The Steampunk Trilogy (19 page)

The sea began to boil and heave off the stern of the Marblehead vessel.

“Not another submersible,” groaned Agassiz.

Whatever deity T’guzeri had sought to invoke saw fit now to grant Agassiz’s desires. The cause of the disturbance was not another submersible. At least not one of human design.

A head big as a locomotive emerged from the water. It was slope-browed and covered with sleek mottled skin. Its eyes were big as cartwheels. Weeds hung from its open jaws.

The head was supported by a neck thick as one of the Corinthian columns of the Central Congregational Church on Winter Street. The neck pushed the head up, up, up, into the night sky, till it towered steeple-high.

Following the neck was a barnacle-covered body twice as long as the
U.S.S. Bibb
.

The surviving wounded Deep Ones—including T’guzeri, who squirmed in the grip of a beefy sailor—began to sing out the creature’s name.

“Dagon! Dagon! Dagon!”

In 1796, long before Agassiz had been born, his mentor, Georges Cuvier, had been summoned to the gypsum quarries of Montmartre. The workers there had unearthed bones of such a size that they could only belong to a species of elephant larger than any extant. After examining the find, Cuvier announced the bones to be those of an antediluvian animal which had been destroyed in some kind of catastrophe. Over the next five years, he had been called upon to examine many other fossils, including the giant Maestricht jaws brought back from Germany by the army of revolutionary France.

Agassiz himself had seen many of these dusty bones during his apprenticeship to Cuvier.

Thus the cool-headed Swiss naturalist was the first to recognize the creature looming before him, though its bones were clothed in substantial flesh.

“This is no supernatural monster, men! It’s only an extinct fish-lizard, an Icthyosaurus!”

“It doesn’t look very extinct to me,” muttered Cezar weakly.

Captain Davis added his voice to Agassiz’s. “Give it all you’ve got, boys!”

Cannons boomed from the
Bibb
.
Melville’s harpoon flew unerringly through the air. A volley of arrows took wing from Chief Snapping Turtle’s bow. Small-arms fire resounded. Finally, Kosciuszko’s bomb arced through the air, to burst impotently against the monster’s neck.

The Icthyosaurus was as little affected as if the assault had consisted of so many peas. It swung its huge head back and forth searchingly.

Now Maurice stepped forward, out of the crowd.

“All you imperialists know is force. Let me attempt tp reason with the creature. Ahoy, creature! I represent the proletariat—”

Seemingly attracted by the whiney voice of the socialist, the Icthyosaurus dropped its head down to peer at him.

“You see—”

In the blink of an eye, the horrid beast swallowed Maurice Desor.

The rest of the humans were frozen. They waited in stunned silence for the Icthyosaurus to consume them all, smash their ship, or both.

Dottie moved toward the fish-lizard. She bore the fetiche high.

“Down, down, Dagon! Cthulhu commands it! Back to your vasty deeps! Sleep for eons yet to come!”

The monster reared back like a frightened puppy. Then it dove, sending up a wave that rocked the two ships almost to the point of swamping them. Men tumbled about like skittles.

Slowly they picked themselves up as the ships stopped rocking. It took a moment for the fact that they had been spared to dawn on everyone. But when it did, they let out a vibrant cheer.

“Hip, hip, hurray for the Hottentot! Three cheers for Dottie! Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah!”

Hardened sailors were crying. Dogberry was hugging Chief Snapping Turtle. Pourtales, Burckhardt, Girard and Sonrel had formed a chorus line and were kicking their legs like music-hall queens. Kosciuszko and Stormfield were dancing a jig. Cezar had his arms around the humbly smiling Dottie, who miraculously clutched the unbroken fetiche between them.

Now Lizzie appeared, and threw herself into Agassiz’s arms.

“Oh, Louis, you were magnificent!”

She began to kiss him over and over again.

Edward Desor approached. He alone remained aloof from the celebrations. He spoke numbly to Agassiz.

“You and you alone were responsible for my cousin’s death. You will pay for this, Agass. Yes, you will pay.”

Agassiz tugged at his falling pants and started to reply curtly. He stopped. He could not find it in himself to worry about Desor’s threat. Of course the man could make trouble for him. But what could compare to the ordeal he had undergone? With his future wife in his arms, and knowlege of the Cosmogonic Locus secure, his future—and the future of creationism—looked bright.

