Woodsburner (43 page)

“Will you make them dress up?” Josiah asked, after a mouthful of milk.

“Who?”

“The people that are making pretend. Remember. You said.”

“Oh, the actors—well, yes, they do, yes.”

“And they pretend they are other people, because you tell them to?”

“You could say that.”

“Why do you tell them to?”

“Well, because people like to watch other people make-pretend.”

“Why?”

Eliot was determined that this time he would not wither under the boy's inquisitiveness. “It makes them laugh, sometimes. And sometimes it makes them sad.”

“Why do people want to be sad?”

“They're not really sad.”

“They're just pretending?”

“Yes. The actors pretend to be sad, so that the people watching them can feel sad without really being sad.” Eliot knew it sounded preposterous and immediately wished for a better explanation.

Josiah drank more milk, swishing it around in his cheeks, and thought about this.

“So all the people are pretending to be sad?”

“Yes. Unless the play is a happy play Then the people watching it are happy.”

“They are pretending to be happy?” Josiah asked.

“Well, yes.”

Josiah swished another mouthful of milk between his teeth and swallowed.

“Why don't people pretend to be happy all the time?”

Clever boy. Eliot saw traps at every turn. How could he answer without revealing that the world into which he had brought this child was a disappointing place where adults spent precious time trying to escape their ordinary lives? How could he offer an explanation that did not sound like an apology?

“Well…” Eliot proceeded carefully, watching his son's trusting
eyes, wanting to offer a bit of wisdom that the boy would carry with him and draw on in future crises. “People don't need to pretend all the time. They just do it a little bit, every now and then, because they find it amusing.”

Josiah thought about this. He tilted back his empty glass and waited for the ghostly film of milk along the sides to collect and trickle into his mouth. In any other child, the thought would have fled by now, the target of interest shifted. But Eliot knew that Josiah had taken in all that was said and was kneading the information, working and reworking it, looking for the hard lump in the argument. Josiah finished the creamy dregs and smached his lips in what struck Eliot as a deliberate parody of lip-smacking. Still holding the glass in both hands, his son looked at him and smiled.

“That was good milk.”

Then the boy set the empty glass on the table and for a moment assumed the startling gravity of an adult in possession of uncomfortable news.

“Papa?”

“Yes, Josiah?”

“Papa, I don't think that people should ever make-pretend at all.”

Odd sucks at his little dead tooth while he shovels. His eyes sting from the bright heat. The pencil-maker, who rechristened himself Henry David Thoreau, works beside him. He does not strike Odd as so strange a man as Otis Dickerson seemed to think. When Henry learned that Odd had lived alone in the woods for a time, he showed great interest and asked about the construction of the cabin and its location and the number of seasons Odd had spent divorced from the company of men. Odd did not know how to explain that he had never felt comfortable in the company of others and so had felt no deprivation. But the fire allowed little chance for talk, and they soon turned their full attention to driving back the surging flames. It seems to Odd that the fire is growing angrier, and he can just make out a snarling beneath the roar. A shower of swirling red embers rains down upon them, and Odd thinks he hears Henry say something about finding beauty in this.

Staring into the blaze, Odd tries to see it. The brilliant gushings of copper and gold and the shimmering air boiled silver; these may mimic the shades of beautiful things, he thinks, but there can be no beauty in a thing that destroys for no reason. He thinks of the flicking torch in his father's hand, and of the flash and the great ball of red heat devouring the
Sovereign of the Seas
. It seems to him that beauty belongs to what is fragile and vulnerable, forever in need of protection. He thinks of Emma.

Odd can find nothing in the fire but tragedy. He watches Henry push his shovel through the ash and pull it back, making a little powdery hump of smoking embers. Between intermittent waves of smoke, he sees the man whose barn and woods have burned. He sits in the dirt, face buried in his hands. Odd wonders if this farmer has ever done something to deserve punishment
— shooting turtles for sport, drinking himself senseless, deceiving the woman he should protect
. No one is supposed to suffer needlessly, not in the New World, and this suspicion tempers Odd's sympathy for the man.

Henry makes a shallow stab at the dirt with his shovel and wheezes. The smoke is beginning to wear on all of them, Odd thinks. Several men have collapsed, coughing and sputtering oaths against whoever started the fire. Odd tries to take small breaths, tries to defeat his own thirst for huge quantities of pure, cool air. He wonders what it is like to suffocate, to drown, to gag at the end of a rope, and then he wonders if these men will insist on punishing someone for causing this calamity. He worries that they will learn of his small fire on Woburn Farm and accuse him of losing control of it. What is the penalty for carelessness?

The progress of the men is visible now. The fire is still devouring new territory along its flanks, still sending out armies of hot cinders, but it is clearly in slow retreat, and they are forcing it back onto scorched land, where there is little left to sustain it. Where the fire seems to have surrendered, dark patches of brush smolder insolently; here and there the fire chokes on its own smoke, waiting to revive.

