The Ice Harp, page 3
“Waldo, my friend, you were in love with Miss Fuller, who drowned as Mrs. Ossili. If she hadn’t fled to Europe, Lidian would have stitched a scarlet letter to her delightful bosom. Hawthorne called you her ‘Arthur Dimmesdale.’”
“Stony-face gave every indication of being in love with her, as well. At the time, however, Margaret was besotted by young Sam Ward.”
“Humbug, Mrs. Emerson!”
“And don’t deny your infatuation for Anna Barker!”
Anna! You were my silver apple of the moon, my golden apple of the sun.
“Queenie, I behaved toward her like a perfect Neoplatonist.”
Anna Barker, of the violet eyes and luminous character, whose beauty of form and mind took my breath away, was then the object of Sam Ward’s affections. And there was that other Anna—Miss Shaw of the golden meshes of hair and astounding figure, who put me in mind of the goddess Diana. Superb creature! Her shadow on the wall was enough to make me wish us both immortal, so that such perfection would never suffer a decline and I could sit forever and admire it.
Furiously, Lidian applies herself to ridding the kitchen windows of steam.
“It seems that I’ve stumbled into Robert Fulton’s workshop.”
“And let’s not forget the lady poetess Caroline Sturgis, who was so often underfoot!”
As if I could forget her even now! Ah well! Goethe had his Bettina to dandle chastely on his knee, and I had sweet Caroline Sturgis—whose bottom, I hasten to add, never came within an inch of indiscretion!
“Caroline was in love with Ellery Channing, who married Margaret’s sister.”
How entangled our lives were then!
Unconvinced, Lidian tatters a spider’s web to pieces with her towel.
“Damn the woman, she’s exterminated a universe!”
“Shhh, Henry!”
“Louisa May Alcott was another of your conquests.”
“She was a mere child at the time!”
“How she would gaze at you with her dark eyes! I would catch her standing in the road, peering through your study window, in the hope of glimpsing her idol.”
“Poor thing lost all her hair to typhoid fever during the war. Wonderful chestnut hair, as I recall. Luxuriant. Or does one say ‘luxurious’ of hair? In any case, you’re wrong, Lidian; it was Henry Thoreau she adored.”
“Me? I had no idea! At the time, I was in love with Lidian.”
“Nonsense, Henry! You were only a boy.”
“I was thirty-one!”
“Henry had a face only a squirrel could love.”
“Pay her no mind; she’s in one of her cross-grained moods.”
“Do you have one of your headaches, Queenie? Sophia Hawthorne used to be felled by them. Or is it the old dyspepsia that troubles you? If only we could get to the bottom of your malady!”
“Dr. Clarke assured me that there are several organs he hasn’t interrogated yet.”
“My face may have been disagreeable to some, but what books I wrote, what poetry!”
“Posterity won’t care how awkwardly arranged your features were, Henry. Nor how large a nose I had. I’ll have it for a while longer. I may sound the last trump with it.”
“Stop your sniffling, Waldo—and please use your handkerchief!”
“Thank you, my dear, for doing me the honor of calling me by my Christian name.”
“Not the napkin! Use your handkerchief.”
She shies a sopping cloth at me. I take it as symbolic of a rolling pin, or else a cleaver.
“Pinch your nostrils and blow the snot onto the floor as a demonstration of your self-reliance.”
“An abominable habit, Henry.”
“You were much taken with Charles Fourier’s ideas concerning marriage.”
Henry is fingering a soft spot on one of Lidian’s Roxbury Russets, as though intending to probe the rotten heart of civilization itself.
“You should have been a bachelor, like me.”
In the 1840s, we were all mad to remake society—to rid it of the Calvinist disdain for human passions, save that of making a vain show of wealth, which they bless as proof of divine approbation. The Brook Farmers may have been the best of us.
“And now I think of it, you were in love with the dark-eyed heiress Ednah Littlehale.”
“More nonsense! Miss Littlehale was in love with Bronson Alcott.”
“And Alcott, with her, whose sexual nature—the old fool maintained—was necessary to the propagation of his thought.”
