The Ice Harp, page 7
I look up at the sky, as though I would see my words there like a flight of migrating birds.
“Perhaps language is another veil obscuring the one true fact.”
“Language is the universe, Henry, each word a star.”
“And even should all the stars fall, how will the one true fact of Ralph Waldo Emerson be changed?”
“Should I thrill to my own dissolution like a child who sees a meteor shower?”
Henry raises a hand, as if intending to conduct the stars in a celestial conflagration.
“Yours would be splendid, Waldo, like the Leonid meteor storm of ’33, when a hundred thousand points of light fell every hour of that glorious November night!”
“You overestimate my vocabulary by several orders of magnitude, Henry.”
“So long as I don’t overestimate the man.”
I look at the trees.
“By late November, when the Leonids are once again proclaiming the gaudiness of God, there won’t be a leaf left on the trees, at the rate they’re dropping.”
I kick some leaves that have dropped after I raked and burned their brothers.
“All the better to see the reality of the tree, my friend.”
“You may as well say that a man is truly understood only when he’s nothing but bones.”
“Only then do we clearly see the vanity and illusion of life. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. ‘The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of bones.’ Ezekiel.”
“Henry, none of this is helpful.”
“It’s not meant to be. Besides, you don’t sound like a man at a loss for words.”
“My forgetfulness is in adjournment. There are days—some hours of the day—when I feel my old self. But I know that, little by little, I’m sloughing it off.”
“To be reborn as a snake?”
Henry flickers his tongue obscenely—a most un-Henry-like gesture, leaving me, briefly, to wonder if I am talking to a Thoreauvian impostor or the Devil himself, to speak in the old style.
“I’d be satisfied to become a man who knew better, this time round, how to live his life.”
“Mr. Emerson, shall we walk?”
Henry and I walk about the yard, his eyes fixed on the ground.
“You won’t find any potsherds or arrowheads.”
“I believe that if I were to dig deep enough, I’d find woolly mammoth bones.”
“Bones again, Henry!”
“Nature undressed and whispering, ‘Carpe diem.’”
“Eschatology is a doctrine more readily taken up by callow young divines than elderly men of letters, for whom last things are ‘ hurrying near.’”
“‘And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.’ Andrew Marvell.”
Henry stands in front of the kitchen window. I hear it answer his knuckled knock. How potent is a mind possessed by an illusion! How easily it resurrects the dead, especially a mind whose cable has been cut. To be visited by a ghost who knocks, whittles, and walks on my rooftop—what a day this is!
“Do you remember the night Samuel Long threw a stone at your chamber window?”
“Was it he? I suspected a Copperhead taking exception to my abolitionism.”
“It was an act of defiance, Waldo.”
I can see how it would be.”
“And a test.”
“I don’t take your meaning.”
“To see how you would behave.”
“And how did I behave?”
“You shivered in your nightshirt.”
“What did he expect?”
Standing on the mossy stump of an oak tree cut down fifty years ago, Henry gives a fair imitation of me on a lecture platform, reciting one of my verses.
“He thought you might recite, ‘The word unto the prophet spoken / Was writ on tables yet unbroken …’ or some such Orientalism.”
“One cannot always rise to the occasion, especially when wearing a nightshirt.”
“There’s nothing so purgative as a window shattering in the middle of the night.”
“Henry, have you been to Walden Pond lately?”
“I like to walk there in the evening, when the sun is low and the depths of the water are revealed. A lake is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
“Last week, Frank Sanborn caught a seven-pound gold-and-emerald pickerel in your cove.”
“Pickerel seem to me as foreign as Arabia to our Concord life, as if the two ends of the earth had come together.”
“Our deepest thoughts resemble them.”
“Waldo, will we ever be able to think of a pickerel—or a great white whale—not as an evocation of the invisible, but as an animal?”
Henry casts an invisible line, watching as it lofts and then drops at my feet.
“When Radiance shall have burned away the mists of conjecture, there will be no need for poetry—or pickerel, for that matter. Human beings will eat the air.”
“There’ll be no need for thoughts, either, Mr. Emerson, or carping philosophers to think them.”
“Once, I was one of them.”
“What are you now, my elderly friend?”
“The blackening sea.”
“A drowning man lives until his fire’s out.”
I fall into the old routine, the scholarly patter that, at times, seems all that’s left of youth’s heroic days.
“Henry, inasmuch as I breathe, I am.”
“And inasmuch as you speak sensibly, you think.”
I pick up a stone—a piece of common schist—like a geologist giving a public lecture. “Until I become as dumb as a stone.”
“Do you suppose stones have nothing to say?” Henry takes the stone from my hand and holds it to his ear. “They speak in a language older than ours, and when every word is finally lost to you, you may understand, at last, and thereby reach enlightenment.”
I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.
“Lidian will have something enlightening to say about the broken gate.”
“Then fix it, Emerson!”
“You were the mechanic.”
“Then I’ll instruct you in elementary carpentry.”
“God help me!”
Henry takes the willow twig he’s been gnawing and studies it as intently as a man would who expects to see God (or the all-consuming fire) in the ardent end of his cigar.
