by John Pipkin
Caleb holds the burning smoke in his chest. The small bowl he imbibed early that morning had muted his crushing headache but had not been enough to sustain him past noon. He is relieved that today none of the members of his congregation tarried the way they usually did, waiting sheepishly to ask him for special prayers or advice. Whenever they stand before him, describing their doubts and trials and infirmities, he feels as though he were perched on the point of a steeple. How small these people appear, with their self-important worries, wholly unaware that even now they stand cheek to jowl with oblivion; at any moment they might disappear and never be missed. And yet they turn to him for benediction, as if he possessed magical powers to bring them closer to God. If only they could see what he sees.
Caleb inhales deeply, feeling the smoke grow hotter as the contents of the bowl diminish; he rolls onto his side and peers out from under his coat again. He can see distant flashes from the fire churning in the woods. From the size of the dark cloud rising above the treetops, he guesses that the fire will not die out on its own, and this simple epiphany makes him smile. He wonders what Mister Emerson and his followers will think when they see their hapless deities reduced to ashes. He imagines their despair at having the mutability of their frail beliefs rendered palpable. Will they weep for every tree that falls? Caleb does not expect them to weep for him when his plan at last succeeds, but will they shudder at what his proof reveals? Caleb sucks, drawing out another wisp of poison, and the truth of things assumes the clarity that he finds only when he is at his pipe. The logic of his argument is as strong as a tightly woven rope, mathematical in its precision, philosophical in its simplicity, a proof deserving comparison to those of Descartes or Spinoza. Caleb knows that only one question remains: will the Almighty, who surely foresees the design and intent of his clever plan, allow him to follow it through?
10
Anezka and Zalenka
Long before the two ancient women with cropped silver hair took up residence in the small cottage near Concord, Massachusetts, they lived for many years on opposite ends of the exhausted silver-mining city of Kutná Hora, in Bohemia. They were born before the newly independent American colonies drafted their Constitution. They met when one was in the third and the other in the fourth decade of life, and during the fifteen years immediately preceding the arrival of Anezka Havlicková and Zalenka Duseková in the New World they each occupied one of the tiny cells in the prison at Krivoklát Castle. Thus did the two women embark on their life together at the advanced age when most expected only to tend the warm ashes of expired love. So had their jailers thought as they turned their heavy keys, releasing the women in the belief that time and slow decay had diminished the desires that the law could not erase.
Zalenka had first been attracted by the buttery apple koláce that issued from Anezka's oven at summer's end, when bright apples seemed to drop from the trees in pairs and roll into waiting palms as if they had been planning to do so since the first buddings of spring. One September afternoon, with an apple in each hand, Zalenka followed the sugary smell through a narrow alley in Kutná Hora until she found Anezka sifting flour in a hot kitchen, laughing playfully at the pixie clouds she stirred. Anezka looked to be a decade older than Zalenka but was surprisingly youthful for a woman of nearly forty years. Zalenka watched through the open window, a thief of glances, gathering impressions before making her own. Anezka's fingers were long and thin, and they moved lightly through the sifted flour as if she were experiencing a snowfall for the first time. Zalenka looked at her own hands, thick and calloused; wide enough that she might have carried two apples in each if she had tried.
Zalenka lingered at the window, bathing in the delicious smells, until Anezka invited her in. Awkwardness melted into something else, an unfamiliar comfort. Zalenka stood close, watching the thin fingers work the dough, and in the space between the women there arose more than curiosity, something closer to need. Anezka explained that she was baking for her husband, and Zalenka declared that she wished she could bake such delicacies for her fiancé, but neither confession abated the wanting. Zalenka offered the apples in exchange for instruction. They shared information. The flour must be carefully sifted. The dough must be rolled thin and kept moist. Bruised apples, just past ripe, were best. The husband was miserly and difficult. The fire in the oven must be spread evenly. The fiancé was conceited and impatient. The apples should be peeled and sliced into wedges. Sugar and cinnamon and a dab of butter on top. The husband was angry that there were no children. Then the edges are folded over, like this. The fiancé wanted as many children as there were apples on the trees. Neither man spoke often of love. A breeze blew through the kitchen, conjuring a storm cloud from the flour barrel left uncovered, and they laughed at the tempest they had precipitated indoors.
