31

No message will ever reach me from the cold grave where they have laid you!

James Lorin Chapin
Private Journal, Lincoln, 1849

Mary Kelly had spent the morning in the Concord public library among the busts of Hawthorne and Thoreau and Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. For Mary, the library was a familiar haunt. She had once been employed there. Every day she had inhaled the gummy fragrance of glued bindings, the good smell of dictionaries, the cold aura of marble ears and noses, the healthy aroma of middle-aged librarians, along with a certain indefinable transcendental essence like the scent of a pine grove on some bleak and windswept crag.

When she came home with her arms full of books, she was startled to see Homer looking down at her from the porch. “Claire’s gone,” he said.

“Oh, no,” cried Mary, bursting into tears. One by one the books fell from her arms as she sobbed up the steps, overcome by pity and anguished sympathy and, above all, by relief. “It’s over. It’s over at last.”

Mary’s sense of sad deliverance was felt throughout the parish as the word went around. It was as if they had all been holding their breath.

“No more suffering,” said Imogene Gibby, breaking the news by phone to Hilary Tarkington. “She won’t have to endure any more of those awful operations.”

“Oh, no, bless her heart,” echoed Hilary, her eyes filling with tears. In the next room, Hilary’s husband, George, was going through a bad spell, struggling to fill his lungs with air. “Has anyone said anything about the service for her? I suppose they’ll have to bring in another clergyman.”

But who should the clergyman be? In the end it was Ed Bell who made the arrangements, with the help of his wife and Mary Kelly. Joe Bold, the bereaved husband, roused himself from his brokenhearted misery long enough to suggest an old classmate at the Divinity School, and the old classmate agreed to come.

When it was over, the congregation fled in all directions, oppressed by the apparently endless burden of continuous sorrow. Parker Upshaw, for one, felt strongly that they had all endured enough. Striding out to his car, he turned the key and looked significantly at Libby as she climbed in beside him. “Well, thank God. Now maybe Old West can get on with its work. If the man doesn’t shape up from now on, I’m personally going to see to it that we get ourselves a replacement. I’m not kidding.”

“Oh, Parker, honestly,” said Libby, genuinely disturbed. “At a time like this—”

“I mean it.” Parker edged the new Subaru out onto Farrar Road, then waited impatiently for old Mrs. Pomeroy to struggle to the curb with her cane. “Somebody’s got to face facts. Nobody else seems to be willing to make the tough decisions. The nasty jobs always land on me.” Parker wrenched at the steering wheel and the car zoomed past the church, fluttering the skirts of Mrs. Pomeroy.

“Like foreclosing on Jerry Gibby?” said Libby, pinned against the back of the seat, looking sharply at her husband.

“Well, naturally I’m foreclosing on Jerry Gibby. The man should never have had a franchise in the first place. Those financial supervisors, they were far too lax and permissive before I came along. Too easygoing, too pusillanimous.”

“Pusillaminous?” Libby giggled. “Oh, I love it, pusillaminous. You don’t say pusillaminous, you dumb cluck. It’s pusillanimous. You don’t even know how to pronounce pusillanimous.”

The signal at the railroad crossing on Hartwell Road was flashing and ringing. Parker Upshaw could have killed his wife. He snarled at her ferociously and raced the Subaru across the tracks, as the descending gate wobbled over the car roof, savaging the perfect paint.

On the way home husband and wife engaged in gentle debate. Whose fault was it, really and truly? Husband’s? Or wife’s?