The Transcendental Murder hk-1

by Jane Langton

  There was another pause. "I guess they think you're nice," said Homer. His voice was thick.

  "Well, I'm not," said Mary. "Not to them. After a while I start snapping at them and saying waspish things. But they just droop their tongues out and look pathetic and hangdog around again. He left today, thank heavens, to go back home."

  There was another silence. Then Homer changed the subject. He looked around happily. "Look at that muskrat going along over there," he said. "Look at all those ducks!"

  By the time they got back to Mary's house it was dark. At the door Homer pulled her back and started talking huskily, quoting Emerson. "Mary, Mary," he said, "a link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature. Oh, Mary, come on. Aw, Mary..."

  Mary had been kissed before, but mostly by men shorter than she was. It made her feel maternal. (Run along to bed now, there's a good boy.) Being kissed by Charley or Philip was a nose-to-nose affair, like confronted elephants whose long proboscises were always in the way. But this, now, this was different—Mary struggled against it, then gave in, dissolving altogether. Then she struggled again and broke away. The crazy dope was engaged to Rowena Goss. "Oh, go on home," said Mary unsteadily. She pulled at the knob of the screen door. It stuck and she had to kick at it. It wobbled open, and Mary went inside and slammed it, and spoke through the bulge of the screen. "You give me a great big enormous pain in the neck," she said. What a stupid thing to say.

  Homer stood in the dusk, his white shirt heaving up and down. His necktie was the one that glowed in the dark. "You're like the rest of them," he said bitterly. "Like your precious Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Witherspoon and all the rest. Cold as ice. Well, go ahead. Wear a white dress, why don't you, and hide in your room and write poetry. Go ahead. It doesn't make any difference to me. I'm going to find me a girl with some blood in her veins." He turned on his heel and started walking down the road, breathing hard, his white shirt bobbing up and down. Mary went upstairs, lay down on her bed and cried hard. Then she suddenly remembered that they had come home in her car. "Oh, damn," she said. She got up and went downstairs and out of doors, climbed into her car and drove after him. She leaned over and opened the door on his side. "Here," she said.

  He looked at her stiffly, then climbed in. "Holy smoke, turn on your lights," he said. Mary said nothing, struggling to control herself. When she drew up beside his car, he got out. "Thanks," he said.

  "It's quite all right. Good night," said Mary. She sobbed all the way home.

  *51*

  Can't you extract any advantage out of that depression of spirits you refer to? It suggests to me cider-mills, wine-presses, Qc., Qd. All kinds of pressure or power should be used and made to turn some kind of machinery. —Henry Thoreau

  Next day Homer was gone. Charley Goss was held in custody for the preliminary hearing in the Concord District Court. The judge found probable cause to bind him over for the Grand Jury, and he was moved to the jail in Charlestown. Mary forced herself to go and see him. Charley was calm, resolutely cheerful. He had been assigned a lawyer. He felt himself the victim of large forces. "I've always been unlucky, that's all. Some people are born lucky, some aren't."

  "But, Charley, you might as well believe in original sin."

  "Like Jonathan Edwards? Newborn babies hanging over the fiery pit? Well, maybe some of us are."

  He didn't particularly want to talk about his plight. So Mary went back and forth now and then, and passed the time of day. Edith came, too, but her visits irritated her brother, her tongue was so loose and foolish. Rowena stayed home. She was struggling to maintain the dignity and glamor of her position as one of Boston's most ravishing young engaged debutantes. It was difficult, but if anyone could do it with her brother in jail for murdering her father, Rowena could. Mary had discovered with mixed feelings that Rowena's fiance was not Homer Kelly but Peter Coopering, scion of another of Concord's ancient families, an attractive fellow who could be trusted to keep a well-balanced portfolio, play a good game of tennis and wear sensible, conservative ties. Thinking it over, Mary decided that Homer's love-making the other night had been just the result of his being on the rebound from Rowena. She was wrong, but her whole thinking apparatus was upset and running in strange grooves. She was a little bit crazy that fall, there was no getting away from it.

