The Steampunk Trilogy (23 page)

6

“BY WHAT MYSTIC MOORING SHE IS HELD TODAY”

L
AVINIA DICKINSON TIED
her bonnet beneath her chin, picked up a large lidded market basket, and, wearing a look of impatience, turned to her dawdling sister.

“Are you coming, or not, Miss White Moth?”

The use of her costume-inspired nickname roused Emily from her introspection. She had been considering one of the first poems she had ever written, the verse that began:
One Sister have I in our house, and one, a hedge away.

How treacherous the one linked by marriage had revealed herself to be. A regular Cleopatra! If only Austin could have married sweet Mary Warner, how much better things might have been. . . .

Emily thanked the Lord for the stolid common sense of her blood sister. She could not imagine life without her beloved Vinnie—sour, cynical, acquisitive as she was. How she needed her—especially now, in the light of the unbelievable immorality which seemed to have taken hold at The Evergreens.

Three days had passed since the revelation about Madame Selavy’s ideoplastic
poitrines
had caused Emily to beat a righteous retreat to The Homestead. (Curiously, she had not felt compelled to hie herself to the safety of her bed, but had instead frittered the time away in domestic pursuits; enough rye bread had been baked to feed all the gawping spectators at John Brown’s hanging! If this represented an increased toughness of heart on her part, she knew not what to attribute it to, nor whether she liked it. . . .)

In that interval, no one from The Evergreens had approached her to apologize or cajole. Save once, when Walt had knocked the very next day at the front door and been received by Vinnie.

“Give him this,” had been Emily’s response to his arrival, handing her sister a folded poem:

A Burdock—clawed my Gown—

Not
Burdock’s
—blame—

But
mine
—

Who went too near

The Burdock’s
Den
!

After reading it, Walt had departed wordlessly, and not returned.

Emily had felt a little surprised and saddened that the ocean-deep Bard had not pressed his cause harder. The fires of worship which he had aroused in her—strictly those of one Poet and Free Thinker for another, she reminded herself; had he not admitted that his heart was forever betrothed to that nameless New Orleans hussy whose tintype he carried?—still burned, however banked their coals.

But for whatever reason, Walt had not pled or argued, and Emily had sought to put him and the whole insane menagerie at The Evergreens out of her thoughts.

Yet just this morning had come the incredible news from town which had reawakened all her curiosity about the mad expedition Austin and the others were planning, and which now threatened actually to make her pay a visit to the Amherst she had turned her back on years ago.

“Yes, Vinnie,” said Emily, rising from her seat and taking down her Merino Shawl from a peg and donning it. “I shall accompany you to town. That is, I think I can do so, if I may have the comfort of your sturdy arm.”

Vinnie seemed touched, and her gruff manner softened. “Why, that’s the least you may ask of me, Em. I know this isn’t easy for you, but I think it’ll do you good.”

“You are my Nurse and Confessor, Vinnie, so I shall place my faith in your words.”

Arm in arm, the sisters departed by the front door of The Homestead, descended the sloping brick walk, crossed the perimeter of low hedges, through the wooden gate, and turned east, down Main Street’s dusty unpaved sidewalk.

For a moment, Emily was reminded of the joyous sugaring expeditions her family and friends had once embarked on, before they had all grown so old and hard. Why couldn’t one remain young in spirit forever—?

It was a short stroll into town—Amherst was not a big place—but Emily saw something to amaze her at every step. The simple village life—the children at play, the housewives at their chores, the carriages and horses, dogs and peddlers—It was all as miraculous to her as Heaven Itself.

With a pang, she heard again Walt’s admonition that she was refining herself out of existence by cutting the ties that bound her to a common, shared life. . . .

Passing North Pleasant Street, both sisters cast a nostalgic glance at the house where they had spent a portion of their childhood. From its windows, Emily had watched numerous funeral processions wind their way to the nearby cemetery—her first conscious fascination with Death. Out of those sad and mean years when The Squire had been forced temporarily to vacate The Homestead, due to financial setbacks, she yet retained a few happy memories.

Emily wondered how her life might have been different had the family stayed closer to town, been less prosperous, not fortified itself in its castle, The Homestead. Would she have married, even moved away? It seemed so impossible now. . . .

Ahead loomed the Common. Emily noted that most of the foot-traffic abroad this morn was tending toward that open parcel of land, and surmised that the rumors that had drawn her out were indeed true.

As Vinnie had predicted, renewing her acquaintance with the village was indeed proving a tonic. The gentle May breezes were having their old effect. Emily could not meet the Spring unmoved. She felt the old desire, a Hurry with a lingering, mixed—

“Walk faster, Vinnie!”

“Not so speedily, Moth! Ladies do not run in public.”

“I’m not a lady, I’m a Queen! And Queens may do as they please!”

