Steeplechase (27 page)

May their souls fly to heaven

As their bodies flew on earth.

The Forbidden Book

I
t was Homer's turn to take the wheel. On the way home, Mary reached between her knees into the bag of books that had been loaned to them by Julie Flint.

“Oh, I remember this one,” said Mary, laughing. “There's a whole shelf of Tom Speedy books in my sister's house; they were written by our great-grandfather.”

“My God.” Homer pulled the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road and leaned sideways to gaze in wonder at
Tom Speedy's Aeroplane.
“Do you mean to tell me Horace Morgan was your great-grandfather?”

“Of course he was. Didn't you know that?”

“I did not.” Homer was ecstatic. “If I'd known you were Horace Morgan's great-granddaughter, I'd have fallen to my knees right way. They were such great stories—
Tom Speedy and His Motorcar, Tom Speedy and His Locomotive, Tom Speedy and His Hot-Air Balloon.
Well, I suppose nobody reads them anymore, but I had a passion for them when I was ten.”

At home, they went straight to the kitchen. Homer opened two bottles of beer and Mary sliced tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden patch and dumped them in the food processor. As the machine whirled them noisily around, she shouted a question at Homer. “Why do you think she retired from the world?”

“Julie Flint?” Homer looked down at his empty bowl. When Mary turned off the noisy machine, the clock ticked in the silent kitchen. She poured the gazpacho into the bowls and sat down, and at last Homer said solemnly, “Because she's not wearing rose-colored glasses.”

“Well, neither are we.”

“Oh yes we are.” Homer picked up his spoon. “Everybody who isn't a recluse or a suicide wears rose-colored glasses. That includes you and me. We have to look through some kind of distorting lens, because if we got a really good look at the various miseries in the world, we wouldn't be able to carry on from day to day.”

After lunch, they carried the bag of Julie's books into the front room. Mary took out the forbidden book and set it on the coffee table. It was an oversize clothbound volume, its black cover stamped with gold. She looked at it fearfully. “Julie said to open it with care.”

“Well, go ahead.”

“I'm afraid of it. It's full of terrible pictures, she said.”

“Well, I'm not afraid; I'm curious.”

“Okay, you look at it then.”

Homer reached for the book, opened it, and turned the pages slowly. Screwing up her courage, Mary said, “Okay, show me.”

“No,” said Homer, and he slammed the book shut.

“Homer dear, I happen to be a grown woman.”

“Of course you are. Forgive me.” He opened the book again and they looked at it together.

It was an atlas of Civil War injuries photographed
“by order of the surgeon general.
” Some of the pictures were of gangrenous limbs before amputation; some showed the postoperative stumps, others the odd shapes of resectioned arms and legs. The most harrowing were photographs of facial disfigurements—missing lower jaws and noses, drooping, sightless eyes, mouths hideously crimped to one side. Among them were studies of heroic attempts at surgical repair.

The last page described the case of Lt. James Jackson Shaw. Mary made pitying noises. James was blind in one eye. The bridge of his nose was gone and part of his lower jaw. His arms were stumps. Below the photograph was his medical history.

Homer and Mary read the surgeon's dry report.

2nd Lt. James Jackson Shaw, 32nd Massachusetts Volunteer

Infantry. Severely wounded, April 1, 1865, at Five Forks
,

Virginia, in one of the last engagements of the late war.

His wounds resulted from the premature explosion of a shell as it was rammed home in the muzzle of a twelve-pounder Napoléon. His injuries were multiple. The humors of the right eye were evacuated, the nasal bones fractured, and a portion of the inferior maxilla carried away, resulting in great deformity and loss of speech.

Worse still was the catastrophic destruction of both hands. Within an hour of the explosion, amputations were performed in a field hospital. Both arms were removed at the wrist. The wounds cicatrized well and the patient was transferred to St. Joseph's Hospital in New York City, where portions of exfoliated bone were removed and the first of four facial operations performed by Dr. Gordon Buck. Over a two-year period, there were three other attempts at repair with successive skin grafts.

Homer closed the book. When he could speak, he said, “Well, it's war. It's any war. Even now, the worst casualties are spirited away somewhere. Nobody's allowed to photograph men as damaged as this. Why, dear me, it would be in such poor taste. So the poor guys spend the rest of their lives hidden away in veterans' hospitals. Their fellow citizens hear the statistics—you know, how many men were killed and how many wounded—but they never see the worst that can happen to the young men they so blithely send off to war. Otherwise, they might refuse to send them.”

“But sometimes we have to send them,” murmured Mary.

“Only when the particular war we send them to is chosen pretty damn carefully,” growled Homer.

A Bad Day for Homer

S
ometimes, Mary Kelly imagined going back in time to the moment when she and Homer had first met. What if they could relive that crucial encounter? Given a second chance, would Homer murmur, “Excuse me” and turn his back? Would she?

Poor Old Homer, his new book was done, hurried to a finish. At the last minute, he had added an exciting new chapter about the lost and found church in the town of Nashoba, and then he had rushed the manuscript to his editor by overnight mail.

Next day, Luther called to say, “Well, it's about time, Homer. Your last bestseller has slipped right off the bottom of the list, but now, please God, you'll be back on top again.”

