Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy

  He stood that way for a long while.

  Mrs. Cobb was waiting for him with hands on hips. "Three o'clock," she said. "Not two o'clock. Not four o'clock. Three o'clock. Here I've let that child in and she's sitting in my parlor and I don't have a thing to say to her, and Lord knows she hasn't a single thing to say to me."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Cobb. Mrs. Hurd's house looks closed up."

  "All I know is that those awful shutters have been painted a Christian color."

  Turner could see that Lizzie was annoyed when he came into the parlor. Her mouth was closed tight, but her eyes said, "Turner Ernest Buckminster, if I had to sit in this parlor alone with her for one more minute, I'd have thrown something through a window, and it would have been your fault."

  Turner got right down to his playing.

  But the green shutters hung before him, and his fingers seemed to miss half the time, and toward the end of just about every chorus he found that his feet had stopped pumping and that the verses were drifting off into a strangling silence.

  "Turner Buckminster, keep your mind on God's songs."

  He tried. He did try. But Mrs. Cobb got more and more exasperated. "Are you trying to send me into my last words?" she finally hollered. Lizzie's eyes grew big, and Turner figured he didn't want Mrs. Cobb to die on him. So he picked up the pace with a few Civil War hymns, but even so, she finally waved her hand and told him to stop. There was playing the organ, she said, and there was playing at the organ. If she wanted to hear someone playing at the organ, all she had to do was listen to that dreadful Lillian Woodward. It was high time for him to go on home and leave an old lady some use of her ears.

  Lizzie Bright stood up and walked over to Turner. She took his hand and led him out the back of the house. They stood together on the back porch, as they had done so many times, but now, for the very first time, there was a gentle touch in Lizzie's hand that Turner had never noticed before. He did not let go.

  "You know I was about to throw something through the window by the time you got there?"

  "I know."

  "You know what it's like to sit in there not talking with her? Golly Moses, I kept trying to find a place to put my eyes so she wouldn't think I was planning on stealing something."

  "She wouldn't open the door for you every day if she thought that. She just doesn't know what to say to you."

  "I know. Just like sometimes I don't know what to say to you."

  "Lizzie, you never have any trouble knowing what to say to me.

  "Well, Turner Ernest Buckminster, right now I'm trying to figure out how to ask you why a wild turkey could have played that organ better than you today."

  "You still trying to figure out a way to ask?"

  "Not anymore. I guess it's right out there."

  "I don't know. Me leaving Boston. What might happen to you and everyone else on Malaga. And now Mrs. Hurd's house. And then these dinners at home where no one says a single thing. Not one single thing. I guess, I guess I just want one thing to stay the same. Just one thing."

  "Well," she said, "if you were still in Boston, you'd never have heard of me."

  Turner smiled. "I suppose some changes are as fine as they can be."

  "Turner Ernest Buckminster, you best be careful what you say." Lizzie took her hand from his and was gone.

  Turner went out to the street, looked at the green shutters of Mrs. Hurd's house, and walked back to the parsonage. The sea breeze, wearing its overcoat, followed him all the way until he closed the door on it. Then it tipped up into the sky and spread out, looking for a maple it could scorch or a beech it could blanch. It found the maple and went about its business, so that if Turner had looked out his front door, he might have seen the maple just past First Congregational shiver some and then coldly begin to burn into reds.

  But he didn't look out. He went up to his room and listened to the clicking of the typewriter from his father's study, and he thought about sunlight shutters and strawberry doors and Mrs. Hurd and baseballs hit higher than the dome of the Massachusetts State House and Lizzie Bright, and he suddenly knew that he needed to find a way back to Malaga Island.

  And he needed to find out where Mrs. Hurd had gone.

  So that night, as dishes were passed around a silent table, and as the clock on the breakfront chimed the quarter hours, Turner decided he would dare the silence and ask.

