Thoreau in Phantom Bog

by Oak, B. B.

  Conversation turned to more agreeable topics and everyone relaxed, leaning back in their chairs or forward on their elbows. The Sun may well be one of the most comfortable spots on earth, cool in the summer and toasty in the winter, and smelling most pleasantly of pipes and cigars, leather and whale oil, strong beer and stray dogs. Fortunately Edda Ruggles, despite all her cleaning, has not managed to eradicate these familiar taproom odors. Instead, thanks to her, delicious aromas emanating from the Sun’s kitchen now mingle with them.

  As Mrs. Ruggles bustled around us, slamming down platters of sausage and pancakes, there came from behind the nearby bar a loud grunt. We turned to see a heavy keg of ale rise into view, held up on Ruggles’s thick shoulder by his burly arm. His bald, gleaming head then appeared as he reached the last of the stairs from the storeroom below. He carefully let the keg slip down off his shoulder onto the shelf behind the bar, changed the storage bung for a spigot plug, turned the keg on its side, poured himself a frothy draft, downed it in one long, delicious gulp, and turned to face us. He was sweating profusely.

  “Lugging up kegs will be the death of me yet,” he cheerfully announced.

  Mrs. Ruggles released an exasperated sigh. “I tell him to have built to go up and down a Speiseaufzug.”

  “She means a dumbwaiter,” Ruggles said, “like they have in those fancy Boston hotels. But who could I find around here to build one for me? I’ve been warned by other taverners that if such a contraption is installed improperly, it is sure to get stuck and sit idle thereafter.”

  “They’re right,” Henry said. “The pulleys and guides will likely become tangled, jamming the platform. Furthermore, the heavy frame must move within the shaft with measured exactitude, else it will either wedge tight or pull itself apart.”

  Ruggles raised his shaggy eyebrows as he listened to Henry. “Sounds like you know what you’re talking about.”

  “Henry usually does,” I said. “Among other things, he is both a mechanic and a carpenter.”

  “Is that so?” Ruggles regarded Henry with an interest he’d never shown him hitherto. The few times Henry had come into the Sun before today had been to fetch me away from it, and he has never bought so much as a small beer from Ruggles. “You ever built a dumbwaiter before, young feller?”

  “No,” Henry said. “But I’ve built far more complicated contraptions for our family pencil manufactory.”

  Ruggles beckoned him over to the bar. “Will you be so kind as to take a look at my storeroom space?”

  Henry left the table, went behind the bar, peered down the hatch, and then stomped down the stairs. We all waited with interest until he came up again.

  “Well?” Ruggles said. “Could you install a dumbwaiter down there?”

  “Easily,” Henry said.

  Ruggles slapped his palm on the bar. “Do so then! I will feed and house you whilst you work and pay you a fair price.”

  I expected Henry to refuse the offer outright, for he does not like to encumber himself with worldly obligations beyond his family’s business. He greatly values his free hours and prefers to spend them in writing or contemplation when he is not spending them with Lidian Emerson and her children. He has been settled at the Emerson house since September last, and I much doubted he would want to remove himself to the Sun Tavern for even a brief stay. So it rather surprised me when he told Ruggles he would think on it.

  I gave him a quizzical look when he returned to the table, but his own interest was taken up by a big-hatted man coming into the taproom. It was none other than Shiloh Prouty. His boots were muddy and his pants dotted with burrs, so he must have been scouring the countryside after his slave Tansy. He looked bushed as he took out from his pocket the daguerreotype of her and began to walk from table to table, showing the picture and asking if anyone had seen her. He glanced toward our table and wisely chose not to approach it.

  Ruggles watched Prouty a moment and shook his head. “I’m letting him sleep in the barn with his horse, for he cannot afford a room.”

  “You should not allow a slave hunter to stay anywhere on your premises,” I said.

  “So Edda tells me,” Ruggles said. “But I cannot help but take pity on the poor hangdog. What a dark cloud he has over his head.”

