Thoreau at Devil's Perch (3 page)

“You must have nothing more to do with this nasty business, Julia,” he said. “I am very sorry you came here with Thoreau.You should have stayed at home.”

Well! Since when does my cousin tell me how to properly conduct myself? As children we dealt with each other as equals, but it seems the equation has changed. Have I become a lesser person in his eyes since becoming a full-grown woman?

“Come now, Lewis, don't speak to your doughty mate Clark like that,” I said, attempting to cajole him. “Have you forgotten how I held my own when we fought wild dogs and bully boys?”

His expression remained stony. “This is not a game, Julia.”

“Nor was that! Leastways not for me. I truly believed we would cross the continent together.”

“As did I,” he said gruffly. “But I was only a boy and did not know the ways of the world yet. Or the proper place of women in it.”

“And what is their proper place, pray tell?”

“Home!” he near shouted back at me.

I did not argue with him further. Instead, I left him to his glowering ruminations all the way back to town. When he stopped before the front gate to let me out I cautioned him to be careful unloading the casts.

“The plaster has not yet cured,” I told him. “When it does I will clean off the casts with a wire brush.”

“I can do that,” he said.

“But I started the process, and I would like to see it through to completion.”

“You have already seen too much, Julia.”

“If you are referring to the body, I barely glimpsed it. Mr. Thoreau told me that the poor soul was a young man of color. What was he doing in Plumford, I wonder?”

“That is what I intend to find out,” Adam said, still regarding me most austerely. “Without any help from you, I should add.”

No, he should not have added that. It only made me more determined to stay involved in the investigation.

Monday, August 3rd

 

I
t is near midnight, and the only sound I hear is the scratch of my pen nib. I am tired but sleepless as I puff on my father's meerschaum pipe. Julia found it on a high shelf in the study a few days ago, amidst a dusty collection of ivory and scrimshaw carvings. The bowl is burnished gold from use, so it must have been one of his favorites, left here in safekeeping when he went to sea for the last time. Sadly, I lost him too young to have any memory of him, but as I regard the visage of Neptune carved into the bowl and the light teeth indentations in the curving amber stem, I conjure up my own image of him. And as I watch the wafting tendrils of smoke rise and curl away, I imagine they connect me in this world to him in the next.

A sense of disquietude has followed me all afternoon, but I took care to hide it from the patients I attended. As soon as my doctoring duties were done, I headed for Tuttle Farm, hoping to calm my thoughts and lift my spirits with a visit to Gran and then some mild sport. Soon as I stepped into Gran's kitchen, she remarked that I looked peckish and insisted on frying me up a batch of doughnuts. Ate six of them and, thus fortified, gathered my bow and a sheaf of arrows and walked out into the field in back of the barn. Archery proved to be the right prescription for me. As usual, aiming, drawing, holding, and loosing my arrows, then watching their arched, hissing flight into the coiled grass target made me more tranquil.

As I was shooting, I was once again taken unawares by Henry Thoreau. How he just appears as if risen from the grass or dropped down from the tree boughs, I know not. He told me he had first stopped at Grandfather's house and been directed by Julia to the farm.

“I am delighted to see you practice an aboriginal art,” he said. As he hefted and examined my bow, he described at some length his extensive collection of Indian arrowheads as well as tomahawk and war club heads.

“How did you come by so many relics from the past?” I asked him.

“Why, I found them.”

“But where?”

“Indian artifacts are everywhere hereabouts,” Henry said. He glanced around. “Right here would be a good place to look for them. It's a perfect site for an Indian camp or village. Level ground. A river nearby that used to be filled with so many salmon they could be caught by hand before white settlers fished it out. And that ancient stand of oaks just yonder would have yielded acorns to attract the deer that thrived here before the white man killed them all off with his musket.”

He kicked about for a moment or two, then stooped and picked up something. He showed it to me, a black granite arrowhead resting on the calloused bed of his palm.

“You amaze me, Mr. Thoreau,” I said.

“As I have many a friend on many a walk,” he replied with a smile. “It is as if I am a magnet drawing the buried remnants of Indian civilization out of the ground. I do not find it so amazing myself, however. I simply
look
. And the observant eye sees what easily passes unnoticed by most.”

