Woodsburner (50 page)

It happens again, almost exactly as before.

Only this time it is not lockjaw but fever that seizes him.

For a full week after the last flame flickers out, Henry is weak with it. He cannot determine the fever's cause, and he tries to keep his ailment secret. He places clammy fingers to hot cheeks. He wakes to cool spring mornings wrapped in sheets dampened to translucence by his own poisoned sweat. He marvels that he does not drown in perspiration; yet even these prodigious night sweats cannot extinguish the fire that he feels dancing beneath his skin, along his arms, down his legs, roiling within his torso. He cannot tell anyone. Not this time. His family has not forgotten the counterfeit symptoms following his brother's death. He cannot again call upon their sympathies until he is certain that this time his disease is real. But he feels that he is burning up. He can hear the faint crackling of flames consuming his ligaments and tendons, feel his bones baking brittle, smell the faint wisps of cooked flesh issuing from his pores. He knows that his blood is very nearly on the point of boiling in his veins. He is convinced that the sharp pain in his head is the result of his brain, swollen with heat, pressing against the inside of his skull. But he tells no one. He drinks copious amounts of water to flush the fire from his body. He applies cool wet cloths to his forehead. He avoids exertion and keeps his breaths shallow, lest he fan the flames. He creeps into the cold
room off the kitchen and sits on the block of Lake Concord ice purchased earlier that spring. He sits on the ice every night, letting it pull the heat from his body. For weeks, his family wonders aloud about the half-moons melted into the top of the block.

And then one morning, for no apparent reason, the fire in his veins abates, the fever breaks.

His health is restored, but little else changes. The world to which he returns is just as he left it. He learns that much of the devastated land in the Concord Woods is the property of A. H. Wheeler and the Hubbard brothers, Cyrus and Darius. The
Concord Freeman
publishes a castigating article that does not mention Edward or Henry by name, but Henry takes offense that the editors of the paper think he merely sought recreation in the woods. Edward Hoar tells him that his father has promised to make restitutions on their behalf, though it is not enough to cover the loss in its entirety, and it cannot restore what has been taken.

The signs of the fire are everywhere. A heavy smell of charred wood, the bitter tang of immolated flora and fauna, drifts into Concord from the desolate forest and lingers in the air. Even when the wind blows away from town, the smell has so permeated carpets and curtains and clothing and living trees that the evidence of his guilt is discernible. People carry kerchiefs held to nose and mouth like bandits. The townspeople of Concord are grateful to have been spared, but their gratitude is soon overtaken by anger. Henry cannot walk the streets of Concord without suffering icy stares and hearing behind his back the angry, accusing whisper:
woodsburner
.

People come from Boston to witness the damage and carry black smudges back to the city with them. People come to scavenge. In every home, at every hearth in Concord, a visitor is sure to find a pile of firewood already blackened. Carpenters and cabinetmakers come to the woods and take what little can be saved.
The soot makes its way onto hands and faces, shirtfronts, jackets, skirts, and hats. The patrons of Wright's Tavern complain that the taste of their beer is sorely tainted, acrid, and smoky on the palate. For months, even the cleanest Irish whiskey tastes like scotch.

And in the unburned world there are still pencils to be made.

Henry returns to his father's factory, but he knows he must do something more.
Woodsburner
, they call him. He hears the accusations in his dreams.
Woodsburner
. The whispers are everywhere, like the drifting ash.
Woodsburner. Woodsburner
. Henry thinks at first that he will immerse himself in work. He and his father become so successful at concocting their lead mixtures that other pencil-makers demand it. Soon the selling of lead itself becomes more profitable than the tedious manufacturing of pencils. They become lead salesmen, purveyors of the blackest bits of earth.

A pencil made with lead from John Thoreau & Co. is a writer's delight. But that does not save Henry from the scorn of his own conscience. Henry knows that every act is itself a cause, a link in a chain, germinating future effects unforeseen. There is a debt to be paid—for what is taken, for what is lost, for what is carelessly thrown away. Henry thinks of the string of uneaten fish, a sacrifice for no purpose. America is not so stalwart a place as it may seem. The bountiful stores of plumbago and lumber and coal and fish and fur and all the other incomprehensible riches of the continent, riches waiting for industrious men to come along and scoop them up—these things are not endless. Once gone, they are gone for good. Even lifeless clay, taken from the ground, leaves only a hole in its stead. Man's inability to conceive of the world's limits does not render the world limitless. And there is no longer a new world for the empty-handed to flee to from here.

The vast wilderness that covered the shores of the New World seemed impenetrable until they built a city. The hills and rivers of Boston seemed immovable until they leveled and filled them.
Concord was an outpost in the wilderness until it grew to devour its landscape, like an actor kicking away his props. And then the fire took its portion of what little remained. Henry David Thoreau knows he must atone. He has seen the swiftness and finality of loss. There are wildernesses still, and what was lost at Concord might yet return, if it knows that its return will be safeguarded. Henry cannot live among men now, cannot give his time—always in short supply—to those who call him
woodsburner
as if this were all he will ever be. He will seek out what is not yet lost. He will help other men grasp the limits of the seemingly infinite; he will look to nature for instruction.

