Steeplechase Read Free Page B

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
    T here 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