He pushes his finger through the apple’s skin. I watch as juice oozes out with relief—or so I imagine, having felt, in my youth, the congestion of the loins.
“Oh, do be quiet, Henry! And that apple was meant for a pie!”
“Mr. Emerson, I’ve had enough of your company this morning. If you don’t remove yourself to the backyard at once, I will—”
“Scream, I suppose; it’s what people do when words flail them.”
“I will not scream. I’ll impale you on the toasting fork.”
“But I fear to see the leaves, their flames all but extinguished.”
Fork in hand, she menaces me.
“I’ve never known you to be so out of sorts, Queenie.”
She brushes crumbs from my waistcoat with the blade of her hand more emphatically than either crumbs or waistcoat deserves. She tugs me upright by my ear, which, thank God, she does not box. She turns me toward the back door and supplies a Newtonian force sufficient to send me tripping over the sill.
“Your hat, Mr. Emerson!”
She reaches for my soft-brimmed hat and claps it on my head, and before I know it, I’m in the yard, underneath the falling sky, while the plants, those that continue toward winter, rise in their classes, orders, and genera all around me.
My wise aunt Mary Moody liked to say, “If you last the winter, you’ll live another year.” I wonder if the brave oak, in its ancient wisdom, whispers the same to the trembling aspen.
* * *
Each autumn, I rake dead leaves into heaps so that they may be burned. I think that one day the Almighty will send His fallen angels to burn me in perpetuity for having abandoned my pulpit and stopped my ears against His calling. This morning I’ve come to do battle with them, since my own once greeny leaf is sere.
“Anon, anon, I say!”
The old harrier is rapping at the kitchen window, mistaking the mind’s work for idleness.
I give the rake a shake in her direction and scratch the tired earth with its tines. And then I stop, my brain chuffing to be away on the shining rails of thought. How much longer before they rust and the old man, his fire out, is shunted onto a weedy siding and forgotten?
Once more my royal consort raps upon the pane, and I must get down to business.
It suits an old dodderer well to have nature bounded by a picket fence. Henry snorts at convenience. But he has a young man’s bones, though they be flensed.
“Is that you, Henry, I hear splintering the brittle leaves?”
“It’s Samuel Long, come to stop with you awhile.”
He is standing before me now, as he did when Bronson Alcott brought him into my study on a summer’s evening in 1845. The young negro had emancipated himself from a plantation in the Tidewater by chopping off his hand and staunching the spurting wound with tar intended for a horse’s hooves. Bronson, his daughter Louisa May, Lidian, and I were conductors for the Concord station of the Underground Railroad.
“Samuel, I know you by your empty cuff.”
He pulls up his coat sleeve to show me the place.
“Does the stump itch?”
“It was more than thirty years ago I freed myself, though I can still feel the manacle that no ax can remove, since it bites into the brain’s tender flesh. Emancipation is not accomplished by the reading of a proclamation.”
“And the War of the Rebellion?”
He shakes down his sleeve.
“Alas, not even that has proved sufficient.”
“Lidian and I were just speaking of you. You aren’t deceased, by any chance?”
“No, Waldo, I’m still quick, though my mortal part is elsewhere at the moment.”
When we were together before the war, he would not have been so familiar.
“That’s fine, then. Your old friend Thoreau has been pestering me all morning. Where is your earthly portion now?”
“I’m in Mount Pleasant, Mississippi, hiding behind a magnolia tree while a white mob gets ready to lynch Charles Brown, a carpenter who objected when a white man refused to pay for the house Brown had built for him.”
“My first wife’s father owned a rope factory in Boston.”
I smile foolishly, but Samuel appears not to have noticed my stumble into gaucherie.
“ The Christian Recorder sent me to write about the White League and the Klan. I take it you never saw a man hanged.”
“It’s certain I’d remember if I had. My mind may be clabber, but some things one does not forget.”
Samuel gazes into the far distance and then speaks in a tone compounded of amazement and sorrow.
