by John Pipkin
He wants to close his eyes and sink back into the dream he awoke from that morning. Already the exact details have left him. He remembers only a large ship and a bright sea and a suffocating calmness. The dream is familiar, but there are many others. His dreams are vivid, and on occasion they are so very like his real experiences that they confuse him, mingling with his memories until he cannot tell them apart. Emma is in them, though not always. Sometimes his dreams are lustful, and he wakes in need. Sometimes the dreams themselves bring satisfaction. And in his dreams his understanding of the world and its mysteries often seems greater than when he is awake, as if he were too simple a creature for daylight. He has only brief glimpses of this understanding. It is more a feeling than a knowing, a vague sense that there are truths sleeping within him, waiting to be roused.
Faint ribbons of smoke, final, desperate gasps, push through the little mounds of earth Odd has piled within the stone circle. He throws more dirt onto the last bit of smoldering brush and drops the shovel next to the pitchfork. He will have to finish the burning later. He waits a moment longer, then turns slowly and walks toward the farmhouse, stopping every few steps and glancing over his shoulder to see if the fire has only been waiting for him to leave before it crawls out of hiding.
Woburn Farm sits on a low rise that looks as though a giant elbow were gently pushing upward from beneath the carpet of rich soil. The house and barn sit at the southern edge, hidden from the far corner by the swelling at the farm's center. Odd trudges toward the swell, rehearsing what he will say to Emma, reminding himself of the things he cannot say, reminding himself not to think of what he has seen hanging on the clothesline. He unrolls his sleeves as he walks. One sleeve clings more tightly than the other. He buttons the cuffs, lowers his head left and then right to wipe his face against his forearms, looking for a moment like a cat cleaning itself.
Odd runs his fingers through his hair, only half believing he might render himself presentable, while he sucks at the dead tooth behind pursed lips. Even alone in the field, he tries to keep it out of sight. Teeth are tiny blunders of creation, he thinks, brittle bits of unrealized pain, one of the many flaws in the human animal, like the soft exposed belly or the tender heart encaged by narrow ribs. He never bares his teeth unless effort or discomfort gives him fit cause to grimace, but it is not just the tiny dead tooth's appearance that bothers him. By itself, it is hardly a thing to make him stand out from other men. He has seen far worse, and most people in Concord revealed missing or broken teeth whenever they smiled. The dozen or so tobacco-stained teeth still left in Mr. Woburn's gums lie sunken in the shadows of his mouth like a clumsily harvested field. And Emma's teeth were scarcely better, gray and square, overlapping as if there were simply too many for her small mouth. When she smiled, though, Odd saw only her happiness; she appeared exactly as she should be, which made Odd all the more intent on hiding his own flaws.
What vexes him most about his rotted infant tooth is the way it draws attention to his other teeth, which appeared unnaturally flawless, straight, white, and intact. Years earlier, he cracked a molar on a buckshot pellet in a shank of venison, but this mishap left behind a void noticeable to no one save himself. He makes no extraordinary efforts to care for his teeth, aside from scraping them clean once a month with the splintered end of a chewed stick. They were bestowed upon him like an inheritance, unasked for, unearned. Every Hus in the Old World likewise possessed a broad and brilliant smile, one that seemed as if it bespoke a flawless soul, a smile that surely aided the disreputable ones in their wicked pursuits. People might estimate a man's character by his eyes, Odd thinks, but they will gauge his intent by the shape of his smile every time.
Odd has tried to work the infant tooth loose on more than one occasion, but its sinewy resistance always made him think of meat pulled from the bone, and the sensation forced him to abandon every attempt. The roots of the dead thing would not let go. A barber once asked him where he had obtained such masterfully carved dentures, finding it unbelievable that a man entering his third decade of life might retain all of his natural teeth in so remarkable a condition. Upon realizing his error, the man offered to extract the dead tooth for free, but as he demonstrated the gleaming forceps and the practiced yank Odd swooned.
“Odd-mund!”
Odd hears Emma call for him again, and he quickens his pace. He knows she will see him once he reaches the top of the rise. He can already picture her: knuckles rolled inward against plump hips, rounded shoulders thrown back, one foot turned outward. He brushes away the crumbs of dirt still clinging to his shirtfront, slaps his thighs and knees, checks and rechecks his trousers, making sure there is no cause for embarrassment. His clothes are mottled with dirt and grass and animal stains, greasy imprints of manure and feed, dried outlines and dark patches of fresh sweat. He sees nothing shameful.
Odd mounts the gentle swell at the farm's center, and with every step the horizon rocks up into his line of sight, a little more each time, until the house pops into view: first the chimney, then the weathered gray roof, then the white shingles and the second floor windows, and at last the green door and the crooked porch with Emma before it. The farm's chickens are gathered around her feet in worship. She is almost as he has pictured her. The sun lights her hair, single strands bright as fire straying from the mass of dull orange curls hanging to her shoulders. She stands with hands at hips, feet together at right angles, head thrown back, as though she were trying to balance the weight of her cheeks on her short neck. The sight never fails to make Odd catch his breath. He feels his steps stutter as his feet suddenly grow uncertain of themselves.
