Thoreau on Wolf Hill

by Oak, B. B.

  “When I awoke her in the night because she was moaning most piteously, she said there was such a weight upon her chest she could not catch a breath.”

  “Hetty sitting upon her torso feeding!” Solomon interjected.

  “The weight poor Joanna felt was the fluid trapped in her lungs, blocking her breathing,” I told Mr. Wiley. “Pay no heed to your brother’s reckless conjecture.”

  “But ’twas Joanna herself who said to me that she saw Hetty looming over her in the night, eyes black as a demon’s and mouth dripping blood.”

  “When did she tell you this, Mr. Wiley?” Henry inquired. “When first you awoke her?”

  “No, not then, but the next morning.”

  “After her Uncle Solomon had talked to her?”

  “I don’t recall.” Mr. Wiley looked to his brother.

  “What I recall,” Solomon told him, “is poor little Joanna pleading with me to save her from Hetty. And that is what I intend to do.”

  Mr. Wiley shook his head and commenced to weep. “How can we desecrate Hetty’s body? She was such a good daughter.”

  “That is why we must save her too!” his brother said. “If we kill this vile thing Hetty has become, her soul shall be set free to go to heaven.”

  Mr. Wiley regained his resolve. “Then we must do it for her sake as well as Joanna’s.”

  We had reached the burying ground at the top of the knoll, and on the grass lay a wooden casket they had already hauled out of the grave. I heard a piercing cry and looked up to see a hawk gliding in a wide, sweeping circle overhead. I had to wonder at what the hawk saw. Four grim men and an unearthed casket were but a part of a wider view from such a height. Spread out below the bird lay the rolling hills of the township, and atop one of them stood the Green, where the steeple of the Meetinghouse pierced the sky and the white clapboard houses clustered peacefully about the rectangle of grass and trees. Beyond the Green the ribbon of the Assabet River curved away south, with mills and water meadows along its banks. Carriages and pedestrians moved along the roads stretching through the landscape, chimneys puffed out smoke, and perhaps the sharp-eyed hawk could make out a train sliding along the gleaming rails of the new Fitchburg line. From such a height our individual, impassioned efforts below must seem as significant to a bird as the scurrying of ants does to us. I could not help but muse that as this hawk must circle and scream, we each have our destinies to act out, no matter how meaningless to other eyes. Yet as Henry oft reminds me, it is what man thinks of himself that really determines his fate. So our destinies are of our own making.

  “It is not too late to put back the casket and let Hetty rest in peace,” Henry now told the two brothers.

  Solomon picked up a crow bar, gave Henry a vicious look as if to strike him with it, then turned his attention to the task at hand. As he pried loose the lid, the nails holding it down shrieked, and when he yanked it off and revealed the corpse within, Mr. Wiley shrieked too.

  “Her eyes!” he cried in horror.

  They were wide open, pools of viscous liquid without iris or definition. Her skin had a faint blush of color, and her body was so bloated that it pressed against the fabric of her girlish white dress. Although the smell of rot permeated the damp air, indicating decomposition, there were no signs of decay. I have seen the condition many times in bodies brought in for dissection classes, some, shame to say, robbed from graves such as this and sold to Harvard Medical School.

  “Observe how she has turned herself sideways,” Solomon said. Indeed, Hetty’s body, distorted by the gas within, had shifted in the coffin. “She lives, Ezekiel!”

  Mr. Wiley gazed at the body, his countenance contorted with horror. “She lives upon the blood of her own sister,” he sobbed and pointed at fluid that had been forced out by the internal pressure of decay through the gaping mouth. “Look how she is swelled up on Joanna’s blood.”

  “No. What you see is caused by the gases within the corpse,” I began to explain. “It is a most common occurrence and does not mean—”

  My words were cut off by the thrust of an ax swung by Solomon into the dead girl’s chest, landing with a most sickening, squelching thud and cleaving through clothes, flesh, and into the sternum. The corpse shook, the arms rising in rebound from the force of the blow, the legs near jolted straight up in a most alarming fashion before falling back down. A gush of blood and fluid assaulted us, but Solomon did not falter. He swung and struck down once more with a ferocious and precisely directed blow, cleaving through the sternum entirely. He wrenched wider the split in the raw white bone to expose the heart, took out a curved knife, and savagely hacked around the organ. Then, without the slightest hesitation, he reached into the chest cavity and pulled the heart out with a sucking wrench. It leaked a red gore that was comprised of decomposed blood trapped at death within the now limp heart chambers.

