by Norman Lock
“Go get Sam Staples,” shouted Henry.
I hurried into town and brought the sheriff back with me—the morbid and the curious trailing noisily behind us like the rattle of a snake.
Later, at Anderson’s Market, where Henry and I had gone to buy flour, lard, potatoes, and candles, village men were vociferously airing opinions on how the Carlson boy, missing since fall, had come to be in the pond. Some believed a renegade had murdered him and put the body into the water before it froze. Others suspected the Irish ice cutters because of their allegiance to the Roman church, which wished all good Protestants harm. Henry snorted at this latest proof of the lunacy and prejudice of vox populi.
“They tell a story hereabouts of an iron chest lying at the bottom of the pond that can be seen, on occasion, floating toward shore before it sinks out of sight again,” said Henry while we were crossing the Mill-dam on the way back to our woods. “Water has reasons of its own; the things of the natural world carry on as if humans had not yet been thought of—as if God had ceased in His creation before Adam, who, according to Scriptures, was made after the fashion of a brick.”
Henry’s misanthropy was never more pronounced than just after the drowning, as though a seam had opened inside him, wide enough for a vein of ice to clot. It may have been there since the death of his brother and required only this latest proof of God’s indifference and men’s spite to chill his genial spirit.
One night at the end of winter, while I was inside my hut, reading by candlelight from Abraham Rees’s The Cyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, lent to me by Emerson, the boy’s father shouldered open my door with a crack of splintering wood. He was well beyond sobriety, appeals to reason, or caring whether or not there was one negro less in Concord. Experience had taught me that safety lay in silence. Carlson had an ax, with which in peaceable days he used to cut down trees. It would serve, as well, to cut down a man.
“Did you kill my boy?” he snarled, spittle dripping onto his unshaved chin.
I shook my head sadly. “No, sir, I did not.”
I pitied him his loss and, in spite of myself, admired his violent love. If my own death could have resurrected the boy and turned his gray face to the rosy tints of childhood, I would have laid my head upon the table and bid the father chop.
The lamplight shone upon the blade of his ax. Carlson rocked on his heels like someone under the strain of a great uncertainty: Would he give way to despair or to desperation, emotions that led to quite different ends? The hut seemed choked—or rather, I did, as though the flue had been closed and the smoke from the stove had begun to spill out into the narrow room. Carlson appeared bewildered as Abraham was after God had demanded the slaughter of his son. He dropped the ax; I heard the dull sound of its striking the floor. I beheld it as if it were the sacrificial knife, or a relic of holiness. It was only an ax, dulled by the flesh of trees. Carlson slumped in my chair—he was welcome to it. I moved to get Hawthorne’s whiskey, but repented. The man had had enough—more than enough would not have consoled him. Nothing could console him. I could read that much in his stricken face. I hesitated, wanting to put my hand on his arm, but I was afraid and put it in my pocket instead so as not to be tempted to comfort him again.
After a while, he stood, picked up his ax, and left without a word or even so much as a glance at me. He had already returned—in Emerson’s phrase—to his “private music,” which would be ever after sad. I set the door roughly in the broken jamb. Too shaken to rest, I sat up during much of the night and read from the Book of Psalms. I remember this verse from the forty-ninth: “My mouth shall speak of wisdom; and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding. / I will incline my ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp.”
Only the month before, Henry had played the “ice harp” with stones thrown, one by one, onto the frozen pond. Air, trapped inside its icy chambers, resounded in an eerie music. That night in my hut, I imagined a dirge played in the place where the Carlson boy had drowned—a lugubrious melody of stones falling on frozen water.
The next afternoon when I returned from Emerson’s house with a book by Audubon for Henry, I found my cabin door had been mended.
Thereafter, I would always think that a tincture of death had stained Walden Pond as tea leaves do water when they are brewed.
“Death is in the pond,” I would say to Henry, as if I still believed the stories I had heard as a child from Haitian slaves of the supernatural world, in which the Loa dwelled.
“Nonsense!” he would reply, his voice raised in impatience.
