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Walter Harding
(1917-1996)
Uncle Charlie Comes
to Concord:
A Portrait of Thoreau's Bachelor Uncle
"Have you heard? Have you heard?
Charlie Dunbar's back in town. He blew in with the northeaster last
night, I guess. Yep, he's up to the Thoreau's house on Texas
Street, out beyond the station. You know, Mrs.Thoreau's his sister
Cynthia. Most talkative woman in town, so they say. But I doubt it,
we've got plenty of talkers in this town when it comes to church
sewing circles.
"Poor Henry—that's
her son. Only son they've got since Young John died a couple of
years back—cut
himself shaving and lockjaw set in before he did anything about it.
Well, Henry, he likes to talk too (if he finds the right person to
talk to), but he finds it mighty hard to get a word in edgewise
between his mother and all the boarders around the dining room
table. You know what he told Mr. Emerson over on Lexington Road,
don't you? Said he'd rather live alone in hell than live in a
boarding house up in heaven. Don't know as I blame him. So he up
and moved out on his folks and built a little cabin out on Walden
Pond, and he's been living there all alone for a year now.
"Well, Henry, he got hankering for some of his mother's
cookies, I guess, this morning and came strolling home for his daily
visit mighty early, just dawn. He nearly fell over his Uncle Charlie—Charlie
Dunbar, that is-all curled up and sound asleep in front of the
kitchen stove. Must have got in town late, after folks had gone to
bed, and got that far before he fell asleep himself. He's the
sleepingest man I've ever heard of. Henry swears that Uncle Charlie
fell asleep one day when he was shaving himself. Sundays when he's
in town, he goes down in the cellar and sprouts potatoes so to keep
awake. Think it's not religious to sleep on the Lord's Day. Not
that the rest of the family's so religious either. Henry told old
Parson Ripley that he got more religion out of walking around Walden
Pond Sunday morning than he did in going to church service. Don't
know as I blame him. The parson's sermons are getting longer with
every Sunday.
"Yep, Charlie Dunbar's a queer old duffer. Nice fellow
though, even if he is a little queer. You know what the old Quaker
said about everybody being queer but me and thee, and sometimes I
have my doubts about thee. Every now and then he ups and
disappears. No one will hear from him for months at a time, not
even his sister. Then they'll get a note from him from Montreal or
Vermont or some out-in-the-sticks place in Maine saying he's fine
and will be back to see them soon. Sometime later he'll wander in,
just like he did last night.
"What's he doing to earn a living? Nothing much. Just
like his nephew there. Thinks time is more valuable than his money.
Young Henry there works six weeks a year and then lives the rest of
the year on that. Not lazy though, not a one of them. Old John,
that's Henry's father, likes to sit around the post-office and talk.
But not till after he has made his quota of pencils. Makes the best
pencils this side of the Atlantic. You can't find a better pencil
than a Thoreau. Charlie's just like the rest of them, can set his
hand to anything. Why, when he gets stuck in the wilderness without
any food or money, he just walks into the nearest inn and starts
performing tricks. He can do every card trick you ever saw or heard
of and a lot more besides. Thought up some good of his own, I
guess. It's a good thing he don't gamble or he'd have everyone's
money won soon and in his pocket. Well, he performs his card tricks
and then asks for a twelve foot ladder. That has them all guessing.
He takes it out on to the middle of the lawn, balances it upright
and then, by gosh, runs up one side and down the other side, kicking
it over as he jumps to the ground. It's better than those theater
acts you hear tell about. After that most any landlord's willing to
give him a free meal, or else the crowd chips in for a meal for
him. Why I've seen him with my own eyes broad jump over the backs
of a yoke of oxen, back and forth. And then he walks off, tossing
his hat ten feet up in the air, catching it right side up on his
head every time. Hope he doesn't take young Henry's hat by mistake
sometime. Henry's got a shelf built inside his hat so he can keep
his fool wild flower specimens in there when he's out for a walk in
the woods.
