The Transcendental Murder (20 page)

Red hair must run in the female line in Elizabeth's family—from great-grandmother to, Elizabeth to Elizabeth's children. There was a picture downstairs in the dining room, painted in the style of John Singer Sargent, that showed Elizabeth as she had looked when she was married. She had been a redhead, all right, like her children, with a pretty, bushy bob. But not this color, surely? The hair in the portrait was a light red like Rowena's, not this deep, lustrous red-brown, the color of a sorrel horse …

Then Mary was struck by a thought, and her fingers shrank from the hair she was twisting. There was an old wives' tale (or was it true? perhaps it was true!) that the hair of a dead man goes on growing in the grave. A picture blossomed in her mind before she could stop it, a picture of a beautiful young corpse in a flowing white dress, with a pale pre-Raphaelite face, her white hands folded on the heliotropes of her breast, and her dark coffin filling and filling with the ever-lengthening coils of her glorious ghostly hair …

Chapter 36

	How martial is this place! Had I a mighty gun I think I'd shoot the human race And then to glory run!
EMILY DICKINSON

The D.A. had finally come out to Concord. He didn't do anything in particular while he was there except spend an hour in Jimmy's office, whining. Miss O'Toole was away on vacation, and the D.A. felt naked and defenseless. And it was a misty night. He hadn't liked the way the trees had hung over the road on the drive out. The country was spooky, with those
huge
barns, probably jam-packed with cows, and those
trees
, brrrr.

And the newspapers were at him again. A district attorney was supposed to come through with brilliant solutions to crimes and spectacular prosecutions. And here he was, getting nowhere as usual, the “Do-Nothing DA.” again. Well, they couldn't arrest the wrong man, could they? Then the papers would have at them for sure. And they couldn't arrest Teddy Staples, because they couldn't
find
Teddy Staples. Where in the hell was Teddy anyway? Brrrr, those trees!

After the D.A. left, Homer sat with his knees wedged into the kneehole of his desk, playing idly with his tie. He rolled it up from the bottom and then let go. As it unrolled, Mary and Jimmy Flower could watch the girl who was diving off the diving board go through the various positions of a swan dive and end up with a big splash at the bottom. “Holy horsecollar,” said Jimmy.

“It would look a whole lot better on a horse,” said Mary.

Homer wasn't listening. He looked up from his tie and slapped the desk. “I know one place we didn't look for those letters, or that gun or the missing hat—the Gun House.”

“The Gun House?”

“Where the Concord Independent Battery keeps its cannon. Come on. How can I manage to be so everlastingly dumb?”

Mary squeezed out of her chair and loomed up behind her card table. “Well I never,” she said. “Homer Kelly being humble. What a nice change.”

Homer laughed a huge basso laugh and lifted Jimmy right out of his chair. He dandled him up and down. “Well, if a person knows he's the cat's pajamas, why try to cover it up?”

“Ow,” said Jimmy. “For Chris'sake, lemme down.”

Jimmy didn't have a key to the Gun House, so they drove out by Harvey Finn's farm on Lowell Road and picked him up. The Gun House had been erected in the field next to Emerson's house by a patriotic town, the popular subscription taken up in a few days. Outside it a sign hung on a pole, displaying the crossed cannon insignia of the Battery. Harvey Finn opened the side door and turned on the light. The single room was like a big garage with a high beamed ceiling. Around the walls hung the harnesses for the horses. The two gleaming guns, copper-cent color, faced toward the big front doors, with the high-wheeled limbers behind them, their shafts resting on the floor. Homer stood between the guns and looked at them.

“What's today? May 6th. They won't be used again until Memorial Day, right? Suppose Ernest Goss was looking for a temporary place to stick his letters where he could get at them any time he wanted to. He had a key to the Gun House, didn't he? He might have planned to take them away again before Memorial Day. He didn't expect to die in the meantime.”

Homer was stooping over, peering into the muzzle of the right-hand gun. He took out his flashlight and pointed it inside. “Nothing here.” Then he tried the other one. “Oh, hell.” He sat back on his haunches and scratched his head.

Mary tried the ammunition boxes on the limbers. They were empty, too.

“It was a cute idea anyway,” said Jimmy Flower.

“Harvey,” said Homer. “Show me how they work. You use blanks to start them with?”

“That's right. See, here's the box that holds the charges, black powder in little red bags. The powder monkey puts it in the muzzle, the rammer rams it home, and the thumber, he stands in back and puts a blank cartridge here under this little screw (it used to be a thumb-hole) like this. Then the lanyard man pulls the rope on it when I yell ‘fire.' Like this.” There was a colossal BLAM. Mary shrieked, totally unprepared.

“Hey, hey,” said Homer. “M-my God, man.”

“That was just the blank. There wasn't any charge in it.”

“Even so. Jesus. Say, what's in that bucket there, with the rag on top?”

Harvey Finn lifted up the rag and glanced underneath. “Oh, it's just …” He put the rag back hastily. “It's not anything.”

“Well, what is it?” said Jimmy. He picked up the rag. The bucket was full of empty beer cans. Harvey Finn snickered. “Some of the boys must have had a party. Well, it's not like the good old days, though. We've really reformed since then. Don't forget, we're not a dry Battery …”

“I know, you're a wet cell.”

