Sixty Days and Counting (45 page)

The candle flames danced on some breeze that Charlie could not feel. An old man on the opposite side of the circle from Qang shouted something. Joe, however, did not seem to notice the shout. He was staring at Qang and the others around her with the same absorption he displayed when watching one of his favorite truck videos. He raised a hand, and seemed to conduct Qang in her singing. She stared fiercely at him, cross-eyed and looking a bit mad. Charlie wondered if she were possessed by the spirit in question.

Finally she took some saffron powder from a bowl held before her by the man on her right, and held it out for Joe’s inspection. He put his finger in it, regarded the tip of his finger, sniffed it. Qang barked something and he looked up at her, held his hand out toward her. She nodded formally, theatrically, and took up a bowl of flower petals from the woman on the other side of her. She held the bowl out to Joe, and he took a fistful of pink flower petals, staining them saffron with his finger. The circle of elderly Khembalis joined the chanting, and began shuffling in a clump-footed dance around Joe, punctuating their chant with rhythmic short exclamations, somewhat like the “HAs!” that Rudra had shouted in Joe’s face the previous year. Some of them smacked their hand cymbals together, then held the vibrating little disks over their heads. Joe began a little two-step, hands clasped behind his back, reminding Charlie of the dance of the Munchkins welcoming Dorothy to Oz. Then as the chanting rose to a peak, Qang stepped forward and put her hand on Joe’s head. He stilled under it. The woman beside Qang put the rest of the flower petals on the back of Qang’s hand, and Qang flicked them into the air when she moved her hand away.

Joe sat down on his butt as if his hamstrings had been cut. Charlie rushed to his side, cutting through the dancers.

“Joe! Joe, are you okay?”

Joe looked up at him. His eyes were round, they bugged out like the eyes of the demon masks up at the farmhouse. Wordlessly he struggled to his feet, ignoring Charlie’s outstretched hand offering help. He took a swipe at Charlie:

“No, Da! Do it MY SELF. Wanna GO OUT! Wanna go!”

“Okay!” Charlie exclaimed. Instantly he worried that Anna would be concerned by this linguistic regression. But it happened sometimes to young kids, and surely it wouldn’t last for long. “Hey there, Joe. Good to see you buddy. Let’s go outside and play.”

He glanced up at Qang, who nodded briefly at him before she returned her gaze to Joe. She seemed herself again.

“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Come! ON!”

“Okay sure! Let’s go! Let’s see if we can find Nick up in the treehouse, shall we? Treehouse? What do you say?”

“Treehouse? Good!” And his face scrunched into a climber’s scowl before he marched out the tent door, like Popeye on a mission.

“Okay!” Charlie looked at Qang. “I better go catch up. Hey Joe! Wait a second!”

When Anna came out from the Khembali farmhouse, where she had been conferring with Padma about the re-establishment of the Khembali Institute for Higher Studies, and the possibility of transferring the Khembali/NSF collaborative funds to studying the Chesapeake Bay rather than the Bay of Bengal, she found all three of her boys up in the treehouse, running from one room to the next on a network of catwalks. One of the catwalks was as flexible as a bouncy bridge, and the three of them were busy finding the sweet spot that would cast Joe the highest when Charlie and Nick jumped. Anna could have told them from many previous ground observations that there would be two sweet spots, one each about halfway between the midpoint and the ends, but they seemed to have to rediscover that physical fact every time.

Charlie had gone exuberant, as he often did in these situations. He was getting to be more Joe’s age than Joe himself. Although it would have been hard to tell at that moment, given Joe’s helpless giggling, and his shrieks of delight at every sprung launching. He had always loved weightlessness. Even in his first weeks, when colic had so often left him wretched and inconsolable, if she had tossed him lightly up and then gently supported him on the way down, never quite releasing her hold on his body and head, he would goggle and go still, then rapt. At the time she had postulated that the weightlessness reminded him of being in the womb, in a swimmer’s world, before the outer world had inflicted colic and all its other trials on him. Now, watching him fly, she thought maybe it was still true.

