Woodsburner (42 page)

He watches Young America regard the smoldering ground with sensitive eyes, and he thinks that he sees a blunted longing there. Henry has had his fill of confident men, with their bold plans and overreaching ambitions, men who would transform the land that will soon cover them. The look he sees in this man's eyes,
a trepidation that cannot contain its want, gives him hope. The new nation might yet outgrow the old ways of men, but it will require something stronger, a different kind of animal, descendants of Young America, perhaps, or others like him. Henry thinks he would like to converse with him when the fire is done, and at that very moment the man looks deep into the woods, where the fire as yet holds sway, and he mutters, “I know it is not mine.”

It sounds more like an angry exhalation of words than actual speech. Henry assumes he is talking about the land, and it amazes him that they may have been thinking the same thing. Henry leans in close so that he can be heard over the roaring flames.

“A man might come to woods such as this,” Henry says, “to live on his own. Only then might he claim some dominion.”

Young America starts, as if he had forgotten that Henry was working next to him. He stops shoveling for a moment, seems to take Henry's suggestion seriously, and at last responds.

“I did.”

It is Henry's turn to be surprised. “You have lived in the woods, alone?”

When Young America nods, Henry can only marvel that this man has already accomplished what he has only dreamed. His unrealized ambitions litter his mind with thoughts of things undone.

“I ought not have left her,” Young America mumbles to himself as he resumes his shoveling, and Henry understands his regret. If he were finally to go off to live alone in the woods, Henry thinks, he might never find reason convincing enough to leave, might wish to remain forever as nature's guest and protector, living in accordance with the seasons until he passes as quietly as autumn passes into winter.

Young America kicks at a tongue of flame pushing up through
the ash. He remains focused on the rhythm of his shovel strokes, and Henry hears him whisper, “She is in danger.”

Henry stomps at the flames. He thinks he knows on whose behalf Young America fears. He places a hand on his strong shoulder, feels the taught muscle beneath, and leans close. “Nothing in nature is ever endangered. She alone always is.”

The heat is far greater than he expected. It seems a thing in itself, a glassy surface, malleable and shimmering, pressing upon him with the force of a solid object.

And the business of fighting the fire strikes him as far less heroic than he thought it would be. His hands and face are black with ash. The air is thick with it, and he feels the grit in his collar. His eyes burn and his tears mix with the soot, caking his lashes. He licks the coarse powder from his teeth. He is certain that his lungs are coated with a greasy paste he will cough up for months to come. The first thing he will do upon returning to Boston, he thinks, is invite Dr. Samuelson to call, and then he will go straight to the apothecary to see what purgatives the chemist might provide to flush the filth from his body. These thoughts bring him solace.

A visit to the tailor would not be entirely out of the question, either. Eliot looks sadly at the sleeves of his coat. The expensive dark blue is streaked with ash, like shooting stars. His yellow vest is torn and stained. It cannot be helped. Errant cinders swirl about him, landing on his arms and shoulders, burning scores of little holes ringed with hard crusts. Instinctively, he reaches inside his jacket for his memorandum to record this last thought, but then pauses, reluctant to smudge the creamy pages with sooty fingerprints. He will not forget the observation. He decides that he will
save his ruined clothes and put them on when he resumes work on
The House of Many Windows
. He looks at his boots, scorched beyond the rescue of rigorous polishing. A visit to the cobbler will be in order as well.

Eliot pauses and leans on his shovel. More men than he can count have gathered in the woods, and more keep arriving. He can feel their desperation and wonders how he might capture and convey this emotion on the stage. Around him the metallic complaints of shovels and axes and saws compete with the rushing howl of the fire. And that is something else Eliot did not expect: the symphony of noise. Eliot wonders if Moses Kimball can recreate the sound with his orchestrion. The fire thunders and moans, as if the underworld were breathing its last in one long, continuous exhale. Were it not for the other men, Eliot might have cowed under the pressure of the roar alone. It surprises him that he takes comfort in their presence. He had briefly thought that he might distinguish himself from the society of men in this fight, but they sought him out and made him one of their own again.

And then a curious thought crosses his mind. He wonders what would happen were his bookshop to catch fire. Would so great a number of men arrive to extinguish the flames? It would take little effort to start a blaze in a building crammed from floor to ceiling with paper: just a spark, an overturned candle, a dropped cigar. And if it happened at midday, when the streets were too crowded for the horses to bring the pump engines, or in the middle of the night, when no one would notice until it was too late, in either case the shop would be beyond rescue in a matter of minutes. His father-in-law would have money enough to finance another such business, but would he still have the will, once he had seen how vulnerable such an operation was to the capricious whims of chance? Eliot imagines his proud bookstore a hollow
shell, the fine volumes reduced to ash, the lewd illustrations cooked to cinders in their secret tin boxes. A man might agonize over decisions for years, and in a single moment decisions might be made for him by a sudden turn of circumstance.

The pencil-maker is a fool, Eliot thinks. From the moment he first saw him, he thought the man's eyes were set far too deeply beneath his prominent brow to be trusted. Eliot suspects the man has neither wife nor children of his own to care for, else how could he so easily have suggested that Eliot abandon his family.
Then leave them
. The phrase floats through Eliot's mind, halfway between impossibility and temptation. Clearly, Eliot thinks, the pencil-maker must be a bachelor still, to have leisure to sit in judgment and make proclamations about the world and the lives of others. For those men who must actually live in the world as its owners, driving and shaping it, the choices are not so plentiful as they may seem from without. A happy accident is their only hope for liberty.

