Woodsburner (39 page)

Caleb waited outside the dark door for half an hour, wrestling with his conscience, before he finally entered. He found Amos Stiles half-asleep at a long table with a smoldering clay pipe cradled in his open palm. He opened his eyes when Caleb nudged him, but he did not appear to recognize him at first.

“It cannot be you,” Stiles said, waving his hand and sinking back into his seat.

So sunken were the man's cheeks that it looked to Caleb as if his eyes had swollen to the size of walnuts beneath their lids. Caleb nudged him again.

“Go away,” Stiles mumbled.

Caleb stood above him and tried to sound commanding. “Mr. Stiles, I have come to taste of your weakness, that I may show you the path to strength.”

“Aye?” Stiles rubbed his eyes and waved away the smoke between them. “What's this, then?”

Caleb felt foolish for trying to engage Stiles in discourse, but he was determined not to turn back. He would find a way to partake of the man's wickedness.

“Together we will outsmart the Devil, Mr. Stiles, but you must help me to understand how the Devil leads you astray.”

“The Devil?” Stiles awakened with a start. He did not move, but his eyes opened wide and seemed to reach for Caleb. “How do I know you ain't himself, the Devil, come to tempt me? You might take any shape you please in these shadows.”

“Mr. Stiles—”

“Away! I am a man redeemed!”

“The fact that I have found you here confirms my suspicion that you are no less fallen than before.”

The pipe rolled onto its side in Stiles's palm, and he jumped from the touch of the hot bowl. He looked up and smiled slowly in recognition, and Caleb counted no more than three brown teeth tucked behind the man's lower lip.

“Reverend Dowdy? Is it you?” Stiles wondered aloud, trying to sit up straight. “You make me doubt my very eyes.”

Caleb sat down across from Stiles and folded his hands in his lap. He stared at him sternly; he knew the man would never comprehend his true reason for coming.

“It disappoints me to find you here, Mr. Stiles.”

“But not entirely, eh? Otherwise, you wouldn't have come looking.”

“Don't make light of your sin.”

Stiles's stupid smile faded, and he came back to himself, suddenly serious.

“It's the poison in me, Reverend. It falsifies my logics.”

Caleb watched Stiles examine the pipe as if it had suddenly materialized in his hand.

“Look here, Reverend,” Stiles said, tapping the pipe on the table. “I'm going to cast this off. To testify to my efforts.”

“Wait. Show me.”

Stiles struggled with the idea before putting the pipe eagerly
to his lips, like a child happy with permission to misbehave. After inhaling, he spoke in a small voice.

“And then you have to hold it for a while, like this, so you can drink it in.”

Stiles blew a steady stream of smoke across the table and smiled. Caleb's mouth watered. He wanted desperately to taste of something that might bring him relief from guilt and doubt, from the nightmares and the waking visions. He wanted to flaunt his weakness before heaven and call down upon himself the punishment that was his due.

“Give it here, then.”

Stiles froze. He cocked his head sideways and stared at Caleb. Stiles started to speak but was distracted by the coil of smoke that drifted over his face when he opened his lips. Caleb noticed that some of the other men huddled in the dark room clutched larger pipes, pipes connected to thin tubes, pipes of polished wood decorated with precious metals that sparkled in the dim light. Stiles's pipe was gray and crooked and looked as if it had been fashioned from mud.

Stiles seemed to remember something, then said, “I cannot let you do that, Reverend.”

Caleb saw how the other men reclined on benches, hunched over tabletops, asleep or barely conscious, and he looked enviously at Stiles's half-opened eyes. It angered him that these worthless men had found blissful release from their cares while he still struggled under the crush of uncertainty. If they could so willingly embrace their damnation and reap the rewards of sin while yet on earth, he would do the same.

“Give it to me at once!” He snatched the pipe from Stiles, who stared at his empty palm for several long seconds before looking up.

Caleb put the gritty opening to his lips, inhaled, and choked
on the sweet smoke. It burned his tongue, and he thought he tasted blood. Caleb tried again, and forced the smoke down his throat into his lungs. He tried to exhale slowly but could not control the coughs erupting from his chest.

“Slowly,” Stiles said encouragingly.

Caleb found that the third pull went down smoothly, and his head seemed to expand. To his surprise, the first sensations came almost instantly, a dizzying feeling of having been suddenly transported to the rafters.

“Powerful stronger than laudanum or that Brown Mixture,” Stiles said. “Never much liked the licorice medicines myself.”

“Marvelous strange,” Caleb said appreciatively.

Caleb inhaled again, placing the rough end of the pipe a little farther into his mouth this time, disregarding the disgusting wet sheen he saw on Stiles's lips. He took another long taste from the pipe and watched with curiosity as Amos Stiles dissolved right in front of him; the man's gray face smeared itself over the space between them. If only the visions haunting his dreams would dissipate so easily, Caleb thought, the death mask, the black eyes, empty sockets and swollen tongue, his own mother's face, wasted with sickness. Caleb could stand the visions no longer. If God had not the courage to strike him down, then he would erase the visions himself with whatever weed Amos Stiles could stuff into his pipe.

