Steeplechase (2 page)

Jack and Jacob Spratt

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Eben

A
storm of paper drifted down over Concord's Milldam, flapping all over the road. One pamphlet slapped the nose bag of a horse tied up at the Middlesex Hotel. Startled, it reared and plunged. An astonished deacon plucked another from the front of his coat.

When one of the flying pamphlets drifted lazily back and forth over the head of Eben Flint, he reached up, smiling, and took it out of the air. It wasn't every day that messages fell from the sky. Was this an angelic announcement?

But, of course, it was only a broadside dropped from the hot-air balloon that was majestically disappearing behind the elm trees on Main Street. Eben read the message as he headed for the bank.

“Eben, Eben,” called Ella Viles. From across the street, she waved a pamphlet.

Eben waited, watching her dart in front of a team hauling a wagonload of empty barrels. The driver shouted, “Whoa,” the heads of the horses jerked back, and the hollow barrels thumped and rattled. Angrily, the driver shouted, “What's your hurry, miss?”

Ella only giggled and bolted to the other side, skipping over puddles in a flurry of swaying skirts. Breathlessly, she held up the pamphlet. “Oh, Eben, we must both be taken.”

Against the background of the dull mercantile street, she was a lovely object. Behind her, two ladies in drab shawls were gossiping in front of Cutler's Dry and Fancy Goods, a hired girl hurried past with a basket of eggs, one of the Hosmers shook hands with one of the Wheelers as they agreed to trade two bushels of turnips for one of winter-stored apples, and the fish cart rattled past the town pump, the driver blowing his horn.

Did Eben mind the way Ella teased him about their names being so much alike? Did he mind her inference that it was the hand of Fate? Did he object to the way she kept saying, “Eben and I,” “Me and Eben?” No, he didn't mind. Not when it came so sweetly from such a pretty creature as Ella Viles.

As the wagon rumbled away down the Milldam with its wobbling cargo of barrels, Eben smiled at Ella and shook his head. “I don't need another likeness. I've already been taken.”

“Oh, that one. I've seen that one. Oh, Eben, you were just a little boy. The war is over, and now that you're back home, you're so much more grown-up and good-looking.” Ella blushed and dropped her eyes. “And, oh, Eben, I hope you'll like to have my picture?” Tittering, she said, “My gracious, I'll have to order a whole set, I have so many admirers.”

This was said in jest, but it had the desired effect. Eben gazed at her without speaking, and she told herself how delightful it was to be so pretty and to be standing so close to Eben Flint, right here on the Milldam. How that old spinster Betsy Hubble must envy Ella Viles! And surely the other ladies on the street were saying to one another, “There they are again. You always see them together, Ella Viles and Eben Flint.”

But then Ella remembered that she had sensational news, and her face turned solemn. She stepped closer and lowered her voice, “Oh, Eben, have you heard about James?”

“James?”

“James Shaw.” Ella's eyes shone with the excitement of being the first to tell the horrid story. “He was your teacher, wasn't he, Eben? Your old friend? Oh, Eben, do you mean you haven't heard the dreadful news?”

Eben stiffened and said sharply, “Tell me.”

“He's back from that hospital in Philadelphia. And, Eben, they say”—Ella's eyes widened and her voice sank to a whisper—“they say he's dreadfully
disfigured.
”

Eben stared at her blankly, and she hurried on. “Oh, poor Isabelle! James was such a catch, remember, Eben? All us girls in school, we were so jealous, but now— Oh, poor Isabelle.”

“She's with him?” said Eben. “Isabelle and James are back home in Nashoba?”

“So they say.” Ella looked slyly at Eben. “I remember how everybody used to say you were sweet on Isabelle. But now, just imagine what her life will be like, married to that— Oh, poor
dear
Isabelle!”

Horace

D
r. Alexander Clock picked up his bag and looked at his brother-in-law soberly. “I don't know, Eben. I told you, I've seen James and I've seen his wife. She told me James wants no visitors.”

“But James was my friend before the war. He was like an older brother.” Stubbornly, Eben pulled on his coat. “And I was in school with Isabelle.”

“But Eben, it's very bad.” Alexander gazed out the open door at the two Miss Rochesters, who were bouncing on the seat of their runabout, racing along the road to Barrett's mill behind their high-stepping mare.

Eben wondered if the Misses Dorothea and Margaret Rochester were scurrying to call on the neighbors and pass along the sad news about James Shaw. “Do you think I can't bear it?”

“No, it isn't that.”

Alexander's wife, Ida, called down from the top of the hall stairs, “Have you seen Horace?” She hurried down and threw open the door to the sitting room. “I thought he was still napping, but he's gone again.”

At once, Eben bounded away to look in the kitchen, calling for his nephew, while Alexander shouted, “Horace, where are you?”

