Jolly Old Dickens

The sweet airs of spring were gone. It was midsummer, hot and close. The rain held off. Kitchen gardens and orchards suffered, but the corn grew apace. It was fine weather for haying and for drying fresh-cut wood.

“Another week,” said Josiah, tapping one of the planks piled up behind his house. “By the time I’m back from touring all the almshouses in the southern part of the county, these boards will be fit and ready to go.”

The clearing in Josiah’s woodlot was no longer a clearing. Cartloads of topsoil had been carried away to improve an impoverished acre here and there, but heaps of sandy subsoil still remained beside the cellar hole. All the rocks had been hurled to one side after they were pulled out of the ground, then picked up again to line the foundation. Leftover stones cluttered the edge of the woods, along with a boulder dragged out of the hole by the team of oxen belonging to Joseph Hunt.

Behind the boulder stood the toolshed, finished by Eben in a couple of evenings. “I could have slapped it up quicker,” he told Josiah, “if I hadn’t been slapping mosquitoes at the same time.”

The window glass had come. Eben’s order had been filled far too early, and the three heavy crates lay unopened behind the toolshed. Part of Josiah’s pretty woodlot was now a wasteland of stumps, the wreckage of trees felled to eke out the supply of lumber. A straw bonnet hung forgotten in a brush pile, a lost doll leaned against a stump, and a rubber ball that had streaked away from Eben’s nephew, Horace, lay among last year’s fallen leaves.

When Josiah came back from inspecting the shoddy appointments of the almshouses at the extreme southern border of Middlesex County, he declared with an exultant shout that the stacked wood was dry. At last, the construction of his defiant little church could begin in earnest.

Not much could be expected in the month of August from the farmers among Josiah’s supporters. But other men had time to spare. Alexander Clock’s patients were always healthier in summer than in winter, and he often accompanied Eben to lend a hand. All the district schoolhouses in Nashoba and Concord were locked up and empty, except for a few droning flies. Pupils and schoolmasters were free to help out. Even Professor Eaton no longer traveled by rail to Cambridge to give instruction in the Eclogues of Virgil, and the court cases in which lawyer Jarvis Brown was concerned had been reduced to one (about which he did not speak).

But the construction of even so small a building called for many hours of Eben’s time. As its designer, he had to furnish measurements for sills, corner posts, cross beams, and rafters. And no one else but Eben could direct the layout of the timbers on the ground and mark precisely for the amateur carpenters the places to cut the mortises and tenons that were to hold the framework together.

Sometimes Eben was so beset that he wanted to harden his heart and take off for some other corner of the world. But soon his resolve would be restored by the ardent look on Josiah’s face as he hewed a beam with a broad ax or pressed his knee on a board to send his excited saw wheezing back and forth.

And there was also a strange exhilaration in visiting Josiah’s house whenever new boards had to be carted to the woodlot from the stacks in his backyard.

They were comfortable together now—Eben and Isabelle, Eben and James. One day in early August, Eben found Isabelle reading aloud to James a novel by Charles Dickens. “Oh, good,” said Eben, “jolly old Charles Dickens,” and he sat down to listen to the story with James.

But the passage she had been reading was not very jolly. “It’s such a sad story,” said Isabelle, apologizing to Eben. “Perhaps you’d rather not hear the last page.”

“What, A Tale of Two Cities?” said Eben. “But it’s a very fine book.”

So Isabelle looked down and went on reading to James the sublime last thought of Sydney Carton as he stood on the scaffold. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”