Charlie, on the other hand, just liked playing. Anything would do. In the absence of anything else he would pitch pennies against a wall, or flick playing cards into a pan set across the floor. Wrestle with the boys, especially Joe. Make paper airplanes out of the newspaper. Throw rocks, preferably into water. They all liked that. Very likely during some part of this day she would find them down on the banks of the Potomac, grubbing for pebbles to throw in the stream.

T
uberculosis progressed in Thoreau until it was clear he was dying. He was forty-four, and just beginning to become a well-known writer. In the bold if morbid style of the time, people dropped by to visit him on his deathbed. It became a kind of tourist destination for the New England intelligentsia. Stories were told to illustrate his flinty character. God knows what he thought of it. He played his part. A few weeks before he died, a family friend asked him “how he stood affected toward Christ.” Thoreau answered, as reported later in the
Christian Examiner,
that “A snowstorm was more to him than Christ.”

His Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, and he replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and family friend, dropped by near the end, and said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”

Thoreau said, “One world at a time.”

Then he died, and for Emerson it was yet another in the series of catastrophic premature deaths that had struck his loved ones. Wife, child, friend. In reading Emerson’s essay on Thoreau, Frank could sense the intense care the old man had taken to give a fair and full portrait. “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscles, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ’Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”

Emerson went on, “He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed
through it as freely by paths of his own. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of year it was within two days.

“To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws.”

In short, a scientist.

But Emerson’s grief also had an edge to it, a kind of anger at fate which spilled over into frustration even with Thoreau himself:

“I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”

Whoah. Pretty harsh, that. And Frank saw reason to believe that this was not the first time Emerson had used the phrase—and that the first time it had been said right to Thoreau’s face. They had argued a lot, and about things they both thought mattered, like how to live in a nation where slavery was legal. And in Thoreau’s journal, whenever he was grumbling about the terrible inadequacies of friendship, it was pretty clear that he was usually complaining about Emerson. This was particularly true whenever he wrote about The Friend. It made sense, given the way they were; Emerson had a huge range of acquaintances, and spread himself thin, while Thoreau had what Frank thought would now be called social anxieties, so that he relied heavily on a few people close to him. It would not have been easy for any friend to live up to his standards. Emerson said, “I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.”

In any case they clashed, two strong thinkers with their own ideas, and so they saw less of each other, and Emerson disapproved of Thoreau’s withdrawal, and his endless botanizing.

Only in the privacy of his journal did Thoreau make his rebuttal to Emerson’s waspish accusation; this was why Frank thought Emerson had made it directly—perhaps even shouted it: he imagined the two men out in Emerson’s yard, Thoreau having dropped by without warning, withdrawn and contrary, headed into the woods, and the lonely old gabster hurt by this, and frustrated to see the potential great voice of the age go missing in the
swamps—“You could be engineering for all America, and yet off you go to be captain of a huckleberry-party!”

Thoreau wrote: “To such a pass our civilization and division of labor has come, that A, a professional huckleberry-picker, has hired B’s field; C, a professed cook, is superintending the cooking of a pudding made of the berries; while Professor D, for which the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book. That book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry field, will be worthless. There will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. The reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. I believe in a different kind of division of labor, and that Professor D should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry-field.”

Four days later, still nursing this riposte, he wrote:

“We dwellers in the huckleberry pastures are slow to adopt the notions of large towns and cities and may perchance be nicknamed huckleberry people.”

In the end, despite these spats, the two men were friends. They both knew that a twist of fate had thrown them into the same time and place together, and they both treasured the contact. Thoreau wrote of his employer, teacher, mentor, friend:

“Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no more easy, methodically distinct expression. His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”

Interesting how even here Thoreau alluded to that source of conflict between them, the question of how to make an impact on the time. Meanwhile, Emerson thought Thoreau had disappeared into the woods and failed to live up to his promise; he could not foresee how widely Thoreau would eventually be read. It took many decades before Thoreau’s journals were transcribed, and only then was his full accomplishment revealed, a very rare thing: the transcription of a mind onto the page, so that it was as if the reader became telepathic and could hear someone else thinking at last; and what thoughts! Of how to be an American, and how to see the land and the animals, and how to live up to the new world and become native to this
place. His
Walden
was a kind of glorious distillate of the journal, and this book grew and grew in the American consciousness, became a living monument and a challenge to each generation in turn. Could America live up to
Walden
? Could America live up to Emerson? It was a still an open question! And every day a new answer came. Frank, reading them in awe, having found the true sociobiology at last, a reading of the species that could be put to use, that helped one to live, looked around him at all the ferals he lived amongst, at the polyglot conclave of all the peoples in the city; and he watched the animals coming back to the forest, and thought about how it could be; and he saw that it could happen: that they might learn how to live on this world properly, and all become huckleberry people at last.

