The Transcendental Murder

by Jane Langton

  “Shrubsole,” he said, “it’s June.”

  “That’s right, sir; lovely day.”

  “Miss Morgan and I will be out all day. Mind the store.”

  “Working on the case, are you, Mr. Kelly?”

  “Naturally. You didn’t think we would take a day off, and go boating on the river, or some frivolous thing like that, did you? We’re just going to be doing some miscellaneous—ah—”

  “Research,” suggested Mary.

  “That’s it.”

  Sergeant Shrubsole was looking curiously at Homer. He lifted up his forefinger, rubbed it on his superior’s cheek and looked at it. It came away pink with lipstick. Shrubsole shook his head, winked at Mary and drew an obvious conclusion. Homer hastily pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed his face. Mary blushed, and, trying hard not to look unhappy, succeeded in looking guilty. But it wasn’t her lipstick.

  “Come on,” he said testily to Mary, pushing her out the door ahead of him. He slammed the door. “Impertinent young fool.”

  “You’ve got some on your collar, too,” said Mary. She licked her handkerchief and wiped at the smudge. Homer looked down at her and growled, “Where can we hire a canoe?”

  “A canoe? Oh, I see. Our research is going to be …”

  “Naturally. Boating on the river.”

  Chapter 39

  I left the village and paddled up the river to Fair Haven Pond … I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog.

  HENRY THOREAU

  “Wish I could go with you,” said Tom. “I sure love this river. But what with crating asparagus and one thing and another a man hasn’t a moment’s peace this season. Here, why don’t you use the outboard? See, it has its own battery. Doesn’t make any noise at all.”

  Homer looked at the motor doubtfully. “Maybe we’d better just paddle,” he said. “I don’t know a thing about making motors work.”

  “Nonsense. You don’t have to. This one’s good for ten, eleven hours. Here, I’ll start her up.”

  Gwen had made them a lunch in Annie’s old plastic lunch-box. She came down to the edge of the river with Freddy to see them off. Freddy wanted to go, too. He wept as they shoved off from the shore into the middle of the dark stream. “Goodby, Freddy,” shouted Homer. “Don’t cry, and we’ll bring you a turtle.”

  Freddy stopped crying right away. “Big,” he said. “Big.”

  Out in the middle of the Assabet Mary could feel the sun drawing all the slivers from her mind. She knelt facing forward in the bow of the canoe and stared straight ahead so that Homer wouldn’t see her smile. Grind away, hurdy-gurdy. (Henry Thoreau had spent half his life on the rivers.) Homer sat still in the stern, his hand on the tiller of the motor, his eyes on Mary’s back. She was wearing a white dress. Unbidden, a quotation from Emerson floated into his head. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. There was an asinine remark if ever there was one.

  Mary pointed silently to a half-submerged log on which five turtles lay basking, leaning upon one another. They looked like overgrown shiny black beetles. Homer aimed the canoe that way, but when they came near, the turtles all slid into the water. “Better on the way back, anyhow,” he said.

  They passed a heron, standing motionless, and later a fisherman, motionless as the heron. Cloudy heads of water willows filled the edges of the river. “We could be Indians,” said Mary. “Everything must have looked just the same when they lived along this shore.”

  “You awful heap big squaw,” murmured Homer. “Squaw Head-in-Clouds.”

  “Look,” said Mary, “here’s the junction of the three rivers. See? This is where the Sudbury comes in and joins the Assabet to flow on downstream as the Concord. We’ll be at the North Bridge in a minute. It’s just around the bend.”

  The Concord River was slower-moving, but the surface rippled slightly in the warm breeze and slipped over the still body of the rest. The reflections in the water were upside-down impressionist pictures of the shore. Then a pair of redwing blackbirds fluttered out of the buttonbushes and Homer lost his self-control. That did it. It was all so damn pretty. Almost as if it were trying to persuade him of something he didn’t want to be talked into. Homer looked around nervously and started tearing into Concord. In his opinion it was a polite little suburban pesthole, living on its picayune history, full of proper little anglophilic old biddies in sneakers. It made him sick. It was like Brattle Street in Cambridge, where you could feel the ghostly whiskers of old dead professors tickling your cheek. Creepy, that’s what it was.

