Woodsburner (29 page)

Sometimes he composed sermons while he chopped, swinging the hatchet ferociously, as if he thought the Devil himself resided in the trees. Caleb worked until the pain in his arms and shoulders overwhelmed whatever part of his brain occupied itself with his distress. Sometimes he returned from the woods empty-handed; sometimes he returned with a cartload of split logs ready
for the hearth. He chopped wood for elderly widows; he hauled cords to the Sisters of Charity at the Female Asylum, to the School for the Feeble-Minded, to the City Lunatic Asylum and the House of Industry. And once, after he had chopped enough for those in need, he envisioned how he might employ the overgrown American forests in the salvation of his followers. Caleb amassed a great pile of firewood behind his church, and he engaged a carpenter from his congregation to install a large cast-iron stove behind the altar, where it would not be seen. No other church in Boston was equipped with so indulgent a comfort as a stove, but comfort was not at all what he had in mind.

Caleb still takes satisfaction in recalling how profusely the worshippers in the Court Street church sweated as he delivered a three-hour sermon on one exceptionally cold Sunday in 1832. He knows his mother would have admired his cleverness; she had always praised his resourcefulness as a boy, his small successes at silencing a creaking chair with a bit of twisted wire or leveling a table with a flat slice of shale. She had told him that these little deeds bespoke greater achievements to come. Caleb remembers how the bitter January morning squeezed New England in its petrified fist, how the immense icicles beneath the eaves of the small church caught the pale sunlight and spread thimblefuls of wan color into the nave, how the fat beads of perspiration glistened on the pink, round faces nearest him. He watched the men in the first row unbutton their coats and tug at the stiff shirt collars half hidden beneath their heavy jowls.

The wealthy paid a handsome rent for their private boxes at the front of the church, where every Sunday they sat closer to God than their fellow worshippers, stoking the hot embers of the foot warmers they had brought from home. As Caleb sermonized in front of the blazing stove, he imagined the envy they must have felt for the less fortunate seated on their drafty, open pews in back,
their hot bricks long since cooled. Caleb surveyed the prominent men and women on display in the pews nearest him—Silas Tooke, Edmund Meade, Albertus Crowe—and he imagined the flaws they concealed beneath their respectable cloaks:
adultery, fornication, onanism, gluttony
. Their wives were no better; even the staid widow Harriet Crane, swaddled in her black shawl and lace, harbored venial secrets, he was sure of it. He watched Elijah Harwood, of Magnus-Harwood Shipping and Transport, open the narrow door to his family's box to let out the hot air. Caleb scowled and drummed his fingers on the pulpit, a sign for the boy behind the altar to cram another log into the overheated stove.

Caleb wanted to make his congregants feel the punishing heat that would percolate in the veins of the condemned. He did not shout like other preachers he had heard, did not try to force his way into the hardened skulls of the unrepentant. He spoke with restraint, trusting in the power of his words to convey their awful truth:

Caleb looked out over the flushed faces, watched sinners remove their gloves and loosen their shirt collars. He felt his contempt for them rise in his breast; he could summon no compassion for those
who would seek first to alleviate physical discomfort when they should be contemplating the dire state of their souls.

Caleb felt no pity for these pious dissemblers, ingratiating supplicants meek and stupid as dogs; they were the font of the New World's moral decrepitude. He felt impatient with God for not casting them into the fire at this very moment. Caleb drummed his fingers, heard the creak of the stove door, and felt a burst of heat strike the back of his head. Sweat poured from his skin. He searched their faces but did not see the terror necessary for their salvation. Caleb returned his gaze to the soft chin of Elijah Harwood, and watched in disbelief as the man let his jaw drop open, apelike, into an unencumbered yawn.

And then Caleb almost gave voice to the dread that nightly fed the fire in his blood:
And if it is not your own condemnation you fear, then fear this: what if there is no hell, no heaven? What if as some in this New World would suggest, God is nothing more than the wind whistling through the trees?
Let them contemplate that! Let them contemplate an eternity rotting in the earth like so many fallen trees, fattened in life only to provide a nest for pulsing maggots. How could he make them understand that by dreading eternal torment they purchased the reassurance of a touchable eternity, a proof of something beyond death's door, even if that something was unending pain? Caleb would show them that fear gave stronger testimony than hope. He would show them the comfort to be found in hell's everlasting fire, for those flames consumed all doubt that this life might constitute the sum of all being.

But there were other things he could not tell his congregants. He could not reveal to them that, if forced to make the choice, he would find it preferable—a blessing, even—to suffer for all eternity rather than to cease being altogether. He could not tell them that what he feared more than the irrevocable certitude of death was the possibility that nothing at all came after.

When Marcus Dowdy learned how his son had abused the Court Street congregation, he wrote a reprimanding letter in the runic blotches that issued from his crippled hand. He encouraged his son to think on God's grace, on the promise of forgiveness and the power of redemption, and he gently urged him to soften what he called his “unforgiving ministry.” Caleb tossed the letter into the cold stove but did not burn it.

At the time, Caleb thought it a shame that he would never again put the stove to use, but now he understands. It is clear to him at last: all that followed from that day has been necessary, else he would not have found himself here, in Concord, at this moment. It had all transpired in accordance with God's will.

