Steeplechase

by Jane Langton

  Eben’s sister Ida had come from Concord to watch her husband as he worked in his shirtsleeves with the others. She was amused to see the awkwardness of Alexander’s clever doctoring hands. The saws of the other men whizzed swiftly through board or beam, while Alexander’s bucked and stuck fast.

  Smiling, Ida laid Gussie down on the blanket in the shade while Horace romped with the other little boys, screaming joyfully in the discovery that there were other beings in the world like himself.

  Professor Eaton came nearly every day to inspire the builders with architectural examples from classical times. He brought no food for himself, but he was always well supplied with delicacies from the women’s baskets. Yesterday, brushing cake crumbs from his coat, he had taken Eben aside in order to describe in detail the Tuscan villa of Pliny the Younger. Later, he enlightened Samuel Brooks on the history of Grecian temple construction while Mr. Brooks cut to size the last long boards for the floor. And throughout the long afternoon, as David Kibbee sat patiently riving shingles with a drawknife, he was lectured on the tepidarium, calidarium, and frigidarium of the Baths of Caracalla.

  Today the food was laid out and ready on the blankets, but the work did not stop. With a count of “One, two, three,” ten men hoisted the entire framework of the south side halfway up, supported on their humped backs, and then at the shout of “Now,” they heaved it upright and braced it to the sill. Then, hooting and laughing, they walked across Sam’s new-laid floor, wiping their hands on their pants. Josiah folded up his long legs and sat down beside Isabelle.

  Only Eben Flint did not join the others. He stayed high on a ladder, augering a hole for a mortised joint.

  Isabelle watched his intent face and deft hands. Ella Viles watched, too, but she was tired of waiting. Jumping up from her pretty display of cold tongue and sponge cake, she called out sweetly, “Eben, dear, come down.”

  The other women stared at her in surprise, but Eben did not look her way. Instead, he darted a quick glance at Isabelle. His face was hot and red as he lifted a heavy beetle to drive the treenail home and pin the joint together.

  The nooning was over. The ladies scrubbed the sticky faces of their children, gathered up their pickle jars and eggshells and leftover cakes, shook out their blankets, and set off for home.

  Ella’s good things had not been tasted, but she giggled as she repacked her basket. Then she took Isabelle’s arm as if they were the greatest of chums and whispered secrets in her ear all the way home.

  Behind them in the clearing, the men went back to work. Axes were honed, window frames roughed out, holes drilled with brace and bit. Eben was pleased to discover that George Blood knew how to clamp a narrow board in a curve. “You can’t have a house of worship without you got pointy windows,” said George. “Ain’t that right, Eben?”

  Eben laughed and said it was right; in fact he had drawn pointed windows on his plan. “See there?” Then Eben and Josiah were surprised when another carpenter appeared just as the other men gathered up their tools and set off down the Acton Turnpike.

  It was old Dickie Doll from the Nashoba Home Farm. “The pulpit, Reverend Gideon,” said Dickie, taking Josiah by the front of his shirt. “I’ll make you the grandest pulpit ever was seen.”

  Is Humanity Depraved?

  Ingeborg Biddle was a woman of spirit, fearless in her pursuit of the truth. Surely in this case it would prevail, she told herself. But so far, the pursuit had been stalled—her investigation of the history of the burying ground and the actual ownership of the precious wood from the fallen tree. To whom did it actually belong? The parish records went back only as far as the year 1828, when a fire had destroyed the first edifice. That avenue was closed. And her research into the rights of the town in this case was hindered because the town clerk was a fool.

  “We got nothing here, ma’am,” he told Ingeborg. “Guess you’ll have to consult the Registry of Deeds.”

  “And where, pray, is the Registry of Deeds?”

  The town clerk gestured vaguely at the window. “It’s in Cambridge, ma’am, way to the east in Cambridge. Never been that far myself. Boston coach don’t go that way. Of course, ma’am, you could take the train at the Concord depot, but the cars don’t go that way, neither. You have to change someplace or other.” He threw up his hands. “I fear I am not acquainted with Cambridge transport.”

  Scornfully, Ingeborg retorted, “You make it sound as impossible as finding the Northwest Passage.”

