by John Pipkin
“You must go at once,” she said. “It cannot be true, but you must go at once.”
Odd thought she was telling him to flee. “Where will I go?”
“To Leverett Street. To your uncle.” Her tears, he understood then, had nothing at all to do with what had happened in the weeds. “They have taken your uncle Søren to the jail.”
Odd found his way to the Leverett Street Jail just as Mrs. Galligan had instructed. At first, he was not as alarmed as he thought he might be to see his uncle imprisoned. The communal cell looked palatial compared with the dark cabin Odd's family had been forced to share with two other families during the crossing. Odd remembered how his mother had shared all of their sugary potato lefse with the other children that first night, though he had hoped there would be enough to last all the way to America. There was no food in his uncle's cell, but there was a square window near the ceiling and piles of clean straw and no dead flies floating in the water bucket. Odd saw that a number of other men occupied the cell, and they appeared to be keeping their distance from his uncle, squatting on the straw and leaning into the corners. Odd tried not to look at them. Søren Hus retained an air of offended elegance—as if he had been slapped for brash words at a dance and needed only to return home to sleep off his rejection. His vest and coat were torn but still buttoned, his cravat still tight at his throat. A purple bruise spread beneath his right eye, and flecks of dried blood sat at the corners of his mouth. Odd thought he smelled cloves and cinnamon.
Søren Hus tried to tell him what had happened. Odd watched his uncle's tongue flicker through the jagged gap where teeth had been broken. The story spilled out in jumbled fragments; it involved a young lady, he said, a very young lady. Odd was struck by the look of shock in his uncle's eyes, as if he had abruptly been awakened from a terrible dream to find it real. The details made no sense at first. The story had to be repeated, enlarged. The girl, his uncle explained, a child really, had resisted his advances and in the ensuing scuffle he had used more force than he intended. He had, in fact, very nearly killed her, but the child escaped his grasp and spoke of what had happened. She might not have been believed, but there was a witness, and within days other witnesses came forth. He had been seen with other girls. He had been seen in the company of young boys as well, ruffians and guttersnipes, unfortunate boys without families. The women of the Boston Female Asylum said he had pretended to be the uncle of one of their destitute girls before they sent him away, and he confessed to Odd that he had visited the Boston Asylum and Farm School on Thompson's Island more than once. Søren Hus seemed relieved to have been found out. He said that he would willingly have confessed, but before he could be properly arrested angry men marched on Scollay Square and dragged him to the jail. He denied nothing. He made no excuses to Odd. His only explanation for his deeds was that he could not do otherwise.
Odd listened, silent, bewildered. Nothing in his uncle's demeanor—his quiet speech, gentle manners, fine clothes—had ever suggested that the man might be capable of what he described. Odd thought of the portrait sailing from his father's hand, and he loathed himself for not trusting his father's judgment. Then he thought of Sarah Middlebrooke. He thought of the urges that had rushed through him, and he wondered if he himself had narrowly avoided a similar end. What violent acts might he have committed if Sarah had not been so willing from the start? At that moment, a strange sensation rose from the pit of his stomach; it was not hatred or disgust for his uncle but, rather, abhorrence for the blood in his own veins, the blood he and his uncle shared. Odd felt as though he had been plunged into a murky pool; his vision blurred and he felt that he could not breathe. And then something his uncle had said, a small detail, bobbed to the surface. Odd formed the question slowly, already saddened by the answer that he knew would come.
“When you came to the island, it was not to find me?”
His uncle shook his head slowly.
“You wanted a different boy,” Odd said. “Sturen gutt, dårlig gutt—any boy.”
“I did not even know you had come to America,” his uncle said. “It was an accident, my finding you there. Chance. Fortune.”
Odd puckered his lips and sucked at his dead tooth. He realized, then, that since his arrival in the New World he had always been alone.
“Oddmund,” his uncle muttered through swollen lips, shaking his head ruefully, “you were to be my atonement.”
