Thoreau in Love (32 page)

“But your mother heard from someone else.”

“I know. I know. Oh.” Henry gasped a couple more times and then said he had to go up to his room, where, by himself, he read the letter again and again. The signature at the bottom read Gustaf something-or-other. Gustaf obviously knew Stearns well. He knew about their being roommates at Harvard, knew Stearns had lived alone in a cabin in the woods, knew everything about Henry. Gustaf couldn’t believe Stearns was dead either. They’d gone to Berlin because Stearns was feeling so under the weather. They’d had a great time, but then, on their return, Stearns seemed to, as he put it, “fall into a ditch,” and then he came down with some sort of infection he couldn’t shake, the doctors said they hoped it would pass, and then he was dead. Gustaf, a Roman Catholic, convinced himself—and tried to convince Henry—that Stearns’s “sin” was what caused God to punish him, and he was afraid the same fate would rain upon him.

“Hogwash.” Henry stood, wondered why he’d stood, then sat again at his desk. No, that was no good. He took out paper, thinking, I have to write Stearns, I have to tell. . . . “What am I doing?” He pushed out his chair and stood. He walked a circle. “I can’t believe it. Stearns is dead.”

Henry trudged through the swishing wheat field across from the house, found himself saying with each step through the bending grain, “Dead . . . dead . . . dead.” Into the cedar forest he went, trying to find life in the rotting, dead bark and in the fallen dead trunks, and in the soft brown carpet of needles that had fallen dead from the trees, but the woods gave him no solace. There was a yawning great pit in his stomach. Henry and Stearns had talked about everything. Stearns went places no one else dared, not pioneers, not even frontiersmen. Stearns was the bravest person Henry had ever met. And Stearns knew Henry like no one else ever had—not even John. Stearns knew what drove Henry, what got him out of bed in the morning, what burned within him.

From deep inside, Henry coughed, but it was a cough of pain, and then he began to weep, and he wept gushing tears, and from his gut great heaves of sorrow rose, but no number of wails or cries or tears could get rid of the pain. And he became so angry he thought his head would pop. “Goddamn Stearns! What were you thinking? Goddamn you!” He kicked at the soft carpet, spraying brown needles and dirt, up, up, again and again, until he’d cleared a path. A rotted trunk, bam, shattered into chunks. He collapsed onto the ground. A couple of times he heard Susan or Mary calling his name, but he didn’t respond. He looked up into the canopy of cedar. And when he and the day were spent he got up and slogged through the gloaming back to the long brown dead house.

Food had been left, but he wasn’t hungry. He went to his room and reread all of Stearns’s letters. Gustaf’s as well. And then read them again. And again. He fell asleep in his clothes and awoke in a cascade of cool air coming in through the window, still with Stearns in his every thought.

From the day they’d met, Stearns had talked about his urges and about “whacking his lance,” and it was on a night such as this, a week or so after they’d become roommates, that Henry first heard Stearns whacking his lance. Laying stock still and holding his breath so he could hear every sound, Henry listened as Stearns whacked and whacked, breathed sharp shallow breaths, sighed and then relaxed. For three nights Henry listened, wanting to join him but afraid if he did that Stearns would tell everyone what Henry had done. On the fourth night, no longer able to restrain himself, Henry joined in the breathless activity, which released the satyr in Stearns, who then whacked his lance again. The boys went on for the year like that, their nightly revelries referred to only in smirks and knowing glances from Stearns.

Henry remembered the day Stearns burst into their room gushing about his new professor, and how he had thought, Stearns is in love. He’s in love with Professor Very. And how jealous he’d become. Or was it Very jealous? At the time he reasoned that it was merely because he didn’t want anyone disturbing their friendship.

But then his mind went skipping off to a cold November day, when Stearns came flying into their room, soaking wet, shivering and raving: “They ducked me in the pond! Ducked me! And they call me perverted? We’re not the perverted ones, Henry!”

“It was always we,” Henry said quietly, sitting on his bed.

Henry woke in the morning still in his clothes, his waking thought, Stearns is dead. He still couldn’t believe it. Also, not to see him dead, feel him dead. That’s how it was for Ben. He got pencil and paper. “Dear Ben,” he wrote. “My good friend Stearns is dead”—but of course he had nowhere to send it. He tried to write Gustaf, but couldn’t. He did write Waldo, a stiff letter with none of the “rude truth” Emerson so espoused. “This must be what it’s like when someone’s shipwrecked,” he told Susan. “Never to see your loved one dead. And does that really matter? He’s dead.”

