Coffins Read Free Page A

ONCE.
    JEBEDIAH, WHITE HARBOR
    â€œTwo Coffins buried” must, I assumed, mean that two of his family had recently passed away. The Captain had to be his father, revered by Jeb and invariably referred to by his mariner’s title. The Captain said this, the Captain did that, always in a tone implying the highest kind of filial devotion. So if I parsed it right, the patriarch of the Coffin family was insensible with the tragedy, and Jeb, in his distress, had need of a friend.
    Naturally I could not refuse. Indeed, I packed up clothing suitable for mourning and boarded the train eagerly. I am ashamed to say the darker part of my nature was glad of the excuse to leave the smoke and stink of the city for an excursion into what I envisioned to be a kind of salty paradise. I pictured slumbering mountains sloping gently to a pine-treed shore. White sails luffing in a still and perfect harbor. A church steeple poised to pierce clouds of cotton bunting. For my image of White Harbor was derived entirely from a painted postcard that I carried in my breast pocket as a reminder of destination, to be consulted frequently, if not mooned over.
    White Harbor, Maine. Surely, despite the expected lamentations, and the orderly rituals of grief (with which I was all too familiar, having buried the sum total of my blood relations), the change of scenery would be most welcome. My work, if it could be called work, had not been going well. To be truthful, it had not been “going” at all.
    Each day at noon, having wasted as much of the morning as possible over a late breakfast, I would finally, gingerly, sit down at my desk and take up my pen—and then stare for hours at the blank page before me. My book had a lofty title, The Transcendental Journey, Reflections on the Teachings of Ralph Waldo Emerson . Oh, yes, a lofty title and little else, for I’d torn up a number of false starts and at present my “book” was comprised of a few scribbled notes and an outline that had been revised so many times it no longer made sense to the would-be author.
    I’d not much to show after nearly a year of labor. You think me lazy, but there’s nothing more exhausting than attempting to force that which will not come. Say to yourself “I shall write a fine poem, as good as any by Byron or Tennyson.” Now take up your pen and begin. What’s the problem—can’t think of a first line? A first word? No? Try starting with the letter “A,” as in “A fool attempts to mimic his betters.”
    So I left my unfinished book behind, spurned like a reluctant lover, and hurried off to the wilds of Maine with barely a twinge of regret.
    Jebediah I had not seen for some months. He’d given up his rooms in Cambridge and had been accompanying various fanatical abolitionists to rallies and lectures throughout the Northern states. Though he never himself took the stage, my little friend was the force behind many an impassioned speech, and acted as a financial backer, paying expenses for the speakers, who invariably had vast appetites. Lately, with the prospect of war more and more likely, the abolitionist cause seemed to be at one with the idea of battle, and the true believers spoke of the necessity of spilling blood. At the time I was of two minds regarding this unfortunate situation; opposed to slavery, and equally opposed to war, for what can be settled by cacophonous battle, when the true freedom of man is held within?
    I was soon to find out, in a way unimaginable.
    The Boston & Maine Railroad crosses into Maine through the sleepy hamlet of Dover, New Hampshire. From there it is a little more than two hours to Portland, the primary port and by far the largest city in the state. The industrious nature of the Portland waterfront rivals that of Boston, and is in some ways more hectic, with ships and schooners and lighters plying what seemed every square yard of the bay. Hundreds of vessels were lashed or