  "Mrs. Hurd's house is all closed up," he said. He was surprised at how loudly his voice crackled around the room, as though it were electric and sparking up the paneled walls."And her shutters are all painted green."

  "Yes, I know," said Reverend Buckminster without looking up. He deliberately cut a square piece of lamb and dipped it into the mint jelly on his plate. He brought it slowly to his mouth and chewed properly.

  The clock chimed another quarter hour.

  "Do you know where she went?"

  Reverend Buckminster slowly chewed. There was a long silence, so long that Turner wondered if the clock might chime again. "Yes," his father said, "I do know. But it's not to be gossiped about at the minister's dinner table."

  Turner's mother put down her fork. "Tell him, Buckminster. Tell him where Mrs. Hurd has gone."

  "It is a family affair."

  More silence, then his mother said softly, "Turner, Mrs. Hurd has been sent to the Home for the Feeble-Minded in Pownal. Do you know what that is?"

  Turner shook his head.

  "It's an insane asylum, Turner. It's a place where people live in long wards, tied to white iron beds. It's a place where there are strong nurses to tell them exactly what to do."

  Turner thought he might throw up. The smell of the mint jelly filled the room, heavy and sickly sweet, awful, wafting around him.

  "You don't need to frighten the boy."

  "But she wasn't feebleminded or insane," she continued. "I knew her, and she wasn't feebleminded or insane."

  "That's for her son to decide. He is a deacon, after all," said Reverend Buckminster.

  "For her son to decide," said Turner's mother, looking only at him, "and for two other respectable citizens of Phippsburg to agree to, if she was to be legally committed. One of the respectable citizens was Mr. Stonecrop, who just happens to be looking for capital to build his new hotel. And my, isn't it surprisingly convenient that the good Deacon Hurd now has his mad mother's house to put on the market, all newly painted in colors that everyone expects? And isn't it surprisingly convenient that once it has sold, Deacon Hurd will have a nice sum to invest?"

  "Deacon Hurd, Turner, has been fearing for his mother's sanity for some time, and he cannot leave her safely alone. You can hardly expect him to care for an insane woman."

  "The other respectable gentleman who signed the committal papers," said Turner's mother, "is best named by your father." And she gathered up her dishes and went out to the kitchen.

  Turner did not ask his father who the other respectable gentleman was. As silence descended upon the dining room again, and the ticking of the breakfront clock grew louder, he, too, gathered up his dishes and left his father sitting very still, his hands on the edge of the table.

  His mother was gone from the kitchen. Turner stacked his plate atop hers and then went out to the front porch and sat on the steps. The days were darkening earlier now, but down Parker Head he could still make out Mrs. Hurd's house—or what had been Mrs. Hurd's house. "I have some friends before me gone," he sang quietly, but the sound seemed so lonely and lost that he stopped before the chorus. He thought of Mrs. Hurd in some awful gown, confused and afraid, her hair uncombed, in a well-lit ward under sheets white and starched, stretched tight across her chest, and he knew that she was thinking only one thing: if only she could light out for the Territories. If only she could.

  ***

  So when he stepped into his father's study the next morning to begin the first formal day of tutelage, Turner was about as grim as a dark cloud lowering itself over a Sunday-school picnic. He stood silent, watching his father finish draf
ting the day's assignment. The collar was tight and perfect around the reverend's neck. His coat fell in folds as precise as those of a marble sculpture. Each sleeve of his starched shirt protruded the same amount from the coat, just enough to show the matched cuff links, gleaming silver. His nails were cut precisely to the pink.

  Turner wondered if his father had ever played baseball, had ever hit a fly into air so blue that it hurt his eyes to look at it. He wondered if his father had ever joked around, out-loud lied, gotten into a fight and pushed another kid's nose off to the side, jumped off a cliff about as high as a middle-sized pine into an oncoming froth of wave.

  Probably not.

  His father looked up. "Arma virumque cano," he said. His first words to his son that morning.

