Good and Dead

by Jane Langton

  Ed looked out too, just in time to see the doctor’s little VW careen around the bend. “It’s Arthur Spinney. I wonder where he’s going in such a hurry?”

  But the VW wasn’t the first car to pull into Betsy Bucky’s driveway. Betsy had also called the police. While the doctor was racing past Ed Bell’s house, the emergency medical technician from the Nashoba police department was already tumbling out of the ambulance.

  But as soon as he took a look at Carl Bucky, he put down his equipment. “How long has he been like this?” he asked Betsy.

  “Well, the truth is,” said Betsy, thinking quickly, anxious to protect herself, “I left him sleeping when I got up this morning, and I didn’t check on him before I went to church.”

  When Dr. Spinney ran up the stairs into the bedroom, he too could see at a glance that it was too late. He made an examination anyway. Then he straightened up and looked sadly at Betsy, and told her he was sorry.

  “Cremation,” said Betsy firmly, leading the way downstairs. “That’s what Carl always wanted. He told me so, jillions of times.” Betsy had figured out this part long ago. A container of ashes wouldn’t require an expensive cemetery plot. It wouldn’t need a big stone monument. Betsy would put Carl’s ashes in a nice jar she had inherited from her mother, a really dignified and handsome sort of cooky jar, with shepherds and shepherdesses on it, and lords and ladies in white wigs. She would seal the jar with hot paraffin, the way she did with her preserve jars, and bury it under the shrine to the Virgin Mary in the front yard and surround it next summer with red salvia and orange marigolds.

  23

  I saw nothing … this afternoon but a train of ladies … each armed with four knitting needles, busy with their fingers and as busy with their tongues.

  James Lorin Chapin

  Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849

  Joe Bold had never visited the Buckys’ house before. When he got out of his car, the shrine took him by surprise. Beside it a garden fork had been thrust into the grass next to a deep hole and a pile of dirt. There was a shovel in the hole.

  The shrine was unexpected, but the noises from the house were even more startling, screams of laughter and gales of high-pitched giggles. When Joe rang the bell, the laughter stopped in mid-shriek. There was a throbbing silence, then the squeal of a chair being scraped back and hurrying footsteps. Someone was running to the door, throwing it open.

  “Well, Reverend, hi, there,” cried Betsy. “You just come right in. Some of the girls are here. We’re just planning the service.”

  Joe didn’t know what to say. He had come to console the bereaved widow, but consolation didn’t seem to be what was wanted. And he had called at the wrong time. When Betsy led him into her dining room, he found a luncheon party in full swing. Priscilla Worthy and Mabel Smock and Mollie Pine were sitting at Betsy’s table, looking up at him, their mouths respectfully pursed. The table was laden with provender. There were orange baskets filled with sherbet, canned pears coated with halved grapes to look like clusters on the vine, a great pile of Betsy’s special sausage fritters, and slices of checkerboard cake fanned out on a platter. The food was as yet untouched, but the bottle of sherry was empty. The sherry was inside Betsy and Mabel and Mollie and Priscilla. Before long it dispelled their false dignity. Once again hilarity bubbled to the surface.

  “We’ve planned everything except the. flowers, Reverend,” said Betsy proudly, giggling.

  It was true. The service for Carl Bucky was all in order. The advice of Betsy’s pastor was not required. Mollie Pine’s sister from Quincy was going to sing Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” because it was Betsy’s dearest wish. Heavy decisions had been made about after-the-service snacks. There would be no burial at the cemetery, because Betsy was going to lay her husband’s ashes to rest all by herself. Joe goggled at the cooky jar on the sideboard and blushed, as though Carl had been listening, as though he had heard the laughter.

  For ten tormented minutes, Joe sat quietly, while the four women talked at full tilt. Then he made his excuses and started for the door.

  Betsy accompanied him, jabbering at his elbow. As they made their way through the living room, Joe saw the big lounge chair that had obviously been Carl’s. The hollows in the plastic upholstery were all that remained of the big gloomy man who had come to church regularly, who always sat in the same pew, totally obscured by the energetic little woman who had dominated him so completely, who had killed him, Homer Kelly said, with savage and homicidal kindness.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” said Joe at the door, but Betsy insisted on following him outside to show him the shrine. Together they stood in front of it. Tenderly the Virgin Mary spread her blue robe and gazed into the hole that gaped for Carl’s ashes. Joe murmured his sympathy and went away, unutterably depressed.

