Steeplechase Read online

  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.

  Immediately after Lieutenant Shaw was carried to a hospital tent on the field, both arms were amputated at the wrist. Hooked prosthetic devices were later supplied in Philadelphia.

  The extensive wound to the face includes the loss of sight in the left eye. The patient’s mental condition is deeply distressing.

  Eben handed the note back without a word.

  Lieutenant Shaw and his wife, Isabelle, had come home to Nashoba at last, to live in the house of Isabelle’s parents, the Reverend Josiah Gideon and his wife, Julia.

  The Gideon house stood on a corner, its barn and outbuildings facing the Acton Turnpike. The front door of the house looked across Quarry Pond Road to the burying ground, and across the green to Nashoba’s parish church, where the Reverend Horatio Biddle held sway. Within sight of the house stood the building that was the bailiwick of the Reverend Josiah Gideon himself, a large structure with many windows and a good-size barn. It had once been known to the people of Nashoba as the workhouse, but under the directorship of Josiah Gideon, it was now the Nashoba Home Farm.

  The most remarkable feature of this small country town was not a building, but a tree. At the bottom of the sloping burying ground grew a venerable chestnut tree, massive in diameter and lofty in height. It was the pride of Nashoba, famous far and wide as the Nashoba Chestnut. Now in late May, its myriad new leaves trembled in the light breeze as Josiah ducked under the lower limbs and climbed over the stone wall.

  He was taking a shortcut from the church after an ugly confrontation with his neighbor, Reverend Biddle. As Josiah crossed the road, his head was still teeming with powerful argument, all the crushing things he might have said. But when he saw the doctor’s gig at the gate, his anger dropped away, leaving only the accustomed pang.

  The dining room of Josiah’s house had been turned over to his wounded son-in-law. The table and the clutter of dining room chairs had been pushed aside to make room for James’s upholstered chair, his bed, washstand, and bookshelf, and also for the chair on which Isabelle sat to attend to his needs, which were many and grievous.

  James did not look up when Josiah entered the room, but his wife smiled at him and Dr. Clock stood up and shook hands. Isabelle merely glanced up at her father as she tried to slip a spoon into James’s mouth. James turned his head away.

  Then Josiah was surprised to find another visitor in the room. The young man introduced himself as Eben Flint. “James was my friend before the war,” said Eben, “and I think you know my mother, Eudocia.”

  Josiah tried to sound heartily cordial. “Eudocia Flint, of course.”

  Isabelle put down her spoon and spoke to Dr. Clock. “I was so sorry to miss your wedding. Your wife was my friend in school.”

  “Yes,” he said, “Ida was sorry, too.” It was a painful subject. Everyone in the room knew why Isabelle had missed the wedding. She had been with James, following him from one hospital to another while army surgeons did all they could for him.

  There was an awkward silence. Eben could not look at Isabelle, and he did not know whether it would be kinder to look straight into James’s face as he would with any normal friend or look away.

  But Isabelle’s mother spoke to Eben gently. “Your little nephew must be a big boy now.” Then Julia turned to Alexander. “And I hear he has a baby sister.” Quietly, she added, “I’m so sorry about the loss of your first little one.”

  It was apparent to Alexander that her sympathy was genuine, and he was touched and grateful. But the tension in the room was unbearable. It could not be good for James. Alexander caught Eben’s eye and stood up, promising to return before long.

  Eben looked straight into James’s face and said, “So will I.”

  Josiah and Julia accompanied their two visitors to the door, but it was a silent departure. What, after all, was there to say?

  Alone with James, Isabelle dipped the spoon once again in the bowl and said calmly, “Remember, James? These peaches are from the summer when you first came calling. Remember how you stoked the stove?” Lifting the spoon, she said again, “They came out very well.”

  But once again, James turned his head away.

  If it were only that he were half-blind, he could have borne it lightly. Or if he were half-blind and had but one arm how easy it would have been to be a man like other men. Yes, even if he were half-blind and both hands were missing, he could have borne it somehow. But to be half-blind and armless, with a face that was a mask of horror—it was more than he could bear.

  James closed his single eye and prayed. Let them stop breaking their hearts over me. Let them give up trying to help me. Let Isabelle stop wasting her life to care for me. Please God, let me go.

  A Sad Connecting Cord

  There was another crisis at home. As Mab whirled around the corner into the yard, hungry for the oats in her stall, Ida came running out to meet them, tearing off her apron and calling, “It’s Horace—he’s gone again.”

  At once, they scattered to look, and Eben soon found his small nephew on the roof of the henhouse.

  Horace was stuck there, afraid to come down. He had gone up the back of the shed roof like Jack climbing the bean stalk, shifted his boots to the windowsill, reached up to the ringbolt for the clothesline, grasped the edge of the roof, thrown one leg over, and scrambled up easily. At the top of the roof, he had perched in triumph, king of the henhouse, lord of the bean stalk. But getting down was another matter. The slope of the roof was steep, the ground far away. And the peevish turkey was flapping across the hen yard to gobble at him, wagging its red wattles and spreading its tail, eager to nip poor Horace. Then Horace remembered the roar of the giant in his grandmother’s story—“Fe-fi-fo-fum”—and he began to cry.

