by Norman Lock
The afternoon following my hasty withdrawal from your family parlor, Austin visited me at Tess’s house, where I stay whenever I’m in Amherst. (I write what is common knowledge with us, in case other eyes should happen on these pages.) If you can find the energy, I’d like it if you could visit her. Do you recall the house? The white clapboard one next to the grange. She is getting on in years. Who knows when she will be called to the Land of Canaan? I must believe in the hereafter; the damp earth is unhealthful to lie in for any length of time. Tess always liked you, although she thought you were too skittish.
She let your brother inside—despite her reservations concerning “clodhopping young men”—and we sat in her cheerful kitchen, enjoying the smell and warmth of a currant cake baking in the oven. It had snowed overnight, and the window ledges, fence posts, and garden wall were iced with white frosting—please pardon an obvious metaphor. We should not scorn the obvious thought simply because it occurs to ordinary people not endowed with uncommon faculties.
“Emily asked me to come,” said Austin, as snow melted from his overcoat and trouser legs.
“You’ve been wallowing again,” I said, pointing to a puddle on the floor. He replied with a grin so delightful, I had to laugh. “You’re a walking snowman who should on no account be allowed indoors.”
He handed me an envelope addressed to me in your spidery hand.
“Emily hasn’t been herself. Last week, I brought her home from Mount Holyoke. She was unwell.”
“I hadn’t realized,” I said contritely, “or I wouldn’t have walked with her all the way to Mill River in the cold. You must tell her how sorry I am.”
“She wants to see you before you go. We’ve hatched a plot between us. It’s all in the letter.”
“I’ll read it now, shall I?”
“Yes, she’s expecting an answer by special courier . . . me.” He beamed again—he used to be a jolly fellow, like many of the ginger-haired tribe, whom the advancing years will grizzle.
I gave him hot coffee to drink while I teased the meaning out of your letter. I’ve saved it—well, I have everything you wrote to me, except a bundle of poems lost at Charles Town in ’59.
North Pleasant St.
Tuesday Morning
Dear Reverend Winter,
I write in haste—like any Gothic heroine whose Ogreish father is waiting in ambush for her to commit further Missteps & Misdeeds. I am—as doubtless dear Austin has told you—“under the weather”—a curious phrase, because I cannot imagine being “Over it,” unless I were a Condor or—to be baldly patriotic—the bird stamped on our specie, disliked by Dr. Franklin for a rapacity alien to the Virtues of a Republic.
I will meet you here in two days hence—at the stroke of one, in the afternoon. Be sure to wipe your boots! Father, whose feathers you ruffled, will be in Boston on legal business, & Mother in her room, entertaining her complaints.
In case you have forgotten me, my hair is red, & my feet will be shod in dainty slippers suitable for a Caliph’s daughter. Poor Carlo continues to sulk and has sworn to me in DOG that he will have nothing to do with his assailant, who fancies himself Edward Dickinson, Esquire.
Hush! I hear his footsteps and so must dash——
Your ACOLYTE
I read the letter again to assure myself that I’d deciphered it correctly. Your handwriting is a mare’s tail one needs to curry. Your odd twists and turns of speech and your maddening dashes can confound me; you’re too clever by half for a man like me of no special wit or intelligence.
“Tell her I will come,” I said to Austin, who got into his overcoat, pulled his hat down over his ears, and left with a slam of the door.
The noise brought my aunt into the kitchen, alarmed her cake would fall. “Your friend is a galoot,” she said, having once heard the word used to describe a New Bedford man.
“He’s young,” I said, believing that in youth lay the absolution of youth’s errors. At two months shy of twenty-five years old, I pictured myself as a man already treading the foothills of middle age. The sensation was agreeable.
Aunt Tess took the cake from the oven to cool, bustled militantly as maiden aunts do—kitchen rituals are mysterious to those of us who are served their suppers on a plate—and left with a parting adjuration: “Don’t you dare touch that cake, young man!”
I had more on my mind than cake, however much I loved currants.
