Woodsburner (21 page)

If men only knew the discomforting tug and pull of her heft, she thinks, it would surely dampen their curiosity. She has felt them staring at her heavy breasts, at her broad backside, has felt their sidelong glances stroke the fullness of her thighs, as if these parts were set out before them for their merriment. It is not merely lust that drives these men to gaze at her so intently; something close to wonderment and disapproval is there, too. She has felt them dismiss her with their eyes after they have had their fill. She has grown accustomed to being ignored once they have thought through their wicked little fancies, and it angers her that they can think her so easily disappeared. And yet she cannot help feeling cowed by their reproachful looks when she dares to look back.

Men had not always treated her this way. In Ireland, she had been regarded as a pretty girl, slender like her mother, with delicate features and dark eyes. Her ma told her that she would soon enough attract a herd of young men from which to choose a fit husband. For a time, Emma's family had been better off than most in County Donegal. Her pa held a lease on a small farm in Tawnawilly Parish, where Emma and her two brothers were born. She recalls no unhappiness between her parents before things turned bad. Emma remembers her ma's laugh. She remembers her cleverness with needle and thread, and how she mended clothes long past the point where new stitches outnumbered those that had turned to dust. She remembers the animal satisfaction her father seemed to take in a day spent sweating in the fields.

Their family had survived rebellions and poor harvests. They had lost land and regained it. But the real trouble began in 1830, when the potatoes in Donegal came out of the ground small and soft and black. Long after the harvest was over that year, a fetid-sweet stench of vegetable rot hung over the fields in Tawnawilly and in nearby Killymard Parish, and her family struggled through the winter like everyone else in that part of the island. They butchered the few skinny animals they owned; they ate the feed they had stored for the chickens. They watched wagonloads of grain clatter toward Donegal Quay to be loaded onto ships and taken away. Emma watched her pa's thick arms and chest shrink beneath his baggy clothes.

He was a proud man and refused to resort to outright begging, as many of their neighbors had done, but he walked into Donegal Town every Monday—the day that the local shopkeepers had declared Help Day—and stood in line at the grocer's to collect a few handfuls of corn or oatmeal or whatever was being doled out that week. He was given a paper badge showing his name and parish and told to wear it on a string around his neck so that the
starving families in Killymard and elsewhere could not abuse the generosity of the Tawnawilly merchants. On Mondays her pa walked the streets of Donegal Town until late, and brought back stories of what he saw in the shop windows. Behind the glass, the buying and selling continued. When he could not put food in their bellies, he put stories in their heads to help them forget the dull, empty ache. He was a great one for telling stories. He could describe a sack of grain such that Emma could feel the bread crumbling on her tongue. He invented stories about the ladies he saw in town, buying fine hats and boots, and the men lugging away sacks of nails and armloads of lumber and bricks and carefully boxed panes of glass bound for unknown inland estates. He described in great detail the huge sides of blood-fresh beef hanging next to the puckered carcasses of birds of all sizes.

Emma still clearly recalls the evening he told them about the table-size books on display in a shop window; the books held etchings of sailing ships and fish and flowers and animals of all sorts. He described pages that looked as if they were sliced from giant slabs of butter, and bindings of leather so rich it seemed they could be eaten with gravy. He conjured up the printed pictures for them as if he were holding one of the big books in his hands, reading it to them in the dark cottage by the cold hearth and the empty pot. The sound of his voice called forth images of slippery eels cooked into stews, partridges baked into pies, and loaves of coarse bread piled high next to mounds of bright-colored fruit. And Emma promised herself right then that she would one day have beautiful books of her own. She might go without stockings or a bonnet; she might want for better shoes or a heavier coat, but she would always have books.

Her father was confident that things would improve. But the potato crop failed again the next year. Even the untainted potatoes they rescued from the lazy beds and stored in the shed soon
wore the slippery pale fur of blight. Emma had heard it said that the trouble in County Donegal was not widespread, but this news offered little solace. She had also heard that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the island felt the bitter sting of famine; they said that this was but a taste of a greater horror to come. But it was hard for her to imagine that anything could be worse.

