Thoreau in Phantom Bog

by Oak, B. B.

  “Why did you come here alone, Julia?” he said. “You should have waited for us. I feared you were in danger.”

  “Mrs. Tripp would never hurt me.”

  “But her husband’s killer might!”

  “Jared is long gone from here,” I said. “He took off right after he shot his stepfather.”

  “How did you reach this conclusion, Julia?” Henry said.

  Whilst I related everything Tansy had told me and what I myself had observed and conjectured, Ripper kept up his loud, explosive racket, as if to confirm my hypothesis. Neither Adam nor Henry laughed at me. I jumped in the gig, and we went back to the house. Mrs. Tripp came out and just stared at us as we stepped up onto the porch.

  “Is your son Jared still here?” Henry asked her right off. “Are you hiding him?”

  “Why would I hide him? He left for Ohio weeks ago. How many times do I have to say it afore you believe me?” She looked ready to drop from exhaustion.

  “Mind if we take a walk around the property?” Henry asked her.

  “Go ahead if it will make you stop bothering me. You won’t find Jared.”

  Billy came running out of the barn, delighted to see Adam. “You here to take out my stitches, doc?”

  “Not yet, son. I just put them in two days ago.”

  “What’s that yonder?” Henry said, pointing to a dead tree standing alone in a field. The trunk was stripped of its bark, and a black circle a foot in diameter was painted on the pale wood.

  “That’s a shooting target,” Billy said.

  “Let’s go take a look at it,” Henry said.

  We all trooped over to the tree, including Ripper, who had thankfully stopped barking. The soft, punky wood within the black circle was riddled with holes. Henry pulled out his pocketknife and carefully prized out a bullet. He turned it over several times in his hand as he carefully examined it.

  He then took a bullet from his waistcoat pocket. “This bullet killed your husband,” he told Mrs. Tripp. “It passed right through his body, and I have kept it.” He placed it on his palm along with the one he’d just extracted from the tree trunk. “As you can see, both bullets have a distinctive nick on the side, cut there by a burr in the barrel of the same gun. That gun was the murder weapon.”

  “It was my gun,” Mrs. Tripp said. “I shot it at this tree for practice, and then I shot my husband with it.”

  “May I take a look at it?”

  “I threw it into the bog!”

  “Ma? You gone plumb crazy?” Billy said. “You don’t even got a gun. Jared fired those bullets into the tree with his rifle.”

  Henry squatted to be at eye level with Billy. “Where’s your brother’s rifle?”

  “He took it with him when he left.”

  “Do you remember what day he left?”

  “I do. It was my birthday, and he give me his pocketknife.”

  “I wager you were born on May sixteenth,” Henry said.

  Billy’s eyes widened. “How’d you guess that, mister?”

  “You look the sort of boy who would be born on exactly that day.” Henry stood and patted the boy’s head.

  “Go back to packing up in the barn, Billy,” his mother said.

  “I want to stay here.”

  “If you do as your mother’s bidding,” Henry said, “I’ll give you an arrowhead when I leave.” Billy ran off to the barn with Ripper chasing after him.

  “What are you going to do with those bullets?” Mrs. Tripp asked Henry.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  Mrs. Tripp sank to her knees, clasped her hands, and looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “I implore you not to turn them over to the law.”

  I have never seen Henry look so uncomfortable. But rather than help Mrs. Tripp to her feet, he sat down beside her on the ground. “Can you tell me why I should not do so?” he asked her.

  Mrs. Tripp nodded and began speaking in a low voice. Adam and I also sat upon the ground to hear her better, and the four of us formed a circle in the field as the morning sun warmed our backs.

  “Jared was twelve when I married Ezra Tripp,” she began, “and Billy only six. Their father had died two years before. I married for their sake more than my own. I did not want them to grow up without a good man’s example to guide them. I thought Ezra Tripp a good man. He went to church every Sunday, and he supported my work in the Underground Railroad. We did not have the same sort of relationship my first husband and I had. We shared little intimacy. But that was all right with me. Ezra was kind to the boys. He spent a great deal of time with Jared, teaching him manly skills a mother cannot teach her son, and Jared seemed to worship the ground Ezra walked on. But then, as he grew older, Jared changed toward his stepfather. By the time we moved here last year, he could not bear to be within ten feet of Ezra. They even came to blows in the barn last month. Ezra fell from the hayloft. Do you remember, Dr. Walker?”

  “I do,” Adam said. “Ezra’s shoulder was dislocated.”

  “After that Jared and he never spoke a word to each other,” Mrs. Tripp continued. “Ezra became surly and mean and drank more and more. He’d rant that Jared was old enough to be on his own and he should get out. But he was still kind to Billy. Very kind indeed. Oh, how stupid I was! How blind! It was Tansy who opened my eyes to the manner of man I had married. She espied him fooling with Billy from her hidey hole in the barn. She told me what she had seen, and I told Jared right off. I wanted him to know so he could protect his brother. In truth, I wanted him to run Ezra off the farm now that he was big enough to do it. Instead, he just packed his bag, saddled his horse, and said he was heading back to Ohio. He gave Billy his knife and left. And that’s the last I seen or heard of my eldest son.”

