Thoreau in Love (31 page)

On the Fourth of July, a mock battle was staged in the harbor, with Navy frigates firing cannon after cannon in “salute” to a British frigate, which fired back, while onshore batteries “defended” the city by firing volley after volley into the blue sky. Appearing hourly at Barnum’s American Museum was General Tom Thumb, “weighing only fifteen pounds.” Also on display was Giant Girl, who looked like an India-rubber balloon. The highlight of the day was to be a display of fireworks shot from the roof of the museum after dark.

Henry wanted to go into the city to see these goings-on, but the Emersons had different plans. Wanting to surprise him, they had invited Beatrice and friends of hers who were visiting from Manhattan to join them in Stapleton to watch boys with fife and drum, dressed in revolutionary costume, parade the streets. Marching behind the boys was a ragtag group of veterans, two of them wearing their ancient, revolutionary garb and carrying thirteen-star flags as old and tattered as they were. Old salts from the sailors’ home marched proudly in their moth-eaten navy blues, followed by a well-trained regiment of soldiers, their uniforms crisp, their weapons held high. Along the route, everyone had flags—those few tattered ones from 1776, hundreds of commemorative flags with thirteen stars, but most with twenty-five stars. There was even a flag with eighteen stars, no one knew from when. Bringing up the rear of the parade were ladies in colonial garb, and finally, waving to all from his festooned carriage, was Commodore Vanderbilt himself. Henry enjoyed being with Bea watching the parade; only occasionally did he wish it were Ben beside him.

Still, he loved testing his ideas on Bea. Walking her home after the parade, he said, “What good is this independence our forefathers fought and died for, if we can’t . . . if we don’t—was it all so we could wave flags? Watch parades? Do you see what I’m saying? If we don’t live our own independent lives, if we can’t live every day by our own personal declarations of independence, then didn’t they die in vain?”

“It wasn’t easy for them, and it’s not easy for us,” said Bea. “You know that, Henry. It’s a struggle for each and every one of us.”

“Yes, I do know that.” The Emersons, Bea’s brother and the others passed by in their carriages. Haven waved madly, calling “Mister Henry! Mister Henry! Don’t you want a ride?” and then Bea’s brother Robert was calling, “Mister Henry, Mister Henry! Don’t you want a ride?” Henry’s instinct was to call “yes!” and leap on the carriage beside Robert. But he was with Bea, not Robert.

“Go on if you want to,” said Bea. And how did she know?

“I’m here with you,” said Henry, and Bea, changing the tune, called out, “Mister Robert! Miss Eliza! Don’t you want to walk?” And Henry joined in the fun, “Mister Robert! Miss Eliza! Don’t you want to walk?”

Henry and Bea waved wildly as the carriages proceeded up the rutted road, with Robert and Bea’s friends and the Emersons all waving back to them. And then Bea, continuing their conversation, said, “And maybe this is what they died for, Henry, so we future generations could lean out of carriages and wave and carry on, so we could have fun.”

Henry smiled. “Perhaps you’re right.”

When they arrived at Bea’s house, Bea said she should get back to her friends. Henry, feeling they had left things between them unfinished, said, “Bea. . . .” His voice strained. He wanted to talk more, say what he’d wanted to say the entire walk but didn’t know how. But maybe she already knew. Perhaps when he’d stopped writing she’d realized. She too had stopped their correspondence. And how could he tell her that he loved being with her, perhaps even loved her, but that they shouldn’t see one another again? Words failed him.

“I know, Henry,” said Bea. “I’ve enjoyed myself too. You’re one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met.” She squeezed his hand, then ran through the gates and into her house, he was sure in tears.

“Forgive me, Bea,” he said quietly after she was inside.

That evening, from Madame Grymes’s back porch they were able to see the fireworks over the harbor as well as the ones shot from the roof of Barnum’s museum. William said, “Why ever go to Manhattan?” And Henry replied with an ironic, “Yes, why indeed?” Upon their return to the Smuggery, Henry went up to his room and wrote in his journal: The war for personal independence is the great, continuing struggle.

