Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  The Vaughn Woods, a piece of the old Vaughn farm the family opened to the town, that lay between our street and the new high school was the one place Henry and I spent any time alone away from the family and his friends. Except in the winter, when the snow was too deep, he and I walked the trail through the woods to school. The fields in the Vaughn Woods were arranged like a series of symmetrical rooms, each room a hay field separated by a strip of fir trees. In the spring after the ground had dried out, the warmth of the sun released the sweet smell of new grass sprouting from thawed mud. Our pace quickened in the cooler air of the shaded dales. Our mother called it our route through Arcadia, which I shared with his girlfriend Michele. They often walked back together after his practice, and I took the road home.

  Sometimes Henry and I didn’t talk the whole way to school; it didn’t bother me. He went over his French grammar or recited chemistry formulas. He was second in the class, in his junior year, behind the vice principal’s daughter. I just liked to be with him, and eventually I took on the job of quizzing him from note cards.

  In the fall, Michele and I usually watched baseball practice from the fence that ran along the parking lot, and once I remember she said that Henry and I looked a lot alike. In a few more years, she said, when I grew, I would look just like him. I thought she was kidding at first; what she said made no sense.

  “Sometimes I wish he was more like you, that’s all.” She looped her arm around mine and smiled at Henry who stood out on the field and paid no attention to us.

  That afternoon I walked home with them through the Vaughn Woods. Much of the way the trail was wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, but it narrowed after the stone bridge over the stream, and I had to follow behind them listening to Henry talk about a test he had taken that day in chemistry. I stopped walking and listened as his voice trailed off and melded with the sound of the stream. They vanished around a bend, and though I wanted to catch up to them, I could not move. Michele’s words played through my head and I wanted her to take it back.

  Late in the fall of his senior year Henry pitched three consecutive no-hitters. It was the first time a team from Vaughn had ever won the state championship. The coach and my father started talking scholarship or minor league after a college scout showed up during one of the final games to clock his pitches. The scout spent most of his time outside the fence, watching each pitch, making occasional notes in a black book. He spoke only briefly to Henry.

  I watched the last game from my perch up in a tree off the third-base line. Henry’s expression never changed, his concentration never broke, and every time he rose over the pitcher’s mound, I shut my eyes, and every time a batter struck out, I didn’t think he could possibly throw another perfect pitch. Henry never flinched, though, and after the last batter struck out, the entire team rushed onto the field and lifted him into the air. They carried him over to the bleachers where the parents and most of the town were gathered.

  Walking through Vaughn Woods on Monday morning, Henry and I relived every moment of the last inning, and when we pushed through the front doors of the school, kids rushed up to us, patting me on the back as well as him. That afternoon during a ceremony in the gymnasium, Henry walked across the floor to receive an achievement award sent from the governor himself, and I was reminded once again of how our paths in life would diverge. There had never been any question of Henry staying with us for long in Vaughn. Everyone, especially my father, had always spoken of him in terms of where he would go and how far he would rise. When the whole school stood and clapped, my father, on stage with the other teachers, buried his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor. At first I thought he was afraid someone would see pride in his face, but when he finally looked up, I saw the same fear that I had seen at my basketball game.

  After the award ceremony, I waited for Henry outside the school. It took a long time for him to make his way through the crowd, and then he talked for a while with Michele and members of the team. I had seen Michele’s mother, so I knew Henry wouldn’t walk home with her. Even so, I knew I should have just gone on home alone—people had been coming up to Henry all day, and he looked tired. I wanted desperately to be alone with him, though, and to hear his voice talk about the different moments of the game—when the kid from Monmouth hit a foul that was almost a homer, when he almost walked their shortstop. I let him pass me and then I fell in behind him. With Michele and the others still watching, he turned around and yelled, “Will you for once stop following me around!”

  He rushed around the corner of the school, and I followed him to the parking lot, empty now except for one car in the corner. Rod and Denny stepped out, careful not to slam their car doors, and followed Henry into the woods. I started to run—I knew a side path I could take to rush ahead and warn Henry—but then I stopped and let them go.

  Rod and Denny dressed in jean jackets and cutoff T-shirts; they smoked in the parking lot and drove cars without mufflers. My father described them as just the kind of students who gave up on him without giving the class a chance, but actually they were just the kind of students our father gave up on the minute he saw them.

  I walked home by the side of the road and was behind the house when Henry came out of the woods, limping slightly, holding his elbow. I thought maybe Rod and Denny had pushed him around a little, but I didn’t think for a moment that they could have beaten him up. I waved, somehow feeling that he and I would be even now for what he had said to me. He didn’t wave back, though, and the door slammed behind him. Everything was quiet. The smell of cut hay swelled in the air.