Pulling her sister after her, Emily hastened toward the gathering crowd.

The Common was a rectangular expanse two or three acres in extent, fringed and spotted with May-bright trees. Several of Amherst’s six churches fronted on the path-laced mall, as did those slightly disreputable yellow-painted structures known as Fraternity Row, among others. The hilly countryside surrounding Amherst held the public seat in its cupped hands, a natural amphitheater, the mountains standing in Haze, the Valleys stopped below.

And now, as Emily could plainly see, the Common sported a new feature.

In the middle of the lawn, secured in its wheeled cradle by thick hawsers, seventy-five miles or more from the nearest harbor, stood a twin-masted schooner, looking as incongruous as trousers on a Sandwich Islander.

Surrounded by noisy spectators, the schooner resembled a misguided barque stranded on a shoal of flesh.

As Emily drew nearer, she espied the trim figure of Professor William Crookes standing on the deck. He was bent over a surveyor’s instrument. Following the direction of its barrel, Emily saw Andrew Jackson Davis some yards away, holding a plumb bob.

Eight sweating Percherons in harness—no doubt the team that had transported the craft over the roads from East Boston—were still attached to the ship’s undercarriage. At their head, holding a whip, stood Henry Sutton and his helper, Austin Dickinson.

Neither Walt nor Madame Selavy was anywhere to be seen. Emily suppressed an evil thought.

“We’ve got to move it fifteen yards further on, Hen!” called out the savant now, above the exclamations and japes of the crowd.

Young Sutton cracked his whip in the air and urged the team on, aided by Austin.

“Hee-yaw! Put yer backs into it, boys!”

Ponderously, the craft began to roll across the turf. At the proper moment, Crookes signaled with a chopping motion to disengage the team, and Sutton did so swiftly by knocking out a wooden pin in the linkage. The ship’s inertia carried it on for a short distance before it ground to a halt.

“Perfect!” cried Crookes. “A tribute to Newton’s Laws!” Abandoning his instrument, Crookes turned to address the crowd in his regal English manner.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of Amherst, you are privileged to witness today the dawn of a new era, an era in which regular travel between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead shall inaugurate a Golden Age of scientific theology. No longer will life be shadowed by death. Instead, a flourishing commerce between the two kingdoms will permit one and all to live without anxiety or fear, in the knowledge that our souls survive their earthly husks.”

From the crowd a rough male voice yelled a flippant rejoinder. “Maybe you and your spooks can solve the Burdell murder!”

The reference to the scandal which had filled the New York papers a couple of years ago set off a gale of laughter. Crookes weathered it good-naturedly. When it had died out, he simply concluded, “You shall see more, and shortly. This much I promise. Then you may judge for yourselves.”

With that, Crookes turned and clambered down a rope ladder, joining his three compatriots, who were planting chocks under the wheels of the schooner. The crowd, seeing that no more immediate entertainment was to be had, began to disperse.

Vinnie turned to Emily. The younger sister’s face wore a mottled flush.

“Oh, Emily! I’ve never been so mortified in my life! Look at Austin, consorting with those mountebanks! How shall I ever attract a husband now!? Not to mention how Father is going to explode when he returns! There’ll be hell to pay!

Emily had never heard her sister swear before. It rather thrilled her. A kind of glorious exaltation had come upon Emily with Crookes’s speech. All her life, Emily had secretly considered herself a rebel and even something of a thrill-seeker, though her thrills had been limited to the mental variety. “How I love danger!” she had written in her girlish diary. Now, with this fabulous and improbable ship sitting here like a slap in the face of placid, conservative Amherst, she felt as if her real life were just beginning.

Where was Walt, to share this excitement with her, and urge her on?

Tugging Emily’s hand, Vinnie pleaded, “Please, let’s go home. . . .”

Emily disengaged from her sister. “You may scurry home if you wish, Vinnie. But I intend to see what else they’re up to.”

Vinnie appeared shocked. “But Emily—”

At that moment, a familiar resonant tenor thrilled Emily’s ears.

“I think that only sailors, far from land, will ever truly appreciate my poems.”

7

“HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS”

A
LL AROUND EMILY
, the whispering Leaves like Women interchanged Exclusive Confidences.

And since Emily was a woman too, she could understand what they were saying.

He is true to you. He is here when you want him.

Her heart light as eiderdown, Emily turned about.

Twice as big as life he stood, Walt Whitman, a kosmos, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, singer of himself.

The difference between remembering him and actually seeing him was like the Liquor in the Jug as opposed to the Liquor between the Lips.

Whitman beamed at the women, his bearded cheeks crinkling. “How good to see you abroad, Emily. And you too, Miss Lavinia. The very folds of both your clothes, your style as I watched you pass in the street, and, most especially, the contours of your shapes downwards inspired me deliriously.”

