The Seeker: A Mystery at Walden Pond

by R. B. Chesterton

  Joe had upended all of that, and the worst part was that I couldn’t say how he’d done it. His touch, his humor, his gentleness. Not one single thing, but the whole of it. I doubted that he was aware of his impact.

  Breathless and weak-kneed, I found myself at the pond. An old stump beside a stand of bare maple trees offered a seat. I dropped onto it, seeking calm by watching the wind ripple the water and send fragments of light to pierce the surrounding forest.

  The woods were alive in the winter sun. Brown birds darted and chirped. Small creatures rustled through the fallen leaves. These familiar sounds of childhood settled over me and my heartbeat slowed. Joe wasn’t part of my future. I had to keep that foremost in my mind. Long ago I’d learned that sexual intimacy did not forge a lasting bond. Pleasure was fine, pain was not acceptable. If I couldn’t control my emotional reaction, I would have to walk away. I inhaled slowly and deeply and willed the tension from my shoulders. I would master this.

  Enclosed by such beauty and stillness, I shifted my thoughts to Thoreau’s attachment to solitude. Had he, too, been a victim of past pain? Had he come to Walden to avoid the tentacles of emotional attachment that so often ended in amputation? He and his brother had courted the same girl, who’d rejected him. And then Bonnie had found him. She’d loved him, and by all readings of her journal, he’d loved her back. Had she undone him?

  Part of my reason for choosing Walden Pond as the place I’d write my dissertation was to allow me access to public records, unavailable online, where I hoped to find evidence of Bonnie’s life before Thoreau. While I knew the journal to be authentic, I had to have solid, physical proof of Bonnie’s existence in this place. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that my revisionist view of Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond wouldn’t meet resistance. Proof was critical.

  Thoreau’s time at Walden and the area was well documented—if inaccurate, since Bonnie was never mentioned. At least there was a sense of history about the man. My only knowledge of Bonnie came from her journal, which encompassed the months, often not clearly defined, she’d spent with Henry. Before that and after, there was no record of her existence. From the journal, I knew she was a flesh-and-blood woman who’d worked as a governess in Concord. That was a good starting point. Surely I could find a record that proved this. I had to.

  After the time at Walden, Thoreau was collected by his family and carted home, only to eventually die, at age 44, of the tuberculosis he’d initially contracted ten years before Walden at age 18. And Bonnie? Did she contract the disease from her lover and die in a New England boarding house? Perhaps she married, but I doubted it. If she had children, none reconnected to the Cahill roots. Or if they had, I hadn’t yet discovered it.

  A jay flitted among the gray tree branches, a flash of blue neoned by a shaft of sunlight. It would be night before long. I’d been woolgathering for nearly an hour. Closing my eyes, I sought a deeper understanding of Thoreau’s pursuit of the delicate relationship between man and nature.

  While he must have loved my aunt, he was, at heart, a man most comfortable with his own thoughts. He understood the darkness in the center of man’s soul. Man destroyed the natural world at a pace that outstripped any other living organism. Thoreau glimpsed the future, perhaps with Bonnie’s help.

  Based on a section of the journal I’d recently read, Bonnie believed she had the power of second sight, a talent I had yet to fully grasp. Granny said second sight did not lead to happiness, that it was a dance with the devil. Had Bonnie seen the future? Did she know her fate, the way her relationship with Thoreau would end? If so, how did she have the courage to go forward and love? That was a battle I’d yet to win. When life taught a person that the worst pain imaginable came from loving, why risk it?

  For a brief time, Thoreau explored love and my ancestor helped him. To the world, he was the most famous virgin of his time. To Bonnie, he was the tender lover, the seducer, the seeker who broke her heart.

  Behind me a stick crackled, and my chest contracted. Not because I was afraid, but because I realized I was waiting for Joe. I anticipated he’d find me gone from the inn and come here.

  I didn’t turn around. The total silence of the woods told me he was near. What did it mean that he’d come? Was it obligation or chivalry or true concern? My pulse rushed at the thought it might be desire. I pretended to be unaware.

