by John Pipkin
And then fate intervened again, Henry thinks. He wonders how often his life will be affected by accidents, by the chance occurrences that outweighed the impetus of his own intentions. Henry did not want to spend his life making pencils. He gave up working in his father's factory so that he might devote his energies to writing and teaching. He traveled to New York to pursue a writing career and to tutor the sons of William Emerson, brother of Henry's good friend Waldo, in whose home he had been living for almost two years. It was Waldo who encouraged his writing, insisted that he begin keeping a journal, urged him to move to New York and cast himself into the wider world. The arrangement was, at first, all that Henry could have hoped for. But he soon found life in New York a wholly unpleasant and lonely affair, unless one enjoyed the companionship of the wild pigs roaming the city streets. Even the weather displeased him; it seemed, if possible, colder and wetter than in New England.
And there it is, Henry concludes, as he watches another leafless maple succumb to the flames. There is the distant cause that has resulted in this calamity before him. Cause and effect. If New York had been more hospitable, if he had found a publisher there for his poems and essays, if tutoring the Emerson boys had brought him more satisfaction, if he had found another friend like Waldo, if only one of these things had transpired, he might happily have remained in that great American city, and the Concord Woods would not now be aflame.
But Henry did not stay in New York for long. Homesick and disappointed, he returned to Concord, a route he seemed destined to travel again and again. Determined to be useful to his family, he resolved to help his father improve his pencil-making business. Henry experimented with new blends of plumbago paste in search of a better filling. He mixed plumbago with boot polish. He stirred in ash and tallow and spit. He added silt from the bottom of the Sudbury River. He sprinkled in manure. And then he mixed the graphite with Bavarian clay and found that, by carefully varying the ratio of the two, he could control the hardness and darkness of the resulting paste. He designated pencils of varying hardness with SS or S or H or HH. He made pencils in Carpenter's Large, Round, and Oval sizes, black or red. The new blend left a rich mark, smooth and smudgeproof; Thoreau pencils gave testimony that American pencils need not crumble under the pressure of a nervous hand or change consistency with the weather. Within months of developing the new filling, he heard that men of discerning taste—men who appreciated the qualities of a fine line well drawn—refused to write with anything else. Henry found some contentment in knowing that he was providing Americans with pencils worthy of their grand ambitions.
John Thoreau & Co. began supplying the new lead to other pencil-makers at considerable profit, while Henry turned his attention to the machinery of the business. It was tedious work. The wood had to be split into thin fingers, the halves grooved, the hollows packed with lead paste, and the halves glued back together, all by hand. The monotony of the process was surpassed only by its wastefulness. But Henry knew that his special mixture tolerated fire and could be baked into cakes hard enough to withstand cutting. He invented a machine to slice the hardened lead cakes into thin rods. He invented another machine for drilling holes in pencil wood. To better grind the plumbago into the finest possible dust, he built a churnlike device that operated on its own once his sisters, Helen and Sophia, wound the clever spring. He devised a method for tamping the hardened lead rods into the hollowed wooden shafts. The shop overflowed with cords of pencils piled high, like a miniature forest laid low; Henry and his father walked among the little fallen trees like gargantuan lumberjacks. For the first time in their lives, the Thoreau family could begin to think about purchasing a parcel of land on which to build a home of their own. No longer would they live in rented lodgings. With little forethought, Henry became an engineer of sorts; after years of failing to choose a career himself, he found that circumstance had chosen for him.
Then, wearied by his industriousness, he decided to take a holiday, to stretch his legs and clear his lungs. His pencil work kept him indoors, bent to the workbench, breathing the heavy air of graphite and sawdust. He and Edward Sherman Hoar set out to wander under the open sky, a day of gliding over noiseless waters, bothering no one save the occasional bittern nesting along the river's edge. They caught a mess of fish and thought to boil a chowder. They forgot matches, but fate interceded, yet once more, and a shoemaker near the river gave them three red-tipped marvels that they could strike anywhere. The matches were a great improvement over the phosphorus locofocos notorious for erupting in their boxes. Henry struck the match against a hollow tree stump; everything was as it should have been, but the grass was exceedingly dry and the wind exceptionally strong.
