by John Pipkin
“Tell me how you have come here,” Caleb said.
“I am a free man.” Desmond Boone's voice was deep and strong. “Bought and paid myself. Done nothin' wrong.” There was no hint of the quivering fear Caleb had so often heard from the condemned.
Caleb spoke slowly, unconvinced that Boone was not a fugitive. “Slavery, like deceit, is but one of many sins for which men must answer in the hereafter. Neither is justification for the other.”
Boone struck his broad chest with his fist and repeated, “Free! I own my own self. I will die as a free man.”
Caleb studied him. He wondered if the man's confidence came from some trust in the pagan lies of his forefathers. He squatted next to Boone and spoke softly into the curled dark shell of his ear. “Tell me then, Desmond Boone, what have your false gods promised you after this life.”
Boone leaped from his chair, knocking it to the floor and nearly toppling himself as well. His chains rattled and scraped against the floor as he regained his balance. The guards looked through the doorway, but Caleb waved them away.
“The Devil sent you to me!” Boone said fiercely through clenched teeth. “I am a Christian!”
Caleb stepped back and held the lantern between them; he saw outrage on the man's face, but nothing more. “If you are a Christian, then you know that only by confessing your sins can you hope to enter heaven.” Caleb needed to get him to admit what he had done. Only then would this man look upon his eternal punishment with certainty. “We must first despair,” Caleb prodded, “before we can find hope.”
“I ask for no forgiveness,” Boone said. “Lord Jesus knows I laid no hand on those boys.” Boone swung his head from side to side, as if looking for an exit. “God won't punish me for what I never done.”
The guards returned, and Boone resisted when they grabbed him by the arms. They led him into the hall, past the common cell, and into the prison yard, where the scaffold waited. Caleb followed close behind, marveling that they were able to navigate the powerful man, until he noticed the dagger that one of the guards held at the small of Boone's back. Aside from the warden and the other guards gathered under the jaundiced sky, the yard was empty, and Caleb thought it regrettable that the scaffold was no longer wheeled into the Common for public executions.
The two guards struggled to hold Boone steady while a third readied the noose. Caleb stood to the side and watched as Boone squeezed his eyes shut, and he grew incensed to think that this man would deny him what he sought. Caleb opened his Bible, and the words he read felt sour as they spilled from his lips. He laid his hand on Boone's shoulder and was surprised to see the man begin weeping. Caleb stood near as the noose was secured, and then Boone opened his eyes and spoke.
“I do repent my sins,” he said quietly. “I swear I am good. Will you ask God to receive me?”
Caleb considered the power that he held at this moment, the power to fortify this despairing man with an invocation of God's saving grace. But never had he heard an appeal so baseless as this. Caleb wanted to draw back the veil of hope that so often clouded men's eyes at the end, to force this wretch to look clearly upon the inescapability of his damnation.
Caleb leaned in close to Boone's ear and answered, “No.” Boone did not at first understand, and then the realization struck and his face seemed to fall from his skull. His eyes widened, and Caleb saw a blur of animal terror as the trapdoor swung open and the doomed man's cry was cut short by the drop.
Once the death spasms ceased, Caleb climbed beneath the scaffold and looked closely at the protruding eyes, pupils tight as pins, whites ringed red and shot through with burst vessels. In a short time, the dead man's face, with its swollen tongue bitten purple and black, would look no different from the rotting skull that Caleb had found in the woods as a boy. But in his final moments of life Boone had given Caleb the glimpse that he sought, for Caleb knew that what he saw captured in the dead man's eyes was the undiluted awe of seeing eternity for the first and possibly last time.
