A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  “In his diary, Pepys mentions having seen the game for the first time, played in St. James’s Park, during the reign of Charles the Second,” said Emerson, taking obvious pleasure—or refuge—in pedantry.

  “I’m going after sand cherries,” said Henry, rising from his chair.

  “I’ll come, as well,” I said, wanting to be away from there.

  “That leaves three to play,” said Lidian.

  “A sufficiency of ardor is better than a superfluity of lukewarm interest,” said Emerson as pithily as if he had rehearsed his remark. He may well have done so in his shaving mirror, while he stropped his razor that morning, and had been waiting for a suitable occasion.

  “Well said, Waldo!” Henry shouted as he started across the lawn toward Mill Brook on his short legs—“the legs of a galoot,” Henry called them in becoming self-deprecation.

  Following after him, I heard Hawthorne’s mallet strike the heavy ball with a click.

  “To knock a wooden ball through an iron hoop is no good reason to keep one’s gaze fixed upon the ground,” said Henry. “But to delight in a shell, a stone, or a blade of grass . . . There’s divinity in it. Waldo wrote in Nature, ‘God dresses the soul, which He has called into time.’ I think he dresses it in grass. Waldo’s chamber hardly needed ventilation, Samuel, no more than his thoughts do. He is the chanticleer of a new morning, while I am only a gamecock digging in its spurs.”

  I stood with my eyes on the brook, sullenly defiant.

  Henry broke into a laugh worthy of a schoolboy who had pulled a prank.

  “Whatever your reason, Samuel, it was well done and probably needed doing, if only for your soul’s peace.”

  He squatted beside a low bush and began to pick the ripened purple fruit—one for his mouth and two for his hat. Thus would prudence always outweigh self-indulgence in him.

  “I don’t know why I did it,” I muttered.

  “You know perfectly well! But I’ve wasted enough time on the subject and you, no doubt, in brooding on it. It is too fine an afternoon to rake over yesterday’s coals or to put ourselves under an obligation, for courtesy’s sake, to send a little ball hissing though the grass toward a dubious end. I’d rather blind man’s buff or snap the whip than pall-mall, even if a king of England once played it.”

  I took off my shoes and washed my dusty feet in the brook. Laying my head on a flat gray rock warmed by the sun, I stared at unraveling clouds, wishing that I might see an angel—or a devil. One would be as good as another to prove an afterlife. Henry joined me and offered me his hat, from which I ate a handful of tart cherries.

  A muskrat waddled over the brook’s dry margin, disturbing the reeds and tall grass before slipping nonchalantly into the brown water. While Henry had not missed its comical progress, I saw that his mind was elsewhere.

  He spit out a pit onto his palm and, showing it to me, said, “To each is given a hard, irreducible core where what is essential to him resides. Some call it the soul, others a man’s character. The next time you don’t know who you are, Samuel, remember the cherry and its stone.”

  “Why must you always draw lessons?” I asked petulantly. “Why not let things be themselves?”

  It was fine for the seers to have spoken in riddles, for Jesus in parables, and for His disciples in tongues, but it was a wearisome habit in an ordinary man.

  “What can you expect of a pencil maker?” Henry said with a snort of self-derision.

  My self-righteousness collapsed, and I laughed.

  “Cato Robbins says you’re a fool.”

  “He’s right: I am a fool.” He took a wooden flute from his pocket, piped a merry tune, and danced. “All the wisest men have been so.”

  He pocketed the flute and headed toward the river and the site of the Old North Bridge. I followed at his heels; he had power over me, fight against it however I might. We stopped at the obelisk erected ten years earlier on the east bank of the Concord, half a mile beyond Egg Rock. The bridge was gone; only the stone abutments remained, spotted orange with lichen. Henry took off his straw hat and mopped his brow with his sleeve. Then he recited Emerson’s hymn in a tone of voice whose irony verged on irreverence.

  “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

  Here once the embattled farmers stood

  And fired the shot heard round the world.”

