Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (22 page)

"Turner," said Deacon Hurd, "we're more grieved than we can say about your father. But this is a closed meeting of the church."

"Sir," said Turner, "the bylaws say that the minister may appoint a representative to act in his place if he is unable to attend any meeting of which he is a voting member. My mother looked it up this afternoon. She'd be here herself, but..."

"I'm not going to allow it," said Deacon Hurd.

Mr. Newton crossed the room and took down a copy of the bylaws from a shelf.

"Page fifteen," said Turner helpfully.

Mr. Newton turned to page fifteen. He looked up, smiling. "Unless you want to go against the bylaws, Deacon, I don't see that you have much of a choice."

"Then read the minutes and let's begin," said Deacon Hurd angrily. "He can stay if he wants."

"Don't you begin with prayer?" asked Turner, as sweetly and innocently as if he were a minister's son right out of a Sunday school book.

Deacon Hurd looked at him hard. "Let us pray," he said slowly, but Turner thought that the prayer he prayed wasn't rising much above First Congregational's steeple.

"Amen," said Deacon Hurd.

"Amen," said the rest of the deacons' board.

"You didn't pray for my father," said Turner.

Deacon Hurd prayed for Reverend Buckminster. Turner figured the prayer didn't rise much off the table this time.

They dispatched the Old Business quickly. They voted the money to repair the supports under the front three pews. And they voted to replace the bell rope, seeing how it was so frayed it would certainly come down by springtime.

Turner was very quiet through the Old Business but sat forward when they came to the only item on the agenda under the New Business: "The status of Reverend Turner Buckminster." Given present circumstances, Deacon Hurd began, this was a difficult matter, but he felt it was the sworn biblical duty of this board to bring a recommendation to the congregation.

"What would that recommendation be?" asked Mr. Newton.

Deacon Hurd did not look at Turner. He cleared his throat, then cleared it again. "I suppose," he said, "that that is what we are deciding right now"

"I'm not sure that's quite so, Deacon," said Mr. Newton. "You wouldn't be asking us to recommend that Reverend Buckminster be asked to stay. We already decided that last fall. So it must be that he be asked to leave."

Deacon Hurd straightened some. It looked to Turner as if he was about to deliver a speech. Which he was.

"I speak," said Deacon Hurd, "as one who has the confidence of the congregation. When we invited Reverend Buckminster to our pulpit—and I must speak plainly, even if it brings pain to you, Turner, but it's you who insists on being here—when we invited him, we expected a minister who would bring God's message to the town, who would support us through his strong connections in our coming trials and tribulations, who would pastor a flock. Instead, we found a man who has shown no interest in preserving the prosperity of the town. He has thwarted us at all turns, even to the point of threatening to bring Negroes to live right in the town center. I tell you, it would destroy the town—and there's not a soul in this room who doesn't see the truth of that."

"I'm not so sure that—"began Old Mr. Thayer.

"And when the town is engaged in the philanthropic task of bringing the less fortunate to a place where they will be cared for, this minister follows his duties by attacking our sheriff. I'm sorry he got hurt, but if he hadn't been interfering where he shouldn't have been interfering, he might be sitting here right now."

Silence, as Deacon Hurd dared the board to challenge what he knew to be true. Most of the deacons sat grim-faced, their mouths set. Some stared at the table in front of them; others fiddled with pencils. Turner sat with his hands clenched, seeing his father's eyes as he had gone over the ledge.

"Deacon Hurd," Mr. Newton began slowly, "a minister surely does need to support the town. But I'm not sure that means the same thing to me as it does to you. Seems to me you're saying that a minister should go along with whatever the town decides is fit. But I'm wondering if what we need is a minister who makes us ask what is fit."

"What is fit is what is good for the town."

"I know you think so, Deacon. I know Mr. Stonecrop thinks so, too. And maybe the rest of the congregation, I don't know. But I do know this: what we did down at Malaga wasn't philanthropy, and we're only lying to ourselves if we say it was. They all could have lived there another hundred and twenty-five years without bothering a single soul, but we wanted them gone. And that's the truth." He pointed down the table to Turner. "And that boy there saw someone who had no roof over her head, and he set doing something about it, and I'm ashamed because I didn't stand with him. I'm ashamed that not a single deacon on this board stood with him."

