Steeplechase (10 page)

So for five-year-old Horace Morgan, the world was populated by elves and fairies, gnomes and trolls, storekeepers on the Milldam, giants and goose girls, white rabbits and the spotted cow, the man in the moon, his mother and grandmother, Little Jack Horner, and the horses in the stable.

Therefore, when the hot-air balloon of the brothers Spratt drifted over the apple orchard, Horace was not surprised. The fantastic spectacle was all of a piece with the floating gossamer of dandelions and the news from fairyland.

The Tinkerer

I
n the busy household of Eudocia Flint on the road to Barrett's mill, Horace was surrounded by young aunts and uncles. Josh and Alice were still children, but Sallie was seventeen and Eben older still. At twenty-one, he was his mother's right-hand man. Eben's brother-in-law was older, of course, but Alexander was often miles away, attending a sickbed.

Therefore, Eben was in charge of the heavy chores around the place. It was no longer a working farm, unless two horses, a cow, and miscellaneous poultry made it a farm, but like every boy brought up in the country, Eben could handle just about anything, from daily chores to unexpected calamities like the one last week: a raid on the henhouse by a fox. He had been forced to drop everything and mend the fence, while his mother wept over the carcass of the Toulouse goose, then got to work plucking and roasting it and rendering the fat in a kettle.

The care of the apple trees had been abandoned, “at least for now,” said Eudocia regretfully, remembering an orchard cloudy with blossoms and heavy with fruit. But there was still a great deal to do. Hay had to be cut with a reaping machine borrowed from Mr. Hosmer, and stored in the hayloft. Trees had to be felled in the woodlot, carted home, and split for the stove, and now and then a few cedars from the farthest field were hewn into fence posts. The cow had to be milked twice a day and taken to the bull once a year, and her calf safely delivered in the spring. Of course, some supplies had to be brought from town, oats and flour from the grain merchant, lamp oil, sugar and soap from Cutler's store, as well as luxuries from all over the world—raisins from the Levant, tea from China, oranges from Spain.

Eben's mother did most of the cooking and the laundry, although Ida handled her baby's washing and Sallie helped with the shirts, slamming down one heavy iron on the stove and picking up another. Little Alice helped out in the kitchen, obeying the sharp commands of the whirlwind that was her mother, as Eudocia darted from flour bin to bread board, pried up stove lids to poke at the fire, disemboweled a hen, slammed a butcher knife down on a side of pork, or jerked open an oven door to pull out a loaf pan, her hand bunched in her apron.

Eben took his household chores for granted, but Josh was apt to use bad words while shoveling out the slimy heaps plopped in the gutter by the cow. Sallie had been known to burst into tears at the sight of the laundry piled high in the basket, and Alice sometimes dropped dishes on purpose.

As for Horace, Eben's five-year-old nephew never complained about his chore of finding new-laid eggs in the hen-house, although he often broke as many as he carried safely inside to his grandmother.

Eben's real employment was away from home. Six days a week, he took the cars to Waltham, where he was employed as a draftsman for a firm of church architects. His school days were over, but Eben's two years of study at the college in Cambridge had included not only orations in Latin and Greek but chemical experiments—inflating bubbles with hydrogen, making light with phosphorus, as well as the precise recording of the results. Now he was equally precise in the drafting of architectural plans and elevations, although he didn't much care for the fussy designs of his employer. He was eager to try his hand at something of his own.

It was a common saying, Every farmer a mechanic. It was certainly true of Eben, who had a Yankee knack for tinkering. His boyish perpetual-motion machine had failed to work, but his waterwheel had turned an axle that twirled a paper bird. Now he took on a project for his wounded friend James Shaw.

“The trouble with these hooks of yours,” he told James, “is that they don't grip. You need to pick things up and hold them.” When James made a mournful sound and shook his head, Eben said, “No, James, truly. I swear I can do it.”

And within the week, he was back with a gadget that squeezed and let go, and squeezed again. James lifted his hooked stumps in despair.

“Please, James,” said Isabelle. “Let Eben try it.”

