Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

  In the pew behind Ella Viles sat Julia Gideon. Julia’s prayer was true and fervent, but, as always, it was pointless. What could she pray for, after all? Not for the restoration of James Shaw’s handsome face, nor the sight of his left eye, nor the return of his two hands. For what, then? Julia’s head bowed lower. Only for the courage to bear it, for James, for Isabelle, and for herself. Then, clasping her gloved hands tighter in her lap, Julia prayed for her husband. Josiah’s anger alarmed her.

  As for the prayer of the Reverend Horatio Biddle, it was a wild jumble. With his face buried in his hands, Horatio tried to persuade the Almighty that the destruction of the finest tree in the county of Middlesex had been a pious act, rather than an error of judgment.

  The prayer of his wife was not confused at all. It was direct and articulate. If the brothers Spratt could have caught her prayer as it shot skyward through the roof of the church and streaked past the balloon, they might have pursed their lips and tut-tutted, because Ingeborg’s prayer to the Supreme Being was more in the nature of a curse upon the head of her husband’s enemy, the Reverend Josiah Gideon.

  But then in a single instant, all the prayers in the sanctuary of the First Parish Church of Nashoba, whether addressed to the God of Abraham or to the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book or to the Devil himself, were interrupted by a crash from the burial ground.

  Julia winced and looked up. Could that terrible noise be the sound of Josiah’s ax?

  The Lift and Fall of the Ax

  The service came to a close much earlier than usual. Horatio Biddle’s sermon ended with a “thirdly” rather than a “tenthly.” At every crash from the burial ground, Horatio flinched and the face of his wife grew darker. When he quavered, “We will forego the final hymn,” there was a slamming shut of hymnbooks and a rush for the door.

  The noonday sun shone brightly down on the green hillside, on the scattered tombstones and the pale stump of the chestnut tree. It shone on the strange spectacle of Josiah Gideon savagely at work in the welter of fallen branches, and on the men and women flooding out of the church to watch the lift and fall of his ax. It shone on the woman who came last, picking her way slowly among the gravestones, Julia Gideon.

  Ingeborg Biddle followed, too, in an equal state of dismay. Her husband strode ahead of her, trying to persuade himself that it had been Josiah Gideon who had committed the original offense by desecrating the resting place of Deacon Sweetser. “Sir,” he shouted at Josiah, “may I ask what you think you are doing?”

  Josiah gave him a burning glance, steadied a thick bough under his foot, lifted the ax, and brought it whistling down.

  “Church property,” cried Horatio. “I command you, sir, to desist.”

  Josiah did not desist. Crash went his ax, and crash again.

  Courageously, Horatio Biddle took a step forward, as though to wrest the ax from the madman’s hands, but when Josiah turned toward him with the ax held high, Horatio thought better of it and withdrew. Ingeborg withdrew also. As she stumbled away, she stared straight into the faces of her friends for sympathy, but Elfrida Poole looked down, and Ella Viles simpered, and Abigail Whittey blew her nose. Only Julia Gideon gave Ingeborg a direct and troubled glance.

  Thirty-seven men and women of the congregation remained in a silent circle around the prostrate tree, watching the powerful lift and crashing fall of Josiah Gideon’s ax. If any precise recorder had been on hand to note down the names, his list would have looked like this:

  Arthur Wall, pharmacist

  Frank Wheeler, attorney, and Martha Wheeler

  George Blood, farmer, and his wife, Pearl

  Elfrida Poole, widow, mistress of the pianoforte

  Samuel Bigelow, judge of the district court, and Lydia Bigelow, arranger of noonings, fairs, and bake sales for the benefit of the parish

