Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy: Chapters 10–12

Turner’s mother sat in a chair by the window, her hands discreetly clasped in her lap; Reverend Buckminster sat behind his desk, his sermon notes discreetly covering Darwin.

“I believe we have come up with a fine, equitable solution to the situation,” said Mr. Stonecrop.

Turner wondered if the tendency toward homicide might be one of the multiform individual differences or slight variations that were introduced into a species by moments just such as this.

By God, Buckminster, this is the result of your lackadaisical handling of your son—this after all the warnings we have given.

Ethics are a fine thing to have, Reverend. You can take them out and wave them around like a flag whenever you feel a qualm of conscience.

She waited for him by the pines above the granite ledges—it was too cold to wait down by the shore—and together they explored the New Meadows coast, watching everything hunker down for the winter: the chipmunks and the squirrels with their last cheekfuls of larder, the deer toward dusk with their heavier coats, the rabbits whitening except for the tips of their ears.

Even Lillian Woodward failed to show for her prelude, and Turner found himself taking her place at the organ bench and looking over a mighty small congregation.

When Deacon Hurd went past, he nodded curtly.

“No, Reverend. For meetings of this sort, the bylaws tell me I have to inform the minister, not invite him.”

He groped his way through the kitchen, down the hall, and to the front door, afraid to light a lamp, afraid to make a sound.

He could make out the trestle of the sewing machine, and the straight-backed chair behind it.

Another loud creak decided it: his eyes open wide; he bolted across the hallway, pulled the door open, shouted, “I see...,” and smashed into a flight of steep stairs, striking shins, knees, a hip, elbows, and his nose, which began bleeding. But he couldn’t stop to staunch it now.

The spire of First Congregational rose until it was itself a part of the night sky.

His knees bent; he could feel the sea breeze wrapping itself around the cupola and leaning into it some, setting the frame to creaking cheerily at the familiar nudge.

Turner crawled away from the ledges and stood up unsteadily, as if the blast had loosened the granite beneath him and it was swaying with the quarrelsome waves.

He has thwarted us at all turns, even to the point of threatening to bring Negroes to live right in the town center.

“And when the town is engaged in the philanthropic task of bringing the less fortunate to a place where they will be cared for, this minister follows his duties by attacking our sheriff. I’m sorry he got hurt, but if he hadn’t been interfering where he shouldn’t have been interfering, he might be sitting here right now.”

“My mother did ask me to tell you that we’ll be leaving the parsonage just as soon as my father’s well enough. We’ll be moving over to Mrs. Cobb’s house. My mother says to tell you that she would rather not have anyone think we were beholden to you in any way.”

He had come to the last heady page of The Origin of Species, had felt a thrill crawling up his back and into his gut with the closing sentence of praise and wonder: “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Turner was glad all the mud had frozen and there was just a patina of frost.

Still roiling and billowing, it pushed through the woods and came out in torn clouds from the trees and gathered down Parker Head.

Then the Bath minister asked if the bereaved would like to come forward and speak some words to the assembled congregation about this good man, comforting others through an account of this holy man’s homegoing.

They crossed the vestibule and went down the stairs and on to Parker Head.

In the parlor, she would finger a vase as if it were some sort of talisman.

Even so, the light was weak and paltry in the cold air.

And a cold and annoyed matron led them to her office and sat them down on one side of her desk, while she ascended to the lofty chair behind it.

So they did, all the little Newtons bustling past them, the two boys putting up their fists as they passed Turner and grinning like loons when he put his fists up, too; the four prim and pink girls putting their fists up and hitting him full in the belly as they passed, one by one.

Mr. Newton tousled his hair, and Mrs. Newton sat next to his mother and took her hand.

When the seas softened and were more blue than green, when he and Willis rowed up and down the coast in the Hurds’ tender until Turner felt the muscles in his arms toughen into cords, even then Turner kept the New Meadows at his back.

“And you’re still reading this tripe,” observed Mr. Stonecrop, holding up The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. “You won’t learn much from a fellow who thinks we came from monkeys.”

They had not gone back to First Congregational since February, but soon after Mr. Stonecrop’s absconding, the Ladies’ Sewing Circle, led by Mrs. Newton, called on Turner and Mrs. Buckminster to invite them back to services.

Deacon Hurd, beset with financial woe, was no longer preaching.

Speculators from Philadelphia bought up most everything, but not for what Mr. Hurd or the bank had hoped for.

The Sunday after the auction, the Hurds sat in the last pew of First Congregational, stone-faced, haggard, bent over.

Turner and Willis got themselves hired on a lobster boat out of Bath, and even though, as Willis pointed out, Turner was a whole lot scrawnier than he was, Turner did heft his share of the traps and do his share of culling out the shorts.

“Probably there’s 'better ways to earn money,” said Willis most every morning, but even if there were, Turner wouldn’t have taken another way, because hardly a day passed when the lobster boat didn’t fool with a pod of whales as playful as kittens in the sun, showing off their dorsal fins, spraying the boat with their spouting, sometimes jumping full out of the water and grinning for all the world to see.

“Probably there’s 'better ways to earn money,” said Willis most every morning, but even if there were, Turner wouldn’t have taken another way, because hardly a day passed when the lobster boat didn’t fool with a pod of whales as playful as kittens in the sun, showing off their dorsal fins, spraying the boat with their spouting, sometimes jumping full out of the water and grinning for all the world to see.

Above them, seagulls and black terns hovered and circled, screeching and cackling at each other, until suddenly the mounds erupted, and whales—two, four, five, seven, oh good Lord, nine—rose out of the water like easy behemoths.

Turner knew that everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.

Beneath him he felt the currents eddying around the bodies of the whales, felt the tides and shifting water that they created as they passed him, one by one, until the sea closed over the eye of the one he was touching, and they had all lowered into the cool, wet, smooth sea—and they were gone.