Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  My mother accosted me in a minor frenzy and asked me to come down to the lower deck and help at the food table. People were making a mess, she said. By then, I couldn’t spot Henry, and I began to wonder if I had seen him at all.

  Clouds swept over just before sunset and then it was pitch black in the middle of the lake. The former high school principal put his arm around my father and leaned forward to tell some anecdote to a small circle of people. I knew all the stories about my father: there was the time he leapt out of the classroom window to make some point. I couldn’t remember what. Another time he made everyone eat hard tack and several students had to go home sick. No one ever complained. He convinced the conservative school board that he didn’t need to have any tests in his U.S. history class. He gave his own kind of tests, often outdoors, where students were asked to reenact certain events and speak in the voice of important figures. Field tests, he called them.

  I tried to get my mother to settle down and mingle, but she darted around the food, replacing finger sandwiches and cheese. Brendan Lee (head of the Maine Board of Education under two governors and my father’s old roommate from Orono) brought the party to order by tapping his wine glass.

  “I wish I could say we were all here just to have a good time,” he said. “But alas, school must begin, and today we have a history lesson on the history teacher himself. Can we blame him for Old Vaughn Day, that rowdy mess that takes place on Water Street every July? And that green park down by the river? Yes, we can. Would the high school have lost its accreditation ten years ago if this man had not devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours to drawing up the changes that made the difference? The man to blame for all these catastrophes stands right over there. We all know him. Everyone knows him. He was born here and for forty years he has taught in the same classroom.

  “Jack and I were roommates together up at Orono—before the Civil War. I remember thinking then that this guy could do anything he wanted to in life, and he chose to come back here, to Vaughn, and teach history to the children of this town. He could not have chosen a worthier path. His kingdom was his classroom, but he has been a leader to all of us who have known him.”

  Brendan Lee stepped aside for my father to say a few words. My father waved him off at first but Brendan said, “I think we could all do with one more lesson.”

  My father smiled and bowed his head, trying to pretend, I knew, that he hadn’t rehearsed what he was about to say.

  “Anyone who has taken one of my classes knows that the word ‘lesson’ is second only to ‘wisdom’ in my lexicon of useless words. But here I am. I am a freshman again, without lessons, leaving the life I have known, the school I have known, for the unknown.” He paused, head bowed, lips pursed, and then he said something that I could tell he had not planned to: “The trouble with teaching,” he said, “if you’re any good at it, is that you never grow older than your students.” He looked up, surprised at his own words, and before he could move on, my brother stepped out of the crowd behind me and edged along the wall. My father and brother eyed each other for a moment until my brother reached for the handle of a door I had not noticed and stepped out into the darkness. There was a splash, and then we were all quiet listening to the ambient hum of the engine beneath us. My mother ran forward into the space between my father and his audience and turned in a circle.

  “What?” she said. She whirled around, looked frantically over my face and chest as if for signs of injury, and turned to my father. “Henry!” she yelled. “Did I see Henry?” The second call for her son sent everyone into action. My father came forward to comfort her, but she hit him hard in the chest and pushed him away.

  Jim, the photographer from the Valley Journal, who had been quite a few years younger than me in school and an only child, did what I should have done and flung himself out into the lake with all three of his cameras wrapped around his neck. Doug Molloy, a kid I had known in school, and now the new history teacher, technically my father’s replacement, followed, hitting the water in his sport coat and with his wine glass still fixed in his hand. One of my father’s brothers jumped in, along with two of my cousins. I prepared to go, too, taking off my jacket and my shoes and laying them next to the wall, but the captain pulled me back.

  “We don’t need anyone else in the water,” he said, raising both his hands in the air.

  “Why is there a door there?” Brendan Lee demanded. My mother looked at the open door in disbelief, but it was the opening we had walked through when we climbed the gangway to board the boat earlier in the evening. Of course, someone should have locked it.

  The captain returned to the helm and told everyone through the intercom that all parties would be rescued. The boat turned around and the crew searched the water with spotlights. My father and mother stood in the bow on the upper deck, calling Henry’s name. I felt there was little I could add to the situation now and sat down on the lower deck next to a bottle of wine and a plate of cheese. People huddled and discussed in hushed tones what had happened. Occasionally, they glanced at me—the brother, the son. I was used to being one or the other in Vaughn, but I had not lived in Vaughn for some time. The sound of my parents calling for Henry rose above all the other voices. Eventually, my father gave up and people around me quieted down, leaving just the echo of my mother’s croaks.

  The crew rescued the young teacher and the photographer, who had yanked off his cameras and shoes to save himself, and now seemed somewhat chagrined as they covered him with a blanket. They pulled my uncle and cousins out of the water. All of them had stripped off their shoes. Even as other boats joined the search, I never once considered that any harm had come to Henry. I had never believed anything could happen to him, but this was a belief forged in childhood, in the mind of a younger brother. Now he was a man who had been living out of a backpack for ten years.

  Our boat returned to the dock, and people skulked off to their cars. I rode with a cousin to the house where my parents waited in the living room, each in their respective chairs, for some news. My father’s two sisters waited in the kitchen with four cousins. They wanted to be on hand in case they were needed, but they didn’t want to intrude on my parents’ distress and grief, which they all would have considered a private matter.