  Mary promised herself she wouldn’t get angry. She looked up at the watery light under the arch of the Red Bridge and remembered that Henry Thoreau had cooled himself in the same spot on hot days. That was it. Cool down. Just cool down.

  “And the Battle. Some battle. Absurd little hesitation waltz of a skirmish. Cradle of American liberty, my foot.”

  Well, all right then. Jump in when the rope swings. Jump, jump. Mary swung around to talk back. “You know what Emerson said about the battle? “The thunderbolt falls on an inch of ground but the light of it fills the horizon!’”

  “Very pretty.” Damn it, those things in the water were water lilies. Wouldn’t you just know. Blasted river. Blasted town. Double blasted girl. Then a mallard took off in its stooping flight from a stand of weeds in front of them, and Homer jumped. The canoe swerved and almost caught a snag. “You’ve always got a quote, haven’t you? Typical intellectual female. Talk talk talk.”

  “All right then. You don’t have to speak to me. Just shut up.”

  “Okay. Who wants to talk to an intellectual female anyhow? Not me. There are two things that don’t go together, and that’s females and brains. Women weren’t meant by God to talk in words of more than one syllable.”

  “Well, I’m not, am I? All I said was, shut up.” Mary stared grimly ahead at the North Bridge. What an irascible boor.

  The railing of the bridge was lined with tourists. The tourists were all staring back at them. For some reason people beside a body of water always assume that anybody in a boat must be deaf and dumb. A Woman from Belmont dug her elbow into her husband’s side. “Look,” she said loudly, “lovers.” Her husband lifted his camera and leaned way out over the railing to take a snapshot. Another fellow laden down with equipment was making an artistic home movie. He hung over the side, too, found the canoe in his finder and adjusted his new zoom lens. Idyllic picture—lovely girl in white, tall fellow with sleeves rolled up, lock of brown hair on forehead. Charming. Now. Come in close on the girl. Zooooooom. Boy, she’s a dilly. Looks a bit stiff though. Now for her beau. (Homer adjusted his features into a grimace, rolled up his eyes, crossed them, and lolled his tongue on his chin.) The movie expert shifted his focus, zoomed in on Homer, and nearly fell off the bridge. He just managed to save himself, but his Bell and Howell Director Optronic Eye Reflex Camera ($249.95) fell into the middle of the Concord River, along with his Pistol Grip ($16.95) and his Luxury Contour Camera Carrying Case with smart Chrome Trim ($24.95). As Mary and Homer passed under the bridge, the movie expert was jumping up and down and waving his arms around.

  Homer could feel his good humor coming back. Come on, rile her up some more. “Of course what I really don’t understand is why Concord has any claim to fame at all. It was Lexington where the first blood was shed. And there wasn’t any indecision and running around behind hills there. What did they do? They stood there on the Common and met the enemy face to face. Besides, Lexington was where the brains were, with Hancock and Adams holed up in Jonas Clarke’s house.”

  “I sometimes wonder,” said Mary acidly, “what would have happened to the history of this country if it hadn’t been for Jonas Clarke’s wife. Do you know how many children she had? Twelve. And on top of them she had all those important people and their aunts and cousins sleeping and eating in her ho
use for weeks at a time. What if Mrs. Jonas Clarke had thrown in the towel? The whole thing might never have come off at all.”

  Homer snickered. “You’re probably right, at that. What is there behind every great man? A great woman.” Homer pulled back on the tiller, and the canoe made a wide turn and started back toward the bridge. The man who had lost his camera was kneeling on the bridge, poking around in the water with a golf club. Homer agreeably turned off the motor and fished around in the water with the handle end of a paddle. He got the handle neatly under the strap of the camera case and brought up the whole thing, streaming water and trailing weeds, but still grinding away, five dollars’ worth of color film wasted on a lot of curious out-of-focus bass who had nosed up in a school to see what the funny noise was. The owner of the camera took it back with bad grace, and then Homer pulled the switch of the inboard and they headed upstream again. At the joining of the rivers they took the left-hand branch and nosed their canoe up the Sudbury River. Suddenly they discovered that they were ravenous, and Mary opened up Annie’s lunchbox.

