Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  Owen was doing his best. Hastening up and down the sloping lawn, he tried to speak to everyone, to Professor Nogobuchi, to the emeritus professor from. Hokkaido, to Marybelle Spikes, to Helen Gaunt, to the Smith brothers, to the Swedish schoolteachers, and to Tilly Porch, who was holding a big baby in her arms.

  “Your grandson?” said Owen, peering at the baby politely.

  “No, just a little friend.”

  Owen’s jaws ached from smiling. When Mary Kelly came up behind him and took his elbow, he jerked convulsively and barked, “It’s been so good to know you,” before he recognized Mary and clasped her in his arms. “Mary dear, oh, Mary Kelly, thank heaven. I’m extremely pleased you’re here at last. I’ve been enjoying Homer so much. Have you found him? Does he know you’re here?”

  Mary looked at him soberly. “Homer’s in the house with Archie Gripp. Oh, Owen, that poor wretched girl, Winifred Gaw. You know, I think I met her once in your office, a long time ago. She had a missing finger, isn’t that right? I thought I recognized her, just now, as they were taking her away. Pitiful. What on earth do you think happened to her?”

  Owen flapped his hands in distress. “I have no idea. And now something else is worrying us. A young woman has disappeared. She simply vanished into thin air. She’s engaged to my young friend, Tom Perry. Naturally, Tom is beside himself. He’s gone to the police.”

  “Good heavens,” said Mary, “do you think there could be any connection between her disappearance and the death of Winifred Gaw?”

  “Oh, Mary dear, I can’t imagine how there could be. Now forgive me, but I’ve got to say good-bye to everyone. They’re all about to go home. I’ll be so grateful when the whole thing is over.” Owen squeezed Mary’s hand and returned to his duties.

  Owen was struggling with his feelings. He had promised Dombey Dell to say nothing to any of the participants in the symposium about the death of Winifred Gaw. And so far the lighthearted guests seemed unaware that anything was wrong. They had not heard of the gruesome calamity in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. They had not witnessed the removal of Winnie’s body to the police van on the other side of the house. And, with Homer’s help, Dombey had made a deal with Archie Gripp. Everybody who had not been staying in the Homestead could go home without interrogation, as long as Dombey supplied Archie with a list of names and addresses.

  There was Dombey, sprawled under the magnolia tree. He was polishing off the last of the malmsey wine, waving the pitcher tipsily at one of the Smith brothers. Dombey obviously felt he had pulled off a great coup. But for Owen it seemed like treachery to grin and show his teeth while poor Winifred was on her way to a marble slab.

  “Come, Professor Klaznik! Come, come!” It was the emeritus professor from Hokkaido. He wanted to take a group picture of the entire symposium. He had a camera with a 28-millimeter lens. Crowding everyone together, he pulled Owen Kraznik to the front with Dombey Dell, then ran around the outside, dabbing and patting, arranging and rearranging, shoving them all into a dense grinning mass. He took one picture, then another, and another.

  “One more, please?” he said eagerly. But his orderly rows were falling apart. Someone was shrieking. It was Dottie Poole.

  “Stop him!” hollered Dottie. “Oh, someone, please stop him!”

  Startled, Tilly Porch turned around to look, and then she rushed up to the picnic table and reached for Elvis Buffington. Elvis was sitting beside the black cake, joyfully bashing his fist into the middle of Dottie’s magnificent creation.

  33

  It was not Death, for I stood up,

  And all the Dead, lie down—

  It was not Night, for all the Bells

  Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

  Harvey Kloop had escaped at last. Yesterday, with his car barreling down Route 9, weaving a little with the weight of the boat-trailer behind it, he had felt an impulse to look back over his shoulder for possible pursuit, for some messenger calling him back to his duties, for Eunice Jane tearing after him in her little Honda, beeping and waving her arm out the window.

  But no one had followed to summon him home. Now, out on the water, chugging northward past Mount Zion, Harvey could feel all the tension in his body give way. At the place where the east branch of Fever Brook entered the reservoir, he turned off the outboard and sat for a minute, gazing around and smiling in the bliss Of being at last in the place he had dreamed about all winter long. Last night he had set up his little tent in the state forest at Petersham and stretched out in his sleeping bag, rejoicing in the distance he had put between himself and his wife, with all her punishing little eccentricities and her perpetual harping on Emily Dickinson. “The hell with Emily Dickinson,” Harvey murmured happily to himself as he drifted off to sleep.

