Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy: Chapters 6–7

Turner watched a small yellow hornet buzz listlessly around the pulpit as the priests of the Hebrew host organized their march.

He imagined the hornet turning on Deacon Hurd, and the general melee as he ran down the aisle, chased by the eager insect, hollering and swatting at the thin air.

By now his father had gotten onto the woes of Jericho, and he was finding his stride.

The organ turned to a melancholy last hymn, playing too slowly; after four verses, it sighed to silence a phrase or two behind the congregation.

Instead, the quiet and still afternoon wore on like a too-slow hymn while Turner read some, stalked about the house some, looked out the window some, and wondered a great deal about why God had settled-on Sunday afternoons to be dreary and miserable.

Instead, the quiet and still afternoon wore on like a too-slow hymn while Turner read some, stalked about the house some, looked out the window some, and wondered a great deal about why God had settled-on Sunday afternoons to be dreary and miserable.

And when he closed with a rousing “As Flows the Rapid River”—and it wasn’t easy to be rousing with four sharps—she actually, really, honestly, truly clapped.

“You’re much better than that wretched Lillian Woodward. She hasn’t played anything faster than a dirge since the Civil War.”

He felt his entire body grow taut and then begin to quiver with surprise and humiliation and...anger.

And sometime after the glory, glory, hallelujahs were over, Turner glanced at her to assess her general state of health, and if she seemed hale and hearty enough, he meandered into “I Have Some Friends Before Me Gone,” and played more loudly than it ought to be played so that Mrs. Hurd could hear it across the street.

Turner watched it rushing pell-mell down Parker Head and toward the shore.

That night, after a quiet and still supper, Turner sat by his window watching the late dusk turn purple, and suddenly there was the sea breeze again, chuckling and rolling down Parker Head, whipping three times around First Congregational and then rollicking across the street, up the clapboards of the parsonage, and to him, rustling his hair and scooting down the back of his shirt so that he shivered and laughed.

Turner figured that sneaking through a minister’s house wasn’t exactly something fit for a minister’s son, but the scriptures never said, “Thou shalt not sneak,” and that was good enough.

“That’s no reason not to have a dog. If I had a big fine house like this, I’d have a dog. Even a mangy dog. And I’d run him all day, and then we’d come back here and throw balls back and forth till I couldn’t throw one more ball.”

The stars popped in the night sky like distant firecrackers, and beyond them the great streak of the Milky Way came down out of heaven and draped a swathe into the ocean beyond.

The sea breeze came down from the leaves and followed at her heels, jumping up now and again and frisking all around.

By the next morning, gray clouds scuttled over the sea, muffling the sound of the waves and throttling hope of a sea breeze.

By the next morning, gray clouds scuttled over the sea, muffling the sound of the waves and throttling hope of a sea breeze.

Around noon, all the clouds that had been gathering back of the White Mountains let loose and skittered across the lowlands with a slanting rain until they hit the sea, where they stopped to enjoy the view.

And then Turner heard a knock at the back door. A tiny, halting knock.

The rain came on gray and cold, pattering with hard, metallic fingers at the panes of Mrs. Cobb’s parlor.

“A Negro girl in my very house,” she said again after the first refrain.

He lifted his fingers and let the last wafting air carry the notes out into the room.

So Turner pumped again and set into the “Battle Hymn,” and then into a couple of missionary hymns written to hold the attention of lost drunkards—they were pretty catchy—and a temperance hymn with a kind of rollick to it.

“It’s a morbid hymn, for funerals. No one plays a funeral hymn loud unless they want to wake the dead.”

Phippsburg cooled into autumn, and Turner spent an hour or so every morning moving wood into the shed closer to the house and splitting kindling—until he figured he had enough kindling to start a conflagration across the whole state of Maine.

Turner felt a kind of unhappy kinship with them.

School would begin soon in Phippsburg, and although he would not be attending—Reverend Buckminster believing that a minister’s son should learn at home under the tutelage of his ministerial father—he was already beginning to read the theology that would soon be a part of his curriculum: Nathaniel Emmons, On Some of the First Principles and Doctrines of True Religion.

School would begin soon in Phippsburg, and although he would not be attending—Reverend Buckminster believing that a minister’s son should learn at home under the tutelage of his ministerial father—he was already beginning to read the theology that would soon be a part of his curriculum: Nathaniel Emmons, On Some of the First Principles and Doctrines of True Religion.

School would begin soon in Phippsburg, and although he would not be attending—Reverend Buckminster believing that a minister’s son should learn at home under the tutelage of his ministerial father—he was already beginning to read the theology that would soon be a part of his curriculum: Nathaniel Emmons, On Some of the First Principles and Doctrines of True Religion.

Then it tipped up into the sky and spread out, looking for a maple it could scorch or a beech it could blanch.

“But she wasn’t feebleminded or insane,” she continued.

Reverend Buckminster handed Turner an ominously large book.

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.

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

He thought Mrs. Cobb’s swooping gave his summary a kind of flair.

“Read the first two propositions, and then summarize them after dinner.”

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

It was about as forlorn a thing as he ever wanted to see.

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.