Woodsburner (31 page)

After what happened in Court Street, Caleb expected that no church in Boston would open its doors to him. He looked to the west, where he thought he might live as a hermit or preach to savages in territories unknown. Following the Concord Turnpike, Caleb carried his Bible and his hatchet into the untamed world beyond Boston. He spent the night in the woods and found nothing in the experience to suggest that there might be a spirit among the trees, as his father had insisted. He could not see how his father or Mr. Emerson or any of their deluded contemporaries could think it right to seek God in the dwelling of maggots. Caleb slept with pine needles for his bed and a pile of leaves to cushion his head, and he awoke to find a dozen members of his former congregation standing around him as if he were dead. They had come looking for him, they said. He recognized them from among those who sometimes stood at the back or hid in the corners of his church, and he had always suspected that they were in attendance only to seek shelter from the cold. They said they knew he could not return, but they begged him not to leave them, and Caleb understood that they needed his strict teachings the way a dog needs its master's cane. He knew then that he had found his mission.

He sought out new followers from among their acquaintances, the city's most despairing. In the alleys of Boston, he told the hopeless about his reformation in the woods. He carried his message to the prostitutes in Mount Vernon, to the beggars around Mill Pond, and to the thieves at the Leverett Street Jail, and he was always surprised to see a new face nearly every Sunday when he hung his hatchet from a tree and opened his Bible on a tall stump he had hewn into a crude lectern. At one of his meetings, a farmer who shared his disgust for the tree-worshippers of Concord came forward and offered him a place to stay and the use of his barn. Caleb preached in the barn on Sunday mornings, just
after the cows had been milked, with the scent of manure and masticated grass hanging in the air. There were no private boxes, no cushions or foot warmers, no ornaments of gold or lurid stained glass.

On a bright Sunday morning in spring, after nearly three years of meeting in the barn, Caleb concluded his sermon by announcing that the time had come at last to build a church. He knew it might take years to accomplish, since many could contribute only pennies at a time, but he knew they would not waiver. They were being called to rekindle the light that had once adorned the city on the hill. He told them that they would succeed where their forefathers had failed.

After the sermon, Caleb stood in the open barn door as his followers filed past and readied themselves for the long walk back to Boston. They shuffled out from between the long wooden benches that Caleb had built himself, and the last two men in each row remained to carry the benches to the back of the barn. Within the hour, the cows would be led back in, lowing and belching.

From among the departing worshippers a woman dressed in black, face half hidden by a shawl, detached herself and waited until the benches were moved away. Then she grabbed a broom and began sweeping the ground with exaggerated zeal, as if the ferocity of her strokes might undo things long since done.

Caleb approached her and placed his hand gently on her arm.

“Mrs. Harrington, there is no need to do that. This is a barn, after all.”

“It's as good a church as any when you're doin' the preaching.”

Esther Harrington put her head down, swept, stopped, and looked back at him. She opened her mouth, revealing fewer teeth than she had when they first met, then rubbed her chin in deep contemplation. Caleb had seen her do this at least once every Sunday.

“Have you remembered today, Mrs. Harrington?” Caleb asked.

“Not today. I suppose the Lord will remind me when the time comes.”

Caleb nodded as she scurried off with her broom. As if the Lord did not have concerns more worthy than the restoration of a drunken old whore's memory, he thought. Esther Harrington began appearing at his services a year earlier—somehow she had found him—and ever since her reappearance she claimed to have some important news. She could never remember what it was, but she was sure that it would be of great interest to him.

“Look here, Reverend!”

Caleb turned wearily toward the dry, cricket voice to find another drunkard he had recruited from the gutters of Boston several months earlier. The man stood close, right arm outstretched, hand flat, palm down, inches from Caleb's chin, close enough for him to smell the heavy scent of old tobacco. The man's fingers shook, and his face revealed that this feat was taking considerable effort. Caleb tried to remember the man's name.

“You said I ought deny myself drink, and I done it.”

No matter how long or fiercely he preached, Caleb thought, it was never enough for these people. He wanted to transport them with his words, to send them into holy convulsions, to bring on fainting spells, but they just sat there during his sermons, waiting to speak to him afterward about their ailments or visions or moral confusions.

“See? Hardly no tremors at all, Reverend. Not half as bad as last month.”

“You've abstained from the drink … Mr. Stiles?” Caleb asked. He remembered the man now, Amos Stiles, a drunk and a former pickpocket.

“Nary a drop in two months,” Amos Stiles swore. “I count myself an improved man.”

“Pride, Mr. Stiles. Beware of pride. And what of the other thing?”

Amos Stiles lowered his arm, and he spoke less confidently than before.

“I have touched no liquor or beer. No cider even. And no tobacco. Hardly.”

“And the other?”

Caleb waited impatiently as the weak man struggled to admit what Caleb already surmised. The man wore the mark of his sin in his heavy-lidded eyes. It amazed him how the same men who were capable of committing the darkest acts imaginable would, when pressed, find themselves unable to utter the words for what they had done. What was this strange power of language?

Amos Stiles scratched his trembling arm in a raking motion from shoulder to wrist. “I did not think it was forbidden in Scripture.”

“Mr. Stiles, excuses are the Devil's logic. Many are the wicked deeds not explicitly forbidden. Can you think it any different with the foul, intoxicating weed you put in your pipe?”

“I am trying to be a better man.”

“Pray that His protecting hand does not release you into the flames before your transformation is complete.”