"Of course, if Charlie really gets stuck, he just
settles down anywhere for a while and gets a job as a hired man. He
can pitch hay against any man and weed a row of carrots fast as you
please. Course he doesn't settle down long. He's like a mosquito,
never in the same place two minutes at a time.
"You ought to hear him yell. He's got a voice like a
foghorn down on Cape Cod when he wants to use it. Word drifted back
here all the way from Maine one time about that voice of his.
Seems he was walking along the beach one day and he saw a boat he
knew passing by. So over the roar of the waves and everything else
he up and hails the boat with a shout. They heard him and put into
shore to pick him up.
"Funny old codger, he is. Used to go 'round betting he
didn't have a single tooth in his head. And he won every time
because they were all double. That was in the old days. He hasn't
got any at all of his own in the nowadays.
"Then his nose! You know what the rest of the Thoreau
and Dunbar noses are like. People 'round here say the two biggest
things about young Henry are his thoughts and his nose and I think
his nose is the biggest of the two. Well, Charlie, if you can get
him in the right mood- and it's pretty rare when he isn't feeling
like a good stunt or two- his nose is just as big as Henry's but he
up and swallows it with his mouth. Funniest thing I ever saw.
Henry can do the trick too, but he is not as good as old Charlie.
Charlie's a born actor, but Henry's kind of cold and formal in
company unless you get him talking about his walks in the woods and
his wild animals. He thinks all wild animals are pets and guess
they are the way they let him pick them up and handle them. He
caught a woodchuck last week that had been nibbling at his bean
patch out at Walden Pond, caught it in a box-trap and then couldn't
bear to kill it. So he carts it off about two miles and lets it
go. Says it hasn't come back to bother his garden yet.
Reminds me of Mr. Alcott, young Louisa May's dad, you know. He along
with a lot of these other fool abolitionists don't like this Mexican
War. They say it's a slave war. So he refused to pay his poll tax
and Sam Staples put him in jail. Alcott believes in what he call
non-violent resistance so next morning when Sam let him out—someone
else paid the tax for him- Alcott went home, picked all the potato
bugs off his plants and dumped them over the fence into Sam Staples
potato patch.
"But to get back to Charlie Dunbar. He come and goes
all the time. Never married. Never settled down. Every now and
again he swears he's going to settle down at last. But he never
does—for
long. Two weeks or a month, or maybe two or three months and he's
up and off again. Last time he came to town, last spring that was,
he swore he really was going to settle down. His sister Cynthia's
boarding-house was too much for him in any more than small doses, so
he decided he was going to settle down with the Hosmers. So up he
gets and marches over to the Hosmer's and tell them he's moving in
with them. Hosmer doesn't like the idea too much and tells Charlie
so. Charlie's insulted. He's been hearing Henry telling too many of
those stories he's been reading, I guess, for he challenges Hosmer
to a duel. No regular duel, not for Charlie Dunbar. No pistols or
swords, but a special Dunbar duel-wrestling. Charlie considers
himself the champion wrestler of New England and I guess he's not
far wrong. He just kind of sidles up and knocks the other fellow's
legs out from under him and then he's got him down. Hosmer knew
that, but he's no one to let a challenge like that to go by and out
on the front lawn they go. In then minutes half the town is there
watching them. Charlie refuses to start until they spread some
straw on the ground. Says he's afraid he'll bust Hosmer otherwise.
One throw and Charlie has Hosmer down. Hosmer asks for another try
but Charlie throws him again. But those two are no ones to stay
enemies. When it's all over they shake hands and Charlie's decided
he doesn't want to settle down this time after all. So that
afternoon he's up and off again and no one heard a word from him
till Henry found him in the kitchen this morning. No explanation,
said he'd just been up to Maine for a couple of months.
"Maybe this time he'll stay two weeks, maybe five
months. There's no telling. But as long as he is in town there'll
be something doing. That you can bet on. Yep, Charlie Dunbar's back
in town and old Concord's going to wake up for a while again.
A
Note on the Text:
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Source: Nature Outlook (Fall,
1948) pp. 7-9
in The Walter Harding Collection in the
Thoreau Society Collections
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