  He was skilled at moving silently and swiftly. Faint noises from my left made me wonder if he was moving away. Sound in the stillness of a woods can be deceiving.

  My eyes were not tricked, though. I opened them and saw red streaking through the trees just beyond the edge of the pond. Cold dread drained away any thought of romance. It wasn’t Joe who’d come to keep me company. It was the figure I’d seen near the inn.

  I hit the trail back to the main road where passing cars would give me some safety. As I darted through the trees, dead limbs tangling about my ankles, the red-coated person followed. She kept pace with me. Not coming closer, not falling back. She stalked me. If it was Karla, she would strike before I gained the road.

  To my surprise, she suddenly stepped out of the woods into a slant of sunlight some fifty yards away. I stopped. It wasn’t Karla, it was a child. Blond curls escaped the hood of her red snow jacket. She wore black pants and boots.

  She watched me with the patience of someone much older. She wasn’t hiding—she was out in the open. But at such a distance, I couldn’t distinguish her features. She was slender, and could have been any age from seven to fifteen. I guessed nine or ten.

  I waved, but she didn’t respond. Who was this child that roamed the woods with total freedom? I’d glimpsed her near the inn several times when she should have been in school. Why wasn’t she? And where were her parents?

  I decided to skirt the pond to ask those questions. By the time I arrived, she’d vanished. I couldn’t tell if she’d stepped back into the trees or taken a trail to Thoreau’s cabin. The sun sat on the treetops, soon to ease below the horizon. I’d never been afraid of the woods at night—streetlights didn’t exist in the part of Kentucky where I grew up. But Karla’s attack had unnerved me. I didn’t want to be out in an isolated spot in the dark.

  I took the trail to Thoreau’s cabin. The docent who gave lectures would be gone by now, but it was the shortest route to the main road. When I reached the parking lot, the peaches and mauves of sunset were giving way to cobalt blue. The eastern sky led night’s march, and I made a wish on the first star. I refused to waste it on Karla, so I wished for support from my dissertation committee. If I could focus on my work, I’d leave the Concord area before March.

  There wasn’t a sign of life around the replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin. The child had obviously gone home. It was time for me to do the same. I’d tarried too long at Walden.

  A giggle caught me off-guard. I spun in all directions. Was it the little girl? It wasn’t Karla. The sound had been too young, too filled with mischief.

  “Will you play with me?”

  The question stopped me cold. I pivoted to find the child standing by the corner of the cabin.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” she repeated.

  “Aine Cahill.” My name was no secret.

  “You can call me … Mary or Martha or Mattie or Mabus.”

  I knew the odd name but couldn’t place it. “What are you doing in the woods alone?”

  “Playing. I like to play here in the quiet. It’s where the best things are. Secrets.”

  She stood at the edge of the trees. The lack of light blurred her features. Blond hair, carefully brushed and curled, cascaded down her chest. She was no older than ten. “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “It’s a secret.” She giggled as if she’d told a joke.

  “Come over where I can see you.”

  “Do you like dolls?” she asked.

  “I did, when I was your age.” It was a lie. I’d never cared for dolls. “Did you leave the doll for me?”


  “Someone did. Someone watches you. Someone not nice.”

  The total creepiness of this conversation made me anxious. “Did you see who left the doll?” The child was peculiar. More than peculiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what or how.

  “Someone left a doll for you. Someone did,” she answered in a sing-song voice.

  “I need to head home. Will you come with me?” I couldn’t just leave her alone in the woods with night dropping over us by the second.

  “You live in the cabin at the inn.”

  This child knew all about me, yet I couldn’t even clearly see her. The hood shaded her face. “That’s true. Come with me.”

  “No.”

  “You can’t stay here. Night is falling.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

  “I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

  “You’re silly.” With that she ran behind the cabin.

  By the time I jogged there, I found only emptiness. I circled the cabin. Nothing. It was time to go back to the inn. At least now I had another puzzle to chew on, something to keep my mind off the fact that Joe had never even come to check on me.