  “I like to fight with you,” said Homer, with lordly condescension.

  “Thank you,” said Mary, nodding graciously. “How nice of you to say so.”

  The river was becoming domesticated, flowing past the green lawns behind the houses on Main Street with their small docks and their canoes leaning up against trees. A noisy powerboat piloted by a man in a duck-billed hat beat them to the railroad bridge. They joggled pleasantly in his wake, and presently the river became wild again. Tom’s little motor pushed them silently past Thoreau’s Conantum, with its tall pines and its discreet development of new houses, half hidden in the trees.

  “What happens here?” said Homer. The river was opening out into a lake. “Oh, I know.” There was a shade of reverence in his voice. “It’s Fairhaven Bay.”

  “Yes. And there’s Teddy Staples’ house. And that white one next to it is Alice Herpitude’s.”

  “Look over there,” said Homer. “There’s an island. Funny, I don’t remember any island on the map. Holy smoke, look at the size of that pine.”

  “Well, most of the year the island is connected to the mainland by a marsh, but it’s all high water around it at this time of year. Would you like to land over there and look around?”

  The island was about as big as a baseball diamond. There was a clearing near the place where they drew up their canoe, and at one edge of it the tall pine tree grew. It was a magnificent specimen with irregular outflung branches at the top, a long bare trunk and a bristling set of broken snags below its evergreen arms. They walked to the other end of the island, knee-deep in blueberry bushes and the pale stars of Quaker Ladies. Then they walked back again, pushed the canoe off and climbed in. Misfortune struck. Tom’s little motor wouldn’t catch. Homer fiddled with it clumsily. “I think the blasted thing’s out of juice.”

  “That’s what’s so exciting about Tom’s gadgets. You never know what will happen next. I’m afraid we’re in for a lot of paddling. Horrors, there’s only the one paddle.”

  “Oh, well, give it to me. Me heap awful big chief. Bendum mighty arm.” Homer’s paddling was inexpert and splashy. He caught a crab and doused Mary with water.

  “You heap big lousy paddler,” chortled Mary. “Here. Me paddlum with lunchbox. Don’t dip down so deep.”

  The lunchbox provided just enough extra movement of water to allow them to creep forward. The sluggish current was with them, but the wind wasn’t, and they made slow progress. They inched past Conantum. An hour later they we struggling past the Main Street lawns. Homer had taken over the lunchbox and he was plying it in rhythmic sweeps and bellowing in basso profundissimo a hymn he had made up called “Arise, O Man, and Curse!” He called it a typical Protestant hymn. Mary sang a dreary alto part—fa, fa, fa, fa, mi, fa. The whole effect was altogether too plausible. She asked a question that had puzzled her. How could anybody who called himself a Catholic have anything in common with the Transcendentalists?

  “That’s easy,” said Homer. “Awe and majesty and glorification of the spirit, that’s all. The mystic sense of God the Creator, what Emerson called the geometry of the City of God. You Protestants had a good thing in Martin Luther, and then you let it all go down the drain and replaced it with ethical culture and rationalism and humanism and Japanese flower arrangements. Corpsecold Unitarianism, that’s what Emerson called it. A society of the diffusion of useful knowledge.”

  An hour later they were still bickering. “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s go ashore,” said Homer. They had reached the joining of the rivers.

  “But we’ve still got to go upstream on the Assabet,” said Mary. “That’ll take ages.”

  “Go ahead. You go upstream. Be a hero. I’m getting out right here.” Grumpily Homer took off his shoes and socks and jumped out of the canoe. It rocked wildly from side to side. Homer’s feet found a mushy footing and he pulled the canoe after him toward the left-hand shore. Mary found this action highhanded and she began to protest.

  “Squaw talkum too much,” growled Homer. “Squaw shut-tum-up and come ashore.” Then suddenly he began to howl and hop around on one foot. He lifted the other foot out of the water. There was a small snapping turtle attached to his toe. “Ow, ow!” roared Homer, trying to kick it off. The turtle hung on like grim death.