  "Arms I sing," said Turner ... after more than a few moments.

  "Of arms I sing, and the man. Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam."

  "And the one who first from Italy..."

  "No."

  "From Troy, the coasts of Troy to Italy."

  "Fato profugus."

  "Fate's ..."

  "Turner, we've done this passage before."

  "By fate. Exiled by fate."

  "Laviniaque venit litora."

  "Come to the shores of Lavinia."

  Reverend Buckminster handed Turner an ominously large book. "Do the first hundred lines." He looked at the grandfather clock guarding the study's corner. "An hour and a half should be enough."

  So Turner sat at a small desk by the window—a window closed tightly and imperiously against sea breezes exiled by fate—and began the first hundred lines of the Aeneid. He tried not to sigh. He tried not to scratch too often. How was he to blame if dang Virgil was so ornery that he wouldn't give up his verbs until the very end of his sentences, as if he thought it would be a fine surprise to snap things around like a cat changing direction?

  But there was something here he knew. Someone exiled by fate from a place he loved. A man thrown around greatly—or whatever multum iactatus meant—thrown around on the shore and on the sea by something he did not understand.

  Turner knew what this was about.

  He finished in two hours. He was sweating. His father was not. He was tapping his pen in rhythm with the ticking of the clock. By the time Aeneas's chilled arms were weakening with dread—if extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra meant chilled arms weakening with dread—Turner was wishing that fate would exile the Minister's Son anywhere else.

  "You must be done now," said his father.

  "Yes, sir."

  Reverend Buckminster looked at the clock. A long look. "Read me your translation."

  His father quietly tapped his pen through the reading.

  "It's not his arms that are chilled," he said when Turner finished. "More like 'chilled dread.'"

  I almost touched a whale, thought Turner.

  "Write a summary of the passage, one hundred and fifty words." Reverend Buckminster looked at the clock again. "Thirty minutes." And he turned back to his own writing—probably a sermon about hell's torments, one of which was writing a short essay in thirty minutes.

  Turner began. And no matter if Aeneas's storms had come to chill his arms or chill his dread or whatever, Turner was determined to finish in thirty minutes. If whole empires rose and fell, continents shifted, and the earth tilted upside down, he would finish in thirty minutes.

  He finished as the grandfather clock ticked to twenty-six minutes, and he handed the paper across his father's desk.

  His father glanced at it."Another summary," he said."From the perspective of Juno."

  "Sir?"

  "The queen of the gods, Turner. Write it as though she is telling the story. This is Juno here, regina deum, line nine. Thirty minutes seems about the right amount of time."

  Out in the bay, I almost touched a whale, thought Turner.

  He began again, starting with Juno's unforgiving cruelty, sweeping into the cave of winds, and finally breaking into the storm: ruunt et terras turbine perflant. He chaffed some at going over a hundred lines for the third time, but he felt Juno's malice as she snatched the daylight from the Trojans' eyes, and as she heaved up the seabed on them. He imagined her as, say, Mrs. Cobb, swooping out from behind her picket fence with eyes aflame, calling down the turbine perflant upon a minister's son who threw rocks.

  He finished in twenty-four minutes. He thought Mrs. Cobb's swooping gave his summary a kind of flair.

  "Now from the perspective of Aeolus," said Reverend Buckminster, and Turner was in the gloomy cavern of the king of the Winds, reining back the storms until he could unleash them at Juno's will. "From the perspective of Aeneas," said Reverend Buckminster next, and Turner despaired with the hero in the groaning and stretching ship—or maybe it was Aeneas who was groaning and stretching. It was hard to tell.

  He supposed, in the end, that the morning was about as passable a morning as anyone could pass when he was forging through a Latin exercise.

  His father set all four summaries on his desk, side by side, and read each one twice. He tapped his pen on each in turn, underlining now and again, circling a phrase here and there. He tapped some more with his pen, as loudly as the ticking of the grandfather clock, and finally gathered all four together, arranged them neatly, and handed them back to Turner.