  24

  … the time is short;—life is precarious;—opportunities swiftly pass away;—and the final judgment is rapidly approaching!

  Reverend Ezra Ripley

  Concord, 1809

  The day after Carl Bucky’s funeral, Claire Bold was scheduled for more surgery. But at the last minute the surgeon changed his mind. Claire had been made ready for him, she had been brought into the preparation room deep in the lower levels of the hospital, where the sharp secret work of the surgeons was carried on. The anesthetist was already checking his dials. But Claire’s doctor was shocked at the sight of his patient’s increased fragility, and he called the whole thing off. The woman was surely too weak to endure another invasion with his keen-edged tools. When he leaned over Claire and told her his decision, she burst into tears. It was a cruel letdown, after she had worked herself up to endure yet one more ordeal.

  The surgeon found it even more difficult to inform the patient’s husband.

  Waiting upstairs, Joe saw the doctor walking toward him along the corridor, too soon, much too soon. He stood up shakily, his heart beating, to learn that the operation was not to be performed after all. “But what does it mean?” he said, staring wildly at the surgeon.

  The doctor found it hard to explain. It’s no use, he wanted to say, but he knew Joe couldn’t bear it, so instead he said, “Let’s go on building up her strength first. Your friend Mrs. Kelly is doing a good job, getting sustenance into her. Let’s work on it some more. Then we’ll see.”

  Once again the world presented itself to Joe in tragic but astonishing shapes. This time there were extraordinary patterns on the green operating tunic of the surgeon, imprinted by hot water in a boiling vat and the scorching heat of a dryer. Joe gazed fixedly at the wrinkled tunic. “May I take her home?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  From that moment on, Joe made no pretense of fulfilling his duty to Old West Church. He took his wife back to the parsonage and set up a bed for her in the front room and handled the morphine syringe himself. Mary Kelly and Lorraine Bell took turns at mealtimes, spooning mashed vegetables into Claire, reading aloud from The Mill on the Floss. Mary had almost forgotten the days when she had had time for herself. She had stopped working on her teaching syllabus altogether. Homer would take over this fall and do all her teaching for her. Fortunately he saw the need and didn’t grumble. As for Claire, she was obedient, opening her mouth for her supper like an infant bird. Joe was effusively grateful.

  He was grateful to Ed Bell, too, because Ed was doing his best to make up for Joe’s absence from the church. All at once Ed was in action everywhere, keeping the whole parish running in its ordinary groove. When Felicia, the church secretary, complained that nobody was telling her what to do, Ed kidded her into standing on her own two feet and making decisions by herself. When a pair of sudden crises appeared on the agenda of the Parish Committee, Ed handled them with diplomacy and tact.

  The first was a problem with the sexton. He was falling down on the job. Should he be fired? Ed turned the question over to a subcommittee of one, Joan Sawyer, and Joan took care of it swiftly. Sitting down with the sexton, she learned he was working at two jobs,
sixteen hours a day, like some nineteenth-century wage slave in a dark satanic mill. Soon the Parish Committee was surprised to find itself doubling his salary. The sexton promptly quit his other job, and the problem was solved.

  The second crisis was more serious. It was a letter from Parker Upshaw, Donald Meadow, and Jonathan Sinclair, a formal request to the Parish Committee to consider the dismissal of Joseph Bold. “The needs of the parish are not being served,” declared the letter.

  Ed sat at the scratched table in the Sunday-school room that was the meeting place for the committee and led the discussion. “We’ve got to rally around the man,” he said persuasively, “not kick him out because he happens to be enduring the severest trial that can happen in anyone’s life. What’s a church for, anyway?”

  What was a church for? The phrase had worked before. It worked again. But it had been a near thing. If Ed hadn’t posed the question, Parker Upshaw’s opinion that The needs of the parish are not being served might have won the day easily. As a rallying cry against Joe Bold, it was dangerously plausible. And its swift defeat in the Parish Committee did not mean it had gone away for good. It was still seething in Upshaw’s breast, Ed knew that. It would turn up again, sooner or later.