  “You see!” Solomon said, holding it up. “The demon’s heart drips with Joanna’s blood from last night’s feeding.”

  Ezekiel staggered back. “Kill it!” he cried. “End it!”

  Solomon stepped to the coffin and sawed through the corpse’s throat and neck vertebrae, grunting with the effort. The head shook in a most gruesome fashion as if protesting this further indignity. A handful of fair hair broke free of the scalp as he yanked upward. He bent again, wound his hand in the tresses, and pulled the head free of the neck. So disturbed, the eyes poured out their fluid, and more gore dripped around the projecting black tongue and ran down the chin.

  Solomon turned the head around and shoved it backwards into the coffin but now at the feet of the corpse. “There!” He regarded his handiwork with grim satisfaction. “All that is left to do is burn the heart.”

  Henry and I nailed the lid back on the coffin and, with Mr. Wiley’s help, lowered it into the ground. As we shoveled the dirt back, Solomon lit a fire and burned the heart on a flat stone. It took a good blaze to accomplish the task in the mist. I will never forget the hissing and bubbling and the odor of roasting flesh until the organ was finally reduced to ashes.

  “Joanna has not breathed in the smoke,” Solomon said, “but we can bring her the ashes to ingest.”

  “No.” Ezekiel kicked the mound of ash into the grass. “This must be enough, brother. I can bear no more.”

  Solomon relented. Henry and I went back to the house to assure Mrs. Wiley it was over and her daughter was safely back in the ground. We did not, of course, mention the defacement done to Hetty’s body, and I pray the two Wiley men spare her the details.

  Henry and I rode home mostly in silence, each in his own thoughts. Mine were grim as I considered the ignorance and savagery we had just witnessed. Henry’s thoughts, however, had taken an uplifting turn.

  “Let us hope Solomon Wiley will evolve into a more enlightened creature in some future life here on earth,” he said.

  “Perhaps his soul will regress instead of advance, and he will return as a slug,” I replied.

  “That too is possible, I suppose,” Henry said. “Indeed, I sometimes wonder if my own soul has regressed by returning to earth in the body of a civilized white man.”

  I smiled. “You think your past life as a savage suited your soul better?”

  “Yes. But let us not speak of it anymore.”

  That had been our agreement two summers ago, when we had found the skull of an Indian that had proved to us the truth of Reincarnation. And we had only spoken of it once since then, when I had asked Henry’s permission to write about his regression in a scientific article regarding hypnosis. When I assured him that neither his name, nor the evidence we found, nor any reference whatsoever to rebirth would be revealed in the article, he had given me leave to do so.

  For the rest of the way home we returned to our private musings. We both have a great appreciation for silence. No doubt that is one of the major reasons we became and remain friends.

  This evening, however, alone in my room, I find silence oppressive. Ghastly memories of what I witness
ed in the Wiley graveyard slither through my mind. I do not want them to be the last images I recall before I fall asleep, else they will haunt my dreams too. In order to prevent this I shall conjure up images from the happy past, when Julia and I were together. Such golden memories remain untarnished despite her betrayal of our love. They comfort me far more than her presence ever could. Indeed, I would find her actual presence unbearable now. Frailty, thy name is woman!

  JULIA’S NOTEBOOK

  Friday, 3 December

  Although I had no expectation of seeing Adam today, I now await his arrival with great impatience. A good half hour has passed since Henry went to the tavern to fetch him. To stop myself from pacing, I have settled myself at the kitchen table to record the day’s events. My hand is nearly illegible, I see, for I am trembling with anticipation. I must take control of my emotions before Adam comes through the door. Indeed, I must always control myself in his presence now that I am a married woman.

