The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

When I think of my whole life from my childhood up, I cannot see much in this life that I need regret leaving it for. How I was abused by my own father worse than any man ever used his bull-pup, and always standing in constant fear of doing something that might offend my mother. I have had to lead a life that is altogether unnatural for me. I might have had one of the best of lives, but I tell you it is pretty hard to make water run uphii, and that is the way my folk has wanted me to live.

  And so this was how August Woehler spent his final days and hours of November 15, 1879: in a cheap boardinghouse by the corner of Twenty-third and Fourth, hiding under an assumed name, bereft of hope, a man wanted by the police. Here he lay staring at the ceiling, at the walls, and out the windows at the city around him as the minutes trickled away, lost in the most powerful city of the world's freest country—but lacking the one freedom that he cared about. He wrote bitterly:

  Compelled since I was 7 years of age to live against my whole nature. And then leave home and for nearly two years live as moral a life as any man ever lived and then come home again and live as straight as string so as not to offend the old lady.

  They all said, Why don't you get married?

  "Marriage," I hear on the street.

  I saw it in the newspaper kiosks coming on my way over: MA COURT UPHOLDS SAME SEX MARRIAGE. Murmur civil murmur union murmur. It's all anyone at the next table could talk about in Chinese Mirch, or in the shop I stopped in for peppermints down the street, and on the AM radio station crackling across the taxi that I hail. Will it be legal? Will we have tolerance for it? Will it . . .

  Tolerance is an ugly word. When Foote wrote of men granting women rights that already rightfully belonged to them, he was mindful of what his preceptor had written a lifetime before in 1787: 'Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but the counterfeit of it," Paine wrote. "Both are despotisms. The one assumes the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it." Casting a baleful eye over the citizenry's concern over what they should or should not tolerate, Paine had a simple directive: "Mind thine own concerns."

  In public discourse it would be instructive, I suspect, to always replace the word tolerance with liberty.

  "JFK," I tell the driver. "British Airways."

  We slice downtown through avenues that Foote once trotted through in his fine carriage, the streets that the disconsolate Woehler wandered with a .38 in his pocket. Having survived both assassins and attorneys, Foote turned to the man that inspired him decades before. Using the house on Lexington as its headquarters, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association began to form around a nucleus of the leading troublemakers in New York City. Foote was its treasurer, and its shared address with his house meant there was scarcely a day when the association's business did not cross his path. A clever fellow named Thomas Edison even began turning up at their informal meetings, recalling wistfully how picking up a volume of Paine from his father's bookshelf, at the age of thirteen, had been "a revelation." Edison himself eventually wrote a book on Paine and became a Vice President of the Association. But in those earliest days, the choice of the man to serve alongside Foote, leading the freethinker's charge—to be the Thomas Paine National Historical Association's first president—was very clear.

  I shuffle through the old documents in my backseat. Here, staring out from me in a photograph, is their Association's leader: a Southern gentleman in a top hat and with a cane, gravely dignified with his graying beard and an expression of perpetual inquisitiveness. In his decades abroad in London and in Paris, he'd spent years preparing The Writings of Thomas Paine, the first comprehensive edition ever published. He'd also written the first serious biography of Paine—a weighty two-volume set that remains a definitive work. There is a caption underneath the photograph: "Moncure Conway."

  "The law," wafts from the taxi's AM radio. ". . . the right . . ."

  Conway possessed an advantage that no modern scholar can: when he first wandered out to Paine's old homes and haunts, they were still there. And what's more, so were the last remnants of Paine's old neighbors and cronies. Paine was not a distant Founding Father to Conway or his interviewees, but a man who still existed in living memory. He had a physical presence. He was tangible: he ate here, he walked there, he drank a brandy in this very spot.

  And so, among the living recollections that gave some hint into the man's soul, there was one last thing Conway could bring to Foote. Something that the doctor and other association members had long been quietly wondering about. For years Conway had been pursuing an elusive quarry that had led him across an ocean and through country lanes and city alleyways.

  Paine's body.