  14

  I awoke the next morning with renewed determination to pursue my work. I headed into town, enjoying the fall day.

  Concord prides itself on being the first inland community settled in Massachusetts and the location where “the shot heard ’round the world”—the beginning of the Revolutionary War—was fired. Each street I traveled echoed with the footfalls of war heroes, learned men, Native Americans, and women far ahead of their time, such as my aunt Bonnie and Louisa May Alcott.

  I meant to employ my research skills to find a link between Aunt Bonnie and the novelist who penned Little Women. At the time Bonnie lived with Thoreau, Louisa May would have been thirteen or so. While she was schooled by her father, her world views differed from the Transcendentalists. An activist in women’s rights, she chose to be a nurse in a Washington, D.C. hospital during the Civil War, confronting the battleground horrors in the most brutal way.

  Her beloved novels brought the duties and joys of family life to millions of young readers. Fiction and free-thinking sustained Louisa May. If I could prove that Bonnie Cahill, flouter of social conventions and seeker of love, had known the novelist, possibly even influenced her, I would conquer another academic peak.

  On a more realistic level, if I could find a mention of Bonnie in Louisa May’s work, I’d score a huge victory in proving that Bonnie Cahill really existed.

  In the daylight hours, I could convince myself that I’d overreacted about the encounter with the child in the woods. I’d been upset, my abandonment issues regarding Joe had kicked in. I knew all the proper psychological terms. I’d exaggerated the creepiness of the little girl. In an effort to regain control of myself and my future, I needed to focus on work and nothing else.

  I loved the history of Concord, and the past was recorded in architecture and monuments—the old North Bridge where Revolutionary War re-enactment battles were staged each year, the statue of the Minuteman rendered by the same sculptor who created Abraham Lincoln in his chair at the memorial in Washington, D.C. Exquisite detail gave both subjects life and hinted at their humanity.

  It was to the Concord historical records that I ambled. Tight budget or not, I stopped at the Honey Bea for a stuffed bagel and coffee. I didn’t breakfast at the inn, couldn’t bear Dorothea’s suggestive comments and pointed questions about my night with Joe. I had no good answers. I hadn’t heard from Joe. Not a text or call or whisper. Not a hint that the night had meant anything of the smallest significance to him. The silence triggered insecurities I’d fought hard to overcome.

  Under other circumstances, I might have enjoyed Dorothea’s good-natured teasing and veiled hints at the pleasures Joe provided. Had I been secure in the knowledge that he wanted to see me again, I could take pleasure in the night before last. I didn’t expect flowers and poems, but a phone call would have done wonders for my sagging confidence.

  Granny had warned me that a man’s interest fades the moment he achieves his conquest. My boarding-school romance with Bryson Cappett had left scars both physically and emotionally. Perhaps spiritually. I hated the thought that I might have been a fool—again. It was a hard lesson to learn twice, but such was the Cahill way. I’d escaped the curse, but my past followed me like a shadow as I entered the library.

  Data prior to 1850 were collected in the Concord Registry of Vital Records. I dug up a host of interesting things, but none related to Bryoni Cahill, which was Bonnie’s legal name. I’d hoped, against all odds, that Henry had done right by my aunt and made her an honest woman. Then again, if Bonnie ran true to Cahill form, the conventions of society wouldn’t have meant a lot to her. Not surprisingly, my search showed no record of a marriage.

  And no record of her birth, or that of any Cahill in Middlesex County. I fought back disappointment and a growing anxiety that I might not be able to prove that Bonnie’s journal was valid. I couldn’t allow even the whisper of such a thought. It would take more time and effort, but I would prevail. I didn’t have a choice.

  From all I’d been able to deduce, Bonnie’s branch of the family descended from Daniel Cahill, eldest son of Elikah. That whole branch had returned to their traveler ways and were lost in the miasma of history. No permanent home, no connection to a place, they moved constantly. Babies were born in the wagons they called home. The dead were buried at campsites along the way in unmarked graves. They were ghosts in many ways.

