The Wreckage of Eden

by Norman Lock

  He put his hand on my arm and peered into my eyes. The fierceness had gone from his, and he looked at me with sympathy, even affection.

  “Did you do right in killing him?”

  I shook my head ruefully. “I broke God’s commandment.”

  “If you had not killed this man, would you feel lighter in spirit, untroubled and clean?”

  “I would!” I cried in self-pity.

  “Then you would be just another person who failed to act in order to escape a burden, whether it be fear of censure, punishment, or a heavy heart. To do God’s work, we must oftentimes suffer an unclean spirit and a tormented conscience. That is the sacrifice we make to Him. That is the gift we can give to Him. To endure shame and, if required of us, to die an ignominious death—even if we must endure the intolerable pain of His absence throughout all eternity. This is the measure by which we judge whether we are honest and upright or not. It is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render unto God, even if he be damned for it.”

  “And if we are wrong? Suppose we have misheard God or misunderstood His wishes?”

  “Was the Almighty wrong when He created man, although man turned out to be a bitter disappointment? He could easily have undone His handiwork and destroyed the race, but He did not. He learned to live with us, His greatest mistake, and we must learn to live with ours. And if, in spite of my intentions, Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry were wrong, I will die with them on my conscience, knowing that I acted for the right reasons. I offer Him my errors, as well as my banishment from His sight. And God said, ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ I was hot to do His bidding, and if He chooses to spew me out into the void, it is for reasons of His own, which must be inscrutable to us.”

  He paused and allowed the silence, which rounds out our brief lives, to be restored in the room, in which we waited for morning and the appointed hour when eternity would yawn in the field where the noose awaited, certain of its purpose, faithful to its master, obedient to the forces that had gathered at Charles Town—some to forestall civil war and others to hasten it.

  “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form,” said Brown when the silence had grown intolerable.

  “If only His promptings were clear and unequivocal!” I groaned.

  “You have only to look around you to be certain of His will,” he replied sadly. “Pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit.”

  I would not have been surprised if the night outside the window had suddenly turned to radiant day, so very moved was I by Brown’s faith and surety. Had he been dressed in white instead of a black frock coat, rusty with age, I could have taken him for an angel.

  “Even if you can no longer believe in the efficacy of Grace, in Divine Providence, in salvation and last judgment, in the words of your calling, in goodness and mercy, you must act as if you do believe in them.”

  “Would you like to pray, John Brown?” I asked him in a voice very near to breaking.

  “Pray for yourself!” he said sharply. “Pray for the negroes and pray for the abolitionists—that they will keep faith with their black brothers.”

  “Will you pray for me, John Brown?” I asked, meek as a child frightened by the dark.

  “I will remember you in the next world,” he replied, “and you will do well to remember that we are ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’” And then he wished me good night.

  The next morning—I could not tell you if it rained or snowed or dazzled us with sunshine—“Captain” Brown walked to the scaffold in the purposeful way he had always walked, with his head bowed not in fear or sorrow, but in meditation. Fifteen hundred soldiers were there to see him hang, including, although I didn’t know it then, John Wilkes Booth, a private in the Richmond Greys. I detested them and the curiosity with which they regarded the morbid scene, as though an interesting tableau had been arranged for their entertainment. (The newspapers would call it “picturesque.”) I must admit, however, that I, too, was curious to know how the great man—yes, by now I thought him so—would conduct himself.

  He climbed the wooden stairs that led to eternity, which is quite a different thing from immortality, without an awkward step, a cowed look at us, or so much as a tremor in his hand. I saw Colonel Lee standing erect near the gallows, as if waiting for Brown to fall to pieces. But Brown neither fell nor faltered. He took the gallows like a stage, although he had nothing more dramatic to utter than “Do not keep me needlessly waiting” to the executioner before his stoical countenance disappeared beneath a white hood.

  They kept him waiting a full ten minutes while the military cadets formed up around the scaffold, and then he was dropped like a sack of meal. Instantly, he became a shell, a hull, a void around which the once-living flesh suffers its natural corruption. What Brown did become, in fact, was the match that lit the powder keg that nearly blew the nation to kingdom come. He was, according to Melville, the “meteor of the war.”

  During his trial, the grizzled prophet of the coming night had testified to the nation’s guilt:

  I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled,—this negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.

  –11–

  I TOOK MY CHRISTMAS LEAVE IN AMHERST, returning once again to snow. I stayed five days at Tess’s house and enjoyed Charlotte’s impish company. I had purchased gifts for them in Boston while I waited for the train to depart: a shawl for Tess and a fur muff for the girl, too large for her small hands. At a stationer’s shop on Court Street, I bought you a fountain pen, but, at the last minute, I gave it to Austin. On a table, a pile of books published by Stearns & Company promised to reveal the full extent of what was titled The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, in “a Work for Every American Household.” Where is Savonarola now? I asked myself. I’d have lighted the match and incinerated that hateful work and its author, Mr. Edward Beecher, D.D., a theologian and an abolitionist who believed that the Antichrist resided in the Vatican and wore red satin slippers. Madness!

