For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it.
—Henry David Thoreau
“I wish to discuss matters of the heart,” Calvin Greene said. Ellery Channing winced. So this was what it was all about. This after Greene had produced his copy of Channing’s Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, lauded Channing’s decision to write and include memorial verses from his own hand, and revealed that he had pressed Channing’s letters within the book. Also, that Channing’s biography would join his copy of Walden, his letters from Thoreau likewise preserved between the covers, and that these two books formed the sturdy pillars that supported his own philosophical musings.
Vanity, all is vanity. A dozen years and the wound of Thoreau’s loss was rooted deep in Channing, scabbed but never healed. Greene’s visit tore at the scab, dug at the wound. “Matters of the heart? Of yours? Mine?” Channing almost snarled. Foolishness. Greene had waited until his leaving day to bring up something that had likely been on his mind ever since his arrival. Greene was artful in his interactions, but in the same way a cow might emulate a fox.
“Those of our good yet sorely missed friend.” It was always and ever about Thoreau.
“May the great man rest in peace.”
“You must forgive my enthusiasms,” Greene said. “My questions are ever in service to Thoreau’s grand enterprise. His philosophies should be extolled throughout the land.”
“As far away as Michigan, perhaps?”
“You joke, but I wish my home state to find inspiration, such as I do, in his philosophies.”
“Commendable.”
“But I have heard tales, perhaps gossip . . . ”
“About Thoreau’s matters of the heart as you put it? There is little to say on that account and, what little there is to say, I am sure you already know. Thoreau may have strayed along the matrimonial path in his younger years, a proposal born of innocent folly, but wisely sidestepped.”
Greene, also perhaps wisely, made no mention of how Channing had separated from his wife and children, a matrimonial mistake compounded with interest. Not be distracted, Greene worried the bone of his initial premise. “Thoreau may have remained a bachelor, but he was no hermit. He bivouacked at his Walden Pond cabin, but spent his days at home and was the most genial of hosts. Or so I am told.”
“At home, as you say, with his family and friends.”
“But think also of the pleasure you and he took in your countryside rambles. Might he not have enjoyed similar expeditions with members of the fair sex?”
“Not likely. I once introduced Thoreau to a certain young miss of the town, and she celebrated for her beauty. All he wanted to discuss were the magnification properties of spectacles.”
“A single instance, but I am not entirely convinced. In his writings, Thoreau is circumspect with the names of his acquaintances, curious for someone so exact when describing nature. Furthermore, I believe he also substitutes pronouns for his female acquaintances to suggest that they are members of his brotherly fraternity.”
“Substitutes?” And then I think of those among men, who will know I love them, though I tell them not.
“I have studied his words most carefully. To his credit as a truth teller, he does not bluff well.”
“All I can say is that every time I interacted with Thoreau, and every time he chose to write about those occasions, I remained in text as you find me here, the poet, never the poetess.” The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted, but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love.
“Others are open to alternative interpretations.”
“Where did you find these others?” No doubt in a tavern, and deep in their cups.
“As you know, I am very thorough in my investigations when it comes to our good friend.”
“Our good friend? How many years, again, did you know him?”
“Enough that he wrote and confided in his letters such matters as pressed him.”
“Personal matters?”
“Sometimes. He wrote of a girl who lived on a farm. He wrote that she lived as kin to all living things, whether animal or botanical. You too have written of this girl, I believe, in the poems that accompany your biography.” Greene tapped the book for emphasis. “She of the red farmhouse on the hill. She whom you named Constance. Perhaps your pen substituted for your tongue in this matter.”
Constance! Such maids as thou delight the eye. Delighted the eye. “Her name was Constance. But you know that. She died of consumption. You know that too, no doubt.”
Constance, sweet and ne’er cloying, beautiful yet free
Of truth the best, of utter constancy;
Thy cheek whose blush the mountain wind laid on,
Thy mouth whose lips were rosebuds in the sun;
Thy bending neck, the graces of thy form.
The blush of death that insighted hunger in poor Henry. Could he not see the rot in her? The death in life. Those eyes, pearl-moons sunk within their sockets, pleading from cavernous shadow. Was love confused with pity?
She was a flower, but frail as the flowers are our hours in the hands of the Lord. The family plot, the fieldstone wall, the iron gate ajar. A crow caws from the white pine. Slate slabs, twelve in all. The names of the dead recited. One family culled, and now another on the path to extermination. Two brothers laid to rest in the past year alone. The earth yawns for their sister, her coffin roped for lowering. One distant cloud, the Lord’s breath.
