by John Pipkin
“There must be books that you cannot find in your library.”
“I find what matters to me.” By way of illustration, Henry pulls a book from his breast pocket. Its battered leather binding is held together with a strap that fits into a tiny silver buckle.
Eliot accepts the book Henry offers, turns it in his hands, and wipes away a sooty thumbprint on the spine.
“Catullus? If I am not mistaken, this is a valuable book, Mr. Thoreau. What library allowed you to remove it?”
Henry reaches for the small volume and squirrels it away in his coat again. From deep within the woods there issues another loud rumble, like logs rolling downhill.
“I have a way with librarians,” Henry explains. “I consider it my one true talent.”
Eliot watches Henry pat the pocket hiding the valuable book.
“When I am done with this book, I shall return it,” Henry says, “and I need no longer concern myself with its care.”
Eliot nods appreciatively. He puts away his memorandum, slips the gnawed pencil back into his pocket. He sits and straightens his legs before him and watches the rising pillars of smoke just long enough, Henry assumes, to show the solemnity of his contemplation.
“I see you are a simple man, Mr. Thoreau.”
Henry shrugs.
“I myself am not so complicated a man as I may appear,” Eliot says.
Henry thinks of the leather-covered memorandum the bookseller has just returned to his pocket. He observes the man's fine clothes, dusted with ash, takes note of the expensive-looking boots and the watch chain at his waistcoat pocket, and he imagines the gold timepiece nestled within. He watches Eliot frown as he inspects the lenses of his spectacles, rubs them on his sleeve, and checks them again. Owning such fine things, Henry thinks, must encumber this man's days with tedious cares; he no doubt consumes precious hours with polishing his boots, winding his watch, arranging the books on his shelves. Henry's agitation gives way to pity. He has seen this sort of man before, and he is suddenly seized by the urge to warn him of impending disappointment, but he realizes he can offer no solution. What direction can he provide, when lately he has done little more than distract himself—from his own true ambitions—with the making of pencils? Henry resists the impulse to lecture Eliot and instead tries to think of gentle advice.
“There are many ways a man might content himself,” he says.
“True,” Eliot says, brushing ash from his sleeves and lapels. “Opposing these advancing flames, for example, shoulder to shoulder with the good people of Concord and”—he gestures toward Henry—“with the maker of America's finest pencils. What greater expression of manhood can there be?”
Henry finds that he cannot bear to meet this man's gaze. And after you have finished with this adventure, he thinks, you will go back to Boston. You will return to the safety of a big house and the comforts of fine possessions and your business and the thousands of meaningless little tasks that consume your hours, and you will regale your friends with embellished tales of how you fought the great fire in Concord. The memory of this one day will supply vitality for the thousands of lifeless days to follow. You are mired in a life of desperation, Mr. Eliot Calvert, and do not even know enough to remain quiet about it.
“Simplicity”—Eliot nods solemnly in response to Henry's silence—“it is all a man need pursue.”
Eliot pulls at the cuffs of his trousers and takes hold of his heels. Henry watches as the bookseller removes his boots, and he becomes conscious of his own feet, hot and damp and swollen. Henry pulls off his boots as well and soot pours forth like sand. His dark stockings are covered in gray ash, and he sees that there are more holes than there were when he dressed this morning. He places his feet side by side, misshapen lumps in ragged green wool. Even in his stockings, it is easy to see that one foot is missing its big toe, the result of a childhood accident. If his young hand had dropped the hatchet an inch to the left, Henry thinks, he might have lost half his foot. Even had he survived such a grievous injury, his life would have followed an altered path; he most certainly would not have had means to foster his love for nature. How could he have explored forests or clambered up mountains, how could he have tramped through snow and mud and fallen leaves with little more than a stump in his boot for balance? But then at least, he thinks, the Concord woods would not be burning.
