Woodsburner Read online

  And then a surprise—a momentary shift in the wind and they suddenly begin taking back what the fire has recently stolen. Henry and Edward swing and kick in a pantomime of madness, and the fire staggers back over what it has already burned. Henry's eyes sting from smoke and sweat. The fire is almost at the trees, but Henry sees that it is running out of grass and he begins to take comfort in Edward's naïve hope. The entire slope, from the water's edge to the beginning of the woods, is a charred scab and now the fire has no retreat. The remaining line of flames must push past Henry and Edward and into the trees if the blaze is to survive. Edward howls, defiant, a soldier's scream of impending victory dearly bought. The flames cower under the relentless thrashing; they dissipate, suffocate, and try to outflank the two men. Henry increases his efforts. His knees feel as though they could shake loose under the vicious stomping; his shoulders ache in their orbits. He grows dizzy from the exertion, but the thought that they might succeed drives him on. A dark space opens as the fire loses momentum, and Henry steps into the breach, stands astride the gap he has created. In the scorched grass, scattered bright tongues of circumscribed chaos sputter, cough, and expire. He swings at the stranded flames and crushes them underfoot.

  Within moments their job seems nearly done, and Henry allows himself to answer the exhaustion in his limbs. Around them the blackened earth hisses. Edward laughs, and Henry is embarrassed for having panicked in front of his young friend. Already, in the part of his brain where memory assembles itself, the fierce blaze is becoming little more than an amusing footnote to their day, an anecdote of tragedy narrowly averted, but he shudders when he thinks of what might have happened. Henry hears a splintered shriek behind him, a cackle of triumph. He turns and looks at Edward, but he sees that his companion is not laughing. Henry follows Edward's gaze, looks up into the naked extremities of the woods budding unbloomed, and then he knows. He knows that nature will not be rushed. He knows that each spring comes calling as coyly as the last, for rebirth is always a slow and then sudden transformation. Overhead, he sees a throng of clever flames crouching in the branches of a sleeping birch.

  2

  Oddmund

  Oddmund Hus sucks on the dead infant tooth wedged alongside his adult incisors like a misplaced apostrophe, and he tries not to think about the thing he saw swinging heavy and damp from Emma Woburn's clothesline. The image has ripened in his mind since the morning, pestering the taut sinews that barely restrain his urges. The air is brisk, but he rolls his sleeves to his elbows, feels the trapped heat rise from his forearms, and pauses to wipe the sweat from the back of his neck. He works alone in the corner field, clearing a patch of ground where Cyrus Woburn's property cuts into the southwest edge of the Concord Woods. Little by little, farms have eaten into the woods. To the south, rolling fields stretch as far as Nine Acre Corner and the Sudbury Meadows. Looking east, Odd figures that only a dozen or so harvests will pass before he is able to see all the way to Boston without so much as a dogwood to block his view. It does not particularly bother him, this impending loss; he knows that things go away.

  Odd drags his pitchfork through the heap at his feet: creeping vines in petrified coils, brittle twists of leaves and twigs, and uprooted saplings dumbfounded by winter's assault. He flings another dry clump into the small fire he has built, and he flinches as it surges to receive his offering. A steady wind whips the busy flames. The sound is like a sheet of paper flapped close to his ear. He feeds the fire slowly, makes sure it does not reach beyond the ring of knee-size stones he cautiously set out—and he tries again to dismiss the bothersome image in his head. Odd has seen Emma Woburn's inexpressibles before, and not always by accident like today. From time to time, he finds cause to cross the back porch while Emma is busy at the washboard, her dripping forearms and chapped knuckles bright pink with effort, the woven basket distended with heavy wet knots. Sometimes he lingers within sight of their untangling, watching the clothes catch the breeze and test the wooden fasteners clipped to the line. He is familiar with the limp translucence of freshly scrubbed petticoats and chemises and stockings. But what he saw this morning was nothing so ordinary as that.

