Woodsburner (28 page)

Punch squeaked again through the flattened nostril. “You flatter me. I have not the skill, but I know talented artists in need of money. Men do what they must to meet their debts. And know this: you will be able to charge your buyers
twice
what you pay me for these items.”

Eliot noticed that his hands were trembling, and he was angry that he had permitted this man to make him feel that he was not so worldly as he liked to think. “Look here, I have a reputation to
maintain. I cater to respectable clientele. I cannot possibly permit these
… things …
in my shop.”

Punch bared his brown teeth, wide and blunt as toenails. “The men who want such items are not the sort to pass judgment. Honest men recognize their honest desires.”

Eliot grabbed the edge of the counter to keep his hands from shaking. “Do not think that you can teach me about honest men.”

Punch scowled and began stuffing the books and cards back into the dirty sack.

“I will not play this game with you, Mr. Calvert. I see what you are up to. You think that you will shame me. And then, once you have made me feel that I am your inferior, you think you will dictate our terms. I am no fool. There are others, wiser in the ways of the world, who understand that your so-called respectable clientele will pay dearly for this.”

Eliot watched Punch stuff the cards and pamphlets into the sack, and in the fading daylight he caught a sparkle from a long crack in one of the shop's windows. The pane of expensive tinted glass would need replacing.

“Wait, please,” Eliot said softly.

Eliot picked up the stack of cards that remained on the counter. “No. 47” showed two lovers entwined with heads and feet at opposite ends. He thought of the shutters that were currently being repaired on Beacon Street. He thought of the broken flue in the chimney that would need mending before winter arrived. He thought of the spidery brown water stain that had mysteriously appeared on the ceiling of his bedroom. Eliot looked at “No. 52,” where three bodies were, improbably, tangled in positions that did not strike him as at all productive. He thought of the expensive medicine that Margaret had begun needing for her headaches. He thought of the patterned china that she said could not possibly be used for another season of entertaining. And he thought how
Josiah Edward, now five years of age, had already begun to show an interest in the scientific microscope that his grandfather kept as a novelty for examining small, squashed insects.

“You say that these men will actually pay for such things?” Eliot asked.

“Men pay dearly for what they desire, Mr. Calvert.” Punch drummed his fingers presumptively on Eliot's countertop. “Dearly.”

Eliot knows he should not allow these pointless ruminations to distract him from his business in Concord. He steps into the street in front of the old cobbler's shop, then turns and watches the blur of smoke spread above the distant treetops like a dark thought. He would gladly purge his life of men like Punch and Seymour Twine and forgo the added income their wares have brought, even if doing so necessitated moving into a smaller home, one less expensive to maintain, one that required no servants. But he knows that Margaret's father would not hesitate to intervene if he perceived that they were in financial difficulty. And the truth is, Eliot admits to himself, he has come to enjoy the idea that he is the kind of man who can afford expensive comforts. He has grown used to the unexpected luxuries that surround him. And what was wrong with that? He does not ask anything of anyone. Patrick Mahoney had provided him with a home and a business, but Eliot can point to his own labor as the sole source of his family's continued contentment. He is about to open a second bookstore; he is very nearly finished with the final draft of
The House of Many Windows
, and it seems that he has at last found a place for it onstage at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum. His ambitions have survived undiminished. Has he not remained true to himself, after all?

Eliot watches as the wind smears the looming dark cloud against the sky, and still no one seems to pay it much attention.
He assumes the people of Concord are accustomed to farmers burning off their fields, or whatever it is they do this time of year. He knows it would serve him well to learn from their wise indifference. It has done him no good to be so easily distracted by his own restless memories. Eliot turns away from the smoke and walks toward Wright's Tavern at the town's center. Every man has his employments, he thinks, responsibilities enough to occupy him for a lifetime without having to seek out new worries. He has an ample store of his own, and today meeting with Seymour Twine heads his list.

Caleb knows exactly how he has come to this.

And the fire assures him that he is not mistaken.

He crawls from under the tent of his wool coat, and he sees that it is still there, distant in the woods, little flickers of brilliance intimating greater things. He leaves his coat draped over the crumbled foundations of the farmhouse, and when he stands his long white surplice catches the wind. His followers concluded soon enough that the fire was no talisman of celestial reckoning. Caleb knows what they must have thought: if the Almighty so decreed that the woods should burn, who were they to countermand the wishes of heaven? They had no cause to find anything remarkable about a world consumed by flames.

But there is more to it than they can possibly understand, he thinks.

With the black-lacquered pipe clenched between his teeth, Caleb looks around the plot of land as if he were seeing it for the first time. Then he begins pacing its perimeter, crunching the spiky stalks of last year's weeds beneath his feet. The fire confirms that Providence has been at work all along, feeding his doubts, leading him into blasphemy, all so that he—Caleb Ephraim Dowdy—might willingly sacrifice himself in executing the plan that will bring proof of God's existence to a corrupt and ignorant world. Why else would the Concord Woods be aflame
on this day of all days? Surely the universe was not so accidental a place.