Henry hugs his knees tightly, watches the half-mile-wide fire, and considers the many individual acts that led to this moment. He has gone over this again and again. Is blame elastic, or can it be confined to a single point? He watches as the southwest wind continues to push the flames away from the river, away from the hollow stump at Fair Haven Bay, over Shrub Oak Plain, toward Fair Haven Hill, Bear Garden Hill, and Concord. The fire continues its dizzying climb into the uppermost reaches of the trees and beyond, hurling itself upward, reaching for the clouds. On the far side of the fire, the newly laid Boston–Fitchburg rail line will create a firebreak, Henry thinks. Although the trains will not begin their journeys between Boston and Fitchburg until the summer, Henry already despises the railroad for the ruin it will bring to the serenity of the woods. Now he wonders if there will be woods left to disturb.
Henry slaps his thighs, kneads the muscles with his knuckles, begins to feel life slowly returning. He will be ready to rejoin the battle when the men finally arrive from town. But he has begun to worry. He expects to see scores of men running through the trees, but it already seems that an hour or more has passed since he and Edward parted ways. Has it been longer? What if Edward cannot convince the people of Concord that the fire is of a magnitude that warrants their concern? What if the stout farmer and his dog have been overcome by smoke and cannot corroborate Edward's alarm? At what point, Henry wonders, should he conclude that he has been abandoned on the hill, left to face the flames alone?
He knows it is of no real use, his sitting and watching, but he cannot turn away from the raucous fugue. Viscous sap bubbles from blackened bark with greasy hisses. Pinecones squeal and pop. Leaves whistle and disappear. Trunks crack open, limbs burst, tiny buds snap with tiny cries. Other cries are unbearable. Birds lost in the smoke, unable to fly upward without knowledge of the sky, call for direction; squirrels stranded in the attics of trees chatter fiercely at the invisible ground. Nothing emerges.
Henry rubs his legs vigorously. He drives his knuckles deep into the muscles as if he might force the regret from his limbs, wring out the hopeless desire to undo what he has done. He wishes now that he had taken no holiday. He wishes that he had remained in the workshop today, shut away from the natural world, hunched over his geared inventions, blackening his lungs with clouds of powdered pencil lead.
12
Oddmund
He follows the narrow cow path called Corner Road and crosses Hubbard's Bridge and does not pause to watch the Concord River sparkling in the gaps between the loose boards. In summer the bridge is slippery with moss, but today the boards are as dry and dusty as the fields. Under his footsteps they clatter loosely against the worn crossbeams. Now and again he thinks he can smell the smoke behind him, but he does not turn to look. He takes short, explosive strides, and in no time he passes Bear Garden Hill, nearly halfway to town. He would rather not go. He is, at best, a reluctant messenger, and he worries what the people of Concord will think when he delivers the news. He avoids them whenever he can. It is easier to shun their company altogether than to bear the little disappointments of their polite indifference. They are always uneasy with him, always unsure what to make of his quiet, solitary manner. He wonders if they will be suspicious when he tells them what is happening in the woods. Will they accuse him of causing
the fire through his own carelessness?
If Mr. Woburn himself had asked him to go to town, Odd might have found a reason not to, but he never refuses Emma. He cannot stand the thought of disappointing her. Odd counts his steps. He knows the number the milelong walk requires, give or take a few strides. He travels this road frequently and can reckon the extra time needed to make the trip ankle-deep in mud or knee-deep in snow. Today, with the wind at his back, there is nothing to slow his pace but his own dread; he will make the trip in less than half an hour.