  Emma probably forgot that he would likely pass near the clothesline on his way to the far corner, he thinks. Or she simply did not think it mattered. He remains certain that she is wholly unaware of the glimpses he steals as she goes about her chores. His head is full to bursting with imprisoned visions of her thick ankles peeking from beneath the hem of her dress and her wide buttocks softly straining against tightly wound apron strings and the weighty pale sway from armpit to elbow as she scrubs floors and dusts shelves … He has secreted away scores of other glimpses in the folds of his memory. Sometimes he pictures Emma's full lips rounded in pleasure and he feels a covering shadow between them and a rough edge beneath his fingers, and he cannot tell whether these images are real or something from his dreams. Emma has no idea that he has such thoughts; Odd takes great care to make sure of that.

  For a quarter of an hour that morning, though, he stood carelessly in full view, transfixed by what he saw on the clothesline. He watched the miraculous garment rise and fall in the morning breeze as if it were a living, breathing animal. It looked more like a harness for a dray horse than anything Emma might wear next to her skin, but Odd reckoned its purpose right off, tracing the shape of the fabric until the empty outline awakened his longing. He could tell that Emma had stitched it together herself—here a portion of a pleated skirt, there a section of an old corset that she would never have tried to force around her ample hips. At either side were blue wedges cut from one of her husband's handkerchiefs and gusseted to form two large pouches between a brace of curved whalebones. The gentle sway of sagging laces made him shudder, and before he realized what he was doing he began scratching halfheartedly at the butternut wool of his trousers, sending expectant shivers through his limbs, until he stopped himself by picking up a stone and stuffing it into his pocket. Odd could recollect no name for what he saw hanging in the cold air that morning; it was something entirely new, a creation intended to bring some degree of belated support to Emma Woburn's immense and impractical bosom.

  Odd squeezes the wooden handle of his pitchfork and tries to sweep away the vision. He hurls a clump of twisted vines into the fire and watches the lacework of desiccated leaves turn to smoke and disappear in the heat. The flames wriggle and spin, dancing to their own crackling music, approximating the languid curves of living things. What he has seen continues to prick at him. Like Emma herself, the garment's presence was irrefutable, its size unapologetic. Odd cannot help imagining the hefty burden it is intended to ease. He leans forward against the rigid shaft of the pitchfork, seeking some momentary relief in the contact, but the sensation is altogether unsatisfying. It is quite the opposite of what he wants, but he has learned that America is a land of ingenuity a land of invention and resourcefulness, and to live as an American is to make do with what one has ready at hand. If only the woods were a few strides closer, he thinks, he might easily step behind a tree and gratify himself while still keeping an eye on his fire.

  Odd has long suspected that something is wrong with him, an imperceptible corruption of sorts, as if the very fibers of his heart and brain daily willed their own misalignment. He cannot define this flaw in his nature, but he knows it is not simply a matter of lacking self-restraint. He has learned to deprive himself of the comforts that might lead him into trouble, but still the yearnings find him, livid sproutings deep in his soul beyond the reach of spade or scythe. He wonders if other men surrender to their base desires as readily as he. He has heard old men snicker wistfully about youthful lusts long since expired, and he wonders if he can dare to hope that his own urges might eventually subside. No longer a young man, at twenty-five he feels he is well past the age at which the desire of his sex should still hold him in thrall. He is old enough to recognize firsthand that all sensations grow dull with repetition—the taste of an apple, the bright relief of cool water o
n a dry throat, the scent of rain-soaked fields, the crunch of fresh snow. All things excite with newness and fade with routine. Life's many details pale by degrees with each passing season, but his lust alone remains unaltered, unwithered, resilient. It seems a real ailment, one for which he might seek a physician's cure. But he cannot speak of it. He sometimes wishes this hunger would transmute itself into a visible pox, so that he might at least be deserving of some sympathy from the woman who is the sole cause of his suffering.

