Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  Dion tripped on a log and twisted his ankle. She was out of sight. These were her woods; she had grown up playing here. He stood with his arms apart, hunkered down, and screamed her name as loud as he could.

  She stopped running and looked up at the sky washing over the treetops. They could probably hear her name all the way in Bath, she thought. He loved her, he really did. She ran on, but stopped when her name sounded again and again, moaning through the trees like a foghorn, his voice seeming more desperate and distant. He was headed in the wrong direction. She almost called out to him.

  Mr. Dawson opened his door and stepped out before putting his truck in park; it lurched forward slightly before he could hit the brake. No one was watching. His neighbor, Mr. Shumaker, ran across the lawn, taking long, even strides. Their boots crunched over the dried leaves and grass with the sound of falling water; all of them headed toward Natalie’s father standing at the edge of the woods. “This way,” he called and ran into the shadows. They all stopped running when Dion’s voice called for Natalie. His voice, her name. They leaned over their knees, listening to their own heavy breathing. The smell of their own musty heat escaped from beneath their shirt collars.

  A few of them had guns. He stopped calling her name. She turned at the edge of Nason’s field when she heard the silence. When she listened harder she heard the voices of her father, her uncles, their friends, and the fathers of her friends calling to one another. For a moment she wanted to take it all back. She did love him. Then she wanted to take it all the way back to never having loved him to begin with. She couldn’t say now how it had started. Ron would never forgive her. No one would.

  They caught up with him, all the men shouting at once, stumbling and waving. Dion couldn’t hear what any one of them said, only fragments of words and phrases. Finally Natalie’s father appeared and Dion could see the resemblance in the shape of his face, thin but sagging near the jowls. Her father was the only one not shouting as the rest formed a circle around him, the ends of their waving gun barrels like dark eyes. Dion raised his hands as the police had told him to one night in Monmouth. He closed his eyes and pictured the house he and Natalie were going to have, every room smelling of her wrist, the bed with the tent, and the red barn with the horse, the boat with the captain taking them down the coast toward the sun. He could see it all so clearly it seemed as if these things had already happened and he was looking back now after a lifetime together.

  “David Dion.” It was her father’s voice rising above the others. The father had a right to speak. He was the one wronged; anything he did might be excused later. Dion looked briefly at her father and the others. Her father’s eyes darted around the woods, skipping off Dion’s face every few seconds. Dion lowered his chin and closed his eyes again, holding his arms out so they would know he was unarmed. It seemed he had been waiting his entire short life to accept blame. “David Dion.” His name again, and the picture Dion had formed on the backs of his closed lids of her father pointing a finger at him, eyes red with anger, almost with tears, was more accurate than the real thing. Dion waited for his name, imagining her father’s mouth opening, his jagged teeth bared. Instead there was the deafening crack of a shotgun blast, and in the total silence that followed Dion found himself floating in the treetops, uncertain if he was dreaming or dying. The maple and oak leaves turned toward him and shivered. He saw the field beyond the woods where a burst of wind sliced a path through the grass like an invisible hand combing through hair. At the edge of the field near the road Natalie stood looking back. She made him so sad he had to look away, into the sun. When he looked back down it was too late: the image of the sun was burned into everything he saw.

  I was outside our house throwing a tennis ball against the wall, pretending I was the star of a baseball game with scouts ready to sign me up, and was just winding up for another pitch when I heard the crack of the gunshot echo across town. My mother flew out the back door and grabbed hold of me, searching my arms and chest to see if I had been hit.

  Mrs. Dawson dropped a sandwich roll at Dawson’s, ran outside with the customers, and looked up at the sky. Natalie’s mother fell to the floor in her kitchen. In her mind they were all dead: her husband, her daughter, and Dion. The police chief stood up from his desk and looked at the receptionist. He had been afraid of what might happen if people took the law into their own hands. This was the consummation of our relief.

  When Dion opened his eyes he was still there, kneeling before his accusers, handfuls of dirt and pebbles sprinkled over his shoulders. All the men’s eyes searched his body for wounds or blood, but there were none. Natalie’s uncle had fired his shotgun by accident, blowing a hole in the ground and kicking up a cloud, nothing more.

  Gazing back across the field to the woods where he lay dying, Natalie found it impossible to accept at first that they had shot him. But then it made sense, and she decided she would bear the mark of his death by never smiling again for the rest of her life. For her, the siren approaching from across town was the sound of an ambulance arriving too late, the second siren, which came a moment later, the sound of the police coming for her. She raised her chin and removed the strands of hair from her face to see if Dion’s soul was rising out of his body over the treetops and into the sky. In court, as in her prayers to him, she would beg for mercy, for pardon. She would admit everything, absolving everyone but herself. For a few moments this morning she had been a fool thinking love was not real, thinking she could live without him, and now she had lost everything.

  TREES

  Lucy lay awake past midnight worrying about what she would bake the next day. She had tried everything from cakes to cheese breads, but her nephew Robbie only nibbled at the food she put out for his Wednesday visits.

