Woodsburner (41 page)

“Damn fine piece of land. Came all the way to New England to start over. But a man can always start over in this country. New
farm, new name—a new wife, too. Ha, there!” Mr. Woburn suddenly threw his arm wide, tossing the bottle clear and knocking Odd onto his side, and with his other arm he pointed the rifle and fired. A large turtle on the opposite bank burst open and the fragments skipped across the creek's surface. The recoil sent the rifle flying from Mr. Woburn's hand.

“Damn!”

Clutching his hand, Mr. Woburn fell onto his back, and when Odd tried to help him up he began laughing hoarsely. “I think it's broke.” He laughed, squeezing his forefinger, not yet acknowledging the pain. “Oh, we mustn't let the old girl get knowledge of this predicament, Oddie my boy.”

Odd wonders if Mr. Woburn, drunk or sober, is fighting the same fire right now on its other side. If the flames are already this close to Concord, surely they must have reached the edge of Woburn Farm. Odd and the other men force the fire back over what it has already burned, and they reclaim a little strip of charred earth. The fire moves to their flanks, lunging at them with bright spears, looking for a way around their assault. Odd is growing tired. His shirt is soaked through with sweat. His throat is dry and his arms are heavy; he feels his efforts begin to slow. After each shovelful of dirt, Odd gazes deep into the burning trees, looking for some indication that this is not
his
fire, that it was not a spark from
his
burning that spawned this beast. He tries to ignore the growing sense of guilt, and each time it rises up he shovels more furiously.

No matter how hard he works, though, he cannot keep himself from wondering if he has caused this. The brush he cleared that morning burned differently; at times it seemed almost reluctant, and Odd needed to coax it with forkfuls of brush to keep it going. But this fire soaring above him destroys with impunity, as
if destruction were its right, and in response Odd works his shovel in the soil, striking the ground with enough force to rattle his elbows. He does not understand the anger that hardens in his chest, but he lets it guide him, lets it shift his center of balance forward so that he might dig more efficiently. Heat and effort drench his shirt. Some of the men curse under the burden.

Odd sucks at his dead tooth, forces his shovel through a thick root, and sends the twisted mass flying into the fire. He glances about before stepping sideways to start on a fresh patch of earth, and he finds the sight at once noble and pathetic—the wall of flames towering over bent backs, swinging arms, blackened faces. The thick smoke obscures the sun, but the fire casts its own sideways light, intense and focused. Odd hunches over his shovel and resumes digging. Behind him, his wide shadow dances on the rolling smoke, stretches out along the earth, and touches the laboring shadows of the other men.

Many have come to quell the convulsing wrath among the trees. Henry looks for Edward among their number, but the smoke is thick and the men are spread along the front of the blaze for a half mile or more. Some of the men are experienced, and they shovel and chop with the rhythm of fights remembered. Some clearly have no inkling how to battle a fire and they display curious tactics. One man, marked by a great shag of gray beard and a dazzling crown of gray hair, attempts to smother the flames with a heavy blanket, singeing the shadows of leaves and vines into its fuzzy nap but achieving little else. Another kicks at the flames as if he were driving a stubborn mule. Within minutes his trousers ignite and he is set upon by the other men, who shovel dirt on him until he is extinguished. He rises, a wiser man, and resorts to clearing unburned brush by hand.

They are too far from the river to form a line of swinging buckets, but a number of men have come straight from the tavern, bellies full with drink. They realize at once—as if through some unconscious concordance—that they have, each of them, brought ample stores of water, and with no women present they are free to make public use of private resources. One man and then another puts idea into action; laughter erupts; trousers drop. A dozen men take part, and the nearest flames spit steam under the insult. The foul streams slacken, and the fire marches back
over the barely dampened earth. The men retrieve themselves and fight on.

Some of the men tire quickly, starved for air, stunned by the intense heat. Henry accepts a shovel from one of the exhausted men and joins in the digging. More men continue to arrive from town and, each in turn, they show a gaping admiration for the size and ferocity of the blaze before they attack the fire with undiminished assurance. All exude the same empty confidence that Henry found so abrasive in the bookseller he met on the hill. Where, he wonders, do these men find this powerful consistency to look upon the world as if they owned it, as if they held the answers to its every dilemma?

Nearby, Henry notices a trio of Negroes, dark as the smoke itself, hacking at trees with long-handled axes. He has seen them in Concord before, Africans brought to the New World to advance the dreams of white men. The tallest of the three, Douglas Jackson, directs the other two. His head is shaved smooth and on either side his ears rise to shriveled points, razor-clipped as punishment by the Georgia master from whom he eventually escaped. The fugitives Henry has encountered each bear some horrid deformity, testimony to the unfathomable creativity of vicious men—branded faces, missing fingers, split noses, and worse—silent injuries punctuating the discourse between savagery and hope. The Underground Railroad brought these men to freedom, and Henry knows they have witnessed trials far graver than this. As a modest protest against the evils of slavery, Henry has begun withholding his annual poll tax from the state of Massachusetts, but thus far no one seems to have taken notice of his resistance, and he wonders if a single man can ever expect to affect the mass of men. America, Henry fears, will always be a brutish home to noble ideals.