He inquired about my yew bow, and when I told him it was of English manufacture, he went into a rather lengthy discourse lauding the power and efficiency of an Indian bow over a modern one. He cited one of elm he had seen in a Harvard collection that he had no doubt would outmatch mine in power and accuracy. But despite his disparaging remarks concerning my English bow, he seemed eager enough to give it a try. We paced off a fair distance from the barn, and I shot several arrows so he could grasp the rudiments of proper form. I then showed him how to hold the arrow on the string by using three fingers.

“But I observed that you use only two,” he said. Apparently nothing escapes his notice.

Explained that was a personal preference or quirk I could not account for. I had read that English longbowmen used that grip during the Middle Ages, but it had long fallen into disfavor.

“Perhaps in a past life you went on a crusade as a yeoman archer,” he said.

“As no doubt you were once an Indian brave,” I replied. We both laughed.

Proceeded to instruct him how to draw, hold, and loose properly. A longbow such as mine requires fifty pounds of effort to hold at full draw, yet he drew it easily. His first arrows flew wildly, but after only a moment's instruction he shot with amazing facility, exhibiting excellent coordination and wiry strength of arm and back. After we shot a dozen arrows each, we seated ourselves upon the stone wall surrounding the farmyard and became better acquainted.

He told me he had attended Harvard, and we established that he had studied there five years earlier than I had. He did not seem to think much of the institution. He claimed that he had as many trades as he had fingers, along with being a transcendentalist and a natural scientist, and that he was presently writing a book in the seclusion of a cabin by a pond. Quite an impressive fellow, this Thoreau, if indeed he is all he says he is.

He asked me where I practiced medicine, and I told him I had been assisting Dr. Holcomb Quincy in Boston for the two years since I had graduated from Medical College.

“But I have taken over my grandfather's practice here in Plumford temporarily, until he recovers from his accident,” I went on to say. “He was badly injured a few weeks ago playing town ball on the Green.”

Thoreau looked surprised. “Is the play that rough?”

“For the most part, no. But Grandfather was running backwards trying to catch a fly ball and collided right into the town pump. Broke his leg on the base and knocked himself out on the handle.”

“I cannot understand why grown men waste their time and strength of mind and body in sport,” Thoreau said.

It was my turn to look surprised. “For the joy of it of course!”

“A simple walk in nature can bring joy,” he said. “But games of sport can bring out the worst in man's own nature.”

“And the best,” I said.

“I will gladly argue the point some other time,” he offered. “Right now we have more important matters to discuss, however. I am outraged at the decision reached by the Coroner's Jury this morning, and I presume you are too, Dr. Walker.”

I assured him that he was correct. “It has disturbed me all day, and I have been attempting to fathom the reasoning behind their judgment.”

“Reasoning? There was none! Ratiocination is beyond such fools.”

“I have known most of those men all my life, Thoreau, and they are not fools.”

“Then how could they have reached the idiotic conclusion that the death was accidental? Did we not present evidence of foul play that was well-nigh unassailable?”

“I agree we stated the case with logic enough to call for a murder investigation,” I said. “But such an investigation could arouse fears that a murderer might be loose in the area.”

“One
is
loose!” Thoreau said.

“And I do not think Elijah Phyfe wants that made public.”

“Do you refer to the pompous fellow in the silk hat and purple cravat?”

I nodded. “Not only is he Plumford's Justice of the Peace. He is also the town's wealthiest citizen. He holds the mortgages on many farms hereabouts, and more than a few town merchants are also in his debt.”

“No wonder he held such sway over the men in the jury,” Thoreau said. “Still, I fail to understand why he wanted them to ignore our evidence.”

“Perhaps you will understand better when I tell you that Justice Phyfe is presently in the thick of persuading several new mills to locate in Plumford,” I said. “He is touting our town as a peaceable, conducive environment for trade.”

“So that's it,” Thoreau said grimly. “Far better to disregard the death of a mere Negro than risk tarnishing Plumford's reputation with a murder investigation. I opine that many of the men on the jury would also benefit from new industry coming to town. Pecuniary interests influenced their verdict.”

“This is speculation on our part,” I cautioned. “We cannot know for certain what was in the hearts of those men when they considered the evidence.”

“I know for certain that self-interest most often supersedes justice,” he replied. “Your jury of respectable Plumford citizens acted no better than a pack of slave owners.”

I thought that too severe a recrimination, yet it brought us to the sad truth of the matter. Even in Massachusetts, where the abolitionist movement is deemed the strongest in the nation, the death of a black man does not matter as much as would the death of a white man.

