“We watched her, her legs tucked up under her petticoats, gazing at the place where her son had gone under, she sat still as stone, until the waves took her too and knocked her sideways and she went over and under.”
A few other sailors and salvage workers brought their lunches up to the hill and sat with them at the graves. Someone gave Henry a piece of bread, some cheese, and a sour plum. They chewed and they drank cider from a common jug, and then they and Bolton resumed their talk, which seemed to be, over and over to one another: “Terrible storm, worst ever, terrible voyage, bad seas, fool captain, bad luck, marble too heavy, slid right through the hold, never go on a merchant again carrying stone if I can help it.”
Henry thought he could hardly bear to hear it again but each of the sailors seemed to need to say it, more than once, and so it became a kind of muttered chorus: “Terrible storm, bodies lost forever, the child tossed and tossed, brave lady, the child, terrible terrible sea.”
Ellery Channing and Arthur Fuller arrived just before sunset. The scale of the mess at the beach nearly overwhelmed them; but in an unmethodical manner, they more or less retraced Henry’s search all that evening, with identical results. There was brief excitement when Ellery found some scraps of paper in a note-book — upon drying them, however, they could see enough of the lettering to make out that these were only pieces of the ship’s log. Camping out near the workers, without a tent, they had tried to cheer one another but a light rain kept their gloom constant through the night. In the morning Arthur oversaw the digging up of his nephew’s coffin and hired a cart for the first leg of its trip back to Cambridge for family burial. Since it seemed that all hope of recovering the other bodies was gone, they spoke about the missing manuscript instead. It was Margaret’s book, her “History of the Italian Revolution.” Her last letters home had announced its completion. There was little chance, they knew, of finding it — but Henry made a promise as Arthur and Ellery left with their burden, that he would continue to try.
Richard Fuller, Margaret’s youngest brother and Henry’s good friend, had stayed behind in Boston with a fever. More than for anyone else, Henry wanted to recover something for Richard. All he had were two jet buttons from a coat, perhaps Ossoli’s, that he had found on a scrap of wool cloth in the foam.
Henry resumed his beach walking. He was looking now for nothing in particular, and was able to enjoy noting the dozens of sea-birds, their fishing habits and cries; kelp and sea-lettuce and small moon-jellies pulsing on the sand; the razor clam-shells and jingle-shells and acres of boat-shells, lumpy underfoot.
A few miles down from the salvage encampment, as he was stepping idly along the wave line, he put a foot directly onto a mass of kelp and bones. They were big bones, and not of fish — he looked closely and saw that they were not quite clean-picked by the gulls and crabs, and definitely human — a shoulder, and an arm, two fingers still attached with shreds of cartilage. He could not touch these bones. No doubt they were from the wreck. They could be from any one of the bodies. He believed nonetheless that they were Margaret’s. That looked like her hand, it did, feminine, with her long fingers.
He thought perhaps of taking a finger bone for Richard. It was like something out of a fairy tale, but what? The Seven Crow Brothers, that was the one — with the sister who saved them all by whittling her own finger into a key to fit an impossible lock.… And yet he could not touch the bones. Instead he took off his boots and used them as scoops, scraping up wet sand and burying the bones as best he could; then, barefoot, carrying the boots, he walked back quickly, the red light from the setting sun in his eyes.
Even before life had been disrupted by the ship-wreck, things in the Thoreau house that summer were already in a state of agitation (“all of a doo-dah,” said Mother) because the family was packing to move, to a large house they had recently completed building in the center of town. This was a social and economic “return,” as their move out of town several years earlier had marked a grim moment in their finances. The family’s move back to the center of Concord was made possible by the recent prosperity of their pencil factory. This small business, which Father had inherited, occupied a barn warehouse. The family had always joked about their move “west” a half mile from town, and called the house-and-barn their “Texas” house. Henry’s inventions — of a new way of grinding plumbago for pencil lead and for printing, and a new way of pressing the wood together around the lead — had made the business thrive, so that now they were providing pencils and printer’s ink to shops throughout New England and even Europe. Once they had moved back “east” into the center of town, their old Texas house would serve as offices and shipping station for the business.
But with Henry away, the moving had slowed. Mother was in a stew, un-packing and re-wrapping the plate and glassware, so that dozens of bundles littered the dining-room and parlor. All meals were now eaten in the kitchen. Father was not good at asking for help and kept trying to do the heavy work by himself; last night, the fourth day of Henry’s absence, he had strained his back trying to move a grain bin.
Anne was down to one smock, one dress, and a shift — everything else was packed away in trunks. For now most of Henry’s things were temporarily lodged in a shed, and there Anne hung the bird-cage and, every morning, tended to his Monarch caterpillars. He had allowed her to help with his butterfly hatchery this year — last year, his first of documenting, she only had been allowed to watch. She was better than he, it turned out, at finding the rice-like white eggs on the milkweed plants. Of the dozen or so they had captured in June, only five had hatched into caterpillars, and one was now so fat it would soon be at its last moult and go into a chrysalid.
