Steeplechase (21 page)

The prayer of Julia's daughter, Isabelle, was disjointed. She found it impossible to concentrate. She had to keep her eyes tightly shut against the sight of Ella Viles on the bench in front of her, crowded close to the side of Eben Flint. When Isabelle's father said “Amen,” she opened her eyes and saw Ella looking back at her with a sly smile.

The time had come for Josiah's sermon. Julia stiffened as her husband began to speak. But to her relief, he did not gloat in triumph or indulge in tempestuous exultation. His eyes were incandescent, but he spoke with the reasoning eloquence of a seasoned preacher. The burden of his homily was simple. The wooden church they had built with their own hands was a temple whose corner posts were the ethical commandments of Jesus Christ and the Sermon on the Mount. The floor was holy reason, the roof the love of God.

In the hush that followed, Josiah picked up a hymnbook, riffled the pages, and called for “Old Hundred.” At once, Eudocia Flint sprang forward. Sitting firmly upright at the organ, she pumped air into the bellows with her feet, thrust out her knees to swell the melodious noise, and ran her fingers up and down the keyboard. Everyone rose to sing.

Josiah closed the service with the psalm about the blessed man whose delight is in the law of the Lord, who is like a tree planted by the rivers of water, a tree that bringeth forth fruit in his season, whose leaf shall not wither.

He said nothing more. He did not have to explain the pretty allegory about the resurrection of the slaughtered tree. The tools of the men had hammered it into the posts and beams, and the mixing spoons of the women had beaten it into their gingerbread. It was common knowledge.

“Et tu, Jedediah?
”

W
hen Ingeborg Biddle at last screwed up the courage to show her husband the abominable piece of doggerel in the
Evening Transcript
, Horatio's mortification was complete. He paced the floor, wrung his hands, ground his teeth, and then, suddenly, he bolted.

Ingeborg cried, “Horatio, where are you going?”

He could not speak. Throwing up his arms in anguish, Horatio charged out of the house by the back door. In the kitchen garden, Agnes, the cook, was heaving at an enormous winter squash while her gentleman friend plucked at a banjo. When the master of the house came lurching through the cabbages, Agnes looked up in surprise and the banjo twanged a false note. Horatio stumbled past them, heading for the barn. Before him the great door yawned wide, and within the fragrant darkness one of the carriage horses looked out from its stall at Horatio and stamped and tossed its head.

High above the barn roof rose the familiar domed steeple of Horatio's church. By all the laws of God, that steeple was the property of its pastor. The church belonged to Horatio as surely as the coat on his back, as surely as the burial ground and the accursed chestnut tree, as surely as the souls of his congregation. All of those men and women, by sacred tradition and absolute right, belonged under the fatherly care of the Reverend Horatio Biddle, and under his care alone.

“There shall be no other steeple in the town of Nashoba.” Horatio had uttered this decree with solemn authority and his wife had echoed it. And yet now there was indeed another steeple in Nashoba, an absurd joke of a steeple on the ridiculous little shanty that Josiah Gideon called a church, that blaspheming hovel standing so defiantly on a scrubby patch of grass in Josiah's woodlot, right there beside the road to Acton.

During the months when the shanty had been little more than a hole in the ground, Horatio had stayed away, not wanting to show interest in its progress. But sometimes he had crept out at night to fumble through the trees and take a look, hoping to find the whole thing given up as a bad job.

But it had not been given up, and now it was a solid finished building topped by a gimcrack turret with a tinny bell.

And this morning, Horatio had witnessed with his own eyes the defectors from his flock marching straight past the open door of his church to obey the call of that evil little bell. To his dismay, he had seen Douglas Pease stroll by, whistling. Then young Ted Wilbur had sauntered down the road, smoking a cigar. Bitterly, Horatio had watched the familiar runabout of Joseph and Eugenia Hunt wheel blithely down the road, and then the pony trap of the two Miss Rochesters, and finally the splendid equipage of Samuel and Lydia Bigelow.

These apostates were bad enough, but Horatio's heart broke within his breast when he saw the old-fashioned phaeton of the most distinguished member of his congregation rollicking down the road in the direction of that godless meetinghouse. Even Professor Jedediah Eaton, Horatio's dearest friend and colleague, had been lured away by Josiah Gideon. Horatio felt like Caesar when Brutus appeared among the assassins:
Et tu, Jedediah?

At the window, Ingeborg watched her despairing husband dart into the barn. Was he about to ride away, to abandon his predicament and leave her forever? And then Ingeborg had a perfidious thought: But would that be so terrible, after all?

No, now he was coming out again, lugging a bale of hay. Ingeborg watched in astonishment as Horatio began tearing it apart and throwing down bundle after bundle. Had he lost his senses? Craning her neck, she saw him shamble away with a single armful, trailing wisps on the ground.

NOW

The Acton Steeple

What is the meaning of life?

(No exceptions, please.)

Doaksie Bisbee

Y
ou're way down,” said Luther Stokes, keeping Homer informed of the bad news every day. “You're second from the bottom. If you don't hurry up with that new whizbang of yours, you'll be gone and forgotten. Have you seen what's on the top of the nonfiction bestseller list right now? A new stunner by Doaksie Bisbee,
You and Your Vagina.
”

“Oh, God,” said Homer. “I don't want to hear about my vagina.”

“Well, naturally, because you haven't got one. This is strictly for females. I'll bet Mary would be interested. And say, that Doaksie's a cute kid. Have you seen her on TV?”

“Unfortunately, I have actually met the woman.”

“No kidding? Well, I suppose all you bestselling writers go to the same snazzy parties.”

