Steeplechase (25 page)

“Yes, you have to.”

Grumpily, she waded after him through the burdock and the dead trees. Homer lifted aside the trailing curtains of willow and led her into the glade. Then she, too, was entranced by the gravestone. She fumbled for her glasses and peered at the inscription. “Lieutenant,” she murmured. “Lieutenant somebody. Wait a sec. I have it—‘Lieutenant James Jackson Shaw.' That's what it says.”

“Strange, don't you think? A soldier buried here all by himself?”

Homer's instinctive nosiness was fully aroused. On the way back to the parking lot, he jerked open the door of a shed attached to the back of the pizza parlor and poked around inside. When Mary pulled firmly on his shirttail, he said, “No, no, wait.” Reaching past a spade with a broken handle and a snaggletoothed rake, he murmured, “My God.”

It was a masterpiece. Behind the broken tools stood a piece of upright furniture carved with fruit and flowers. A noble pair of robed and bearded men supported a classical pediment.

Mary whispered, “What is it?” and Homer said, “Why is it here?”

Dreamily, they walked around the building and opened the door of Nashoba Pizza, hoping the girl behind the counter would stop being bitchy long enough to tell them about the gravestone and the beautiful object in the shed.

“Oh, hi, there,” she said with a radiant smile. “What can I do for you this fine morning? Did you ever see such a day? Sunshine and blue sky? All's well with the world.” The girl laughed. “More or less, I guess.”

They gaped at her. What had happened to her bitchiness? Had there been a religious conversion? A flash of revelation?

“Oh, the usual, I guess,” said Mary, sitting down on a stool and glancing doubtfully at Homer.

“Right, the usual,” said Homer. “Me, too.”

“I'm sorry,” said the no-longer-bitchy girl, “but I don't know what you usually order.” She laughed again. “Oh, it was my sister. You must have been ordering from my sister, Jane.”

“No, no, it was you,” said Homer, dumbfounded.

“Yes, it certainly was,” said Mary. But then her head cleared. “You mean you and your sister are—”

“Twins. She's Jane Spratt; I'm Jean.” Jean smiled and nodded at the oddly shaped cupboard that rose high against the wall behind the counter. They had noticed it before. It was bedecked with little shelves, a tiny mirror, and a host of frolicsome curlicues. Jean reached behind a bottle of catsup and extracted a picture. “You see? It runs in the family.”

They had seen this, too, the faded photograph of two identical men in bowler hats standing with arms akimbo in front of a hot-air balloon.

In Homer's cross-eyed vision, everything began to double. There were two bowler hats, two bottles of catsup, two identical young women. “You mean they were twins just like you?

Mary, too, was dazzled. “You mean twins run in the family?”

“Right.” Jean looked fondly at the photograph. “One of these guys was our great-great-great-grandfather, only we don't know which. Now tell me”—Jean lifted a lid of the cupboard, revealing a keyboard, then pumped a pedal with one foot and ran her fingers up and down the yellow keys—“what is your usual, exactly?”

The Darkroom

I
t was a church once, you see,” said Jean, whirling around and waving her arms. “This whole building, it was a church.”

“A church!”

“Of course it was.” Jean turned back to the keyboard, pumped a pedal again, and played a chord. “This was the organ, you see, and this must have been some kind of signboard.” She reached up and pulled down the thumbtacked menu. “You know, on the front door.”

The wooden board that had been hidden under the list of pizzas was adorned with a tree carved in magnificent low relief.

“It's the tree,” gasped Homer. “I'll bet it's the chestnut tree in the poem, the one that was cut down.” Rearing up from his stool, he leaned over the counter and pointed at the aerial photograph on the wall. “See there, see that stump?”

Mary was stunned, too, but she failed to see the connection. “The carved tree isn't a stump, Homer; it's a big and beautiful tree. It could be any old tree.” She turned to Jean, bewildered. “Do you know what the carving had to do with this place when it was a church?”