  Mary was overjoyed. She clapped her hands. “Freddy’s turtle! Oh, good for you. Here, don’t lose it. Just hold still.” She reached over the side with the lunchbox, held it open like a clamshell, and then clamped it hard around the turtle and Homer’s toe, slam. Homer hollered and jumped around, and Mary, hanging on, fell clean out of the canoe. She went under, and stayed there, and Homer found himself groaning and fishing around for her desperately. But in a minute she was up, smiling radiantly, her hair streaming, her wet dress clinging, clasping a lunchbox that was shut and locked on the bloody mingled waters of the Assabet, the Sudbury and the Concord rivers and on a snapping turtle that was digesting a piece of Homer Kelly’s toe. “It’s all right,” said Mary brightly, “I’ve got him!”

  “Who’s worried?” snarled Homer. He turned to wade toward the shore, hobbling, hanging onto his toe. Then he stopped, and hopped up and down in one place, and pointed. “What’s that?” he said.

  Facing them was a great grey rock. There was an inscription carved into its face. “That’s Egg Rock,” said Mary. “We went right by it twice before.”

  Homer waded clumsily to the edge of the water, and read the inscription.

  ON THE HILL NASHAWTUCK

  AT THE MEETING OF THE RIVERS

  AND ALONG THE BANKS

  LIVED THE INDIAN OWNERS OF

  MUSKETAQUID

  BEFORE THE WHITE MEN CAME.

  “Musketaquid,” said Homer. “That’s the old Indian name for the river.”

  “Yes, and of the tribe. It means Grass-ground River, or river surrounded with grassy meadows. Thoreau liked to call it that, too. He called his little boat The Musketaquid.”

  Homer was bleeding into the water, but he let go of his toe and ran his finger over the word Musketaquid. “Musketaquid. Musket-a-quid. Musket …” He looked at Mary. “Say, you don’t suppose that was what Ernest Goss was trying to say when he died?” Mary stared back at him. Could it have been? Then Homer tugged at the canoe and dragged it up on the sloping shore. Mary wrung out a streaming handkerchief and tied it on his wounded toe. It was hard to do because he kept hopping around.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know. Looking for something. Doing research.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, hold still. Golly, I’m afraid you’re going to bleed right through this bandage. He really took a piece out of you.”

  Homer got away and hobbled all over the small point of land that marked the joining place of the rivers, leaving wet red drops on the ferns that grew in clefts in the granite outcropping. Then he found something. It was a small tin bait box, wedged deep down in one of the clefts. It was fas
tened shut by a heavy padlock.

  “Zowie!” shouted Homer. “My letters! What do you want to bet?” He rattled the box around. “Something in there all right.”

  “You’re sure it’s not just a lot of smelly worms?”

  “Doesn’t sound like worms. Sounds like papers.”

  “Well, it could be a club that some boys have, and this is their secret hiding place, and the papers tell who’s president and what the password is. Oh, Homer, look, you’ve got to sit down and put your foot up. You’ll bleed half to death. You stay here. I’ll find a house and call Tom and get some bandages and he’ll bring the car as close as he can.”

  “You go wigwams? You one heap awful big wet squaw.”

  “You one heap awful big bloody mess, go Happy Hunting Ground.” Mary climbed over a great fallen log, rotten and soft, and started up a barely visible path. Old Squaw Sachem had had a trail somewhere here, and up on Nashawtuc Hill there were some houses.

  Homer stretched out on the ground and put his foot up on the canoe. He held the bait box on his stomach and patted it. “Me findum plenty wampum. Me plenty heap awful smart.”

  Chapter 40

  Everything that befalls, accuses him.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Homer was for opening the bait box with a can opener, but Jimmy Flower would have none of that. He brought out a manila envelope that held the contents of Ernest Goss’s pockets, and poured them out on his desk. Small change, wallet, penknife, key chain. And on the key chain there was a small key for which they had as yet found no matching lock. “Will wonders never cease,” said Jimmy. The rusted padlock was reluctant, but it gave way. Inside the bait box was a plastic folder, and in the folder was the batch of letters. Mary recognized them at once. These were the letters, the letters Ernest Goss had read to the Alcott Association, Transcendental dynamite.