  “The echoes of that shot can still be heard,” said Henry, joining me on the bank. “At the Nueces River, in Santa Cruz, Tucson, and in the Sonoma Valley. Mr. Polk is getting himself a western coast, some copper mines, and God knows what else for America to fatten on. Waldo, of course, got himself a famous patriotic poem.”

  Henry held with Dr. Johnson that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

  I rubbed my hand against the obelisk, relishing the roughness of its granite stones.

  “I dislike monuments; they’re falsities ossified into a semblance of truth. This obelisk bears the same relation to facts as this morning’s coddled egg did to the hen that laid it.” He picked up a stone and held it as if it were that egg. “Obelisk indeed! What does Egypt of the pharaohs have to do with Concord?” He gazed at the stone as though he hoped to find an answer there. “I was mostly in earnest when I allowed Sam Staples to jail me. It was a self-important gesture, but it was also a conscientious one. The two can be difficult to disentangle. The truth is, Samuel—since we seem to be concerned with it at the moment—one’s motives are seldom pure.”

  He threw the stone into the water and watched the ripples spread toward the limit of their influence before merging in the river’s atoms.

  “Why do ripples come to an end?” he asked of the water, since his gaze was on it and not on me. “Because Sir Isaac Newton tells us so? Is it not reasonable to believe instead that they carry on throughout the universe in another form? In Corinthians, we are told, ‘. . . it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.’ A corpse is made incorruptible by the action of the spirit, but the principle must apply to all matter—even to a ripple of water: It, too, must enter the rarefied dimension where it can no longer be perceived but exists nonetheless. If only in our conviction.”

  Bored, I began to play with my jackknife.

  “‘Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. . . . In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine. . . . But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.’ Waldo wrote that somewhere or other—God bless his prolixity.”

  All of a sudden, Henry looked like a man whose stomach had soured, and, turning his back on the memorial, he said to me, “We think too much.”

  “What do you think about love, Henry?” I asked impulsively.

  In our private, mutual history, I had seldom been bold enough to ask Henry a question whose answer demanded more of his intellect than the plane geometry he used in land surveying, which fascinated me. Subjects like love, regardless of their universality, had seemed beyond my ken.

  “I can tell you what the ancients thought of it and the opinions of a few of our modern poets. Their words are grains they happened to choose for their poetical conceit because they made a pretty sound or figure, but I suspect that the grains they overlooked are nearer to the truth of love. In any case, I cannot presume to answer you, Samuel, having no real experience of it.”

  “Nor have I,” I said truthfully, knowing that my encounters with Zilpha had incited in me emotions too simplistic to be called by that most complex of human feelings. “I have had only carnal experience.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me. I’ve known neither love’s balm nor its tumult, only its fretfulness.”

  W
e left the ruined bridge and walked south along the river into the village. At Shattuck’s store, Henry bought a bag of barley sugar sticks.

  “To rid our minds of the sour taste,” he said, handing me one. “A candy to sweeten the garlicky cud of thought.”

  We wandered through the village. He stopped at the jailhouse and insisted on showing me where he had been lodged, a guest of the county—board included. He took me upstairs to the cell that had been his for the night and pointed out its amenities and lines of doggerel scratched by former inmates on the plastered walls. A man wearing a torn coat was snoring on a cot, while the gold light of evening, barred with shadows, fell across his toothless face.

  “I passed a pleasant night here,” said Henry, as one might say of a deluxe hotel in Boston or Philadelphia. “I was sorry to leave it.”

  “Evening, Henry,” said Sam Staples, arriving at the top of the creaking staircase with the jangle of keys and of tinware on a tray for the inmate’s supper. “Keeping out of trouble, I hope.”

  “I hope to disturb the peace regularly in this world and—if practicable—in the next,” said Henry, smiling broadly at his erstwhile warder.

  “Well, see that you don’t do it in Concord,” said Staples placidly.

