by John Pipkin
“He's the one! Wastrel! Villain! Woodsburner!”
31
Oddmund
Odd runs west through the trees. Those that have already burned stand mutely iridescent beneath their charred husks, like glowing pillars of coal. Odd knows the weeping man was pointing at him. Through the trees he can still hear him shouting, “Woodsburner!” But as Odd penetrates deeper into the fire these cries are gradually swallowed by the roar of the flames, which will not be outdone. Odd wonders if this is to be the moment that history at last catches up with him. He has slipped from its grasp before, but those escapes were dearly purchased. When fate could not take him from this world, it gladly took from him those parts of the world he loved most. His feet catch in the fire's tangled leavings. It has finished on the ground, but it is everywhere above, a fiery canopy dropping burning debris upon him in thick, slow clumps. Odd knows he cannot push on without setting himself aflame, but he cannot retreat; surely the men, spurred on by the weeping man's accusation, would pounce upon him, and Emma would find herself alone and unprotected. Fate would again take his world from him. Odd curses his stupidity; he should never have left Emma's side that morning.
Odd dodges the falling clusters of fire and continues running. He understands the fire in a way that the others do not. For most of the day, a steady wind has spread the flames north and east, and now the men with their shovels and axes and hoes think they have stopped its advance. They believe they will beat it back slowly, suffocate it inch by inch until they can crush its last thrashings underfoot. But Odd knows better. The fire will not burn itself out. It is a living thing, but it will not be bled to death. It will deceive them. Like a serpent cornered, it will only grow fiercer as it loses ground, coil onto itself and lash out if they do not strike at its heart.
Odd runs over seething ashes, past the Andromeda Ponds. He heads toward the concentrated flames, hurls himself straight into the dead forest covering Shrub Oak Plain. The fire slithers back, curls between black trunks already burned, looking for a place to hide. The air grows hotter, and the smoldering underbrush bites at his legs. He passes little outcroppings of flame and keeps going, ignoring the hot air that stings his eyes and burns in his throat, willing himself to suck in deep breaths to keep his legs pumping. His chest tightens and he grows dizzy. He thinks he hears voices amid the howling flames, and then realizes that the other men are pursuing him, calling his name, demanding that he return.
He passes through a stand of burning trees and continues running. Blazing eyes wink at him from the blackened woods. The fire retreats, outflanks him, and retreats again, teasing him, drawing him in. He ignores the blazing columns that sprout left and right and continues forward, swinging his shovel at the burning brambles in his way. There is a loud crack and a tall tree topples behind him, spewing flames in all directions. He is deep inside the inferno, cut off.
Odd leaps over a burning log and keeps going. He thinks of Emma, wonders if she has fled to safety or remained behind to protect the house and her precious books. He imagines the flames reaching the barn, exploding in the dry hay, running along the clothesline, engulfing the porch of the house, the door, the roof. He pictures Emma running from door to window, unable to escape. He sees her bright orange hair and flames all around. Odd runs faster, head down, arms pumping, and he feels a sickening crunch beneath his foot and suspects what it might be before he recognizes seared fur and red skin. He stops and examines the charred lump more closely. It is an animal of considerable size, though hardly recognizable—a small deer, perhaps, a fawn. The carcass shudders, the legs twitch; the animal has not finished dying, but it is close. Then Odd notices the other blackened carcasses scattered over the ashes, caught in the underbrush, trapped beneath fallen trees, and tangled in the blackened branches. He cannot move without stepping on something dead or dying. Here the trees stand close together and the fire must have spread especially fast. It took what it wanted and moved up into the branches. Small flickerings underfoot reveal that the fire has left sentinels behind, hiding in the ashes, waiting for someone to return. Odd looks up and sees that the sky is blotted out by dark smoke and bright flames. He hears the flames cackle all around as he scans the ground for other bodies. Squirrels, birds, woodchucks, skunks, raccoons—he is unable to distinguish their charred and shrunken forms.
Odd cannot move. The forest has become a peculiar landscape. The trees are little more than phantoms, but some appear to have life in them yet, hidden away in untouched limbs. These trees might yet heal themselves, ooze sap over their grievous wounds, extrude great whorls of scarred bark, thick and knotted like permanent scabs, signposts to past tragedies. Odd knows that at this very moment some of the trees are exhaling invisible pollens, dropping bundles of cones that will open in the intense heat and laugh at the fire's futile rampage. The forest will return, populated by a greener, softer version of itself. The new trees will toughen over time. More complicated creatures, however, are not so resilient. These dead animals littering the ground will never live again. Their skeletons will not sprout tender new limbs, nor will their descendants spring from desperately scattered seed. Animals will again roam these woods, but they will be the descendants of animals fast enough to have escaped the flames and fearless enough to return and breed faster, wiser creatures. That is what the New World requires, Odd thinks; if it is to survive the intrusions of the Old World, America needs stronger animals.
Odd wonders what his father would have done had he made it to America. Men can leave their homes and their families, but no man can leave his past. Søren Hus was proof enough of this. Where could a man go to start anew, to purge himself of what runs through his veins? Crossing an ocean is not enough. Something more powerful is needed to bring about such a change, something more corrosive.
