Death on the River
During that first week after his move to Walden, not everyone in Concord was as happy as Henry. Less than a mile away from his cabin—almost to the Mill Brook and no more than two hundred yards from Emerson’s desk—stood the almshouse, the Concord Asylum. It was not hidden. Painted red, it stood out against the trees and fields. Thanks to the almost constant screaming of an inmate named Nancy Barron, it stood out as well against the rattle of carriages passing on the turnpike and thrushes yodeling from the chestnut trees in the front yard. Emerson sighed to his journal that whenever he opened a window, he could hear mad Nancy scream. Her inarticulate lament rang in his ears and his memory—a reminder of a physical world of troubles anchored far below the celestial realm in which Emerson was comfortable. Barron’s pain was the most vocal, but not the only such lament surrounding Henry’s happiness.
On the evening of July 9, Nathaniel and Sophia and Una Hawthorne were at home together in the Old Manse. Ever since the visit from Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce in May, offering Hawthorne the job of surveyor in the Custom House, they had been in the midst of planning for their departure from this, their first home.
Following a knock, Hawthorne found Ellery Channing waiting at the door with darkness behind him. It was just past nightfall of a clear starlit evening, a few days past the new moon. Unlike Henry, Hawthorne didn’t like Channing. “A gump,”1 he had called him, and “little better than an idiot,” in a letter to his wife the previous June. “He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood,” he fumed; “and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now.”
But these were unusual circumstances. Channing was there, he explained, to borrow the Pond Lily, which was needed for a search party. Young Martha Emmeline Hunt,2 a nineteen-year-old teacher, was thought to have drowned herself in the river that morning. Her parents, Daniel and Clarissa Hunt,3 lived farther down Monument Street, near Punkatasset Hill, so naturally the neighbors were forming a search party, and naturally Hawthorne would be expected to help. Friends had scoured the nearby woods, calling Martha’s name, to no avail. He readily volunteered both the boat and, although his shyness and reserve must have made the gesture painful, himself. Either no one notified Henry, on the far side of Concord, or he chose not to leave his new cabin.
One of ten brothers and sisters, Martha was known in the village as an intelligent girl who had achieved an air of refinement and culture above her modest farm upbringing. She had distinguished herself with honors at a school in a nearby town, and was said to have been at her happiest during that time. Henry must have known this fellow teacher in a small community. At her young age she was already superintending a class at District School No. 4, with responsibility for sixty difficult students. Despite her well-known virtue and piety, however, and her much-admired quiet manners, she was plagued with melancholy humors and seemed to have no friends. The farmers who knew her family considered her uppity for not being satisfied to churn butter without complaint. Like Henry, she could often be seen walking alone in the woods. Martha resisted discussing her gloom with others. Her rough but supposedly well-meaning family had professed themselves unable to understand or help her. Although descended from early settlers of Concord, Daniel Hunt farmed with antiquated methods, had too few sons among his flock to help him, and barely kept his numerous children fed. The girls, especially, had few options, and Martha turned toward teaching as her way out.
In the darkness, Hawthorne and Channing pushed the boat into the water, Channing at the oars, Hawthorne maneuvering a paddle, and they set off downstream on the dark slow river. The almost still black water reflected the bright stars overhead. Some distance below the bridge, Hawthorne saw flickering lights and shadowy figures on the river bank—a crowd of searchers with lanterns and torches whose reflections danced on the dark water. He and Channing pulled the Pond Lily up to the bank and climbed out. Another boat was present. The searchers were gathered here because they had found Martha’s bonnet and shoes on the bank, drenched with dew, and her kerchief caught in reeds by the shore. They assumed that, if she drowned herself in the river, her body must be near, because the Concord’s current was sluggish and this was its deepest stretch. Their lanterns, held above the water, reflected in its black surface.
To continue the search, the Pond Lily took on board a stranger to Hawthorne, a young man in a blue frock coat. They also carried Joshua Buttrick, who had inherited the family farm4 in Sleepy Hollow, near the river not far north of town, in the hollow northeast of Punkatasset Hill—another neighbor of Martha’s family. About Hawthorne’s age, he was a general in the militia who liked to say that he found the smell of burning gunpowder exciting.5 The search party on shore included the general’s relative David Buttrick; a loquacious elderly carpenter; some people Hawthorne recognized and some he didn’t; young George William Curtis; and even Martha’s younger brother, William Henry Hunt. At fourteen, William kept his face from showing much emotion as he waited for news of his sister. When asked how many siblings there were, he calmly answered, “Ten.”
