The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  He stood outside the Chestnut Tavern near Green Street with a tankard of ale that flashed against the sun and seized my eyes with a fortune of sharp, merciless pinpricks. But I did not falter. He raised his tankard as his blue eyes lit upon me.

  “Hello, Daisy.”

  I was glad I had given him my nom de guerre. He could have connected Emily Dickinson to Amherst and the mistress who had helped ruin Zilpah Marsh. He might have stood with the Devil and sought revenge against the Dickinsons, murdered Pa-pa, Vinnie, and God knows who for having dismissed his mouse and sent her hurtling into the hospital. I was careful with him as careful could be. Lolling in that Sahara sun don’t mean much to Daisy. Her blood had gone to ice. Daisy preened her feathers before she spoke.

  “Enobarbus, I thought I was your mouse.”

  He smiled his Assassin’s smile and I could have fainted with the beauty of it, but I did not. An accordion man was leaning with one foot against the tavern wall, and Tom the Pickpocket, my Tom, tossed him a silver dollar.

  “Johnny, I intend to dance with that little mouse.”

  There were no invitations. Tom, or whoever he was, picked Daisy off the ground, held me so tight I could have been stapled to him. The accordion man tapped with his toe and started to play, and that melody was like nothing I had ever listened to—halfway between the polka and a Virginia reel for solitary couples, since no one else was allowed to dance. Tom whirled me around Magazine Street with him, and I had little breath to spare. With another man I might have been terrified. But I had only one wish—to be stapled forever to Tom.

  Vertigo meant nothing now. I didn’t mind the dizziness. And then the dancing stopped. Tom loosened his grip, and I slid to the ground.

  “I have to scram,” he said, like a sudden rip in the air.

  “Without your mouse?”

  “We’re quittin’ Cambridgeport. The town has hired too many damn civilian soldiers. There are more of ’em than cats. And a mouse like you would draw attention—particularly with your red hair.”

  “But that’s your business, selling hair. Why didn’t you just steal my scalp?”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “You remind me of somebody.”

  I was readying to fall into his arms. “Mr. Pickpocket, who could that somebody be?”

  “I can’t recollect. A girl with red hair was once kind to me. That’s all I remember.”

  It was the nearest thing to a declaration of love. My blond Assassin could have scalped me with the blade of his hand. Daisy don’t care. I was filling up with a vile phlegm. I was green with jealousy. It was Zilpah Marsh who had poured Shakespeare into his ears, strutting around as Cleopatra, while I was a lad with a freckled face. Cleopatra was round and dark and could smolder in the hot Egyptian sun, and I was as shapeless as a Dimity gown.

  “Will you find me again if I should ever faint?” I asked, stroking my horse blanket.

  “Daisy darling, I could spot your red hair all the way from Roxbury and Blue Hill.”

  I wanted to blurt out that I was the ruddy angel who had wiped his brow and fed him in his shack at Holyoke, but I didn’t dare. He’d been ill at the time, in a dark haze, and could remember nothing but my reddish look—else I would have been scalped!

  I could hear the church bells tolling with their loud, lugubrious clatter for Cambridge’s war dead. The bells seemed to bother Tom. His eyes began to flutter with every peel.

  “Best to say goodbye, mouse.”

  Would I have to spend half my life losing that blond Assassin? He finished his tankard of ale, wiped his lips with one long finger, put the tankard down, propelled his whole body with a pantherish leap of his legs, and turned the corner, onto Green Street, without looking back.

  32.

  “GREAT THUNDERING SKIES!” VINNIE SCRIBBLED FROM HEAD-QUARTERS in her loquacious hand. “Brother will not have to die on the Battlefield.” Even with the bounty it offered, Amherst couldn’t meet its enlistment quota and had to draft able-bodied bachelors and married men. Brother had escaped the first draft, but this time his name had been pulled out of the lottery wheel. Father found a substitute, a handyman from Rooming-house Row, paid him a small fortune—five hundred dollars—to go to war in Brother’s stead. An Irisher, Lawrence Steele. How could he not remind me of my Handyman, who liked to pose as a pickpocket? The five hundred dollars had ransomed Lawrence’s life and took his five children out of poverty. There was even a rumor, so said Vinnie, that Lawrence Steele had several missing toes. But the War Department wouldn’t have accepted a crippled soldier.