He grows conscious of the heaviness in his arms and legs, and realizes that he has not moved for some time. The muscles in his shoulders tug at one another for balance. The fire screams in his ears alongside the rushing beat of his own blood. He knows he has made a terrible mistake. He should not have separated himself from the other men. He should not have left Emma alone. The fire mocks his indecision, dances left, dances right, a center without substance. It drops on him from above. How could he have thought that he might slay it with a single, well-timed thrust? Odd steps forward and then back. The fire mirrors his movements. Odd moves forward again, and he feels the heat of the flames like sunburn on his cheeks. He steps back, and the heat bites into his tired shoulders. The fire closes in slowly, surrounding him with indifferent patience. Odd lifts his shovel and waits.
A flood of visions rises from his memory. He recalls how quickly his father became a swirling cone of flame. One moment his father was standing with the burning scroll in his hand, and in the next moment the expanding ball of red heat was lifting Odd from the deck of the Sovereign of the Seas, suspending him above the shocked, upturned faces of his family. There was his mother beneath him, a large, self-possessed woman of generous proportions, shorter than his father but twice as broad, anchored to the earth by the confidence of her girth, and she stared up at him with a complex spray of emotions across her wide cheeks: terror and sorrow and hope—a hope, perhaps, that he alone might escape the horror. And in the next second the fire consumed all.
Odd remembers the cool, clear blue above him and the feeling that he was being pressed flat against the dome of the sky. He remembers holding his breath as he rose impossibly high on the blast of hot air. Far below, he saw his mother waving at him, not in farewell but in warning, and he thought that he heard her voice encouraging him, reminding him, urging him: breathe. He inhales and chokes on searing heat. The fire has come for him again. Through the smoke he sees an impertinent flame nibbling at the cuffs of his trousers. It has tracked him from the Old World, pursued him across an ocean, determined to carry out his sentence.
And then he hears the voices of the men. They have broken through and can see his predicament. They shout to him. They tell him h
e is burning and they urge him to act. They have not come to apprehend him; they have come to help. And then Odd smells something sharp and sees the flames scurrying giddily up his trouser leg. He drops to his knees, onto his back, rolls, smothers the flames, and he is back on his feet. He feels a stinging in his eyes, sees the blistered skin on his arms, and is angry. It is a euphoric outpouring of anger, and he lets the feeling carry him forward.
All at once, the understanding comes to him: he is supposed to be here. He can see that this has been his destination from the moment he washed up onto the beach at Boston Harbor. Odd puts aside the fears that he will not be able to convince his pursuers that he did not bring this fire here. It is no longer of any consequence; this fire will not be his ruin. He determines to put an end to it, regardless of how it started. He will not swing from a scaffold simply because that is what fate has decreed. His blood will not rule him as it ruled other members of the family Hus.
He attacks the fire wildly, screaming at the flames. He swings his arms above his head and brings them down, smashing the blade of his shovel onto the many-headed beast. He hammers so powerfully that the wooden handle splinters under the blows. He tosses the broken parts into the fire and does not need to call for another; an ax materializes in each hand, brought forth by the men dumbfounded by his ferocity. Two axes now, one in each hand, and his arms fly over his head and down, smashing flames, scattering brush and branches. The men join him, following him into the heart of the fire. They shovel dirt over the flaming detritus that his flying axes spew in his wake. Some of the men pause in disbelief, and then resume, spurred on by the sureness of Odd's advance, arms spinning, chewing through the fire. They cheer their looming success. Odd does not look back, does not check to see if they are following. He knows where he is going and what he must do. The fire will not escape him. It will not dictate his end. It cowers, tries to flee, but he is on it, crushing it beneath his boots. Flames scatter and dwindle before him, and the men fall in line behind their new leader. Odd feels transformed, tempered by the intense heat. He feels the blood in his veins come to a boil. He has become a different animal—something stronger, something entirely new.
32
Eliot
Eliot is in trouble, though he is slow to admit it.
It happens so quickly, it seems a temporary thing until it is not. He moves to the right when the others move left, and the fire, seeking opportunity, comes between.
He is not certain how it begins, but he watches them run, one after another, until there is no one left around him. Like madmen, they breach the very battlements they have constructed and follow one another into the heart of the blazing woods: a useless display of courage. Eliot stands at the end of one of the shallow trenches that extends as far as the fire to his right. They were to continue digging, to join this trench to the other. For hours the men labored, chopping trees and clearing brush. Before him stretches a blackened expanse where they have beaten back the flames; behind him, a denuded strip of earth runs alongside the trench and stops, unfinished. Certainly the fire cannot cross these barriers, Eliot thinks. There is no need to pursue, no need to fight on; all that remains is to let the flames burn themselves out.