Gawking, Vinnie opened her mouth, shut it, then opened it once more.

“Well, I never—! Emily, you can find your way home alone!”

And with that ejaculation, Emily’s sister stalked off, swinging her market basket like a truncheon.

Walt was crestfallen. “I fear I have offended your sister. Please forgive me, Emily. It is something that happens all the time. I forget that not everyone is as spontaneous and free as Walt Whitman.”

“Oh, don’t believe her indignation for a minute, Walt. She was secretly pleased, I’m sure. It’s just that she could not show so in public. I myself might have departed just so, a few days ago, in the mock affront demanded by propriety.”

Walt laid an assuming hand on Emily’s shoulder. “I sensed as soon as I saw you today that a change long underway in you was well-nigh complete. I am happy to have played a part in it, however small.”

For once, Emily chose not to spoil her new confidence by analyzing it to pieces. She shifted closer to Walt so that his whole brawny arm slid naturally around her shoulders. Protected in his embrace, she felt even more assured.

“Let us go see what my brother and his cohorts are up to.”

“Exactly where I was tending myself.”

Walt and Emily walked up to the wheeled schooner. Under the shade of its elevated bow, Austin, Sutton, Davis and Crookes were prying the lid off a crate that had just been delivered by a local merchant and his wagon. Spotting the duo, the laborers paused. Sutton hailed Walt gleefully, and Austin glared suspiciously at his sister’s compromising attitude. Davis and Crookes, after a brief nod, resumed their prying attack on the lid.

“What have we here, Hen?” asked Walt.

Grunting, Crookes answered for him. “It’s the ideoplastic tubes. We’ve got to clamp them to their fixtures on the ship and wire them in circuit. Then we’ll be prepared to set out. Perhaps as early as tomorrow.”

With a creaking of wood and squealing of nails, the lid of the large box finally gave way. The men lowered it to the ground, and Emily peered curiously inside.

Nestled in straw, layer by layer, were dozens of Crookes tubes, each filled with a misty gray substance that swirled and coiled like a narrow Fellow in the Grass.

Emily’s chest pinched with a tighter breathing, and a Zero at the Bone.

“Walt—I don’t feel well. Can we go?”

Crookes evinced little sympathy for Emily’s distress. “By all means, go. The four of us can manage quite easily to mount these electro-spiritual phials. Why don’t you and the lady attend to the ostriches, Wally? That’s more in your line, what with all your talk of loving the birds and baboons.”

Walt seemingly took no offense at the half-veiled slight. “A splendid suggestion. Come, Emily—let us visit our feathered friends and study their wing’d purposes.”

When they reached the edge of the Common, Emily felt better. She sought to explain what had come over her, not wishing Walt to think her a typical faint-hearted spinster.

“The sight of that slimy spiritual stuff affected me queerly, Walt. The notion that it all came out of the gross corporeal form of Madame Selavy—I fear it was too much for me.”

“I recall that I too felt somewhat unnerved when I first witnessed a materialization. But such feelings pass, when you realize that nothing that happens on this earth is unnatural. Everything is good in its place, and nothing is out of its place.”

Walt’s careless admission that he had witnessed an ideoplastic extrusion reawakened in Emily all the repugnance she had experienced upon first learning of Madame Selavy’s promiscuous behavior. Stiffening and stopping, she slipped out from Walt’s embrace and turned to confront him.

“I suppose you don’t think there’s anything immoral then in helping to milk that trollop as if she were a prize Holstein! You’ve doubtlessly enjoyed such scandalous behavior often enough yourself! Why, it’s, it’s—positively Mormon!”

Walt sighed, and, despite knowing herself in the right, Emily felt saddened to have hurt him. His patient smile that followed somewhat heartened her.

“Morality. I had hoped you were above such small conceptions, Emily. Is the sea moral, or the tree-toad? Is the running blackberry moral? Morality is the bane of small minds, to paraphrase my friend Emerson. I simply eat what is put on my plate, without recourse to praise or blame, thanks or curses. Life is much better lived in such a fashion. And as for our poor, much-hounded friends at Salt Lake—who can say that their way is not as good as—or better than—ours? It’s more natural, at least. Does not a single stallion quicken many mares? But if it will put your mind at ease, I am happy to assure you that I myself have never materially participated in assisting Madame Selavy to, ah, form her ejectamenta. That task belongs to Davis and the professor.”

Walt’s words left Emily feeling both chagrined and relieved, embarrassed and reassured. She was glad that Walt had not participated intimately in the materializations; however, his cavalier attitude toward convention was hard to swallow for one who—however independent—had been reared all her life amongst the contaminating small minds of Amherst.

In the end, Emily let her predisposition toward Whitman have the ascendancy. He was a Poet, and such could not be judged by normal scales.