The leaves on the trees were disappearing, and it turned out they were disappearing into the stomachs of 17-year locusts. The last time the insects had appeared was in 1826, when Henry was nine. Where were they living then? Maine? New Hampshire? John would have remembered.

A swarm of net-bearing entomologists descended on Staten Island—where the biblical creatures were apparently doing the most damage—to capture and study the locusts. From one of the net-bearers Henry learned that the locust is actually a grasshopper, and that these were not locusts at all, but cicadas with a seventeen-year life cycle. They hatch into larvae from eggs freshly laid in tree branches. The larvae drop to the ground and burrow down at least a foot, where they live as larvae for seventeen years. They then emerge en masse, climb trees, eat leaves—and emit waste that in the forest makes it sound like there’s a gentle rain falling—transform into winged creatures, mate, lay eggs and die.

How strange that in July so many trees gave the appearance of November. And the racket, day and night, especially in the forest, Pharr-r-r-a oh, A-r-r-a oh.

Sitting over lunch with Henry, Susan brought up William Miller, the celebrated preacher who had announced that the world would end on October 30, 1843.

“I must admit,” said Susan. “It frightens me to think that not four months from now this will all cease to exist.”

Incredulous, Henry said, “You don’t believe it, do you?”

“He predicted the locusts. And, yes, I know, they come every seventeen years, but who remembered the last time they were here? Did you?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t. And was Dr. Miller prescient enough to predict that God would smite Staten Island, not evil Manhattan?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“The locusts are not in Manhattan. They’re only doing damage here. Your Dr. Miller’s a Barnum, or wishes he was.”

“He’s a man of God.”

“So is Barnum, but at least he gives a good show. The Mermaid of Fiji? You went yourself, just to make sure she was fake. And you loved it. William Miller and his disciples are probably making more money than Barnum on his prediction. He filled an auditorium last night and charged admission. It’s absurd, these Millerites sewing ‘ascension robes,’ getting ready for the trip. Can you imagine? On October 29th they’ll don their ascension robes and, what, stand outside, waiting for midnight? Noon? Did he say exactly when it would end? Or do we still know not the hour, though Miller knows the day? Ascension robes! It boggles the mind.”

“You’re a little too cynical for someone your age. Perhaps if you believed, you might be more of a success.”

“There we go—that’s what we’re talking about. And this is where I go.”

By the time Henry reached the scent and quiet of the cedar forest, his anger had dissipated. He breathed in deeply through his nose, thankful that Susan’s biblical creatures didn’t eat cedar. The cedar forest gave Henry hope; when so much of that other world wanted no part of him, this world embraced him. In the woods, he felt alive. As Henry tramped an old path to the other side of the island, he heard the whacking of axes on tree trunks. Louder and louder, kung, kung, kung, kung. Suddenly the path opened onto a clearing—kung, kung, kung—and after his eyes adjusted to the blinding light, he saw that it was unlike any clearing he’d ever seen.

Rather than a gradual lessening, the forest ended abruptly—into an expanse of stumps. Ragged stumps, naked and raw in their appearance, covered the terrain, softened only by the massive trees that had just been felled and were being stripped and dragged away. To his left, to his right, rising before him over a hillside, stumps. And as he stood, his mouth agape, woodsmen made work on the woods he’d just departed. And departing they were. Crash went a giant cedar on Henry’s right. Kung, kung, kung went an ax to his left.

So great was the rape of the land that Henry was unable fully to take in what he saw. In a daze he walked through the wasteland of stumps, stumps of ancient trees, ragged stumps, stumps bleeding sap. Not a sapling left standing. The undergrowth, so recently lush, browned and curled as it died in the blistering sunlight.

Henry nodded hellos to several rough young men hacking branches from downed trees, and then he came upon a sweaty fellow he realized was the young man he’d met on Richmond road his first day in Staten Island. They greeted each other warmly, and the handsome, sweaty young man with the curly hair said his name was Gregory.