  Normally, my father, a member of the volunteer fire department for forty years, would have been out there helping, but I had heard someone say to him as we left the boat that he should see to my mother. He looked like the star athlete benched for the rest of the game, shocked and stunned that he was not indispensable. Finally, as the sun came up, my mother rose to make everyone breakfast, and I went over to stand by my father and gaze with him out the window at the black locust tree we had planted on my tenth birthday. The twenty-foot high branches were covered now with white blossoms.

  History, our father was often fond of saying when Henry and I were young, is a mirror, though he would usually rejoin that he had not meant “mirror”—not exactly. “Not exactly” was his stock response to any pretense at certainty. For such a skeptic, though, he loved to speak in absolutes. He claimed it was a teaching method, a way of baiting his students (and as his children, my brother and I were always his students) onto thin ice. He used to make Henry and me watch an hour of TV a day—anything we wanted as long as it was “popular”—while he stood behind us attacking (in a steady monotone), the lies perpetrated on a comatose public. To prove we were comatose, he once held the hall mirror next to the TV so we could see ourselves watching.

  Our father had very little tolerance for people who didn’t understand right away, and even less tolerance for people who could understand if they wanted to, but showed no interest. He was never sure which category I fit into. I confused him, I think, by earning an A in French and a C- in social studies. Just when he had decided I was hopeless, I would do well. No sooner had he congratulated me on my success, than I would fail an exam. For a while, in junior high, he made me his project: my eraticism, he called it, was due to lack of disc
ipline and inefficient method. He clocked my study hours at night and monitored my note taking. When my grades went down, he finally raised his voice at dinner one night, declaring that I just wasn’t trying to focus. My mother stepped in (which she rarely did) and told him that was enough.

  In a final effort to transform me, my father signed me up for the junior high basketball team because I was tall for the ninth grade. The coach, a friend of his, kept me after practice trying to improve my skills, and my father enlisted two of my older cousins, one of whom was on my team and one of whom was on the high school team, to help me with my ball handling. I made some progress at the free-throw line when no one else was in the gym, but the coach benched me for most of the first game until the last four minutes of the final quarter, when we were hopelessly behind. I ran up and down the court and managed to stand in the right places with my hands in the air. I could feel my father watching me intently, leaning forward in the bleachers with his chin in his hand. The unfortunate moment arrived when I found myself open, and someone passed me the ball. I saw it coming and raised my hands, but I miscalculated somehow and it thudded against my chest. The buzzer sounded, freezing everyone’s eyes on me, and I saw my father, one hand extended up along his temple. I had expected to see disappointment and shame on his face, but not the kind of terror only a child can imagine, in which the smallest failure or embarrassment has the power to destroy.

  It was a good thing, my mother said to me after the game, that my father had other things to focus on. He had Henry, and he had his book. For ten years, from when I was very young until just after Henry left, our father worked on a book about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the event, according to him, that had shaped the future of North America. He spent two hours after dinner every night behind the shut door of his small office at the back of the house supposedly working on the book, which no one knew about except my mother, Henry, and me. Through the keyhole, I watched his monolithic back expand with his slow breathing.

  “If Wolfe had not seen the path on the side of the cliff into the Achilles’ heel of Montcalm’s defense,” our father explained as we drove north to Quebec for one of our yearly visits to the Plains, “he would have been forced to attack head on up the steep bluffs, or go around the bend in the river to another fortified position. He had only a few days to attack before he would have to sail for England to avoid being iced in for the winter. If he had attacked head on, he would have lost the majority of his forces. Despite his corrupt mismanagement of the colony, Vaudrevil might have retained Canada for France; encouraged by the victory, Louis XVI might have reinforced his troops. England might have left New France alone and focused instead on New England, possibly short-circuiting the American Revolution. Without the American Revolution, French troops would not have returned to help inspire the French Revolution—no Napoleon.”

  His eyes widened as he painted an alternate picture of our past, as if he were shaping its course with his own words.

  The last trip we took to Quebec was the summer Henry turned sixteen and I turned thirteen. We had no radio, but our mother had an incredible memory for songs, which she belted out hour after hour in her off-key voice. My father sang along as well, as these were mostly the songs (Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Supremes) of their courtship, from a time before Henry and I were born. I hummed along, leaning into the front seat, while Henry sat back looking out the window. Or he slept. Even among his family, he was slightly aloof much of the time.

  We stayed, as always, in a campground outside Quebec City, and at night around the fire my father reminded us of the history of the battle as the English General Wolfe faced it on September 13, 1759. He drew with a piece of kindling the rivers enclosing Quebec to the east. The Cap Rouge flowed between cliffs and high, wooded banks until it joined the St. Lawrence. The city was protected on all sides and should have been impenetrable, even to a superior force.

  “Wolfe on one side, Montcalm on the other. Quebec a natural fortress. The Lower Town, houses, warehouses, and docks, lay along the riverside. The Upper Town perched atop the bluffs.”

