A Loaded Gun (12 page)

       
Immediately grew

       
I felt myself a visitor

       
And hurriedly withdrew—

       
Revisiting my late abode

       
with articles of claim

       
I found it quietly assumed

       
as a Gymnasium

       
Where Tax asleep and Title off

       
The inmates of the Air

       
Perpetual presumption took

       
As each were spectral Heir—

       
If any strike me on the street

       
I can return the Blow—

       
If any take my property

       
According to the Law

       
The Statute is my Learned friend

       
But what redress can be

       
For an offense nor here nor there

       
So not in Equity—

       
That Larceny of time and mind

       
The marrow of the Day

       
By spider, or forbid it Lord

       
That I should specify
—
    
[Fr1174]

The poem rumbles out in all directions. Dickinson often sees herself as the spider-artist, spinning meticulous webs of Pearl. And here the spider has usurped her place in the privy. So she's become the plaintiff against herself. Still, she argues her case. We should also remember that Austin seldom appeared in court. He was never his father's “bulldog,” never a trial lawyer. But the poem itself has a special Circumstance; it also happens to be a piece of constructivist art,
“and is one of the oddest in all of Dickinson's writings,” as Christopher Benfey acutely observes in
A Summer of Hummingbirds.

Right in the middle of the poem is a collage, with Dickinson's own spiderlike handwriting swirling around the central image. [A 129] Dickinson has pasted a three-cent stamp “sideways,” with a pair of tiny cutouts from the May 1870 edition of
Harper's Monthly Magazine.
One of the cutouts reads “GEORGE SAND,” the other is simply the name of Sand's novel “Mauprat,” and they
fly
out of the two left corners of the stamp, like
“a bird with wings outstretched.”

Sand, of course, was one of Dickinson's heroines, who wrote about
the “White Heat” of her love affairs; she also flaunted her independence by dressing as a man. But the stamp itself is part of the extravaganza; it depicts a locomotive with smoke
“streaming from its pyramidal smokestack,” while the train, as placed “is traveling upward like a rocket, the smoke cascading down,” almost into the language of the poem.

It was Edward who first brought the railroad to Amherst. Emily would write about it in one of her most celebrated poems, “I like to see it lap the miles” [Fr383], where the locomotive, with its pyramid of smoke, ends up “docile and omnipotent/At its own stable door,” just like the carriage horses her father loved to drive. He's the phantom conductor of the train, as well as her secret interlocutor in the earlier poem—Edward's trace is everywhere.

Is it any wonder that she was so reluctant to “print,” to see her lines—and her name—in some public auction of the soul? And yet she seemed to mimic the art of publication, as if she were preparing a secret oeuvre; but how could anyone ever have published a poem with a locomotive in the middle? Still, there was “divine Sense” to what she was doing—she survived with the lightning inside her head. And after Carlo died, she would find another ally: Margaret Maher.

2

J
AY
L
EYDA WAS THERE FIRST, AS HE OFTEN IS
. Long before scholars ever considered the importance of servants at the Homestead and the Evergreens, Leyda wrote about Margaret Maher, the Dickinsons' Irish maid, in his essay “Miss Emily's Maggie.” Leyda wasn't interested in the usual smoke screens; he wanted to dig under the false legends and reports that surrounded the poet. Minutiae, he believed, might unlock some of the secrets that surrounded Dickinson's “
surprising poems and equally surprising life.” Minutiae would help reveal “warm and wild and mighty” Maggie, as the poet came to call her. [Letter 907, early August 1884]

But it hadn't always been that way. Dickinson never lost her patrician
manner, and was on guard against the Irish, who worked on her father's railroad and lived near the railroad tracks. As Leyda tells us:
“Every fence was employed to isolate the Irishman from the community,” his Catholicism “an excellent barrier to the tightly buttoned Congregationalist villages of western Massachusetts.” There was no place for an Irishman among gentrified Whigs like her father; the wild Irish had to join the Democratic Party if they wanted any political clout.
Scribner's
and the
Springfield Republican
constantly made fun of the Irish. And for the poet herself, they were barely human, blushing as easily as some savage child from the railroad tracks.

Several months after Margaret arrived at the Homestead, in 1869, Dickinson wrote to Loo about her father's Irish handyman and his expertise with horses:

. . . Tim is washing Dick's feet, and talking to him now and then in an intimate way. Poor fellow, how he warmed when I gave him your message!
    
[Tim must have been kind to Loo on her last visit].
The red reached clear to his beard, he was so gratified; and Maggie stood as still for hers as a puss for patting. The hearts of these poor people lie so unconcealed you bare them with a smile.
    
[Letter 337, late 1869]

Yet she would learn to trust Margaret, to depend on her, as she trusted no one else. Margaret might deliver a message to the poet's sister-in-law, keep strangers out of her hair, protect her from every prying eye. They formed a powerful unit—mistress and maid. Dickinson stored her stash of poems with Margaret; all her fascicles lay at the bottom of Margaret's trunk, in that tiny room above the kitchen where Margaret slept. Emily was still the same patrician, but by 1881 she would write to her Norcross cousins:

Maggie's brother is killed in the mines, and Maggie wants to die, but Death goes far around to those that want to see him. If the little cousins would give her a note—she does not know I ask it—I
think it would help her begin, that bleeding beginning that every mourner knows.

Before she came to the Homestead, Margaret worked for the Boltwoods, who were every bit as prominent in Amherst as the Dickinsons. She had moved to Hartford with Clarinda Boltwood and her husband, but after her brother-in-law, Tom Kelley, lost his arm in an accident—he fell off a building and tumbled thirty feet—Margaret returned to Amherst to be with the rest of her family. The Boltwoods still wanted to keep her; Margaret was quite attached to Clarinda, and wrote as often as she could.

