THE BAND OF BURGLARS STRUCK A FEW DAYS AFTER THE TENTS were pitched. And what I feared most finally happened. The Evergreens was attacked while Austin presided over the dinner table. Not a footstep was heard. And these housebreakers did not leave their usual mark; they didn’t rampage upstairs, didn’t upset a single mirror. They went through Ned’s room and took whatever coins were in the pocket-book he had left on his bureau. They also visited Mattie’s room and took a few small trinkets that could hardly have been worth their while. Nothing else was touched.
Austin may have pondered over the mystery of it, but I did not. Vain creature that I was, the Poetess who prided herself on her Plumage had been out-feathered by a handyman. That was no robbery! It was a surreptitious, subterranean letter sent without a postage stamp—a letter from my blond Assassin.
How could I answer him! Daisy would have to deliver herself. But I still didn’t have the courage to sneak into the Circus and catch Tom under a tent.
Tomorrow, I told myself. Were I a necromancer who could wish Carlo back into being, I would have rushed over to the Circus with him and berated that blond Assassin. But Carlo don’t answer my calls. And I promised my own good angel that I would muster up whatever I needed tomorrow.
My good angel must have abandoned me—tomorrow was the fourth of July, and I was struck by it with the Devil’s own tail. I shivered at night, and that Dark Eyed Monster with his wound of a mouth seemed to hover on my bed like some mammoth, tailless bird. He did not menace me, or mock my condition as a dried-up maiden, but he was agitated, as if he had come to warn me of some impending doom and could not utter a sound from that hole in his face.
I woke to the noise of warning bells and went to the window, where a brightness attacked my face, as if I had encountered some furnace-sun from another planet. Then Sister arrived out of nowhere in her nightgown and shut the curtains.
“Emily,” she said, “it’s just hullabaloo—the firemen are out with their trucks on the fourth of July. It ain’t worth our bother.”
And she rocked me in her arms, my own Little Sister, who could have attracted any man; her arms were still plump, and her figure had the fullness of a dressmaker’s mannequin; she turned every suitor away except for one, Joseph Lyman, who went off to marry another. He said that my sister was nice to spoon with, but that she didn’t have the brains or the accomplishment of a bride.
Lord, what did he know about Lavinia! She had cared for Father and had kept Mother alive as long as she could with her constant devotion. And now she mothered me. I could hear the crackle of burning wood, smell the smoke and hot oil, but I pretended that it was the merriment of Independence Day. The fire raged and roared; that foreign sun seemed to rip right through the curtains and shine upon my walls—it wasn’t arson, but an act of God. Barns collapsed. I did nothing until I heard an elephant sob like a frozen child on the fourth of July. I pulled the curtains apart, and there was Jumbo wandering on Main Street in her red ruche. Circus performers and firemen were trying to steer her back to the higher ground of the Commons. They clucked their tongues and stamped their feet as if my Jumbo were some ordinary cow. She remained in the hot wind and swatted at them with her trunk. And then the sobbing stopped. She stood like a lady at my window, trumpeted once, and started to ramble back toward the Commons.
Her trumpeting had restored my courage. I went down into that dying fire in my summer bonnet. I too wore a ruche at my throat; but mine wasn’t red. Neighbors gaped at me; they hadn’t seen the recluse in years. I curtsied and whisked past them as some waif would. I hadn’t plunged into the street to chat with them about the wind.
I could see the burning tents. The fire had ruined the Menagerie. A lion shivered on the lawn. The whole Commons was thick with smoke. I hadn’t expected to confront my dream clown, but there he was in his costume, a rash of red on his face. He wasn’t coy or nonchalant.
“Daisy the Kangaroo,” he said.
I was in mortal danger of losing my mind. The Devil was standing in front of me dressed as a clown with Tom’s blue eyes and that awful smear of red paint, talking about kangaroos, and knowing that the mention of Daisy would bewilder a spinster’s heart.
“Ah,” he said, “where’s your dark glasses? I was wondering what would bring ya to my little abode. Are you still my mouse?”
