The Ice Harp, page 4
She chivvies the fire with a fork. She beats the flames flat with a shovel. They retreat to the edge of the bed; they tremble and lie low; they make a show of submission. Lidian drops the shovel. She sinks to the ground, dirties her cheek with sooty fingers, and laments like Niobe for her children. I help her stand. I give her my arm, and we walk, elderly, toward the house. The sly fire awakens from its smolder, and the old frame’s tar-soaked timbers roar into malignant rage. I hear the storm in the wood as the timbers blacken and crack open like burnt loaves. I hear the scrolls and codices shrieking in the Royal Library of Alexandria, set ablaze by an ill wind blown from Roman fire ships meant to bottle up the fleet of Ptolemy, brother of Cleopatra. In my own way, I have annotated the voluminous chronicle of conflagration, the prodigious history of fire, with a single lucifer match.
I dare not tell Lidian that I can hear earthworms emigrating in terror from underneath the azalea bushes toward the fading glory of the hydrangeas planted next to the rain barrel. Should the wind turn spiteful, “Bush”—our house and habitation—may burn a second time.
“I will beat the rain barrel and pray to Jupiter to open the heavens.”
I sing the chorus from Handel’s Die Schöpfung: “The heavens are telling the glory of God. / The wonder of his work displays the firmament.”
“Husband, you’ve brought me to my wit’s end!”
“A desperate place for anyone to fetch up,” I reply, hoping to sound a sympathetic chord.
Wanting to cheer her, I call, “Puss, puss” to Jeoffry, who is cleaning himself in the middle of the yard, as unconcerned by the disaster as Nero was by Rome’s. The cat regards me, his back leg stuck up obliquely stiff, and then returns to his nether region. Ah, the ingratitude of cats!
The azaleas, which shed their scarlet petals in June, are again radiant. Flowers of fire are lavishing the sky as flames inundate the hedge. I hear tree roots shrieking in the pit, “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. For everyone shall be salted with fire.”
The gate flies open at the behest of a titanic force that breaks the upper hinge. Aeolus carrying his bag of winds steps into the yard.
“I was hoping for a god of rain, not the postman.”
Henry leans over the fence and sniggers.
His mockery infuriates me. I snarl a recrimination: “Woods burner!”
“Waldo, I told you not to call me that!”
“How many acres of Walden Woods did you burn down? How many woodlots ruined?
“An accident!”
“The good people of Concord would like to have burned you at the stake. And you never, in your life, indemnified them.”
I wipe my runny eyes on my sleeve and see the fool postman smacking smoke with his hat. It’s difficult to suffer fools gladly when one is himself a fool.
“Do you have any letters for me?” I ask.
Weeping either from smoke or in frustration, Lidian pulls him by the hand. She shrinks into the shape of a supplicant.
“Mr. Tolliver, do something, please, before the house goes up again!”
The village Hermes throws down his bag, which may contain an offer to publish my collected works bound in red morocco. Seizing the singeing tarpaulin, he embraces the fire and smothers it till not an ember remains. Dissatisfied, he hacks the smutched earth with Henry’s old hoe, dividing and subdividing each clod, until I begin to think Tolliver has come in advance of the Fitchburg barons, who intend to run their railroad through my backyard garden. The fire bell that has been ringing in my ears stops. The tunneling inchworms fall silent in their mines. Anthropomorphism is not to be despised, since none can know the faculties of the insect mind.
Dabbing her soot-tracked cheeks, Lidian gives her hand to this Marcus Licinius Crassus dispatched by Jupiter to Massachusetts from the time of Augustus, in answer to my thumping on the rain barrel. He takes her hand shyly in his own.
“God bless you, Mr. Tolliver!”
Oh, the humiliation of it all!
“Don’t mention it, Mrs. Emerson.”
Wishing to appear in a favorable light, I ask if he will stay for lunch.
Wiping his face with a large pocket handkerchief that, rigged and bellied with wind, could send a toy boat scudding across Walden Pond, he accepts. Like bride and groom, Lidian and her deliverer walk, stately, toward the kitchen bower.