The hunger came first; it prepared the way, left their withered bodies and wilted spirits easy prey. Then came the sickness. Consumption took one brother, then the other, and then Emma's ma. Their deaths seemed a gradual disappearing, and in the constant dizziness of hunger Emma found it impossible not to dream that they would all reappear in the spring, sprouting from the sick earth. Her father was too worn out to grieve, too hungry to care about his pride. He took to begging in the end. The sickness had seized him, but he was not too weak to stagger from one house to the next. Some days he was well enough to stumble for miles. He pleaded at the doors of well-off farmers throughout Tawnawilly He threw away his name badge and went begging in the neighboring towns of Killymard Parish until at last he could rub together coins enough to buy Emma passage to America. He reminded her that she was of marriageable age, and there was every reason to believe she might find better prospects in the New World. It was easier to imagine a life in a world they had not seen than it was to forecast the portion that awaited Emma in the misery they knew. In America, her father told her, the heavenly Father bestowed riches equally on all his children. He insisted that Emma leave at once, since she, too, was little more than skin and bones kept upright by some mysterious force of will.

Emma refused at first. She did not want her pa to die alone, another unnumbered death, but he had been a strong man and he clung to his life for months, the flesh taking its time to melt from his bones. And, when he was finally gone, it was as if he had never
been. So many had passed in this way, unmarked deaths that left no room for grief, for the dying had vanished long before they actually passed on. The dying were everywhere, wraiths barely taking up the spaces where they lay, as if they feared their lingering presence might be seen as an insult to the earth.

Emma determined that, once she arrived in the New World, she would root herself firmly in it. Like the rocky islets that held fast against the current of the River Drove near her home, she would not allow herself to be swept away. She would leave a mark upon the earth. She would marry and fill herself with children, spread herself across the new continent that would have no choice but to surrender to her claim. She would not wither and fade like everyone she had ever known in her homeland. People could turn away when she approached, they could spurn her friendship and whisper mean names when she passed, but she would never permit them to deny that she was here.

In the weeks after she first set foot in America, Emma wandered the streets of Boston in a daze, huddling in doorways, hands cupped, just another emaciated girl from across the ocean looking for work or charity, anything that might put a crust of bread in her mouth. Men pitied her. They paid attention to her—if only briefly—as a soul in need of rescue. Some few sought to take advantage, saw in her frail and wasted form something that aroused unnameable thirsts. Some promised her measly fortunes in exchange for awful favors, but most simply let a coin or two drop before stepping past. She refused to surrender to her hunger; in this new land such a yielding seemed wholly needless. At every square and intersection in Boston, she heard shouts from vendors hawking oysters and fresh fish and hot corn and raspberries and milk and sweet doughnuts fried in pig fat. Everywhere the air smelled of cooking, as if America were one vast kitchen, and it seemed she need only breathe to fill herself with food.

She tried to get work as a seamstress, but, pale and thin as she was, no one would hire her for fear that she would faint before her first shift was out. Instead, she took a job as a book folder for a printing house, making a penny for every hundred sheets of paper she folded into rectangles eight layers thick. She rubbed the words and pictures covering the pages as she halved the sheets again and again, and she renewed her promise that one day she would have books of her own. In a boardinghouse near Dock Square, she found a cheap room and shared it with two German girls, square-faced and braided, who spoke no English. Sometimes she took in piecework, imitating the quick movements of her ma's fingers in the dark, and when her strength returned she found a second job at night making boxes and sewing sacks.