The blaze devours all things equally. Grass, shrub, and tree are
reduced to cinders in its wake. The ground becomes a black sameness, and no one notices when they cross the invisible line marking the boundary of private property. Through the trees the men see a half-plowed field, a farmhouse, a barn, stables, and tall haystacks dry and inviting. The fire does not hesitate to trespass. It consumes private trees, crawls over private grasses, hobbles over the stubble of last autumn's harvest, slinks along parched fence posts. The woods seem to shudder as the fire heaves, coughs, and catapults a part of itself—a sparkling oyster flickering weightless through the air—onto the roof of the nearby barn. For a moment, the men stop and stare in disbelief as a solitary shingle smolders, glows, and pops into flame. The fire races madly from shingle to shingle, spreading along the roof edge before beginning its steady march up the incline to the weather vane; the copper rooster points northeast, as if showing the fire the fastest route to Concord. Within minutes, the entire structure is engulfed.

From the burning barn a farmer in a frayed straw hat comes running toward them, waving his arms, barely able to shout. His clothes are scorched from his futile efforts to save his barn. When he reaches the men, he wrings his hands and bursts into sobs. He cries that they are trespassing in his woods and, in the same breath, begs them to rescue his doomed trees. Narrow shoulders quivering, the weeping man stands useless among the firefighters, wiping his eyes with the back of sooty wrists, indicating places where the fire seems to be advancing, pointing out heroism for other men to undertake. He offers no assistance, so absorbed are his energies by his despair. The weeping man removes his broad-brimmed straw hat and smacks the frayed edges against his thigh, and Henry recognizes him as the first man he encountered on his search for help, the man who refused him aid.

In the weeping man's anguish, Henry finds further cause for dismay, for here he sees the narrowness of men's lives defined. He
knows that Concord brims with farmers who will labor for the better part of thirty years—an entire lifetime—to pay for their land and the house that sits upon it. In this, Henry thinks, the Indian proves far wiser, for he would never exchange his wigwam for a mansion if it so ransomed his life. The weeping man no doubt has taken pains to draw a map demarcating the extent of land he possesses, but his map, like all maps, is an illusion. Draw as many maps as he will, a man no more owns this land or these trees than does the blackbird that alights here in search of insects.

Henry sees the weeping man collapse on a charred patch of earth, his head hanging between raised knees, black holes in his straw hat where flying embers have penetrated. “I am ruined. I am ruined,” the man moans, and Henry feels a twinge of guilt, a criminal remorse distinct from the regret with which he regards his thoughtless act at the pine stump. But Henry knows that he has committed no crime against man. His carelessness may have brought about this calamity, but no one can accuse him of being anything so common as a thief. He has not taken what was not his. He has not caused the destruction of anything that a man might rightfully possess. He has done nothing more than unleash a natural force; the flames, after all, are but consuming their natural food. The weeping man may believe he has suffered great loss, Henry thinks, but a man cannot lose what he has no right to own; nor can any man be robbed of what was never his.

Amid the chaos, something catches Henry's eye, a figure laboring apart from the rest, a solid and powerful-looking man, fair-skinned, white-haired. The man stands considerably shorter than the others, but his quiet self-reliance nonetheless marks him as a fine specimen of Young America. Something about his demeanor, a certain stutter that haunts his gestures, suggests that the man mistrusts his own abilities, and Henry feels a flicker of kinship to see uncertainty registered in so sturdy a frame. Henry
hears shouts, and turns to discover the weeping man running back toward his doomed barn; he does not get far before a pair of men tackle him and drag him back to safety. The fire exhales a cloud of thick smoke, and for a moment Henry is surrounded by darkness. He hears men coughing in the impenetrable gray, and he stumbles forward with arms outstretched. The fire inhales, the smoke dissipates, and Henry finds himself next to Young America, who is wildly shoveling dirt onto the retreating flames.

The man acknowledges him with a silent nod and flings another shovelful of blackened dirt; he spits, wipes grit from his lips, and grimaces, revealing a tiny, dead tooth perched on a row of remarkably white teeth. Henry is transfixed by the sight; he had lost the first of his adult teeth several years earlier, and he recalls how swallowing the tooth seemed to render him lame and vulnerable, as if he had been missing a limb or a piece of armor. At the time, he could not hold his head up in the presence of other men, but since then he has lost more teeth through accident and rot. He understands the inevitability, and he realizes that he will probably be altogether toothless before long. It is a sad curiosity, he thinks, probing the gaps in his mouth with his tongue, how something as simple as the loss of a tooth seems to leave his soul a little more unprotected each time. Henry sees Young America work his tongue at the black tooth. It appears to be a source of shame to him, a reason not to smile at kindness shown. Henry almost envies his unusual white teeth, even though the man seems wholly unaware of his prize.