  “Where’s that, ma’am? Never been there myself.”

  Ingeborg stalked out of the town hall. Surely the human mind had devised a way of crossing the barren wastes of the city of Cambridge from one side to the other. But for now, the journey must wait. There was too much to do at home.

  For one thing, there was the next meeting of her conversazione. What subject should the ladies be told to discuss? Ingeborg sat at her desk, sucking the feathery tip of her pen, and at once a topic occurred to her. Swiftly, she scribbled it down: “Is humanity depraved, or is there a potential for goodness in every human breast?”

  It didn’t take long to make up her own mind about human depravity. The next church service settled the matter.

  The weather continued fine, which was lucky for the work on Josiah Gideon’s rambunctious new church, but unlucky for everything else. Wells threatened to go dry. Crops lay parched in the field. But Josiah’s little building grew taller in the sunshine every day, like the growing tree it had once been. On the last Sunday morning in August, a small bell was swayed up in the new steeple, complete with bell rope and wheel.

  Eben had found it among the effects of a dismantled church in Watertown and bought it, he said, for a song. Now he knelt in the open bell chamber and fed the end of the rope through the opening in the ceiling. Josiah reached up from below and pulled it down.

  The bell jangled, competing with another loud reverberation from farther up the road. The bell in the steeple of the First Parish was ringing to summon the congregation. That bell was bigger than this one, and its peal was louder and more musical, sounding far over the town and the surrounding fields, bonging dimly even in the robing room of the Reverend Horatio Biddle.

  But as Horatio adjusted the folds of his ministerial gown, he stiffened at the sound of an unfamiliar clanging from the direction of the Acton Turnpike, a rude noise that interfered with the noble chiming of the bell in his own steeple. At once he guessed that Josiah Gideon was ringing a mutinous bell in the crude little shack he called a church. Listening to the crisscrossing clash of the two bells, Horatio told himself that he had nothing to fear. The God-fearing citizens of Nashoba would surely know which bell was calling them to blessedness and which to godlessness and anarchy. Timidly, he peered at his congregation through a peephole in the door.

  Something was terribly wrong. Where were they? Horatio could see only a scattering of elderly women and the sad relics who walked to church every Sunday from the Home Farm. His wife was there, of course, sitting firmly upright in the Biddle family pew. She was staring straight ahead, contemplating the nature of human depravity.

  Well, at least his old friend Professor Jedediah Eaton was walking into his pew, just as usual. Like Horatio, Jedediah was an ardent Latin scholar. The two of them enjoyed exchanging jocular Latin tags—Caesar’s famous exclamation when he saw his friend Brutus among the assassins, Et tu, Brute? or some cutting remark by Cicero. Oh, yes, thank God for Jedediah, but where was everyone else?

  Horatio pulled out his watch and held it to his ear. Had it stopped? No, but surely it was running too fast. Perhaps the actual time was only half-past ten? Usually by quarter to eleven, he could hear the shuffle of feet, the subdued murmur of voices, and the creaking of pews as his parishioners sat down. In the winter, there was also the cheerful noise of wood being chucked into the stoves and the pinging of the stovepipe as it expanded with hot air, but this morning the stoves were cold and the stovepipe silent.

  In fact, there was no noise at all from the sanctu
ary. Horatio jumped back as the door opened and his wife slipped in, her tight smile vanishing as she closed the door behind her.

  Ingeborg’s face was white, her hands were shaking, and her whisper was hoarse and desperate. “It’s that wicked traitor Gideon. He’s kidnapped the congregation.”

  The Doom of Leadership

  The Reverend Horatio Biddle sat alone in his study, the door closed against his wife and the servant girl. Once again, he was looking for a certain half-remembered passage, but in what book had he seen it? His desk was heaped with weighty volumes.

  Turning the pages of one after another, he found it at last in Charles Cuthbert Hall’s great spiritual outpouring, Ministerial Power.

  He who has borne the burden and heat of the day learns in bitterness of soul the doom of leadership. To stand in the midst of the ecclesia, with the ordinary vicissitudes of man’s life transpiring upon one’s self from day to day, its variations of mental activity, its episodes of spiritual depression, its yoke of earthly care, its fettering relationships, and yet to behold a thousand souls assembled and waiting for inspiration … that is the doom of leadership.

