by John Pipkin
“It disappoints me to find you here, Mr. Stiles.”
“But not entirely, eh? Otherwise, you wouldn't have come looking.”
“Don't make light of your sin.”
Stiles's stupid smile faded, and he came back to himself, suddenly serious.
“It's the poison in me, Reverend. It falsifies my logics.”
Caleb watched Stiles examine the pipe as if it had suddenly materialized in his hand.
“Look here, Reverend,” Stiles said, tapping the pipe on the table. “I'm going to cast this off. To testify to my efforts.”
“Wait. Show me.”
Stiles struggled with the idea before putting the pipe eagerly to his lips, like a child happy with permission to misbehave. After inhaling, he spoke in a small voice.
“And then you have to hold it for a while, like this, so you can drink it in.”
Stiles blew a steady stream of smoke across the table and smiled. Caleb's mouth watered. He wanted desperately to taste of something that might bring him relief from guilt and doubt, from the nightmares and the waking visions. He wanted to flaunt his weakness before heaven and call down upon himself the punishment that was his due.
“Give it here, then.”
Stiles froze. He cocked his head sideways and stared at Caleb. Stiles started to speak but was distracted by the coil of smoke that drifted over his face when he opened his lips. Caleb noticed that some of the other men huddled in the dark room clutched larger pipes, pipes connected to thin tubes, pipes of polished wood decorated with precious metals that sparkled in the dim light. Stiles's pipe was gray and crooked and looked as if it had been fashioned from mud.
Stiles seemed to remember something, then said, “I cannot let you do that, Reverend.”
Caleb saw how the other men reclined on benches, hunched over tabletops, asleep or barely conscious, and he looked enviously at Stiles's half-opened eyes. It angered him that these worthless men had found blissful release from their cares while he still struggled under the crush of uncertainty. If they could so willingly embrace their damnation and reap the rewards of sin while yet on earth, he would do the same.
“Give it to me at once!” He snatched the pipe from Stiles, who stared at his empty palm for several long seconds before looking up.
Caleb put the gritty opening to his lips, inhaled, and choked on the sweet smoke. It burned his tongue, and he thought he tasted blood. Caleb tried again, and forced the smoke down his throat into his lungs. He tried to exhale slowly but could not control the coughs erupting from his chest.
“Slowly,” Stiles said encouragingly.
Caleb found that the third pull went down smoothly, and his head seemed to expand. To his surprise, the first sensations came almost instantly, a dizzying feeling of having been suddenly transported to the rafters.
“Powerful stronger than laudanum or that Brown Mixture,” Stiles said. “Never much liked the licorice medicines myself.”
“Marvelous strange,” Caleb said appreciatively.
Caleb inhaled again, placing the rough end of the pipe a little farther into his mouth this time, disregarding the disgusting wet sheen he saw on Stiles's lips. He took another long taste from the pipe and watched with curiosity as Amos Stiles dissolved right in front of him; the man's gray face smeared itself over the space between them. If only the visions haunting his dreams would dissipate so easily, Caleb thought, the death mask, the black eyes, empty sockets and swollen tongue, his own mother's face, wasted with sickness. Caleb could stand the visions no longer. If God had not the courage to strike him down, then he would erase the visions himself with whatever weed Amos Stiles could stuff into his pipe.
Stiles began laughing, flaccid shudders that rippled along his arms. Caleb felt the intoxicant take a stronger hold, but he was not giddy. He felt somber, a bit dulled, as if he had been sealed inside an enormous glass jar stuffed full with rags. Caleb held up the crude pipe and looked into its bowl at the black ball glowing red at its edges, like a distant planet or a flaming comet. Caleb sniffed the hot fumes rising from the bowl and he felt a calmness suffuse his veins, even as his nostrils burned. Stiles laughed again, sluggishly.
“I had not thought your foul weeds to have so remarkable an effect,” Caleb said, closing his eyes, sinking deeper into a confounding quietude.
“Reverend,” Stiles mumbled, sounding as if he were drifting along the edges of a dream, “this is no weed. This is opium.”
