The Wreckage of Eden

by Norman Lock

  “Not at all,” I replied with a cavalier gesture.

  “Good,” you said, and I grew annoyed that you seemed inclined to let the matter rest.

  You were aware of the wars being waged in the forest. You heard the alarms raised by red squirrels ambushed in their leafy coverts by the neighbor’s cat. You thrilled to a flicker’s enfilade against a dead elm trunk, to the attack of the broad ax wielded by a lumberman, and, in early spring, to the boom of thawing ice splintering in zigzags across the pond. As our conversation wended, however, I became convinced that the Mexican War could be of little import to one of Miss Lyon’s young ladies. You lived far away from smoke and casualties, except for what a mouse trap or a drafty flue could produce.

  “We put up so many jars of piccalilli relish, Robert! The cauliflower were plentiful. I’ll give you a jar to take home with you for your aunt. How is Miss Winter? I have not seen her in an age. I hope her lumbago does not overly trouble her. Does she still enjoy piccalilli as much as she used to?”

  I played with my stick. I remember how the ferrule gleamed in the light from the parlor window. It made a dazzle amid the heavy furnishings. I was transfixed, and, for a moment, forgot my grievance.

  “What a handsome stick, Robert!”

  “Thank you. It is because of my wound.” I imparted to the word a dying fall in the hope of turning the conversation from cauliflower to Galaxara Pass.

  “I’m sure you were well looked after.”

  “As well as one can be under the most appalling conditions,” I replied peevishly.

  “No doubt you gave a good account of yourself.”

  Wishing to steer the conversation into a flattering light, I’d begun to relate my encounter with Rea’s horsemen, when I veered, according to the mind’s waywardness, toward the subject of Huamantla. I relived the “incident” vividly, as if the town had materialized in the Dickinsons’ parlor. The words that came to me—accompanied by a vile smell, which overwhelmed the pleasant odors of baking bread and pine sap—seemed to belong to Lieutenant Pearson.

  “The Mexicans got what they deserved,” he snarled, or I did. “They’re no better than the mangy dogs they eat.” Looking into your eyes, I realized, gratefully, that the voice, whoever had uttered it, had been heard only in my mind.

  I was not myself, Emily. I’d lost my way while we were bringing fire and the sword to the Mexicans. The sketch that, moment by moment, we make of ourselves had smudged. The coarse language I had used was Lieutenant Pearson’s, although he’d fallen two months earlier in the Atlixco Valley. I gave him water to drink from my canteen as he lay gasping on the parched earth, and, at his end—an agonizing one—I held him in my arms and whispered words of spiritual comfort, in which I did not wholeheartedly believe.

  After Huamantla, I’d broken with the lieutenant, and, at that electric moment when he was about to cut all ties with the living, I did not truly wish him well. I was obliged, however, by considerations beyond personal likes and dislikes. I tried to summon, for the occasion, an image of the glory that awaited him. Instead, I pictured the pathos of the scene rendered in oils, in the heroic style of Watteau’s The Death of Montcalm, transported from the Plains of Abraham to the Mexican Highlands, in the shadow of Popocatepetl. God, what hopeless, hapless creatures we are, whom a housefly can distract from the contemplation of eternity!

  “Robert, would you like some tea?” you asked, ensconced in Amherst.

  I was offended by your cheerfulness; it jarred with my somber fantasy.

  You went into the kitchen and returned with tea and scones, which were, in your case, nibbled at and, in mine, gnawed on—not in hunger, but because of an obscure fury. You went on to give me news of your family, of friends left behind at the academy, and of friendships newly made at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

  “I am mostly shy of people, preferring to bind some few kindred souls to mine than to spread a jam of universal sweetness,” you said, picking a crumb from your plain dress. “A sorority of young ladies can be tedious. I dislike gossip unless it trills.”

  Your voice came from far away, reaching me at the Chapultepec Castle walls, where I’d drifted on the boat of reverie. I tasted black powder; the smoke from musketry and cannon were everywhere thick and noxious as incense. I was kneeling over a dead marine; his chest had been blown open a moment before by a Mexican large-caliber musket ball. My bloody hands had been rooting helplessly inside him. What had I hoped to find? He wore a stunned look on his face. I had thought to see the hope of heaven in his still-opened eyes, but they were blank and staring. Hurriedly, I said the words of my office over him, afraid that he had gone on unprepared for the obligations of immortality.