  Phineas Wilder, postmaster, and Wilhelmina Wilder

  Jarvis Brown, attorney, and Eliza Brown

  David Kibbee, dairy farmer and selectman

  Potter Viles, merchant, his wife, Joan, and daughter, Ella

  The Misses Dorothea and Margaret Rochester

  Miss Abigail Whittey, widow

  Jedediah Eaton, professor of Latin at Harvard College

  Samuel Brooks, retired clergyman

  Joseph Hunt, farmer, and Eugenia Hunt, painter of artistic lamp shades

  David Monroe, farmer, and his widowed mother, Alice

  Jonas Todd, banker, and Dorothea Todd

  Theodore Wilbur, district schoolmaster

  Charles Holland, farmer, and Annie Holland

  Artemus Grout, sheriff, and Eleanora Grout

  Reuben Mills, farmer, and Dora Mills

  Miss Cynthia Smith, spinster

  Douglas Pease, merchant

  Richard Doll, resident, Nashoba Home Farm

  Gradually, the crowd thinned and dispersed, until no one was left but Josiah, savagely rending branches from the trunk of the tree. But within the hour, Ted Wilbur was back with an armful of tools, and by evening the whole town of Nashoba echoed with the crashing of axes and the wheezing of crosscut saws.

  Women and children had come, too, and now, following the sturdy example of Lydia Bigelow, they were stumbling in the tumbled chaos of the shattered tree, hauling away the heavy boughs and dragging them into piles.

  Julia Gideon was not among them. Julia was at home, watching from the window of the sitting room, not knowing whether to be glad or sorry. The gathering of carts and buggies and the cheerful confusion were exhilarating, but at the same time she was profoundly distressed by her husband’s fury. No matter how righteous it was, no matter how justified, where would it lead him? Unable to watch any longer or listen to the buzzing of the saws and the chopping whack of the axes, Julia withdrew to the kitchen and made noises of her own, thumping bowls on the table and clashing her bread pans.

  At another window, James kept his own vigil. When Isabelle said, “James, would you like to lie down?” he shook his head violently. Resigned, she left him and joined her mother in the kitchen. The fire in the stove had gone out. Isabelle lifted the lid of the firebox, dropped in a bundle of kindling, and set it alight.

  James remained alone at his window, watching the turmoil across the road. In anguish, he thought of the use he could make of the hooks on his arms if only he could be out there with the others. His strong arms quivered in their eagerness to grasp and haul away the heaviest of the severed branches.

  When Isabelle heard a knock on the door, she ran to throw it open for Eben Flint. There was no need to speak. Eben looked at her soberly and went at once to James. Eagerly, James turned from the window and lifted his hooked hands. Eben understood him at once, but he only gripped James by the shoulder and left the house with a whetstone in one hand and an ax in the other. Soon he was over the wall and hard at work with the others, slashing at the limbs of the fallen tree.

  From the top of the burial ground, high on the knoll beside the church, the tall stone of Deacon Sweetser looked serenely down.

  Advice from Julius Caesar

  The steam-powered sawmill stood directly below Quarry Pond Road, kitty-corner to the house of Josiah Gideon. Isaac Pole, the sawyer, stood in his cluttered yard, looking up at the commotion across the way. He yelled at Eben Flint, “You got to open up that stone wall.”

  Eben shouted, “I know.” He dropped his ax and threw himself at the task, picking up lichen-covered stones and thumping them down a dozen yards away.

  “What about those very large boulders down there at the bottom?” said Professor Eaton, coming up to assess the situation and offer scholarly advice. Surely Julius Caesar had run across obstacles of this nature during the Gallic Wars.

  “Oh, we’ll think of something,” said Eben, staggering under the weight of two heavy stones, and then Josiah Gideon lowered his ax long enough to shout, “Crowbars, Eben. You’ll find two in my shed, maybe three.”

  Professor Eaton followed Eben around the corner and into Josiah’s shed, explaining a
long the way the astonishing achievements of Caesar during his conquest of Gaul. “For example, Mr. Flint, his towering siege engines. Caesar’s legions rolled them right up to the enemy’s very walls.” And while Eben poked in dark corners in Josiah’s shed, looking for crowbars and cant hooks, Professor Eaton discoursed on the foolish belief of the Belgians that the Romans had accomplished this feat with divine aid, when of course it had been their superb engineering skill. “Surely, Mr. Flint,” urged the professor as Eben started back up the road, “Roman ingenuity might be called upon in the present crisis.”

  “Why, yes, how extremely interesting, professor,” said Eben, lugging heavy tools in one hand and dragging a stoneboat with the other.

