Woodsburner (38 page)

Henry redraws the lines, then crosshatches the triangle and adds to its length by increments, scratching out the
X
as he does so. He hears Eliot's comment, but it makes no sense to him. Who is the man so careless that he would fail to claim his life as his own in the first place?

Eliot grabs a stick, too, and begins adding to Henry's sketch. He scratches in the new Fitchburg rail line and draws another snaking line to indicate the Concord River. Henry flinches as Eliot's meandering stick comes close to the triangle's apex, where the hollowed tree stump should be marked, but Eliot takes no notice of his reaction. “I believe the proximity of the present danger has focused my understanding of things,” Eliot says. “In life, as on the stage, a tragedy can expunge the extraneous diversions that so often muddle one's mind. I think it possible that some good may come of this.”

“No good will come to the former tenants,” Henry says, without looking up from the map.

“The trees will return,” Eliot says. “The woods might become stronger than before, and as for the
tenants—
assuming you speak for the people of Concord—well, after great loss one is always more appreciative of what remains.”

Henry sighs. He cannot make this man understand what has been lost. He puts down his stick and explores the toe that has poked through a hole in his stocking. He picks a tiny sliver from beneath a thick toenail and says quietly, “If you would appreciate what has been lost, then you must return and live among the ashes.”

“I have no doubt,” Eliot muses, “that a week in nature's
bosom—a trip on the river, perhaps—would elicit a deeper understanding of its beauties.”

“That is not my meaning,” Henry says. “I do not propose that you return for sport. Rather, come to this very spot and build your home from the blackened timbers. Feed yourself with what meager fruit struggles up from the scorched earth. Live.”

Eliot fumbles. “I might find such an exercise useful for my own reflections, and certainly it would provide much desired opportunity for writing, but I fear my wife and children would find such privations intolerable.”

“Then leave them,” Henry says, rubbing his feet. He looks at Eliot and watches him search for some sign that he has made the comment in jest.

“I understand the thrust of your arguments, Mr. Thoreau,” Eliot says slowly, “and I cannot disagree.” Henry listens as Eliot thinks clumsily out loud, and he is reminded of having once seen a bee struggling in the oozings from its own hive. “If I am truly to simplify my life,” Eliot continues, “I must find ways to pare down that which I truly do not require. Of course, I cannot ask my family to abandon civilized life, but we might secure more modest accommodations. And under reduced conditions we might still find means to afford some small comforts, which would be all the more enjoyable for having required no greater sacrifice of time or labor.”

Henry picks up his stick and gouges a divot at the apex of the triangle to mark the point where the fire began.

“Mr. Calvert,” Henry says, sighing, “a man cannot simplify halfway.”

They are plotting strategies in the dirt with the pointed ends of sticks when the firefighting Concordians arrive shouting plans of their own. Henry sees a hundred men or more come through the
woods from the north, waving shovels and axes and hoes, a host of warrior angels in need of flaming swords. They run at the fire, shouting and catcalling, as if they believe they might intimidate the flames. The assault quickly turns to slow retreat. The determined Concordians set up a moving line of defense; the men with hoes align themselves first, thrusting their heavy weapons into the burning underbrush and raking it forward, stamping it underfoot. Behind them, men with shovels set about digging a ditch several yards ahead of the flames; they dig like dogs, hurling the loose soil into the burning grass to bury the fire alive. But this arrangement is flawed.

The flying dirt showers the men on the front line, stones bounce off their raking shoulders, and one man stumbles backward into the shallow ditch. They reorganize and stagger their positions. The men with the shovels form the front line. The men with hoes stand at either end of the line; some move back to rake the unburned brush, exposing dry earth, clearing an unburnable space behind the men with shovels. Farther back, the men with axes set about removing the trees next in line for destruction, depriving the flames of their food. The men can only hope to claim the trees before the flames reach them. The fire forces the men to fight it on its own terms. They must destroy what they would save.

In the chaos the men work together, though some have arguments; flying elbows and empty boasts reveal prior tensions. Henry and Eliot are still perched on the spine of the hill, hurriedly pulling boots onto swollen feet, while the men below switch positions a second time, trying to find workable arrangements.

“The essence of heroism,” Eliot observes, as if what is passing below them is evidence of a theory he has recently proposed. As Henry squeezes his feet back into their boots, a fat blister bursts and he can feel the sticky liquid seep between his toes. It does not
hurt, but the thought of it—the torn onionskin bubble of flesh— makes him flinch. A wound, a breach of any kind in the body's ramparts, leaves it vulnerable to invasions that might carry off a digit, a limb, a whole person with the indifferent necessity of natural cause.

Eliot leaps to his feet and shouts, “Let us to battle!” Then he picks up his shovel and runs down the hill toward the other men.

