Imogene looked so small in her knee-length winter coat, large stocking cap, and thick mittens. The lower half of her face was swallowed up by her wide scarf. However, her dark eyes were full of anger. “I asked you a question.”
“I—I’m so sorry. I live on the other side of the woods and was out for a walk. I didn’t know anyone was staying in this cabin during the winter.” That was sort of true.
“You were not just out for a walk. You came here to spy on me.” She shook a mitten-covered had at me. The mittens were bright purple and looked like they had once belonged to Barney the dinosaur. It was a bit hard to take her pointing seriously.
I tried to ignore the mitten. “Spy seems like such a strong word.”
“But it is the right word.” She removed her mittens and hat and dropped them on the table, covering the letters. “For someone who doesn’t believe me, you are quite interested in the life I lead.”
“I think I shut you down too fast when you told me your story earlier. I’m here to hear you out.”
She gave me a dubious look and sat in the kitchen chair. She didn’t remove her winter coat. It was cold in the cabin—only a few degrees warmer than the outdoors. The wood stove was not on. Did Imogene use the stove at night? If she didn’t, how did she stay warm?
“So you weren’t just out for a walk after all.”
She caught me.
“May I sit?” I asked, pointing at the chair across from her.
After a moment of hesitation, she nodded.
I slipped into the chair. I was trying to decide how to ask her to tell her story again when she began to speak.
“My grandmother was the one who told me the truth about our family. She heard it from her grandmother, the woman who’d had Henry David’s baby. My great-great-great-great-grandmother Elsey was only eighteen when she fell in love with Thoreau. She was a simple farm girl, but loved to read. She’d walk several miles every few weeks to get books from the library. When Thoreau came to Walden Pond, she was excited that such a learned man would be humble enough to live a simple life like her own. Her father sold food to Thoreau and offered to help him with his kitchen garden. Elsey went with her father as often as she could to escape chores at home.
“My grandmother said that Henry David loved Elsey too, but they could never be together. They were from different positions in life. Henry David, for his part, told Elsey that he was dedicating himself to a simple life of study and had no plans to marry. Elsey left him and married another man, a local farmer by the name of Devon Crumpet.” Imogene stood up and walked over to the family tree tacked to the wall. “Devon was the man my grandmother knew as her grandfather. She said he was a kind and simple man. A good farmer who worked hard for his family. He loved Elsey dearly.” She played with the ID bracelet on her wrist. It had something engraved on it, but I couldn’t read what it said. “When her husband died, Elsey told my grandmother the truth. Devon never knew Maxwell, my grandmother’s father, was not his son. Maxwell never knew either. Elsey told my grandmother not to tell another soul, and she didn’t until she told me on her deathbed. At the same time, she gave me the book as proof.” She shook as she spoke.
I sat back in my seat. “Thoreau never knew he had a child.”
She nodded. “Elsey kept it a complete secret from him. She would have been ruined if the truth had come out. Her husband, even though he was a good man, might have turned her out of the home. What choice did she have but to keep the secret? They were happy enough. I think the only reason Elsey told my grandmother was because she wanted to make peace with her past before the end.
I shivered because Elsey’s story was so much like my mother’s. She had a relationship with my father when he was passing through the village as a traveling musician. She got pregnant, but she never told him. Instead, she had me alone and raised me with Grandma Daisy’s help. It wasn’t until she was dying that she reached out to my father and told him the truth. She died when I was thirteen, but my father didn’t come looking for me until many years later when I was adult. I did not welcome him into my life at first.
“I kept my promise to my grandmother and didn’t tell anyone until after she died. However, when she passed, I told my mother, and I told my husband at the time. I was planning to tell the world. They discouraged me. They said it would only embarrass the family. They were wrong, though. It will lift the family up.”
“My mother refused to speak to me about it, and my husband left me over it. He claimed I had become obsessed with a lie. It wasn’t a lie. It was the truth.” She pounded her fist onto the table.