“I doubt the Maker of Days can hang a gate.”
Satisfied with his witticism, he puts the twig between his teeth again.
“‘ The words of the wise are as nails fastened by the master of assemblies.’”
“That’s more or less true, Waldo.”
I get a hammer, nails, a plumb bob, and some raw lumber from the shed and manage to restore the gate to something of its former condition, sans glory, sans paint. (Asserting a dead man’s privilege, Henry didn’t lift a finger.)
“Eepur si muove!” I’m pleased with myself as I watch the gate move on its hinges.
“With practice, you’ll be able to build a privy.”
“And you, Henry, shall be my privy counselor.”
I go into the kitchen and pour a mug of beer. Three sharp raps coming from the yard send a shiver down my back. “Here’s a knocking indeed!” Macbeth, the porter scene. What a joy to be surrounded by one’s wits, a sane man’s kith and kin! God grant that I shall know them still on the morrow.
I go outside into the dooryard in time to see a black man striking a picket with a stick.
“‘ Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub?’” I shout.
The man takes off his hat. It is stained, as are his sack coat and patched trousers. His boots are worn and dusty. He has the look of someone who has walked the roads and slept in barns—a man on a pilgrimage in a fallen world. He puts me in mind of the ragged Neapolitan beggars I saw during my first trip abroad.
“Mister, is there anything I can do for you to earn the price of a meal? I haven’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast.”
My own sits heavily on my stomach, like John Calvin’s dismal religion or David Hume’s skepticism, which, in its extremity, would make the earth stink with suicides.
“I just fixed the gate you’re thumping, so, no, I’m sorry, there’s nothing that wants doing. I can give you a little money to be going on with.”
Henry tsk-tsks his disapproval from the plum tree he climbed while I was savoring the yeasty taste of ale and the pleasant seething of its foam. At this time of year, plums are few and mostly shrunken or wormy. He, too, is of unsound flesh where he lies a-mouldering. I shudder to picture maggots at their business and shake the thought from my head, as if to evict a troublesome tenant gnat from its lodgings in my ear. What is worse? To be of unsound mind or flesh.
“I’ve a suit of clothes you can have; I was saving it for my funeral. And a hat that should fit you.”
“I’d rather work than accept your charity.”
“The kitchen window.”
Reflected in the kitchen window, my face reveals the double aspect of my thought—that of the ecstatic idealist Plotinus, who believed in the mystical union of the self with the One, and that of the celebrant of human life Montaigne, who relished each day’s earthly good.
“What about it, Henry?”
“Remember Samuel Long.”
“Ah, an excellent idea!”
I pick up a stone and throw it. The window shivers, breaks, and shatters the image of my bemused face. Thus by a violent act, the jarring chords that compose the comic operetta that is Ralph Waldo Emerson are resolved, and he is freed from the Manichean shackles of either/or.
“It sounded very like the crack of doom, my iconoclastic friend.”
I turn to my flesh and blood visitor—black flesh and red blood.
“You can fix that.”
The man stares a moment in astonishment, which turns to doubtfulness, and then to a glower of resentment. “I said no charity, mister!” He puts on his hat and turns to the road.
“I’m old and often at the mercy of caprices over which I have little, if any, control.”
To reinforce the impression of senile eccentricity, I do a buck-and-wing.
Up in the tree, Henry laughs and takes a bite of rotten plum.
“For whatever reason, the window is broken and needs to be replaced. Will you do it, or shall I have the carpenter come?”
“I’ll do it.”
Sullen, he enters the yard. Seen up close, his face looks like seared meat. He regards me with suspicion. I hope to lessen it by the offer of a glass of beer.
“Thank you kindly. I’m parched.”
“Come into the kitchen and sit awhile before you start to glaze.”
* * *
As the stranger and I go into the house, I glance at the plum tree. Henry has gone—to Walden Pond, maybe, to peer into its untroubled depths when the sun descends, or else to heaven to tend his bean field. I must remember to ask if he takes the blessed of the imperial town huckleberrying. When he was at his best—as a man, I mean, of flesh and sinewed bone—he would drop everything to lead a party of young people to search the woods and bogs for the tart fruit that he loved.
I point to a chair, and the stranger sits. I pour him beer and give him a slab of cold meat on a plate, the mustard pot, and half a loaf of bread. As I sweep the shards of broken glass into a corner, he lays into his meal with the single-mindedness of a Roman Catholic supping at the altar rail, devouring the transubstantiated body of Christ. I put the offending stone on the windowsill, in memoriam of action, wondering if I had been rash to cast it and, if so, whether or not it can be salutary to throw caution to the winds.
“I wish I had something else to serve you, but we’ve lost another cook. Unless we chain the next one to the stove, I fear she, too, will join her many predecessors in deserting us.”
He looks up from his meat with something like resentment in his bloodshot eyes, as if he fears that, given half a chance and a moment’s inattention, the plate might disappear. Might he sense the unreality in the air, increased by the aromatic quince, which is nowhere present in this house?
