Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

“Overarching philosophical turns of mind?”

  “Well, I suppose so. Anyway, they’re just so typical and revealing. Here they are, these two congregations of good people, equally the spiritual descendants of the Puritan fathers, both of them publicly displaying their inmost churchly hearts and souls, warts and all. Listen to this, Homer. Guess which one this is.”

  Mary sifted through the photocopies and read from a pink list. “‘Learning God’s good news. Prayer concerns and joys. Please remember these people in your daily prayers. Make music with the Lord. Bible Sunday. Moms’ Book Group. The Knitting Ministry.’” Mary paused and held up a picture. “Look at all these happy people with their casseroles and paper napkins and balloons. It’s a family church supper. Isn’t it nice? Okay, which church is it?”

  Homer glanced at the photograph. “They look to me like good, devoted, hardworking Congregationalists. Prayer and God and the Bible and family values front and center, right?”

  “Are you sure? All right, here’s the other one.” Mary plucked out another list. “‘Globalization study. Urban ministry. Interfaith couples. A hearty welcome to lesbians and gays. A just economic community. Multicultural leadership training. Singing as an act of compassion. Wellness Institute. Forum on the arts. Spirituality and justice. Intergenerational potluck and circle dancing.’”

  “Well, that’s easy.” Homer laughed. “Speaking as a compassionate old multicultural circle dancer myself, I’d say they’re a bunch of heretical Unitarians.”

  “Of course they are. But isn’t it strange—they’re both such a long way from their original beliefs, whether it was the single nature of God or the doctrine of original sin. So tell me, which great spiritual leader is whirling faster in his grave, Jonathan Edwards or Ezra Ripley?”

  “There must be a high rpm in both cases.” Homer edged the car down the switchbacks of their steep driveway. “And I can’t help wondering if we’re really any better off with our globalization studies and knitting ministries. I mean, we may be a little nearer to the raw truth, but haven’t we lost something at the same time? You know, in majestic old philosophical dignity? Jonathan Edwards was a great man.”

  “But surely, Homer, it’s better to be right, even if ruefully, rather than majestically wrong?”

  “Well, maybe so. “Homer turned off the engine and sat gazing for a moment at the blue expanse of Fairhaven Bay. “He liked spiders.”

  “Spiders? Who liked spiders?”

  “Jonathan Edwards. He knew an awful lot about spiders.” Sighing, Homer heaved himself out of the car. “His doctrine of original sin may be gone for good, but his spiders are true forever.”

  1868

  “There Shall Be No Other Steeple in the Town of Nashoba!”

  What degenerate days are these!

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero,

  “First Oration Against

  Catiline”

  No Cathedral

  It was clear to Josiah that his rebellious new church would be no cathedral. When every board cut from the chestnut logs in the sawmill of Isaac Pole had been stacked in Josiah’s backyard, he took a pencil from behind his ear and calculated the total number of board feet. With Isabelle’s hens stepping around his feet, he scribbled figures on one of the clean white boards. “Fair-size chicken house, that’s all we’ll get,” he told Eben sadly.

  “There are plenty more small trees in the woods,” said Eben. “We can cut as many as we need, only they ought to be felled right away so they’ll be dry at the same time.”

  Eben’s supervision of the church construction in Waltham was finished at last, but now he was charged with erecting a large house for a wealthy citizen of Concord. It was to be an elegant mansion in the Italianate style, complete with veranda and servants hall. Only in his free time could Eben draft plans for Josiah Gideon. Josiah’s church was far simpler, but even so, it had a steeple. Eben had sketched an open bell chamber with a pyramidal roof over the front door.

  One evening, eager to take a look at Eben’s plan, Josiah appeared at his door.

  As usual, the house was swarming with miscellaneous activity. Eben’s brother-in-law, Dr. Clock, was instructing Eben’s younger brother, Josh, in the properties of a right-angled triangle, but he jumped up and went to the door in answer to Josiah’s knock. Eben’s sister Ida hurried away with her howling baby, his sister Sallie ran out of the kitchen to see who was at the door, and Eben’s mother, Eudocia, called down a welcome from upstairs, where she was putting Alice to bed. Only Eben’s nephew, Horace, was quiet, because he was sound asleep.