  We continued on our way, past the bank, the fire insurance company, and the Unitarian meetinghouse. Henry could not resist making one of the ironic observations of which he was so fond.

  “The columns of the Concord Bank are fancy Ionic, those of the Unitarian meetinghouse plain Doric. They both hold up the porch roof.”

  We passed by the barber’s, the milliner’s, the haberdasher’s, and the blacksmith’s. The blacksmith in his leather apron—his face looking scorched as a piece of char cloth—paused in his hammering long enough to denounce Henry as a “woods burner” and a “jailbird.” At Mill-dam, Henry stopped to shout a raucous “hallo!” to the coopers. They waved their caps in answer. He clambered down to Mill Pond and discussed a question of bait with an angler whose worm seemed unable to whet the appetite of any fish. Henry and I went as far as Sudbury Street and the Fitchburg Railroad. We followed its tracks southerly, bruising our heels like the very devil on the stones, until we came to Stow Woods.

  “Let me pay you a visit, Samuel,” said Henry, his weather-beaten face hidden in the shadow of his hat.

  His visits to my cabin had been few. We walked through the darkening pines, the fallen needles soft beneath our boots, the air redolent of turpentine and clamorous with birds.

  I unlocked my front door. Henry held his tongue concerning my attachment to property, my jealousy of things, although there was no property to speak of and certainly nothing to guard. We went inside. He took one chair, and I the other. There was no first- or second-best one. We sat awhile in silence—that is, neither of us spoke; the rumors of a summer’s night were borne in to us by the rising breeze, which was conversation enough. Henry took off his boots like a man making himself at home. I took off mine like a man at ease with a friend.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked him finally. He was my guest, and, besides the barley sugar sweets, we had eaten nothing since Mrs. Emerson’s sandwiches and rhubarb pie. “I have some cheese and bread.”

  “Thank you, Samuel. I’ll take some of both.”

  Eating allowed us to be silent awhile longer. I did not know whether Henry was saving an observation or polishing an epigram in his mind; he was not usually reticent. While I enjoyed an intermission in what seemed sometimes to be a play without an interlude, I grew anxious, watching the darkness slowly engulf the room. When I could stand the suspense no longer, I blurted, “Was there something you wished to say, Henry?”

  “No,” he replied without a trace of ill humor or, for that matter, curiosity.

  I was puzzled. Unlike Hawthorne, whose mouth might have rusted shut for all the use he made of it, Henry could “talk the ears off a field of corn,” as Alcott used to say.

  He stood, brushed bread crumbs from his lap, stepped to the window, peered out at the sumac bushes, and sat down again.

  “I loved my brother, John,” he said wistfully. “Perhaps more than anyone else. It was a great happiness to have him at my side. Our trip on the Merrimack and Concord was the summit of my life. He ought not to have died.”

  I almost said something, but I realized that I was overhearing a monologue; that, in my little room made spacious by the night, which tends toward infinity, Henry had forgotten me. He was with his ghosts, while I sat in the dark like a maggot in a tin of meat.

  “Why am I fashioned so? I am ugly as Hephaestus at his forge—mine, the writing desk, hands blackened by soot turned into ink, a friend to falsehood. What was God thinking when He created us? Easier to understand a mole than a man! Poor Abiram and his fellow dissenters ‘went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them’ for their disobedience. . . . George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ . . . ‘Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, / Though foolishly he lost the same, / Decaying more and more / Till he became / Most poore . . .’ Lord, deliver us from complications, though we seem to be delivered from one complication to the next. . . .”

  Henry’s voice rose and fell while he talked. The thread was hard to lay hold of—his reverie obscured by its fitfulness. I fell into a drowse while he droned on. I was sometimes in the room with him and, at other times, adrift among the wreckage of my own memory, like a shipwrecked sailor grasping at jetsam. I remembered having seen a woman naked on the auction block while a man lifted her breasts with a riding crop, then parted her buttocks with it. I had sobbed in answer to her tears of humiliation. She was bought and taken away, and I did not see her again. Was she my mother?