  Gwen worried about her. "She was out in the orchard last night, wandering around in her pajamas with her bathrobe on inside out and her hair every-which-way, singing."

  "Singing?" said Tom.

  "Yes, that Mozart thing they sang at Alice's funeral."

  "Look," said Tom, "I can only worry about one of the Morgan girls at a time, and you're the one I've got my eye on. How do you feel, honey?"

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, don't be ridiculous. I'm fine. But I don't want my lovely Mary to go getting spinsterish and eccentric. Another thing. Isabelle Flower told me that she saw Mary on the subway the other day, you know, the day she went to the dentist, and after the train started up Mary started to laugh, and after a minute she was doubled up, she was laughing so hard, and everybody was looking at her. Isabelle went up to her and asked her what was funny, and she said she was on the wrong train."

  "What's the matter with that? Struck her funny."

  "Well, it's just part of the whole picture. I think she needs a vacation. She's at the library all day trying to do everything Alice used to do and everything she used to do, too, and then at night and Saturday and Sunday she's working on those lady Transcendentalists of hers. Sometimes I hear her typewriter thudding away up there in the middle of the night. And when she's not doing any of those things, she's off to East Cambridge to cheer up Charley. And that's guaranteed to bring on the glooms."

  "Look, stop brooding. I'm going to get the cider press going and surprise John. He's been nagging at me all summer. Do you feel up to washing some bottles?"

  "Don't be silly, of course I do. Grandmaw'll help me after she and Freddy are through with their naps. Where's that long bristly brush we used to have?"

  Gwen loved the look of the roadside stand in the fall. There was bittersweet hanging from the top of it, and on the counter there were chrysanthemums in a blue granite kettle and purple eggplants, green acorn squash, white and purple turnips, half-bushel baskets of Tom's apples, so far just the Cortlands and the Macs. Much of the produce was grown by Harvey Finn, but not the apples, of course, nor the cider. The squash and pumpkins were Harvey Finn's, piled up along the road—the Hubbard squash, so graceless in its shape, so delicate in color, like the lichen on the stone walls that bordered Tom's fields, and next to it the humble screaming orange of the pimpled squash and the mellow yellow color of the pumpkins.

  Gwen scrubbed out the old washing machine that stood outside the cider shed, and got it ready to wash the burlap cloths. Then she ran the hose over the cheese-frames that would separate the layers of ground-up apple pomace. Tom unloaded the boxes of drops he had brought down from Harvard and carted them into the shed. He dumped some of them into the feeder bin. Then he connected up the hose that ran to the big wooden keg, and adjusted the belts on the little motor that pumped the squeezings into the keg. He oiled the grater-motor. He looked around for the 18-ton truck-jack that was supposed to go between the top cheese-frame and the press, and finally found it in the back of the pickup. It was rusty and dusty, so he blew on it, and wiped it off. Gwen trundled John's old metal wagon across the road with two cartons of clean gallon bottles on it, unloaded them and picked up some dusty ones. "All set?" said Gwen.

  "Yup," said Tom. He turned on the switch of the pump, then flipped the toggle on the grater and turned to dump a box of apples in the feeder. There was a most tremendous terrible noise.

  "Jesus X. Christ," said Tom, and he grabbed at the switch on the grater. The racket ceased.

  "Some of those dern kids must have put rocks in it," said Tom. He stepped up on the edge of the press where the words American Harrow Company were painted on and looked into the grater.

  "
Oh, fer..."He stepped down again.

  "Well, what is it?" said Gwen, standing still with the handle of the wagon in her hand.

  Tom, as though he couldn't believe what he had seen, climbed back up again. Then he got down again and turned to Gwen. "I'm sick and tired of it," he said. "I'm just plain sick and tired of having muskets and pistols and machine guns and various odd pieces of artillery showing up on this place and stripping the gears of my machinery. Next thing you know we'll find a howitzer in the raspberry patch and it'll blow us all to blue blazes. I hope it does. I'm sick and tired of it. Those blades have got big bites taken out of 'em. Look at 'em."

  He helped his wife up and she looked into the grater. "For goodness' sake, Tom, it's another old gun."

  "That's what I said, didn't I? I said it's another old gun."