I put on my coat and wool hat and left the kitchen, whose inside windowpanes were wet with condensation. I stomped about the snowy yard, too old to make snowmen, not old enough to curse the cold. Young men like to feel themselves on the brink of tragic outcomes. When I was a boy of ten or twelve, I’d stalk a nonexistent bear through a nearby New England wood, pretending it was Lapland or the Schwarzwald. How grand to imagine myself mauled! With my last ounce of strength, I would slay the beast with a sharpened stick and then—succumbing to the elements—expire picturesquely on ground hallowed by my blood, after which I’d hurry home to hot milk and scones.
I walked around town, wishing I had on my uniform instead of civilian clothes, which I wore without distinction. I waved through the window of the barber’s, where the old man who used to cut my hair was stropping a razor. I waved to Mrs. Oliver, who was leaning over the counter inside the millinery shop, where she was buying a bolt of dimity to make summer dresses for her daughters. I knocked on the window of Garrett’s hardware store. Sam stepped outside onto the pavement, wearing his denim apron, as he did at every hour of the day and, for all I knew, wore over his nightshirt, to sell iron hinges and fishing hooks in his sleep. Upon seeing my fancy stick, he asked about my wound. I kept silent, as I knew brave men must, until they get their snouts in a glass of whiskey. He soon grew bored by my reticence and, after nodding farewell, went back inside to his kegs of nails.
No one else bothered to acknowledge my presence. I might’ve been in a sleepy Mexican town while the inhabitants were diligently taking their naps.
I walked down High Street toward the river with no other end in view than to rid myself of nervous energy. In my strange, impatient mood, I felt as tightly drawn as a bowstring or a trebuchet, ready to hurl myself into some vague action. I was angry with your father, but my anger was likely the result of the buffeting my faith and intellect had received while I was in Mexico—assaults, I was sure, that I would not have experienced in a Connecticut or an Ohio pastorate. I remember raging with my stick against the Christmas ferns, green above the snow.
“Mr. Winter, you are an ass!” I said aloud.
I chastised myself for inaction and indecisiveness. It has always been thus: I go forward because it is the only way open to me. Who knows, perhaps my progress—fitful and unplanned—is a delusion. Although I have traveled much and far, in actuality I may have been as bound to one place as you, Emily, are now to your Homestead. I imagine you make a formidable ghost.
What is the place from which I have not strayed?
I do know that it lies inside my mind—or soul, if you prefer the word. What “it” is, however, I’ve yet to discover.
I stood by the weir where you and I had paused two days before. Broken ice swept down the river, sped up as it neared the falls, and then, with a rush, fell down like a boat smashing on the rocks below. Though the drop was no Niagara, the noise of water cascading with its freight of ice was loud enough to drown out any other. A Red Indian could have crept up behind me and taken my scalp or a thief my wallet, which had been fattened by my army pay. I’d meant to buy you something else, after having seen the serape appropriated by Carlo for his bed. I had intended to look for a gift while walking, more or less aimlessly, through the streets of Amherst, but my mind had been distracted. I promised myself that I would get you something before I left for Springfield. But what? The usual presents a young man might give a young woman whom he admired, but to whom he was not engaged, would have probably ended in your sister Vinnie’s dresser, or as a plaything for the dog. You never cared for tawdry stuff
that finds its way into bottom drawers—“cramped hostel for spiders.” Like Thoreau, you would have been happy with an acorn or a pebble.
Hearing a noise, I spun around, almost wishing to see an Indian or a bandit standing in front of me. But I’d heard only a bashful squirrel, whose twitching gray tail I managed to catch out of the corner of my eye before it disappeared into the underbrush.
I thought of you in your room, sitting at a desk no bigger than a child’s and writing, as other women knit, row after row of words—enough by now to fill a steamer trunk, which will never cross the sea, except as may be sent by mesmeric currents to kindred souls. I am not one of them. It pains me to admit it, but I’m not like Sam Bowles or your Mr. Higginson, of Cambridge; I have no appreciation for your crabbed verses, even if I honor them for having come from you—through what storms and upheavals only God knows.
