March: a novel

by Geraldine Brooks

  Some years earlier, my uncle had settled in the very same village and made a tidy fortune there in the lead sheeting business. He was a kindly man, and I might have applied to him for an invitation had his wife and I been on better terms. He had married late to a woman from an old Boston family, far above the claims of our Spindle Hill connections, a woman whose lameness and captious nature had kept her single past the prospect of any match more equal in situation. Her peppery wit somehow attracted my quiet uncle, setting her, as it did, aside from the bland manners of the day. Others did not find it so appealing, and I confess I was among them. When their one child, an infant girl, was taken from them, it soured her temper still further. She became a wasp, ever ready to sink her sting into any person foolish enough to expose to her a vulnerable place. And so I did not think it prudent to conduct a courtship from under her roof Instead I wrote to my uncle on the pretext of business, to ask him if he knew of any likely local interests in want of capital. He replied with news of a mechanic in the village whose son had developed a scheme for the manufacture of a better pencil. I was inclined to find this rather ordinary proposal of immediate interest. And so I wrote, and obtained by return post an enthusiastic invitation from the mechanic.

  It is a tedious journey by stage, and I found myself thinking along the way that I could walk the distance more profitably. My first impression of that place I have come so much to love was rather mixed: it seemed to me scant of trees and overserved by taverns. Yet I was struck, even on that first approach, by the handsome array of ponds edged by woods that stood to the south of the village. Walking those woods, by that water, I thought, would afford a man a great refreshment, and so it has proved these many years.

  There were some two thousand industrious souls settled in the village and its surrounds, engaged predominately in agriculture but also in manufacture and commerce, while the many inns profited from the teamsters’ patronage. I had thought to stay in one of these, but the pencil-maker would not hear of it. Greeting me at the stage with a horse and trap, he told me that his wife let rooms in their own house, where I would be most welcome. The house was more elegant than I had expected: a handsome foursquare yellow clapboard structure set in grounds planted out with many saplings of hemlock and balsam. Someone other than myself, I thought, had taken note of the village’s want of trees.

  I had not expected any form of agreeable society in the pursuit of my ruse: I believed that putting up with tedious dissertations on the better milling of plumbago and the inferior quality of spermacetti as binding agent were the price I should have to pay to secure my proximity to Miss Day. But there I was much mistaken. I was barely inside the door when the mechanic’s wife launched into an encomium on a sermon I had but recently preached on the internment of Massachusetts’s Negro seamen in Southern ports. She was, it seemed, one of the leaders of the Concord antislavery women, and, on learning this, I could not help but blurt out an inquiry as to whether she was acquainted with Miss Day. She shot me a look that was at once piercing, intuitive, and kind. Why, yes, she said. That young lady was a very great friend of her daughters, Sophia and Cynthia. In fact, she and Sophia had been speaking that very morning of Miss Day’s return, and of their obligation to invite her to dine. I blushed when she said this, confirming her instinct, and went gleefully upstairs with the mechanic, ready to hear all about his notions for the improvement of the pencil.

  His son, it appeared, was the family innovator. That young man was about my age, or perhaps a little older. We found him at work on the third floor, packing pencils for shipment. There was a greasy feel to the air in the workshop, and a strong scent of cut cedar. Motes of sawdust and a dirty gray mist danced together in the bands of light from the attic transoms. Henry Thoreau was unhandsome in physique, with short legs and long arms. But his face, framed by an untidy thicket of hair, was very striking. His features were large-the nose a vast hooked thing, the mouth full-lipped, and the eyes enormous-pale, deep-set, and prodigiously intelligent. He nodded curtly as his father made the introduction, and I noted the wonderful economy of his gesture, clutching up an exact dozen pencils at each grasp of his hairy hand, not falling short or overreaching by a single unit, but sliding the green bands around the bundle with the exactitude of a machine.