  “That is just his over-large hat.” I had no sympathy whatsoever for Prouty. And I was eager to get to Boston to find proof that would make a liar of him and place him in Plumford the night of Tripp’s murder. So clearly could I envision Prouty shooting Tripp in the chest with his rifle and then chasing after his slave through the bog that I might as well have been there to witness it.

  Before Henry and I left for Boston, however, I wanted to see to my patient Jerome Haven, and I had brought my bag along with me to the Sun for that express purpose. I left the taproom and went up to the Quaker’s chamber, where I found him sitting up in bed, tossing playing cards across the room toward his upturned black felt hat on the floor. He was grasping a bottle of brandy in his other hand.

  “Helps pass the time and deal with the pain,” he said when he saw my stunned look.

  “How can you claim to be a Quaker?” I said.

  Haven bowed his head. “I do not claim to be a good one. May the Lord forgive me, for I cannot help myself. I suffer from dipsomania.”

  When I’d practiced in Boston I’d treated a few patients with this uncontrollable craving for drink, and I took pity on Haven. The only cure I knew for dipsomania was total abstinence, but I did not think this a good time for my poor patient to suffer through alcohol withdrawal given his leg injury. Therefore I only cautioned him to not drink so much that he would poison himself.

  “Oh, I am rationing myself most carefully,” he assured me. “I have a very limited amount of cash with me, and once that runs out, the innkeeper’s wife will not bring me any more brandy. She has made that clear enough.”

  I considered asking him to settle his bill with me before spending all his money on booze but could not bring myself to ask for payment at that particular moment. I checked his wound, which was still draining, and changed the dressing.

  “You must stay off that leg,” I advised him.

  To make sure he did, at least for the moment, I began to gather up the cards on the floor that he had tossed to his hat. As I was doing so Henry came to the room to ask how long I would be. He was anxious to get to Boston. I introduced him to Haven, Henry wished him a speedy recovery, and off we went to the Concord station. I had just enough time to stable Napoleon before the Boston train pulled into the depot.

  Henry and I boarded a car and settled in seats by an open window. The warm spring air washed past us as the train sped down the track, and white puffs of smoke from the belching smokestack blew downwind and away from us. We reached Boston in an hour, a trip that used to take three hours by coach no more than four years ago. People used to say of the railroad that nobody could live for a minute agoing at such speed. But now we have all grown accustomed to traveling so fast and only wish to go faster still.

  From the Causeway Street terminal in Boston it was but a ten-minute walk to Beacon Hill’s North Slope, where several thousand free Negroes have formed a close-knit community. As we walked through this neighborhood I observed that we were being regarded with suspicion by the other pedestrians, who were for the most part Negroes.

  “They think we may be slave catchers,” Henry told me. “Such men have come right into houses and businesses here and snatched out escaped slaves. They’ve even taken away free Negroes to sell in the South. The Vigilant Committee was formed by local residents to safeguard the neighborhood, and a constant watch is kept.”

  Henry suggested that we separate in order to make the most efficient use of our time. He would go to a Brattle Street clothes shop owned by his friend John P. Coburn, who was a leading Negro abolitionist, and I would go to a barbershop on Howard Street. The owner, John Smith, made his business a place where runaway slaves could find safe refuge and be moved along the Underground Railroad.
We agreed to meet at the corner of Joy and Cambridge Streets in an hour.

  As I walked along Joy Street I glanced across the street and was taken by the familiar appearance of a robust Negress treading the cobblestones with a bold, determined step. She was none other than Tansy, the young woman in the daguerreotype that Prouty had showed us! Pleased to have come across her so easily, I hastened toward her. She saw my approach and hurried away down to Cambridge Street with me not far behind.

  I realized I had frightened her but had no course but to follow. On Cambridge Street I near lost her in the press of shoppers, workmen, boys hawking news sheets, and pigs darting about for scraps. To make matters worse, the first parasols of spring were out to shield the ladies against the warm sun, and the bobbing domes blocked my vision.

  I increased my pace and Tansy, looking back, saw me coming closer. She darted across Cambridge, dodging fearlessly between handcarts, wagons, gigs, and horsemen. I followed as best I could and glimpsed her disappearing into a dry goods store. It did not take me but a moment to reach and enter the store. The black man behind the counter scowled at me as I approached him. Before I could say a word he ordered me to get out in a commanding tone.