  I was in a rage that afternoon. I felt I had been burned clean of moral indecisiveness by the white heat of John Brown’s rapture. Surely he had been a god, even if a lesser one. Hadn’t I seen him radiantly crossing night’s immensity when the day that took his life was spent, like the meteor Melville had called him? Didn’t the war come, didn’t the Union triumph, and weren’t the slaves disenthralled—by John Brown, as well as by Abraham Lincoln and his army? None of it, I’m afraid, was Christ’s doing.

  On Christmas morning, I walked to the Homestead. I knocked at the door after using the boot scraper, to give your father one less reason to be harsh. Vinnie showed me to a chair set outside the north parlor’s pocket door. The door was shut. I sat in confusion, wondering if the family had resolved to shun me. Then I heard a rap on the other side of the door, succeeded by two others.

  Rap . . . rap, rap!

  I held my breath in expectation of I knew not what. Some Christmas mummery, perhaps.

  Then your voice arrived from the other side. “Robert.” I felt myself tremble with anger. “Robert, is that you?”

  Exasperated, I nearly shouted. “Are we to converse in Morse or play at spirit rapping?”

  “I seldom see anyone. Upheavals have told on my face, unless the glass lies. Remember me as I was in halcyon days.”

  And then you scratched at the door with your nails!

  “What new mania is this, Emily?”

  “I am the tenant in the wall, nibbling at its heart’s desire.”

  I hammered on the door.

  “Hush, Robert, you�
��ll disturb eternity, which, excepting thunder, is silent!” I stopped, and you said, “If you like, you can court me as in old-fashioned days, when ladies would blush to see a gentleman stare.”

  “I want to see you!”

  “You have my ear, and I have yours. Faces would only confuse—the way an expression tends one way while utterance goes quite another. Words are what is vital between us.”

  I sat in my chair like a schoolboy banished to the corner, sullen and defiant.

  “I’m sick to death of words!” I might have been admitting to a disgust for suet pudding for all the interest you took in my complaint.

  “Austin has told me that you were in Harper’s Ferry and at John Brown’s execution.”

  “That’s right, I was!” I replied petulantly.

  “Was it very terrible?” Your voice, no matter how I strained to hear your intention, revealed neither sincerity nor dissimulation.

  “Not half so terrible as this mockery of yours!”

  My reproach went unanswered or unheard.

  “Mr. Emerson says that John Brown was a great and good man. Do you think so also?”

  I wanted no more of this desultory conversation leading nowhere. I stood and tried to force the door, but you had apparently bolted it from inside.

  “You must not carry on so, Robert! Think of me as a ghost. Are you afraid of ghosts? I promise I shan’t gibber.”

  So this is to be my homecoming, I thought. I had arrived in “Ithaca,” only to find la Calavera Catrina instead of Penelope. I’d expected piccalilli and was to be served sugar skulls by a madwoman in a white dress! No, I was not to be shown even that much courtesy.

  “John Brown would’ve detested your smug reclusiveness!” Had it a voice, an asp might have spoken thus. “Look to his example, Emily!”

  “I would not want such another father,” you said coldly. “He would bid us all drink from a poisoned chalice.”

  “‘Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue.’” I rebuked you, as if I had been standing in a pulpit.

  “Too often I’ve bitten my tongue.”

  Were you referring to a habitual reticence or to epilepsy, the “sacred disease” that once afflicted and inspired the Oracle at Delphi?

  “For Christ’s sake, Emily, speak plainly for once!”

  “The Hindus arrange things differently. You must be reborn as a woman, Robert, and be my sister.”

  Again, I banged on the door with my fist—once, twice, thrice—portentously.

  “The death knock, Emily—the sound you’ve waited all your life to hear. Your ‘Master’ has come with his scythe to harvest you.” It was I who gibbered, by now past caring if your father drove me from the house with his ax.

  “I’ve become an abbess of the Abyss,” you said as blandly as if you were giving me news of the weather or the asparagus. “Soon I will be as alone as God is.”

  “Walk with me into town!” I pleaded, knowing that the moment was near when we would be separated forevermore.

  “Why would I shamble up and down insipid village streets when eternity’s golden minarets shiver at my window?”

  I couldn’t decide if you were shamming, insane, or rehearsing a wretched part you would, by words and will, one day make your own.

  “I heard a bird yesterday whose voice was like Jenny Lind’s. Father disapproves of her.”

  “Why do you allow him to oppress you?”

  “He allows me the morning hours to write my verses, believing no harm can come of it, although he would rather I needlepointed Christian mottoes on fine linen to decorate the prison walls. And for this favor, I make his bread, which he prefers to bakers’ loaves.”

  I entertained the idea of breaking down the parlor door with the chair, as the marines had done to the engine house’s with a heavy ladder. But the splintering noise and chorus of shocked voices from the parlor would have been too much for my nerves. I went to the coat tree, put on my winter things, and strode dramatically out the door and into the snow like Young Werther.

  “Old Brown” would have mocked me for my egotism. I was thirty-six years old; you were twenty-nine; we might have been a pair of sulking children. I was determined to be done with you, and I have neither seen your face nor heard your voice since that December morning. Why you continue to write to me, I’ll never know, unless your purpose is to reduce human intercourse—all society and friendships—to words. Goddamn them!

