by Jane Langton
Eleanor stared at the fresh tufts of grass springing up in the driveway. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.
She looked up to see the big Ford pickup that belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Kelly turning out of the driveway onto Acton Road. Her father was running down the porch steps, calling to her, “Ready for church, Ellie? Where’s your mother?”
Eleanor walked stiffly around the house to the front door, and found her mother scrabbling in her pocketbook in the hall. She looked anxious and absentminded, as if her mind were on something else entirely. “Here, dear,” she said. “Here’s something for the collection plate.”
“Listen, Mom, I’m not going to church today. I feel sort of awful. I mean, I think I’ll stay home.”
“Why, Eleanor.” Lorraine Bell suddenly focused her attention entirely on her daughter. She reached out a hand to feel her forehead. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Hey, you girls, are you coming?” shouted Ed. The car door slammed.
“Well, all right, dear,” said Lorraine. “Just as you wish. You want to lie down on the sofa?”
“Maybe I will,” said Eleanor. “I guess so. Maybe I’ll just go lie down.”
41
Truly it is a solemn thing to die.
James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848
On this first day of spring they were all in church—the Kellys, the Bells, the Harrises, the Upshaws, the Fensters, the Sinclairs, the Otts, Joan Sawyer, Arthur Spinney, Donald Meadow, Geneva Jones, Maud Starr, Mollie Pine, Mabel Smock, Priscilla Worthy, Jill Marx, Marigold Lynch, the widows Deborah Shooky, Judy Molyneux, Betsy Bucky, Maureen Donlevy, and Hilary Tarkington, and widower Bob Palmer. The Gibbys were there too. They had driven all the way out from Cambridge.
In the pulpit Joe Bold conducted the service and surveyed his flock. He was still like a man cut off at the knees, but his vision had cleared. When the hospital bed had been taken out of his living room, along with the jars of morphine and the wheelchair and all the other desperate paraphernalia of the sickroom, it had been like coming out of a cocoon into chill, biting air of an amazing transparency. This morning, looking over the reading desk at his congregation, he was surprised by their resemblance to animals. With her little topknot, Betsy Bucky was a Celebes crested ape. Ed Bell was an American river otter, Dr. Spinney looked exactly like a kinkajou, Homer Kelly was a rough-coated dingo, and Parker Upshaw was remarkably like a Bactrian camel. Joe gazed in startled appreciation at Upshaw, wondering why he hadn’t seen the resemblance before in Parker’s heavy eyelids, his immensely long nose, his supercilious expression. Then Joe caught sight of Augusta Gill in the balcony. She was glancing over her shoulder at him questioningly. Immediately, Joe leaped to his feet, late for the call to worship, seeing out of the corner of his eye the flash of Parker Upshaw’s silver pencil in the sunlight. What was Upshaw scribbling in his pocket notebook?
Joe’s sermon was a little delayed too, but this time it was the fault of the car that roared past the church up Farrar Road. Joe had to pause and wait until the noise died down. The congregation waited too, flinching at the rending clash as the driver shifted gears, waiting for the end of the grinding racket as the car picked up speed and thundered up the hill. Parker Upshaw grimaced at his wife. Why didn’t people have the courtesy to slow down, passing a house of public worship on a Sunday morning?
It wasn’t until the service was over and everyone had emerged into the glare of outdoors to stand basking in the unaccustomed warmth, shaking hands with the minister, exchanging the time of day, that the car came back. This time it was lunging down the hill out of control, swerving around the curve of Farrar Road, veering off the pavement. There were shrieks, and people flung themselves left and right as it bounded across the grass and thumped violently up the steps of the church. Lorraine Bell cried out as she saw her daughter’s white face behind the windshield, but Ed turned only in time to throw himself at Joe Bold, who was in the way.
“Ed, Ed,” screamed Lorraine.
As the car struck, the shaft of the steering wheel burst the spleen of Paul Dobbs and broke his back, and the door popped open, tossing Eleanor to the side like a morsel from a vending machine. As for Ed, he was pinned and crushed between the crumpled hood of Bo Harris’s Chevy and the easternmost pillar of the church.
42
The firmest pillar of the church has fallen … that full, warm, generous heart, ever true to friendship, has ceased to beat.
