The Ice Harp, page 5
“You must play the part that’s left you. Why not have fun as you go about your dying?”
“I’ll try, though I’m an indifferent player.”
“Did you say something, husband?”
“I asked Mr. Tolliver if he has any choice tittle to impart.”
Who hears more village gossip, grievances, and slanders than its postman? Ours has dismembered the chicken on his plate, disturbed the cranberry sauce, masticated the bread, and drunk the ale I poured him from the stone jug. He takes his time, while I await his pleasure. I don’t resent him, because he did me a service this morning. I would never have heard the end of it had Bush caught fire a second time in a decade that promises to be my last as a householder listed in the Concord census before I become a tenant—in perpetuity—of its graveyard.
“Until the land speculators evict you.”
“True enough, Henry. If they do not hesitate to put widows and orphans on the street, they won’t scruple at mere bones.”
“I don’t know much in the way of tittle. Mr. Jarvis at the bank was let go because of ‘irregularities.’ Clayton Smith got arrested after breaking the arm of Meehan the butcher for giving short weight. Tongues have been wagging ever since the Providence Grays beat the Boston Red Caps, to win the National League pennant. Something’s rotten there; something stinks.”
I rub my hands together like a fly sitting atop a cow flop.
“Why don’t we read the letters in your bag?”
Her mouth stuffed with pudding, Lidian cannot rebuke me, though in her eyes, I see that she longs to fry my gizzard in black butter.
“You know I can’t do that, Mr. Emerson; it’s a federal crime to read other people’s mail.”
“Imagine the insights to be gleaned, Mr. Tolliver! I’d think it worth a spell in Concord’s hoosegow to acquaint yourself with the self-aggrandizing nature of our kind. Thoreau thought it worth a night in jail to protest Polk’s war on Mexico.”
“That’s all right for them who speechify for a living.”
“A windy living, Mr. Tolliver. A grinding and grueling one, I assure you.”
“The villagers used to think a Transcendentalist was an expert at pulling teeth.”
Lidian chortles, splutters, wheezes, turns red and Pentecostal as she chokes on a mouthful of cobbler and consonants.
The postman looks consternated.
“Mr. Tolliver, if you’ll kindly clap her back, the little world at number twenty-eight Cambridge Pike will once more be harmonious.”
While Lidian gasps and goggles like a winded grampus, he weighs the propriety of such an assault on her person against the possibility of her expiration. Who knows? He may have a letter for her whose delivery, posthumous, would be as a wrench thrown into the works. As it was in ancient Persia, so it is in America: “Couriers are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed,” thus wrote Herodotus in his Histories.
“Sooner than later, Mr. Tolliver, if you please.”
He gives her a splayed-fingered whack on her back stays.
“Mr. Tolliver, for the second time today, the Emersons are in your debt.”
“My pleasure, R. W.”
What cheek the fellow has!
“I wonder if there might not be a letter for me in that bag of yours?”
“I know for a fact there is.”
“Would it be a crime were I to read it now, or must I wait till it arrives, in due course, in my mailbox?”
“There’s nothing in the regulations against letting you have it now.”
He rummages among the envelopes and hands me mine. Escaped from Aeolus’s sack, a storm of passion is loosed upon the air, expressed in the manifold tones of a baffled, bereft, and bilious human-ity—grief, grumblings, shrieks, curses, effusions of love, and eruptions of enmity that the tepid prose of the companion catalogs and business correspondence cannot muffle.
“Please close your bag, Mr. Tolliver. It seems all of New England is clamoring to be heard.”
Eyeing me with mistrust, the postman shuts his bag, and the voices cease.
Lidian, poor woman, begins to hiccup.
“If you’ll pardon me, friend, I’ll take my letter outside and read it to the jays. When Mrs. Emerson has conquered her spasms, she’ll spoon out some of the cold pudding beloved by our parrot. Not the same pudding, of course, for that went the way of Polly, who perished ages ago, but very like it. One should be a freethinker everywhere except the kitchen, where it is advisable to follow the recipe to the letter. To the letter, Mr. Tolliver!”
