Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [16]
Before he became entangled in business, Samuel had excelled as a lawyer. His eldest son, Edward, followed his father in this profession. By the age of thirty-two he was trusted for his probity and responsibility, and these qualities, enhanced by the afterglow of his father’s sacrifice for Amherst College, led to Edward’s appointment as college treasurer, not a task for which he was especially suited. Though more cautious than his father, he was also too scrupulous - some might say too honourable - to handle finance. He did, however, manage well enough with his legal practice and owned some of the finest horses in the area. He would drive through Amherst, spare, erect, the reins taut behind the high heads. In time, he paid off his father’s debts and settled his family in the right half of the Dickinson Homestead (sometimes called the Mansion) built by his father in 1813. It was the first brick house in town and stood apart on a rise in Main Street, three blocks east of the village centre and looking out in front over a large field, called the ‘Dickinson meadow’. The Mack family, who had bought the left half of the house, then went on to buy the Dickinsons’ side in 1840. Edward Dickinson moved his family to more spacious quarters, a white clapboard house in West Street (now North Pleasant Street) where his daughter Emily spent the formative years between nine and twenty-five.
Her room overlooked the graveyard. Funerals took place nearly every day. After each funeral she saw a ‘Swelling of the Ground’ to house the dead for all Eternity. When, she wondered, would Death take her? There was the untimely death of the gardener’s baby, and with a keener shock Emily entered the sickroom of a dying cousin, Sophia Holland. Visitors were forbidden when Sophia could no longer communicate intelligibly:
Then it seemed to me that I should die too if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even to look at her face. At length the doctor said she must die & allowed me to look at her a moment through the open door. I took off my shoes and stole softly into the sick room.
There she lay mild & beautiful as in health & her pale features lit up with an unearthly - smile. I looked as long as friends would permit & when they told me I must look no longer I let them lead me away. I shed no tear, for my heart was too full to weep . . .
When Sophia lay in her coffin it hit Emily that she could not call back a schoolmate whose thoughts and feelings were her own, or so she fancied. Unable to speak her feelings, she ‘gave way to a fixed melancholy’. Her condition was bad enough for her to be removed from her school, Amherst Academy, and sent away to recuperate with Aunt Lavinia, who was now married and living in Boston. There Emily remained ‘down-spirited’ and unable, she said, ‘to busy myself about anything’. At such times she seems to have felt cut off from expressive warmth. Though warmth was her aunt’s strength, the melancholy Emily had brought with her was, by now, hard to budge. She turned to a new arrival at Amherst Academy, Abiah Root from Springfield, asking that letters be ‘long’ and thanking Abiah repeatedly for her affection.
Mrs Fiske, the mother of another schoolmate, Helen, was consumptive. As her strength failed she kept Helen with her, out of school. She hoped to cheer her younger child Ann with a birthday party on Christmas day, but by then was too weak. By way of compensation she wrote to ask the Dickinsons if Ann could visit Emily and Vinnie. This didn’t come off, and Mrs Fiske died a few weeks later. Emily’s letters to Abiah remark the loneliness of yet another schoolfellow who had lost her mother, and the girl’s longing for one more glimpse of her.
Mortality was rife in Amherst, its proximity inescapable, and this in part contributed to the pervasive speculation about immortality. Thinking back to ‘the early spiritual influences about a child’, Emily later said: ‘The angel begins in the morning