  I knelt over the lieutenant, the marine, and many others during my nine months at war. They departed this world for some other, as well as lodged deeply in my mind. They had power over me, could disconcert and disturb my self-regard. By my disquiet, I know that I was not entirely the frivolous man that I supposed. I pray that I was not.

  Your voice drew me back to Amherst and the wintry parlor. I arrived with a stinging in my eyes, which had been overwhelmed by the memory of the Mexican sun, which is to New England’s like a gold doubloon to a dull one-cent piece. You had been prattling about your brother, Austin, and your “dear friend” Abiah Root.

  I expect you bristle to read the word prattling. Well, you were not always a sibyl, for whom every word is serious.

  You soon left Miss Root and an encomium on her qualities for Silliman’s chemistry.

  “To think that the world is made of potions, such as a magus or a charlatan would have concocted! I do believe God created the world in Mr. Hooke’s laboratory and, according to Dr. Lyell, spent a dreadfully long time in doing it.”

  You seemed a capricious schoolgirl, yet there was sense in your whimsicalities.

  “For geology, we have Mr. Hitchcock, who discerns ‘the divine character’ in rocks, which were once thought to exist solely to break plowshares and to bruise our heels when, on picnics, we walk barefoot through the grass.”

  “I doubt God would have had the vanity to autograph His handiwork,” I said with the self-importance of a youthful scholar.

  “He must be at least a little vain—his flora is so showy.”

  You begged my pardon and rustled from the room and returned with a notebook filled with volcanoes and antediluvian creatures sketched in your peculiar hand.

  “Dr. Lyell has given Bishop Ussher and his chronology a terrible knock. Abiah will not forgive him for meddling in God’s business, not after having needlepointed, on the finest linen—oh, with such industry!—a motto concerning the seventh day, called ‘rest.’”

  I was too distracted to pretend to be dismayed by your casual blasphemies. I was much like a chess player who, in thinking over his next move, does not realize that the game has been lost.

  “Mexico is blessed with volcanoes!” you exclaimed, as if in praise of fertile plains and navigable rivers. “Amherst, alas, has none, and Father won’t allow an eruption in the house. I must keep myself stoppered and let the lava flow within, or else I will inflame the town.”

  I remembered the serape I had brought home for you. I’d left it in the vestibule, after I had taken off my winter things. I hurried to get it, forgetting to limp.

  “I bought you this in Veracruz,” I said, feeling suddenly foolish.

  You untied the brown-paper parcel and beheld an emphatically red native shawl.

  “Robert, I am a plain New England wren, not a parrot of the Yucatán.”

  You smiled, and I wondered if I ought to feel insulted. You stood and swung the gaudy thing around your shoulders, loosening, while you were at it, a clutch of coppery hair.

  “Shall I walk abroad and shock the town?” you asked, striking a saucy pose. “Happily, the time of feeding witches to the fire is past.” You took off the serape and tossed it on a chair. “I will wave it at Father and, when he charges me, dispatch him with a sword. My words have no e
ffect on him.”

  I must have appeared downcast, because you said with charming self-effacement, “I’m impossibly provincial, except in my imagination, where I will wear your colorful gift as the robin does its red breast and the cardinal his cassock. And when I’m cantering on my night mare down the streets of dear dreary Amherst, I’ll answer the curious with a stately nod of my head like so—a gesture quite in keeping with birds and ecclesiastics.”

  Pleased to see you merry, I laughed at your pantomime of bird and churchman.

  “Shall we walk to the brook?” you asked.

  I inclined my head in what I thought was a fair approximation of a gallant. My manners were not rustic like Thoreau’s, but I suffered from a shyness made worse by a very young man’s infatuation with a girl standing before him with the assurance of a sovereign. You must’ve sensed my discomfiture, for, having started for the entrance hall, you stopped and came back to the parlor again. Do you remember? You favored me by putting on the serape, despite your misgivings.

