. Taking him by the shoulders, she bounced him up and down. “I mean it this time.”

  The mattress jounced and twanged, and Homer protested loudly, but Mary took him by the ankles and dragged him off the edge. (Their connubial relation was more pugilistic than erotic.)

  Soon they were zooming up their terrifying driveway and turning out on Route 2. Whizzing through the center of Concord, they made their way along Lowell Road in the direction of the town of Nashoba. Nashoba’s Old West Church was actually one of the offspring churches Homer was writing about. It had set itself off in 1760 because the Sunday journey to meeting had seemed so long and difficult to the farmers in the northern quarter of Concord. Nashoba was a town of swamps and glacial eskers, of low hills and arable fields, of brooks running into the Assabet River, the Concord, the Merrimack. As a village it had a quarrelsome history, perhaps because its citizen farmers had been so maddened by the clouds of mosquitoes breeding in the swamps. Remoteness and poverty had kept it unspoiled for a long time, but now the Subarus and Saabs and Toyotas of software engineers tore down the narrow ways where apple-laden carts had once lumbered to market. Along Nashoba’s winding roads there were still two-hundred-year-old farmhouses of supreme and simple beauty, but there were new houses as well, especially on Lowell Road and Heald Avenue and Blood Street. Homer and Mary passed one of the new developments on their way to church.

  “Tsk-tsk, will you look at that,” said Homer, shaking his head in disapproval. “They’ve finished that Southern plantation. There’s the new owner in person, installing his birdbath.”

  The man with the birdbath was Jerry Gibby, the newly arrived citizen of Nashoba, the proprietor of Gibby’s General Grocery. Homer and Mary didn’t know it, but Jerry and his wife, Imogene, were about to become the newest members of Old West Church. Imogene and Jerry had fallen in love with the beautiful old building on the green, with its charming domed tower. It was part of their image of their new life in the suburbs. Jerry wanted to become acquainted with the church members, hoping to bring new customers into his store. Imogene, too, wanted to know everybody. She wanted to find out if there was a women’s group in the church. She wanted to be part of the community right away.