  Oh, yes, that was Horatio Biddle’s present case—“bitterness of soul, the doom of leadership.” Horatio put his palms down flat on the open book and lowered his forehead until it rested on his hands, for his condition was even worse.

  If only there had been in his own congregation that morning “a thousand souls assembled and waiting for inspiration.” Alas, the only souls waiting for inspiration from Horatio Biddle had been the flotsam from the Home Farm, the Widow Poole, the Misses Rochester, deaf old Dora Mills, the sexton, and, of course, dear Jedediah Eaton. Horatio’s wife, Ingeborg, didn’t count. Even the choirmistress had played hooky, along with every one of her screeching sopranos, tenors, altos, and basses.

  How dared they abandon him? As their pastor, did he not have a lofty claim on all those people? Were not their souls his to entreat, to teach, to ennoble? And did not they, in their turn, have a loving stake in the church of their fathers, and in the pews of which they were proprietors? Even in the stabling of their horses?

  That thieving scoundrel Josiah Gideon had alienated the affections of Horatio’s favorite parishioners, the leading men and women of the congregation. Could it possibly be true that he had captured Frank and Martha Wheeler? George Blood and his wife, Pearl? Stalwart Samuel Brooks? Sweet Abigail Whittey? And what about Horatio’s old friend District Court Judge Bigelow and his entire family? “Oh, no, dear God,” prayed Horatio, “let it not be true that Sam Bigelow has followed the beckoning finger of Josiah Gideon.”

  Then Horatio grasped at a straw. What if Josiah had no legal right to ensnare a congregation? He called himself “the Reverend,” but what if he had never been ordained?

  Once again, Horatio riffled the pages of his books until he found an excellent passage in a splendid work by Dr. Ross: “The local churches are the only organs of the Spirit provided for this work of ordination. They have consequently the highest reasons for keeping out of the ministry all whom the Lord has not qualified and called.”

  Keeping that fiend in human flesh, Josiah Gideon, out of the ministry, that was what it meant. Horatio stood up eagerly and snatched off the shelf The Handbook of the Congregational Ministry in Massachusetts. It was a useful compendium. Horatio often ran his finger down the lists of pastors to find the names of colleagues here and there. Now his finger raced down a page and stopped abruptly at Josiah Gideon’s name. Josiah had been ordained in the year 1840 in the First Parish Church of Hemingford, Connecticut. The man was actually a clergyman. He did indeed have the right to an ecclesiastical title.

  Disappointed, Horatio threw the book on the floor. He couldn’t bear it. He rose from his chair and paced around the room. In his despair, he would have torn his garments, had they not been woven of stout Boston broadcloth. Instead, he laid his suffering head against the plaster forehead of Marcus Tullius Cicero and wept.

  How much further, Catiline, will you carry your abuse

  of our forbearance? What bounds will you set

  to this display of your uncontrolled audacity?

  Alas! What degenerate days are these!

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero, “First Oration Against Catiline”

  Another Bitter Pill

  Even worse than the humiliating church service on Sunday was Ingeborg’s conversazione the following Thursday.

  Wilhelmina Wilder sent a note by her kitchen maid. “Dearest Ingeborg, I am so sorry, but I am indisposed this afternoon, having taken to my bed.”

  A creamy envelope from Eugenia Hunt was delivered by her husband’s hired man. He arrived at the parsonage door just as Abigail Whittey came up the steps of the front porch. Ingeborg took the envelope, Abigail opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again, and Ingeborg’s maid, Millie, scurried past with the cake stand.

  “My dear Ingeborg,” said Eugenia’s note, “I am désolée that I cannot attend this afternoon, being afflicted with one of my frightful migraines. I shall spend the afternoon in bed in stygian darkness, having drawn the shades.”

  “Well, it’s too bad,” said Ingeborg to Abigail, rallying her forces, “it appears that our circle will be a little diminished this afternoon. Minnie and Eugenia have both been taken ill.”