  “In here, sir, if you please,” said Eben. He led Josiah into the dining room and unrolled his plans on the table. Holding down the corners with two teapots, a pitcher, and a pickle dish, Eben grinned at Josiah and quoted the words of Mrs. Gideon: “There shall be no other steeple in the town of Nashoba.”

  Josiah spread his hands on the table and leaned over Eben’s plans and elevations. His whiskers brushed the paper, his quick eyes looked at every detail, and his mind instantly grasped the whole. “Good,” he cried, thumping his fist on the table, bouncing the teapots.

  Upstairs, Horace woke up. The shout from downstairs was a call to action. He scrambled to his feet on the bed and began jumping up and down. Bouncing on the bed was forbidden, but he couldn’t stop, because the springs were making such a fine whangety-whang and the bed was shaking so violently and banging against the wall.

  “No, no, Horace,” cried his grandmother, running in from the next room.

  Whimpering, Horace crawled back under the covers. Eudocia picked up his storybook, sat down on the edge of his bed, and read him “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”:

  The youngest Billy Goat crossed the bridge.

  “Trip, trap! Trip, trap!” went the bridge.

  Beneath the bridge lived a terrible troll.

  It roared at the Billy Goat,

  “I’m coming to gobble you up!”

  Horace soon fell asleep, but his fingers were so tightly wound in his grandmother’s apron that she had to uncurl them one by one.

  “Two months it will take for those boards to dry,” said Josiah as Eben rolled up his plans. “But the foundation needs to be dug. We can get busy on the hole right away.”

  Pillars of the Church

  Josiah’s woodlot on the Acton Turnpike was only a half mile from his house. He had chosen a clearing not far from the road, a little glade empty of trees. On the following Saturday afternoon, he walked down the road, pushing a wheelbarrow laden with shovels, spades, and a keg of ground limestone as white as new-fallen snow.

  Eben arrived a moment later with a cartload of short boards, tools, a bucket of nails, and a couple of sawbucks. At once, he began slapping up a crude toolshed, while Josiah used his foot rule to lay out a rough shape in the grass. When he had sifted through his fingers a trail of white limestone all the way around, he gave an excited shout: “Eben, come and look.”

  Eben put down his saw and stood beside Josiah to admire the white rectangle in the weedy grass. It was the ragged outline of a single large room. The white square at the far end was the woodshed. No longer was the new church a heroic fancy. There it lay on the ground. The straggling white line proclaimed the existence of a second parish church in the town of Nashoba. Simultaneously, they looked up, as if they could see the entire building, tall and complete, steeple and all.

  “Hark,” said Eben, “methinks I hear the bell.” But then he picked up a heavy fork and handed it to Josiah. “Four feet down, Josiah. The hole’s got to be four feet deep so the frost won’t heave the whole thing out of plumb.”

  “Right you are,” said Josiah, and he flung himself at the task. Setting his boot on the fork, he tried to thrust it deep into the earth. But instead of sinking to the top of the tines, it struck a rock. Feverishly Josiah levered up the rock and sank the fork in again. This time, it was caught in a choking tangle of roots.

  “I’ll go kitty-corner,” said Eben, and he carried his fork and spade t
o the far end. It was clear that every chunk of earth in the clearing would have to be wrenched up and pried out.

  They worked at the formidable task all afternoon. Occasionally, a passerby glanced at them curiously. One of them turned off the road to pass the time of day. “What you fellas up to? What you got down there, a treasure chest?”

  Eben looked at Josiah and said nothing. Josiah went on digging, but with a dash of bravado he said, “It’s a church. We’re building a new church.”

  “A church!” The man was dumbfounded. “But this here’s Nashoba, ain’t it? You folks already got a church.” He looked at them accusingly. “This here ain’t gonna be no goddamned popish chapel?” When Josiah glowered, the stranger backed away. “Sorry, gentlemen, didn’t mean no offense.”