“It looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” said Henry, and Gregory, taking Henry’s sarcastic comment as a compliment, said the trees were headed for a mill owned by a shipbuilder. Then, boasting with a kind of naïve pride, he said, “Don’t you worry, Henry, we’ll have this island cleared six months most.”

“Such progress,” said Henry, chagrined.

“I’d love to talk,” said Gregory, “but I’ve got work to do.” He smiled and shrugged. “And if it’s work you’re lookin’ for, Tommy over there does the hirin’. Nice seein’ you, Henry,” he said and went back to stripping branches from the thick trunk.

Henry made his way through the ravaged landscape, his mind reeling. “Why would they? I can’t believe it. . . . It was lovely forest . . . living trees cooling the air. . . . Now, worthless stumps, an airless wasteland.” He spun around to take it all in. “My lord, this was what happened on Block Island! Is this what we’re doing to ourselves?”

Instead of birds, crickets, bees, buzzing mosquitoes, even seventeen-year cicadas, the only sounds were the kung, kung, kung of axes biting into giant cedar, the sawing of limbs and the grinding of trunks being dragged by oxen.

Finally Henry reached a promontory overlooking the sea. Dolphins breached the surface, welcome life after the raped land. The sea was a clear, light green near the shoreline and, farther out, as blue as Henry had ever seen blue. An off-shore breeze cooled his brow.

He tried to turn back to the horror, but he couldn’t face it, and not yet wanting to return to the Smuggery, he decided to circumnavigate the island along the sea-beach. He climbed down the cliff and followed the shore to Princes Bay, where he came upon a dozen Negroes who’d just arrived in small sloops from their oyster beds. One of them, Dawson Landin, invited him to their hilltop village called Sandy Ground. And sandy it was. Dawson, who’d been an oysterman in Snow Hill, Maryland, until Maryland declared as a slave state and confiscated every Negro’s property, was the first Negro Henry had ever spoken with outside a lecture hall.

“We were Free Negroes,” said Dawson. “They shouldn’t of done that.”

“Free Negroes,” said Henry. “Astonishing! As if any man should be anything but free.” Dawson and the others laughed at the truth of it.

“Princes Bay is the best oyster bed on the east coast,” said one. “Better than Snow Hill too.”

“Amen,” said another.

“Did they cut Sandy Ground’s trees?” asked Henry.

“Never were trees on Sandy Ground,” said Dawson.

“Nothing grows in Sandy Ground,” the youngest oysterman piped in. “Why you think they let us live here?” Again they all laughed.

“They cut those trees, they don’t grow back,” said Dawson. And Henry wondered, When the last tree falls in the last forest on earth, will anyone be left to hear it?

16

Henry returned to the Smuggery to find a letter from his mother saying she’d heard that Stearns Wheeler was dead, and could it possibly be true. “No, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “No, it can’t be.” He went up to his aerie and reread Stearns’s letters, dozens of times, for clues, hints. “No, it can’t possibly be true.” He wrote his mother asking what she had heard, if there was any more word. Stearns was so alive. Stearns couldn’t be dead.

When the following day the mailman arrived with a letter for Henry, from Germany, Susan called, “Henry. Henry! There’s a letter from Germany.”

Henry bounced he was so excited. “Thank God, thank God, thank God.” He and Mary had been reading
The History of Robin Hood
. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He ran to the kitchen and took the letter. But it wasn’t Stearns’s handwriting. Like a icy wave, it hit him that what his mother had written was true. His hands began to shake.

“It’s from Heidelberg,” said Susan. “Posted the seventeenth of June.”

“But it’s not his handwriting. Oh God.” Henry sat, popped the seal, unfolded the paper and read. His heart sank.

“He’s dead. . . . ‘I am sorry to inform you your good friend Charles Stearns Wheeler is dead.’ No, it must be a joke. I’m sure it’s a joke. Stearns got someone to write this. This is the kind of thing he does. He’s always playing practical jokes like this.”

“Henry. I’m sure it’s not a joke.”

“But he did this to me at school. He had someone come rushing into our room, tell me he’d had an awful accident. Broke his leg or something. And there was Stearns outside my door, wanting to hear how I reacted. If I really cared for him.”