Woodsburner (4 page)

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 empty 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.

It is a perfect day for walking. Eliot instructed Silas Greene, his driver, to deposit him on the Cambridge Turnpike so that he might walk the remaining mile to Concord. He had put on his sturdy boots that morning in the expectation that he might be seized by a notion to wander. Few people use the turnpike nowadays, even though the toll has been suspended. Most prefer the less hilly Boston Road, and this is precisely why Eliot insisted that Silas take the turnpike. He awoke this morning craving solitude. It has not rained since February, and Eliot presumed, correctly, that the roads—usually impassable stretches of mud this time of year—would be hard and dusty, in excellent condition for walking.

Eliot has not packed the valise he usually brings along on overnight business. Today he comes prepared to follow his impulses; he carries a simple bundle, tied up in a tattered plaid blanket that he has knotted around the end of a long stick. Simplicity is the key. He resumes walking down the center of the road with an exaggerated stride. The bundle on the stick bounces on his shoulder, an incongruous accompaniment to his finely tailored blue coat and bright yellow vest. He instructed Silas to return to Boston and inform Mrs. Calvert that her husband has decided to
spend the night in Concord. Eliot revels in the near-spontaneity of his decision. Surely Margaret would understand that the few diversions available in rustic Concord are of the most innocent sort. Besides, Eliot is not a man to indulge in reckless entertainments. In fact, the only indulgence he ever seeks these days (though he could never confess it to Margaret) is simply to be left alone.

Eliot follows the Cambridge Turnpike to the Lexington Road, where the wheel ruts of muddier days form faults and ridges that he negotiates with some difficulty. He inhales the tang of rich earth, envisions a bucolic tableau: sturdy men plowing fields, casting seeds, studying the open sky. Boston is the finest city in America, but its streets are so plagued by carriages and trolleys and other horse-drawn conveyances that all one ever smells there is the accumulated dung of transportation. City officials have tried numerous solutions, but they never do more than move the great stinking piles from one side of the street to the other. In Boston, one can no longer smell the earth buried beneath the city. The fresh air of Concord invigorates him. And Eliot finds something more in it today, a soft smell of burning wood so distinct he can practically hear the crackling embers.

Perhaps that is why he is thinking of autumn. There is no reason that the scent of burning wood should not just as well make him think of winter, or of Christmas, or even of a cool New En gland summer evening, but there is no logic to how the mind answers the senses. He used to consider autumn the most delightful time of year, ripe with the promise of all the things yet to be done. Without the oppressive heat of summer to slow one's hand, grand accomplishments used to feel truly within reach during that magical season. At least that was how he felt as a young man, before dreary poets taught him to regard autumn as the last flush of summer, a harbinger of the season of cold death. Poets, he thinks, are
intent on ruining everything. Playwrights, on the other hand, know how to render palatable life's most harrowing moments. A stage play with an unhappy ending can lead one to a much needed catharsis, whereas an unhappy poem simply leaves one, well, unhappy. Far better to write plays, he thinks.

Eliot's last trip to Concord occurred five months earlier, when he answered an invitation to a dinner commemorating issue no. XIV of
The Dial
, that strange and unprofitable transcendentalist magazine, the publishers of which—Mr. Brown and Mr. Little—had obliged every notable bookseller in New England to acknowledge as the pinnacle of American thought. Eliot had sometimes thought
The Dial's
poetry passable, but he found the philosophical essays—repetitive ruminations on the soul's infinitude, its immanence in nature, etc., etc., etc.—impossible to digest. That was what he told the other booksellers who attended the dinner. Each man at the table had, in turn, been compelled to stand and offer a few words of admiration for the magazine. Eliot thought he set himself apart with his witty contribution:
“I can only say, with deep regret, that the contents of The
Dial
, unlike this evening's marvelous repast, have often proven quite indigestible.”
Unfortunately, the other diners were of a humorless sort and did not give his clever quip the appreciation it deserved. As Eliot now recalls, the food and drink truly were the only memorable aspects of the evening.

Eliot had agreed to attend the dinner solely for the purpose of meeting
The Dial's
distinguished editor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. To Eliot's great disappointment, however, Mr. Emerson was absent, as were the magazine's other principal architects, Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. Miss Fuller was said to be out in the Western territories, preaching women's rights on the frontier, and Mr. Parker was pursuing philosophical abstractions somewhere in England. It was no wonder the magazine ceased shortly thereafter. Eliot's disappointment in the evening deepened when he
learned that most of the other guests in attendance were also booksellers. The conversation proved more business than literary, and Eliot drank more than was his custom.