That morning, when Mother was rubbing Father’s back with liniment and scolding him, Anne escaped the kitchen and went out to the shed for her morning chore. She peered into the glass box that sat on the table by the one window, then lifted the pierced-tin lid with great delicacy — the fresh, shiny green chrysalid was attached by sticky threads to the underside of a pierced dimple — and reached in to drop fresh milkweed leaves for the caterpillars that were still eating. She fished out the dried leaves and with a rag pinched up the tiny black droppings.
She and her brother shared a sort of giddy admiration for these plump caterpillars, striped like a dandy’s waist-coat out of The Lady’s Book in bright yellow-green, black, and white. When you held one in your hand, it would at first curl up timidly, its wedges of caterpillar flesh bunched together like a squashed accordion; but then it would stretch out again, lifting its head and waggling short black horns.
The tabby cat had followed Anne to the shed. She nosed against the glass box, then against Anne’s pencil and ruler, and got a vigorous push off the table. The Canary-bird twittered nervously. In the Monarchs note-book, Anne wrote a description of the chrysalid, gently angling the ruler for a measurement. She then measured and noted, to a millimetre’s precision, the length of each caterpillar. A cloth tailor’s tape with millimetre markings went around the thickest place on each one — for a “waist” measurement, circumference. She wrote it all down and dated it. Then she made several preliminary sketches. Henry was in correspondence with a Dr. Jaeger, who was compiling an encyclopedia of insects; their data would be mailed to him. Possibly Anne’s drawings would be included in the encyclopedia. She was exact in detail, but her perspective and shading were inexpert and Henry argued with her about her choice of colors. She hoped he would remember to buy her some new water-color paints in New York.
It was necessary to push the cat off the table again. She tidied the note-books, then replaced the lid, anchored it with stones, and shooed the cat ahead of her. She looked idly at the piles of Henry’s books and noticed, suddenly, a thin green-bound volume with gilt lettering: Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller. She had never read it. Well. She would read it now. Was it a coincidence that she had found it, or was it that her eyes were newly alert to the author’s name? She tucked it into the front poc
ket of her smock and closed the shed door.
A surprise: Miss Fuller’s brother Arthur had stopped in, and he would stay for a cup of tea. Father sat stiffly by the stove, his face drawn, but fortunately Mother was occupied with the visitor and had let up her scolding. Arthur Fuller looked wild, his big hands clumsy, his pale eyes flat and full of the ocean at which he had been staring. His sister’s body was not recovered — nor was her husband’s, nor the book — just some scraps of clothing. He nearly broke into tears many times. He told them about the one recovered body — that of his nephew, little Angelo Ossoli, not yet two years old, for whom a grave in the upper dunes had been quickly dug the day after the wreck. “I never saw his face in life,” said Arthur. “I never met my nephew. There was a wooden cross — we dug it all up and brought him back in a crate.”
The funeral for his nephew would be held the next day in Boston; Arthur was to visit with Mr. Emerson briefly before heading back to be with his own family. He gave Anne a note from her brother.
Dear Annie,
There are difficulties and we will probably not succeed in finding what we came for. I am staying for a week or so more to walk and hunt for specimens. Tell Mother. I have notes on birds and other beach life and will bring you shells and a skate’s egg-sac called a devil’s purse. It is empty, but do not let that give you false comfort. The devil grows richer every day.
H.
Henry hired the oysterman to take him to Mattituck, on the North Fork of Long Island. He spent several days there, boarding with a farmer, and continued his walks and his notes. On his last day, he returned to Fire Island and watched the dogged, nearly finished haulage of the marble. Most of the stone was in rough slabs, but there were also two out-sized marble statues, a man standing and a man on a horse, lying, bizarrely, on the sand. By looking more closely, he realized that the block faces had been left unsculpted — evidently these stone figures were basic models of the heroic, meant to be adapted locally once they had reached their destinations, some county seat court-house, some new library or athenaeum in Ohio or Maryland. They shared the feature of having the right arm raised. The solitary man pointed to an indefinite future — for the moment, as he reclined on the wet sand, to the clouds above the beach. The figure on horseback had suffered more from the wreck: The horse’s neck and head were gone and the man’s extended arm was broken off at the elbow, making his intended gesture less clear.
The police-man had vanished, and so had the pickers. But the sailor Bolton dropped his work and came over to tell Henry that one of the locals had been offering something for sale, papers he thought, from the wreck. He directed him to a fishing shack which stood close by the grave-yard.
The family had decided that no further moving could take place until Henry was home. In the lull, Anne visited the widow Allan at her two-room shack down by the creek, where she tended her vegetable garden and took in washing and mending. Dolly Allan’s own children were grown and gone, and she had worked for the family as house-maid and nurse-maid when Anne was little. Anne had tried for years to educate her; and although she no longer tried, she still read to her.
That day she brought with her Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century. As she held the delicate volume in her hand, she thought how much more discreet and seemly than its author the object was. Dolly was pulling weeds; Anne set down her book and basket — which contained a thick slice of ham, a loaf of bread, and a cup of cream as well as a jar of lemonade — and bent to help her.
