The Signature of All Things (35 page)

“Possession by spirits, perhaps? A gathering of magic? An erasure of material boundaries? Inspiration, winged with fire?” He did not smile. He was quite serious.

This confession gave Alma such severe pause that she could not reply. There was no place in her thinking for the erasure of material boundaries. Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries.

Ambrose regarded her carefully before continuing. He looked at her as though she were a thermometer or a compass—as though he were trying to gauge her, as though he were choosing a direction in which to turn based entirely on the nature of her response. She endeavored to keep alarm from her face. He must have been satisfied with what he saw, for he went on.

“When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?”

Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma’s mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme.

The old cobbler had believed in something he called “the signature of all things”—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love. This is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water.
Polygonum
, with
its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh. And so on, ad infinitum. Beatrix Whittaker had always been scornful of this theory (“Most leaves are shaped like livers—are we meant to eat them all?”), and Alma had inherited her mother’s skepticism.

But now was not the time to speak of skepticism, for again Ambrose was reading Alma’s face. He was searching her expression most desperately, it seemed, for permission to proceed. Again, Alma kept her countenance impassive, although she felt much disturbed. Again, he proceeded.

“I know that the science of today takes issue with Boehme’s ideas,” he said. “I understand the objections. Jacob Boehme worked in the opposite direction of proper scientific methodology. He lacked the rigor of orderly thinking. His writings were filled with shattered, splintered, mirror-fragments of insight. He was irrational. He was credulous. He saw only what he wished to see. He overlooked anything that contradicted his certainties. He started with his beliefs, then sought to make the facts fit around them. Nobody could rightly call that science.”

Beatrix Whittaker could not have said it better herself, Alma thought—but again, she merely nodded.

“And yet . . .” Ambrose trailed off.

Alma gave her friend time to collect his thoughts. He was quiet for such a long while that she thought perhaps he had decided to end there. But after a long silence, he continued: “And yet Boehme said that God had
pressed
Himself into the world, and had left marks there for us to discover.”

The parallel was unmistakable, Alma thought, and she could not help but point it out. “Like a printmaker,” she said.

At these words, Ambrose spun to look at her, his face flooded with relief and gratitude. “Yes!” he said. “Precisely that. You understand me. You can see what that idea would have meant to me, as a young man. Boehme said that this divine
imprimatur
is a kind of holy magic, and that this magic is the only theology we will ever need. He believed that we could learn to read God’s prints, but that we must first swing ourselves into the fire.”

“Swing ourselves into the fire,” Alma repeated, keeping her voice neutral.

“Yes. By renouncing the material world. By renouncing the church, with its stone walls and liturgies. By renouncing ambition. By renouncing study. By renouncing the desires of the body. By renouncing possessiveness and selfishness. By renouncing even speech! Only then could one see what God
had seen, at the moment of creation. Only then could one read the messages the Lord had left behind for us. So you see, Alma, I could not become a minister after hearing of this. Nor a student. Nor a son. Nor—it seemed—a living man.”

“What did you become, instead?” Alma asked.

“I tried to become the fire. I ceased all activities of normal existence. I stopped speaking. I even stopped eating. I believed that I could survive on sunlight and rain alone. For quite a long while—though it seems impossible to imagine—I tell you that I
did
survive on sunlight and rain alone. It did not surprise me. I had faith. I had always been the most devout of my mother’s children, you see. Where my brothers possessed logic and reason, I had always felt the Creator’s love more innately. As a child, I used to fall so deeply into prayer that my mother would shake me in church and punish me for sleeping during services, but I had not been sleeping. I had been . . . corresponding. Now, after reading Jacob Boehme, I wanted to meet the divine even more intimately. That is why I gave up everything in the world, including sustenance.”

“What happened?” Alma asked, once more dreading the answer.

“I met the divine,” he said, eyes bright. “Or, I believed I did. I had the most magnificent thoughts. I could read the language hidden inside trees. I saw angels living inside orchids. I saw a new religion, spoken in a new botanical language. I heard its hymns. I cannot remember the music now, but it was exquisite. Also, there was a full fortnight when I could hear people’s thoughts. I wished they could hear mine, but they did not appear to. I was kept joyous by exalted feeling, by rapture. I felt that I could never be injured again, never touched. I was no harm to anyone, but I did lose my desire for this world. I was . . . unparticled. Oh, but there was more. Such knowledge came into me! For instance, I renamed all the colors! And I saw new colors, hidden colors. Did you know that there is a color called
swissen
, which is a sort of clear turquoise? Only moths can see it. It is the color of God’s purest anger. You would not think God’s anger would be pale and blue, but it is.”

“I did not know that,” Alma admitted, carefully.

“Well, I saw it,” Ambrose said. “I saw halos of
swissen
, surrounding certain trees, and certain people. In other places, I saw crowns of benevolent light where there should have been no light at all. This was light that did not
have a name, but it had a sound. Everywhere I saw it—or, rather, everywhere I heard it—I followed. Soon after that, however, I nearly died. My friend Daniel Tupper found me in a bank of snow. Sometimes I think that if winter had not come, I might have been able to continue.”

“Without food, Ambrose?” Alma asked. “Surely not . . .”

“Sometimes I think so. I do not claim it to be rational, but I think so. I wished to become a plant. Sometimes I think that—just for a very short while, driven by faith—I became a plant. How else could I have endured two months with nothing but rain and sunlight? I recalled Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass . . . surely the people is grass.’”

