Miss Fuller (5 page)

The voyage of the
Elizabeth
had been troubled nearly from the first; soon after leaving Livorno on May 17th, the captain had died of typhus at Gibraltar. The ship sat in harbor under quarantine for a week, and then the first mate had taken charge. The Ossolis’ boy then also came down with typhus, but a milder version than the captain’s; he survived. Later, fierce winds hit just south of New York, and though the crew expected the mate to find a safe harbor and wait out the gale, he had pushed on.

Around three in the morning the ship, heavy with its marble cargo, had run aground on a sand bar. The marble slabs slid and thrust through the hull, and then the water poured in. Some five or six of the crew made it to shore by paddling on planks, and this was when the first unlucky sailor drowned. Those who landed on the beach were able to set up a make-shift tow-line, by which the rest of the crew and Mrs. Hasty, the late captain’s wife, had struggled in — but the Italian girl had lost her grip on the rope and had been swept away in a rip current. The waves and wind were too loud to hear anyone scream, and the darkness was almost total.

Ossoli and his wife would not leave the ship without their son and the baby was of course too small to use the tow-line, or even to hold on to an adult. They were waiting
for a promised life-boat from the nearest town. But instead of easing, the storm worsened; the tow-line broke; the ship broke up and began to sink. The ship was so close that those on shore saw clearly as Ossoli was next washed away. In the early dawn, a sailor actually swam back out to the wreck and took the child from his mother’s arms and made for shore. Within minutes, he and the boy had been beaten and killed in the ferocious surf, pulled back again and again by the undertow. Then the woman was alone, most of her skirts torn away, sitting with her back pressed against the mast, her knees at her chin. Finally an enormous wave covered her as well and she disappeared.

One sailor told Henry how much the crew had liked the lady, how she had expertly nursed the sick captain and a sailor at Gibraltar early in the voyage and then had nursed her own son without panic. Past the Canaries, once the boy was out of danger, she became sociable; one night, she joined the crew below and told them the story of Aeneas and the founding of Rome. For many nights thereafter, he said, she had told stories from Virgil, with long pauses to allow for translation for the Italian men in the crew — for although she did speak some Italian, they had laughed at her accent and formal style and so she had wisely stayed with English.

“Dido’s death by fire,” said Henry thinking suddenly, vividly, of the way Margaret had sometimes looked at Emerson.

“She could tell a story! Waving her arms, she had a beautiful voice, she looked like an angel. The boy sitting on her lap just stared up at her face.”

Another sailor, Bolton, whose good pal had tried to save the child, showed Henry to the small grave-yard and its scrap-wood crosses. “We have to keep the pickers away from here or they’d take these too, for fire-wood.” Bolton was talking too much, still had a shocked look about the eyes, as he told of the mother handing her child into the sailor’s arms. “The husband was gone under already, but she held the boy above the water and handed him to Tomaso. We yelled on the beach, we called to the little boy and brave old Tommy — ‘Come on, come on! The lady will try for it, too!’

“And then we all — us on the beach and she on the ship — we saw them go under. Between the wreck and the beach, tossed and smashed, Tommy and the little boy. It wasn’t till morning, when the rips had calmed, that the bodies came close enough for us to drag them in, dead. She saw everything, her boy drowned in the sailor’s arms. She never moved after that.

“We watched her, her legs tucked up under her petticoats, gazing at the place where her son had gone under, she sat still as stone, until the waves took her too and knocked her sideways and she went over and under.”

A few other sailors and salvage workers brought their lunches up to the hill and sat with them at the graves. Someone gave Henry a piece of bread, some cheese, and a sour
plum. They chewed and they drank cider from a common jug, and then they and Bolton resumed their talk, which seemed to be, over and over to one another: “Terrible storm, worst ever, terrible voyage, bad seas, fool captain, bad luck, marble too heavy, slid right through the hold, never go on a merchant again carrying stone if I can help it.”

Henry thought he could hardly bear to hear it again but each of the sailors seemed to need to say it, more than once, and so it became a kind of muttered chorus: “Terrible storm, bodies lost forever, the child tossed and tossed, brave lady, the child, terrible terrible sea.”

Ellery Channing and Arthur Fuller arrived just before sunset. The scale of the mess at the beach nearly overwhelmed them; but in an unmethodical manner, they more or less retraced Henry’s search all that evening, with identical results. There was brief excitement when Ellery found some scraps of paper in a note-book — upon drying them, however, they could see enough of the lettering to make out that these were only pieces of the ship’s log. Camping out near the workers, without a tent, they had tried to cheer one another but a light rain kept their gloom constant through the night. In the morning Arthur oversaw the digging up of his nephew’s coffin and hired a cart for the first leg of its trip back to Cambridge for family burial. Since it seemed that all hope of recovering the other bodies was gone, they spoke about the missing manuscript instead. It was Margaret’s book, her “History of the Italian Revolution.” Her last
letters home had announced its completion. There was little chance, they knew, of finding it — but Henry made a promise as Arthur and Ellery left with their burden, that he would continue to try.

Richard Fuller, Margaret’s youngest brother and Henry’s good friend, had stayed behind in Boston with a fever. More than for anyone else, Henry wanted to recover something for Richard. All he had were two jet buttons from a coat, perhaps Ossoli’s, that he had found on a scrap of wool cloth in the foam.

Henry resumed his beach walking. He was looking now for nothing in particular, and was able to enjoy noting the dozens of sea-birds, their fishing habits and cries; kelp and sea-lettuce and small moon-jellies pulsing on the sand; the razor clam-shells and jingle-shells and acres of boat-shells, lumpy underfoot.