  I was on the point of explaining myself when I felt a powerful whack against the back of my neck. I staggered, fell onto a stack of flour sacks, and looked up to see Tansy standing over me, a broom raised to strike again. I rolled away from the blow, and the handle thudded on a soft sack instead, splitting it open. Tansy threw down the broom and ran out the door as I struggled to my feet. The moment I righted myself the shopkeeper leapt over the counter and gripped me by the lapels of my frock coat. I managed to free myself, snatch up my flour-dusted hat, and stumble out of the store just in time to see Tansy run back up Cambridge.

  I admit that my hackles were now up, and I rushed after Tansy, determined to catch her and explain myself. She turned and ran into the barbershop on Howard Street, the very place I had been headed before I’d spotted her. When I entered after her I was grabbed by a pair of massive black hands and thrown with such violence to the floor the wind was knocked clear from my sails. As I gasped and tried to speak, a rag was stuffed into my mouth, and I was roughly raised up. A deep voice muttered in my ears that I deserved to die like the rabid dog I was. My arms were held so tight behind my back I felt they were near to being dislocated from my shoulders.

  “Easy with him, Cato,” another man cautioned. “We won’t get much out of a feller with his bones all broken.”

  “He come chasing after my wife, Mr. Smith!” this Cato brute said in his own defense, easing slightly his vise grip.

  “Rose, tell us what happened,” the middle-aged black man addressed as Mr. Smith said evenly. He wore a white apron tied around his waist, and above his black waistcoat and starched shirt, his face radiated both intelligence and wariness.

  The woman he called Rose (and who I believed to be Tansy) cast both fearful and angry looks at me. Her dark brown face was damp from her exertions to stay out of my clutches.

  “I saw him staring at me too close,” she said. “So I started walking away, and sure enough he came snuffling after me like a bloodhound. Faster I went, faster he did too. I couldn’t lose him. So I came running here.”

  “Nobody with a scrap of sense is going to try and just haul a Negro from this neighborhood in broad daylight anymore,” Mr. Smith said. “That’s why I can’t figure out what this one was up to.” He pointed a long straight razor at me that still bore flecks of shaving cream on its gleaming edge. His deep-set eyes held more curiosity than hate as he observed me, although there was no respect in his regard either. “Could be he’s just dumb as a bag of hair.”

  I cared not for Smith’s observation nor the unjust rough treatment from Cato. I could only manage to breathe in short, wheezing gasps around the gag that near choked me.

  “Set him down in the chair, Cato,” Smith said, and I was summarily dumped down in the leather seat like a sack of potatoes with the three of them looking down at me.

  “There ain’t nothing more low-down than trying to kidnap a free Negro to sell to a slave trader,” Cato said to me, his voice quivering with emotion. “And my wife is free as any white woman.”

  “My husband bought me my freedom last year,” Rose/Tansy added. She extracted a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her sleeve and reached up to gently wipe shaving cream off one side of Cato’s glowering face.

  “Must have caulked the sides of fifty cargo and whaling hulls down in the shipyards to earn enough to buy Rose from her owner,” Cato said to me. “And now you come along to try and steal her away!” I shook my head in the negative and made protesting sounds through my gag to no avail. Cato turned to Smith. “Let me deal with this bastard. When I’m through with him he won’t be trying to steal our black women no more.”

  “Best we have the Vigilant Committee decide what to do with him when we meet this evening,” Smith said. “Meanwhile, we will make sure our slave catcher don’t get away.” He walked to a box in the corner of the shop and pulled out shackles that he dangled in front of me. “I got these from another slave catcher before he could use them on one of us. We will now give you a taste of your own medicine and see how you like it. Chain him up, Cato. We will lay him in the space below my chair for the time being.”

  As Cato locked the heavy iron shackles round my wrists and ankles there came over me a revolting sense of helplessness that near made me ill. I struggled with every muscle of my body and yelled out against my gag to no avail. Smith then took from the box a metal plate of perhaps four inches round with several lengths of light chain attached.

