51

Our whole life is startlingly moral.

Walden, “Higher Laws”

“For you,” muttered Mary, reaching the telephone across the bed. It was six o’clock in the morning.

Homer groaned and rolled over. “Homer Kelly here.”

“Homer?” It was Police Chief Jimmy Flower. “Hey listen, I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”

“Well, I don’t know,” murmured Homer, getting up sleepily on one elbow. “What kind of favor?”

“We’ve got some people here, locked up for breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property. What they need is counsel. You know, somebody to act for them, arrange bail.”

“Listen, Jimmy, it’s true I’ve got a law degree, but I haven’t practiced in years. Why pick on me?”

“Because you’re such a goddamned famous old-fashioned liberal, everybody knows that.”

“What’s being a liberal got to do with it?”

“Well, it’s these homeless. It’s a typical bleeding-heart case. Everybody else in town is mad at them, mad as hell. You know what they did? They moved into Roger Bland’s house while he was on vacation and wrecked the whole place. Bunch of freeloaders. Welfare Cadillac types, if you ask me. Just your meat.”

“Now wait a minute.” Homer sat up in bed. “You mean we’ve got homeless people here on the streets of Concord?”

“Homer Kelly, where have you been? Haven’t you been downtown lately? Haven’t you seen them on the Milldam? I tell you, the merchant community is giving me a hard time. That Ms. Pink, she calls me every day, wants ’em run out of town.”

Homer was dumbfounded. He couldn’t speak.

“Homer? Are you still there?”

“Of course. It’s just that I didn’t know we had people like that here in Concord. I guess I’ve had my head in the clouds. I’ve been listening for wood thrushes. You know, stuff like that.” Homer sat up and rubbed his frowsy head. “Well, okay, I’ll come over and talk to them.”

At the police station on Walden Street he found the ten of them sorted into three lockups. Little Christine was officially too young to be locked up, but she had been permitted to stay with her mother.

At first Homer talked to Palmer Nifto, who was by far the most presentable and articulate. But in the end it was Sarah Peel who commanded his attention. Homer liked her laconic truthfulness. Her speech was not encumbered with excuses, fanciful stories, and elaborate sociopolitical jargon like Palmer’s.

“We’ve got no place to sleep,” said Sarah.

It was enough. The words rang in Homer’s head like a gong. The foxes have holes, and the birds of heaven have nests, but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.

“That’s terrible,” he told Sarah, and she said nothing, she just looked at him, while the others jabbered and told their stories. The worst was Doris Harper, with whom it was difficult to feel any sympathy. In a few minutes Doris had exhausted all the obscenities in her repertoire—religious, excretory, sexual—and now she was repeating herself. Somebody should invent a new religion, decided Homer, just to give Doris new words to swear with.

Before Homer left the police station he promised to arrange bail for all ten of them, volunteered to be their public defender, and obtained the immediate release of Dolores and Christine Marshall. “I’ll be back,” he said earnestly to Sarah Peel, but she just looked at him silently.

Homer felt an urgent need to talk to Oliver Fry, but first he delivered Dolores and Christine to his astonished wife. Then he drove back into town and pulled up beside Oliver’s back porch. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

Homer was in distress. Until today he had been juggling only two things in his head, the splendor of the natural world on the one hand and its bloody teeth and claws on the other. Now there was this huge third thing to worry about, the fall of man, and Homer couldn’t handle it. How could there be any excuse for preserving these lovely fields and forests in the face of all this human need? Let them build low-income housing all around Walden Pond, and erect cheap apartments on Thoreau’s sacred cliffs, and comfortable dwellings along the river all the way from Sudbury to Bedford. He could no longer find it in his heart to fight against such things.

But, oh, God, those places were so precious, so sacred. Homer burst into Oliver’s kitchen, full of doubt. “We can’t do it, Oliver,” he proclaimed, while the alarmed owl screeched at him. “We’ve got to drop the whole thing.”

Oliver was eating breakfast with his daughter Hope and Ananda Singh. They looked up in surprise as he poured out the news about the helpless people in the police lockup.

Oliver fought back. “Drop it? Never,” he thundered, lowering his mighty brows. He stood up and prodded Homer with his forefinger. “Those homeless people don’t have anything to do with whether or not we should save the countryside. They’re beside the point. We can take care of them and save the land, too. Those developers, you think they’re going to do anything about homeless people? Hell, no.”

Ananda listened in dismay. The existence of people without homes of their own was not new to him. With his own eyes he had seen the teeming streets of Calcutta. He had seen lepers lying among open sewers. It was terrible that such things should be.

Hope listened, too. Silently she set a fourth plate of pan cakes on the table. Ananda leaped up and pulled out a chair for Homer.

“Oh, thank you,” Homer said, breaking off in midshout. He sat down, attacking the pancakes hungrily, and let Oliver pummel him with furious protestations. Then he stopped listening. An idea had occurred to him. He calmed down. The ugly housing he had built in imagination around the shore of Walden Pond faded, and the trees returned. The moment of ethical crisis was over. He knew what to do.

“Look here,” he said, changing the subject, putting down his fork, and turning to Ananda, who was, he remembered, one of the ten most eligible bachelors in the world, “where shall we go next?”

“Go next?” said Ananda blankly.

“Following in Thoreau’s footsteps, where shall we go now?”

Ananda’s stricken face cleared. He smiled. “Have you ever been to Gowing’s Swamp?”

“Never. It’s a quaking bog, right?”

“Oh, no,” said Hope, “you’re not thinking of going there?”

Homer adopted the idea at once. “Of course we are. What about some day next week? Oliver can tell us how to get there.”

“You’ll need rubber boots,” exulted Oliver, “because you’ll sink in up to your knees. Ananda, I’ll loan you mine.” Then he gave them a lecture on the nature of quaking bogs. “Sphagnum moss grows over the surface of a pond and gets thicker and thicker, and things grow in it, so that it looks like solid ground, but there’s water underneath, so you have to be careful.”

“I’ll come, too,” said Hope, flinging off restraint, the seesaw of her alternating affections flinging her high in the air.

Ananda beamed at her, and she turned away, smiling, to wash the dishes at the sink. Dumping them on the drain-board, she was pricklingly aware that Ananda was looking at her back, which was engulfed in a huge sweatshirt. In the competition with Bonnie Glover, Hope had fiercely made up her mind to be herself. The more lusciously Bonnie exposed the curviform parts of her anatomy, the more stubbornly Hope draped herself in her old clothes, the more violently she pulled back her hair into a tight pigtail.

Ananda looked at her bony little skull and longed to caress it. He jumped up, snatched a damp dish towel, and dried the dishes, setting them down in the cupboard with extreme care, each chipped dish touching the one below with the most delicate of clinks.

Tags from Walden ran through Hope’s head, and she wanted to say them aloud, to impress Ananda. But she couldn’t fit them into the conversation. “I love the wild, not less than the good”—it didn’t go with washing dishes.

“Thank you for helping,” she whispered as Ananda picked up the last cup and wiped it around and around with the towel.

“You are most welcome,” he said softly, hanging it tenderly on its hook.