* * *
A man’s sixth age is oftentimes accompanied by regret that he does not shuffle toward his end “full of wise saws and modern instances” but has arrived at a “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The careless days when body and intellect were vigorous are like the fading recollection of the sea for the fish that lies on a boat’s planked deck, kissing the alien air. So here stands Ralph Waldo Emerson, seventy-six years old, admired for his moral philosophy, which he hopes will survive him into the next century—that is, if the earth does not crack and ooze like an overripe melon.
On the arbor that Henry built, some of Ephraim Bull’s Concord grapes linger. If a grape can be improved by a man, may not men and women be also by their Maker? God, the great propagator—surely He could bring out the sweetness of the race if He chose. Why must He always lay waste to His creation? Were I a Hindu, I would revere the elephant god Ganesha, patron of letters and learning, rather than Kali, the destroyer. Shall I partake of the grapes my neighbor created to thrive in New England’s cold?
I place one on my tongue like so. Bah! It’s bitter! Perhaps bitterness is the essence of everything fated to be crushed. From the summit of old age, I see the bitterness that our kind is given to endure. I must ask Mr. Tolliver how goes it with old man Bull, whose lungs are bad.
I loop the wire arms of my spectacles around my ears. Ah, a letter from John Muir! I can almost smell sap on the writing paper. It’s been—what?—eight years, if I’m not mistaken, since we were together amid the sequoia trees and sugar pines of the Mariposa Grove.
Thin, ascetic, his beard cascading from his chin, a hard man with a gentle soul like bark on a jack pine, Muir steps from behind a tree. He speaks as God would were He a Scotsman.
“Fennel must be crushed to release its perfume.”
“Have you crossed the continent, John, just to remind me that the act of crushing can be needful?”
“Do you remember this by Longfellow?
“‘Above the lower plants it towers,
The fennel, with its yellow flowers,
And in an earlier age than ours
Was gifted with the wondrous powers,
Lost vision to restore.’”
“I’m afraid no common elixir can restore my lost vision.”
“You saw clearly in Yosemite.”
“‘ There were giants in the earth in those days.’”
“Aye, indeed there were.”
“I can scarcely recall the man I was then.”
“You were fine, Waldo! When we rode out from Leidig’s in the valley, I worried that the country would be too rough for you.”
“I was already an old man—though I rode a mustang up the mountain trails.”
Everywhere, an uprising of granite sheered above black oaks into heaven—a gray sea veined with gold and peopled with clouds.
“Twenty-five miles on horseback through the Sierra Nevada. Not an easy trip.”
“For a reedy scholar from the East.”
“I admired you immensely before we met, and ever after you’ve been with me in spirit.”
“John, I was about to read your letter.”
“Take off your glasses; I’ll save your eyes the strain.”
“It’s wonderful to see you again! You look the same as when I first set eyes on you by Yosemite Creek. You were keen as you showed me your drawings and botanical specimens in your ‘study’ under the sawmill’s gable.”
“‘To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door.’”
“Did you write that, John?”
“You did, Waldo, in ‘Nature.’”
“This morning I set fire to a parcel of nature outside my kitchen door.”
I gesture vaguely at the scorched earth, the splayed gate. A pall seems to drape above the yard, greasy and particulate. Doubtless it is the color and texture of my mind, in the aftermath of the morn-ing’s minor apocalypse. I recall poor Job, put-upon by God, as he sat among the ashes.
“Nature is also an idea, and an idea can’t be destroyed.”
“Maybe so, John, but the idea of a lilac has no fragrance.”
“I grant you that, Waldo, nor do your passed-over grapes taste sweet.”
“You were eavesdropping on me.”
“We’re of a common mind, you and I.”
“You’ve come at a good time; I seem to have my wits about me for the moment. That is, if I’m not imagining you.”
He will not say. Instead, he expatiates on the condition of my grapes.
“It’s not the fault of a saturnine deity, but of the bitter rot that spoils the fox grapes.”