When Caleb explained to his father what he had done and what he had seen, the right side of Marcus Dowdy's face exploded in frantic twitches, as if to compensate for the limp expression of the left. He sputtered incoherently, his lips unable to move rapidly enough to convey his righteous fury. His right hand grabbed the pencil he kept tied to a long string looped around his neck, and when he could not find the notebook that usually sat at his bedside he snapped the string in anger and threw the pencil at Caleb. It was the last time they spoke, though Marcus Dowdy lived on in his half-sensate body for eight years more. Marcus later made overtures of reconciliation, but Caleb would have none of it; the struggle to redeem mankind in the New World allowed no leniency for the preservation of polite civilities between ill-advised fathers and stalwart sons.
Despite the coldness of their relations, Caleb felt the stab of his father's spiritual infelicity one final time. In the last year of his life, the Reverend Marcus Ezekiel Dowdy fell under the spell of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caleb received a dictated letter, in neat, balanced script, in which the influence of Concord's gleeful pagan was all too clear.
My Dear Caleb: April 5, 1840
I would speak to you while we both yet inhabit this earth, but even had I as yet the power of speech, how difficult it would be to break the silence that has isolated us for these many years. A father and son should not be, as we have been, islands to one another. We are of the same continent though the waters of disagreement may flow between us. We are one and the same a part of God's creation, and it is a blasphemy that we have sundered ourselves thus. Perhaps it is the greening of the natural world at the coming of another spring, perhaps it is witnessing this surge of life as I feel my own draining away, that makes me realize that one great soul imbues all things; it vibrates in the world around us and in ourselves. It is not in fear that I make my way into the winter of my being, for I take comfort in the knowledge that, like the trees of the forest, a spring awaits my soul. My son, I implore you to think on this, to reflect on the virtue of the natural world and attune yourself to it. Mr. Emerson has said, “Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us.” My son, it is not too late for you to make yourself receptive to the “beautiful sentiments” in this world, before seeking them out in the next.
Caleb was aghast. His father had certainly gone mad. A vibrating soul? Had the old man mistaken his own palsy as proof of pantheism? Caleb took no joy in the thought of sharing his soul with a tree, as if the soul were some sort of transparent rodent, equally at home in the woods as in its human nest. Once men like Emerson and his friends were shown that forests were nothing more than unharvested timber destined to frame the cities of the New World, there would be no more worshipping of trees.
Marcus Dowdy died a month later, and during the funeral Caleb studied the red glow of the stained-glass fire and thought of the hidden flaws in the window, a mockery of the perfection it was supposed to represent. He thought of his father's letter and its assertions that austere piety and Puritan dogma had no place in the New World. “Their creed is passing away,” his father had again quoted Emerson. Caleb could not forgive his father's conversion to Mr. Emerson's blasphemy. Yet he could not stand the thought that his father might suffer the eternal torment he had seen in the eyes of Desmond Boone. Nor could Caleb bear the idea of his father's flesh rotting from his bones to feed blind worms, no better than the dead Irishman in the woods. Caleb desperately sought a reason that his father might be pardoned for his obvious failures; he prayed that God might show mercy on his soul, and then he was ashamed of himself for having done so. He knew that his weakness was brought on by his failure to remain true to the path he had chosen. Caleb knew he must show himself no leniency; he needed to purge his world of the distractions that had led him astray. Desperate to return himself to the proper path, Caleb walked into the church of the Court Street First Reform
ed Unitarian Assembly alone on a Saturday night, seeking guidance.
The sound of shattering glass brought the first witnesses early the next morning, and when the rest of the congregants arrived they found their minister, hatchet in hand, face red, shirtsleeves rolled, standing amid the ruins of what had once been their beautiful church. Caleb had saved the smashing of the great window for last, and he was still sending shards of fire and clouds flying about the nave when they arrived. He had worked through the night, chopping away at the benches until there were no pieces too big to fit into a stove. The walls were rent with deep gashes. He had smashed the pulpit as well, and he had very nearly smashed his own foot when he toppled the heavy altar. He had left not a single pew intact. If they want to sit, he thought, let them sit on the splintered remnants of their pride.
