by John Pipkin
“Please. It should be easy to answer.” Eliot looked at his butchered manuscript, and he thought of the conversation he and Mr. Mahoney had had so many years earlier. He had never asked Margaret if the bookstore was her idea, and she had always pretended that it was a surprise.
“For all of the reasons you can certainly imagine,” Margaret said with a tight, indulgent smile. “Because I love you and respect you. Will that do?”
“Yes, but why?”
“Oh, Eliot, really. It is because … you have a quality that so many men lack. You are a practical man.”
“Practical?” Eliot felt something shrink inside him. “I thought you believed in my work—in my writing, I mean.”
“Well, of course I do. It is what first distinguished you from all the boorish, moneyed men that Father so often introduced to me. And your devotion to your art still distinguishes you from such men. But, more important, you are not the sort to sacrifice the practicalities of living to airy dreams that may never come to fruition. You have always provided for your family, and you are a good father to your children. You are a reasonable man, Eliot. It is a most uncommon quality. Father approves, and so do I. Will that do for now? I have left Father alone with the Durhams….”
Eliot nodded. He had expected something more, but he was not entirely disappointed; instead, he felt a relentless sobriety wash over him. His eyes were still adjusting to the piercing bright light, and when Margaret crossed the room she seemed to him to be pushing her own shadow. He saw her come toward him, then saw her turn abruptly toward the door.
“Father!”
“Those stairs are a fright.” Mr. Mahoney stood in the doorway, balancing his bulk forward with both hands on the head of his cane.
Margaret rushed to her father's side, but he waved her away. “You shouldn't overwork yourself like that,” she said. “Where are Mr. and Mrs. Durham?”
“Terrible company,” Mr. Mahoney grumbled, “but what would half of the coffee merchants in Boston do without Mr. Durham, eh? What are you doing, Eliot? Working on a Sunday?”
“Eliot is working on one of his plays, Father.”
“Excellent recreation. Just the other day I wrote a poem about my cat, right after balancing the accounts for the week. You can tell us all about it over sherry. Unless it is unsuitable for the ladies.”
“Really, Father.” Margaret laughed, moving toward him. “Eliot would never write such rubbish. Come, we should give him a moment to prepare for our guests.”
“I believe I can suffer the Durhams' company for another quarter hour,” Mr. Mahoney said with mock resignation. “Then we'll talk of the coffee trade, Eliot. Impressive profits to be had.”
Margaret gently prodded her father from behind. “He'll join us soon,” she said, smiling, and looking at Eliot she mouthed, “Hurry up.”
Eliot heard their voices recede down the stairwell, and then heard Mr. Mahoney's booming laugh greeting the Durhams as if they had only just arrived. He felt his face grow warm on the side facing the bright window. He sometimes pondered what would happen if he opened one of the windows and walked out into the light. Even when the room was dark, he wondered: if he were to pull back the curtains, crank open the windows, and step confidently into the bright air, would the solid shafts of sunlight support his steps so that he might walk about freely above the city of Boston? The thought always brought him a momentary thrill.
And now Eliot is wondering much the same thing as he faces the burning woods alone. Would it be practical—reasonable—to run into the flames as the others had done? He knows that the men who have thrown themselves into the conflagration need his help. They will need every available pair of arms that can swing an ax or shovel, but Eliot's arms hang limp as he imagines the terrible things that are happening where the other men have gone. If he were to follow them now, it is entirely possible that he might never sit at his desk again. He feels the ground shudder as a massive tree falls somewhere behind the impenetrable curtains of smoke. Eliot shuffles sideways, tracing a close circle in the black earth.
Those men are fools, Eliot thinks. He watches the flames scatter, sees them test the edges of the trench, searching for something to burn, something to take them to the other side. Little points of flame hop toward the trench, lurch for the clearing where Eliot stands, and expire in midair. The fire cannot cross the divide, but it does not give up. It is possible, Eliot thinks, that a shift in the wind might send the flames skipping east to the Walden Woods, and a strong enough gust might launch the flames over the trench into the trees that stand on the other side of the firebreak. If that were to happen, there would be no one here to help him. Eliot faces the flames across the divide, and he feels suddenly vulnerable.