Caleb stares at his feet as he walks, entranced by the rhythm of his steps. He draws on his pipe, feels the hot, bittersweet smoke seep into his lungs, and he circles the property a second time. From the corners of his eyes he recognizes groupings of stones he passed before, only now he perceives patterns, illegible messages arranged in characters native to the soil. The fire shows him a new way of seeing, shows him that there is a divine cause behind every act, every trial, every doubt that has accumulated in his memory, and he realizes that he has led a life composed of parables. Everything in his experience has happened for his instruction: his mother's early passing, the flaw in the stained-glass window of his father's church, the dead Irishman in the woods, the blind indifference of his first congregation, his visits to the Leverett Street Jail, even his dealings with fallen souls like Esther Harrington and Amos Stiles. He circles the ruins and recalls, with a renewed sense of purpose, the causes that have brought him here.

Doubt had always been with him: the first syllable of a query, a hard kernel of desperation ready to torment him in his idle hours. It had not begun with his stumbling upon the dead Irishman, but the worm-hollowed skull did give substance and shape to his already nascent misgivings. He saw the rotted face staring at him in his dreams, mocking his attempts to believe that something more awaited the sons of men. He held the preachers of the New World responsible for permitting so wicked a thing as incertitude to gain purchase in his mind; it was a consequence of their carelessness, a symptom of their failed vigilance. He counted his father among them, another impotent leader of insouciant believers; he thought his father too ready to forgive, too eager to dispense the promise of redemption, as if his church were an apothecary for the soul. The great stained-glass window held out
hope for the perfectibility of this world, but the sparkling flaw half hidden in the highest pane was a constant reminder to Caleb of man's irredeemable failings. If so beautiful a creation as the window could harbor such a defect, Caleb reasoned, why should he not suspect that the erudite orations of his father and the other ministers of New England hid errors of reasoning in the depths of their well-turned phrasings?

Toward the end of Caleb's final year at Harvard Divinity School, his father proclaimed that marvelous revelations had begun appearing to him in his waking hours, fiery pinpoints of light crackling in the periphery of his vision like mute and skittish angels. The intermittent visions ceased altogether after several weeks, but they were succeeded shortly thereafter by a massive epiphany that knocked Marcus Dowdy to the cobblestones as he strolled along Tremont Street, robbing him of speech and infusing his limbs with tremors. Months later, slurred and slow, he described the searing radiance that had felt as though it clove his skull in two. He struggled for words, grunting through the living half of his mouth, and with heroic effort he was eventually able to convey that, like Saint Paul, he had been struck down so that he might look upon eternity, and he rejoiced.

Marcus Dowdy accepted the physician's conclusion that his powerful revelation had brought on an apoplexy from which it was unlikely he would regain his former vigor. His left side, the doctor informed him, had ceased to function, and Marcus took this as confirmation that man's earthly mold was a poor vessel to convey the full glory of heaven. Marcus could not return to his ministry, and the day after Caleb completed his studies, in the spring of 1830, he stepped into his father's pulpit in the Court Street Unitarian Church. Caleb envied his father's epiphany; he would gladly have sacrificed speech and motion in exchange for a glimpse of what lay beyond this world.

But Caleb understood the immediate significance of what had come to pass. Providence had stricken his father in order that Caleb might introduce the reforms so desperately needed. For guidance, he looked to an earlier generation of preachers who sermonized when the New World had not yet slid into decadence; he sought to revive Christianity's former glory from the days before the Revolution. He renamed his father's church, and in the Court Street First Reformed Unitarian Assembly he began delivering the kind of uncompromising sermons that had not been heard in Boston for a hundred years.

But neither this reformed liturgy nor his father's recurring epiphanies—which delivered to Marcus visions of increasing brilliance—assuaged Caleb's pernicious misgivings. Whenever his mind was not fully occupied, the doubts crept back. Caleb gnashed his teeth in his sleep. He dreamed of bottomless chasms. In idle waking hours, he saw the dead Irishman's face staring back at him black and empty. Caleb despaired and prayed for guidance until his clasped hands cramped around each other. And he labored. Like an indentured servant working off impossible debts, Caleb toiled until he could not tell where his calloused hands ended and the work began. He tended to the sick. He walked dark streets preaching to the indigent; he visited infirmaries. He exhausted his body in order to quiet his mind, and when acts of charity were not tiring enough he saddled his horse, stowed the blue-handled hatchet that he had found years earlier next to the rotting corpse in the woods, and rode into the trees beyond the city.