  "Aside from your multiple spellings of Aeneas—which, despite all of your creativity, has, according to Virgil, no u in it at all—you have translated and summarized well enough for someone coming back to Latin after a summer's break. You see how important it is to view the story from different perspectives?"

  Turner nodded. He waited for his release. He felt the quiet sea breeze stirring outside the house and peeking in at the window.

  Reverend Buckminster stood and turned to his shelves. He looked them up and down, one finger at his lip, as Turner's heart stood still, and as the sea breeze paused and quivered.

  He pulled out one of the volumes, thumbed through it, put it back, pulled out another. Its leather binding and marbled edges proclaimed to all the world that it was about as dull a book as could ever have been written by any one human being. "Robert Barclay's An Apology for the True Christian Divinity: Being an Explanation and Vindication of the Principles and Doctrines of the People Called Quakers," he said."Read the first two propositions, and then summarize them after dinner."

  Outside the window, the sea breeze dropped and slunk away.

  It was a dreary afternoon that followed a dreary and silent dinner. The Aeneid was one thing—at least there were storms and ships being tossed and people being washed overboard. But a proposition on "The True Foundation of Knowledge" was as awful as Mrs. Cobb's seeing him in his underwear in her kitchen. Well, almost as awful.

  He wondered if he would be reading propositions by Robert Barclay if he were sitting at a desk in the Phippsburg schoolhouse. Probably not—but Willis Hurd would be there. So he sat in his father's study as the sea breeze frolicked somewhere else, and as Lizzie Bright was probably flying with the Tripps, and read propositions. Long propositions. Long propositions that didn't seem to want to go much of anywhere and that were taking their time not wanting to go there. He sighed, glanced at his father to see if he had heard above the ticking of the clock, and settled in to write about seeking divinity.

  It looked to be a long school year.

  It was, at least, a mighty long school week. A hundred lines of the Aeneid with their summaries for each morning, followed by two propositions by Robert Barclay for the afternoon. Virgil was passable, with the storm breaking up the fleet, and Aeneas finally coming to land, and the gods bothering and fussing at each other. But reading Robert Barclay while the sea breeze waited outside—that was something not even a minister's son should have to do. Aeneas—or Aenaeus, however he spelled his dang name—would never have put up with it.

  Maybe even Reverend Buckminster understood that. On Friday, after the Trojans had come upon Queen Dido and all the exciting parts were getting ready to die down, a m
iracle greater than the parting of the Red Sea descended upon the town of Phippsburg, Maine: Turner's father gave him the afternoon free. Turner supposed something more amazing could happen in his life, but if so, he couldn't imagine what it might be. So he let Robert Barclay drone on by himself and ran outside and jumped off the porch and caught the sea breeze when it raced past him, and he followed it down Parker Head and thought how fine it was to be free, free, free for an afternoon.

  He didn't mean, at least at first, to head on down to the shore, since Malaga was still forbidden. But the sea breeze did race on ahead of him just that way, and he did think of Aeneaus (or however he spelled his dang name) with his two great spears exploring the coast, and it might be that he would find Lizzie clamming on this side of the New Meadows so that he wouldn't actually be going across to the island. Forbidden. So he followed the breeze out of town and through the pines and across the granite ledges to the shore. And when he looked down to see if Lizzie might be clamming, he came upon the second most amazing thing of his day.

  Just off the shore of the island, a house was set on a raft, bobbing up and down in the gentleness of the surf. Even Aeneas would have been surprised.

  It was about as forlorn a thing as he ever wanted to see. The house perched on its raft as though it were trying not to be sick. Its roof beams sagged in the middle, its shingles clung loosely, and the chimney pipe swayed with each wave, trying to be jaunty but not very good at it. Lashed to its sides were two barrels, a few lobster pots, and an old, battered trunk complaining at being dragged out onto the water.