But the publishing world proved fickle. Luther called a few months later to say regretfully, “Sorry, Homer, but this one's a dud, I'm afraid. We fired off a couple hundred review copies, but nobody took the bait.”

Mary took him out on the river to cheer him up, but it didn't work. “It's not just the new one that's failing,” said Homer gloomily, dipping his paddle in rosy pieces of reflected sky. “Luther says
Hen and Chicks
is going out of print.”

Mary changed the subject. “Look, Homer, it's that time of day again. Thoreau's favorite time.”

“What time do you mean?” groaned Homer.

“When the setting sun and the rising moon are equal and you can't tell whether it's day or night.”

“Who the hell cares?” Homer had said the same thing before, laughing in triumph. This time, he said it bitterly, not bothering to look east or west.

Fortunately, the celestial bodies themselves seemed to care. The sun went down in a fiery display of pink and crimson cloud and the moon rose slowly over Fairhaven Bay, majestic and serene, oblivious of human trouble, of books and disappointments, of churches and scandals and the miscellaneous sufferings of mortal flesh.

Homer's
Steeplechase
had failed, but the steeples themselves remained, parish churches all across the face of New England, with their Bible Sundays, knitting ministries, bicycle rides for hunger, Easter luncheons, globalization studies, intergenerational potlucks, and even their occasional hanging sermons. There they stood on a thousand village greens, wooden structures as simple as barns and as commonplace as gas stations, but of a timeless and surpassing beauty.

1868

Three Trees

I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear

But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear;

The king of Spain's daughter came to visit me
,

And all for the sake of my little nut tree.

—Anonymous, nursery rhyme

A Miscellaneous Harvest

T
he first of the three trees had been real, but it was gone now, leaving only an enormous stump in a thicket of sprouted saplings at the foot of the burial ground. The second was the tree of Mr. Darwin, but it existed only in the head of Josiah Gideon. The third was also invisible, but, like a grafted tree in an orchard, it bore a miscellaneous harvest:
The Origin of Species
and the
Book of Genesis, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
, Caesar's
Gallic Wars
and
Jack and the Beanstalk, A Tale of Two Cities
and
Three Billy Goats Gruff
, Cicero's
Orations
and Miss Fuller's
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Surely some of the crucial events of the year 1868 in the town of Nashoba were the fruit of this latter tree. Perhaps they had been read into being.

It was late September in New England. Noisy flocks of wild geese flapped down on Quarry Pond and took off again, heading south. The gossamer egg sacs of spiders appeared in the corners of rooms. Cattle were driven to Brighton and apples carted to Boston. Pumpkins swelled in the fields and curtains of wild grapes hung on stone walls. Virginia creeper and poison ivy blazed on dead trees. Wood was corded, coal got in.

In Nashoba, there were funeral services in both churches. A lawsuit was dropped, and Josiah Gideon hired a firm of carpenters to repair his half-burned steeple.

But how does a five-year-old boy recover? In the house of Eudocia Flint, Horace did not speak. Night after night, he woke up screaming. Ida and Alexander took him into their bed, and in the morning he climbed into his grandmother's lap. All during that anxious week, he spoke only once—when Eudocia brought out the storybook. “No,” said Horace, pushing it away.

Nursery rhymes were safer, although Mother Goose sometimes reveled in dire events, like the fate of the three blind mice and the fall of Humpty-Dumpty. But the cat and the fiddle were harmless, and Horace smiled at the cow that jumped over the moon. He liked the blackbirds popping out of the pie and the fine lady with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. And when Eudocia told him stories about his own toes—“This little piggy went to market”—Horace laughed out loud.

In Nashoba, there were important changes. The Prudential Committee of the First Parish Church returned to its duty and chose Josiah Gideon as its new pastor. Then, since the newly built church was no longer needed, Josiah and his friends offered it for sale.

But who would be interested in an empty church? Through the rest of the fall and all winter and spring, it stood empty. The door blew open, dead leaves piled up in the corners, and bats hung from the rafters. In June, at long last, the property was acquired by two pairs of newlyweds. And before long, to everyone's surprise, a new enterprise appeared on the Acton Turnpike: a photographic studio à la mode. At once, it began doing a land-office business in cartes de visite, cabinet photographs, and touching images of deceased infants.

As for Ingeborg Biddle, she dawdled and delayed. Although the returning congregation lost no time in calling Josiah Gideon to the pulpit of the First Parish Church, Ingeborg was in no rush to vacate the parsonage. There were too many important things to do, such as the removal of her bathroom fixtures.

“What do you want we should do with them?” asked the plumber after wrenching free all the connections.

“Bury them,” said Ingeborg, having vowed that no member of the Gideon family would ever enjoy their splendor.

“Well, all right, missus,” said the plumber, “if you say so.” But he wisely took them home to glorify his own domestic arrangements, while Ingeborg moved to Cambridge with the rest of her worldly goods.

On the whole, she was not sorry to leave Nashoba. For one thing, she had no intention of being whispered about as
poor Widow Biddle, whose late husband
—
here, dear, I'll whisper it in your ear.
For another, she was tired of country smells, country noises, and country society. Her new friends in Cambridge were so much more sophisticated. Soon, Ingeborg established a new series of
conversaziones.
From the start, they were more successful than her pitiful afternoons among the provincial ladies of Nashoba.