  EVERYWHERE

  The Mornington Crescent Game

  IT WAS JUST above fi-eezing outside when they had shoveled the soil out for the grave—a shivering December day in 1874—and now Moncure stood officiating by the graveside as the coffin was laid into the ground and the first handfuls of dirt thrown upon the lid. Through the gathered mourners, a glimpse could be caught of a square block of polished red granite at the head of the grave:

  IN MEMORY OF

  JAMES WATSON

  PUBLISHER

  Born Sept. 21, 1799-Died Nov. 29, 1874

  Conway paused to consider the crowd of grizzled old radicals. His Unitarian church in London was now the most famous liberal outpost in the country; he often invited leading progressives to speak at it, and from his pulpit in Finsbury Square he produced pamphlets urging not only the end of racism and militarism, but supporting racial intermarriage as the true route to social stability. NEGRO THE SAVIOR OF AMERICA, one newspaper had headlined his views. Little wonder that Richard Carlile's old apprentice in radicalism, John Stuart Mi, had befriended him—or that the fellow Carlile veteran James Watson had become a member of Conway's congregation. The old Quaker publisher was, Conway mused, a "serene man of such calm mind that I could hardly realize his age.'' Yet he bore the living memory of Cobbett and Carlile; indeed, the most ancient members of Conway's congregation had known Thomas Paine himself in their earliest youth.

  It had been over a decade since Conway bitterly left the United States; here in England he'd found his friendship with Emerson was enough to make him welcomed by any author; the young man soon found himself regaled well into the night at Alfred Lord Tennyson's house, and when the two got lost trying to find the inn Conway was staying in, they fell down a muddy embankment roaring with boozy laughter. "Do not mention this to the temperance folk," the disheveled poet laureate mock-pleaded of him. And so it was that the amiable minister was initiated into the fraternity of authors. Before the year was out, he was walking away from the funeral of William Thackeray side by side with Robert Browning and Charles Dickens; later he'd preside over the burial of their beloved humorist Artemus Ward. But this latest funeral was . . . different, somehow.

  Watson had spent his final few years living simply in quiet retirement: after his many run-ins with censors and years of jail time in the service of a free press, he spent his old age peacefully living near the immense exhibition halls of the Crystal Palace. He delighted in strolling its grounds each day, taking in the science displays, and attending the free recitals played upon the hall's immense pipe organ. There he could linger for hours, serenely listening to Handel and Beethoven. Old friends could rely on finding him there each day until, at last, he showed up no more: he had passed away in his sleep.

  As the crowd slowly dispersed from the freshly covered grave and Conway comforted James's steadfast wife Eleanor, one question still hung over the proceedings, one that the calm old man had taken into the silence of his own grave. What had he done with the bones?

  Here is what I can tell you about the town of Guildford: if you are taking a chid there, bring a helmet. Maybe it's the steep slope of their High Street, or the uneven cobbles of the market-town streets, but I've never seen so many little tykes turning involuntary somersaults in my life. In the last fifteen minutes I've seen four of them g
o crashing down onto the pavement. There is the moment of stung realization, and then they burst out crying. For such a pleasant little city, Guildford is a good place to get your baby teeth knocked out.

  I sit down on a bench by Trinity Church, watch the youth of Britain go sprawling by, and thumb through a book I picked up on High Street. Surrey Privies starts with what is surely one of the better opening lines in literature—"Privy hunting is a curious occupation"—before going into the fine points of Mode earth closets, "four-holer" group models, and a local brand of toilet paper that repeated across its sheets the printed injunction NOW WASH YOUR HANDS. Better still is this outhouse advice from one elderly Surrey resident: "It was always advisable to kick the door before going in to get rid of any rats."

  Elderly couples keep passing me, wandering around the Guildhall, the Guildford castle grounds, and up and down the High Street, all clutching sheets of paper and looking rather lost. They're not looking for privies, at least: the modern restrooms are well marked here. One husband and wife pair stop in front of my bench, eyes squinting at their sheet.

  "Um . . ." Suddenly it dawns on me. "Scavenger hunt?"

  "Why, yes." He smiles delightedly. "An historical one."

  Me too.