“Umph,” growled Homer. It had not been a party; it had been a shared platform, a horrible experience. He had prepared his speech with care, a dazzling account of the squabbles among Protestant churches in the nineteenth century. He had timed his presentation to the required fifteen minutes, cutting out many a choice paragraph.

Then it was Doaksie's turn. Doaksie had not prepared a speech at all. She had sat on the edge of the platform and talked about her free and easy life—or rather, about the life of her vagina. “Remember the old days,” said Doaksie, “when you had to get married to have sex?”

There were screams of laughter, encouraging Doaksie to further intimate revelations. Profoundly pained, Homer sat on his folding chair on the platform and examined the audience closely for the first time. They were mostly young women, very young women. In fact, they reminded him of the rosy-cheeked little girls who were his graduate students.

“Any questions?” asked the moderator, leaping to her feet when Doaksie had exceeded her allotted time by half an hour.

There were dozens of eager questions about sexuality, creativity, and spirituality. At one point, Homer, like a fool, jumped up to complain that words like
creativity and spirituality
were too important to be bandied about. “It should be against the law,” he scolded, “to use them more than once a year, or else the word police will get you.” There was a feeble titter as he sat down.

Afterward, Homer told Mary that the poet Dante had neglected one of the chief torments of hell. “Pity the unhappy speaker who has to sit in dignified silence while all the questions are addressed to somebody else. Oh, if only I had a vagina to call my own.” Groaning piteously, Homer strode across the room to his desk, snatched up a sheaf of papers, and tossed them at the ceiling. “Worthless,” he cried. “Not a vagina in the lot.”

Mary snatched some of them out of the air, then ran around retrieving the rest from the rubber plant, the lamp shade, and the basket of overdue library books. Two had slithered behind the desk into a snake pit of wires and cables. “Come on, Homer,” said Mary, “we've got to pull this thing away from the wall.”

“Why bother?” asked Homer, but he heaved on one end of the desk, and soon all the flying papers were shuffled together in a stack.

Then Mary took Homer by the hand and said, “My poor darling, it's a shame that you don't have a vagina. Tell you what. I've got one.” She looked at her watch. “We don't have to leave for that church in Acton for half an hour.”

A Semantic Problem

F
rom the road, the church seemed modest enough, a pleasant Victorian building with a small bell tower. But when the car turned into the parking lot, they saw the splendid modern addition. The Acton Congregational Church was obviously a successful parish.

In the entrance lobby, they could hear laughter from upstairs and the soft sound of paper flip-flopping out of a copy machine. Somewhere up there, the pastor was expecting them, but Mary said, “Wait, Homer, this is where it's at.”

“Where what's at?” asked Homer, but he knew what she meant.

It was the bulletin board of the Acton Congregational Church. Once again, the thumbtacked notices summed up the present condition of New England Protestantism. One of them went straight to the point:

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?

“Good question,” murmured Homer, moving on to the next, which was a call to action:

ARE YOU GOING TO BE ONE OF MANY TO MAKE THE ANTIQUES SHOW AND SALE A SUCCESS?

Another listed the dishes to be cooked for Rosie's Place:

SLOPPY JOES, COLESLAW, SHEET CAKE WITH WHITE FROSTING

(NO EXCEPTIONS, PLEASE).

“Sounds delicious,” said Homer. “What's Rosie's Place anyway?”

“Oh, Rosie's Place is famous. I was there once. It's on Harrison Street, near Boston City Hospital. Nice church ladies come in from the suburbs in their Orvis sweaters and slacks from L.L. Bean. They bring the food and heat it up and serve it to homeless women. I felt kind of crummy, as a matter of fact, like a condescending Lady Bountiful, but it's an important work, Rosie's Place.”

Homer murmured, “Isn't it a shame that none of those homeless women get nice catalog in the mail. Then they, too, could be arrayed like the lilies of the field.”

Mary smiled ruefully and looked down at herself. “Right, in nice Eddie Bauer shirts and Lands' End pants.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Kelly?” It was the pastor, looking down at them politely from the top of the stairs.

The Reverend Theodore Jones turned out to be a scholarly clergyman who knew the history of his church from its antique beginnings to the money-raising antique shows of the present, from horses and buggies to SUVs, from lined-out hymns to the youth choir for Christian pop music.

The sanctuary was warmly Victorian, with curvilinear pews facing the pulpit. Sunlight streamed through a stained-glass window, bringing to radiant life a scene from the New Testament. Another window was a miracle of delicate patterns with a glowing benediction at the bottom:

PEACE BE WITHIN THY WALLS

PROSPERITY WITHIN THY PALACES

“Prosperity,” said Ted Jones, shaking his head, apologizing. “Well, it's the old problem. Christ told His disciples to sell everything, but Acton Congregational wants us all to get rich. At least it did in the old days. I guess we wouldn't have guiding principles like that anymore.”

“It seems to me,” said Mary kindly, “that Acton Congregational is distributing its prosperity pretty well.”

“Thank you,” said their guide. “We try to.”

“I like these churches,” said Homer as they drove away. “Sometimes their pious effusions seem a little silly, but where else, I ask you, can you find virtue all balled up in one handful?”

“Nowhere,” said Mary stoutly. “Too bad Mr. Jones didn't know anything about trees, lost churches, or Oliver Wendell Holmes. Honestly, Homer, all that stuff seems more and more absurd.”

“If only,” said Homer, “we could talk to that old hermit lady in Nashoba, the one with the roots and berries. She's our only hope in that department—I mean the Big Tree/Lost-Church/Poetical Department. Tell you what. I'll call Joe Bold again. Maybe he'll have some idea how we can sneak up on the old lady Fay Flint.”

But Joe seemed confused by Homer's phone call. “Fay?” he said. “Who's Fay?”

“You know, the old woman in the woods. You told me about her. You said she'd know everything.”