43

This is the great end of the gospel, of the ministry, of the church, that sinners may be saved.

Reverend William Jackson
Lincoln, 1848

Ed Bell’s death was the twelfth in six months in Old West Church. Devoutly everyone hoped it would be the last for a long time. But not until the Fourth of July was it apparent that circumstances in the three church communities of Nashoba had fundamentally changed.

At seven o’clock on the morning of the Fourth, Frances Mary Huxtible slipped on the braided rug in her kitchen while preparing a soft-boiled egg and broke her hip. An hour later, Roger Dolby fractured his skull when he fell off the roof of his house while attaching the lanyard of his American flag to the eaves trough. Mrs. Huxtible, a member of the Catholic parish of St. Barbara’s, died twenty-three days later. Mr. Dolby, a lay reader in the Lutheran congregation of the Church of the Good Shepherd, was dead on arrival at Emerson Hospital.

The spell was broken. In Old West Church, death was no longer triumphant. During the month of September, Joe Bold baptized two infants, and in October he performed three marriages. One was the wedding of Bo Harris’s sister. Louise Harris walked up the aisle of Old West during a thunderstorm in a seven-hundred-dollar wedding dress, preceded by eight bridesmaids.

And membership was on the rise. A few people said the influx was the result of the Reverend Bold’s preaching, which was regaining its original fervor, others thought it was merely a reflection of the increase in the town’s population because of the new real-estate development off Hartwell Road.

Jerry and Imogene Gibby were still diligent in their attendance at church on Sunday morning. Their rented house in Waltham was a lot closer to Nashoba than Imogene’s mother’s house in Porter Square. And before long Jerry was back at his desk in the office above the courtesy booth in the Bedford franchise of General Grocery.

Mary Kelly was surprised to see him at the store when she walked in from the parking lot one chilly morning in late October. There he was in person, standing on a tall ladder, attaching plastic bunting to the ceiling.

When he saw Mary, he climbed down off the ladder and shook her hand.

“Jerry,” said Mary, “I can’t believe it. I’m so glad to see you back.”

“You bet I’m back. It’s the pastry chefs doing. I got this idea for a new gimmick. You know, a pastry chef in a big chef’s hat.” Jerry patted an imaginary hat in the air high over his head. “And I sold it to top management. I mean, all I had to do was go to Boston with a bunch of samples, and top management bought the idea and gave me a new lease on life in the store. Here, come on, you’ve got to see this.”

The aisles were festooned with bunting and bright Day-Glo arrows pointing toward the back of the store, to the pastry chef’s domain, a small kitchen boutique with striped awnings, surrounded by a crush of customers. At first Mary could see only the tall white hat of the pastry chef, but when Jerry pulled her around the end of the counter, she was astounded to see Betsy Bucky’s knobby little face beaming at her below the hat.

Betsy didn’t have time to talk. She was too busy presiding over her simmering kettle of lard. The girl beside her was busy too, bagging Betsy’s sausage fritters as fast as Betsy’s tongs could whisk them out of the pot.

“Betsy,” gasped Mary, “how wonderful. Congratulations. I understand you saved the day for Jerry.”

Betsy glanced up from her boiling fat. “Well, like I always say, why are we put here on this earth in the first place? I mean, we come this way but once, isn’t that right? Whoops!” One of Betsy’s sausage fritters eluded her tongs and frisked to the side of the pot. Viciously she jabbed at it with her fork, and dropped it into an open bag. “Here, take some home to hubby.”

“Go right ahead, take a dozen or two,” said Jerry proudly. “It’s on the house.”

“Well, thank you,” said Mary. She took the bag reluctantly, holding it at arm’s length like a poisonous snake.

“Hey, Mary,” said Jerry. “Listen, there’s something else.” He was tugging at her again, moving her away from the pastry boutique, guiding her into an isolated corner of specialty items, pickled onions, Scottish marmalade, smoked clams. “Listen,” Jerry went on in a loud whisper, “You know Upshaw? Parker W. Upshaw? Guess what happened to him!”

“I don’t know,” said Mary, her eyes alight. “Tell me, what?”

“He’s out in the cold. Fired from General Grocery. Will Daly told me, friend of mine. Will just got his job back too, just like me. Everybody Upshaw fired has been rehired.”

“No kidding,” said Mary, delighted. “Why did they fire Parker?”

“The chairman of the board finally caught on to what he was doing. Upshaw went over top management to the board just once too many times, trying to wangle himself into somebody else’s slot, and this time the chairman persuaded the chief executive officer of General Grocery to get rid of him and reinstate everyone else.”

“Well, what a good man, that board chairman,” said Mary. “Who is he, anyway?”

“Who was he, I’m afraid,” said Jerry solemnly. “You know who it was? I’ll tell you who it was. It was Ed Bell.”

“Good God,” said Mary, awestruck at the wild oscillation of the tipping scales of justice, at the miraculous redemption of the murdering Betsy Bucky, at the resurrection of Jerry Gibby as a successful businessman, at the reincarnation of Howie Sawyer as a thespian performer, at the abasement of the mighty Flo Terry and the descent of Parker W. Upshaw into the abyss. “It feels like Judgment Day around here, the separation of the sheep from the goats at the last day.”

“Well, Upshaw was a goat, all right,” said Jerry in vengeful triumph.

“Some of us knew that from the beginning,” said Mary Kelly. “Right, Jerry?”

But to Libby Upshaw, Parker’s wife, the news that her husband was no longer among the upwardly mobile blessed ones of the earth was a horrifying discovery. At first she couldn’t believe it.

“You mean,” she said, staring at her husband, “I am married to a man who is unemployed? The top, you said! When I married you, you said you were going straight to the top.”

“Shut up,” said Parker Upshaw. He kicked the coffee table. He tipped over his Nautilus machine. He tossed a stack of books to the floor, his French grammar and every volume of the complete works of Plato, his new matched set, gold-tooled and bound in leather. Perfection as a life-style faded from his horizon. Parker W. Upshaw was once more as other men.