A peculiar thing then happened as the morning progressed and the air warmed. Presley, complaining of the heat, unbuttoned and removed his coat, which he threw over a low branch. His waistcoat soon followed. Then, after a few more tickings of the clock, he gradually undid his shirt, which soon joined the coat and vest, and he sat down on the log beside Lyman bare-chested, doughy as pancake batter and white as a summer flounder having sprouted hair. All the while Sutton, who had given up his poem and begun speaking about pigs both general and specific, observed this behavior narrowly. When Presley stood again and began fumbling with his remaining garments, Sutton leapt up in anger.
“If you touch one button of those trousers, I will box your ears square.”
“It is a beautiful day and I am over-warm,” said Presley with mildness.
“A more temperate day could not be conceived. You will not disrobe.”
“Why, what forbids it? There are no women about, even though it is without shame for either me or them.”
Sutton turned to Lyman. “David has insisted Presley here not express his peculiar philosophy in front of the women of Bonaventure and only in the privacy of the cabin. Why such punishment should be inflicted upon me as his house mate, I cannot say. For the most part Presley has obliged though I am afraid poor Mrs. Alby and her daughter has not been entirely unscathed—Presley cavorts about the yard at all hours.”
“It does no good to remain indoors. Eden was without log cabins.”
“Damn you, Presley.”
Lyman observed this revue with ascending alarm, wishing they could just install the beam and return him to his solitude. Presley, however, spoke to Lyman in an evangelical tone.
“Brother Tom,” he said with a sincerity rarely seen outside a pulpit, “what if I told you there was a medicine that could cure you of all sickness and disease by preventing it from ever taking root in your blood? What if I told you this medicine gave health and long life and was free of cost and readily available around us? That this medicine was the sun and air itself and has been known to us since the days of Adam? I speak of course, Tom, of the power of nudism.”
Sutton, with a curse, pounded the log with his fist, and the two men fell to arguing.
This went on for a few minutes until Lyman, realizing there was nothing to do but mediate, brokered a truce in which the benefits of public nakedness were considered and its detriments denied, or at least not disputed for the time being; but that trousers would stay fastened while they worked, regardless of the day’s pleasantness.
The incident, at least, had the benefit of finally spurring the men to action.
“You see who and what Bonaventure attracts,” Sutton said low to Lyman as they worked on the roof, gesturing with his hammer to Presley’s hindside down below. “ Every reform was once a private opinion, says our august Emerson, and yet these are our reformers: misfits and eccentrics.”
“I suppose upon examination every man holds some queer belief or two,” said Lyman. “And by its very nature these will bubble to the top of the saucepan at a place like Bonaventure.”
Sutton considered. “There’s some sense in that. I myself came here out of a wish to separate from a society that condones and abets the evils of slavery and to live among abolitionists only. I refuse to think of that idea as queer, however, or on the same grounds as Presley’s dogma. It is the civilization outside the farm that is queer, insofar as it would truck in misery and pain.”
“But to them, you and I are the queer ones.”
“We are the correct ones.” He scraped and hammered, preparing for the beam. “And you, Tom? What road led to Bonaventure for you?”
Lyman smiled and shrugged. “Despair at milling table legs and hanging shutters for the gentry. I wanted to help the poor and give my labor meaning so I left Norwalk and came here.”
This summation was scene and act from Lyman’s epistolary script with Grosvenor, with the ad libitum bit about poverty tailored to Sutton’s sensibility.
But the quip, intended to encourage fraternity, had the opposite effect. Sutton stopped work and squinted at him. “Your hands are too uncalloused and your carpentry too poor for that story to hold much water.”
Lyman’s blood froze and he scrambled to assemble a counter-argument. But before he could, Sutton said, “You know, in my former career I was a broker at the Exchange Board on Manhattan. I dealt in cotton and tobacco—in fact, it was exposure to the slave labor behind it that brought me hither. There was a warehouse I had dealings with, quite a large one on South Street, and you bear a strong resemblance to one of the clerks there.”
As he had with Minerva during their picnic, Lyman again practiced facial impassivity. “I’m sorry to admit Bonaventure is as far as I’ve ever roamed from Norwalk.”
“You’re the very image of that clerk, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Should there be a Remus to my Romulus, I’ve never met him.” Lyman tried to laugh but instead sputtered like a crow.
Sutton said nothing but kept at his examination of Lyman until finally, mumbling an excuse, Lyman descended the ladder to earth, where he found the company of the half-naked Presley oddly preferable.
•••
As the days stretched farther into September, Lyman convinced himself the voice