But Agassiz could not forsee that even now a man named Charles Darwin was at work on a book called
The Origin of Species
,
a book which would forever link man and animal, yoke white to black, through Civil War and beyond, and replace Agassiz’s beloved creationism with a disgusting notion called “evolution,” rendering Agassiz in his old age a cranky, outmoded, derided fossil himself.

In fact, Agassiz’s oracular ability did not even extend as far as his wedding night, April 25, 1850, a night when his timid second wife would turn to him and say:

“Louis, I—I have a small feminine abnormality you should know about.”

“Nonsense, Lizzie dear. You are the perfect woman.”

“No, dear, I’m a little different from most women. I have a kind of birth defect. I never knew the name for it until a few years ago. I’m still rather ashamed to use the common term. Perhaps if I whispered the Latin—”

“Go ahead, dear. And then we’ll get to bed.”

“It’s—it’s called
sinus pudoris
.”

And they never did have any children.

WALT AND EMILY

1

“MORNING MEANS JUST RISK—TO THE LOVER”

O
N THE MORNING
of May 1, 1860, Miss Emily Dickinson, the self-styled “Belle of Amherst,” awoke feeling uncannily perturbed; so disconcerted by nocturnal phantoms and their ineffable residue of bewildered prescience, in fact, that, sliding quietly out of bed so as not to awaken Carlo, who yet snored canine-wise at the foot of the four-poster, she padded barefoot in her white gown across the rush matting of her flower-papered bedroom to her small cherry-wood table (its surface a mere eighteen inches square, yet easily encompassing the Universe Entire) whereon she daily wrestled with her painful and ecstatic poems, and, pausing not even to sit, dashed off these lines:

Dying! Dying in the night!

Won’t somebody bring the light

So I can see which way to go

Into the everlasting snow?;

upon the completion of which, feeling somewhat relieved yet still faintly palsied of soul, Emily crossed to the single window set in the western wall of her corner bedroom in the upper floor of The Homestead (two southern windows looked out across Main Street), and, flinging back the shutters of the open window for a revivifying glimpse of her bee-ornamented garden and the next-door household known as The Evergreens, where dwelled her beloved brother Austin and his wife Sue, she was treated instead to the barely credible sight—which imprinted itself now and forever on her retinas like the last earthly patterns seen by a dying man—of a huge hairy bearded barbarian, utterly and shamelessly naked save for a black floppy wide-brimmed hat, giving himself a bath on her gem-bright grassy lawn.

Emily’s heart filled with a mob of feelings no Inner Police could suppress.

The intruder had apparently taken no notice of the movement at the upper story of The Homestead he was so brashly profaning. He seemed utterly intent—in an almost devotional way—on laving his muscled and bulky form, using a cake of soap, a rag and the contents of the rain-barrel set immediately below Emily’s window. His simple clothing piled beside him, his voyager’s hat perched ludicrously atop his flowing gray-streaked locks, the stranger proceeded unconcernedly with his ablutions, as if he were alone in the midst of some Kansas prairie.

With his manly toes digging into the soil, he soaped his calves, he soaped his thighs—he soaped his reproductive organs! Emily blanched at the heretofore unrevealed sight of that manly portion, queer feelings thrilling every nerve. Reminding herself of her White Election, she raised her eyes with no little effort from that nether generative region.

The giant had moved on to scrub his masculine chest and arms, these latter plainly the well-formed thews of a laborer. Emily wondered if this could be some ignorant new hired man, employed by Father before his departure, who, having wandered from his quarters in their barn, now washed himself yokel-style in public . . .

All be-lathered, the giant paused now. He lifted his frothed arms up toward the new sun, as if in welcome to a brother. Then, shattering the matitutinal stillness (and whatever remained of Emily’s composure!), he loudly declaimed, “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of every man hearty and clean! Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest!”

This wild unexpected outburst was too much for Emily. She sank to the windowsill in a half-swoon, the sudden fragrance of a few premature lilacs wafting to her and filling her nostrils with sweetness.

In so doing, she knocked over a basket perched on the ledge. Secured by a long string, it was the vehicle by which she dropped sweetmeats to the neighborhood children on those days she felt incapable of leaving her room.

Emily watched the basket fall. It seemed to tumble down with unnatural slowness, taking an Awful Hushed Eternity to drop through the lambent spring atmosphere.

At last, however, it reached the end of its tether, bouncing several times with diminishing vigor, and Time resumed its wonted flow.

The madman’s attention was at last caught. He turned and gazed upward, fixing Emily with his deep gray eyes, set beneath craggy brows. Doffing his hat and bowing, he launched into a strangely metered utterance.

“Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, she hides handsome and richly drest at the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her!”

Indignation replaced embarrassment in Emily. She straightened her back and summoned up her voice.

“If you attempt some peculiar kind of poesy, sir, be advised that it is more effective when delivered by a clothed bard! And I’ll have you know that my age is nigh unto thirty, not twenty-eight!”

And with that Emily slammed the shutters on the naked man.

Trembling with rage and frustration, Emily rushed downstairs, her long auburn hair still sleep-dissolute.

In the kitchen, she found her younger sister Lavinia peeping through the dimity curtains at the bather, who was now rinsing himself heartily with buckets of water from the rain-barrel.

“Vinnie!”

Emily’s sister jumped. “Emily! Have you seen him too?”

“Of course I have. How could I possibly have missed such a spectacle? My eyesight is bad, I confess, but not that poor. I only pray that Mother hasn’t witnessed this horrid invasion. You know her health isn’t up to snuff, and I can hardly imagine how she’d react. Vinnie, what are we to do? If only Father were here! One of us must run and fetch the sheriff, Vinnie, and I fear it must be you.”

Lavinia regarded her sister with a look of disbelief. “Fetch the sheriff? Why, whatever for?”

Emily returned an equal measure of incredulity. “Is it not as plain as the spots on a tiger-lily? To arrest this jay bird-naked trespasser, of course!”

“Oh, I see. You’re not aware then.”

“Aware of what?”

“This gentleman and his party are guests of our brother. I assume that our Hercules has wandered over from The Evergreens, although why he should feel the need for such an exhibition, I cannot say.”

From outside came the lusty chanting of the bather, along with the plashing of water. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself! And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you!”

Emily shook her head. “Tish, what doggerel!” Returning her attention to her sister, she counterposed a question.

“Even granted his status as Austin’s guest, why should we exempt him from the most basic laws of civility?”

Lavinia’s eyes grew wide. “You really do not recognize who he is?”

“Should I have? He was hardly wearing any badges, nor could I see a
carte de visite
on his person.”

“Oh, Emily, can’t you ever be serious? Even a little housebound dormouse like you must have heard of the scandalous Walt Whitman and his
Leaves of Grass
.
Why, the first edition was so shocking, Mister Whittier felt compelled to burn it! And rumor has it that the Boston firm of Thayer and Eldridge are to publish a new edition this very year! That’s one reason, I understand, why this ‘son of Mannahatta,’ as he styles himself, is visiting our New England. But there is another, more secret reason—or so Austin hints.”

Emily fell weak-kneed into a ladderback chair. She hardly heard Vinnie’s peroration. All she could think was:

At last, He has come.

2

“DEATH IS THE SUPPLE SUITOR”

I
NTO THE TRUNDLE-BASKET
Emily lay the sweet dead children, row by row.

Foxgloves, turks-head lilies, pansies, columbines, the early rose. All her darlings fell to her merciless shears, weeping their glaucous tears.

I
could not behead you, dears, if I doubted your assured Resurrection. But as children caper when they wake, merry that it is Morn, my flowers from a hundred cribs will peep, and prance again.

When her basket contained a sufficiency to hide what was at the bottom, Emily turned nervously to face her brother’s house.

The Evergreens had been erected four years ago, a lavish wedding present from Emily’s father to his only son (calculated, Emily frequently thought, to impress the town of Amherst with Edward Dickinson’s stature as much as to house the newlyweds). The impressive white Italianate house with its boxy corner turret stood a mere hundred yards away, separated from the ancestral Dickinson Homestead by a small copse of birches, oaks and pines, linked by a narrow well-trodden path “just wide enough for two lovers abreast,” as Emily had described it to her good friend Sue Gilbert, upon that selfsame friend’s attainment of the sacred status of Mrs. Austin Dickinson.

But at this moment—as at so many, many others—in terms of Emily’s ability to reach it the house might have been situated halfway across the globe, midst the wastes depicted in the engraving “Arctic Night” hanging in The Homestead’s parlor.

She did not know what flaw or affliction bound her so strongly to the confines of The Homestead, sometimes indeed forbidding her even to leave the cloister of her bedroom. The face of that cruel Master was always in impenetrable Shadow, strain as she might to glimpse it; though His Hand was always more than real, squeezing her heart with fear and self-loathing, should she try to run counter to its fluctuating dictates.

