Woodsburner (22 page)

“If you've a mind to have me as your wife, Mr. Woburn, then there is one condition to be met.”

“A condition?”

“I will have books.”

“I got the Bible if that's what you're after.”

“Books of poetry. Stories. Pictures. That sort.”

“Reading books, you mean?”

“It is all I ask. I fetch one book every month out of my wages. I can leave the tavern, if you require it, but I'll not give up my monthly books.”

He did not even mull it over. He only shrugged, as if someone were telling him that a particular head of cattle on auction came with its spots.

“Well, all right, then.”

Emma did not tell him that she had never actually read an entire book on her own. She recognized hardly more than a bushelful of words in the books she bought. She mouthed the letters in the printed shapes she did not recognize, and often the resulting sounds did not match anything she had ever heard in conversation. Mostly, she liked the feel of the type beneath her fingers. She knew she held something worthwhile in her hands, and she liked nothing more than to sit on the porch at dusk or by the fire in the evening and cast her eyes over the lines of print, thinking of her pa, his gravelly voice describing the things he had seen on his
hungry wanderings. If her ma would be disappointed to find her shackled to the likes of Cyrus Woburn, she thought, her pa would be proud to see the small library she was building for herself in the narrow bookcase off the kitchen.

When Cyrus Woburn proposed, Emma knew little of how her own parents had satisfied each other's needs, but she found something wanting in the way that he offered his reluctant smiles as small surrenders to the fact that he had taken her as his wife. He seemed willing enough to take what other men had spurned, and she was grateful for his attention. She only wished that he had not so readily accepted her gratitude as proof of his charity.

After readjusting the damp undergarment on the line, Emma trudges back to the house, the half-full laundry basket cradled beneath her arm. She sees that the smoke has thickened above the treetops like a mounting thundercloud, spread out flat at the bottom, swollen at the top. She worries that the fire might come this way, after all. It would not be able to cross the barren fields, but it might easily leap from tree to tree along the farm's boundary and nestle in the cluster of apple trees next to the house. Mr. Woburn has warned her not to worry so, but she knows how things can simply go wrong. She watches the immense cloud's dark shiftings, and she tries to calm herself with the notion that it might move in the other direction. All will be well, she tells herself. She has sent Oddmund for help, and she decides that the best thing she can do now is stay indoors and wait for him to return. Her morning chores are almost complete, and she is looking forward to stealing a few restful moments with her new book, a collection of tales by the brooding Virginian Edgar Allan Poe. She keeps the book hidden at the back of her bookcase. She asked Cyrus to purchase
it for her, but she does not want visitors to find the scandalous little volume on her shelves.

On the back porch, Emma shifts the basket from one hip to the other and turns away from the looming cloud to look in the direction that Oddmund has taken, as if he, too, might have left a trail of smoke. She knows he will probably find himself drawn into fighting the fire in the woods, despite his noticeable dread. She assumes that his fear of fire has something to do with the scars on his arms. He has never spoken about what happened, though she has asked him directly more than once. He is a good man, she thinks, this Oddmund Hus. There are not many men like him, certainly not among those she has met.

Her husband is nothing at all like Oddmund, and she cannot keep from drawing comparisons, though she knows it is wrong of her to do so. Oddmund always shows an interest in the books she pretends to read, always asks politely, in as few words as possible, what new books she has collected for her little library. Someone taught him to read English, but she has never learned how this came to be. She can sometimes persuade him to read a few sentences aloud for her, when she finds one especially difficult to decipher, though this is a rare accomplishment. She wonders what it would be like to have Oddmund read to her all the time, after supper, near the fire on cold nights, to hear him speak the words that covered every single page of every book on her shelves. What would her pa think of that? Surely even her ma would approve of such an arrangement.

Emma does not entirely regret her marriage. She is confident that she need never again want for the necessities of life, and she might still hope for children, but she cannot help feeling that her satisfaction would be increased if she could somehow supplant the coarser attributes in Cyrus with the sweetness in Oddmund. She retreats into these guilty imaginings on those nights when
she lies awake next to her snoring husband, sore from his abrupt, efficient attentions. It is wrong of her, she knows, terribly wrong, but she sometimes wishes she could take the best portions of the men she has come to know and piece together a better man, a superior animal deserving of this new world they have come to inhabit.

The light finds its way to him through naked branches, fracturing into complex mosaics of yellow and orange, geometric patterns like stained glass. The similarity does not escape Caleb's notice. Huddled beneath his coat, he peeks out at the edge of the woods and draws on his pipe, lets the smoke transport him to the stained-glass window in his father's church. He finds cause to think of it a dozen times a day, for it was this magnificent window that occasioned the first of many signs revealed to him. He inhales the fumes from his pipe and leans back against the farmhouse ruins, feels the colors radiating from the glass, sees the loud fires roiling in its design.

