The Transcendental Murder

*3*

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,

Possessed the land which rendered to their toil

Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tom Hand had hornswoggled his wife Gwen and her Girl Scouts into helping him. They were walking around the round oak table in the dining room under the big picture of the Angelus, assembling the pages of his Preliminary Report of the Committee on Public Ceremonies and Celebrations Relative to the 19th of April Ceremony. Tom was general chairman of the April 19th parade. 'As if raising apples, asparagus, corn, cabbages and kids wasn't enough for me to do,' he said. He was in high spirits. He snatched up a toppling pile of stapled reports, juggled it into a cube and dumped it into a cardboard box. 'Is that you, Charley? Say, look here, we tried to get hold of you when we were typing this thing up. Are you going to ride again this year, or not? You sure as hell better, because it says in here you are.'

'What, me ride for Dr. Sam Prescott? You bet I am. Dolly's raring to go. I'm already putting vitamins in her hay.'

Tom's mother whammed the stapler on a pile of pages. 'Now, Charley, you look out. If Sam Prescott hadn't got away when Paul Revere was captured, and if he hadn't brought the news to Concord, where would we all be right now, I ask you? Don't you go making a fool of him on that big horse of yours.'

'Don't you worry your head, Mrs. Hand. And I promise not to trample on anybody either, unless they call me Paul Revere.' Charley slapped his side and galloped around the room, while the Girl Scouts giggled. One of them naturally said, 'Hello there, Paul Revere,' and got spanked.

'Here now, Dr. Prescott, you behave yourself,' said Tom. 'My mother's a sensitive old lady.'

Charley skipped out the door, then he yelled back in, 'Sensitive old ladies like your mother know what a fool I am anyway. Don't you, Mrs. Hand?'

Mrs. Hand yelled back, 'You just bet I do. When is Mary going to make an honest Christian fella out of you?'

'Whenever she'll have me. Put in a good word for me, will you, Mrs. Hand?' He disappeared. Mary watched him drive past Tom's cornfield and turn left into the driveway behind the long row of hemlocks that led to his house, the big impressive Goss house on the river side of the road.

'Of course, Philip is the sensible one, Mary dear,' said Mrs. Hand. 'That Charley, he's still sowing his wild oats. Though he may snap out of it, that's what I tell his father. Ernie says Charley is going straight to the dogs. I keep telling him he's wrong.'

'Now, Mother,' said Gwen, 'let my poor sister alone. She's not going to marry either one of them if she can help it.'

'Besides, I'm already madly, head-over-heels in love,' said Mary, throwing her eyes up at the ceiling.

'Who with, Mary, who with?' said Mrs. Hand.

'Henry David Thoreau,' said Mary.

'Oh, go along with you.'

John, the first-grader, came in then, after loitering home from school. He blew up his lunchbag and popped it with a sharp bang. 'I'm hungry,' he said.

*4*

I accept the universe. —Margaret Fuller

Egad, she'd better. —Thomas Carlyle

Mary picked up the two gallons of good clouded Hand cider and slammed the door of the pickup truck with her knee. Then she stood for a minute in the small parking lot in front of Orchard House, looking across the dark fields, letting the hurdy-gurdy grind. Henry had walked here, calling on Alcott (his ally against the arch-enemy). Louisa May Alcott had written part of Little Women here, and Bronson had cultivated his vegetable garden without benefit of foul ordures, and conducted his School of Philosophy. And here on this very patch of ground Emerson must have stood, many times, listening to Alcott's never-failing fountain of eloquence. Wearying of it, perhaps, sometimes, and walking home to confide as much to his journal. But Bronson had been his Plato in the flesh. Or Apollo in disguise, the god of poetry himself, forced to do the plowing for King Admetus. But that was what they had all called themselves, struggling to earn the bread that would sustain their colossal souls— they had all been Apollos, gripping the plow handle for King Admetus, tilling the harsh fields of Thessaly, their eyes lifted to Mount Olympus.

'Come on in, Mary dear,' said Mrs. Hand, bustling ahead. 'We don't want the whole Alcott Assocation to have to wait for us.' Mary followed her up the walk. In the front hall they ran into Ernest Goss, Charley's father. He was lighting candles, making a hash of it. Alice Herpitude was fluttering about, arranging little bowls of crocuses.

'Hello, Mr. Goss,' said Mary. She towered over him genially, balancing her jugs of cider, passing the time of day, thinking cheerfully at the same time how much she disliked him. He was as 'Old Concord' as anybody could be, but somehow he didn't ring true. Or he had lost the spirit of the forefathers, or something. He wasn't the only one who had. There were plenty of others like him, well-meaning people with money, living in housees that looked like Christmas cards, spending the summer on the Cape, getting tan, playing tennis, driving around in convertibles, living what was supposed to be the good life. But hollow somehow. Ernest Goss had a handsome wife, four handsome children (well, three anyhow), he talked with an exaggerated nasal Yankee twang, he was a graduate of Exeter and Harvard, he wore tweedy jackets from the Country Store and he kept up the general impression of being the superbly appointed country gentleman. But there was something wrong somewhere. He was like a paper pattern that had been cut out very carefully on the black line. His wife was even more so. Together they bored Mary exceedingly. What she liked to think of as real 'Old Concord' was Grandmaw Hand and her son Tom, and a lot of others like them. They were true squeezings from the Concord grape. The old Barrett place was still a working New England farm, and the Mission armchair and the roll-top desk with the stuffed duck and the plastic globe and the feathery egg-boxes stacked on it and the spindly geraniums in coffee cans and the calendars and the Angelus and the linoleum on the dining room floor—they were not there to be part of a certain kind of setting, they were just there. And Tom himself, in his overalls, and Mrs. Hand in her husband's old hat ... But of course it wasn't just a matter of living in the past. Those new families in Henry's Conantum woods seemed to have soaked up the spirit of plain living and high thinking that had always been the best of Concord, like something given off by the soil, or breathed in the air. It occurred to Mary that Concord's aboriginal Indians had probably been just another flock of egregious individuals with a passion for sunsets and a taste for abstraction.

She lugged her cider into the little kitchen, ducking under the lintel of the door. And there she ran into the gorilla of the morning. He was leaning gigantically against the hutch-back bench, going over a handful of notes. 'Excuse me,' said Mary. She set her cider down on the black stove and opened the door of the cupboard where the paper cups were.

'So you're one of them, too,' he said.

Mary looked up at him, and felt her cheeks flare. She knew what his 'one of them' meant. (One of those little provincial biddies who play dolls with Little Women.)

'Yes,' she said shortly. He lifted his notes again, and Mary started pouring cider. It felt odd to be in such close quarters with someone bigger than she was. Carefully she poured out twenty-four cups of cider, exerting all her attention so as not to spill any. She turned politely to nod to the gorilla as she finished. The darn man wasn't reading his notes at all. He was looking at her with eyes that were little barbs of concentrated curiosity. She might be some new species of woodchuck or pit viper or something. Mary's cheeks went back on her again. She turned away, ducked her head grimly under the door and went out to sit in the dining room beside Mrs. Hand. Homer Kelly looked at the blank back of the door. Too bad he didn't know one flower from another. Carnations, was it? Peonies, maybe.

Grandmaw Hand was being outrageously charming, chuckling girlishly with Alice Herpitude, recalling the old