  Shackled though I am by matrimonial bonds, at least I have liberated myself from my husband’s daily oppression. What a sense of freedom swept over me when I disembarked from the ship this morning! So relieved was I to set foot on American ground that I almost knelt down right there on the pier to offer up a prayer of thanks. Good thing I did not give in to that impulse, else I would have been trampled by my fellow passengers as they rushed down the gangway and into the arms of waiting friends and family. I pushed through the cheery throng and made my way toward a free hackney cab I had spotted. Unfortunately, a gentleman more swift of foot than I got to it first. Further attempts to engage a hack proved just as fruitless. A lone woman is as good as invisible in dear old Boston. So off I went by foot to the railway station. It would have been an easy enough walk if not for my heavy portmanteau and a strong, cold wind coming off the Charles River.

  By the time I boarded the train to Concord I was chilled to the bone. Fortunately there was a blazing stove in the ladies’ car, and I took a seat as near as I could to it. My time in the south of France has made me too sensitive to stern New England weather, and I could not stop shivering.

  The lady occupying the seat next to mine looked up from her book. “You are not dressed warmly enough,” she said.

  She was quite correct on that score. But I had little inclination to relate to a stranger that I had fled the prison that was so unfortunately my home with little more than the clothes on my back and a valise stuffed with undergarments.

  “Here, wrap this around your shoulders,” she said, shrugging off her woolen shawl.

  “But then you will be cold,” I protested.

  “I assure you I will not be. I am wearing three flannel petticoats,” she confided to me sotto voce. “Truly, you will be doing me a great service by alleviating me of this heavy shawl. I find the hot air radiating from that charcoal stove most oppressive.”

  She did not look to me to be the least bit overheated or uncomfortable. Her rather melancholy face was as smooth and pale as milk, without a trace of a flush or a hint of exudation. There was, however, great depth and forcefulness in her gaze, and I found myself following her directive and wrapping her shawl around my shoulders.

  “I thank you kindly, ma’am,” I said.

  “Why, you sound as if you are from these parts,” she remarked. “I presumed from your attire that you were foreign.”

  “I own that my garments and bonnet are of French design, and I have spent a great deal of time living abroad, but I am as American as a body can be,” I informed her. “I consider the town of Plumford my true home, for that is where my heart is, and I intend to settle there now.”

  “Then we shall be neighbors. I am Mrs. Lidian Emerson from Concord. And who might you be?”

  “Mrs. Julia Pelletier.” I almost choked on my surname.

  “Do you have family in Plumford, Mrs. Pelletier?”

  “Alas, not anymore. Nor friends either. I do have a friend in Concord, however. Do you perchance know Henry Thoreau?”

  “Indeed I do!” Mrs. Emerson gave me a more intense appraisal. “He is a friend of yours, you say?”

  “I still consider him as one although we have not communicated since I left Plumford the summer before last.”

  “Is Henry also friends with Mr. Pelletier?”

  “No, he has never met my husband. You see, I married soon after I returned to France.” I changed the subject. “How crowded this car is! Such a lot of ladies coming back from Boston. What brought them all there today, I wonder. Perchance a temperance gathering?”

  “I venture it was something far less noble,” Mrs. Emerson said dryly. “Shopping most likely. Note all the parcels they are carrying. The Yuletide season encourages spendthrift ways, I’m afraid. Even one as frugal as I can be tempted to spend more than I should on presents for my children.”

  “And did you succumb to that temptation today, Mrs. Emerson?”

  “I had neither the time nor the energy for shopping. My purpose for going to Boston was to consult with a homeopathist concerning a disorder that has been causing me much discomfort.”

  “I am sorry to hear that.” I did not make so bold as to inquire what her disorder was.

  She went on to inform me anyway. “You see, I suffer from dyspepsia. For years I took dosages of calomel on doctor’s orders, which weakened rather than helped me. And the only advice I received from the homeopathist today was to eat less. Food you do not take in, he said, cannot upset you.”

  I did not think that such good advice for she was as thin as a rail already. “Perhaps you should consult with my cousin, who also has a practice in Boston,” I suggested. “Dr. Walker uses advanced yet gentle methods to cure his patients.”

