Thoreau at Devil's Perch (4 page)

“Of course I considered that danger, Grandfather. But the bone break was not fragmented, and there was a minimum of tissue damage. And dash it all! I could not have you go legless if I could help it. So whilst you were still unconscious, I aligned the two halves of the fibula at the point of breakage and sewed up the wound with cat gut.”

“Darn good thing I was insensible to the pain,” he grumbled. “So tell me, young doctor. What is your prognosis? When will I be up and about?”

“As soon as a proper knit takes place between the bone ends. And for that to happen, we must keep your leg immobile for a while longer.”

He groaned with impatience rather than pain as I replaced lengths of wood to each side of his leg and bound them. Julia brought his pale, bony hand to her lips and kissed it. I could not help but imagine the soft warmth of her mouth against my own flesh.

“Do not fret, Grand-dear,” she told him. “You shall be walking about soon enough. And until then I shall stay by your side.”

Comforted by her promise, he lay his white head down upon the pillows and closed his eyes. She pulled a light blanket over him, and we both quietly exited the chamber and went downstairs. Molly had gone for the day, and Julia offered to make me supper. I told her I had consumed a hefty portion of Gran's fricasseed chicken before leaving the farm, and she looked relieved. The preparation and consumption of food seem to be of little interest to her. Perhaps she receives her sustenance from her art.

I suggested a stroll in the garden or a walk around the Green, but she declined. Thinking she was perhaps fatigued, I suggested retiring to the parlor where I might entertain her by strumming my guitar. Feeble as my musical talent is, it has entertained her well enough on previous evenings. But again she declined. Stating she had work to do, off she went to the study, leaving me to wonder if she was irked with me. It had not escaped my attention that she had been so this morning. But was she
still?
Decided to find out.

She looked surprised when I entered the study for I have stayed well out of it since she took over the room as a makeshift studio. An unfinished portrait of our grandfather rested upon an easel she had set up by the window. The liveliness of it astonished me.

“I have depicted him as he will look once he recovers,” Julia said and gave me an expectant look. “He
will
recover fully, will he not?”

“He is mending as well as can be expected for a man of seventy,” I hedged.

“Oh, dear,” Julia said, wrapping a long pinafore around her slender frame. “That does not sound an overly optimistic prognosis.”

“Oh, I am optimistic,” I said to assure her.

“Then why are you twisting your fingers in your palm like that?”

I immediately let go grasping the first two fingers of my right hand, recalling how Julia used to tease me about this telltale sign of apprehension when we were children. She knows me too well. “He will regain his ability to walk,” I said.“But he will never regain the youthful vigor you have given him in your portrait, Julia. In truth, I believe Grandfather will need assistance should he continue his medical practice. You might consider staying here in Plumford with him for good.”

“For good?” She did not seem too pleased by my suggestion as she turned to the writing desk she had covered with canvas. It was littered with tubes and bladders of oil paints, and vials of turpentine and linseed oil, along with an assortment of brushes. After carefully selecting a brush, she looked back to me. “You might consider staying here for good yourself, Adam. You would be of more assistance to our grandfather than I could ever be.”

“But I have my own work to do.”

“And I do not?” She slapped the brush lightly against her palm. “I suppose you do not consider me a serious artist because of my sex.”

“I am highly respectful of your sex,” I replied rather stiffly.

“Even though you think it inferior to yours?”

“You have no reason to believe I do, Julia.”

“That you spoke to me as one would speak to a child this morning seems reason enough.”

“I knew it,” I said.

“Knew what, pray?”

“That you were harboring some resentment toward me. But you should not hold it against me for trying to protect you, Julia. Indeed, that is rather childish, as I am only looking out for you.”

My words, unfortunately, did not appease her. Instead, they seemed to perturb her even more. Color rose to her cheeks, and anger flickered in her eyes.

“How fortunate for me that we are reunited, Adam. How did I possibly manage to look out for my own witless self all these years we were apart?”

Do not find sarcasm an attractive trait in women. What man does? Still, I would have been most willing to continue our discussion had she seemed so inclined. But she turned her back to me again and busied herself squeezing paints onto a wooden palette. I left her to her work, and for aught I know she is still at it.