“And what if God is no poet?” I hear you ask. “What if He is a strict grammarian who condemns verses that are not always grammatical, whose rhymes are improper, and whose meaning—like His—is not always clear? At His vast age, I think it likely He prefers Alfred Tennyson to Mr. Whitman, who is too newfangled, and to me, who is too nervous.”
“What do you know of God, Emily? For nearly twenty years, I have been His minister.”
An acorn dropped from on high, making the tiniest of thunderclaps among dead leaves veined with ice.
“You are the vainest man I know, Robert Winter!” you scold me from afar.
Impulsively, I hurled my walking stick into the river. Its gold ferrule gleamed briefly in the winter light before it disappeared. The gesture held a certain glamour that pleased me. Immediately, I was sorry for my intolerable conceit. I got down on my knees and began a prayer that went nowhere, like a letter mailed without a stamp. I stood and dusted the snow from my trousers.
How many times have we beseeched God to make Himself known to us, even if He chose a cat—or Carlo the dog—as His vessel, ignited the smallest shrub, or dropped a shining angel’s feather on the lawn? It does not seem too much to ask of a father—the Father of us all, as is said.
Once, when I voiced that puerile complaint, you replied with vehemence enough to shake your slender frame, “I would sooner expect Father to speak kindly to me or stroke my hair or ask to read my poems.”
Mine? I didn’t really know him; he died of diphtheria when I was two. I recall a big man, his arms matted with dark hair, a cigar whose end was always wet clamped between his teeth. I remember the feeling of his cheek against mine and the chafing bristles of his beard. Little else.
“It’s enough to reconstruct a man,” you said grimly. “Or a beast that smokes cigars.”
Mother died when I was fourteen of cholera. I went to live with her sister-in-law, Tess. So much for the family tree. It has been well pruned by a variety of deaths. At least none of us has been hanged or drowned, shot through the guts or eaten by cannibals. Not yet. There’s time enough for fate, accident, or cosmic drollery to devise an ingenious and uncommon end.
I walked back to town and found that I did not miss my stick at all.
–7–
ON THURSDAY, I WENT TO YOUR HOUSE. When you opened the door, you blushed as if I were a lover instead of a friend. I’d have renounced my ministry to have been the former. You were shy, but bold enough to let me in “without a fig leaf for what the neighbors say.”
“Your mother is asleep?” I asked while I stood in the hall and unwound the scarf from around my neck.
“She’s gone out with Tim, the stableman, to visit Miss Hub, who is sick. When Mother is not overcome by melancholy or illness, she does much good abroad. She is often ‘away’ even when she is at home: Her thoughts will sometimes wander! She is lonely and must find society however phantom.”
“What time will she return?” I asked apprehensively. I did not care to be found alone with you. My heart was in turmoil, and I felt guilty for my thoughts.
“She’ll be at least an hour yet. She’s gone halfway to South Hadley, where dear Miss Lyon reigns over her charges—I nearly said ‘hostages,’ but that would’ve been unkind, which I hope never to be.”
I hung my hat and coat on the coat tree in the vestibule and followed you into the parlor. You sat in Edward’s easy chair “to spite him” and gestured toward the sofa for me to sit.
“Your leg is healed?” you asked politely, glancing down at it.
“Pardon?”
“Your walking stick . . .”
“I threw it in the river.”
“Pity, it was a handsome addition,” you said without a hint of irony or a smile. “You and your stick looked well together.”
I could think of nothing else to say but “Thank you.”
“I’m glad you made a speedy recovery; a wound to the body takes the mind away.”
“What is that you’re reading?”
You were holding a book bound in morocco.
“Oh, it is one of those books you cannot put down for fear the story will go on without you.”
I made a sour face—a plain man can sometimes tire of riddles, Emily!
“Emma,” you said. The name meant nothing to me.
There followed an expectant pause such as an angler senses between the nibble at his hook and the tug at his line.
“Jane Austen’s novel. Oh, if Father were only like dear kindly Mr. Woodhouse! What a heaven home would be! The fire’s nearly famished. Would you be so kind as to feed it? It will take coal, but it prefers wood—its nose is uncommonly discriminating. It is especially fond of apple wood.”
I put wood on the grate and, stooping on the hearth rug, applied the bellows vigorously.
