by Norman Lock
I left the tent, ostensibly a free man, but I knew I had consigned myself to the prison of self-loathing. How very fortunate Emily is, I thought, to suffer no greater duress than what her gossamer chains impose. Forgive me for belittling your pain. Next to cowardice, self-pity is my most unattractive quality, and possibly my most enduring. At that moment on the wind-scoured hillside, my eyes watering with Mormon dust, I wanted not to be. A funny phrase, but true for so many of our kind. I thought of Shakespeare’s Dane, whipped by doubt. I thought of Judas at the end of his rope. He’d betrayed his Lord. I’d betrayed myself, as well as the trust the church and the army had placed in me. I prayed to God Almighty to make me other than I was, to weld me to a purpose that would please Him.
“Give me back the faith I had as a child,” I muttered, as if it had been He who had taken it. “Make me worthy of your creation. Forgive me for having lied and murdered. Forgive me my vanity.”
If only my fervent wish to be washed clean had not, in time, cooled. If only my heart had not already been excised by the obsidian knife.
HARPER’S FERRY
Remorse—is Memory—awake—
—Emily Dickinson
–1–
“YOU LOOK LIKE A MAN WHO WAS DELIVERED from the belly of a whale, only to find himself washed up among cannibals.”
With those words, you greeted me in the doorway of the Dickinson family “mansion.” We hadn’t seen each other since 1855, but you could not bring yourself to show me tenderness—if not that, then kindness. Always your hand and mouth must do your spiteful muse’s bidding. Carlo wriggled past you and licked my hands, as Odysseus’s dog, Argus, had once welcomed him home from the windy plains of Troy.
“I’ve been in hell!” I said with a jauntiness I did not feel. Men must play their part, regardless of their true feelings, which are often unknown even to themselves.
After the rebellion had been put down, I returned to Springfield and resumed my duties at the fort. In mid-December, I used my leave to visit Charlotte, Tess, and you in Amherst. Your family had moved from North Pleasant Street to a stately house on Main—the Homestead, where you have taken refuge, as if in a storm cellar in the eye of a hurricane.
“You’ve been in ‘Zion,’” you replied. “What news of the Kingdom of God?”
Brigham Young had finally renounced his dream of a Mormon Zion, and the Saints had accepted Buchanan’s pardon for their sedition. Humbled, they had laid down their muskets, sabers, and bayonets fashioned from scythes. In time—where even gods grow old—Zion will forfeit its splendid isolation to western expansion. America’s new frontier will be ruled neither by theocrats nor statesmen, but by another sort of visionary: the plutocrat. Of the three, which will prove the more grasping and corrupt only time will tell.
“No pasó nada,” I said. “It came to nothing.”
“And so shall we all.”
I could think of nothing to say.
“In the meantime, have you brought me some little gift?” you asked in a way that could have been mistaken for flirtatious. “A Paiute blanket, perhaps.”
I reached into my coat pocket and took out a smooth stone, which I’d picked up nearby the body of the dead Mormon, where it might well have lain—obedient to the law of inertia—for millennia.
“A stone,” you said, weighing it in the palm of your hand. “Very pretty.”
“Its name is Urim,” I said in a voice rich with mystical solemnity. “Together with its companion stone, Thummim, it embellished the sacred breastplate worn by the high priest of Israel. Both were lost when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem.” I was enjoying myself at your expense. “Then, in 1823, instructed by the angel Moroni, Joseph Smith unearthed them on a hill called ‘Cumorah,’ some twenty miles from Rochester. Fitted into silver spectacles, they served Smith as lenses, by which he was able to translate the gold plates of Mormon. The stones are said to possess the power of divination. Perhaps you can use Urim to unveil the truth.”
“The truth is too bashful for common eyes, but thank you, Robert.”
I shrugged. “I’m only sorry that the original diamond has long since turned into common quartz.”
“Even Divinity must degrade in such a caustic age as ours,” you replied, gazing at the object in your hand as though it were a precious gem.
The dog barked.
