5

An humble spire, pointing heavenward from an obscure church, speaks of man’s nature, man’s dignity, man’s destiny, more eloquently than all the columns and arches of Greece, and Rome, the mausoleums of Asia, and the pyramids of Egypt.

William Ellery Channing

Of all the white wooden spires pointing skyward from the green commons of suburban villages in Massachusetts, from the public squares of cities, from rural crossings surrounded by shopping malls, from abandoned parishes where deer and foxes ran in the woods, the small-domed tower of the Old West Church of Nashoba was among the most demure. It housed a single bell and a family of barn owls. The bell rang only on Sunday mornings, but the owl came and went every night through a broken slat in the shutter, carrying live mice and voles for her downy young to dismember.

It was called Old West because it lay a few hundred yards west of the church from which its disgruntled orthodox founders had detached themselves in 1836, shocked by the way the church of their fathers was drifting into the Unitarian heresy. A century later, the two churches had joined forces once again, and now the united parish paid dues both to the Congregational United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. The reunion was not a matter of philosophical tolerance so much as a recognition of their mutual poverty in the Great Depression.

Back in 1836, when the present edifice was built, tricky points of theology had counted for much more. God was three, not one. Bang! went the hammers. Three, not one! Bang, bang, bang! Christ the Son was coequal to God the Father, not subordinate. But, even so, the carpenters had not carried the cross of Christ up the ladder to the top of the steeple. A cross would have been suspect, smacking of popery. Instead they had crowned the building with a rooster weathervane.

This morning, after a century and a half of pointing to the four corners of God’s vast creation, the same rooster was sweeping around on his creaking iron axle in the thrust of the brisk wind that tossed the bare tops of the maples and drove white clouds like puffy sofas across the cold blue sea of air.

When Homer Kelly’s big pickup slowed down in front of the church, early comers were thronging across the road. “I’ll drop you off here,” he said to his wife.

“I’ll save you a place as long as I can,” promised Mary.

Driving up the hill beyond the church, Homer found a parking place in front of the parish house, the old building that had once housed the Unitarians. Opening the car door, stretching out his long leg to the pavement, he looked at his big oxford and imagined instead the high laced shoe of a Kibbe or a Farrar or a Blood descending from a buggy or a rockaway or a buckboard, or the worn boot of a Heald or a Russell or a Hutchinson stepping down from a cutter or a sleigh in the winter snow. This morning the snow was gone, the sun was shining, the grass at the edge of the green was gouged with tire tracks. Homer hurried along the dry asphalt of the road and joined the press of fellow parishioners moving up the wooden planks that had been set down on the lawn last fall.

The vestibule was crowded. People were shuffling toward the two doors, peering past each other, craning their necks. There were extra ushers this morning, dodging up and down the aisles, opening the little pew doors, handing people their orders of service, packing six bodies to a bench instead of five. Charlie Fenster crooked his finger at Homer and wedged him in beside Mary in a rear pew. Homer settled himself in the narrow space, Mary squeezed up against Joan Sawyer, Joan prodded her husband, Howie, to move over, Howie shoved massively against George Tarkington, and George crowded still closer to his wife, Hilary. There was a sense of expectation in the murmured greetings, the rustle of coats, the flutter of orders of service, the wooden noise of pew doors sticking, opening, shutting, the sound of whispering from the choir in the balcony, a blundered bass note from the organ.

The choir was a world unto itself. On the long varnished benches, the singers sat jammed together in their black robes, separated from the congregation, enjoying an undercurrent of hushed hilarity. “I can’t find the damned hymn,” muttered one of the baritones, Percy Donlevy, riffling through his hymnbook. “It’s the punishment of an angry God,” explained Bob Ott, and there was a burst of subdued laughter from the other tenors.

But then they didn’t rehearse the hymn, after all. Glancing over her shoulder at the packed church, choir mistress Augusta Gill shrewdly forbore. “It’s too late,” she said. “We should have started earlier.” Then Augusta rearranged her music, took a deep breath, and launched into the prelude. Her fingers rippled on the two keyboards, swell and great, her feet ran up and down the pedals. The music pealed out over the congregation, and the sense of anticipation increased.

