Thoreau on Wolf Hill

by Oak, B. B.

  “I need to operate on him,” I told Julia. “Are you strong enough to help me carry him to the house?”

  “Of course I am,” she said, and lost no time picking up his feet.

  “Keep him steady,” I said, as I took up his torso. We staggered up to the farmhouse, the oldest child, a girl about ten, following behind with my bag. Thankfully, she had stopped screaming. The other two children stayed by their prostrate mother, patting her hands and face.

  A fire burned in the kitchen hearth. We heaved Gray onto the big table in front of it. “Is there any whiskey in the house?” I asked the girl.

  She gave me a most disapproving look and pointed to a jug on a high shelf. Julia had to stand on a chair to reach it. She found a pan to soak my instruments in the whiskey, and I doused Gray’s wound with it too, after removing the makeshift bandages and slitting away his pant leg. Although the ax head had fortunately missed the main femoral artery, the descending branch of that artery was sliced open and pumping out a copious amount of blood.

  “Bring me honey if you have it,” I told the girl. Again she scowled at me, but went and fetched a pot of honey.

  “If we are going to save him,” I said to Julia, “we must work quickly.”

  “Tell me how to help you and I will do it,” she said, taking off her cloak and rolling up her sleeves. Her calmness did not surprise me. We had worked together to save a life once before, and she had proven to be a woman who was not afraid of blood.

  Turned Gray on his left side to better get at the wound and instructed Julia to thread a fine needle with a length of silk from my bag. She then held the wound open for me, and blood pulsed out in a thin spray onto her cheek. Took a serrated forceps and clamped it down on the artery above the slice, then slowly and with care stitched the tissue walls of the slippery artery back together. Removed the forceps, and blood began to flow through the artery again instead of pulsing out. By this time Gray had lost consciousness completely, and for this I was glad, for the next step would be most unpleasant. Told the girl to heat up a poker and then leave the kitchen. Held the white-hot poker to the wound area to cauterize the exposed tissue. The sound of hissing flesh and the smell of burning blood rolled up around Julia and me. ’Twas a frightening stink. Threw the poker aside and splashed whiskey with a generous hand over all of my work.

  Gray came back to consciousness and began to moan and shift. Told him in a loud voice that I was fixing him and he must lie still. Julia brought the whiskey to his lips and poured in a good mouthful, meanwhile murmuring soothing words. Her female voice quieted him more, I think, than the whiskey.

  Sewed up the gaping wound with catgut and my thickest curved needle as Julia held the sliced flesh together with both hands. Tied off and knotted every other stitch to give the repair more chance of holding. Worked from groin toward knee and left an inch open at the lowest point of the wound for pus and fluid to drain.

  The sewing took but a few minutes, twenty stitches in all. Triple folded a piece of cotton petticoat, soaked it with honey, placed it atop the sewn gash, and kept it in place by winding more petticoat fabric, ripped into strips, around Gray’s leg.

  “Thank you for the use of your unmentionables,” I told Julia.

  “Do not mention it.” She smiled at me. Gray’s blood had crusted around her mouth and nose, and I had a fleeting fancy that she looked like a beautiful, irresistible vampyre that I would gladly allow to suck me dry. Glanced away from her and spotted Gray’s wife standing in the doorway.

  “Is he dead?” she asked in a quivering voice.

  “Just drunk,” I replied. “Your husband will survive, Mrs. Gray. As severe as the ax cut was, his nerves and ligaments as well as major arteries and veins remain intact.”

  She rushed forward and bestowed a tender kiss upon her husband’s sleeping face. Fortunately, the kitchen also serves as the Grays’ sleeping chamber, and it was easy enough to settle the injured man in his bed. Mrs. Gray asked what I charged for my services. Told her we could discuss that later. The Grays do not seem to have a penny to spare, and if I had quoted my standard Boston rate for such a surgery, she might have fainted on me again. She insisted on giving me Mr. Gray’s best Sunday shirt to wear home, for my own was blood-soaked, and as far as I’m concerned that is payment enough.

  We set off in the dark, and Julia leaned into me for warmth, placing her head on my shoulder. I did not object.