But Horace was nowhere in the house. He was out-of-doors, darting joyfully into the henhouse and astonishing the chickens. When they flew up and squawked, he ran out again and romped across a bedsheet that had been spread out on the grass to bleach in the sun. A tin pail was hanging upside down on a fence post, and it bonked as Horace scrambled over the fence. In the pasture, he startled the dreaming cow, then raced to the dead tree that stood high on a rise of ground. The bark of the tree was rough, but Horace shinnied up easily to the lowest branch and then clambered higher. But the branches were rotten, and one of them broke. Half-falling, half-slithering, Horace came down with a bump and rolled over. Rolling over was so pleasant, he rolled all the way to the bottom of the hill. When he stood up, covered with dry leaves, his stepfather towered above him.

“Horace,” said Dr. Clock mildly, “your mother is looking for you.”

“Oh,” said Horace, and he raced ahead of his stepfather to the stable, where his mother was standing in the doorway, holding baby Gussie.

She said nothing to Horace, but she gave his breeches a soft slap as he scooted by. “But after all,” she whispered to Alexander, “he's only five years old.”

“He's got to learn,” said Alexander. He thumped his bag down on the seat of the gig and showed Horace how to help him hitch up the mare. Mab stood quietly, stretching her neck sideways to chew at the brim of Horace's hat.

When the turnout was ready, Alexander tousled Horace's hair, kissed the baby, kissed his wife, and said, “I'm off to see James.”

“Oh, poor James,” said Ida, and she pressed her face into Gussie's fat cheek.

Eben was waiting beside the road. Alexander sighed, but he did not complain when his brother-in-law climbed up beside him. Together, they set off down the road to Nashoba to visit Eben's old friend and Alexander's tragic patient, Lt. James Jackson Shaw, shattered by the premature explosion of a shell at the Battle of Five Forks, only eight days before Appomattox.

James had survived, but might it have been better if he had not?

Ida watched them drive away in the direction of Nashoba, their wheels churning up the dust. As she walked into the house holding Horace by the hand and baby Gussie against her shoulder, she wondered how her old friend Isabelle would bear it. And how would Isabelle's mother and father bear it? And what about Ida herself? How would she herself bear the pity of what had happened to Isabelle and her husband, James?

It was not that Ida was timid. She had seen terrible things before. After the Battle of Gettysburg, during her desperate search for her missing husband on the battlefield, she had witnessed an amputation, she had endured the stench of dead horses, she had seen hundreds of badly wounded men, and she had searched among long rows of dead soldiers awaiting burial.

Of course, her second husband, Alexander, had seen even more terrible things. As an army surgeon, Alexander Clock was accustomed to every kind of battle wound, gangrenous and worm-infested, and every kind of dangerous camp fever. He had served in field hospitals in Maryland after the Battle of Antietam, and then as chief surgeon in the Patent Office hospital in Washington. In fact, it had been in the Patent Office that he had first met Ida. She had gone there to look for her missing husband, but she had found her brother Eben instead, dangerously ill with typhoid fever. And it was there that Alexander had fallen in love with her, even as her time came to deliver her baby, the boy who was now bouncing up and down on the sofa in the sitting room.

“Horace?” called Ida's mother. “Are you trying to bring the house down?” Eudocia ran into the sitting room, plopped her grandson down on the sofa, and settled herself beside him. It was time for “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

James

With drums and guns, and guns and drums
,

The enemy nearly slew ye.

My darling dear, you look so queer
,

Oh, Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

—Irish folk song

T
he mare needed no direction to follow the road to Nashoba. Mab trotted steadily between strawberry fields where people were spreading armfuls of hay. The gig rocked and jiggled as it crossed the bridge over Nashoba Brook. There was no other traffic on the road but a plodding old horse coming the other way, drawing a wagon loaded with a gigantic basket and a strange flabby object of shriveled red and blue. Two men in bowler hats were squeezed together on the seat beside the driver.

Eben nodded as the wagon rattled by. “It's the balloon, I think,” he told Alexander.

His brother-in-law had not seen the hot-air balloon of Jack and Jacob Spratt floating over the Milldam that morning. He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded paper. “Perhaps,” he said, “you should read this.”

Eben had to hold the paper before his eyes with both hands to keep it still. It was Alexander's dry medical assessment, written neatly, like an official report:

THE CASE OF 2ND LT. JAMES JACKSON SHAW, 32ND

MASS. VOL., WOUNDED BY AN EXPLODING SHELL AT

FIVE FORKS, VIRGINIA, APRIL 1, 1865

The wound to the patient's face has resulted in a complete loss of the bony and cartilaginous support of the nose. The tip of the nose has been drawn up and back until the nostrils and columella are so distorted that instead of looking downward, the interior nares look directly forward, giving a most dreadful appearance. The shattering of the patient's jaw and the destruction of his tongue have resulted in the loss of articulate speech.