Steeplechase (23 page)

Mab could feel Horace's jouncing through the trembling shafts. She cocked her ears, but her pace did not slacken. She trotted along easily toward the bridge over Nashoba Brook.

The bridge.
Horace had forgotten about the bridge. At once, he stopped bouncing, wrapped his short arms around his stepfather, and buried his face in Alexander's whiskers. Was there a troll under the bridge? A monster with sharp, tearing claws?

The southeast corner of the town of Nashoba displayed the predicament of the two churches in a simple right-angled triangle. One side of the triangle connected Josiah Gideon's house with the unhappy church from which he had robbed the congregation. The line stretched uphill across the burial ground, where the stump of the chestnut tree stood like a memorial to the spitefulness of Horatio Biddle and the headstone of Deacon Sweetser rose like a monument to the fury of Josiah Gideon. The second side of the triangle joined Josiah's house to the robber church itself, and the third ran straight through the woods from one church to the other.

The charged geometry of the landscape was clear to Eben and Alexander as Mab pulled up at Josiah's gate. Alexander leaped down and hitched her to the gatepost. Eben jumped down, too, and reached up for Horace.

The late afternoon sky was sunny, but the air was chill. In the doorway, Josiah's daughter, Isabelle, stood waiting to welcome Alexander and Eben, but when she saw Horace, she stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

Alexander looked at Horace gravely. “You are to stay here, boy,” he told him sternly. “I won't be long.”

“Oh, Horace dear,” said Isabelle, coming forward and smiling down at him, “the sow farrowed yesterday. Would you like to see her little pigs?” She pointed. “They're right there in the shed.”

Horace stared at the distant shed. It was made of wood, just like the house of the second little pig in the story. Horace was a clever little boy, but he was still not clear where stories ended and true things began. What if the wolf was hiding under the barn? He shook his head at Isabelle and clutched Alexander's hand.

“He mustn't come in,” whispered Isabelle, glancing at Eben.

Eben nodded gravely. Alexander tweaked Horace's nose, ruffled his hair, patted his shoulder, and walked inside with Isabelle. Eben smiled at Horace, and then he said it, too: “We won't be long.”

The door of the house closed behind them with a light slam. Horace looked around for something to do. He studied the gate. There was no gate in front of his grandmother's house because there was no fence. Tentatively, he wrapped his cold hands around the top rail of the gate, set one foot on the bottom rail, and pushed off with the other. The gate swung, creaking, back and forth, banging as it struck the fence post, creaking open again as he rode it out.

The house was silent. From behind it came a soft murmur that sounded like chickens. Horace liked chickens, but these were too close to the wolf, so he didn't seek them out. A big two-horse wagon rolled by, a school barge full of children. They stared at Horace. He stared back. The barge ran smoothly past the house, the children turning their heads to keep him in sight until it disappeared around the bend on the way to an outing in Concord.

Horace stepped down from the gate and sucked his cold fingers. His stepfather and Uncle Eben had been gone a long time.

While Isabelle and her mother made tea in the kitchen, Alexander watched Eben strap his new contraption on the stump of James's right arm.

“Try it, James,” said Eben. “It's supposed to open and shut.” But when James lifted his arm, the gadget slid sideways and drooped. “Needs to be tighter,” said Eben, adjusting it. “There, try it now.”

James tried it. Eben and Alexander watched him reach out to the table beside his chair and fumble at a book. When he succeeded in picking it up, Alexander murmured softly, “Good.” But when James tried to turn a page with the other hook, the book slipped and fell.

“Can you pick it up?” asked Eben quietly.

James could. He picked up
A Tale of Two Cities
and dropped it on the table. Then, chuckling, he reared up from his chair and stretched out his arms as though reaching out for something else to grasp and hold.

Alexander and Eben laughed in congratulation, but when they heard the front door open, they stopped laughing and turned their heads. Isabelle ran out of the kitchen and cried out.

Horace stood in the doorway, staring in at James.

Horace Runs

H
orace turned and darted out of the house.

Alexander jumped up, snatched his coat, and ran after him, calling, “Horace, wait.” Eben jumped up, too, and ran after Alexander. Isabelle wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and ran after Eben. Julia stepped out the side door to look in the henhouse and the frost-ravaged garden. At the front gate, Mab whinnied, as if she, too, were calling for Horace.

“The pig shed,” cried Isabelle, running that way. Eben set off down the Acton Turnpike, shouting, “Horace, come back.” Alexander took a flying leap over the stone wall into the burial ground to search among the tombstones, calling, “Horace, where are you?”

But inside the house, looking out from the dining room window, James saw Horace tumble over the back fence and scramble into the woods on the path to Quarry Pond. James ran into the kitchen, threw himself against the screen door, and plunged outside.

The troll was at his back. Horace could hear the pounding of its terrible feet. Ducking frantically under a thorny tangle of blackberry canes that tore at his hands and stabbed at his face, he heard the sharp claws of the troll tear them out of its way.

In the distance, Uncle Eben was shouting, “Horace, Horace,” but the shouts died away and the snarling howls of the troll grew louder. Horace ran faster, afraid to look back, then screamed and fell on his knees because something burst up in his face with a rush of wings. But it was only a bird like an enormous chicken. Sobbing, Horace stumbled up and scampered forward, his short legs flying.

There was an opening ahead, a piece of sunset sky and a gleam of water. The water was a pond. Horace knew the pond at once because there had been a picnic there last summer, and his mother had told him not to go near the edge because the water was so deep, and he had stood on the rocky shore with Josh, throwing stones into the water, trying to make them skip the way Josh's did,
once, twice, three times
, but Horace's had all sunk.