Henry, immobile, a post carved from seasoned wood into a falsity of life. Gray work clothes, rueful eyes, his hair dirty and unruly, creviced cheeks. Eyes dry as sawdust. Later, he told me of the corpse light seen around her grave, he sheltered in the nightwood, a forlorn watchman. Bluish light that flickered and dimmed and seemed it might extinguish but then, as if about to sink past the sod and into the troubled earth of her grave, rebounded with renewed strength and shone so brightly that he could pick out each blade of grass like so many knives pointed Heavenward. Henry’s shadow extended behind him, bone-thin and bone-weary. The skeletal hands of leaves stretched down from above.
“I heard there was a curse upon the farm.” Greene leaned forward, almost spilled his coffee.
“That would be the way of gossip.”
“A whole family taken by consumption. But the eldest, the grandfather, outlived them all.”
“The grandfather was popular in town.” Especially in the taverns. “The family worked the farm, but they died one by one, the weak and the strong, each buried in the family plot. Nine dead in five years. And he, the old vulture in attendance at each lowering of the coffin.”
“What of the farm?”
“It went the way of thistle and stone with none to care for it.”
“Not even the grandfather?”
“He had a propensity for drink even in his youth and, with each family subtraction, he compensated with the solace of the tavern. He avoided consumption but not fate. One drink too many and he stumbled into the path of a wagon. He was buried in town and with a proper ceremony at that.” Channing harrumphed. “Truly a credit to our citizens who would see no man who shared ale with a neighbor be set to rest without a hoist and a cheer.”
“Where does Constance fit into the story?”
“Her family were distant relatives at best. They came from Rhode Island. Old country ways, you know. The Concord farm was up for grabs, and they claimed it as their own.”
“And Constance, how did Mr. Thoreau meet her?”
“On one of his rambles, no doubt.”
“He loved her?”
“He found her of interest, nothing more. She could never be confused with one of those dried-up Puritans who run along the rails of lies and compliments. She was knowledgeable of the earth and the plant life that so entranced him.” Channing paused, lost in reverie of his own rambles with Thoreau. “Do you know that he would tuck plant specimens away in his hat as substitute for a botany-box?”
“Nevertheless, the farm’s curse also claimed her.”
“First her mother and then two brothers. Then Constance. God rest their souls.”
“The entire family?”
“The orchard lost half its harvest. Four gone to the Lord counting Constance, she the youngest and the favorite of her father. The eldest brother did his best by the farm. He had muscles like iron and could not be bested in wrestling, but he too took sick and coughed blood. He complained of a weight on his chest. The grandmother said it was Constance and that she was unquiet in her grave because she was taken so young. Her brother said it must be so because he could feel her bony knees like twin knives jabbed into his ribs.”
“My understanding is that three months after her burial, Constance’s grave was exhumed.”
The graves opened with pick and spade, the bodies of mother and brothers so advanced in decomposition they cannot be distinguished but for their stone markers. Then she, Constance, expelled from the worm’s bower, the coffin lid split from within. The bones of her kneecaps kiss the grave soil. “She rode my grandson to his sickbed.”
Vegetation grows worm-pale among the boards of her coffin, twining upward as if to reclaim verdancy in sunlight. “There is life within her. She feeds life.” Skin molded to her bones like wet newsprint, her arms elastic at the joints. The spade’s blade slashes at the bowering nest of white tendrils. “Not the new growth. Her. She who feeds on us.”
The doctor rests one hand on grandma’s shoulder, scalpel held with delicacy in his other. It is not he who digs with butcher’s knife into Constance’s chest cavity, who mangles her ribs, and pulls loose her heart and lungs. But it is the doctor who slices open her lungs and educates those assembled on the rapacious nodules within. It is the doctor who excavates Constance’s shriveled heart with his scalpel. Four chambers has the heart, he informs, two atria and two ventricles. He slices into each and probes with a gloved finger. The atria are dry but his finger comes out dripping from the left ventricle, not the dried blood of coagulation but blood still liquid, bright with ambient life. Stolen life.
The granite boulder protrudes like a giant’s molar from the burying ground, the fieldstone fence built to accommodate it. A stone table. The withered heart doused in lamp oil and set alight. Blood bubbles forth. The fist-sized muscle crisps, flakes, blackens. A distracting breeze tickles the fire. The surviving family members follow the smoke course, inhale the ashen fumes. Later, teary eyed, lips blackened with oily ash from charcoaled meat, they are triumphant as if they have fought a battle and emerged victorious. “She won’t drag us to the grave.” Grandma muffles a phlegmy cough.