  Back in the 1850s, when Cobbett's old secretary Ben Tilly had gone broke, his possessions wound up going to the Richards auction house, where the box of Paine's bones was purchased by none other than James Watson. He'd already published a biography of Paine the year before, not to mention a pamphlet on the bones; clearly Watson's concerns that Paine receive a decent burial had never left him. Soon he was quietly inquiring how he might go about making a burial in Kensal Green cemetery. And here is where the darkness of history closes upon us: where a curtain comes down upon the scene before it is quite ended. For we do not know what Watson then did-he took that secret to his grave. He may have given the bones back to Ben Tilly; or, the remains of Thomas Paine may be buried in some nameless consecrated plot in London. Only James Watson knows. But even so . . . he did not quite know eveything.

  I walk down the street, gaping at the ancient architecture and the glassy modern storefronts, scanning for the occasional building that bothers to list its street number outside. I come up to Tunsgate Arch, as lost as any of the scavenger hunt retirees, and wander into the next store I see. Inside are bare wooden floorboards and coolly minimalist displays of tiny translucent colored bottles of essence of jasmine, vanilla, lemongrass, coconut. The shopgirl watches me with the sharpened stare of one who has been practicing for runway modeling.

  "Can I help you?"

  I am strangely transfxed upon a sales display that glows with backlighting, the tinctured green, pink, and yellow bottles like a hypnotic array of hard candies. It's oddly appropriate, for the Tunsgate was a massive Tuscan arch built to shelter the town's corn market. Once they sold the fruits of the soil in these buildings: now only the scents remain.

  "I'm looking"—I pull my gaze away—"for 130 High Street." "They're the other side of the arch." I cross over to find a building with a shop simply called Games. They sell games, you understand. Inside it is crammed with video game sets and titles leering out at shoppers: Vietnam Battlefield, Grand Theft Auto, the usual. WE WANT YOUR GAMES: TRADE IN exhorts a sign. But I come up to the counter empty-handed.

  "Excuse me," I ask an employee about to hit Level 5 in his game. "Is this number 130?"

  " Tis." Blap. "130." Kablooey. "Bugger!"

  I look around at the displays, imagining a time when burlap sacks and iron-hooped barrels stood where track-lit wire racks of CDs and game carts are now. It makes sense that a corn merchant would have lived and worked in the building closest to the town's corn market. It was in the summer of 1849 that a next-door neighbor visiting this store, and lingering aimlessly much as I am right now, got to talking with the shopkeeper John Chennell about the missing bones of Thomas Paine.

  The corn merchant couldn't have been much fazed by the subject. The clan of Chennells, long a pillar of brewing and farming around Guildford, had their own spectacularly grisly family affair back when Cobbett was still swiping bones in New York. In 1817 local shoemaker George Chennell and his housekeeper were both found murdered, their throats slashed, and the shop till emptied out. Suspicion quickly fell upon the victim's dissolute son, George Jr., and a deliveryman named William Chalcroft. Pound notes found in George Jr.'s pocket were speckled with blood.

  I turn and look out the front window. It was through these streets that Chalcrofi and Chennell, shackled in heavy irons, were borne by carriage out to a meadow. There they were hung on the gallows, and their still-warm bodies immediately conveyed to the house where the murders occurred. The corpses were carried into the kitchen—Chalcroft's was laid on the precise spot where the housekeeper's body had been found—and two local surgeons fell upon them with scalpels, dissecting the men at the very scene of their crimes. Then, with their innards exposed, they were left splayed out for the rest of the day, viewed by thousands of locals who queued up outside and shuffled through the shoemaker's shop to see the dissected criminals.

  So the bones of a man who'd died of natural causes? Hardly worth raising an eyebrow over. But it was good local gossip between neighbors, after all; John Chennell's neighbor had heard about Pigott the auctioneer, some years back, refusing to sell a box of Paine's bones a few villages over, in the hamlet of Normandy. That's what he'd heard, anyway.

  Oh, Chennell said, it's true.