In the last pew on the south side, Homer was butted up against the shutter of the window. His back was stiff. The sun warmed his neck. From the three south windows, the light poured into the chamber, filling the hollow volume of the church, ricocheting from the white walls, the white pews, the white ceiling, multiplying itself in white upon white, losing itself in overlying white shadows in the crevices of the classical moldings behind the pulpit, in the carvings of the Corinthian capitals, in the slats of the shutters. It was a cheerful light, devoid of mystery. It said “Wake up,” rather than “Adore.” Homer thought of the forefathers and their pious teachings on original sin and total depravity and atonement and eternal punishment and predestination and the covenant of grace—mighty fallacies, sublime hallucinations, exalted errors. What was there in this sunlit space to equal them in majesty, in solemn grandeur? How did the church survive when it no longer believed in a God who heard the cry of every heart, who listened with fervent interest to the prayers rising like steam, who never failed in his earnest seeking of lost souls? Would the Reverend Joseph Bold measure up to the stature of the devoted and misguided men who had stood in the several pulpits of Old West in the past? Or would he be only a flea on the back of the last elephant in that long and ponderous parade, hopping up and down, emitting an insect whine? Well, they would soon find out.

Homer glanced across his wife and Joan Sawyer, and marveled at the way the morning sunshine had picked out Joan’s husband for its full attention this morning. He had noticed it before, the sun’s personal interest in the còngregation, its habit of choosing one and then another to bathe in light. At this moment its warm slanting rays glowed lovingly upon Howie Sawyer’s bald head, penetrating the freckled skin a fraction of an inch, illuminating the gray hairs that fluffed around the dome, turning the brown fibers of his polyester jacket into rainbows. Against the brilliance, Howie’s face was nearly invisible. His glasses flashed at Homer. He was leaning heavily over his wife, describing an encounter with a traffic cop.

“I told the man, it’s not my fault. And he said, whose fault is it? Ha-ha! So I said, the other guy’s, right? So he said, listen, you want a citation? Me, he was going to give me a citation. So I said to him, listen, I said …”

Homer slumped on the bench and made an occasional low rumbling noise that spurred Howie to further meandering recollection, while the sun lit up his ears like the handles of an alabaster jar. Between them, crushed against Howie’s wife, Mary Kelly could feel Joan Sawyer’s mortification. Joan was a large-boned, sober young woman, far younger and cleverer than Howie. Why had she married the man at all? Now in the tight grip of Joan’s hands in her lap, in the rigidity of her crossed knees, her chagrin was manifest.

Diagonally across the church, in the first box pew on the north side, Eleanor Bell sat alone. Now and then she glanced back at the two doors to the vestibule, hoping to see Bo Harris. But Mr. and Mrs. Harris had been helping out downstairs in the common room. When they came upstairs at last and hurried up the aisle, Bo was not trailing behind them, scowling gravely the way he always did in church.

Eleanor was crushed. Drooping forward, she stared at her homemade skirt, and poked her finger in an open place along the seam where the sewing machine had run off the edge. But then she stiffened her back and listened. Mr. and Mrs. Harris had settled into the pew directly behind her, and Mrs. Harris was talking to Mr. and Mrs. Palmer about Bo.

“He’s got this new car,” said Mrs. Harris. “It’s the worst wreck you ever saw. He wants to work on it in the driveway. Can you imagine? An old heap like that? So of course I said no. So the poor boy is furious with me. So is Fred.”

Eleanor could hear Mr. Harris make a demurring sound.

“Poor old Bo,” Mrs. Harris went on. “He should have asked me before he bought the car. Nobody asked me. ”

Halfway between the front of the church and the back, Arlene Pott sat in her customary pew, unaccompanied by her husband, Wally. Arlene touched her cheek, hoping the red mark didn’t show. She had powdered it with peach face powder. Now she looked down at her new suit, and decided she had chosen badly. She should have worn her pink. The new minister wouldn’t even notice her. Just another old lady, he would think, and then he would look past her at young Eleanor Bell or at Maud Starr with her big bust. It was lonesome coming to church without Wally. Arlene’s peŕpetual sense of grievance enveloped her as she stared at her plump crossed ankles. “I am fifty-seven years old,” she said to herself. It was a fact that haunted her every hour of the day. Then her heavy self-consciousness lightened as she remembered the peas she had planted yesterday in her vegetable garden. The peas would be up soon, their little pairs of leaves unfolding in the cold soil. The germination of the peas seemed mysterious and wonderful to Arlene. She was here in church this morning partly because she was curious to see the new minister, but also because of the peas. It was hard to understand exactly what they had to do with the minister and the Bible and religion, but there was some connection, Arlene was sure of it.