Henry stands apart from Constance’s family, the black-lipped living and the slate-marked dead, accepts no consolation.
“Nothing to note about her exhumation as I understand it. Just an old family ritual.” Channing sipped his coffee. His hands barely shook.
“A ritual?”
“Perhaps I misspoke. The family was from Rhode Island. They have their own way of dealing with the dead. Holy water, or the like.”
“Were you present at the exhumation?”
“It was a family matter. I only learned of it in passing.”
“And Henry. Was he there?”
“He did not inform me, which would suggest otherwise. Constance was a friend, but he took solace in that she would become one with those plants and beasts of the wood they loved so well.”
“I told you of his letter to me. That is how I learned of Constance, a woman whom I understand he loved.”
“Again, you use the word love as if it can have only one meaning.”
“This woman whom he mourned.”
“Yes.”
“In his letter, he mentions the exhumation.”
“So I gather.”
“But he wrote much like a newspaper reporter would in describing local events. I quote from memory: A grave was exhumed this past Saturday, a Concord woman who was much loved by the community. A doctor was present to perform the examination. Thoreau had earlier written of the death of the farm girl, and so I took it to be a reference to the same. But he also wrote something that puzzled me. He wrote: There was more, but on that measure, I would not partake.”
Channing nodded.
“What does that mean, that he would not partake?”
“I can only guess. I think it most likely that he could not be present at the exhumation.”
“The word partake is a strange one. It suggests food, a feast.”
“Perhaps there was a family feast held in remembrance.” Channing shrugged.
“I am sorry if I trouble you.”
“It is not so much your questions that trouble me but simply that you raise thoughts of my dear friend. He is never far, but now he is all the closer and, although he attends so close that he sometimes seems to live and breathe in my memory, he is but a fragment out of time whom I cannot touch.”
“Apologies again, but I find myself troubled in part because Constance’s fate seems so much like that of our friend Thoreau. Our friend, too, was stolen from us too soon. And by the same dread disease.” Why did Greene’s every use of the term friend so grate on Channing?
“I was the sad witness to his loss.”
“But Thoreau fought bravely! His sweet mother told me that the parlor where he rested did not even seem like a sickroom. Our friend insisted the room be filled with flowers and pictures and books. He was cheerful in his sickness and wanted others to be also. He read and wrote until his final breath. An inspiration to us all!”
The rotted Hell of the sickroom. The parasitic cough when first welcomed into Henry’s chest, my discovery during a woods ramble: Henry and Constance, heads twinned in reverie, bending over something, perhaps a fungus, or a downy feather, or glittering mica. Something shared. Why this pang of jealousy? Over what, friendship with a doltish farm girl!
Laughter is human, whether a chortle or a giggle. Henry giggling, a sound I thought never to hear. But there are other sounds emitted from human lips that are better married to a beast. Bruised ferns, bruised flesh. A mosquito blooded on my wrist. God could not have commanded me to watch.
And this, the corollary: Henry’s cheeks and lips bled of color, shriveled and pinched. His voice a fragile echo: “My body betrays me.” Stained sheets, no sooner changed than soiled again. His sister Sophia, red-eyed: “I’ll have to burn them.” Did Henry muffle a bronchial cough at Constance’s exhumation? His emaciated body shakes with rattling coughs, but he refuses opiates. His eyes sunk into black hollows. Small miracle to sleep fitfully and wake: “I dreamed I was a railroad cut, where they were digging through and laying down the rails. They excavated my lungs.”
Henry’s pencil held in trembling fingers. Blood-streaked mucus dabbed at with the bed sheet. “I must complete my list of Birds and Flowers.” Mucus, once measured in teaspoons, now in cups. “These must be published.” Bony fingers uncompliant, the papers smudged, wrinkled, slip-sliding to the floor. Illegible scribbles. “Promise me.” The fatal torture, to be torn limb from limb by the dread disease, by friendship betrayed.
“I paid a visit to our friend’s grave, and hope to do so again before I take my leave,” Greene said.
“I’m sure he appreciates your attention.” To call it a grave seemed to sap it of all significance, as if the man was truly lost, body and soul.