There is nothing left in the blackened woods to sustain a man, Henry thinks, but there is another place he might go. Adjacent to the devastation, the woods at Walden Pond did not burn. Through those green and budding trees, he might watch the lonely charred trunks nearby, offer meek consolation as they wait for the spring that will not come. Together, Henry and Waldo have often mourned the distressing number of trees felled each year at the pond, and Waldo has hinted that he might purchase a parcel of the land himself in order to protect the beautiful surroundings from further abuse. Walden, Henry thinks, would serve as good a place as any to settle down by himself. The privacy and stillness might even grant him opportunity, at last, to make a book from the notes and sketches he collected with his brother during their trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Henry knows what he must do. He will turn his back to those who would call him
woodsburner
. He will build a simple cabin near the pond, perhaps, and study nature's infinitesimal beauties, as frail as they are profuse. He will commiserate with displaced creatures, tend to the injured woodlands until they revive. And, if they will have him, he will become their steward.

He will build them a fire, unafraid.

They are running through the trees with no sense of urgency or fear. Their footfalls are light, their course without direction. West, perhaps, is their general heading, but they have sacrificed their bearing to giddiness. Euphoria consumes any sense of direction that might have guided their steps. They run as if in chase, though pursuer and pursued are the same, roles they exchange through embrace or glance; to catch and to be caught reaps the same reward.

It is Emma's turn to follow now, and she runs with a lightness that surprises. She holds her arms around herself to support her bulk, but does so more out of habit than need. Beneath her dress she wears the undergarment that she fashioned out of a dismembered corset and her husband's old handkerchiefs. The tight lacing and the whalebone do her hugging for her, hold her bosom close as she hops gracelessly over a rock. Then he reaches back for her, grabs her elbows, and slingshots her forward. They switch places, and it is her turn to lead them nowhere.

Odd does not care where they are headed. Almost any direction, any direction but east, will take them someplace new, someplace to start over.

Emma's final vision of her husband will fade. The word itself is already foreign to her:
husband
. Will its meaning transfer to
wherever they are going, or can time and distance divorce the word from its object? She can see Cyrus Woburn in the fading image she carries. She imagines him still sleeping where she left him, stupefied by drink in the chair by the fireplace, the fire in the hearth an unusual color, more blue than yellow, his watery eyes half open and not seeing, an empty bottle on his lap, and in his hand the last of her expensive books. In the fire, the doomed pages of a splayed book curl into ash, one at a time, as if the flames were taking the time to read what they consumed. Around the chair and in his lap are the dozen or so cards with lewd illustrations that Emma retrieved from their hiding places and flung in his face when he staggered into their home so drunk that she could not fathom how he had made the trip without leading his horses into a ditch. When she confronted him with the cards he struck her, for the first and last time, and then he lurched toward her bookcase as she cowered in a corner and wept.

Emma will never know what she might have been driven to do after her husband had fallen into the chair by the fire, insensible at last. She might have flown into a rage, reached for the nearby poker, dragged his feet into the fire, grabbed the empty bottle and smashed it over his head. Not until Odd arrived did she realize that her shaking hand was clutching the kitchen knife so tightly that she had cut her own palm. She might have committed any number of irreversible deeds had Odd not come at that very moment, clothes torn and scorched, bleeding, blistered, wild-eyed. She noticed straightaway that he stood differently and walked toward her as if his feet owned the places they trod. He touched her gently.

Without hesitating, he said quietly, “We will go now.”

Odd had not known what he would find when he arrived, but he knew what he wanted. He had walked through fire to embrace those wants, and he was confident of the consequences. He had
no right to hope for success, but he knew what he must do. He knew he would start over, though there would be no need to cross oceans or change names. They are running, but not fleeing.

Emma is happier than she has ever been. She has never run like this, has never known what it is like to be chosen by someone who does not expect her to be grateful for the choosing. She can barely keep from leaping in her stride, weightless with happiness. Odd knows where he is going. He pretends he does not, but she knows him better than that. He is a careful man, a man to be trusted, though she has never seen him look so reckless or exude such boundless energy. He said something about being a “stronger animal” now, and she is happy to wait forever for an explanation. They find a clearing where they will spend yet another night in their journey. Emma has lost count of the days and does not care. The fire Odd builds is larger than what they require. Logs stacked in a pyramid, a skeleton of right angles beneath the bright, flickering skin. In the dark night, leaves appear overhead in flashes as the flames leap and lick at the high branches overhanging the clearing. Odd is not worried. The fire will do what he wants it to, for he is the author of its world.