A few feet away, Eliot sees the wooden handle of his shovel begin to smolder in the heat where he left it stuck upright in the ground. He has been treading steadily backward without realizing it. He knows he can hesitate no longer. He decides. He takes a deep breath, gathers his courage, then pivots on his heels and runs away through the dark clouds, toward the clear, cool air of Concord.
33
Henry David
Young America is gone. Henry watches him disappear into the fire like a man fleeing the specters of his own conscience. Some of the men pursue him, hesitantly at first, and then moments later the rest follow, with Henry swept along in their midst. No one can remain behind when one of their number dares to move forward.
The fire closes behind the men in front of Henry, and he calls to those nearest him to fan out over the charred ground. They swing their axes at the crippled half-burned trunks, felling trees left and right. They cut a fresh swath the fire cannot cross. There are more shouts, more orders; in confusion each man seeks to direct the action of another, but in the end they only narrate their own deeds. For a half hour more, they labor without pause. And then they stop, and wait, and watch.
The fire makes several attempts at crossing the new void they have carved. It marshals its forces, hurls itself skyward, aims at the treetops across the divide, lurches hopefully toward the distant, tantalizing rooftops of Concord. But each effort diminishes its intensity.
The men stop chopping, stop shoveling, devote themselves to selfish gasping. There is no cheering, no triumphant slapping of backs. Their victory is gradual. It is, Henry thinks, an anticlimax, a slow dawning. It affords no moment that one might celebrate as now. Portions of the woods as yet lie under siege, but the men have halted the main advance. They stand wearily in the firebreak, leaning on handles, watching the fire eat itself, and as the smoke thins, new scenes emerge: ghostly shadows, blackened trunks, tall sentinels stripped of bark and branch and leaf, a giant forest of silent spent matchsticks.
Never has Henry been so relieved to see a creation of his own hands approach its end. He has mangled his creations before. He has torn apart drawings of flawed perspective, blotted out the malformed poems that sometimes issued from his pen, but the relief then was for embarrassment avoided. And, now that the enemy has been halted, the murmuring begins anew. There is talk already of pecuniary losses, of recrimination and restitution, as if a man could assign a price to the soil and the sky and the living woods. But, in fact, men can and do. There will be estimates of lumber lost. There will be the untallied damages to shovels and axes and hoes and boots and clothes. There will be complaints of chickens unable to lay for months because of the disturbance, and together these losses will accrue considerable sums. When weighed against what might have been suffered—the possible destruction of Concord, the potential loss of life—the sums will seem small, but when considered alone the amounts will amaze. Already someone points out that even the felled trees at the firebreak will be of no use to the carpenter, smoke-damaged as they are.
Henry at last sees Edward Sherman Hoar among the others. Edward sees him, too, but they do not acknowledge each other. They keep their distance, not wanting to invite further suspicion or accusation. The weeping man has returned to his ruined farm, and no one has yet asked Henry
about the man's accusation. They will not believe it until the story is repeated, until Henry confesses to the deed as Edward no doubt already has. It occurs to Henry that it may prove some benefit to count Edward Sherman Hoar as his companion in this misadventure. Fortunate accident, that. In deference to Edward's esteemed father, Squire Hoar, there may follow a willful forgetting, just short of forgiveness. But Henry knows that he will not smother his sorrow, will not ask forgiveness from men. He will tend and cherish his regret, until he finds himself restored. He will remain behind after the men have left; he will find his way back to the beginning and finish the excursion begun that morning. Perhaps he will spend the night here, alone, among the ashes.