The wind comes in strong gusts, lifting Caleb's coat from the crumbled foundations of the farmhouse, tumbling it through the ruins, like a dog seeking shelter.
There will be no church after all, Caleb thinks, neither bricks nor bones. The lingering words of the old women cut through his opium haze and prick some remote part of his brain as yet un-addled by the soporific poison. He can see their wizened faces and the deep-set eyes, one dark pair, one faded pair already dead in their sockets. He watches stalks of light poke through the distant trees, illuminating swarms of tiny gnats floating above the shorn fields. Tongues of orange flame flutter from branches like autumn leaves. Most trees have not yet bloomed, and in their nakedness they seem more vulnerable than the few already dressed in riotous spring attire. Caleb knows it is a foolish thought. Fire shows neither preference nor deference; it consumes the living and the dead with equal fervor.
Nearby, a dormant sycamore rustles the parchment leaves it has stubbornly clung to since October, a thousand stale petitions for which April now has no use. Caleb does not share his fellow New Englanders' enthusiasm for the golden days of autumn. It is a season more piteous than beautiful, a prolonged dirge for insensate organisms incapable of understanding death's inevitability The season of bountiful harvests is nothing more than a rusty-hued death rattle—stately oaks and maples so desperate to cling to life, so uncertain of what lies beyond the long winter to come, that they eat the green from their own leaves to eke out one more day. The brilliant reds and yellows of that cruel season are evidence that brute life, unguided by reason or faith, will willingly cannibalize itself just to purchase another hopeless hour on earth. To be sure, in Caleb's experience the forest reawakens every spring, but how can the trees of October know that? To a penumbral mind of pulp and bark, the dark clouds and arctic winds rolling in from the north are dire heralds of an infinite void. And each year there are, perchance, a scattered handful of otherwise hardy-seeming oaks and maples and birches and pines that prove unable to parry the bitter thrust of January and the vicious stab of February. Evergreen is a misnomer of the highest order. No wonder the coppery leaves do not release their grip like the heavy fruits of summer but cling tenaciously to twig and branch until the last is torn away by the first nor'easter of the season. Each tree dies a hundred little deaths without knowing which one will be its last.
It is no different for man. It was no different for Desmond Boone, clinging to the last few seconds of life even as he dangled at the end of a rope. Which moment was his last? There was the drop, the dangle, the gasp, the fierce struggle, the bright red of burst vessels, and the fluttering descent. Was his autumn any less glorious? And would he have a spring?
You will build here a church of bones, yes?
Caleb kicks the crumbled foundations and sends a fist-size stone into the stubbled cornstalks. Desmond Boone was once alive. Then he was dead. That was it. No prologue. No epilogue.
Caleb remembers his mother's gaunt cheeks, but he had not seen his father's face at the end. Already four years in the grave, does his father's face look now as it did in life, he wonders; is any part of it still recognizable as the man he knew? Caleb examines the expired ashes in the bowl of his pipe; he licks a finger, wipes it around the bowl, and touches the blackened fingertip to his tongue. He tastes smoke, a tang like burnt sugar, and he feels a deadening calm smooth out the wrinkles in his logic. He cannot know the fate of his mother or his father—their salvation had not been within his authority to dismiss—but he himself condemned Boone to the flames. Caleb looks into
the woods, sees the fire motioning for him, and suddenly realizes that there is only one way to find out if the man's soul lives on. He must look for it. He will go and seek out Desmond Boone's spirit among the very flames to which he condemned it. Caleb sucks once more at the empty pipe and tosses it into the field. He will need it no longer. A peaceful feeling suffuses his limbs, the confident serenity that precedes knowledge soon to be acquired.
Caleb pulls his arms into the sleeves of his white robe, points himself toward the Concord Woods, and treads lightly through the dry field. Each step seems to catapult him skyward. He tries to measure his gait so that he does not fling himself over the treetops out of sheer eagerness. He keeps his eyes locked on the fire peeking at him from between the trees. He hears the flames calling to him, roaring in his ears. He steps carefully, bouncing, floating, giddy and terrified at once; he reels from the sublimity of truth too quickly imbibed. He realizes that his first impression earlier in the day had been absolutely correct. He should never have doubted his own insight. This fire is indeed for him, specifically for him alone. This is precisely what he has been waiting for. These flames are to be his salvation, or his doom, his affirmation or condemnation. There is only one way to find out.