  “You keep to hollering,” he said, “and I will lock this plate round your head to shut you up. It goes tight against your mouth and nose so if you ain’t careful you’ll drown in your own drool. You understand? Yes, I see the fear in your eyes. It is not a pretty prospect, is it? But I will do it to you if need be. It’s been done to thousands of us. So why should I spare you?”

  I stared with disbelief and revulsion at this medieval apparatus of torture. To be so shackled and then have that device tightened against one’s face! I could see that instrument alone might drive a man mad. I made not another sound, and Smith put down the plate. But then he bound tight my arms and legs with rope.

  Cato slid the heavy barber’s chair to one side and lifted out several wide planks. I stared down into a space small as a child’s coffin, and there I was stuffed, forced to lie curled up on my side like a fetus in the womb. The floor boards were replaced not six inches over my head, and I heard the chair being slid back over me. I could see a bit of light out of the edge of one eye.

  I heard Smith and Cato and Rose talking in low, muffled tones, and then there was silence. I know not how long I lay there until I was suddenly roused out of my troubled, dazed condition by a familiar voice. It was Henry’s voice! He greeted Smith most cordially and was greeted the same way in return.

  “It is very good to see you again, Mr. Thoreau,” Smith said. “What brings you here today?”

  “I am looking for Dr. Walker,” Henry replied. “He didn’t show up where we had arranged to meet, and I hoped to find him still here.”

  I struggled against my bonds with all my might and moaned and groaned loud as I could through my gag. I became quickly exhausted as I could barely breathe. I heard the voices over me continue without pause.

  “Here?” Smith said. “I do not understand. I have never heard of this Dr. Walker.”

  “He didn’t come here to ask you questions concerning a fugitive?”

  “No. What concern is this fugitive to you?”

  “Dr. Walker and I wish to find her and help her.” Henry said. A brief pause. “Who is that young woman standing over there?”

  I heard the tread of heavy boots cross the room. “Why you asking about my wife, mister?”

  “She looks familiar to me.”

  “The hell she does! Why all this interest in my wife today by white men?”
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  “Cato, stop talking,” Smith said. “Rose, would you please come here?” I heard lighter footsteps. “This is Mrs. Davis, Mr. Thoreau.”

  “And I am Mister Davis,” Cato said. “Me and my missus are both free, and we got papers to prove it. That’s all you or any white man need know about us, so best you get the hell out of here.”

  “No need for such rudeness, Cato,” Smith said. “Mr. Thoreau and his family work on the Underground Railroad.”

  “I hear tell there are plenty of spies on the Railroad,” Cato said.

  “Well, I am not one of them,” Henry said. “I am here out of concern for Mrs. Davis’s twin sister.”

  “She ain’t got a sister!” Cato shouted.

  “Hush up now, dear,” Rose/Tansy told him. “Let’s hear Mr. Thoreau out.”

  “Your sister’s name is Tansy,” Henry continued, “and she is fleeing from a man called Shiloh Prouty. He is presently in Plumford looking for her.”

  In the long silence that followed I made another effort to be heard through my gag. The sound I produced was most feeble, but it has been said that Henry can hear as with an ear trumpet.

  “Whoever is under your floorboards, Mr. Smith,” Henry continued calmly, “seems to be protesting his interment, so I do not think you are hiding a runaway slave.”

  “Just the opposite of one,” Smith replied.

  “Ain’t none of your damn business who’s under there,” Cato said.

  “Indeed it is not,” Henry easily agreed. “Unless, that is, he is a tallish, youngish fellow with brownish hair and bluish eyes and . . . if I recall correctly, a cravat of a greenish color. If this matches the description of the poor fellow you have stowed down there, then it is very much my business. For I have just described my friend Dr. Adam Walker, and I will not leave here without him.”

  Another long pause. Perhaps they were trying to stare Henry down, which cannot be done. “Show him our prisoner, Cato,” Smith finally said. “Members of the Vigilant Committee trust Mr. Thoreau, and we should trust him, too.”