Woodsburner (46 page)

And then he hears the voices of the men. They have broken through and can see his predicament. They shout to him. They tell him he is burning and they urge him to act. They have not come to apprehend him; they have come to help. And then Odd smells something sharp and sees the flames scurrying giddily up his trouser leg. He drops to his knees, onto his back, rolls, smothers the flames, and he is back on his feet. He feels a stinging in his eyes, sees the blistered skin on his arms, and is angry. It is a euphoric outpouring of anger, and he lets the feeling carry him forward.

All at once, the understanding comes to him: he is supposed to be here. He can see that this has been his destination from the moment he washed up onto the beach at Boston Harbor. Odd puts aside the fears that he will not be able to convince his pursuers
that he did not bring this fire here. It is no longer of any consequence; this fire will not be his ruin. He determines to put an end to it, regardless of how it started. He will not swing from a scaffold simply because that is what fate has decreed. His blood will not rule him as it ruled other members of the family Hus.

He attacks the fire wildly, screaming at the flames. He swings his arms above his head and brings them down, smashing the blade of his shovel onto the many-headed beast. He hammers so powerfully that the wooden handle splinters under the blows. He tosses the broken parts into the fire and does not need to call for another; an ax materializes in each hand, brought forth by the men dumbfounded by his ferocity. Two axes now, one in each hand, and his arms fly over his head and down, smashing flames, scattering brush and branches. The men join him, following him into the heart of the fire. They shovel dirt over the flaming detritus that his flying axes spew in his wake. Some of the men pause in disbelief, and then resume, spurred on by the sureness of Odd's advance, arms spinning, chewing through the fire. They cheer their looming success. Odd does not look back, does not check to see if they are following. He knows where he is going and what he must do. The fire will not escape him. It will not dictate his end. It cowers, tries to flee, but he is on it, crushing it beneath his boots. Flames scatter and dwindle before him, and the men fall in line behind their new leader. Odd feels transformed, tempered by the intense heat. He feels the blood in his veins come to a boil. He has become a different animal—something stronger, something entirely new.

Eliot is in trouble, though he is slow to admit it.

It happens so quickly, it seems a temporary thing until it is not. He moves to the right when the others move left, and the fire, seeking opportunity, comes between.

He is not certain how it begins, but he watches them run, one after another, until there is no one left around him. Like madmen, they breach the very battlements they have constructed and follow one another into the heart of the blazing woods: a useless display of courage. Eliot stands at the end of one of the shallow trenches that extends as far as the fire to his right. They were to continue digging, to join this trench to the other. For hours the men labored, chopping trees and clearing brush. Before him stretches a blackened expanse where they have beaten back the flames; behind him, a denuded strip of earth runs alongside the trench and stops, unfinished. Certainly the fire cannot cross these barriers, Eliot thinks. There is no need to pursue, no need to fight on; all that remains is to let the flames burn themselves out.

But he hears the men shouting for those ahead to return, and then he hears them calling for him to follow. Eliot shouts to no one in particular, and the sound is meaningless to his own ears. He yells simply to match the cacophony around him. Something in his chest tugs at him, makes him feel that he should run after them. But he cannot summon the courage, and with each passing
second they grow more distant. He knows there is another group of men somewhere to his left; he can hear the clank and scrape of their shovels, the clap of their axes as they work their way toward him, to join their work to his, but he cannot see them through the thick smoke. He shovels faster, flinging dirt onto the licks of flame that creep forward toward the trench. He is suddenly gripped by an overwhelming desire to rewrite the scene in which he finds himself—a playwright should never place characters in circumstances so inextricable. The stage dictates that there always be a way out: a door unlocked, a hidden closet, a forgotten weapon ready at hand. An audience, Eliot knows, has little patience with the reality of undeserved, inexorable doom.

The fire surges in the distance and the smoke surrounds him as he looks for a way in, a way to follow the others, but he cannot move. He cannot reach the men who have run forward, and he cannot find those who have stayed behind. He knows he is nothing like DeMonte; he is not the hero he would write. Before him he can see only fire and smoke, and he is terrified. He cannot understand how these sensible men could plunge headlong into it. And now, in their absence, the fire creeps toward Eliot in fits and starts, trying to reclaim the ground, useless earth it lately conceded to the swinging shovels and axes.

The heat makes him squint until the bright flames become flickering diamonds between his eyelashes. And that is when he sees it, a wink, a sparkle in the dark smoke that fills him with a chilling realization:
it knows what it's doing
. The fire studies the barrier the men have constructed, looking for a way around it. Eliot watches flames stagger toward him, searching for unburned bits of terrain, anything to sustain them long enough to make a last-gasp attempt at the true prize—Concord—and he understands that he alone stands poised to stop the fumbling attack. The fire lunges toward him, and Eliot hurls dirt in wild sprays,
stepping backward with each desperate shovelful. He wants to move forward, to follow the other men, who surely need his help more than ever. Instead, he thrusts his shovel into the bottom of the trench and leaves it standing upright in the blackened soil as he backs away across the firebreak. A billowing mass of gray smoke rolls over him like an open hand.

