20

How the days pass! They fly like clouds before the wind.…

James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1848

Ed Bell’s retirement had been an active one from the beginning, but now he was busier than he had been in the old days when he went off to work every morning. In Boston there were more board meetings than ever, and the church canvass was taking a lot of his time, because whenever he called on Old West parishioners at home, they were always so sociable and welcoming he usually had to stay a while and pass the time of day.

And then there was Rosemary’s group of people in various kinds of desperate physical trouble. They had started meeting at Ed’s house regularly every Sunday afternoon, and the whole thing was taking on more consequence all the time, more investment in the way of cogitation in the middle of the night. The group had expanded, and the formidable problems and perplexities of its members were more heavily on Ed’s mind with every passing week. Charter member Rosemary Hill was suffering from inoperable stomach cancer, Thad Boland had a similar sort of growth in his colon, Eloise Baxter’s kidneys were failing, and Agatha Palmer had been stricken by leukemia. George Tarkington was another charter member, but his emphysema often kept him home in bed or cooped up in the hospital attached to a respirator. A new member was Philip Shooky, with his threatening heart condition.

At first Ed had felt out of place, an impostor, since he alone was perfectly healthy, not terminally ill like the others. But as time went on he almost forgot that he was well. More and more he began to feel like one of them, as if he too were under sentence of death. He was not alarmed by this sensation. In fact, it gave a pure beauty to every common thing, as though he were beholding it for the last time—the curved back of a chair, the rough bark of the maple tree, the mounded shape of Farrar’s Hill, the comfortable outline of his wife in middle age, the awkward loveliness of his daughter.

With Phil Shooky’s appearance in the group, the meetings changed their character, becoming more gravely purposeful. As a veterinarian, Phil knew things that might be immensely helpful to all of them in their assorted plights. It was true he was getting pretty vague about a lot of things—everybody knew Phil was terrified of having another stroke and losing his mind entirely—but about the details of good medical practice he was as sharp as ever.

Rosemary and Thad and Eloise and Agatha listened gravely as Ed explained the breadth and usefulness of Phil’s medical and pharmaceutical understanding.

“That’s right,” said Phil earnestly, nodding his head. “I mean, I may not know everything about human diseases, but in some ways humans and animals are just alike. I mean, you know, at certain times you could do the same thing for humans that you do for animals, if you see what I mean.”

Then Thad Boland told a long story about the time his angora cat had been put to sleep, and they all grew more and more depressed, and afterward Ed had to kid them back into good humor. He passed around a plate of peculiar cookies he had made himself, because Lorraine had washed her hands of the whole thing.

But Rosemary, Thad, Eloise, Agatha, Phil, and George were not the only members of the parish who were the victims of hopeless disorders. Claire Bold and Howie Sawyer were two more. In fact, it had been the terrible spectacle of Howie Sawyer’s stroke, that day in church, and Claire’s interminable dying that were the double inspiration for the existence of the group in the first place.

And Ed had Howie’s wife and Claire’s husband on his hands as well. Joan Sawyer’s tightlipped poise was extremely fragile, and Joe Bold was nearly prostrate. Ed had to keep picking Joe up off the floor and propping him against the wall, only to discover that he had slipped down again the next day into total despair.

Still, with Ed’s help, Joe managed to give at least an appearance of doing his job. In his office in the parish house he was present most of the time, Tuesdays through Fridays, keeping Felicia Davenport, his secretary, fairly busy. He attended regular meetings with the church-school director, the religious-education committee, the Parish Committee, the canvass committee, and the prison-visiting committee, but the Bible-study class was getting along Without him, dutifully working its way through the Old Testament. Leaderless as they were, the members of the class were mired down at the moment in the Book of Ecclesiastes, becoming more and more dejected in the face of its suicidal cynicism. Wasn’t Bible study supposed, to improve your moral fiber and tone up your spiritual life? Well, this time it wasn’t working. At the last meeting Deborah Shooky had burst into tears over the passage, What gain has he that toiled for the wind, and spent all his days in darkness and grief?

Even if Joe Bold had been able to summon the strength to join the Bible-study class on Thursday nights, it’s doubtful that he would have been useful to them in keeping their courage up. He was too sunken in gloom himself. But at the Parish Committee meetings on Tuesday evenings, under the jurisdiction of Ed Bell, Joe did his best to shape up. When new member Joan Sawyer offered to oversee the sexton and keep track of problems having to do with the physical plant, Joe promised to show her the rotten place in the eaves of the church. And he was there in his office, as agreed, on the morning she came to have a look.

But when Joan arrived at the parish house and walked into Felicia Davenport’s office to say hello, Felicia looked at her darkly, and nodded her head balefully in the direction of her boss’s ministerial study. “You can’t go in yet. She’s in there.”

“She?”

“Maud Starr. Claimed it was an emergency. Stuck her nose in here and giggled at me and romped down the hall. What could I do? She’s been in there for an hour. Oh, watch it, here she comes.” Felicia turned back to stare at the sheet of paper in her typewriter, but both she and Joan were listening to Maud’s jolly farewells. Now Maud was popping into Felicia’s office, grinning at the two of them, girlish in overalls and high-heeled sandals. To Joan, Maud didn’t look like a woman caught in the desperate grip of trouble, but of course one couldn’t really tell. Some people’s laughter was the same as other people’s tears.

“Honestly,” gushed Maud, “isn’t he just great? I mean, I brought him my little problem, and we got down to the nitty-gritty right away. Oh, Felicia, he’s having supper with me tonight, so just put that on his calendar, okay?” Chuckling and nodding, Maud pattered to the door, her bag swinging jauntily from her shoulder, her hands in her pockets, her buzzard wings folded, her red wattles trembling.

Felicia was deeply shocked. “How can he?” she whispered to Joan. “With his wife in the hospital, deathly ill?”

But Joan Sawyer wasn’t shocked. She didn’t care. It was no concern of hers. Gratefully she approached Joe’s office, smiling, looking forward to a conversation about rotten wood and carpenter ants, because talking to Joe was medicine, the best kind of medicine. She would swallow it greedily, every drop, knowing it was doing her good.