Odd closed his eyes and tried to pretend that none of this was happening. He wished he could lay claim to his life as a thing untouched by others, a solitary, singular fullness that he might cleave to himself and carry off into the wilderness.
“I see you are disgusted with me,” his uncle said. Odd wanted to protest, but he could not explain what it was that had taken the place of disgust.
“It is easy to condemn my weakness,” his uncle said, lisping through his broken teeth. “But one day you will understand.”
Odd wanted to ask his uncle a hundred things. He wanted to know how he might avoid a similar end. He wanted to beg him for guidance. Most of all, Odd wanted to be reassured that whatever willful perversions had seized his uncle would not, one day, enthrall him as well. Odd thought of Sarah lying on top of him in the weeds, and he began to fear for her safety. He thought of the cravings that she drew out of him, and he knew he must never see her again. Sarah had not resisted, but there had been nothing to resist. He had been too nervous to do anything. He had only to let it happen. But what if he had wanted more? What if she had denied him? What would he have done?
Odd's uncle rummaged in his coat pocket and came toward him. “They will, no doubt, take everything. There are debts, of course. But this is for you.”
Søren Hus slid his fist between the bars of the cell door, uncurled his fingers, and a small weight dropped into Odd's palm. It was shaped like a flattened egg. The silver was badly tarnished, but the clasp worked and the hinge opened to reveal two thumb-size portraits of Odd's parents.
“My brother forgot me. Understandable. A family must rid itself of what it cannot explain. But, still, he was my brother.”
The trial, the conviction, the hanging—all followed a week later.
Odd wanted to see for himself, to make sure, but executions had ceased to be public spectacles in Boston; the old, portable gallows was no longer wheeled into the Common before a jeering crowd. So, on the appointed day, Odd climbed up into the branches of a sturdy oak and peered over the edge of the prison wall. He saw that no one else was in the yard or on the street. Some said that the anti-gallows societies would eventually eliminate the dispatching of criminals altogether, but Odd had heard that even those who wanted to abolish the ugly practice fell mute when they learned of Søren Mikkel Hus's crimes. Odd carried the broken spyglass with him, and from the tree he scanned the empty prison yard. He did not expect to be able to see it happen, but he hoped that there would be some way to make sure that Søren Hus took his weakness with him. Odd could not bear the prospect of facing it alone in the New World; he was not strong enough by himself to defeat whatever demons had tormented the family for generations.
Like the officials gathered on the scaffold in the prison yard, Odd knew that his uncle had not done the things they said out loud. No one dared speak of his true crimes. Instead, they called him a thief and a murderer. A thief of virtue, a murderer of innocence. It was said that several years earlier another man had paid for the evil that Søren Hus acknowledged as his own. The minister attending the previous execution had refused to ask God to have mercy on the unfortunate man's soul, and now the condemned man's spirit was said to wander Leverett Street at night seeking vengeance. But no one regretted the tragic error. Some crimes were so heinous that an accidental sacrifice seemed a small price to pay to ensure that evil was purged from the society of decent men.
Odd perched in the branches, looking through the broken spyglass, and he thought he saw his uncle grin as the noose was placed around his neck. Odd saw his uncle scoff at the men too weak t
o name his transgression, saw him mock his executioner as his false sentence was read out loud, saw the pride he took in the fact that he alone committed acts that other men dare not even speak aloud. When the trapdoor swung open, he saw his uncle drop through the black hole, saw his back arch and twist in the shadow of the scaffold. Once the struggle stopped, once the man's last breath carried off his life and his pants darkened with the final issues of the dead, Odd watched for some sign of the departure of his uncle's soul. His eyes watered as he strained to see what was not there. Was it possible for a soul to remain with its mortal shell and molder in the ground? And, if not, where would it go, unwanted, unwelcome, unrepentant? Odd stared. He cupped a hand to his ear and listened. He cannot remember clearly what happened next, but he was certain he heard something, muffled and distant at first. And then it was coming for him in a great, howling rush. The sky moved around him. Trees and buildings shuddered under the blow. Odd dropped his useless spyglass and clung to the branches of the oak, and he felt the force of it lifting him, driving him up through the branches and out over the scaffold, offering him to the tortured spirit that death had unleashed below.