Eliot rams his shovel into the earth and the handle twists from his hands as the blade strikes something hard and unyielding. In the crook between thumb and forefinger, a purple blister rises beneath the tender skin. Eliot crams the affected area into his mouth. He looks to see if anyone has noticed his clumsiness, then retrieves his shovel and flings another futile load of dirt into the flames.

He cannot stop thinking about Henry's suggestion.
Then leave them
. Could he return to Boston, blistered and soot-covered, and tell Margaret that he was retiring to the woods to write for a week, a month, a year? Could he announce this to her father? What would he say to their children, and how would he explain this to their friends? He knows that undertaking such a humble quest would not endanger his family's finances. And he would not, after all, abandon them forevermore; he would return a wiser, happier
man. Men left families every day to pursue fortunes in the new territories out west, and no one thought the less of them for it. Men left wives and children in terrible circumstances and sailed across the ocean in search of advancement, and no one thought this reckless or selfish. The men building America had not hesitated on the shores of the Old World, so why should it be different for him?

And yet it
was
different. Eliot knew that he could circumvent the opinions of his wife and his father-in-law, and he need not worry about his youngest children, who were too busy reeling from the countless innocent insults of childhood to notice their father's tribulations. But he could not deceive his oldest son, Josiah Edward, a perceptive boy teetering on the brink of reason. Josiah Edward—keenly aware that adult expectations sometimes exceed the still inexplicable world—would know his father was crippled by doubt. Eliot knows that Josiah has already begun to suspect that his father is not the hero he needs him to be. Eliot tries to hide his weaknesses, but his son seems always to see through the charade with quiet disappointment. Josiah possesses a preternatural ability to turn the appearance of a thing into an argument against the thing itself. The night before Eliot left for Concord, the boy had disarmed him with just such an observation.

Eliot often wrote late at night, long after everyone else was asleep. It was the only way to find solitude in a house bustling with children and servants and frequent guests. Since moving into the house on Beacon Hill, he found writing to be less a conversation with the Muse and more a struggle to shut out the world. He cursed his predicament quietly in those late hours, pulling at his hair when the pages were blank, burning those that displeased him, muttering self-disparaging oaths. He did not want his children to witness any of this, did not want them to see that their father, at some rudimentary level, was unhappy.

But last night Eliot had failed to notice the door to his study open slowly, and he was startled when his son finally spoke.

“Papa?”

Eliot covered the pages with his hands and turned to find his son standing in the shadow of the hallway, rubbing his eyes. He had no idea how long the boy had been standing there.

“Josiah! What are you doing awake at this hour?”

“I cannot sleep.”

Eliot smiled gently. “Have you tried closing your eyes?”

“Both of them. But I am seeing things.”

Josiah often ignored Eliot's quips, but Eliot suspected that it was not that his son misunderstood. The boy seemed predisposed to lure his father into making pithy statements, only to reveal that he, the child, was several cognitive steps ahead. Eliot looked at this boy, a creature possessed of the good and bad parts of himself; he watched him rub his eyes with soft-knuckled fists, took in his sandy hair, the curve of his small ears, the narrow shoulders, and the bare feet just visible below the hem of his nightshirt.

“Where are your socks? The floors are frightfully cold.”

“My feet have to breathe.”

Why did Eliot always feel outwitted by him? He never had a satisfactory response at the ready. “I think there might be some milk left from supper. Let's have some milk, and then it's back to bed.”

“What are you doing, Papa?”

“Writing.”

“Why?”

“Because I cannot sleep, either.”

“Are you going to have some milk, too?”

“Perhaps I will. Yes.”

“Are you writing letters?”

“No.” Eliot never knew how much to tell the boy. “I am writing a play, Josiah.”

Eliot watched his son think. Josiah made it look like a physical activity, as if thinking were a meticulous finger-tracing of a large catalogue, page by page, a marshaling of relevant facts.

“Will you read it to people, like Mama reads to us?”

“Well, no. Actors will read it, in a theater. And they will pretend that they are the people in the story.”

Eliot watched Josiah consider these new facts, his small features squeezing together in an unconscious performance of concentration.

“Come on, Josiah. Let's see about that milk.”

Eliot stood and led Josiah down to the kitchen. The boy's small hand rested in Eliot's, clutching the base of his thumb, where the muscle swelled faintly bluish into the palm. Eliot might have made a fist then and crushed the fragile bones. Josiah looked up at him, and Eliot felt his own hand go protectively limp, felt his body assume its instinctive defense, protecting the boy from his father's errant thoughts.

In the kitchen, Josiah pulled himself onto a chair while Eliot fetched the half-full pitcher of milk from the cold room at the back. Eliot thought about the expensive blocks of ice that were dragged here in March, and the worthless puddles that would cover the floor by May. In the heat of summer, the cold room was almost as warm as any other room. A worthless luxury. Eliot poured two glasses, and took a seat across from his son. This was a good moment, he thought, and he immediately wished he had not had the thought. He wished he could stop thinking about every moment as if it were a rough draft of a much better life that would never be realized.