Reverend Barzillai Frost, Concord
on the death of Dr. Ezra Ripley, 1841
All the children came for the funeral, gathering at the house on Acton Road, Stanton and his wife and kids from San Diego, Barbara from New York City, Margie and Cap from Milwaukee, Roberta and Lewis from Orono, Maine. They found their widowed mother still enraged. Over and over she kept saying the same thing, “What right has that boy Paul to be alive instead of your father?”
“Now, Mom,” said Stanton, “it doesn’t do any good to talk like that.”
And Barbara said, “At least Ellie’s all right.” And they all embraced, while Eleanor sobbed remorseful tears and Lorraine, dry-eyed, tried to control her fury.
On the day of Ed’s memorial service, they entered the church with Joe Bold in a parade of Bells, filling the first two pews across the middle of the chamber. The church was packed. The basement common room was jammed. People stood on the grass outside, mourning for Ed.
The service was short. Joe Bold held himself together and read the words he had written the day before in a convulsion of sorrow and affection. Afterward everyone collected on the lawn, anxious to speak to Lorraine and her family.
“Oh, Lorraine,” said Flo Terry, embracing her in a paroxysm of sobbing. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.”
Flo’s husband, Peter, shuffled past Lorraine in his turn, taking her hand wordlessly. Peter had endured a difficult week. His wife had fallen completely apart, and it had been up to Pete to put her back together. On first hearing the news of Ed’s death, Flo had been utterly dismayed. Then she had persuaded herself that this solution to Ed’s troubles was really the best thing in the long run. Then doubt had begun to creep in, and finally Flo had succumbed to regret and self-recrimination.
Bo Harris was next in line. Working his way past Mrs. Bell to Eleanor, he looked at her red eyes and swollen tearstained cheeks.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “Are you really okay?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Eleanor. “Oh, Bo, I’m really sorry about your car.”
“Oh, never mind the car.” Bo looked dreamily at the plywood that had been nailed over the broken door of the church. “Mrs. Tarkington’s giving me her husband’s old Chrysler. It needs a lot of bodywork. You know, fiberglass repair. You want to go to a movie sometime? I can borrow my dad’s car.”
Eleanor blew her nose with her mother’s handkerchief. “Well, all right, I guess so.”
“How’s Paul?” said Bo politely.
Eleanor shook her head. “Pretty bad. Paralyzed from the waist. I’ve seen him. He wishes he were dead.”
Bo refrained from saying that he agreed with Paul, that Paul should have been killed instead of Mr. Bell.
But it was what everyone was thinking. Parker Upshaw said it out loud to his wife, Libby, but he blamed the whole thing on Ed, rather than Paul. “It’s bound to happen every time, when you’re too permissive with criminals. When that kid had his accident with the stolen motorcycle, they should have dumped him right back in prison. But Ed insisted they should give him another chance, right? Well, see what it led to. The whole thing was Ed’s own fault. Now, don’t look at me like that. It’s true. Face facts. Ed Bell was a sentimental old fool.”
43
This is the great end of the gospel, of the ministry, of the church, that sinners may be saved.
Reverend William Jackson
Lincoln, 1848
Ed Bell’s death was the twelfth in six months in Old West Church. Devoutly everyone
hoped it would be the last for a long time. But not until the Fourth of July was it apparent that circumstances in the three church communities of Nashoba had fundamentally changed.
At seven o’clock on the morning of the Fourth, Frances Mary Huxtible slipped on the braided rug in her kitchen while preparing a soft-boiled egg and broke her hip. An hour later, Roger Dolby fractured his skull when he fell off the roof of his house while attaching the lanyard of his American flag to the eaves trough. Mrs. Huxtible, a member of the Catholic parish of St. Barbara’s, died twenty-three days later. Mr. Dolby, a lay reader in the Lutheran congregation of the Church of the Good Shepherd, was dead on arrival at Emerson Hospital.
The spell was broken. In Old West Church, death was no longer triumphant. During the month of September, Joe Bold baptized two infants, and in October he performed three marriages. One was the wedding of Bo Harris’s sister. Louise Harris walked up the aisle of Old West during a thunderstorm in a seven-hundred-dollar wedding dress, preceded by eight bridesmaids.