Betsy Bucky had no trouble knowing why she came to church. The Old West Church was the theater where Betsy displayed her talents, at after-church coffee hours, at church suppers and bake sales and noonings. Social events like these were the realms in which Betsy held sway, the stage where she won applause for her sausage fritters, her Sunshine cake, her Blackbottom pie. At the Christmas Fair everyone exclaimed at Betsy’s aprons and afghans and potholders. But of course the cooking and sewing were only part of it. There were deeper reasons, really religious reasons, why Betsy came to church every single Sunday, why she never missed a service. As soon as Betsy sat down in her pew beside Carl, her thoughts soared up and out, romping in the blue sky among hosts of fluffy clouds, frolicking with angels and the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin always said to her, “Betsy Bucky, you’re the cutest little, woman! Oh, you’re special, Betsy Bucky, really special!” Of course Betsy knew you weren’t supposed to pray to the Virgin in Old West Church, but she thought that was silly. The Virgin was in the Bible, wasn’t she? Jesus had a mother, didn’t he?

Beside Betsy, her husband, Carl, sat sullenly, his feet wide apart on the floor, his belly tight against the button of his blazer, his face wadded and pale. The pain in his chest had come back. Carl thought of nudging Betsy to say he wanted to go home and lie down, but he knew she would only scold him in a fierce whisper and tell him to keep still. So he went on sitting quietly, one hand spread wide over his chest under his coat.

“Look, Carl,” whispered Betsy, pinching his arm, “new people.”

It was the Gibbys, Jerry and Imogene. While Betsy Bucky watched eagerly, they hurried up the aisle after Charlie Fenster to one of the pews at the front of the church. The three chubby boys walked in front, then Imogene came tripping gaily in her yellow dress, the frills catching every little breeze, and Jerry followed in the rear, his bald forehead gleaming, his sallow jowls glistening, his teeth showing in an anxious smile. Jerry felt like an interloper in this Anglo-Saxon Protestant church, but he was not troubled by any sense that he was betraying his Catholic boyhood. God was God, after all, and a tricky bastard, wherever you found him at Home.

Taking his seat, Jerry was stunned to find himself in the pew next to Parker W. Upshaw’s. Good God, Parker Upshaw, the big wheel in the upper echelons of General Grocery! Thank God; Upshaw was in some other department. He wasn’t in charge of franchise holders like Jerry. The guy was a cold fish with a reputation for nosy interference. Uneasily, Jerry nodded at Parker W. Upshaw and yanked at his trousers, which were tight in the crotch. Then he focused his attention on the words printed on the front of the order of service. They were from the prophet Isaiah:

And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord … these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer.

Foreigners, thought Jerry, that’s us. We’re foreigners. Well, okay, go ahead, you Protestants, make us joyful. Bring on the new minister. What’s his name? Bold? Joseph Bold.

Jerry and Imogene Gibby had heard no rumors about the minister’s wife. Therefore they were the only ones who did not guess that the woman entering from the door beside the pulpit, limping into the chamber on the arm of Lorraine Bell, was Claire Bold. A tremor ran through the crowded rows of pews. In her customary place at the back of the church, Rosemary Hill winced with shocked compassion. The face of the minister’s wife was a mask of skin and bone. Her arms and legs were bony sticks. Rosemary stopped staring and lowered her head. So that was the truth about Mrs. Joseph Bold. She was going to die! Then Rosemary felt a sympathetic pang beneath the belt of her skirt, and reminded herself to make an appointment with the doctor. She mustn’t wait any longer. She had waited too long already.

From his front pew, Parker Upshaw looked inquisitively around the room to see how they were all taking it. He wanted to stand up and say, It’s not my fault. I told the other members of the selection committee to pick another candidate. That guy from Pennsylvania, he had a wife with a doctor’s degree in church-school administration, and the Chicago man’s wife was a Harvard overseer, for God’s sake. But Parker’s intelligent suggestions had been overlooked. The rest of the committee had fallen for Joseph Bold in spite of Claire’s desperate physical condition. Ed Bell had talked them into it. Parker raised his eyes and stared at Claire Bold as she faltered into her pew. Look at the woman. She can barely stand up.

Mary Kelly, too, was astounded by her first glimpse of the minister’s wife, but for a different reason. “Homer,” she murmured, “I know her. It’s Claire Macaulay. She was my roommate freshman year. Oh, Homer, she used to be so—” Mary clutched Homer’s arm, overcome with helpless pity, as the choir stood up in the balcony to begin their anthem of welcome. The tenors exulted, the sopranos caroled jauntily, the altos droned on one note, the basses leaped with heavy agility from octave to octave. The music flooded the sunlit chamber as the door beside the pulpit opened a crack, then closed again, then opened wide to admit the new pastor into the presence of his congregation.