The smells of the settlement (sweet honeysuckle and minty wild anis around the main house and the many nearby huts, the walnut sawdust hanging in the air of the mill, the rich cellar smell of the loamy earth itself) were fresh and alive. The residents were courteous and seemed kindly, the food good and abundant. Every meal was taken by all the residents together at three long tables arranged in a triangle and, whenever the weather allowed, outside on the grass behind the Hive, as they called the large main house. At the Saturday night feast where Polly and Priscilla were initiated as PCs, or probationary consociates, each of the other forty-seven current residents, one by one, sprinkled handfuls of wildflower petals—red royal catchfly, orange butterfly milkweed, pink lilacs—onto the heads and shoulders of the two new recruits.
Every evening after supper, Polly and Priscilla took drawing tablets and colored chalks up the cleared hill behind the gardens and sketched until sunset. The second night, Billy asked if he could join them. When it became too dark to draw, they watched the lightning bugs. Billy started to sing in a beautiful tenor voice—Polly and Priscilla knew only scattered verses from “Woodman, Spare That Tree!” (“Touch not a single bough!…/There, woodman, let it stand/Thy axe shall harm it not!”), but all three of them sang all the verses to “Buffalo Gals.” And by the time they sang “Can’t you come out tonight,/And dance by the light of the moon?” for the fourth and last time, the moon had just risen over the far hill.
The first week, even ordinary, tedious tasks—tilling the wheat field, weeding the garden, milking the cows—had a dreamy, enchanted aspect. For Polly, almost every sight and smell and sound became a revisitation to a particular place or moment in the Clove Valley of her childhood. And to Priscilla, each pastoral moment and agricultural task was thrillingly alien.
They were put to work the first morning, and Polly was happy for the chores. They kept her thoughts from straying too often to Ben Knowles and the rest of her former life. Labor was assigned without regard for one’s sex—men cooked and laundered as well as plowed and sawed, women swung axes and drove wagons and spread manure. Young Billy, who had grown up the oldest of eight siblings, took turns with Priscilla caring for the community’s several toddlers, and Polly was assigned to the Fencing Team (boiling wire in vats of linseed oil to rustproof it, lugging five-foot fence posts from the sawmill to the pasture) and the Dairy Team.
At first, even the queerest customs seemed agreeable. Surnames were never used. Greetings—between men, between women, between men and women—frequently involved pecks on the cheek. The service on Sunday was unfamiliar to Catholic Polly and unchurched Priscilla, but both of them enjoyed the references to Norse and Hindu divinities intermingled with allusions to God and Jesus. They learned most of the jargon—consociate, conclave, aspirationalism, PC—within the first few days. The Glee diet, with the exceptions of milk and cheese and butter, was vegetarian—or “Pythagorean,” as James called it. Any consociate could request permission from the group to drink coffee or tea or eat fish, but permission was granted for only a month at a time, and fish eaters were responsible for catching their own bass from the river Xanthos—Danforth’s name for what the locals called Skunk Creek. For Polly, grown accustomed these last years to clean rags in the privy, the corn husks and pieces of moss stocked in Glee’s outhouses were (she told herself) charmingly rustic.
As probationers, Priscilla and Polly were assigned to sleep in one of the tiny sleeping huts that were big enough only for one bed and a sink. Everyone at Glee was abed by nine, not because the time was prescribed but because candles and lamps burning lard or tallow or whale oil—light that required the slaughter of animals—were prohibited. And bayberry wax candles were too expensive. After nightfall, Glee was completely dark.
None of the women wore bonnets. All the members of both sexes picked their costumes each morning from common closets and chests. And although Polly had never considered red a flattering color, she did not mind the female uniform—simple gingham dresses in various shades of scarlet and peach and pink, flannel undergarments all dyed the same colors. Priscilla was balky about the uniforms, having been required to wear one during her months in New York’s Home for the Friendless. But Polly reminded her that Duff had sometimes worn a sombrero and serape when he was in Mexico, and that when Skaggs traveled last year in Transylvania, he’d grown a mustache—“When in Romania,” he had said, “always do as the Romanians do.” Glee was like a tiny foreign country where the inhabitants spoke English.
