by Jackson Kuhl
“I am a coward,” he said to her. He was close to tears.
“Mr. Presley,” said Minerva, “I can think of no word less fitting to describe you.”
“It’s true. That day you came to my cabin, I neglected to tell you something. It seemed trivial at the time, but after everything that’s happened with Mr. Lyman, I don’t know what to think.”
“It can’t have made any difference.”
“I’m not so sure. Nonetheless I cannot leave Bonaventure without scrubbing my conscience.”
“I understand.”
Presley wrung his hands a moment more and then, without looking at her, said, “What I described to you about the final time I saw Mr. Sutton, I described truthfully. What I failed to tell you was that Mr. Sutton kept an amount of cash in his desk drawer, and when you explored his desk that afternoon, I noted the cash was missing. I naturally assumed he took it with him when he departed for New York.”
Minerva considered. “Was Mr. Sutton wealthy?”
Presley’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know if wealthy is the proper word. But he did intimate on more than one occasion that he’d made several successful investments while working at the Exchange Board. It was a concern of his, how best to use the proceeds toward national abolition.”
“And he kept some of it in his desk.”
“Yes,” said Presley. “I know so because I often saw him slip a banknote into the letters he sent to his sister in Pennsylvania.”
“Show me.”
Yet when they thoroughly searched the desk, they found not so much as a cent.
Presley’s face flushed red. “I assumed he took the cash with him when he departed, but now—I assure you, I would never —”
“Of course not, Mr. Presley,” said Minerva. “I would never accuse you of such a thing.”
“He must’ve taken it with him,” Presley repeated.
After a moment, Minerva said, “Was there anything unusual about Mr. Sutton the last time you saw him? I’d like to know, no matter how inconsequential it may seem.”
Presley shook his head. “Nothing I can think of. As I told you, Mr. Sutton had received a letter from his friend in New York, and upon reading it, he jumped up suddenly and ran out of the cabin.”
Deep inside Minerva, something tightened. “Did he say anything?”
Presley hesitated. “Yes, now that I think of it. He said, ‘I must inform David of this.’ That was all.”
Minerva kept her opinion to herself. Everyone attributed Minerva’s account of what had transpired at Bonaventure to the concussion supposedly received from the wagon crash. She had found the more insistent she was, the less they believed her, about that and everything else.
Lyman was committed to the state prison at Wethersfield. In the beginning, he and Minerva corresponded frequently. The conditions were difficult at first, he wrote; but the men were expected to engage in trades for the support of the prison, and eventually Lyman was placed in the carpentry department, where he found some relief from his circumstances. The food was very basic. Still, Lyman complained little and these notes remained congenial if perhaps a bit self-conscious, considering the awkward relationship between the two authors.
Yet over time Lyman’s letters became increasingly agitated. Originally Lyman’s cell was located above-ground; but some months into his sentence he was transferred to a cell in the basement of the same building. Lyman refused to accept the transfer but ultimately was physically coerced, and all protests to the warden went ignored. This move had a deleterious effect on Lyman’s nerves; he complained of being unable to sleep and, when he finally did, of being tormented by horrible dreams.
The letters abruptly ceased until December when Minerva received a short note in shaky handwriting. It pointedly requested that Minerva give him the leather medallion she had received from Bitty Breadsticks; he said she could think of it as a Christmas present. It had remained in her grasp during their flight down the hill and was returned to her pocket, but she’d thought no one else knew that fact.
Lyman’s brusqueness took her aback, but Minerva chose to remember her tender memories of him and did as he asked. He never received it: the medallion arrived at the prison—Lyman was told as much—but the officials refused to deliver it to him for arbitrary and indistinct excuses. Minerva wrote with indignation to the warden, demanding to know why her gift had not been delivered to the inmate. Some weeks later a response arrived in which the warden begged her forgiveness but explained that he did not feel it was in Lyman’s best interests to give it to him. The medallion, as she well knew, was stamped with a daisy-wheel symbol with which Lyman had become obsessed, scratching it into the walls of his cell over and over with whatever implements he had at hand. When those implements were seized from him, Lyman would often knock his head against the wall, then use the resulting blood as ink to repeat the shape on the bricks.
After this, Lyman’s letters degraded into hysteria. The last she received simply read,
Maybe they’re not echoes Judith we must go back.
With a sorrowful heart, Minerva resolved to end her correspondence. The contents only reawakened unpleasant emotions, feelings of that long-ago autumn and especially that terrible night which she had learned to bury under the spadings of public disbelief. Better to leave them underground and settle into a common life.
Our experiences, so real and truthful to us, rarely translate adequately, if at all, to those around us, and so often it’s easier to pack them away as old clothes in a trunk, out of view. Tell your friend you bought a load of groceries at the store and he will shrug, but tell him you’ve seen a ghost and he will laugh. People, like the stones in a partition between acres, may touch and rest upon one another, but ultimately each is a separate thing, alone and uncommunicative. Every stone believes its own story of how it came to rest there and only infrequently do those narratives overlap. Minerva was reminded of this years later when she read a newspaper report that the man she had known as Tom Lyman had escaped from incarceration at Wethersfield. Yet a closer reading of the story showed that escape was the reporter’s assumption, while the warden himself, perhaps protective of his reputation, only admitted Lyman was missing.
What we encounter in the night we encounter by ourselves, whether it is murder, memory, violin music, or voices plural, whispering to us through prison walls.
Further Reading
Readers interested in learning more about transcendentalist utopian settlements may want to start with some of the semi-fictionalized testaments written by former residents. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, inspired by his time at Brook Farm, is as dry and funny today as it was in 1852, and Louisa May Alcott’s “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873) is a satirical send-up of her father’s experiment at Fruitlands.
I also suggest Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836) and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” (1862) for understanding the transcendentalist mindset. Really, anything by Thoreau is recommended.
Philip F. Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A History (2007) is a solid primer on transcendentalism in general. Finally, if you can find it, there is Edith Roelker Curtis’s history of Brook Farm, A Season in Utopia (1961), now long out of print.
— JK
About the Author
Jackson Kuhl is the author of the Revolutionary War biography Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer and the fiction collection The Dead Ride Fast. Kuhl has written for Atlas Obscura, Connecticut Magazine, the Hartford Courant, National Geographic News, Reason, and other publications. He lives in coastal Connecticut.
For more information, visit www.jacksonkuhl.com.
NEWSLETTER
Subscribe to AURELIA LEO’s newsletter for new releases, discounts, and more. We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at any time!
&n
bsp;