As he circuits the skeletal remains of the abandoned farmhouse, Caleb mulls over his disappointments at Court Street. He takes another pull on his pipe, welcomes the vapors easing his senses into blessed confusion. The ground beneath his feet grows more distant with each step, but he detects no diminishment of reason. Every confounding inhalation improves his clarity of thought, he believes, even as his body seems to break apart and scatter like so many dried leaves.

His congregants at Court Street, he recollects, had not been at all like the followers who assembled before him this morning. Poor, desperate, ill clad for the chill, most shuddering from the cold, some from lack of drink, they huddled around him today as
if he were their last chance to touch the face of God himself. Their incontestable fallenness was almost proof enough for Caleb that a time and a place had been appointed already for meting out their interminable punishment. Caleb realized many years before that only among the fallen could he hope to find the absolute certainty that something more waited beyond this world, for they had every reason to be confident of eternity. And there was no better place to find a man assured of his damnation—and equally certain of the hour and the manner of his end—than on the scaffold.

So, in the summer of 1833, Caleb began visiting the Leverett Street Jail. He did not minister to the petty thieves and drunkards who occupied the large communal cell. He came only to speak to the vilest criminals, those who were sentenced to swing by the neck, for he hoped that by staring into the eyes of those who looked upon the prologue to everlasting misery he might catch a glimpse of eternity himself. Where his father had seen pure light, Caleb would content himself with a glimpse of smoke and fire, as long as they evidenced the eternal. In Leverett Street, there was no need to rely on a currency so nebulous as faith, Caleb thought, for here man had created his own narrow universe of truth.

At first, though, disappointment was his lot. Despite the certainty of their damnation, despite the heinous crimes they had committed without remorse, the condemned were too eager to repent on the scaffold; the uncertain hope of redemption clouded their eyes, mitigated their fears, and obscured any view that Caleb might have caught of the fires that lay beyond. Caleb nearly abandoned his quest, but on a suffocating July morning he came to Leverett Street before sunrise to spend a moment alone with a man calling himself Desmond Boone, a man condemned to hang for crimes that none dared speak aloud.

Caleb made his way through the dark prison, an hour before Boone was scheduled to hang, and he had nearly reached the office
where the condemned man waited when he felt the clutch of bony fingers at his arm. He had been walking closer to the bars of the common cell than he realized.

“Please, sir.” The voice reminded him of the rats he had seen scraping over the stone floor.

In the weak light of his lantern, Caleb found a face round and flat as a saucer, framed by a dirty bonnet unable to contain burst springs of rust-colored hair. The woman's pink eyes sat deep beneath her brow. She pressed her forehead against the bars of the cell, as if she thought she might slip through.

“I ain't eaten for two days, and I've no money for the guards,” she begged.

Caleb caught a powerful whiff of gin and tobacco and sweat, and he raised his lantern so that he might take relief in the oily fumes.

“Are you intoxicated?” he asked.

“I come in that way, and it ain't worn off,” she said. “Did you bring a drop with you, perchance?”

“I bring the word of God.”

“A reverend? You come for the wretch what's about to hang, haven't you?”

Caleb tried to leave, but she held his jacket tight.

“Consider the state of your own soul, woman,” he said, reluctant to touch her hand and pry the grubby fingers loose.

“My name is Esther Harrington, and I done nothing to hurt nobody. Least no killing,” she said proudly. “That one is gettin' what he deserves.”

“As will we all,” Caleb said. “Which is why it would be wise for you to concern yourself with your own sins.”

“You're a kind man to come for him,” she said, showing him her rotten teeth. “He don't deserve no good words at the end, but I see you're a merciful man.”

Caleb knew what she was after. He jingled the coins in his
pocket, but left them there and leaned closer to the bars. “It is not for me to show mercy. We are spared only by His grace alone,” he said. “Just as your own wretched soul now dangles precariously above the flames, suspended from God's hand by the thinnest of threads.”

Esther Harrington let go of Caleb's sleeve and put her hands over her ears.

“Why do you say that?” she screeched. “I done nothin' to hurt no one!”

Caleb could have walked away, but he kept talking, pleased by the effect of his words. “Can you feel the heat, Mrs. Harrington? Even now, in this damp place, can you not feel the hot flames licking at your feet, waiting for God to let you drop?”

“I didn't hurt nobody!”

“Think on this when you have sobered. You know not the number of days you are allotted, but each day that you waste in dissipation God's hold on you slackens.” Caleb spoke just above a whisper, as if imparting a holy secret. “Tell me, Mrs. Harrington, have you ever awakened drenched in sweat?”

“Yes, yes! I am soaking even now! Feel this.”

Her arm flew out between the bars. She grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand to her breasts, which hung heavy and hot beneath her damp clothes.

Caleb recoiled in disgust, but the woman would not let go. He felt sharp fingernails dig into his wrist.

“That sweat,” he said, “gives evidence that you have felt the flames in your dreams, flames brought ever closer by your misdeeds.”

“Oh Lord! Oh Lord, no! I thought it was just the fever.”

“What is a fever, Mrs. Harrington, but a taste of the eternal torment that awaits? You cannot save yourself. You must put your trust in God, and swear off the foul intoxicants.”

“I will. I will. I swear it. What else?”

Caleb was impressed by the ease with which she settled into her fear, and he wished he could fill his church with souls so easily transported.