The koláce that formed under Zalenka's fingers were lumpy and misshapen, pimpled by pockets of unmixed flour, but her heavy hands were not without skill. They were more accustomed to wrapping bandages, setting splints, sewing gashes, and returning displaced joints to their proper orbits. She had once mended her brother after a hunting accident, removed the bullet, stanched the flow of blood, and made repairs with needle and thread without flinching. He lived to hunt again, though one's aim is never as good after something like that. From her mother, Zalenka learned the art of midwifery, and by an early age she was well acquainted with the terrors of childbirth, long before she became familiar with the cause. Zalenka noticed a fresh burn on Anezka's forearm where she had brushed the hot bricks of the oven; she recommended a salve, and promised to bring an ointment for the older burns already scabbed. Anezka did not ask her for a remedy for the tender, fist-size bruises hidden beneath her corset.
Zalenka and Anezka settled on a place and a time where they could meet without attracting suspicious stares; people readily questioned furtive errands, but no one doubted the propriety of two women bringing flowers to the dank ossuary at Sedlec. The crowded Cistercian graveyard where the ossuary squatted half underground was hardly a spot that anyone would think suitable for trysts. Five centuries earlier, the promise of silver in Kutná Hora had lured men by the tens of thousands; they tunneled into the dirt for the precious metal and remained until plagues and wars swept through the region and filled the earth at Sedlec with their bones, as if in recompense for what they had taken out.
Once a week, sometimes more, Anezka and Zalenka walked between rows of teetering headstones, descended the steep steps into the dark ossuary, and took refuge amid the thousands of bones stacked in pyramids beneath the vaulted stone ceiling. Huge wooden crowns hung above each pyramid, the sides of which were decorated with bones lashed into crucifixes, and at the corners of the ossuary bones festooned the walls in long, drooping chains. In front of the small altar, four Baroque candelabra shaped like towering darts held a procession of skulls gnawing on leg bones, and, at the top of each, fat candles flickered and spilled wax from the laps of trumpeting cherubs.
Anezka and Zalenka knelt before the altar with fingers interlocked; they spoke in whispers that might have been prayers. They shared stories of the parts of their lives that had begun to seem as insubstantial as the stories themselves. They exchanged rings. There was no need to hide their friendship. Acquaintances admired their sisterly devotion to each other and praised the kindness they showed to the nameless, forgotten remains in the cold, dark chamber. Anezka and Zalenka left flowers at the altar. They carried in brooms and swept the powdery dust that had accumulated on the steps and floor. They gathered the loose bones that spilled from the pyramids and arranged them in straight rows against the ossuary walls. Sometimes they found a tidy pile of bones stacked like firewood at the entrance, bleached white and tied with string, waiting to be laid to rest. Anezka brought a length of cord, and Zalenka helped her string together a garland of skulls and drape them from one pyramid to the other.
For two years, Anezka and Zalenka found sanctuary among the bones, until the day that Anezka did not arrive at the usual ho
ur. Zalenka waited in the gloom, worried that something terrible had happened to Anezka, that her husband had learned the true purpose of their devotions. Zalenka watched the dim candlelight invent shapes and usher shadows between the restless bones. She did not believe in visions, was much too practical to pay attention to the waking dreams that sometimes masqueraded as premonitions. As a child, she had scoffed at her grandmother's earnest tales of fairies who harvested fields in the night, of saints who protected the miners in their tunnels, and of the clay behemoths who guarded the Jews of the Josevov ghetto in nearby Prague. But, despite her skepticism, Zalenka beheld a vision as she waited for Anezka in the animated darkness. She glimpsed what was to come: the bones taken from their piles and rearranged in an elaborate chandelier at the center of the ossuary ceiling, ribs and skulls and tibias, an intricate masterpiece of interlocking pelvises and femurs and vertebrae, candles nestled in knuckled joints, blinking in empty eye sockets. The ghastly spectacle hung before her in the flickering candlelight, swaying in the jittery shadows, and Zalenka thought she could hear the hollow wooden clink of the bones swinging against one another.
