Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (20 page)

"No, Lizzie. You listen for once. They're already taking away your house. They're taking away the entire island. But they can't take away Mrs. Cobb's house, too, because it isn't theirs to take, It's mine.

"Turner, you never can look at things straight. Look at me. No, look at me. Look at my skin. It's black, Turner. No one in Phippsburg is going to let someone with skin as black as mine live with them. They're not."

"It won't make a bit of difference," he said.

"It won't make a bit of difference," he said, waving to her on the shore.

"It won't make a bit of difference," he said to Mr. Eason, rowing across in the dory.

It won't make a bit of difference, he said to himself on the road back to Phippsburg.

But each time he said it, he believed it less.

By the time he reached Parker Head, the sun had come out dully and shone on the brassy undersides of the high clouds. They looked heavy enough to fall into the sea, maybe to fall on top of Phippsburg itself, crushing the steeple of First Congregational and all the fine houses on Quality Ridge.

It won't make a bit of difference, he said to himself as he climbed the porch steps. Not one bit, he said as he opened the door.

But now he hardly believed it at all.

"Turner, is that you?" called his father.

Turner took off his boots and left them outside. Then he went to his father's study, where Mr. Stonecrop was filling the room. Turner's mother sat in a chair by the window, her hands discreetly clasped in her lap; Reverend Buckminster sat behind his desk, his sermon notes discreetly covering Darwin.

Turner wondered what Darwin would think of being covered by sermon notes.

He began to burn again.

Reverend Buckminster glanced at the grandfather clock. "Mr. Stonecrop and I were discussing what might be done with Mrs. Cobb's house. He has brought the keys over."

Turner saw that they were still in his hand.

"I believe we have come up with a fine, equitable solution to the situation," said Mr. Stonecrop. "The house will be sold for the benefit of the town. And since Mrs. Cobb obviously intended you to benefit from such a sale, young Buckminster, we shall put aside a percentage of the proceeds to be held in trust for your ministerial education." Mr. Stonecrop pocketed one of the keys.

"My ministerial education?"Turner looked at his mother.

"So that you might follow your father, as he followed his," said Mr. Stonecrop.

"To be a minister?"

"That is what a ministerial education would be for, certainly."

Turner felt the Territories moving farther west. He looked at the pile of sermon notes and felt the bulk of a ministerial education covering him. He took a breath.

He had almost touched a whale.

"Well, Reverend Buckminster," said Mr. Stonecrop, "I think everything is most satisfactorily concluded."

"No, sir," said Turner.

Mr. Stonecrop looked hard at him.

"No, sir," said Turner again.

Mr. Stonecrop looked harder still. "It is not the place of a young boy to question," he said slowly.

"I wonder," said Turner's mother, "if Turner hasn't already made plans for the house."

"Plans for the house?" Mr. Stonecrop now looked more than irritated. "What plans could you have made so quickly?"

"I've decided to give the house to Lizzie Griffin and the Easons."

"Jake Eason?" Mr. Stonecrop stood.

"Yes, sir."

"Jake Eason from Malaga Island?"

"Yes, sir."

"And Lizzie Griffin, that Jonah's daughter?"

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Stonecrop leaned over the desk. "You realize, Buckminster, that she is as black as the ace of spades!"

Reverend Buckminster sat silent.

Mr. Stonecrop took two steps across the room, two steps back. He glared at Reverend Buckminster and then at Mrs. Buckminster. He glared especially long at Turner, who saw the word
homicide
spring into his mind. Turner wondered if the tendency toward homicide might be one of the multiform individual differences or slight variations that were introduced into a species by moments just such as this.

"By God, Buckminster, this is the result of your lackadaisical handling of your son—this after all the warnings we have given. Do you see how those people have brought him to this? But I won't have it. I won't have a Negro living in Phippsburg. What do you think we've been about these past months? Do you imagine there would be a single soul come up from Boston to summer in a town populated by them? A single soul? We brought you—all three of you—here to be a part of the new Phippsburg, but I can see now that you have no such interest."

"Mr. Stonecrop," said Reverend Buckminster, "nothing is decided yet."

