Woodsburner (35 page)

Eliot emerges from the trees at the edge of a sloping field and sees that something is not right. He puts on his spectacles and discovers that the trail of smoke he has followed for nearly a mile has misled him. On the far side of the field, a coal-black plume snakes over unmolested treetops, weighed down by its darkness.
Eliot traces its source to where the smoke swallows a slice of the horizon. In the distance, at the bottom of a rocky hill, rows of blackened trunks stand like limbless sentinels before a fierce, menacing glow. The blaze is much larger than Eliot expected. Even from a distance he can tell that this fire is a wild, angry thing. Eliot grips the shovel resolutely and trudges toward the green hill he sees rising through the distant smoke.

Emma listens to the far-away skillet clang of the bell in Concord's town hall, and it is a relief to her to know that Oddmund has delivered the news, though now she wishes she had not sent him away. The smoke has grown heavier since he left, and her chickens have all returned to the coop, fooled by the darkening sky. She does not want to imagine the monstrous things taking place in the woods. She stands at the back of the kitchen, in front of the last open window in the house, and tries not to worry.

Mr. Woburn said he would not be away long, but still he has not returned, and Emma dislikes being alone. Sometimes when she is left to herself she can feel her worries gorge themselves on the empty space around her. She closes the window to keep out the smoke and goes to the basket of unfolded bedclothes sitting on the kitchen table. Then she remembers the undergarment she left hanging on the line to dry. She is sure that it already smells of the burning and will need to be washed again before she can try to wear it. She considers fetching it, but she is afraid to go outside; the sight of the black clouds, rolling toward Woburn Farm like a blight from the heavens, would be too much for her to bear. She knows that she ought to fold the laundry and tend to the mending that awaits her needle and thread, but her mind is so full of worry, she thinks it best to distract herself for a few moments with the new book tucked behind the others on the top shelf of her bookcase.

A few weeks earlier, Emma had overheard two young women in Concord discussing a book by Allan Poe. She heard the women say that his book was filled with stories of murder and spirits and mysticism, and when they said that it was a wholly inappropriate book for ladies she could not help but find her curiosity stirred.

She asked Mr. Woburn to purchase the volume for her the last time he traveled into Boston, since she knew that any respectable bookseller would have refused her outright, and recommended that she purchase the latest volume in the
Eclectic Reader
series instead. And she also understood that Concord's new library would never afford her the opportunity to run her fingers over the scandalous pages, for the venerable Squire Hoar—whose conversion to novels, it was said, came only after he found himself snowed in at a distant tavern with nothing to occupy his time but an abandoned copy of Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe—
would never approve of the inclusion of Mr. Poe's work. Emma was not overly fond of frightening tales, but she simply could not stand the idea that a book might be forbidden to her, whatever the reason.

Under her bed, Emma kept a jar of coins earned from the piecework she still took in, and out of this she purchased books once a month for her little library. Despite Mr. Woburn's promise before they wed, he regularly grumbled about the money she spent on books that she could barely read. He complained about the time she wasted staring at the pages as if the words might suddenly announce their meanings to her. Emma seldom asked him to buy books for her, but she had handed him the money with a slip of paper bearing the title, and she was surprised that he consented to purchase Mr. Poe's book after only a brief show of displeasure.

She has not looked at the book since Mr. Woburn returned with it last week, and now, she thinks, it might be just the sort of thing she needs to take her mind off her worries. She stands at the
bookcase, retrieves the little volume, and runs a penknife under the first set of uncut pages. This is her favorite moment with a new book, cutting open the pages to look on the fresh ink seen only by a handful of people. The title page of Mr. Poe's book holds three lines of poetry in a language that looks to her like German, followed by the name “Goethe.” She turns to the opening story and slowly mouths the first words, expecting to be appalled from the start. But in the first few dozen lines there is no mention of murderers or ghosts or demons of any kind.

Emma cuts the next set of pages to see if there are any illustrations, and when she slides the knife through the open end a card slips out and flutters to the floor. At first Emma thinks it is an etching that has come unglued, but there does not seem to be a missing space on the front or back boards. She retrieves the card from the floor and finds a skillful drawing of two men threatening a kneeling woman with short, curved daggers, a scene no doubt spawned by Mr. Poe's grim imagination. All three of the figures have heavy-lidded eyes, dark hair, and dusky skin. The men grin like devils, and the woman appears frightened, as one would expect. But Emma can tell that something about the scene is not quite right.