Stiles paled and his jaw worked dryly, as if he were gulping from an empty flask. “I'm most sorry, Reverend. Indeed I am. I'll get back to stacking those benches.”

He watched Stiles lope about, dragging the splintery benches against the wall with misplaced zeal, atoning for his transgressions through a surfeit of frenetic activity. Caleb retrieved his Bible from the top of the stump that still served as his lectern, and he grabbed the hatchet that leaned against it. He slipped the Bible under one arm, collected the loose pages on which he had written his sermon, and hefted the hatchet to his shoulder. The hatchet
was the sole ornament he would allow in his new church, he thought, and he envisioned a new building rising at the edge of Concord, austere, simple, righteous.

Caleb left the dusty shadows of the barn and walked out into the sunlight. He felt the bright warmth on his face and heard the soft swarming gnats rushing past his ear; his pulse quickened and he was stunned by the powerful urge that suddenly overcame him. For a moment, he was seized by the peculiar thought that he might be content to lie down in the grass and contemplate this beautiful creation without the incessant clawing after truth that marked his waking hours. He thought of another infuriating reference to Mr. Emerson in his father's final letter: “… one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool…” Caleb turned away from the sun, tried to ignore the blue sky and the green scent that filled the air, but the feeling would not leave him; he sensed a buzzing in his limbs, as if something had been awakened, as if he could actually feel a trembling spirit infusing his mortal veins. He looked at his forearm, saw the feral pulsings beneath the skin, and he tightened his grip on the hatchet. He would not allow himself to be misled by the temptations of this new Eden. If his arm offended him, he thought, he would willingly cut it off. He heard someone calling his name, and he turned slowly toward the sound.

“Reverend Dowdy! I remember now!”

Caleb rubbed his eyes, as if emerging from a dream, and he saw Esther Harrington hobbling toward him from the barn. Her left leg lagged behind, and her earnestness seemed to transform her limp into a graceless ballet.

“What is it, Mrs. Harrington?” Caleb braced himself for some incomprehensible tale of dissipation and revival.

“The confession, did you hear about it?” Esther Harrington asked, out of breath.

“You'll have to be clearer, Mrs. Harrington. I have heard many.”

“The scoundrel confessed to doing those terrible things.”

Caleb shook his head, uncomprehending.

“Remember?” she said. “Another says he done the same things.”

“What same things, Mrs. Harrington?”

“The buggering!”

There was no limit to the blackness of men's souls, Caleb thought. Everywhere one looked in the New World, moral decay was evidenced a hundredfold. Even this woman seemed to delight in the reporting of such crimes.

“No doubt the villain was under the influence of a terrible intoxicant.” Caleb tried to sift the lesson in the tale. “You would do better to concern yourself with the state of your own soul and avoid those poisons that we were never meant to imbibe.”

Esther Harrington was undeterred. “Listen, Reverend, this villain was hanged for the same deed, a year or two after. I was surprised you weren't there.”

Caleb sighed. “I cannot minister to every soul in need.”

Caleb turned and began to walk away, but he felt the familiar grip, the cold hand on his arm. The old woman seemed about to scream but could not summon the sound.

“Mrs. Harrington, please.” He nearly pulled the woman from her feet as he tore his arm away. “What else can I offer? I am confident the miscreant received justice.”

She grabbed his arm again, and this time he felt the fingernails at his wrist.

“Ain't I makin' myself clear?” she cried. “The man what confessed, he went by the name of Hus. Søren Hus. He confessed to the crimes they said that Negro did.”

Caleb let the hatchet slide from his shoulder. He held on to
the bottom of the handle and rocked the hatchet head on the ground, as if trying to work something loose.

“Boone?” he asked quietly, unwilling to believe it was possible.

“The one they thought did them same perversions,” she insisted. “The one you ministered to before he hanged.”

Caleb saw the face racing toward him. He remembered the dead eyes and the swollen tongue. “Boone,” he mumbled. “Desmond Boone.”

“That's the one. Didn't do it at all, they said.”

“You must be mistaken. Perhaps they were in league?” Caleb asked.

The old woman cackled. “Far as I apprehend, buggerin' don't take much help.”

Caleb felt a chasm open before him. He ran his tongue over his teeth and rocked the hatchet head back and forth in the dirt. A bitter taste crept into the back of his mouth. His final word to the innocent man echoed in his ears.
No
. What power had resided in that simple utterance? Had it condemned the man to eternal torment? Had it countermanded heavenly Providence? And, if not, were his words utterly without meaning?

Esther Harrington appeared delighted at the success of her brittle memory.

“Least he's in a better place,” she said.

Caleb could not speak. The sunlight was suddenly blinding, and he thought he could hear the clicking and chewing of the manifold insects burrowed in the earth. He stepped forward unsteadily and felt the wooden handle of the hatchet slip from his fingers. The hatchet balanced on its head for a moment, shadow-less under the high sun, before teetering over like a felled sapling.

The more Eliot thinks on it, the more obvious it seems that Seymour Twine should be found in a tavern at midday, stupefied by drink, when other men are hard at work. If he were staging the scene of their meeting for the Haymarket Theater, a tavern is exactly the setting he would have chosen: a sinister door hidden in a narrow street, a dark interior, heavy wood timbers in the ceiling, the air visibly laced with tobacco and greasy fumes from shanks of lamb and pork hissing in the open hearth.