  And there were other urgencies to occupy Ed’s attention. Filling the pulpit was one, on those Sunday mornings when Joe couldn’t bear to leave his wife’s bedside. Lay ministry, Ed called it. Suspecting that every parishioner had at least one sermon to deliver, he called on them one by one. Charlie Fenster was glad to oblige. Homer Kelly was waiting his turn. Agatha Palmer worked up her courage to present her recollections of Junior Endeavor, a youth group that was part of the program at Old West, back in the twenties. Even Parker Upshaw was flattered to be asked by the wily Ed Bell to address his fellow church members. Parker got to work and slaved over his sermon, a lengthy homily on aspiration, on man’s need to set himself lofty goals, to achieve the most soaring heights.

  The crisis would last only as long as Claire Bold remained alive. “The poor woman is fading away,” whispered Lorraine Bell to her husband in the privacy of their bedroom. “She can’t last much longer. How is Joe going to stand it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ed. “Are you sure she’s in such a bad way? Joe’s promised to be in church next week.”

  But next Sunday Joe wasn’t there, after all. At the last minute he called in desperation and begged off. “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t. Not this morning.”

  And therefore Ed walked jauntily up the pulpit steps himself and delivered a sermon off the cuff. It wasn’t a sermon, it was an informal monologue about the last thirty years in Old West Church. Ed dwelt on the lighter moments, remembering disasters like the time the boiler blew up. He ended with a prayer for the minister and his wife, fervent but calm.

  But of course that was not the end of Ed’s duties. The secret Sunday-afternoon meetings were still taking place in his house. Percy Donlevy was a new member, and so was Bill Molyneux. Bill suffered from multiple sclerosis. He was younger than the rest. Percy Donlevy was far gone with Parkinson’s disease.

  Lorraine Bell was still staying strictly away from Ed’s Sunday-afternoon gatherings in the living room. “I don’t want to know anything about it,” she told him firmly, more than once. “It’s not my affair.” But sometimes Lorraine couldn’t help noticing mysterious things. Why, for example, was Rosemary Hill so solemn, one day after church, when she told Ed she had finished cleaning the attic? Why had Ed embraced her so affectionately? And why did Phil Shooky always bring his toolbox when he came to the house on Sundays? Lorraine suspected it contained something other than tools, but she reminded herself severely that it was none of her business. Still, she couldn’t help wondering.

  Deborah Shooky wondered about the meetings too. One day she asked Lorraine about them point-blank. “Phil’s always so anxious to get over to your house every Sunday. What goes on there anyway?”

  “What does Phil say about it himself?” said Lorraine guardedly.

  “Oh, church stuff of some kind,” said Deborah vaguely. “At first I thought it was the deacons all getting together, because Phil’s a deacon. But Rosemary Hill goes to the meetings too, and Rosemary isn’t a deacon.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t know,” said Lorraine. “I’m always busy doing something else on Sunday afternoon.”

  Homer Kelly was curious about the meetings too. He stumbled into one of them without warning.

  Lorraine tried to block his way. “Did you want to talk to Ed?” she said, standing nervously in front of the closed living-room doors, wishing he would go home.

  “Well, it’s about this sermon he wants me to deliver next week,” said Homer. “I mean, I never expected to find myself in such an embarrassing position. I just want to know what gyrations Ed wants me to go through up there in front of the congregation. What does he expect in the way of prayers, readings, genuflections, supplications, sacraments, hosannas, libations, burnt offerings, and human sacrifices? That sort of thing, you know?”

  “Well, I don’t think you can see him now, Homer,” said Lorraine, glancing over her shoulder at the living-room doors. “They’ve just begun. Maybe you should come back later.”

  Homer looked curiously at the sliding doors. On the other side he could hear a soft murmur of voices. “I’ll just pop in and ask when he can see me,” he said to Lorraine, and then, before she could stop him, he flung the doors wide open.

  “Hey, Ed,” cried Homer, and then he stopped short and backed away in confusion from the circle of people who were standing with bowed heads and linked hands in front of the fireplace. “Oh, whoops, excuse me,” said Homer, mortified. Slamming the doors together with a bang, he looked at Lorraine, abashed.