“One would not have thought the human neck could stretch so far.” Perhaps he sees the carpenter Brown at the end of his rope, the Kentucky hemp creaking as his boots kick at the air a moment before the living man turns to deadweight and is everlastingly still. “I’m a coward to be hiding behind a tree.”
“What else can you do?”
Samuel looks at his feet.
“Die for him, I suppose.”
“Christ would. You’re not by chance He?”
“I am a negro.”
“I can see that plainly. Still, I don’t see why He could not have been born again as a black man.”
Samuel smiles into his empty cuff. He turns his back on me, as though he means to return to Mississippi, where his flesh is waiting.
“Waldo, I no longer believe in the soul of man.”
Once, I believed that a soul could neither be created nor destroyed, that not even God had that much power.
“What do you believe in, Samuel?”
“The Fifteenth Amendment. I won’t be denied my constitutional right to vote, no matter how many crosses are burned or negroes lynched to discourage me.”
“William Lloyd Garrison would be proud of you, if he hadn’t died in May.”
A wind jumps up and brisks the rusty leaves across the yard.
“Do you recall having insulted him and your people by miming ‘Daddy’ Rice doing a breakdown and shuffle?”
“I refused to be Garrison’s ‘well-spoken negro,’ trained to show my teeth behind a punch bowl.”
I hope Garrison doesn’t take it into his head to visit me. His opinions are fiery, and I dread being scorched.
“Do you recall making this cucumber frame?”
“For Lidian, yes.”
Samuel crosses the grass to inspect the ruin of his handiwork. He could not have picked a better day for his visit. The sun is gently warming the air, as a candle does brandy in a snifter. Others whose noses are not so gifted (or large) snuffle at the odor wafting from the fields and vines. The odor of rot. I breathe it in—I fill my lungs with it. Here, too, our lives are evident.
“‘ The summer is past, the harvest is ended, and we are not saved.’ Jeremiah.”
“I remember being happy when I made you understand why I had behaved like a white man’s ‘coon’ in front of Mr. Garrison.”
I recall the moment in my study when I realized Garrison and I had tried to turn Samuel into a demonstration of the evils of slavery, instead of treating him as a man of flesh and blood. Oh, I can see the scars on his back even now, and am very much ashamed.
He higgles with a board; it comes away in his hands from the rot beneath; the nails poke through like a harrow. Like a Hindu widow, the frame longs to give itself to the pyre.
“Whitman would not approve of cremation. He wouldn’t deprive the natural worm of its meal.”
Whitman! Always there is Whitman, ready to leap at my throat, like a catamount!
“His leaping days are behind him.”
“Can you read my mind, Samuel?”
“Naturally.”
Lidian is bearing down on me, her eyes sparking, as if she means to ignite the autumnal conflagration with them. Out of apple, she looks as decrepit as old Tumbledown Hall. Not apple, surely! Cast your net, Emerson, and see what comes up from the roiled depths. Plumb. The very one! The words aren’t lost, but merely resting until the time comes when I will—What is that fangled word Whitman is so fond of? Promulge. What flatulence! In any case, my words are waiting till I should feel impelled to promulge a new philosophy.
“Mr. Emerson, whom are you talking to? It’s not Henry David, is it?”
“Were my lips moving?”
“They were indeed!”
“I did not expect to be observed. I was planning my attack on the cucumber frame. Ideas must always precede action.”
I find I have a hoe in my hand. Perhaps Henry was here after all and left me it. He was a clever man with a hoe, was Henry David Thoreau. Another fine rhyme, Waldo! Ha! I recollect the morning Wallie was with me in the potato patch. He called the garden implement a “hoer.” How I laughed at the sweet ingenuousness that would call the implement by the name unkind men give to those women who minister to their loneliness! For so, in his innocence, had he pronounced it.
“Give me that!”
Lidian manhandles the hoe from my grasp. She fumes. She advances on the enemy’s rampart. Oh, Lord, how the earth doth tremble! I sweep my eyes round the compass and see Samuel skulking behind the grape arbor. Courage, man! I call to him, in my mind. The tempest will soon subside into its pot. Queenie may be fierce, but she hasn’t wind enough to rampage.