Stiles began laughing, flaccid shudders that rippled along his arms. Caleb felt the intoxicant take a stronger hold, but he was not giddy. He felt somber, a bit dulled, as if he had been sealed inside an enormous glass jar stuffed full with rags. Caleb held up the crude pipe and looked into its bowl at the black ball glowing red at its edges, like a distant planet or a flaming comet. Caleb sniffed the hot fumes rising from the bowl and he felt a calmness suffuse his veins, even as his nostrils burned. Stiles laughed again, sluggishly.

“I had not thought your foul weeds to have so remarkable an effect,” Caleb said, closing his eyes, sinking deeper into a confounding quietude.

“Reverend,” Stiles mumbled, sounding as if he were drifting along the edges of a dream, “this is no weed. This is opium.”

The wind comes in strong gusts, lifting Caleb's coat from the crumbled foundations of the farmhouse, tumbling it through the ruins, like a dog seeking shelter.

There will be no church after all, Caleb thinks, neither bricks nor bones. The lingering words of the old women cut through his opium haze and prick some remote part of his brain as yet un-addled by the soporific poison. He can see their wizened faces and the deep-set eyes, one dark pair, one faded pair already dead in their sockets. He watches stalks of light poke through the distant trees, illuminating swarms of tiny gnats floating above the shorn fields. Tongues of orange flame flutter from branches like autumn leaves. Most trees have not yet bloomed, and in their nakedness they seem more vulnerable than the few already dressed in riotous spring attire. Caleb knows it is a foolish thought. Fire shows neither preference nor deference; it consumes the living and the dead with equal fervor.

Nearby, a dormant sycamore rustles the parchment leaves it has stubbornly clung to since October, a thousand stale petitions for which April now has no use. Caleb does not share his fellow New Englanders' enthusiasm for the golden days of autumn. It is a season more piteous than beautiful, a prolonged dirge for insensate organisms incapable of understanding death's inevitability The season of bountiful harvests is nothing more than a rusty-hued death rattle—stately oaks and maples so desperate to cling to life, so uncertain of what lies beyond the long winter to come,
that they eat the green from their own leaves to eke out one more day. The brilliant reds and yellows of that cruel season are evidence that brute life, unguided by reason or faith, will willingly cannibalize itself just to purchase another hopeless hour on earth. To be sure, in Caleb's experience the forest reawakens every spring, but how can the trees of October know that? To a penumbral mind of pulp and bark, the dark clouds and arctic winds rolling in from the north are dire heralds of an infinite void. And each year there are, perchance, a scattered handful of otherwise hardy-seeming oaks and maples and birches and pines that prove unable to parry the bitter thrust of January and the vicious stab of February.
Evergreen
is a misnomer of the highest order. No wonder the coppery leaves do not release their grip like the heavy fruits of summer but cling tenaciously to twig and branch until the last is torn away by the first nor'easter of the season. Each tree dies a hundred little deaths without knowing which one will be its last.

It is no different for man. It was no different for Desmond Boone, clinging to the last few seconds of life even as he dangled at the end of a rope. Which moment was his last? There was the drop, the dangle, the gasp, the fierce struggle, the bright red of burst vessels, and the fluttering descent. Was his autumn any less glorious? And would he have a spring?

You will build here a church of bones, yes?

Caleb kicks the crumbled foundations and sends a fist-size stone into the stubbled cornstalks. Desmond Boone was once alive. Then he was dead. That was it. No prologue. No epilogue.

Caleb remembers his mother's gaunt cheeks, but he had not seen his father's face at the end. Already four years in the grave, does his father's face look now as it did in life, he wonders; is any part of it still recognizable as the man he knew? Caleb examines the expired ashes in the bowl of his pipe; he licks a finger, wipes it
around the bowl, and touches the blackened fingertip to his tongue. He tastes smoke, a tang like burnt sugar, and he feels a deadening calm smooth out the wrinkles in his logic. He cannot know the fate of his mother or his father
—their
salvation had not been within his authority to dismiss—but he himself condemned Boone to the flames. Caleb looks into the woods, sees the fire motioning for him, and suddenly realizes that there is only one way to find out if the man's soul lives on. He must look for it. He will go and seek out Desmond Boone's spirit among the very flames to which he condemned it. Caleb sucks once more at the empty pipe and tosses it into the field. He will need it no longer. A peaceful feeling suffuses his limbs, the confident serenity that precedes knowledge soon to be acquired.

Caleb pulls his arms into the sleeves of his white robe, points himself toward the Concord Woods, and treads lightly through the dry field. Each step seems to catapult him skyward. He tries to measure his gait so that he does not fling himself over the treetops out of sheer eagerness. He keeps his eyes locked on the fire peeking at him from between the trees. He hears the flames calling to him, roaring in his ears. He steps carefully, bouncing, floating, giddy and terrified at once; he reels from the sublimity of truth too quickly imbibed. He realizes that his first impression earlier in the day had been absolutely correct. He should never have doubted his own insight. This fire is indeed for him, specifically for him alone. This is precisely what he has been waiting for. These flames are to be his salvation, or his doom, his affirmation or condemnation. There is only one way to find out.