“It isn't perfect yet,” said Eben, opening and shutting the contraption. “You'll need help at first. But once it closes on a spoon, you'll be able to feed yourself. Or hold a pen tightly enough to write.”

“Oh, yes, James,” said Isabelle eagerly. “Here, let's try.”

But the first holding device refused to be attached to the stump of James's right arm. “No matter,” said Eben cheerfully. “I can see what's wrong. I'll try again.”

At the door, Isabelle took his hand. “You are a such a good friend to James. He would thank you if he could.”

Eben had known Isabelle at school, where she had been the shyest girl in the seventh grade. His mother and father had known Isabelle's mother and father. But now, although it no longer troubled Eben to look at James, he was afraid to look at Isabelle. The crisis was too great and her trouble too crushing to give him any right to look at her. Turning away, he put on his hat. “I'll be back on Sunday, if it's no trouble.”

“Of course not,” said Isabelle, and she went back to James.

“Where were we, James?” she said, picking up
A Tale of Two Cities.
“Oh, I remember.” Sitting down beside him, she began to read. “‘
Good night, citizen,' said Sydney Carton. ‘How goes the Republic?
'” Isabelle paused before reading the sawyer's response.

“‘
You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount to a hundred soon.
'”

One of the Noblest Works of God

T
he giant tree that straddled the stone wall at the bottom of the Nashoba burial ground had already been growing on this hillside when the tribe of Nipmucks came from the north to fish at the junction of the rivers and hunt in the forest of the countryside known as Nashoba. Some of them had been “praying Indians,” but all of them, whether converted to Christianity or not, would have seen the branches of the chestnut tree hung with fragrant yellow flowers in summer. And they would have gathered the harvest of nuts that rained down in the fall, just as throngs of children did now, appearing like magic under the tree to fill pockets and baskets and pails.

The chestnut tree was massively broad and tall, rising from its gnarled platform like a monument from a pedestal. Some of its branches were dead and bare, but new shoots had sprung up to become part of the whole, and now the entire tree was sprightly with fresh green leaves. Whenever Josiah Gideon left his front door, he gave it an admiring glance.

This morning as he came out to prime the pump and fill a pitcher, Josiah looked across the road and saw Horatio Biddle standing under the tree. Josiah set the pitcher on the doorstep, walked across the road, and climbed over the wall to say good morning. Then the two clergymen, neighbors on this hillside and—whatever Ingeborg Biddle might say—colleagues in the ministry, stood side by side under the tree, contemplating the magnificent spread of leaf and branch over their heads. As always, the sight exhilarated Josiah. He wanted to exclaim, but he refrained.

Then the man beside him made a remark. “See there, it's cracked the monument to Deacon Sweetser.”

Josiah lowered his eyes down and down, through layer after green layer, to the foot of the tree, where the slate tombstone of old Deacon Sweetser stood tall and tilted, heaved to one side by the thick mass of interwoven roots.

“It won't do,” said Horatio Biddle. “And anyhow, that tree's too old. Next big wind, the whole thing will fall down.”

Josiah looked at him keenly. “It hasn't fallen yet.”

“No, but it's bound to happen.” Horatio whistled for a moment, then clapped his hands and made a pronouncement. “That tree must be removed.”

“You're jesting,” said Josiah.

“No, no, it must come down.”

“Come down?” Josiah was dumbfounded. “Surely you don't mean it? Look here, Horatio, I have a better idea. Why not move Deacon Sweetser instead?”

“Move Deacon Sweetser? Profane a Christian burial?” Horatio Biddle was shocked in his turn. “Remove a casket from the place where it was reverently interred a century ago? My dear Josiah, have you no respect for the dead? That is an abominable suggestion.” Horatio dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand, turned away, and said once again, “The tree must come down.”

“No,” cried Josiah. “Horatio, you wouldn't do anything so outrageous.”

Pausing to look back, Horatio said patiently, “Calm yourself, Josiah,” and glanced up again at the tree. “Lord God in heaven, that trunk must be eight or nine feet across.”

“Because it's so old,” shouted Josiah. “That tree's a lot older than Deacon Sweetser. What about respect for one of the noblest works of God?”