  "But they looked around in here, the police, they looked all over."

  "Yes, but don't forget they were looking for a gun about the size of a canoe. They never would have thought of looking in the grater. It's only eight or nine inches across."

  "Tom!" Remember I told you Freddy saw someone on a horse, he called it a funny lady, someone who broke his balloon—that day, April 19th? Well, suppose it was the murderer, the way we thought—"

  "Suppose it was? We kept our mouths shut to keep Freddy out of it."

  "Yes. but the point is, he was right here, right outside the cider shed. And he broke Freddy's balloon. It's almost as though he wanted to draw attention to his being there—because of the gun—so that the gun would be found right away." Gwen climbed up on the press again and looked at the gun. "Look how big the hole is. That's plenty big enough to have fired a musket ball. Oh, golly, Tom, I'll bet that's the gun that killed Mr. Goss, not the other one. And the murderer wanted it found. Why?"

  "Say," said Tom, "remember those boxes of apples that turned up in the spring, way last May or June? I'll bet somebody brought them to get us to make cider so we'd find the gun right away." He brooded darkly. "Unless somebody's just plain got it in for this farm and all my blankety blank machinery."

  *52*

  Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  "So what do you think of that?" said Jimmy. "And Charley's fingerprints on it as pretty as can be? I'll tell you how I feel, and that's a whole lot more comfortable. The pistol's so small Charley could have stuck it right in his pocket. So the problem we had with Arthur Furry not seeing any weapon is solved. Good boy, for sticking to his guns. Ha, ha, no pun intended."

  The D.A.'s voice sounded tired and buzzy over the phone. "Was it one of Goss's old guns, too?"

  "Sure. It was one of a pair of flintlock duelling pistols he had in that highboy." Jimmy looked at his notes. "Engraved Wogdon and Barton, made in London around 1800. That kind usually came in a case, so they tell me, a fancy case fitted up for two pistols. But Ernie didn't have a case, so they just lay loose in the drawer. So nobody noticed that one was gone. Charley should have spoken up that it was missing. So should his brother, for that matter. And Kelly cussed himself out for not having noticed it. You should've heard him."

  "What about the flint?"

  "Well, of course, this one still has a flint. Which is annoying. The only flintlock without a flint in the whole collection was the musket. But this thing has Charley's prints on it, and the ball fits it perfectly, and it's been fired. The prints were well preserved. That shed's nice and dry, but not too hot."

  "But the musket? What about that? Why did Charley bury that?"

  "Well, that's one of the things we've got to work out yet. We grilled Charley and he said, yes, he'd killed his father twice, once with the musket and once with the pistol. Then he denied knowing anything about the pistol. Said he must have handled it, putting it away the night before, but he hadn't seen it since."

  The District Attorney rocked gently in his chair with the phone tucked against his ear and looked at the beer can he was holding on his stomach. "What about Charley's lawyer? Has he requested a delay in the trial?"

  "No. He wanted to, but Charley wouldn't hear of it. So all we've got is ninety days."

  "Hmm," said the D.A. sleepily. "Don't forget this is an election year. Let's hurry it along faster than that. I'd like to try this case myself, and get a fat conviction before November 4th."

  Miss O'Toole, listening humbly in the corner, raised her eyebrows and looked worried. The last time her boss had tried a court case her elaborate system of communication by notes had proved impossibly cumbersome, and the D.A. had fumbled badly. She would have to think up something else. What about a set of hand-signals? If she touched her hair it would mean, "No further questioning." Putting her glasses on would mean, "Make an objection." Yes, perhaps that could be worked...

  *53*

  Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel. —Henry Thoreau

  The Governor of Massachusetts had called Homer into the State House for a confidential chat. It was a nice day, and Bulfinch's gold dome rose glorious over Beacon Hill. Far below it in his handsome office in the west wing, the Governor was lending his prestige to an inglorious proposal by a certain powerful member of the State Legislature.