And the occasional bit of some dead language. James Danforth was a proud college graduate, and liberally salted his conversation with phrases from ancient Greek (he called it “Attic”) and Latin. Although no Christian grace was spoken before meals, James always gave a kind of benediction before the first mouthful. “My dear fratres et sorores of Glee,” he said at the first luncheon Polly and Priscilla attended, “before we gratefully share the gift of our earth’s bounty, and delight in her warm and toothsome flesh”—by which he meant a hash of corn and tomato and summer squash—“may I remind us all that tonight is our evening cleanse in Persephone Spring. And the sun sets at half past seven.” In his remarks at meals James always contrived to include some piece of celestial news—the remaining fraction of the waning moon, the precise length of the day just ending or the night about to come. The information came from his Old Farmer’s Almanack, but the ritual announcements served to reinforce his casually godlike air. When rabbits invaded the gardens, or a pair of geese landed on the pond, James referred to them as “the beasts of the field” and “the birds of the air.”
He was in his middle thirties, and he combed his very long, dark hair straight back from his temples and forehead. He was tall and moved gracefully. His demeanor was brotherly and fatherly in equal parts, grand and sometimes stern but also genial and with even a hint of mischief. As a young man he had been ordained in the Unitarian Church. He referred sometimes to “the difficulties in Burlington”—many of the consociates had been members of his congregation in Vermont. Polly believed, hopefully, that Glee’s combination of discipline and eccentricity should suit her, since her mother had been a strict Catholic and her father a freethinker. But James Danforth was unlike any priest she had ever known.
He encouraged Polly and Priscilla, “our latest lovely PCs,” to sit near him at meals so that they “might begin to commune deeply sometime sooner rather than later.” Today at lunch they had discussed the hanging, just completed, of the new upper millstone in Sampo. (James had recently renamed the mill after a cosmic mill in Finnish myth.) Polly had said that the stone—a circle of granite five feet in diameter and ten inches thick—looked to her “like the wheel from the giant gig driven by some ancient race.” James had practically shivered with delight, and placed his hand on her forearm. “Like a chariot, you mean, of the giants hurled into the pits of hell by Zeus! Yes, Polly! I had the very thought myself when I first glimpsed the millstones.” She was happy to be praised by the leader of Glee, of course, but his slavering reaction reminded her of those she’d provoked in certain men at Mrs. Stanhope’s when she would make some passably intelligent remark about politics or literature or art. Or like Ben Knowles on their first evening at Castle Garden, when she’d pretended to know about architecture.
Yesterday James had joined her for the evening milking, since one duty he always assumed for himself was ensuring that novice Dairy Team members knew how to milk properly. Polly had not touched an udder in years. James had put his fingers over hers as she milked, and after a minute declared himself pleased with her touch and the sure rhythm of her squirts into the pail. “Your fingers are excellent,” he had told her. Making small talk as their hands tugged together on the Holstein’s full, warm nipples, Polly had mentioned that she was doubly pleased that certain vegetables had not appeared on Glee’s menu so far. She hated turnips and parsnips, she’d said, and had been taught as a child that for the sweetest milk, one never fed their scraps to cows.
“At Glee,” Jam
es had explained, “you shall never see any turnip or parsnip or radish.” The name of each vegetable he’d pronounced with a mild disgust, or…disappointment, as if he were listing the names of sinners. “Or beet. We eat no root vegetable here. Do you know why?”
“Because you dislike their taste, or texture?”
“Because we pity them. Because they are poor creatures who come to maturity underground, secret and dirty and ashamed. At Glee, we favor the aspiring vegetables that extend themselves upward, straight and true toward the mother sun.”
Except for Timothy Skaggs, who after a few drinks might launch into an elegy for the gallant whale that sacrificed its life for the sake of a reading lamp and a corset stay, she had never heard anyone speak about such an ordinary matter in such poetic fashion. And she understood why at Glee she had eaten so much corn and asparagus, and not a single potato or carrot.
