Woodsburner Page 3

  It is a perfect day for walking. Eliot instructed Silas Greene, his driver, to deposit him on the Cambridge Turnpike so that he might walk the remaining mile to Concord. He had put on his sturdy boots that morning in the expectation that he might be seized by a notion to wander. Few people use the turnpike nowadays, even though the toll has been suspended. Most prefer the less hilly Boston Road, and this is precisely why Eliot insisted that Silas take the turnpike. He awoke this morning craving solitude. It has not rained since February, and Eliot presumed, correctly, that the roads—usually impassable stretches of mud this time of year—would be hard and dusty, in excellent condition for walking.

  Eliot has not packed the valise he usually brings along on overnight business. Today he comes prepared to follow his impulses; he carries a simple bundle, tied up in a tattered plaid blanket that he has knotted around the end of a long stick. Simplicity is the key. He resumes walking down the center of the road with an exaggerated stride. The bundle on the stick bounces on his shoulder, an incongruous accompaniment to his finely tailored blue coat and bright yellow vest. He instructed Silas to return to Boston and inform Mrs. Calvert that her husband has decided to spend the night in Concord. Eliot revels in the near-spontaneity of his decision. Surely Margaret would understand that the few diversions available in rustic Concord are of the most innocent sort. Besides, Eliot is not a man to indulge in reckless entertainments. In fact, the only indulgence he ever seeks these days (though he could never confess it to Margaret) is simply to be left alone.

  Eliot follows the Cambridge Turnpike to the Lexington Road, where the wheel ruts of muddier days form faults and ridges that he negotiates with some difficulty. He inhales the tang of rich earth, envisions a bucolic tableau: sturdy men plowing fields, casting seeds, studying the open sky. Boston is the finest city in America, but its streets are so plagued by carriages and trolleys and other horse-drawn conveyances that all one ever smells there is the accumulated dung of transportation. City officials have tried numerous solutions, but they never do more than move the great stinking piles from one side of the street to the other. In Boston, one can no longer smell the earth buried beneath the city. The fresh air of Concord invigorates him. And Eliot finds something more in it today, a soft smell of burning wood so distinct he can practically hear the crackling embers.

  Perhaps that is why he is thinking of autumn. There is no reason that the scent of burning wood should not just as well make him think of winter, or of Christmas, or even of a cool New En gland summer evening, but there is no logic to how the mind answers the senses. He used to consider autumn the most delightful time of year, ripe with the promise of all the things yet to be done. Without the oppressive heat of summer to slow one's hand, grand accomplishments used to feel truly within reach during that magical season. At least that was how he felt as a young man, before dreary poets taught him to regard autumn as the last flush of summer, a harbinger of the season of cold death. Poets, he thinks, are intent on ruining everything. Playwrights, on the other hand, know how to render palatable life's most harrowing moments. A stage play with an unhappy ending can lead one to a much needed catharsis, whereas an unhappy poem simply leaves one, well, unhappy. Far better to write plays, he thinks.

  Eliot's last trip to Concord occurred five months earlier, when he answered an invitation to a dinner commemorating issue no. XIV of The Dial, that strange and unprofitable transcendentalist magazine, the publishers of which—Mr. Brown and Mr. Little—had obliged every notable bookseller in New England to acknowledge as the pinnacle of American thought. Eliot had sometimes thought The Dial's poetry passable, but he found the philosophical essays—repetitive ruminations on the soul's infinitude, its immanence in nature, etc., etc., etc.—impossible to digest. That was what he told the other booksellers who attended the dinner. Each man at the table had, in turn, been compelled to stand and offer a few words of admiration for the magazine. Eliot thought he set himself apart with his witty contribution: “I can only say, with deep regret, that the contents of The Dial, unlike this evening's marvelous repast, have often proven quite indigestible.” Unfortunately, the other diners were of a humorless sort and did not give his clever quip the appreciation it deserved. As Eliot now recalls, the food and drink truly were the only memorable aspects of the evening.