“Carlo, like Mr. Emerson, does not care for dogmas of any kind.”
Having gone into the parlor, I imagined I saw Edward’s stark shadow in the room and felt its chill. As if guessing my thoughts, you said gaily, “The Homestead is too stifling for ghosts, which are fond of damp and drafty houses.”
“How is he?” I asked, sitting deliberately in his chair. There could be no question of whom I meant. There was room in that house for only one “he.” I fancied that I could smell his Macassar oil and cigars beneath the pervasive odors of dog and sanctity.
“Father is always Father.”
And you, Emily, were always the gnome.
“And your mother?”
“Melancholy.”
“And Vinnie?”
“Plump and toothsome.”
“And Austin?”
“Austin sleeps in the tomb next door.”
“And your muse?”
“She raps my knuckles because my rhymes are slant and scourges me for croaking in common meter. I wish I were Barrett Browning. She is an invalid, too, you know.”
“You are not an invalid, Emily!”
“Underneath my stays, I am all rickets.”
My eyes roved the walls of the room and settled on a landscape in oil depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from an Eden resembling an ancient Theban ruin.
“It’s called The Wreckage of Eden,” you said. “I bought it from an itinerant painter who had been to Bedlam.
“‘. . . Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
“Would you like to tell me about Buchanan’s war, which the world calls ‘Blunder’? Now that I am older, my hearing has improved, even though my poor eyes are sometimes plagued by fancies.”
“No,” I replied. “I’d rather forget.”
“As you wish.” We were silent for a time while the dust of time laid down a shroud that not even Margaret, your industrious maid, could stop. “What do you make of little Charlotte?” you asked, breaking the silence as one would sweep away a cobweb with a broom.
“She didn’t know me.”
“She does not remember you. Be patient with her; she’s only a child.”
“I didn’t think I would miss her until I did, and now her mind’s made up against me.”
“Nonsense! She’s a little girl whose mind has not yet been fitted with a head screw.”
You were thinking not of Charlotte, but of yourself. What is your pain or mine to that of someone made to wear the Spanish boot, someone who is drawn and quartered and burned at the stake, or, like Henry Thoreau’s brother, John, dies of lockjaw? What is it to that of the walking dead I’d later see at Andersonville? Or even to the travail of women giving birth to something far more vital than a verse. We are both poseurs, and our lives tableaux.
“I’m in your debt for having looked after her,” I said in lieu of anything self-righteous.
“I hardly did that. I am, you know, too preoccupied by words—those nails, which will not, howsoever I hammer them, seal the coffin shut.”
Then you did the most unexpected thing. Do you recall? You laughed like a bawd, deeply and immodestly. I’d never heard the like from you. And then, just as abruptly, you became the wren—shy and dun.
“When you returned to us from Mexico, there was also snow. We walked through the pine woods as far as Puffer’s Pond. You shook down snow onto me that had been nesting in a bough.”
“Let’s go there now, Emily.”
“Only Eskimos
walk abroad today.”
The room was uncomfortably warm; you’d poked at the fire to make the apple wood spark and crackle. I felt like shutting my eyes. Apparently, I did, for when I opened them, the parlor was empty, except for Carlo, asleep in his wicker bed. I supposed that you had gone upstairs to scribble. The afternoon had passed into evening, and eventide shadows had rolled into the room. Then I heard noise in the kitchen, and, going to investigate, I found you among the pots and pans.
“Father will be wanting his dinner,” you said. “You were sleeping so soundly, I hated to wake you. Mother is upstairs with a headache. Will you stay? We’re having fish. Whenever I eat it, I fancy myself P. T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid.”
I did not feel up to an encounter with your father.
“We wish he would return to Congress and regulate the nation. Father would free the bounden slaves, all except those on Main Street, whom he keeps enchained behind the hemlock hedges.” You fell silent for a moment and then said absently, “And yet he is necessary, should lightning strike; he was a fireman, after all.”
I could not bear to stay a moment’s longer in that house. I could not bear you, Emily.
