The Seeker: A Mystery at Walden Pond

by R. B. Chesterton

  I knew the story of scorned love resulting in the death of two young people, hard-hearted Barbrie Allen and lovesick William. And I knew without looking that the singer was the child I’d seen at Walden Pond. She’d found me again, and now she waited for me to wake up.

  The cabin was freezing, the fire long dead. I slipped from the bed, dragging several quilts after me and wrapping in them as I made my way to the window. It wasn’t even six o’clock and sunrise teased the eastern edge. Staring out the window, I saw her.

  In the fringes of the trees, her red coat was a splotch of bright color in the monochrome forest. She watched the cabin. Was I meant to help her or suffer at her hands? I couldn’t say, but I accepted the futility of trying to hide from her.

  I dressed as quickly and warmly as I could. The day lightened as I stepped onto the porch and walked to the place I’d last seen her. It was time to talk with her. No more games. No more hound and hare. Whatever she wanted, I meant to find out and resolve it.

  She was gone, of course, and no footprints marred the snow. But she’d left me a present, and this time it wasn’t a doll. In the gloom of the woods I picked up the old tintype. It showed a handsome woman with chestnut hair and pale eyes, her jawline as square as any Cahill in the family tree. Her right hand rested on a child’s shoulder. Only a bit of lace collar and a rich velvet sleeve remained of the child—the jagged edge of the tintype told me the youngster had been deliberately cut away.

  My heart ached, and I realized it was exultation, not fear. I had discovered no information about Bonnie Cahill in the historical record, but perhaps I’d stumbled on a means of connecting with her. My gut said this was her photograph, and it was possible that the excised child might be none other than Louisa May Alcott. If I could prove that, I would prove Aunt Bonnie had been here in Concord and that she did indeed have a connection with the Alcotts. It was one step closer to putting her in the cabin at Walden Pond.

  I gripped the evidence of my aunt’s existence in my hand. It could be no one but Bonnie. Now I had to prove that it was her.

  19

  Instead of working, I walked into town and rented a car. Once on the road that skirted Walden woods, I turned off my cell phone. My quest demanded solitude, and the temptation to keep checking for a call from Joe was too distracting. At Wayland I took Route 27 and followed it south to 95. The once-thriving whaling port of Warren, Rhode Island, was my destination. This was where the Cahills had settled in the mid-1700s.

  I hoped to find some record of Bonnie Cahill. While her branch of the family roamed in the traveler tradition, their central hub had been the New England states that bordered the ocean. This was as good a place as any to search.

  I tried to imagine her in Warren as I walked along the downtown area. I had no success. If Bonnie had traveled the routes I now covered, she left no echoes.

  The scent of salt water slowed me. The smell carried life and also death, the undercurrent of rot and decay. The waves entranced me with their rhythm, the tidal pull. Here the water was calm, but on the far horizon where the brackish bay waters mingled with the saltier Atlantic, the ocean showed her power. I was generations removed from the whalers, but the open water still called to me. I understood in a way I hadn’t before.

  Had Bonnie been born nearby? Had she returned here to die after Thoreau abandoned her? Had the water spoken to her in that seductive whisper?

  The stinging salt wind on my cheeks hinted at the harshness of winter in February. The women of the whalers often struggled for three to five years without their men. They boiled water in the yard to scrub clothes with lye soap they made themselves from rendered hogs. They chopped wood for cooking and heat. They baked and cleaned and schooled their children, knowing the boys would sign onto a ship as soon as they were old enough. They lived most of their days without men.

  They were a colony of widows, for all practical purposes. In those households the sea was the wife, and the wife was the maid and caregiver. Not much of a life for a woman, but then that was true for almost every life. Jonah had not remarried, but that didn’t mean he failed to have a woman who kept his house and warmed his bed for the few months he put into port.

  Jonah’s sons married and produced children. I imagined these women, all pregnant simultaneously because their husbands had returned from the sea just long enough to fill their wombs with a child. Women carried on the line. They kept the home fires burning while their men spent weeks and months chasing whales they meant to butcher. Such a life was incomprehensible to me. I could find not a single speck of joy in such an existence.

