Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  Like now. That silver light made her think of Eternity, perhaps because the silver made the light seem unnatural somehow.

  She crept to the window, crouching before it, her hand on the sill, and peered out.

  Behind their home lay Amherst’s burial ground. The poor and the unshriven slept here, alongside the colored and those not raised within the confines of a Christian household. Oftimes she sat in her window and watched as families mourned or as a sexton dug a grave for a lonesome and already forgotten soul.

  On this night, the graves were bathed in unnatural light. The world below looked silver, except for the darkness lurking at the edges. Something had leached all of the color from the ground, the stones, and the trees behind—yet the bleakness had a breathtaking beauty.

  In the midst of it all, a young man walked, hands clasped behind him as if he were deep in thought. Although he assumed the posture of a scholar, his muscular arms and shoulders spoke of a more physical toil—farmer, perhaps, or laborer. Oddly the light did not make his shirt flare white. Instead, its well-tailored form looked as black as the darkness at the edges of the cemetery. His trousers too, although she was accustomed to black trousers. All the men in her life wore them.

  He paced among the graves as if measuring the distance between them, pausing at some, and staring at the others as if he knew the soul inside.

  Emily leaned forward, captivated. She had seen this man before, but in the churchyard in the midst of a funeral. He had leaned against an ornate headstone, resting on one of the cherubim encircling the stone’s center.

  She had expected someone to chase him off—after all, one did not lean against gravestones, particularly as the entire congregation beseeched the Lord to send a soul to its rest.

  But he had for just a brief moment. Then, perhaps realizing he had been seen, he moved—vanished, she thought that day, because she did not see him among the mourners.

  Although she saw him now.

  As if he overheard the thought, he raised his head. He had a magnificently fine face, strong cheekbones, narrow lips, dramatic brows curving over dark eyes. Those eyes met hers, and her breath caught. She had been found out.

  He smiled and extended a hand.

  For a moment, she wanted nothing more than to clasp it.

  But she sat until the feeling passed.

  She ran to no one. She did no one’s bidding, not even her father’s. While she tried to be a dutiful daughter, she was not one.

  And she would not run to a stranger in the burial ground, no matter how beautiful the evening.

  No matter how lovely the man.

  May 23, 1886

  The Homestead

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  Piles of papers everywhere. Vinnie sat cross-legged on the rag rug no one had pulled out during spring cleaning—Emily had been too sick to have her room properly aired—and stared at the sewn booklets she had found hidden in Emily’s bureau.

  Once their mother had thought the bureau would house Emily’s trousseau, back when the Dickinsons believed even their strange oldest daughter would marry well and bring forth children, as God commanded. But she had not, and neither had Vinnie. Austin had married well, or so it seemed at first, although he and Sue were now estranged, a condition made worse by the untimely death of their youngest child, Gib.

  Vinnie wished Emily had given Austin this task. Emily lived in her words. She had better friends on paper than she had in person. She wrote letters by the bucketful, and scribbled alone late into the night. To destroy Emily’s correspondence, Vinnie thought, would be like losing her sister all over again.

  And yet Vinnie had been prepared to do it, until she discovered the booklets. Hand-sewn bundles of papers, with individual covers. Inside, the papers were familiar: Emily’s poems. But oh, so many more than Vinnie had ever imagined.

  Emily gifted family and friends with her poems, sometimes in letters, sometimes folded into a whimsical package. Her tiny careful lettering at times made the poem difficult to discern, but there, upon the page, were little moments of Emily’s thoughts. Anyone who knew her could hear her voice resound off the pages:

  I’m nobody, she said in her wispy childlike voice. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

  Vinnie could almost see her, crouching beside her window, watching the children play below. More than once, she had sent them a basket of toys from above, but had not played with them.

  Instead, she preferred to watch or participate at a great distance.

  But once she had been a child, with Vinnie.

  Then there’s a pair of us, Emily said. Don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.

  The poems had no date, and Emily’s handwriting looked the same as always. Her cautious, formal handwriting, not the scrawl of her early drafts.

  These poems had meant something to her. She had sought to preserve them.

  Vinnie closed the booklet, and clutched it to her bosom.

  Emily lived inside these books. However, then, could Vinnie destroy them?

  May 19, 1847

  The West Street House

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  The silver light returned four nights later. It was not tied to the moon as Emily had thought because, as she headed up the stairs to her room, she noted clouds forming on the horizon.

  The night had been dark until the light appeared.

  Instead of peering out her window, she slipped on her shoes and hurried down the stairs. Her father read in the library. Her mother cleaned up the kitchen from the evening meal. Her older brother Austin, home from school, sat at the desk in the front parlor, composing a letter. He did not look up as she passed.

  She let herself out the front, simply so that her mother would not see her.

  Cicadas sang. The air smelled of spring—green leaves and fresh grass and damp ground. All familiar scents, familiar sounds. The music of her life.

  The strange silver light did not touch the front of the house. Perhaps the light came from some kind of powerful lantern, one she had not seen that night.

