Woodsburner (11 page)

Some who saw the end of the
Sovereign of the Seas
spoke of it
as if they had been standing on the doomed ship's deck and could verify the cause. There was mention of an old cannon in the hold, forgotten from the last war with the British; there was talk of a lightning bolt thick as a man's arm splitting the vessel's hull; there was speculation that witchcraft was to blame. Some fishermen claimed to have seen smoke before the explosion, and they surmised that something volatile in the cargo hold must have come into contact with an open flame. There was little else to be said. The fishermen returned to their nets. The newspapers had plenty of other wrecks to report. The bankers who had invested in the ship's cargo wanted only to forget their loss. Scavengers found nothing salvageable among the wreckage that washed ashore later in the day. The only survivor was a ten-year-old Norwegian boy, whom they found sprawled unconscious on the sand amid charred bodies and blackened remnants of sails and masts and decking.

The scavengers carried Oddmund away before the tide could reclaim him. In his pockets they discovered nothing that might tell them who he was, nothing of any value except for a small, smooth stone shot through with a coppery vein. They left the worthless stone with him, thinking it might remind him of his home, his family, his name, in the event that the sea had stolen those memories along with the rest of the cargo.

Oddmund had no recollection of what happened to him once the fiery cloud let him drop. When he finally awoke, he expected things to be as they were before he left his home. He expected to see his mother leaning over him the way she did whenever he shivered with fever, expected to feel the thud of his father's heavy footsteps in the next room, to hear Birgit's chirping laughter, to smell a salty chowder of salmon or yellow peas bubbling in the pot. Instead, the first thing Oddmund saw upon opening his eyes was fire and blood. The blood fell in large red drops from grievous wounds, from a heart swollen and red, immersed in flames but
unburned, somehow continuing to beat outside the chest of the soft-smiling man whose unblinking eyes held him in their gaze. The vision terrified him. He had seen the man before, he thought, though never with the burning heart. Oddmund squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of his mother's gentle voice. He tried to wish her face before him. He found the small stone someone had placed under his pillow, and he clutched it tightly in his little fist until his knuckles turned white and his hand felt as though it had become hard as the stone. He drifted away again, but every time he opened his eyes the man was still there; he seemed to be waiting for something, his disembodied heart still bleeding, still burning.

On the fourth day of his convalescence, Oddmund realized that he was looking at a large painting on the opposite wall, and then he remembered one of the man's many names. Oddmund's mother had taught him to memorize prayers to the solemn statue of the Savior in the small church near their home, but if the statue he prayed to had held a burning heart it had been hidden somewhere beneath the thick folds of its marble robe. Oddmund wanted to ask his mother if this was the same gentle God in the stories she read aloud, but he knew that she was not going to come to him. He understood that she and Birgit and his father had gone away. For a while, the painting made him hope that they might have come through the flames without being consumed, burning yet unburned like the miraculous heart. He hoped they might somehow have drifted back home unharmed, even if this meant that he would never see them again. But, no matter how hard he wished it, he could not convince himself that it was so. The painting, he decided, was a cruel trick, the fanciful strokes of an artist's brush, and after his recent glimpse of heaven on the cloud of hot air Oddmund decided he would prefer to keep his eyes fixed solidly on the earth for as long as he walked upon it.

A woman in a black hood with a stiff white brim spoke to him in a kind voice, gave him gentle commands that he followed without really knowing what the words meant. The scavengers had left him on the steps of the Saint Vincent Female Orphan Asylum. The Catholic Daughters of Charity bandaged the burns on his arms and chest; they set his broken shin. They prayed for him. The nuns fed him salted cod, told him how fortunate he was. In simple English, they said that God had smiled on him. They reminded him that he should be thankful that he had arrived. Eventually, he understood their meaning:
Just think how much worse it would be to find oneself orphaned in the Old World, with no hope of reaching the shores of the promised land
.

The nuns could not refuse to help a child so terribly injured as Oddmund, but they dared not jeopardize the innocence of their girls by keeping a boy among them at the Purchase Street asylum. Once his fever passed and it was clear that he was beginning to mend, they sent him back out to sea. Oddmund could not communicate the panic he felt as they carried him, swathed in bandages, back to the docks, placed him on board another boat—a small one, with no sails—and began to take him away from the New World where he had only lately arrived. Such a small boat could not possibly survive the ocean, and Oddmund believed that they were only going to row him out to the wreckage, to return him to his family. The journey took an hour, by his reckoning. They docked at an island in Boston Harbor, and they delivered Oddmund to the Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys. He recovered from his injuries and, with the hundred or so other orphans and street Arabs and guttersnipes, he was given a blue uniform and taught how to be a farmer.

The other boys found him amusing, for all the wrong reasons. Oddmund did not understand why they snickered whenever his name was called, and it perplexed him that their sneering did not
diminish even after he had learned enough English to be able to explain the significance of his name. The other boys, brutish and dull, found his name immeasurably funny, and Oddmund learned his first lesson in the New World: one must never underestimate the persistent convictions of the ignorant.