"Lizzie doesn't have a house," said Turner. "And the Easons might not have one soon. What are they supposed to do? Float down the New Meadows and hope to tie up somewhere?"

"Let them head wherever they see fit to go. It's none of my affair, and nor, by the way, is it yours."

"I'm giving the house to Lizzie," said Turner.

He looked at Reverend Buckminster, expecting the disappointment he knew his father must feel. But his father's eyes were upon him, and they were not disappointed.

"Buckminster, this is your son. Have you nothing to say as the minister of this town, if not as his father?"

Then Turner saw his father stand like Aeneas with his two spears, pausing beside burning Troy and putting it all behind him, his face to an open world.

"What would you have me say, Mr. Stonecrop? That my own boy shouldn't find shelter for someone in need? That my own boy shouldn't care for the outcast?" Now he leaned across the desk. "By God, that my own boy shouldn't stand up—as his father should have stood up—against the money of the town when it set about to destroy a community that never harmed it, merely for the sake of tourists from Boston? Is that what you'd have me say to him?"

Mr. Stonecrop went to the door of the study. "Ethics are a fine thing to have, Reverend. You can take them out and wave them around like a flag whenever you feel a qualm of conscience. And all that flag-waving will make you feel just like you're up there in heaven with God Himself. But God has seen fit to set me to live in the here and now, Reverend. And I do what it takes to live in the here and now."

Turner's father reached over his desk and pulled away the sermon notes. "Have you read this book, Mr. Stonecrop?
The Descent of Man,
by Charles Darwin. Turner and I have been reading in it quite a bit together. We've already finished
The Origin of Species.
I suspect you might not recognize it."

"Are you, a minister of the gospel, taunting me with godlessness, even while teaching it to your son?"

"Darwin writes that man is liable to slight variations, which are induced by general and complex laws."

"The deacons will hear of this."

"I have no doubt they will. But consider this, Mr. Stonecrop, my slight variation, induced by general and complex laws: I will not stand with you at the destruction of Malaga Island. I will instead stand with my son."

Mr. Stonecrop narrowed his eyes. Turner had never seen anyone do it in quite this way before, and he thought once again of homicide. "There will never be a Negro living in the town of Phippsburg," Mr. Stonecrop said quietly. "I will see to it myself." He flung the keys onto the floor.

***

That night, in the quiet of his dark room, while a deep and clear cold frosted the starlight over the town, those words came back to Turner: "I will see to it myself." He sat up in his bed and looked out the window. He stayed that way for a long time, as if to guard the world.

He guarded the world most nights through that next week. When he was more angry than afraid, he recited Virgil: "Of arms and the man I sing!"

He was more than halfway through the
Aeneid
now, and getting faster at his hundred lines. After lunch and a chapter of Darwin—he did not mind the summaries—his father told him he was free to find Lizzie Bright. She waited for him by the pines above the granite ledges—it was too cold to wait down by the shore—and together they explored the New Meadows coast, watching everything hunker down for the winter: the chipmunks and the squirrels with their last cheekfuls of larder, the deer toward dusk with their heavier coats, the rabbits whitening except for the tips of their ears.

Every day Turner asked Lizzie to come live in Mrs. Cobb's house.

Lizzie would smile at him and shake her head. "Turner, they'll never let us," she said.

"It won't make a bit of difference," he said.

And she would smile again and tell him he didn't look at things straight on, and then she would find some mouse tracks in the snow and they would follow them until they disappeared beneath a small bank.

Mr. Stonecrop wasn't at church the next Sunday. At least, not at First Congregational. There were, in fact, quite a few souls of the Phippsburg faithful who did not come on that Lord's Day. Even Lillian Woodward failed to show for her prelude, and Turner found himself taking her place at the organ bench and looking over a mighty small congregation. The Newtons were there, with all the little Newtons. Deacon Hurd was there, and Willis, but none of the other Hurds. Reverend Buckminster waited for a few minutes past the hour to give the opening prayer, but the congregational singing that followed was thin, and Turner had to tone the volume down about as low as it could go if he was to hear any voices at all.

