Woodsburner (48 page)

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 them 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.

She sifts blindly through the ankle-deep ash with her toes and clutches the reins of the sled, as if the thin leather strap anchors her to the rest of the world. She is reminded suddenly of a small toy that her father made for her when she was scarcely old enough to speak, a little wooden dog that she had pulled around on wheeled legs. It was strange how these memories announced themselves, rising from beneath the ruins of other experiences too bleak to admit memory's grasp. The recollection makes her clutch the reins all the tighter. Zalenka sometimes upbraids Anezka for allowing her heart to harden, but Anezka can never find the words to express that this is not the case at all. Given the enormity of the past and the future, she simply finds that there is more to care about in the world than there are hearts to bear the weight; picking and choosing is a matter of surviving.

Anezka strikes something hard with her foot and retrieves a good-sized chunk of wood on her own, but she can tell by feeling along its length that it is burned beyond use. She hears the amazed voices of the tourists as they climb back into their carriages and set off. Strange, she thinks, how this new world, as yet inexperienced in the tragedies that wearied the Old World centuries ago, seems to inspire an insatiable hunger for disaster. These
Americans seem to think that the horrors endured by others are spectacles for their entertainment. Their own terrors will come soon enough—terrors that will leave their storybooks and walk among them, through their streets, into their homes and bedrooms. She does not wish this sad knowledge on them, but she knows it is coming. She shudders when she hears men talk excitedly of the war they believe is on its way, a fight that will be waged not against a foreign invader but between the Americans of the North and the South. Some men say the fight is inevitable, though Anezka does not believe that the terrible things men do to one another should ever be thought of as unavoidable. If the New World does not grant men the freedom to rise above the dark paths mapped by fate, then what is the point of coming here?

Anezka squints into the darkness but cannot tell which of the shadows belongs to Zalenka. She starts to call out but stops. She knows Zalenka is there; she knows that she will never again be alone. Anezka ventures forward a few steps, dragging her feet through the ashes until they strike another fallen tree. She kicks along its side to determine whether there is a branch small enough for her to lift without Zalenka's help. Something seems unusual about the tree. She kicks it again, and her jaw falls open in amazement.

Too far away to see what Anezka has found, Zalenka drops her armload of wood as soon as she hears Anezka's shout and stumbles toward her as fast as she can, swinging her stiff legs over the blackened debris. It is not quite a scream but something closer to startled amazement. Zalenka finds Anezka standing next to the upturned roots of a large tree trunk half buried in the ashes.

“Co se děje?! Jsi v pořádku?!”

“I am fine,” Anezka reassures her friend. “But please, you must watch. Amazing things. These American woods, they live.”

Anezka reaches out for Zalenka's support, then she swings her
right leg with as much force as she can muster and kicks the fallen tree. The mound of debris stirs and a weak moan rises from under the ashes.

Anezka smiles. “It is a miracle, this moaning tree, yes? An American golem.”

Zalenka drops to her knees and claws through the charred earth until her fingers strike something soft in the soot. She pulls her kerchief from her head and wipes at the soft black mound until something pale emerges—a round opening that moves, opens and closes—a mouth—then a nose, a pair of eyes. The moaning increases, the eyes flutter open, and Zalenka sees in them the unmistakable shock of recognition. Zalenka grabs Anezka's arm.

“It is the priest.”

“The priest for the new church?”

“He.”

Together they dig through the ashes. Caleb Ephraim Dowdy is pinned under the massive tree, his right leg twisted at a telling angle beneath the weight of the trunk. At least one bone is broken, Zalenka can tell, but the size of the tree has saved him from the fire. Most of the heavy trunk is burned away, enough that Zalenka is able to rock it back and forth while Anezka pulls at Caleb's left arm until he is out from under it.

Caleb's lips work and he coughs; he tries to speak. He has not had a pipe in three days, and the effects on his brain are even more devastating than the hunger and thirst and pain that hold the rest of his body in thrall.