  I didn’t know whether to clap my hands or cry. I was delighted for Brother, and so were my little cousins. I would have worried myself to death if he had to wear the Union blue, but I couldn’t stop thinking of Lawrence, the mutilated man, who might leave five orphans in his wake. I was a scandalous girl. I wished that Lawrence would desert the War and run to Canada with his family and Pa-pa’s five hundred dollars.

  I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept hearing bugles in my brain. At first I thought I had gone to Heaven, not as my reward—but as my perdition, the punishment of being without that blond Assassin who had crept inside my bones. I was convinced that the Lord’s own buglers were mocking me, that their refrain was part of a pernicious song about a half-blind old maid who had fallen in love with an army deserter. But then the buglers broke through my sleep. Fanny and Loo were sitting on my bed, their nightgowns awry, with a look of perdition on their faces, terribler than I’d ever seen.

  “Auntie, Auntie, it’s the end of the world.”

  I hugged them hard as I could.

  “My dears, it don’t make sense. God’s trumpeters wouldn’t come down to Austin Street with their night music.”

  But I trembled as I spoke. I knew nothing about this particular band of bugler angels and trumpeters. And then Margaret Tripper burst into our room. She wasn’t wearing a nightgown, but was dressed all in Dimity, as if she had a winter uniform that could protect us from any peril.

  “Shush,” she said. “We aren’t in danger. It’s the Civilian Guard. They’re on the march, rounding up vagrants and deserters and storing them inside the old almshouse. I’d dump ’em in the Charles, that’s my opinion.”

  The Provost Marshal, it seems, had declared war on Boston’s bounty jumpers and army deserters who posed as pickpockets, and had unleashed the Civilian Guard to round them up. But this Civilian Guard was a band of lawless men with the license to plunder at will. They were the dregs of Boston and Cambridge who were too old to be drafted—they did their own military training in the streets and attacked whoever displeased them.

  “Why so many buglers?” Fanny asked, her eyes as agitated as ever.

  “It’s their way of signalin’ to one another from afar. Each squad has its own bugler.”

  I wore whatever mask I could, made a fist to stop my fingers from trembling. “Trip, did they find Byron Thrall?”

  “I told ya. Byron Thrall is dead.”

  “But their new leader. Tom the Pickpocket.”

  Margaret perused me with a touch of contempt. “They’re all pickpockets when they ain’t selling women’s hair. I have never heard mention of this Tom.”

  And she was through with us. I pined to rush over to the almshouse in my horse blanket, but I’d only have heaped suspicion upon Tom and myself. And Mrs. Bangs and Big Daughter would have come charging after me, with Margaret holding down the skirts of her two boardinghouse queens. I’d have to lie low, wait until all the bugling ended, and Captain Josiah’s infernal men vanished inside the almshouse with their sour breath and bitter wind. I did not cherish having to meet Captain Josiah and his twin Colts again, a robber with the Provost Marshal’s writ in his pocket.

  I PLAYED HEARTS WITH BIG DAUGHTER. I HAD HOURS AND hours to kill until it grew dark. I practiced being a Vampyre, since I’d have to suck the life’s blood out of Josiah and his men if I wanted to free Tom from the old almshouse. But even a Vampyre could run out of breath.

  Finally
the gloaming crept onto Austin Street, house by house, and I did not have to watch the shadows on my wall, or fight my way to the front door. Mrs. Bangs and Margaret Tripper were strangely passive, strangely glum. And my little cousins couldn’t have stopped me on their own. Perhaps Mrs. Bangs and Big Daughter didn’t believe I was suicidal enough to go out on a mission, into a night menaced by mosquitoes, deserters, and all their debris.

  I was alarmed, if truth be told. Under my dark glasses I saw battered men lying in the gutters; they begged for water and I had none to give. I wondered what Witchcraft was at work. The ground of Magazine, Valentine, and Green had gone to rubble. The little territory near 86 Austin was now a battlefield mummified. I nearly stepped into a crater. Mosquitoes swarmed above the groaning men, streaked with blood.

  The Ice Cream saloon at Haymarket Square could offer no more solace to the citizens of Cambridgeport. Its windows had been shattered, its potted plants strewn on the sidewalk. The Civilian Guard had taken over the saloon as its head-quarters. I saw men milling about inside the windows, with ice cream on their faces like vanilla masks. Horses wandered in the streets in their broken bridles. The horse-cars had been overturned, and the terminus half-destroyed, as if visited by some wanton wind. That wind had been manufactured by men with vanilla faces.