They resumed their walk, covering the distance back to The Evergreens in silence. Passing through the luxuriant grounds, they reached the ostrich pen. The enormous birds crowded to the fence to greet Whitman, who responded by petting them affectionately.

“I think I could turn and live with the animals,” said the man, “they are so placid and self-contain’d. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. And above all, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God!”

So neatly did these sentiments tally with Emily’s own—she who had oft imagined herself a bee or spider—that she dropped a silent tear or two of joy. When she found her voice, she asked her companion, “I still do not understand what part these glorious fowls play in this expedition, Walt.”

“You are aware that our motive power for breaching the dimensions comes from the miracle element, electricity—specifically, a set of Voltaic piles, are you not?” I am now.

“Well, the piles hold but a single charge—enough, perhaps, to send us to Summerland, but not to return. They must be continually recharged, by means of a treadmill-powered generator. The ostriches shall serve that purpose.”

“But why such exotic draft animals? Surely a horse or two would have done as well. . . .”

“It was instructions from Princess Pink Cloud, Madame’s spirit guide. We were informed by the ghost that ostriches were the only animal psychically fitted to make the transition with us to the spirit domain. There is something especially ethereal about them.”

“I can believe it,” said Emily. “Just look at them!”

“They are beautiful, aren’t they? I’ve named them all after the female cantatrices of my favorite operas, for some quality they possess reminds me of those prima donnas.” Walt assumed an air of mock formality. “Miss Dickinson, may I present you to my ladies? Here is Donna Anna and Zerlina, Marguerite and Elsa, Lucia and Alisa, Barbarina, Violetta, Norma, Gilda and Magdalena.”

Emily curtsied. “Charmed, I’m certain.”

They both began to laugh then, Emily’s titters gradually escalating to match Walt’s roaring. They were forced to retreat to a seat which circled the bole of a large spreading elm until the shared fit of hilarity had passed.

When Emily could speak again, she said, “Walt, dear, I know why my brother and Davis and Crookes are participating in this expedition. But what are your motives? And what of your young companion, Henry?”

Walt coughed, then said, somewhat disingenuously, thought Emily, “Ah, Hen, he’s a splendid lad. He’s made much of himself, considering his orphan status and rough upbringing. I’ve known him since we worked on the
Eagle
together, lo, these ten years and more. Hen was a printer’s devil while I was the editor, but we never let that come between us. We were always the best of friends. There is a rare degree of adhesiveness between us, and he is along simply because I value his company.”

Emily recognized in Walt’s mention of “adhesiveness” the phrenological term for masculine bonding. She could well credit the relationship, having seen the fond glances the two men exchanged. “That explains Henry’s presence. But what of yours?”

Walt took Emily’s hands, as he had during their first
tête-à-tête
.
“Emily, what I am about to confess to you, I have told no others. They think I am along simply to gain general wisdom that will strengthen my poetry. After all, what poet worth his salt would refuse to embark on a voyage to probe the afterlife?”

Emily felt a pang, as if Walt were criticizing her own lack of enthusiasm for the expedition.

Oblivious, Walt continued, “And in a sense, that is not a lie. After all, I have a duty to make my songs as true and brave as I can. Our country, the glorious poem known as America, is entering a perilous period, Emily. I can sniff as much in every Southern breeze, if you take my meaning. And my songs must be strong, to help carry America through her times of trouble.

“But there is another, more personal reason for my wanting to visit Summerland.

“You see, I need to speak to my father.”

Walt paused, and took a deep breath before resuming.

“My father died the very week my
Leaves of Grass
was first published. He never got a chance to see it, to see that I was making something of my life. He was a rough-hewn man, who measured success with his carpenter’s level, and I was always something of a disappointment to him. Not to my blessed mother—no, she always had faith in her favorite son, and she yet lives and is pleased by my work. But my father—Well, suffice it to say that I feel that there is an unresolved matter between us, and that if only I could speak to him again, I would be able better to live my life and sing my songs. Do you understand, Emily?”

Now Emily was giddy, any slights forgotten. An ecstatic anguish raced through her veins. She should have known that Walt could have no ignoble motive for his involvement with the Poughkeepsie Seer and his entourage, no more than her brother did.

Throwing her arms around his neck, Emily exclaimed, “Oh, Walt! I who have never had a real mother or father I could love or turn to can sympathize with you better than anyone! Please, please, forgive me for ever being so impertinently curious!”

“It is not mine to forgive, nor is it even necessary. But I do.”

Thrilled at his words and by his rough-hewn, sweaty, aromatic closeness, Emily shut her eyes and waited expectantly.

At that very moment she heard footsteps approaching.

She and Walt hurriedly disengaged and stood up.

It was only young Sutton.

“The professor says ter kindly wake up the gypsy, Walt. They’re a-fixin’ to have a say-ants tonight!”