Thoreau at Devil's Perch (8 page)

Wednesday, August 12th

 

T
his afternoon was gray and the air heavy with damp. A cloud of mosquitoes joined us as we three climbed down from the gig. When I took two crowbars from behind the seat, Henry reached for one and Trump for the other. Since coming to consciousness yesterday, the young Indian has been recovering his strength at a most amazing rate. Nevertheless, I shook my head at him, gave a crowbar to Henry, and kept the other for myself. We all walked to the open grave in the burying ground. At its head stood a simple cedar cross bearing as yet no name. Gran's farmhands had removed the earth atop and around the coffin, but they left it to us to pry up the lid.

The odor of decay permeated the atmosphere. I looked up to see several redheaded vultures circling. “I must warn you that what we are about to do can make even the strongest man qualmish,” I said.“And that goes for myself, despite my training dissecting cadavers.”

“I inhale the scent as I would a rose, and I am as cheered by the sight of those vultures as by the sight of songbirds,” Henry said. “When I was younger I questioned why we cannot depart from Nature more cleanly and gracefully, but now I accept the whole process. I have come to realize the only answer to death is life.”

“No, vengeance is the only answer,” Trump said.

Henry and I glanced at each other but did not gainsay him. The young man was distraught and no wonder, for we were here to see if he had lost his only friend.

Henry and I stepped down into the grave. There was just room enough dug free of dirt on each side of the plain pine coffin for us to flank it. Without ceremony, we began to pry at the lid with the crowbars. The nails squealed as if in protest at our disturbing the peace of the corpse.

As we each raised the two planks of the lid, a wave of noxious fumes struck us, so pungent my eyes watered, and I had to step back to blink away the tears. Henry too reeled backward for an instant, despite all his talk about roses. We steeled ourselves and stared at a bloated horror. The dead creature before us did not look human but for the clothes it wore, stretched taut to bursting.

“The putrefaction and gases produced by decay can alter features beyond recognition,” I explained in a choked voice. “Perhaps you lack the strength to come down for a closer look, Trump.”

But he was determined to see if the corpse had been his good friend, and he slid down into the grave and gaped into the coffin. Every feature on the dead man's face was distended to the point of explosion. The eyes were tight slits. The tongue projected out from distorted lips like nothing other than a sickening black leach. The bile of decay had run out of the mouth and nose and congealed on the chin and neck. Insects were already at work under the skin. Their movements made one cheek waver slightly as if from a nervous tick. I sensed the entire corpse was alive with bugs feeding frantically. The head itself moved a fraction. A squirming mass of life had access to the rotting brain through the wound in the back of the skull.

I would not have held it against either man if they had bolted from the spot and not stopped running till they reached town. Henry was flat calm throughout, all alert, studying what lay before him. He glanced at me, and his large, clear eyes seemed to hold a deep understanding of what such decaying mortality meant. Trump looked at the corpse in bewilderment.

“Perhaps you can recognize the clothing?” I said.

Trump nodded and softly said, “Those are his fine boots. I was there when he won them in a game of craps. And he won that yeller coat the same night, the lucky son of a gun. Let me have a knife.”

I passed him my pocketknife, and after he felt carefully along the shoulder of the frock coat, he began to slice into the material along the seam.

“Take care,” I said. A slip of the knife into the bloated corpse would release enough gas to make us all violently sick.

Trump slowly parted the seam, felt through with his finger, and drew out a gold piece. “Caleb sewed it in there in case he got robbed or cleaned out at dice, so he'd have a fresh stake.” He returned the knife to me and slipped the coin into his pocket. “I'll remember him by it.”

There was no more to be done, and since the flies had come around in increasing number, we hastily slid the boards back atop the coffin and used the ends of our crowbars to nail it down tight. Henry and I climbed out of the grave, and Henry extended a hand to help Trump out. We shoveled dirt back over the coffin, and I promised Trump I would have the name Caleb carved on the cross.

“I would like to carve Caleb's name on his murderer's chest,” he said.