25
Oddmund
He is not prepared for the certainty of the flames.
On the way from Concord they watched the smoke unfurl overhead, a procession of phantoms grasping for light, opaque one moment, translucent the next. The men approached the fire from the opposite side of Fair Haven Hill, and they shuddered together as the wall of crackling heat slammed into them. Odd was stunned by the enormity of the sound. The men fell silent as they took in the extent of the fire, and then, weapons raised, courage renewed, they charged.
Odd fears that they are outnumbered, for the fire is not one enemy but many, thousands of individual flames, chewing through trees, taking possession of the woods as if this were their inheritance. During the years Odd lived alone in his little cabin, he had come to suspect that trees and plants and animals—and all else that relied upon sun and soil and water—were inhabited by a gentle spirit that seemed to tremble beneath the surface of living things. And now he imagines the ghosts of what has burned gathering in the dark ribbons of smoke and fleeing skyward. Odd feels helpless to save them; he inhales, tries to draw the dissipating life into his chest, and doubles over coughing.
This is what it means to be haunted, Odd thinks. He has heard others speak of ghosts as half-glimpsed shadows in forgotten corners, but Odd knows that they are more sensation than presence, an ache, a stirring. He has sometimes felt their earnest touch—a flutter in his stomach, an acrid finger at the back of his throat. The first time he visited his family's gravestone at Copp's Hill, Odd discovered that the spirits of the dead did not haunt places at all; they haunted people.
The gravestone sat in the overgrown weeds at the back of the burying ground, near the spot once set aside for slaves. A grieving Boston family had paid for the stone, and they allowed the grass around it to grow tall like the seaweed shrouding the relatives who did not make it to the New World. Odd's family was not buried there, but they shared the memorial with the forty-three other passengers from the Sovereign of the Sea who also were not buried there. Together, their bones mingled on the ocean floor, dressed and undressed by shifting sands. Odd used to worry that the ghosts of his mother and father and sister would be unable to breathe underwater, but when he visited the gravesite he understood: from the moment he flew from the ship's deck on the expanding ball of heat, he carried their spirits with him. The fire in his lungs should have been a sign to him that he was to be the vessel of their haunting. The vacant grave at Copp's Hill was marked by a thin rectangle of slate topped by a jawless, winged skull. Odd studied the hollow sockets and the empty grin of the half-bird, half-death's-head image etched into the brittle stone. He pressed his fingers into his cheek to feel the hidden contours of his own skull grinning back from behind closed lips, and he knew that he, too, for a time, had had wings.
A shovelful of dirt hits Odd's shoulder. Otis Dickerson yanks the ax from Odd's hands and pokes the handle of a shovel against his ribs.
“Wake up, man! If you're going to stand here, you'll need this instead.”
Odd nods. He takes the offered shovel and starts digging.
Otis Dickerson shakes his head and carries the ax back to the men who are chopping down the trees behind them. Odd helps the men nearest him dig a shallow trench in front of the flames like a long, snaking grave. He tries not to stand too close to the others. Beneath grunts and coughs there are darker complaints, muttered between strokes and swings, as if their thoughts must be kept secret from the flames.
“This will carry on to Concord.”
“If Concord goes, the forests at Walden will go next.” “We'll hang the devil that brought this down upon us.”
Odd fears that their anger is directed at him, that each man has somehow already intuited that he is responsible for this. They fling the dirt into the burning woods, trying to bury the fire alive. Odd digs faster than most. He is strong, and the loose black earth yields easily. He feels his muscles settle into a comfortable rhythm of exertion, expanding and contracting across his rib cage, yanking the bones of his arms forward and back. His shovel bites into the soil, tears up grasses, rips out spindly, tangled roots and hurls them into the fire, feeding and killing the monster at the same time. He calls on the anger that he feels over the fire's certainty and lets it flow through his limbs, lets it energize him with a sense of purpose.