  The cry of the seabirds, so much more demanding than the woodland wrens that wintered in Concord, brought up images of my ancestors. I could clearly see Jonah standing on the prow of his whaler, the Badb. He was a massive man with shoulders as wide as an axe handle. Standing with him, his sons were as powerful as their father. Granny painted them so—bigger than life. Tough and fit and capable. They, too, were scavengers. And predators. They demanded and took what they wanted.

  I turned my back on my long-dead ancestors and headed to the heart of the town. Boat building and whaling had once been the mainstays of the Warren economy. Now the harbor was jammed with fishing vessels, but those after seafood, not whale blubber. It was a sunny day and the town was alive with folks tending to their chores. I enjoyed the sea breeze and the sun on my shoulders as I walked through downtown and several residential areas.

  Any trace of the land belonging to the Cahills was long gone. Granny Siobhan had told of weathered houses that faced the stiff breezes lashing off the Atlantic and up the bay. I walked the picturesque streets and imagined a time when the roads were rutted dirt and horse-drawn wagons carried the spoils of the ocean up the incline to the town. It would have been a hard life, for sure.

  In the town archives I found the record of the property owned by Jonah Cahill and his sons. I photographed the line of spidery writing that proved my past. Jonah was listed as a shipmaster. He had no wife and only sons. Granny’s oral history proved remarkably accurate. Amazing so many facts had passed down through the generations.

  Once I’d found what I could on my own, I asked the clerk for help. She sent me to the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Bright sunlight warmed the day, and the idea of a drive along the edge of the bay pleased me. Hill people, as my family is described, know creeks and swift rivers. The vast expanse of the ocean is alien. But I had the blood of Jonah Cahill, whaler and pirate, in my veins. The bay winds whispered freedom to me.

  As I drove across Fall River, I wondered if I would ever truly know my heritage. Did anyone? Some families were documented in portrait and deed. Some bloodlines inspired permanent records. Little about the early Cahills had been written down. Bonnie’s journal was an anomaly.

  I found a quiet coffee shop in the New Bedford downtown and pulled out my laptop. I’d been told in Warren to check the American Offshore Whaling Voyage registry for the Cahill vessels. Granny had spoken of the Badb, the first of Jonah’s fleet. I’d researched the name and knew it was that of an Irish shape-shifting warrior Goddess. Appropriate for a ship used to lure other whaling vessels to their demise.

  Sure enough, the Badb was listed as “lost on the Minerva shoal.” I knew that to be false. Jonah had re-fitted the ship and used her to run the British blockades under the name Bridgit.

  All told, the Cahill Clan had run five whaling ships, and I found the registry for each one. Their fates were “lost at sea,” “wrecked on shoals,” “sold to a foreign land.” The entries that interested me were the ones for ships Jonah had likely scuttled. Many were listed as lost at sea or burned. That much was true, but it wasn’t the hand of God that sent those men to their watery graves, it was my ancestors.

  I didn’t have a printer with me, so I saved my research and packed up for the walk to Johnny Cake Hill and the New Bedford Whaling Museum. As I strolled the old downtown, I had the strangest sense someone was watching me. I turned around several time
s, wondering if Joe had somehow divined my whereabouts. Wishful thinking. No curious eyes met my search.

  Above the door of the museum, Moby Dick floated. The great white whale drifted in and out of my life. Some would call him an omen, others a sign. But of what? Change? Death? New opportunity?

  Those answers were unsatisfactory, even to me. I stepped into the museum and immersed myself in the days when whaling reigned supreme.

  My appreciation for the courage of the whalers grew as I toured the half-scale replica of a whaling vessel, the Lagoda. The bones of the blue whale, Kobo, dwarfed me. But it was the videos of the ruthless, savage pulse of the kill that brought fully home to me the bloodstock I descended from. Economic necessity could never justify such cruelty.

