Woodsburner (36 page)

Odd had once clung to the pallid hope that Emma's marriage to Cyrus Woburn was just a convenience, a partnership built on sweat and chaste respect. There were no children, and Odd let himself think the marriage was unconsummated. It was a simple fiction to attend, since he already found it unlikely that people actually did the things he imagined them doing when they were alone. He dared not ask after Emma's happiness and had not the boldness to confess his feelings for her, but it mattered little. He has always known that they would never be together; it was the one certainty in his world. From the first time they met he understood this, simply by the way that Emma sprawled on top of him in the mud. He could tell she was familiar with the immediacy of other bodies; she sank into him unashamed, even as he felt his own skin retreat from the intimacy.

One of the men walking in front of Odd begins to chant a marching song about a forlorn lover, but no one else joins in and he gives up after the first stanza. There is some nervous laughter, then silence, and then the angry chattering resumes. Odd's thoughts wander back to the night, a few months earlier, when he had allowed himself to hope for something more between himself and Emma. Mr. Woburn was not at home the night that Emma
stood in the rain and knocked on Odd's door to ask him to carry a load of firewood onto the porch. It seemed a strange request. Odd thought he had brought in plenty that afternoon, but Emma felt that the stormy night called for more. The rain had soaked through his clothes by the time he was finished, and she insisted that he sit by her fire until he dried. Mr. Woburn was not expected until morning, she said, and she did not wish to be alone while the storm raged. The thunder shook the windows and the lightning made the shadows of trees dance along the walls like shuddering marionettes. She asked that he stay until the storm weakened, and Odd could not refuse. He followed her inside and stood cautiously by the fire. Emma removed her wet bonnet and shook it out. She draped her wet shawl near the hearth, and Odd saw how her pale arms shown through the clinging damp sleeves of her dress. Her skin shone like fire in the orange light. She insisted he remove his boots and jacket, and she placed them near the fire next to her shawl. Odd allowed himself the fantasy that they were behaving as husband and wife.

“Do you play whist?” she asked Odd, as she crossed to the other side of the room. She came back holding a deck of cards decorated with bluebirds and little blue boats.

“I don't know.”

Emma laughed. “You don't know? Have you ever played cards before?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well then, Oddmund Hus, let's find out.”

She pressed several cards into his hands; the cards were covered with perfect red hearts on one side. Emma's fingers felt soft against his palms. He listened to her patient explanations.

“Really, we're each supposed to have a partner for whist,” she said, “but I think we'll do just fine by ourselves.”

He showed her the cards he was supposed to keep hidden, and
he listened to her laugh at his mistakes until he felt an ache behind his ribs. To hear her laugh like that, he would have been content to make a lifetime of errors. She showed him how to fan the cards, and when he could not master this simple skill she placed her fingers on his and spread the cards for him.

They were still sitting by the fire, Odd's wet jacket dripping from the screen in front of the hearth, a blanket hanging from Emma's shoulders, when Mr. Woburn unexpectedly returned. He stood silently before them, lit by the fire and framed by the blackness of the open door. A flash of lightning made him double in size for a second. He held his fists at his side, and swayed slightly, as if he were trying to contain the building rage that flickered across his face in the firelight. He mumbled, stopped, then sputtered.

“Bloody hell.”

Odd did not move, Emma pulled the blanket tightly over her bare arms, and Mr. Woburn stared past the two of them at the fire. He leaned forward and stepped toward Odd, then seemed uncertain, as if he thought the floor might be dropping away in front of him. He stepped back and almost fell over.

Emma stood slowly. “Mr. Woburn, come to the fire. You look ill.”

It occurred to Odd that he had never actually heard Emma call her husband by any other name, and now he wondered if such informality existed between them. Mr. Woburn removed his dripping hat and dropped it where he stood while he groped the air for support. Emma stepped forward and grabbed his arm. At the same time Mr. Woburn reached out, looked Odd straight in the face, and cupped his wife's breast roughly, as if he were appraising its heft. Emma slapped his hand away.

“Not here.”

Her voice took on an edge that had not been there a moment
earlier. She turned Mr. Woburn around and led him away from the fire while Odd clumsily pulled on his wet boots and grabbed his jacket. His hands moved like bricks as he thought about what Mr. Woburn had just done, and he fumbled hopelessly with the tangled sleeves of his jacket. Emma smiled at him over her husband's shoulder and nodded toward the door, but before Odd could hurry off Mr. Woburn spun about on his heels and bellowed.

“Hussss!”

“Sir?”

Mr. Woburn broke free from Emma and charged toward him. Odd backed toward the open door, nearly tripping as he stepped out onto the porch. Mr. Woburn kept coming, and he caught the edge of the door to keep himself from falling. Odd could smell the liquor on his breath.

“Mnninthellbrrr! Dvillivll!”

Odd said nothing. He looked past Mr. Woburn's swaying form and caught Emma's eye before she cast her gaze to the floor in shame.

“Many thanks, Hussss! Looking after missussss. Devil's night out.”

Mr. Woburn leaned heavily against the door, slamming it shut, and Odd heard the bolt slide into place on the other side.

