It tore at me that Father did not know one damn thing about my Treasure. A couple of years ago I gathered up the courage to leave one small booklet of Verses under his door. Lord, I wasn’t looking for praise, but the privilege of having a tiny anthill of my own. Months later I found that booklet shoved back under my door like a misused missile. And never a sound from Pa-pa, never a syllable. I couldn’t become a sergeant in any war. It wouldn’t even have pleasured Pa-pa had he known that half my songs were to him.
Daisy festered, and Pa-pa must have seen the smoke pouring out of my brain. He gathered me in his arms. And he began to sing out some lines in that dry baritone of his.
My Dolly deals her pretty words like blades…
And stuns her poor Pa-pa by degrees.
The smoke inside me began to settle. I had my king’s ransom. I was purring like a mouse. Pa-pa had memorized some of my Plumage. He was serenading me with my very own sounds.
“Why couldn’t you tell me that you read my Verses, Pa-pa?”
“Dolly,” he said, “it’s taken me two years to recover. They nearly tore my head off. Ain’t I tellin’ you now?”
“In the middle of a battlefield,” I said.
I was still purring, but my ecstasy didn’t last. That lone bugle kept sounding in the distance. I felt a claw in my stomach, as if a bullet with a hundred knitting needles had suddenly invaded my loins. I didn’t need a bloodhound to understand. Zilpah’s own dead child had come to haunt its mother’s live Mistress. I could feel its blood leaking down my legs. I couldn’t tell Pa-pa, blame it on moon blindness. That barbed bullet tore at my insides. I expected to meet my own destruction on Cambridgeport’s battered streets. My knees buckled. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the clawing stopped. I started to limp. Pa-pa was still holding my hand.
Frazar Stearns
Sue had memorized the Battle of New Bern. It wasn’t from any morbid love of carnage, even if Union boys had routed the Rebels. Yet there was little to rejoice. Frazar Stearns had fallen near the feet of his commanding officer, Colonel William S. Clark of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Volunteers, his own chemistry professor at the College. Colonel Clark could not be consoled. And neither could the town. Frazar had been one of Amherst’s most beloved boys. He was Austin’s close friend and classmate, and son of the College’s own President Stearns. The Twenty-first had captured a “six-pounder” during the battle, and this brass cannon was given to President Stearns in memory of Frazar.
Sue had gone to the president’s house to see the cannon, to rub its brass with her own fingers. Emily wouldn’t come along—that’s how the Dickinsons were. They walked around in their own private trance. Austin said he was too dazed to eat. But having lost her mother at the age of six, Sue was closer to the rub of mourning than they would ever be. She was the youngest of seven children—the Gilberts, who were scattered across the land. She’d lost her favorite sister, Mary, who died shortly after childbirth, when Sue herself was twenty. She mourned Mary for three years, could not seem to give up the “black.” She might have mourned Mary another three had Austin not pushed her into marriage.
She couldn’t stop thinking of battle sites; the main site was in North Carolina, at a brickyard outside New Bern. The Rebels’ right flank was holed up with its artillery in the brickyard kiln. The Twenty-first Massachusetts had to charge this kiln twice, but broke the Rebel line. The Battle of New Bern was over in one day, March 14, 1862, the day that young Frazar died.
North Carolina had once had its own fleet, the infamous Mosquito Squadron that attacked Union shipping and transported Rebel troops. But Union gunboats sank the entire fleet. And Sue loved to recite the individual names of the Union flotilla: the Philadelphia, the Louisiana, the Underwriter, the Hunchback, the Henry Brinker, the Stars and Stripes…
She remembered helping to nurse Frazar when he had scarlet fever during the epidemic of ’58. He was braver than most, let Sue put some salve on his own red sores. She was certain that he would die, even while she applied the salve and prayed for him. But the fever broke and the redness went away. And she didn’t have to preside over his deathwatch.
There were other deathwatches, but soon she couldn’t attend to the sick. She began having nightmares: She was trapped in a cellar, a horrid damp place where fetid plants grew and entangled her feet. It was like a hospital room, where women lay on cots and shrieked their lungs out. The incessant sounds injured Sue’s ears and gave her a terrible fright.