Just heard the tread of her footsteps on the creaking stairs, then the squeak of her chamber door opening and closing. She has finally gone to bed, so I too shall retire, knowing she is safely tucked in. And as I do every night before I fall asleep, I shall imagine how the moonlight shines through the lace canopy above her bed, casting light and shadow upon her face and neck.

 

E
arly this morning we buried the young Negro. Town officials would not permit him to be interred in the Plumford cemetery, so Adam asked his grandmother to give him a place in the Tuttle burying ground on the farm.

That Elizabeth Tuttle would allow a stranger, and a black one at that, to be buried alongside her kin might be surprising to some, but not to me. During the three years I'd resided in Plumford as a child, I'd never seen her deny Adam anything. I'd thought him a most fortunate boy to have such a doting grandmother and took to thinking of Mrs. Tuttle as my granny, too. Not that I would have presumed to address her as such, for we were not related. Nor had she ever shown the slightest fondness for me. Even so, in my heart she remains Granny Tuttle to this day. I suppose I still feel a strong connection to her because we both care so much for Adam.

Adam, Henry Thoreau, Granny Tuttle, her ward Harriet, and I were the only graveside mourners. How sad to think that the deceased youth's friends and loved ones do not even know what happened to him. After the simple wooden coffin was lowered in the ground, Granny read out some Bible verses, and Thoreau played a poignant tune on his flute.

Adam and I stayed behind whilst the others went back to the farmhouse. We have been cool toward each other since Monday evening, but our warm feelings returned as we stood before his mother's grave and held hands, just as we used to as children. I felt the connection between us once again, as strong as the links in a chain, yet as subtle as a current in the air. The marble marker we gazed upon, carved with an angel's head and wings, was as white and shiny as I remembered it, thanks no doubt to Granny's diligent scouring. I had memorized the inscription as a girl: “Sacred to the memory of Sarah, daughter of Elizabeth and Eli Tuttle and wife of Owen Walker. She was born November 18, 1799, and departed this life June 11, 1829.” Seventeen years ago. Adam had been but seven. Two years later, when I removed to Plumford from Boston, we became fast friends, and he would often take me here to admire the marker.

“I have always imagined your mother to look exactly like that beautiful angel,” I told him.

“She might well have,” he replied. “I remember her voice and laugh and even her touch, but her features have sadly faded from my memory.”

“What a pity you have no likeness of her as I do of my own dear mother.”

“My father had one, I am told. A portrait miniature painted on ivory. He always carried it on his person. Therefore it was lost with him at sea.”

I imagine Owen Walker pressing Sarah's image to his heart as his ship went down in the whaling grounds of the Pacific Ocean. His last thoughts must have been of her and his baby boy.

“Sadly, I have no likeness of my father, either,” Adam said.

“Ah, but you do. All you need do is gaze in a looking glass to see his features. Does not Grandfather Walker claim you are the spitting image of his beloved son?”

Adam smiled at my attempt at a small jest. “I may look like my father, but I have always felt myself more a Tuttle than a Walker.”

“Do not let Grandfather hear you say that. He is so proud you followed in his footsteps.”

“In truth, I do not intend to follow him but to go my own way,” Adam said. “Dr. Silas Walker is of the old school. He still believes in ancient medical theories concerning the body's humors. If purging doesn't do the trick, he is ever ready to use his lancet and his leeches.”

“Oh, those horrid leeches! The memory of them makes me shiver,” I said.“When I was out of sorts as a child, he would fish them out of the big Staffordshire jar in his office and apply them to my limbs.”

“Gran would give me a dose of some bitter herb concoction to cure my ills, and 'twas then I missed my mother most,” Adam said. “Ma always dosed me with honey from her prized hives.”

It must comfort Adam that when his mother fell off a high tree branch whilst trying to capture a swarm of wild honeybees, she died instantly. When I think of my own dear mother's drawn-out, painful death from Consumption, my only comfort is the frail but persistent hope that a spirit as fine as hers must continue forth in some other blessed form.

