Woodsburner (44 page)

Odd hears the pencil-maker wheeze loudly. Henry's eyes are red-rimmed, and he places a hand on Odd's shoulder to steady himself. Then he rubs his eyes, stares, and points. Odd follows Henry's skinny finger and assumes that his own watering eyes have begun projecting visions onto the terrible landscape. What he sees is impossible. A white shape, a ghost or an angel, materializes in the distance and glides toward them, indifferent to the danger, floating unharmed over burning logs, passing fearlessly beneath flaming trees ready to topple. From a distance, the figure seems to have wings amended to human form. The other men see the specter, too, and they call out in disbelief; they shout warnings, as if the strange creature were unaware of the danger. The apparition heads directly into the heart of the fire, armed with neither ax nor shovel. Then Odd and the others realize that it is not an angel at all but something even more improbable, an ordinary man clad in white robes. The man is not floating but stumbling and staggering deeper into the fire. The men yell at him. They urge him to turn back. One man starts to run after him, but another man restrains him, warns him that the doomed man will drag him into the flames the way a drowning man will sink his would-be rescuer. The poor fool has no doubt been driven mad by the heat, they say. The men yell louder still, until the white robes grow dim and disappear into the smoking woods. An awed silence falls over them.

“The man is touched by madness,” Henry explains to Odd,
breathing heavily. “The natural elements can powerfully disturb the finite mind.”

Odd clutches the handle of the shovel tightly and wonders what Emma is doing at this very moment. He pictures her alone, facing the flames that have driven a man mad, ruined a farm, a barn, and an untold number of trees. And what of her sensitive mind? Could her worries drive her to the kind of distraction that the pencil-maker has just described? Odd thinks of the expensive books on her shelves, the pages of beautiful, flammable words. She would never abandon them to the flames.

Henry clasps Odd's shoulder again for balance; Odd feels the subtle transfer of weight as the man leans more heavily against him. Henry churns something up from his lungs, spits, and clears his throat. Odd looks around and sees that the other men are beginning to flag in their efforts as well, unable to withstand their growing exhaustion.

“We need to keep going,” Odd says. He wrestles his shovel through roots and stones and tries to read the fire's next move, tries to listen to the strategies whispered by one flame to the next, but he cannot fight back the pestering image of Emma trussed up in her enormous, elaborate undergarment, wielding an ax before a looming column of flames.

The Reverend Caleb Ephraim Dowdy swims happily through the burning sea.

The fires part before him and the flames touch him not. Trees fall, shaking the ground with powerful tremors. Caleb shouts passages from Scripture, barely able to hear his own voice over the thundering fire.
“I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?”
Great spires of bright orange heat tower above him. Billowing clouds of soot and ash swirl around him, lift him off his feet, propel him onward. If this were indeed the anteroom to hell, it is infinitely more glorious than foretold. The image on his father's stained-glass window had never come close in intensity. Searing heat and tumultuous rumbling. No mere abstraction, this. There truly is nothing in God's creation that does not possess some form of beauty, however mysterious. He walks calmly through the maelstrom, descending deeper, level by level. If these glories are but the furnishings of purgatory, he can only shudder in anticipation of what waits at Pandemonium's heart.

Moments ago, Caleb passed legions of the condemned, toiling and suffering in the heat. Men half consumed by the fires, swinging useless implements, shovels and axes and hoes, condemned men sentenced to perform these vain tasks again and again, in infinite torment. But among them he did not see the damned soul of Desmond Boone. He saw a man weeping, and one whose
clothes had been burned from his waist, his exposed torso shimmering in the heat. All around, men choked and gasped. He saw a giant, bald devil, skin black as night and ears pointed, ordering the men to work harder, sending them into the flames where they were hottest. Two more dark-skinned demons stood at his side, and their exposed arms and chests glistened in the flickering light, their muscles swelling with effort as they labored like men possessed. And these poor souls called out to Caleb, crying out for his aid, but he ignored their pleas. He is not of this place, and cannot countermand the sentences they serve.

He has left them behind, but still he can hear their desperate cries as he plunges deeper into the horrifying depths.
“Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more than they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.”
Caleb sees through the flames, sees through the burning to the bodies ablaze, the curling bark and smoldering skeletons of trunk and branch and limb. What is the body of man but a rootless tree, as readily devoured by flame and beetle alike, as fit to feed the hungry soil as any piece of rotting offal.

