35

… most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders … rarely make any moral
distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil,
without intending it, as God.

Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

The first August hearing of the Concord Planning Board was held on the hottest night of the summer. As Homer waited for Oliver Fry on the steps of the town hall, his shirt was already clinging to his back.

He was early. He looked out at the Civil War obelisk rising above the round green trees of Monument Square. The trees were hazy with humidity. Their leaves hung limp. The flag on the traffic island drooped on its lofty pole. The long view down Main Street was striped with sun and shadow.

Turning, Homer saw an apparition speeding toward him down Lexington Road. It was Oliver Fry on his bicycle. Even from here there was a sinewy cantankerousness in Oliver’s outline against the evening air. Nobody but Oliver Fry would pump a bicycle so furiously forward and drive down the pedals with such violence. Homer grinned, appreciating from afar the essence of his old and valued friend. After the easy laxity of polite ties with other people, there was excitement in the tug of the vibrating string that was Oliver Fry.

Together they mounted the stairs to the public hearing room on the second floor. When Oliver paused on the landing to catch his breath, Homer pressed him gently on the subject of Pond View. Had Oliver heard about the fire?

Oliver didn’t seem interested. He had no wrath to spare for anything but the new dragon that was spitting fire and threatening the sanctity of Walden Woods.

Thankfully Homer dropped the notion of Oliver Fry as murderer and arsonist. But there were other earnest conservationists in Concord who might harbor in their breasts a deadly eagerness to see the abrupt end of the trailer park. Homer vowed to track down a few and talk to them.

The hearing room was a high and handsome chamber. Surely, thought Homer, it was the very room in which American eloquence had reached its peak, when Thoreau delivered his oratorical defense of John Brown. He looked around reverently and took off his jacket. The place was hot. Some of the sweltering heat rose to the ceiling, but no cooling breeze wafted through the tall open windows. A standing fan turned and droned, failing to stir the sodden air. Under the windows the board members arranged themselves behind a long table. Chairman Roger Bland sat in the middle. It was clear to Homer that there would be no eloquence this evening.

But it was a crucial meeting of the planning board. Homer had seen the agenda. Would the board members support Walden Green? Would they urge the board of appeals to look on it with favor? Would they speak for it in Town Meeting? Homer feared the worst.

Oliver and Homer settled down on two of the folding chairs. “There’s the enemy,” said Oliver, nudging Homer, glowering at a crowd gathering on the other side of the room. “The young one’s Jack Markey.”

“I see,” murmured Homer. He didn’t need an introduction to the bearded older man taking a chair next to Jack’s. Jefferson Grandison had a celebrated face. He was accompanied by eager lackeys. They gathered around him and whispered in his ear like the mob of lesser angels buoying up Michelangelo’s Jehovah.

Other petitioners were fluttering in, alighting in murmuring flocks on the folding chairs. Homer recognized Mimi Pink as she paused in the doorway, raked the room with a chilly eye, and found a seat behind the numinous sublimity surrounding Jefferson Grandison.

Did she know those people? Homer watched as Jack Markey turned his head and glanced at her. Was that a nod of recognition? Now Jack was leaning forward again, while Mimi put her big pocketbook on her lap and crossed her legs. She seemed unaffected by the heat. Probably she was coated with some sort of lacquer that protected her like a space suit.

Then Homer caught a glance between two opposites. Roger Bland’s mild eye, exploring the audience, encountered the scowling stare of Oliver Fry. What a mistake! Roger winced and looked away. A sob of laughter rose in Homer’s throat. How Roger must fear poor old Oliver! And rightly so. In a fair contest Oliver Fry would devour him like a python swallowing an egg. Homer closed his eyes and tried to control himself, imagining the cracking shell, the breaking of the tissued bones, the pitiful wriggling on the way down.

The meeting was about to begin. The board members leaned toward each other, joking among themselves. Some were dressed in proper business shirts, but they had rolled up their sleeves and wrenched loose their ties. Others wore short-sleeved polo shirts and shorts. Big sneakers shifted under the table. One member of the board, Isabelle Moseley, was late. She came hurrying in and sat down, her face red, her breast heaving with the effort of running upstairs in the heat. The recording secretary opened her notebook. Roger Bland glanced up at the clock over his head and called the hearing to order.

“Mr. Markey? Would you like to begin your presentation?”

Jack came forward and unzipped a portfolio. He removed a large plot plan of Walden Green, set it up on an easel, and began to talk.

He was smooth and brisk, but there was a smiling excitement in his manner. Homer guessed that the whole layout was his. The access road through the farm off Fair Haven Road and the bridge over the railroad track, all, all were his. It was a Grandison enterprise but a Jack Markey project from beginning to end.

“Am I right in thinking, Mr. Markey,” said Roger Bland, “that the site you propose is now a high school playing field?”

“That’s true,” said Jack, “but as you will hear in a moment from Mrs. Bowman of the school committee, we have their blessing. She will demonstrate that the present lacrosse field is unnecessary to the high school athletic program. The playing fields nearer to the school buildings have been declared perfectly adequate. I must point out that the tennis courts here”—Jack touched the chart with his pointer—“will remain just as they are.”

Homer glanced at Oliver. The man was choking. He was beside himself. Homer remembered Mary’s cautious suggestion that he do his damnedest to keep Oliver in check. He patted Oliver’s knee.

The plot plan disappeared and was replaced by a handsome watercolor rendering of Walden Green, an oblong sward of grass surrounded by white houses. Sunlight slanted through the pale spring foliage, making long strokes of shadow across the grass. Concord citizens strolled in twos and threes along the circling paths of this land of Beulah.

Swiftly Jack ran through his list of promises—the low-income housing units, the day-care center, the extension of the sewage line, the gifts of the transfer station and Titcomb’s Bog and the Burroughs farm, and last but not least, the perpetual flow of tax dividends into the town treasury.

The list was impressive. But not to Oliver Fry. Leaping to his feet, Oliver thundered in a voice of doom, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” warning of Greeks bearing gifts. He shook his fist at Jack.

But the planning board members had not read their Virgil. Roger Bland frowned. “Oliver, I must ask you to refrain from such outbursts. Later on there will be an opportunity for comments from the floor.”

Fuming, Oliver sat down, his chest heaving. At the table where the board members sat, Isabelle Moseley modestly kept her eyes down. She was drawing a portrait of Oliver Fry on the pink cover of her zoning bylaws. Her fellow board member Brad Woodrow glanced at it and tried to control an outburst of laughter. The picture was Oliver Fry to the life. The burning eyes! The wild hair! The shaking fist!

Homer Kelly pitied his friend. He was beginning to see Oliver Fry and Jack Markey and Roger Bland and the entire planning board in their relation to something Thoreau had said about snowflakes. They were the product of enthusiasm, he had said, the children of ecstasy.

The product of enthusiasm! Well, here it was in real life, surrounding Homer on all sides—enthusiastic Oliver on the one hand, the child of ecstasy, tempestuous for the right, and Jack Markey on the other hand, enthusiastic in the pride of his creation, eager for the wrong.

And there in the middle sat Roger Bland, neither right nor wrong, the soul of moderation, stroking his chin.

What good did moderation ever do in this world? wondered Homer bitterly, sensing the passionate throb of Oliver’s heart as he shuffled his feet under his chair. You had to go whole hog if you wanted to accomplish anything, and clash with the hogs on the other side. It was passion that built things up and tore them down. To hell with moderation.