Steeplechase (9 page)

Ingeborg watched as Dr. Clock was welcomed into the house by Josiah's daughter. Then she was surprised to see that instead of inviting the doctor's wife and little stepson into the house, Isabelle ran out to join them. Ingeborg watched as Isabelle kissed Ida, hugged the little boy, and patted the horse's nose.

Patiently, Ingeborg waited for the end of the doctor's visit. At last, he came hurrying out of the house and mounted the gig. At once, the horse started up with a sprightly bounce, nearly tossing the little boy over the side. The doctor grabbed him by the strap of his overalls, flicked his whip, and immediately horse and wagon were off and away, rattling down the turnpike on the way home to Concord.

Surely now the women of the Gideon household would be free to do something about the tossing sheets in the backyard. Ingeborg stared impatiently. Why on earth didn't someone take them in? By now, they must certainly be bone-dry. The enormous chestnut tree shaded the front of the house, but the sheets in the backyard flapped in the sunshine.

Ingeborg was tired of her vigil. Frustration made her bold. What if she were to walk down the hill and wander behind the house as though looking for her fluffy gray pussy? Why ever not!

Carefully, she picked up her skirts and made her way down the ladder to the platform where the ticking clockworks smelled of machine oil, and then down a staircase to the vestry. Here she brushed her skirts, patted her high-piled curls, and walked down the hill. With a dignified step, she strolled past the front of the Gideon house and turned the corner on Quarry Pond Road to observe the ménage from the side. But there were too many tall bushes. Darting a glance left and right, Ingeborg slipped in among the lilacs. The path to the privy was still out of sight. Boldly, she pushed branches aside, until at last she could see the back door, the path, and the latticed bower enclosing the outhouse.

But then she had a fright. An orange cat, a clawing cat, a cat that was not her fluffy gray pussy, leaped out of the bushes and landed on her shoulder. Ingeborg screamed and sprawled full length across the path just as Josiah Gideon emerged from the outhouse.

Gallantly, he helped her to her feet. “Madam,” he said, throwing wide the privy door, “I beg you to be my guest.”

NOW

The Lost Steeple

Lost, lost is the music! Lost

All the prayers and the people!

Lost Is the Music

I
've been thinking,” said Mary, thumping down her empty beer glass on the kitchen table.

“Dangerous habit,” said Homer. “What about?”

“About the great unwashed. I mean in history.”

“The great unwashed?” Homer snickered and wrenched open another bottle. “I worry more about the great washed. I hate the way everybody nowadays is so clean. They brush their teeth and gargle away their foul breath, and shampoo their hair until it's squeaky-clean, and all the women shave their legs and all the men frustrate the urge of every whisker on their chins to emerge into the light, and that isn't all. After purifying their bodies, they attack their brains with wire brushes and cleansing powder until everything of interest has been scrubbed away.”

“But, Homer, that's exactly what I mean. When you think about history—”

“Unless, of course, it's sexual intercourse,” Homer went on, correcting himself. “That stuff never goes away.”

“Sexual intercourse?” Mary looked blank, then hurtled on. “Okay, but I've been thinking about history. Cleanliness wasn't so rife in the past. Listen, Homer, what about all those great dead people? You know, the Shakespeares and Johann Sebastian Bachs and the Walt Whitmans and the Wordsworths of times gone by. They weren't squeaky-clean. They didn't have the plumbing for it, or maybe they didn't even feel the need.”

“Thoreau was clean,” objected Homer primly. “At Walden, he bathed in the pond every day.”

“Well, good for Henry, but what about the others? We look at these great icons from afar, but what if we came close, really close, very, very close? What would they be like? Think of the foul latrines and the greasy bedding. Think of the dirty feet and the unwashed bodies. Think of the bad breath and the spitting, the stinking underwear, the rotting garbage and the excrement thrown into the street. Think of the privies! You know, Homer, there were still a few privies in Concord when I was a little girl.”

Homer flinched. “I see what you mean. The great and glorious unwashed.” Shuddering, he changed the subject. “Guess what? I've slipped again.”

“Slipped? Oh, you mean—”

“The bestseller list. I've sunk to fifth place.”

“Well, fifth place isn't so bad. You just have to get the new book out in a hurry. Wait a sec, Homer; you've got to see this.” Mary reached for her notebook and flapped the pages back and forth. “It's sort of mysterious and exciting. Maybe you could work it in. Did you ever hear of a lost church around here anywhere?”

“A lost church?” Homer grinned. “How could a church get itself lost?”

She sucked her pencil. “I know it sounds strange.”

“You mean it just pointed its steeple at the horizon and took off, galumphing away in the night?”

“Heaven knows. I was bumbling around in the archives of the Concord Library and I found something strange. I wouldn't have paid any attention to one crazy letter, but there were two of them. Look, here's the first one. It was just a wisp of torn paper in a file. No date, no return address, no signature. I made a copy. Look.”

