My eyes considered the sea, its anger much reduced. Wisps of purple-pink clouds framed the sun. Seabirds squawked and argued over almonds, then rose precipitously to navigate the winds. I was about to leave the beach and its carnage when a stranger appeared.
“Much death,” he said; “A world tragedy. You survived, I see.”
“I floated to the beach on a wooden contrivance,” I said, my cape billowing.
“Is that a seaworthy vessel during such a blow?” the stranger asked.
“Indeed.”
The wind whipped us. He chased his hat to the edge of the sea and screwed it back on. His hairstyle begged for panache. So absorbed in the memory-maelstrom, the stranger forgot to clean sand from his whiskers.
“I’m unaccustomed to water and could not help a family,” I confessed, swaying.
“A family, you said?” said the stranger.
“A family. Must I echo?”
“You knew them?”
“Ships force conviviality or isolation,” I replied; “The sea pukes waves, and creaking planks make good men into cowards.”
“You don’t say.”
His inquires boiled my bile, methinks. It took no effort to conjure the family, their wonderment impressed me: the revolutionary father, the mother with a mind like a library, the boy, Nino who had his feet in two worlds. I kept the stranger waiting, pretending to capture the steam percolating in my brain; I knew what he desired more than corpses for Christian burial. As the sun darkened the horizon like butterfly wings, we continued along the beach. The sea appeared calmer and lowered its tones; but how much of that was trickery, I knew not.
“Angelo was his name,” I said just above hearing; “We called him Nino.”
“Nino, you say? A pleasing name.”
“Yes, Nino,” I said; “The mother Margaret read to us – like the music of the spheres. She knew Greek like Plato, Latin like Caesar, German like Goethe.”
“Italian like Dante?” he said with grim charm; “You exaggerate, sir. What did she say?” He leaned toward me. Otherwise he was a distant fellow, plain and of middle height, bearded and rude, more country than city, sedate but vigorous.
“She was the Library of Alexandria on feet. She predicted a future of revolutions.”
The stranger nodded in fractions as if calculating the destructive end of all paths, of humans with their infernal ambitions & lusts. We walked along the beach, with pine trees on one side, whale road on the other. He bent to fetch a button from a shipwrecked coat. The beach was more apparitional than real. It told tales. Of those on board the doomed brig, some made it to shore while others got reduced to fish meal and bones. “May I inquire as to your name and origins?” the stranger asked.
“Me? Bastian Bloodsaw, citizen of the world,” I answered, circling my finger; “My lineage: royalty. My coat of arms includes a unicorn and dragon.”
“A unicorn would not sit with a dragon,” he said. “And royalty, it is not popular in these American states. Fought a war over it.”
“You all love royalty,” I said with froth. “Quite an unlovely outcome of your revolution: slavery goes on, the rise of vulgar opinion, the great circle of Indian nations turning into bone.”
“We are a-working on that. Freedom is inside too,” he said, bending to pick up a shell, enticed by its undulations; “The Indians collected these shells for wampum.”
“Sir, did you not rebel during a more recent war?”
“Did,” he said with a nod; “It was slavery, the war with Mexico. Virtue seduces the soul.” The stranger had not offered his name. A good way to know people is not to know them. Children shouting & tossing yarn redirected our gaze. We surveyed the picked-over carnage: clothes, silk, rags, wood, almonds, olive oil, soap, broken chests, frames absent of paintings, an adult skeleton with a frown. Leftovers from a non-attended funeral.
Wagon furrows and footprints had worn smooth, but there remained labyrinths in the sand. Items had been stolen and re-stolen by the local pirates who, by now, had returned to their homes and legitimate pursuits. Tragic, they did not sail rescuing crafts.
“There,” I said, catching a nose of salt air. “Sandbar out yonder called the brig like the proverbial Sirens. Doom! The captain had died of smallpox and the first mate, Mr. Bangs, was unqualified for his promotion. I should have banged Bangs onto the pirate plank. But who would have steered us? Bangs was a boy-man. Did I say we carried a load of marble that crashed through the sides? Marble belongs in churches. Oh, cruel seas! Oh Poseidon.”
“Sir, you have a preternatural levity with words, with a finger-poke of risibility,” he said, rubbing the button like a rosary. A tear escaped his stoic visage, “I’m told the hurricane sent up wicked waves, that the lifeboat fell short of volunteers, that the scavengers were more interested in trinkets than in lives.”
“Should be a law against beach vultures.”
“Law never made men a whit more just,” he said, staring down. A horse and buggy creaked along, its residents tipping their hats. A meat wagon, pulled by some devilish canine, left empty with its owners cursing. So long folks, nothing left to loot. The rustic and I continued along the beach, avoiding horse dung. He bent to touch a woman’s glove, twisted and mummified.