I remembered dancing with him on a dark street in Cambridgeport, during the late Rebellion, a pickpocket who was always gallant. But he didn’t seem so gallant now. He grimaced under his smear of red paint, as if he meant to violate that memory. Clowns were cruel, I surmised, waltzing in a red mask while they poked fun of people. So I hid my own charity toward Tom, and that deep affection I had ever since I found him in the handyman’s shack.
“Darling,” I trumpeted, “I’m as constant as the North Star. But you should not have traduced my own brother.”
He laughed, and the ring of it, the soft, palpitating thunder, ripped through my bowels.
“What brother is that?”
“Don’t pretend,” I told him. “You know who I am, and you always knew.”
And the Devil didn’t bother to lie. He bowed in his silly suit. But there was a sadness around his painted eyes. Perhaps he wasn’t as immune to me as he liked to imagine.
“Ah, Miss Dickinson, who fed me water while I was in a damn shack. I wouldn’t forget a favor. Didn’t I pick you out of the gutter a hundred years ago in Cambridgeport and carry ya home like a regular swain? But if I remembered too hard I would have slit your throat. And so I made ya my mouse.”
I died right there among the Circus animals. Tom was blaming me for what had happened to Zilpah Marsh, and he wasn’t wrong.
“I had to let Zilpah go. She—”
“You shouldn’t have taken her yellow gloves. You broke her heart. She adored your father. He didn’t treat her like a common girl. He respected her book-reading. He was proud as Moses to have a maid like her.”
His eyes were pierced with flecks of anger, and I meant to charm him with the small ammunition that was left to an old maid.
“Enobarbus,” I said. I called him by his nickname, knowing as I did that Zilpah had introduced him to Shakespeare, not me. But he still wouldn’t play.
“Daisy, Enobarbus is dead…I never tetched you or your Pa-pa. You were the safest heiress in Amherst.”
There was no soft thunder in his voice; it sounded like terrible tin.
“I’m not an heiress,” I said.
I couldn’t puzzle out his features in that haze of smoke on the Commons’ bumpy lawn. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not, or just mocking me.
“Then what would ya call a girl who lives in a mansion with a fence in front of it and a wall of grass that’s greener than God’s eyes?”
“I’m not a girl,” I had to insist. “I’ll be fifty-three come December. And how the Devil would you know that God’s eyes are green?”
I didn’t want an answer. I was sick with love for a burglar who wouldn’t even burgle his own mouse.
“Zilpah told me,” he said.
“You mean your other mouse.”
I couldn’t help myself. I was eaten up with jealousy…and spite. She had enthralled my Tom with her Plumage. And here I’d thought that my feathers were so fine. But Tom had feathers of his own. And he had all the mystery, while I had none. That’s what drew me to him. Lord, I’d never stopped dancing with Tom. I was still stapled to him, the way I had been on Magazine Street. I could hear the accordion man tapping with his toe to our crazy polka. But Tom broke into my melody with a brutal song.
“She wasn’t my mouse,” he said. “She was my little wife…and my college. I didn’t require Senior levees and Commencement balls. I didn’t have to puncture her with a fraternity pin. All I needed was to steal words from the Lexicon, with the devotion of a pickpocket. And Zilpah helped me steal.”
“Darling,” I whispered, struggling to hold on to what little veneer I had left. “I could have been just as big a thief.”
&
nbsp; “But it’s not the same thing. You were born with words, and Zilpah had to scream and sweat to put them in her mouth. Those damn witches shouldn’t have tossed her out of Holyoke like a dying dog. I had half a mind to burn their school to the ground.”
A zebra walked out of the mist and went up to Tom with its nostrils all aquiver. He stroked the animal’s mane, and it vanished into the mist.
“Daisy, I’m moving on,” he said. “I’m leaving Circus life. And I won’t be around here again. I just had to visit Amherst one last time. My valedictory. Isn’t that what they call it?”
I began to sob like Jumbo the elephant; I was crying for myself, and for Zilpah too and for Tom’s baby that Zilpah tore out of her womb with a knitting needle. I couldn’t tell him about the baby. I couldn’t. Tom took my hand, cradled it in his. And I cursed myself. He’d passed my window year after year in that silly clown’s suit, and I’d held him at bay. I was an heiress, the way he’d said, a little rotten heiress without a penny in her pocket.