But Sue wouldn’t give up her war work, even though she had a one-year-old baby at home, Little Ned, whom she left with a colored nurse. She traveled as often as she could to Soldiers’ Rest, a retreat in Springfield for wounded veterans who had nowhere else to go. Sometimes Vinnie and the Squire would accompany her, would read to the soldiers, while Sue saw to their bandages and the balms they had to swallow. But Emily wouldn’t come to Springfield. Emily was immobilized, a casualty of war. She sat in her room like a hermit and scribbled notes to Sue with the rapidity of a telegraph writer. And how could Sue express her undying devotion when she had an infant who screamed day and night and a husband who was morose half the time? She could hardly bear to be touched by him. Perhaps it was Sue’s own fault. Austin was always kissing her when and where she did not want to be kissed. And if she refused him once, he would sulk for days, call himself the banished husband.
But on one of her trips to the depot, she found her sister-in-law. Emily had arrived with a tight little traveling bag and a bunch of day lilies in her hand. Sue began to shiver near the depot tracks. Was her sister-in-law going to China with another rapscallion of a Tutor? Good Lord, no! She’d accepted Sue’s invitation to succor the wounded in Springfield.
What had changed her mind?
“Frazar,” she quipped.
“Dearest, Frazar is dead.”
“But I dreamt of him, Susie. His ghost was riding in the wind and couldn’t seem to lie at rest in the burying-ground…until I went to Springfield.”
“Did the ghost speak his intentions?”
“He didn’t have to. I’m perfectly capable of reading a ghost’s mind.”
Sue decided to end the interrogation. Emily had come to the depot with lilies from her garden and hopped aboard the Springfield Express. The train was filled with soldiers who looked like scoundrels; their uniforms were ripped and they wore paper wrappings instead of shoes. They kept leering at Sue and Emily like wild men. Sue was the one who was immobilized now. But Emily offered them each a day lily and a coin from her purse.
“Darling, they could be impostors,” Sue whispered in Emily’s ear.
“Well, impostors suffer the same as we do.”
She began to wonder if Frazar’s ghost had possessed Emily, and was riding in some wind that Sue couldn’t see. Emily rid herself of all shyness at the retreat. She was as lively as an electrical storm. She danced with a crippled soldier, read bits of Shakespeare to a little band of blind veterans, and attended to the oozing sores of another soldier like the ablest nurse. She’d put aside the secrets of poetry and her own natural reluctance to lend a hand.
Sue was enraptured by that picture of Emily darting everywhere. “Darling, you amaze me.”
And Emily pouted like a little girl. “Why, Susie, just because I never learnt to make a decent bandage, that don’t mean I’m dumb as a cow.”
The pair of them giggled like naughty children for a moment and went back to work.
PART FIVE
Queen Recluse
Amherst
1865 & Beyond
33.
I COULD HAVE HID FOREVER IN MY ROOM WITH THE SHADES down, skulked around on Pa-pa’s back porch with a bandanna over my eyes, or buried my head in a barrel of brine. It wouldn’t have mattered. I was going blind. Wherever I went, a needle cracked right through my skull. I had to abandon Carlo for a second time and return to Boston for treatment with my Physician, each one terribler than the last. Our neighbors said Carlo was the oldest Newfoundland in history—bu
t fifteen doesn’t seem that old. Carlo will always be my Pup.
I served a six-month sentence in Cambridgeport and sneaked home in the fall, having asked Lavinia to meet me at the station. I didn’t want a whole parade of Dickinsons to welcome the half-blind girl with gray in her hair who was still an apprentice poet at thirty-five. But I was forlorn when Sister took my traveling bag.
“Where’s Carlo?” I asked. “Where’s my dog?”
Carlo wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to meet his mistress. He would have forsaken the lemon-pie mush that Ma-ma prepares for him while I’m away—he no longer has enough teeth in his head to chew on something solid.
Sister was struggling what to say. “Emily, Carlo’s—collapsed!”
I ran from the station with Sister right behind me clutching the bag. My head whipped with every sort of imagining. Town-folk looked at the Squire’s eccentric daughter, a meteor in dark glasses, hopping along like a wingless bird.