  “Eugenia?” said Abigail in surprise. “But I saw Eugenia’s buggy careering down Quarry Pond Road only a moment ago.” Abigail realized at once that she should not have said this, but she went on bravely to deliver her own regrets. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Ingeborg, but I’ve only stopped by to tell you that a very important engagement has come up, which will prevent my attendance this afternoon.”

  Abigail had rehearsed this speech, mumbling it over and over on the way to the parsonage, but it did not have the hoped-for effect. Ingeborg’s company face changed. She glowered at Abigail, who then whipped out something from under her shawl, thrust it at Ingeborg, and fled, explaining as she scuttled out the door, “I just wondered if you’d seen this.”

  “Seen what?” Ingeborg stared at the Boston Evening Transcript. But at once, two more of her ladies fluttered in and had to be welcomed. With her heart clenched in foreboding, Ingeborg laid the Transcript on the hall table and led them into the sitting room, where the topic of the afternoon had been changed from the question about depraved humanity—it was depraved; it most certainly was—to a safer subject: “Poetry sublime.”

  A circle of three was too small to be called a conversazione, especially since Eugenia and Abigail, the cleverest of Ingeborg’s friends, were missing. Even frivolous young Ella Viles had not come, although she had failed to send an excuse.

  “Cynthia,” said Ingeborg, pulling herself together, “I hope you will favor us with your opinion?”

  Cynthia Smith jerked upright in her chair and tried to remember the first line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” She had committed the entire poem to memory, but now under the gelid eye of Ingeborg Biddle, she could remember only one line. “O Attic shape!” gibbered Cynthia, then faltered to a stop. “I’ll just read it from the book,” she whispered timidly.

  Pity Ingeborg Biddle! She was not a stupid woman, and her efforts to raise the intellectual aspirations of the women of Nashoba were surely worthy of praise. Heroically, she explained to silly Cynthia Smith and foolish Dora Mills that the discussion this afternoon was supposed to be concerned with the meaning and value of the poetic instinct, not merely a recitation of favorite verses.

  Eugenia and Abigail would have been up to it, but not Cynthia and Dora. They were struck dumb. In desperation, Cynthia reared up from her chair, seized the cake stand, and rushed it across the room to Dora, who stopped up her mouth with macaroons, and then to Ingeborg, who waved it away.

  The afternoon was a failure. Not until her guests had made their farewells could Ingeborg plump herself down on the sofa with the newspaper and a piece of cake.

  Only then did she understand the pitiful excuses of Minnie, Eugenia, an
d Abigail. The subject of the afternoon’s discussion had been poetry, and this, too, was a poem, but it was a bitter blow.

  On the first page of the Transcript, the lofty view of Nashoba’s burial ground appeared once again, with the white scar of the chestnut stump showing clearly among the tombstones. But this time, there was also a poem by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was a parody of Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” but at the same time it was a villainous attack on a nameless person who could be none other than the Reverend Horatio Biddle.

  Under the spreading chestnut tree

  A vicious killer stands;

  He looks up at the branches free,

  A great ax in his hands.

  The tree flings wide its glorious crown,

  Its leaves the winds caress.

  Two hundred years the burial ground

  By this tree has been blessed.

  But now the madman lifts his ax

  To play the devil’s part.

  The keen blade strikes and strikes again

  To burst that mighty heart.

  Great nature weeps, Nashoba’s jewel

  Lies shattered on the ground,

  Broken, the hearts of young and old

  In all the country round.

  Let good men curse the vandal vile

  Who killed our ancient tree.

  May this foul deed afflict his soul

  Till he shall cease to be.

  Ingeborg couldn’t believe her eyes. Anguished, she read the dreadful poem again. The “vandal vile” had been her own distinguished husband. Everyone in Nashoba knew it, and soon everyone in the great cities of Cambridge and Boston would know it, too. The name of the Reverend Horatio Biddle would be a byword and a hissing throughout the land—or at least throughout the Massachusetts counties of Suffolk and Middlesex, which were all of the land that mattered.

  Of course it was the fault of Josiah Gideon. And yet—how strange!—Ingeborg felt a curious hunger rising in her heart. She longed to run down the hill and across the road, knock on the Gideons’ door, and fling herself into the open arms of Mrs. Julia Gideon.