  When Eben found him, Horace was clinging forlornly to the stovepipe. “Hang on, Horace,” said Eben, “I’ll get a ladder.”

  But when he was safely deposited on the ground, Horace cheered up right away. It was clear that he had not learned a thing. Alexander scolded him anyway, his mother hugged him, and his grandmother carried him into the kitchen, where gingerbread was fresh and hot. Eben went to the stable to rub down Mab’s steaming sides, and then he walked slowly into the house and climbed the stairs.

  Left alone with Alexander, Ida said, “How is James?” When he only shook his head, she said nothing more.

  But for the rest of the day there was a sense that the two houses were joined. Their comfortable house in Concord was attached to that other house in Nashoba. In actual miles, the two houses were not far apart, and now they were linked by a sad connecting cord. Eben could feel it thrumming in the walls, trying to tug the house out of the ground and drag it westward. The illusion was strong. This familiar homestead set among lilacs and a neglected apple orchard, this noisy house echoing with the banging of his mother’s piano and the wheezing of her reed organ and the sentimental singing of his sister Sallie—“Last night the nightingale woke me”—and the cries of
baby Augusta and the shrill games of Eben’s brother, Josh, and his sister Alice and his nephew, Horace, this house that was quiet at the same time with Ida’s reading and Alexander’s writing and Eben’s thinking, was now linked by a cord of sympathy that stretched taut above the orchard and Nashoba Brook and the town line and the chestnut tree to the house on Quarry Pond Road, where James Jackson Shaw sat with bowed head, bereft among the dining room chairs.

  And therefore it was strange that Eben’s dream that night was not a nightmare vision of the ravaged face of James, with his mutilated arms and single suffering eye; it was a dream about a woman whose face was vague, her identity unsure. Was it Ella Viles whose nightdress he was tearing off, Ella’s breasts he was caressing?

  Eben sat up in a sweat. Awake, he knew it had not been Ella who had so sweetly returned his ardor in his dream. No, no, it had not been Ella Viles.

  NOW

  The Necessity for Steeples

  From this window I can compare the written with the preached word: within is weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; without, grain fields and grasshoppers, which give those the lie direct.

  —Henry Thoreau, Journal,

  July 8, 1838

  Homer’s Fame

  A strange mania had gripped the readers of the nation. Homer Kelly’s little monograph, Hen and Chicks, was the talk of cocktail parties. Glitzy bars buzzed with Homer’s name. It did not seem to matter that few people had read past the first obscure pages, because everyone fully intended to pick up the book any minute now.

  Success went to Homer’s head. But that was all right, decided Mary. For the last year, the poor man had felt the day of his retirement looming closer and closer, and it was an added insult that her own star kept rising at the same time. Whenever the phone rang, Homer would jump to answer it, only to say glumly, “She’s right here,” and hand it over. In fact, things had become so sticky, Mary had begun to keep her small triumphs to herself.

  Now things were different. Homer was in demand everywhere. The chairman of Harvard’s Committee on Academic Honors wanted to speak to him. And would Professor Kelly address the Academy of Arts and Sciences? Would he accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Modern Language Association?

  So now it was Mary’s turn to hand over the phone with a dry remark—“It’s NPR,” or “It’s the New York Review of Books.”

  “The trouble is,” said Homer after agreeing to be filmed while puttering around his delightful riverside residence or sitting at his keyboard composing another chapter of a thrilling new work to be called Steeplechase, “there’s no time left to write the damn book.”

  So when his editor called again at dawn, it was the last straw. A joyful shout came over the phone, “Sex, I forgot about sex.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” said Homer, sitting up in bed and rubbing his ear. “I never forget it for a single moment.”

  “I mean in those churches of yours,” gabbled Luther. “The preacher eloping with the choirmistress, fornication in the cloister, copulation in the crypt.”

  “There ain’t no cloisters in these here churches,” growled Homer. “Nor no crypts, neither.”

  “Well, I don’t care where it happened, but it must have happened somewhere. Fornication any old place on the sacred premises, okay? Screwing in the steeple? Hey, that’s pretty good. Readers, they’ll eat it up, and you got another bestseller.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Homer, dumping sugar in his breakfast coffee. “Luther’s a distinguished editor at a dignified old university press. What’s gotten into him?”

  “He wants to make another killing—that’s what’s gotten into him. But you know what, Homer? He may be right.”

  “Right!” Homer was scandalized. “The preacher and the choirmistress? Screwing in the steeple?”

  “Well, no, probably nothing as sensational as that. But I’ll bet those pious old church histories don’t always tell the whole truth.” Mary clattered the breakfast dishes into the sink. “Come on, let’s get away from the phone and chase a few steeples. I’ll bet all the churches around here have skeletons of some kind or other in their closets.”

  “Good, where shall we start?”

