The Mind of Horace

When Alexander, Ida, and Horace came home from Nashoba, Eudocia was waiting with baby Gussie in her arms. Ida stepped down from the buggy and took the baby. Eudocia lifted Horace down and said, “Were you my good boy?”

“Of course he was,” said Ida.

“I saw a big tree,” said Horace. He spread his arms wide. “As big as a giant.”

“Oh, yes,” said his grandmother, unbuttoning his jacket. “I know that big tree.”

Jake peered over the side of the basket as the balloon wafted over Walden Pond. “You see Hector anyplace, Jack?”

“He’s a-comin’, Jake,” said Jack. “See him down there in the wagon, galloping that old horse? Whoopsie, Jake! Look at that. Wheel fell off the wagon.”

Jake looked down at the disaster on the Walden Road and said mildly, “It’s all right, Jack. Horse ain’t dead. Hector’ll catch up by and by.”

“You do love him a little?” Ida whispered to Alexander as she lay beside him in the big bed that had once belonged to her mother and father.

“Of course,” said Alexander, “just as I love his mother. And after all, who was it who helped bring Horace into the world?”

Ida smiled as she rested in the crook of her husband’s arm. It was true that Horace had been born in the Patent Office hospital in Washington, where Alexander Clock had been chief surgeon. Ida had gone looking for her husband, Seth, missing after the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, she had found her sixteen-year-old brother, Eben, deathly ill with typhoid fever. Then instead of going home to Concord to have her baby, she had stayed to help care for her brother. And therefore when her pains began, the head nurse had been forced, willy-nilly, to find her a bed.

But was it true that Alexander had helped with the baby’s birth? No, of course it wasn’t true. Although army surgeon Alexander Clock had been acquainted with every kind of wartime casualty, he had known nothing whatever about babies. He had seen the infant born and he had watched with relief as baby Horace was handed to his mother, and then he had visited the pretty pair every day for the next week, while Eben recovered in another part of the hospital. And when the little family had packed up its belongings and left for home, Dr. Clock had written to Ida every day. Her search for Seth had ended with the news of his death, and now it was Alexander who lay beside her in the bed in which she had been born.

But Horace was no longer an only child. He had a half sister, Augusta, who was still nursing at her mother’s breast. Everyone fussed over Gussie. Nobody fussed over Horace. Every night, the house was loud with Gussie’s cries. Every day, it steamed with Gussie’s washing. There were kettles boiling on the stove, set tubs sloshing with soapy water, hands rough and red from rubbing small garments on scrubbing boards, and on wet days Gussie’s laundry stretched across the kitchen and flapped in Horace’s face. And yet, after causing all this trouble, Gussie was the one who was kissed and cooed over, not Horace.

It was clear to his grandmother that Horace’s small nose was out of joint. Therefore, Eudocia adopted him as her special charge. “Come, Horace dear,” she would say when he was scolded for misbehaving, “I’ll read you the story of Goldilocks and the three bears.” Or sometimes it was nursery rhymes—“Humpty-Dumpty” and “Little Boy Blue” and all the rest. Horace sopped them up. He lived in them; they filled his head with pictures.

So for five-year-old Horace Morgan, the world was populated by elves and fairies, gnomes and trolls, storekeepers on the Milldam, giants and goose girls, white rabbits and the spotted cow, the man in the moon, his mother and grandmother, Little Jack Horner, and the horses in the stable.

Therefore, when the hot-air balloon of the brothers Spratt drifted over the apple orchard, Horace was not surprised. The fantastic spectacle was all of a piece with the floating gossamer of dandelions and the news from fairyland.