Woodsburner (17 page)

He was a boy when his father began manufacturing pencils in the small room at the back of their rented house. It is still an honest enough pursuit, Henry thinks, a humble and forthright occupation. Its absolute impunity is compromised only by the observable fact that his father conducts the business at no small
profit. Henry grew up amid the smells of wood shavings and glue, learned the grammar of pencil manufacture along with mathematics and history, and he has worked in his father's little factory, off and on, for years. But only recently has he come to accept that his filial service to John Thoreau & Co. may very likely constitute his defining labor as a man.

Henry assumes that chance played no small role in the early success enjoyed by the Thoreau brand of pencils—chance and a lode of exceptionally compliant graphite. American pencils were generally regarded as impotent tools: greasy, gritty, easily smeared. For years, the Munroes and the Dixons and the other pencil-making families of America sought the proper mixture to improve their dismal stores of the twinkling black mineral. Glue, bayberry wax, spermaceti, and graphite were all to be found in the most popular concoctions. But American pencils remained temperamental things—glutinous in summer, brittle in winter. Some pencil-makers sealed their boxes with forged foreign stamps to make their pencils easier to sell, since everyone knew that pencils of real quality were to be had only from Europe
—crayons
from Pannier & Paillard of Paris,
Bleistiften
from the Fabers of Nuremberg—and the very best came from London, made with superior English antimony from Borrowdale. But European pencils were an expensive luxury, and in times of conflict and embargo they could not be had at all. Americans needed pencils of their own.

And so it seems to Henry that fate must have been at work when his maternal uncle, Charles Dunbar, stumbled upon a rich vein of graphite—what some still called plumbago—near Brixton in the hills of New Hampshire. Charles persuaded Henry's father to open a pencil factory after John Thoreau's attempts at coaxing a living from the soil had proved fruitless for yet another season. Henry's father was earnest in his new trade, even if he was disheartened to find that making pencils was a dirty business. The
New Hampshire plumbago crumbled at the touch. It smeared, left greasy smudges on his hands, clothes, face. The walls and doorframes of Henry's childhood home collected black fingerprints; at dinner a loaf of bread bore the leaden mark of his father's hand where he tore off a piece for his gravy, and customers complained that their documents left traces of the words and figures they recorded. But, even so, Charles Dunbar's plumbago proved to be superior to anything else available, and in no time the pencils that issued from the little factory of John Thoreau & Co. were regarded as the finest in America. Some shopkeepers in Boston proudly displayed the award-winning Thoreau pencils—which did not need the masquerade of forged foreign stamps—as if they were fine cigars, ribbon-bound in handsome wooden boxes.

And then fate intervened again, Henry thinks. He wonders how often his life will be affected by accidents, by the chance occurrences that outweighed the impetus of his own intentions. Henry did not want to spend his life making pencils. He gave up working in his father's factory so that he might devote his energies to writing and teaching. He traveled to New York to pursue a writing career and to tutor the sons of William Emerson, brother of Henry's good friend Waldo, in whose home he had been living for almost two years. It was Waldo who encouraged his writing, insisted that he begin keeping a journal, urged him to move to New York and cast himself into the wider world. The arrangement was, at first, all that Henry could have hoped for. But he soon found life in New York a wholly unpleasant and lonely affair, unless one enjoyed the companionship of the wild pigs roaming the city streets. Even the weather displeased him; it seemed, if possible, colder and wetter than in New England.

And there it is
, Henry concludes, as he watches another leafless maple succumb to the flames.
There is the distant cause that has resulted in this calamity before him. Cause and effect
. If New York had
been more hospitable, if he had found a publisher there for his poems and essays, if tutoring the Emerson boys had brought him more satisfaction, if he had found another friend like Waldo, if only
one
of these things had transpired, he might happily have remained in that great American city, and the Concord Woods would not now be aflame.

But Henry did not stay in New York for long. Homesick and disappointed, he returned to Concord, a route he seemed destined to travel again and again. Determined to be useful to his family, he resolved to help his father improve his pencil-making business. Henry experimented with new blends of plumbago paste in search of a better filling. He mixed plumbago with boot polish. He stirred in ash and tallow and spit. He added silt from the bottom of the Sudbury River. He sprinkled in manure. And then he mixed the graphite with Bavarian clay and found that, by carefully varying the ratio of the two, he could control the hardness and darkness of the resulting paste. He designated pencils of varying hardness with
SS
or
S
or
H
or
HH
. He made pencils in Carpenter's Large, Round, and Oval sizes, black or red. The new blend left a rich mark, smooth and smudgeproof; Thoreau pencils gave testimony that American pencils need not crumble under the pressure of a nervous hand or change consistency with the weather. Within months of developing the new filling, he heard that men of discerning taste—men who appreciated the qualities of a fine line well drawn—refused to write with anything else. Henry found some contentment in knowing that he was providing Americans with pencils worthy of their grand ambitions.

John Thoreau & Co. began supplying the new lead to other pencil-makers at considerable profit, while Henry turned his attention to the machinery of the business. It was tedious work. The wood had to be split into thin fingers, the halves grooved, the hollows packed with lead paste, and the halves glued back together,
all by hand. The monotony of the process was surpassed only by its wastefulness. But Henry knew that his special mixture tolerated fire and could be baked into cakes hard enough to withstand cutting. He invented a machine to slice the hardened lead cakes into thin rods. He invented another machine for drilling holes in pencil wood. To better grind the plumbago into the finest possible dust, he built a churnlike device that operated on its own once his sisters, Helen and Sophia, wound the clever spring. He devised a method for tamping the hardened lead rods into the hollowed wooden shafts. The shop overflowed with cords of pencils piled high, like a miniature forest laid low; Henry and his father walked among the little fallen trees like gargantuan lumberjacks. For the first time in their lives, the Thoreau family could begin to think about purchasing a parcel of land on which to build a home of their own. No longer would they live in rented lodgings. With little forethought, Henry became an engineer of sorts; after years of failing to choose a career himself, he found that circumstance had chosen for him.