“Door, you ass! Kitchen door.”
“Who said that?” I ask, turning on my heels. The yard is empty of all humans, save me.
I stoop to pick the burrs from my bootlaces. My eyes fix on a clump of cyclamen, their diminutive pink flowers previously unnoticed from the grand height of what would be nearly six feet, head to toe, were I not so slumped. How good of the Demiurge to furnish my backyard with loveliness for the otherwise somber winter to come! One needs must give thanks where thanks are due. What if humankind perishes, so long as the cyclamen bloom underneath the ash or snow? The earth abides; her beauties are forever. If we outrage her, she’ll sweep us over the doorsill as easily as Lidian does crumbs from the kitchen floor.
This morning as I sat over my porridge, I watched a thin column of ants march, like an army crossing a frontier, from beneath the kitchen door to claim a crust of bread. I marveled at the communal intelligence and will of the tiny tribe. Of more interest to natural philosophers is the rogue that left the single file to wander off, alone and careless of such perils as my boot soles, Lidian’s broom, or the merry cruelties of our local deity, Jeoffry. Here, I said to myself, is an example of the individual you have praised—a member of the species Thoreauvian, stepping to the music of a different drummer. Alone and apart, the nonconforming beings of our world are united in their oddity.
The tribal ants carried away crumbs till the crust was gone and, with it, the necessity that had obliged them to trespass on the Emerson precincts. Meanwhile, the disobedient fellow—the individualist—walked its solitary path toward the Hyblaean honey, which it may never find. If one can imagine befuddlement in insects, that lonely pilgrim was befuddled. You will surely starve, I said, before you ever set foot in Canaan Land.
I am left to wonder whether the impulse that led a few ants to choose freedom was in defiance of the horde in favor of self-knowledge or a derangement in the organism that must end in self-destruction. In other words, were the libertarians of the tribe sick in body and disturbed in mind, or did they hanker for enlightenment? Did they, in their extremity, envy the slaves and wish to be one of them? Or is it enough for an ant to die on the way to self-fulfillment? Had I eyes as sharp as a microscope’s lens, would I see the recusants walking as bravely as the three hundred Spartans did to the “hot gates” of Thermopylae?
Speculation will drive you mad, Emerson! There is madness among us. You need look no further than brothers Bulkeley and Edward, who would have outshone you had he lived. Strange that two brothers, one backward, almost feebleminded, the other exceptional in intellect and the moral sentiment, should go mad and be confined, as was the case for both of them. I feared that I, too, would be taken, in time, to the McLean Asylum. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if I shan’t make my last bed there. I’m more likely to die of consumption, which carried off my first wife, Ellen; my grandfather William; Edward; our youngest brother, Charles; Henry T.; and—from what I’ve read—smothers a third of Bostonians each year. Wasting kings and commoners, politicians and poets, alike, consumption is democratic, though unrhapsodized by the so-called Poet of Democracy.
A boy of the sort my aunt Mary Moody Emerson would call a “ragamuffin,” were she still in life, peers at me over the fence. In memory, I can hear her voice—the sharp edge of it that “could cut the head off a tenpenny nail”—admonish the child thus: “If you give me sauce, boy, I’ll box your ear!”
Saucebox. What a delightful expression, though, for the life of me, I can’t envision the object for which it’s named; for all I know, it’s sitting in the cupboard next to the gravy boat.
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful gravy boat.
“Are you the admiral of the gravy boat, good sir?”
The good sir treats me to a look for which boys are universally condemned—a mixture of hauteur, disdain, self-confidence, amusement, and a soupçon of pity. Only then does he deign to give me his answer.
“Admiral yourself!”
“Is that sauce I hear?”
“Applesauce!”
“Ah! So you’ve come to steal my pippins, you pleasant rogue!”
He turns his head to regard my apple tree.
“I stole the last good one a week ago.”
“I shall box your ear, you rascal!”
The rascal sticks out his tongue and waggles it rudely.
“Just wait till I get my stick!”