It had not always been so with her. Why, even as recently as five years ago, she had journeyed to Washington and Philadelphia, exulting in the freedom of travel. (Particularly stimulating had been her first encounter with an old family friend, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and the many talks they had had on literature and art, continued now by correspondence.)

But as Emily had grown older, her Father—the dominant presence in the household—had grown less flexible, more demanding, harsher. (His religious spasm of a decade ago, during which he had bullied everyone except Emily into joining the First Church of Christ, had accentuated a certain Calvinism in him.) The Squires iron rule of his quiet, insignificant invalid wife and his two daughters was positively Draconian, circumscribing all Emily’s actions.

Still, Emily knew she could not place the blame for her reclusiveness totally on her Father. After all, Vinnie exhibited no such fear of society, and she too chafed under the Squire’s reins. No, there was some congenital defect in Emily’s own personality that made the prospect of venturing out among other people, dealing with their naked faces and needs, inherently impossible most of the time, however desperately and paradoxically she might feel the need for companionship. . . .

Yet now here she was, out in the open, late in the afternoon of the day that had begun so oddly. (The egregiously hirsute Mister Whitman had dressed and departed somewhither before Emily could con how to address him after her pert dismissal of his oratory. She prayed now that her hasty impudence would not foreclose further communication between them. . . .)

Steeling herself to walk across those paltry twenty rods and into a house full of strangers, with bold plans to accost one in particular with the secret that resided beneath her flowers, Emily reminded herself:
If your Nerve deny you, go above your Nerve
.

Straining forward, willing confidence to arise, she teetered on her tiptoes, yearning toward The Evergreens. A sensation as of a hot bath tingled along her limbs. Her innards were molten. This was exactly how it had been three years ago, that December when the Sage of Concord, Mister Emerson, had visited The Evergreens, and she had longed to go to him, that noble personage out of a dream, but instead, oppressed by a certain slant of winter light, she had faltered and hung back.

Emily felt poised on the verge of a high precipice, volitionless to fall either backwards into safety, or forward into danger, without some kind of Motive Push.

And then it came.

From out of the primal greenery bordering the connecting path poked the enormous naked head of a strange bird.

Carried a full six feet above the ground, at the end of a long pliable neck, the sapient avian head examined Emily with quaint goggle-eyed curiosity for a timeless period. Then, giving a soft mooting call, the bird pulled its head back into the shrubs, followed by the sound of its retreat in the direction of The Evergreens.

The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met embarked upon a twig today. . . .

Emily set out after the apparition.

Halfway down the path, with yet no renewed sight of the fast-moving mysterious bird, Emily felt a sense of unreality sweep over her. Was it really possible that she was doing this? If Father had not been in Boston, speaking with the politicos of the Constitutional Union Party, who wanted him to run for Lieutenant Governor, she doubted that she could ever have braced herself for such a wild flight.

At last Emily emerged from the boskage and onto her brother’s lawn.

And there was the glorious bird!

In the open, Emily could recognize the creature for what it was: an ostrich—from fabled Ophir, perhaps, yet still comically resembling a stilted feather-duster. No supernatural messenger, to be sure, but a strange sight nonetheless to encounter in placid, pedestrian Amherst.

At that moment a prepossessing young man, casually attired and roughly Emily’s age, appeared from behind the house. Spotting the bird, he hailed it thusly: “Norma, you rascal, git back a-here, or tain’t gonna be no supper for you!”

With unnatural alacrity, the big-footed bird hastened to obey the youth, trotting toward him with the zig-zag locomotion peculiar to its species. Soon, bird and man disappeared back around the house.

Simultaneously, the door of The Evergreens opened, framing Emily’s brother within. His thatch of hair the same red as Emily’s and his extravagant sidewhiskers had never looked more familiarly reassuring, though the unwonted expression of troubled distraction which he wore was less so.

Searching for the source of the ruckus, Austin’s gaze fell on his sister. He molded his features into a forced semblance of hospitality.

“Why, Emily, what a pleasant surprise! Please, come in.”

Now that she was fully committed to making her visit, however unwelcome it seemed to be, Emily found within herself the capacity to put some adamant in her limbs. She advanced with unfaltering steps across the lawn and into her brother’s house.

Once inside, her brother tried to relieve her of her basket.

“Sue will appreciate these blooms, sister. She’s been feeling rather low since her return from Boston.” A look of woeful gravity crossed Austin’s countenance. “As have I, to tell truth.”