  John Thoreau was as voluble as his son was taciturn. “I have been making pencils, Mr. March, since my brother-in-law discovered a seam of plumbago—or graphite, as some like to name it, from the Greek, graphein, ‘to write’-back in, ah, I think it was 1824.” It was all I could do to stifle a yawn as he went on. “The pencils we made were nothing special then, nowhere near as good as the European. But young Henry here, while he was at Harvard, used the library to study the matter, and learned the Europeans’ secret: mixing clay with the plumbago as a binder. But he wasn’t satisfied with that, were you, son?”

  The old man turned to his son, who shook his unruly head without an upward glance and did not pause in his packing. “Henry has an idea for an improved mill that will make the graphite less gritty, and he also has an idea-quite brilliant, I think-for a drill the same size as the leads, so that we shan’t have to saw and glue the cedars anymore.” As Mr. Thoreau rambled on about his son’s notion of manufacturing leads in varied grades of hardness, which he thought would find favor among both artists and technicians, my mind drifted. I could readily see the virtues in these proposed improvements, and the amount of capital required to implement them was really very little. Yet, since coming to any hasty agreement would thwart my own purposes, I pretended to be unconvinced, advancing a number of rather dull questions until the young man, weary of my apparent obtuseness, flung a last bundle of pencils into a gross box, wiped his hands on a piece of rag, tossed that down impatiently, and marched out of the workshop. As he brushed past me, he looked right into my face—a penetrating look from those remarkable gray eyes: a look cold enough to blast the foliage off an oak tree.

  John Thoreau sighed as his son’s boots thumped down the stairs. “He’ll be off now, to the woods, and I don’t know when we’ll see him again. You must not mind Henry’s want of conventional manners, Mr. March. His brother died but recently; they were close, and Henry feels it. He has withdrawn into himself a good deal, since.”

  “Indeed; I am sorry for your loss.”

  He passed a hand over his bald pate and rubbed his eyes. They were kind, intelligent eyes, pale blue and watery. “Young John was a sunny boy, very different from Henry. Henry would always prefer a solitary walk in the woods to an evening at a salon, but John loved society, and Henry would go about with him, for his brother’s sake, and so be drawn out in spite of his natural reserve. Now he embraces his loneliness, and becomes unfit, sometimes, for the company of others.”

  I tried to reassure the old gentleman that I had taken no offense, and that I was inclined toward favorable consideration of the investment. In fact, I said, a walk in the woods sounded like a refreshing aid to reflection, after being pressed like a salt herring in a crowded stage all morning. I had brought some old clothes for this purpose, so Mr. Thoreau showed me to my room, where I changed my attire, and then was set courteously on my path.

  How one longs, when in love, for a glimpse of the beloved. As I walked through the village on my way to the woods, I imagined Miss Day’s feet falling on the very same ground that mine trod. I indulged my fancy even so far as to let myself think that the air I inhaled might have contained a particle of her breath. Such is the folly of the young! Every glimpse of a woman in the distance made me check my stride, as I tried the height and figure against the ideal I held in my mind. Yet none was she, and so I passed on into the woods, chiding myself for my foolishness.

  At first, these woods seemed neither as lush and humming with life as the Southern forests I had come so well to know, nor yet as wild and unyielding as the woods that pressed in around my childhood home on Spindle Hill. These were tamed woods, logged over time and again, cleared in broad patches for farms, dotted with the wretched shant
ies of the Irish, tracked through by hunters and fishers and aimless amblers such as myself Yet as I pressed deeper, I saw spiraling cedars that had escaped the ax, their wide fronds fingering the high air, and old spruce festooned with webs of lichen. This was wholesome, inviting, unintimidating Nature. I walked on, listening with delight to the lisping voices of the leaves and when, thirsty, I reached the pond edge, the water I drew into my cupped hands was of a purity and sweetness I think few places so close to human settlement could match.