  “I’ll take one of those crows,” said David Kibbee, the dairy farmer, whose fourteen cows kept many a local family supplied with butter and milk. Artemus Grout helped himself to another. Soon both of them were hard at work, helping Eben pry massive boulders out of the ground while Professor Eaton delivered a lecture on the construction of Roman bridges.

  The afternoon sun was warm. By the middle of the afternoon, the heavy work was done. The fallen trunk of the chestnut tree lay bare and shorn of its limbs, and the opening in the stone wall gaped thirty feet wide.

  The axmen put down their tools. Eben collapsed on the ground, and so did David and Artemus. The women’s work was finished, too, and they laughed at one another’s straggling hair. Satisfied and exhausted, the men and women of the congregation gathered up their tools and set off for home. Only Professor Eaton, Josiah Gideon, and Eben Flint remained behind.

  Professor Eaton had stopped lecturing, but now he picked up a cobblestone and carried it to the rock pile as a symbolic gesture of support. Eben smiled and said, “We certainly thank you for your help, professor.”

  “Oh, no, don’t thank me.” Professor Eaton dusted his coattails, quoted Catullus—“Noli admirari, after all”—and said good-bye.

  “Sir,” said Eben to Josiah, “I expect you must be pretty tired.”

  “Tired!” Josiah’s shirt was dark with sweat, his face was scoured with scratches, there were blisters on the palms of his hands, and the tip of his left thumb bled from a grazing blow of the ax, but he was in a transport. “No, no,” cried Josiah, “I’m fresh as the morning.”

  From across the road, the sawyer shouted, “I’m getting up a head of steam. Why don’t you gentlemen trundle me down a few of them there logs?”

  The Sawmill

  Isaac Pole stood in a calculating posture beside a heap of lopped branches in the graveyard. “This one will do easy,” he said, bending over the thickest log and spanning it with his hand.

  “It’s very good of you, Isaac,” said Josiah, “to get up steam on a Sunday.”

  “Sabbath don’t mean nothing to me,” said Isaac, opening the jaw of his peavey.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Josiah, “it’s a good thing it happens to be a Sunday. Any other day of the week, all those good people would have been someplace else.”

  Eben grinned. “And what would we have done without Professor Eaton?”

  “Big strong fella?” said Isaac.

  “Pretty strong on advice,” said Eben. He set his hands on one end of the heavy branch and braced himself.

  “Straight from Julius Caesar,” said Josiah, spreading his hands on the other end.

  Isaac gripped the middle of the log with the peavey and together they tried to shove it toward the gap in the wall. It wobbled and began to roll. Isaac pulled the peavey loose and ran after the log as it slid neatly through the gap in the wall, rolled across the slant of Quarry Pond Road, bounced across his yard, tumbled through the open front of the sawmill, and thudded to a stop on the log carriage. “There she is, nice and easy,” shouted Isaac above the hiss of the steam and the thump of the engine. At once, he slammed down the iron dogs to hold the log in place and fiddled with the setting to adjust the width of the first cut.

  The mill was hot with steam. Isaac ran around, disappearing behind clouds of vapor, appearing again to adjust his belts and pulleys. The arms of the governor flew sideways, the flywheel turned, the shavings in the firebox blazed, the boiler sent hot steam into the pipe, and a whizzing belt turned the arbor of the great round saw.

  By midafternoon, a pile of newly cut boards lay at the foot of the slanting ways. “What you mean to do with these here boards?” shouted Isaac, chucking another one off to the side. The board slid down the ways and thunked into the pile and bounced and settled. The engine roared and steam puffed out of the boiler.

  “It depends,” said Josiah. He helped Isaac roll another log in place on the carriage. “How many board feet have we got, do you guess? I mean altogether.”

  Isaac spiked the log into place with the iron dogs and thought it over. “Six thousand,” he said at last, “maybe seven.” He pulled the lever to start the carriage moving, a belt whizzed, wheels turned, and the log moved forward.

  Josiah shook his head and yelled, “Not enough.”

  Isaac jerked out the dogs, tumbled the log a quarter turn, spiked it again, and sent it forward into the saw. Glancing keenly at Josiah as the blade stripped off another piece of bark, he bawled, “Rumor has it you mean to build some kind of sacred edifice.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My wife,” hollered Isaac. He grinned and yelled something about wifely tittle-tattle, but it was lost in the scream of the saw.