“Mr. Tom, don’t you like me just a little?”
I could feel the static pass through him, like a strange current right under the motley he was wearing. He was no different from Daisy. He was lost in his own dark well. And that barking of his was just an orphan’s badge.
“Little darlin’,” he said, “I wouldn’t have bothered much with Amherst if it wasn’t your abode. The pickings are slim. But I’m always loyal to a mouse.”
He dropped my hand and disappeared from Daisy without a kiss.
But pain quickened my blood. Tom hadn’t come to Amherst to break into mansions and remember a mouse. My vanity had blinded me to his real destination. That’s why he’d brought his Circus to the Commons time after time. He was in mourning, just like Jumbo.
I waited a good half hour and then walked up the road to the burying-ground. I caught Tom at the gate. He’d just come from Zilpah’s grave. He wasn’t wearing motley, with a mask of red paint. He’d shucked them off somewhere, and in their stead he had a long black coat that could have been a haven for his burglar’s tools. He was shorn of his blond complection, that angel’s look he’d once had at Holyoke. His hair had gone white at the temples. His skin was as red and blotchy as Esau’s. Rough lines on both sides of his mouth gave him a jackal’s grin. But his blue eyes could still stun a girl. And I loved him even more in his diminished state.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said.
But there was no tin to his voice. He wasn’t Enobarbus, and I wasn’t his mouse.
I held him in my arms, and it must have seemed strange to comfort a man twice my size. But it wasn’t strange to me.
He was sobbing now. “Miss Em’ly, I hated Holyoke. Its Tutor ladies treated me like filth. But it put me near learning. I’d sneak around and listen to the girls recite. Zilpah discovered me at it. She laughed, but it wasn’t to make fun. We’d meet in my shack. I didn’t dare tech a Holyoke girl. But she said I could undress her if I could memorize the alphabet and a hundred words in under an hour. And I did. Then I was sick with fever, and a stunted angel with red hair visited me.”
Tom took something out of his pocket—a miniature of me mounted on a silver plate. Lord, I couldn’t believe it. I had never posed for Tom, not in Amherst or Holyoke or Cambridge or any other corner of Massachusetts. But there I was, with my eyes shut, right next to Tom, as if we were man and wife.
“Tom,” I said, “that’s the Devil’s work.”
“It ain’t. I had a traveling photography man, a friend of mine, take the picture while you was lying on the ground next to the old poorhouse on Magazine Street—after you had fainted.”
My face was so red he couldn’t see my freckles ripen. That housebreaker thought enough of me to carry my miniature around.
“Tom, you might have asked my permission.”
He’d wanted a memento of the little Holyoke scholar in her dark glasses. I’d startled him in Cambridgeport. “With my prettiness,” he said. What other man had ever called me pretty? I must have made an impression on him in that shack, with my red hair. He told his entire gang that I had once “teched” his face in the dark. I’d have touched it again and again until the rawness was gone and his skin was as smooth as silk.
Tom reached down and kissed me—he didn’t gnaw at my mouth. It was the gentlest kiss. We’d never kissed before, not even when I was his mouse. That kiss shattered the bondage of all the years between Holyoke and now. I didn’t have to shut my eyes. I remembered Tom hurling that baby deer out of the snowbank. I remembered his Tattoo, how I had wanted to trace it with my own hand.
Tom was my troubled troubadour. And I was his Siren with a freckled face. He couldn’t keep kissing me while the sheriff was on his trail. He dug my miniature under his shirt.
“You ain’t ever coming back, are you, Tom?”
“No, my pretty.”
I thought I heard the sheriff’s hounds. Tom ran toward the woods. I wanted to bolt after him like a wild rabbit—his wild rabbit. But I’d startled myself with my own wild imaginings. I’d known Tom more than half my life, and didn’t know him at all. The love I had for Tom was itself a wild mask. I wore it only with Tom. But it might be more truthful that the mask wore me. And in its thrall, I was not the old maid of Amherst—but Daisy with the wanton smile.