  Not a soul impeded my path. But I couldn’t find any of the hoi polloi and their carriages outside the almshouse—or Cambridge Athenaeum. It was as dead and dark as pitch. Not a lantern, not a light. And then a light flashed in front of me, and seemed to sear my eyes. I hid under my horse blanket like a loon, and when I looked up again, I discovered a lantern in my face and a voice behind its glare.

  “Confess, you harlot. You’re a lookout for the Shady Hillers. You live with Tom.”

  It was that darn captain of the civilian soldiers. How could he have been so shrewd and imbecilic at the same time? I would have scalped my own little fortune of rat’s hair to remain as Tom’s mouse. But a girl afflicted with moon blindness couldn’t have run from town to town with a renegade.

  “Kitten, I am holding you under the wartime powers that have been invested in me. You can call yourself my prisoner. There’s no use pretending. I ain’t blind.”

  What wartime powers? He had the Provost Marshal’s writ to mask his plundering.

  “Where’s Tom?” I pleaded.

  His laughter sounded like crackling tin. “Then you admit you’re his harlot and his mouse…Why are you wearing spectacles that cover your eyes with black? Are ya Satan’s helpmate?”

  “Where’s Tom?”

  I had to listen to that same sound of tin. “Tom’s where he belongs. In the stockades. He’ll sit there and starve to death. And if he survives until the Rebellion’s over with, the judge advocate will see to it that he’s hanged. I captured Tom—took ten of us to beat him into the ground. I never met such a nefarious creature, stealing women’s hair. You have to be his accomplice, else he would have scalped ya.”

  Josiah looked me up and down, and it was shameful as far as I could tell with my glasses on. That rascal could have been appraising the flesh of a cow.

  “I’ll set ya free, kitten, if you follow me into the poorhouse and let a man love you to death. But give Josiah a kiss first. I have to sample your wares and see if you’re worth it.”

  “I’d rather kiss a bullfrog,” I said, though I was shivering under my horse blanket.

  “Mouse, you’re gonna kiss me sure as Hell.”

  I wasn’t his mouse and I never would be. But I was still shivering while he tore the blanket from my shoulders. I could smell his sour guts. He grabbed me with his fat fingers when some Phantom leapt through the wall of mosquitoes with a swiftness that could stun a girl and gave Josiah a kick that sent him flying. I let my heart churn its own fancy. I didn’t even wait until that shadow materialized into a man. I was convinced Tom had come from the stockades for his mouse. I reached out to caress him. I looked again in my moon blindness—wasn’t my blond Assassin. It was Pa-pa.

  He knew how to disappoint a girl. But I wasn’t disappointed all that much. Hadn’t Pa-pa rescued Zilpah Marsh on the lawn at that lunatic hospital? And now he was rescuing me. But he wasn’t soft and gentle, as he had been with Zilpah. The rage in his eye was enough of a rebuke. I wasn’t even worth the littlest hello. I couldn’t tell him I was a mouse waiting for her pickpocket. Here I was on Magazine Street, with Pa-pa standing over Captain Josiah, who was all agog. That rascal tried to regain his dignity. He dusted off his pants and said, “Sir, you are interferin’ with a legal arrest. I am an agent of the law, deputized by the assistant provost marshal of Massachusetts.”

  Pa-pa kicked him again, not as he would have done to Carlo, but to some cowardly dog. I had never seen so much vehemence in him, so much noise. He was a a quiet man, slow to anger, except when it came to his horse. I’d watched him whip Sarah for the littlest reason. He made allowances for her moon blindness, and nothing else. But Captain Josiah must have insaned Pa-pa.

  “Shut your mouth before I smash you into little pieces. I’m Major Edward Dickinson of the Amherst militia,” he said. Pa-pa hadn’t drilled on our Commons for half a century, but he still had the right to call himself a major, I would reckon.

  Josiah saluted Pa-pa and pointed to me.

  “She’s a spitfire,” Josiah said. “She was dancing with a deserter, and she’s his mouse.”

  “She’s my daughter, Miss Emily Dickinson of Amherst.”