  One by one, during the rest of that long afternoon and throughout all the following day, the branches of the chestnut tree were milled into boards. The saw shrieked through rough bark and clean wood. Isaac was everywhere at once, oiling the moving parts or pumping water into the boiler, or feeding the fire, or jerking back on the feed handle to send a log forward into the teeth of the saw, or shoving the handle forward to back it up and begin a new cut. His clothes were singed and his hands and face were black with grease, but his small sharp eyes missed nothing.

  There was a crisis on Monday morning when one of the skids cracked and sagged under the weight of a heavy log. The log had to be lifted and rolled out of the way and the broken skid replaced. Isaac heaved and cursed. Josiah heaved and gasped.

  By four o’clock on Monday afternoon, nothing was left in the burial ground but a jumble of chopped twigs, heaps of sawdust, and the dismembered trunk of the tree.

  Josiah and Isaac stood side by side, looking down at the enormous carcass from which a hundred thick limbs had been cut away, and Josiah said, “I don’t suppose, Isaac, you could handle anything this big across?”

  “Got a system,” said Isaac proudly. “You get this here log into my mill, Josiah Gideon, and I swear to God I’ll cut it up.”

  It took a yoke of oxen to accomplish Josiah’s part of the bargain. Straining forward, the matched pair dragged the chained trunk of the chestnut tree through the gap in the stone wall and across the road. When the massive log was at last hauled up the skids onto the carriage of Isaac’s sawmill, cant-hooked in place and bulking so high above the teeth of the saw that it grazed the rafters, Isaac prodded it, gazed at it, and pranced around it. Milling it into boards would be the greatest work of his life.

  After shouting for two days, he had no voice left. His thinning hair was powdered with sawdust and his eyes burned red in his blackened face, but Isaac grinned at Josiah and spat on his hands.

  At home, Josiah whirled his arms and made slicing gestures to illustrate Isaac’s heroic system of milling the massive trunk of the chestnut tree. “He ran that log past the saw and cut off a small piece from one side, and then he canted it a few degrees and ran it through again. He just went on around and around, cutting slices from the edge, anyplace the saw could reach, until that prodigious log was small enough to handle.”

  Julia lifted her hands in wonder, Isabelle said, “What a miracle,” and James nodded and bowed his head.

  While these turbulent events were happening in the burying ground and across the road in the sawmill of Isaac Pole, life in th
e parsonage of Horatio and Ingeborg Biddle was in a state of crisis.

  All Sunday afternoon, Horatio watched from the kitchen window, observing the alarming scene at the bottom of the hill. Dozens of his own parishioners were at work around the fallen tree, chopping and sawing and dragging branches into piles. Squinting between the curtains, he quailed. Could that bearded man in shirtsleeves be Samuel Bigelow, chairman of the Prudential Committee? With dread in his heart, Horatio watched as the stone wall was torn apart and heavy branches rolled across the road into the sawmill of that notoriously unchurched citizen of Nashoba, Isaac Pole.

  While Horatio maintained his post at the window, Ingeborg bustled around the kitchen as if she had not a care in the world. She whacked at a slab of bacon with a cleaver and whipped up eggs in a bowl. But before long, she was huddled at the window beside her husband, peering through an opera glass. “Horatio,” she murmured, “we must go to law.”

  “What? Go to law!”

  “That man is purloining the property of this church. He should be prosecuted for criminal trespass and grand larceny. And, Horatio, just think of his first offense.” Ingeborg put down the opera glass and looked at her husband in triumph. “What could be more illegal than robbing a grave?”

  Horatio made an uncertain noise in his throat and looked down again at the scene in the burial ground. Where there had once been a massive tree, he now had an unobstructed view of the property across the Acton Turnpike, the home of Josiah Gideon.

  NOW

  Carlisle Steeples

  Tablecloths—HELP!

  Scandals and Skateboards

  I’m sick of it,” said Homer as they locked the door and trudged down the porch steps.

  “Sick of what?”

  “The past. Ancient ladies decaying in the woods and all this groping around among the bones of the dead. Why don’t they just lie there and shut up? They’ve had their day in the sun. It’s our turn now. Life’s too short! Why don’t we live a little?”