Woodsburner (15 page)

Caleb Ephraim Dowdy stands alone in the lifeless yellow field, waiting. Nearby, the remains of the old farmhouse trace a jagged rectangle in the dirt. An hour earlier, his voice seemed to fill the ruined space, as if the nave of their new church already enclosed the air above them, but now the only sound he hears is the wind huffing through dry stubble. After the final prayer, the others returned to their homes and shops and farms and street corners; some paused to praise his vision, but now they, too, were gone. Caleb waits until he is certain that they are all out of sight, then he removes his black topcoat, drapes it over a corner of the farmhouse's crumbling foundations, and crawls under.

Over his black shirt and black trousers, he wears the white surplice that he has not put on since leaving his Boston congregation, and the robe spills around his feet as he crouches beneath the tent of his coat and squeezes himself into a ball. He reaches up into his coat pocket and retrieves a slender wooden box. It holds everything he needs. He flips the clasp, and the wind whips the edge of his coat against his face and scatters the contents of the box over the ground. Stiff blades of dead grass prick his fingers as he scratches in the dirt. He finds the pipe easily, but it takes him longer than it should to collect the matches, and he has to stop twice and press his hands flat on the ground to keep them from trembling. Sitting knees to chest, he strikes a match and watches
the flame claim a corner of the semidarkness. The sliver of wood curls into a whisker. The flame hiccups, disappears.

This very spot is where his new church will rise—his
church of bones
, the old women called it. So be it, he thinks. Caleb licks his singed fingertips and selects another match. He could waste the dozen or so matches in the same way, and that would put an end to it. He allows ample opportunity for a heavenly power to intervene and drive off the demons that torture him. He strikes another match, holds it a few inches from his nose, and watches the flame crawl toward his fingertips.

These are crucial moments, each pregnant with the next, each an opportunity to expunge future remorse. The actions men regret—actions they can do nothing to change—live always among things yet to be done. At any moment, a man might forestall the conception of deeds that will later torment him with their irreversibility Caleb delivers powerful sermons about that very fact. He makes the faithful weep with his descriptions of remorse. He knows how to make them feel the mortality of their fragile bodies and fear for their souls. He makes them see the terror in a pocket watch, the merciless progression of gears, the indifferent sweep of hands, the incremental loss, second by unobserved second. He fills them with guilt for things they have done or contemplated or failed to do. He makes them regret the simple comforts they so easily enjoy in a land where their lives are inexcusably less miserable than they would be anywhere else. And whenever he speaks to his congregation he sees the haunting face, the eyes rolled back, the open mouth and distended tongue, swollen, purple, like a fat bruise. The face gives no sign of recognition. It neither accuses nor forgives; it is simply there, an indifferent, irreversible fact.

Caleb angles the match downward, coaxing the flame toward his fingers. He places his long-stemmed pipe between his teeth
and waits. It is not genuine deliberation, this momentary hesitation. The flame sputters, waits for him to make up his mind. It squats into itself like a dog crouching to defecate, and the blackened matchstick glows red, then white, seeming to burn without being consumed, a modern miracle between his fingertips. He holds the match to the bowl of his pipe and then pulls it away, as if prolonged contemplation of the sin will somehow blunt the inevitable transgression. He wants a witness to his struggle, wants God to see his soul's discord played out. Again Caleb brings the flame to his pipe, and this time he inhales the hot perfume that curls off the sticky ball in the pipe's bowl.

The smoke sinks into his lungs. He closes his eyes and thinks of the fallen city on the hill until he can see it hovering before him. He thinks of sin and punishment, of vengeance and condemnation, of lakes of molten ore and everlasting fire, but none of these certainties fill him with the holy dread that has kept generations of the faithful on the straight and righteous path. It is not damnation he fears. What frightens him more is the possibility that these horrific visions merely hide an unfathomable darkness. More terrible than the sentence of eternal suffering is the incomprehensibility of eternity itself, a blank, empty, measureless abyss. What if this fearful nothingness—which men so desperately cram with painted fantasies far better and far worse than the world they know—what if this void is all that awaits even the most devout?

He has spent countless dream-riddled hours staring into the darkness. No longer can he recognize the religion of his forefathers. Their one faith has shattered like a pane of glass, each narrow fragment clear and pure and edged with dangerous points—Unitarians, Trinitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Shakers, Baptists, and the rest, never again to be reunited into a bright whole. As if revelations fell like spring rains, the fertile soil of New England seems to sprout new faiths, each promising nourishment beyond
what their corrupt fruit could ever hope to yield. Caleb finds none so poisonous as those recent heresies that seek to deify America itself, and yet, though he has awaited a fitting response to this sacrilege from heaven, he hears only silence; the profane continue to walk upon the New World with impunity. Faced with such evidence, how could one not find just cause for doubt? Caleb wants to pose this very question to the man who has shown how easily a pagan can walk without fear in God's light. If Caleb could blame one man for showing him heaven's indifference to earthly folly, it is the Unitarian minister—the
ex–Unitarian minister—
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has demonstrated how carelessly one might progress from believing in Christian redemption to worshipping trees. And has heaven objected to this blasphemy? Do the old women who cursed Caleb's church also beleaguer
Mister
Emerson with their talk of bones? Do these witches stalk the tree worshippers of Concord and remind them that their bones will soon lie in the earth to feed the roots they venerate?