“The fire thanks you and wishes you to know that it will raise no objections if you care to smoke. You may purloin a pinch or two of Father’s Cavendish from the jar. He owes you that much! Was he very rude? Did he hurt your feelings? Do I talk too much? I do, you know, although only when my interlocutor is congenial. You are congenial, Robert, if overly earnest. You must go into the kitchen and pinch some of Mother’s leavening. I do talk too much once the cork is pulled. It is a fault for which Miss Lyon has more than once reproved me.”
I fiddled nervously with my pipe, like an actor with a prop who hopes to hide his feelings for the heroine behind a distraction. You watched my hands curiously while they spilled tobacco onto my lap. I felt myself to be on the wrong side of a row of glowering footlights.
“What would you say to me and have me say to you?” you asked, as if you, too, were an actor preparing for a play—a farce or some nonsense by Goldoni.
I took advantage of your sincerity. “Do you want me to stay, Emily?”
“Yes, but you must slink away like a poor blind possum before Mother arrives home. I would not know how to explain your presence without blushing bright as a cockscomb.”
I was annoyed and said with more acid that I’d intended, “Would you like me to stay in Amherst? I’d give up my commission if you asked me to.”
“I shouldn’t if I were you, Robert. Commissions are not for the asking. Besides, there is nothing here in Amherst to keep you close.”
“I have feelings for you, Emily. Tender ones.” There! The truth was out.
“They say even an earthworm has feelings—they are that common.”
“Wouldn’t you like to leave this?” The sweep of my hand took in the house, Amherst, your father’s oppression, your mother’s travail, and your gradually diminishing circumference.
“My thoughts go with you, and that is sufficient, for they are the better part of me; the rest is naught and fit only to molder here with Father. He is the rasp that sharpens my nails and tongue and the flint that sparks my anger. What would I be without my anger? It is not small, but large, like that of Moses when he broke the sacred Decalogue against a rock. I’ll stay and goad Father and my muse. They seem somehow related.”
“There is nothing I can say to convince you, then?” I asked despondently.
“Keep me in
your thoughts, and I shall get about as well as Mungo Park in Timbuktu.”
The wood on the grate crackled like a volley of musket shot. I felt like a man whose turn had come to stand before a firing squad, which would put an end to the quandary of his life.
“Robert, you are to be spared!” you said brightly. “Be glad I care enough to send you on your way. I can be electric, like the eel that stings.”
I sighed and said no more.
“Shall we view the house, as Father says to lesser folk, like an emperor eager to show off his domain?”
Moping, I followed you into the kitchen.
“Here is a room over which he does not preside, where Mother is at large amid the pots and knives. She is free to admire her preserves sealed in wax, shrouded in dust, and guarded by a spider, which is what became of the dragon and its golden hoard in our modern age. See how richly the peaches glow, and this jar of honey—gold assayed by honest bees!”
You handed me a dusty jar, which I churlishly refused.
“The bees will be disappointed to have their labor spurned. But I’m not the least put out. We are friends and must be tolerant of each other’s moods, which are sometimes dark. Besides, you accepted my gift of piccalilli, which made the cauliflower glad.”
You returned the jar to its shelf, the dragon’s lair, and led me upstairs to your room.
“Here is where I receive nocturnal callers. They bring me poesies while Carlo brings me bones, fleas, and doggerel. One must take care to weigh the souls of those who stand at the door to her sepulcher, as the Egyptian Ma’at did the souls of the dead. I’m sure mine must weigh no more than a feather—I am so unfledged.”
Your room was austere; nevertheless, the cherry desk and chest in which you kept your poems in the dark “like potatoes growing eyes,” the sleigh bed “for visiting polar regions,” and the painted walls that shone with afternoon light like the honey in the jar created a pleasant refuge. But still your demons—“Compulsion & Ambition”—would harry you after the candles had given up their ghost in rising threads of sooty smoke. I doubt you realized then the true nature of your calling, except, perhaps, as a voice insisting—more imperatively as time passed—on the destruction of Father, form, and the wretched play in which you had been cast as ingenue.