“It is a beautiful location and well placed, so unlike what I found on my previous visit.” Greene smiled, chastised by memory. “Remember how I searched the Concord burying grounds back then, each in turn, and found no stone to mark the great man’s resting place. At last, I inquired of a man working the grounds . . . ”
“Did you not also inquire how to pronounce the name Thoreau?” Channing laughed.
“You remember the story well. I knew the name only as a byline. I was told he was buried in the new grounds, and there I found a grave with the headstone marked John Thoreau Jr. Nearby, a new but unmarked mound, and this I took to be the resting place of our friend.”
“So recent was his passing that the stone had not been carved.”
“But my trip this time was a comedic recreation of the first! I visited the new grounds to pay my respects, but discovered his grave gone as if it had never existed.”
“His remains were moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.”
“That is what I learned. But so large is Sleepy Hollow that I might have spent days in the search had not another worker pointed me in the correct direction. A shaded hill with a neat headstone, beneath oaks and pitch-pine, Thoreau listed on the slab as Henry. Beautiful in its simplicity and in keeping with our friend’s effacing nature.”
“It is a lovely spot.” How many dull, aching hours had Channing spent in attendance as if, through supplication, the dead might rise? Small comfort the tree shadow, the hilltop breeze.
“Still, I was puzzled. Thoreau’s history mirrored so closely that of this farm girl Constance. Consumption, a burial, and then not long thereafter an exhumation.”
Channing winced.
“I apologize again if my words bring you pain. Say no more and we will return to more pleasant topics.”
“Death comes for us all. Little coincidence in that. As for Thoreau’s exhumation, it was not just he but the family entire who were conveyed to rest at Sleepy Hollow.”
“A lovely and well-chosen spot.”
“Thoreau’s sister Sophia, I believe, in conference with their mother, made the request. A simple request, and with a good reason behind it, that Thoreau should join his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne who is also interred at Sleepy Hollow.”
“Hawthorne’s name is inscribed on a short, thick slab of white marble just a little higher on the hillside.”
“Perhaps the dead converse and, if so, what joy to be reunited as neighbors in the afterlife.”
Grief that I cannot bury, nor against it strive.
“Apologies again if I spoke out of turn,” Greene said. How many times could the man apologize? He stood silhouetted in the doorway, sunlight draped cat-like across his shoulders, his arms laden with Channing’s parting gifts: five books for his edification, some choice illustrations from nature, and a shingle from Thoreau’s hut with a wax painting on it. He would soon be sweating like a beast in the August heat. “Thoughts are like fishhooks in my mind. I feel the strike, but I cannot derive satisfaction until I land the fish itself.”
“Think nothing of it. Are you sure that you will not join me for a call upon Emerson before you leave?”
“That is a pleasure I must forego. I hear our friend Emerson is in poor health. Moreover, I have a train to catch.” Greene readjusted the books piled in his arms.
“So be it. But know that Emerson, like I, is anxious that Thoreau’s writings reach beyond our borders. You shall be our Michigan delegate on this mission.”
“Mission accepted.”
“And when may we count on your return?”
“I’m saddened to say that this may be my last visit. Walden Pond is no longer as I remember it. The cabin is gone. Our friend now rests elsewhere in good company. Tears cannot restore them.”
“I trust you will reconsider and, in good time, once again grace us with your presence.” Channing watched Greene struggle with the books on his way to the street, waved buoyantly, then shut the door. Good riddance. For just such purpose were door locks invented. Greene was a fool, a small man who would attempt greatness by association, but not so much a fool as he pretended. Only time would tell how much truth he had gleaned from Channing’s words.
Channing mounted the stairs to his office. He had earlier been employed at his desk on a new poem. The inspiration was now lost, evicted by Greene’s interruption, and the verse reread clunky as miscut firewood. Channing poured water from a crudely formed pitcher into a similarly formed cup. Although roughly made, without ornamentation, both were perfectly functional, molded by Henry himself from local clay. And the water—ah, the water!—the water was dipped from the beatific shallows of Walden Pond, on the northern shore where Henry’s cabin once stood. Not the cold mineral tang of water drawn from a well, not the burbling chill of Brister’s Spring, but water that had experienced wildness in all its dimensions. Foul or not, this was water that mirrored Henry’s face and hands each break and close of day, water green with the possibility of life’s renewal.
