Woodsburner (24 page)

Long-faced, clean-shaven, carefully buttoned, Nathaniel had at once struck Henry as a man poorly suited for life outdoors. Over dinner with Nathaniel and his wife, Sophia, Henry learned of his host's miserable rustic experiment at the Brook Farm community, where shoveling manure had proved far less agreeable than tallying weights and tariffs at the customs house in Boston. Nathaniel praised Henry's love of nature, and he professed his eagerness that they undertake a river excursion together, though Henry detected in him a reluctance to dirty his clothes or hands.

Henry thinks of Nathaniel's pale fingernails, trimmed and clean, tidy hands for writing stories and novels, better suited than Henry's for bright papers squarely stacked, slanted desktops, and well-cut nibs. Then Henry looks down at his own chipped fingernails underwritten with soil, fingertips blunt like broken sticks, accustomed to scrawling in notebooks with nubbins of discarded pencils. As if to prove his thoughts, he claws a primitive design in the dirt and wipes his hands on his pants. Despite their differences, Henry had been attracted by the graveness in Nathaniel's eyes, and they formed an immediate friendship without forethought of what that friendship might bring. It is not wholly unreasonable, Henry thinks, to conjecture that their relationship has, in its own small way, contributed to the present tragedy. After all, had Nathaniel not been a friend, Henry would not have offered to sell him his boat—the very boat that Henry and his brother John had built with their own rough hands. Henry had only sold the
Musketaquid
because he could not take the heavy boat with him
to New York when he left to tutor Waldo's nephews. But now he suspects that if he still owned his old boat the Concord woods would not be burning.

Long before they drove the first nail, Henry and John had decided that they would name their boat
Musketaquid
, after the Indian name for the Concord River. For years, they had discussed taking a trip on the river, and each season the waters beckoned to them impatiently, asking when they were coming. Henry did not understand the urgency then; they were young men, and there seemed an endless reserve of long summer days in which such an adventure might be taken. Yet the river called as if each summer might be the last. Even in winter, Henry felt the frigid current tugging at him, and all he need do was look at his older brother staring out the frost-etched window to understand that he was feeling the same pull. When they finally committed to the journey, they decided that their old boat, the
Rover
, was too ordinary for the task. A trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers required a superior vessel, and they set about selecting each plank with this journey in mind, as if they were consecrating stones for a cathedral. They gave the new boat wheels and a set of sturdy poles for transport over land; they gave it two masts, two sails, two sets of oars, and room enough to store a tent and all the supplies their adventure would require. Henry and John had agreed on every detail down to the green and blue paint. And the boat performed admirably on their journey, taking them past hundreds of brooks and farms and hills and men whom they had never heard of before and whose names they never knew.

Henry still thinks the
Musketaquid
a dignified, manly name. But Nathaniel Hawthorne apparently took it for granted that his seven dollars also purchased the right to rechristen the proud boat the
Pond Lily
. Henry did not believe that any man could possibly imagine himself destined for adventure in a boat called the
Pond
Lily
. And what further disheartened Henry was that Nathaniel simply did not appreciate the fine vessel he had so cheaply purchased; he did not connect with its obedient temper. All Henry ever had to do was will the boat this way or that. But, even after repeated lessons, Nathaniel complained that the
Musketaquid
was sluggish, heavy in the water, and impossible to steer.

If Nathaniel had not renamed the once noble vessel, Henry might have considered borrowing it today; instead, he embarked in Edward's small boat, and Henry deferred to his young companion in the choice of where to come ashore. Had Henry been at the helm of the
Musketaquid
, he might have chosen not to stop so early in the day, might have insisted they not cook a chowder at all, or he might have been bold enough to suggest that they ignore their hunger and continue on until dusk. By then, the wind would certainly have lessened. With the
Musketaquid
beneath him, he might even have elected to make the excursion by himself.