POLLY WAS IN the dairy barn with her fellow members of the Dairy Team, Presence and an older man named Granby, feeding the day’s kitchen waste to Glee’s six cows. Granby stood under the hayloft ten feet from the two women, stuffing wheat stalks into “the dog power,” as they called the new device. One of Glee’s two Great Pyrenees was harnessed inside the ten-foot-tall drum, the huge white dog’s trot on the treadmill spinning a crankshaft that in turn operated a rotary blade that cut the straw.
Presence said that she looked forward this fall to hooking up their churn to the dog power for the first time.
“When does your buttermaking season begin?” Polly asked. She remembered her mother always making the first batch at Thanksgiving.
“Early this year, James says, in September, because now we can buy ice in Greencastle and needn’t wait for the weather.”
“And perhaps add more saltpeter to the recipe,” Polly said, thinking that an extra ration of preservative would keep the butter from spoiling.
“No,” said Granby sharply. “No saltpeter.”
Presence smiled slightly and shook her head. “At Glee we are opposed to such…medicines. As you might expect.”
Polly thought she understood—the community’s approach to health was homeopathic. “If we are starting to make butter as soon as that,” she said, “should we not start soon to give the animals Indian meal and salt to eat?” Every fall, Polly remembered, the Luckings would feed their cow rations of skim milk and salted ground corn to improve the taste of her butter.
Presence nodded. “For the cornmeal, I have already asked at Sampo for a hundredweight. But for salt, we no longer…some at Glee do not favor salt in our butter.”
Granby glowered at her. “The vote was lopsided, Presence.”
“Once you are a consociate,” Presence said to Polly, avoiding Granby’s look, “you may propose at the Conclave that we return to making salted butter.”
The Conclave was the regular meeting of all the members of Glee, at which certain questions of governance were voted upon—whether orange fabric could be used for clothing (no), whether coal oil or petroleum might be adopted as lamp fuels (tabled), whether butter was to be made with salt (no). About more fundamental issues there was never debate.
“Do you feed the cows skim milk in butter season?”
“They refuse to allow it.”
“The Conclave?”
“No,” she said, nodding toward the cows, “they.”
“But if you withhold their water, they drink the milk. As I recall.”
“Yes, but here at Glee, no animal is forced to do that which he doesn’t wish to do. We use no oxen to pull the plow, for it requires a stick or a whip to make them move.”
“And likewise,” Granby said, “the two stallions that pull our wagon are stallions.”
Polly did not take his meaning.
“There are no geldings,” he explained with a proud and slightly angry air, “at Glee.”
Polly wondered how it was determined that the horses and dogs wished to walk in harness when they worked, but decided against asking just then.
37
July 22, 1848
Buffalo, New York
MY LORD,” SKAGGS said as their train pulled into Buffalo’s new brick depot, “it has become a, a—what was your big word, Knowles?”
“Megalopolis.”
The city had tripled in size in the few years since Skaggs’s brief residence. They drove directly from the station to the harbor, where they discovered that the next steamer taking passengers to Ohio would not leave until the following morning. Ben wanted to board a smaller vessel sailing immediately, but Skaggs warned that “those lake schooners capsize every week.” Besides, he argued, the extra day would give them a chance to stock up on provisions. He also had in mind an excursion.
“Excellent,” he said as he took fifteen dollars from Ben. All three men had brought with them every cent they had—Skaggs because he didn’t have much, Ben because he didn’t know whether he would be gone a month or a year, Duff because he thought he was gone for good and didn’t trust banks anyway. “You two boys wash and eat and rest, and I shall serve as quartermaster. I know the requirements of a journey west.”
“And do you plan to make portraits of the shopkeepers?” Ben asked.
Skaggs held his camera case and tripod.
“Who knows what fresh wonders one might come upon?”
HE DID NOT return to their hotel room until after six, hatless and accompanied by a porter and a dozen boxes and packages of various sizes.
Duff smelled hops. “You fell off the water cart, didn’t you?”
Skaggs gave him a dirty look. “I signed no oath, Reverend Lucking. When in Buffalo, one does as the Buffalonians do. And two beers with my old friend Swarr at the Republic does not make me a failure by my lights.” He would leave unmentioned his quick trip by rail to Niagara Falls, and the glass of champagne he had there.