“Do you have any other evidence?” I asked quietly.
Her dark eyes snapped in my direction. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have any proof that Elsey’s story was true?” I asked quietly. Surely, she had to have something more than a story if she wanted to prove this was conclusively true.
“I have—had—the book! That should be the only proof that is needed.”
“But that’s not true,” I said as gently as I could. “You need more proof. The book is not enough.”
“It’s signed.”
“But it is only signed with his name. It’s not even made out to Elsey. You have to see why people would have doubts. Thoreau was bound to have signed copies of the first printing of his book. There are copies out there in libraries, archives, and even private collections.”
“He wouldn’t have put her name in the book if he didn’t want anyone to find out about the affair. They had to be careful!”
“I’m sure that’s true, but it doesn’t help your case as it stands today.”
Tears gathered in Imogene’s eyes. “You don’t know how much I have lost because of this. In the end, my mother would not speak to me. My marriage was ruined. My son barely tolerates me and only continues to check in with me out of a sense of obligation and duty. He does not love me as a son should love his mother. I have lost so much.” She clasped her hands together on the table and gripped them so tightly that her knuckles turned stark white.
I leaned across the table. “What do you gain by proving it?” I asked.
She looked at me. “Validation.” Her breath caught. “Because sometimes—just sometimes—I think my son and the others are right. That I am losing my mind. I need to prove this story is true to prove that I am not.”
Her last comment was the first grasp on reality that I had seen from Imogene. In essence, she was far too invested into her tale about Henry David Thoreau to turn back now. If she took it all back now, she would have destroyed all those relationships in her life for no reason. She would rather hold onto a lie—if it was a lie, I didn’t know anymore—with all her might than know it was all for nothing.
“There is a way to settle this once and for all, true or false.”
She looked up at me with hope in her eyes.
“I don’t know if you can do it, but if you had a piece of Henry David’s DNA, you could test it and yours and see if you are related. I don’t know how you would get that DNA, and the test would be expensive, but at least you would know.”
“You are not the first person to tell me that,” she said, sounding disappointed that I hadn’t come to her with a brand-new idea.
“Who else suggested it?” I asked.
“It does not matter because it can’t be done. It just can’t,” she said.
“How did you meet Roma, Imogene?” I asked.
She scowled at me as if this was abrupt change of subject. Maybe it was, but I was grateful when she answered the question.
“I met her at a conference on Thoreau.” Imogene smoothed one of the photocopied letters with her hand. “I went in hopes that someone there would listen to me.”
“Roma was one of the scholars?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, she worked in a booth, selling trinkets and souvenirs to the attendees.”
I must have made a face because she went on to say, “That didn’t mean she didn’t know a lot about literature. She explained to me that she had a degree in American literature but never went to graduate school because academics weren’t open to new interpretations.”
In some cases that was true, I mentally admitted. “But Roma was?”
“Yes.” Imogene’s eyes sparkled. “She listened to me. She believed me.”
I bit my tongue to stop myself from asking if that was really true, or if Roma had lied to her to get her hands on the book. “How was Roma going to help you prove your grandmother’s story?”
“She said she needed the book to do it. She said if she could authenticate the book as signed by Thoreau, it would prove my story.”
I wanted to tell her that authenticating Thoreau’s signature would prove nothing about her ancestry. It would only prove that Thoreau had signed the copy of Walden that she owned.
“You gave her the book then and there?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, no. We met over two years ago. I said that I wanted to try myself. I thought I could get someone in a position of authority to take my story as the truth. They should. It is the truth!” She lifted the photocopied letters from the table and ran her finger absentmindedly along the edge. “I stayed in contact with her over time. She changed jobs. She was no longer selling souvenirs. She told me that she worked for an archive and had the connections to people there who could prove my story.”
“Did you go to that archive?” I asked.