  Henry’s voice had insinuated itself into my reverie:

  “When I was a child, I had a box turtle. It lived in the yard under a red huckleberry bush. It was a pretty thing! I admired its house. My cabin is the next-best thing. . . . I could cart away my belongings in a trice if the bailiff came knocking. What business would a bailiff have with me? Neither my house nor my self is mortgaged. I owe no one. . . . Except for the mysterious lady who paid my tax and got me put out of my white room. Damn her for her officiousness! I can’t abide it in people or in governments. . . . I should have been a box turtle living beneath a berry bush . . . so long as I kept well clear of the soup pot. . . . People will eat almost anything, like the worm its dirt and the mole its worm. . . . While we live, we have our peck of dirt to eat. How much, I wonder, have I swallowed on my way to dusty death? If we could eat our words—what a diet mine or Waldo’s would make, forced down the gullets of people who care more for Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Rules than for Milton’s or Dante’s sublime poems! Nothing comical about divinity. . . . To have lived under the old gods’ dispensation, to have played the Pan flute in a sylvan glade, far from Eden and sin . . .”

  I remembered my first experience of desire. One must have at least a small allowance of freedom in order to covet—to want something more than the daily ration of bread and escape from the lash. What does a horse or an ox covet? We could not even call our skins our own, since they could be striped at another’s pleasure. But I had wanted the shiny spoon with which the master’s young daughter played in the dirt of the yard.

  I was aware again of Henry’s voice.

  “To read may be more a waste of spirit than watching the Knickerbockers play baseball at Elysian Fields or Hawthorne, Waldo, and Lidian—he calls her ‘Queenie’—pall-mall at Bush. We belong outdoors and not in fusty rooms reading musty books. . . . Without John, I prefer to get away by myself. Now that he’s gone, I enjoy my own company best. ‘To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.’ Waldo wrote that, too. In Nature, was it? Emerson’s a giant; I’m a pygmy. . . . Africa . . . I can’t even say the word without shuddering!”

  I remembered an ancient slave woman. She ha
d been brought here from the Kingdom of Dahomey when she was a young child. Her mother and she had passed through the “Door of No Return,” in the port town of Whydah, and boarded a Portuguese slaver’s ship. They were laid in the hold, shackled to each other. Her mother died during the Middle Passage; the girl was left chained to her corpse until it began to stink. To think that the girl’s grandmother had been one of King Ghezo’s Amazonian warriors!

  Henry spoke like one who was confessing.

  “I’ve never understood people. John understood them. He could make them laugh. I can only make them laugh by playing the fool. . . . I’m a clown beating a rustic with a pig’s bladder. . . . John had lightness of spirit. . . . I come back to him—I come back to you, brother, always. . . . Circularity is the great principle, although civilization is built on the straight line and the right angle related by geometry. . . . Savage races worship the circle, the moon, the rounded hill, the gravid belly, the full breast, the ocean’s curve. ‘. . . the Concord circling nine times round.’ . . . Man is no better than the mole. . . . Whimsicality. To knock a ball through an iron hoop! With a phosphorous match, I could make a blaze that would light the world . . . and scorch it to its roots. ‘Woods burner,’ ha! . . . Absurd obelisk—what fools men are to ape the ancients! We require iconoclasts and incendiaries, Sam Staples, and I will not stay out of trouble in Concord!”

  I remembered sitting all day in a barrel for having taken the little girl’s spoon. But first, I had been made to swallow one, two, three spoons of castor oil. Jeroboam called it ‘pickling.’ I was pickled twice—the second time, for daydreaming. To be put down into the fetid darkness, ankle chained to ankle . . . galling . . . ‘Night is the solvent in which matter is dissolved.’ Henry said that, or Waldo did, or maybe the madman poet Jones Very, who claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ. There was a large meadow next to Jeroboam’s place. They called it “Christian Fields,” and the white people would go there on Sunday afternoon and praise God from whom all blessings flow.