The Expeditions (2 page)

“Boy.”

Elisha turned.

Brush motioned toward the wall behind his desk. A skein of loose black twine, like a charred perch net, was tacked beside the bookcase. With a shock Elisha recognized it as a scalp lock, dangling from a swatch of leathered flesh.

“There will be no trouble from savage Chippewas. That I guarantee.”

On the sidewalk, in the sunlit drizzle, Elisha moved among a hustle of gentlemen and street vendors and ladies, amid the shouts of charcoal peddlers and airy clang of church bells, the smells of manure and smoke and coffee. He was almost too excited to breathe. He turned onto a side street and broke into a jog, then yanked the hat from his head and with a shout whirled it skyward. It skated far along the laneway, rising on an updraft before coasting slowly down.

A drunkard squatting in a doorway spat and called, “Hey! Don’t dirty that fucking capper!”

Was this how bliss tasted? Of manure and woodsmoke and rot and roasting coffee? Elisha raced down the laneway and scooped up the hat, clapped it on his head. From the thrown-open doors of a corner church came a reedy chorus of praise.

He had come to Detroit after two winters in the forests north of Manchester, cutting white pine with an outfit of Swedes and Poles. The lumber camp existed in Elisha’s mind now as luxurious sensations, devoid of imagery: the sharp scent of pine sap, the taste of smoky sassafras tea. The initial draft of morning air, so cold it made him sneeze. That first winter, he’d risen an hour before dawn to drive a team of Belgians down the snowy tote roads, a water tank’s trickle turning the trails into belts of ice. Despite the wagon’s jostling he often dozed, waking in startled confusion with the horses stopped, his breath clouding before him, the frozen reins limp in his gloved hands. Around him, snow-covered pines and birches and sugar maples slumped before a vast white sky. His calls echoed faintly then were swallowed by the forest.

The second winter Elisha gained promotion to the timber crew, cutting white pine that he figured to be two hundred years old by the rings on their table-sized stumps. Now he slept until dawn, hiked out to the cut beneath a chorus of grosbeak and chickadee. White-tailed deer froze as the men approached, then vaulted away. Afternoons, they stripped the felled logs then chained them into enormous pyramids to be hauled away by oxen. One afternoon a chain binding snapped. The sound was like a pistol shot; then a pyramid of logs collapsed with a groan, rushing toward Elisha and a young Polish teamster. Elisha dove away, his legs twisted beneath the timber, but the teamster was struck full in the chest, his toque knocked clear. The boy lay on his back as blood slid from his mouth. He was too frightened even to scream. The lumbermen lifted the pair onto a sled and rushed them to the bunkhouse, the Polish boy repeating a single whispered word:
Matka, matka, matka.
Mother. Elisha clasped his hand to comfort him. The boy died fifty yards from the bunkhouse.

Elisha laid up for two weeks, until the swelling in his knee diminished, then limped to the depot in Manchester and scanned the schedule board. Somewhere far away, he thought, somewhere warmer. Somewhere with women. He paid eighteen dollars for a seat on a train headed to Detroit via Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toledo. He carried a bundle with a spare pair of trousers and a change of underclothes. His coin pouch held two worn gold eagles. That first morning in the city he purchased a copy of the
City Examiner,
and that afternoon he knocked on the door of Alpheus Lenz on Woodward Avenue, who had posted an advertisement for a scientific assistant, no experience required, payment of three dollars coin per week. Elisha’s shirt was stained from a long-ago bloody nose. His hair was matted and frayed.

Alpheus Lenz was a short, fleshy gentleman with curly blond hair and smoke-colored pince-nez spectacles. He squinted at Elisha’s stained shirt, then reluctantly invited the boy into a study stacked with wooden crates. The crates, he explained, were filled with specimens that he planned to arrange in a cabinet of curiosities for public display. He asked Elisha to sit at a desk and write the words
Animal bipes implume
on a sheet of parchment. “How did you learn to write so beautifully?” the man asked, holding the paper close to his ruined eyes. Elisha thought to describe his father’s nightly regimen: three verses of Scripture copied in perfect hand, any wavering characters causing the entire verse to be repeated. He said, “My mother taught school.” Lenz hired him on to start that afternoon.