  In the morning, she made a batch of oatmeal cookies and set them on the rack to cool. Robbie nibbled at a few and looked through the window to the back field and the forty acres of woods sloping down to the river.

  “You see the crowns on the spruce,” he said, and she leaned over her steaming coffee to look. It was late spring, the ground had started to dry out and harden, and the field before the woods had started to green.

  “They’ve topped out,” Robbie said. “And that oak, see, it’s getting in the way of those bird’s eye maples. Now those maples, Aunt Lucy, they’d be worth something.”

  She nodded, as she always had when he talked about the need to thin and space. “Manage,” he called it.

  “A lot of people think all you do with the woods is let it grow,” he said. “There’s a lot more to it than that. They think it’s a place to hunt deer or fool around in, a place to get in trouble.”

  “People are poaching in the woods?” she said. Her husband had hated poachers, and she thought of what else her nephew had just said—people fooling around? “Are they in there at night?”

  “No, Aunt Lucy. I didn’t mean people in your woods. I mean the woods in general, people in general.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, though she definitely didn’t understand what he was talking about, and it made her nervous.

  “I didn’t mean to make you nervous, Aunt Lucy.”

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  “I just wanted to talk about your woods,” he said and took a bite from one of her cookies.

  The woods he referred to had belonged to her husband, also named Robert, and when she died, they would belong to her nephew. It made perfect sense: she and Robert never had children, and the farm had belonged to her husband’s father and his father’s father, and all the way back. Nevertheless, Robbie, her nephew, was always careful to say, “your woods.” He was kindhearted, she knew, but she preferred he not talk about the trees. They would be his soon, and she thought that should be enough.

  After her husband died five years before, her nephew began his weekly visits. Robbie’s mother, Rebecca, had pushed him to come over. He was only a teenager then with no thoughts whatsoever about the future. They had little to talk
about until he started dating Melanie and bringing her with him for his visits. Lucy loved Melanie—she was saucy and full of beans—but in the last two years she had stopped coming because she worked a half hour away in an old folks home. They called them something else now, but that’s what it was. Lucy understood—Melanie was tired in the evenings, and busy on the weekends. She admired Melanie for getting out there and working. Robert had never wanted her to work, even when they were short on money. It was a point of pride with him but it was more than that, too. He had always wanted to protect her.

  Robbie came by every Wednesday when he was in town even though he was also busy. In the late spring and summer, he worked at his father’s lumberyard; in the winter, he worked in the woods cutting for a big operation that sold to Great Northern. Now Robbie and Melanie were in their twenties. They were thinking about the future.

  “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the trees,” Robbie said, pulling his facial features into a knot. “I’m worried, you know, that the good trees got no room to grow and that some of the dead ones, specially them old spruce, they’ve got to be a fire hazard.”

  Robbie squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his nose, just as her husband had done when he was trying to bring up a subject that made him nervous.

  “I was thinking—Melanie and I were—that I should do some work down there for you. Before things get too bad and it’s not worth anything. We can both make some money on it, you know.”

  It made her feel awful, this idea that something was wrong down in her husband’s woods. People down there at night, hunting, starting fires.

  “Robert loved those woods.” She shook her head.

  “He looked after them, but you can’t be expected to, Aunt Lucy.”

  “You do an awful lot of work for me already, Robbie, and you never let me pay you.”

  “Now don’t you worry about that,” he said. “I’m worried, though, that Uncle Robert never spaced in there, and now everything’s growing wild. I’m not saying Uncle Robert did the wrong thing. But he wasn’t thinking about it, you know, toward the end. He was in no shape then to thin and space on his own and to take out what’s valuable while it was worth something.”

  “He loved to sit out there in the woods by himself in the afternoon.”

  “Course he did. Uncle Robert had an eye for lumber like no other woodsman I ever knew. The man could spot heart rot from looking at the bark.”

  Lucy squeezed her fingers around her coffee spoon. There was something she wanted her nephew to understand about her husband. Robbie faced her, a simple and pleasant expression on his handsome face. She had known him as a baby.

  “No one knew how to manage a forest like Uncle Robert,” he said.

  “But I don’t think he wanted to manage it, as you say.”

  “I know, he was too old in the end, and I should’ve been around more to help him. He never woulda let it get so bad if I was here to help. I blame myself.”

  “No, Robbie, no. . . .”

  “I know it’s my fault, Aunt Lucy. I was too busy working up north. Right before Uncle Robert got sick I was trying to earn enough money to get a truck. Now we’re trying to save enough to get married and buy a house. But it’s always a busy time, Aunt Lucy, and I shoulda come by more often then.”

  “No, Robbie, you have your own life to live. You do enough for me as it is.”

  She was thinking how he had painted the house that summer and mown the field with his father’s bush hog.

  “Melanie and I are talking about having children.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, Robbie. That makes me so happy to hear.” And it did make her happy, the idea that someday children would live in this house.

  “Don’t tell my mother and father yet. They’ll have all kinds of worries. You know them. But I thought I’d tell you.”