  She stole around the house, her heart pounding. She never went out at night, except when accompanied, and only when it was required. A concert, a meeting, a request to witness one of her father’s legal documents.

  Unmarried girls did not roam the grounds of their home, even if they were sixteen and worldly wise. She was not worldly wise, although she was cautious.

  And now what she was doing felt forbidden, deliciously daring, and exciting.

  She rounded the corner into the back yard. The silver light flowed over the burial ground, but did not touch the Dickinson property. The darkness began at the property line, which she found passing strange.

  But as she stepped onto the grass behind her house, the silver light caught her white dress, making it flare like a beacon.

  She froze, heart pounding. Revealed. Her hands shook, and she willed them to stop.

  She had nothing to be afraid of, she told herself. The burial ground was empty except for the light.

  She tiptoed forward, trying not to rustle the grass. She kept her breathing even and soft. She had seen deer move this way, silently through thick foliage. The grass was not thick here. The yardman kept it trim for the Dickinsons, the sexton for the burial ground.

  Yet she felt as if she were being watched. The hair rose on the back of her neck, and in spite of her best efforts, her heart rate increased.

  It took all of her concentration to keep her breathing steady.

  To walk in a graveyard at night. What kind of ghost or demon was she trying to summon?

  All of Amherst already thought her strange. Would they think her even stranger if they saw her wandering through the graves, her white dress making her seem ghostly and ethereal?

  Something moved beside her. She looked over her shoulder, half expecting Austin, arms crossed, a frown on his face. What are you doing? he’d ask in a voice that mimicked Father’s.

  Only Austin wasn’t there.

  No
one was there.

  She wanted to run back to the house, but she made herself walk forward, to that small patch of ground where she had seen the man four nights before. The graves there were not fresh. One had sunken slightly. Another had flattened against the earth. A third had a stone so old that the carvings had become unreadable. The light seemed stranger here than it had from the window, leaching the color from her skin. She seemed fanciful, a phantom herself. If someone saw her, they might not think they were seeing young Miss Dickinson, but a specter instead.

  Something rose behind one of the ancient tilting headstones—a column of smoke, no!, a man dressed all in black, a cowl over his head, a scythe in his hand.

  Emily fled across the grass, careful to avoid sinking graves, her breath coming in great gasps. She was halfway to the house before she caught herself.

  It was, she thought, a trick of the light, and nothing more. She had expected to see a phantom in the graveyard and so she had—the worst of all phantoms, that old imperator, Death.

  She made herself turn. She was not frightened of anything, and she would not flee like a common schoolgirl from phantoms in the darkness.

  Behind her, the sky was clear, the silver light still filling the burial ground. But there was no column of smoke, no cowled figure, no scythe.

  There was, however, that handsome young man, leaning on a gravestone that looked like it might topple at any moment.

  He smiled at her again, and her traitorous heart leapt in anticipation. But she knew better than to approach him—not because she was afraid of him; she wasn’t—but because she knew once she spoke, this illusion of interest and attraction would fade, and he would see her as all the others had, as intense and odd and unlikable.

  “Emily Elizabeth Dickinson,” he said, his voice a rich baritone. “Look at you. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night.’”

  His use of her name startled her. That he so easily quoted Lord Byron startled her all the more. A literate man, and one not afraid of showing his knowledge of the more scandalous poets.

  She straightened her shoulders so that she stood at her full height, which wasn’t much at all. She knew some often mistook her for a child; she was so slight and small.

  “You have me at a disadvantage, sir,” she said. “You know of me, but I do not know of you.”

  His smile was small. “I know of many people who do not know me,” he said. “In fact, I am astounded that you can see me at all.”

  “Tis the strange light, sir,” she said. “It illuminates everything.”

  “That it does,” he said. “You should not be able to see it, either.”

  He was strange, from his word choice to his conversation to his decision to lean against a gravestone. Was this how others saw her? Strange, unpredictable, something they had never encountered before?

  “If by that you mean I should not be out here among the graves, you are probably right,” she said. “But it is a beautiful evening, and I fancied a walk.”

  He laughed. “You fancied me.”

  She raised her chin ever so slightly. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “I did not mean that like it sounds,” he said. “You saw me four nights ago, and you came to see what I was doing.”

  He had caught her again. “Perhaps I did, sir,” she said. “What of it?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” he asked.

  “Mourning, I would assume,” she said. “I did not mean to intrude upon your grief.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “I am not grieving. I am just visiting my dead.”

  Blunt words, harsh words, but true words. He was a kindred soul. Her entire family constantly admonished her for her harsh speech. But, she said, she preferred truth to socially acceptable lies.

  It seemed, however, that others did not.

  She took a step toward him. His eyes twinkled, which surprised her. Before she had thought them dark and deep, unfathomable. The hint of light in them was unexpected.

  “Why visit at night?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to come here during the day?”

  “Yes, it would,” he said. “But daylight is not available to me. So I bring my own.”