For the first time in years, Alma remembered how, as a child, she had also longed to be a plant. Of course, she had been a mere child, wishing for more patience and affection from her father. But even so—she had never actually believed that she
was
a plant.

Ambrose went on. “After my friends found me in the snowbank, they took me to a hospital for the insane.”

“Similar to where we just were?” Alma asked.

He smiled with infinite sadness. “Oh, no, Alma. Not at all similar to where we just were.”

“Oh, Ambrose, I am so sorry,” she said, and now she felt thoroughly sickened. She had seen more typical hospitals for the insane in Philadelphia, when she and George used to commit Retta to such houses of despair for short periods of time. She could not imagine her gentle friend Ambrose in such a place of squalor and sorrow and suffering.

“One need not be sorry,” Ambrose said. “It has passed. Fortunately for my mind, I have forgotten most of what occurred there. But the experience of the hospital left me, forever after, more frightened than I had been in the past. Too frightened to ever again experience full trust. When I was released, Daniel Tupper and his family took me into their care. They were kind to me. They gave me shelter, and offered work for me to do in their print shop. I hoped that perhaps I might be able to reach the angels once again, but through a more material manner this time. A safer manner, I suppose you could say. I had lost my courage to swing myself into the fire once more. So I taught myself the art of printmaking—in imitation of the Lord, really, though I know it sounds sinful and prideful to confess that. I wanted to press my own perceptions into the world, though I have still never made
work as fine as what I wish it to be. But it brings me occupation. And I contemplated orchids. There was comfort in orchids.”

Alma hesitated, then asked, not without discomfort, “Were you ever able to reach the angels again?”

“No.” Ambrose smiled. “I’m afraid not. But the work brought its own pleasures—or its own distractions. Thanks to Tupper’s mother, I began eating again. But I was a changed person. I avoided all the trees and all people whom I had seen tinted by God’s angry
swissen
during my episode. I longed for the hymns of the new religion I had witnessed, but I could not remember the words. Soon after that, I went off to the jungle. My family thought it was a mistake—that I would encounter madness there again, and that the solitude would harm my constitution.”

“Did it?”

“Perhaps. It is difficult to say. As I told you when first we met, I suffered fevers there. The fevers diminished my strength, but I also welcomed them. There were moments during fever when I believed I could nearly see God’s imprimatur
again, but only nearly. I could see that edicts and stipulations were written into the leaves and vines. I could see that the tree branches around me were bent into a disturbance of messages. There were signatures everywhere, lines of confluence everywhere, but I could not read them. I heard strains of the old familiar music, but I could not capture it. Nothing was revealed to me. When I was ill I sometimes saw glimpses of the angels hidden inside the orchids again—but only the edges of their raiment. The light had to be pure, and everything quite silent, even for that to occur. Yet it was not enough. It was not what I had seen before. Once one has seen angels, Alma, one is not satisfied with the edges of their raiment. After eighteen years, I knew that I would never again witness what I had seen once—not even in the deepest solitude of the jungle, not even in a state of deluded fever—and so I came home. But I suppose I will always long for something else.”

“What do you long for, precisely?” Alma asked.

“Purity,” he said, “and communion.”

Alma, overcome with sadness—and also overcome by a jarring fear that something beautiful was being taken away from her—took all this in. She did not know how to bring Ambrose comfort, though he did not seem to be asking for it. Was he a madman? He did not seem a madman. In a way, she
told herself, she should feel honored he had entrusted her with such secrets. But such alarming secrets! What was one to make of them? She had never seen angels, or witnessed the hidden color of God’s true anger, or swung into the fire. She was not even entirely certain what that meant—to “swing into the fire.” How would one do it?
Why
would one do it?

“What plans do you have now?” she asked. Even as she spoke these words, she cursed her plodding and corporeal mind, which could think only in terms of mundane strategies:
A man has just spoken of angels, and you ask him his plans.

But Ambrose smiled. “I wish for a restful life, though I am not convinced I have earned it. I am grateful that you have provided me with a place to live. I enjoy White Acre enormously. It is a sort of heaven for me—or as close as one can reach to heaven, I suppose, while still living. I am sated by the world, and wish for peace. I am fond of your father, who does not seem to condemn me, and who permits me to stay. I am grateful to have work to produce, which brings me occupation and satisfaction. I am most grateful for your companionship. I have felt lonely, I must confess, since 1828—since my friends first brought me out of the snowbank and back into the world. After what I have seen, and because of what I can no longer see, I am always somewhat lonely. But I find that I am less lonely in your company than I am at other times.”

Alma nearly felt she would cry when she heard this. She considered how to respond. Ambrose had always given so freely of his confidences, and yet she had never shared her own. He was brave with his admissions. Although his admissions frightened her, she should return his bravery in kind.

“You bring me respite from my loneliness, as well,” Alma said. This was difficult for her to confess. She could not bear to look at him as she said it, but at least her voice did not waver.

“I would not have known that, dear Alma,” Ambrose said kindly. “You always appear so stalwart.”

“None of us is stalwart,” Alma replied.

T
hey returned to White Acre, back to their normal and pleasant routine, but Alma remained distracted by what she had been told. Sometimes when Ambrose was busy working—drawing an orchid or preparing a stone for
lithographic printing—she would watch him, looking for signs of a sickly or sinister mind. But she could see no evidence of it. If he was suffering from, or longing for, spectral illusions or uncanny hallucinations, he did not reveal this, either. There appeared no evidence of a distempered reason.