  After the fight, as my father called it, Henry wouldn’t get out of bed for a week, and he wouldn’t talk to any of us. My father gave a speech, as my mother and I listened in the hall, on how there was no shame in taking a beating. In fact, my father said, a beating like the one Henry had just taken—nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises, nothing broken—was a good thing for a boy. It sharpened the teeth. When Henry didn’t respond to this, our father told him to buck up.

  “Damnit Henry, this is only the beginning of the fight for you! You think everything will come easy? You can’t let one beating knock you down. You have to get back out there. People are counting on you.”

  Our mother had a very different idea of what should be done about it: they would call Sheriff Chuck Sheldon and have the two boys arrested. She knew who they were, she said. “Those two hoodlums who drive around in that red car.” And then they would call Jerry MacDonnell, the district attorney, and press charges. When my father came out of the bedroom, pale and shaken, my mother rushed in and shut the door. No one but Henry knows what she said to him, for she wouldn’t tell us, but she never mentioned calling Chuck again. She wouldn’t even let the subject of what had happened cross our lips, and just as she predicted, Henry came down to breakfast the next morning dressed for school. He did not, however, get back out there, as our father had told him to. He left for school early to avoid walking with me and first thing broke up with Michele and quit all his activities and sports.

  That night our father lost control of himself in a way I had never seen before, screaming in Henry’s face that he didn’t even recognize his own son. He threw a tantrum, sweeping a whole shelf of books out of the bookcase and kicking them into the fire while we all stood there watching. Finally, he leaned against the mantle, his back heaving. I could see from under his armpit that his nose was dripping like a child’s, and I felt sorry for him, more sorry than I felt for Henry, who sat on the couch with a blank expression frozen on his face. Our mother squeezed her hands together.

  “It’s going to work out,” she said. “We need to look forward.”

  “I don’t understand!” our father said, pleading.

  Michele came to the house and tried to get Henry to speak to her; the coach stopped by, along with a number of Henry’s friends. Henry stayed in his room reading books he had borrowed from our father’s shelf, books on war, though not for school, my parents soon disco
vered: he would drop from being second in the class to below the top 20 percent—the cutoff point, the guidance counselor said, for out-of-state colleges.

  After he came home from serving overseas, Henry stopped speaking to our parents, who blamed it on some kind of shell shock, as my mother called it, though they both knew Henry hadn’t seen any combat. He and his unit had patrolled a fence in Korea.

  In the ten years after the army, he would call me, somehow finding me wherever I was at the time, from wherever he was at the time—Boulder, Denver, San Jose—and tell me about the latest place he had just traveled to. He had a long list of places he wanted to visit, he said. I never found out what he did for a living, but he seemed to have money for travel. He lived in a silver Airstream. He sent me a picture of it. He never had any plans, except where he wanted to travel next. I had worked in construction since high school, moving every couple years. I never knew where to call to give him my new number, but he always phoned every year right before I headed home for Christmas.

  All morning and afternoon we waited at the house while boats and divers searched the lake for Henry. Each time the phone rang, and it seemed to ring every few minutes, we all jumped and my cousin answered, saying no, we didn’t have any news. The rest of the family waited over at my aunt’s house on Second Street. Even those people in town not invited to the boat party were like family to my parents, and each one of them called to express their concern. My mother offered to make us sandwiches and soup. My father asked her repeatedly to sit down, but she said we had to eat. Finally, he begged her, his voice trembling in the small square living room of the old colonial, and she shivered in place with her hands clutched in front of her stomach. She looked older to me than I had ever thought she would.

  Sometime in the late afternoon Michele, Henry’s high school girlfriend, called.

  “Is this important?” my cousin asked before handing me the phone.

  “Who was that? Was that your cousin John?” she asked. I grunted and looked his way. “Listen, Paul, you better come. Don’t say anything to your parents; just come over.” Her accent had thickened while mine had all but faded in the far-flung places I had lived.

  I told my parents I was going out for some air. Michele had directed me up to Central Street where, in my absence, a few new houses had been built over the ridge toward the farmland. Doug Parris, who I hadn’t seen since high school, met me at the door. An excellent outfielder in my brother’s year, he had also been kind of a goon, at least on the outside. Despite his size, he now seemed shy. He mumbled for me to come in while looking at his feet. I noticed a Nason’s Heating and Cooling van in the driveway and guessed that was what he did for a living. A child cried from the back room as Michele appeared.

  “Your brother’s in the rec room in the basement,” Michele said, standing with both hands pressed into her hips. I leapt toward the door halfway down the hallway. “Wait a minute,” she said and sat down on the couch. “He showed up here soaking wet late last night and we put him to sleep on the couch.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He asked for you,” Michele said. “But he wanted me to talk to you first. I guess that’s not what he said exactly, but that’s what he wants.”

  “I’m just happy he’s here.”