Alpheus Lenz showed Elisha how to pin butterflies through the thorax to cedar specimen blocks, there beside a screened fireplace, their shirtsleeves pinned up, sunlight slanting through the tall windows. Afternoons, Elisha penned title cards for specimens from Georgia and the Carolinas, Maine and Texas, the chiton shells like strange coins, the cave bats frozen as if in panicked flight. For reference he paged through Lenz’s gilt-edged volumes: Say’s
American Conchology
and
American Entomology,
Townsend’s
Ornithology of the United States of North America.
Nuttall’s
The Genera of North American Plants,
in green morocco binding. He admired the elegant logic of taxonomy: that everything in nature, no matter how varied or obscure, had a home in a single grand scheme. Weeks passed, the ripsaw calluses fading from his palms to reemerge as small nubs where his thumb pressed the steel pen. The lumber camp seemed to exist only as a dream, save for the deep, constant ache in his knee.

One Monday in August Elisha opened a crate to find it filled with broken shells—crushed, no doubt, during transport from Florida. He sifted through the sharp, iridescent fragments as a swell rose in his throat. It was the sole remaining crate in Alpheus Lenz’s collection. Now Elisha would climb the stairs to the man’s study, where Lenz would be dozing in a leather armchair, spectacles fallen onto his chest, a book splayed across his lap. Elisha would tell him about the crushed shells, and Lenz’s eyebrows would furrow with the same irritated disappointment that Elisha now felt. Then they would walk together down to Woodward Avenue, and Elisha would stand in the bright morning light, dazzled, blinking. Alpheus Lenz would shake the boy’s hand and say that he was deeply sorry, that there were no more specimens to catalog, and that he appreciated Elisha’s diligent efforts, and that he wished Elisha the best possible fortune in every future endeavor.

It was possible to stay there, wasn’t it? In that study, with its dusty blue light, the bookcases holding up the ceiling, the porcelain bust of Linnaeus looking like he might burst into tears. The row of pens, the inkwells, the blank parchment cards awaiting inscription. The insects and shells and plants and birds frozen on shelves, the cards below them penned in Elisha’s hand. Surely there were as many specimens in the world as there were sheets of parchment. The study’s empty shelves seemed a pitiful admission of failure.

It was possible to stay in that room forever. Wasn’t it?

That Thursday night Elisha opened the front door of his boardinghouse to find the stairway dark. He lit a splint and made his way to the second floor, judging each footstep with drunken precision. He had spent the evening in a saloon on Franklin Street at a table near the fire, reading and sipping from a flask of whiskey. In his pocket was a pasteboard pamphlet:
Language and History of the North American Indian Tribes,
by Professor George D. Tiffin.

At the print shop on Jefferson Avenue he’d found a dozen of Tiffin’s works:
On the Physiognomy and Racial Equality of the American Negro. Receipts for Growing Vegetables of Prodigious Size and Quality. An Examination of the Hebrew Language and Its Bearing on the Question of the Unity of Races. A Simple and Effectual Cure for Consumption.
Elisha had pointed at the Indian pamphlet then waited impatiently as the proprietor fetched a stool and retrieved the volume from a top shelf.

“That’ll be me someday,” Elisha said. “My books will be on your shelf, lined up next to Professor Tiffin’s.”

“And what makes you think a body will want to read your writings?”

“Because I aim to write on scientifical subjects—I’m joined up on an expedition with Mr. Silas Brush to the state’s northern peninsula. You’ll read reports of it in the newspapers soon enough!”

“My best congratulations.” The man slid the volume across the counter. “Remember me for an especial discount.”

Now, outside his room, he worked his key in the lock as a sigh drew his attention to a man’s form sprawled in the hallway: his neighbor, an Italian named Vecchione. Vecchione had come to Michigan from a farm town in Abruzzo because he’d heard there was gold in the territory. Lucky fellow, Elisha thought, drunker even than me. Vecchione had shaved, and in the dim light his face was as bronzed and craggy as a Chippewa’s.