No point in staying any longer. Harvey Finn walked around the big room, straightening a harness, patting a wheel-rim. He had the look of a housekeeper fussing about her parlor. Mary got a strong whiff of the feeling the members of the Battery had for their gear. It was an affectionate pride, a boyish pleasure in anything noisy and slightly dangerous. They were an easygoing unmilitaristic outfit that liked to have fun on the boys' night out.

Homer drove Harvey Finn home and then Jimmy Flower. Jimmy lived on Lexington Road in a tidy little house that had ice-cream-scoop hedges around the front porch. Isabelle Flower invited Mary and Homer in for coffee. She gushed over Homer and gave him a big squeeze around the stomach, which was all she could reach. “Boy, Homer,” she said, “are you my type! I'll bet you make hay with all the girls. Say, wouldn't we make a cute couple?”

“And here it is, spring, and all,” said Homer.

“How do the girls keep their hands off you?”

“They don't seem to find it difficult.”

“For gosh sakes, Isabelle,” said Jimmy. “Lay off of Homer.”

Chapter 37

	One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.…

“This isn't the way to my house,” said Mary. Homer's car was turning up Bedford Street.

“Oh, come on. How would you like to go for a spooky walk in Sleepy Hollow cemetery? We'll just walk up to Authors' Ridge and pay our respects to the immortals. Come on.”

The street lights were propagating rectilinearly, making straight paths through the mist. The elm trees had leafed out, and the shadows under them were black and huge. Homer waved his large hand overhead. “Thoreau called them chandeliers of darkness, when he walked under them of a summer night.”

Mary looked at him sideways. He had almost sounded … Was he giving way at last to the spell of those old dead words, made alive again in Concord's elms and rivers and fields? But it couldn't be. Not the man who had condescended to Emerson and trampled on Margaret Fuller. No.

It took them fifteen minutes of fumbling along the misty paths with the help of a flashlight before they stumbled on the steep rise of Authors' Ridge. They climbed to the top and looked around. “Look,” said Mary. “That's Bronson Alcott's stone, the fancy one. And this little marker is Louisa's.” They stood a minute looking down at it. Then Homer moved away, groping for the iron chain around Emerson's big piece of quartz. Mary knelt down and touched the simple marker that said L.M.A. She thought of Louisa's bust in the library, with the gentle plaster face and the heavy chin and the enormous coil of plaster hair hanging over the collar in back. Then she thought of the rows of dead, lying side by side beneath her feet—Louisa and her sisters, her mother.
Was their hair still growing and growing in the grave
—
their long, long hair?

Mary struggled to her feet, and looked around in the dark. She began to feel panic-stricken. Oh, now look here. Don't be idiotic. But—where was Homer? If he didn't come back soon, she would be compelled to call out for him, and she was determined not to do that. Mary stood still, trying not to tremble, trembling all the same. She could hear his steps crunching on the gravel, off to the right. But he had gone to the left, to see Emerson's grave. Suddenly Homer took her hand, and she jumped spasmodically, jerking her hand away.

“Mary,” he said huskily.

Mary began to babble. She had just had an extraordinary idea. “What day did you say it was?”

“What? I don't know, for heaven's sake. It's May sixth.”

“That's what I thought you said, that's what I thought. Homer, do you know what today is?”

“Darned if I know. Your birthday? Happy birthday.”

“No, no, not mine, it's Henry Thoreau's birthday. I mean it's the anniversary of his death. He died a hundred years ago today, in that house on Main Street. I knew that, and then I forgot. They're having a big celebration in New York at the Morgan Library.”

“Well then, all the more reason for paying Henry a call. So it is—so it is—well, well. A hundred years since he lay there in the front room, dying of TB and failure of the legs, with spring breaking forth outside his window … And somebody (who was it?) asked him if he had made his peace with God. ‘We have never quarreled,' says Henry. I like that.”

“Wait, wait,” said Mary. “Listen!” There was that crunching sound on the gravel again. “It's over there where Henry is buried.
Homer, he's walking
.”

“Good God, girl, what's the matter with you? I'll know better than to take you into a cemetery at midnight any more.” He stopped, then, and listened. “Hey, you're right. There is somebody over there.”

The crunching sound grew more audible. Grate, grate, grate. Then it stopped. There was a swollen piece of fog hanging over Thoreau's grave. (Like a winding sheet—or a cocoon about to loose some great shadowy moth—and the moth would flutter its huge grey wings and then blunder against Mary's cheek and grapple in her long hair.) She shuddered violently, and struggled to master herself. But then out of the fog there came a voice, and Mary was suddenly calm and still, listening. The voice had a low sepulchral hollowness, as though it came from some body that had gently laid aside its coffin lid like the newly risen dead.

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau …”

It broke off. Homer gripped Mary's arm. But her fear had turned to a weird longing. She felt an intense desire to walk forward, rend the mist and find Thoreau inside it, reborn, alive, clothed in flesh, his eyes upon her—those great, burning eyes! The voice began again, more loudly this time, more firmly.