“I feel a trample of my soul,” I offered. “Margaret could not swim, the husband Ossoli raised his arms, in hopes that God was watching. The steward grabbed Nino, hoping for kinder waves. When I looked back, Margaret in ghostly white leaned against the foremast with a most dejected face. Waves snatched–.”
“A terrible day for the Respiration of our Republic,” he said; “Only a few minds like hers in a century. Even Poe feared her genius.”
“You sir, I know you. You’re Thoreau – the agitator and Emerson sidekick?”
“I am Henry David Thoreau,” he said, “Waldo Emerson, my soulful friend, sent me.”
“’Tis an honor.”
“I second that, sir.”
I bent to examine a good bottle of Chianti embedded in the sand. While I took a swig and another, he stared at the moon. Buddhists in far-off pagan lands celebrate such a glow. We were silent for a long while, considering there were two of us, and the waves and wind roared. “Mr. Thoreau,” I said, with a turn of my head, “have you thought of the next world?”
“One world at a time.”
I removed snuff from my golden Medusa case and offered some; “No fish, fowl, meat, drink or smoke for you, Mr. Thoreau. May I inquire of your fitness?”
Thoreau exhaled one of those Hindoo sea breaths. “I awake with sunlight and birdsong, to swim the pond, sauntering the universe of Concord. All good things are wild and free. You?”
“My humors are balanced,” I said; “Enough blood.”
“Do you know Emerson? Revolutions started outside and inside his house.”
I doubted his perfect fitness, as we strolled along the beach. The wave crests shone like old heads. Boys played dominoes, wearing pilfered clothing, including hats. When I saw one of Margaret’s hats, I wanted to ring their little chicken necks. Thoreau was disturbed. We continued on a course parallel with the restive waves. He referred to it as “a saunter in search of remnants,” which was oddly grandiloquent. This Thoreau had hastened from Concord-town when news came of the shipwreck, only to find leftovers, and me. Of Margaret, he found little but the false door of memory. Genius, such as it is, lives on.
Margaret, you may recall, was a celestial salon all by herself, a source of new and antique ideas. Like Athena from Zeus, books and ideas leaped from her head. The barrister-father had trained her beyond normality. While other children played with dolls, she recited Homer and Cicero. Margaret, you may recall, had been editor of The Dial, the mouthpiece of those Romantic peacocks. (During my time abroad, copies of The Dial reached me by some Hermes means of transport). Margaret had been hired by the New York Tribune to cover, in all its winged glory & airless failure, the Revolution in Rome. One day, she’d been wandering around St. Peter’s when she met that Italian aristocrat, of modest position and wealth.
Love begins so freely in the modern world. Zounds! ‘Tis Heaven. (My parents had glued me to some fabulous Lady’s fleshy niece: we were too decadent for each other. But I stray).
Amazing that Margaret was a foreign correspondent who worked for the New York Tribune and wrote the greatest book of the century for women. Speaking of which, what of Margaret’s Roman manuscript? Was it scooped up by the waves or used, like Egypt’s mummies, by riffraff to kindle a fire? It joins the list of the lost.
Thoreau and I were out of words, but not wine or sand.
I cry for Nino, miss the child. Nino mixed English and Italian, and liked figs. The best children act like adults but bring out the child in men. They were a family with a future. I placed a sailor’s hat over Nino’s heart. He was buried in angelic white.
How I wish I could have shared Margaret’s stories – of her childhood vision of an eagle with a chain on its foot, of Mazzini and Garibaldi’s faith in Italy, of her husband’s trot toward the crack of cannon fire, of the ancient ruins & piazzas. Sadness brought up the biting eels in me. Death echoes from the hollows, from the bottom of the seas, from the graveyards and city dumps, from the diseases that slumber in breath and bowels, from the infuriating darkness, from whales and waves.
“Mr. Thoreau, you have a scientist’s mind and a mystic’s heart. A new species, is it not?”
“I’m not the first,” he said, then after a pause, added, “Margaret rejected a few of my essays. She, Bronson Alcott and Emerson are the ones with immortal fame. Someday they will wear marble garments. I am mainly a saunterer and note-taker.”
“You un-sole a lot of boots. But slogging in the sand has unraveled me. Perhaps another time I could offer you ale in that public house up yonder?” I said. “We’d wake snakes.”
He gave a subtle nod. I’d not feasted in days, felt water-logged, bloodless. I looked him over from boots to beard-hairs. I sniffed him — that graveyard of his lungs…
“I accept your invitation, though I’m not known for merry-making,” he replied, cocking his hat. “Mr. Bloodsaw, you are a man out of time.”