  So the news went by zigs and zags from one astonished ear to another, until it reached the parsonage of the Reverend Horatio Biddle. Horatio was struck dumb. Recovering, he jumped up from his chair, clapped on his hat, threw open the front door, crossed the green at a gallop, and raced along the Acton Turnpike.

  By the time he pulled up, gasping, at the clearing in Josiah Gideon’s woodlot, six men in shirtsleeves were prying up the dirt, digging down deep, slowly cutting out the corners of a rectangle in the ground. Horatio backed away in dismay. The rumor was true. They were carving out the foundation of a new church, a rival church, an outrageous church that had no right to exist.

  To Horatio’s mortification, he saw that four of the men digging the foundation were not madmen like Josiah Gideon nor out-of-towners like young Eben Flint. Horatio knew them all by name. They were Artemus Grout, Joseph Hunt, Theodore Wilbur, and Samuel Brooks. They were members of his own congregation. No, not merely members—they were pillars. All four of them were stalwart pillars of Nashoba’s First Parish Church.

  Jolly Old Dickens

  The sweet airs of spring were gone. It was midsummer, hot and close. The rain held off. Kitchen gardens and orchards suffered, but the corn grew apace. It was fine weather for haying and for drying fresh-cut wood.

  “Another week,” said Josiah, tapping one of the planks piled up behind his house. “By the time I’m back from touring all the almshouses in the southern part of the county, these boards will be fit and ready to go.”

  The clearing in Josiah’s woodlot was no longer a clearing. Cartloads of topsoil had been carried away to improve an impoverished acre here and there, but heaps of sandy subsoil still remained beside the cellar hole. All the rocks had been hurled to one side after they were pulled out of the ground, then picked up again to line the foundation. Leftover stones cluttered the edge of the woods, along with a boulder dragged out of the hole by the team of oxen belonging to Joseph Hunt.

  Behind the boulder stood the toolshed, finished by Eben in a couple of evenings. “I could have slapped it up quicker,” he told Josiah, “if I hadn’t been slapping mosquitoes at the same time.”

  The window glass had come. Eben’s order had been filled far too early, and the three heavy crates lay unopened behind the toolshed. Part of Josiah’s pretty woodlot was now a wasteland of stumps, the wreckage of trees felled to eke out the supply of lumber. A straw bonnet hung forgotten in a brush pile, a lost doll leaned against a stump, and a rubber ball that had streaked away from Eben’s nephew, Horace, lay among last year’s fallen leaves.

  When Josiah came back from inspecting the shoddy appointments of the almshouses at the extreme southern border of Middlesex County, he declared with an exultant shout that the stacked wood was dry. At last, the construction of his defiant little church could begin in earnest.

  Not much could be expected in the month of August from the farmers among Josiah’s supporters. But other men had time to spare. Alexander Clock’s patients were always healthier in summer than in winter, and he often accompanied Eben to lend a hand. All the district schoolhouses in Nashoba and Concord were locked up and empty, except for a few droning flies. Pupils and schoolmasters were free to help out. Even Professor Eaton no longer traveled by rail to Cambridge to give instruction in the Eclogues of Virgil, and the court cases in which lawyer Jarvis Brown was concerned had been reduced to one (about which he did not speak).

  But the construction of even so small a building called for many hours of Eben’s time. As its designer, he had to furnish measurements for sills, corner posts, cross beams, and rafters. And no one else but Eben could direct the layout of the timbers on the ground and mark precisely for the amateur carpenters the places to cut the mortises and tenons that were to hold the framework together.

  Sometimes Eben was so beset that he wanted to harden his heart and take off for some other corner of the world. But soon his resolve would be restored by the ardent look on Josiah’s face as he hewed a beam with a broad ax or pressed his knee on a board to send his excited saw wheezing back and forth.

  And there was also a strange exhilaration in visiting Josiah’s house whenever new boards had to be carted to the woodlot from the stacks in his backyard.

  They were comfortable together now—Eben and Isabelle, Eben and James. One day in early August, Eben found Isabelle reading aloud to James a novel by Charles Dickens. “Oh, good,” said Eben, “jolly old Charles Dickens,” and he sat down to listen to the story with James.