  And this morning, waking up at dawn, he had muttered it again—“The hell with Emily Dickinson!” And then he had turned over luxuriously, deciding not to get up early after all.

  He had slept till noon.

  Now, floating close to the shore in the brilliant sunlight, admiring the translucent tassels suspended from the oak trees and the separate puffs of needles on the white pines, Harvey lifted his head and shouted, “THE HELL WITH EMILY DICKINSON!”

  The words drifted across the water and echoed from the shore and the surrounding hills. Another fisherman was putt-putting in the direction of the pass beyond Mount Zion. He looked up and waved his Day-Glo orange hat in greeting, and the gentle wash from his stern rocked Harvey’s boat.

  For a while Harvey just sat there, grinning, studying the shore, looking for some sign of, animal life, a deer coming down to drink, a wildcat in a tree, an eagle lifting from a topmost branch. Someday, if he lived long enough, he might even chance to see that creature he was so curious about, a mountain lion—the beast the old settlers had called a catamount—and hear its legendary scream. But now there was nothing moving in the undergrowth, not even a bird hopping from branch to branch. The only sign of life was a jet going over, taking off from Westover Air Force Base, ripping the sky into halves like someone tearing a wide blue piece of cloth.

  Harvey turned his attention to the water below the boat. Down there he could make out poising shapes—largemouth bass, decided Harvey. He had been hoping for lake trout, here in the cold water flowing out of Fever Brook.

  The shallow water was wonderfully clear. Squinting, Harvey could see the bottom. There was a dark strip there—no, two dark strips with a lighter strip between. Immediately he knew what they meant, and he was charmed. The dark strips were the double track of a road, one of the old roads that had run through the Swift River Valley in the days before the dam was built, before the water had risen in the valley to drown the towns of Greenwich and Enfield and Prescott and Dana and make islands out of Mount Zion and Mount Pomeroy and Mount Lizzie. Harvey looked up curiously at the shore. Yes, there on the point he could detect a trace of the old road, coming abruptly to an end at the water’s edge. Well, it was all a long time ago now. Forty years or more, wasn’t it? No, fifty. More like fifty.

  Harvey got to work preparing his tackle. Yesterday he had stopped at a bait shop along Greenwich Road for a jar of salmon eggs. Now, lifting his rod, he cast his line near the boat and watched the fluorescent eggs descend over the wheel tracks of the old road. He smiled. It seemed so queer that fish should be darting there now instead of birds, ten feet above the place where horses and wagons had once traveled with loads of hay, and tin lizzies had sputtered along on their way to Hardwick, and probably even Chryslers and Pontiacs in the streamlined nineteen-thirties.

  Soon Harvey stopped reeling out his line. Hunched contentedly in the stern, he leaned a little to one side to gaze down into the shimmering amber depths. In his mind’s eye he could imagine the old towns as they had once been, with their sunlit fields of white rye straw for the making of bonnets, their farmhouses and mills and box factories, their charcoal kilns and schools, and all the other buildings that had once housed a living population of three thousand souls.

/>   Romantically, Harvey stared down over the side of the boat, letting his imagination rip, until he could almost see the lineaments of one of the old frame buildings wobbling under the water below him—a church, perhaps, with salmon passing in and out of the windows, and schools of silver smelt flashing into the door to nibble the hair of the ghostly sexton as he pulled down, down, down with his skeleton fingers on the slimy rope of the bell in the steeple to summon the long-dead flock. And then they would come floating along the road, those old parishioners, men and women with hollow eyes, their Sunday clothes spreading behind them in the watery depths. There now, hear the bell ring—muffled but penetrating—bong, bong, bong—farther down, out there in deep water, the drowned bell in the drowned steeple!

  With a start, Harvey sat up. A bell? What bell? There was no church underwater anymore, there was no steeple, there was no bell. All the villages had been destroyed! There was nothing left but stone foundations and cellar holes. The people had moved away. Even the dead bodies in the cemeteries had been dug up and reburied somewhere else.

