Woodsburner (30 page)

“Leave me to tend to my business,” he said, “and come to me when you have sobered.”

Caleb pulled free, and she tumbled backward. He heard some hard part of her slap the stone floor. In the dark recesses of the prison, other women called out for her to be quiet.

Even in her drunkenness, Caleb thought, Esther Harrington was right about one thing: the wretch at the far end of the corridor, the man who was about to be launched into eternity, was beyond forgiveness. There were two guards in the office when Caleb arrived, and the inevitable slow dawn was already leaking through the windows. Caleb did not see the prisoner at first, but one of the guards motioned to a chair in the dark corner where the sluggish morning light did not yet penetrate. There sat a large man, barefoot and dressed in tattered clothes that did not reach the ends of his limbs; his black skin was almost indiscernible from the shadow that still filled half of the room. Caleb hesitated in the doorway. He had not been informed that Desmond Boone was a Negro.

The guards nodded without speaking and stepped into the hall. Desmond Boone stared at the blank wall opposite. Caleb was relieved to see that the man's thick wrists and ankles were shackled with heavy chains. He looked strong enough to be capable of snapping a neck one-handed.

“Have you prepared your soul?” Caleb asked.

The man ignored him. He continued concentrating on the wall, as if trying to identify a face in the shadows, and Caleb could not help following his line of sight to see if something was there, watching him.

“Desmond Boone, I asked if you have prepared your soul!” Caleb took hold of the man's heavy shoulder, tried to make him
turn to face him, but the man was immovable as stone. “Look at me.”

Desmond Boone sat straight in the chair, the posture of a man unburdened by guilt. Caleb studied the man's broad face. His wild black hair stood stiff with filth; his cheeks shone in the faint light from Caleb's lamp, and in his eyes Caleb saw defiance. It obscured everything else. His face seemed swollen above the cheeks, but if there were bruises they were hidden beneath the indigo sheen of his skin. Caleb wondered if the man was a runaway, unused to obeying laws without the constant threat of the lash. That would explain the savagery of his crime, he thought.

“Tell me how you have come here,” Caleb said.

“I am a free man.” Desmond Boone's voice was deep and strong. “Bought and paid myself. Done nothin' wrong.” There was no hint of the quivering fear Caleb had so often heard from the condemned.

Caleb spoke slowly, unconvinced that Boone was not a fugitive. “Slavery, like deceit, is but one of many sins for which men must answer in the hereafter. Neither is justification for the other.”

Boone struck his broad chest with his fist and repeated, “Free! I own my own self. I will die as a free man.”

Caleb studied him. He wondered if the man's confidence came from some trust in the pagan lies of his forefathers. He squatted next to Boone and spoke softly into the curled dark shell of his ear. “Tell me then, Desmond Boone, what have your false gods promised you after this life.”

Boone leaped from his chair, knocking it to the floor and nearly toppling himself as well. His chains rattled and scraped against the floor as he regained his balance. The guards looked through the doorway, but Caleb waved them away.

“The Devil sent you to me!” Boone said fiercely through clenched teeth. “I am a Christian!”

Caleb stepped back and held the lantern between them; he saw outrage on the man's face, but nothing more. “If you are a Christian, then you know that only by confessing your sins can you hope to enter heaven.” Caleb needed to get him to admit what he had done. Only then would this man look upon his eternal punishment with certainty. “We must first despair,” Caleb prodded, “before we can find hope.”

“I ask for no forgiveness,” Boone said. “Lord Jesus knows I laid no hand on those boys.” Boone swung his head from side to side, as if looking for an exit. “God won't punish me for what I never done.”

The guards returned, and Boone resisted when they grabbed him by the arms. They led him into the hall, past the common cell, and into the prison yard, where the scaffold waited. Caleb followed close behind, marveling that they were able to navigate the powerful man, until he noticed the dagger that one of the guards held at the small of Boone's back. Aside from the warden and the other guards gathered under the jaundiced sky, the yard was empty, and Caleb thought it regrettable that the scaffold was no longer wheeled into the Common for public executions.

The two guards struggled to hold Boone steady while a third readied the noose. Caleb stood to the side and watched as Boone squeezed his eyes shut, and he grew incensed to think that this man would deny him what he sought. Caleb opened his Bible, and the words he read felt sour as they spilled from his lips. He laid his hand on Boone's shoulder and was surprised to see the man begin weeping. Caleb stood near as the noose was secured, and then Boone opened his eyes and spoke.

“I do repent my sins,” he said quietly. “I swear I am good. Will you ask God to receive me?”

Caleb considered the power that he held at this moment, the power to fortify this despairing man with an invocation of God's
saving grace. But never had he heard an appeal so baseless as this. Caleb wanted to draw back the veil of hope that so often clouded men's eyes at the end, to force this wretch to look clearly upon the inescapability of his damnation.