“I promised Tess I’d have dinner with her and Charlotte.”
You nodded. Did you divine the lie? Maybe so, if Urim were in your apron pocket.
–2–
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AUSTIN AND I went hunting in the woods by Mill River, where, eleven years earlier, you and I had watched ice floes caught in the current slip over the lip of the weir. We took Carlo with us, not to harry squirrels, but to mitigate uncomfortable silences. A dog is an excellent envoy when conversation stalls. When I had last seen your brother, he had been an awkward eighteen-year-old. I didn’t know him now except as a composite sketched by your letters. That morning, traipsing through the snow while Carlo snapped at wind-sown flakes, I was pleased to find Austin grown into a likely and likable young man of twenty-nine. He was competent, a fair shot, and, if not talkative, neither was he dour. There was an element of the grim in him, however; it was not always evident, but a melancholy strain would emerge—a darkness of mood, which seemed a Dickinson family trait. I wondered how he and Sue got on and hoped their marriage was happy. He had been good to Charlotte, who called him “Uncle,” and for this, I was in his debt.
Austin had borrowed the surety of the law; it propped him up just as I had once been by God’s law. By this time, only the starch in my cassock kept me erect. I envied him: The law of men seemed more certain than God’s. Farmer Gilles wants to buy a piece of land. He has it surveyed, assures himself that it is clear of encumbrances, bargains, pays the purchase price, files the deed, and the land is his to keep, sell, or leave to his heirs. There is clarity in the transaction, whereas there is only faith for those who enter into a divine covenant. I believe in little enough, although my cynicism is not ever-present nor my gloom unrelieved. In my ambivalence, I’m like most people, except the saints, who are always in the light, and lunatics, whose day is always night.
Austin showed no interest in the Utah War or in the intervening years since we had last met. His lack of curiosity pleased me: I had no wish to relive them. I’d thought they had been put away for good, until this recollection prompted me to open memory’s drawer and bring the faded images into the light again. Unlike the scent of violet, mixed with the not unpleasant odor of ancient dust that escapes Tess’s opened dresser drawer, memory’s smell can sometimes take one’s breath away.
“Do you enjoy practicing law with your father?”
“It has, at times, its satisfactions,” he replied unsatisfactorily. Well, I had my anthill to moil in, and Austin had his.
We were leaning against the leeside of a granite outcropping, kicking snow from our boots while we caught our breath; walking was hard where snow had recently fallen. Carlo lay on his belly, nosing a chip of wood, unmindful of the cold and wet.
No doubt you will want to know the color of the sky, what sounds the forest made, whether there were squirrels, and, if so, whether they were red, gray, or brown, if a fitful wind sent the loose snow whirling up like wraiths, whether the river groaned above the reach where the ice was thick.
The sky was white, unless it happened to be blue. The squirrels, I think, were gray. The woods murmured, twigs snapped, avalanches of wet snow thudded to the ground, and the river did, on occasion, groan.
“Mr. Emerson is coming from Concord to address the lyceum and will be stopping at the Evergreens,” said Austin. He’d spoken as if he had announced the imminent arrival of Moses from Mount Sinai. “He stays with us whenever he’s in town. Some time ago, Mr. Thoreau was our guest. Father is well connected, as you might expect.” I licked my lips, which the wind had chapped. “You’re welcome to join us for tea tomorrow.”
We roamed the woods for another hour. Austin shot a pheasant. I found that I had no taste for killing birds or small mammals. Carlo chased a red fox, vivid against the snow. Tired, Austin and I spoke fitfully of this and that. I do recall something striking that he said about you.
“Emily would have us all believe she is a captive in her dungeon, when, in fact, she is the warder.”
Although I was curious to know what he’d meant by his trenchant observation, I could not bring myself to ask. I was like someone who happens on a scene too horrible to speak of, even to himself. What would you say, Emily, if you were here in more than just my thoughts?
We trudged home, Carlo worrying the dead bird in Austin’s bag.
