Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [28]
Lucrece also reported her recurrent illnesses—more headaches, dizziness, pain in her side and breasts. Worries about Lucrece’s health intensified Finley’s yearning for her, so that for all his effort to center his affection on God, he was making her an idol: “My impatient longings to be with you as though you were not safe out of my presence tells me this, my constant fears of bad news from you tells me this, my dreams.” A steamship had come into service between New York and Charleston, and he sometimes felt tempted to drop everything and immediately return home.
Finley’s discontent may not have been much relieved by several visits from his brother Richard. Now twenty-five years old and a licensed minister, Richard was preaching for a while at the Presbyterian church on John’s Island, near Charleston. Even more restless than his brother, he had come out of their closely regimented childhood with no clear sense of what he wanted. Having failed as a schoolteacher, he accused himself of one defect after another—timidity, selfishness, impiety, a “moping melancholy” that made him unsociable and unpleasant. He still consulted his mother about how to get a new coat—a “quere [sic] creature,” Elizabeth thought him. Finley assured him that he would succeed in anything he undertook, “with a little self confidence”—a trait Richard wholly lacked. While in Charleston, Richard wandered about to relieve his ennui, bit his nails, brooded in his journal: “This evening I felt as if every one was my enemy.”
At the end of his dismal season, Finley returned not to the parsonage but to his parents’ temporary new home—a rented cottage in New Haven. Lucrece was there with little Susan, although now, a married woman and mother, she felt uncomfortable living with her in-laws: “I wish I could receive you at our own house,” she told Finley. Scraping by himself, he had sent what money he could to help pay for his parents’ move from Charlestown. They found some comfort in at least having their furniture with them. Jedediah borrowed $400 to have a studio built for Finley, and counted on loans from his son to partly finance the construction of a house in New Haven to accommodate the entire family.
Only a few months after relocating, Jedediah left for distant Buffalo and Detroit. Through highly placed officials in Washington who admired his geographies, he had obtained an appointment to collect information on the numbers, location, and institutions of all the Indian tribes outside the Northeast—“400,000 of our fellow beings,” he said. In this way he managed to be far from the Charlestown First Church when its new minister was installed in his place. Instead of preaching the customary farewell sermon, he sent a letter to be read to his flock.
Jedediah’s appointment took him to new scenes that he found fascinating—Mackinaw, with its waterside lodges and birch canoes, most of the villagers filthy, many naked, some in war paint. But he remained bitter at having been driven from his ministry by people he had counted friends—“conduct cruel as the grave,” Elizabeth called it. He fell prey to “depression of spirits,” developed an obscure numbness, constriction in his chest. The thought of separation from his wife and from the home he had had for thirty years sometimes made him weep.
Finley tried one more season in Charleston, then never went