An image formed in Elisha’s mind of a childhood journey with his father to Boston, to view an exhibition of tame Iroquois braves: the Natives had squatted on a raised platform in the Boston common, smoking clay pipes and wearing tattered turkey-feather head-dresses, staring dully at the clustered men and women. The braves’ faces, Elisha remembered, had looked like crumpled leather masks. He’d buried his face in his father’s trousers but the faces had remained in Elisha’s mind all that month. Years later they reappeared in his dreams.

In the room, he lit a candle then slumped to the floorboards. In three days he would be on a steamer headed to the northern peninsula; the notion caused his stomach to flutter. There will be specimens everywhere, he told himself, insects and animals and plants and fish—he might encounter a new species, have his name immortalized in Linnaean taxonomy.
Pinus stonus. Coleoptera stonus.
But his thoughts kept returning to the Iroquois’s face.

He fetched his notebook, tore a page from it and dipped his pen. He wrote
My dear Mother,
then crumpled the page and flung it toward the room’s corner. A mouse’s rustle answered from the darkness. He tore a second page and smoothed it against the floor, his chest tightening in a familiar knot of guilt and love. At last he wrote:

May 30, 1844

Dearest Mother,

I pray this letter finds you in good health, as it leaves me. I write these lines from the city of Detroit, having today won a place on a scientifical expedition with Mr. Silas A. Brush to the state’s northern peninsula. Do not worry for my safety, as Mr. Brush has guaranteed there is no danger, whatever, from savage Natives. Know that I am daily taking solace in prayer.

I would explain my disappearance from Newell and my absence these past years, but any words I might write seem pale shadows of my true thoughts. Know that not a day has passed that I have not dreamed of home. Mother, this country is more mean and solitary than I had ever imagined. In my dreams Newell seems part of a different world entirely.

Is the bantam cock with the injured comb still alive and ruling the chicken yard? Have you kept at growing the Chinese vines on the trellis behind the privy? Dear Mother, I have missed you with every part of my heart. My mood is lifted only by the hope that I might see you again, very soon.

My fondest greetings to Father and Corletta.

I remain, forever,

Your dearest loving son,
Elisha Stone

He blotted the ink then stared at the page, his calm sentences a strange counterpoint to the ache in his chest. He thought to strike the lie about taking prayer then decided to leave it be. A lie to ease another’s worries couldn’t be entirely sinful. Elisha folded the thin sheet in four then held it to his lips. How long had it been since he’d written to his mother? Fifteen months, during the train ride to Detroit from the forests of Manchester. He’d been homesick and miserable, there in the frigid rail car, and at the Buffalo station he’d nearly gathered his belongings and boarded a train back east, toward Newell. But the motion of his hand across the page had been enough to temper his unhappiness. He’d finished the letter then torn it into squares, let them flutter like snowflakes to the carriage floor.

But now the ache in his chest refused to diminish. You were a boy then, he told himself, and you’re a man now. So act as a danged man. Outside, the clock on the Thompson Bank tolled nine o’clock. In Newell his father would be slouched in a rocker beside the fire, eyes closed, a half-written sermon on his lap. His mother would be humming a quiet melody as she doused the lamps. Elisha had once measured the distance from Detroit to Newell on a map and found it to be seven hundred and twenty miles. A mouse skittered along a baseboard and he shrank deeper into the corner.

Seven hundred and twenty miles, of forest and lake and darkness and snow. Elisha wrote the address of his father’s house on the folded sheet, then slipped the letter into his vest pocket, next to his heart.

Two

Reverend William Edward Stone placed his hat on the dining room table and wiped a slick of sweat from his neck. Not yet eleven but already the sun shimmered above Newell and the damp meetinghouse yard. It had rained that morning, the storm’s thrum waking the minister to a smoke-gray dawn shot with silver veins of lightning, but now the clouds were dissolved and sunlight spangled on the meetinghouse’s high windows. Such ridiculous, extravagant splendor, Reverend Stone thought. If the Lord ever displayed vanity it was during moments like this, these heart-lifting flights of beauty.