  “I’m so excited for you. I do wish you’d bring Melanie by sometime. I miss seeing her.”

  “We will, we will. She’s so busy now, you know.”

  She meant to say she understood, but somehow she couldn’t.

  Robbie pushed his coffee away and stood up.

  “I have to get back to the yard, Aunt Lucy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course you do.”

  “But I’m glad we agree on the woods. I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  “Good,” she said.

  Through the kitchen window, she could see the wind moving through the upper branches of the trees at the edge of the field.

  Lucy and Robert tried for years to have children. Each time she miscarried, there was more damage to her body until the doctors said it was no use. In the early years, Robert went into the woods in the fall and didn’t come back until the spring thaw brought the logs down on the river drive. Later, he drove home some weekends and on holidays unless they were snowed in. He never cut in his own woods behind the house. “It’s money in the bank,” he said once. His father had never cut back there either, except the oak cut down to make the banister and the pines cut down to frame the barn when the old one burned down. Otherwise, no one had cut in those woods since the lumber was taken out to build the house two hundred years ago just after the Revolution. Robert talked of little else in his last days, when it took him more than half an hour to make his way across the field leaning on her arm. Each generation had saved these woods, in case they were needed in the future. Going way back, he said, the really big spires were taken for masts, and a good deal of the white oaks for ribs, but after that, nothing. Not since we have lived here, he said. By “we” he meant his family, the Parkers.

  After he stopped working, Robert would walk slowly across the field to spend several hours every afternoon in the woods sitting by himself under the thick canopy of leaves. Occasionally, she helped him, but she understood that he was accustomed to his life away from her in the woods, and she spent that time deciding what they would have for supper.

  All his life her husband had been built like a tree himself, as straight and hard as the logs he skidded out of the woods north of Millinocket, a part of Maine she had never seen, even though he had spent more time there than he had with her. After he could no longer physically do the work in the camps and he came home for good, she thought finally she would have all of him. When he started spending his afternoons sitting in the woods down by the river, she realized there was a part of him she would never touch. Maybe it wouldn’t have bothered her as much if they had been able to have children.

  Once, Robert came back, hung his cane in the closet (he could still walk on his own then), and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “I guess I worked hard enough,” he said, “that we won’t have to cut the trees down.” He faced the field and the woods beyond, but his eyes were closed and his jaw slack as if in sleep.

  In the last few years of his life, he collapsed inward, his knees and back barely strong enough to carry him from one side of the property to the other. Part of her was grateful then, for she finally had him entirely to herself. He was like a child. He needed her for everything. She helped him to the tree line and turned around while he struggled ten or twelve feet into the shade of the giant white oaks and maples. Those were the happiest times of her life.

  After he was gone, she took over the habit of his vigil by sitting in the woods for an hour each afternoon on a bench he had hewn from a fallen hemlock. “Hemlock never rots,” he had said. She thought of their life together. He had never wanted to talk about his winters working in the woods. It must have been cold, she guessed, sleeping in the uninsulated camps, fifty cots surrounding the wood stove. Days so cold the trunks of the pines cracked, sounding through the woods like gunshots. Her father had told her stories. She had always known her husband lived two lives: one in the north woods, and one here on the farm with her.

  After lunch, she walked down to the woods. She felt closer to him here, and as she gazed at the bark and leaves and needles, and at the green above spread like a blanket between her and the sky, the nam
es of the trees came back to her: hemlock, white birch, red maple, white pine. Some of the pines seemed as wide as her car was long. Where the woods met the field, apple trees had gone wild, the tangled branches arching to the ground.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table at ten in the morning the day after Robbie’s usual visit when a knock sounded at the door. It was Robbie smiling in the window. She couldn’t understand at first why he was here. It wasn’t Wednesday, she hadn’t baked anything. An older man she had never seen before nodded at her once and stared at his feet.

  “We’re going to be down the hill, Aunt Lucy. You won’t even see us.”

  “Down the hill?” she said.

  “Don’t you remember, we talked yesterday?”

  “Yes, of course I remember.”

  “We’ll just be down in the woods then,” he said.

  She wasn’t exactly sure what was about to happen. They had talked about the woods, but they had talked about it many times before. She didn’t understand how they had come to this point all of a sudden.

  “I don’t want you to worry, Aunt Lucy. From up here, you won’t even notice the difference. We got a whole crew down there. Only take a few days.”

  She nodded and looked down at the two pairs of boots on the doorstep.

  “Now there’s a bit of money in it for you, Aunt Lucy.”

  “I don’t need the money.”

  “Of course you do. You need a new roof. And the foundation is cracked on the south side.”

  He was probably right about these things. She had always kept the house clean and the garden weeded. She didn’t know how much it cost to fix a cracked foundation or put on a roof. Her husband had taken care of all that. She needed to keep the house in good shape; someday it would belong to Robbie. To him and to Melanie. She had some money, she wanted to tell him, but didn’t. She had always saved money, even when there was little to save.