The bitter rot has crept into my brain. I’ve been too long on this parcel of earth, where I now stumble graceless and diswitted. But I keep my disheartenment to myself rather than spoil the sweet temper of this most optimistic of men.
“How’s San Francisco these days, John?”
“Cold and damp, like a wet dog come in out of the rain.”
I visited the city of seven hills in May 1873, along with my Edith, her husband, Will, and Jim Thayer. My old friend John Forbes secured one of George Pullman’s cars for us to do our westering in. Crossing the Great Plains, I saw only a single, pitiful buffalo—the army, railroads, and sporting men from the East having reduced them from their millions to a hundred, more or less. Bleached bones heaped high as a two-story house glared reproachfully in the sun, waiting to become fertilizer, buttons, and stays. At Laramie depot, Indian squaws were begging for pennies, while young bucks lounged in idleness against a blaring wall.
At Ogden, Utah, we went south and stopped at Salt Lake City. I wanted to meet Brigham Young. In spite of his polygamy, I esteemed him for having taught us how to subdue the desert and turn it into a habitable garden. The Mormon fields were fat, their peach and cherry orchards in righteous bloom. Young claimed never to have heard of me. Perhaps fame is irrelevant in a world peopled by saints and incorporated spirits.
In San Francisco, we stayed at the Occidental and dined at Cliff House, dashed by the chiding sea. On the rocks below us, a herd of seals scolded, while we ate beefsteaks and oysters and drank to the health of the great nation we had crossed. At night, our cigars lighting the way, we walked the streets of Chinatown, where men, their hair done in long braids, argued points of view alien to our own, which may be less wise, being less ancient, than we care to admit. They had scrabbled, by pickax, shovel, and dynamite, over the granite roofs of the Sierra Nevada to Ogden, where, ten years ago, at Promontory Summit, their iron rails met the Union Pacific’s, begun at Omaha, and the golden spike was driven home. The coolies were excluded from the commemorative photograph.
“California is America’s bedraggled hem. Speculators in everything, except philosophy, are there. So are swindlers, peddlers, pettifoggers, sharps, shams, confidence tricksters, and evangelists—former easterners, mostly, who got drunk on their own ideas of freedom, a limitless one that—”
“Waldo, isn’t your idea of freedom also limitless?”
“No, yes—no!”
“In your journal, you wrote, ‘I shed all influences.’”
“Hell, John, I don’t know what to think anymore! Words are forsaking me, and when the last has gone, will I still be a moral philosopher? Will I be even as much as a moral man, or, for that matter, a man? I won’t be a poet—that much is certain, since a poet is a namer of things.”
“A jack pine is still a jack pine, though there be no poets to call it so.”
“I’m lost in the thickets.”
“You’ve only to follow the setting sun to get clear of outmoded forms and philosophies. ‘The star of empire rolls West’—your words, Waldo.”
One eats one’s words with little appetite.
“Would you have me pick my teeth with crow feathers, John?”
“When you stood on the porch at Cliff House, you muttered to the wind, ‘Voices raised in contention, whispered in deceitfulness, or whined in petulance come to an end at the western edge of the continent. Beyond the noise of breakers, the clamor of our kind is silenced. Beyond lies the Orient.’”
“Did it know our hearts, the Orient would tremble.”
“It is safe enough, I think, with so vast an ocean between us.”
“The black-hulled warship Mississippi steamed into Edo Bay and fired on the town of Uraga. The shells were blank, but the meaning was clear: The Orient is a pearl, and we must have it.”
A pearl, a pear, someone else’s paradise, we must have all and everything, for only that can sate the insatiable.
On the way to San Francisco, I saw the immensity that is America. And yet our appetite for land remains unsatisfied, is likely never to be satisfied. Behold the famous States / Harrying Mexico / With rifle and with knife! Why should we be content with a portion of the continent? Tacked to the wall of McCreary’s barbershop is a chromo of John Gast’s American Progress—an allegory of rapacity, in oil paint, in which a golden-haired and -girdled woman draped in an Attic gown strides through the sky above emigrants westering in prairie schooners and steam trains. Being resourceful, as well as aerial, she strings telegraph wire as she goes, while Indians and bison scatter into the outer dark.