  “How good you must feel right now, Adam,” she said in a low voice.

  “Oh, I own it feels good to have you pressing against me,” I replied rather gruffly.

  “You mistake my meaning, cousin,” she said, but did not pull away. “I was referring to the sense of satisfaction you must feel after saving a life.”

  “A successful surgery does give me great satisfaction,” I allowed. “Of late, I have felt myself useless as a doctor.”

  “Useless? What would Plumford do without you during this epidemic?”

  “All I can offer most of my patients is comfort, along with laudanum to ease their pain, Julia. Old-fashioned methods such as bleeding only weaken consumptives more, and the latest medications may be just as harmful. Doctors have been dosing patients with medicines containing prussic acid or creosote, for instance. Even boa constrictor excreta!”

  “Surely you are jesting about the boa constrictor.”

  “I wish I were. And it is a very expensive treatment indeed. Another treatment I have heard of is less exotic and far cheaper. A doctor in Vermont has been rubbing lard into the bodies of his Consumption patients. Why? He has observed that butchers seem immune to the disease.”

  “Now I have heard everything,” she said.

  “Not quite.” Although frank discussions concerning medical procedures are not considered fit for the shell-like ears of delicate females, I have never hesitated to talk about such procedures with Julia. And I did not hesitate now. “Hark this, Julia. A highly lauded doctor in New Haven uses coal gas to ease congested breathing in consumptives. He pumps this vile gas into the rectums of his unfortunate patients, claiming it works its way into the lungs to good effect.”

  “Well, I am not a learned doctor, of course,” Julia said, “but I always thought vile gas was meant to exit the rectum, not enter it.”

  Vulgar humor such as that had much delighted us as children, and I confess it still did, for we laughed all the rest of the way to Plumford. Our only excuse was that we were both exhausted. I left Julia off at the house and continued alone to Tuttle Farm, greatly missing her company. How easily we still work together, talk together, laugh together. Yet what does any of that matter when we cannot be together as man and wife? That is entirely Julia’s fault, and I cannot find it in my heart to forgive her. Doubt I ever will.

  JULIA’S NOTEBOOK

  Monday eve, 6 December

  A young farmer would have surely bled to death this afternoon if Adam had not come along in time to sew up his slashed artery. I assisted him as best I could. After the operation the farmer’s wife brought us a basin of warm water to wash off the blood, and I am ashamed to admit I forgot all about the poor, injured man then asleep in his bed as I stole glances at Adam. He was bare chested, having used his shirt as a compress for the wound, and I could not help but admire how well-muscled and broad-shouldered he has become since last I saw his naked torso when he was a lanky lad of twelve. If the farmer’s wife and three children had not been right there in the kitchen observing our every move, I might well have pressed my cheek against his nakedness. Better yet, my lips. Wanton woman! Has my experience as Jacques Pelletier’s wife corrupted me entirely? Did I not vow a life of chastity upon leaving him? My base human nature is wayward indeed.

  If only I could be as pure-spirited as dear Lidian Emerson. How ethereal and innocent of heart she does seem. And yet . . . there is something simmering beneath her cool, serene surface. Perhaps I am not the best judge of people, having been fooled far too often by men, but I do think I know something about my own sex. And wha
t I know about Lidian is that she is far deeper and more complicated than she lets on.

  When I visited her today I caught her in the midst of brewing beer. “I raise the hops and celandine myself,” she told me. “And Henry kindly collects the pyrola in the woods for me.”

  I apologized for intruding, but Lidian insisted that I had come at a perfect time for she had just put aside a pot of wort to cool. She whipped off her apron and ushered me into her parlor. It is a neat, handsome room, the walls covered in cream-colored paper with a crimson border, the floor overlaid with a red and yellow carpet, and the windows curtained with buff cambric. The bookcase and tables are of rosewood, and the chairs and sofa are upholstered in red moreen. A print of Correggio’s Madonna hangs on the wall, handsomely framed. Lidian flitted about the room, minutely adjusting the position of various ornaments. After she had repositioned a vase to the very center of the card table and nudged two candlesticks directly over the pilasters of the fireplace mantel, she finally sank down beside me on the sofa.

