The Transcendental Murder (10 page)

Chapter 16

	Crisis is a Hair
Toward which forces creep
Past which forces retrograde …
EMILY DICKINSON

One of the tourists from Texas had longer legs than Patrolman Vine. He brushed past him and bounded down the path. “I'm a doctor,” he hollered over his shoulder. Ralph Chope was the representative of a floor machinery company in Houston, but he had been a medical corpsman in the Korean War, and if there was one thing he knew how to do in the medical line, it was tell if a poor devil was dead or not. By the time Patrolman Vine came pounding up, Chope had administered his tests on the body, and had rolled it over and was groping with his fingers in the wound.

“Is he dead?”

“He sure is. Jeez, look at that. The ball went all the way through him and out the other side, almost.” The Texan held up something between two fingers. “Looky here. That's a regular old-fashioned musket ball. Say, this sure is some show you're puttin'on here.”

Patrolman Vine didn't think that was funny. He took the musket ball and looked at it, then wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief and put it in his pocket. He stared at the corpse, then wheeled and looked sharply at a growing audience of Texas tourists, the bus driver and the woman with the baby carriage. “
Okay
,” he said loudly. “Get back, now. Don't anybody touch anything.”

Chapter 17

	The village appeared to me a great news room … These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers …
HENRY THOREAU

Letitia Jellicoe, acting as a substitute guide for the holiday in the Old Manse, had arrived with a young couple at the upstairs room which both Emerson and Hawthorne had used as a study. She pointed to the window that looked down toward the bridge and started her spiel. “You will see written on the glass with Mrs. Hawthorne's diamond the words
‘Man's accidents are GOD'S purposes
.'” The young couple drifted toward the window, but Mrs. Jellicoe, suddenly sharpening and lengthening her focus, pounced at the window and got there first. Wasn't that a policeman running down toward the bridge? Was he chasing that man? “Thief, thief!” twittered Mrs. Jellicoe, and abandoning her charges she ran downstairs and across the field, crying, “Stop, thief!” at the top of her lungs. Broadcasting exotic and shocking pieces of information was meat and potatoes to Mrs. Jellicoe. Coming up against a crowd of people she elbowed her way to the front, and sucked in the whole frightful scene.

“That's Ernest Goss, isn't it?” she said sharply. “Did somebody …?”

Arthur Furry spoke up then, with the information that was trembling on his lips. “It was Paul Revere. I mean, you know, not Paul Revere but that other one, that rides up in the parade. I heard a shot as I was coming up back there behind the Minute-man, and this man on a horse with a costume on, you know, and a wig, he rode almost on top of me, jumping over the fence …”

Everybody stared at Arthur. “And he-he said ‘musket,' I heard him myself …”

“Who?” said Patrolman Vine. “Who said ‘musket'?”

Arthur pointed to the dead man. “Him. He did.”

Patrolman Vine squinted at Arthur. Then he put his big hand on Arthur's arm and pulled him forward. Arthur, staring up at him respectfully, began to be aware for the first time of the glory that was to be his. But then the policeman looked away from Arthur and spoke to Mrs. Jellicoe. “You've got a phone in there at the Old Manse? Would you get the station on the line and ask them to send some more men down here and the District Medical Examiner? Tell them there's been an accident, it looks like someone's been shot. You know the number? Okay.”

Mrs. Jellicoe was off like a hare. She ran all the way back to the house and breathlessly did as she was told. Then she hung up the phone and rolled her codfish eyes up at the ceiling. The officer hadn't told her she was
not
to telephone anybody else. Why shouldn't she notify poor Mrs. Goss? After all, someone should tell the poor woman, and she, Letitia Jellicoe, might as well have the painful task. Mrs. Jellicoe stared at the telephone. She loved its rubbery black feel. In her grasp it was an instrument of steel. Quickly she called up Elizabeth Goss, informed her tactfully that her son had murdered her husband with a musket ball at the North Bridge, reduced her to hysterics, and hung up gently, clicking her tongue sympathetically against the top of her dentures. Now, should she run back to see what was happening? Or perhaps she should take the time to make one or two more calls. She mustn't be selfish, after all …