Eliot can no longer hear the shouts of the men digging and chopping their way toward him on his left, only the howl of the flames, and through the smoke he sees the winking eyes telling him that the fire is there, too. The fire seems for a moment to change its mind, to retreat unsteadily, and then Eliot understands that he is the one retreating, carried backward by his own uncertain steps. The fire prods him, mocks him, forces him to follow his heels blindly.

This is not at all how Eliot envisioned that the fire would behave in
The House of Many Windows
. He had not given any thought to the powerful confusion of heat and smoke. He understands now that the burning of a house onstage might cause the bonnets of the women in the front rows to burst into flames. And what would keep soot and ash from raining down upon the entire audience? And the roar of the flames—he had not thought of this at all—surely that would drown out any dialogue. There would, in fact, be little for the actors to do save run about the stage in a pantomime of distress. The grand conflagration at the end of the play had not been his idea to begin with, and he realizes now that if it were an impracticable effect after all, then he truly had no idea how he would end his play.

Reworking
The House of Many Windows
to suit the requirements of the Boston Museum proved far more difficult than Eliot had expected. He attacked the manuscript with a vigor bordering on
vengeance. He had heavy curtains made for the windows of his study, so that he might work in the darkened room during the day, but the sunlight still found its way in around the edges. On warm days, he could feel the heat radiating from the other side, the curtains squarely haloed by sunlight.

One Sunday, a few weeks after Eliot's meeting with Moses Kimball, a soft knock at the door interrupted his editing.

“Eliot?” Margaret searched for him in the shadows. “I thought you might be in here. What on earth are you doing sitting in the dark?”

Margaret made her way to the curtains and pulled them back, allowing the bright day to flood the room. Eliot held his hands to his eyes and saw flashing blue squares fluttering where his stack of writing paper had been.

“Margaret, please.”

“Eliot, you look terrible. And our guests will be here soon.”

“Guests?”

“It's
Sunday
, Eliot. We're having dinner, remember?”

Margaret finished tying back the heavy curtains with braided tassels, and smoothed the folds of her dress. “There. That's better. Isn't that better?”

“When are they arriving?”

“Father is already here, and he has brought Mr. and Mrs. Durham with him. I will entertain them until the rest arrive, but you must get yourself ready at once.”

Eliot looked at the manuscript before him, littered with
x
's and marginal scribblings. On many pages he had crossed out all but one or two lines, and a few pages had not fared as well. He rubbed his eyes. He wore his spectacles only to see at a distance, but lately even words at arm's length had begun to seem a bit blurred. He no longer knew how many years had passed since he penned the first page. It sometimes seemed he had been at work on
The House of
Many Windows
for most of his life, since before he had married Margaret, since before he had become a father, since before he had worn spectacles at all, and now the only way he had found to save his troubled masterpiece was by undoing it.

“Eliot. Are you all right, dear?”

Eliot did not know that he was going to ask the question until the words had already fallen from his tongue. “Why did you marry me, Margaret?”

“What?” Margaret stared at him, hands at her hips. “Why did I—Eliot, there is hardly time for this now! We have guests below.”

“Please. It should be easy to answer.” Eliot looked at his butchered manuscript, and he thought of the conversation he and Mr. Mahoney had had so many years earlier. He had never asked Margaret if the bookstore was her idea, and she had always pretended that it was a surprise.

“For all of the reasons you can certainly imagine,” Margaret said with a tight, indulgent smile. “Because I love you and respect you. Will that do?”

“Yes, but why?”

“Oh, Eliot, really. It is because … you have a quality that so many men lack. You are a practical man.”

“Practical?” Eliot felt something shrink inside him. “I thought you believed in my work—in my writing, I mean.”

“Well, of course I do. It is what first distinguished you from all the boorish, moneyed men that Father so often introduced to me. And your devotion to your art still distinguishes you from such men. But, more important, you are not the sort to sacrifice the practicalities of living to airy dreams that may never come to fruition. You have always provided for your family, and you are a good father to your children. You are a
reasonable
man, Eliot. It is a most uncommon quality. Father approves, and so do I. Will that do for now? I have left Father alone with the Durhams….”

Eliot nodded. He had expected something more, but he was not entirely disappointed; instead, he felt a relentless sobriety wash over him. His eyes were still adjusting to the piercing bright light, and when Margaret crossed the room she seemed to him to be pushing her own shadow. He saw her come toward him, then saw her turn abruptly toward the door.