A loud crash signals another fallen tree, and as Henry watches blood-red embers coil skyward he admits that these are foolish thoughts, the desperate overreachings of his troubled reason. He cannot blame Nathaniel Hawthorne any more than he can blame Edward or his brother, though he wishes he could have spent this day with John instead, paddling the
Musketaquid
as they had done five years earlier. There had been no disagreements between them on their trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and in the span of an immortal summer week they had garnered experiences to fortify them for a lifetime of winters. What a piece of wonder it was, those days spent on the river together. In no time before or since has he felt greater contentment, or companionship as complete. He is still nourished by memories of the sheer volume of life everywhere on display—swaying alders, birches, oaks, and maples, scurrying mice and moles and splashing muskrats, floating cranberries and wheeling gulls, and John behind him at the oars, smiling
quietly in the bright flashes from wind-driven waves. Henry meticulously recorded every detail of their journey in his notebooks, and he sometimes believes he might work his notes into a proper book, given the time. He wishes he could abandon his pencil-making duties and live alone with only his notebooks, so that he might finally write the book he has long had in mind. If John were here to help guide him, Henry knows he would at last find the time and the means to finish the project. John always seemed at the ready with solutions.

After all, Henry thinks, it was John who had come to his rescue when it seemed that his Concord Academy would fail, and together they made a success of the little school for almost three years. Henry still considers it one of his happiest periods, among his few real contributions to the world, though he knows the students always preferred John to him. Henry was not jealous of his brother in this regard. John was warm and encouraging where Henry could sometimes be stern and demanding. Henry was content in the knowledge that their students respected him, even if it was John whom they loved. Another tree crashes to the ground, and it makes Henry wonder what his brother would do in this predicament. Nothing like this would be happening if John were here, he thinks.

But John Thoreau is dead.

Two years have already passed since John's death, and Henry's loneliness, far from dissipating, has grown deeper. Henry thinks that the only remedy for the loss of his brother's love is to love more, but neither new acquaintances nor the companionship of old friends can fill the absence. Together, Henry and John had dared swift-moving waters, hiked trails where a single misstep might have sent them tumbling. Together they had slept out of doors, exposing themselves to cold and rain, taunting illnesses that preyed on human carelessness. They had fired guns, swung
axes, climbed unreliable trees, mounted unruly horses, ridden carriages over uncertain roadways. They had offered misfortune a thousand opportunities to seize them.

Then, on New Year's Day, 1842, John cut himself while stropping his razor and died of lockjaw ten days later. Might today's events, Henry wonders, be blamed on a rusted edge of steel? How quickly, how easily, a man moves from one state of being to the next. The language cannot keep up. “My brother John
is
dead,” Henry shouts at the distant flames. The present tense of the verb invites him to think of his brother inhabiting a different state, lying cramped in a pine box, staring at the lid, bored and lonely, as if the tragedy of dying were simply that one must tolerate conditions considerably less pleasant than those enjoyed by the living.

John is dead
. It is a fact so difficult to grasp that shortly after John's death Henry began experiencing the same symptoms. Some inquiring part of his brain—the part dedicated to the acquisition of impossible facts—determined that only by experiencing the same condition as his brother could he claim the requisite information. Henry had not cut himself; for days after his brother's accident Henry would not go near his razor. His mourning kept him confined to his room, away from the pencil works, far from the garden and the woodshed and the river and the forest, far from any setting where he might encounter a sharp edge. Nonetheless, Henry began suffering the unmistakable symptoms that had delivered his brother to the grave. He knew he was not truly ill, but there was no denying his condition. He awoke feeling miserable, he complained of uncertain pains, a stiff neck, and a spreading numbness in his limbs.

The doctor was perplexed. He could find no cause, no visible wound or mortified flesh. Henry sank deeper into the vague malaise. His flesh grew cold. Days passed, and he could not rise from his bed. He found it difficult to speak; his words came out
slurred and stupid. His jaw went slack in open-mouthed astonishment at its own capitulation to a phantom affliction. The doctor recommended they trickle water onto his tongue, enough to quench thirst, but not too much, lest he drown in his bed. For days, Henry's grieving mother squeezed a sponge over his open mouth. She changed his bedclothes and rearranged his pillows. Henry rolled his eyes in panicked submission, fearful that he would soon be joining his brother in death's semiconscious prison.