  “Dr. Walker? Why, I believe I met him at Henry’s cabin when the Anti-Slavery Society congregated there. A tall, somber young man, is he not?”

  “I would not describe my cousin as somber,” I replied. “Indeed, Adam has a genial disposition and a ready smile. He is quite tall, however, and young enough, I suppose, being well under thirty. So we are most likely speaking of the selfsame person.”

  “Yet I seem to recall Henry’s mentioning that Dr. Walker practices in Plumford, not Boston.”

  “Well, there are two Dr. Walkers. Or were. It was Adam’s and my grandfather, Silas Walker, who had a practice in Plumford. Doc Silas, as he was called by all the patients who loved him, died quite suddenly of heart failure a few months ago whilst making his rounds.” My voice began to warble, and I blinked back tears. “According to my cousin’s letter, Grandfather’s faithful horse brought him home and waited patiently at the front gate until his body was discovered in the gig.”

  Mrs. Emerson expressed her condolences, and then, to give me the privacy I needed to get control of my emotions, she turned her attention back to her book. For the rest of the short trip I gazed over her neat bonnet and out the gritty window. The sky was gray and gloomy, and the passing scenery of stubbled cornfields, ravaged woodlots, and stagnant swampland appeared most bleak to me, so unlike my sun-gilded memories of this countryside. I glimpsed a body of water through the naked tree boughs, and my heart rose.

  “There’s Walden Pond!” I declared.

  Mrs. Emerson looked up from her book. “So it is.”

  “And lo! Henry’s cabin!” I said, catching sight of it through the pitch pines. “He is most likely within, writing away at his desk.”

  “He is no longer there,” Mrs. Emerson informed me. “He left two months ago.”

  That surprised me for I’d been under the impression Henry had been most settled and content at Walden Pond. “Where does he live now?” I asked Mrs. Emerson.

  “With me,” she replied softly.

  As I was trying to comprehend this bit of information, the locomotive whistle shrieked, the conductor called out Concord, and the cars jolted to a stop. Mrs. Emerson and I stood up, and I commenced to remove the shawl she had lent me.

  “No, no, you must not take it off yet,” she enjoined. “You will need it on y
our ride to Plumford. The stage coach is but an open wagon.”

  “You are very kind. I will be sure to send it back to you forthwith.”

  “Better yet, fetch it back in person. I would very much welcome a visit from you, Mrs. Pelletier.”

  “Then I shall come see you soon,” I promised.

  The other ladies in the car had lost no time rushing toward the exit door as we talked, and we had to wait for a long brigade of petticoats to pass before we could step into the aisle. Hence, we were the last passengers to debark from the car. I looked toward the open stage coach waiting by the depot and saw that all the bench seats were already occupied. The only places left for me would have been beside the driver, who at that moment was expectorating a stream of tobacco juice, or upon some obliging lady’s lap. No such accommodations could be expected for my bulky portmanteau, however, and I hoped I could make arrangements to have it sent to Plumford after me.

  Mrs. Emerson offered me her hand in parting. As I shook it I saw an amazing transformation come over her countenance. Her pallid cheeks blossomed pink, her eyes lit up and sparkled, and she became quite youthful-looking although I had initially reckoned her to be over forty. She was looking not at me but over my shoulder. I turned around and saw none other than Henry Thoreau coming toward us. He did not see me, however. His attention was riveted upon Mrs. Emerson.

  “What brings you here, Henry?” she asked him, sounding quite flummoxed.

  “What else but you?” he replied in that brusque way of his. “I was concerned that you would be fatigued by city bustle and borrowed a carryall to drive you home.”

  “Where are the children?”

  “They are in it, awaiting you with much anticipation.” He gave her one of his rare, sweet smiles. “You were sorely missed whilst you were away.”

  She laughed like a girl. “Such nonsense! I was gone but half a day. And the walk home is short enough. It is fortuitous that you have use of a carriage, however. You can drive a friend of yours to Plumford.” She gestured toward me.