  That day, I made my first acquaintance with sights and smells that would become dear and familiar to me. After I had strode out the restlessness in my limbs, I began to make my way more slowly, stopping to study a vivid fungus painting a beech trunk, and to note the delicate cutwork of the ferns. I bent and peered, got prone in the leaf litter to seek burrows or to admire the tiny, delicate star-flowers in bloom on a pillow of emerald moss.

  I was about this, breathing deep the scent of crushed herbiage and rich wood rot, when Henry Thoreau came up behind me, silent as an Indian. He must have observed me for some while, for when I raised my head, he was leaning at his ease against a tall alder, smiling. His arms were folded across his chest. A flute protruded from the pocket of his coat.

  “I did not take you for a natural historian,” he said.

  “A country lad who settles in the city sometimes yearns for the scent of wild earth,” I said, returning his smile and getting to my feet, dusting the twigs from my well-patched coat. Henry eyed my attire with approbation. “Come fish with me!”

  He kept a small skiff pulled up on the shore of a pond about half a mile distant. I tried to keep pace with him as he moved through the woods with the ease of a deer. Eventually, we broke out of the thicket onto a sheet of water more like a lake than a pond, its sedgy shore giving way to rank upon rank of rushes, waving gently in time with the waves. We were on the wild shore; the farther bank was groomed farmland. He found his boat and pushed off; handling the craft as dexterously as he had the pencils, with a grace belied by his gangly form. “This is not the most beautiful of the ponds,” he said, “For beauty I choose White Pond, the gem of the woods; for purity, Walden, but this is the pond I find most fertile in fish.”

  “What is it called?”

  His countenance, which had been benign, shaped itself into a scowl. “It is called Flint’s Pond-though not by me!” His oars slapped the water, hard. “Flint’s Pond! What right has that stupid farmer, whose farm abuts this luminous sky water—to give his name to it?”

  “Our nomenclature seems impoverished, at such times,” I agreed.

  Henry tossed his head back in a gesture of assent. He was agitated, impassioned. “Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wildflowers which grow by its shores. Not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him—him who thinks only of its money value and lays its shores all bare.”

  He rowed on into the center of the pond and lay back in the bow, letting the boat transcribe a lazy arc. “Flint’s Pond!” he said again. “Mr. Flint, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word of it, nor thanked God that he had made it. Why, that man would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom. He’d carry the landscape, he would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him.” His agitation brought him upright, so that the boat wobbled and I clutched an oarlock.

  “I know I am extreme.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You are eloquent. It is the habit of our species to despoil all we touch. Yet few see it so.”

  “Few, indeed; yet I am glad to know another.” He squared his shoulders, but did not reach for his line. Instead, he took his flute, and as the lowering sun turned the water scarlet, he played sweet airs, till the perch, charmed, rose all around us, beating the skin of the pond so that we stood in a circle of shimmer.

  Over breakfast the next morning, Mrs. Thoreau mentioned that she had invited some friends of Henry’s to dine that day. “They are the Emersons—Henry lived with them for a time last year and they have shown him much kindness.” I feigned a polite enthusiasm, mentioning that I had heard Mr. Emerson speak in Cambridge, but my face must have betrayed disappointment. For I had hoped that the daughters’ friend, rather than the son’s, might have been applied to. Mrs. Thoreau rose from her seat and was almost out of the room when she turned, with a barely suppressed half smile, and added as an afterthought: “Miss Day also will join us. I think you said you were acquainted, Mr. March?”

  I coughed and wielded my napkin, hoping to hide the flush racing up my neck. I could barely contain myself through the following hours, wishing the day away so as to get to the appointed time for dinner. I tried to read some published articles by Mr. Emerson in the hopes of being able to intelligently contribute to the conversation. But my thoughts flew about, hectic as hummingbirds, and could not settle.