Adam and I soon left the little burial ground on the shady knoll and joined the others in Granny Tuttle's kitchen. As she served up gingerbread and chamomile tea, she asked Mr. Thoreau why he had chosen to get himself carted off to jail last month.

“I warrant you weren't fetched up to be a jailbird,” she said.

“As the bill, so goes the song; as the bird, such the nest,” he replied.

Granny narrowed her eyes at him. “What sort of flummydiddle talk is that? I should think your Aunt Maria was mortified.”

“You know my aunt, Mrs. Tuttle?”

“As a girl I was pretty budge with her. And I know all the Thoreaus to be a fine, honest race. 'Tis no wonder then that I was flabbergasted when I heard one of 'em got hisself arrested.”

“I preferred that to paying my poll tax,” he said.

“Look-a-here, son. 'Tis every freeborn man's duty to pay his taxes. How else can this Great Democracy function?”

“Now, Gran, don't get all brustled up about it,” Adam said, falling into her way of speaking as he rocked in the splint-bottomed chair his Grandfather Tuttle had made. “Henry surely had good reasons for refusing to pay the tax.”

Granny gave one of her sniffs. “I can think of nary a one.”

“Allow me to give you mine, ma'am,” Thoreau said, courteous as can be. “I was protesting the Mexican War. I will not pay a penny to support an immoral war designed to spread slavery.”

“I don't countenance slavery,” she muttered and changed the subject. “Anyways, I hear tell you are now residing in a shanty by some piddling pond, young man.”

“Call it a shanty if you like, Mrs. Tuttle, but I live in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building.”

“Well, I should think you would feel mighty lonesome in it.”

“No more lonely than a loon, ma'am. Nature keeps me company. It is the perennial source of life, is it not?”

“What are you, a hermit?” Granny countered.

“I think that I love society as much as most,” Henry replied, but his smile was most ironic.

“So what do you do all day?” Granny persisted. “Anything
useful?
”

“I support myself well enough by the labor of my hands.”

“I wager yer family made sacrifices to get you a fine Hah-vahd education, young man. What good is it doin' you?”

“I still have the leisure for literary pursuits and the study of nature,” he answered. “If a man must have money—and he needs but the smallest amount—the true and independent way to earn it is by day labor. There is no good reason an educated man cannot work with his hands, Mrs. Tuttle.”

Adam laughed. “Oh, I am certain Gran agrees with you on that score, Henry. Despite my own fine education, she asked me just yesterday to lend a hand with the apple harvest next month, and I would very much like to oblige her.”

I was sitting in the high-back settle by the great fieldstone fireplace, sketching, and my ears pricked up like an attentive dog's. Does Adam plan to stay in Plumford after our grandfather has mended after all? Not that such a decision on his part would change my own plans. Then again, what worthwhile plans do I have? Unless I go along with the terms stated in the letter I received yesterday and commence work within the week, I shall lose the portrait commission I had been promised before departing from New York. But how can I leave Plumford before Grandfather is well enough to do without me? I am afraid I shall have to forego the commission.

Henry got up from the bleached oak table, most likely to avoid further questions from Granny, and strolled over to the fireplace to get a closer look at the old flintlock musket adorning the massive lintel.

“That was my Great Grandfather Tuttle's trusty weapon in the War for Independence,” Adam informed him.

“Does it still fire?”

“It does indeed,” Granny stated most emphatically. “I recently used it to shoot at a fox sniffin' around the hen house. Just missed the critter, I regret to say.”

“Well, I did not regret it,” pretty little Harriet said softly as she poured Adam another cup of tea. (She is always right there to serve him when he is in need of sustenance, I have noted.) “I would be greatly upset to see a wild creature killed.”

“Then be forewarned to stay away from the Reverend Mr. Upson,” Henry said. “I am sure Miss Bell shall do her best to avoid him after peering into his sack of horrors Monday.”

I went on drawing in silence, for I saw no reason to tell Mr. Thoreau that I allow Mr. Upson to call on me whenever he begs leave to. How can I be so uncharitable as to refuse a lonely widower such as he?

