by Norman Lock
I had not said a word, nor had I taken my eyes off him. Suddenly, I blew out the candle and leaned away from the path of the bullet. He fired blindly into the darkness. My small room was filled with the stink of gunpowder. The man hunter coughed. I took my knife and threw it at the black shape he made in the doorway. The knife stuck in his throat. He fell to the floor, a hand pressed to his neck, blood oozing between the fingers. With hardly a thought, I plucked out the knife and finished him.
I do not know how long I sat on the floor, next to the man hunter’s corpse, my eyes watering in the acrid smoke. I was neither jubilant nor remorseful. Gradually, the smoke drifted out the doorway like a ghost. I remember hearing a night bird calling in the woods. I remember the sound of scampering paws beneath the cabin floor. I heard the echo of the pistol shot, but it was only in my mind that I heard it.
I was satisfied. Slowly, however, I realized that, if found out, I would most likely be hanged in the yard outside Middlesex County jail, where Henry had luxuriated in the delicious sensations of rebelliousness.
I had killed a white man, never mind that he had forced my door and drawn his pistol on me. I could picture the trial—the eloquent pleadings of Henry, Emerson, Hawthorne, Garrison, the gruff kindness of Sam Staples, Lidian’s tears. . . . But they would plead and weep in vain. The law would take its arctic course and have its way with me.
I went to Henry’s cabin, but he was not at home. I thought of the pond and went there. I could see him on the water in his canoe. He was paddling toward shore. I waited for him on the beach.
“Samuel,” he said, too loudly for my unstrung nerves.
I hushed him.
“What is it, Samuel?” He shone his lantern on my face. “You look ghastly in this light.”
“I just killed a man hunter,” I said without preamble.
He hurried to my cabin, lighting our way with the lantern. With it, he examined my handiwork lying crumpled on the floor.
“Not a pretty sight,” he said, stroking his beard.
I laughed nervously. My knees felt unhinged. I sat down on the chair.
“This is a bad business, Samuel.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered.
“He has to be gotten rid of.”
His matter-of-factness took me by surprise. I took heart.
“I thought maybe we could plant him in the bean field.”
“To increase the harvest,” he said wryly. “It would be the only good thing he’d ever do in this world.”
“Shall I get the barrow?” I asked. My voice was strained by the contrary impulses of eagerness and despondency.
He nodded. I wheeled the barrow from behind the cabin to the front door, and, together, we manhandled the body into it.
“Just like wrestling a bag of feed,” said Henry.
I laughed nervously again.
We started toward the bean field, the barrow jolting over ruts and rocks. Henry stopped abruptly and let go of the wooden handles.
“Bean field won’t serve,” he said tersely. “Animals’ll dig him up. Then some poor soul looking to appease his hunger with my crop will stumble over him. I couldn’t sleep nights for worrying about it.”
“What shall we do, then?” I asked anxiously.
I felt the warmth of the rising sun on me, but it was only the heat of exertion. The night still held sway and concealed my crime. Even now, I call it a crime, though I do not believe it. We are creatures of the law—even the lawless, who scoff at it and, for its sake, live in fear of discovery and then, to satisfy it, die by a bullet or a noose.
“We’ll put him in the pond,” said Henry decisively. “Wait here.”
He left and, in a short while, returned with a chain used to clear the fields of stumps. I pushed the barrow with its deadweight toward the water. We went in stealth, afraid to light the lamp. My heart worked like a bellows. Henry kept silent.
We dumped the body onto the sand. While I shifted it, Henry wound the heavy chain about it, which he secured with a padlock, so that the body could not be raised by the action of the currents or the effect of decomposition into the light of day, where justice is served. I say “justice,” for form’s sake. I tell you that I felt no contrition and feel none now.
We carried the body, made ponderous by the addition of the chain, to the canoe, and then we paddled onto the lake. It might have been an ocean, so very small we seemed under night’s immensity. I could not see the shore or the trees beyond it; my mind was taken up—beset by distractions of its own making.
We seem to stir the stars each time we dip our paddles into the pond, I said to myself.
I was proud to have coined so clever a figure. I almost repeated it to Henry, but I was reminded of our dread purpose when my naked foot touched the dead man’s.
Henry’s fancy also seemed to be preternaturally active, for he quoted from Paradise Lost. He did so in a whisper, suitable for so awesome and dangerous an occasion as ours.
“. . . Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire.”
“I suppose to liken a man hunter to the author of all evil is extravagant. . . . Or maybe not. I leave it to you to decide, Samuel, as well as the scouring of your bloody cabin floor.”
I kept my thoughts to myself.
Henry had steered us to the pond’s deepest place, seventeen fathoms, midway between “Thoreau’s Cove” and Little Cove. We pulled the body over the side and nearly swamped the boat in doing it.
“He will not trouble you again, Samuel.”
I thanked him with as much fervor as my shaken spirit could muster.
We turned the canoe about and paddled across to “Thoreau’s Cove.” Stars no longer shone upon the water—their fiery particles had been put out. I could not help feeling all of Concord’s eyes on me. I could not see Henry’s. I would never know how much, if anything, it had cost him to become my accomplice.
“Next winter, when the ice returns and, with it, Mr. Tudor’s men, Walden Pond will have lost its purity,” he said. Whether he had spoken ironically or sadly, I could not judge.
We never spoke of that night again.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
July 17, 1864
“Moose . . . Indian.”
—Thoreau’s last words, May 6, 1862, overheard by William Ellery Channing
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I DO NOT CLAIM TO BE A HISTORIAN, however much this story will be seen to rise from history’s particulars. Like any other novelist of the kind, my fiction appropriates the past—its people, places, organizations, political debate, wars, and chronology—in the interest of storytelling. I need only ask the specialists of the time to recall that Thoreau shaped his and his brother’s two-week-long boat trip to Plymouth, New Hampshire, and back to Walden Pond, when writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I have taken occasional liberties with the sequence of events. (I might have blamed them on Samuel Long’s faulty memory.)
To have written this story from a first-person viewpoint that claims to belong to a black man and a slave is a presumption; my motives were the highest, among them to learn something new about myself and to reflect on Samuel Long’s ordeals as a member of the race responsible for them. (Whether or not the responsibility continues even unto the present day, I leave to the readers’ consciences.) In any case, no sooner has a writer set words to paper than he or she has presumed, but unless one is willing to appropriate the lives of others—fictional or factual—to achieve an honorable end, the writing cannot escape the gravity of the authorial self. I did intend that this book should have an honorable aim, whether or not it succeeds in achieving it.
I have relied on a number of works by Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, but I have also read or consulted invaluable secondary sources: The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Y
oung Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond, by Michael Sims; Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, by Carlos Baker; Henry David Thoreau, by Frank B. Sanborn; Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself; as well as Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938. Some of the lines spoken by Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne were in fact theirs; most, however, have been given to them without, I hope, giving them cause to regret my imposition.
I acknowledge my debt, once again and with pleasure, to Bellevue Literary Press, to my publisher, Erika Goldman, to the press’s founding publisher, Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., and to Leslie Hodgkins, Crystal Sikma, Molly Mikolowski, Joe Gannon, and Carol Edwards, as well as to Eugene Lim, novelist and friend, for his many kindnesses. My gratitude to Helen, my wife, is one of my life’s constants.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NORMAN LOCK is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His most recent books are the short story collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a reenvisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Scott Simon of NPR Weekend Edition said, “make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone”; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain, a “mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered” (New York Times Book Review) homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter.
Lock has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.
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