  Eliot had agreed to attend the dinner solely for the purpose of meeting The Dial's distinguished editor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. To Eliot's great disappointment, however, Mr. Emerson was absent, as were the magazine's other principal architects, Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. Miss Fuller was said to be out in the Western territories, preaching women's rights on the frontier, and Mr. Parker was pursuing philosophical abstractions somewhere in England. It was no wonder the magazine ceased shortly thereafter. Eliot's disappointment in the evening deepened when he learned that most of the other guests in attendance were also booksellers. The conversation proved more business than literary, and Eliot drank more than was his custom.

  So that explains it, Eliot thinks, savoring the Concord air as he negotiates the humps and pits in the road. The night of the dinner had been filled with the heavy musk of harvest. Obviously that is why he is now thinking of autumn, of apple cider, mulled wine, falling leaves, and great stacks of pale yellow squash and bright orange pumpkins.

  Eliot stops again in mid-stride, though this time he nearly trips as he braces himself against the slap of memory. Pumpkins! He had almost forgotten the appalling sight. He sorts through the foggy recollections of that night, a process that requires him to remain still as his mind lurches backward. He removes his spectacles, twirls the rectangles of glass in one hand and rubs his eyes with the other, his legs wide in the middle of the road, each foot planted on the high crest of a wheel rut.

  The memory comes back to him now in full. He had decided to return home directly after the disappointing dinner. Silas had taken ill, so Eliot had driven himself, but he lost his way looking for the turnpike in the gray moonlight. The grog had apparently muddled his sense of direction, though Eliot was certain that he had not consumed enough to invent so gross a vision as what he witnessed from his perch atop the carriage. Eliot recalls the distasteful details one by one, assembling the scene like a stagehand: a dark sky, bright fringed clouds half shrouding a full moon, a field of ripe pumpkins, and the grunting brute, a pale, white-haired Caliban, hunched forward over a large gourd, trousers at his ankles—an onanist in the pumpkin patch, befouling the fruits of autumn. What could one expect this far from the civilizing influence of Boston? Eliot is appalled anew by the memory. There is no shortage of perversions in the city, he thinks, but at least in Boston men pursue their unsavory penchants with discretion, and men know well the places to avoid should they prefer not to witness such pursuits.

  Eliot returns his spectacles to his nose, wraps the wires behind his ears, and shakes off the memory. He will not allow the troubling image to interfere with the purpose of his current visit. Another twenty minutes of walking brings him to the edge of Concord. He passes a school set back from the road, and farther on he sees homes with wide front porches, pitched roofs, shuttered windows overgrown with ivy, white picket fences. The Lexington Road takes him past the First Unitarian Church into the center of town, and before he reaches the courthouse on the square he turns left onto Mill Dam Street and walks past both the mill and the dam. A team of four oxen pulling a heavy cartload of timber enters the square and turns onto the Boston Road. The wearied driver does not bother to lift his eyes from the reins. Mill Dam becomes Main Street; white clapboard houses give way to a long block of redbrick storefronts.

  Eliot slows his pace. People saunter about at the edges of the dirt road, tipping hats, nodding pleasantly. The sudden blast of a horn sends him scurrying aside to allow the Boston stagecoach to pass. Concord is not so bustling as Boston, but it is a theater of business nonetheless, as the dust and rattle of passing wagons seem to insist. He follows Main Street to the address he has been given, strolling beneath the painte
d wooden signs that hang above a variety of shops: “Pierces Harnesses;” “Brown's Clothing Co.;” “Mann's Boots and Rubbers;” “John Parkhurst—Druggist Specializing in Pure Wines and Liquor for Medicinal Purposes.” There are more taverns than he expected—and at their doors a steady traffic of tradesmen, teamsters, and the Irish laborers newly arrived to complete the rail line to Fitchburg. Here, Eliot thinks, a man might satisfy his every want, and discover a few new ones.

  He surveys the storefronts along Concord's Main Street, and he is pleased to confirm that there is no bookseller on the block.

  In Boston, the business of bookselling is ever-present, a miasma of commerce easily mistaken for culture. Eliot never envisioned a livelihood grounded in ledgers, and lately he has grown weary of the relentless urgency of buying and selling. Boston publishers are forever at his heels, inconstant curs, ingratiating one minute and vicious the next; no sooner are they finished with the collection of one debt than they are encouraging him to incur new ones. In the past week alone, Eliot paid bills and placed orders with Crocker & Brewster, Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, Saxton & Kelt, Strong, Sherburne & Co., and Jenks & Palmer. The upper end of Washington Street is crammed with publishing houses, twenty or more, and though many have shops of their own, their agents endlessly distribute flyers and notices and catalogues, proffering their newest books to other shop owners, boasting improved editions, promising discounts and bulk pricing and generous terms of credit. And near the top of this clamoring row, where Washington Street stumbles past School Street, William Davis Ticknor sits confidently on his publishing throne above the Old Corner Bookstore as if he were king.

  Eliot wonders if Ticknor will ever understand that he is in no small way the reason for this visit to Concord today. As far as Eliot is concerned, the thriving Old Corner Bookstore should really be his, and not Ticknor's. Sooner or later, Eliot is certain, he would have been made a partner in the firm of Carter, Hendee & Co. if not for Ticknor—a man with little experience in the world of books—who came along and snatched up the business: shop, stock, and publishing house. The great injustice Eliot suffered has all the elements of a fine melodrama—a tragic tale of promise withheld, a moral for the common working man—and Eliot would happily write it himself were it not for fear of the unseemly vitriol that would surely spew from his pen. Eliot has decided instead that if he cannot compete with Ticknor in Boston he will take the competition elsewhere. Here, in Concord, out from under Ticknor's shadow, he has good reason to hope that a second bookshop might finally purchase him the liberty he has so long sought.

  Walking down Main Street, Eliot passes the Shakespeare Hotel, where he will spend the night; he passes Concord's carriage factory, a dry-goods store, a haberdashery, and pauses in front of a jeweler's window, where gold and silver watch fobs hang from delicate chains. It amazes him, the effort people expend in creating objects for the sole purpose of ornamenting other objects. Watch fobs, hat pins, tie tacks, snuffboxes, cigar cases, opera-glass chains, wallets, reticules, the whole lot of things that people use to coddle their other things. He has seen men with a half-dozen fobs—commemorating everything from political campaigns to wedding anniversaries—dangling from their watch chains like military medals, as if by decorating themselves these men might convince others of the fullness of their lives.

  One of the fobs on display in the shop window is cast in the image of an open book roughly the size of a silver eagle dollar. It sits next to a campaign fob bearing the likeness of the unfortunate William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe,” whose presidential campaign three and a half years earlier proved more successful than the four-hour inaugural speech he delivered to the cold, wet crowd gathered on the Capitol grounds beneath a raging snowstorm. As a result of the infamous speech, longer than any in presidential history, Harrison fell victim to a severe ague, which sent him directly from the inaugural podium to an early grave and catapulted the uninspiring vice president, John Tyler, into the highest office of the land. After months of hearing campaign slogans for “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” the country now had only Tyler.

  Eliot has read editorials claiming that President Tyler's vehement support of states' rights during the past three years has deepened the rift between the Northern and the Southern states, but Eliot does not concern himself with such matters. As a man dedicated to the art of the written word, he believes that he needs to rise above the quotidian, to aspire to something more universal than the time-bound debates of politicians and abolitionists.

  Eliot stares at the fobs on display and fingers the watch chain drooping naked between his buttonhole and his waistcoat pocket. He does not think the book-shaped fob is large enough to hold the inscription that appears on the recently amended sign above his Boston storefront: “Eliot R. Calvert, Purveyor of Fine Books, Maps of Impeccable Quality, Stationery and Writing Supplies, Toy Books, Games, Apparatus for Schools.” There are more items listed on the sign, now, than there were when he first opened his shop a decade earlier. The last part of the list, in particular, depressed him. He hated the fact that he desperately needed the measly profits from primers and pocket maps and copybooks and writing papers and cheap nibs. No one had warned him that a bookseller is little more than a well-read hardware salesman. The sign above Eliot's shop expanded over the years, advertising an increasingly varied stock, but it still does not, of course, mention the other, highly profitable materials that patrons might also acquire by arrangement. Discretion Assured. He has considered simplifying the sign, now that he is about to open a new location. “Calvert Books—Boston, Concord, and Beyond.” That would easily fit on the fob. Perhaps just “Calvert Books” would suffice. He pictures the fob hanging from his chain, a counterweight to the gold watch he consults with dramatic flair whenever one of the Washington Street publishers refuses to settle on a reasonable price.

  A small paper tag hangs from the fob in the window. Eliot stoops, but the tag is facedown. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the proprietor watching him. If he wants to learn the price, he will have to enter the shop. Eliot knows the tricks shopkeepers employ to lure a customer across the threshold, the necessary prelude to getting said customer to draw forth his purse; he has used such ploys many times himself. Eliot straightens and turns to leave, but he catches his reflection in the window, the bright flash of his spectacles, and stops to study it. His face has changed considerably over the years, but the ambition is still there, tucked away behind the well-fed softness of middle age. His once sharp jaw is now buried under an extra layer of flesh, but these changes do not worry him. The engravings of the great tragedians in his bookshop show the same changes. His chest is still sound as an oak barrel, even if his shoulders have begun to slump forward under the invisible burdens that no man can hope to escape. His hair is still thick and dark, and, though his vision is not what it once was, the blue of his eyes suffers none of the cloudiness that afflicts some of his best customers, who no doubt spend too many nights sighing over candlelit pages. Eliot gives his reflection a nod of approval. Happy is the man, he thinks, whose countenance is reflected thus.

  Eliot turns from the window, scribbling this last thought in his expensive pocket memorandum. If he loiters any longer at the window, he knows he will not be able to resist the temptation to enter the shop and examine the fob more closely, discuss its craftsmanship with the jeweler, feel its heft, dangle it from his own watch chain experimentally. Eliot walks on past other storefronts, taking note of the goods available and the size and lettering of the signs hanging above. He nods politely at a young couple strolling past. He observes the cut of the man's clothes, hopelessly out of fashion, and he can tell that the woman's jacket is too thin for such a chilly day, but with no parade of children behind them the young man walks tall, shoulders back, and the young woman clings weightlessly to his arm. The day is theirs to use as they wish, the world wide open to them to explore or ignore as they see fit.

  Eliot shakes his head. He has no reason to feel ashamed of such thoughts, ha
s he? There are men who would run from the duties that he accepts without complaint. He sees these fugitives every day on the streets of Boston, nameless men at easels mixing watery paints with bristly nubbins, skinny young men outside dark-windowed taverns, writing on scraps of paper, muttering in rhyme, veterans of forgotten jobs strung together to support their stubborn devotion to fiddle or flute, penniless old men who refuse to abandon the fruitless dreams of their youth. Yet sometimes, beneath his contempt, Eliot wonders how it would be to switch places with one of them for a day, to be a man whose sole purpose in rising from bed was to make manifest the airy shapes that populated his imagination.

  And that is the real reason for his coming to Concord, is it not? If all goes as planned, the additional income from the new bookshop will afford him that which he covets most of all: time. He pulls a card from his coat pocket and checks the name of the man he has come to meet. It distresses him to think that his lot could be bound to such a person, but the world is indeed a vast stage with a great variety of players. In business, such liaisons are regrettable but necessary. If his new bookshop succeeds, he will hire another clerk. As the owner of two bookstores, he could not possibly be expected to involve himself in the daily details of receipts and ledgers, and he might even give over management of both shops to a trusted employee for one, or two, or even three days a week. Three days in which to sit and work on his plays! Given such a luxury, surely he might at last finish his most recent play, The House of Many Windows. The manager of the Boston Museum, Moses Kimball, has all but agreed to produce it and has encouraged Eliot to complete the manuscript, but Eliot thus far has found himself at an impasse. He needs time to revise. And there are financial matters to consider: the play will conclude with a great conflagration, an unheard-of and expensive spectacle. In the third act, an entire house will be burned to the ground, right before the audience. Moses Kimball made the suggestion himself, but there remains the question of cost. There is always the question of cost.