He remained in a stupor for days, aimlessly walking, patting the boys on the head. And one morning he awoke and thought, maybe this is what religion is for. He went to see Reverend Reed, and all he’d been holding in burst out of him.

“What does God have against me? First my brother John, then little Waldo, now Stearns?” Ralph sat quietly listening, while thoughts and revelations rushed into Henry’s head. “Was that when Lidian first went off? Was it soon after her little boy died that she started on the laudanum? Is this all life is? We go on for a while, and then we die? Are we no better than the creatures around us, no different, ultimately, than that horse carcass we saw at the shore?”

“You know we’re different, Henry,” said Ralph.

“Are we? Or maybe we only struggle to make our lives seem more meaningful? Perhaps the struggle is all there is. What if we’ve created heaven and hell to keep our minds off the awful reality that we merely live for a time, then die? There was no reason for John’s death. He cut himself, contracted lockjaw, suffered horribly and died. I felt the life leave him. Did his spirit pass from my arms to heaven, as the churches would have us believe? Or did it pass into little William James, who was born just a few hours later? Or did he just end? Certainly he could not have deserved hell. Could his expiration be merely that? The breath leaving him? The life leaving him, his life force not a spirit or soul but merely a life force, no different even from a tree’s?”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Is it? If you cut down a tree, it changes. It’s no longer that oak or that cedar. It’s mere wood, that rots or becomes something else: a boat, a cabinet, a floor. If it rots, it becomes soil. If you burn it, its essence passes into the atmosphere. Stearns died, no reason. He was a good man. No churchgoer. No, churchgoers condemn the way he lived. But did he die because of that? Not if John died for no reason.”

Henry’s throat constricted as all the nights he and John had spooned under the covers came into his head.

“Little Waldo was a child. Surely he had a clean slate. He was so alive, had so much promise. Certainly there was no reason for his death. Or could it have been retribution for the way his father. . . . No, no. That’s absurd. Look at me, thinking as the small-minded do. The toll these deaths take.”

After a moment, Ralph asked quietly, “What do you mean when you say churchgoers condemn the way Stearns lived?”

Henry looked for a way out. “He fought Christianity. He hated how Christians hated, how they tie us up with their strictures.” Waldo’s voice announced itself in his mind: The rude truth, Henry. “Stearns . . . was . . . a pervert.”

Ralph’s eyebrows lifted as his mouth tightened.

“There, I’ve said it. Stearns was my roommate. He was in love with me.”

Ralph waited for more, and when it was clear Henry had no more to say, he said, “And . . . how did you feel about him?”

“I loved him, but not in the way he loved me. I loved the way he’d jump on his bed and rail at the world. Once it was, ‘Henry, did you know the Indians made men loving men a part of their society? Think of that. Part of their society.’ Then this look of horror came on his face, and he said, ‘Do you think that’s why there are no more Indians in these parts?’ ”

Because Ralph laughed, Henry went on. “Another day he came into our room and—no one can hear us, can they?”

“No one can hear.”

“He came in and said, ‘Henry, we must throw off our clothes.’ And he did. He stripped off all his clothes. He wanted to go to class like that. He said, ‘The Indians didn’t constrict themselves with clothes, so of course men loving men flourished.’ I said, ‘But we’re not like that,’ and he said, ‘Can you imagine if we were?’ He’s standing on his bed, totally naked. ‘What would happen if society as we know it tossed off this yoke of clothing? What they call perversion would be the norm. Can you imagine, men loving men, even men loving women, openly, without fear of heavenly or earthly retribution?’

“He was on a tear that day—wild, hysterical, naked. And all the while I was trying to study. ‘Look at your Greeks,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that why we’ve studied them all these years? Isn’t their superiority because men loved men openly? We think of ourselves as cultured, but are we any more cultured or in any way more advanced than the Greeks? The Greeks had running water, paper, pen, ink, lamps, libraries. They had everything we do except the steam engine, and is that an advance?’ He made me laugh. I loved his seriousness. Stearns lived fully! He didn’t hold back.”

Ralph fell back on his ministerial teachings, saying with empathetic certainty, “You must miss him.”

And Henry thought, All right, it’s time to leave. And he got up, said he had to go and did, knowing he was leaving Ralph in a funk of inadequacy.