“What are you scratching away at so industriously?” Thoreau asked me.

“I am
sketching
, not scratching away like some chicken.”

He left his position by the fireplace to come look over my shoulder. I did not mind, for my sketch was progressing quite well. I had drawn, with perfect perspective, the yawning hearth outfitted with a lug pole, a chain and pulley, and a long crane. A kettle, suspended by a hook from the crane, hung above a small mound of coals. I had managed, with the adroit use of a mere pencil, to make the coals
glow
.

“Ah, a study of your cousin,” Henry said.

Admittedly, Adam was also in the drawing, but well off to the side and sketched in lightly, without any of the attention to detail I had given the fieldstones and brick and cooking implements. He just happened to be in the outer edge of my viewing range, thus I had included him.

“It is a study of a passing way of life,” I told Henry, perhaps a little primly. “More and more fireplaces are being blocked up and replaced by cooking stoves.”

“You might consider such a convenience for yourself, Gran,” Adam said to his grandmother. “I would gladly buy and install a stove for you.”

“You do that, dearie, and I will take a sledge to it, by gory!” she retorted. “There will be no iron monster in my kitchen, saturating the food with poisonous fumes.”

Adam, not one to argue futilely, went back to sipping his tea. And Henry went back to studying my sketch. “You have talent enough,” he concluded.

“
More
than enough,” I said, demonstrating my insufferable lack of modesty concerning my talent.

“More than enough talent to do what?” Henry asked me.

“Why, to make my own way in the world. I barely manage to support myself now by giving drawing lessons to silly girls who do not take art seriously. But my goal is to become a well-regarded and gainful portrait painter.”

Henry did not seem too impressed by this ambition. He suggested that I apply my talent to botanical drawings rather than portraits of vain people. Nature, he stated, was a greater and more perfect art than any that man—or woman, he hastily added—can produce. I challenged this, of course, claiming art to be the very measure of civilization.

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue,” he allowed. “But it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. And are we not all sculptors and painters? Our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”

“What sort of flummydiddle talk is that?” I asked him, imitating Granny Tuttle.

He smiled. “At any rate, I am glad to see you are making use of one of my pencils, Miss Bell.”

I looked down at the Number 4 in my hand. “You are
that
Thoreau? The one who makes the best drawing pencils in New England?”

“In the world, I venture to say.” (Like me, he has no false modesty.)

“Pray why are Thoreau pencils so much better?” I asked him.

“Because of improvements I saw fit to make in my father's established process. Such as using clay as a binder for the plumbago, which produces a better lead.”

“Indeed it does,” I agreed. “Your lead does not smear as others do.Yet it remains exceedingly malleable. And I like that your pencils come in differing gradations of hardness and softness.”

“Produced by varying the amount of clay in the mixture,” he informed me. “I also invented a grinding machine that collects only the finest particles of the ground graphite. Therefore, the lead has far less grit. We insert it in a hollowed-out cylinder of wood rather than two halves glued together as our competitors do.”

“Well, Mr. Thoreau, I warrant I shall be a lifelong customer of your excellent pencils.”

“Allow me to send you a box of them.”

“Oh, I am afraid I could not afford an entire box.”

“I am offering them to you as a gift, Miss Bell.”

Thoreau & Co. pencils are not cheap. In fact, for one such as I, who receives such a meager income, they are very, very dear.

“That is far too generous a gift for me to accept, Mr. Thoreau,” I said with regret. “We hardly know each other.”

“Then I will renew my offer when we become better acquainted. Unless, of course, you do not wish to know me better, Miss Bell.”

Henry Thoreau is such an odd combination of frankness and formality, shyness and boldness, that I confess I am charmed by him. “Of course I wish it,” I replied. “And I wish you to call me Julia.”

He asked me to call him by his first name too. Thus we are now on easy terms with each other and may be on our way to establishing a true friendship. I would not be so ready to make friends with Henry, however, if Adam did not clearly hold him in high regard. I trust Adam to be a good judge of character. Did he not always know, when we were children, which dogs would bite and which would not?