  In the glow of the firelight, I watched shadows form in the lines of my father’s face below his temples as he looked from one to the other of us. For the first time during the trip, my brother’s attention sharpened.

  “Maybe it was just chance that he saw the path,” Henry said, and I knew he was only trying to get our father going.

  “No, Henry,” our father said. “Only someone of Wolfe’s character could have noticed that. Steep cliffs two hundred feet high stretch unbroken for miles on either side of the city,” our father continued, looking at Henry.

  On the outside, our father said, Wolfe was the antithesis of a hero: a neurotic, diseased, secretive military fanatic. He suffered from severe depression and impenetrable silences followed by fits of yelling at his officers. He was short, ugly, and dying, just like his empire. But Wolfe (or someone in his command) spotted an inlet two miles west of Quebec with an overgrown path winding up the cliff face to a weak spot in the French defenses, and this made him a hero.

  The next day we drove into Quebec and went straight to the Plains, a plateau about three-quarters of a mile wide, now surrounded by buildings, shops, houses, and steady traffic. My father played the role of the French Captain Vergor, dozing in his tent after having sent most of his militia home to gather in the crops. Henry played Wolfe’s lead pathfinder. Branches and sticks served as our guns and knives. I had worried on the drive up that Henry might think he was too old for these games, now that he had a girlfriend, Michele, and was the star of the baseball team; but in the bushes by the cliff, he kneeled down and assumed his command. We both smeared mud on our faces, which our mother refused to do, though she had brought scarves for us to tie around our heads. She didn’t seem to care that scarves were not period uniform for either side.

  “Paul,” Henry said to me, “You come up the left flank on my signal.”

  “Jo,” he said, making our mother laugh. “You take the right flank.”

  “What’s the signal?” I asked.

  “A whip-poor-will call,” he said, pressing his fingers to his lips and letting out a low trill. Henry pointed to the edges of the field to our left and right and then drew a map with his stick in the dirt, just as our father had done.

  “You take out these two sentries,” he said to me, “and Jo will take out two on the other side.” Our mother laughed again.

  Our father, meanwhile, reclined in his camp chair with his stick gun resting against his thigh and yawned before reloading his antique pipe. We took up our positions, and I mimicked cutting the throats of two sentries before looking to Henry to see if he was watching. He nodded approval and whistled. We all came creeping out of the bushes toward our father, who removed his pipe from his mouth and gawked with mock surprise as Henry and my mother tackled him to the ground. I tripped and then hung back, watching as my mother rolled away and Henry and our father continued wrestling. After he pinned our father, Henry took off running across the field toward Quebec with his stick raised in the air. His body sprung like a coil, his feet propelling through the grass. He wouldn’t stop until he had taken the city.

  “Come here,” our mother said when she noticed me. “Come on, sit down,” she said, reaching into her bag for our sandwiches. “The battle’s over. Do you want turkey or roast beef?”

  I turned from her and walked away to look over the bank to the river.

  It took me a long time to understand that my father was incapable of focusing on more than one thing at a time, and when that one thing was not General Wolfe, it was Henry. After my failure on the basketball court, he could no longer see me most of the time. I wasn’t there even when I stood right in front of him. Henry and my father were the same. When Henry was pitching, he told me, he couldn’t hear people in the bleachers or calls from the other players. He didn’t see the batter’s face, just the catcher’s glove. When he spoke to me, he focused in on me and heard every word I said, but as
soon as we arrived at school or he saw one of his friends or one of our cousins or Michele, he pulled inside himself. He had a friendly way of standing erect and smiling in large groups that made him appear relaxed. I knew he wasn’t.

  I think I knew before anyone that my father was no longer working on his book when he locked himself in his room after dinner. I listened at the door, but did not hear the keys of his typewriter snap. Whatever energy he had once put into his project, he now poured into Henry. He monitored Henry’s grades, proofread everything he wrote for school, attended practice, and talked with Henry about his pitching strategy over dinner every night. The more my father worked on him, the more Henry began to resemble a book. There was a purpose, a thesis, to each day: studying for a test, shaving imperfections off his fastball, gaining total control over the curveball.

  I was the opposite of my father and Henry: I couldn’t focus on any one thing—a sentence, a face, a math problem—for more than a couple seconds. In a crowd or a classroom or the basketball court, I took in all the peripheral information and almost never what I was supposed to focus on. Between the release of the basketball and its thud against my chest, I saw the anticipation on my father’s face, the bored look of a girl sitting in the bleachers, and the clenched fist of the coach.

  I spent most of my time looking out the second-story window of our house and daydreaming. I liked to imagine what life had been like in our town when our family first came there. My father had talked about our ancestors so much that I felt as if they were still among us, plowing fields and gathering firewood. At one time, when the slope of the valley from our doorstep to the riverbank was still a cow pasture, ages before any of us were born, our cape at the top of Central Street had been a farmhouse on the edge of town. The landscape had changed since 1750, though, and from my bedroom I could see all the buildings that had come up and the empty lots where a few had fallen. Sometime in the late 1950s, they tore down the old high school and built a modern flat-roofed school behind us that housed grades 7–12 and drew students from all the outlying farms and villages.