  Why then was there a deep watery ringing that tingled into Harvey’s finger ends, a reverberating hum that rattled the metal sides of his boat, a hollow jangling that tightened the very scalp under his duckbilled hat? Clutching his rod with one hand and the gunwale with the other, Harvey leaned over as far as he dared, and peered down at the old road on the bottom of the reservoir, twenty feet below. How could a bell be tolling mournfully, down there under the water?

  Then something caught Harvey’s eye, something bright, something white, a columnar white shape moving along the road. He caught his breath in horror. It was a woman! A woman was walking along the road under the water! A woman in an old-fashioned dress, a white old-fashioned dress, a woman with red hair flowing out behind her in a filmy torrent. Jesus God, it was Emily Dickinson.

  A terrible shivering seized Harvey Kloop as the ringing grew louder, clashing sonorously, bongety-bongety-bong, as though the church were directly below him, as though the bottom of the boat were about to be punctured by the invisible steeple. And then Emily Dickinson lifted her great dark eyes to look up at Harvey, and now—dear God—she was lifting her arm, pallid and limp in its white sleeve, and now—HOLY MONKEY EYES—she was waving at Harvey! She was waving at him with the slow, languorous motion of the dead!

  Harvey nearly lost consciousness. His hundred-and-fifty-dollar Fenwick rod slipped from his lifeless fingers and splashed overboard, carrying with it his forty-dollar Pflueger reel and his twelve-dollar lead-core line and his five-dollar Dave-Davis rig. But then, taking hold of himself, Harvey slammed the throttle to full speed and yanked on the starting rope. After a couple of false sputters and misfires, the engine caught and the boat zoomed away from Emily Dickinson, racing at full speed in the direction of the boat landing, skipping up and slamming down on the surface of the water, in Harvey’s desperate eagerness to get away from the outlet of Fever Brook and the old underwater road and the apparition of the woman who had left the land of the living so long ago, a hundred years ago, a hundred years ago today, and the bell that was ringing her death knell.

  The waters chased him as he fled,

  Not daring look behind;

  A billow whispered in his Ear,

  “Come home with me, my friend …”

  34

  What triple Lenses burn upon

  The Escapade from God—

  The flowers were still blooming in Emily Dickinson’s garden, the grass was still soft and green underfoot, the trees cast down the same glowing shade. But the party was over. The Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium had come to an end. Reluctantly, in knots and bunches, people began to leave.

  Peter Wiggins was ready to go. He had accomplished his mission. He hovered at Tilly’s elbow, saying good-bye, feeling a vested interest in Tilly, and in Tilly’s old house on Market Hill Road, and especially in Tilly’s attic, where his forged photograph was now tucked away in a dusty cardboard box, almost at the front of the wedged contents, sticking up invitingly from all the rest.

  Tilly was polite, but her attention was elsewhere. She was keeping an eye on Elvis, who was toddling around on the grass. “Where do you suppose his mother is?” said Tilly, looking at her watch. “She was supposed to be here at one o’clock. Where can she be?”

  “Why don’t I drive you home again?” said Peter, smiling at Tilly like the old, old friend he felt himself to be. “After all, now that I know the way …?”

  So once again Peter Wiggins drove Tilly Porch and Elvis Buffington back to Market Hill Road.

  “Now don’t forget what I told you,” he said roguishly as Tilly lifted a sleepy Elvis out of the car. “Just get right up there in that attic and go through all those old boxes of papers. Promise me?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Tilly. “I promise. I might as well start this very afternoon while Elvis takes a nap.”

  But even Peter could hardly believe his good fortune when Owen Kraznik came running out the back door of the Homestead at the sound of his returning car, with the announcement that another picture had turned up.

  “Another picture like mine?” Peter was flabbergasted.

  “Yes, more or less. But …”

  Already? Peter grinned with satisfaction. Tilly must have galloped up the attic stairs two at a time and homed in on the right box and reached in to find his picture like Jack Horner pulling out a plum from his Christmas pie. Good for Tilly. “No kidding!” Peter beamed up at Owen. “Isn’t that great!”

  Owen didn’t look happy. “Here, I wrote it all down. Telephone call just now.”