“I don't know, but it was right there on the old door, before we turned the place into a pizza parlor. Jane and me, we did it. I mean we had to, because our parents didn't leave us anything except the apartment in town and this place. We could see that it was a really great location, right here on Two A, a perfect place for customers. So me and Jane, we got a bank loan and hired a bunch of carpenters and ordered stuff from a restaurant-supply place, and—
presto
—we were in business.” Jean tucked her thumbs into the straps of her apron and waggled her fingers proudly. “But like, hey, you know what?”

Mary smiled and said, “What?”

“Before we lived here—I mean way back in the old days—it was a business place then, too, sort of a studio for taking pictures, I mean after it was a church. At least that's what our dad thought. Want to see? Oh, wait a sec.” Jean ran around the counter and turned the sign on the door from
OPEN
to
CLOSED.
“Okay, come look.”

Obediently, they followed her through the door behind the counter and found themselves in a large room with pointed windows along two sides.

Homer looked at Mary and they shook their heads, ashamed of their own blindness. How could they have missed it? They had noticed only the storefront with its flickering sign,
NASHOBA PIZZA.
And just now, transfixed by the mysterious object in the shed, they had paid no attention to the pointed shapes of the windows.

“This was the sanctuary, I guess you'd call it,” said Jean. “See the pews?”

“Pews, oh, right,” mumbled Homer, staring at the rows of benches. Sunlight from the clear glass of the windows streaked across them, and there were splashes of red and blue from the stained glass at the top.

“My grandfather and his brother grew up here,” said Jean. “They were twins, too. My father wasn't a twin, he was an only son, so the place was all his. He really cared about it, so after we grew up here and Mom died, he did his best to put everything back the way it must have been when it was a church. He moved us into the apartment in town, and then he began tearing down rickety walls and clearing out all the furniture and even the kitchen stove and refrigerator. He got rid of everything and tried to make it look like a church again. My sister, she thought it was crazy, but I sort of liked it.”

“Well, of course,” said Homer, smiling at her and looking around. “So do we.”

An important question was still unanswered. “But Jean,” protested Mary, “why did it stop being a church in the first place?”

“I haven't a clue. But look, follow me. There's something else.”

Jean led them to the far end of the sanctuary and pulled aside a curtain. “See? It's sort of a darkroom.”

“A darkroom!”

“My sister, she wants me to throw all this stuff out. But my father really cared about it.” The space behind the curtain was full of blocky objects. Jean edged past them and pulled up a roller shade. “See, this big camera is on some funny kind of tripod.”

“A cantilever, I think,” murmured Homer.

“What on earth is this?” asked Mary, running her hands over a tall stand that looked like a coatrack.

“Oh, I figured that one out,” said Jean. “In the old days, when the exposures were longer than they are now, this thing stood behind you to keep your head still.”

For a moment, they looked around and said nothing. Jean picked up a dusty pamphlet and handed it to Homer, and he began reading it aloud. “‘Jack and Jacob Spratt, Aerial and Portrait Photographers.'” Then he stopped and looked at Jean. “Your ancestors? The twins in the picture? They had a camera in their balloon?”

Jean was fascinated. “Oh, that's fabulous. I'll bet they did.”

“They could have aimed it over the side,” said Mary.

“With the cantilever contraption,” said Homer happily. “Clever, that's what they were, your ancestors.”

“And brave, too,” said Mary graciously.

“Well, yes, I guess they were,” said Jean, “doing all that stuff way up in the sky. Oh, wait a sec.” Jean looked at her watch and said, “Whoopsie, I've got to go. I'm supposed to be someplace else.”

She pulled aside the curtain and ran out of the darkroom. Homer and Mary hurried after her down the center aisle of the long-lost church and through the far door into the pizza parlor. “I've got to deliver these,” said Jean, reaching under the counter and picking up a couple of grocery bags.

Nothing could astonish Mary now. “Jean Spratt's Delivery Service?”

“No, no, it's just one old woman, Julie Flint, up the hill. She doesn't get out much, so sometimes she gives me a list and then I get the stuff. There's a shortcut to her place through the woods.”

“Julie Flint?” Homer was staggered. “You mean the Miss Flint who is—”

He had almost said “the roots and berries woman,” but Mary interrupted quickly. “I gather Miss Flint is something of a recluse?”

“Well, I guess you could call her that, but she doesn't hide away from me. Julie and me, we're good old pals.”