Caleb leaned in close to Boone's ear and answered, “No.” Boone did not at first understand, and then the realization struck and his face seemed to fall from his skull. His eyes widened, and Caleb saw a blur of animal terror as the trapdoor swung open and the doomed man's cry was cut short by the drop.

Once the death spasms ceased, Caleb climbed beneath the scaffold and looked closely at the protruding eyes, pupils tight as pins, whites ringed red and shot through with burst vessels. In a short time, the dead man's face, with its swollen tongue bitten purple and black, would look no different from the rotting skull that Caleb had found in the woods as a boy. But in his final moments of life Boone had given Caleb the glimpse that he sought, for Caleb knew that what he saw captured in the dead man's eyes was the undiluted awe of seeing eternity for the first and possibly last time.

When Caleb explained to his father what he had done and what he had seen, the right side of Marcus Dowdy's face exploded in frantic twitches, as if to compensate for the limp expression of the left. He sputtered incoherently, his lips unable to move rapidly enough to convey his righteous fury. His right hand grabbed the pencil he kept tied to a long string looped around his neck, and when he could not find the notebook that usually sat at his bedside he snapped the string in anger and threw the pencil at Caleb. It was the last time they spoke, though Marcus Dowdy lived on in his half-sensate body for eight years more. Marcus later made overtures of reconciliation, but Caleb would have none of it; the
struggle to redeem mankind in the New World allowed no leniency for the preservation of polite civilities between ill-advised fathers and stalwart sons.

Despite the coldness of their relations, Caleb felt the stab of his father's spiritual infelicity one final time. In the last year of his life, the Reverend Marcus Ezekiel Dowdy fell under the spell of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caleb received a dictated letter, in neat, balanced script, in which the influence of Concord's gleeful pagan was all too clear.

Caleb was aghast. His father had certainly gone mad.
A vibrating soul?
Had the old man mistaken his own palsy as proof of pantheism? Caleb took no joy in the thought of sharing his soul with a tree, as if the soul were some sort of transparent rodent, equally at home in the woods as in its human nest. Once men like Emerson and his friends were shown that forests were nothing more than unharvested timber destined to frame the cities of the New World, there would be no more worshipping of trees.

Marcus Dowdy died a month later, and during the funeral Caleb studied the red glow of the stained-glass fire and thought of the hidden flaws in the window, a mockery of the perfection it was supposed to represent. He thought of his father's letter and its assertions that austere piety and Puritan dogma had no place in the New World. “Their creed is passing away,” his father had again quoted Emerson. Caleb could not forgive his father's conversion to Mr. Emerson's blasphemy. Yet he could not stand the thought that his father might suffer the eternal torment he had seen in the eyes of Desmond Boone. Nor could Caleb bear the idea of his father's flesh rotting from his bones to feed blind worms, no better than the dead Irishman in the woods. Caleb desperately sought a reason that his father might be pardoned for his obvious failures; he prayed that God might show mercy on his soul, and then he was ashamed of himself for having done so. He knew that his weakness was brought on by his failure to remain true to the path he had chosen. Caleb knew he must show himself no leniency; he needed to purge his world of the distractions that had led him astray. Desperate to return himself to the proper path, Caleb walked into the church of the Court Street First
Reformed Unitarian Assembly alone on a Saturday night, seeking guidance.

The sound of shattering glass brought the first witnesses early the next morning, and when the rest of the congregants arrived they found their minister, hatchet in hand, face red, shirtsleeves rolled, standing amid the ruins of what had once been their beautiful church. Caleb had saved the smashing of the great window for last, and he was still sending shards of fire and clouds flying about the nave when they arrived. He had worked through the night, chopping away at the benches until there were no pieces too big to fit into a stove. The walls were rent with deep gashes. He had smashed the pulpit as well, and he had very nearly smashed his own foot when he toppled the heavy altar. He had left not a single pew intact. If they want to sit, he thought, let them sit on the splintered remnants of their pride.

He expected their anger, but he was surprised when this did not give way to a deeper understanding of what he had done. He watched the faces of the men and women as they arrived, one by one; he watched as they realized that his weekly tirades against wealth and indulgence had not been metaphors for spiritual renewal. Caleb expected the poorer members of the congregation to stand up in his defense, but even those who usually sat on the exposed pews nearest the drafty doors expressed as much outrage as the rest.

And then the truth struck him. In this new world of unlimited possibility, the poor were willingly misled by the perversity of material ambitions. The meek would rather look upon the decadence of the wealthy as a sign of what they might one day attain on earth; they would prefer to covet these beautiful lives than follow the stark path to salvation. Caleb left his old congregants weeping among the wreckage of their church. Under one arm he carried his Bible, under the other his hatchet.