Emma's voice is soft and confident, like the hum of swarming honeybees, a voice capable of achieving distance-conquering volume without becoming harsh or grating. Her accent carries no remnant of what she suffered before leaving the famines and plagues of her native Ireland. When she calls him, she stretches out the first syllable like an invocation: Odd-mund. She is the only person who uses his full name. She listened with interest when he explained to her that his name was rich with meaning. He told her how Odd came from Oddin, meaning “the point of a sword,” and mund from mundin, meaning “protection.” Emma seemed to accept this as true. He knows that his name sounds like an American word, but the similarity is only an accident of language. No one but Emma has ever seemed willing to believe that his name could be a different thing altogether, a word unto itself. His father told him that it was the name of kings, but most people in the New World uttered the first syllable like an accusation.
Emma's voice traverses the shrinking space between them and settles gently in his ear. “Odd-mund Hus! There you are. Mr. Woburn said he set you at clearing the far corner, and in such a wind as this. I cannot reason with that man. Not when his mind is fixed I cannot.”
Odd feels his feet lose the rhythm of walking. He moves toward her awkwardly, stepping between the chickens pecking at the pale yellow kernels sprinkled in the dirt. Only now does he notice the noisy clucking.
“Did you eat breakfast this morning?” Emma asks as if it were the most pressing question of the day.
“I did.”
“There's always something for you in my kitchen, you know. Bacon and biscuits today. Hot coffee, too. Why you don't come in every morning I'll never understand. It does no good to put something cold in your belly the way you do. I thought surely you would come in to warm yourself at the stove.”
Odd wades through the chickens, and he almost trips to keep from lumbering right into Emma, headfirst like a goat. He imagines falling into the warm folds of her flesh, wrapping his arms around her, tumbling to the ground, and the very thought prickles the skin up and down his legs. Emma is staring at him, as if waiting for a reply, and Odd wonders if she can tell what he is thinking.
“This morning I had much to do,” he offers.
Emma folds her arms and taps her foot. “I know what you were doing.”
Odd sucks on the dead tooth and tries to avoid her s
tare.
“I saw you this morning, Oddmund Hus, standing out there for a half hour.”
Odd sucks harder on the little tooth, almost hard enough to pull it from its socket. He knows she saw him staring at the clothesline. His eyes dart toward the neckline of her dress and he drags them away. He looks instead at the porch, the sky, the chickens. To his amazement, despite the rising panic and embarrassment and the noisy clucking, he feels a stirring, a warm, heavy rising.
“I… I…”
Emma holds up a chapped hand. The wedding band is outlined in red where the finger has swollen around it. “I know what you were about. I saw the glow at your cheeks….” Odd feels the urge to run, wishes he could hide. “Staring off into space, deep in thought, you were. Looking right through this world. It's a philosopher you are, Oddmund Hus. I've told Mr. Woburn a thousand times, what he's hired is no farmer. I told him he's got himself a philosopher in his employ.”
“Mrs. Woburn … I …”
“Don't think I don't comprehend. I've met plenty of deep-thinking men. There's no shortage of them hereabouts. Something in these parts does it to a person, gets him thinking on the things he cannot hope to see.”
Odd's eyes dart over Emma's face, drop to her shoulders, her arms—sneaking, creeping, fighting against his own will—across her wide bosom, and back up to her face. He does not see any signs of straps or laces, but he knows they are there.
“You are a thoughtful man,” Emma says, her final judgment.
She stoops to brush away a chicken perched on her toe, and Odd cannot pull his eyes away from the inviting cleft at the neckline of her dress—the soft skin, the dark recess, all right there before him. He cannot let her catch him looking, but he looks anyway, a short fugue of quick glances. The urge to run away comes upon him again.
“Why did you call for me, Em—Mrs. Woburn?”
“Oh.” She straightens and points over his head. “What is that?”
Odd follows the line of her finger, and the tingling in his legs ceases; the heavy warmth dissipates. She is pointing at the tower of pale smoke, which has doubled in size since he last looked.
“Ah … skog…” Odd shakes his head. The old words sometimes creep back. “Ja, the woods.”
“I've never seen them do that before,” she says. “You're sure that isn't any of your smoke, then? With this wind, might be hard to tell.”
“No, ma'am. No. It is none of my smoke.”
Emma nods. “Well, I told Mr. Woburn you'd not get smoke such as that from burning off a field. I told him it was trouble, to be sure. But I knew you had nothing to do with it. I told Mr. Woburn if there was any trouble out there in the field, you would already be seeing to it.”
Odd swallows. He knows his fire is not the cause. He watched it carefully, and he extinguished it before the wind could spread the cinders.
Emma laughs for no reason, a soft, apologetic laugh. “Mr. Woburn said I ought to send you into Concord to tell someone, if I was still having apprehensions about it once I talked to you.” She repeats the concerns she voiced to her husband without letting the slightest hint of worry cross her face.
Odd can never tell when she is upset or angry or disappointed. Her smile never diminishes to anything less than a placid crescent, like the faint wisp of the new moon, a suggestion of fullness to come. From the bits of stolen glances in his memory, he can compose the soft details of her face, her shifting expressions, the generous proportions of her arms and legs and back, and the way her dress struggles over certain curves, but he cannot puzzle out the feelings hidden beneath the expanse of flesh standing right before him.