  –12–

  IN SPITE OF MY RESOLUTION AND A RANCOR that would not quit me, I carried your letters and poems, as well as the daguerreotype, all through the bitter years of war. Rarely were you absent from my thoughts, although they were often unkind. I might have called Amherst home and escaped the bloodshed had you shown me kindness. I did not require love; I would not have embarrassed you again by my former importunity. I wanted—wished for—the mystic chords of affection, to alter Abe Lincoln’s phrase for my own narrow purpose. I wished for a connection—a bond—to another person. Charlotte was too young and too close in blood to satisfy my need for intimacy, and Tess, by then, too dotty. Ruth was dead, and memory is a thin broth of little nourishment.

  During that endless war, whose tokens are, for me, a muddy ditch flooded with rain, a jumble of dead men beside a fence, pigs rooting in shallow graves, green leaves spotted with crimson, gray earth, gray skies, gray bread, gray smoke, gray snow, a hacking cough, musket fire, a fearsome noise like a twig’s snapping, which might have been caused by a bushwhacker or a femur shattered by a minié ball—all through that endlessly harrowing war, I did as John Brown had adjured me. That I did so perfunctorily and believed in almost nothing was beside the point. The emptiness I felt was my sacrifice and confirmation of my place on earth—never mind in a future heaven or hell. I was like a man who is kept upright by his suspenders and his bootstraps, by the starch in his shirt and the crease in his pants. My black frock coat with its nine brass buttons was adequate to the performance of my duty.

  In this way, I endured.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Dear Emily,

  I have wronged you in this effusion as often as I have shamed myself. To my mind, the one cancels out the other, and, by this arithmetic of compensation, we are acquitted—you by me, and I by you. This, at least, is how I choose to think of the matter and—in lawyers’ talk—close the case of Winter v. Dickinson. I have born you a grudge far longer than is good for me and is deserved by you.

  John Brown has been in my thoughts as often as you or Abe. To him, I owe the greatest debt, though I swear I have yet to resolve the moral questions posed by his life and death. He is as mysterious as any other of the workings of God or—for those days in which I do not believe in Him—the universe, drained of meaning and spelled with a lowercase u. I’ve come to agree with Brown that it is better to act wrongly than to do nothing. This conclusion is not sound theology and most likely unpleasing to God’s ear and yours, but it is—at times such as these in which we live—what is required of every man and woman who hopes to do some accidental good in the world.

  I was in Andersonville, in May, for the liberation of the remaining Union prisoners held there. I might have gone to sleep in our time, only to have awakened at the foot of the Pyramid of the Moon, so ghastly were the sights and smells of that most notorious of prisons. I had arrived shortly after the arrest of Henry Wirz, the commandant, who will be hanged in November for war crimes, the only man on either side to merit such an ignominious punishment.

  I could never have imagined the misery that carried off so many. The word hell no longer evokes the childish Sunday school picture of fires tended by devils; instead, I think of Andersonville Prison, its fetid swamp, filthy stream, field of noisome excrement, pestilential mosquitoes and biting flies, shallow graves, and human beings so emaciated that not even a louse would seek its nourishment there. I would not have been surprised to see a skull rack, a bloody terrace, and Mictlantecuhtli, his appetite momentarily appeased, grinning in satisfaction.


  Pray send me some saxifrage for the stone in my heart.

  I have said all that I know to say, Emily. This reminiscence has turned out to be what a man might write in his jail cell while waiting for the warder to usher him onto the little stage where he will perform his final scene. And if, in ages hence, this text should find itself—by the strange ways of accident or fate—in another’s possession, he may not have heard of our bloody affairs. We can only hope—or pray, if faith survives our reckless generation—that the future will be more peaceable than the present and the past have been.

  No man can escape dying. Only a few men can escape a premature death while the body is left to shamble through the dust.

  You once wrote that a life told in words is like a leaf in winter, when all that remains is a tracery of veins—the skeleton of what had been green, generative, and full of hope. These words of mine have cost me dearly.

  Robert W.

  Summer 1865

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As I have done in the four preceding books in the American Novels Series, I acknowledge my debt to the literature of the American past, the “genetic inheritance” of most every American writer, even those in opposition to its mainstream. Like a faith long ago renounced, the American voices that thrilled and moved me in my youth have returned in my seniority—like the story of Eden itself, which held me in thrall as a child and does so still, even if the Garden is a ruin as sad and irrecoverable as Pompeii.

  Time writes its own narrative, which we call history, and history is—in and by time—rewritten according to the excavations and annotations, the memory and forgetfulness of each succeeding generation. History, like fiction, is shaped by necessity. Historical fiction, to which genre this novel most likely belongs, makes its own accommodations with the past. While I have largely cleaved to historical fact, I have enjoyed prerogatives of storytelling, such as anachronism and elision. For example, I have introduced Carlo, Emily’s dog, into the Dickinson household a year before he was acquired by the family and taken him a year earlier than his allotted time. I have given Austin the avocation of painter, when he was, in fact, a connoisseur. Emily’s reclusion, I should point out, did not begin until 1867.