He expected their anger, but he was surprised when this did not give way to a deeper understanding of what he had done. He watched the faces of the men and women as they arrived, one by one; he watched as they realized that his weekly tirades against wealth and indulgence had not been metaphors for spiritual renewal. Caleb expected the poorer members of the congregation to stand up in his defense, but even those who usually sat on the exposed pews nearest the drafty doors expressed as much outrage as the rest.
And then the truth struck him. In this new world of unlimited possibility, the poor were willingly misled by the perversity of material ambitions. The meek would rather look upon the decadence of the wealthy as a sign of what they might one day attain on earth; they would prefer to covet these beautiful lives than follow the stark path to salvation. Caleb left his old congregants weeping among the wreckage of their church. Under one arm he carried his Bible, under the other his hatchet.
After what happened in Court Street, Caleb expected that no church in Boston would open its doors to him. He looked to the west, where he thought he might live as a hermit or preach to savages in territories unknown. Following the Concord Turnpike, Caleb carried his Bible and his hatchet into the untamed world beyond Boston. He spent the night in the woods and found nothing in the experience to suggest that there might be a spirit among the trees, as his father had insisted. He could not see how his father or Mr. Emerson or any of their deluded contemporaries could think it right to seek God in the dwelling of maggots. Caleb slept with pine needles for his bed and a pile of leaves to cushion his head, and he awoke to find a dozen members of his former congregation standing around him as if he were dead. They had come looking for him, they said. He recognized them from among those who sometimes stood at the back or hid in the corners of his church, and he had always suspected that they were in attendance only to seek shelter from the cold. They said they knew he could not return, but they begged him not to leave them, and Caleb understood that they needed his strict teachings the way a dog needs its master's cane. He knew then that he had found his mission.
He sought out new followers from among their acquaintances, the city's most despairing. In the alleys of Boston, he told the hopeless about his reformation in the woods. He carried his message to the prostitutes in Mount Vernon, to the beggars around Mill Pond, and to the thieves at the Leverett Street Jail, and he was always surprised to see a new face nearly every Sunday when he hung his hatchet from a tree and opened his Bible on a tall stump he had hewn into a crude lectern. At one of his meetings, a farmer who shared his disgust for the tree-worshippers of Concord came forward and offered him a place to stay and the use of his barn. Caleb preached in the barn on Sunday mornings, just after the cows had been milked, with the scent of manure and masticated grass hanging in the air. There were no private boxes, no cushions or foot warmers, no ornaments of gold or lurid stained glass.
On a bright Sunday morning in spring, after nearly three years of meeting in the barn, Caleb concluded his sermon by announcing that the time had come at last to build a church. He knew it might take years to accomplish, since many could contribute only pennies at a time, but he knew they would not waiver. They were being called to rekindle the light that had once adorned the city on the hill. He told them that they would succeed where their forefathers had failed.
After the sermon, Caleb stood in the open barn door as his followers filed past and readied themselves for the long walk back to Boston. They shuffled out from between the long wooden benches that Caleb had built himself, and the last two men in each row remained to carry the benches to the back of the barn. Within the hour, the cows would be led back in, lowing and belching.
From among the departing worshippers a woman dressed in black, face half hidden by a shawl, detached herself and waited until the benches were moved away. Then she grabbed a broom and began sweeping the ground with exaggerated zeal, as if the ferocity of her strokes might undo things long since done.
Caleb approached her and placed his hand gently on her arm.
“Mrs. Harrington, there is no need to do that. This is a barn, after all.”
“It's as good a church as any when you're doin' the preaching.”
Esther Harrington put her head down, swept, stopped, and looked back at him. She opened her mouth, revealing fewer teeth than she had when they first met, then rubbed her chin in deep contemplation. Caleb had seen her do this at least once every Sunday.
“Have you remembered today, Mrs. Harrington?” Caleb asked.
“Not today. I suppose the Lord will remind me when the time comes.”