  “Your mother came to see me five years ago. She had never said more than hello to me in the aisle at Boyton’s for all those years since Henry and I broke up, then she knocks on my door and asks if we can talk about what happened. Remember those two guys who went after your brother—Rod and Denny, lived out the Chelsea Road? They didn’t just beat your brother up. There was more to it. I guess she was the only one Henry told. I don’t know why she decided I needed to know. Then last night he shows up dripping wet saying he had to talk to me. He kept apologizing to me as if it had all just happened, curled up on the floor down in the rec room. Rod and Denny. I’m sure they hardly knew what they’d done even after they’d done it. One of them still lives here, works down at the garage. He’s married and has kids.”

  Downstairs, Henry hunched on the couch in a bathrobe that hung past his wrists and ankles. I sat down in the recliner opposite him. His shoulders bony, his cheeks sunken, and his skin the color of cement, he didn’t look like my brother.

  “Mishy talk to you?” he said.

  “Henry, it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “That’s what Ma said years ago.”

  Lines traced down into his beard. He was losing his hair in two tracks extending along his temples and his skin there was as flushed and tender as it had been when we were young. It came as no surprise to me that I had not realized what Henry had been through. I saw no more than I had to. People were always surprising me.

  “What else did Mom say to you in that room?” I asked.

  I knew what she had said, though, and his silence confirmed it. She judged that Henry had a better chance of carrying the weight of what had happened on his own than our father did of surviving the shame.

  “You come back here every year, don’t you?” he said.

  “Twice a year.” These visits to our parents had been the only consistent thing in my life.

  “Last night—I thought that door on the boat led to a deck. I was just going out for some air,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “I thought this might be the right time to come around. The parents wouldn’t recognize anything about me anyway.”

  “Sure they would.”

  “Look,” he said, “I wanted to let you know I was all right. But I also want you to do something for me. I don’t want you to tell them you saw me. Mishy agreed. You don’t have to lie for me. You just have to keep quiet.”

  “I saw them follow you into the woods,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I thought they might push you around,” I said, “but I—”

  “No,” Henry said. “No.”

  I pictured how our mother would react when it became clear they wouldn’t find the body. Over the last ten years she had been wearing down. I asked Henry if he couldn’t just forgive them, our parents. I begged him to.

  “It has nothing to do with that,” he said, and I nodded. I thought I knew what he meant. I, too, had grown into a person I didn’t know or even like very much, and it was far too late to blame or forgive anyone for that.

  “Just let them forget about me,” he said. “It’s the best thing for everyone.”

  On the way to the bus station in Augusta, he leaned down low in the passenger seat, his face tense until he found the country station on the radio. The farther upriver we drove, the more he relaxed. By the time we pulled into the terminal, he was tapping on the dash and pointing out where I should park. I realized he had been through here a few times in the last ten years, maybe even walking right by our parents’ house, as he decided whether to come back or disappear forever.

  He grabbed for the handle, and I asked if he couldn’t just come home anyway—just put it all aside. “For her,” I said, “for Ma. Think about what this will do to her.”

  “What makes you think she wants to see me like this?” he said. “She doesn’t want to know who I am now. Neither of them do.”

  I hesitated long enough for him to nod and take off. After several minutes sitting frozen in the car, I ran out and found him in line for the bus. I didn’t know what to say, though. I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t right. He must have known what I was thinking because he smiled in the way he once had.

  “You can’t leave,” I said.

  “I already did,” he said, and boarded the bus.

  He was right, he had left, when he was seventeen, and I hadn’t known what to do since then. I loved my brother, and he was being swept away from me again. I watched his bus descend the hill, and I wanted to think that everything would have been different if I had only followed my first instinct years before, the better part of myself, and sped through the woods to warn him about Rod and Denny. But despite what our father had always said about General Wo
lfe, I didn’t believe that a single event could determine the course of our lives. It seemed more likely that we were swept up in the momentum of currents that reached back farther than we could see.

  A message at the house said they had all gone over to the lake, and when I arrived at the shore the beach was nearly full: Chuck Sheldon, the Sheriff; all my uncles, aunts, and cousins; and all the people who had been at my father’s party, crowded the dock. People Henry had known in school lined up along the shore with many of the local schoolteachers. The police boats landed and dragged their equipment up the beach.

  I stared at my mother’s back, wrapped tightly in her gray cardigan. She had underestimated our father years before, and now, no doubt, Henry was underestimating her, but we had all been wrong about each other for so long that I was afraid of what the truth would do to us.

  The sun lowering into the trees on the opposite shore shot a fan of orange light out over the lake, turning the surface a deep purple. A few moments later the sun blinked below the horizon, and the lake fell under the shadow of the trees. I don’t think any of us had expected it to end like this, my father’s career and my brother’s life. They had to end, though, everyone knew that, and I think a few of us felt relieved it was over.

  My mother held her arms folded, her elbows gripped in her palms. When she saw me, she stared until I was sure she could read what I was trying to keep from her. Her eyes dimmed, and she came forward to wrap her arms around me.