“May I help, dear?”
Glaring as God did at the Sodomites before He smoked them, Lidian chops the offending planks with the hoe, sending flinders every which way.
“An interesting metaphor, don’t you think, Samuel? God as beekeeper smoking His hives.”
“Apiary.”
“Quite so.”
Lidian is gasping like a fish out of water. She throws the hoe into the red chokeberries, puts a hand over her heart as if to keep it from jumping out of her chest, and with a final, if not so triumphant, humph, she strides back into the house.
I remember that, when I was nine years old, I, along with some other boys, went across by ferry to Noddle’s Island, in Boston Harbor, to help dig earthworks against the British. What a thirst I had that day! And that night, how wearily I tumbled into bed! The War of 1812 is all but forgotten. The present washes away the past as a hose does blood and gore down the drain in a slaughterhouse floor.
Samuel comes out of his covert, working his tongue to dislodge a seed from one of the remaining grapes. I’m entranced to see the seed between his lips before he spits it on the grass. What corporeality! I say to myself.
“You mustn’t reproach yourself, Samuel; there’s no shame in skedaddling before a formidable opponent with her head full of steam. In spite of its ribbons, Lidian’s mobcap is Phrygian in its chilling effect on me.”
I spoon the flinders into a barrow and wheel it to the pit, where, last month, I incinerated a wooden horse that, long, long ago, had belonged to Waldo minor. I kindled the fire with several pounds of yellowed manuscripts.
I rake the gold and ruby amulets—for so the dying leaves appear to be—into heaps that the wind flusters. Samuel nods approvingly at the little pastorale—scrape of rake, scuttle of dry leaves, mournful tolling of a chickadee. I assemble the litter into piles and walk among them as satisfied as Mr. Boffin surveying his dust mounds.
“You’d better set them alight before the wind scatters them.”
“Sage advice, Mr. Long.”
Glancing toward the kitchen, I catch Lidian’s gaze, as though her eyes were barbed. I touch my lips to still them in case they have been moving. Should I acknowledge her with a wave of my hand? Do I dare to throw her a kiss? She would wonder at the senile old man’s effrontery. I had better pretend I didn’t see her. I’ll keep my lips clenched. But I find myself licking them.
“Pliny recommends goose grease mixed with gall nuts. Spiderwebs are also a sovereign remedy for chapped lips.”
For the present, I ignore Samuel and his balms. I unpack the leaves from their piles onto a tarpaulin and drag it to the pit. Fire will purge us of impurity, blood cleanse us of sin. “An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen.” I consider Jeoffry, who is daintily sniffing a piece of filth in a corner of the yard, a remembrance of the neighbor’s tiger cat. But Lidian would miss her bedfellow were I to broil him. We will do without blood, Emerson, and the only aroma will be that of burning poplar leaves. May it be found pleasing in God’s nostrils. I strike a match and touch the flaring head to a leaf and watch the brittle bones appear and shrink to ash. The fire leaps into the air, as once it did in Pudding Lane when London Town burned inside its Roman wall.
Do you know the muffin man?
The muffin man, the muffin man.
Do you know the muffin man
Who lives in Pudding Lane?
I think I see Henry dancing in an exultation of pyromania, but it’s only a sooty wraith of twisting smoke. Prey to a childish impulse, I wave my hat and whoop as the fire salamanders in the flames.
The back door flies open, the hinges grouse, and out bursts Lidian. She scythes through the grass toward me. The wanton flames have turned her teeth to rubies. I stare and stare.
“Mr. Emerson, you’ve set the azalea bushes on fire!”
I look to Samuel for confirmation, but he has gone elsewhere. Back to his magnolia tree, perhaps. God, spare his neck the noose! I turn to the lufting flames and spit in disdain of the fire element, whose opposing quality is water.
“‘Water will quench a flaming fire.’ Ecclesiasticus.”
“You old fool!”
The Emerson bushes are burning, but God is not here.
