Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  At first she thought to bake something, in case Robbie and the other one came in for lunch—they hadn’t carried lunch pails with them—but when the chain saws started she had to sit down. It felt as if a screw was tightening the column of her spine, paralyzing each muscle. More than two buzzed down at the bottom of the slope. It sounded like an army. She sat there all morning until finally the buzzing stopped at noon and she walked down the hall to the bathroom. The sound returned after lunch and lasted until dark when it stopped but still echoed through her thoughts all night, long after the boys had gone home, holding her on the edge of sleep. She woke up past eight to the sound of the saws already at work again. There seemed to be more of them today than the day before.

  She dressed quickly, pulling her coat over her nightgown and hurrying out the door and down the road to Robbie’s parents’ house. Charlie wouldn’t be home, but Rebecca, Robbie’s mother, would be, and she would have to see that there had been some misunderstanding.

  Rebecca answered the door and waved Lucy inside. Rebecca was on the phone so Lucy sat down and clamped her hands between her knees. The buzzing was loud, even this far away.

  Rebecca leaned against the wall on the other side of the room. Lucy watched her lips move, but she couldn’t hear what she said. The murmur of her voice sounded like the purring approval of a cat. Lucy hated to be reminded that she didn’t like someone, but it was hard to avoid with Rebecca.

  “I’m afraid I’m on my way out the door, Aunt Lucy,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s just about the trees,” she said.

  “The trees?”

  “Down the hill. Behind the house—they’re cutting down the trees.”

  “I thought Robert talked to you. He told me that he talked to you, about the thinning.”

  “Yes, he did. He did.”

  “Then I don’t understand what the matter is, Aunt Lucy. I’m going to be late.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to barge over like this.”

  “Well for goodness sake. If you talked to him—did he not tell you what he was going to do?”

  “I didn’t know he was going to cut the trees down.”

  “I’m afraid I just don’t understand. He came over to talk to you about thinning. We told him he had to talk to you first.”

  “He did, yes, he did.”

  Rebecca looked at her watch.

  “But I didn’t know he was going to cut them down.”

  “Not all of them, for goodness sake. I don’t know what you thought he was going to do.”

  “Robert—he was saving those trees.”

  “Saving them for what? They don’t last forever. I’ll talk to Robbie, and I’ll have him go back over to see you, and you can tell him what your worries are. I may not see him tonight, though. I won’t be back in time to tell him tonight. I’ve got a meeting. We’re planning a sale at the library, and he goes to bed early.”

  Her nephew had everything, Lucy wanted to yell but stayed silent. He had Melanie. He had a new truck, he would have her land and her house filled with children and grandchildren. She and her husband had always saved everything. During the war, everyone did. Robert was in the war for four years, fighting his way from Sicily to Germany while his younger brother Charlie, Robbie’s father, came in at the very end to guard prisoners for six months. Robbie had no idea what it had cost her and her husband (and their parents who had provided through the Depression) to put off what they wanted and do with less.

  In the morning, she left soon after the saws started, for a parish meeting. Afterward, Elsie had people over for tea and coffee. Elsie had a big house on the opposite side of Vaughn, and though Lucy was too distracted to listen to the other women, at least she couldn’t hear the saws. She stayed as long as she could and afterward went to the town landing to look out at the river until the sun went down. They couldn’t work in the dark.

  The next morning, Robbie stood on the front step with the low light at his back, his face in the shadow.

  “Aunt Lucy? Hello,” he said, his voice just like her husband’s. She sat down at the kitchen table, the breath taken out of her.

  “My mother said you came over about the woods. She said you were worried we would leave a mess or something.”

  He went to the cupboard, pulled out a glass, and filled it with tap water.

  As if he already owns the place, as if I’m already dead, she thought but then felt guilty. She offered him some juice or some coffee.

  “No, water’s good. Thank you, Aunt Lucy.”

  She put the pot on anyway.