Odd remembers the restrained elation he felt once he stepped out into the rain, a feeling like a trapped bubble that seemed to lift his feet from the earth.
She had slapped his hand and called him Mr. Woburn with a voice that sounded as distant as last year
. Odd had never known hope like this.
Mr. Woburn was a drunkard
. All he needed from her now was a sign that she was waiting to be rescued.
They still had no children
. He had no idea how he would go about it, but he felt as though a door had been thrown open to him, a possibility existed where he had felt no reason to expect one.

Then he heard a crash and a muffled scream from the back of
the house, and Odd's fleeting hope collapsed. It had not occurred to him that he ought to be worried for Emma. Her husband had returned home, drunk, to find her sitting by the fire with another man. What would any husband likely think? The rain splattered his face and ran down his neck. He heard another cry and made his way around to the back of the house, sick with himself for allowing his desire to push aside the concern he should have kept foremost in his thoughts. He should never have allowed his selfish wants to jeopardize Emma's safety. What husband would not react violently to any man who so poorly concealed his feelings for his wife?

Odd sank to his ankles in the mud as he crept alongside the house, and he crouched low when he reached the window, where the cries were audible through the bubbled panes of glass. He hesitated, and hated himself as he did so. Emma cried out again. He knew what he was likely to see—Mr. Woburn, the drunken brute, striking his wife for her disobedience. But what should he do? Break down the door? Crash through the window and run to her aid? Would that not make matters worse? What if, in the gallant act of rescuing Emma, some evil that lingered in the blood of the Hus family drove him too far? What if his rescue turned to murder? Emma's cries soared louder, and Odd grabbed the splintery wood of the window frame and peered into the room.

At first, he could not see Mr. Woburn at all. The room was dimly lit by a single lamp on a bedside table. The rain ran into Odd's eyes, and he held his hands at his brow and saw that Emma lay on the bed alone beneath a dark shadow. In the narrow slice of watery lamplight he saw that her head was turned away from the window, facing the sputtering shadows on the wall. Then he realized what was happening. The shadow was Mr. Woburn, still in his wet coat and boots, hunched over Emma with his breeches at his knees, his hips thrusting awkwardly. Emma squirmed; she swung at his jacket and grabbed at the bedclothes.

Then Emma turned her head toward the window. Odd clutched the windowsill and tried to pull himself closer. He heard her cry out again. He pressed his forehead against the glass and saw her face half hidden by shadows, saw her neck curved back, and saw her lips, dark red and rounded, in what he could only guess was the inscrutable shape of pleasure.

The wind surges and stutters, and in the gaps he hears the faint progression of tinny hiccups that an unfamiliar ear might mistake for the remote clatter of pots and pans. The bells tell Henry that news of the blaze has finally reached Concord, and he imagines Edward reporting their carelessness to the gathering crowd, though it is possible, he thinks, that word may have come to them by some other means.

Henry sights his hand against the leaping flames on the horizon and tries to measure the expanse of the burning between thumb and forefinger. More than two hours have passed since he and Edward attempted to cook their chowder. He knows men are readying to battle the flames, but it will take time for them to assemble, time to gather weapons and plan the assault and march from town. And the fire knows this, too. For now it rejoices unthreatened. It flows like water, eddying, swelling, carrying along forest detritus in its path, burning waves of flotsam. Fierce plumes surge in extravagant display. Great arms of flame reach out and sweep over treetops. Henry watches as the fine needles of a towering pine, hundreds of thousands of green spikes, ignite all at once and leap from their branches, tracing thousands of fiery tangents, swirling erratically like the swarms of locusts he saw in New York City the previous summer. Those buzzing mammoths helped persuade him not to remain in New York—if locusts were
content to frequent the city once every seventeen years, he reasoned, the same would do for him.

Henry closes his eyes, senses hot red fingers pressing against his eyelids, starbursts of orange, gold, the unexpected colors of ripe fruits and vegetables: pumpkins, squashes, melons, carrots, tomatoes. The wind comes in hot blasts, propelled by the pressure of the flames. Henry smells the calamint that covers the hill in scraggly patches, its crisp scent released by the heat. From deep within the woods, a loud rumble sends tremors through the ground, then there is a flash, another roar, another thunderclap— the fire makes its own weather; it is both part of and opposed to the natural world.

The fire hesitates when it nears the bottom of Fair Haven Hill, like a weary traveler contemplating a steep grade. It pauses, deliberates, decides. It splits and moves around the base of the hill, consuming grasses, bushes, small wind-bowed trees. Henry knows what it is doing. A dense massing of trees stretches from here to Concord, but the fire must be clever. It must move slowly, consume gradually, portion out its fuel if it wants to unleash its destruction on the dwellings of men. The possibility makes Henry shudder. He places a hand on a stone next to him and finds that it is growing warm on one side.

His legs feel rested, but they are still unfit to challenge the flames; he might easily be overtaken, or crushed by a falling tree, or suffocated by the blanket-thick smoke. Or he might break a leg in the soft terrain of ash and cinders. Even if it were possible to run away, he dares not leave his post for fear that the fire's boldness will only increase once it realizes it is no longer being watched.

One by one, the trees submit to the burning as if this process were merely the rampage of another season. Henry has trod through the muffled gray of winter, witnessed the jubilant eruptions
of spring and the riot of summer, felt the brilliance of autumn quicken his blood, each season bringing outrageous transformation in answer to the season come before. But what answer would follow
this
transformation? Every season in nature destroys to transform, Henry thinks, but the season of man brings destruction alone.