Emerson, meanwhile, lived on. He carried the burden of grief and love, and his tribute to his young friend ended with the love and not the reproach, as always. “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, not in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish. But wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

Frank tried to make one of those homes. He read Emerson and Thoreau to learn about himself. He forwarded the link to Emersonfortheday in all his e-mails, and passed on their news. And he posted printouts of various passages for the ferals to enjoy at the potlucks, and he read passages aloud to Edgardo and Anna; and eventually a lot of his friends were also reading and enjoying Emersonfortheday.com. Diane was a big fan, and she had gotten Phil Chase interested as well.

Phil’s hunt for America’s past, and an exemplary figure to give him inspiration and hope, was still focused on FDR, for obvious reasons; but he was capable of appreciating the New England pair as well, especially when Diane shoved a passage in front of his face at breakfast. It had become a part of their morning routine. One day he laughed, beating her to the punch: “By God he was a radical! Here it is 1846, and he’s talking about what comes after they defeat slavery. Listen to this:

“ ‘Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances. Slavery and anti-slavery is the question of property and no property, rent and antirent; and anti-slavery dare not yet say that every man must do his own work. Yet that is at last the upshot.’ ”

“Amazing,” Diane said. “And now we’re here.”

Phil nodded as he sipped his coffee. “You gotta love it.”

Diane looked at him over the tops of her glasses. A middle-aged couple at breakfast, reading their laptops.

“You’ve got to do it,” she corrected.

Phil grinned. “We’re trying, dear. We’re doing our best.”

Diane nodded absently, back to reading; she was, like Emerson, already focused on the next set of problems.

As Phil himself focused, every day, day after day; his waking life was scheduled by the quarter hour. And some things got done; and despite all the chaos and disorder in America and the world, in the violent weather swings both climatic and political, the Chase administration was trying everything it could think to try, attempting that “course of bold and persistent experimentation” that FDR had called for in his time; and as a result, they were actually making some real progress. Phil Chase was fighting the good fight. And so naturally someone shot him.

I
T WAS A “LONE ASSASSIN,” AS THEY SAY,
and luckily one of the deranged ones, so that he fired wildly from a crowd and only got Phil once in the neck before bystanders dragged him to the ground and subdued him. Phil was carried back into his car and rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital, his people working on him all the way, and they got him into intensive care alive. After that the doctors and nurses went at him. The news outside the ICU was uncertain, and rumors flew.

By then it was around eight in the evening. Phil had been on his way to the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also known as the Colbert Hour, at which Phil had been expected to shine. After the shooting many of the attendees stayed, standing around in quiet groups, waiting grimly to hear the news, reminding each other this had happened before, and reminiscing about the previous times.

All the Quiblers were at home. When Roy called with the news they were having dinner. Charlie jumped over to switch on the TV, and then they were confronted with the usual images, repeated over and over like a nightmare you could never escape: reporters outside the hospital, administration spokespeople, including Andrea, looking pinched and white-faced and speaking as calmly as she could. And, of course, jostled and bouncing images of the shooting itself, caught mostly in the immediate aftermath, looking like something from an art film or reality TV.

Charlie and Anna sat on the couch before the TV holding hands, Anna squeezing so hard that Charlie had to squeeze back to protect his bones. Nick sat with his face right before the screen, big-eyed and solemn; Joe didn’t understand what the fuss was about, and so began to get angry. Very soon he would begin to demand his proper spot in the limelight. Anna started to cry, bolted up and went into the kitchen, cursing viciously under her breath. She had never shown any great regard for Phil Chase or for politicians in general, as Charlie well knew, but now she was crying in the kitchen, banging the teapot onto the stove as if crushing something vile.