That night, Henry awoke sure that Stearns had appeared to him, and he wasn’t at all sure if it was Stearns or a dream of Stearns. Wiggling his covered feet, he said, “Maybe I’m the apparition. And if that’s so, does it make any difference?” Henry chuckled, and said, “I’m distracting myself. The awful fact is, Stearns is dead. I grieve.”

He got up, lit his lamp, sat at his desk and wrote in his journal.

Is my struggle to tell the story of a week in my life an attempt to make my life meaningful? To make me better than that horse carcass on the beach? Do I celebrate the tavern-keeper to show that no matter how barren the appearance of life, there is still and above all, life? And isn’t every one of our lives to be celebrated? We live. And yes, we die. But we always struggle. That’s it, isn’t it? The joy of life is the struggle. Stearns was a joy because he struggled as no one I have ever known
.

The next day, Henry took his journal to the woods. How long before this magnificent forest falls to the woodsmen’s axes, he wondered. How long before the bluebird, the fox, the deer— “Stop,” he said. “You’re here now.” He sat against one of the mighty cedar trunks, opened his book and wrote:

I’m here now, in the dim light under a massive canopy. With me are unseen birds; beside me on the forest floor wintergreen, laurel, sedge, partridgeberry and all manner of ferns. When this forest falls they will scorch, but until then they thrive, just as I must despite this dim light I find myself in. I came here to inhale the strong scents of earth, loam and cedar. In these woods my senses come alive. I can feel the air with the tips of my fingers. I can spread my arms and spin and dance and howl like a primitive being. And then I can fall unharmed to the soft earth and look up at the monumental trees above and around me. I am at peace here. Life has a sense and purpose here. I shall continue
.

Henry heard loud rustling behind him, near where he’d entered the forest. He peered around the trunk, worried it might be a bear.

“Henry?”

He got up and saw Ralph through the trees.. “Over here, Ralph.”

“Over here where?”

“Turn to your left.”

Ralph, turning, looking left and right, said, “Can you see me?”

“Easily. You can’t see me?”

“No, I can’t.”

“But you’re looking right at me.” Henry waved his arms. “Over here. Walk straight ahead.”

“Now I see you.” He waved to Henry.

Ralph joined Henry and they sat on the soft mat of brown needles.

“Henry, I want to apologize for yesterday.”

Henry cocked his head. “For what?”

“For not,” Ralph stammered, “talking to you. With you.”

“No apology needed. Stearns was remarkable, but strange. No, not—”

Ralph put a hand on Henry’s knee. “Henry.”

Feeling Ralph was up to something he didn’t want to have happen, Henry moved from under Ralph’s hand and sat back on his heels, as if to emphasize what he was saying. “He was normal, for him. But for everyone else, for society, he was too showy. Good Christians don’t like showy. So he had to leave. Intolerance drove him to Europe.”

“I understand, Henry.... Intolerance made me become a minister.”

Henry’s head twitched inquisitively. “I don’t understand.”

“What I tried to tell you the other day is that—oh Lord, this is difficult. Growing up I too had these urges, these same desires as your friend, exploding not just in my brain but in my sex organ. Knowing those urges were condemned by all, I tried to stop them, stop the erections, stop the thoughts. I fought, but I failed—and I knew I had to fight with something more than I possessed. And what stronger weapon than to become one of God’s ministers? Ministers are above these things. They’re supposed to have God’s ear. I was sure that if I fought for the Lord and prayed, these thoughts, these constant, immoral urges, these horrible impulses, would go away. I prayed and prayed and prayed. I even married, hoping that would help. It didn’t work.”

Henry burst. “My Lord, Ralph. Are we all just Puritans at heart?” He jumped up and stood stiff. “Is it the Puritan in me that keeps me from being who I really am?”

“I don’t know, Henry. I just don’t know anymore.” For quite a while, neither of them said anything, until Ralph looked at Henry warmly and said, “I’m sorry I never met your friend Stearns. He sounds quite wonderful.”

“He was,” said Henry. And he smiled at the memories flooding his head. “I can see him now, going on and on: ‘Everyone thinks the Puritans are gone, but look at us. Their repressive spirit is alive in the way we dress. Maybe that’s why the west is wild. The clothes they wear are about openness, not oppression.’ I know Stearns was right: Our clothes do constrict us. Do any of the reformers talk about clothing? Does Alcott? Transcendentalists don’t. But shouldn’t that be a tenet of any new society?”