  “I want you to know you can rest easy,” he said. “Uncle Robert would be proud of the job we’re doing down there. Uncle Robert was a real woodsman, last of the old guys. He liked a job done clean at the end, and that’s the way we’re gonna leave it, don’t you worry.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “We’re leaving some four inch and smaller—new growth.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you are.” Her eyes began to burn, and she squeezed them shut to keep from crying. “You see, I’m worried about the trees—the trees, you know, Robert. . . .”

  “Uncle’d be very happy with the job. Very happy, Aunt Lucy. I don’t want you to worry. We won’t send nothing to pulp. Mostly logs, mostly logs, even in the spruce, and not really cause of the money. Uncle woulda wanted it that way. He hated things going to pulp. But the thing he’d be wild over, Aunt Lucy, is this birdseye maple we got. Gonna make beautiful cabinets in some rich guy’s kitchen. No, you don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  The saws continued after he left. She dressed quickly in front of the mirror, her hands hurrying around her waist. She put on her long brown coat, packed her pocketbook in her purse, and held the keys in her hand, ready to walk down the front steps. It wouldn’t do any good to go to any of the women she knew from church, the wives of her husband’s friends, whom she had known for years. Her friends. They would listen, maybe a few of them would understand, but they were all busy with families of their own. They couldn’t do anything. The only person she could think of going to was someone most people didn’t think of as a very good person at all—Don Small, who had once owned the garage in town. She had not thought of him in years, but she felt he was the only one who could help her.

  Don’s life had not been easy. One of his children had spent time in prison after causing quite a bit of trouble in Vaughn and somewhere else. Don and his wife had lived apart after the birth of their second child. His wife—Lucy could picture her round face but could not remember her name—died of cancer when the children were still young. The poor children went to live with their grandmother while Don stayed above the garage on Water Street. She had heard that he now lived way out the Litchfield Road before the old MacRitchie farm, in what one of her friends described as the remains of an old shack. She had heard that news three years ago and she didn’t know, as she drove out of the valley, if he would still be there or if he was even alive anymore. He would be older than her by a few years.

  Twenty years ago during a winter of heavy snow, her old Pontiac began to spew black smoke out of the tailpipe on her way back from Boyton’s Market. If Robert had not been working in the woods, he would have fixed the car himself. She brought it to Don Small, who had already closed his shop for the day. It was dark, the snow spiraling in the streetlight. She had to knock on the door to his upstairs apartment. He was bleary eyed. Maybe he had already started drinking, but he was courteous, calling her ma’am. They lived in the same town, but they had never spoken before. He had a boy manning the pump during the day, and he rarely came out of the garage to talk to anyone. He told her the car wasn’t fit to drive. After some protest, she accepted a ride home in his truck. He put her groceries in the back under a tarp. The snow stopped and it was a clear crisp night, the banks towering and the powder of the fields crystalline in the moonlight. They didn’t speak all the way up the hill. He helped carry in the groceries and stood mute in the dark house wit
h his long arms hanging at his sides.

  They were together that once, that one night, and to her knowledge no one saw him leave before dawn. She told him they could never see each other again, and he looked at her from the shadow of the doorway to the bedroom and didn’t answer.

  For years he called, always when Robert was away. She knew it was him because no one spoke when she said hello. She lived in fear that someone would find out or that Don would come to the house and force himself inside. He never did; he just called and hung up, like a teenager. She felt when he called how much he wanted her and thought about her in ways that her husband never had. On many Sundays, she asked for forgiveness but never of the priest. She was afraid of what he would think, of the look he would have on his face every time she saw him on Sunday or at the market. She never felt forgiven, though she did, eventually, feel less guilty. In the end, she wasn’t certain she wanted to be forgiven. She had traveled that night with Don to the very edge of the known world. She had wanted to see just once what it would feel like to throw everything away, and over the years she had wished on several occasions that Don would tell everyone and slash through everything she knew.