“Nonsense,” said Horatio, stalking away up the hill. “I've made up my mind.” He did not tell Josiah his next resolve, which was to act promptly, before the fool had time to arouse sympathy among the other members of the congregation.

True, the chestnut tree was old, but it was only a tree after all. What mattered a tree compared with the long and upright life of that pious old father of the Nashoba church, Deacon Joseph Sweetser? Through all the ages to come, his old bones would remain where they were, until the Last Day and the thundering knock on the coffin lid.

Shovels and Spades

J
ulia Gideon was reading aloud by lantern light.
“Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.
” Raising her eyes from the book, Julia looked across the room. Had James fallen asleep?

No, he was turning his head on the pillow to look at her. His single eye was dark and brilliant in the lantern light, but once again he pulled the sheet over the rest of his ruined face. Julia remembered the way her old father had covered his mouth to hide his toothless jaw. She murmured, “Can you sleep now, James?”

He nodded, but she guessed it was a lie. When Isabelle came into the room in her nightdress, her hair falling down her back, Julia laid the book on the table, whispered good night, and turned to go. But then she had to stand aside for her husband and Eben Flint.

In the lantern light, their faces loomed up out of the dark hall. “Hello, Eben,” said Isabelle, feeling her cheeks grow warm.

Eben gazed at her for a startled moment, then backed away in confusion. Josiah struck a match and lighted a candle. He handed it to his wife, picked up the lantern, and gave her a flashing look. “We need it outside. Don't wait up. We may be gone awhile.”

Something in her husband's face alarmed Julia, but she took the candle and said nothing. The floor creaked under two pairs of boots and the circle of light moved away, leaving only the candle.

Soon there were noises from the shed, soft clinkings and clashings. James lifted his head and Julia went to the window with Isabelle. Moving the curtain aside, they saw Josiah and Eben emerge from the shed. The lantern in Eben's hand made silhouettes of the long-handled tools on their shoulders.

Shovels and spades. What were they doing out-of-doors in the dark of night with shovels and spades?

Deacon Sweetser Moves North

P
erhaps Horatio Biddle had been born a clergyman, babbling sermons in his cradle and waving his little fists in declamatory gestures. Now as a grown man, he felt himself to be the natural lord of his congregation. Ever since the laying on of hands at the time of his ordination, he had been the spiritual master of his flock. In that instant, he had become the inheritor of an ancestral line of Christian preachers. Every hand that had lain upon his head had belonged to a clergyman who had himself received just such a laying on of hands by older men of God, and they, too, had been blessed by the hands of an earlier generation. The ceremony of ordination was a passing of spiritual authority from one age to the next, a solemn succession going back and back in time.

But on the morning following the dark midnight when Josiah Gideon and Eben Flint had set off with their shovels and spades, Horatio Biddle woke up and beheld a horrid defiance of his inherited authority. As he pulled off his nightcap and yawned and glanced out the window, he saw something entirely unexpected. A tombstone was standing at the top of the burial ground in a place where no tombstone had stood before.

Horatio threw up the sash and leaned out to stare down the hill to the place where the chestnut tree rose splendidly in the sweet morning air, its great limbs spreading far and high, its constellations of new leaves translucent in the light of the rising sun. He could see no trace of the resting place of Deacon Sweetser below the tree. There was no ugly pit in the ground, no visible scar. It was as though the venerable deacon had never slept at the foot of the chestnut tree.

Outraged, Horatio threw on his clothes in such a hurry that his wife sat up in bed and complained, “Good gracious, Horatio, your shirt's on inside out.”

“No matter.” Her husband charged out of the bedroom, thundered down the stairs, threw open the door, and raced across the green through the dew-wet grass, then pounded along a quiet street, past a sleepy boy carrying a bucket into a cowshed and past the house of the widow Whittey, who was at that moment sweeping her front stoop. Miss Whittey looked up at Horatio and dropped her broom, but he charged past her without a word and rounded the corner to a path that meandered away from the road. The path led to an untidy yard full of sawbucks and to the shack that was the home of two brothers, Brendan and Daniel Fitzmorris. They were sawyers.