He cannot find Desmond Boone, but this gives him hope of another sort. One way or another, he will have his answer, he will demand his epiphany. He plunges on into the bright darkness, ignoring the intensifying heat, ignoring the cinders that land in his hair and scorch his scalp, ignoring the flaming branches that scratch his arms and tear at his robes; he can smell the hot fabric, heated to the point of combustion. He will have his punishment. He will demand it. If there is justice, then it must befall him now. He will not be deprived of the damnation he deserves. The heat bores into him. He can no longer hear the tormented cries of the other sufferers, only the thunderous rush of burning, like the crashing of waves at the ocean's edge. But he does not stop. He
will not be deterred. He alone will move the hand of God. He will have his proof. And then he hears a crack, like the snapping of a giant's neck, and from above he sees it coming, a mighty tree towering no more, plunging to the earth, falling toward him with the speed of denunciation, and Caleb closes his eyes, thinks of the jawless skull crushed beneath the rotted trunk, and waits for the obliterating impact.

Henry cannot believe it, though he sees its beginnings, the clumsy-slow retreat, the fire a dying beast, enraged and indignant. Nothing goes gently. The men are encouraged, but they do not rejoice. They are familiar with nature's deceptions. They have seen April blizzards mock naïve buds, have watched May frosts reap tender crops. The men have been fooled to hopefulness by abundant spring showers and outbluffed by late-summer droughts. They know that the diminishing flames are not finished raising havoc. The weeping man's barn has collapsed into itself, a blackened heap of lumber, more bonfire than building, and his haystacks glow red-black like spent coal. The weeping man is still among them, despondent, staggering aimlessly, as if drunk. His horses and cattle have run screaming from the flames and are nowhere to be seen. A few of his chickens remain, stupid curious, pecking at the falling soot and staring at the barn's glowing flinders. His portion of the woods is completely lost, the unharvested timber ruined, and his fields are buried beneath smoldering ash like a blanket of filthy snow. The fields, Henry thinks, will not bear fruit this season.

The men have worked at a brutal pace without respite. They can almost believe it true that Concord will be spared this destruction, but they do not allow this relief to slow their efforts. These men are happier now than they have been for some time, Henry
thinks, because today they are men of action. The fire has offered them much sport, and yet he knows that they will not abandon their need for retribution. The woods have been steadily disappearing for decades, but no one has ever suggested that farmers and carpenters be judged criminals. No one has proposed levying a fine against the engineers of the Fitchburg rail line for carving a path through the peaceful forest and filling in the extremities of Walden Pond. No guilt has ever fallen upon the people of Concord for the loss of the wild green world where their town sits. But Henry knows that the men who have fought the fire here today will persist in punishing the author of this conflagration, and it is because they do not like to be awakened to themselves.

Henry works his shovel in the hot soil, flings steaming piles of dirt onto the flaming brush. His sweat mixes with soot, traces salty, acrid rivulets into his eyes and mouth. The wooden shaft is heavy as lead in his blistered hands, and he feels his motions grow stiff and sluggish. Henry watches in admiration as Young America plants his shovel deep and leans on the rounded end of its worn handle. He observes how the man's short, broad chest heaves from the exertion, how his rolled shirtsleeves, soaked with sweat, cling to the tapered swells of his shoulders and biceps, and he winces at the sight of a scarred forearm, smooth and taut. Henry is suddenly conscious of a heaviness in his chest. His breaths come short and labored, full of smoke that feels solid in his lungs. He thinks of the string of fish gasping in the bottom of their boat that morning. He doubles over, hands on knees, coughing, wheezing.

Henry feels a steadying hand on his back.

“Sit a moment,” Young America says, the tip of his tongue hiding the little black tooth.

Henry shakes his head, flaps his arm. His lungs are too greedy for breath to allow him to speak. He swallows mouthfuls of air,
wishes he could open his jaw wider, and then he spots a man coming toward them through the smoke, barking something indecipherable. Not until the man is upon them does Henry recognize him as one of the champion pissers from the earlier contest. The man lumbers under the weight of his paunch and uses his long-handled ax as a crutch.

“Ho there, Mr. Oddmund Hus!” says the pisser. “I am surprised to find you among us.”