Odd wipes the grit from his eyes. He hopes Emma has shown the good sense to flee the flames, which have surely already crossed the fields of Woburn Farm and reached the farmhouse. Odd knows that Emma does not understand his aversion to fire. He has worried that his refusal to kindle his own hearth might
seem a ploy so that he could eat his meals at her table. He turned down her invitations as often as he thought necessary. Still, at least once a week he found himself sitting between Emma and Mr. Woburn at the small table in their warm kitchen, shrouded in the comforting smells of baking bread and roasting meat.

When he sat at her table he tried not to let his gaze wander where it didn't belong, and whenever he caught himself following the line of her forearm—plump beneath her white sleeve, up to her elbow, her shoulder, the milk-white skin of her neck—he forced his eyes back to the table. He tried to keep them on the steaming heaps of food that she put before him on the heavy pewter plates. Great mounds of steaming potatoes towering over shanks of meat, bright vegetables boiled to creamy softness, crusty rolls piled haphazardly beneath a striped linen cloth, dark stews so thick they might have stood on their own outside their crocks, and swollen pies pregnant with fruit. It was hard to believe the amount of food she prepared for three people, and yet, at the end of a meal, there was seldom a bite left, especially after she had prepared Odd a basket to carry back to his cabin to make sure that he had food enough for breakfast.

“You do not eat enough, Oddmund Hus,” she would often say. “I cannot understand why you don't take every meal with us here.”

“I don't like to impose.”

“There is food enough. And we have no one to share it with.”

At such comments Mr. Woburn would always look at her sharply. “That's enough. Let him be. The man likes to have some time to himself.”

“Everyone enjoys having some company with their meal,” Emma would insist. “It's no good to eat alone, and we have plenty for a whole
family.”

“Some don't need to be talking all the time,” Mr. Woburn said, his mouth filled with potato.

“It's a shame for food to go to waste,” Emma said. “And it's not as though we have children to feed.”

“Then you should cook less.”

The conversations at dinner were usually the same. Mr. Woburn did not seem to mind having Odd at his table; he just felt no need to talk about it. Odd figured out that this simple rule governed Mr. Woburn's approach to the world: nothing was unbearable, so long as a man spent no time discussing it. Odd seldom had much to say, but he could have sat for hours listening to Emma chatter on about the weather or the color of the sky at noon or the strange behavior of one of the chickens, pausing only to laugh self-deprecatingly at an example of her own foolishness. Emma would talk about anything, just to keep the semblance of conversation alive, sometimes going so far as to respond cheerily to her own idle questions when her husband refused to answer. There was one thing, though, which she spoke of only to Odd, and she did so only when her husband was not present.

Some afternoons, when Mr. Woburn was in town, Emma would insist that Odd join her for tea on the wide front porch, and together they would admire one of her new books. Sometimes she asked him to read to her from a passage she could not decipher on her own. She would offer him the rocking chair that matched hers, not realizing that by making him sit in her husband's chair she made it impossible for him to resist the fantasy that this was his house, his farm, his wife. Emma always looked uncomfortable, her thighs pressing against the confining armrests, stretching the seams of her dress. The seat was too narrow for her, and she had to hunch forward with her cup and saucer balanced on one knee. But she smiled as she sipped her tea and laughed apologetically at the occasional creaks that issued from the overburdened chair.

“My husband does not approve of me spending money in this way.” This was how Emma prefaced almost every new book she
showed to Odd. “But I cannot help myself. Have you read this one? It is by a British poet, a young man named John Keats.”

Odd held the small book and rubbed the whorled leather cover, smooth and shiny like healed scars. Emma sipped her tea, a fat pinkie extended from the tiny cup like a little sausage.

“There is one poem so lovely that I have already memorized the first bits,” she said.
“‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
…’ That's how it begins. Isn't that wonderful?
‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness … close… close bosom fiend of… of…’
Well, I don't remember what comes next, but then there is a part about fruit swelling with ripeness, and plump gourds. I have only made out a few of those words so far. So much beauty in so few words; it makes me want to curl up inside them and fall asleep. Isn't that silly?”

“No,” said Odd, tonguing his dead tooth. “Not at all.”

“You're sweet for saying so. You can borrow that if you'd like. I cannot put it on the shelf just yet or Mr. Woburn will notice. I'm not supposed to buy more than one a month, and I already bought a blank book to practice my letters in. But the pages are empty, so I don't think it should count.”

Odd felt the small book suddenly grow heavier in his hands, and he leaned forward in his chair, as if pulled off balance.

“This poet,” Odd said, wanting to say something appreciative, “he must be a very happy man, I think, to make such beauty with words.”

“Oh, no. I was told he had a very sad life and died right after he wrote this poem. That's what Mr. Fields told me when I bought it in his shop.”

Odd opened the book and closed it. He thought about autumn and swollen pumpkins, and about the unembarrassed way that Emma recited the word
bosom
.

He looked at Emma as she sipped her tea, and then said
quietly, unable to stop the words that spilled out, “I would let you buy as many books as you wanted.”

Emma put down her tea and held a plate of shortbread toward him.

“Oh, you
are
a sweet man, Oddmund Hus.”