AND THEN A BLEAT BROKE THROUGH THE WIND AND TREES OF the burying-ground. It was Jumbo’s call, and she could have been trumpeting to another forlorn female, like herself. I ran back to the Commons as fast as I could with my little, bundling steps. It tore my heart to see her. Jumbo was rampaging across our village green, dragging along entire tents like a scatter of tails. The sheriff and his men hadn’t been chasing Tom. They stood like pygmies behind Jumbo’s little earthquakes.
“Miss Em’ly,” the sheriff screeched, “best to watch out. She’s a roguer. No telling what she will do.”
But I wouldn’t move. “It’s the Circus’s fault,” I said. “They shouldn’t have had her parading in a costume after she lost her calf.”
“Lord’s sake,” said the sheriff. “She’s an elephant. She don’t have the sense of a two-year-old. It’s the fire that’s crazied her.”
When one of his dogs leapt into the air, Jumbo swatted that hound with her trunk and sent it flying across the green like a demented cannonball. She didn’t want to wear a costume, and she tore away the spangles and the red ruche with her trunk. Her eyes were tiny and couldn’t tell me much—two acorn-colored orbits surrounded by wrinkled flaps. But her trumpeting revealed a terrible lament. And neither the Circus nor the sheriff mattered to her. She didn’t want to be without her calf. She swayed once, like some elegant dancer, toppled over, and died, while the ground swelled under her and roiled the whole green. I could feel the turbulence in my toes. It was as if the entire planet had moved with the plaintive melody of Jumbo’s death.
Suddenly other stray animals appeared out of the mist—a striped zebra, acrobatic horses, a lioness and her mate—and stood around Jumbo like solitary mourners while the Circus people and the sheriff’s men considered how to cart away the corpse.
Gib & the Best Little Girl in Town
He was eight years old, and the envy of the entire village—no child had ever been so beautiful, with astonishing blue eyes and long blond hair, a silk cravat, striped pants, and boots of Moroccan leather. And no child had ever been so spoiled. Villagers couldn’t stop looking at Gib; they bought him things, built him a wooden horse and a tent, and touched him all the time, hoping that some of his magic blondness might rub off on them. He would ride about on Austin’s shoulders, or sit in the Dickinson carriage and wave at people.
It was Gib who held the little tribe of Dickinsons together. Sue would have gone berserk without Gib. She went everywhere with him, dressed her blond angel as a little lord.
He had more friends than any other child in the Commonwealth, and that was his undoing. During the summer he could reconnoiter with one or two of his favorites inside the tent on the Dic
kinson lawn, and no harm was done. But in late September, after a storm, he played on the Commons with a wild boy, fell into a mud hole, and landed in bed with typhoid fever.
Emily did not require a summons from Sue. She stepped across the lawn with Maggie Maher. She hadn’t been to the Evergreens in ages, not since Ned had one of his epileptic attacks. She had a coughing fit on the stairs. The whole house was filled with carbolic acid, and she couldn’t have climbed up to Gib without clinging to Maggie. It broke her heart to see that blond boy in bed. He was burning up; his nose bled, and Austin had to keep wiping him with a wet sponge. Sue hovered over him like some fierce mother dragon. It was Austin who was most tender, who dared touch Sue’s shoulder, who comforted her as much as he could, though he himself was pale under his greenish copper scalp, like a painted mask.
“Open the Door,” Gib said in his fever, “open the Door—they are waiting for me.”
Then his blue eyes widened with a sudden clarity, and poor Gib expired with a purr in his throat and without the least shiver—and Emily couldn’t even comfort Austin and Sue; the odor of acid in the sick-room had made her nauseous, and she had to run home from the Evergreens at 31/2 in the morning. She vomited all night and stayed in bed for a month with the shivers.
Emily mourned to the edge of madness—with Brother, Sister, Susan, Mattie, and Ned. Susan never left the house, never rode in her carriage, while Emily never left her room.
Sister and Maggie lured her back into the kitchen, swearing they couldn’t survive without her black cakes. And one afternoon, while Emily was washing raisins in the sink, the whole kitchen went black.
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 27