  We were to dine at the Thoreaus’ generous table, round, of black walnut, with unusual spool-turned legs. I was wondering if Henry had crafted the piece himself, and was on the point of asking him when Waldo and Lidian Emerson arrived. Henry cut off our conversation as suddenly as a fisherman might cut his line. He almost ran to the side of the Emersons, made a curt good day to the husband, and then drew off the wife to the far side of the room, where the two of them began to converse with an intensity that quite excluded the rest of the party. And so, rather awkwardly, I was introduced only to Mr. Emerson. While he radiated a calm poise that seemed admirable, his manner toward me was reserved; his mind clearly was engaged elsewhere. It was plain that nothing I might have the power to say could compete for his interest with his own thoughts. But then the arrival of Miss Day drew him into the discourse in a most unexpected manner.

  She was the last to join us, and arrived with a rather high color born of hastening too quickly from her father’s house. The blush of her cheeks looked remarkably well against the white of her simple dress. The sight of her, so longed for, struck me speechless. After yearning for a glimpse of her, I now found myself unable to meet her eyes. She, it seemed, did not suffer so. She hailed me with a composed, “Mr. March! What an unexpected pleasure to find you here in Concord,” and then turned to her hostess to apologize for her lateness, explaining rather obliquely that she had been detained by the arrival of an unexpected package. Sophia Thoreau shot her a glance full of warmth and meaning. “Is your father quite equal to managing it? You might have brought it here, you know, without any reservation.”

  Miss Day gave a radiant smile of gratitude and embraced her friend. “Thank you, my dear. I know I can always count on you and your family in these matters.”

  Mr. Emerson looked grave. “I hope you will not mind my venturing to express a concern, Miss Day, that you do not involve your father in this beyond his wishes or capacity. For you know the extent of your influence with him, and you also know his frail state at present. It is upon him, after all, and not upon you, that the weight of adverse consequences would fall.”

  Her color, already high, rose to an even deeper blush that I mistook for mortification, until she commenced to speak. “Mr. Emerson,” she uttered the name like a hiss. “If some in this town would take up the mantle of leadership that their positions warranted, these obligations would not be left to young women and frail old men.”

  “My dear Miss Day, a man can only extend his active attention to a certain finite amount of claims. Yet wherever I hear the black man spoken ill of, or whenever I see a Negro person mistreated, I always feel obliged to speak in his behalf. More than that I do not think it is presently in my power to do.”

  “Not in your power!” She seemed unaware that she had raised her voice. Henry and Lidian broke off their intense tête-à-tête and looked across the room. Sophia and Cynthia had each drawn close to Miss Day. Standing one on either side, they half patted, half held her, as one would both soothe and restrain a lunging, growling dog.

  “Not in your power! You, wh
o command great crowds at the Lyceum, who may write for any of a dozen eminent journals ... to say that you can do no more is a sham! It is a disgrace! Worse, it is a lie!”

  The intemperance of her attack left me breathless. Angry women generally cannot be said to show to advantage, and to see that lovely face so distorted by such a scowl as it now wore was immensely shocking to me. Who could have imagined this gently bred young woman to be so entirely bereft of the powers of self government? I had never seen such an outburst, not even from a market wife.

  Mr. Emerson, too, seemed stunned. He had blanched whiter than the table linen. He answered her unseemly shouting with a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “I am deeply sorry to find myself sunk so low in your esteem, Miss Day. I regret that I spoke in question of your judgment. I will consider what you have said.”

  She was trembling with uncontained rage, and I feared that she would continue her assault. Instead she turned her head and looked at me as I stood staring. I saw that the black eyes were swimming with angry tears.

  “Come with me, my dear,” said Sophia. “It is too close in here. I want to show you my roses before we sit down to dine.” Sophia did not wait for an answer but simply threaded her arm through her friend’s, which was trembling, and drew her from the room. The rest of us all let out our breath. Poor Mr. Thoreau, so gentle and amiable, looked as pained as if someone were driving an auger through his toe. Somehow, Mrs. Thoreau managed to address Mrs. Emerson on some light matter, but no one truly relaxed until Sophia returned, alone, from the garden. Miss Day, she said, apologized, but she had developed a headache and thought it best if she return to her home.