“Rather than self-interest, it could have been simple practicality that influenced the jury,” I said. “They could have decided that a murder inquiry would lead nowhere. The dead man is unknown, with no identification upon his person, and our constable is a simple shoemaker who lacks both the detection skills and the time to pursue an investigation.”

“Thus incompetence and inconvenience were the measures used to determine the verdict.” Thoreau heaved a mighty sigh. “Whatever the jury's motivation, it is now left up to us to find the murderer, Adam.”

“But whence do we go from here? We do not even know if his victim was a runaway slave or a freeman.”

“I am an operative in the underground railway,” Thoreau freely admitted to me, “and on my return to Concord this morning I confirmed that no young man of his description has been harbored locally in our houses or hideaways. But I shall investigate further. Someone might have seen our Negro depart from the cars at the Concord train depot.”

“And I shall inquire in Plumford,” I said. “If we could ascertain what he was doing in this vicinity, that might lead to finding out who murdered him.”

We shook hands. Our common determination and shared sense of justice had forged a friendship between us, and we agreed to be henceforth on a first-name basis.

Before we parted, I asked Henry what had brought him to the banks of the Assabet River this morning. He replied he had been in pursuit of a rare climbing fern he had heard grew in the area. He had searched without result for the plant and found the body instead.

“And now you have made your second long hike to Plumford today,” I said.

“Not so long. Less than three miles when I cut through fields, which is my preference,” he replied. “I am in the habit of walking many hours, day or night, to observe nature and cogitate. I do some of my best writing in my head as I roam. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

He politely refused my invitation to sample my grandmother's doughnuts and gave me the arrowhead he had found before going on his way. When I returned to the house, one of Gran's farmhands was waiting for me on the back stoop, the side of his face swelled up and his eyes filled with pain. I took a look inside his fetid mouth and went directly to the gig for my medical bag. When the poor man saw me extract a turnkey, he paled, as it is a dreadful instrument indeed. I assured him he would be feeling better in a jiffy, had him lie on his back, and called for Gran. She came out from the kitchen and cradled his head in her strong, gentle hands as I placed my knee firmly against his chest to keep him down. Told him to open wide, and with one great yank I pulled out a dangerously infected molar tooth. Must say I was so quick about it he barely had time to howl. He felt relief immediately, and for what pain remained I gave him a paper of willow bark powder to mix with water. Gran nodded approval. I was happy she was there to witness that, despite all my fancy learnin', as she calls it, I still use many of the herbal remedies she taught me as a child.

It was nearing sundown when I returned to town. The moment I stepped inside Grandfather Walker's house, I carefully whiffed the air, and kept sniffing all the way up the stairs and into his chamber.

“Any stink?” he asked from his bed in lieu of a greeting. We both know that the odor of putridity would be a sign that mortal infection had taken hold in his leg wound and the advance of gangrene begun.

“Not the slightest trace,” I assured him.

“Good,” he said, “as I would not like to give offence to my granddaughter.”

He directed his gaze, as I did mine, toward Julia, who was sitting by the window, an open book on her lap. The golden light of the setting sun poured through the panes, making her lovely face and hair glow. And when she looked at me, that very same light seemed to emanate from her golden eyes, as though she were beaming solar rays at me.

“Don't you wish to examine my leg, Adam?” Grandfather said.

How long my attention had strayed from him I know not, but I brought it back and began cutting away the bandages. Grandfather sat up and studied his broken limb with the cool interest of a physician rather than the apprehension of its owner.

“Well, it's healing well enough,” he allowed, gingerly touching the crimson scar that extended half the distance between foot and knee. “You did a fine job of mending the tear. I'll give you that much, Adam.”

“How fortunate Adam was visiting you the day you broke your leg, Grand-dear,” Julia said.

He snorted. “Had Adam not suggested I join him in a game of town ball, I would not have broken my leg in the first place.”

“And you will never let me forget it.” I smiled at the crusty old man. “I did not expect you to play with such risk to life and limb.”

“And I did not expect you to risk my life to
save
my limb, Adam,” he retorted. “An open fracture, as you well know, offers a gateway for noxious matter to enter the body. Most physicians, myself included, would have amputated a leg that had a snapped bone piercing through the flesh.”

I had been expecting this criticism from him. Until now he had been too weak to make it, and I was pleased that his assertive spirit had returned. But I also felt it necessary to defend myself, especially in front of Julia.