The panes had arrived packed in molasses. One hundred stout oak barrels stood in two neat ranks along Court Street at Adams Square, their rims encrusted with translucent-winged insects, lured to entombment by sugary promise. Ingenious, he thought. There was no end to the clever feats man could achieve when guided by the hand of heaven. Not a single colorful pane of stained glass had broken during the arduous voyage that had begun three months earlier at the Glasgow Glass Works and ended in Boston in the spring of 1820.

Caleb Ephraim Dowdy, fourteen years of age, eldest son of the Reverend Marcus Ezekiel Dowdy of Court Street Unitarian Church, sat wiping a deep blue pane he held sandwiched between
his spindly legs. The coarse tow cloth of his trousers drank in the molasses until the fabric was heavy and slow. He stood to retrieve another section from the barrels, and he had to hold his pants at the waist to avoid tripping over the sodden cuffs. The molasses clung to whatever it touched. When his father was not looking, Caleb could not resist touching a syrupy finger to his tongue. He had no idea that the amber splotches at the corners of his mouth gave him away, and he did not reckon the significance of his father's indulgent smiles. Luscious warmth filled his mouth, and he surmised that the paradise awaiting faithful Christians could hardly be sweeter.

It was to be the most glorious window of any church in Boston; not even the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, swollen with the idolatrous French and Irish Catholics and their love for gilt objects, would boast anything so sublime. Caleb had marveled at the drawings on his father's desk. The window held eight scenes recounting the creation of heaven and earth, the fall of the angels, Adam and Eve, banishment from Eden, the birth of Christ, his death and resurrection, the discovery of America, and then the most glorious scene of all: Judgment Day. There was to be no representation of God the Father or the Holy Spirit as separate entities, nothing to suggest that deific power issued from anything other than a single, unified whole.

As a young man, Marcus Ezekiel Dowdy had worshipped at the Park Street First Anglican Church, a staid structure of clean white walls, sharp lines, and windows of watery glass. The church had been built two centuries earlier by order of King James II, who had seized a small corner of the Park Street Cemetery from the Puritans so that the Church of England might have a presence in the New World. But as a young man, hopeful that the advances of science and industry—wondrous manifestations of man's reason—might find a place in God's creation, Marcus had marched
into the swelling legions of Unitarians. And now, close upon the midpoint of a new century in America, he believed that the time had come for bold gestures where matters of ornamentation were concerned. The window was an epic undertaking, and Marcus had at first encountered no small opposition from the members of his congregation, but he persuaded them by citing the natural beauty of the land. “Our Puritan roots run deep, but everywhere we see its fruit withering on the vine,” Marcus reasoned from his pulpit, gesturing toward the empty pews at the back of the small church. “God so adorned this land that man might marvel at his wondrous creation; thus, is it not fitting that America's churches should celebrate his glory by doing the same?”

The pane Caleb held showed a portion of the sky, clouds suffused with heavenly radiance. He watched the images emerge as he scraped away the tenacious molasses with a wooden spatula like the one he vaguely remembered his mother using when she made griddle cakes. She had died when Caleb was eight, after a brief illness, and he had not eaten griddle cakes since. The smell of frying batter still made his stomach ache with the sadness of not seeing her at the stove. When Caleb told his father how much he missed her, his father explained that this sorrow was brought on by the sinister workings of doubt. Marcus assured his son that there was no cause for grief, for his mother would one day return, and Caleb tried to imagine her sitting in a straight-backed chair on a cloud, hands folded in her lap, quietly waiting for the appointed time when she could come back and cook breakfast.

Sometimes the doubts returned, but Caleb was having no difficulty thinking of his mother seated on her cloud as he happily dragged the spatula from top to bottom, leaving smooth, even trails on the glass. If his hand wavered, he repeated the motion, straightening the lines in the molasses before moving on to clean another row. Caleb was more careful than the other workers, more
diligent, as if the manner in which the molasses was removed might in some way affect the purity of the overall work hidden beneath. His father had taught him that everything he did, the simplest act, should be undertaken as if it were being performed for a heavenly audience. Even when he worked alone at his mathematics, Caleb made sure that his fraction bars and equal signs were perfectly straight. God was watching, always, and Caleb did not want to disappoint him in a task so simple as a straight line.

Once he had gotten the top layer of molasses off, he worked at the remaining syrup with a rag, then placed the section of window next to the others, propped against the church steps. The workmen were using a special mixture of ash and lye to remove the remaining stickiness from the panes before the glaziers began installing them in the gaping hole that had been opened in the church's nave.