While Eliot writes again in his little book, Henry picks up a stick, scratches a broad rectangle in the dirt, and draws a lopsided triangle inside it, estimating the area of the woods that have already burned. In the crude drawing, he and Eliot are just beyond the triangle's base. He marks their position with an X. Henry is trying to sketch the swath of the devastation when Eliot snaps his book shut and emphatically places his hand in the middle of Henry's drawing.
“I have come to the awareness,” Eliot announces, “that if a man would reclaim his life he must remove all that is extraneous to the living of it.” Eliot looks down when he has finished this pronouncement, and he sees that he has accidentally erased part of Henry's map.
Henry redraws the lines, then crosshatches the triangle and adds to its length by increments, scratching out the X as he does so. He hears Eliot's comment, but it makes no sense to him. Who is the man so careless that he would fail to claim his life as his own in the first place?
Eliot grabs a stick, too, and begins adding to Henry's sketch. He scratches in the new Fitchburg rail line and draws another snaking line to indicate the Concord River. Henry flinches as Eliot's meandering stick comes close to the triangle's apex, where the hollowed tree stump should be marked, but Eliot takes no notice of his reaction. “I believe the proximity of the present danger has focused my understanding of things,” Eliot says. “In life, as on the stage, a tragedy can expunge the extraneous diversions that so often muddle one's mind. I think it possible that some good may come of this.”
“No good will come to the former tenants,” Henry says, without looking up from the map.
“The trees will return,” Eliot says. “The woods might become stronger than before, and as for the tenants—assuming you speak for the people of Concord—well, after great loss one is always more appreciative of what remains.”
Henry sighs. He cannot make this man understand what has been lost. He puts down his stick and explores the toe that has poked through a hole in his stocking. He picks a tiny sliver from beneath a thick toenail and says quietly, “If you would appreciate what has been lost, then you must return and live among the ashes.”
“I have no doubt,” Eliot muses, “that a week in nature's bosom—a trip on the river, perhaps—would elicit a deeper understanding of its beauties.”
“That is not my meaning,” Henry says. “I do not propose that you return for sport. Rather, come to this very spot and build your home from the blackened timbers. Feed yourself with what meager fruit struggles up from the scorched earth. Live.”
Eliot fumbles. “I might find such an exercise useful for my own reflections, and certainly it would provide much desired opportunity for writing, but I fear my wife and children would find such privations intolerable.”
“Then leave them,” Henry says, rubbing his feet. He looks at Eliot and watches him search for some sign that he has made the comment in jest.
“I understand the thrust of your arguments, Mr. Thoreau,” Eliot says slowly, “and I cannot disagree.” Henry listens as Eliot thinks clumsily out loud, and he is reminded of having once seen a bee struggling in the oozings from its own hive. “If I am truly to simplify my life,” Eliot continues, “I must find ways to pare down that which I truly do not require. Of course, I cannot ask my family to abandon civilized life, but we might secure more modest accommodations. And under reduced conditions we might still find means to afford some small comforts, which would be all the more enjoyable for having required no greater sacrifice of time or labor.”
Henry picks up his stick and gouges a divot at the apex of the triangle to mark the point where the fire began.
�
��Mr. Calvert,” Henry says, sighing, “a man cannot simplify halfway.”
They are plotting strategies in the dirt with the pointed ends of sticks when the firefighting Concordians arrive shouting plans of their own. Henry sees a hundred men or more come through the woods from the north, waving shovels and axes and hoes, a host of warrior angels in need of flaming swords. They run at the fire, shouting and catcalling, as if they believe they might intimidate the flames. The assault quickly turns to slow retreat. The determined Concordians set up a moving line of defense; the men with hoes align themselves first, thrusting their heavy weapons into the burning underbrush and raking it forward, stamping it underfoot. Behind them, men with shovels set about digging a ditch several yards ahead of the flames; they dig like dogs, hurling the loose soil into the burning grass to bury the fire alive. But this arrangement is flawed.