So that explains it, Eliot thinks, savoring the Concord air as he negotiates the humps and pits in the road. The night of the dinner had been filled with the heavy musk of harvest. Obviously that is why he is now thinking of autumn, of apple cider, mulled wine, falling leaves, and great stacks of pale yellow squash and bright orange pumpkins.

Eliot stops again in mid-stride, though this time he nearly trips as he braces himself against the slap of memory.
Pumpkins!
He had almost forgotten the appalling sight. He sorts through the foggy recollections of that night, a process that requires him to remain still as his mind lurches backward. He removes his spectacles, twirls the rectangles of glass in one hand and rubs his eyes with the other, his legs wide in the middle of the road, each foot planted on the high crest of a wheel rut.

The memory comes back to him now in full. He had decided to return home directly after the disappointing dinner. Silas had taken ill, so Eliot had driven himself, but he lost his way looking for the turnpike in the gray moonlight. The grog had apparently muddled his sense of direction, though Eliot was certain that he had not consumed enough to invent so gross a vision as what he witnessed from his perch atop the carriage. Eliot recalls the distasteful details one by one, assembling the scene like a stagehand: a dark sky, bright fringed clouds half shrouding a full moon, a field of ripe pumpkins, and the grunting brute, a pale, white-haired Caliban, hunched forward over a large gourd, trousers at his ankles—an onanist in the pumpkin patch, befouling the fruits of autumn.
What could one expect this far from the civilizing influence of Boston?
Eliot is appalled anew by the memory. There is no shortage of perversions in the city, he thinks, but at least in Boston men
pursue their unsavory penchants with discretion, and men know well the places to avoid should they prefer not to witness such pursuits.

Eliot returns his spectacles to his nose, wraps the wires behind his ears, and shakes off the memory. He will not allow the troubling image to interfere with the purpose of his current visit. Another twenty minutes of walking brings him to the edge of Concord. He passes a school set back from the road, and farther on he sees homes with wide front porches, pitched roofs, shuttered windows overgrown with ivy, white picket fences. The Lexington Road takes him past the First Unitarian Church into the center of town, and before he reaches the courthouse on the square he turns left onto Mill Dam Street and walks past both the mill and the dam. A team of four oxen pulling a heavy cartload of timber enters the square and turns onto the Boston Road. The wearied driver does not bother to lift his eyes from the reins. Mill Dam becomes Main Street; white clapboard houses give way to a long block of redbrick storefronts.

Eliot slows his pace. People saunter about at the edges of the dirt road, tipping hats, nodding pleasantly. The sudden blast of a horn sends him scurrying aside to allow the Boston stagecoach to pass. Concord is not so bustling as Boston, but it is a theater of business nonetheless, as the dust and rattle of passing wagons seem to insist. He follows Main Street to the address he has been given, strolling beneath the painted wooden signs that hang above a variety of shops: “Pierces Harnesses;” “Brown's Clothing Co.;” “Mann's Boots and Rubbers;” “John Parkhurst—Druggist Specializing in Pure Wines and Liquor for Medicinal Purposes.” There are more taverns than he expected—and at their doors a steady traffic of tradesmen, teamsters, and the Irish laborers newly arrived to complete the rail line to Fitchburg. Here, Eliot thinks, a man might satisfy his every want, and discover a few new ones.

He surveys the storefronts along Concord's Main Street, and he is pleased to confirm that there is no bookseller on the block.

In Boston, the business of bookselling is ever-present, a miasma of commerce easily mistaken for culture. Eliot never envisioned a livelihood grounded in ledgers, and lately he has grown weary of the relentless urgency of buying and selling. Boston publishers are forever at his heels, inconstant curs, ingratiating one minute and vicious the next; no sooner are they finished with the collection of one debt than they are encouraging him to incur new ones. In the past week alone, Eliot paid bills and placed orders with Crocker & Brewster, Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, Saxton & Kelt, Strong, Sherburne & Co., and Jenks & Palmer. The upper end of Washington Street is crammed with publishing houses, twenty or more, and though many have shops of their own, their agents endlessly distribute flyers and notices and catalogues, proffering their newest books to other shop owners, boasting improved editions, promising discounts and bulk pricing and generous terms of credit. And near the top of this clamoring row, where Washington Street stumbles past School Street, William Davis Ticknor sits confidently on his publishing throne above the Old Corner Bookstore as if he were king.