"Saints are hard to live with, Mr. Newton. Usually they end up getting burned."

Something of a stunned pause before Mr. Newton spoke again.

"Whether I'm—"

"You've made the point, Mr. Newton. Are there any other comments about drafting a recommendation to the congregation that Reverend Buckminster be dismissed from our pulpit?"

The stunned pause hadn't finished playing itself out yet. It laid its huge hands on the shoulders of each of the deacons—except Deacon Hurd. He got up to toss another log into the woodstove. He stared a moment at the open fire before he threw one in.

Then he came back to sit down.

"Hearing none," he said, "we'll proceed to the vote. Those nonvoting members of the deacons' board are dismissed. That's you, boy. That's in the bylaws, too."

Turner stood. "My mother did ask me to tell you that we'll be leaving the parsonage just as soon as my father's well enough. We'll be moving over to Mrs. Cobb's house. My mother says to tell you that she would rather not have anyone think we were beholden to you in any way."

He walked to the door and paused, his back to them. "And she says for me to tell you this: 'Take whatever dang vote you please.'"

"Turner," said Deacon Hurd, "if you hadn't come up with the idea of handing over one of the finest houses in Phippsburg to a pack like the Easons, none of this would have happened. Don't blame us for where your own ideas take you."

Suddenly, Turner was back in his father's study. His father had just lit his pipe, and the sweet tobacco scent of it was curling around the room and mixing with the smell of leather and polished wood. He had come to the last heady page of
The Origin of Species,
had felt a thrill crawling up his back and into his gut with the closing sentence of praise and wonder: "From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

His father had looked up as he closed the book, and he had smiled. "Who knows where these ideas will take us," he had said. "But won't it be exciting to find out." They had nodded together, not only father and son, but two people with an open world in front of them.

"The 'dang' is from me," Turner said, and left the deacons' meeting room.

He stood outside the door and felt everything in him start to drain away until he stood there shaking, hoping he wouldn't cry, trying to breathe slowly so that he wouldn't.

He thought of Lizzie.

"What do you think you're doing?" she would have said to him right then.

"Well, trying to help my father, for one."

"No, that's not what you're doing. You never could see things straight."

"You think you know so much."

"I've learned a lot in the last couple of days. You learn a lot in a god-awful place like this."

"When are you going to get out of there?"

He couldn't hear her answer.

"Lizzie, what am I going to do? I've messed up everything. If I'd never met you..."

"If you'd never met me, I'd still be in Pownal. What I wouldn't have ... well, you know what I wouldn't have. I don't have to say it."

Turner went home to a house mostly dark. The light was turned low in his parents' bedroom, where, when Turner looked in, his father lay still and white, his scalp covered with linen bandages, the blankets pulled tightly around him right on up to his chin. His mother, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a rocker, was asleep, too, and Turner didn't wake her.

Turner went to his room and stood by the window. The clouds were low, but the half moon was lower still and shone a gray, feeble light on their quilted undersides. The spires of the high pines seemed about to poke up into them, and Turner imagined them ripping open the quilts and the feathery snow drifting down upon the town, making everything warm and cozy and weighted with sleep.

"Forms most beautiful and most wonderful." It was the last thing he thought of before the warm and cozy weight of his own quilt took him.

***

The decisions of the Board of Deacons of the First Congregational Church were understood to be secret until they were announced for the consideration of the full congregation. But it would have been more likely for a whale to blunder its way down Parker Head unnoticed than for this decision to be held secret until Sunday. The tides didn't have the time to change before the recommendation was general information around Phippsburg. When folks came by to wish the minister well, they looked at Mrs. Buckminster with embarrassed eyes, and she, too, knew—though she had known all along, Turner supposed.