And when Anezka finally arrived, weeping, her scarf barely hiding the plum ripe bruise swelling beneath her eye, Zalenka knew at once that they would never see her vision made manifest. Zalenka held Anezka's head in her hands, felt the hardness beneath her cheeks, and kissed her softly in the shadow of the bones. She took her hand and led her up the uneven steps into the light of the cemetery to get a better look at the bruise, and there, beneath the bright sky, she kissed her again.
The holding of hands, the embraces, the whispers and smiles, all these could be overlooked, but there was no overlooking the kiss—the long pressing of lips, not an abrupt veneration of chaste friendship but a kiss full of longing and intent. No written law prohibited what everyone knew was unnatural. One might as well pass laws against flying, they said. But where punishment was wanted there were always laws to be found, charges to be brought.
Anezka and Zalenka were accused of holding intercourse with the dead, of casting spells with whispers and furtive glances. Witches, their accusers hissed. Some said that the two women had taken bones from the chapel, that a skull was found under a bed, a rib in a flour barrel. Their husbands charged them with theft and betrayal and argued that they had at last found the cause of their childless marriages, for God would certainly not permit the propagation of evil. Vows and promises were voided. In an earlier, less enlightened time, the women might have been tortured and burned for their witchery, but instead they were granted the vicious mercy of indefinite imprisonment. The cells were crowded, but they were kept apart. Sometimes a compassionate guard, a frail, soft-spoken man, fearful himself of unwritten prohibitions, would accept scribbled notes and deliver them with an understanding nod. Some of the other guards delivered only slaps and kicks.
Though few survived so long an imprisonment, Anezka and Zalenka each refused to die alone, knowing too well the bleak rest that awaited, and when they were finally released, a decade and a half later, they returned to Sedlec, to the graveyard that seemed destined as their final home. The ossuary had grown more crowded still, and disease had already delivered both husbands to the hulking pyramids. The women's crimes were known by everyone in Kutná Hora, but no one cared if two old women embraced to hold each other upright as they hobbled down streets more heavily trafficked than they remembered. Faces vaguely familiar turned away from the two women—one bent, one half-blind—who now resembled the witches they had once been accused of being.
In prison, they had heard whispers about the New World. They had heard about the new towns and villages, the shining city built on a hill, a place where it was said that men had not yet written unjust laws or built cruel prisons, a place where one might look forward to a peaceful rest, unmolested in an uncrowded grave. After they emerged from their cells, they heard the New World discussed openly in the streets and in cafés, a place where simple wants could be met, a place where the only currency one needed was the sweat of honest labor, a place where one need not hide one's wants in silent desperation. So Anezka and Zalenka turned away from the chapel of bones and boarded a ship bound for America, to the land that promised the blessed absolution of anonymity.
11
Henry David
Henry wants to do something but cannot. It is a conundrum familiar to him.
He lies on his back, splayed flat across the crest of Fair Haven Hill as if he had been dropped from a great height by a startled bird. He is clutching the ground, trying to catch his breath, when he feels an urgent prickling along his limbs like hot sparks, feels the muscles in his arms and legs contract in spasms.
Henry ignored the stout man's advice at first; after the man and his dog ran to get help, Henry continued the fight, tried to wrestle the flames on his own. He stomped at the smoldering grass. He kicked waves of dirt. With bare hands, he ripped up vines and bushes in the fire's path. He yelled at the flames, but his voice was a hoarse whisper compared with the pure, thunderous rage moving through the trees. It burned on without remorse. It scorched the earth, felled trees, devoured animals whole—a brutal, reckless harvest. Henry was helpless. Starved for cool air, barely able to lift his legs or swing his arms, he at last turned away from the fire, climbed Fair Haven Hill, and collapsed at the top until the hot sparks of his conscience began to agitate his limbs.