  His hand moved, as if he were indicating the silver light. But it seemed to have no obvious source. If he had command of the silver light, then he also had command of the moonlight, something no mortal could possibly have.

  So she dismissed his talk as fanciful. But intriguing. Everything about him was intriguing.

  He tilted his head as he looked at her. There was a power in his gaze she had never encountered before. It drew her, like it had drawn her that first night. But she was suspicious of power and charisma, much as it attracted her.

  “The real question,” he said, “is not why I’m here, but why you’re here.”

  “We’ve already discussed that, sir. I came to investigate the light.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “But how did you see this light?”

  “Sir?” The question disturbed her, and she wasn’t quite sure why. She certainly wasn’t going to tell him that her bedroom overlooked the burial ground. The fact that he had seen her in her room was already an invasion of privacy no one she knew would approve of.

  “This,” he said, sweeping his hand again—indicating the graves instead of the light? Had she mistook the gesture?—“should all be invisible to you for another forty years.”

  She laughed at his naiveté. Death surrounded them always, didn’t he know that?

  “Death, sir,” she said primly, and saw him start at the word, “is all we know of heaven. And all we need of hell.”

  His smile faded, and so did the light in his eye. “True enough,” he said. “So. Don’t I frighten you?”

  He attracted her; he did not frighten her.

  “I suppose you should,” she said. “But you do not.”

  “Amazing,” he said softly. “You are truly amazing.”

  He stood, dusted off the back of his trousers, and nodded at her, his mouth in a determined line.

  “This meeting is inappropriate,” he said.

  She shrugged, no longer uncomfortable. “I have found that most of what I do is inappropriate,” she said, wondering if she should admit such a thing to a man she had just met. “I did not mean to compromise you.”

  He laughed. The sound boomed across the stones. “Compromise me.” He bowed slightly, honoring her. “You are a treasure, Miss Dickinson.”

  “And you are a mystery, sir,” she said.

  He nodded. “The original mystery in fact,” he said. “And I think that for tonight, we shall leave it that way. Good night, Miss Dickinson.”

  Dismissed, then. Well, she was used to that. People could not stomach her presence long.

  “Good night, sir,” she said, and slowly, reluctantly, made her way back to the house.

  August 16, 1870

  The Homestead

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson called her his partially cracked poetess. He knew, long before he traveled to the Dickinson home in Amherst, that the woman who wrote to him was different. He had many words for her—wayward, difficult, fascinating.

  But none of them prepared him for what he found.

  He arrived on a hot August afternoon, expecting conversation about literature and publication and poetry. He preferred literary conversation; he tried not to think about the war, although it haunted him. He dreamed of boots tramping on damp ground, of neighing horses, and startled men.

  But he woke, panicked, whenever he saw the hooded figure approach, shrouded in darkness, carrying a scythe.

  The Dickinson house itself was beautiful, easily the finest house in Amherst. Two vast stories, built in the Federal style, with an added cupola and a conservatory. Higginson had not expected such finery, including the extensive white fence, the broad expanse of grounds, and the steps leading up to the gate.

  He felt, for the first time in years, as if he ha
d not dressed finely enough, as if his usual suit coat and trousers, light worsted to accommodate the summer heat, was too casual for a family that could afford a house like this.

  But he had known some of the greatest people in the country, and he had learned that finery did not always equal snobbery. So he rapped on the door with confidence, removing his hat as the door swung open.

  A woman no longer young opened the door. Her eyes were bright, her chestnut hair pulled away from her round cheeks. She smiled welcomingly, and said, “You must be Colonel Higginson.”

  “At your service, ma’am,” he said, bowing slightly.

  She giggled, which surprised him, and said, “We do not stand on ceremony here, sir. I am Lavinia Dickinson. I’ll fetch my sister for you.”

  She beckoned him to step inside, and so he did with a bit of relief that this clear-eyed, normal girl was not his poetess. He would have been disappointed if she had been wrapped in a predictable façade.

  The entry was a wood-paneled room, dark and oppressive after the bright summer light. Lavinia Dickinson delivered him to the formal parlor dotted with lamps, marking it as a house filled with readers. He sat on the edge of the settee as Lavinia Dickinson disappeared behind a door, leaving him, hat in hand, to await instruction. He felt like a suitor rather than an accomplished man who had come to visit one of his correspondents.

  Eight years of letters with Emily, as she bid him to call her. Eight years of poems and criticisms and comments. Eight years, spanning his war service and his homecoming, two moves, and changes he had never been able to imagine.

  Still, her letters arrived with their tiny handwriting and their startling poems. He had looked forward to this meeting for months now, had tried to stage it for a few years. But the poetess herself rarely left Amherst and he rarely traveled there.

  His hands ached slightly, and he unclenched his fingers so that he did not crush his hat.

  The house unsettled him; at least, that was what he thought at first. But as the moments wore on, he realized his unease came from the whispers around him, and then something stirring in the air, like a strong rain-scented wind arriving before a storm.