The first time he wandered down Corner Road, he did not expect to return. That was just after his uncle Søren's death, a decade earlier, when Odd found himself abandoned once more in the strange new world. He no longer remembers exactly how many years he lived with Søren Hus in the tidy house on Court Street near Boston's busy Scollay Square, though he can vividly recall how it felt to step through the doorway that first time, like being wrapped in a thick blanket smelling heavily of spices he could not identify, a scent of sweet and bitter confusion. It is easy for him to summon vague impressions such as these; they linger on his senses like an aftertaste of experience, but the facts themselves never survive so well. Most of the nutshell-hard memories from his childhood, the demonstrable tokens of a life lived elsewhere, have all but vanished. He can no longer recall the sound of his father's voice, but he remembers the sensation of the deep baritone resonating against his breastbone, and he has no trouble at all remembering the tickle of stiff whiskers against the back of his neck, or the oily smell of his father's hair. Odd can still feel the soft, blubbery fatness of the pink mole on his father's wrist; he could not resist poking it in fascination whenever his father fell asleep in the chair by the hearth. But Odd can recall none of the practical advice that might have helped him find his way through this foreign land on his own.
Odd's memories of his uncle Søren have already faded in much the same way; a few specific details remain, and most of these he would gladly forget. Søren Hus made his living by importing cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and tea and coffee and other profitable things from distant places. It was not a business that required him to have anything to do with the arduous work of loading, sailing, and unloading ships. As far as Odd could tell, Søren Hus achieved these tasks by shifting long columns of numbers in the thick account books that filled his study. He spent endless hours fretting over the tallies. He traveled often, inspecting newly arrived cargo, appraising the seaworthiness of ships, meeting with merchants in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and sometimes as far away as the Carolinas. The loss of any one ship at sea, his uncle told him, could cost him everything he had earned over the years, including the house at Scollay Square. Odd could not understand why his uncle acted as though something might be done to preclude such inevitable loss. He had seen that all things eventually disappeared, and it surprised him that men struggled tirelessly under the illusion that they could change this basic fact.
Odd cannot recall precisely what he felt for his uncle at the time. He was happy to be taken from the Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys, happy that someone had come looking for him. In the house at Scollay Square, no aspect of his care was overlooked, and his uncle even arranged for private tutors to see to his education. But Odd was not convinced that his sudden good fortune was anything more than a temporary accident. He always suspected that he would be abandoned again, and it did not seem at all unlikely that his uncle would one day simply go away. Odd could not understand what he had done to make people leave him, or why it was that he was sure to be left behind when those he cared for were taken, but he knew that if he bothered to care too deeply he would find it that much harder to deal with the loss when it came. Still, he was drawn to Søren Hus, this man whom his father had so reviled, his only blood relation in the New World. At the time, Odd did not fully grasp how his uncle had found him or why he had even bothered. Søren Hus had no wife, no family of his own, and he usually had few words for Odd, seldom communicated at all aside from patting Odd awkwardly on the head. Sometimes Odd felt that his uncle looked at him as though he were surprised to see him in his home, and it made Odd wonder if the man had simply collected him like one of the knickknacks cluttering his shelves and curio cabinets, another piece of gimcrackery that the man had picked up on his travels to show his guests the richness of his life.
Odd saw more of the housekeeper, Mrs. Galligan, than he did of his uncle, and she daily told him how fortunate he was to be looked after by a flesh-and-blood relation. Mrs. Galligan, a slight woman with sharp features and steel-colored hair, had no living family. She said she had watched them die one by one in the rebellion that ravaged Ireland in 1798. She came to America alone. The blood that flowed through her veins was the last of an unremarkable vintage. She never married, but everyone called her “Mrs. Galligan” out of respect for her age. The day was approaching, she frequently told Odd, when she would depart this earth and there would be no more Galligans of Dun Laoghaire. She seemed more relieved than saddened by this fact, and she did not let an opportunity pass without reminding Odd that no bond was stronger than the bond of family; nowhere would he learn more about who he was and what he was likely to become.
Odd never mentioned the objects that his father had thrown from the deck of the Sovereign of the Seas. He never mentioned how his father had consigned to the ocean the small portrait of the man with an inverted V for a smile. He never told how his family whispered Uncle Søren's name back in the Old World, how they shook their heads and clicked their tongues after he disappeared. In the house on Court Street, Odd found no evidence of the unspoken transgressions that had so provoked his father. He saw nothing that set Søren Hus apart from the mass of well-intentioned men, nothing that should cause him to scorn the man who had come looking for him. Still, he would not permit himself to feel anything for his uncle beyond gratitude, so certain was he that a stronger feeling might trick him into believing that he would never find himself alone again.