He raises himself onto his elbows, but his legs do not respond to the prickling. His calves quiver in phantom convulsions of running, but he is too exhausted to move. His face and hands are black with soot, and his fingers, slashed and crusted in a dozen places, are so swollen that he can no longer clench his fist in defiance. He is grateful that the stout man and his dog agreed to carry word to Concord, for he realizes that he could not have made it himself, not without stopping to rest. He wonders if the river has carried Edward to Concord by now. Edward must be tired as well, Henry thinks, though Edward has not run for two miles through the woods. Surely Edward will not need to rest, but what if the boat runs aground or takes on water or capsizes? How much more time will pass, Henry wonders, before help finally arrives?
He pulls himself to a sitting position, and from the hill he can almost see the distant spot where the fire started. He tries to massage the life back into his legs as he stares at the fury below. The bright swirling plumes inspire unusual thoughts, and his unfortunate likeness to the emperor Nero in this regard does not escape his notice; he is glad that he left his flute at home today. The fire crawls along tree limbs like a luminous fungus, hopping onto frail branches barely able to support the infinitesimal weight of flame before burning into nothingness. Henry examines his rough hands, the very hands that gathered the kindling and struck the match, and he rubs the tips of his thumb and forefinger together, grinding the hard grain of guilt between them. He wonders if it makes a difference, if blame can be ranked and parceled out, if one can ever be less guilty or more innocent. Where can one ultimately assign the first cause? It was his hand that struck the match, but there are any number of preconditions that made the act possible, perhaps unavoidable. He wonders if he might convincingly argue that pencils helped cause this tragedy.
He was a boy when his father began manufacturing pencils in the small room at the back of their rented house. It is still an honest enough pursuit, Henry thinks, a humble and forthright occupation. Its absolute impunity is compromised only by the observable fact that his father conducts the business at no small profit. Henry grew up amid the smells of wood shavings and glue, learned the grammar of pencil manufacture along with mathematics and history, and he has worked in his father's little factory, off and on, for years. But only recently has he come to accept that his filial service to John Thoreau & Co. may very likely constitute his defining labor as a man.
Henry assumes that chance played no small role in the early success enjoyed by the Thoreau brand of pencils—chance and a lode of exceptionally compliant graphite. American pencils were generally regard
ed as impotent tools: greasy, gritty, easily smeared. For years, the Munroes and the Dixons and the other pencil-making families of America sought the proper mixture to improve their dismal stores of the twinkling black mineral. Glue, bayberry wax, spermaceti, and graphite were all to be found in the most popular concoctions. But American pencils remained temperamental things—glutinous in summer, brittle in winter. Some pencil-makers sealed their boxes with forged foreign stamps to make their pencils easier to sell, since everyone knew that pencils of real quality were to be had only from Europe—crayons from Pannier & Paillard of Paris, Bleistiften from the Fabers of Nuremberg—and the very best came from London, made with superior English antimony from Borrowdale. But European pencils were an expensive luxury, and in times of conflict and embargo they could not be had at all. Americans needed pencils of their own.
And so it seems to Henry that fate must have been at work when his maternal uncle, Charles Dunbar, stumbled upon a rich vein of graphite—what some still called plumbago—near Brixton in the hills of New Hampshire. Charles persuaded Henry's father to open a pencil factory after John Thoreau's attempts at coaxing a living from the soil had proved fruitless for yet another season. Henry's father was earnest in his new trade, even if he was disheartened to find that making pencils was a dirty business. The New Hampshire plumbago crumbled at the touch. It smeared, left greasy smudges on his hands, clothes, face. The walls and doorframes of Henry's childhood home collected black fingerprints; at dinner a loaf of bread bore the leaden mark of his father's hand where he tore off a piece for his gravy, and customers complained that their documents left traces of the words and figures they recorded. But, even so, Charles Dunbar's plumbago proved to be superior to anything else available, and in no time the pencils that issued from the little factory of John Thoreau & Co. were regarded as the finest in America. Some shopkeepers in Boston proudly displayed the award-winning Thoreau pencils—which did not need the masquerade of forged foreign stamps—as if they were fine cigars, ribbon-bound in handsome wooden boxes.