When we got back to town I gave Trump a tankard of cider for his nerves and changed his head bandage. He lay back on his cot and was asleep in an instant.

Henry and I went across the hall to the kitchen and found Julia there instead of Molly, fiddling with the cookstove, which was spewing black smoke in her lovely face.

“Curse this plaguey thing!” she said. “I want to boil water for tea but cannot get the fire to catch.”

“Have you checked the dampers?” Henry asked her.

“Oh, what do I know of dampers and such? I am hopeless in the kitchen.”

“So you must be,” Henry said, “if you cannot even boil water.”

“Julia is an artist, not a domestic,” I said, and that won me a smile from her. “Leave the stove to Molly.”

“That I would gladly do, but she did not even bother to come today.”

Henry took up a poker and cleared ashes from the fire in the cookstove, added more kindling, adjusted the dampers, knocked on the stovepipe, and repositioned the kettle. “That should do it,” he said.

Julia thanked him and inquired about the disinterment. I told her that Trump had identified the body as that of his friend Caleb. I did not want to offend her sensibilities by imparting further details, but Henry had no such reservations.

“The corpse smelled to high heaven, as to be expected in this heat,” he informed her. “The Hindoos dispose of human remains much more tidily by burning them.”

Julia did not seem the least put off by such a gruesome topic of conversation. Indeed, she seemed eager to hear more.

“Cremation allows the spirit to ascend pure and fragrant from the tainted carcass to await rebirth,” Henry went on to say.

“Do you really think spirits are reborn?” Julia asked him.

“Methinks the hawk that soars so loftily has earned this power by faithfully creeping on the ground as a reptile in a former state of existence,” he replied, his own words soaring just as loftily. “And as far back as I can remember, I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence. As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, so do they look to me now in New England.”

Julia lightly touched her hands to the sides of her high-boned face, a gesture I recalled her making as a young girl when an emotion or notion touched her deeply. “Perhaps I too recalled a former life,” she stated in a low, hushed tone and looked at me.

“Never mind about that,” I told her brusquely. “It signifies nothing.”

Her color deepened. “Such a dismissive response does not delight me, Adam.”

“I beg your pardon, but I find it hard to credit the possibility of Reincarnation.”

Henry gave me a benevolent smile, as a kindly schoolmaster might give a limited student. “You should read
the Bhagvat Geeta
,” he said.

“What is that?” Julia asked him.

“It is a Hindoo book of stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy. I bathe my intellect in it every morning after bathing my body in the pond.
The Bhagvat Geeta
explains Reincarnation as a perfectly natural state. Just as a body passes from youth to old age, the soul passes into another body at death.”

I shook my head. “That is a difficult concept for us practical Yankees to accept.”

“Why, my friend Waldo Emerson is a Yankee to his core, and he says we do not die, but only retire from sight and afterward return again in some new and strange disguise,” Henry said. “Socrates too was confident that we live again. Surely you recall his accounts of Reincarnation from your study of Greek philosophy at Harvard, Adam. And Goethe, if you recall, was certain he had been here a thousand times before and hoped to return a thousand times more.”

“I have not read Goethe,” I admitted.“Nor do I remember much of the Socratic dialogues I was obligated to translate at school. Rather than philosophy, my interest has always been in the practical sciences, and I am more comfortable discussing the functions of the body than the comings and goings of the soul.”

“Yet you were the one who took me back to a past life,” Julia reminded me.

Henry's light eyes sparked with interest. “How did Adam accomplish such a feat, Julia?”

“Through hypnosis.”

“Hypnosis?” Henry puzzled over this. “In Latin the word
hypnoticus
means inducing sleep. Did Adam give you a sleeping potion?”

“No, he merely dangled a timepiece in front of my face. And that is as much as I can tell you about the process.”

Henry turned to me. “Elucidate, please.”