I didn’t say hello to our handyman, or look for Ma-ma in the kitchen. I called out to my Pup, but Carlo didn’t come. And then I heard that ruff-ruff of his that wasn’t much of a bark. It was the only concession to sound my mute Confederate ever made. But there was a nervous edge to that sound, as if Carlo were communicating his lament to his mistress. It broke my heart. That’s all I care to say.
The sound was coming from my room. I raced up the stairs, Sister still behind me. I whimpered like a loon at the first sight of Carlo, lying down on an old blanket in an enormous bassinet near my bed, his face all grizzled, like the wounded soldiers I had met on the train from Boston.
Carlo’s black tail beat against the walls of the crib with such force that I wondered when the crib would break. But my mute Confederate couldn’t even sit up on his hind legs. I had to lean over while he licked my face. And like the most regal of lions who had to endure the indignity of a bassinet, he started to beller deep within his throat and wouldn’t stop until I clutched his paw and recognized him as His Royal Majesty. He’d been roaming the Orchard as little as a month ago, banishing squirrels from his domain, when he toppled over like some great furry building and couldn’t seem to rise again, Sister said.
Our handyman was petrified, never having seen a Newfoundland fall like that. But Father didn’t panic. He summoned the horse doctor, who surveyed Carlo in the Orchard and said, “Best to shoot that fellah and put him out of his misery. The bones in his legs are brittle and can’t support the bulk of him. He’ll never leave this Orchard alive.”
But Carlo must have sensed his own predicament and didn’t want any part of that horse doctor. He rose up, like a ship battling a squall, wandered out of that Orchard with a terrible limp, went right through the Homestead’s front door, climbed up the stairs, making purchase with both paws, and settled in my room.
Pa-pa didn’t want me rushing home from Boston in the middle of my treatments, so he uttered not a word, and took care of Carlo, fed him and cleaned his blankets, like you would with an aging child. Carlo wouldn’t let another soul near him but Pa-pa. My Pup was guarding the room for me.
And now that I was back I settled in with Carlo, who ventured out of his bassinet from time to time and crawled to my own “crib,” the small cherrywood desk that imprisoned me while I scribbled my Verses under the tyranny of dark glasses. But I wasn’t the only casualty of sunlight. Salient Sarah’s moon blindness went from bad to worse. She couldn’t walk across the barn without stumbling. It was terrifying to behold. Pa-pa put his handkerchief over Sarah’s eyes, clucked at her, calmed her down, but she knew what was coming next. Sarah nuzzled Pa-pa’s sleeve, bit him gently to show her regard for him. Pa-pa took out a pistol I had not noticed before. It had a long silver snout and didn’t hold more than one bullet at a time. He loaded the pistol with something that looked like a shotgun shell. His hand was steady, but his left knee began to jerk. He placed the silver snout behind Sarah’s ear and pulled the trigger. I heard nothing more than a clap, soft as a kiss; Sarah tumbled to the ground, as if her legs had fallen right out from under her like pieces of glass.
The clap of Father’s gun hounded me and began to eat me alive. I prayed to the Lord that he wouldn’t take that pistol and turn it on Carlo. But he never brought its silver snout near my dog. No, he went down on his knees with a hammer and repaired the crib when it was about to topple.
Carlo was practically born in that crib. Pa-pa had built it himself, since you couldn’t find a bassinet that size in a general store. It was like a barn without a roof. Even then the Pup was as tall as I was, his eyes hidden behind all that shaggy hair. I recollect the first time I saw that rascal. Pa-pa was carrying him in his arms, considerable as Carlo was, and he wouldn’t leave off licking Pa-pa’s face. But when my Confederate first laid eyes on me, he leapt out of Pa-pa’s arms and ran around in circles, as if he’d decided right then and there that a nineteen-year-old redhead with a plain, freckled face was the sole source of his happiness.
Lord, I’ve been truer to Carlo than to any man, including that other rascal, Tom the Pickpocket. The Pup has seen me cry, throw jealous fits, plot against Pa-pa, thunder around like Zeus himself, and he’s like a peace officer who can calm his mistress and make her laugh. I cannot recall being lonely in his presence. I talk to Carlo, and he don’t have to talk back. His big brown eyes tell their own prescient tale. He’s met most of my suitors, long before I turned into an irascible old maid, and he hasn’t been jealous of one. He’s never asked me to play with him. Carlo doesn’t consider himself a dog, I’d imagine, and wouldn’t tolerate anyone else calling him Pup. He’s been my Confederate these sixteen years, and a much better roommate than any I ever had.
