Josiah

Josiah walked home from the church, hardly able to contain his anger. Horatio Biddle had aimed a tirade like a blast from a cannon straight at the head of Josiah Gideon as he sat alone in the family pew. Passages from the Bible had been hurled at him like mortar shells, as though the Book of Genesis were the sole property of Horatio Biddle, as though Josiah had trampled it underfoot and desecrated the evening and the morning, the beasts of the earth, and the fowl of the air. Then Horatio Biddle had raised a sanctimonious hand and vowed never to profane the house of God with the name of the British naturalist who had replaced their great ancestors Adam and Eve with ludicrous hairy beasts. And then he had waxed poetic, telling again the fable about the wood of the tree in the Garden of Eden that had become the cross of Christ.

Straight downhill through the burial ground strode Josiah, his long legs carrying him at high speed past the ancient headstones of the first settlers of Nashoba.

The tree in the garden and the cross of Christ! Oh, yes, it was a pretty story, but it belonged to Josiah Gideon as rightfully as it did to Horatio Biddle. And there was another legendary tree, one of which Horatio was entirely unaware.

Josiah paused in his downhill plunge and looked up at the chestnut tree beside the stone wall. It was a gigantic tree, spreading its green crown all the way across the Acton Road to drop its cool shade on his own doorstep. Surely the tree had towered over the graves of the first settlers of Nashoba, and over the memorial stones of the sad generation that followed, when whole families had been swept away by scarlet fever and the bloody flux.

But to Josiah, it had become much more than a splendid survivor from centuries past. He now thought of it as Mr. Darwin’s great “Tree of Life.” He knew the passage by heart and he mumbled it now as he climbed over the wall:

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.

If ever a living tree could be said to have “ever-branching and beautiful ramifications,” it was the chestnut tree in the Nashoba burial ground. Josiah’s anger seized on the tree as a rallying center for all his mental forces.

But as he vaulted the stone wall, he saw the doctor’s horse browsing on the grass beside the gate. Once again, he tried to clear his mind of its feverish excitement, because within that house, where at this moment a curtain was blowing out of a bedroom window and the shadow of the chestnut tree was moving over the clapboards, there could be only one thought. Before it, all others fell away. Josiah’s daughter, Isabelle, flinging open the door to welcome him, was an embodiment of the thought, the doctor spoke it aloud in quiet truths, and James was the thought itself.

Once again, Eben Flint had come with the doctor. Eben nodded at Josiah, then looked back at James. Isabelle and Julia stood watching, too, as James tried to undo the buckles of the prosthetic hook on his left arm with the hook on his right. He failed, and failed again, and at last the hook clattered to the floor.

“Good,” murmured Alexander. He took the stump in his hand and inspected the raw chafing. “I’ll bring something next time. I’ve got an ointment that’s first-rate.”

Eben said quickly, “I think I could make a better fit than that.”

James made a sound in his throat. He was not interested in a better fit and he cared little for an ointment to soothe the chafing. He could not say what he wanted in words. He could only gaze at the doctor with his one suffering eye.

Alexander did not need words. In a field hospital after Antietam, he had seen the same look on the face of a maimed lieutenant from Mississippi. In everything but words, James was pleading, Help me out of this sorrow. Of course, Dr. Clock pretended not to understand. He closed his bag and said a serene good-bye. Eben followed him out of the room, and so did Isabelle and Josiah.

In the hall, Eben took his hat from the table and said to Josiah, “You see, sir, I could make a sort of padded contraption that might be more comfortable for James. I’ll see what I can do.”

Eben could not look at Isabelle, but when Josiah thanked him, so did she.

For the rest of the day, the house was quiet. Isabelle took down a book from the Dickens shelf, but when she showed it to James, he shook his head and pointed a hook at another. “You mean this one?” said Isabelle. He nodded, and she plucked it out. Sitting down beside him, settling herself comfortably among the chair cushions, Isabelle began to read A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

James bowed his head and listened.

Upstairs, Josiah was reading, too. He had set up an office under the eaves of the spare room and arranged on the desk his lexicon, his quill pens, his penknife, his household ledger, and the account books for the charitable institutions that were in his care. Here also was the Bible that had belonged to his father and grandfather before him. Its covers were cracked and its pages limp from a thousand turnings—his father’s hand seeking one of Paul’s Epistles, his grandfather turning to the Book of Revelation.

Josiah picked up the heavy book and opened it to the beginning. He had not looked at Genesis since his days in seminary. Now he read the first three chapters from the beginning all the way to the verse about the angel whose flaming sword drove Adam away from the tree of life.

The story was a wonder. Josiah sank back in his chair and read the beautiful verses over and over, until, to his surprise, he saw that Adam’s tree was beginning to merge with that other tree, the one that teemed with birds and monkeys, lions and tigers. A chimpanzee scrambled past him and a bird of paradise flew so close that its feathers brushed his face, and a kindly baboon reached out its hand.

“Josiah?” His wife was touching his shoulder, and he woke with a start. Julia stood beside him in her nightdress. Josiah lighted a candle, and their shadows followed them across the hall. In the bedroom, he blew out the candle, put his arm around his wife and led her to the window. In a moment, their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Julia drew the curtain aside, and at once they could see the stars, although half the sky was blotted out by the dark shape of the enormous tree across the road.

Charles Darwin had said nothing about the stars.