The flying dirt showers the men on the front line, stones bounce off their raking shoulders, and one man stumbles backward into the shallow ditch. They reorganize and stagger their positions. The men with the shovels form the front line. The men with hoes stand at either end of the line; some move back to rake the unburned brush, exposing dry earth, clearing an unburnable space behind the men with shovels. Farther back, the men with axes set about removing the trees next in line for destruction, depriving the flames of their food. The men can only hope to claim the trees before the flames reach them. The fire forces the men to fight it on its own terms. They must destroy what they would save.
In the chaos the men work together, though some have arguments; flying elbows and empty boasts reveal prior tensions. Henry and Eliot are still perched on the spine of the hill, hurriedly pulling boots onto swollen feet, while the men below switch positions a second time, trying to find workable arrangements.
“The essence of heroism,” Eliot observes, as if what is passing below them is evidence of a theory he has recently proposed. As Henry squeezes his feet back into their boots, a fat blister bursts and he can feel the sticky liquid seep between his toes. It does not hurt, but the thought of it—the torn onionskin bubble of flesh— makes him flinch. A wound, a breach of any kind in the body's ramparts, leaves it vulnerable to invasions that might carry off a digit, a limb, a whole person with the indifferent necessity of natural cause.
Eliot leaps to his feet and shouts, “Let us to battle!” Then he picks up his shovel and runs down the hill toward the other men.
Henry delays. He knows the unexpected results of rash acts. He will not rush the seething cataclysm. Henry watches as Eliot reaches the skirmish, inserts himself between two men raking burning brush on the left flank, and joins in the frenzy, crushing the flames underfoot, a whole line of men seized by Saint Vitus's dance, hopping, jerking, shouting. More men arrive from the direction of Concord, some armed only with intentions. The fire calls upon reinforcements of its own. Forced back upon itself, the blaze seems to burn faster now, hissing and smoking indignantly. It tries to outflank the men on the left, reaching around with long arms, but there are no longer trees there, no underbrush, no fuel to support the maneuver, so it retreats, regroups, and launches a new assault on the right but again finds nothing to burn.
And then a tree collapses across the line of men. No one is injured, but the fire crosses this bridge to new quarry and the flames spread to the trees flanking the men. Henry sees a dismal proof in this. Nature will not be outfoxed so long as chance is her ally. Men exhaust a disproportionate sum of energy in a vain effort to prevent nature from doing what she will: damming rivers, filling swamps, leveling hills, clearing fields, claiming land from the sea. The cities of America are the hosts of gratuitous transformation, aberrant changes that, once left unguarded, will revert to what was. Attempts to bend nature's design are merely pointless acts of hubris. Nature—brutal, beautiful, beneficent nature—will prevail in the end.
Henry is convinced that his efforts to combat the fire will be as impotent as those of the other men, but he cannot divorce himself from the desperate spectacle. He pushes himself to his feet and, empty-handed, picks his way down the hill toward the roiling flames.
24
Caleb
You will build here a church of bones, yes?
It is clear to him, now, that the flames slithering through the distant trees portend the end of things. Caleb stands at the edge of the woods and pokes the sputtering dregs in his pipe with a twig. The fire tells him its intention to advance on Concord, and he divines that it will not stop there; the burning will lay waste the town and then descend upon Boston. Caleb rejoices that heaven has at last grown weary of the wickedness of the New World, and he is pleased to have played no small role in at last moving the palsied hand of Providence.
All fortunes, he thinks, good and bad, betide with purpose: his doubts, his defiance, his revelations and blasphemous rantings. It becomes obvious to him that the two old women appeared this morning as shepherds of the flames, witches sent to announce the arrival of the end. It is very likely, he thinks, that he has been visited by others like them in his life, messengers he failed to recognize. Esther Harrington, Caleb can now see clearly, is most certainly a witch as well. He should have uncovered this truth before. It was she who delivered the news about Boone's innocence; hers was the voice that revealed to him that his words, his prayers, his blessings, meant nothing. And he knows in his heart that she is in league with Amos Stiles. Together, the two have led him to this day; they have shown him the path to self-destruction, and he had no choice but to take it. Even if he had discovered their true nature earlier, he could not have resisted their direction, for everything comes to pass as God so wills.