  Odd walks the narrow compass of his fire to make sure there is no danger of its spreading beyond the circle of stones. The smoldering heap coughs a plume of orange embers skyward, where they swirl around themselves high above his head and drift toward the nearby woods. No rain has fallen in more than a month, and today a steady breeze has risen out of the south from beyond Mount Misery, blowing toward the pond at Walden Woods. Odd knows he should have waited for a calmer day to clear away the brush, but he has already put off the chore a number of times, and in the end he really does not have a choice in the matter. Mr. Woburn is resolved that no inch of his land will lie fallow this season, and once the old man decides on something there is no dissuading him. Odd kicks hard at the speckled crown of a rock jutting from the dry earth, but it only wobbles in its hole like a rotting tooth. The soil here in the far corner is diseased with little outcroppings like this; anyone can tell just by looking that it will take a lot more work to ready the field for seed.

  Odd's fire chews through the knobbed joints of vines and leaves and roots, spitting out white ash. Another plume of embers soars above him and reaches in vain for the treetops at the edge of the field. Odd knows from experience that it is the nature of fire to burn with a voraciousness that hides the fact of its beginning, as if its fierceness alone might prove its immortality. The unabashed gluttony of the flames frightens him. At the same time, though, he wishes they would hurry up and finish their savage business. There is plenty of other work to be done, and he would much rather sweat over an unwieldy plow—breaking up the soil with the worn-out ox that Mr. Woburn purchased last season for a few bushels of corn—than stand here anxiously watching weeds burn.

  Odd suggested carting it all to the edge of the woods, where it might slowly decay under the gentle heat of nature's own invisible flames, but Mr. Woburn wanted it all burned at once. Odd thinks it best to avoid setting a fire. It is not an animal that can be harnessed or tamed. He has never lit a fire in his small cabin behind the farmhouse, although there is a perfectly serviceable cast-iron stove. The stove remains cold and dark even on the most frigid nights, when Odd prefers simply to burrow between extra layers of wool and fur and watch his breath blossom icily in the moonlit room. He likes his bed cold, and on those evenings when he refuses Emma's invitation to supper he is satisfied with cold potatoes and cold meat, which he finds far better for his digestion. But he doubts that a cold meal and a cold bed tonight will erase the image of what he has seen on the clothesline. He has not noticed a change in Emma's shape, but now he will not be able to avoid looking for it. How can he sit at her table, across from Mr. Woburn, and not trace the crescent of whalebones that are sure to be cradling her breasts?

  Odd stabs at the fire with the pitchfork; a lick of flame breaks free, leaps over the stones, and hobbles squat-legged across the dead grass. He is on it at once, stamping it out with a satisfied grunt, leaving a scorched divot in the hard ground. He looks for other errant flames to quash beneath his boot heel. Odd has lived in America for fifteen years, and, like other immigrants of his generation, he is smaller than the Americans whose underfed grandfathers landed decades earlier to begin eating their way through the New World's abundance. On the streets of Concord and Boston, where his short stature singles him out as one of the newly arrived, Odd moves with self-conscious hesitation, shuffling crablike through the throngs of tall Americans as if he were not there at all. But here, out in the open, he is capable of explosive movements when necessary.

  Odd has often wondered if there are other people who feel as ill-equipped for this new world as he does. His body is a bothersome thing, laden with unruly wants, and he would gladly have left it behind in Norway with the other things that he and his family had come halfway around the world to escape. His fair skin and the layer of soft fat—which make his nose, cheeks, and chin appear as though they were formed in raw dough—give him ample protection against the New England winter, but his skin blisters in the heat of summer and flushes red at the slightest hint of embarrassment. His hair, white as talc, is too fine to offer his scalp much protection against the harsh American sun, and he has learned never to go without his wide-brimmed felt hat.

  Odd envies Emma Woburn. He marvels at the way she shepherds her bulk through her daily routines with pendulous certainty. She is a hand's width taller than Odd and carries half again as much weight on her broad frame. Although she spent the first part of her life in Ireland, she has already rendered herself as imposing as any second-generation American. Odd doubts that he could reach all the way around her, though, of course, he has never tried, but he loves her for this. Odd loves her solidness, loves the deliberate trajectories of her daily chores, loves the way that she fills any open space with her gravity. Whenever Emma is in the same room, there is no corner in which he cannot feel her steady pull. Out in the fields, under the open sky, he feels himself drifting in her direction, sweeping gentle orbits through the rows of corn, over the matted vines of pumpkin and squash and melon, until Mr. Woburn yells at him to wake up and watch what he is doing. He has never had such feelings for a woman, and it should have been simple enough to tell her. He had ample opportunity before, but always something stopped him, a quiet voice whispering to him, a warning passed through generations: desire unleashed is harder to contain than fire.

