were growing up with cedar and birch brush, and the barns were badly weathered—hints that the local agricultural economy was hard pressed by rising costs and taxes.
In contrast were the splendid motels and restaurants with names like Heidi, L'Auberge Breton, the Elms, Bel Aire, that lured the tired vacationer. Little shops along the road offered crafts, homemade pies, farm-fresh eggs, antiques.
The children. The thought of them made her stomach clench a little. During each school year, she sheltered them from the vicious realities of the city as much as possible— private schools, tutors, rides to and from school. During the summer, she sent them upstate to Quaker Hill, where her Auntie Mary stayed full-time in her father's country home. There, too, the watchful eyes of Reverend Irving could be on them, at Sunday school. She called them several times a day, and drove up two or three times a week. When they'd been smaller, she had knocked herself out making time to be with them. But somehow, someway, it had not been enough.
The fact was that three of Jeannie Colter's children were growing up as wild as young mustang colts. However successful she had been as a politician, as someone fearlessly carrying the word of God into public life (where it was so sorely needed), she seemed to have been less successful as a mother.
She slowed a little. Ahead, just off 22 on the right, hidden by trees and on a little hill, drenched in sunlight, was the snow-white First Baptist Church. Her church. It was one of the oldest churches in North America. It had been built in 1790, by Roger Tobias and his little group of those first Baptists who came to America from England seeking freedom from savage persecution by both Catholics and Protestants.
She turned off 22 onto the little drive that wound through the trees up a little hill to the church. The church was plain and simple as the Word of God itself. It was built on a foundation of fieldstone dragged from the land around it. Its honest clapboard walls were hewn from the long-vanished virgin forests. The first congregation members had planted four sapling elms beside the fieldstone steps, to shade the tall double doors. Two of the elms were still there, tall and old now, shading the square tower with its little Gothic pinnacles. The other two had died of the elm disease, which the present pastor, Reverend Frank Irving, was fond of comparing to the moral decay of America today.
The church was still owned by the local Baptist society, who had declined to have it named a national historical landmark because they didn't believe in tracing back authority. But the congregation cared for the building lovingly, donating time and materials. The men kept it painted and repaired, and the women planted and tended flowers around it.
Nearby lay the little cemetery, which was also immaculate. The chipped old tombstones stood up straight as soldiers, and the grass was clipped as neat as a golf course. A few big hemlocks and cedars shaded it. One of the newer shiny gravestones belonged to Jeannie's mother.
As usual, she detoured to the cemetery, picked her way among the graves, and stood looking down at the dark granite plaque. Cora Swan Laird, born August 3, 1922, Died January 28,1977. As usual, the fist of deep regret clenched in her stomach. Her mother had insisted on being buried unembalmed, in a plain pine coffin. By now she must be moldering hideously there, the earth caving in through the rotting coffin, onto her skeleton and rotted clothes, the earthworms playing hide and seek in her hair. Jeannie shuddered at the thought—her mother had always been so fussy about cleanliness, always smelling faintly of lavender sachet, never a drop of coffee on her kitchen cupboards, never a speck of dust on her shoes. Death is such an unclean thing, she thought. Fit punishment for sinful humanity.
How much she regretted that she had deceived her mother all those years, making her think that she was more