Henry delays. He knows the unexpected results of rash acts. He will not rush the seething cataclysm. Henry watches as Eliot reaches the skirmish, inserts himself between two men raking burning brush on the left flank, and joins in the frenzy, crushing the flames underfoot, a whole line of men seized by Saint Vitus's dance, hopping, jerking, shouting. More men arrive from the direction of Concord, some armed only with intentions. The fire calls upon reinforcements of its own. Forced back upon itself, the blaze seems to burn faster now, hissing and smoking indignantly. It tries to outflank the men on the left, reaching around with long arms, but there are no longer trees there, no underbrush, no fuel to support the maneuver, so it retreats, regroups, and launches a new assault on the right but again finds nothing to burn.

And then a tree collapses across the line of men. No one is injured, but the fire crosses this bridge to new quarry and the flames spread to the trees flanking the men. Henry sees a dismal proof in this. Nature will not be outfoxed so long as chance is her ally. Men exhaust a disproportionate sum of energy in a vain effort to prevent nature from doing what she will: damming rivers, filling swamps, leveling hills, clearing fields, claiming land from the sea. The cities of America are the hosts of gratuitous transformation, aberrant changes that, once left unguarded, will revert to what was. Attempts to bend nature's design are merely pointless acts of hubris. Nature—brutal, beautiful, beneficent nature—will prevail in the end.

Henry is convinced that his efforts to combat the fire will be as impotent as those of the other men, but he cannot divorce himself from the desperate spectacle. He pushes himself to his feet and, empty-handed, picks his way down the hill toward the roiling flames.

You will build here a church of bones, yes?

It is clear to him, now, that the flames slithering through the distant trees portend the end of things. Caleb stands at the edge of the woods and pokes the sputtering dregs in his pipe with a twig. The fire tells him its intention to advance on Concord, and he divines that it will not stop there; the burning will lay waste the town and then descend upon Boston. Caleb rejoices that heaven has at last grown weary of the wickedness of the New World, and he is pleased to have played no small role in at last moving the palsied hand of Providence.

All fortunes, he thinks, good and bad, betide with purpose: his doubts, his defiance, his revelations and blasphemous rantings. It becomes obvious to him that the two old women appeared this morning as shepherds of the flames, witches sent to announce the arrival of the end. It is very likely, he thinks, that he has been visited by others like them in his life, messengers he failed to recognize. Esther Harrington, Caleb can now see clearly, is most certainly a witch as well. He should have uncovered this truth before. It was she who delivered the news about Boone's innocence; hers was the voice that revealed to him that his words, his prayers, his blessings, meant nothing. And he knows in his heart that she is in league with Amos Stiles. Together, the two have led him to this day; they have shown him the path to self-destruction, and he
had no choice but to take it. Even if he had discovered their true nature earlier, he could not have resisted their direction, for everything comes to pass as God so wills.

After Esther Harrington's revelation that he had condemned an innocent man—a Christian, no less, who had once already escaped the Pandemonium men had created on earth—Caleb expected his own punishment to be swift and fierce. Only a cold, indifferent universe, he thought, could allow his terrible deed to pass unanswered. Caleb waited, and when God's wrath did not immediately descend upon him his old doubts returned. If there truly existed a just and righteous God, how could he not have damned Caleb for so rank an offense? Perhaps, Caleb thought, it was impossible for him to have condemned Desmond Boone; perhaps there was no burning lake into which he or any man might be cast; perhaps Caleb had merely darkened Boone's final conscious moment in this world before sending him into the void. He thought of the Irishman's body in the woods. He thought of Boone's eyes and tongue, straining to leave his skull, and he thought of the lifeless faces that haunted him, visited his dreams, mocked his yearning to believe that something more than this meaningless putrefaction awaited all men. As long as he escaped castigation, Caleb would have no answer, and thus it became clear to him that he must seek out punishment on his own.

Caleb's followers presented no deficit of imitable transgressions that he might willfully heap one upon the other to awaken heaven's justice. After weighing their sins, searching for what might be most offensive to the Almighty, he decided to seek direction from Amos Stiles. Despite his many faults, Stiles seemed wholly unperturbed by the damnation that he certainly knew awaited him. He clung to the hope of redemption not with an outward show of desperation but, rather, with the inconsequential eagerness of a dog begging at his master's table.

Caleb was intrigued by the thought that Stiles's transgressions, while increasing the burden of guilt with each repetition, might actually deaden him to its weight. Caleb had never tasted spirits, had never sampled the tobacco or hemp leaves that he suspected Stiles still imbibed despite his protestations that he was reformed, but Caleb knew that he might easily enough trick the lapsed sot into showing him how it was done and where such intoxicants might be obtained. So Caleb followed him one night into the cramped lanes snaking around Boston Harbor, winding cow paths long since covered by cobblestones now slick with filth, and found him at a tavern lacking any discernible name. The portrait of a white bird above the door was all that distinguished the entrance from the other low doorways.