  What a magnificent woman, that Tilly Porch! Peter took the scrap of paper and glanced at it. The words blurred in front of his eyes. Owen’s handwriting was almost illegible.

  “You see, there was an inscription on the back,” said Owen sadly. “Of course, it may not be genuine.”

  “Oh, I feel sure it’s genuine,” babbled Peter, leaning out of the car window, his glasses flashing with mad dancing lights. “I mean it just sounds so right, don’t you think? Emily don’t like this much. How terribly interesting. No signature, I gather? I can hardly wait to get my hands on it. I want to study the handwriting.” Jumping out, Peter slammed the door of the car. He was dizzy with triumph. Once again everything in the world was shining with his good fortune, the needles of the hemlock tree, the sharp petals of the magnolia blossoms in the shrubbery, the sparkling windows of the garage. “‘Emily don’t like this much.’ Well, good! That would explain why the picture disappeared, don’t you see? Emily didn’t like it. How perfectly fascinating.”

  Owen was puzzled. “But that’s not what it says.” He took his note back from Peter. “See here, it says, ‘Mother before we moved to Topeka.’”

  Peter gasped. “It says what?”

  Pointing his finger at the words, Owen read them again. “‘Mother before we moved to Topeka.’ That’s all. It was written on the back. That’s what the woman said on the phone.”

  “But Tilly wouldn’t—” Peter caught himself. “It can’t be. It just can’t be the same picture. It’s some other picture.”

  “Well, this woman claims it’s the same one. She says she saw your slide lecture. A woman named Helen Gaunt. Somebody put the picture in her mailbox with a note asking her to tell me. She didn’t look in her mailbox until just now, she said, when she got home from the picnic.”

  “But it’s—it’s impossible.” Peter flapped his hands. The sense of blessing in the sunlight had disappeared. The day had become hard and shrewd and glittering. “I’ll bet it’s a—a forgery. It must be.” Peter gulped with dismay as the realization smote him that he had made the thing worse. He had turned an unfortunate situation into a disaster. He had given the whole thing away. He had spoken too soon. He had recited the inscription on the back of his own precious forgery. He had spoken the name of Tilly Porch. Too soon, too soon!

  Owen turned away, distracted by the ring of the telephone. Peter followed him into the house
slowly, dragging his feet, hardly able to walk. As Owen picked up the phone in the kitchen, Peter leaned weakly against the doorframe and looked on, dizzy with regret.

  “Oh, Tilly, hello there,” said Owen.

  Tilly. Tilly Porch? Peter closed his eyes and prayed that Tilly had not rushed up to the attic, that she had not found his picture in the cardboard box. But his prayer was in vain.

  “A picture?” said Owen. “You found a copy of Peter’s picture?”

  At the other end of the line Tilly was all excited. “Peter just dropped me off, you see, Owen, and then I went right up attic the way he told me to, and the first thing I laid my hands on was this old photograph. I mean, it’s the same one. It’s another copy of Peter’s photograph of Emily Dickinson. And listen to this, Owen. There’s writing on the back. Wait till you hear.”

  Owen had a premonition. He could feel it coming. With his back to Peter Wiggins he stared at the refrigerator and mouthed the words to himself as Tilly pronounced them—“Emily don’t like this much.” Behind Owen’s back Peter Wiggins was undergoing a transformation. From now on Professor Peter Wiggins of the University of Central Arizona was not simply a lame duck, he was a dead one, a dead, dead duck. Oh, the poor bastard.

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” said Tilly. “You know, Owen, I could swear I’d been through that box before. You’d think I would have noticed it. But I never did. What do you think of that?”

  Owen knew precisely what to think of it, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud in front of Peter.

  “He’s not back yet?” said Tilly. “I’m dying to tell him.”

  Owen hesitated. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, have him call me right away. I know he’ll be so pleased.”

  “Of course.” Owen hung up slowly, and stood for a moment longer with his back to Peter. The air in the Dickinson kitchen was thick and sickening with mutual understanding. Good God, what should Owen do now? Well, he would have to speak up. He would have to ask Peter for the truth. And the truth would be wretched and “destructive.” And then, somehow or other, Owen would have to find a way to be kind.