“My great fear, John, is that nature will pass away, just as Cliff House will one day fall into the Pacific—or be conflagrated by some scatterbrained fool. Care for a cigar? I find it a singular comfort.”
The cigar was rolled in Havana, a token of the rich prize that is Cuba, waiting, like a ripe apple, to be plucked by the States in the name of Manifest Destiny. I won’t tell the Man of the Mountain standing before me that he has taken the island nation between his teeth and bit off its end.
I reach out my hand toward Muir, but I hastily withdraw it before having confirmed the actuality of his presence in the yard.
“You are here, aren’t you, John? You’re not a figment of my imagination.”
“Could a figment be smoking a cigar?”
“An inference based on a cigar is weak, in that a cigar contains its own dissolution.”
“So does Everest, Waldo, if it comes to that. And so must Cliff House one day succumb to the ocean’s wild importunities.”
I with my hammer pounding evermore / The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust …
“Some mad anarchist’s stick of dynamite will do as well.”
I reach out my hand again, near enough to his coat sleeve to feel the burr of rough wool. “I’ve had several visitations this morning.”
Muir eyes me cannily, like the Scotsman he is.
“Is that so?”
“They left no calling card.”
He searches his coat and hands me a cottonwood leaf.
“Mine. Embossed near Yosemite Creek.”
I appraise it as Queen Victoria’s master of the jewel house would the Koh-i-Noor. The leaf appears the real McCoy, though I am somewhat suspicious of its perfection.
“We are conversing, you and I—are we not? Lidian complains that I talk to myself.”
“As long as the talk is interesting, what does it matter?”
I blurt the question that has been fretting me, as the pea did the princess on her mattress.
“Is Henry Thoreau truly dead?”
“ The poor fellow died of consumption at forty-four. His writings have meant much to me. Both of you taught me to read in nature’s book.”
If Henry and I were nature’s docents, you, John Muir, have been her principal evangelist. You see what few others do: the belittlement—by little men—of the mountains and the forests. In your calloused hands, you hold a shepherd’s crook and the rusted key that Jophiel turned in the lock on Eden’s gate and then flung into the wilds after the expulsion.
“Do you recall the purple valise in which I carried my essays to Yosemite? What would the giants in the earth have made of my tiny thoughts had I been bumptious enough to read them aloud?”
“They are of another order of being, Waldo, and their thoughts are God’s.”
“We drank a purple liquor drawn from sequoia cones you had steeped in water, so that we might apprehend—in your word—‘sequoianess.’”
“You don’t need an altar rail to receive the blessed cup of nature; a tin pail filled with spruce beer will do fine.” He licks his bearded lips. “I wish I’d remembered to bring us some.”
Even now I shiver to recall the tumultuous night we easterners cowered inside Muir’s hut at the foot of Yosemite Falls while he clung—drenched to the bone and ecstatic—to the top of a giant spruce to feel what a tree feels in a storm. He put me in mind of Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship, so that he might hear the Sirens singing, while his crewmen’s ears were packed with paraffin. I stuffed mine with cotton wool. John Muir left the world of men and women to spend his life besotted by wildness. As a young man, he was as clever a tinkerer as Edison and could have been a person of wealth and property had he bothered to patent his inventions. But he does not have an acquisitive soul.
“You’re a rich man, John Muir, notwithstanding.”
“I’m poor as a church mouse—which is to say, I have all that a mouse or a man requires: crumbs of the Host, wine of the spirit, and a cathedral in the wilderness planted by God. That, Waldo, is wealth and property enough for the most ambitious mouse.”
God the planter. Which, I wonder, are we? His tenant farmers or His slaves. I’ve been like the non-conforming ant, solitary and—who knows?—mistaken in its quest.