  “Right here in Concord. Why not? We can begin with the First Parish. Then we could talk to the Trinitarians. And who else? The rabbi of Temple Emanuel?”

  “Temple Emanuel? No, no, Mary dear, think about it. The temple isn’t exactly a hatchling from a Protestant chicken yard.”

  “Of course not. Moses and Jeremiah sat on that egg. And anyway, temples don’t have steeples.”

  “Right,” said Homer. “We gotta have steeples.”

  1868

  Eternal Remembrances

  Like a spirit land of shadows

  They in silence on me gaze

  And I feel my heart is beating

  With the pulse of other days;

  And I ask what great magician

  Conjured forms like these afar?

  Echo answers, ’tis the sunshine,

  By its alchemist Daguerre.

  —Caleb Lyon, 1850

  “Welcome, Ladies and Gents!”

  The brothers Spratt looked so much alike, people couldn’t tell Jake from Jack. But their talents were different.

  “My Jackie,” their mother boasted, “he’s the artistic one. Jackie can paint you a bouquet so natural, you could pick the posies. His brother, he’s just the opposite. Jakie’s always a-tinkering.”

  Thus it was Jack Spratt who set up the elegant chamber for portrait photography in their horse-drawn mobile studio. And it was Jack who furnished it with a thronelike chair, a balustrade, a hollow column, a carpet-covered table, and a velvet curtain with an imposing tassel.

  But it was Jake who understood the wet-plate process and knew how to turn out any number of albumen prints from a single glass negative.

  Then it was Jack’s turn again. It was his clever scissors that snipped out the images, his nimble fingers that mounted them on pretty pieces of cardboard, and his high-flown eloquence that fluttered down from the basket of the balloon:

  Jack and Jacob Spratt

  Aerial and Portrait Photographers

  Cartes de Visite, cabinet photographs

  Men, women, children and babes

  Mortuarie images a specialty

  On the Saturday in May when the mobile studio of the Spratt brothers pulled up on the green between Concord’s Middlesex Hotel and the courthouse, there were no mortuary requirements, although Jack and Jake had made tender images of many a dead baby—Jack arranging the little hands sweetly on the infant’s breast, Jake comforting the weeping mother.

  This morning, they were not surprised to find customers already waiting. The Spratt brothers were accustomed to success. “All kindsa people want their pitchers taken, Jack,” said Jake.

  “Only natural, Jake,” said Jack. “In this cruel world, who knows when a person might take sick and die without no eternal remembrance of their physiognomy while blood still pulsed in their veins?”

  Jake jumped down and unhitched the team while Jack shifted the noble appointments into place and pulled back the shade over the skylight. Then, poking his head through the curtains, he lifted his hat. “Welcome, ladies and gents! Who’s first?”

  It was a small boy. The boy’s mother kept an anxious eye on him as Jack helped him up into the wagon. But Horace was on his best behavior. Delighted to have his picture taken, he stood smartly erect and smiled into the camera.

  Ida was next. She handed the baby to her mother, climbed into the wagon, and sat down beside the carpet-covered table.

  Ida’s husband, Alexander, came running up from the North Road to take his turn. He was carrying his doctor’s bag because he had been attending the deathbed of the Widow Plankton. It was the widow’s fourth deathbed, and doubtless there would be a fifth. As Ida stepped down and took the baby from her mother, Alexander jumped up into the wagon.

  In the artistic judgment of the photographer, this
client had a noble profile. “Sir,” said Jack, “I recommend you look to the side.”

  Alexander obeyed, waited for the flash of light, and then jumped down from the wagon. Once again, the man in the bowler hat stuck out his head. “All right, folks, who desires to be next?”

  Eudocia had disappeared with Alice to go shopping on the Milldam. “Your turn, Eben,” said Alexander. “Go ahead. It doesn’t hurt a bit.”

  Eben had been waiting to take everybody home. “My turn?” he said. “Well, I don’t know.”

  Jack Spratt looked at Eben, his eyebrows high, his face a question mark. “Sir, would you be pleased to have your likeness taken?”

  It was easier to do it than not, so Eben’s face, too, was recorded for eternity.

  A Philosophical Dispute

  The Spratt brothers had come to Concord at a good time, because it was the day of the cattle fair. This huge event occupied acres of ground behind the depot on the other side of the railroad tracks, but Concord center was also teeming with visitors. Carriages bustled up and down the Milldam as interested parties arrived from all the surrounding towns.

  Some of them had urgent transactions to conduct at the fair, but most were drawn by the general air of excitement. Alert to the opportunity, shopkeepers along the Milldam had stocked their shelves with fancy goods. Bonnets in one shopwindow were decked with ribbons and flowers, and in front of the greengrocer lay baskets of asparagus. At one corner of the green, the Middlesex Hotel was doing a land-office business in West Indian rum, brandy, gin, and cider, and the town was awash in oysters fresh from the train.

  There was a new war memorial in the center of the green, an obelisk adorned with bronze tablets. One of the tablets listed the names of the Concord men who had never come back, including the name of Ida’s first husband, Seth Morgan. The other tablet was a tribute: