Thoreau in Love (7 page)

For the rest of that day, Henry promenaded the deck, trying to keep his legs in shape, sat reading in the crook of the bow, watched gulls and osprey and other sea birds dive into the water and rise with fish in their beaks, and hoped to see Ben, who finally climbed out of the forward hatch just before sunset, bearing covered pots he had to get to the captain’s cabin. During supper, every time Henry set his gaze on Ben, Ben flushed and diverted his eyes. Later that evening, most of the crew gathered around the foot of the main mast, telling tales. Henry and Susan joined them. And though Henry was disappointed not to see Ben, he marveled at how relaxed the men were with one another, some leaning back to back, others laying their heads in other’s laps. Then Ben appeared, and a cheer went up for him to sing “Tom Bowline.”

Ben said, “I don’t feel like singing tonight.” There was a murmur of disappointment, then Henry called out, “Please sing.” Ben looked at him sharply, and Henry scrunched his shoulders and bent his head to the side in a supplicant way, and Ben smiled and said, “I guess if a passenger insists, I have no choice.” In a lovely tenor voice, he sang:

“Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowline,

The darling of our crew;

No more he’ll hear the tempest howlin’
,

For death has broached him to
.

His form was of the manliest beauty
,

His heart was kind and soft;

Faithful below he did his duty
,

But now he’s gone aloft
.

“Tom never from his word departed
,

His virtues were so rare;

His friends were many and true-hearted
,

His Poll was kind and fair:

And then he’d sing so blithe and jolly
,

Ah, many’s the time and oft!

But mirth is turned to melancholy
,

For Tom has gone aloft
.

“Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather
,

When He who all commands
,

Shall give, to call life’s crew together
,

The word to pipe all hands
.

Thus death, who kings—and tars—dispatches
,

In vain Tom’s life has doffed;

For though his body’s under hatches
,

His soul is gone aloft.”

As Ben sang, Henry understood why men spent their lives at sea. The utter peacefulness, the awesome night sky, the camaraderie. No worries about where to lay your head or what you’ll eat. It seemed Ben sang only to Henry. And then he sat by him, shoulder to shoulder, which, because so many others were sitting that way, Henry enjoyed. Later, Ben and Henry crowded into the crook of the bow, and after they were settled, Ben asked, “What does your father do?”

“Not much,” said Henry, feeling a bit embarrassed, but wanting to tell Ben the rude truth. “He tried different things, but nothing worked out. Now he sits in his room making pencils.”

“Pencils? Those are expensive.”

“The German ones are. The English ones too. He made a business in it for a while, but now they make them by machine, right in Boston. He still makes them by hand, but it takes him so long to produce each one, it’s hardly worth it. He doesn’t really make any money, I don’t think. My mother supports the family. She takes in boarders.”

“You live at home?”

“I did until yesterday.”

“How old are you?”

Henry flushed, choked out, “Twenty-five.”

“I don’t mean to embarrass you. I thought only girls live at home that long. Now I made it worse, didn’t I? Though I’m just sixteen, I don’t ever want to live home again.”

“Why is that?”

“Just don’t. . . . I want to see the world. All the places I’ve read about. You like to read too, don’t you?”

“I love reading, and looking at maps. That’s how I know where Block Island is.”

“You’re the only landlubber I’ve met who even heard of Block Island, much less knew where it was. . . . I’m reading through the books in Skipper’s cabin. I never seen him read a one. Tell the truth, I don’t know he can read, not much anyway. I just finished
Two Years Before the Mast
, but
The Leatherstocking Tales
, they’re my favorites. I want to go to Indian country. Have you ever been to Indian country?”

“You mean, out west?”

“Everything’s west of here, Henry,” said Ben in smiling mockery. “But yes, I want to go west. I want to see the Mississippi. The Plains. The Oregon Trail. I’d like to experience everything. Maybe that’s from growing up on an island. For me, just seeing the mainland was exciting. Now I’ve been on a ship. I’ve seen New York, Boston. Portland, Savannah. Have you ever seen ?”

“Slaves? No. Have you?”

“Just from the ship. But I want to see slavery up close. I want to see everything.”

“Why would you want to see slavery up close?”

“Just to see who’s right.”

“I can imagine how horrible slavery is.”

“Can you really? I hear about it, but I can’t really imagine it. That’s the way I am with everything. On Block Island, I watched hundreds, no, thousands of ships sailing the sea, but until I came on
Dahlia
, I didn’t really know what it was like. I tried to imagine it, but I had no idea.”

“You’d never been on a boat? Even a little one?”

“Little boats all the time, my father made me, but I always got seasick. I think it was my father made me seasick. Haven’t got sick once on here.”

“What does your father do?”

“My father? He had a boatyard, made beautiful boats. Pretty much everyone on the island worked for him at the boatyard. Fishermen quit fishing, farmers quit farming. But then they ran out of trees.”

“Ran out of trees? What are you talking about? You don’t run out of trees. You’re pulling my leg.”

“I’m not. They cut all the trees to build boats. All that’s left are stumps.”

“Is this true?”

“Cross my heart and swear to die. But when I was little, Block Island had trees everywhere. Hickory, chestnut, maple, elm. Hills of cedar. My mother told me their names. Then they cut them all down to build the boats, and that was that. No more trees, no more boatbuilding. That’s when everyone started burning peat.”

“You mean to say there are no trees left on Block Island?”

“Bushes and stumps. Prickers and stumps. You’ve never seen so many stumps.”

Henry was still trying to take in the concept when Ben, apparently done with the subject, said, “Why did you live at home for so long?”

“I was trying an experiment. I wanted to see if I could live without working, if I could live without money.”

“Live without money? You can’t do that.”

“I did it.”

“But you lived with your parents.”

“Plenty of people live with their parents and work.”

“But aren’t you going to New York to work?”

“To be a tutor.”

“So your experiment failed.”

“No it didn’t fail.”

“But now you’re going to work.”

“I want to be on my own, away from Concord. I want to live my own life.”

“Who’s life were you living?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“I’m interested. There’s something about you, Henry David Thoreau.”

“You remembered my name.”

“Of course I remembered your name. I remember everything about you. Your eyes: sometimes they’re gray and sometimes they’re silver, like beautifully polished silver.”

Henry was taken aback that Ben had studied his eyes, without his even noticing. Ben said, “Look,” and pointed to what looked like a ridge with dim lights scattered across it. “That’s Chatham. We’ll be coming on Monomoy soon. Then we’ll be heading west.”

“Finally.”

“Yes, finally. You know what I just thought?”

“What?” said Henry, wanting to know Ben’s every thought.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever heard doesn’t go to church. Even at sea on a Sunday, someone says prayers. Even my father went to church.”

“I think religion is what’s wrong with this country.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Tell me about the people who go to church. Do they truly live by Christ’s teachings? ‘Do unto others.’ How many of them actually live by those principles? Do they even know what the words mean, or are they just spouting what someone told them to say? They think if they go to church every week, listen to their preacher, they’re living Christian lives. And they feel free to condemn anyone who doesn’t live the way they do. Or take up their faith. But do you know how many religions there are in the world? Hundreds! Maybe thousands, and every one of them believes
it
is the one true religion. Some of them have been around for hundreds of years before Christianity. Hinduism. Buddhism.”

“You feel very strongly about this, don’t you?”

“I do. And the worst of it is when those Christians condescend to pray for you, as if their prayers make any difference. I despise the hypocrisy, the insincerity, the— If God is everywhere, then isn’t everything really and truly God himself? This handful of air. It’s God. You’re God.”

“Henry, I’m not—”

“But maybe we’re all God. And if we are all God, if everything is God, the water, the air, the fish, why do we have to go to church to worship God?”

“Because that’s what people do. All right, you got me. I never gave it much thought before. But I enjoy church. Everyone getting together. I love the Psalms. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in green pastures.’ ”

Henry joined him. “ ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in paths of righteousness. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’ You see? I know it too. Some of the psalms are lovely.”

“I think I get what you’re saying. Like when the minister is talking about being good Christians and my father’s sitting there all innocent, listening like he didn’t hold my mother under the water the night before.”

“Hold your mother under the water?”

“He was trying to drown her. If Fitz and I didn’t jump him, I think he would have. And then he nearly did drown Fitz.”

Henry was aghast. He’d read about killings, one just outside Concord, but no one he knew had ever spoken so intimately about such violence. What kind of a family did Ben come from?

“Lord,” said Ben, his voice cracking. “You talk about forgetting, like your dream? I’d forgot all about my father doing that to my mother, and to Fitz.”

Henry wanted to put his arm around Ben to comfort him, but he didn’t dare. Then Ben said plaintively, “Hold me.”

“No one can see, can they?”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“No, yes, I don’t know.” Henry lifted his arm and Ben snuggled close. They sat like that for several minutes, Henry’s mind wandering from the image of Ben’s father trying to drown his wife to the beauty of the night to the land they were leaving behind to the joy of sitting with his arm around Ben. Finally, he felt a need to say what he’d been thinking the whole time they’d been sitting. “Were you angry at me this morning?”

“No. A little. I guess it hurt when you pushed my hand from your shoulder.”

“I didn’t push it. I just moved so it ... fell.” Henry grimaced, then said, “You know what they’d think if they saw.”

“It was just my hand on your shoulder. And who cares what they think.”

“I guess I don’t want Mrs. Emerson to see.” And then, feeling a fool, Henry said, “There isn’t a single tree on Block Island?”

“Only stumps,” said Ben, walking two fingers across Henry’s thigh. “Thick stumps. Thin stumps. Ragged stumps. Sawed stumps. Hills and hills of stumps.”

“No one can see us here, can they?”

“No one can see us. What was it like growing up in Concord?”

“I didn’t actually grow up in Concord. I was born there, at my grandmother’s house, but when I was young we were always moving because we were so poor.” Ben’s fingers came to rest on Henry’s knee, and Henry tried to relax. “It was difficult trying to make new friends everyplace we moved. That’s why John and I stuck together. Why he protected me.”

Henry gulped, excited to be sitting with his arm around Ben, and Ben’s hand on his thigh. “Grammy’s house in Concord was home for me. Do you know that smell? Grammy’s had the smell of home.”

As they sat shadowed in the crook where they could see but not be seen, Henry told Ben more about John. How he kept a book of birds and plants and trees, and if he saw a bird he wanted to look at, he’d put out worms to coax it and sit very still. How it usually worked. “John had a way with birds and insects and dogs and horses. They did what he wanted. We used to go exploring, as if we were Indians.” Henry had never spoken about his youth like this to anyone. He was happily in thought when, out of nowhere, Ben said, “I heard you last night, after we doused the light.”

Henry choked on his saliva, coughed.

Ben grinned devilishly, then, as if it were the most natural change of subject, he said, “I’ll have to try not going to church.” They sat in silence, in their own worlds, until Ben said, “Can we go in?”

Again they snuck into Henry’s cabin, taking the lighted lamp from the hallway, and closed the door. They sat on Henry’s bunk, facing each other. Smiling, Ben whispered, “I don’t know what it is about you, but there’s something.”

“There’s something about you too. I wish you had a sister.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’d like to marry a girl who’s just like you.”

With the disdain of a Concord churchwoman, Ben said, “That is so stupid.”

Hurt, Henry said, “Why stupid?”

“Like getting engaged to Ellen so you could be near Edmund?”

Henry flushed. He’d never actually thought of his intentions that way. Ben went on, in a hushed but angry whisper. “I’m sorry. But if I did have a sister, she wouldn’t be like me, would she? She’d be a girl, and being a girl, she’d be different.”

Someone entered the corridor. Ben shushed Henry, who in any case didn’t know what to say. He knew Ben was right. Whoever was in the corridor went on deck, and before Henry could think of anything, Ben whispered, “I just don’t understand you.”