Steeplechase (18 page)

“There must be a high rpm in both cases.” Homer edged the car down the switchbacks of their steep driveway. “And I can't help wondering if we're really any better off with our globalization studies and knitting ministries. I mean, we may be a little nearer to the raw truth, but haven't we lost something at the same time? You know, in majestic old philosophical dignity? Jonathan Edwards was a great man.”

“But surely, Homer, it's better to be right, even if ruefully, rather than majestically wrong?”

“Well, maybe so. “Homer turned off the engine and sat gazing for a moment at the blue expanse of Fairhaven Bay. “He liked spiders.”

“Spiders? Who liked spiders?”

“Jonathan Edwards. He knew an awful lot about spiders.” Sighing, Homer heaved himself out of the car. “His doctrine of original sin may be gone for good, but his spiders are true forever.”

1868

“There Shall Be No Other Steeple in the Town of Nashoba!”

What degenerate days are these
!

—Marcus Tullius Cicero,

“First Oration Against

Catiline”

No Cathedral

I
t was clear to Josiah that his rebellious new church would be no cathedral. When every board cut from the chestnut logs in the sawmill of Isaac Pole had been stacked in Josiah's backyard, he took a pencil from behind his ear and calculated the total number of board feet. With Isabelle's hens stepping around his feet, he scribbled figures on one of the clean white boards. “Fair-size chicken house, that's all we'll get,” he told Eben sadly.

“There are plenty more small trees in the woods,” said Eben. “We can cut as many as we need, only they ought to be felled right away so they'll be dry at the same time.”

Eben's supervision of the church construction in Waltham was finished at last, but now he was charged with erecting a large house for a wealthy citizen of Concord. It was to be an elegant mansion in the Italianate style, complete with veranda and servants hall. Only in his free time could Eben draft plans for Josiah Gideon. Josiah's church was far simpler, but even so, it had a steeple. Eben had sketched an open bell chamber with a pyramidal roof over the front door.

One evening, eager to take a look at Eben's plan, Josiah appeared at his door.

As usual, the house was swarming with miscellaneous activity. Eben's brother-in-law, Dr. Clock, was instructing Eben's younger brother, Josh, in the properties of a right-angled triangle, but he jumped up and went to the door in answer to Josiah's knock. Eben's sister Ida hurried away with her howling baby, his sister Sallie ran out of the kitchen to see who was at the door, and Eben's mother, Eudocia, called down a welcome from upstairs, where she was putting Alice to bed. Only Eben's nephew, Horace, was quiet, because he was sound asleep.

“In here, sir, if you please,” said Eben. He led Josiah into the dining room and unrolled his plans on the table. Holding down the corners with two teapots, a pitcher, and a pickle dish, Eben grinned at Josiah and quoted the words of Mrs. Gideon: “There shall be no other steeple in the town of Nashoba.”

Josiah spread his hands on the table and leaned over Eben's plans and elevations. His whiskers brushed the paper, his quick eyes looked at every detail, and his mind instantly grasped the whole. “Good,” he cried, thumping his fist on the table, bouncing the teapots.

Upstairs, Horace woke up. The shout from downstairs was a call to action. He scrambled to his feet on the bed and began jumping up and down. Bouncing on the bed was forbidden, but he couldn't stop, because the springs were making such a fine
whangety-whang
and the bed was shaking so violently and banging against the wall.

“No, no, Horace,” cried his grandmother, running in from the next room.

Whimpering, Horace crawled back under the covers. Eudocia picked up his storybook, sat down on the edge of his bed, and read him “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”:

The youngest Billy Goat crossed the bridge.

“Trip, trap! Trip, trap!” went the bridge.

Beneath the bridge lived a terrible troll.

It roared at the Billy Goat,

“I'm coming to gobble you up!”

Horace soon fell asleep, but his fingers were so tightly wound in his grandmother's apron that she had to uncurl them one by one.

“Two months it will take for those boards to dry,” said Josiah as Eben rolled up his plans. “But the foundation needs to be dug. We can get busy on the hole right away.”

Pillars of the Church

J
osiah's woodlot on the Acton Turnpike was only a half mile from his house. He had chosen a clearing not far from the road, a little glade empty of trees. On the following Saturday afternoon, he walked down the road, pushing a wheelbarrow laden with shovels, spades, and a keg of ground limestone as white as new-fallen snow.

Eben arrived a moment later with a cartload of short boards, tools, a bucket of nails, and a couple of sawbucks. At once, he began slapping up a crude toolshed, while Josiah used his foot rule to lay out a rough shape in the grass. When he had sifted through his fingers a trail of white limestone all the way around, he gave an excited shout: “Eben, come and look.”

Eben put down his saw and stood beside Josiah to admire the white rectangle in the weedy grass. It was the ragged outline of a single large room. The white square at the far end was the woodshed. No longer was the new church a heroic fancy. There it lay on the ground. The straggling white line proclaimed the existence of a second parish church in the town of Nashoba. Simultaneously, they looked up, as if they could see the entire building, tall and complete, steeple and all.

“Hark,” said Eben, “methinks I hear the bell.” But then he picked up a heavy fork and handed it to Josiah. “Four feet down, Josiah. The hole's got to be four feet deep so the frost won't heave the whole thing out of plumb.”

“Right you are,” said Josiah, and he flung himself at the task. Setting his boot on the fork, he tried to thrust it deep into the earth. But instead of sinking to the top of the tines, it struck a rock. Feverishly Josiah levered up the rock and sank the fork in again. This time, it was caught in a choking tangle of roots.

“I'll go kitty-corner,” said Eben, and he carried his fork and spade to the far end. It was clear that every chunk of earth in the clearing would have to be wrenched up and pried out.