“In truth, the journey Julia supposedly took to a past life completely mystifies me,” I told him. “But I can explain the process I used to hypnotize her. I simply asked her to fix her complete attention on my watch case. This, in turn, affected the state of her cerebrospinal centers. You see, a continued fixed stare, by paralyzing nervous centers in the eyes, and destroying the equilibrium of the nervous system, produces the phenomenon of hypnosis. Or so claims Dr. Braid, who invented the name. I merely followed the instructions in his book.”

“Why, it is a process similar to what the Hindoos do,” Henry said.

I tried not to smile. “What
do
the Hindoos do?”

“They sit on the ground with limbs crossed,” Henry replied most earnestly, “and fix their eyes steadily on a subject whilst writhing the upper body. Or so I have been told. I have never witnessed it myself.”

“I assure you, Henry, that I did not sit with limbs akimbo when Adam hypnotized me,” Julia said. “Nor did I writhe.” She looked at me askance. “Or did I?”

“No writhing whatsoever,” I assured her.

“Can anybody be hypnotized?” Henry asked me.

“If the subject won't take the process seriously, it is near impossible. Concentration of attention is absolutely necessary. Hence, idiots, babies, and the hopelessly insane cannot be hypnotized according to Dr. Braid.”

“Well, I am neither insane nor a babe,” Henry said. “And although I have been called an idiot by some for my convictions, I can measure a yard of cloth, count to twenty, and tell the days of the week, so I would not be considered one in the eye of the law. And as for taking the process seriously, I assure I would, Adam.”

“Are you volunteering to be my next subject?”

Henry nodded most vigorously. “There is nothing I would like better than to experience a past life.”

“Oh, I cannot promise to give you such an experience as that. My interest in hypnotism is limited to its use as a healing art.”

“Do give it a try, Adam,” Julia said. “Just tell Henry to keep going back in time as you did me and see what results.”

Of course I knew she was urging me to experiment with Henry so I would be more inclined to experiment with her again, which I had no intention of doing. Even so, I could not resist taking up Henry's offer and the challenge that went with it.

Sat him down on a kitchen chair, pulled out my pocket watch, and dangled it about a foot away from his eyes. Instructed him to look steadily at it whilst keeping his mind free of all other thoughts. When I observed his pupils had dilated, I extended the first two fingers of my other hand and carried them from the watch to his eyes. Just as Dr. Braid had foretold, my subject's lids closed involuntarily, and he instantly fell into a profound sleep, his respiration slow, deep, and sibilant.

“When you hear the clap of my hands, you will awaken and recall everything you experienced whilst in this state,” I told him. “Now go back to another life if you can. Take your time.”

His face settled into what appeared to be an inward gaze of quietude as his mind oriented itself to this novel commission. Then he jolted in his chair as if struck a blow and appeared wide-awake but for his closed eyes, which moved back and forth with great speed beneath his lids. Of a sudden he commenced to respirate heavily and with alarming rapidity.

“I am taken by surprise,” he near shouted. “Two at least pursue me through the trees screaming their war cries.”

“Who and where are you?” I quietly said.

His head moved as if to look down at his arms and hands. “I am a red man and wear but a breechclout and moccasins. In my hand I bear my war ax. I race to a jumble of high boulders and bound up them to better defend myself. I whoop in the joy of battle as two enormous foes come at me.”

“When in time is this happening?”

He shook his head with impatience. “War paint is smeared across their faces and chests. One has a knife with a metal blade, the other raises a club of wood with a heavy ball that ends in a sharp beak. He swings it at my head.”

I tried to ask another question, but Henry raced on.

“I raise my ax, and the wooden ball of his weapon smashes against the sharp quartz edge of it. Bits of pink crystal are broken free and pierce my face. He pulls back his club to strike at me again. Before he can swing I sink my ax deep into his skull with such force that my weapon is wrenched from my hand. He tumbles down into the crevasse between the rocks, my ax still lodged in his head. I feel a searing pain in my side as I turn to take on the other warrior. His knife is dripping with blood—my blood?—and he thrusts it at my chest. I grasp his wrist and twist the knife away. Then I curl my arm around his head and snap his neck. I throw down his dead body. I am invincible!”