Then, wearied by his industriousness, he decided to take a holiday, to stretch his legs and clear his lungs. His pencil work kept him indoors, bent to the workbench, breathing the heavy air of graphite and sawdust. He and Edward Sherman Hoar set out to wander under the open sky, a day of gliding over noiseless waters, bothering no one save the occasional bittern nesting along the river's edge. They caught a mess of fish and thought to boil a chowder. They forgot matches, but fate interceded, yet once more, and a shoemaker near the river gave them three red-tipped marvels that they could strike anywhere. The matches were a great improvement over the phosphorus locofocos notorious for erupting in their boxes. Henry struck the match against a hollow tree stump; everything was as it should have been, but the grass was exceedingly dry and the wind exceptionally strong.

Henry hugs his knees tightly, watches the half-mile-wide fire, and considers the many individual acts that led to this moment. He has gone over this again and again. Is blame elastic, or can it be confined to a single point? He watches as the southwest wind continues to push the flames away from the river, away from the hollow stump at Fair Haven Bay, over Shrub Oak Plain, toward Fair Haven Hill, Bear Garden Hill, and Concord. The fire continues its dizzying climb into the uppermost reaches of the trees and beyond, hurling itself upward, reaching for the clouds. On the far side of the fire, the newly laid Boston–Fitchburg rail line will create a firebreak, Henry thinks. Although the trains will not begin their journeys between Boston and Fitchburg until the summer, Henry already despises the railroad for the ruin it will bring to the serenity of the woods. Now he wonders if there will be woods left to disturb.

Henry slaps his thighs, kneads the muscles with his knuckles, begins to feel life slowly returning. He will be ready to rejoin the battle when the men finally arrive from town. But he has begun to worry. He expects to see scores of men running through the trees, but it already seems that an hour or more has passed since he and Edward parted ways. Has it been longer? What if Edward cannot convince the people of Concord that the fire is of a magnitude that warrants their concern? What if the stout farmer and his dog have been overcome by smoke and cannot corroborate Edward's alarm? At what point, Henry wonders, should he conclude that he has been abandoned on the hill, left to face the flames alone?

He knows it is of no real use, his sitting and watching, but he cannot turn away from the raucous fugue. Viscous sap bubbles from blackened bark with greasy hisses. Pinecones squeal and pop. Leaves whistle and disappear. Trunks crack open, limbs burst, tiny buds snap with tiny cries. Other cries are unbearable. Birds lost in the smoke, unable to fly upward without knowledge of the sky, call
for direction; squirrels stranded in the attics of trees chatter fiercely at the invisible ground. Nothing emerges.

Henry rubs his legs vigorously. He drives his knuckles deep into the muscles as if he might force the regret from his limbs, wring out the hopeless desire to undo what he has done. He wishes now that he had taken no holiday. He wishes that he had remained in the workshop today, shut away from the natural world, hunched over his geared inventions, blackening his lungs with clouds of powdered pencil lead.

He follows the narrow cow path called Corner Road and crosses Hubbard's Bridge and does not pause to watch the Concord River sparkling in the gaps between the loose boards. In summer the bridge is slippery with moss, but today the boards are as dry and dusty as the fields. Under his footsteps they clatter loosely against the worn crossbeams. Now and again he thinks he can smell the smoke behind him, but he does not turn to look. He takes short, explosive strides, and in no time he passes Bear Garden Hill, nearly halfway to town. He would rather not go. He is, at best, a reluctant messenger, and he worries what the people of Concord will think when he delivers the news. He avoids them whenever he can. It is easier to shun their company altogether than to bear the little disappointments of their polite indifference. They are always uneasy with him, always unsure what to make of his quiet, solitary manner. He wonders if they will be suspicious when he tells them what is happening in the woods. Will they accuse him of causing the fire through his own carelessness?

If Mr. Woburn himself had asked him to go to town, Odd might have found a reason not to, but he never refuses Emma. He cannot stand the thought of disappointing her. Odd counts his steps. He knows the number the milelong walk requires, give or take a few strides. He travels this road frequently and can reckon the extra time needed to make the trip ankle-deep in mud or
knee-deep in snow. Today, with the wind at his back, there is nothing to slow his pace but his own dread; he will make the trip in less than half an hour.

The first time he wandered down Corner Road, he did not expect to return. That was just after his uncle Søren's death, a decade earlier, when Odd found himself abandoned once more in the strange new world. He no longer remembers exactly how many years he lived with Søren Hus in the tidy house on Court Street near Boston's busy Scollay Square, though he can vividly recall how it felt to step through the doorway that first time, like being wrapped in a thick blanket smelling heavily of spices he could not identify, a scent of sweet and bitter confusion. It is easy for him to summon vague impressions such as these; they linger on his senses like an aftertaste of experience, but the facts themselves never survive so well. Most of the nutshell-hard memories from his childhood, the demonstrable tokens of a life lived elsewhere, have all but vanished. He can no longer recall the sound of his father's voice, but he remembers the sensation of the deep baritone resonating against his breastbone, and he has no trouble at all remembering the tickle of stiff whiskers against the back of his neck, or the oily smell of his father's hair. Odd can still feel the soft, blubbery fatness of the pink mole on his father's wrist; he could not resist poking it in fascination whenever his father fell asleep in the chair by the hearth. But Odd can recall none of the practical advice that might have helped him find his way through this foreign land on his own.