Seagulls laughed at us. Methinks the moon shares a secret language with crabs heading into the sea and that someday the volcanoes will hit the skies. “Sir, do you have a hermit nature?” I asked.
“Being a hermit is preferable to city muck. A Yankee farmer is a true philosopher.”
“So, you prefer trees to people.”
“That single tree is a life-force to a community of creatures. Sitting beneath a tree was not lonely for the Buddha or Lao Tzu, nor the desert an affront to Jesus or Mohammad.”
“Jesus’ first miracle was making wine at a wedding,” I said.
“Yes, he was more than a funeral,” Thoreau said. “There’s mystery about you. I wish to show you to Mr. Hawthorne. Have you an acquaintance with his romances? I don’t read them.”
“There’s nothing wrong with fancy — granted, it’s pocked with sin and Puritan purpose. Just finished Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Melville and Poe are the gravediggers of darkness,” I said, then something jumped inside of me, and I fiercely gripped Thoreau’s arm, “Thoreau, what did you learn in the woods? Was it not a return to man’s dark primitive?”
Thoreau stepped back, broke free, found his composure, smiled crookedly.
“Bloodsaw you are a zad. Well, I learned about ants and beans and water and trees and simplicity and friendship.”
“Boring as a rocking-chair,” I sneered. “I love power, engines, smoke, spinning wheels and men seeking coal and gold and stacks of buffalo hides and empires, and shares of stock.”
“Mad and diabolical,” Thoreau said, tugging his beard, “Modern engulfment.”
“The push and pull, the trumpets of steam, the flux and hustle, the darkness and charging instincts.”
“All is one.”
I emptied the wine into my throat, “You wish, Mr. Thoreau.” Time stopped. Insects paused in the air just like Krishna and Arjuna conversing between battle lines, like the Pythia’s utterances at Delphi. I gasped, biting my knuckles until blood trickled.
“I must know,” Thoreau said, “What did Margaret Fuller reveal of her time in Italy?”
“No resurrecting the dead. She had five lifetimes in a few decades.” Thoreau removed his hat. I paused, swinging my cape around, walking through the doorway of the indigo night. He trailed along with his demands.
“Emerson sent me here for her Rome manuscript. Man, have you seen it?”
“There was a reason Romulus had been suckled by a she-wolf and came to kill his brother,” I said with steel. “Like rope, good and evil are intertwined. Rome, the center of the world, the proverbial umbilicus. Margaret said many things, which filled her like mother’s milk.”
“Bloodsaw, what in grim Hades do you mean? Do you blab to clarify or confuse?”
“The ocean has taken her secrets.”
Thoreau stomped the ground like a tribal. Dear Reader, I took the English pipe from my cape, glaring big. I wanted to kick sand in his direction & pluck his whiskers. The power of a secret lies in concealment. Does this Harvard rustic not know that there’s more to life than communing with trees & ants. One must lollygag with the fair sex, invest in machines and converse with the night.
“Forsooth,” I ejaculated, “She was alone with her newborn baby – as Marchese Giovanni Ossoli defended Italy with Garibaldi’s army. The pope was on the side of the people, but his heart turned cold, and political. Margaret was melancholy. It was raining. On the way to a market, an artist begged. Margaret gave the miscreant the contents of her purse.”
Thoreau put his hands to his forehead; he cursed muses, ocean, providence and time. Poor man, did these Romantics not adore Nature, its ponds and hedgerows and daffodils? Well, tell them about Pompeii! Nature kicks back. And so, Thoreau removed his clothes down to his gleaming underwear, leaping into the Janus waves. I felt too astounded to lift a finger to stop him, and the hair on my arms became electric. Oh, death the last-ditch teacher.
He rolled over and under the waves, into the spectacular gloom, the black void. “Cold in there, Henry David,” I yelled, “Catch your death.”
Another doodler called by death. Then I felt called to the water, to attempt a-saving of this luminous character, for a plank lay half-buried. Though I may not fancy him, I fancied the waves even less.
Suddenly Thoreau popped up and turned round; he beavered toward the shore. Upon arrival, his legs gave out, and his knees fell into the sand. “I know why Margaret waited on the ship,” said Thoreau, “She had faith in mankind.”
“Zounds,” I replied, buttoning my cape. “That’s too intellectual to be effectual.”
Searching for the dead is bound to arouse a melancholy furor in the soul. Without saying goodbye, I turned toward lights over the hill, pinching myself from the scene.
Richard Marranca had an NEH grant to study the American Romantics in Concord. Recently his interview with John Matteson (wrote books on Fuller & the Alcotts.) was published. He publishes fiction and nonfiction — including digital humanities articles. He has a book coming out, Speaking of the Dead: Mummies and Mysteries of Egypt (Blydyn Square Books.)