–3–
I ARRIVED AT THE EVERGREENS AT THREE O’CLOCK and shook hands gravely with Mr. Emerson. His handsome appearance and boyish smile belied his reputation as the country’s most serious-minded essayist, whose “Nature” I had read in Springfield. Arnold Guyot had also discerned divinity in the natural world, but, unlike Emerson, his opinions were barbed. In the winter of 1859, I could see neither atom nor elephant that bore evidence of God’s handiwork. Having grown tired of His creation, He was an absent landlord, whose tenants fended for themselves.
Emerson was in Amherst to speak at an antislavery meeting to be held that night. Sitting in Austin’s parlor, he talked about John Brown, who, at that moment, was escorting eleven fugitive slaves to Detroit and thence, by ferry, to Canada. Not even a Transcendentalist could have guessed that Brown was also moving toward his Calvary. Emerson read from the speech he intended to deliver at the lyceum. Since you were indisposed at the time, I’ll set it down here.
Who makes the abolitionist? The slave-holder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage passions. And our blind statesmen go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before slavery, and will be after it.
“And what of Pottawatomie Creek?” I asked, reminding Emerson of the bloody affair in Kansas, in which Brown and his followers had hacked to death a handful of proslavery men.
I had accosted the great man in the conservatory, where he’d gone to enjoy a moment’s solitude and the warmth of the sun magnified by the room’s glass panes. I regretted my incivility instantly and asked his pardon.
“Not at all,” he replied graciously. He steered me by the elbow to the library. “Austin tells me you are an army chaplain who has seen the wars.”
“Mr. Robert Winter,” I said, introducing myself.
“The Reverend Robert Winter,” he said, as though to confirm my identity for us both.
I nodded, not wishing to make anything one way or the other of my omission.
“Shall we talk a moment?”
We sat and took each other’s measure. I was careful to hold his gaze, though his eyes bored into mine with disconcerting
intensity.
“It is difficult, perhaps impossible,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “for us to justify John Brown’s actions at Pottawatomie, despite the fact that those who died there were not innocents.”
I nearly reminded him that, as an ordained minister, he could be expected to frown on murder, but I saw the hypocrisy in the reproach now that I, too, had shed blood, whose virtue or viciousness none but God could assay.
“But I believe that history will approve Brown’s act and overlook his method because of the high ideals that prompted him. Brown is an idealist who intercedes on behalf of the voiceless and despised poor—a saint who takes up arms against wicked men. It’s little enough for me to endure a troubled conscience in a cause for which he is prepared to give his life.”
I would soon have reason to remember those words.
“I understand from Austin that you were in Mexico in ’47,” he said, signaling a change of subject.
“And at the beginning of ’48, yes, I was.”
He asked for my impressions of that country, which I gave him. My experience of the Día de los Muertos he found of special interest. He knew about the Aztec rites, of course, but he was unfamiliar with the Mexicans’ macabre holiday celebrated on the first day of November, which, as I have written, impressed me. He was fascinated by my account of Mictlantecuhtli, la Calavera Catrina, the ofrendas, and the sugar skulls, whose taste he was eager for me to describe.
“The Spanish temper can be dark and cruel,” he said. “Spaniards seem closer to death and suffering than most other civilized races. The Inquisition and their abuse of native peoples are proof enough—and who but a Spaniard could have painted Saturn Devouring His Son?”
I said nothing about the burning and looting of Huamantla or our nation’s persecution of the Indians. He would have caught the stink of my hypocrisy soon enough. The discussion of morality belongs to the schoolroom, where it is less likely to offend or embarrass.
My eyes had glazed over, and I blinked to wake them in time to hear Emerson descanting on the Spanish temperament. “When Washington Irving was the American minister to Spain, he sent me a little book on the Inquisition and its instruments of torture. Until then, I had thought my knowledge of men would have prepared me for most anything. I was wrong. I was appalled—stricken—made ill by what I saw in that book. I do not read in Spanish, but the illustrations were sufficient to my comprehension.”