Steeplechase (19 page)

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 them 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.

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?

I
ngeborg 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 sanctuary. 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

T
he 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.”