Homer looked. The handwriting was old-fashioned but precise. It started in the middle of a sentence:

…
picnicking with my dear friends from Concord, Honoria and Mary Ann. Now Mother you know what alwayz happens at picnics it began to pore pitchforks so we went into the empty church and I found a hym book under a bench so I took it because nobody comes there now.

Homer shook his head. “This is your lost church? But, Mary, it could be anyplace. Her dear friends were from Concord, but maybe the letter was written from someplace else entirely. And maybe it was the other Concord, the one in New Hampshire.”

“Yes, that's what I thought. But then I found this.” Mary turned a page. “This one has a date.”

July 17, '69

Dearest Honey
,

Our Poetry Social met yesterday and my little offering was well received! In fact (forgive me, dearest, for bragging) our President praised it as worthy of Oliver Wendell Holmes himself! Think of that
!

THE LOST CHURCH

Deep in the forest primeval

And shrouded in shrubbery
,

A prey to woodworm and weevil
,

The empty church stands.

No sermon of good or of evil

Resounds from that pulpit.

No minister's eloquent hands

Are lifted in blessing.

How many a swift grain of sand

Has drained from the glass

Since last these walls echoed

With hymn music grand?

Lost, lost is the music! Lost

All the prayers and the people
!

Lost, tempest-tossed

And forever abandoned
,

The little lost church and the steeple.

“What do you think?” said Mary. “Isn't it sweet?”

“The little lost church,” said Homer dreamily. “Maybe it was the church of churches, the temple of temples, the perfect union of truth and majesty. I'll bet it was translated.”

“Translated? Oh, you mean—”

“Swept up to heaven.” Homer lifted his hands in wonder. “It was too good for this world, so now it's up there in paradise, an alabaster cathedral, with Socrates and Jesus taking turns in the pulpit.”

1868

The News from Fairyland

The Mind of Horace

W
hen Alexander, Ida, and Horace came home from Nashoba, Eudocia was waiting with baby Gussie in her arms. Ida stepped down from the buggy and took the baby. Eudocia lifted Horace down and said, “Were you my good boy?”

“Of course he was,” said Ida.

“I saw a big tree,” said Horace. He spread his arms wide. “As big as a giant.”

“Oh, yes,” said his grandmother, unbuttoning his jacket. “I know that big tree.”

Jake peered over the side of the basket as the balloon wafted over Walden Pond. “You see Hector anyplace, Jack?”

“He's a-comin', Jake,” said Jack. “See him down there in the wagon, galloping that old horse? Whoopsie, Jake! Look at that. Wheel fell off the wagon.”

Jake looked down at the disaster on the Walden Road and said mildly, “It's all right, Jack. Horse ain't dead. Hector'll catch up by and by.”

“You do love him a little?” Ida whispered to Alexander as she lay beside him in the big bed that had once belonged to her mother and father.

“Of course,” said Alexander, “just as I love his mother. And after all, who was it who helped bring Horace into the world?”

Ida smiled as she rested in the crook of her husband's arm. It was true that Horace had been born in the Patent Office hospital in Washington, where Alexander Clock had been chief surgeon. Ida had gone looking for her husband, Seth, missing after the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, she had found her sixteen-year-old brother, Eben, deathly ill with typhoid fever. Then instead of going home to Concord to have her baby, she had stayed to help care for her brother. And therefore when her pains began, the head nurse had been forced, willy-nilly, to find her a bed.

But was it true that Alexander had helped with the baby's birth? No, of course it wasn't true. Although army surgeon Alexander Clock had been acquainted with every kind of wartime casualty, he had known nothing whatever about babies. He had seen the infant born and he had watched with relief as baby Horace was handed to his mother, and then he had visited the pretty pair every day for the next week, while Eben recovered in another part of the hospital. And when the little family had packed up its belongings and left for home, Dr. Clock had written to Ida every day. Her search for Seth had ended with the news of his death, and now it was Alexander who lay beside her in the bed in which she had been born.

But Horace was no longer an only child. He had a half sister, Augusta, who was still nursing at her mother's breast. Everyone fussed over Gussie. Nobody fussed over Horace. Every night, the house was loud with Gussie's cries. Every day, it steamed with Gussie's washing. There were kettles boiling on the stove, set tubs sloshing with soapy water, hands rough and red from rubbing small garments on scrubbing boards, and on wet days Gussie's laundry stretched across the kitchen and flapped in Horace's face. And yet, after causing all this trouble, Gussie was the one who was kissed and cooed over, not Horace.

It was clear to his grandmother that Horace's small nose was out of joint. Therefore, Eudocia adopted him as her special charge. “Come, Horace dear,” she would say when he was scolded for misbehaving, “I'll read you the story of Goldilocks and the three bears.” Or sometimes it was nursery rhymes—“Humpty-Dumpty” and “Little Boy Blue” and all the rest. Horace sopped them up. He lived in them; they filled his head with pictures.