Caleb nodded as she scurried off with her broom. As if the Lord did not have concerns more worthy than the restoration of a drunken old whore's memory, he thought. Esther Harrington began appearing at his services a year earlier—somehow she had found him—and ever since her reappearance she claimed to have some important news. She could never remember what it was, but she was sure that it would be of great interest to him.
“Look here, Reverend!”
Caleb turned wearily toward the dry, cricket voice to find another drunkard he had recruited from the gutters of Boston several months earlier. The man stood close, right arm outstretched, hand flat, palm down, inches from Caleb's chin, close enough for him to smell the heavy scent of old tobacco. The man's fingers shook, and his face revealed that this feat was taking considerable effort. Caleb tried to remember the man's name.
“You said I ought deny myself drink, and I done it.”
No matter how long or fiercely he preached, Caleb thought, it was never enough for these people. He wanted to transport them with his words, to send them into holy convulsions, to bring on fainting spells, but they just sat there during his sermons, waiting to speak to him afterward about their ailments or visions or moral confusions.
“See? Hardly no tremors at all, Reverend. Not half as bad as last month.”
“You've abstained from the drink … Mr. Stiles?” Caleb asked. He remembered the man now, Amos Stiles, a drunk and a former pickpocket.
“Nary a drop in two months,” Amos Stiles swore. “I count myself an improved man.”
“Pride, Mr. Stiles. Beware of pride. And what of the other thing?”
Amos Stiles lowered his arm, and he spoke less confidently than before.
“I have touched no liquor or beer. No cider even. And no tobacco. Hardly.”
“And the other?”
Caleb waited impatiently as the weak man struggled to admit what Caleb already surmised. The man wore the mark of his sin in his heavy-lidded eyes. It amazed him how the same men who were capable of committing the darkest acts imaginable would, when pressed, find themselves unable to utter the words for what they had done. What was this strange power of language?
Amos Stiles scratched his trembling arm in a raking motion from shoulder to wrist. “I did not think it was forbidden in Scripture.”
“Mr. Stiles, excuses are the Devil's logic. Many are the wicked deeds not explicitly forbidden. Can you think it any different with the foul, intoxicating weed you put in your pipe?”
“I am trying to be a better man.”
“Pray that His protecting hand d
oes not release you into the flames before your transformation is complete.”
Stiles paled and his jaw worked dryly, as if he were gulping from an empty flask. “I'm most sorry, Reverend. Indeed I am. I'll get back to stacking those benches.”
He watched Stiles lope about, dragging the splintery benches against the wall with misplaced zeal, atoning for his transgressions through a surfeit of frenetic activity. Caleb retrieved his Bible from the top of the stump that still served as his lectern, and he grabbed the hatchet that leaned against it. He slipped the Bible under one arm, collected the loose pages on which he had written his sermon, and hefted the hatchet to his shoulder. The hatchet was the sole ornament he would allow in his new church, he thought, and he envisioned a new building rising at the edge of Concord, austere, simple, righteous.
Caleb left the dusty shadows of the barn and walked out into the sunlight. He felt the bright warmth on his face and heard the soft swarming gnats rushing past his ear; his pulse quickened and he was stunned by the powerful urge that suddenly overcame him. For a moment, he was seized by the peculiar thought that he might be content to lie down in the grass and contemplate this beautiful creation without the incessant clawing after truth that marked his waking hours. He thought of another infuriating reference to Mr. Emerson in his father's final letter: “… one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool…” Caleb turned away from the sun, tried to ignore the blue sky and the green scent that filled the air, but the feeling would not leave him; he sensed a buzzing in his limbs, as if something had been awakened, as if he could actually feel a trembling spirit infusing his mortal veins. He looked at his forearm, saw the feral pulsings beneath the skin, and he tightened his grip on the hatchet. He would not allow himself to be misled by the temptations of this new Eden. If his arm offended him, he thought, he would willingly cut it off. He heard someone calling his name, and he turned slowly toward the sound.