I forgive him his wolfish hunger, as one should who himself has never been famished. He finishes the ham and bread, empties the glass, then wipes his mouth on a shabby sleeve. Seeing me regard him with curiosity, he winces, rubs a rough palm across his bristly cheek, and, with a defiant shove, sets the mustard pot skating on the slippery oilcloth. The pot stops just shy of the table edge, like a lucky shuffleboard disk. I sigh to think of what tawny outrage might have been done to Lidian’s floor had the kitchen god or a bit of grit in the cogs of fate not intervened on my behalf.
“No harm done.”
“Mister, I wasn’t always rude and cussed, but an ill wind can peel the veneer off a man, like paint from a barn.”
“Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. I could probe you to the marrow, I think, and find only grave matters.”
“If it’s not a waste of breath to say I’ve had my share of troubles, then I’ll say it.”
“You’ll find me a sympathetic listener, if you care to tell your story, Mr….”
“Stokes.”
“Mr. Stokes, I bid you welcome to Bush. Please make yourself at home.”
“You don’t happen to have any tobacco, do you, friend?”
“If you’d fancy a cigar, I’ll join you in a smoke.”
“I would, thank you kindly.”
I take two Havana cigars from the case inside my vest. Having lighted his, he sits back in his chair and contemplates the live coal of tobacco that his match has brought into being. He eyes me next with equal interest, as though he expects me to combust. When I don’t, he draws up to the table, coughs, and fidgets with his cigar, like someone getting up the nerve to make a clean breast of what weighs heavily there.
In a polished platter, I watch as my features assemble into the face of a confessor whose heart, I hope, is charitable. “My son, is there something you wish to tell me?”
“Maybe.”
“While you make up your mind, we’d better get the window fixed, or the magpies will be looting my wife’s sewing basket.”
It isn’t a magpie that puts its head in the empty window frame, but Lidian, who cocks her head, birdlike, to take in the damage.
“Mr. Emerson, what have you done now?”
I consider the consequences of a truthful answer and decide to lie. “Billy Spicer threw a stone at the plum tree and missed.”
“That boy is beyond redemption!”
“He wanted to knock Henry from his perch.”
She doesn’t even bother to remind me that Henry Thoreau is, in the common meaning of the word, dead. She sniffs through her thin nose, shrugs her bony shoulders, and announces her intention to visit our married daughter, Edith, on Naushon Island, in Buzzards Bay, before Sam Staples arrests her for the murder of the chief ornament of the age—R. W. Emerson.
I think it an excellent idea and tell her so, wishing that she would hurry.
“The Boston train leaves at four and connects with the New Bedford line at half past six. Will and Edith will take me across in the Gypsy.”
I clear my throat and swing my chin toward the black man.
“Mr. Emerson, I see you have company.”
I’m glad to have his reality confirmed by other than the smear of mustard on his plate.
“Mrs. Emerson, allow me to introduce Mr….”
Having forgotten his name, I fall into an embarrassed silence. Each such stumble is a stone laid on the grave of memory.
He introduces himself. “Stokes. James Stokes.”
“Mr. Stokes, if you’ll excuse me, I must pack my grip and cannot stop to talk. But my husband is in a garrulous mood today, even if his interlocutors are figments of his impetuous imagination.”
Stokes smiles strangely, and I feel uneasy once again.
Lidian flies up the stairs. After a commotion of drawers and closets, she reappears before us, dressed in traveling clothes and a poke bonnet. Carrying a hastily packed valise, she does not pause in her headlong flight toward the depot, except to enjoin me to fix the window. She leaves nothing in her wake, except the scent of pears, which winter at the bottom of her closet, together with her summer shoes.
Like a thirsty horse searching the air for water, I sniff and guess which variety of pear perfumed my wife’s departure.
Say the pretty words, Waldo, if only in your mind: Louise Bonne de Jersey, Flemish Beauty, Easter Beurré, plain but reliable Bartlett. Golden words for golden fruit! I taste them in my mouth.
“I hope she didn’t leave on my account, Mr. Emerson.”
“The account is all mine, friend.”
“A fine woman, from what I saw of her.”
“She has a bee in her bonnet. Lately, it is often so.”
“Then she’d better find the kitchen window fixed when she gets back.”
“Mr. Stokes, you’re right. Left to myself, I’d spend the remainder of the daylight hours in dithering.”
I show him where panes and putty are kept, in anticipation of storms and boyish mischief.
“Do your work, and I shall know you.”
Soon, he has sealed the house against hungry squirrels, marauding birds, and crickets wanting to winter by the hearth.
“Thank you, Mr. Stokes.”
“Thank you, sir, for the supper and cigar.”
As he gets into his tattered coat, I notice he is bleeding.
“Why, you’ve cut your arm on the glass!”
“Don’t worry yourself, Mr. Emerson.”
He manages to bind the wound with a handkerchief, knotting it fast with his strong teeth. In a moment, the blood seeps through it. How very red is his blood!
When Samuel Long cut his finger fixing the cucumber frame, my daughter Nelly was surprised by the color of his blood. She thought it would be black, a childish belief shared by many in their majority and no less preposterous than the so-called science of craniometrics, espoused by university anatomist Dr. Samuel George Morton in his book Crania Americana: “Racial intellectual capacity can be determined by measuring interior cranial capacity.”