He warbles a scurrilous stanza, which admirers of bawdy songs and phallic dances might relish:
Old man Emerson
Is a great thinker.
He preaches to the church mouse,
Sitting in his outhouse!
What an old stinker
Is Ralph Waldo Emerson!
I am not offended by this scrap of scatology. I sometimes think that much good would have come from the pagan settlement at Merry Mount had Captain Miles Standish not chopped down the maypole and scattered the inhabitants.
“What’s your name, boy?”
At this moment, he reminds me of Jeoffry cornered by the neighbor’s dog; he doesn’t know whether to flee or show his claws.
In spite of myself, I feel my good humor leak onto my face and puddle in a smile.
The boy studies my eyes for signs of a grown man’s treachery.
“Well?”
Either he has judged me to be harmless or has taken courage in the fence baring its sharp pickets between us. For whatever reason, he decides to indulge me with a choice morsel of his regard. In other words, he is prepared to concede my existence and acknowledge it.
“Billy Spicer.”
He gives me his name—not gives, for he is too fierce in pride and self-possession to give me so much. He lends it to me, so that I may try it out in my mouth.
“By any chance, are you a poet, Mr. Spicer?”
Without meaning to, I let an old schoolmaster’s envy for a vigorous young pupil color my voice with sarcasm. The effect is immediate.
Billy humps his back like a defiant cat.
“I sincerely beg your pardon, Billy. Please help yourself to my pippins.”
“There’s none to get, Mr. Emerson.” You senile old ninny!
I can scarcely recall the days before I was graduated by Harvard, when I enjoyed pulling pranks and other forms of silliness. And here, six decades later, I find myself in the role of Tom Sawyer bandying persiflage with Huckleberry Finn.
Persiflage. It sounds like the name of a villain in a melodrama, or else a parlor snake.
“Billy, you’re correct. The pippins are wintering in my cellar. At this moment, however, my good wife has a pudding in the oven, which is, I promise you, an uncommon comestible on the order of manna. Not even a golden apple of the sun is sweeter than one of Lidian’s apple puddings.”
I let my distinguished nose snuffle in approbation, since a fragrance, such as is borne upon the wind from the Spice Islands to the lucky Dutch plying the Sea of Java, is, indeed, visible in the yard.
Visible. The word seems out of order. Ah, well, let it stand, old man.
“Do you know your Bible, Billy?”
“No.”
“Quite right. Make your own bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that, in all your readings, have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
His eyes brighten. Doubtless, he is picturing himself regaling the town gossips, who are hungry for examples of the deranged mind of the Concord crackpot. Who am I to refuse to satisfy their hunger?
“Did you enjoy the fire, Billy? I know young boys are partial to fires.”
He has his claws out.
“I didn’t set it!”
“No, no, the arson was mine. In—we are in the month of October, are we not?”
He humors me with a roguish nod.
“In October of 1871, I walked amid the ruins left by the Chicago Fire. What passed here this morning is small potatoes in comparison.”
Unwilling to dwell on ruins or potatoes, I shoo the memory, as if it were a fly.
Sniggering Billy says, “Mr. Emerson, we’re in 1879.”
A precocious lad, though much grimed.
“Do you play the trumpet, Billy?”
“No, but I can play the jaw harp.”
“Better the jaw harp than a lyre. It behooves a man always to be honest.”
He gives me a scalding look, a specialty of boys who steal their neighbors’ apples.
“And what is your opinion of ants, Master Spicer? Lately, they’ve been much on my mind. Are those that leave the herd behind them destined for the lyceum or the asylum?”
“My mother pours kerosene down their holes and burns them out.”
“The day shall come, even unto pismires, when ‘the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.’ Second Peter.”
“Ants get into things.”
“That does seem to be the purpose of their corporation. Shall we go into the kitchen and gorge ourselves? Afterward, you can jaw a threnody for the immolated ants.”
At this moment, Lidian chooses to show herself, although not as Aphrodite did to Paris. Unlike the naked goddess at her bath, Queenie is dressed demurely in a plain brown bodice and skirt topping Congress gaiters. Her bustle, of course, is modest.