  “Really, Homer,” said Lorraine in honest dismay.

  Next day he came back by careful appointment and sat down with Ed and accosted him inquisitively about the nature of the meeting he had barged into the day before. “Some kind of prayer meeting, was that it, Ed?”

  “Prayer meeting?” Ed grinned. “Well, yes, of course, that’s just what it was, a prayer meeting.”

  “Okay if I join? Become a member?”

  “Sorry, Homer, I think we’d blackball you.”

  “Not pious enough, right? Old reprobate, right?”

  “Right. That’s it exactly. That’s right.”

  25

  Besty, never allow Daniel to go into the pulpit until he has had his rum.

  Mrs. Charles Stearns

  Lincoln, ca. 1800

  Next Sunday, Homer ascended the pulpit steps and regaled the congregation with an oration on the abolition movement in nineteenth-century Boston. He was charming, outrageous, informative, and learned. Mary grinned at him from her pew in the back of the church, and Homer was relieved, because sometimes Mary didn’t grin, she just looked sorrowfully at her lap. As a temporary substitute for Joseph Bold, Homer was a big success, and Ed Bell congratulated him warmly.

  But that afternoon Ed’s private meeting behind the sliding doors of his living room was a disaster, because of the boy Paul Dobbs. In the middle of the meeting there was a tumultuous uproar from outside. It was Paul on a motorcycle, a big shiny Mitsubishi belonging to one of his brothers. Once, twice, Paul thundered around the house, and then he tore out onto Acton Road and pounded away down the hill.

  Five minutes later, the people assembled in Ed’s living room heard the phone ring in the hall, and then Eleanor Bell threw open the closed doors and cried out to her father, “It’s Paul. He’s had an accident.”

  The meeting broke up in disorder. Ed rushed away with Bill Molyneux, Rosemary went home with Eloise Baxter, George Tarkington drove away in his noisy old car with Phil Shooky, and Thad Boland and Agatha Palmer and Percy Donlevy walked home, highly agitated, in different directions.

  But as it turned out, Paul wasn’t badly hurt. He was merely mauled by the rasping scrape of his side against the pavement after the motorcycle collapsed when he lea
ned over too far, making a U turn in front of the Town Hall.

  The motorcycle itself was totaled, slamming out of control into a stone wall. Afterward Paul’s parole officer told Ed it was stolen property. The parole officer wasn’t happy. He wanted Paul back in the Concord Reformatory.

  Ed put up a fight. “The boy didn’t know his brother stole it. And he’s got a job. He’s learned his lesson. We’re happy to have him living with us. Why can’t he go right on doing what he’s doing?”

  “Well, all right,” said the parole officer. “But you’re asking for trouble. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Lorraine agreed privately with the parole officer. “I don’t know,” she told Ed. “Really, dear, I just feel so uneasy.”

  “But you thought at first he was going to rape Eleanor, didn’t you, now?” said Ed, smiling at her. “You’ll have to admit you were wrong. They hardly even see each other.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Lorraine. “She’s only got eyes for Bo Harris. Still, I worry about it.”

  Lorraine didn’t tell Ed about the teaching session she had overheard one afternoon on the back porch. Eleanor had suddenly taken it into her head to teach Paul to read and write. She had set up a card table on the porch. Lorraine was stuffing a chicken at the kitchen sink. She couldn’t help hearing the voices outside. And she wanted to interfere, to protest, to tell Eleanor she was going too fast. Poor Paul couldn’t keep up.

  “Who cares about the alphabet?” said Paul shrewdly. “Listen, how you spell ‘I love you’?”

  “Oh, Paul, don’t be dumb.” Eleanor was angry.

  “I am dumb,” said Paul. “How you spell ‘fuck’?”

  Lorraine didn’t tell Ed what she had heard. The poor man had too much on his mind. Trying to keep the church going and attend his usual board meetings and help Bo Harris fix his car and drive Paul Dobbs back and forth to work—it was more than any one person should be expected to do. “It’s too much,” she complained to him. “Really, dear, you’ve got to slow down.”