Now, Horace took heart because he knew the way, but the troll seemed to know the way, too, because it was thrashing around in the woods, running sideways to head him off. Horace despaired, understanding at once that you couldn't fool a troll. Turning, he plunged away from the path, with the troll roaring close at his heels, its gigantic feet trampling the forest floor, its terrible claws snapping at branches and twigs. Glancing fearfully back, Horace could see only the dark purple cloud that was obliterating the setting sun. A cold wind had sprung up and all around him the dappled splashes of sunlight were flickering out. Scuttling through underbrush and brambles in a sudden pelting of raindrops, Horace did not know that he was cold, only that he was afraid.

Where could he hide? Zigzagging left and right, he found a hollow place, dropped into it, and burrowed under an umbrella of overarching ferns. They trembled over his head and the rain pattered down, and Horace mistook the drumming of his heart for the pounding feet of the troll. Like a rabbit with a dog at its heels, he jumped out of the hollow and sprinted away.

Had he fooled the troll?
No, because you couldn't fool a troll.
It was still clumping along behind him in the pouring rain, smashing and crashing closer, its fiery breath sounding very near. With hot tears running down his cheeks and water streaming from his hair, Horace made a desperate lunge toward a gleam of light that appeared for an instant between the trees. It was only a flickering glimmer, disappearing and flaring up again, but to Horace it was like a candle in the window of a cottage, the cottage of a good witch who helped little boys lost in the forest, and he blundered toward it.

But it was not a cottage. Drawing closer, Horace recognized the new church in the woods, the one Uncle Eben had built with his own hands, where this very morning his grandmother had played the organ and Horace had helped to ring the bell. Now an orange light flared in the steeple, and there were welcoming jingles from the bell.

Horace floundered across the wet ground, stretching out his arms to touch the door, because he would be safe inside. Churches were holy! Too holy for trolls! The friendly door swung open, and Horace stumbled across the sill. Quickly, he slammed the door, but it flapped open again on its hinges, and at once he saw a dark shape silhouetted against the rain.

Wailing, Horace backed away. Didn't the troll hear the bell jangling in the steeple? Didn't it know that churches were forbidden to trolls? Desperately, he stared around the shadowy room, looking for a place to hide. The church was only one big chamber without cupboards or closets, but then he remembered the ladder. Yes, there it was in the corner, its rungs matted with hay. The trapdoor in the ceiling was a square of orange light.

A ladder was nothing to Horace. With the wild wind blowing into the church through the open door and the bell tingling overhead and the clawed feet of the troll booming across the new planks of the floor, Horace scampered up the ladder, rung after rung, in a shower of sparks and wisps of falling hay. Poking his head through the trapdoor, he saw a man crouched under the bell with a lighted candle in his hand.

He recognized him at once. It was the preacher—the other preacher, not Mr. Gideon—and he was setting the hay on fire.

Horatio Biddle turned around, colliding again with the infernal bell. Below him, at the top of the ladder, a small boy stood staring up at him. Horatio set the candle down on the smoldering hay and took the boy by the throat.

A Far, Far Better Thing

J
ames did not mean to catch the boy. He was only trying to keep him in sight, because these woods went on forever. Josiah's woodlot lay at the edge of a thousand acres of trackless forest, stretching north into Carlisle and west, all the way to Littleton.

As a boy, he had been lost in these woods himself. For an entire November day, young James had wandered in helpless circles among the trees, unable to find his way home. With darkness had come the cold, and he had crawled into a thorny tangle, terrified of wolves and creeping things. In the morning, he had seen at once which way to go, and within the hour the domed steeple of the Nashoba church had appeared above the trees and he had run all the way home to the arms of his mother and a whipping from his father. But that lost boy had been ten years old, twice the age of the boy who was running into danger now.

Like a dog herding sheep, James headed him away from Quarry Pond, then turned him in the direction of the Acton Turnpike. Reaching out with his hooks to thrust low branches out of his way, James managed to keep the boy in sight and urge him northward. Soon, young Horace would find himself in the neighborhood of the new church that was Josiah's pride and joy, and then he would no longer be lost. Yes, there it was, beyond an ugly patch of tree stumps, a rain-darkened building with a miniature steeple.

For a moment, James slowed his steps and tried to catch his breath, but when he heard the jangle of the bell and saw the blaze of light, he began to run again. Stumbling headlong into the clearing, James saw with a single glance of his one good eye that two things were horribly wrong: the boy running into the building and the man in the steeple.

James knew the man on sight. On the mild May morning in 1864 when 2nd Lt. James Jackson Shaw had embraced his new wife, Isabelle, and joined the other volunteers at the depot, this man had been there to shake his hand and say a prayer. He was the Reverend Horatio Biddle, and he was setting the steeple on fire.

James raced across the rough wet grass and threw open the church door. Looking wildly around the dark sanctuary, he saw Horace scrambling up a ladder toward a fiery opening in the ceiling. James bounded across the floor and reached up to the rungs with his iron hands. They were awkward on the ladder, but he managed to hook his way up from rung to rung. At the top, he sprang to his feet in the burning straw and flung himself at Horatio Biddle. With one hook he slashed at the staring face and with the other arm he tugged at the boy.

The Reverend Horatio Biddle shrieked and let the child go. James plucked Horace free and dropped the screaming boy down the ladder.

Horatio, too, was sobbing, but he threw himself at the ghastly apparition that was Josiah Gideon's disfigured son-in-law. The two men grappled and the wild bell rang in the steeple—the insufferable, unbearable new steeple—and the fire in the hay took hold.

The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are robed and ready.…

the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.… The