Lately, I seem to be thinking of apples. The golden one that Paris awarded Aphrodite for her beauty, which outshone Athena’s and Hera’s, had been picked by the goddess of strife from the Garden of the Hesperides to sow discord on Mount Olympus. The other famous apple (for so I believe the forbidden fruit to have been), I mean the one the serpent gave to Eve, had ordinary pips rather than gold nuggets, although the Garden is said to have been glorious.
“Mr. Emerson, are you coming?”
“Coming, Queenie. I’ve invited my young friend to lunch.”
She squints at the boy in disapproval.
“Mrs. Emerson, please be acquainted with William Spicer, admiral of the gravy boat and a future poet, if I’m not mistaken.”
Billy waits with evident apprehension to hear his doom pronounced.
“He’s not welcome here!”
The boy turns to me as a man standing at the bar would to his lawyer after being charged with matricide.
“Lidian, if you’re thinking of the pilferage of our pippins, I’ve forgiven him. Or would you have all boys be like Tantalus, for whom the fruit of the tree was forever out of reach?”
“He’s done far worse than steal fruit!”
“Hast thou murdered thy mother, then?”
“I never did!”
“What new lunacy is this, Mr. Emerson?”
The boy leaps to his own defense.
“My mother’s in Chelmsford, staying at her sister’s.”
Lidian pishes him curtly.
“Last week I caught him stealing a mince pie from the kitchen!”
“Mince, you say? My favorite breakfast pie. Well, Master Spicer, I see you’re already familiar with the wealth of the Emerson larder and pantry.”
Lidian menaces the boy with a stick.
“Now scat!”
“You had better beat hard for the Indies, Admiral.”
“And don’t come back!”
“Had it been any other pie than mince, I’d have pardoned you. As Quetelet, the social physicist, has it, ‘Society seeds itself with crimes, and the criminal harvests according to his famished condition within it.’”
The criminal element before me sticks out his tongue and scats, tossing over his shoulder a parting insult:
Old man Emerson’s
The Sage of Concord.
He lectures the chickens
On Transcendentalism!
What an old crackbrain
Is Ralph Waldo Emerson!
I sigh and go inside the house to hear news of the wider world from the postman, whose mouth seems to possess a superfluity of teeth.
* * *
“What news of the town, Mr. Tolliver? Has it been taken over by its rats?”
I turned one of Melville’s cynical assertions into a question, as befits an invalided mind whose once hard-and-fast convictions have softened into the pabulum of opinion.
“We have no rodent problem in Concord, Mr. Emerson, excepting the squirrels that got into Mrs. Tish’s attic and died there.”
“Even the corpse has its own beauty.”
Postman Tolliver butters his fingers. Scowling at me, Lidian hands him a napkin—too late, I’m pleased to announce, since he has employed the oilcloth to rid his digits of grease.
“Well, the fellow’s no better than he should be.”
Whether the invidious remark was mine or Henry’s is unclear, though a circumspect peek beneath the table does not reveal the presence of my trenchant friend. I give Henry the benefit of the doubt and shoulder the blame. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Tolliver, if I have given offense.”
“None taken.” He beavers through his buttered bread.
I stare in fascination at his teeth.
“You’ve been missed in the town, Mr. Emerson.”
“I can walk to the town, but my lucidity, you understand, will sometimes remain behind. The supreme injury, Mr. Tolliver, is that which old age does the mind. Bush is nearer to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery than it is to the town, and I’m assured of a warm welcome when the jet-creped hearse arrives there.”
“Well stated, Waldo, old friend.”
Henry has appeared. He is polishing an apple on his sleeve. It’s as perfect a specimen of Malus pumila as any picked in paradise or stored in Plato’s cave.
“Thank you, Henry. I had a feeling you were lurking in the vicinity.”
“I’ve been enjoying your antic disposition. You do madness like one born to it.”
“I’m not mad, except as words make me so. I’m terrified of their desertion. They fall out of my mind like cogs from a machine.”