And membership was on the rise. A few people said the influx was the result of the Reverend Bold’s preaching, which was regaining its original fervor, others thought it was merely a reflection of the increase in the town’s population because of the new real-estate development off Hartwell Road.
Jerry and Imogene Gibby were still diligent in their attendance at church on Sunday morning. Their rented house in Waltham was a lot closer to Nashoba than Imogene’s mother’s house in Porter Square. And before long Jerry was back at his desk in the office above the courtesy booth in the Bedford franchise of General Grocery.
Mary Kelly was surprised to see him at the store when she walked in from the parking lot one chilly morning in late October. There he was in person, standing on a tall ladder, attaching plastic bunting to the ceiling.
When he saw Mary, he climbed down off the ladder and shook her hand.
“Jerry,” said Mary, “I can’t believe it. I’m so glad to see you back.”
“You bet I’m back. It’s the pastry chefs doing. I got this idea for a new gimmick. You know, a pastry chef in a big chef’s hat.” Jerry patted an imaginary hat in the air high over his head. “And I sold it to top management. I mean, all I had to do was go to Boston with a bunch of samples, and top management bought the idea and gave me a new lease on life in the store. Here, come on, you’ve got to see this.”
The aisles were festooned with bunting and bright Day-Glo arrows pointing toward the back of the store, to the pastry chef’s domain, a small kitchen boutique with striped awnings, surrounded by a crush of customers. At first Mary could see only the tall white hat of the pastry chef, but when Jerry pulled her around the end of the counter, she was astounded to see Betsy Bucky’s knobby little face beaming at her below the hat.
Betsy didn’t have time to talk. She was too busy presiding over her simmering kettle of lard. The girl beside her was busy too, bagging Betsy’s sausage fritters as fast as Betsy’s tongs could whisk them out of the pot.
“Betsy,” gasped Mary, “how wonderful. Congratulations. I understand you saved the day for Jerry.”
Betsy glanced up from her boiling fat. “Well, like I always say, why are we put here on this earth in the first place? I mean, we come this way but once, isn’t that right? Whoops!” One of Betsy’s sausage fritters eluded her tongs and frisked to the side of the pot. Viciously she jabbed at it with her fork, and dropped it into an open bag. “Here, take some home to hubby.”
“Go right ahead, take a dozen or two,” said Jerry proudly. “It’s on the house.”
“Well, thank you,” said Mary. She took the bag reluctantly, holding it at arm’s length like a poisonous snake.
“Hey, Mary,” said Jerry. “Listen, there’s something else.” He was tugging at her again, moving her away from the pastry boutique, guiding her into an isolated corner of specialty items, pickled onions, Scottish marmalade, smoked clams. “Listen,” Jerry went on in a loud whisper, “You know Upshaw? Parker W. Upshaw? Guess what happened to him!”
“I don’t know,” said Mary, her eyes alight. “Tell me, what?”
“He’s out in the cold. Fired from General Grocery. Will Daly told me, friend of mine. Will just got his job back too, just like me. Everybody Upshaw fired has been rehired.”
“No kidding,” said Mary, delighted. “Why did they fire Parker?”
“The chairman of the board finally caught on to what he was doing. Upshaw went over top management to the board just once too many times, trying to wangle himself into somebody else’s slot, and this time the chairman persuaded the chief executive officer of General Grocery to get rid of him and reinstate everyone else.”
“Well, what a good man, that board chairman,” said Mary. “Who is he, anyway?”
“Who was he, I’m afraid,” said Jerry solemnly. “You know who it was? I’ll tell you who it was. It was Ed Bell.”
“Good God,” said Mary, awestruck at the wild oscillation of the tipping scales of justice, at the miraculous redemption of the murdering Betsy Bucky, at the resurrection of Jerry Gibby as a successful businessman, at the reincarnation of Howie Sawyer as a thespian performer, at the abasement of the mighty Flo Terry and the descent of Parker W. Upshaw into the abyss. “It feels like Judgment Day around here, the separation of the sheep from the goats at the last day.”
“Well, Upshaw was a goat, all right,” said Jerry in vengeful triumph.
“Some of us knew that from the beginning,” said Mary Kelly. “Right, Jerry?”
But to Libby Upshaw, Parker’s wife, the news that her husband was no longer among the upwardly mobile blessed ones of the earth was a horrifying discovery. At first she couldn’t believe it.