  “Much better!” she said in a relieved tone. “Lisette dusted in here this morning, and she always puts things back wrong. I cannot seem to make her comprehend that any decorative object becomes mere litter when it stands an inch or two out of position. I suppose most people would not even notice, but I have a carpenter’s eye and cannot bear to see anything even a hairsbreadth off. I venture you share this sensibility, Mrs. Pelletier. Henry told me you were an artist.Your desire for visual harmony must be most acute.”

  “I desire it on the canvas but not necessarily in my surroundings,” I said. “Painting is a messy business, Mrs. Emerson, and I fear you would find the disorder in my workplace quite shocking.”

  She laughed. “Oh, I am not so easily shocked as all that. I think I would much enjoy visiting your artist’s studio.”

  “It would be presumptuous of me to call the place where I have recently set up my easel a studio,” I said. “It served as my late grandfather’s study, and I have not had the heart to move out all his clutter. Instead, I have simply added to it. But you are most welcome to visit me in Plumford any time.”

  As Mrs. Emerson was thanking me for the invitation, her little boy, called Eddy, scampered into the room. After him, the aforementioned Lisette clomped in, a heavy-set, elderly woman rather than the lively little maiden I had imagined from her name. Lisette added another log to the fire and inquired if we wanted tea.

  “Or perhaps you’d prefer a glass of the currant wine I made this fall?” Mrs. Emerson asked me.

  “I would indeed!” I said, surprised and delighted by the offer.

  Lisette returned shortly with a tray holding three small crystal glasses of wine, and for a moment I thought one was for the boy, who could not have been more than three. But no, it was for Lisette herself. She plucked it up, plopped herself into a chair with a groan, and complained that her bunions were acting up.

  “Oh, dear, not again. Poor Lisette,” Mrs. Emerson said with the most sympathetic of smiles. “I was going to impose upon you to bring us some crackers, but I will go fetch them myself.” And up she sprang, lithe as a girl, to do just that.

  Lisette quaffed her wine in one gulp and then silently regarded me. “Are you related to Mrs. Emerson?” I inquired, attempting a bit of conversation.

  Lisette gave me a puzzled look. “No. Why think us kin?”

  “Well, Mrs. Emerson treats you so kindly.”

  “Oh, that she does. But she treats everyone kindly, don’t she? ’Specially young Mr. Thoreau. He ain’t her kin neither. What he is to her I cannot say. He works the property ’longside my husband Antoine, but he ain’t hired help like us. We sleep out yonder in the barn, but young Thoreau sleeps right here in the house with the missus. I do not mean to say he sleeps in her room.” She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “Leastways, I have found no sign so far that he shares her bed.”

  I glared at her. “Yet you dare insinuate it.”

  “I’d as soon cut out my tongue as say a word against the wife of Mr. Emerson,” she replied huffily. “Such a fine gentleman! He employed us right afore he set sail for Europe and asked us to take good care of his lady and children. I reckon he asked the same of young Thoreau.”

  At that point Mrs. Emerson returned to the room and must have overheard Lisette’s last remark. “Who asked what of Mr. Thoreau?” she inquired in a sharper tone than usual.

  “Your husband, ma’am,” Lisette replied meekly. “To look after his dear family.”

  Without commenting, Mrs. Emerson turned to me and proffered a platter of crackers. I took one, but Lisette did not. And Eddy shook his head most vehemently when his mamma waved the platter in front of him. Since children are always greedy for treats that surprised me—until I bit into my cracker. Dry as sand and just as tasty.

  “I made them myself from buckwheat flour,” Mrs. Emerson told me proudly. “I should be most happy to give you the recipe.”

  “I am not much of a cook,” I demurred.

  “Neither was I until I married. Indeed, for the first thirty-three years of my life I rarely entered a kitchen. But now I could get around one blindfolded. Is that not so, Lisette?”

  “Yes, ma’am. When you are in the kitchen, you might as well be blind.”