A few miles down from the salvage encampment, as he was stepping idly along the wave line, he put a foot directly onto a mass of kelp and bones. They were big bones, and not of fish — he looked closely and saw that they were not quite clean-picked by the gulls and crabs, and definitely human — a shoulder, and an arm, two fingers still attached with shreds of cartilage. He could not touch these bones. No doubt they were from the wreck. They could be from any one of the bodies. He believed nonetheless that they were Margaret’s. That looked like her hand, it did, feminine, with her long fingers.

He thought perhaps of taking a finger bone for Richard. It was like something out of a fairy tale, but what? The Seven Crow Brothers, that was the one — with the sister who saved them all by whittling her own finger into a key to fit an impossible lock.… And yet he could not touch the bones. Instead he took off his boots and used them as scoops, scraping up wet sand and burying the bones as best he could; then, barefoot, carrying the boots, he walked back quickly, the red light from the setting sun in his eyes.

Even before life had been disrupted by the ship-wreck, things in the Thoreau house that summer were already in a state of agitation (“all of a doo-dah,” said Mother) because the family was packing to move, to a large house they had recently completed building in the center of town. This was a social and economic “return,” as their move out of town several years earlier had marked a grim moment in their finances. The family’s move back to the center of Concord was made possible by the recent prosperity of their pencil factory. This small business, which Father had inherited, occupied a barn warehouse. The family had always joked about their move “west” a half mile from town, and called the house-and-barn their “Texas” house. Henry’s inventions — of a new way of grinding plumbago for pencil lead and for printing, and a new way of pressing the wood
together around the lead — had made the business thrive, so that now they were providing pencils and printer’s ink to shops throughout New England and even Europe. Once they had moved back “east” into the center of town, their old Texas house would serve as offices and shipping station for the business.

But with Henry away, the moving had slowed. Mother was in a stew, un-packing and re-wrapping the plate and glassware, so that dozens of bundles littered the dining-room and parlor. All meals were now eaten in the kitchen. Father was not good at asking for help and kept trying to do the heavy work by himself; last night, the fourth day of Henry’s absence, he had strained his back trying to move a grain bin.

Anne was down to one smock, one dress, and a shift — everything else was packed away in trunks. For now most of Henry’s things were temporarily lodged in a shed, and there Anne hung the bird-cage and, every morning, tended to his Monarch caterpillars. He had allowed her to help with his butterfly hatchery this year — last year, his first of documenting, she only had been allowed to watch. She was better than he, it turned out, at finding the rice-like white eggs on the milkweed plants. Of the dozen or so they had captured in June, only five had hatched into caterpillars, and one was now so fat it would soon be at its last moult and go into a chrysalid.

That morning, when Mother was rubbing Father’s back with liniment and scolding him, Anne escaped the kitchen
and went out to the shed for her morning chore. She peered into the glass box that sat on the table by the one window, then lifted the pierced-tin lid with great delicacy — the fresh, shiny green chrysalid was attached by sticky threads to the underside of a pierced dimple — and reached in to drop fresh milkweed leaves for the caterpillars that were still eating. She fished out the dried leaves and with a rag pinched up the tiny black droppings.

She and her brother shared a sort of giddy admiration for these plump caterpillars, striped like a dandy’s waist-coat out of
The Lady’s Book
in bright yellow-green, black, and white. When you held one in your hand, it would at first curl up timidly, its wedges of caterpillar flesh bunched together like a squashed accordion; but then it would stretch out again, lifting its head and waggling short black horns.

The tabby cat had followed Anne to the shed. She nosed against the glass box, then against Anne’s pencil and ruler, and got a vigorous push off the table. The Canary-bird twittered nervously. In the Monarchs note-book, Anne wrote a description of the chrysalid, gently angling the ruler for a measurement. She then measured and noted, to a millimetre’s precision, the length of each caterpillar. A cloth tailor’s tape with millimetre markings went around the thickest place on each one — for a “waist” measurement, circumference. She wrote it all down and dated it. Then she made several preliminary sketches. Henry was in correspondence with a Dr. Jaeger, who was compiling an encyclopedia of
insects; their data would be mailed to him. Possibly Anne’s drawings would be included in the encyclopedia. She was exact in detail, but her perspective and shading were inexpert and Henry argued with her about her choice of colors. She hoped he would remember to buy her some new water-color paints in New York.

It was necessary to push the cat off the table again. She tidied the note-books, then replaced the lid, anchored it with stones, and shooed the cat ahead of her. She looked idly at the piles of Henry’s books and noticed, suddenly, a thin green-bound volume with gilt lettering:
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
by Margaret Fuller. She had never read it. Well. She would read it now. Was it a coincidence that she had found it, or was it that her eyes were newly alert to the author’s name? She tucked it into the front pocket of her smock and closed the shed door.

A surprise: Miss Fuller’s brother Arthur had stopped in, and he would stay for a cup of tea. Father sat stiffly by the stove, his face drawn, but fortunately Mother was occupied with the visitor and had let up her scolding. Arthur Fuller looked wild, his big hands clumsy, his pale eyes flat and full of the ocean at which he had been staring. His sister’s body was not recovered — nor was her husband’s, nor the book — just some scraps of clothing. He nearly broke into tears many times. He told them about the one recovered body — that of his nephew, little Angelo Ossoli, not yet two years old, for whom a grave in the upper dunes had been
quickly dug the day after the wreck. “I never saw his face in life,” said Arthur. “I never met my nephew. There was a wooden cross — we dug it all up and brought him back in a crate.”

The funeral for his nephew would be held the next day in Boston; Arthur was to visit with Mr. Emerson briefly before heading back to be with his own family. He gave Anne a note from her brother.

Dear Annie,