  Before I left the museum, I calmed myself by viewing the paintings and glasswork. When I happened on a display of scrimshaw, I took a moment to learn that the sailors on whaling vessels, at sea for such long periods, used knives and needles to scratch the scenes into whales’ teeth. Umbrellas and corsets were made from the whale’s bones.

  Most scrimshaw scenes showed ships or sailing themes. The intricate ivory carvings were rubbed with soot or gunpowder to make them stand out. Scrimshaw—a way to pass the time. In our society, people played video games or watched television. What would our culture leave behind?

  In the glass case displaying scrimshaw, I caught the reflection of the child. She stood perfectly still, behind me, watching. But when I whirled around, I startled one of the docents but found nothing else.

  “Where did the little girl go?” I asked. I’d seen her in her red jacket, long blond hair hanging down the front from beneath a hood.

  “What child?” The docent was a middle-aged man with a mutton-chop beard.

  “She was there. Just inside the door.” I pointed.

  He checked the hall in both directions. “No one there,” he said.

  “Did you see her?” I couldn’t drop it, though I knew he was growing uncomfortable.

  “I didn’t see anyone.” He left me to pursue another chore, or perhaps he wanted to escape a seemingly desperate woman with a fat lip that showed some connection to violence.

  In the gift shop I bought postcards of whaling vessels and whale sightings, and old drawings of bearded shipmasters who looked as weathered as the unpainted wooden houses that took the full brunt of the sea’s winds.

  I had not found Bonnie, but I had found Jonah and a strangely visceral link to the past. I could consider it a good day’s work. I had no proof or documented statistics, but I had something better, emotional truth. I had begun to know Bonnie. We were becoming friends.

  It was a straight shot up 140 to 24 and west on 495 until I reached the feeder roads that took me back to the Concord area. The drive gave me plenty of time to think what life must have been like for the Cahill clan when they first arrived in America. The death by starvation of Jonah’s wife and daughters turned him into a man incapable of compassion but fully capable of murder. He took what he wanted, without regard for the cost to others. Had he been shaped by fate, by the disaster of a freezing winter and a lack of money to buy passage to America for his entire family, or was the ruthlessness part of him long before tragedy marked him? Impossible to say. But I saw clearly the talent for bloodletting in my uncles and cousins in Harlan County. They killed because they liked it. They ruined the lives of everyone they touched, because it didn’t matter to them.

  Images long repressed—desperate men willing to trade their wives or children for a few pills. Women who thought nothing of selling their bodies for a fix. Oxy and meth, the seeds of destruction for the poor and uneducated. Granny Siobhan—I owed her a lot. She’d stood up to my father, forced him to send me to boarding school. She’d never allowed me to return for summers, only a handful of holidays. I’d barely had time to unpack my suitcase, kiss my father’s tear-stained cheek, and eat a meal before she had a driver to take me to the bus station and the long ride back to the school.

  Yet she’d written me long letters detailing the history of the family, recounting the mishaps and jailings of cousins, the violent acts of revenge, the feud with the Dunagans that claimed a dozen men on each side, and the births of distant cousins, some of them so damaged by the drugs in their mothers’ systems they couldn’t breathe on their own. She counted it as the interaction of a merciful god when they were taken. She told me these things because she never wanted me to return. Her love was like the sea, blowing me far away from the Kentucky mountains.

  I drove through the winter landscape, the bare red and white oak trees a fringe of gray lace on the horizon. My day spent near the ocean had ignited a yearning I’d never known before. From water life rose, and to water we’d return. I’d heard the saying often enough, yet I’d never felt the pull of the tide and wind as I had today.

  My first memories were the treetops singing as the Kentucky wind came over a hilltop and down into our valley. The music of waterfalls, where the bright creeks cascaded over boulders and fallen trees, was my childhood companion. I knew the rocks underfoot as I explored, barefoot in the summers, along a pig trail through the woods, far safer than I’d ever been in a city. Isolated yes, but books provided the only entertainment I needed, and they also gave me a chance to escape for real.

  I missed those long-ago summer days when the sun beat down on a hot, flat rock where I could lie and tan my arms and legs, longing for the kind of life I read about in magazines where teen girls worried about zits or leg hair or make-up. My childhood centered around lazy searches for honey or berries through small fields and copses of leafy trees that cast a cool shade.