  “Pray there is no Papageno in the woods,” you said with a smile.

  We took the least trafficked way to Mill River, outside of town.

  “If we are seen, we’ll say we are two strolling players preparing our roles for an amateur theatrical; I am the mad Ophelia, and you, sir, are the brooding Prince of Denmark.”

  I felt buoyed up, Emily! I would have thrown away my dandy’s stick, if not for the lie—no, not a lie, not truly, but an exaggeration. Who among us is not liable to hyperbole at one time or another? Why, isn’t it the very soul of your poetry?

  We entered a thickset woods without a trace of Mozart’s bird catcher in it. Dead leaves, downed in November, crackled beneath our boots. The afternoon was cold, and you wrapped yourself in the serape, draped over a prosaic and far more suitable “Yankee” coat. How exotic you looked in your “plumage”!

  “I’m glad of it, though it alarms the birds and would, were she skulking amid the maples, offend Miss Lyon. But it is warming, and I thank you for the gift.”

  You stooped to pick a milkweed, the sharp edges of its dried pod opened, revealing tufts of cotton teased by winter’s winds.

  “Do you remember when we were here last?” I asked, wanting to move the conversation, which had been brittle as the icy leaves underfoot, toward an emotion—one we two had shared.

  “It was in late autumn; the leaves still clung to the maple trees, though they had turned scarlet and gold.”

  They had reminded you of your mother’s ruby ring, which, unlike the leaves, could not tarnish, although, in time, it would fall from her shriveled finger. What a morbid fancy you have! I’d thought then. I felt a tenderness for you I could not explain otherwise than love.

  “You were entreating me to settle, once and for all, the matter of your vocation,” you said with a hint of sternness, even disapproval in your voice.

  “I was in doubt.” And I remain so, though I’ve learned to live with it as Lord Byron did a clubfoot. By the way, your father did right to forbid his poems in the house. They’re much too sensational for a former student of Miss Lyon’s seminary for young ladies, or so I’ve been told.

  “I feared for your soul and for your poor aunt’s purse, which had shrunk to keep you at school.”

  “Emily, I wanted your opinion!”

  “I was sixteen and not sufficiently grown up to have an opinion.”

  “You are one of the most opinionated young women I have ever met.”

  “And as changeable as a weathercock.”

  “I admired you, Emily.” It was admiration I had professed, but my voice had been sullen.

  “Whatever for?”

  I hesitated, unwilling to admit the source of my regard, which did not lie entirely in an appreciation of your character. “You seemed a sensible, sober girl.”

  “Feathers! You mistook my qualities, which are dominated by a flightiness much less useful to me than to the bird. You wanted me to nudge you into your cassock, Robert, when I scarcely knew the cloth and fashion of my own approaching adult life. You wanted to discuss belief. Why, I was more interested in the heresy of the dragonfly and the beatitude of the moth, which, in trying to put on a halo, scorches its wings in a candle flame. Have you considered the dragonfly, Robert?”

  “No, I can’t say that I have,” I replied in annoyance.

  “It is astonishing to me how it hovers at the border of entomology and mythology. If I could only make myself small, I would saddle one with a hyssop leaf and ride into a dell peopled with satyrs and nymphs. Does one say peopled in the case of chimeras? Or should I have said—to be respectable and Christian, as I was brought up to be—that I would flutter into Eden as it was before the first couple. I sometimes think that if the Garden were ever to be found again, as ancient kingdoms sometimes are by travelers, only ruin and death would remain—except for the birds, which keep canonical hours.”

  I leaned against a maple tree and picked at bark.

  “Their notes never sour, not even those twittered by jays, the most unmusical of the tribe. I should love to visit Brazil and hear the toucans! I would go to Mexico if it were not so perilous. Tell me about the birds of Mexico, Robert—or, if you prefer, the tigers. Are they truly fierce? I know them only from Blake.” And then you recited his poem in a strangely yearning voice.

  “Leopards, tigers, play

  Round her as she lay;

  While the lion old

  Bowed his mane of gold,

  And her bosom lick,

  And upon her neck,

  From his eyes of flame,

  Ruby tears there came;

  While the lioness

  Loosed her slender dress,

  And naked they conveyed

  To caves the sleeping maid.