Water the balm, the memory. The snow-clad hill from whose white steeps the rushing torrents flow. The glimmering streams that cut and wend beneath the solemn woods. Stripped naked on the sun-dappled riverbank, splashing and bathing in the evergreen-shadowed Concord River, a watery baptism shared with Henry. His face, so often stern and searching, cast anew in a child’s wonder-gaze. Hair and beard dripping. Tanned face, lined from sun and honest labor, honest thought, but his under-skin stripped of clothes fresh-exposed a milky white. Laughing in joy reborn. Brister’s Spring, that sacred fountain, feather-fern clad banks, glittering, hands cupped, and the waters shared, lips to hand. Lips. Between us. The pond. Walden. Home. The home that awaits at day’s end, as sun draws twinkling orange to red to twilight across the water. Gem of the wood and jeweled playmate of the sky. Memory slumbers here.
There are two hidden compartments in Channing’s desk, two drawer-pulls disguised by oak-leaf motifs. One drawer holds gold coins from the Revolutionary War. Channing’s family has a questionable claim to these riches, but has employed them to stave off creditors and starvation in times of need. Channing opens the second drawer. He removes a penknife and an object wrapped in paper. The penknife he places on the desk within easy reach. The penknife, once used to whittle pencils to a point, is a gift from Henry. He unfolds the paper. It is a torn page from Channing’s biography of Thoreau, from the memorial verses he appended to the text. He reads his lament aloud, but softly enough that the burr of his voice will not carry outside the office should a servant pass:
A wail for the dead and dying!
They fall in the wind through the Gilead tree,
Off the sunset’s gold, off hill and sea;
They fall on the grave where thou art lying,
Channing’s voice breaks partway through the poem, short as it is. “I’m sorry, Henry.” Channing says. He coughs, then continues, the text blurred to the eye although he knows the words by heart, each syllable grit strangled in his throat.
Like a voice of woe, like a woman sighing,
Moaning her buried, her broken love,
Never more joys,—ever on earth, never in heaven above!
Ah, me! Was it for this I came here?
Christ! didst thou die that for this I might live?
“My dear, lovely Henry.” The page with the poem is the outer leaflet for the misshapen parcel. Channing unfolds the next layer, one of waxed paper, gray and semi-translucent, and exposes the greasy, charred lump inside. The burnt heart is considerably diminished from its original form. I did not partake. “Would that you had when you had the opportunity. Would that you were still with me in warm flesh, as you remain in spirit.”
The exhumations, the transport of the Thoreau family remains to Sleepy Hollow cemetery, and then Channing returning that night, lamplit, to cut open the rotted fabric of Henry’s coat and shirt. Channing with a kitchen knife atremble. No doctor. No family. Henry’s sunken chest latched together with hair thin as spider silk. The surgery, the entry into the ribbed cavity, the stench like murder twice over. A small sputtering fire of pine. Lord grant me absolution for what I do this day.
Channing gently scrapes the penknife across the scalloped hollow of Henry’s charcoaled heart. A haze of ash clouds the silver blade. He is tempted by an imp of the perverse to lick the blade itself but corrals that desire. He tears up, bows his head, throat salt raw. “Henry.”
There are those families who inoculate themselves against the dead who poach life from their unquiet graves. Old ways. Old customs. Like them, Channing has lived many years and desires to add more years to the balance. But it is more than the promise of life. There is also the opportunity for communion, a fraternity by which we are joined anew in ash and breath and blood. Is he not reborn within me? Can his presence not unhinge my petrified soul?
Channing dips the knife blade into the cup of Henry’s make, stirs, and the ashes swirl into the miniature maelstrom of pond water. Channing raises the cup toward the office window. The window looks to the south across slate-shingled rooftops shimmering in the light of a new day, to the only world that Channing has ever loved, the wooded, enchanted land vouchsafed to him by the only man he has ever loved. To suck out all the marrow of life.
“To you, my bosom companion.” Channing drinks, and the ashes bloom like honeyed wine on his tongue.
Originally published in All the Haunts Be Ours: A Folk Horror Storybook, edited by Kier-La Janisse.
Notes: This story incorporates and repurposes language from Channing’s biography Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, Greene’s journals, and Thoreau’s writings. For more information on the relevant folklore of New England, please refer to Abigail Tucker’s article “The Great New England Vampire Panic” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/), Michael Bell’s article “Vampires and Death in New England, 1784-1892” (https://www.yorku.ca/kdenning/+++2150%202007-8/BellVampiresandDeath.pdf), and Michael Bell’s book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England Vampires. Note that the New England vampiric tradition diverges substantially from that of Europe in that the dead do not rise from the grave but derive sustenance from the living while still interred.