And one night, a few months after I returned from Cambridgeport, there was a howling storm, and snowflakes as big as diamonds beat against the windows. Pa-pa’s fields had a brutal white glare. The totality of it, the immense blanket of snow that moved in waves, frightened me and I was tempted to lie down with Carlo in his bassinet. But I fell into a deep slumber and found myself riding on Carlo’s regal back. I didn’t need to have any reins or stirrups. I held to his collar, but I could hardly straddle the enormous black bundle of him. Still, my Pup wouldn’t let me fall. I wore my nightgown into the wind. I wasn’t cold. It was like sitting on top of a furry furnace.
We rode above Main Street, he and I, and the houses had a sudden regularity, even in the snowstorm, as if Amherst had become a perfect winter map, with half-buried roads and a line of chimneys as mysterious as musical notes on a page.
I clung to Carlo. Riding him was like going away to live with a man and sitting on my own trousseau—the Pup, instead of spoons and pillowcases. Whoever I was marrying couldn’t break into my dream.
When I woke the windows blazed with light. It seemed as if the snow had blanketed the universe. The path between the Homestead and the Evergreens had disappeared in all that drift. Brother’s house had become a wall of snow wearing a chimney-hat. I said good morning to Carlo, but he never blinked once in that blaze of light. I leapt out of the covers in my nightgown and grabbed at Carlo. He wouldn’t move or lick my hand. My fellah had died in his sleep, sitting on his blanket a foot from my bed.
I lay down beside Carlo in his bassinet. I must have been there five or six hours, my arm around his neck, and would have stayed another six if Pa-pa hadn’t started tugging at me. He would tell people how I had all the strength of a steam engine, and that he couldn’t pull me loose until I heard Ma-ma cry.
“Em,” she moaned, “you cannot stay in this room forever with a dead dog.”
I would have stayed, but I couldn’t bear that look of horror in Ma-ma’s eye.
I BECAME A HERMIT WITHIN MY FATHER’S HOUSE. WHEN THE butcher boy knocked on the kitchen door, I fled—his fairness troubled me. He was almost as blond as my blond Assassin, and I did not want to be reminded of Tom the Handyman in the tousled hair of a butcher boy.
It wasn’t only that. All encounters seemed to terrify me, as if they taxed whatever sma
ll gifts I had to natter with anyone outside my own little family. When Emily Fowler Ford, an old playmate of mine, left her card, I did not come down to greet her. Call it cruel, but I had images inside my head of a lioness who would eat Emily Fowler Ford alive. Who was this lioness? Could it have been the same lightning that arrived so suddenly and seemed to rip Verses out of my skin? I did not need Sue—Daisy had become her own Haunted House.
There was one day I dreaded most, Commencement at Amherst College. I had stopped attending Commencement exercises on our Commons a long time ago, but I couldn’t desert Pa-pa, who was still Treasurer and kept up the tradition of an annual Treasurer’s party at the Homestead for Seniors and the hoi polloi of Amherst.
Ma-ma played hostess whenever she was fit and did not suffer from her Neuralgia attacks, with Vinnie as her sergeant-at-arms.
I was master of the kitchen, who had to wash a barrel of raisins and supply enough black cake to glut an army of Seniors. And I couldn’t hide upstairs with my door open a crack while Father prowled the front rooms and Vinnie stood behind the punch bowl.
There was also Susan, as Father’s emissary from the Evergreens, with the smartest Seniors at her side, talking about Colonel Higginson’s latest articles in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the rage of Boston, his articles read in every civilized home, including ours. The Poet, he’d cautioned, could not live without a noble mind, and Poetry itself was neither male nor female—it could be practiced by either sex. It had no hierarchy but its own excellence, bought at a bitter price, a lifelong struggle with the Calvary of the written word. It was the art of a kicking Kangaroo.
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 20