Steeplechase (7 page)

In Nashoba, Josiah's fiery eye had cowed the overseers of the poor into financing a model home for the indigent. The result was a handsome addition to the old workhouse and a new barn equipped with livestock and outfitted with all the tools and machinery necessary to a thriving agricultural enterprise. There were horse rakes and plows, a mowing machine, a cultivator, a mechanical seeder, a spring-tooth harrow, a dozen sap buckets, and a plentiful supply of hand tools.

Compared to the Boston House of Industry, the entire establishment was small. But Josiah had vowed that the inmates of the Home Farm would turn a profit from the wasted fields and common grazing land belonging to the town. In addition, they would put the sugar bush to use and cut a swath through the town forest, a wilderness like some far uncharted corner of the globe.

It had not been easy. The board of selectmen had balked at the expense. Josiah had received a formal letter: “The board would by no means favor an unnecessary expenditure in building ornamental palaces, either for criminals or paupers, nor do they wish even to make such a house attractive to the idle.”

Josiah Gideon cared nothing for official letters. At the next meeting of the selectmen, he had ranted and raved, and prevailed.

Dickie Doll

S
ome of the elderly citizens of Nashoba were slow to learn of the marvels called for by Josiah Gideon. For them, the word
workhouse
still meant a fate to be dreaded more than death itself. “I'd sooner lie down and die in a ditch by the side of the road,” said old Dickie Doll.

But now the ditch yawned for Dickie at last. His home and hire were gone. Miss Lydia Perkins, the old widow whose hired man he had been for most of his life, had taken sick and died. Her property was to go on the auction block—her fields and woods, her crops, and her house and barn, along with the shed where Dickie had so long slept and plied his woodworking trade.

Josiah Gideon sought him out. Josiah's disfigured son-in-law, James Shaw, was beyond any help that he could give, no matter how eagerly he longed to do something, anything, to help poor James. Therefore, he took comfort in tracking down any misery within his power to ease. He rode out to the remotest edges of the town, knocking on the doors of lonely farms to find addled old grannies, superannuated old gentlemen fading into eccentricity, hungry paupers in neglected shanties, Irish field hands who came and went like Gypsies, and even the half-wild men who lived by gun and snare and rabbit trap in the depths of the town forest.

On the day of the auction, Josiah moved among the sharp dealers who were examining the rolling stock that had belonged to the Widow Perkins, and the housewives interested in her sideboard, bedstead, and mangle, and the local farmers who were there to inspect her dairy cattle. Josiah was looking for Dickie Doll. He found him sitting forlornly among his tools while a man in a seedy stovepipe hat dumped a box of Dickie's chisels on the ground and spat and drawled, “These here for sale?”

“Can't say as I care,” said Dickie.

“No, sir, they are not for sale,” said Josiah angrily. He took Dickie's arm and pulled him to his feet. “Come on out of here, Dickie.”

But Dickie whimpered, said, “No,” and pulled away. “I'm not going there, never, never.”

But in the end, Josiah persuaded him to take a look. Dickie mounted Josiah's tall horse and Josiah walked beside him, pointing out the fields belonging to the Home Farm, now green with rye and corn. A field hand waved his hoe at Dickie and roared with laughter, and Dickie said fearfully, “That's Bob Bailey. Ain't he a simpleton?”

“He's a good man with a hoe,” said Josiah.

In the farmhouse, he took Dickie into the parlor, where old dames were knitting socks and a couple of old men were bent over a checkerboard. Then he showed Dickie the bustling kitchen and the dining hall and the small sleeping corner he would have to himself.

No longer did Dickie talk of lying down by the side of the road. Next day, he moved in willingly, arriving in a borrowed cart laden with tools and the tag ends of boards. In a back room of the farmhouse he set up a workbench, and soon he was furnishing the Home Farm with cabinets and wardrobes, tables and chairs.

His specialty was elaborate decoration—carved moldings and heraldic devices, finials and crests. Dickie had once made a dressing table for Ingeborg Biddle, the wife of the preacher. To Ingeborg, it had seemed an act of charity. But where on earth had the poor old soul seen sphinxes and classical pilasters and Ionic capitals? The man was illiterate. He didn't even know the going price for that sort of craftsmanship, and really, his work was quite remarkable. Eagerly, Mrs. Biddle had suggested decorative motifs for her dressing table—dimpled cherubs, festoons of flowers. But when the work was done, she had refused to pay for it, because sly Dickie had festooned her pretty table with gargoyles and bats. The cherubs and flowers were now the wonder of the Nashoba Home Farm.

Ingeborg

A
s shepherd of all the orthodox Christians in Nashoba, the Reverend Horatio Biddle regarded the occupants of the asylum as part of his flock. And in the opinion of his wife, Ingeborg, he had a higher mandate over their spiritual welfare than did Josiah Gideon, who merely attended to their physical needs. Even so, it was infuriating that Josiah should send some of his poor wretches across the green to occupy three entire pews in Horatio's church every Sunday morning, to disturb the peace of public prayer with their meaningless jabber. Sly! It was a sly insult on Josiah's part. And his costly almshouse was the most grandiose in Middlesex County. Ingeborg considered it her duty to inspect it, to see how extravagantly that dangerous man was wasting the town funds.