And these men, Henry thinks, have stood for a moment on the brink of something greater than themselves. These men have had a precious opportunity to act as men, and now they will return to their groveling lives. They will return to the ordained destruction of land and living things that pretends offense at accidental loss. As towns and cities expand across the continent, woods like these, vaster tracts by far, will disappear beneath ax and saw and the other engines that men will devise to quicken the clearing of what brought them here. The railway slicing through the woods at Walden will bring more men to help topple solitude's slow reign. More and still more will distribute themselves far and wide across the surface of things; each day they will extend their numbers over the untouched land, while their individual lives remain as shallow as ever. In all mythologies, a forest is a sacred place, but those who arrive on America's shores will continue to bring with them the old displacing fables, until one day they will voice disdain for the new world that can remember no legends of its own.
II
AFTER
New England
SPRING, 1844
The fire, we understand, was communicated to the woods through the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens, who kindled it in a pine stump, near the Pond, for the purpose of making a chowder. As everything around them was as combustible almost as a fire ship, the flames spread with rapidity, and hours elapsed before it could be subdued. It is to be hoped that this unfortunate result of sheer carelessness, will be borne in mind by those who may visit the woods in [the] future for recreation.
—Concord Freeman, May 3, 1844
That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish,—which had been dressed,—scattered over the burnt grass.
—The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1850
34
Anezka and Zalenka
Three days after the fire is extinguished, the forest still smolders, mourning its loss. At night it glows, its blackness punctured by thousands of glittering orange eyes blinking angrily beneath the ashes. Sometimes a small fire breaks out, but with nothing left to burn it struggles against its own rapacious hunger and vanishes as quickly as it appears.
On the third day, Zalenka and Anezka go searching for wood. Many others are doing the same. Summer is coming, but the cold New England nights are far from over and winter will come again soon enough. Anezka complains that she does not expect to live through another winter, but she says this every year.
It is Zalenka's idea. She says it makes sense to take what advantage they can from the misfortune. There is plenty of dead wood to be had, she says, and the men who fought the fire cut down many trees that did not burn. Even charred logs will be of use once they scrape off the blackened bits. Anezka does not want to go. She says that Zalenka only wants to see the damage, like the rest of the silly tourists who arrive each day from Boston to gawk at the forest that is no longer there and take away handfuls of ash as keepsakes.
Anezka taps her temples with a crooked finger.
“The eyes, I do not miss so much sometime. Not to see bad thing, is good thing.”
Zalenka hitches their mule to the old, rickety cart that looks like it has given up hope of ever being repaired. She helps Anezka up onto the narrow bench and then climbs up next to her. The mule pulls gently, as if he were afraid of pulling the cart to pieces. Like the cart, Zalenka found the mule among the cast-off belongings of others. The poor creature had been beaten and abused and left for useless. Zalenka named him Václav, fed him from their garden, and bandaged his suppurating wounds, which formed thick scars along his haunches like knots in a tree trunk. Václav's hide is dark brown, but, like everything else in Concord now, it is speckled with the gray soot that falls like spring snow whenever the wind blows through the skeletal trees. Although the women live almost a mile from the site of the fire, they need to keep their windows shut against the loitering clouds of floury ash.
The ground is still warm when Zalenka and Anezka arrive. Václav, disconcerted by the smell, refuses to leave the road, so Zalenka pulls a sled from the back of the wagon and drags it in her left hand and Anezka in her right. As Anezka predicted, there are already people in the burnt woods, but fewer than they expected. Some well-dressed visitors stand on an elevated patch of ground, surveying the destruction and making soft noises of amazement from under the brims of fancy hats. Local people sift through the ashes, sleeves rolled, trousers tucked into boots, looking for what can still be burned, hunting for wood that might yet be useful as lumber. Zalenka sees a man pushing a wheelbarrow piled with small, blackened animal carcasses, and she declines to ponder his intentions. Here and there thin wisps of smoke issue from the ground, as if the earth were breathing in troubled volcanic gasps. Zalenka's nose and eyes burn, and she sees that Anezka's milky eyes are watering as well.