“N—no, Roma said that she could handle it all on her own. I believed her. Nearly a month ago, she came and collected the book. It was hard to let it go, but I trusted her. She was my friend, and I knew she’d do right by me.”
Imogene must have been so desperate and naïve to give her book, her most precious belonging, to Roma. Perhaps she was at her wit’s end, not being able to prove what was true. Her son Edmund did say that she’d been thinking about her own mortality a lot as of late.
To be honest, it was hard for me to believe that so many scholars and libraries had turned her away so cruelly. Libraries and archives exist for education and discovery. Even if someone were to come in with a wild idea, they had an obligation to help the person. Typically, the only reason a person would be turned away or asked to leave is because they’d caused a disruption of some sort. It made me wonder how Imogene had approached these institutions for help.
“How did you learn that Roma was trying to sell the book?” I asked.
“I didn’t know about it until the day she died. I spoke to a book dealer, and he said it was strange because there had been a woman in his shop trying to sell him a book that sounded almost identical to mine. When I asked him to describe her, I knew it had been Roma. I had never felt so betrayed in life. I felt worse than when my husband left me.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
She looked at me. “You are the first person to say they feel sorry for me about what Roma did. Everyone else thinks I’m overreacting.”
“Who’s everyone else?”
“My son, of course.”
“And anyone else?”
She didn’t answer my question. Imogene murmured, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” She looked at me. “That’s why I am here in this cabin in the cold and snow.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Two months. I am not here without permission. I know that’s what you think. I paid the rent on it with every last penny I had.”
I frowned. If Imogene had been here for so many weeks, she was likely here the morning of my wedding. “Have you heard any strange noises in the woods?”
“What do you mean? It’s a forest. There are many noises here at night.”
“Like someone hitting the trees.”
She paled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said sharply.
I interpreted that to mean that she knew exactly what I was talking about. I wasn’t going to be dissuaded so easily. “Very early Saturday morning, I was in the park.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why were you in the park so early?”
I internally grimaced. “I was getting married later that day. I came into the woods to clear my head. You and Thoreau aren’t the only ones who go into the woods to find solace.”
She frowned like she didn’t believe that was the whole truth. I didn’t tell her that she was right. “When I was in the park, I heard someone banging on a tree with a large stick or log. I left, and the person followed me out. Did you hear anything?”
She wouldn’t look at me. “No. It must have been too far away.”
But it hadn’t been too far away, and we both knew it.
Instead, she placed a hand to her forehead. “I should lie down. I feel a headache coming on.”
I stood up. That was the least subtle hint to signal the end of the conversation that I had ever received.
She looked up at me. “Are you looking for my book?”
I didn’t see any reason to lie to her. “I am.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “If you find it, will you give it back to me? It’s all I have.”
“I will,” I promised, hoping it was a promise I could keep. Even though I knew she was lying to me about not hearing anything on Saturday morning, I felt compassion for her. If Walden was a shovel, she’d dug a hole so deep for herself that she may never get out.
I looked around the cabin but didn’t see Emerson. I consoled myself that the cat had gotten into the cabin. He’d probably already got himself out of it.
Imogene didn’t get up when I’d stood, so I let myself out. As soon as I stepped outside, I spotted Emerson on the gravel, cleaning his paws. “You’re quite pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”
He purred.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
He trotted in front of me, leading the way. Even though we were in another part of the park, the little tuxedo cat seemed to know exactly where he was going. I followed him along the path to the springs.
In the winter daylight, the springs sparkled as more light reached the water’s surface through the bare trees. I knew I had to get back to the shop to relieve Lacey, but I took a moment to gaze at the shimmering water as it trickled down the side of the rock and up from the ground below. The only word to describe how it looked was magical.
At my feet, Emerson arched his back and hissed at something behind me.
I spun around just in time to see a dark shadow disappear behind a tree. I let out a breath. “Emerson, it was just a deer looking for food.”
He hissed again.
“It was a deer.” This time I said it with less confidence.