The crowd beside the grave of the British soldiers was increasing. Patrolman Vine had all he could do to keep them from pressing forward and trampling the ground around the body. Arthur Furry, standing patiently to one side, looked modestly at the ground. He, Arthur Furry, had practically witnessed a murder, a real murder. There would be pictures and headlines.
BOY SCOUT DISCOVERS BODY!
Arthur's eyes widened. Whatever happened, he mustn't forget to do his very best at all times. He mustn't forget that he would be representing Troop 296 of Acton, in fact the whole entire Boy Scout movement. It sure was lucky he'd been so late. It was funny, but yesterday when he was supposed to be cleaning up his room, it was almost like something had told him he shouldn't do it, he should watch TV instead. It was almost like a voice. Arthur glanced gratefully at the body of the man he had seen in the agony of death. But that was uncomfortable. His eyes slid up to the inscription set into the wall above the body. The inscription lamented with condescending sympathy the two British redcoats who had fallen at the bridge.

THEY CAME THREE THOUSAND MILES, AND DIED,

TO KEEP THE PAST UPON ITS THRONE;

UNHEARD, BEYOND THE OCEAN TIDE,

THEIR ENGLISH MOTHER MADE HER MOAN.

Chapter 18

	Baptismal waters from the Head above These babes I foster daily are to me; I dip my pitcher in these living springs And draw, from depths below, sincerity.
BRONSON ALCOTT

Freddy was looking for something that would be nice to play with, like a tractor engine or a big greasy battery. There was nothing in the bam where his father and John were tooling up the com planter. Freddy had just learned to walk, so he toddled out the door and wandered down behind it toward the red-painted shed where the cider press was, sitting down occasionally with a plop and getting up again. The door of the shed was around on the other side, facing the river. Freddy, his balloon wobbling on the end of the string on his wrist, started around the shed. Then he stopped.

“Horsie,” he said. There was a man sitting high up in the sky on a horse. A funny man. A funny lady? The top of the man was like a lady, a funny lady. The lady looked back at Freddy. Then the lady turned up the sides of her mouth, and beckoned with one finger. Freddy trotted forward. The lady reached out and snapped the string of Freddy's balloon. The balloon started to sail up into the sky. The rest of the string fell down over Freddy's arm to the ground. Freddy looked at the string, unbelieving. Then he looked up into the sky at his disappearing balloon. He reached up for it and started to cry.

Gwen, going out of the house with a basket of wet wash, saw a big red bird in the wrangle of elm branches below the barn. No, it was too big for a bird, and it was floating up out of the tree now into the sky. It was Freddy's balloon. Poor Freddy. She put the basket down, hearing the telephone ring, and ran across the road. Freddy wasn't hard to find. He had gotten away from Tom and was standing beside the door of the cider shed, hollering his heart out, pointing up into the sky at the little red dot that had been his balloon. The long string dangled from his wrist to the ground. Gwen picked him up. There was a good three feet of string left. How had Freddy managed to break the balloon off at the top? Perhaps he had caught it on the edge of the shed roof, or on a nail or something. He was bellowing about a horsie and a funny lady. Gwen tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable. When Gwen got back to the house, Grandmaw met her at the door, her face strange.

“Ernest Gross is dead,” she said. “He was shot.”

“Who?” said Gwen idiotically. “I mean, who shot him?”

“Someone on a horse, they think, dressed like Sam Prescott.”

“Funny lady,” roared Freddy. “Horsie!”

Gwen looked at Freddy, her lips tight. Not Charley? Then she looked grimly at Grandmaw. “I'm not going to have him bothered. I don't care who …”

Freddy was sucking his thumb, his cranky head on his mother's shoulder. He would be asleep in a minute. “No, of course not,” said Grandmaw.

Chapter 19

	Here lies an honest man,
Rear-Admiral Van.

*

In 1846 when Henry Thoreau spent the night in jail as the guest of Sam Staples, the Concord Town Jail was a modest boxlike affair standing on ground now occupied by a parking lot behind Vanderhoof's Hardware Store on Main Street. By the nineteen-sixties the police department had grown to a force of twenty men, with a new headquarters on Walden Street shared by the Fire Department, The police occupied the right half of the brick building, with their own laboratory, dark room, firing range, parking meter repair facility, three radio-equipped automobiles and one walking mobile Unit. Both Fire and Police Departments shared the use of the short-wave radio antenna. It was a good group of men, displaying the discreet and iron virtue of the best class of blue-coated law enforcers in the land. All of them were great broad-chested men except their Chief, James Flower. Jimmy was nine inches under the required minimum height, and he had worked his way into the Force and up to his present position through personality, competence and a special dispen sation of the Legislature.