But he hears the men shouting for those ahead to return, and then he hears them calling for him to follow. Eliot shouts to no one in particular, and the sound is meaningless to his own ears. He yells simply to match the cacophony around him. Something in his chest tugs at him, makes him feel that he should run after them. But he cannot summon the courage, and with each passing second they grow more distant. He knows there is another group of men somewhere to his left; he can hear the clank and scrape of their shovels, the clap of their axes as they work their way toward him, to join their work to his, but he cannot see them through the thick smoke. He shovels faster, flinging dirt onto the licks of flame that creep forward toward the trench. He is suddenly gripped by an overwhelming desire to rewrite the scene in which he finds himself—a playwright should never place characters in circumstances so inextricable. The stage dictates that there always be a way out: a door unlocked, a hidden closet, a forgotten weapon ready at hand. An audience, Eliot knows, has little patience with the reality of undeserved, inexorable doom.
The fire surges in the distance and the smoke surrounds him as he looks for a way in, a way to follow the others, but he cannot move. He cannot reach the men who have run forward, and he cannot find those who have stayed behind. He knows he is nothing like DeMonte; he is not the hero he would write. Before him he can see only fire and smoke, and he is terrified. He cannot understand how these sensible men could plunge headlong into it. And now, in their absence, the fire creeps toward Eliot in fits and starts, trying to reclaim the ground, useless earth it lately conceded to the swinging shovels and axes.
The heat makes him squint until the bright flames become flickering diamonds between his eyelashes. And that is when he sees it, a wink, a sparkle in the dark smoke that fills him with a chilling realization: it knows what it's doing. The fire studies the barrier the men have constructed, looking for a way around it. Eliot watches flames stagger toward him, searching for unburned bits of terrain, anything to sustain them long enough to make a last-gasp attempt at the true prize—Concord—and he understands that he alone stands poised to stop the fumbling attack. The fire lunges toward him, and Eliot hurls dirt in wild sprays, stepping backward with each desperate shovelful. He wants to move forward, to follow the other men, who surely need his help more than ever. Instead, he thrusts his shovel into the bottom of the trench and leaves it standing upright in the blackened soil as he backs away across the firebreak. A billowing mass of gray smoke rolls over him like an open hand.
Eliot can no longer hear the shouts of the men digging and chopping their way toward him on his left, only the howl of the flames, and through the smoke he sees the winking eyes telling him that the fire is there, too. The fire seems for a moment to change its mind, to retreat unsteadily, and then Eliot understands that he is the one retreating, carried backward by his own uncertain steps. The fire prods him, mocks him, forces him to follow his heels blindly.
This is not at all how Eliot envisioned that the fire would behave in The House of Many Windows. He had not given any thought to the powerful confusion of heat and smoke. He understands now that the burning of a house onstage might cause the bonnets of the women in the front rows to burst into flames. And what would keep soot and ash from raining down upon the entire audience? And the roar of the flames—he had not thought of this at all—surely that would drown out any dialogue. There would, in fact, be little for the actors to do save run about the stage in a pantomime of distress. The grand conflagration at the end of the play had not been his idea to begin with, and he realizes now that if it were an impracticable effect after all, then he truly had no idea how he would end his play.
Reworking The House of Many Windows to suit the requirements of the Boston Museum proved far more difficult than Eliot had expected. He attacked the manuscript with a vigor bordering on vengeance. He had heavy curtains made for the windows of his study, so that he might work in the darkened room during the day, but the sunlight still found its way in around the edges. On warm days, he could feel the heat radiating from the other side, the curtains squarely haloed by sunlight.
One Sunday, a few weeks after Eliot's meeting with Moses Kimball, a soft knock at the door interrupted his editing.
“Eliot?” Margaret searched for him in the shadows. “I thought you might be in here. What on earth are you doing sitting in the dark?”
Margaret made her way to the curtains and pulled them back, allowing the bright day to flood the room. Eliot held his hands to his eyes and saw flashing blue squares fluttering where his stack of writing paper had been.
“Margaret, please.”
“Eliot, you look terrible. And our guests will be here soon.”
“Guests?”
“It's Sunday, Eliot. We're having dinner, remember?”
Ma
rgaret finished tying back the heavy curtains with braided tassels, and smoothed the folds of her dress. “There. That's better. Isn't that better?”
“When are they arriving?”
“Father is already here, and he has brought Mr. and Mrs. Durham with him. I will entertain them until the rest arrive, but you must get yourself ready at once.”
Eliot looked at the manuscript before him, littered with x's and marginal scribblings. On many pages he had crossed out all but one or two lines, and a few pages had not fared as well. He rubbed his eyes. He wore his spectacles only to see at a distance, but lately even words at arm's length had begun to seem a bit blurred. He no longer knew how many years had passed since he penned the first page. It sometimes seemed he had been at work on The House of Many Windows for most of his life, since before he had married Margaret, since before he had become a father, since before he had worn spectacles at all, and now the only way he had found to save his troubled masterpiece was by undoing it.
“Eliot. Are you all right, dear?”
Eliot did not know that he was going to ask the question until the words had already fallen from his tongue. “Why did you marry me, Margaret?”
“What?” Margaret stared at him, hands at her hips. “Why did I—Eliot, there is hardly time for this now! We have guests below.”