  Granny Siobhan had been reluctant to talk about this Cahill branch of travelers, but she’d told me they survived by hiring out to complete chores that often took more manpower than one farmer could muster. Barn raisings, well digging, pasture clearing—these were Cahill skills. And the womenfolk would laugh and read cards or gaze into a crystal ball to foresee the future of the farmer and his family. The next morning, when the farmer went out, the travelers would be gone with only a cold campfire to show they’d ever been there.

  When I was younger, I’d fancied I saw them. On a chill fall morning, they appeared out of the Appalachian mountain mist. Wagons creaking, horses plodding, they showed up in a flat patch of pasture and camped for the night.

  I told Granny I’d seen them, shadows in the fog, and she’d told me to keep my imagination in check and would hear no more of it.

  Granny loved a good ghost story, and she told me plenty, but none explained the things I saw. I learned quickly, though, that it was best to keep my visions to myself.

  Poring over land records, I hoped to find some trace of Bonnie Cahill’s existence. The journal included dates and specific events I hoped to match up with items in the local paper, but that wasn’t the primary evidence I would need to defend my thesis.

  Knowing the academic world as I did, I expected resistance. My dissertation took aim at a beloved figure of literature, a man whose writing had supported a generation of sit-ins as peaceful protests. Civil disobedience—the hippies took it to heart and changed a nation. While tactics of peaceful protest go far back in history, Thoreau was the father of peaceful protest in modern America. The view of him, alone, wandering the woods of Walden, bordered on sacred. My work would appear to some to be an attack on an icon. The virginal hermit of Walden Pond had consorted with a woman.

  I wanted all the corroborating documentation I could find.

  I searched every record available and could find no mention of a Cahill. The long-ago issues of the local newspaper were on microfilm, and I went through those. There were public notices of Emerson’s lectures, of the school built by Bronson Alcott, of the stimulating school of philosophy brewing in Concord. The dates mentioned in Bonnie’s journal bore fruit, but nowhere was Bonnie’s name included. Though this substantiated the journal to some degree, I needed much more.

  To my surprise, I realized that the Concord of the 1840s was not a small town in the middle of a forest. Mos
t of the forest had been cut down for fuel, with the exception of Walden Pond.

  Thoreau had settled in the one area where his comings and goings weren’t visible to his neighbors. He wanted privacy. Because of Bonnie?

  My imagination conjured them, walking along the rim of the pond. The bright green of new spring leaves unfurled in pale yellow sunlight. I heard Bonnie’s laugh and watched as she grasped Thoreau’s hand, swinging around to face him. His dour, bearded face broke into an expression of delight.

  This was fancy, but I hoped Bonnie had such golden moments with her lover, for ultimately that romance was fated to die a brutal death. One of the latter entries in her journal spoke of the intervention of Thoreau’s family.

  The bitter scene unfolded in Bonnie’s words. Her handwriting, normally elegant and controlled, belied her sorrow and frustration. Henry’s father appeared at Walden Pond and demanded that his son return to the family. Curses and damnation rained down on Bonnie as she refused to step aside. She held her lover’s hand and stood firm against the derision. Thoreau broke, possibly to spare her further humiliation. He acquiesced to his father’s demands that he leave Walden Pond, leave her.

  An entry in Bonnie’s journal followed shortly after that confrontation and Henry’s abandonment of her.

  I hold no grudge or judgment against Henry. He wanted only solitude when he came to Walden Pond. My presence shocked his system, as well as offered the comforts of companionship and the love of an open heart. Together we explored the natural world and the wonders of this small woodland. He taught me of the simple joys of a scented breeze or the bloom of a flower. My gift to him was a way to face the future with courage. I do not believe he now will fear his own mortality. He is a gentle and kind man, and while the balm of love and the nurturing elements of nature have kept deterioration at bay, he is not a healthy man. He would have left me eventually, but oh, the pain of such an abrupt ending.