They worked at the formidable task all afternoon. Occasionally, a passerby glanced at them curiously. One of them turned off the road to pass the time of day. “What you fellas up to? What you got down there, a treasure chest?”

Eben looked at Josiah and said nothing. Josiah went on digging, but with a dash of bravado he said, “It's a church. We're building a new church.”

“A church!” The man was dumbfounded. “But this here's Nashoba, ain't it? You folks already got a church.” He looked at them accusingly. “This here ain't gonna be no goddamned popish chapel?” When Josiah glowered, the stranger backed away. “Sorry, gentlemen, didn't mean no offense.”

So the news went by zigs and zags from one astonished ear to another, until it reached the parsonage of the Reverend Horatio Biddle. Horatio was struck dumb. Recovering, he jumped up from his chair, clapped on his hat, threw open the front door, crossed the green at a gallop, and raced along the Acton Turnpike.

By the time he pulled up, gasping, at the clearing in Josiah Gideon's woodlot, six men in shirtsleeves were prying up the dirt, digging down deep, slowly cutting out the corners of a rectangle in the ground. Horatio backed away in dismay. The rumor was true. They were carving out the foundation of a new church, a rival church, an outrageous church that had no right to exist.

To Horatio's mortification, he saw that four of the men digging the foundation were not madmen like Josiah Gideon nor out-of-towners like young Eben Flint. Horatio knew them all by name. They were Artemus Grout, Joseph Hunt, Theodore Wilbur, and Samuel Brooks. They were members of his own congregation. No, not merely members—they were pillars. All four of them were stalwart pillars of Nashoba's First Parish Church.

Jolly Old Dickens

T
he sweet airs of spring were gone. It was midsummer, hot and close. The rain held off. Kitchen gardens and orchards suffered, but the corn grew apace. It was fine weather for haying and for drying fresh-cut wood.

“Another week,” said Josiah, tapping one of the planks piled up behind his house. “By the time I'm back from touring all the almshouses in the southern part of the county, these boards will be fit and ready to go.”

The clearing in Josiah's woodlot was no longer a clearing. Cartloads of topsoil had been carried away to improve an impoverished acre here and there, but heaps of sandy subsoil still remained beside the cellar hole. All the rocks had been hurled to one side after they were pulled out of the ground, then picked up again to line the foundation. Leftover stones cluttered the edge of the woods, along with a boulder dragged out of the hole by the team of oxen belonging to Joseph Hunt.

Behind the boulder stood the toolshed, finished by Eben in a couple of evenings. “I could have slapped it up quicker,” he told Josiah, “if I hadn't been slapping mosquitoes at the same time.”

The window glass had come. Eben's order had been filled far too early, and the three heavy crates lay unopened behind the toolshed. Part of Josiah's pretty woodlot was now a wasteland of stumps, the wreckage of trees felled to eke out the supply of lumber. A straw bonnet hung forgotten in a brush pile, a lost doll leaned against a stump, and a rubber ball that had streaked away from Eben's nephew, Horace, lay among last year's fallen leaves.

When Josiah came back from inspecting the shoddy appointments of the almshouses at the extreme southern border of Middlesex County, he declared with an exultant shout that the stacked wood was dry. At last, the construction of his defiant little church could begin in earnest.

Not much could be expected in the month of August from the farmers among Josiah's supporters. But other men had time to spare. Alexander Clock's patients were always healthier in summer than in winter, and he often accompanied Eben to lend a hand. All the district schoolhouses in Nashoba and Concord were locked up and empty, except for a few droning flies. Pupils and schoolmasters were free to help out. Even Professor Eaton no longer traveled by rail to Cambridge to give instruction in the
Eclogues
of Virgil, and the court cases in which lawyer Jarvis Brown was concerned had been reduced to one (about which he did not speak).

But the construction of even so small a building called for many hours of Eben's time. As its designer, he had to furnish measurements for sills, corner posts, cross beams, and rafters. And no one else but Eben could direct the layout of the timbers on the ground and mark precisely for the amateur carpenters the places to cut the mortises and tenons that were to hold the framework together.

Sometimes Eben was so beset that he wanted to harden his heart and take off for some other corner of the world. But soon his resolve would be restored by the ardent look on Josiah's face as he hewed a beam with a broad ax or pressed his knee on a board to send his excited saw wheezing back and forth.

And there was also a strange exhilaration in visiting Josiah's house whenever new boards had to be carted to the woodlot from the stacks in his backyard.

They were comfortable together now—Eben and Isabelle, Eben and James. One day in early August, Eben found Isabelle reading aloud to James a novel by Charles Dickens. “Oh, good,” said Eben, “jolly old Charles Dickens,” and he sat down to listen to the story with James.

But the passage she had been reading was not very jolly. “It's such a sad story,” said Isabelle, apologizing to Eben. “Perhaps you'd rather not hear the last page.”

“What,
A Tale of Two Cities?
” said Eben. “But it's a very fine book.”

So Isabelle looked down and went on reading to James the sublime last thought of Sydney Carton as he stood on the scaffold.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
”

Swashbuckling Insurrection

O
n any sunny day in August, ten or fifteen defectors from Horatio Biddle's congregation would be present in the clearing to help with the raising of Josiah's church. Only a few were skilled at rough carpentry, but all of them followed directions and worked together in a giddy spirit of high-principled and swashbuckling insurrection. It was men's work, but the women arrived at lunchtime with lunch pails and picnic baskets. Every midday was like a festive Sunday nooning.

Julia Gideon came every other day, taking turns with Isabelle. Julia's basket was always full of good things, but she had no heart for the high spirits and laughter of the others. Everything Julia feared seemed about to happen. She had heard a terrible rumor: Ingeborg Biddle had gone to law.