Uncle Søren brought him gifts from his travels up and down the coast: a shark's tooth bearing a scrimshaw schooner along its length, a wooden box with a hinged lid and a clipper ship carved on its side for Odd to store his collection of stones, a new spyglass to replace the broken one that Odd nevertheless preferred. From an Indiaman loaded with cinnamon, Uncle Søren brought a polished teardrop of amber with an insect inside; he explained how this marvel came to be, but Odd felt sorry for the tiny fly, imprisoned for simply alighting on the wrong tree at the wrong time a thousand years ago. It struck him that no creature walking the earth was safe from the accidents of fate, but this knowledge was not enough to prepare him for what was to come.
In the summer of Odd's sixteenth year, Søren Hus was hung from his neck in the courtyard of the Leverett Street Jail for offenses that everyone knew he had not committed, and Odd became the last Hus in America.
A week before Uncle Søren met his grim end, Odd lay hidden in the tall, fecund-smelling weeds near the head of the Charles River with Sarah Middlebrooke, a skinny girl who sold flowers in Scollay Square, and they each tested the boundaries of recently discovered wants. He had not found the skinny girl particularly attractive or interesting, aside from the curiosity of her hopelessly crooked teeth, but she had paid him attention, and that seemed enough. Hidden among the overgrown grasses and top-heavy cattails, Odd kissed her uncertainly. His first kiss was a distant imitation of the kisses he had seen his father grant his mother, chaste gifts of affection, a grudging acknowledgment of presence. Odd heard the weeds whispering disapproval as they bent and swayed, rubbing against each other under the pressure of the breeze. He touched Sarah's shoulder, her elbow, her hair, uncoordinated explorations, as if he were trying to convince himself that she was there, that the clumsy, prodding hand was his. Her touch was more practiced. He sensed that she had been to the weeds before, and it made him embarrassed for his inexperience. Her hand seemed certain of its path. Starting at his face, her fingertips glided over his cheek, a
cross his shallow Adam's apple, down his shirtfront, and then, without the slightest hesitation, into the front of his trousers.
Sarah leaned into him, whispering something into the back of his neck while her fingers worked against a rough seam. Odd felt himself rise to her touch; he clutched at the tangled roots on either side, anchoring himself, declaring this spot the center of his world. But in the next moment he was overwhelmed with disappointment as he felt himself dissolve and drift away. Though the skinny girl was on top of him, she was so light, so insubstantial, that it seemed she might be carried away by the breeze rustling through the tall weeds, leaving him alone with his discovery. As if the girl were in no way connected to the slender fingers urgently working in his trousers, Odd felt himself float right through her, rising on an expanding cloud of heat, and then a roaring wave of pleasure swept him from this cloud and he plummeted into a cold, wet blackness. When he opened his eyes, he found the skinny girl crying and clawing at his hand where it clutched her thin arm. At the moment of his crisis, he had desperately reached out for something to keep himself from floating away, and he had caught her arm in his fist with such force that her pale skin was already showing a ring of bruises like a blue bracelet.
Panicked, Odd ran from the crying girl, promising himself that he would never again return to the weeds. When he arrived at the house on Court Street, he found Mrs. Galligan sitting on the front steps, and he was confused at first to see that she, too, was in tears. For a moment he thought that she had discovered where he had been, but then he saw that the front door hung crookedly on its hinges, the lock shattered. Through the gaping doorway, he could see that the inside of the house was in shambles. Odd knew right away that he had somehow caused this disorder, that the punishment for his indiscretion with Sarah Middlebrooke had lighted upon his uncles house. He told himself how it must have happened: the skinny girl had arrived home before him, had shown her father and her brothers the bruises, and they had come for him. Odd hung his head in shame as he approached, and he was about to confess his guilt when Mrs. Galligan placed her hand on his shoulder and held him at arm's length.