The smoke is thick, and more than once Odd throws a shovelful of dirt into the back of someone's head. At times it is impossible to see, but Odd is convinced that some of the other men are looking at him, watching him for some sign that he is the cause of this blaze. The very thought makes him feel guilty. He wants to shout that this fire is not his. He shovels faster, as if to prove his innocence. Around him, bodies materialize and vanish. Men grow large against the flickering light and shrink back into their own skinny shadows. Odd listens for accusations but hears only angry shouts and the steel thump of axes and shovels above the din in the trees. Each man seems lost in his own repetitive task, but through a break in the smoke Odd sees a man staring at him, a dark shadow among shadows, and after a wave of smoke passes the man reappears in a different place. Odd thinks he has seen the man in these woods before, but he does not know his name.
He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to find Otis Dickerson at his side once again. “Look here!” the shopkeeper yells, though they are standing only inches apart. “What are you doing? We're trenching this way!”
Odd looks once more at the man he thinks is staring at him, and Dickerson follows his gaze before a cloud of white and gray smoke engulfs them and moves on.
“You acquainted with that one?” the shopkeeper asks.
Odd shakes his head.
“If you've no cause to speak with him, I wouldn't recommend it. Strange fellow.” The shopkeeper rests for a moment, props himself on the handle of his shovel. His face is smeared with sweat and soot, and Odd can see a network of thin veins in his cheeks, bright red beneath the filth.
“He's taken to calling himself Henry David Thoreau,” Dickerson says, “though he was christened David Henry. Pointless, that. No less an idler now than he was before he rearranged himself.”
The shopkeeper hefts the shovel with both hands, steps forward, and attacks the gnarled underbrush. Then he turns back to Odd and adds, “He makes a fine pencil, I'll give him that, but I came upon him once in the woods, completely without clothes. Now, what kind of a man does that?” Dickerson resumes digging with a fury that seems to reflect his disdain for the man who dared to change his name. Odd does not find Henry David Thoreau's conversion unusual. People remake themselves in ways more troubling than merely switching their first and middle names. Whole families erase entire histories every day simply by stepping off ships and announcing themselves to the New World as the S
miths or the Coopers. Even Cyrus Woburn is a man remade, though Odd doubts that Emma herself knows as much as he does about her husband.
Odd came upon this knowledge by accident. It began with a spotted rabbit that had made a nest for her squeaking babies in the feed bin. When Odd lifted the lid, the mother blinked at him with surprised black eyes, shamed by her failed instincts. Odd knew Mr. Woburn would order him to fling the babies into the dirt, so he dragged the wooden bin to the garden beside his own lodgings, certain that he would be able to find extra chicken feed somewhere in the barn. What he found instead was a bottle of rye whiskey hidden beneath a worn-out saddle.
When Odd turned around with the bottle in one hand and a half-empty sack of chicken feed in the other, he saw Mr. Woburn outlined in the bright morning light, tamping powder into the long barrel of his rifle. He was not wearing his hat, and his wild tangle of gray hair was swept back from his forehead and stuck out behind, making him look as though he were leaning into a strong wind. Mr. Woburn withdrew the rod, slid it back into place along the barrel, and peered at Odd through one eye, taking aim without his gun.
“Morning, Odd.”
The bottle felt suddenly slippery, and Odd dropped the feed sack so that he could better cradle the whiskey with both hands.
“I was looking for feed … for the chickens.”
“Did she send you back here?” Mr. Woburn asked, holding the rifle lengthwise. He wore only trousers and an unbuttoned vest over his nightshirt, and Odd could see dark circles of sweat beneath his arms. The cuffs of one trouser leg were half tucked into one of his boots.
“I did not see Mrs. Woburn this day,” Odd said carefully. “I will tell her nothing.”
Mr. Woburn shrugged to show that he had nothing to hide. “Why don't you help yourself?”