As he hurries up Corner Road toward Concord, Odd notes that the sun has already begun the slow creep from its noontide height. The fire in the woods has been burning for at least an hour, he guesses, and he dares not imagine how far the wind has spread the flames in that time. He is afraid to look back at the dark plume that he knows has grown steadily since he set out.
At a shallow depression in the road, Odd comes to a raft of logs set into the hard dirt. The logs are a recent improvement, leveling the very spot where Odd first met Emma Woburn a few years earlier, when she was still Emma Manning, when the possibility still existed that he might make his feelings known to her. He imagines Emma's weight pressed against him, and the very idea makes him catch his breath. Another twenty minutes of walking will bring him to the center of town, but he hesitates here at the raft of logs. The whole of Concord could burn to the ground, he thinks, and still he would not be able to tell Emma how often she is in his thoughts.
By the time Odd met Emma, he had lived by himself in a small cabin in the Concord Woods for almost five years, longer than he had lived with his uncle, longer than he had stayed at the orphanage on Thompson Island. After his uncle's death, Odd's first thought was to run, to change his name, to forget the man and his deeds entirely. But he was also old enough to understand that there were things he could not escape. He knew he could not run from the perversions that surely flowed through his own veins, just as it had flowed through the veins of Søren Hus and every Hus whose relics his father had thrown into Massachusetts Bay.
Instead of running, Odd drifted. He wandered the streets of the city that still seemed strange and new. For a few weeks, he lived among the scavengers at Boston Harbor, huddling in the narrow spaces between warehouses at night. The scavengers ignored him. He walked the piers, watched the arrival and departure of ships, waited for the Atlantic to disgorge some remnant of his past, some artifact that might indicate the nature of the crimes he feared he was destined to commit. But the ocean kept its secrets. He watched men and women spill from ships, stunned by the sudden fact of their arrival. He watched families arrive intact—weak, ill, imperfect, but whole—watched them set foot in the New World without suffering through the flames that would have purged their flaws, culled their frailties, transformed them into stronger animals. He imagined himself among them, holding Birgit's hand and clutching his mother's dress, standing in his father's protective shadow. In his loneliness he envied these new arrivals, undeserving survivors of the world's grotesque unfairness. They had no right to bring their weaknesses with them, he thought. What right did Søren Hus have to carry his flaws to the New World? Why had flames and accidents spared his uncle's ship and not the Sovereign of the Seas? Odd was frightened by the rage he felt building in his breast as, day after day, he watched one ragged traveler after another stumble down the gangplanks. He hated himself for wishing upon them the same misery he had endured, hated himself for feeling that he should be somehow stronger, somehow better for having borne fortune's random cruelty.
Odd did not stay at the docks. He turned inland, drifted westward through the growing city that was busily wharfing out and leveling hills and filling bays and rivers; he drifted out into the untouched forests between Boston and Concord. Odd never returned to the house on Court Street at Scollay Square. He never visited Mrs. Galligan, and he never again went to the tall grass with Sarah Middlebrooke or any other girl. He could not risk satisfying one unruly appetite lest it awaken unknown hungers. Odd cast his eyes to the ground whenever he passed another person on the road, fearful that the encounter might summon whatever weakness he carried in his blood. From Concord he wandered south along Corner Road, and then he stepped from the road into the sheltering trees. He drew a large circle in the dirt with the toe of his boot, stood in the center of this circle, and then drew a smaller one inside it and erased the first.
