Deacon Sweetser Moves North

Perhaps Horatio Biddle had been born a clergyman, babbling sermons in his cradle and waving his little fists in declamatory gestures. Now as a grown man, he felt himself to be the natural lord of his congregation. Ever since the laying on of hands at the time of his ordination, he had been the spiritual master of his flock. In that instant, he had become the inheritor of an ancestral line of Christian preachers. Every hand that had lain upon his head had belonged to a clergyman who had himself received just such a laying on of hands by older men of God, and they, too, had been blessed by the hands of an earlier generation. The ceremony of ordination was a passing of spiritual authority from one age to the next, a solemn succession going back and back in time.

But on the morning following the dark midnight when Josiah Gideon and Eben Flint had set off with their shovels and spades, Horatio Biddle woke up and beheld a horrid defiance of his inherited authority. As he pulled off his nightcap and yawned and glanced out the window, he saw something entirely unexpected. A tombstone was standing at the top of the burial ground in a place where no tombstone had stood before.

Horatio threw up the sash and leaned out to stare down the hill to the place where the chestnut tree rose splendidly in the sweet morning air, its great limbs spreading far and high, its constellations of new leaves translucent in the light of the rising sun. He could see no trace of the resting place of Deacon Sweetser below the tree. There was no ugly pit in the ground, no visible scar. It was as though the venerable deacon had never slept at the foot of the chestnut tree.

Outraged, Horatio threw on his clothes in such a hurry that his wife sat up in bed and complained, “Good gracious, Horatio, your shirt’s on inside out.”

“No matter.” Her husband charged out of the bedroom, thundered down the stairs, threw open the door, and raced across the green through the dew-wet grass, then pounded along a quiet street, past a sleepy boy carrying a bucket into a cowshed and past the house of the widow Whittey, who was at that moment sweeping her front stoop. Miss Whittey looked up at Horatio and dropped her broom, but he charged past her without a word and rounded the corner to a path that meandered away from the road. The path led to an untidy yard full of sawbucks and to the shack that was the home of two brothers, Brendan and Daniel Fitzmorris. They were sawyers.

Horatio sometimes pitied the foreign element in town, but the Fitzmorris brothers were not within his charge, since they were Irish Catholics. The kindly reach of parish charity did not extend to papists, no matter how needy they might be. Now, at least, they would be paid for laboring in a Protestant cause. Their saws and axes owed no allegiance to the Pope in Rome.

“You there,” cried Horatio Biddle, pounding on the shanty door. “Wake up.”

By ten o’clock in the morning of the same day, across Nashoba Brook in the town of Concord, Eudocia Flint and most of her family were up and about. Eben had come home at dawn, but after sleeping only a few hours, he had dragged himself out of bed to go back to Nashoba with Alexander. Baby Gussie was asleep. Ida, too, had been nodding off in the rocking chair until the loud singing voice of her mother jerked her awake.

In the sitting room downstairs, Eudocia’s feet vigorously worked the treadles of the reed organ, her fingers bouncing on the keys and her knees thrusting sideways against the levers that sent more air into the bellows. Eudocia’s lungs expanded, too, as she gave tongue to a jolly song, “Oh, the bulldog on the bank! And the bullfrog in the pool!”

It was the signal for Horace’s music lesson. But when Horace did not run into the room and climb into her lap, Eudocia stood up and called for her grandson, “Horace? Where are you?”

Ida laid Gussie in her cradle and ran downstairs, telling herself that she should have been keeping track of Horace. Any day now, her clever little boy would learn how to draw the bolts on the doors.

“Horace, Horace,” called Ida. But at the foot of the stairs, she whispered, “Oh no,” because the bolt had been drawn and the door stood wide open.

Eudocia and Ida looked everywhere. Sallie and Josh and Alice scattered to look for the missing boy in the henhouse, the stable, the barn, and the orchard. Naughty Horace was nowhere to be found.

But when the Reverend Horatio Biddle made his way back to the chestnut tree at the foot of the burial ground, accompanied by two men armed with axes and saws, he saw the lost boy high in the branches of the tree, looking down at him and laughing.