“What is all of this?” Ben asked, a little peevishly, about the mountain of goods.
“I spent half my day bargaining with half the shopkeepers along Michigan Avenue, and this is the thanks I receive from my slugabed partners?”
All of them tore open the parcels. Three pairs of goggles “for dust storms.” A small brass telescope covered with black leather in a leather-covered wooden case. (“I returned the binocular opera glasses,” Skaggs said. “Mother-of-pearl fittings are not rugged enough for trail life.”) Something called Levinge’s apparatus (“for keeping off vermin”) and, “since I am to serve as the physician on this expedition,” quinine, camphor, calomel, bandages, sticking plasters, and, in case Duff had a blue spell, a bottle of Blue Mass.
“I have no need for those any longer,” Duff said. “I am jim-dandy now.”
There was also paregoric (“for diarrhea”), laudanum (“for headache”), and morphine (“in case of injury”). Ben was surprised that Skaggs considered it necessary to pack three different opium derivatives.
And although Skaggs had brought his photographic equipment from New York—the portable camera and tripod, the plates and their sensitizing case, the fuming box and alcohol lamp for developing—he needed chemicals if he was to make pictures on the road. So from the Buffalo chemist he’d also bought mercury, nitrate of silver, iodine crystals, and a dark red liquid with a skull-and-crossbones label. Ben sniffed it and gagged.
“Careful,” Skaggs warned. “That will kill you.”
“Quickstuff,” Duff said.
“Makes the plates more sensitive,” Skaggs explained. “‘Quicker.’”
And he had bought maps—a large new atlas of all the U.S. states and territories (“Including Texas, California, and the Formerly Mexican Lands”) printed on tough banknote paper and packaged in a red leather tube with gold-tooled lettering.
He’d also bought an atlas of the Indian country beyond the Missouri River “Based on John C. Frémont’s Famous & Unexcelled Maps.”
“We are not traveling so far west as that, Skaggs,” Ben said.
“No, but since his court-martial last year—‘conduct to the prejudic
e of order and discipline’!—I’ve had a soft spot in my conscience for Colonel Frémont. And we happen to be precisely the same age, besides. Also, the German at the shop let me have it for a quarter.”
Skaggs unfolded and unrolled the maps and laid them out on the floor, beginning to plot a route. Because Albert Brisbane had sworn to them that Polly’s list of prospective communities included none east of the Alleghenies, the search seemed daunting but manageable: fifteen places in five states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
LIFE IS ALL in the timing.
If Polly had arrived in Chicago a few weeks earlier, before the telegraph line reached the city, she would not have been able to wire her message to Duff, telling him that she and Priscilla were BOUND FOR DANFORTH’S COMMUNITY KNOWN AS LOVELY PUTNAM COUNTY INDIANA.
And if the men had delayed their departure from Manhattan by a day—by even a few hours—they would have received and read the telegram that now sat in a drawer at Duff ’s boardinghouse.
Life is indeed all in the timing, and timing is mostly a matter of luck.
38
July 29, 1848
New York City
PATIENCE! HE WAS a warrior, a man of action, but in this battle, he knew, patience and guile were the required arts of war. From reading Inspector Vidocq, Gabriel Drumont knew well that the scientific sleuthhound must expect to endure frustration. Sweet victory—the second of the English running dogs snared at last, Michel’s murder avenged, France honored—would in the end erase all memories of discomfort along the way.
But he was dispirited nevertheless. This was his tenth day staring at one spot, waiting for one man to step into his sights. It had rained for four of those days, and it had been nauseatingly hot for all but two. And he was sleepy. Every morning except Sunday, he had arrived at the corner and stood at his post until half past six in the evening, attempting to appear nonchalant, eating cake and apples kept in what he had come to consider his food pocket (as opposed to his Baby Dragoon pocket), drinking water from a canteen, stepping a few paces back into the alley when he needed to piss, keeping a constant eye on the front door of the building at 42 Wall, which housed the offices of Prime, Ward & King.
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