“Pals,” echoed Homer. “Oh, please, dear Jean, may we come, too?”

Julie Flint

T
he path was a narrow, winding track, but Jean Spratt's feet had long since beaten it down. Mary and Homer followed as Jean made her way to the home of Julie Flint, Homer's witch in the woods, the old recluse who was not, after all, a gatherer of nuts and berries.

Carrying her bags of groceries, Jean moved in front of them through a field of wildflowers, where doilies of Queen Anne's lace lay on the grass like delicate washing. When Mary poked him, Homer said, “Oh, right,” and took the bags from Jean.

The path was indeed a shortcut. Soon, Homer recognized the fence around Miss Flint's vegetable garden and, beyond it, the roof of her house.

“Wait here,” said Jean. “She's a little shy. Last month, some strange man banged on her door, pushed his face against the window, and called her by the wrong name. Some rude barbarian.”

Mary suppressed a laugh and Homer flinched. Humbly, he put the grocery bags back in Jean's arms without a word. Silently, they watched her set off for Miss Flint's door. It opened at her knock and Jean disappeared inside. They waited, leaning over the fence to admire the sprawling zucchini and squash vines, the clusters of green peppers, and the tepees thickly hung with tomatoes. “Nice garden,” murmured Mary.

“No weeds here,” said Homer. “Not like our patch.”

Mary looked at him and said tartly, “I suppose you think it's my fault?”

Homer thought carefully. “Yes, I think it's your fault. It's also my fault and your sister's fault and the selectmen's fault. In fact, it's the fault of everybody in Middlesex County who failed to weed our tomato patch.”

Mary laughed and said, “Sorry” just as Jean Spratt looked out the door of Miss Flint's house and gave them a welcoming wave. At once, Mary took Homer's arm and whispered, “Now remember, Homer, you mustn't loom.”

“Loom? What do you mean, ‘loom'?”

“You're just so big and overwhelming. Try to shrink down a little.”

Obediently, Homer hunched his shoulders, and they walked into the enchanted cottage of the good witch of the woods.

Indoors, the air was moist with steam. Like a proper witch, Miss Flint was hovering over a boiling caldron, but she was only canning tomatoes. For an instant, she glanced up, then looked back at her task. Reaching into the kettle with a pair of tongs, she lifted out a steaming jar, thumped it down on a towel, and reached into the pot for another. Miss Flint's back was hunched and bowed, her face was an intricate complex of wrinkles, and one eye was blank and blind.

They were afraid to speak, but Jean said boldly, “Mr. and Mrs. Kelly are here to see you, Julie.”

“Well, fine,” said Julie Flint, leaning over her sterilizing kettle. “But they'll just have to wait a sec.”

They stood back patiently and watched her lift four more scalding jars out of the pot. At last, she said, “Okay, all done,” switched off the stove, and turned around slowly. She smiled at Mary, then scowled at Homer with a sharp glance of recognition. “You were here before.”

“Yes,” mumbled Homer. “I'm sorry, Miss Flint. I didn't mean to be rude.”

“Well, you were.” Miss Flint waved at a circle of wicker chairs and said, not ungraciously, “Why don't you sit down?”

They obeyed. Then, while Jean helped with the putting away of the groceries, they studied the furnishings of Miss Flint's house. Everything was shipshape—the tables and chairs, the bookshelves, the cupboards, and the forest of potted plants. Only a desk under the window was messy with books and papers. They stared at it greedily.

“Now,” said Miss Flint, lowering herself carefully into a wicker chair lined with pillows, “what is it you want?”

They looked at each other. How should they begin? But Jean Spratt was leaving. She touched Miss Flint's shoulder and said, “Do you have another list for me, Julie?”

“No, my dear, thank you. Did you take what I owe you from the coffee can?”

“Fifteen dollars and thirty cents, and I left the receipt.” With a wave at Mary and Homer, Jean slipped out the door and shut it gently behind her.

It was brass-tack time. Homer hitched himself forward in his chair and said bravely, “You see, Miss Flint, I was told by our friend Joe Bold that you know more about the history of Nashoba than anyone else.”

“Yes, Miss Flint,” said Mary. “You see, we're studying local churches.”