  “Not quite,” Henry said. “You heard his gun go off before sunrise the next morning.”

  “Somebody’s gun anyway,” she said.

  “You must have known it was Jared’s or you would have told us about hearing it when we came to talk to you that morning,” I said.

  “I thought it best to say nothing about anything. I just wanted you gone so I could get on with my mourning.”

  “For your dead husband?” I said.

  “No. For my poor boy. If he killed Ezra I reckon he had reason to. No doubt in my mind that he was mistreated by that monster when he was too little to protest. And he saved his brother Billy from the same fate.” She looked at each of us, dry-eyed now, and let her gaze rest last upon Henry. “Should he hang for what he did?”

  “It’s not for me to judge,” Henry said.

  “Will Tansy testify she saw Jared kill Ezra?”

  “She claims she did not see the shooter,” Henry said. “And even if she did, her slave status would prevent her from testifying in a court of law.”

  “So the only evidence you have is the bullets,” Mrs. Tripp said.

  Henry opened his hand and dropped the two bullets he held into Mrs. Tripp’s lap. “I have no evidence now,” he said.

  Before we drove off Henry took an arrowhead from his pocket and gave it to Billy as promised. It seems he always has an arrowhead upon his person. He finds them in the ground as easily as pebbles.

  ADAM

  Friday, May 26

  We rode back to town together, and I left the gig in the drive, planning to go on to Tuttle Farm to check on Gran after we told Tansy what we had learned from Mrs. Tripp. Upon entering the kitchen we were astonished to see Shiloh Prouty sitting at the table drinking coffee with Tansy.

  “You all calm down now,” Tansy told us right off. “If Shiloh wanted to snatch me away, he’d have done it already.”

  Prouty stood and bowed to Julia. “I apologize for intruding, ma’am.”

  “Did Tansy let you in of her own free will?”

  “Yes, she did, ma’am.”

  “Then you’re not intruding. You are a guest of my guest. Pray be seated.”

  Henry and I looked at each other. I shrugged, poured myself a cup of coffee, and join
ed Prouty and Tansy at the table, as did Julia. Henry remained standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his arms folded.

  “I peeked out the window and saw Shiloh making a beeline across the Green to this house,” Tansy explained, as calm as a millpond. “He called out my name at the front door, so I figured the jig was up and let him in. I reckoned he wasn’t going to drag me away, screaming and kicking, in front of all the townspeople on the Green.”

  “He might have,” I said, “without Henry or me around to stop him.”

  “I wouldn’t do no such thing,” Prouty said, looking mightily offended.

  “You would do no such thing,” Tansy corrected him.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I been knowing Tansy was here for days now. And I bided my time till I had a chance to get to her clear of y’all.”

  “How did you know she was here, Mr. Prouty?” Julia said.

  “Rusty told me. He said he wanted the hundred and fifty dollar reward I posted and would cart her back to my farm in Virginia in his wagon instead of taking her north. I was mighty tempted to accept his offer.”

  “But you didn’t,” Julia said.

  “No, I did not, ma’am. Tansy would have likely put up a fight once she caught on that Rusty had tricked her. And after he brung her to me, she would have likely just run off again. No use getting her back if she ain’t going to stay.”

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked brusquely. Julia, in my opinion, was being too gentle with him. Henry had not said a word and was just observing them all with a slightly bemused expression.

  “I am here hoping to talk some sense into my girl,” Prouty replied.

  “Don’t call me that like I was your chattel,” Tansy said. “Your horse, your pigs, your dog, your girl.”

  Prouty looked as hurt as if she’d kicked him. “I never can say the right thing to you, can I? I ain’t come to lay claim to you as my slave, Tansy.”

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked him again, my tone even more brusque.

  “Mr. Prouty was addressing Tansy, not you, Adam,” Julia said. “Perhaps we should all just leave the two of them alone to talk this out in private.”

  “No need,” Tansy said, “for there is nothing further for us to talk out.”

  “Maybe you will listen to me better than she does, ma’am,” Prouty said to Julia. “Tansy come to be my slave as a bequest from my aunt. I know you folks up North don’t hold with that, but in Virginia that is the way things are done. And after Tansy come to me, I ain’t ashamed to admit I grew mighty fond of her. She knows a heap more than me from book learning, and she’s got a heap more sense, too. I’d be proud to have such as her as my lawful wife and helpmeet.”

  “Then why didn’t you just free her and ask her to marry you?” I said. To me it seemed the obvious solution.

  “I didn’t want to give her up,” Prouty said.

  “The law in Virginia,” Tansy explained, “requires manumitted slaves to leave the state within a year of getting their freedom. So I could not stay there as a freedwoman, even if I married Shiloh.”

  “That leaves me no choice,” Prouty said to her.

  “But to keep me your slave?”

  “No, honey. I will free you like you want me to. I done made up my mind it’s what I got to do to truly keep you. I’ll sell my farm, and me and you will go homestead in a free state. That is what I come to tell you. And I do not mind doing so now in front of witnesses.”