Inside, they put the food away. Anne opened the jar and poured the lemonade into cups as Dolly washed at the sink pump. They settled into their usual postures: Anne with the book on a cushion on the floor, Dolly sitting on a chair behind her, embracing her with her knees. The old woman unpinned and unbraided the young woman’s light brown hair. As Anne read, Dolly combed and stroked, dipped her comb into rose-petal water, combed the hair through, braided it, unbraided it, twisted it up and pinned it, then unpinned it and combed it some more. Anne propped her elbow on Dolly’s knee; the older woman’s cotton skirt was patterned with green sprigs, faded to the same hue as the book.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century had made Miss Fuller famous. It had made it possible for her to go to England, where the book had excited admiration; and to France and Italy, where it had appeared in translations almost immediately. But Anne had never read it. She found that the style took some getting used to. She thought, as she paused occasionally to make sense of what she had just read aloud, that it was not exactly flowery — but rather somehow vegetal, vine-like, even mouldy, each sentence adhering around some central idea, with examples.
In clear triumphant moments, many times, has rung through the spheres the prophecy of his [man’s] jubilee, and those moments, though past in time, have been translated into eternity by thought; the bright signs they left hang in the heavens, as single stars or constellations, and, already, a thickly sown radiance consoles the wanderer in the darkest night. Other heroes since Hercules have fulfilled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur; while no God dared deny that they should have their reward.
Miss Fuller began with an invocation of Man’s capacity for the heroic, and went on to explain that Man cannot be fully heroic until Woman is allowed to be heroic beside him. In her first intimation of the main argument, she wrote of women that:
Those who till a spot of earth scarcely larger than is wanted for a grave, have deserved that the sun should shine upon its sod till violets answer.
Anne looked up from the book and said, “That’s elegant. It sounds a lot like Henry.”
“All done?” asked Dolly, making a final twist and pinning Anne’s hair back into place.
“It goes on forever, actually. I’ll bring something more lively next time. You need your nap.”
She settled Dolly on her low bed.
“How is the moving coming along?” Dolly asked.
“Hectic — Mother throwing her hands in the air and shouting, and Father trying to pull the stove out of the wall. We hope Henry will come home soon to supervise.”
“You need a home of your own.”
“I know I do,” said Anne. “But I almost feel that I shouldn’t. Helen and John never had the chance to marry. Henry and Sissy — they both say they will never marry.”
“But you must.”
It was too hot for a blanket, even with all the shutters closed against the sun. Anne kissed the old woman’s cheek and smoothed her sparse white hair.
“I’ll do your hair next time.” It was an old joke.
“If you undo it, it will fly away.”
Back at home, Anne returned to the book with reluctance. Guilt about her dislike of Margaret — would she call her Margaret at last, now that she was dead? — made her disinclination to wade through those sentences feel like an actual crime. So she would read.
Miss Fuller argued for the need to explore the full capacities of both men and women. Ah, this was familiar. She acknowledged that most women would continue to be womanly, and interested in domestic affairs; but she also maintained that in such a time as this nineteenth century, when women have unjustly lost much liberty by having lost their property rights (such as they had known in early centuries and in different cultures), it behooved more women to turn to what she termed their “Minerva” side. Minerva again! Minerva represented the wise, masculine aspect of femininity. By allowing Minerva to flourish, she said, women could accomplish a redress of the bad bargain that currently prohibited women from exploring their male strengths (of leadership, courage, invention), or men from exploring their female strengths (of kindness, spirituality, nurturance). This was exactly the same language of the Conversations. But the next passage went further:
We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.… We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordan
t collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres would ensue.…
The sexes should not only correspond to and appreciate, but prophesy to one another. In individual instances this happens. Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.…
When Emily Plater [a hero of the Polish independence movement] joined the army where the reports of her exploits preceded her … some of the officers were disappointed at her quiet manners; that she had not the air and tone of a stage-heroine. They thought she could not have acted heroically unless in buskins; had no idea that such deeds only showed the habit of her mind.
Others talked of the delicacy of her sex, advised her to withdraw from perils and dangers, and had no comprehension of the feelings within her breast that made this impossible.… But though, to the mass of these men, she was an embarrassment and a puzzle, the nobler sort viewed her with a tender enthusiasm worthy of her.…
Mercy! She closed the book; she would help fix supper.
Sieving the creamed potato soup — Anne had proposed they try it cold in the French way — she asked Mother and Sissy if they had ever heard of Emily Plater. Mother said, as she had often before: “Women and war are an abominable combination. Joan of Arc — or your Emily Plater — are stories to sicken any woman of right feeling.” She slammed the stove door for emphasis. Whatever the weather, they would have the biscuits hot.
That night, unable to sleep in the heat, Anne felt herself still whirling inside what she had read. She was wearied by the tortured way that Fuller’s argument ranged, without apparent logic or — well, control. What was it about the philosophers (she excepted Henry of course, and anyway he disdained the label) that made them argue in circles, moreover in circles that kept expanding indefinitely? It was as if they were looping out into the future, including everyone now and forever. She lit the candle and continued to read.
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