Even now I think about that boy staring walleyed through the frosted window at the sky under which he used to play, tramp hills and meadows, climb the ancient trees, walk to school, to church, to town, to Walden Pond, at every season of the year, for the handful of years that had been his. I picture him caught in a net of rank bottom weed—chained up in it—while the pond freezes over. Later on, a disturbance beyond even Henry’s power of audition unshackles him and sets him wandering, dreamily, through Walden’s icy veins. Even now, long after he was raised from the water through a hole in the ice chopped by his father, I sometimes imagine him on his way, passing through underground sluices into the Assabet, the Concord, and the ocean, where he is swimming still among a silent host of drowned mariners. And I could never see the fields painted red with sorrel in June without remembering with a shudder the frozen bit of scarf.
II
DESPITE THE SMALL SOCIETY of Concord to which I was admitted, I felt lonely. I knew no one well. My acquaintances, thus far, had been of the white race. The difference between us could not be forgotten, however much it might be ignored. I wanted to talk to another black man. To have done so as a free man, albeit a fugitive, would have been as if to speak to another of my people for the first time, without inhibition or fear of the lash. We would be free to like each other or not, according to our different characters and temperaments. We would have been two persons instead of a pair of barely distinguishable beings on the order of beasts, maltreated and despised. Finally, I asked Henry if he knew of another negro living in the vicinity.
“There’s old Jake, who mucks out the livery stable, but I doubt you would have anything in common beside your race. Arnold Knowles, elder son of a carter, lives out on the Cambridge Turnpike. And Joseph—I don’t recall his surname, if I ever knew it. He’s a dogsbody at the printer and engraver’s and stays with his sister and her brood out by Little Goose Pond. We tilled Hawthorne’s garden before he and Sophia moved into the Old Manse.” He paused and then said, “There are a number of negro housemaids hereabouts. . . .”
He glanced curiously at me. He would not have known how to leer, and would never have pulled so indecent a face, if he had. Henry’s manners were rough because he considered them superfluous to living, but his mind and heart were sound.
I had seen Jake bent over a horse’s hoof to rid it of a stone. I had seen the carter and his son driving down Main Street, the wagon sagging on its leaf springs under a load of barrels. I had never thought to speak to them. But Joseph, who apprenticed at the printing shop, might be congenial. He had been manumitted when his owner, thrown from a horse that had been struck by lightning, freed his slaves, lest God Almighty’s aim improve. So we became acquainted.
“You are Mr. Emerson’s hired man,” said Joseph during our first encounter.
“I can expect nothing better,” I grumbled.
I was indulging in self-pity like a man in a tub of hot water after weeks of roughing it. I have been guilty of feeling put-upon and aggrieved. I would like to blame my disgruntlement on hardships suffered in my youth, but I suspect it has more to do with weakness.
“Better a hired man than an enslaved ‘boy,’” Joseph replied tartly.
I did not care for his remark, which I considered rude to one who had taken him into his home and confidence. I could be patronizing, only I could not see it. In those days, I was often blinded
by resentment that would flare up like phosphorus on a matchstick.
Joseph chided, “You make yourself small, Samuel, if you can’t admire good people who also happen to be white.”
He was right, and I would have blushed for shame had the color of my skin allowed it. But his reproof had irked me, no matter that it was well-meant and deserved. I stood and turned my back on him. I remained thus until I heard his chair scrape against the rough floorboards, his heavy tread making for the door, and the door open and softly close. He left without another word. I hated him for having risen above shouting and the melodramatic slamming of the door. He had not goddamned me, although I had deserved it and, in his place, would have goddamned him.
Emerson would have done better by Henry to have hired the “dogsbody” to look after him. Joseph understood, as I did not, the difference between service and servility. The former can be dignified; the latter must be hateful and abject. Perhaps I was too young to have made such a distinction: I was only twenty-two or -three; the date of my birth is a mystery, as it is for most of my people. I do know that I came into the world during one of the coldest of Virginia winters, when water froze in ditches and in washbowls.