  The longing struck me so suddenly that tears filled my eyes. I missed Granny, and I even missed my drunken father who, though ineffective, was often kind. I was distressed to discover I couldn’t clearly picture him. It was as if the alcohol, which numbed his wit, had also blurred the edges of his features into a fetal image that might be human or sheep.

  Only sheer will beat the tears back as I turned down the drive to the cabin. I was supposed to return the rental car, but I couldn’t. My emotions were raw, my longing for home writ so clear in my eyes that I’d pay the extra day for the use of the car and return it tomorrow. I wanted a glass of wine and my bed.

  20

  The cold and a pounding headache woke me at three a.m. The overturned wine bottle on the floor told its own story. I’d drunk the whole thing, eaten no supper, and stumbled into bed by eight o’clock. Duty folded beneath drunkenness, and I’d forgotten to bank the fire. In my alcohol haze, I’d also failed to properly close the door. It swung open several inches and then closed on a gusting wind. No wonder I was freezing.

  Nausea hit like a hard fist in the gut, but I managed not to vomit as I made my way to the door and closed it. I was too hung over to worry with the fire. Instead, I limped back to bed and buried myself in quilts.

  I returned to consciousness at lunchtime, when Patrick appeared with a tray. He came into the cabin and closed the door with a thud.

  “Dorothea stopped by this morning to give you a message, but she said you were out to the world.” Dimples gave him an angelic countenance. “She sent a bit of the hair o’ the dog.”

  I groaned and burrowed beneath the pillow. “Aspirin.” I could barely push out the word.

  “Drink this.” He eased the tray on my desk and offered a Bloody Mary sporting a straw. “Take it.” He pummeled my pillows to sit me up. “It’s freaking freezing in here.”

  I forced myself to sip as he rebuilt the fire. The spicy tomato mix jolted me awake. Soon, a blaze jumped in the fireplace. The cabin warmed quickly. Against all common sense, the vodka did seem to make me feel better. No wonder my father started each day with a mug of whiskey—to chase the whiskey he’d drunk the night before.

  Patrick perched on the edge of the bed. He looked me steadily in the eye, and then his hand grazed my cheek. “You look a mess, Aine Cahill.”

  “Dying couldn’t be worse.” His laughte
r made me smile.

  “You’re a poor excuse for a hard-drinking woman.” He picked up the wine bottle. “One measly bottle put you in your bed?” He tsked. “That’s sad, woman. You need more practice.”

  “I need to take the car back to the rental agency.” My brain was beginning to function. My budget didn’t allow for extravagances like rental cars sitting unused.

  “It’s just now noon. They don’t close until five, and I’ll follow you there in my car and bring you back.”

  “Thank you.” I wasn’t ready to move. Not yet. The nausea had gone, but my stomach still wasn’t steady.

  Patrick retrieved the tray and set it across my lap. “Eat the toast and hash browns. Starch is good for a hangover.”

  “Sounds like the voice of experience.” He wasn’t old enough to be an authority on hangovers. Or sex. But he’d demonstrated his abilities.

  “I’ve had my share. It’s part of the testosterone experience. You know, you have to prove your manliness in high school, which generally means lying about sex and drinking too much.” He kissed my palm. “I won’t have to lie about sex ever again, since I met you. If I told the whole truth, I’d be voted the luckiest man in the world.”

  Even though my head throbbed, I had to laugh. “You’re full of the very devil, Patrick Leahy. Someone taught you the gift of blarney.”

  “And you love it, don’t you?”

  The truth was, I did. Patrick made it so easy. And fun. Not serious and responsible. Nothing permanent could possibly be struck with Patrick, and therefore there were no expectations. “Dorothea will be wondering after you.”

  “It’s my lunch break.” He built a fresh fire and lit it as I ate.

  He might be lying or he might be telling the truth. I only knew that the drink made my head better, and the food had settled my stomach. Due to excess drinking, I’d lost half a day’s work. I had no more time to squander.