Steeplechase (28 page)

Authors: Jane Langton

BOOK: Steeplechase

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When the parsonage was empty at last, Josiah and Julia moved in, leaving their widowed daughter, Isabelle, in possession of the house at the corner of Quarry Pond Road and the Acton Turnpike.

A year later, Eben Flint bought the house from his new father-in-law. On the night of their wedding, Eben fell on his knees before Isabelle. She knelt, too, and wrapped him in her loose long hair. Not until noon of the next day did they rouse themselves because sunlight was falling through the window at a scandalous angle. The sun was so high above the town of Nashoba that even the tall tombstone of Deacon Sweetser in the burial ground cast no shadow, nor did the stone soldier on his pedestal, nor even the steeple of the First Parish Church.

Within the year, Isabelle gave birth to a baby boy. Eventually, five childrenâBartholomew, William, Eudocia, Julia, and Ebenezerâmade the house ring with the noise of their games and their laughter and their fighting.

Eben set up his drafting table in the room where James had spent the last summer of his life. His architectural practice went well, but sometimes he had to rear up out of his chair and shout, “Pipe down,” although it didn't do much of any good.

As time went by, Eben often thought about Isabelle's first husband, whose place he had taken. Sometimes he told himself that there was a sort of poetical connection between the chestnut tree and James Jackson Shaw. Perhaps by his heroic action the lopped man had been made whole, just as the lopped and fallen tree had been born again. Sometimes Eben believed in this noble parallel, and sometimes he didn't.

Author's Note

T
he ideas for the four central elements in this novelâthe tree, the church, the wounded veteran, and the tempestuous nature of Josiah Gideonâcame from other books.

The tree is an American chestnut
(Castanea dentata)
, but it was inspired by an ancient British chestnut
(Castanea sativa)
in Thomas Pakenham's
Meetings with Remarkable Trees.

There are photographs of many simple rural churches in
Wooden Churches: A Celebration
, by Rick Bragg, including a church turned movie house in Woodville, Mississippi.

A magnificent volume of medical history,
Plastic Surgery of the Face
, by Sir Harold Gillies, is a photographic record of this surgeon's heroic efforts to repair facial injuries suffered by British soldiers in World War I. It provided painful information about cases like that of James Jackson Shaw.

Anthony Trollope's pugnacious clergyman, Josiah Crawley, was kidnapped from the pages of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, set down in a New England village, and renamed Josiah Gideon.

The photographs of the nineteenth-century characters in this book came from the collection of Henry Deeks in Maynard, Massachusetts. Finding their likenesses was like moving through throngs of men, women, and children, looking for the right faces. Three of them had to resemble the characters in an earlier book but seem five years older. Amazingly, they turned up. I recognized Ida at once, and pulled her out of the crowd, along with Alexander and Eben.

As for Jack and Jacob Spratt, the only research for their aerial adventures was a breathtaking flight over the town of Queechee, Vermont, in Gary Lovell's hot-air balloon.

The town of Nashoba is fictional, forcibly squeezed into the map of Middlesex County. And although Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes often wrote about very large trees, he had nothing whatever to say about the great chestnut of Nashoba.

For advice and counsel about trees, I'm grateful to Dr. Anne Myers, who sent me a photograph of a small North Carolina church built in 1913 of American chestnut, proving that such a building was possible. Other knowledgeable advisers about trees and sawmills were Dr. Willard Weeks of Amherst, Tom Kelleher of Old Sturbridge Village, Norman Levey of Lincoln, archivist Sheila Connor of the Arnold Arboretum, Dennis Collins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, Lincoln's Ted Tucker with his axes and grindstone, and Kim Johnson with his backyard sawmill.

Professor Robert Gross of the University of Connecticut loaned important chapters from his forthcoming book,
The Transcendentalists and Their World.
Another Thoreauvian, Professor Nikita Pokrovsky of the University of Moscow, chivvied my computer files into shape. Peggy Marsh and Ellen Raja of Lincoln improved my fragmentary understanding of nineteenth-century ways of doing things, Lincoln reference librarian Jeanne Bracken found books far and near, and my old friend Wendy Davis invited me to a Quaker meeting in the venerable Friends Meeting House of Henniker, New Hampshire. Her daughter, Marcia Davis, drove us from one New Hampshire church to another, all of them
as simple as barns and commonplace as gas stations, but of a timeless and surpassing beauty.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The photograph on page 25 is number 206 in
The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861â1865)
, prepared in accordance with the acts of Congress under the direction of Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes, U.S. Army, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1870â88.

This edition published in 2012 by
MysteriousPress.com
/Open Road Integrated Media

180 Varick Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com