  The secret they shared had, over time, earned him a mythical power in her mind. No one, however, not even Don, could take away what had never been given by her own marriage, by her own body. And, in the end, she didn’t want to lose what she did have. Her years with Robert were all she had. Each time Don called, the silence on the other end of the line was the sound of Robert, her friends, the priest, and the parish vanishing into the ether of pure white snow. After he finally stopped calling, though, she felt emptiness inside her that she hadn’t noticed before.

  She was here at Don’s house (if you could call it a house, with a hole in the roof and half the windows boarded over) to ask his help in saving the last of what she had feared losing: the trees her husband had loved maybe more than he had been able to love her.

  The man in the doorway didn’t look familiar, though it was Don. He was shorter, much shorter, hunched, and his dry cheeks had faded into a delicate onion skin. He wore a stiff blue cap, which he took off and quickly put back on again, and he made a grunting noise—not quite a greeting—before backing away from the door, leaving it open. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go inside, but she did, and removed a metal object the size and shape of a fist (some part of a car, she guessed) from a wooden chair before sitting down. Don sat on a filthy old couch and turned his head to the side, as if he expected someone to come out of the next room.

  She started talking frantically about the woods behind the house. “The trees,” she said. “My nephew’s cutting them all down. I know he is. They were my husband’s trees.” She described what kind they were, or what kind she thought they were—hemlocks, pines, maples. She didn’t know what to do to stop her nephew, she said. She had asked him to stop, or at least she thought she had asked him to stop. She went on longer than she intended to, describing how her husband had loved the trees and never wanted them to be cut. Finally, with all her will, she stopped herself from talking and saw that Don wasn’t listening—he couldn’t listen. His eyes, staring right at her, were like small green stones in a clear brook. The same thing had happened to Robert before he died.

  She looked around and saw an old cot in the corner and piles of opened cans on a crumbling sink counter. Flies buzzed above a mound of half-filled trash bags. For some reason, he had stuffed some of the cans into the wood stove. The stench was overwhelming now, and the worst of it was the smell of urine coming from his filthy pants. He looked down at his hands (which alone remained unchanged after more than twenty years) and back up at her.

  “Oh, Don,” she said, and his face softened into a smile almost of recognition. While Don sat in his old chair looking from his hands, to her, and back to his hands, she carried trash bags full of cans and rotting food scraps out to the road. She pumped water into a bucket, and scrubbed the floor and the counters. Finally, she hand washed what clothes she found in cardboard boxes, and hung them to dry on a rope she tied from a branch to the shell of an old porch light next to the front door. Don watched her work for the rest of the day. It was late afternoon when she finished, the sun low in the trees when she squeezed Don’s hand to say goodbye, and he looked up at her to smile again. Someone had been coming by to drop off food for him—some distant kin, probably—but they were doing little else. Don stood on his stoop and waved once as she backed out of the drive.

  Tomorrow she would call Elsie, she thought, as she drove up the hill. Elsie would help him. She had worked in hospice care in Augusta and was now in charge of a group of women from the parish who looked after old people who had no one else. Of course, Lucy would have to explain why she was at Don’s in the first place, and she wasn’t a good liar.

  She entered her house and put her bag down on the table before she heard the absence of the saws buzzing down the hill. Maybe they had quit early. As she walked along the trail behind the house to the woods, she thought about what she would say to Elsie, and all the women in the congregation Elsie would talk to about how Lucy had started doing old Don Small’s laundry. She could say she was just driving by and saw what a state the place was in, but driving by on the way to where? She could say she had heard he needed help, but heard from whom? Who would talk to her about the old mechanic who had once lived above his shop where he drank and befriended no one? She decided she wouldn’t explain anything. Damn them all. She would tell Elsie there was a man out Litchfield Road before the MacRitchie place, who lived alone and needed help. She wouldn’t even name him. She would tell Elsie that no one should die dirty and all alone. It lacked any dignity at all. In fact, she would volunteer to go down there herself and check on him once or twice a week.