Caleb exhales, watches the bluish smoke coil like snakes into a floating pair of eyes and open-mouthed astonishment. He swats the visage away, then lifts a corner of his coat and surveys the empty field, making certain he is still alone. The old women stayed well after the others, chattering excitedly, poking through the crumbling foundations, comparing bits of brick and mortar to the knobby joints visible beneath the flesh on their skinny arms. They are gone now, but he can still hear their voices.
You will build a church of bones, yes?
Yes, indeed, if that is what is required to force God's hand, then he would build a church from his own bones and place a clapper in his skull to toll loudly from the belfry. Caleb lets the corner of his coat fall, and returns his attention to the shiny black pipe with red-gold dragon lacquered along its length.

He thinks he has seen the two old women before, though he knows he has never heard them speak. He would have remembered
the halting accents, the voice of the blind one like a dog's growl, the voice of the other like a wet finger on glass. Despite his fervent hope, they did not prove to be angels dispatched to cast him into the fires of perdition; they did not comport themselves like angels at all, unless, perhaps, they were agents of another rank, seraphim entrusted with gathering evidence to ensure that his damnation, once decreed, would be incontrovertible. Heaven's justice is said to be swift, but it is also said that eternity for man is but a second in the eyes of God. As far as Caleb knows, his trial might be under way this very moment, a court of angels debating his soul's fate. The thought gives him hope.

It was not unthinkable that the women came as messengers from that other place, heaven's opposite. Caleb realizes that if his plan has even the slightest chance of success, Satan himself would certainly want to interrupt its machinations before it brought forth proof. Caleb has not thought of this before. Failure or success will give him an answer—yea or nay—but if his plan goes unexecuted he will have nothing to dispel his doubts. Another thought restores Caleb's trust in his plan. In the event that the old women—if not angels, then witches to be sure—succeeded in foiling his plot, would not this intervention itself prove the existence of Satan and, therefore, the existence of eternity, of a world beyond this? At the very least, he thinks, surely it would disprove the absolute emptiness of the void.

Caleb holds the burning smoke in his chest. The small bowl he imbibed early that morning had muted his crushing headache but had not been enough to sustain him past noon. He is relieved that today none of the members of his congregation tarried the way they usually did, waiting sheepishly to ask him for special prayers or advice. Whenever they stand before him, describing their doubts and trials and infirmities, he feels as though he were perched on the point of a steeple. How small these people appear,
with their self-important worries, wholly unaware that even now they stand cheek to jowl with oblivion; at any moment they might disappear and never be missed. And yet they turn to him for benediction, as if he possessed magical powers to bring them closer to God. If only they could see what he sees.

Caleb inhales deeply, feeling the smoke grow hotter as the contents of the bowl diminish; he rolls onto his side and peers out from under his coat again. He can see distant flashes from the fire churning in the woods. From the size of the dark cloud rising above the treetops, he guesses that the fire will not die out on its own, and this simple epiphany makes him smile. He wonders what
Mister
Emerson and his followers will think when they see their hapless deities reduced to ashes. He imagines their despair at having the mutability of their frail beliefs rendered palpable. Will they weep for every tree that falls? Caleb does not expect them to weep for him when his plan at last succeeds, but will they shudder at what his proof reveals? Caleb sucks, drawing out another wisp of poison, and the truth of things assumes the clarity that he finds only when he is at his pipe. The logic of his argument is as strong as a tightly woven rope, mathematical in its precision, philosophical in its simplicity, a proof deserving comparison to those of Descartes or Spinoza. Caleb knows that only one question remains: will the Almighty, who surely foresees the design and intent of his clever plan, allow him to follow it through?

Long before the two ancient women with cropped silver hair took up residence in the small cottage near Concord, Massachusetts, they lived for many years on opposite ends of the exhausted silver-mining city of Kutná Hora, in Bohemia. They were born before the newly independent American colonies drafted their Constitution. They met when one was in the third and the other in the fourth decade of life, and during the fifteen years immediately preceding the arrival of Anezka Havlicková and Zalenka Duseková in the New World they each occupied one of the tiny cells in the prison at Krivoklát Castle. Thus did the two women embark on their life together at the advanced age when most expected only to tend the warm ashes of expired love. So had their jailers thought as they turned their heavy keys, releasing the women in the belief that time and slow decay had diminished the desires that the law could not erase.

Zalenka had first been attracted by the buttery apple
koláce
that issued from Anezka's oven at summer's end, when bright apples seemed to drop from the trees in pairs and roll into waiting palms as if they had been planning to do so since the first buddings of spring. One September afternoon, with an apple in each hand, Zalenka followed the sugary smell through a narrow alley in Kutná Hora until she found Anezka sifting flour in a hot kitchen, laughing playfully at the pixie clouds she stirred. Anezka
looked to be a decade older than Zalenka but was surprisingly youthful for a woman of nearly forty years. Zalenka watched through the open window, a thief of glances, gathering impressions before making her own. Anezka's fingers were long and thin, and they moved lightly through the sifted flour as if she were experiencing a snowfall for the first time. Zalenka looked at her own hands, thick and calloused; wide enough that she might have carried two apples in each if she had tried.