Rain had seeped through the rotted shingle roof and lay pooled on the dining room floor. He stepped over the puddle and sat at the scrubbed pine table, and a moment later Corletta, the hired woman, emerged from the kitchen with a platter of fried ham and stewed green beans and milk biscuits. He thanked her and murmured a blessing over the meal, then reclined in his chair and gazed idly out the window. From the dining room he could see past the meetinghouse and chicken house and whitewashed privy, down the treeless hillside to the creek and Baptist church. New Hope, with its portico and brass weathercock and oak pews, its six-hundred-pipe Appleton organ shipped from Boston. The church was quiet now, but lately on warm afternoons its choir would practice with the front doors flung wide, the organ’s raspy bass rolling uphill to the minister lying sleepless on his bed. The melodies had at first pleased him but soon piqued his annoyance; they felt like a pious show of strength, a taunt. The Baptists were winning new followers in Newell every hour, plucking them like wildflowers from the thicket of unbelievers. Soon New Hope would be too small to seat its congregation.

He ate a biscuit and scrap of ham but found he had no appetite. From the kitchen came a harsh scrape of iron against iron: Corletta preparing to black the cookstove. Often she sang while she worked, simple workaday or Bible-story chants, and the minister found himself awaiting her breezy voice. She was a virtuous woman but not religious. Once he had drawn out her beliefs and the result was a disappointing muddle of Scripture and superstition.

The scraping stopped and Corletta appeared in the doorway. She frowned at the clotted grease on the minister’s plate. “Something wrong with your lunch, Reverend Stone?”

He began to speak but was seized by a cough. He clapped a handkerchief to his mouth until the spell faded. “No, nothing. I’m weary from yesterday’s services—I am sure my appetite will return quick enough.”

Her gaze lingered a moment, then fell with an expression of vague shame. She stepped back into the kitchen. Reverend Stone glanced at the handkerchief to find the gray linen flecked with crimson blood. The absurdity of his furtiveness struck him: concealing the blood from Corletta, when she was the woman who laundered his handkerchiefs. He was filled with sickly amusement. Then Corletta reappeared and took up his plate and fork. The minister smiled at her, then stared hard at her retreating form.

Lately Reverend Stone had begun feeling a queer conviction that he could see the color of other people’s souls. That if he stared deeply enough, he could see a person’s soul hovering about them as a pale, colored nimbus. Two months ago, on the morning of his sixty-first birthday, he’d been delivering a chipped hewing axe to the smithy for grinding when he’d been overwhelmed by the notion that if he gazed at William Lawson he would see the man’s soul as a faintly hued mist. Lawson hunched over the anvil, truing a warped pry bar. The minister stared, transfixed. A dusty gray haze grew around Lawson’s shoulders, like ash consuming a burning page. Reverend Stone’s throat constricted. He lost his grip on the axe and it clattered to the floor. Without a word he rushed from the shop, hurried to the parsonage and lay motionless on the bed, his heart drumming as though he’d run a sprint.

The color of souls. Purity, he suspected, was white as January snow; the violent and corrupt possessed scarlet or ocher colorations; sinners of the flesh fell among the infinite shades of gray. What was the color of his own soul? Reverend Stone hadn’t yet chanced to observe himself, and for that he was grateful.

He took up his hat and crossed the humid yard. The meetinghouse was an old clapboard building with a steeply pitched roof and squat tower and open belfry, low granite steps leading to a weathered front door. In need of whitewashing yet again, Reverend Stone noted. A dim chill surrounded him as he stepped inside. The meetinghouse smelled faintly of mildew. He shook the wet from his brogans then climbed the back stairs to the vestry, where Edson, the deacon, was bent over a paper-strewn desk figuring sums in a ledger. Edson was a wide, clumsy young man with a shock of corn-tassel hair and thick spectacles that lent him a false appearance of intelligence. Four scratched-out sums showed at the bottom of the page.

Edson smiled and shook a pinch of blotter powder over the ledger. “Discouraging news from the collection.”

“A difficult week. There is a torpor in the air, Edson. Do you feel it?”

Edson nodded uncertainly. “I meant to ask you: did you hear any commotion last night? There’s a fox troubling the chickens. This morning I found the chicken house nearly dug under.”

