Miss Fuller Read Online Free PDF Page B

horses on, pastthe tall green spears of mullein, the joe-pie weed with tight grey buds, the flutter of buttercups, campions, and hawkweed that swayed and bobbed in the ditches by the road.

    When Henry arrived in New York, a newspaper at the hotel carried the latest news of the wreck of the Elizabeth . She had foundered on a sand bar off Fire Island in the night three days earlier, in the freakishly violent hurricane that had run up the eastern coast, then cut across Long Island and into Connecticut, where it had abruptly died out into nothing more than heavy rains.
    The paper was The New York Globe — a rival of Greeley’s Tribune — and the tone of the article was dry. After reviewing the essentials — number of estimated dead in the nation (84), estimated speed of winds (more than 100 miles per hour), how many hurricanes reported on this path from previous years (3), number of merchant ships on the Atlantic estimated lost due to weather each year (27) — it focused on the continued efforts of the shipping company to recover their cargo, 150 tons of Carrera marble. She was a merchant vessel; apart from the crew and some livestock, the few passengers had included the writer Margaret Fuller, her two-year-old son, and her husband, the Italian marquis named Ossoli. All three, along with an Italian girl who was their maidservant, and two sailors, were now dead. Sixdead, seventeen survived. The child’s body had been found — he had died in the arms of a sailor only yards from the beach, and both bodies had already been buried behind the dunes. Now that the seas were calmer, rope lines and mule-teams would be engaged in the effort to drag the marble slabs to shore. The rest of the paper was filled with reports of the hurricane’s wrecking path from the Carolinas north, and of the efforts to clean the streets of Manhattan from debris. A political cartoon showed the mayor of New York City riding the hurricane like a bucking horse. “Winds from Washington are powerful strong,” he said.
    In the Tribune , a black-bordered space offered a tribute to their dead correspondent. “Death of Margaret Fuller, the Marchesa Ossoli, the Most Famous Woman in the World,” said the head-line. The next phrase continued editor Horace Greeley’s combined instincts for drama and advertisement: “Tireless Champion of the Truth.” Henry set the papers aside with a sigh.
    That night Henry slept only a little, then rose early and walked through rubbishy streets. The mess of roof slates and broken glass was being cleaned by men with shovels and brooms. At the pier he caught a ferry to Bay Shore. The next ferry to Fire Island was delayed, so an oysterman with a single-sailed dory took him across the choppy bay.
    He walked across the narrow finger of Fire Island in the hot, bright, salt-stung air. Dead animals, smashed cottages and barns, and flattened trees told of improbable disaster inthe midst of rose-hips, sand, heather, thrushes. Coming up over the dunes to the ocean-side, he saw spread before him what looked like a battlefield: a tent encampment, teams of mules and drivers in the surf, the bulk of the destroyed ship so close to shore — absurd that it had sunk, that people had died, virtually on the beach! — and a line of slowly moving people stretched in either direction from the wreck as far as he could see. He realized that they were scavengers, pickers. Four days since the storm, only the dregs were left — shreds of soggy timber still peeling from the ship, bottles and ropes and bits of cloth that washed up. Important items, such as trunks and cartons and furniture, were long gone, he feared; unless perhaps the shipping company had done its own salvage work.
    A short conversation with a boss at the mule-teams took away that hope. There was only one forlorn police-man guarding a sad heap of empty trunks wrested from the hands of pickers. Jumbled about were sea-weed, scraps of clothes, a couple of plates, a kettle, and a broken