In the hours while Turner read to his father—he was full along in
The Descent of Man
—his mother loudly packed. When they had left Boston, packing had taken weeks, with trunks and crates and loads of straw to cushion whatever might break. Now there was none of that. Turner would push a wheelbarrow up to the front steps, go into the house, and grab whatever she had piled at the foot of the stairs. He carried it out hugger-mugger—books, dishes, the downstairs rocker, all in a great mix—and carted it right down the middle of Parker Head.

Turner was glad all the mud had frozen and there was just a patina of frost.

Whenever his mother was in Mrs. Cobb's house, Turner would wait by his father's bedside. He'd listen to the slow breathing, try to figure how he might get down to Pownal, and imagine how his father would awake and come with him to rescue Lizzie Bright, storming the gates like Aeneas himself. Then he'd listen again to the slow breathing.

When Turner wasn't watching his father, he translated the
Aeneid
—he figured his father would want him to be keeping that up—or he walked along the far coast, away from Malaga Island. One late afternoon he met Willis standing alone above the Kennebec, and together they climbed down to the water, cracked sheets of ice from the rocks, threw stones from the beach through the wave troughs to skip them before the white water buried them.

Turner soon took to going down there most afternoons, and more often than not, Willis was there, too.

They always began the same way.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Minister about the same?"

"About."

Willis would nod, and then they would head to the shore, even when the wind scudded up and drove the salt spray at them, even when a new snow covered the beach so that they couldn't find any stones, even when it was so cold they had to wrap their scarves around their faces.

It was Willis who told Turner about the graves over on Malaga Island. How Mr. Stonecrop had hired men from the shipyards to dig up the markers, then hack through the frozen ground to the coffins—or what was left of them. How the workers jumbled everything they found into five caskets and carted them off the island.

"I never saw anyone working up at the church cemetery," said Turner.

But Willis shook his head. "Down to Pownal," he said. "The town wouldn't let Negroes in the church cemetery."

Turner couldn't help thinking of Lizzie's grandfather, dug up and tossed around, not allowed to stay on the island where he had seen the sun rise and set ten thousand times.

Two days later, Turner didn't need Willis to tell him what was happening on the island. Mr. Stonecrop's workers were not yet finished. The Eason home had already been burned to the ground, but now fire was set to the Griffin home, and one by one to every house, shack, privy, pier, barrel, stack of lobster traps—everything that could burn on the island. White smoke covered Malaga, and then, the sea breeze being what it was, the smoke blew inland, crossing the New Meadows and drawing up the granite ledges. Still roiling and billowing, it pushed through the woods and came out in torn clouds from the trees and gathered down Parker Head. It passed Mr. Newton's grocery, passed Mrs. Cobb's house and Mrs. Hurd's house, passed the parsonage, and then circled around First Congregational until it rose up to the top of the steeple. It went on even to Mr. Stonecrop's fine house, passing through the wrought-iron fence and coming up onto the fine front porch.

And everywhere the cloud touched, it left ashes. On the street, on the houses, on the church steeple, even on Mr. Stonecrop's fine porch. Ashes fell on the pine boughs, on the bare limbs of the maples and aspens, on the dried brown leaves of the oaks, on the snow. Folks who had to go out held handkerchiefs to their faces and walked quickly. Most stayed in.

Turner, between carrying books from his father's study, watched it all from the cold cupola of Mrs. Cobb's house. The smoke came in, he thought, as if it knew what it wanted to do. He wondered what Lizzie might think about that. He figured she would smack him on the shoulder and tell him to see things straight. But maybe he already did.

The ashes fell against the books Turner carried down Parker Head that afternoon. With each load, Turner felt he was leaving something behind, and though he could not say why, he felt lighter. It no longer mattered to him how the people of First Congregational voted; he imagined that his father would hardly care, either. Maybe they would leave Phippsburg. Once his father was conscious again, they could go down to Pownal, pluck Lizzie Bright from the asylum, and leave forever.

Maybe they would head out for the Territories, after all.

But the next new snow covered the ashes on the trees, covered the ashes on the houses, covered the ashes on the steeple of First Congregational, and covered the ashes Turner had strewn over the newly dug grave of his father.