Reverend Stone settled into a chair beside the desk and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, our old friend mister fox! Corletta will be unhappy if there are no chickens to stew.”

“I mended the planking. I hope it will hold.”

Reverend Stone nodded. “‘The natural body is an obstruction to the soul or spiritual body.’ Do you believe that statement to be true, Edson?”

Edson stared, motionless, at the minister. From the road outside a clap of hoofbeats rose then faded.

“I have often wondered what is meant by that passage.
Obstruction.
A strange choice of words. Yes?”

“Maybe it means that only after death is the soul truly freed. Maybe that’s what is meant by obstruction.”

Edson had been raised in Maine, a potato-farm boy with a deep, simple faith that Reverend Stone both scorned and admired. The minister saw him as a child, saying grace over supper at a coarse sawbuck table by the glow of a tallow stub, the pitiless Maine wind prying at the door. Edson had come to Newell when he was fifteen years old.

“Tell me, Edson: would you say that passage contains heresy?”

The young man reddened. “No. No, I don’t believe it does.”

“But our natural body was formed by God! If it obstructs the spiritual body it must be deeply flawed. How could the body, created by Him in His own image, be so imperfect, Edson?”

“Nothing He created is imperfect.”

Reverend Stone’s gaze fell to the pen lying atop the blotter, then traveled to Edson’s ink-stained fingertips. Edson folded his hands and placed them in his lap. He said, “Or maybe the author is referring to the natural body’s wants—the sinful wants. They could be viewed as an obstruction.”

“Perhaps. The sinful wants of the natural body obstructing the sublime aspirations of the spiritual body.” Reverend Stone tapped his index finger against the desk. “Troubling thoughts, Edson. Good, troubling thoughts.”

He noticed a clothbound volume half-hidden by papers at the desk’s edge, and picked it up: Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
“Excellent, Edson! We must resume our literary discussions. We must contemplate whatever meaning you might find in Milton.”

“If you think that’s best,” Edson said stoically.

“Oh, I do. Milton is brimming with troubling thoughts.”

He rose to leave, then Edson said, “I’d hoped we might speak. About the coming Sunday.”

Reverend Stone paused.

“You’d mentioned some while back that you were feeling withery.” Edson drew a breath, then continued. “Of course, you seem perfectly well, but if you have a need for—”

“You would like to preach this Sunday.”

Edson nodded. “I’ve been sketching a sermon. I hope you don’t mind.”

“What is the topic?”

“Geology and religion. Would you like to hear a piece?”

Reverend Stone relaxed back into the chair. From beneath the ledger Edson drew a sheet of paper filled with loose, slanting script. He cleared his throat.

“There is much argument of late on the complementing natures of geology and religion, especially with regard to mineral evidence of the great deluge. It is fully agreed that geology and religion shine with new and peculiar beauty in each other’s light, and cannot obscure or destroy one another. Yet doubt often lurks beneath the cloak of geology, and all the sciences. This doubt is cause for gravest concern.”

“You need not be a scientist to feel doubt.”

Edson glanced at Reverend Stone. The minister said, “Go on, go on.”

“Geologists correctly claim that every happening follows certain chains of causes. Thus, some hold, the entire world’s workings might eventually be explained. But man is capable of observing only the lowest, and crudest, links in the chain, whereas God exerts his influence on a higher level, one entirely hidden from our observation. The peril for a geologist lay in believing he has discovered the meaning of an entire happening, when he has merely discovered the last, and simplest, cause in a grand chain.”

“Interestingly phrased,” Reverend Stone said. In truth, he was struck by Edson’s eloquence. Perhaps he had underestimated the young man. That, or Edson had flourished without the minister’s notice, his light hidden beneath a bushel basket. I could disappear, Reverend Stone thought, and the congregation might continue under Edson. Might thrive.

“There’s just a bit more.” Edson smiled nervously. “We know that the waterwheel is driven round by gravity—but what, then, is gravity? We know not. Men shall never divine the true nature of the world’s essential processes; and thus to claim that the Lord created the world, then allowed it to function freely and without command, is a form of infidelity, and one deserving great wariness.”