He walked back to Concord and described his plans in as few words as possible to the gray-haired dry-goods merchant, Shebuel Hapgood, who would not be dissuaded from demonstrating how, despite his rheumatism and his crooked back, he could still swing an ax in one and and a hammer in the other.
“I am to live in the woods,” Odd told him.
“A respectable endeavor,” the old man replied. “You'll need this ax and hammer to start. And you tell your wife, anything she wants, Dickerson and Hapgood's Dry Goods and Hardware will see to it.”
“I will live alone.”
“No wife, then? Well, I suppose you'll still be after something in the way of domestic comforts. We've got cloths for your table, and a doormat and window coverings in back.”
“I'll have only what is needed, naught else.”
What little money he had he spent on an ax, a hammer, a box of nails, three hinges, and a coil of rope. On credit he bought a shovel, a cup, a plate, a large spoon, a blanket, and a useful knife. He built a small cabin from the wood of fallen trees; his walls were painted with green mosses, egg-white freckles of mildew and mushrooms, and soft dark cavities of arrested decay. When this wood ran out, he chopped down as few trees as he absolutely needed to complete his roof. He made a single door, and a single window with a shutter hinged at its top. There was no chimney and no hearth, since Odd had no intention of ever lighting a fire. He took on small jobs at nearby farms. Later, he added a small porch to his cabin, so that he might have a place to sit when the weather turned pleasant in the spring. He brought nothing with him from his uncle's house, not even the collection of stones that began with the one he had pocketed on board the Sovereign of the Seas. He gathered new stones; he adopted rocks and pebbles as if they were orphaned bits of the earth. He was especially fond of stones that bore feathery veins of contrasting hues trapped like frozen thunderbolts. It made him sad to think that these small fragments of beauty went unnoticed, scattered on the ground, trampled underfoot.
Once, when he was looking for interesting stones near the road, he came upon a box turtle with its shell staved in. A carriage wheel had crushed the black-and-orange dome into a broken puzzle. Odd thought of burying the turtle in the woods to spare it the indignity of swarming flies, but when he lifted the ruined shell a wrinkled head drunkenly emerged and the creature cast a brittle-hooded eye at him. Odd carried the turtle back to his cabin, and after picking out the jagged bits from the soft crater he tried to bandage the wound as best he could with a long strip of burlap. He brought the turtle seeds and dead insects, and though he never saw the creature emerge to take what he had left, he could tell it was eating by the small dark pellets that piled up beneath its tail. In a few weeks, the turtle began to claw its way slowly around the cabin, but the slightest sound sent its head snapping back into the damaged shell. Odd understood. After a few months, the turtle began picking at the knotted burlap with its beaked jaw, and a few weeks after that Odd found the crumpled bandage by his cabin do
or, and in the dirt he saw a shallow trail of claw marks, like swimmer's strokes, leading away and disappearing into the undergrowth.
Odd had sought only to remove himself from the paths of other people, but he had not expected that he would find in the woods companionship of a different sort. He walked among the trees at night, in the pitch black, not half so apprehensive as when he walked among people in the city. He was grateful to the woods for providing him with the means to build his simple cabin, and he knew that he was only its caretaker, that someday someone else in need would arrive and give him an opportunity to repay his debt. Odd did not want for company; he found that the rustling leaves provided adequate conversation. He listened to the winds agitating the trees, and he found a corresponding spirit in the sound. He imagined each gust as a great wave beginning on the other side of the world, rearing up on the coast of his native land, sweeping up portions of all it traversed, and depositing the collected wealth at his door. He needed only to walk around his cabin to feel as though he were traveling the globe. He learned that the smallest woodland animal lived a life of great complexity, and as he watched the creatures scurrying and flitting about he realized that they were part of a vast whole, a complication far greater than the combined complexities of its parts. There was much to study, much to learn from the woods, and he decided that he would live out his days alone, simply, quietly, without fear of doing harm to anyone, and for a while this brought him some measure of peace.