“Seems to me we might be needing help if the wind changes and it comes this way,” she says. “Mr. Woburn would have seen to it himself, but he told me he had business in the other direction. He says I worry too much. Still, it would put my mind at ease if you could tell someone in town. Oh, I suppose you'll have to walk to Concord, as Mr. Woburn took the wagon. I hope you don't mind.”
Odd checks the front of his trousers; it has become almost a reflex. He sees Emma make a face when he does so, then he nods.
“Ja, ja. I will go, then.”
Emma turns and gestures toward the kitchen door with a heavy arm. “I baked a pie …” she starts to say, but when she turns back she sees that Odd has already picked his way through the cluster of chickens and set off toward the center of Concord.
Emma calls after him, “You might as well take something to eat.”
Odd waves, a long, slow sweep of the arm, but he does not stop.
7
Oddmund
Emma is not wholly incorrect. He does not believe himself so deep a thinker as she suggests, but in his dreams he is indeed a philosopher. In his dreams he is eloquent, no awkward stumbling after the American words that still feel like stones in his mouth, no grasping after the ideas of wiser men. When he is asleep, his mind awakens to the truths he has somehow always known but cannot fully recall in daylight. When his thinking self lies dormant, his dreams explore the profundities of his adopted home.
Before it was a place, the New World was an idea. Before desire found its object, regret knew what it would willingly leave behind. The only world men had ever known was once so old that they could not imagine a time when it might have been young, a time when civilizations might not have marched blindly toward collapse in order to avoid slipping into the gulf of history. The citizens of the Old World longed for boundless, level plains, and out of this longing was born the idea of the New World, a pesky half-thought hiding in the shadows of disappointment, haunting the margins of laboring hours when futility acquired the numbing power of an opiate. The idea survived the onslaughts of religion and history, a vestigial hope, a footprint of want from previous generations, eroded but intact.
The continent that would bear the weight of these expectations had always been here, for as long as continents had floated on the oceans, crashing into one another with remorseless mountain-making force. The first explorers came in the name of primitive desires: gold, jewels, spices, slaves, trade. Those who came later wanted less, wanted—above all else—to discover the one condition that promised unimpeded possibility: nothing. Men would have been satisfied to find the land barren, as long as it contained absolutely nothing to remind them of the past, nothing to limit the horizon.
The wonders of the New World did not disappoint, but they were unlike the strange marvels that previous centuries had foretold. The plants and animals were somehow familiar, like an unfocused reflection of the Old World projected and inverted through a pinhole; the flora and fauna were wonders in kind but more so in number, for America's true wonder was a wonder of plenitude. What need had a starving man for a rare parrot of bright plumes, when he might easily grasp a hundred gray sparrows simply by swatting at the teeming skies? What fascination did a scaly monster from the deep hold for a simple man who might dip his net into silvery flashes and snare enough unremarkable fish to feed his family for a month? Wonders of abundance!
But this new world held disenchantments, too, and the greatest was that men were already here. What disappointment to learn that the promised land had been promised to someone else! Oh, epic jealousy, the old poets would have cried had they not been among the most reluctant to leave the Old World behind. This garden already had ample Adams and Eves, blissful spoilers, a people whose crude weapons and forthright manners seemed to serve no purpose other than to remind the newly arrived that nothing in the world was new. The native inhabitants were far less exotic than what one might expect to find peopling the land of one's fantasy. None of the bronze Indians spoke through yellow-fanged navels; none sprouted feathers instead of hair; none stood on cloven hooves or carried more than one head upon their shoulders. But, wonder of wonders, these men and women had been here for generations, daring to walk upon the soil of the New World like somnambulant trespassers in a centuries-old dream. The explorers of the New World turned to the machinations of the Old to preserve their ill
usion; history had not forestalled the discovery of Eden, and they would not allow it to disrupt their dream. And so began the infection of the New World with the ways of the Old. In the end, desire would not be sated; regret would go unreconciled. The Old World would not be left behind, after all.
Oslo, Norway, 1829. Oddmund Hus's father, Lars, insisted that the large trunk belonging to Oddmund's grandfather accompany them on the voyage that most travelers made with little more than what they might tie up in a quilt. Over the protestations of Oddmund's mother, Lars Hus paid the crew extra gilders to bring the heavy thing up the gangplank and down into the hold. Ingrid Hus had little patience with impracticality, and though she fully realized the significance of their leaving, she had no interest in hidden meanings. She had cut her hair stubble-short the day before, not as a symbolic gesture—though Lars mistakenly admired the act as such and dramatically razored his own head of blond hair— but for entirely practical reasons: as a deterrent against fleas and lice. They were not a wealthy family, but neither were they as poor as many of the other travelers lining the docks at Oslo, willing to barter themselves into servitude for passage to America. Lars Hus had no need to seek fortune in the New World, but he had reason enough to leave the old one behind. Ill fortune took many forms, and, among them, the affliction of a family name was by far the least uncommon.