Passing down Change Avenue one afternoon, she happened to notice a man get up from a long wooden table outside the Bite Tavern and leave his meal unfinished to hurry back across the square to Quincy Market. She returned the next day and, peering through one of the tavern's open windows, saw the same thing happen again, only this time a dozen apron-wrapped market men leaped from their half-eaten meals to return to their stalls across the square. She saw unwashed platters stacked at the counter, plates and tankards scattered about the empty tables, trampled remnants of meals strewn across the floorboards. Without hesitating, Emma entered the Bite and talked the owner into hiring her as a table girl. She saw to it that the leftover food did not go to waste. As she worked, she furtively stuffed her pockets with half-bitten biscuits and gristly rinds of steak and the hard ends of sausages. Within a few months, her dress no longer hung empty from her shoulders and she felt the earth begin to tug at her with more urgency than before. Month by month, she grew large on the abundance of the New World, until the same men who had once shown pity for her when she first arrived found her bosom
and buttocks to be of unseemly proportions, her thick arms and legs swollen with an indiscreet surfeit of life.

Six years after arriving in Boston, Emma left for Concord, taking with her a valise holding a pair of boots, a bonnet, three dresses, and five times as many books. She had grown weary of Boston, and she longed for green farms and open spaces. She also knew that there would be fewer people in Concord than in the city, fewer eyes to stare at her in disapproval. She found work as a barmaid in Wright's Tavern. Within the year, she had learned the name of everyone in town, except for the curious white-haired young man she first saw on the road into Concord; she was passing in a carriage and he was standing at the side of the road, holding a length of twine tied to a turtle whose shell was wrapped in what looked like a dirty bandage. She saw the white-haired man again on Mill Dam Street, hands in pockets, shuffling hesitantly toward the center of town as if he felt he were trespassing, but she did not speak to him until the day she fell on him in the thick mud of Corner Road.

It was not the introduction she would have wished, but he seemed to take an interest in her, despite being nearly smothered. A few days after their folly in the mud, he came into Wright's Tavern for a tankard of weak ale, which he drank diluted with hot water. He sipped the drink slowly, spoke to no one, but made a point of wishing her a good day before leaving, offering her an embarrassed smile that revealed a tiny blackened tooth set prominently in the front of his mouth. Then he began coming to the tavern for supper, never more than once a week, and always he sat as far as possible from the open fire. That was when Emma first felt the weight of his stare. She sensed it like a gentle hand on her shoulder. From across the room, she could feel his eyes follow when her back was turned and she found it reassuring, a reminder that she had not disappeared. It amused her that he seemed to
believe she was blind to his attention. She saw how his head snapped away whenever she glanced in his direction, saw how he jumped as if prodded with a hot poker whenever she called his name.

She tried to tease him into conversation, and through half-finished sentences she learned that he lived alone, collected pretty stones in the woods, and worked as a laborer on nearby farms, doing whatever needed to be done on any given day. Most often he took on jobs for Cyrus Woburn, a regular patron at Wright's Tavern, whose stern face at first reminded Emma of her pa. Though she knew little else about Oddmund, Emma half expected the strange young man to seek her hand. He always seemed on the cusp of asking a question or making a statement that required more courage than he had in store. Emma knew that some people were not made for marrying or raising children, and she supposed Oddmund might possibly issue from this mold. Emma was certain that she had not mistaken Oddmund's quiet interest, yet she suspected he might be the sort who would prefer a tiny, prim woman half his age for a helpmeet. But, to be sure, Emma knew little of what brought men and women together.

Emma Manning was up to her elbows in dishwater at Wright's Tavern when Cyrus Woburn surprised her by muttering his sensible offer of marriage. As he spoke, she watched his reflection squirm on the washing barrel's greasy gray surface. His calloused hands were clasped behind his back, and he was staring at a clump of blond dirt he had scraped from his boots. It was a wholly practical proposal. He owned a large farm and had no children; Emma was approaching the end of her childbearing years and had neither suitors nor any prospects other than the wearisome future that her heavy, chapped arms bespoke. Cyrus Woburn delivered his proposal in the same tone of voice he might have used to offer a begrudging price for a field of shallow, rocky soil.

Emma knew that this was very likely her only chance at companionship, her only chance at children, but she had one demand that would need to be satisfied by the man who would be her husband. Emma had heard the patrons recount how Wright's Tavern had seen desperate strategies worked out during the War of Independence, and so it seemed to her a fitting backdrop against which to negotiate the terms of her future with the old farmer.