7

… Walden, is it you?

Walden, “The Ponds”

Ananda Singh had lost track of himself. What was he doing here? His pilgrimage to Walden Pond was a failure. He had found the pond, he had seen the replica of Thoreau’s house in the parking lot, and he had walked down to the beach in a crowd of half-naked bathers. Then he had hiked along the beaten path to the place where Thoreau had lived for two years in a house he had built himself. The house was gone. There were stone markers and a sign. Four teenage boys were horsing around, pushing each other and shouting. Embarrassed, Ananda extracted from his suitcase the specimen of manganese from Jamshedpur and dropped it on the cairn of stones, a silent witness to the presence of a devotee from the other side of the world. Then he turned, exhausted, and found his way back to the road.

He was in a state of shock. Through a haze of heat and dust he saw the caravans at the place called Pond View, and the old man sitting on a chair beside the road.

Stuart LaDue saw him coming and prepared himself for a peevish exchange. The kid had those dangerous-looking foreign eyes with that liquid look, like he could mesmerize you. His skin was dark and ashen at the same time. He looked sick, like he had some tropical disease.

“Excuse me,” said Ananda, pausing in front of him, desperate for enlightenment. “I have come ten thousand miles to see Walden Pond. I am surprised to find it so different from what I had imagined.”

“Hey, listen,” said Stu LaDue, “you should of knowed better. That Henry Thoreau, he wasn’t no great shakes. Womanizer. He used to have women every night while he was here, that’s what I heard. Drinker, too, that’s what they tell me.” Stu watched with satisfaction as the foreigner blinked and winced. “Hey, I tell you what. You should talk to Norman Peck. Real Thoreau freak.” He pointed. “Blue home, down the driveway. You can’t miss it.”

Stu watched the foreign kid start down the drive, congratulating himself on spoiling Norman’s day.

Ananda’s suitcase weighed him down. In the last hour it had grown very heavy. Which place was Mr. Peck’s? Staring ahead, Ananda heard a woman scream, and then beyond the last of the caravans he saw the bushes swaying wildly left and right. Ananda had once seen a herd of elephants crashing through a forest in southern India, and now for a moment he imagined an elephant trampling this American woodland. It amused him to think how pleased Henry Thoreau would have been to see an elephant in Walden Woods. Thoreau had played with the conceit that someday he would find every kind of flora and fauna within the confines of the town of Concord, even the alpine edelweiss. If the edelweiss, why not the elephant?

There was another cry, a different voice, a man shouting, “Hey, what’s going on up there?”

Ananda walked around the last caravan to the far side and looked down at the ground in consternation. A woman in a pink wrapper lay on the steps before the open door. Her feet were on the top step, her head rested on the cement slab below. Her eyes were open and unblinking.

Dropping his suitcase, Ananda knelt beside the woman and lifted her wrist to feel for a pulse. There was none.

A shadow fell across the woman’s face. Ananda looked up to see a big man standing beside him, breathing heavily, looking down.

“I fear she is dead,” said Ananda.

Homer Kelly got down on his knees. “There’s a terrible wound on the back of her head,” he said softly.

“Perhaps she fell and her head struck the step.”

“Perhaps.”

They both turned at the sound of breaking crockery. A small round woman stood staring at them. At her feet lay a broken pitcher and a scattering of ice cubes.

“Oh, poor Alice,” cried Honey Mooney. Waving her arms, she ran away, screaming along the driveway. In a moment she was back, trailing a parade of elderly men and women.

“Jesus,” puffed Stu LaDue. He looked accusingly at Homer Kelly. “Who the hell are you?” Narrowing his eyes, he pointed a finger at Ananda Singh. “I knew this kid was up to no good. Somebody call the police.”

The others ignored him. They ignored Ananda Singh and Homer Kelly. With exclamations of sorrow they bent over Alice Snow. One of the women was crying.

“Where’s Julian?” said Norman Peck.

“He went off in his truck,” said Stu. “Kind of funny. His wife dies and he drives off. I call that mighty peculiar, if you ask me.”

“Nobody’s asking you,” said Norman.

Charlotte Harris was the last to arrive, running awkwardly along the driveway, her arms and legs stiff, her head forward. At the sight of Alice’s body on the ground she stopped short and put her hand to her face. Norman Peck put an arm around her, but Charlotte pulled free and stalked away as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.

“You know,” Honey Mooney said sorrowfully, “it’s like I had a premonition. We were watching TV in Alice’s bedroom this morning, and I remember thinking, Maybe we’ll never be all together like this, watching ‘The Young and the Reckless,’ not ever again.”

“Now she’ll never know how it comes out,” said Shirley Mills.

“How what comes out?” said Norman Peck.

“Vanessa and Angelica. They’re both in love with Dirk, only Dirk can’t make up his mind. But I think Angelica—”

“Shirley, honestly,” said Honey. “At a time like this.”

Then Homer Kelly touched Ananda’s arm and nodded at the truck that was pulling up beside them. “The husband, I think.”

Julian Snow got out of the truck with the bag containing Alice’s ice cream and looked at the neighbors gathered beside his house.

They stood back sorrowfully so that he could see Alice lying on the steps of the trailer in her pink bathrobe.

Thereafter, for the rest of his days, Julian Snow associated the death of his wife with the scent of elder flowers opening in the woods around Goose Pond.