“You mean,” she said, staring at her husband, “I am married to a man who is unemployed? The top, you said! When I married you, you said you were going straight to the top.”
“Shut up,” said Parker Upshaw. He kicked the coffee table. He tipped over his Nautilus machine. He tossed a stack of books to the floor, his French grammar and every volume of the complete works of Plato, his new matched set, gold-tooled and bound in leather. Perfection as a life-style faded from his horizon. Parker W. Upshaw was once more as other men.
44
The heart … is not a superficial sensibility,—the shallow pool that changes with every change of temperature. The well is deep.…
Reverend Barzillai Frost
Concord, 1856
Joe Bold plucked his robe off its hook and darted a glance out the window. The cloudburst that had been going on all morning was over. The cold gray sky was punctured by cavities of blue. Crossing the back entry, where umbrellas lolled on the floor and coats hung dripping from the rack, he opened the door of the sanctuary and mounted the steps of the pulpit to face once more his gathered parish.
Homer and Mary Kelly were present, as usual, although Homer didn’t know how much longer he would be a loyal member of the congregation. He was finished at last with his history of the spread of the faith from the town of Concord. If God wanted to put the roof back on the church, it was all right with Homer. Let Him reach out with his stupendous hand and turn off the stopcocks of all those gushing faucets. But of course the final result of Homer’s researches was disappointing. His history wasn’t at all what he had intended. Oh, the Reverend William Lawrence of Lincoln was in there with all his recorded possessions—his six chairs, his eight-day clock—and so was Ezra Ripley, who had preached in the Concord church for sixty years, and so were all those other august ministerial presences, looming out of the histories of all these little towns.
But where were Rosemary Hill and Betsy Bucky? Where was Ed Bell? Where was Bo Harris? Where were the Farrars and Wheelers and Bloods and all the rest of the nameless congregations of yesterday? Well, of course a lot of sermons had survived, and Homer had taken dutiful note of them. How those old ministers had talked and ranted from their several pulpits! The congregations must have listened at least some of the time, and taken it all in
, while out-of-doors the thick rushing life of their parishes went on just as it did right now, and the sow farrowed, and the horse died, and the barn burned down, and the price of apples rose and fell, and the baby cried, and the wife grew troubled in her mind, and the orchard blossomed, and the rugged trunks of the sugar maples were flooded with sap, and in Icehouse Pond the fish darted and the Canada geese came down to feed. It was this urgent life that had spoken in one voice from Parson Bulkeley in Concord in 1635, and in another from Reverend Stearns in Lincoln in 1795, in still another from Reverend Stacy in Carlisle in 1835, and in yet another from Reverend Joseph Bold in Nashoba right here and now. It would never stop talking, it would forever keep up its ceaseless murmur, its hoarse musical shout. Translated in the pulpit, the words would come out different, odd perhaps, peculiar often, sometimes dead wrong. And yet all of these reverend clergy would go right on cocking their ears and whispering, “Listen, did somebody say something? I could have sworn I heard something. Listen to that! Right now! Hear that?”
For Homer, then, the taps were turning off. But for Joseph Bold they were turning on. Looking over the pews this morning, he no longer beheld his parishioners as creatures of field and jungle. His vision had been increasing in severe acuity for months, and now he saw them magnified, as if he were gazing through an enormous hand lens. Clearly visible were individual pores and freckles, wens and pockmarks. It was painfully apparent that they were a spotted flock. Then, as they stood up to sing the first hymn, their troubles rose up too, and smote him, and Joe rocked back on his heels. Good God, there in the front row was Parker Upshaw, his dignity mortified by the loss of his job, and behind him sat Lorraine Bell, still embittered and unreconciled to the accident that had killed her husband. And smack in the middle of the rows of pews was that extraordinary moral enigma, Betsy Bucky. And Arthur Spinney had been cracking up lately, and Deborah Shooky looked wretched, and Maud Starr with her hungry face was a perpetual nuisance, and how could a person be of use to Jerry Gibby as he clawed his way up the polished glass hill of middle-class prosperity? Then Joe blinked as a light flared up in one of the box pews. Good heavens, what was that? Oh, it was only Joan Sawyer, sitting directly in the path of the sun as it burst out from behind the clouds and hurled a burning ray through the window.