As owner of the closest boat, Hawthorne found himself unwittingly at the center of the search party. They got into the boat without lanterns because they needed their hands for other work. Carefully Hawthorne steered them above the deeper water. Channing probed the depths with a long-handled hay rake, while Buttrick and the younger man used poles with hooks at the end. It was the kind of scene Hawthorne usually conjured rather than witnessed. For the villagers, it was a rare opportunity to glimpse the silent and reclusive author who had moved into Reverend Ripley’s house, who was rarely glimpsed except in his garden in the morning or alone in his little boat. While the party on shore watched anxiously and occasionally shouted advice, Hawthorne guided the boat back and forth in front of the spot where poor Martha had left her bonnet and shoes. One of the men would catch his rake or hook on something, cautiously haul it up dripping into the lantern light, and find that what seemed at first to be drenched garments were in fact waterweeds. Both Buttrick and Channing thought at times that they had hooked the submerged body, but if so they were unable to dislodge it or pull it upward. Probably, Hawthorne thought, they were hooking sod that had slipped down from the bank.
Hawthorne took the boat past the party on shore one more time and, midway between the river’s banks, turned it to float broadside. They drifted slowly downstream.
On the plank seat in front of him, the young man in the frock coat sat probing his hooked pole in the water. Suddenly it caught on something. “What’s this?” he exclaimed. He tugged on the pole. “Yes, I’ve got her!”
To Hawthorne he sounded dismayingly like an excited fisherman. The young man bent all his strength on the pole and heaved upward, revealing in the faint starlight light-colored clothing rising to the surface, then the first undeniable glimpse of the girl’s pale body. He pulled the corpse toward the boat, while the girl’s limbs swayed stiffly in the water, until he could grasp her cold hand and draw her closer. He held on to her while Hawthorne steered the boat toward shore. Men waded out to help them, their lanterns revealing what had been barely visible in the starlit middle of the river. After eighteen hours in the water, Martha’s arms and legs were already rigid—the legs only slightly bent and the feet close together, but her arms caught reaching forward in the act of struggling, her hands clenched in agony. Although her complexion was a terrible dark red, her hands were disconcertingly white.
“Ah, poor child!” exclaimed one old man who helped carry the body onto shore.
By the time Hawthorne and Buttrick and the young man were out of the boat, the others had placed the body under an oak tree. They huddled around it with their lanterns, horrified but fascinated, their shadows dancing around them as they spoke in low voices. Mary’s eye socket had been torn, perhaps by the hooked pole that drew her corpse back up among the living. Her face was dark red. Watery blood streamed from her nose. Two of the men scooped water from the river and splashed it on the poor girl’s face to stanch the flow of blood, but it wouldn’t cease. The old carpenter, who in his long life had seen other villagers drowned in this peaceful river, confided authoritatively that the poor girl would continue to “purge” until they placed her in her grave, and that by morning her body would swell beyond recognition.
To Hawthorne’s mind, always gnawed by religious symbolism, it seemed as if Martha’s posture embodied an inflexible divine judgment rather than the grace he thought she must have sought in the next world. He imagined that she would keep the same heartbreaking pose in a coffin, that when her body decayed her skeleton would remember this horror and preserve it, that on Judgment Day her spirit would rise from the grave bent in this horrific mortal posture.
When the men tried to lower Martha’s arms, they resisted, and if held down for an instant, when released they moved with ghostly autonomy back into their pose of supplication. One of the men even put his foot on the girl’s arm to hold it down and force it into a normal position; but as soon as he moved, the limb rose to its former place. Surely, Hawthorne thought, when Martha stood by the river and dropped her bonnet eighteen hours earlier, had she foreseen a grotesque tableau of men stepping on her limbs she would have spared herself this posthumous indignity.
One middle-aged member of the search party, David Buttrick, could not bear the scene and fainted dead away. He was found insensible on the grass nearby and others bent to rub his limbs and hands to help wake him. Meanwhile everyone talked about the girl, her family, whether an inquest was needed, who might comprise it. The old carpenter remarked grotesquely that he would “just as lief touch dead people as living ones.”
Some men brought two rails, laid broken oars and other boards across them, wrapped the girl’s bent body in a quilt, and laid it on the makeshift bier. Everyone helped to either carry the burden or steady it while walking alongside. The body seemed to grow heavier as they trudged up the slight gradient of the hill from the river to the Hunt farmhouse, a long half mile under the distant uncaring stars.