She takes the card to the window to study the picture in the gray-filtered sunlight, and then she realizes that what the men are clutching are not daggers at all. She feels the blood rush to her face. The shock of what she holds settles in slowly, but her curiosity will not allow her to put it down. The men wear short robes that stop at their waists, and below this they wear nothing at all. The woman's robe is thrown back over her shoulders; her small breasts stand out straight, the nipples pointed like darts. One of the men wears a little hat with a limp tassel. For some reason, the inclusion of the tassel strikes Emma as supremely ridiculous.

Emma's hands are trembling, and she wishes now that she had
decided to tend to the laundry. She stares at the smiling woman until the two men fade away and all that remain are the woman's face, her unreasonably pointed breasts, her round hips, and the hidden ends of the men's impossible curves. Emma stares at her face, trying to puzzle out the expression she finds there. At first glance she thought the woman was frightened, but now what Emma sees on her face is not fear but something else, a kind of pleasure, perhaps, for which she can find no words.

These are not acts that Mr. Woburn requires of her, she thinks. He never makes any demands other than that she lie still while he dutifully grunts above her once a month. In his exertions she can hear the expectation that his joyless efforts will again prove fruitless. She knows that he blames her for their childlessness. Once, in a drunken rage, he went so far as to tear her precious books from their shelves and scatter them across the floor, telling her that too much reading had rendered her barren. After that episode, she made him swear that he would never again touch her books, and he promised to cease his indulgence in drink, though she could tell he did not mean it. She knows he keeps bottles hidden in the barn, and she suspects that today's business has led him to a tavern. She has learned to tolerate his drinking, but she promised herself that she would never again suffer his abuse of her books.

Emma checks the bookseller's stamp inside the cover: “Eliot Calvert, Bookseller, Boston.” There is no stamp on the card. She imagines her husband's dirty, blunt fingers clutching the vulgar illustration and she quickly slips the card between the pages and places the book back on the shelf. Her face burns as if she has done something wrong; she knows she should not have looked at the etching for so long, and she cannot keep from thinking of it and wondering if the smiles were genuine, if the depicted figures were indeed happy to be coupled thus. She thinks of the woman,
naked and unashamed before two men. What other varieties of bliss, Emma wonders, would be forever unknown to her? She has learned not to want kind words or caresses, but sometimes she cannot help but wish that the grunting might go on a bit longer.

The card is Mr. Woburn's doing, she knows, but she blames herself. He would never have set foot in a bookstore in the first place were it not for her. Emma had hoped that his willingness to purchase Mr. Poe's book signaled a softening of his feelings toward her, but the card suggests otherwise. She realizes that he must have had his own reasons for visiting the bookshop, and then it at last occurs to her that this is probably not the first time he has purchased such things. She looks around the room and through the doorway into the next and she takes note of the many nooks at every corner, dark places that she has never noted before. And she wonders, then, how many cards just like this one may already be secreted within the paper-thin crevices of her home.

The chatter of the angry men, the bump and jostle at his elbow, the gritty scrape of shovels and ax heads dragging in the dirt— none of this keeps Odd's mind from drifting elsewhere. Odd knows he must take greater pains to concentrate on matters at hand. He looks around at the men briskly walking toward the fire. If he were to allow any of them close enough to eavesdrop on his errant thoughts, he knows they would surely have him pilloried. Odd trudges along in the middle of their little army, but even now, with the danger before them and the town of Concord in peril, his thoughts return to the undergarment on the clothesline, to the image of Emma's breasts giving substance to its shape. He sees her bending low to brush away the chickens pecking at her feet. In his mind he peers into the shadowy cleft at the scoop of her dress. He thinks of her lying on her back.

There are too many scraps like this in his memory, and with each passing year he finds it harder to separate the real from the imagined. Things he has witnessed sometimes prove more peculiar than what he invents. The images of things he should never have seen creep along the dark folds of his brain: his father disappearing in a flash, his mother looking up at him from the burning deck, the deific heart engulfed in flames, his uncle's grin before the rope goes taut, Emma's full lips rounded open in pleasure, her eyes hidden in dark shadow, his own wet hair plastered to his
forehead and the feel of a splintery window frame beneath his fingers. Images overlap in his mind. Faces displace other faces. He manufactures memories from fragments that have no bearing in the world: his father and mother walking the streets of Boston, his sister fully grown and playing with her children, Emma on board the
Sovereign of the Seas
, squeezing his hand, surrounded by flames that do not consume, the ship turning from America back to the open sea. It is foolish to desire the world other than it is, but he believes there have been moments when he might have rendered the present more tolerable had he simply looked away, for no amount of regret can excise the hard lump of memory.