After Esther Harrington's revelation that he had condemned an innocent man—a Christian, no less, who had once already escaped the Pandemonium men had created on earth—Caleb expected his own punishment to be swift and fierce. Only a cold, indifferent universe, he thought, could allow his terrible deed to pass unanswered. Caleb waited, and when God's wrath did not immediately descend upon him his old doubts returned. If there truly existed a just and righteous God, how could he not have damned Caleb for so rank an offense? Perhaps, Caleb thought, it was impossible for him to have condemned Desmond Boone; perhaps there was no burning lake into which he or any man might be cast; perhaps Caleb had merely darkened Boone's final conscious moment in this world before sending him into the void. He thought of the Irishman's body in the woods. He thought of Boone's eyes and tongue, straining to leave his skull, and he thought of the lifeless faces that haunted him, visited his dreams, mocked his yearning to believe that something more than this meaningless putrefaction awaited all men. As long as he escaped castigation, Caleb would have no answer, and thus it became clear to him that he must seek out punishment on his own.
Caleb's followers presented no deficit of imitable transgressions that he might willfully heap one upon the other to awaken heaven's justice. After weighing their sins, searching for what might be most offensive to the Almighty, he decided to seek direction from Amos Stiles. Despite his many faults, Stiles seemed wholly unperturbed by the damnation that he certainly knew awaited him. He clung to the hope of redemption not with an outward show of desperation but, rather, with the inconsequential eagerness of a dog begging at his master's table.
Caleb was intrigued by the thought that Stiles's transgressions, while increasing the burden of guilt with each repetition, might actually deaden him to its weight. Caleb had never tasted spirits, had never sampled the tobacco or hemp leaves that he suspected Stiles still imbibed despite his protestations that he was reformed, but Caleb knew that he might easily enough trick the lapsed sot into showing him how it was done and where such intoxicants might be obtained. So Caleb followed him one night into the cramped lanes snaking around Boston Harbor, winding cow paths long since covered by cobblestones now slick with filth, and found him at a tavern lacking any discernible name. The portrait of a white bird above the door was all that distinguished the entrance from the other low doorways.
; Caleb waited outside the dark door for half an hour, wrestling with his conscience, before he finally entered. He found Amos Stiles half-asleep at a long table with a smoldering clay pipe cradled in his open palm. He opened his eyes when Caleb nudged him, but he did not appear to recognize him at first.
“It cannot be you,” Stiles said, waving his hand and sinking back into his seat.
So sunken were the man's cheeks that it looked to Caleb as if his eyes had swollen to the size of walnuts beneath their lids. Caleb nudged him again.
“Go away,” Stiles mumbled.
Caleb stood above him and tried to sound commanding. “Mr. Stiles, I have come to taste of your weakness, that I may show you the path to strength.”
“Aye?” Stiles rubbed his eyes and waved away the smoke between them. “What's this, then?”
Caleb felt foolish for trying to engage Stiles in discourse, but he was determined not to turn back. He would find a way to partake of the man's wickedness.
“Together we will outsmart the Devil, Mr. Stiles, but you must help me to understand how the Devil leads you astray.”
“The Devil?” Stiles awakened with a start. He did not move, but his eyes opened wide and seemed to reach for Caleb. “How do I know you ain't himself, the Devil, come to tempt me? You might take any shape you please in these shadows.”
“Mr. Stiles—”
“Away! I am a man redeemed!”
“The fact that I have found you here confirms my suspicion that you are no less fallen than before.”
The pipe rolled onto its side in Stiles's palm, and he jumped from the touch of the hot bowl. He looked up and smiled slowly in recognition, and Caleb counted no more than three brown teeth tucked behind the man's lower lip.
“Reverend Dowdy? Is it you?” Stiles wondered aloud, trying to sit up straight. “You make me doubt my very eyes.”
Caleb sat down across from Stiles and folded his hands in his lap. He stared at him sternly; he knew the man would never comprehend his true reason for coming.