  Lucy followed the path through a thin wall of trees into the open light. Except for a few spindly birches and maples, no wider than her calf, all the trees had been cut down on the hill that sloped to the river. Long-armed branches lay strewn waist high around stacks of sixteen-foot logs, reminding her of a photograph she had seen of a field of fallen soldiers. The vast maze, so dense that it had seemed impenetrable, was now bare and washed by the sun. She leaned against the butt end of an old pine, the still damp wood staining her fingers with sap. It would take a lifetime—more than a lifetime—for the trees to grow as tall again. No one now living would survive to see them cover the sky. She had always known that her nephew would cut them down, but she had hoped that he would wait until she was gone. It seemed so little to ask, she thought, just to wait.

  THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM

  I belonged to a large family that had lived in the same town in Maine for over two hundred years. When those who had moved away came back in August to visit, we treated them as if they had never left, and in some ways they hadn’t. No matter where they had moved to or what they had done with their lives, they still looked and acted like Ingersolls, at least while they were among us. Even those we called married-ins seemed to acquire the tense Ingersoll jaw and the officious presence that I have only otherwise noticed in school crossing guards and the managers of fast food restaurants.

  Our family had never been wealthy or influential (our ancestors first came to Vaughn to farm for the original Vaughn family), but we liked to think we were intelligent and sturdy, if nothing else, as evidenced by our determination to stay in one place for such a long time. We also liked to think that we had always, from the beginning, come down on the right side of things, even when it was dangerous to do so. A distant uncle, a deacon of Newbury, spoke out against the witch trials while they were happening, not afterward when it was safe. Half a dozen of us died fighting King Phillip’s men; one Ingersoll actually reached Quebec with Arnold on his treacherous winter expedition (though it’s never been clear, to me at least, what that says about us); another defied our employer, the founders of the town, to oppose the English during the Revolution; another refused to serve on ships involved in the rum trade, choosing instead to work in the
woods for a fraction of the pay.

  After my grandfather’s death, my father became the head of our clan; he was the oldest living member of the family still in Vaughn, and for forty years he had taught history in the local high school. When he retired from teaching, he announced that he would throw a party for himself that he said would double as a family reunion. He hired an old boom towing barge converted into a tour boat to take us on an evening cruise across nearby Lake Sumner, where my great grandfather had built a log cabin. When I was young, my grandfather had maintained a raft with a diving board at the old camp, and my brother, cousins, and I had spent hours there swimming and warming our pale skin in the August sun. The lake was always cold, even in the middle of summer.

  On the day of the party, more than a hundred extended family members and old friends climbed the gangway and mingled in the cool breeze of a mild summer evening. August is the only time of year in Maine when the weather could be called ideal. The mosquitoes and black flies had taken a break and the air seemed braced for the coming fall. The tips of the spruce rocked in the reflection of the water, and the hills to the west balanced in the haze of the horizon. My mother and I leaned over the railing on the top deck and talked about what their lives would be like now that my father wasn’t working. I thought they should travel somewhere, but she said nothing much would change. He would volunteer in the schools up and down the valley, and she would continue at the school library.

  After my mother went down to the first deck to find my father, my brother Henry jumped out of an old Chevy that had pulled into the parking lot, thanked the driver for a ride, and boarded just as the captain was about to cast off. No one had expected my brother—he hadn’t been home in more than ten years—and I don’t think anyone else noticed him. Though he had a beard and dark shaggy hair now, he still moved with the same rolling gait. As we headed out into the lake, I tried to make my way toward him at the back of the boat, but it had been years, in some cases, since I had seen certain cousins and aunts who lived out of state, either in New Hampshire or Vermont, and others, too—friends of my parents from Vaughn, old teachers, my father’s buddies. I visited Vaughn twice a year but only briefly.