When she knocked on the front door of the Nashoba Home Farm, it was opened by a barefoot child—one of the bastards, no doubt—and Josiah came at once. With a courtly bow, he exclaimed, “Welcome, Mrs. Biddle,” and led her on a grand tour.

They began in the kitchen, where the matron and the cook rose from their chairs to be introduced, then sat down again to go on with their accounts.

“May I see?” asked Ingeborg sweetly.

The matron looked at her gravely, then handed over the book with its list of the orders for the day:

Ingeborg handed it back with a winning smile, then followed Josiah to the dining room, where two orphan female children were clattering plates down on the table. Then she followed him to the common room, where a madwoman screamed at her joyfully and a humpbacked old lady looked up from her tatting and an ancient man sat snoring with his toothless head thrown back. The old gentleman was sitting in an
upholstered chair
, noted Ingeborg, and the towering cabinet in the corner was crowned with a pediment in the Grecian taste, obviously the work of Dickie Doll.

Her kettle had reached the boiling point, but Ingeborg said nothing to Josiah. “Good afternoon, ma'am,” he said graciously as she swept out the door.

Only at home could she open the stopcock of her anger. “Are those people to be treated like kings and queens? Before long—are you listening to me, Horatio?—all the old paupers in the surrounding towns will be clamoring to get in. Can't you do something about it, Horatio?”

Her husband looked up from his book in a daze. “About what, my dear?”

“The new almshouse—it's outrageous. Those old women, why can't they earn their keep by taking in washing?”

“It was the selectmen,” said Horatio. “Josiah mesmerized the selectmen and the overseers of the poor, and this is the result. The man's a sorcerer.”

“And an unbeliever,” said Ingeborg. “Don't forget that, Horatio.”

Mrs. Ingeborg Biddle was no fool. She had attended a female academy. She had studied German and Italian, algebra, geology, and botany. She had collected minerals and made a herbarium of dried leaves. She also painted china and sang arias in Italian.

And like her scholarly husband, Horatio, she was an ardent disciple of the teachings of Louis Agassiz. It was Professor Agassiz who had explained the Book of Genesis as a beautiful parable. The seven days of creation were a metaphor for God's loving interference in the world. With a slowly improving hand, Professor Agassiz's benevolent God had brought to perfection one species after another, until the whole world displayed the luxuriance of His infinite creative power.

Therefore, it was intolerable that anyone calling himself a Christian clergyman should declare that all creatures on earth had come into being by a series of accidents, and, furthermore, that even the greatest glory of creation, man himself (and woman, too, of course), could be traced back to some howling creature of the jungle.

The
Conversazione

T
he town of Nashoba could not, like Concord, boast a nest of philosophers, but it was more than a rural backwater. It had its own lofty pretensions.

It was true that Ingeborg Biddle chafed at the primitive nature of Nashoba society. She often wished that Horatio occupied a pulpit in a town where no hint of a pigsty wafted in the window and no chorus of crowing cocks fractured the peace of the morning, and, above all, where the advancement of womankind was not a terrifying new idea.

Ingeborg herself was an ardent disciple of the movement for female suffrage. While her husband looked backward to the classics of Greece and Rome, Ingeborg was a woman of the future. She revered Miss Fuller's
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
She laughed at a timid friend who declared that she would never read George Eliot's
Adam Bede.

“But why ever not, Elfrida?”

“Why not? Because that woman's personal life is a disgrace.”

Oh, yes, it was too bad. The women of Nashoba were old-fashioned and conservative. They knew nothing of Miss Fuller's famous defense of the ambitions of women, “Let them be sea-captains, if you will.” But these ladies were all that Ingeborg had to work with, so let her instruction begin here.

Therefore, once a month she played hostess in her sitting room to something she called a
conversazione.
These uplifting afternoons were not sewing circles or gossip sessions, but feasts of intellect. Only the more thoughtful ladies of the parish had been invited. Most of her guests were women of mature experience, like Elfrida Poole, but young Ella Viles had been included for her ornamental contribution.

The theme for today had been announced last time. The women had already pondered it gravely at home—whether life's sorrows be not blessings in disguise. Thus the talk began as usual at a high level, but almost at once, to Ingeborg's surprise, it descended from cloudy abstraction to a single naked example: the dreadful affliction that had fallen upon the family of Josiah Gideon.

“Hardly a blessing in their case,” said Minnie Wilder, the wife of the postmaster.

“More of a judgment,” agreed Elfrida Poole.

Ingeborg thanked her lucky stars that Julia Gideon had not accepted her invitation to join the circle. Julia was certainly one of the more intelligent women of the parish, but her presence this afternoon would have silenced the free exchange of thought.

Abandoning at once her role as captain of a ship tossing in a sea of philosophical speculation, Ingeborg leaned forward boldly and asked the question that was in everyone's mind. “Has anyone actually
seen
him?”

There was a general shudder. “They say,” whispered Eugenia Hunt, “that the poor boy has no lower jaw.
No lower jaw whatsoever.
”

There were exclamations of horror and pity, and then everyone was relieved when Ingeborg's fluffy cat sauntered into the room. Ingeborg swooped him up, dumped him in the hall, slammed the door, and signaled to Ella Viles to pour the tea. It was unnecessary to say anything more, to point out the conclusion of the afternoon's discussion, because it was as plain as the nose on your face.