  "Come with me," the corn merchant added. The two men descended into the shop's cellar; and there, in the dank underground room, Chennell produced a container. It was a porcelain jar, sealed at the top with a piece of parchment. In the darkness the words inscribed upon it could just be made out: The great Paine's bones.

  The bassoon lies comically—for every posture assumed by a bassoon is a comical one—by the side of a grand piano; and a breeze passes through the French doors that lead out into Charles Darwin's garden. Four chairs are sociably arranged into a circle within his drawing room, awaiting a family concert that will never happen again. I stroll out onto the croquet pitch-perfect lawn, and upon crunching gravel back toward Darwin's greenhouse and his laboratory. I'm still a little rumpled from hours of travel on three different trains and one bus to get here from Guildford. But I feel the footsteps beneath me that I follow: for it was here, one fine spring morning, that Moncure Conway awoke in a guest room and pondered the great man he had not yet met.

  Well, at least this time he'd find a hero of his who was alive and still in one place. The other great influence on his life had proven rather more elusive. Conway had heard the stories about Tom Paine's bones mysteriously showing up at Chennell's shop over twenty years earlier. It seems people had been pocketing bits ofTom Paine at each step of the old patriot's journey. Before sending the bones back up from London to Normandy in 1833, Ben Tilly had quietly lifted the hard black lump that was once a brain, and wrapped his prize in a labeled piece of oilcloth. The bones, sent back to Surrey in a corn merchant's wagon, appear to have been plundered yet again by Chennell, who may have taken a few bones to store in a jar. And even with the bones returned to him years later by George West, Tilly kept Paine's brain separate from the box: when he lost the box to a debtor's auction in the 1850s,Tilly cheated the auctioneer out of his one cloth-wrapped souvenir.

  Well, that was fair enough: it might be that the auctioneer was cheating too. The box sold at Richards the Auctioneer was an incomplete set, because the skull and a hand were secretly pieced out for separate sale. So the box that James Watson won that day was rather lighter than the one William Cobbett carried from the Liverpool Customs Yard. Even if Watson had tried to bury Paine in Kensal Green, he couldn't have buried allof Paine. The body was becoming impossibly scattered.

  It was enough to give Moncure a headache. But the air here, in the countryside outside Bromley, was a good cordial to raise his spirits. Rising from his bed, he looked out his window to see Darwin already up and inspecting the
flowers out in this garden. Conway could hardly help remarking to himself on the man's very form, as he bent down with his gray beard as if to talk with his flowers.

  "All that phrenologists had written," he mused, "was feeble compared with a look at that big head with its wonderful dome."

  The dissenting minister's laudatory sermons on evolution had earned him an invitation to Darwin's house, but he'd arrived here after Darwin's early bedtime. Now, crossing the garden, the two men finally met for the first time. A hermit thrush was singing loudly in a tree, and Conway paused to gaze at it. "He is justifying his hermit profession," he ventured, "by a Vedic hymn to the rising sun."

  No, Darwin countered good-naturedly—he is singing a canticle to his beloved.

  Their talk turned more serious as they strolled about the garden. Inspired by reading The Origin of Species weeks after it first came out, Conway had plunged himself into years of scientific study in London, mingling easily in the company of Lyell, Galton, and Huxley. Darwin had heard of Conway's resulting sermons, which lofted evolution as the great hope and wonder of the world, as the very essence of progress itself—and still entirely divine as well. As one paleontologist mused to Conway, "If you tell me of a mechanic who made a remarkable steam engine I may admire his skill; but if you tell me of a man who has made an engine which can of itself produce another engine, and then another, an engine from which is evolved an endless series of steadily self-improving engines, I might say that inventor was a god." But Darwin wouldn't quite say whether he agreed with Conway's friendly theological interpretation of his work, though he appreciated its intent. While denying that his theory attacked religion, in private he was less sure of just how viable religion had been left in the wake of his work, and-unknown to Conway or nearly anyone else—his former piety had long drifted into a realm of agnostic doubts.

  I stop in front of Darwin's laboratory. It's a formality, really: nature was his laboratory, and his laboratory was nature. You can step over the stone threshold from one to the other, but there was no real boundary at all.