  The captain’s eyes rolled around in his head. He was lost in a maelstrom, and wasn’t certain what to do other than humble himself. He drifted off with his lantern, while I expected Pa-pa to pounce on me, to ask what an old maid with an irritated iris, who could not live near the light, was doing in a deserter’s arms. I wasn’t without my weapons. Hadn’t Father found a substitute for Austin, rescued him from the draft? And if Pa-pa pounced, I’d whisper in his ear that Austin might have become a deserter too if he’d had half the chance.

  But Major Dickinson didn’t even interrogate his errant daughter.

  “Mrs. Bangs wrote me that you were wandering about at night…”

  “She shouldn’t have,” I whispered like the little girl I became in Pa-pa’s presence.

  “Emily, we were like stranded children without you,” he said. “Mother can hardly bear it. Lavinia mopes. Austin swears he cannot amuse himself without his wild sister. And Carlo pines near your bed.”

  “Father, if you mention my dog, I will surely cry.”

  “I do my best. I hike with him in the fields. But he has one master—you. Vinnie has to feed him filet mignon out of her own hand, while that dog is as big as a church, bigger even. He’ll reach our chimney one day, and I’ll have to cut a hole in the roof for his head.”

  Pa-pa had me laughing and crying. He hadn’t palavered so much in years. His long silences were mythical. He and Mother had their own rooms. And they had to meet on the stairs to see how the other was doing.

  I should have kept my own counsel, but I couldn’t. I had a cruel streak.

  “Pa-pa,” I said, “how is Lawrence Steele?”

  He looked at me askance, his auburn eyebrows twitching once or twice. “Who the Devil is Lawrence Steele?”

  “Austin’s substitute,” I said, “the handyman with five children and three missing toes who took Brother’s place.”

  Pa-pa’s eyebrows were hopping again. I was the only Dickinson who could crawl under his skin.

  “Austin’s a family man. I didn’t want him goin’ to war.” Pa-pa’s voice began to quaver. “I kept dreaming of him in a ditch…I’m not Steele’s angel, but I did what I could. I’m looking after his children and his wife.”

  I was at the last lottery, before Brother’s name was selected in the draft. The enrollment board met in a room on Main Street, near Pa-pa’s office. Amherst had collected a bounty tax to encourage enlistment, but it still had to depend on a lottery wheel. Frederickson, a farmer who had been blinded by a lightning bolt, spun the wheel—the b
oard insisted on a blind man, so that there wouldn’t be any politics associated with the draft. But even a blind man had to guard his own impartiality. Frederickson closed his eyes, and I remember all the pulsations under his eyelids, as if a storm were collecting there. He pulled the names out of the wheel and handed them to Squire Edward, who was acting commissioner of the board. Father perused the names and intoned them one by one. He could not reveal the least emotion. I wanted to shout hallelujah when Brother’s name wasn’t called, but Pa-pa would have been mortified. The blind farmer did have a smile on his lips. Pa-pa let him work in our meadow as a hired hand, and he must have been glad that Brother had not been drafted. He accompanied us home to head-quarters, where we all had a glass of sherry. Some of the sherry spilled on his shirt. I can still see the spots, like the imprint of a tiger’s paw…

  Captain Josiah must have cleared the way for us. We weren’t stopped by any of his ruffians with their Colts. We walked amid the debris. Pa-pa took my hand. And I wondered if bugles had sounded throughout Boston, if the Provost Marshal was trying to sweep away all deserters and bounty jumpers. The Union could have been another Vampyre, hungry for the blood of new men.

  I COULD HEAR A LONE BUGLE SING IN THE DISTANCE. WAS IT sounding for Pa-pa and me? Or Lawrence Steele and Tom? And I wondered if Pa-pa would have paid a king’s ransom for his daughter had she been going away to war—the little sergeant of Poetry. Had I beguiled Pa-pa with my Verse, he might have paid that ransom for Tom. But I wasn’t much of a soldier. I did not seek fame or send my Verses to periodicals, though a few were published anonymously in Drum Beat, a near defunct Brooklyn journal trying to raise money for wounded war veterans. Susie must have sent them under cover with some of her own Verses. And the Springfield Musket had asked us to contribute one or two “gems.” But I declined, worrying that Pa-pa would trace the Verses back to me, and wishing that he would. I had even concocted a nom de guerre—Daisy the Kangaroo. Somehow it was easier to scribble when I thought of myself as Daisy rather than Miss Dickinson.