She, of course, made no attempt to speak with me. Nor did Lyman, when he was with her. Any initiative would have to be mine, and I had neither the courage nor the clarity to take it.
I know now what was the cause and true nature of my fixation on the woman, how thwarted and misshapen it was, how far from its true object; but I did not understand it then in the least. I was ashamed of it, naturally; but ashamed for all the wrong reasons.
Often, at an hour close to dawn, I found myself, after a long night of prowling alone through the forests, lurking in the close vicinity of the cabins of Timbuctoo, peering through the mist and the languorous, sifting pines at the very cabin where she slept beside her husband. I would crouch in low bushes for hours, lost in a sort of reverie, my heart furiously pounding, my hands trembling, my legs weak and watery, as if I were a hunter who at last had sighted his long-sought prey. Then I would suddenly shudder and come back to myself and, horrified, would steal away home.
These prowls were not unlike my sordid, secret, nighttime walks several years earlier in the streets and alleyways of Springfield, and my family accepted them more or less as they had then, which is to say, as evidence of a solitary young man’s restless nature. And to a degree, they were correct to think that. Also, I always carried my rifle and sometimes brought home the carcass of a raccoon or fisher or some other nocturnal animal, as explanation for my having been out so late and long. As long as they did not interfere with my work on the farm, Father did not acknowledge my late night absences; perhaps he did not even notice them, so preoccupied was he that summer, first with Mary’s long recovery, then with the planting and further clearing of our woodlands, and with his local abolitionist activities and the Railroad. Also, he was busily educating his neighbors as to the advantages and virtues of raising blooded stock by selling them some of his Spanish merino ewes and carting his best ram around for stud and showing off and now and then selling one of his red Devon cattle. After lengthy negotiations by mail with a farmer in Litchfield, Connecticut, whom he knew from his past dealings with Wadsworth & Wells, he had succeeded in having a fine young Devon bull delivered as far north as Westport for him. I do not know how he paid for it, as such an animal did not come cheaply; possibly with promises of eventual returns from stud fees, possibly with a portion of the monies he accepted from our neighbors to help feed and clothe the fugitives. It was not beneath Father to mix ingredients like that; despite all, he was still unaccountably optimistic when it came to financial matters. But in early July, he sent Salmon and Oliver over the mountains to the lake to retrieve the beast, and soon it had become a source of much pride and the occasion for his traveling about the settlement in the attempt to improve the stock of his friends and neighbors.
Thus, except for my brothers, who watched me go out late and come back in the early pre-dawn hours, my nighttime prowls went largely unnoticed by the family and, in a significant sense, unnoticed by me as well. My brothers teased me some, privately, for they suspected that I was secretly courting one of the maidens in the settlement, but they did not otherwise speak of it.
Then in August, like most of the farm families of the region, we took ourselves, our best produce and manufactured items, and our finest livestock down to the Essex County Fair, in Westport. We loaded the wagon with jugs of maple syrup, Mary’s and Ruth’s quilts, blankets made from the wool of our sheep, willow reed baskets and fishing weirs, tanned hides, and various leather items the boys had made during the winter — wallets, purses, sheaths for knives, belts, harnesses, and, a specialty of Oliver’s, plaited bullwhips. Father made up a small, handpicked herd of merino sheep, together with his finest red Devon heifer and the widely admired new bull, and off we went — a triumphant return to Westport, as it were, proof that our spiritual errand into the wilderness, despite our reputation as non-farming, abolitionist troublemakers, had turned out an agricultural success, too.
Father rode at the front on his fine sorrel mare, which later carried him all through the Kansas wars with great strength and courage. He loved that animal as he had no other and trusted no one not a family member to care for her and trusted not even us to ride her. I drove the wagon, with Mary and Ruth beside me, the younger children all crammed in with our cargo, and the boys came along behind with Father’s little herd of blooded stock, helped by our black collie dogs, the type Father preferred over all others, despite their diminutive size and their uselessness for hunting.
We arrived in mid-afternoon, in high excitement. There was a light off-shore breeze, and in the east, across the glittering waters of the lake, a towering white bank of clouds rose from the softly rounded hills of Vermont into the bright blue sky, where it broke apart and scudded off in pieces to the south, leaving us here on the western shore to bask in bright sunshine. It was the first agricultural fair ever held in the region, a visible sign that the northern wilderness of New York State had finally been settled and conquered by farmers. People came to it from all over the Adirondacks. They trekked in from their log and daub-and-wattle cabins in the furthest, most isolated valley and bog — squatters, grubstakers, miners, shag-bearded trappers and hunters dressed in the skins of their prey. Merchants and storekeepers, boatswains, blacksmiths, and coopers rode down in carriages from the prosperous shoreline towns to the north, like Port Kent and Plattsburgh, or rode up from Port Henry and Ticonderoga or sailed across from Shelburne and Charlotte in Vermont, readier to buy goods and livestock than to sell. The big dairy farmers and sheepmen rode in from their fifty-year-old farms on the broad, rolling meadows of the older villages inland, like Elizabethtown, Jay, and Keene, their wagons and carts stacked high with the fruits of the year’s labor, touting their skills and bearing evidence of the generosity of the fertile Lake Champlain and Au Sable River floodplains. From the newer outlying settlements tucked up among the mountains, North Elba, Tupper Lake, and Wilmington, came the poorer, hardscrabble farmers, folks like us and the Thompsons and the Brewsters and the Nashes, recent settlers who were still chopping small fields out of the upland forests and had not much to show for it yet, although we Browns intended to give that the lie. Many of the citizens of Timbuctoo came over also, a two-day trek on foot, bearing on their backs and in wheelbarrows — for they had no wagons at that time and no draft animals — garden produce to sell and exhibit in the halls, hams and maple syrup and candy and cheeses, packs of furs and hides, caged fowl, and a variety of crafted objects: reed baskets, woven hats, and prettily dyed cloth. There was even a small number of Indians, Abenakis and Micmacs, who had paddled down along the lake shore in canoes from their last remaining encampments, north of Plattsburgh, coming more out of curiosity, it seemed, than to exhibit wares or to buy and sell livestock and farm goods, for they had none to sell and no money with which to buy. Their abject poverty and loneliness were apparent to all, and they seemed more like refugees in the land than its original masters, a people exiled without ever having left home. It was difficult to know how to feel towards them, and so we tended to watch them in silence and from a distance and not to speak of them at all, even to one another.
This was the largest gathering of people that Mary and the children had seen since leaving Springfield and the largest gathering of northcountry people that any of us had ever seen. Young men and women strolled hand-in-hand openly, and gangs of boys roughed each other up and organized teams for ball games and other sports, and girls walked demurely in pairs in their vicinity. Old folks and distant family members renewed connections with one another, while men compared crops, animals, and prices and talked politics, and women set their smallest children free to run and turned to one another in friendship and cheerful confidentiality.