  Mrs. Emerson continued without missing a beat. “Henry sowed our back property with buckwheat last spring, and it yielded a fine crop. Hence I use buckwheat flour for most everything, from muffins to johnnycakes. Even puddings! I consider it most healthful for the children.” Eddy scrunched up his face, and Mrs. Emerson laughed. “The children say my pudding tastes like the roof of a house, but how, pray, would they know what a house roof tastes like?” She ruffled her son’s silky hair.

  I took a sip of wine to help wash down the cracker. It might as well have been vinegar. No doubt that was why Lisette had downed hers like medicine. I promptly drained my own tiny glass, much relieved to be done with it.

  Mrs. Emerson observed me with her benevolent smile. “I fear the currants this year were a trifle tart. Do you find the wine so?”

  “Not at all,” I said, making a great effort to keep my mouth from puckering.

  “Would you like another glass? I’ll fetch the decanter.”

  “No, no, one glass is sufficient. I am sure it shall keep me warm all the way back to Plumford.”

  “You be from Plumford?” Lisette’s eyes widened. “Why, that is where the vampyre stalks!”

  “There are no such things as vampyres, Lisette,” Mrs. Emerson said gently.

  “There are and always have been!”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  “No, but few have. Vampyres shun the sun and only come alive during the night.”

  “Then I may well be a vampyre myself,” Mrs. Emerson told her. “I too shun the sun. You have often seen me close the shutters against the glare of it through the windows, have you not, Lisette?” The old woman nodded. “Indeed, I am greatly relieved at sunset and feel my best at midnight,” Mrs. Emerson continued. “I am also inordinately pale. You yourself have remarked upon it, Lisette. And have you not noticed my fangs?” Mrs. Emerson smiled without showing her teeth.

  Lisette did not smile back. “As sure as I am that you are not a vampyre, ma’am, I am sure one roams in Plumford. I’d not set foot in that town any sooner than I’d set foot in hell. That young man from Concord should have stayed away too. ’Course he was on the road to hell anyways, along with that Plumford gal he took carnal pleasure with. She lured him there sure as she was the vampyre’s helper.”

  “Lisette, enough foolish talk,” Mrs. Emerson said.

  “Foolish is it? Well, I seen the two of ’em carrying on with my own eyes last summer at the Grange dance. I was hired to serve the wine, so I well know how much the Plumford miss imbibed afore that fop Bidwell dragged her off to a dark corner to canoodle. I do not care to speak ill of the dead, but he was not to be trusted with foolish young ladies. Even got one in the family way, I hear tell, and—”


  “I do not countenance gossip,” Mrs. Emerson interrupted. “Best you go about your household business if you have nothing of more consequence to say.” Apparently Lisette did not, for off she did go most speedily, despite her sore bunions.

  “You are very tolerant of her,” I remarked.

  Mrs. Emerson sighed. “Lisette comes from up Canada and is not accustomed to our discreet ways. Pay her prattle no mind. I for certain do not.”

  “Gossipers can be treacherous,” I said most emphatically. “Especially if they talk about those who employ them.” I gave Mrs. Emerson a steady look and waited for her to pick up on this hint.

  She did not. “I wish my two girls were here to enjoy your company, Mrs. Pelletier,” she said. “They go to the Alcotts’ house every afternoon to be tutored by the eldest daughter, Anna. They had their own governess until Miss Foord left our household in September, as did my excellent housekeeper, Mrs. Goodwin. I would be quite alone and without help during my husband’s long absence if not for Henry. And Lisette and Antoine of course. But they are strangers to me and reside in rooms above the barn.”

  “So Lisette mentioned to me. And more.”

  “More?”

  “She made a point of telling me that Henry sleeps here in the house.” There! I waited for Mrs. Emerson’s reaction.

  Raising her long chin, she returned my look with unwavering eyes. “Yes, Henry has the room at the top of the stairs, and there he shall remain for as long as he chooses. Since I have never paid any mind to gossip about others, I see no reason to mind gossip about me, either. I trust my friends will also disregard it.”

  That made me like her even more. “May I be considered your friend?” I said.