Oddmund held on to the smooth gray stone that he had rescued from the deck of the
Sovereign of the Seas
. Aside from his tattered clothes, this was the only possession that survived with him. One afternoon, wandering alone along the edge of the island, Oddmund found two short wooden tubes half buried in the sand. The tubes were so arranged that the smaller slid into the larger, and he decided that this may very well have been the spyglass used by the captain of the
Sovereign of the Seas
. Though the lenses had fallen out and the brass rings at either end were missing, Oddmund clutched the useless spyglass as if it held forbidden secrets, and looked through its empty tunnel, comforted by the confined perspective it offered. He carried it everywhere, hidden in his pocket with the stones he collected from the grounds around the asylum. From the window of the dormitory, he surveyed the harbor, the masts of the tall ships at the wharf, the steeples of the churches of Boston, and, when he dared, he scanned the dark surface of the water where, to the best of his knowledge, the
Sovereign of the Seas
had disappeared. His nightly searches with the useless spyglass only added to the mirth of the other boys, who believed his puzzling behavior confirmed the meaning of his peculiar name.

For almost three years, Oddmund remained at the asylum on Thompson Island while his Unitarian caretakers circulated his name through the surrounding counties. They had reunited other families. They printed his name in newspapers. They posted bills. They wrote letters and knocked on doors in search of a Hus who might take him in. There was a
Hoss
family in Connecticut. There
were
Hooses
in Vermont. There were
Hesses
in the Berkshires and
Hasses
in the Appalachians. But these settlers were not included on the family tree that Lars Hus burned on board the
Sovereign of the Seas
. The Hosses and the Hooses ignored the letters. The Hesses and the Hasses turned away inquiring visitors. Those who did respond swore ardently that they were not related to the poor boy's family; they insisted they had never heard of the father; they said they already had children enough, and some confessed that they wanted nothing to do with an orphaned Hus from the Old World.

But it was only a matter of time before someone retrieved him. Oddmund might eventually have found himself alone, to fend for himself on the streets of Boston, had it not been for the well-dressed man with hard sweets in his coat pocket who drifted up the orphanage steps one day and knocked gently on its doors. The man conferred with the ministers in hushed tones; he said he came as soon as he learned of the possibility, and one look at Oddmund told him that his suspicions were correct. When he smiled—a mouthful of white, even teeth—his bottom lip contracted into an inverted
V
at its middle.

“You must be Master Oddmund,” the man said. “How delightful.” He presented Oddmund with a peppermint lozenge in his open palm. “I am your uncle, Søren Mikkel Hus. I have long hoped someone would come.”

Thus did something discarded and forgotten by the family Hus reappear, washed up by the inexplicable undercurrents of fate.

Eliot squints through his spectacles at the fat pillar of smoke rising in the distance and wonders if there is cause for concern. It is possible, he thinks, that his heavy glass lenses are making the plume appear larger than it really is. No one else on Main Street seems to take notice. He slips the spectacles into a coat pocket, then pulls a key from another pocket and works it in the lock of the shop's door. He has heard stories of men who thought they had purchased a property only to learn that they had procured nothing more than a counterfeit deed and a phony key, and he is relieved when the bolt reluctantly gives way. Of course, he will need to replace the lock with something more modern, he thinks, and the cracked pane of glass in the door will need fixing as well. Once inside, he is disappointed to find the space smaller than he expected, narrower and darker than his Boston shop. And the smell surprises him. It will take some effort to expel the pungent aroma of boot polish and mildew and rotted stockings. But here, at least, he will not find himself in daily contest with the Old Corner Bookstore, will not have to compete for the attention of the customers who frequent Ticknor's cluttered rooms, which, as Eliot recollects with some consolation, are not without their own malodorous history.

The building in which William Davis Ticknor runs his bookstore has stood at the corner of School and Washington Streets
since 1718, when it began as Thomas Crease's Apothecary, and patrons of the Old Corner Bookstore can still smell the abrasive chemical perfume beneath the more alluring scent of leather bindings and ink and slowly moldering paper stored in the printing house on the second floor. But the stink does not keep the eminent writers of New England from gathering there for readings and conversation. Eliot knows his Boston shop will never become a meetinghouse for the likes of Longfellow and Holmes and the other literati who lounge about Ticknor's as if it were a public drawing room. But he also knows that a customer with a full purse wants something more than the privilege of mixing in famous company; he desires items that cannot be found anywhere else, and Eliot has become proficient at attending to these needs. He would happily open his doors for a lone, paying customer before letting in a hoard of poets with empty pockets. Still, he cannot help believing that things should have turned out otherwise, that the Old Corner Bookstore should, rightfully, be his.

He has worked through the fantasy a thousand times, and though he tries not to dwell on it, the suspicion that he was swindled out of his destiny claws at him from within, like a tiny spur of bone at the base of his skull. A decade earlier, Eliot fully expected that, in due time, he would be made a partner in Carter, Hendee & Co. He had, after all, given five years of loyal service to Timothy Carter and Charles Hendee, who then owned the Old Corner Bookstore and the publishing enterprise on its upper floors. Eliot had envisioned what he would do at the helm of the company; he made imaginary lists of the great literary works he would publish and the new authors he would discover. He never dreamed that William Davis Ticknor—a man with little experience in publishing—would take over the business with the help of Carter's older brother. When Ticknor, Allen, and Carter purchased Carter, Hendee & Co., they announced that, henceforth,
they would publish books of medical interest only. Eliot foresaw a dreadful future for himself, editing the cramped scribblings of ghoulish surgeons, surrounded by tedious engravings of frog bladders and misshapen tumors. So he set out on his own, certain that Ticknor's shop would founder within a few months and that the Old Corner Bookstore would soon be placed on auction. But Eliot had been wrong.