But Henry's sympathetic lockjaw did not outlive his sorrow. The symptoms passed on, but he did not. One morning his jaw swung shut, and he found himself returned to the living world. The doctor could explain neither the illness nor the cure and blamed Henry's overly sensitive disposition. Henry emerged from his ordeal without the satisfaction of having conquered a real disease. And John was dead, still.

Henry knows that his brother would have stopped him from committing so tragic an error as striking a match on such a day as this, but his brother will never again travel with him down any of the rivers of New England. It is almost unbelievable to Henry that he still cannot determine what to make of the long years stretching before him, when none remain for his brother. After twenty-six years, Henry has accomplished little, and the burden of his empty history weighs heavily on him. He cannot determine how to order the life that still feels as new to him as a stiff pair of boots. Yet his brother's life is complete. John has already become all that he will ever be.

Henry no longer expects to find a love that might take the place of what he felt for his brother. They had once even proposed marriage to the same woman, Ellen Sewall, within days of each other, and afterward they commiserated in their rejection. Henry has felt admiration for other women, but not having a wife is not something he regards as a loss. He knows there is a divergence
between love and the entanglements of wedlock, though sometimes the two concur. He knows that the insatiable yearning for physical touch so confounds heart and mind as to reduce a man to animal bewilderment, a dog chasing its tail. He has come to prefer the love he finds in nature, and in this he has never been disappointed. He has been moved to soft tears by the generosity of spring and the unexpected gifts of autumn. He has taken comfort in the embrace of dappled moonlight beneath a crown of oaks. The woods are full of more varied personalities than he could ever hope to find in Concord. He observes now how every tree burns with a signature distinctly its own as the intense heat releases saps and resins hoarded in its concentric heart. A pine bursts into flame from trunk to crown, a gigantic matchstick with a blue-white fist of heat at its center. Trees hiss and whistle at different pitches, some burn like coal, blackening and crumbling beneath a thin aurora, some flare like lanterns filled with oil.

If John were alive, Henry thinks, this day would have turned out differently. He considers how he and his brother prepared scores of meals under the open sky, and never once had they started a fire they could not control. It is clear to him that one man's death erases not only that man's possibilities but all the possibilities that might have ensued from those, like the wake of a boat slicing through waves that might otherwise have reached the shore. Every man lives among the deaths of all who came before. What consequences would he unleash, Henry wonders, if he were to walk down the hill into the burning trees? What unforeseen series of events might his sudden demise cause or forestall, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now? How would his non-being ripple through the seasons to come?

Henry runs his open hand over his whiskers, feels the hard edge of the jawbone beneath, and decides that there is something quintessentially corporeal about the jawbone. Here is the definition
of a man, he thinks. A man is a composite of bone and deed. About the first, one can do nothing, but it is through deeds that one makes oneself a man, a creature distinct from the nameless mass of jawbones.

He steps to where the downward slope begins and studies the furrows he left on his last descent. He considers walking back down, but first he listens for the whispers that chased him here. The fire is close, but its advance has slowed; the flames lash out and retreat, like a cat suspicious of the dish of milk it demanded. Henry expects the flames to take a half hour or more to reach the base of Fair Haven Hill. He knows it should not take as long as that for the men of Concord to assemble and come to his aid. And they will bring with them more than shovels and axes; they will come with angry stares, furious accusations, and thoughts of retribution. His regret, he understands, will not be so easily embraced after all. His guilt will not be so readily mastered. Henry steps back from the slope. Remorse presses down upon him heavy and full, like the lowering sky of an approaching tempest, and he admits that he is grateful, after all, to be alone here above the burning earth.