“We should go, maybe,” Zalenka suggests.
Anezka wipes her useless tears and squints at the pale shadows she just barely discerns against the dark horizon. “Pshh! Now, after we are come here?” Anezka coughs. “Take what we need. Tonight I will make nice tea for the throat.”
The air is hazy, as on a humid summer afternoon, but there are none of the gnats or swarming flies that usually herald warm weather. Aside from the voices of human scavengers, the woods are quiet—no chattering or barking or twittering or buzzing of any kind.
Zalenka walks into the woods, scanning the ground. Anezka stands with the reins of the sled in one hand, and she looks so much like a child with a toy on a leash that it makes Zalenka's heart ache. Zalenka stoops to pick up a charred branch and smiles. She cannot help it. She still finds the world a wondrous, capricious thing: cruel and unjust, it can become inexplicably, unexpectedly generous. It has, after all, granted them these years together, a whole lifetime to be lived at the end of a life. Already, Zalenka begins to think of the tea that Anezka will prepare later, some unique creation of local herbs and roots that she will blindly identify and measure out with sensitive fingertips.
When they first arrived in Boston, penniless, hungry, it was Anezka who turned whatever they stumbled upon into something edible. Dead birds and rodents and rotten vegetables became, in her hands, a feast. Too old for factory work, and too clumsy to pass as a seamstress, Zalenka eventually discovered that people beyond the reach of city physicians were willing to pay generously for an experienced midwife. Zalenka put her skills to work, setting bones and cleaning wounds and pulling rotten teeth for farmers. And after Zalenka found work Anezka continued to seek out new ways to coax startling flavors from the simple garden behind the abandoned cabin they had adopted and redeemed.
It was an odd cabin they found, far from the road, a solitary outpost in the woods. The cabin had no stove, and the small, poorly built hearth looked as though it had never been used. It held no other comforts, but it seemed as if it had been left specifically for them, as if the world were trying to meet their simple needs in recompense for the deprivations it had visited upon them in the Old World. On the floor at the center of the room, they found a pile of small, colorful stones, veined with contrasting minerals. They wrapped them in a cloth bag and put th
em aside, in case the previous owner returned for them one day. Zalenka surprised herself with the repairs she ably made to the roof. Generous souls in Concord helped, gave advice and supplies, lent tools. A young man arrived unexpectedly, a white-haired Norwegian with a gentle smile and a black tooth, just passing through the woods, he had said, though he seemed surprised to find them there, as if he had been expecting to spend the night in the cabin himself. He reassured them that the man who had once lived there was not intending to return. He asked if he might have the colorful bag of stones, and in return offered to build them an extra room for a kitchen. While he was at it, he extended the porch as well, so that Zalenka and Anezka could position their rocking chairs to watch the rising and setting of the sun through the trees at any season. It surprised Zalenka to learn that men had once debated the meaning of the sun's shifting path, when they needed only to accept it as a fact and adjust their perspectives accordingly.
Zalenka sifts through the ashes on the forest floor and considers the good fortune they have enjoyed in recent years. The world still surprises them with so many things to savor. Zalenka feels at times that she wants to do something to repay its belated kindness. She spots another branch poking up from the ashes, and when it proves too big to carry she snaps it into smaller pieces over her knee.
A few yards away, Anezka pulls the small sled over fallen branches, slowly feeling her way into the ruined forest. She is not as helpless or fragile as Zalenka likes to think, and she occasionally feels the need to prove this, though she knows that her weakness appeals to some deep-rooted need in Zalenka's nature. The details and colors of the world dropped away years ago, but she can still see vague shadows enough to keep from walking into objects that honestly present themselves. It does not bother her, the loss of vision. She has seen enough of the world in the first half of her life to know that some things are best seen in black and white, while other things should not be looked upon at all.