“Again, interestingly phrased.” Reverend Stone rose to depart. “I am sure the congregation will find it enlightening, despite the fact that there is not a single scientific gentleman in Newell.”

“You received a letter—or, one arrived for Mrs. Stone.” Edson gathered the desk’s papers into a sheaf. He riffled through the papers, then set them down and slowly opened and closed the desk drawers. He paused with his hands spread over the desk; then he said, “Aha. Yes.” Edson reached to the far corner of the desk and lifted his wide-brimmed hat to reveal a letter. “Here it is now.”

Without looking at it, the minister slipped the letter into his trouser pocket. He nodded to Edson then descended the stairs and stepped from the meetinghouse into the warm yard.

Grackles were huddled in the rhododendron bushes, and as the minister approached they ascended in a single black ribbon and wheeled toward the parsonage. The grackles’ shrill song and the creek’s distant mumble augured the coming of summer, and for this the minister said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. It had been a relentless winter that had turned people inward on themselves; bitterness had hung in the air like soot. The words of his sermons had echoed over rows of pallid faces then tumbled unheard to the stone floor. For the past several winters Reverend Stone had struggled toward spring like a swimmer toward a distant shore; this year, though, he feared that the change of season would not bring relief. He felt exhausted, his spirit as heavy as water. And then there was the blood in his throat, the taste of his body trying to unmake itself. The blood’s appearance some months ago had terrified Reverend Stone, but now its presence was numbingly familiar.

He descended the hillside to the creek edge, momentarily nostalgic for his first days in Newell: he had been a young man of thirty-one, suffused with hope. His darkest sin was pitying the congregation members for their failings. He’d felt God’s grace as nearly palpable, a certain thickness in the meetinghouse air. Glorious, light-filled days. Reverend Stone hiked his trousers and sat on a mossy oak stump and withdrew the letter from his pocket, and with a shock recognized his son’s script.

He unfolded the letter against his knee and read
Dearest Mother,
and was struck by the beauty of his son’s penmanship.
Dearest Mother,
he read again, then traced his fingers over the faint indentations where his son’s pen had pressed. The letter was puckered with moisture, and Reverend Stone held it to his nose but could not discern a scent.

He rose and hurried southward along the creek, head bowed, his mind filled with toneless clamor. He passed the mill bridge and the Spillman stables, then slowed his pace as a memory surfaced: a bone china platter lying shattered against oiled oak floorboards. Smell of goldenrod and privy, drone of cicadas and a woman’s far-off call for her daughter. Heat. His thirteen-year-old son crouched at the edge of this very creek, attempting to conceal himself in the rushes. Inside the parsonage the boy’s mother lay beneath two woolen quilts, her forehead the gray-white of a boiled egg. Her cough echoed through the empty house. Reverend Stone stood on the creek bank, shouting, his cheeks gone crimson with anger. The boy stared out at his father then closed his eyes.

He unfolded the letter and read it again, refolded it carefully and placed it in his breast pocket. He was stricken by an urge to see the boy, an ache that seemed equal parts love and remorse. He had not seen his son since Elisha had vanished one Sunday in July, nearly three years earlier; Reverend Stone had tracked the boy as far as Worcester before he’d lost the trail. Who was he now? Still a liar and petty thief, a Sabbath day runaway who’d emptied the meetinghouse’s collection basket? Or grown into a man, with whiskers on his chin and weariness for the world’s beauty? His father’s son, then. Of course he could be nothing else.

A breeze rippled in from the south, bringing a scent of mud and high, chirping shouts. Downstream, three children squatted at the creek’s margin, two towheaded but one dark, like Elisha. Reverend Stone watched their frolic for a long time, then at last wandered back upstream, ascended the hillside and entered the meetinghouse.

He called, “Edson?” Dust motes swirled before the sunlit windows. He climbed to the gallery and took a seat in the rearmost pew. An empty meetinghouse: the building felt holiest when it was free of bodies and voices, when it was filled only with sunlight and silence and the mossy smell of rain. It was near to prayer, this silence. Reverend Stone closed his eyes and said a prayer for guidance, then pushed every thought from his mind and sank into the silence.