I kept to myself, avoiding Henry and Emerson both. Sitting in my cabin, I could hear the pond ice begin to crack. While the days lengthened and the sun grew near, the ice would shrink, together with the continents of snow on fields and meadows from Pine Hill to Mount Misery. I could hear the crack of rifle fire, too, as hunters stalked rabbits, squirrels, deer, and canvasbacks arriving from the Chesapeake to nibble our pond weed. I also heard a thin music coming from Henry’s cabin; he liked to play his flute while standing at the window overlooking the pond. Regardless of his assertion that he could teach me nothing, I knew that I had much to learn from him, but, at that time, I preferred ignorance to a disciple’s veneration.
THE DAY CAME WHEN I WAS SICK of my own company and ashamed of my peevishness. I was, as Henry had said of me, “well on the way to misanthropy.” What is your reproof, I thought, but the pot calling the kettle black? “Solitude should be a temporary retreat from society, but not a substitute for it,” he went on to say. In any case, I had neglected him and was determined to pay him a visit in his cabin.
The lowering sun was turning the pond water to gold when I set out through the copse from Bare Peak, where I had my dwelling. Three days of rain had beaten the ground into mud. Enraged by my trespass, squirrels chittered and jays jeered. Something rustled furtively in the grass. Wading unseen among the pond’s reeds and rushes, a bittern made a noise like a stone falling into a well.
“You have an ear for native songs,” Henry had once said—as handsome a compliment as one was likely to hear from him.
I had replied, “Anyone who has worked in the fields and woods from before the sun has risen until after it has set, week in and week out, year after year, with only the shouts and curses of the driver to fill his ears, will end up listening intently to the sounds of unfettered nature.”
I write those words now, but I could not possibly have said them then. In truth, I cannot recall what words I had at my command. It was long ago. I have read mightily since my year in Walden Woods. I have wrestled with Emerson and Thoreau. I have chewed on such dry morsels as Mr. Whately serves in his Elements of Rhetoric. I have read most everything by Edgar Poe, Herman Melville, and by my old friend Hawthorne, with more pleasure than I have taken in the essays of my two erstwhile mentors.
“Reading is our recompense for having only one life to live,” said Emerson—or maybe it was Hawthorne who said it. Memory is treacherous like pond ice when it has begun to thaw.
I knocked at Henry’s door; his cottage had only one. The house was quiet, except for what sounds a house will sometimes make when the atmosphere changes, the timbers clench, or the dirt underneath grows restless. I put my ear to the door and strained to hear a noise betray a human presence within. All was silent.
“Henry! Henry Thoreau!” I shouted, knocking harder. “Are you all right?”
I heard a muttering that I could make no sense of it, but I was sure the voice belonged to Henry. I opened the door and went inside. Unlike me, he did not keep his door locked. I kept mine so because of the novelty of having one to lock, with none in the small world of Concord to forbid it.
Henry lay abed under blankets, shaking with fever. Damp shocks of his brown hair lay pasted to the high forehead; his color was hectic; his lips were chapped and bitten, his bluish gray eyes unnaturally bright.
I leaned over him and called his name. He was elsewhere. Anchor weighed, he was adrift in the current that carries us into the country of the sick. From snatches of a tune he sang, he must have been on the Merrimack with his brother, John, in their homemade boat. They had traveled together, during the summer of 1839, fifty miles down the Concord River and onto the Merrimack.
Delirious in his sickbed, Henry sang, “Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, / The rapids are near and the daylight’s past!” And he would talk to Ellen Sewall, who stayed at the Thoreau boardinghouse when she visited her grandmother, Mrs. Ward. Henry adored the dark and pretty girl from Scituate.
I filled a washbowl, mopped his feverish brow, and wet his lips. His sunken cheeks made his beak of a nose more prominent. He thrashed about, trying to lift his head from the damp pillow.
“Water,” he said in a voice like sand.
I gave him some.
“Ice,” he said. “I’m parched.”