  Now it is impossible for him to speak to her of it. When Emma married Cyrus Woburn, there was nothing else Odd could think to do but go to work for her husband. It was the only way he could satisfy himself that she was happy, and it was the only way he could stay close enough to her to ensure that he did not spend the rest of his life adrift, a lifeless planet without a sun.

  As he scans the boundary of his small fire, Odd runs his tongue over his teeth and stops at the obscene thing hanging useless where a stronger animal would have sprouted a fang. The small black tooth refused to fall out at the appropriate time with the rest of his infant teeth. From one year to the next it clung to its socket, an indecent thing, a baby's tooth in a man's mouth. His adult teeth pushed it away, choked it, but still the tooth hung on, dying slowly, painfully, turning yellow, then brown, then black. When he was younger, Odd used to soothe the aching tooth by sucking it as it rotted. Now the dead tooth registers no sensation whatsoever, and Odd sucks at it to soothe other things.

  He walks around his fire, prodding it with the pitchfork, trying to stir up trouble so that he might have the satisfaction of crushing something else beneath his heel. He pokes at an unburned section of the pile and stops when he hears a squeal. Something dark, unrelated to the fire, moves in the tangled mass. There is a twitch, a flash of pink and gray, and then a terrified mouse clambers out of the smoking heap and perches on a fist of twigs. Odd lifts his foot high and brings his heel down savagely, stamping a small opening in the flames near the trapped animal. He kicks aside one of the stones. The mouse curls into itself and leaps. The flames lurch for it, but the mouse is quick, a dense ball of nervous muscle: instinct and spasm unhampered by thought. It dashes through the opening and scurries away. Odd smiles, tightlipped; even when he is by himself he keeps the tiny black tooth concealed out of habit. He watches the mouse run across the field until it diminishes to a speck and disappears into the trees. Then Odd looks skyward and frowns at the pencil-gray line of smoke he sees rising from the Concord Woods.

  3

  Eliot

  It could easily be an October afternoon, he thinks, and not the final day of April.

  He stops for a moment and stands in the middle of the em
pty road, taking in his surroundings as if he were surveying a recently purchased tract of land. The air is brisk, with none of the gray dampness that usually drops into the lungs like wet dough this time of year. Tall trees line either side of the road, and their leafless branches click in the steady breeze like a thousand snapping fingers. Through the trees he can see open fields of quiet, furrowed soil, vague brown humps brought into focus by the small rectangles of glass balanced on his nose. Without his spectacles, the world at a distance is a blur to him, but such is the cost of age and experience. A certain crispness in the light makes him think of his not-too-distant youth, of long afternoon shadows, of the limitless potential spread out before him.

  Unharvested frosts of apple-bitten days.

  The phrase leaps into Eliot Calvert's head. He pulls out a small pocket memorandum bound in Moroccan leather and secured with a roam clasp (six dollars per dozen wholesale from G. H. Derby & Co. of Geneva, New York, though Eliot sells them for more than twice this) cracks open a gold edged page, licks the tip of a nine-cent Thoreau No. 2 pencil (the best pencil available at any price, far superior to the greasy Dixon) and jots down the words. The blank book is the most expensive kind he stocks, an outrageous price really, but he has learned not to underestimate the amount of money that people will pay to convince themselves of the value of their purchase. Eliot knows he could get them cheaper in Boston from the likes of Crosby & Nichols or Phillips & Sampson, but he prefers the imitation Russian endpapers and has grown accustomed to the particular weight and feel of the book in his coat pocket. Its retrieval is a gesture rich with intention. Inspiration, coy mistress, flirts only with those who seek her first. Eliot licks the tip of his pencil again but decides that this last observation is not inventive enough to deserve a line on one of the creamy-fine pages.