  “Wouldn’t it be fine to keep a tiger in Amherst and take it walking on the Sabbath while the congregations are preening in their pews? It saddens me to have been born a Calvinist, although the fault’s not mine, but my paternity’s. I would like to have sat on Sunday mornings in the dust-moted gloom and read the stories told in leaded glass. I’d have listened attentively to the lowing of sheep and the stiff wings of archangels beating the crystal air sky blue. I’d have turned a deaf ear to the minister, whose mouth was certain to taste of the coddled egg he’d eaten that morning and whose ears sprouted tuffets in their ‘porches,’ as Shakespeare would have put it. Calvinism is too plain for those who room in a nutshell—the walnut’s, in particular, whose gnarled tenant is said to resemble the human brain. In mine, the Lord’s star is still hanging above the barn, although partially eclipsed by time. How awful to have been born a Hittite and obliged to worship the hippogriff!”

  Your flight of fancy, delivered without pause, left me reeling. I made no answer, because none was possible in that seeming rout of sense. You had managed to drive me off as effectively as if each word had been a stone. I sat on a stump, my stick between my knees, and brooded “in character.”

  You made some noises to a sparrow, and I made a face.

  “What is the matter, Robert?”

  “I didn’t know you spoke Sparrow.”

  You glared at me, and I almost repented of my sarcasm.

  “It is a language more ancient that Egyptian, and the sparrow understood me perfectly. And I won’t thank you for your sarcasm, Mr. Winter, nor for that sour face you’ve put on. There’s enough vinegar in it to pickle a cucumber.”

  “You confound me utterly!” I scolded. “Speculators taking stock of you would soon be bankrupted.”

  I sat on my stump and stewed. I wanted to apologize, but you had driven me nearly mad with your chatter, which, I now suspected, was a fire screen to keep my ardor at a safe distance. You dropped a dead leaf, which winter had reduced to a skeleton, bowed your impish head, and approached me cautiously, like a reluctant penitent.

  “I am sorry, Robert, if I have said anything to annoy you. At times, I can be an irritating creature—everyone says so. More than once Miss Lyon thre
atened to wash my mouth with brown soap. I told her I wouldn’t at all care for the taste and, as to hygiene, I preferred my brush and powder.”

  I couldn’t help but smile: You were so impertinent. What changed you into the Belle of Amherst, wearing a ghostly white dress, in a house you keep to like an anchorite? Where did all the fire and foolery go?

  “For once, Emily, I wish we could talk seriously.”

  “If we must, let’s do so by the water. Rivers are oceans for those who live inland, and nothing sobers like an impression of infinity.”

  We passed in silence until we came to the river, then watched ice floes slip toward their polar destination. Most of the river had frozen; up the next reach, I saw a lone skater tracing figure eights like a schoolboy learning his numbers. But here where it raced and tumbled down a weir in a “mournful solfeggio,” the white-capped water was free of ice. You stood mutely for the longest time, until I began to fret.

  “What are you thinking now?” I asked.

  “American rivers naturally speak English, Mexican rivers Spanish. Did your brain translate them when you were in the ‘infernal zone’?”

  “They . . .” I paused in order to contrive an effect that might endear me to you.

  “And what might they have said?” you asked before I could finish my thought.

  You were looking at me curiously, your head turned to one side like a wren’s, the bird you always claimed to be.

  I meant to tell you that the rivers had talked to me of you. But I did not say it. I said nothing, and you turned away before I could catch the look on your face.

  “Imagine the Rhine speaking in Low German!”

  I sighed, got to my feet, and, taking your arm, began walking toward town.

  You were cheerful, and to act the man I did not feel myself to be, I donned a genial mask. My heart, however, was caked with river ice, or so it felt while the maple trees closed ranks and the creeping vines untied my bootlaces. The hike out of the woods seemed arduous, as if I were carrying a haversack on my shoulders, but it was melancholy and disappointment that oppressed me. In Mexico, I had thought of you often, Emily. But on that winter afternoon, in those woods I had recalled vividly and tenderly, I could think of nothing to say.