Emily resisted Austin’s gentle tug. “No, please, let me hold them a while longer. They comfort me.” She was not prepared to show what lay beneath the blossoms yet, nor to just anyone. “But what is it that grieves you so? Does it have any connection with the guests Vinnie has told me you’re entertaining?”

Austin closed his eyes and massaged his brow wearily. “Yes, in a roundabout way. Although I only fell in with these people accidentally, through my connection with the College. But they and their mission answer a need of mine, a need which has been growing apace this past year.”

“Your words confuse me, Austin. What need do you speak of, that I know not? Since when have we kept secrets from one another, dear brother? Come, tell me what troubles you.”

Austin opened his eyes and fixed his sister with an agonized gaze. “You would hear all, then? Very well, so be it. I have tried to spare you prior to this, but shall not refuse your direct offer of a sympathetic ear. But my story needs some privacy. Let us step into the study.”

Somewhat daunted, Emily nevertheless followed Austin into the room whose shelves were lined with the lawbooks of his profession. Once they were seated, Austin pulled his chair close to Emily’s, reached forward to clasp both her hands (
the sweaty palms of a fevered man,
she thought), and began his recitative.

“My problems, sister, concern relations between Sue and myself. No, please, let me speak plainly, before you interject a word on Sue’s behalf. I know that you’ve ever been her partisan, Emily. Sometimes, in fact, I think we never would have married, were it not for your urgings. But that’s of no consequence now. Married we are, and married we must stay. But you must know what connubial life has revealed to me of certain traits that were perhaps not fully developed in Sue when you and she were girlish chums.

“Sue is a very ambitious woman these days. She desires to become the paramount hostess in all of Amherst. Not a very wide sphere, you might say, and you’d be right. Sue’s ambitions do not stop there, I fear. She has grander dreams, to be enacted upon a larger stage—a stage which I am to provide somehow or another.

“Now, you know me, Emily, at least as well as I know myself. I’m not as driven as Father. I have no desire to venture beyond the pleasant ambit of Amherst as he has, representing the Commonwealth in Washington or parts more exotic. I’m basically a dreamy fellow, with a nature fully as poetic as yours. The fabled rushing blood of Grandfather Samuel has dwindled to a proportional trickle in my veins. Nothing would suit me better than a simple family existence conducted right here for the rest of my mortal days.

“But family life, you see, is just what Sue is dead-set against. She feels that children would be a drag on her social climbing.”

Emily considered long and hard before venturing a comment. “I had wondered why the past four years had brought me no little niece or nephew. Father, too, speculates aloud why no heir has yet appeared. But I never expected that it was Sue’s reluctance to consummate your union.”

Austin laughed mirthlessly. “‘Reluctance to consummate!’ ’Tis far worse than that, dear sister! The union has been consummated more than once, as a result of certain ungovernable impulses upwelling from both our baser natures. And a year and a half ago, the natural result obtained. Sue became with child.”

Emily faltered. “But, I never—Did she miscarry?”

“Far, far worse! She killed it!”

It was as if all the Heavens were a Bell, and Emily just an Ear. When she returned to herself, she struggled to utter the fatal word, but Austin mercifully preempted her.

“Yes, she journeyed to Boston in ’Fifty-nine for a—an abortion!

“And this latest trip was for another!”

With this revelation, Austin burst into deep wracking sobs.

Emily cradled her brother in her arms, his violent sorrow washing away her lesser pangs, until he had cried himself dry. When he raised his face, it was stamped with inexpressible grief.

“The thought of that first death grew and grew in me, Emily, like a worm. When I learned of the second—although Sue begged to accompany me to the city on my latest trip, I never guessed her intention to repeat the evil deed, and she only divulged it upon our recent return—it nearly did me in. I cannot find it in me to put all the blame on Sue. Not only does she suffer terrible pangs from what she’s done, but she’s also only acting in accord with her own ideas of what’s best for our life, horrible though her crimes may be. No, I account myself equally guilty with her, as much as if my hand had held the bloody instruments of infanticide! That is why, you see, I have taken up with these strangers. There is a Spiritualist among them—”

As if a Cloud that instant slit, and let the Fire through, it flashed like summer lightning upon Emily what her brother intended. Somewhat disdainfully, she said, “You wish to speak to the souls of your unborn children, then, and seek some token of absolution, through the medium of this mystic personage. . . .”

Austin fixed Emily with a wild, dire gaze.

“Speak to them! If only it were that simple!

“No, dear sister, we’re going to visit them!”