From the organ bench, Turner listened to his father preach as though he were addressing a house packed full of the saints, but he could also see his mother fidgeting in the front pew, opening and closing her Bible, taking out her handkerchief and twisting it in her hands until she realized what she was doing and put it away. Then she'd take it out a minute or two later and start all over again.

Turner imagined the houses up on Quality Ridge falling to the trumpets of the Hebrew host.

It didn't take too long to shake hands with folks after the service. Most of the congregation didn't meet the eyes of their tightlipped minister. When Deacon Hurd went past, he nodded curtly. "There's a deacons' meeting this Wednesday night," he said.

"I'll be there."

"No, Reverend. For meetings of this sort, the bylaws tell me I have to inform the minister, not invite him."

Turner wondered if his mother might swing out her right arm and go for Deacon Hurd's nose, then his eye. That would be worth seeing. And he was sorely disappointed when Mrs. Buckminster simply shook the deacon's hand as he went on past.

But all thoughts of a bloodied deacon disappeared a few seconds later when Willis whispered to him, "Tonight. It's tonight," and then went on by, holding Turner's eyes with his own for as long as he could. Turner felt himself go cold in the center, a cold so deep it made him nauseated. He felt as though he were standing on a cliff over the sea.

Tonight, something would happen to Mrs. Cobb's house.

He did not tell his parents what Willis had said. They sat in silence through dinner, but it was not the same as the silence that had been there before. His parents' eyes often met, and sometimes they reached out to touch each other's hands. They ate quietly, glad to be together.

So Turner let them be glad together.

It turned out to be the coldest night Turner had spent in Maine so far, the kind of night that let him know that fall was pretty much wrung out, and that deep winter was on its way to freeze the salt water out into the New Meadows. Turner lay in his room, shivering even though he was still dressed, listening to the familiar sounds of his parents moving around in the room below him, coming up the stairs, closing the door. Their quiet talk. He listened to the mantel clock chime the quarter hours and to the house tightening itself against the cold.

He figured he would leave the house just at midnight, but he got so fidgety that he couldn't wait that long, and around eleven-thirty he crept downstairs. Across the hall. Into his father's study for the keys to Mrs. Cobb's house. Back to the front hall. Slowly turned the doorknob and opened the door. The air was so cold it rasped in his throat, as cold as a hardened heart. He sat on the top porch step, put his shoes on, shivered, and then set off down Parker Head for Mrs. Cobb's house. "
Arma virumque cano,
" he said to himself, and wished he had Aeneas's arms.

He let himself in through Mrs. Cobb's back door—the door Lizzie had always used. Inside, only a faint starlight shone through the windows. He groped his way through the kitchen, down the hall, and to the front door, afraid to light a lamp, afraid to make a sound. Around him the house seemed huge, with rooms above and beneath him that he had never entered. Who knew what could be there? Who knew if Mrs. Cobb herself could be there, still trying somehow to get her last words right?

Turner shivered, and not only with the cold—though the Lord knew it was cold enough to shiver. His breath frosted the window in the door, and he stepped back, wondering if someone outside might be able to see him—or his breath. But outside, Parker Head was as quiet as the hall inside Mrs. Cobb's house.

Turner went into all the rooms on the first floor, his hands held out in front of him to feel anything he couldn't see. And when he got to each of the windows, he held his breath and peered out, looking for whatever it was Willis had meant was coming—though he wasn't sure what he would do when it came. He figured if someone snuck up to the house and looked in on him, he could pretty well startle whoever it was into a faint. But what would happen when he woke up and found it was only Turner inside?

He fumbled his way back to the parlor and reached around for the organ stool. He sat down on it, careful to keep his feet from the pedals. He let his fingers slowly stroke the silent keys, tapping out "I Have Some Friends Before Me Gone." He didn't need any light to find the notes, and the feeling of something so familiar on his fingertips kept him from thinking about a ghostly Mrs. Cobb.

He was in the middle of the third verse when he heard something upstairs creak four times—four separate times—and he knew that while he had been sitting alone in the dark, someone had come in.