Free Woodsburner by John Pipkin Page B

at the tower of pale smoke, which has doubled in size since he last looked.
    “Ah
… skog…
” Odd shakes his head. The old words sometimes creep back.
“Ja
, the woods.”
    “I've never seen them do that before,” she says. “You're sure that isn't any of your smoke, then? With this wind, might be hard to tell.”
    “No, ma'am. No. It is none of my smoke.”
    Emma nods. “Well, I told Mr. Woburn you'd not get smoke such as that from burning off a field. I told him it was trouble, to be sure. But I knew you had nothing to do with it. I told Mr. Woburn if there was any trouble out there in the field, you would already be seeing to it.”
    Odd swallows. He knows his fire is not the cause. He watched it carefully, and he extinguished it before the wind could spread the cinders.
    Emma laughs for no reason, a soft, apologetic laugh. “Mr. Woburn said I ought to send you into Concord to tell someone, if I was still having apprehensions about it once I talked to you.” She repeats the concerns she voiced to her husband without letting the slightest hint of worry cross her face.
    Odd can never tell when she is upset or angry or disappointed. Her smile never diminishes to anything less than a placid crescent, like the faint wisp of the new moon, a suggestion of fullness to come. From the bits of stolen glances in his memory, he can compose the soft details of her face, her shifting expressions, the generous proportions of her arms and legs and back, and the way her dress struggles over certain curves, but he cannot puzzle out the feelings hidden beneath the expanse of flesh standing right before him.
    “Seems to me we might be needing help if the wind changes and it comes this way,” she says. “Mr. Woburn would have seen to it himself, but he told me he had business in the other direction. He says I worry too much. Still, it would put my mind at ease if youcould tell someone in town. Oh, I suppose you'll have to walk to Concord, as Mr. Woburn took the wagon. I hope you don't mind.”
    Odd checks the front of his trousers; it has become almost a reflex. He sees Emma make a face when he does so, then he nods.
    “Ja, ja
. I will go, then.”
    Emma turns and gestures toward the kitchen door with a heavy arm. “I baked a pie …” she starts to say, but when she turns back she sees that Odd has already picked his way through the cluster of chickens and set off toward the center of Concord.
    Emma calls after him, “You might as well take something to eat.”
    Odd waves, a long, slow sweep of the arm, but he does not stop.

7

Oddmund

    Emma is not wholly incorrect. He does not believe himself so deep a thinker as she suggests, but in his dreams he is indeed a philosopher. In his dreams he is eloquent, no awkward stumbling after the American words that still feel like stones in his mouth, no grasping after the ideas of wiser men. When he is asleep, his mind awakens to the truths he has somehow always known but cannot fully recall in daylight. When his thinking self lies dormant, his dreams explore the profundities of his adopted home.
    Before it was a place, the New World was an idea. Before
desire
found its object,
regret
knew what it would willingly leave behind. The only world men had ever known was once so old that they could not imagine a time when it might have been young, a time when civilizations might not have marched blindly toward collapse in order to avoid slipping into the gulf of history. The citizens of the Old World longed for boundless, level plains, and out of this longing was born the idea of the New World, a pesky half-thought hiding in the shadows of disappointment, haunting the margins of laboring hours when futility acquired the numbing power of an opiate. The idea survived the onslaughts of religion and history, a vestigial hope, a footprint of want from previous generations, eroded but intact.
    The continent that would bear the weight of these expectations had always been here, for as long as