  "Look here, Kelly," said the member of the legislature, "I've had my eye on you for a long time. Now I suppose you know how your county leaders feel about that chowderhead, the present incumbent of the District Attorney's office? With this last disaster of his all over the front pages he hasn't got a chance at the polls in November. Now it's my understanding by way of the grapevine that this blunder wouldn't have happened at all if the dumb boob had taken your advice. Now here's what I propose. I want you to resign from the case and oppose him in the party primary. You're a shoo-in. You can't lose. We'll back you to the hilt, all the way."

  Homer refused point-blank, but the Governor poured on oil and refused to take a final no. "Just think it over for a while. If ever anybody was destined for high office in this Commonwealth it's you, Kelly. You've got the right kind of name and at the same time you're a natural for the Brahmins. I don't know how you're going to get anywhere if you refuse the help of your political advisors. Think it over. That's all we ask."

  Homer found his way back to his apartment gloomily. It was a set of furnished rooms on the top floor of one of those large wooden purplish-brown houses seen nowhere in the world but in the vicinity of Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The furniture was a scrappy mixture of Grand Rapids Baroque and Rooming House Mission. Homer walked over to the window of the room his landlady referred to genteelly as his "sitting room," and looked out. Beyond Longfellow Park he could just see some of the sycamore trees along Memorial Drive and a glint of the Charles River. Harvard boys and Radcliffe girls would be soaking up the sun's warmth on the riverbank, more aware of each other than of the books they had brought along to study.

  Damn them all anyway. Homer turned away suddenly and sat down at his desk. It was a skimpy affair with peeling striped veneer. There was an open notebook on it, but he ignored the notebook and stared absently at the wall. Then, abruptly, he wiped his hand across his eyes. It was a new gesture he had adopted in an attempt to sweep away the interior vision of a face, a vision so constant that it was like some celestial phenomenon or ring around the sun. He could shake his head and turn away from the sun, but then the face would rise silently again from the opposite horizon, shining like a sun-dog or bright flaring spot in the sky.

  Oh, the hell with it. Homer took his glasses out of his pocket, balanced the bow that was held on with adhesive tape on his right ear and frowned at the open page of his notebook. Half of the page had been written last winter, before he had had the bad fortune to go out to Concord at all. He read it over.

  The sage himself admitted his inadequacies as a husband, and Henry Thoreau continually shrank from his friends. The indriven ego, the denial of sexual drives, the glorification of asceticism and the subli
mation of emotional frustrations into vague spiritual strivings—it is clear that the transcendental movement in Concord was the febrile outpouring of sick natures as surely as the ravings of a De Sade were diseased at the other extreme.

  Under this firmly written, neat paragraph there was another, scrawled in a larger, looser hand. It was a non sequitur, written barely two weeks ago.

  From Nine Acre Corner to Walden Pond, from the Great Meadows to the Mill Brook, these men and women knew their Concord. They knew it in all seasons and all weathers. And upon these hardy descendants of the Puritans the New England landscape with its white winters, its honeyed springs, its languorous summers, its riotous falls wrought a curious spell. Concord became for them a hallowed place, encrusted with tradition, heavy with meaning, cathedral-like with symbolism. They very nearly invented Nature for themselves, ripping it bodily from the banks of the Sudbury River or plucking it like wild flowers in the fields, and letting it grow from the pages of their journals. Beside Thoreau's woodchuck, what price Shelley's skylark? Who would exchange Emerson's rhodora for Wordsworth's daffodils?

  Homer stared at the second paragraph, then slammed the notebook shut and reached for a cardboard file labelled "Goss case." His phone rang.

  It was Letitia Jellicoe. "Letitia who?"

  "Jellicoe. Miss Letitia Jellicoe. I've been away. I was visiting my sister-in-law. Oh, isn't it terrible. My best friend. Alice was my best friend. I said to my landlady, isn't it terrible. And she said, didn't you read it in the paper. And I said, no, it wasn't until I got home this morning that I heard about it on TV. I was eating breakfast at the time. Mercy, if I didn't choke. There was Cheerios all over my robe."

  "Are you referring to Alice Herpitude's death?"

  "You are correct. And I can tell you something about her that nobody knows but me. She knew something about Elizabeth Goss. Some secret from when they were girls in Amherst!"