  But the passage she had been reading was not very jolly. “It’s such a sad story,” said Isabelle, apologizing to Eben. “Perhaps you’d rather not hear the last page.”

  “What, A Tale of Two Cities?” said Eben. “But it’s a very fine book.”

  So Isabelle looked down and went on reading to James the sublime last thought of Sydney Carton as he stood on the scaffold. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

  Swashbuckling Insurrection

  On any sunny day in August, ten or fifteen defectors from Horatio Biddle’s congregation would be present in the clearing to help with the raising of Josiah’s church. Only a few were skilled at rough carpentry, but all of them followed directions and worked together in a giddy spirit of high-principled and swashbuckling insurrection. It was men’s work, but the women arrived at lunchtime with lunch pails and picnic baskets. Every midday was like a festive Sunday nooning.

  Julia Gideon came every other day, taking turns with Isabelle. Julia’s basket was always full of good things, but she had no heart for the high spirits and laughter of the others. Everything Julia feared seemed about to happen. She had heard a terrible rumor: Ingeborg Biddle had gone to law.

  But look at Josiah! Just look at him! The wolves were gathering, and yet he was flinging himself into the work, rejoicing in the lifting of every timber, careless of who might legally own that particular measured board, whether church, town, commonwealth, or God on high. Every morning, he bounded out of bed at cockcrow, kissed her, and went rollicking off down the Acton Turnpike with a slab of bread in his hand.

  Oh, yes, it was a great work; Julia knew that. The whole undertaking was a kind of metaphorical revolution: The murdered tree would live again as a house of God. Her husband’s obsession was dangerous, his excitement too wild and uncontrolled, and yet Julia was helpless to interfere. She could do nothing but play a woman’s part.

  It was high summer in Nashoba. Every day, Julia stripped the kitchen garden. The pole beans were coming on thick and fast, and so were the beets, the cucumbers for pickling, the summer squash, the watermelons. The potatoes were invisible underground, but Julia knew they were there, and later on she would fork them up in clusters, the Early Rose, the Green Mountain. The squash vines were yielding a bumper crop, and tiny ears were showing on the cornstalks. The blueberries had gone by in the shady woods, but the blackberries were ripe. Isabelle and Julia waded into sunny thickets and came home with scratched hands and brimming pails.

  And every day in the sweltering heat of August, Julia fired up the stove for the baking of velvet cakes and gingerbread. She brewed tea in jars, wrapped them in newspapers, and cooled t
hem in the cellar before packing them into the basket.

  For Isabelle, these journeys were excursions, respites from her care of James. But whenever she took the loaded basket from her mother, the two women exchanged a sober glance. Isabelle’s meant, Be good to him; Julia’s, Of course I will.

  Returning home, Isabelle brought stories to James about the events of the day. “Mr. Pease tipped over on the ladder this morning. He wasn’t hurt, but he said things we ladies weren’t supposed to hear.” James made a chuckling noise in his throat.

  “Ella Viles caught her skirt on a nail and it fell right off. There she stood in her petticoat! How she blushed! James, do you remember Ella Viles?” James shook his head. But when Isabelle described Ella’s curls and ribbon bows, he nodded, remembering.

  But sometimes Isabelle’s encounters with Ella Viles were not to be described at home. One day, Ella unpacked her basket and, casting a significant glance at Isabelle, said, “It’s for Eben.”

  “Oh?” Isabelle still found it hard to believe that Eben could be so foolish. “Did he like your photograph?”

  Ella giggled. “Oh yes.” Leaning closer to Isabelle, she whispered, “He keeps it next to his heart.”

  “He does?” Then Isabelle couldn’t help asking, “How do you know?”

  Ella rolled her eyes and simpered, “Oh, I know.”

  Horrid visions appeared to Isabelle, and she said no more.

  On the third Saturday in August, the sun shone as always through the remaining trees in the woodlot, dappling the clearing with round spots of light. And once again at noon, the rugs and tablecloths were spread out all over the rough grass. Abby Whittey leaned against a stump, shelling hard-boiled eggs. On a checkered shawl, Eloise Stearns opened a napkin and handed warm rolls to the little girls curled up beside her, their skirts flounced out like china dolls.