  It seemed like a mighty good plan to me, and I was all set to uncork a bottle of wine and propose a toast. I smiled at Julia. She was regarding Tansy most closely.

  “Is that what you want?” Julia asked her.

  “I just want my freedom,” Tansy said softly.

  “Don’t you want me?” Prouty looked at her beseechingly with his bleached-out blue eyes.

  Tansy pressed her lips together and stared back at him. After a long moment, she shook her head.

  If that surprised me, it must have stunned Prouty like a blow to the head from a hammer. He did not move a muscle. Did not even blink. The man’s world must have turned upside down when he realized that the woman who was his slave did not want him for her husband. Henry and I exchanged a look. If things got out of hand we were both ready to protect Tansy.

  “Sell me, Shiloh, I beg you,” she said, covering his big sunburnt hand, lying flat and still on the table, with her smooth brown one. “Let my sister buy my freedom from you. Then I can stay in Boston with her. You go back to the farm you love. You’ll forget about me soon enough.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “You won’t sell me?”

  “I won’t forget you.” Prouty stood up slowly, as if he ached all over. “But I will give you your freedom, Tansy. I said that I would in front of these witnesses, and I will not go back on my word. Before I go home I’ll ride into Boston and talk to your sister and her husband.”

  He bowed to Julia, did not so much as glance at Henry or me, and left, keeping his back straight and his head high for a change.

  “He will be better off without me,” Tansy said. “I might have been raised up a slave, but I sure wasn’t raised up to be a farmer’s wife.”

  “So in truth it is you who will be better off without him,” Julia said.

  “I always wanted to be a teacher,” Tansy said. “My sister and I have this dream of starting up a school for young ladies of color.” Her eyes shined bright with possibilities.

  “Here’s to your freedom,” I said, raising my cup to her.

  “Prouty should not be paid for giving it to her, however,” Henry said. “Tansy is not rightfully his to sell. No human being can be owned by another.”

  “Let it be,” I told him. “Tansy got what she most wanted, and Prouty left with his dignity intact. That is called compromise, Henry.”

  He winced, as he always did, at the notion of compromise when it came to slavery, and I hoped he would not dampen Tansy’s happiness with further argument. If he had the inclination, he suppressed it, for he was as happy for Tansy as we were.

  “You have been through quite an ordeal,” he told her, taking both her hands in his. “And I admire your fortitude and spirit.”

  “If there is any spirit you should admire,” she replied, “it is the phantom of the bog. When I ran away from the shooter, she’s the one who saved me.”

  “Did she?” Henry regarded Tansy closely. “How?”

  “Each time I broke through the slippery, wobbly bog moss and thought I would disappear for good,” Tansy said, “I rose up again as if a hand were lifting me out of the icy waters. When I reached the opposite side and was on solid ground again, I dared turn around to see if the shooter was pursuing me. I did not see him, but I saw her.”

  “And what did she look like?” Henry asked evenly.

  “She was silvery and beautiful. She floated above the bog for a moment, smiling at me, and then disappeared into thin air.”

  “Because she was thin air,” I said. “Mist in the moonlight.”

  Tansy shrugged. “I saw what I saw. And I truly believe she saved me.”

  “Then she did,” Henry said. “I saw her too,” he added as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. “Perhaps we see the phenomena of Nature more vividly during times of extreme vulnerability. Indeed, I believe that the woods are choke-full of Spirits.”

  “When you talk like this, Henry,” I said, “it’s hard to believe you’re the same man who records natural phenomena with meticulous attention and careful measurements.”

  “Oh, I am that man for certain,” he replied. “But my desire for knowledge is intermittent and my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. Nature can be viewed both empirically and mystically, can it not?”

  Henry might well have gone on talking in this fashion till the cows came home, but he had more pressing matters to attend to. He left us to go to the Sun and finish constructing the dumbwaiter, for he wanted to
move back to Concord as soon as possible. Lidian and her children had returned from their visit to Plymouth.

  Tansy asked Julia if she might stay with her a little while longer. She thought it would be best for Prouty to have settled things with her sister and brother-in-law and departed for home before she went back to Boston. Julia agreed, only too happy to have her, and Tansy excused herself to go write Rose a letter.

  I invited Julia to come along with me to Tuttle Farm, and we had a long visit with Gran, who was in good spirits. She assured us she did not plan to give up the ghost until she saw us married and held our firstborn babe in her arms come the new year.

  Afterward Julia and I went for a walk in the apple orchard. The turf was soft and springy underfoot, and hundreds of apple trees were in full bloom. The clusters of fragrant flowers perfumed the warm breeze as golden sunlight streamed down upon us from the cloudless blue sky.

  It seemed as though we were in a heavenly cathedral as we strolled down a grassy aisle festooned with pink and white petals that had fallen from the canopy of blossom-laden branches above. A choir of humming bees sang all around us. I knew in the deepest part of my being that we would always be together in this life. And that we have been together like this in past lives. And that we would meet and love in future lives.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2015 by B. B. Oak

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.