. . .
I don't know whether it is day or night since I left hartford . . . the dath of dear father lies in a
cloud
of sadness on me and I can't get over it he died in my armes . . . how nice it would be to have all friends lay down and die so that we would not have to suffer the loss of those that gone . . .

Edward had had a difficult time finding and keeping servants. As one former seamstress said,
“The Dickinsons didn't like strangers . . . Outsiders weren't welcome there.” Particularly if they were Irish.

Margaret was well into her twenties when she came to work for Edward Dickinson; she had no real desire to stay in his service. Born in Tipperary in 1841, she had come to America with bits and pieces of her family, and wanted to join her brother in the Far West—or move back to Hartford to be with the Boltwoods—but couldn't seem to get out from under Edward's grip.

. . .
Mr. Dicksom said he would Pay me as much more wages soner then let me go so that I have decided to stay for the Preasant . . .

The “Preasant” soon became thirty years; she would outlive all the Dickinsons who had ever employed her—father, mother, Emily, Austin, Vinnie—but five years after the poet's death, she still signed her letters “Miss Emily's and Vinnia's Maggie.”

Yet even as Leyda hunts down Margaret and uncovers as much minutiae as he can, he still can't tell us much about Margaret's relationship to her mistress's poetry. Neither can Richard Sewall and the poet's other biographers; she's not even mentioned in John Cody's psychoanalytical study, though Dickinson spent more time with Margaret,
“the North Wind of the Family,” than she ever did with Sue. It's only in the twenty-first century, when most class distinctions have long disintegrated, and we've had more than a hundred years of mining the poet's art and life, that we can find a much more subtle and
searing
portrait of Edward's “Irish girl.”

As Aífe Murray writes in
Maid as Muse,
“There was an invisible story within an invisible story,” about Irish, Native American, and black gardeners and maids who worked for genteel families like the Dickinsons but remained unrecorded ghosts, outside time and history. Margaret would also have remained a ghost if her mistress hadn't become
our
Emily Dickinson. But Aífe Murray is the only one who has grasped that Margaret helped shape the poet's interior landscape. Her maid would keep alive a counternarrative of
“a cacophonous tumbling kitchen ‘world.'” If, as Murray suggests, the parlor was the stern, almost morbid, fixture of Puritan Amherst, the kitchen was
“the most creative room in the house[,] dominated by a mix of voices and purposes.” But it was also beyond the pale of Puritan culture.

The kitchen, pantry, and back rooms belonged to the
“architecture of the unseen,” where servants could disappear from view and never be noticed. The poet learned to intrude upon this hidden architecture. She often scribbled bits of poems in the pantry and worked with Maggie in the kitchen, particularly after her mother had a stroke. And Murray doesn't see the poet's mythic white dress as a mark of seclusion. It had a much more practical bent. The white wrapper allowed her to move unimpeded from her garden to the kitchen, and to her writing desk upstairs. It also brought her much closer to Margaret's world. Murray senses a “
seamlessness between the motions of maid and mistress . . . as
one mixed and the other measured, as quick remark of one was met by quick remark of the other.”

How much of Margaret's cadences broke into Emily's
moosic
is difficult to surmise. Murray can feel Margaret's presence in every single one of the poet's celebrated dashes, which
“provide a halting, almost rollicking gait,” like Margaret's own. But I find Dickinson's dashes much more violent, and not part of any particular “chant.” Her dashes decapitate lines and words, until syntax shatters and we're left with sharp little strings of language, like lonely, isolated islands.

Yet Margaret still managed to influence Dickinson's fate. She would become the poet's accomplice, a female master sergeant. Margaret was the guardian of her mistress's “Snow,” the stitched and unstitched booklets, and isolated scraps written on recipes and chocolate wrappers. Dickinson had ordered Margaret to burn the entire stash upon her death. But Margaret removed the poems from her trunk and put them back in her mistress's bureau, where Vinnie discovered them. Murray believes the poet knew all along that Margaret would never destroy her “Snow” and was counting on her maid's loyalty and shrewd judgment.

I'm not so sure. Dickinson was very careful and precise about other matters. She had Judge Lord prepare her will—Margaret was one of her witnesses. She orchestrated her own funeral, asked for a simple white coffin, and wanted six of the family compound's Irish laborers to carry her out the back of the house, through the barn, and across the fields to the burial ground—one of these six men was Margaret's brother-in-law, Tom. Yet she was so reckless and nonchalant about the fate of her poems, that spider's material she had accumulated for almost thirty years. Perhaps she wasn't reckless at all, and really preferred that the poems be destroyed. It was a form of “suicide”—she didn't want to leave a trace of herself.

She could rant to Higginson about the unbearable burden of publication:

If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog, would forsake me—then—My Barefoot-Rank is better—
    
[Letter 265, June 7, 1865]

But she wasn't Barefoot in the swirl of her mind. She had an audience to play against in her letters; she could dance on invisible toes, pirouette for some imperfect Other, except perhaps in her “Master Letters,” where the Other may never be defined, or could have been her own invented male self. The poems were often
secretions
within the letters themselves, like the markings of a snail, and she might shift a word or a line to suit a particular correspondent, like some poet-tailor. But all her lines, altered or not, still had their own very private life. She may have worn as many masks as she could in her letters, but here she was pirouetting for herself. And though it's dangerous to intuit her intentions about her poetry from a particular poem, we might find a couple of clues:

       
I would not paint—a picture—

       
I'd rather be the One