The ice had gone from Walden. The nearest icehouse was at Fresh Pond, on the road to Boston. I thought of the icemen and their cold harvest shipped by boat to the Carolinas, New Orleans, to Calcutta and Bombay to chill a rich man’s sherbet.
“I’m dying of thirst,” he said, licking his cracked lips.
The philosopher lay helpless against the body’s overthrow, while the ice that had grown all winter outside his window was slaking the thirst of a plantation owner or a maharaja.
Suddenly, I recalled the ice at Long Cove, left by Tudor’s men because of imperfections that would have made it unprofitable to haul to market. Packed with coarse meadow hay and roofed over with boards, the ice, or some remnant of it, might have survived into the spring. I hurried through the darkness to the cove, carrying with me Henry’s mattock and a wooden pail. Wrenching off a board, I found enough ice to fill it. By moonlight, the inert block looked dull. In sunlight, it would have been green.
Is it not strange that water left standing will turn putrid but if frozen will stay fresh for a thousand years? Might it not mean that ice—water’s coarser nature—is, in actuality, the liquid element’s transfiguration, partaking of eternity? Henry’s thoughts, not mine.
I carried the pail to the cottage and, with the ice, made compresses, which, in a short while, checked Henry’s rising temperature. I changed his bedding and clothes and cleaned his thin body. I had cared for my former master’s children, performing small intimacies that, if they had not been sick, would have gotten me hanged. On several occasions, I tended Jeroboam when he had been drunk. Next morning, he would be especially severe with me for having witnessed his humiliation. Ministering to Thoreau that evening, I felt again the shame of Noah’s son Ham, who had seen his father drunk and naked and had been cursed for it.
I fell asleep in Henry’s chair, with his journal open on my lap. I had been reading nothing more interesting than a page of bookkeeping concerning the cost of his having set himself up in the woods. I found the prosaic entries restful. One cannot always be bogged down by ethical and philosophical speculations. I would have welcomed a novel by Sir Walter Scott or Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.
In the morning, Henry was only a little improved. I gave him iced water to sip and left him to rest while I searched among the brambles for the blackberries he loved, but it was still too early in the season. At the pond, I encountered a boy carrying a fishing pole. I gave him a one-cent piece, which satisfied him, and sent him to Emerson’s house.
“Tell M
r. Emerson that Mr. Henry is sick at his cabin. Tell him Samuel said he was to come, please, if he can.”
Lidian arrived instead, bringing elderberry syrup and cold red sumac tea, a sovereign remedy for fever and chills. She had also brought a bottle of barley wine “to fortify him.”
“Mr. Emerson has gone to Brook Farm to inspect the damage.” The main house of the Transcendentalist utopia founded by George and Sophia Ripley and Hawthorne had caught fire the month before. “He won’t return until tomorrow. I thought I should look in on Mr. Thoreau.”
Lidian Emerson was a slight woman—some would have called her gaunt—and in poor health ever since the scarlet fever. It had left her head feeling “hot ever after.” She would not indulge her maladies, but fought beside her husband for his causes. Henry was drawn to her like a needle to a lodestone. I greatly admired her simplicity and strength. What is more, she called me “Mr. Long” or, sometimes, “Mr. Samuel,” with a regard that was affectionate and sincere. She was not one of those women of the Concord sorority who hid an atom of condescension behind an unfailing show of politeness toward negroes.
“He’s been asleep this last hour,” I told her while she pulled off her gloves.
She laid a competent hand on Henry’s brow. She had nursed her own four children in sickness, and, one of them, Waldo, she had watched as he embarked on the sickness unto death. She was satisfied by the treatment I had been giving Henry.
“You’ve done all that can be done, Mr. Long,” she said matter-of-factly. “The crisis is past, and I don’t believe the doctor need be sent for. Will you stay until he is well again?”
I felt momentarily put-upon but relented when I realized that it was for such a mischance as Henry’s illness that her husband had installed me in his woods.
I nodded in the affirmative.
“If he should take a turn for the worse, please send word to me at Bush, and I will bring the doctor.”