Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  The girls lined up as a drizzle stung our cheeks. People craned their necks and squinted at the runners before turning to each other and shrugging—no Melissa. Some of them—especially the women, the other mothers—whispered to each other. William raised his camera but then let it drop against the neck strap. His face turned pale.

  The pistol snap sent the runners forward in a wave under the gray November sky. Doug, the ex, gasped. Poor boy, I thought, though not out of compassion. He was poor. He didn’t have a father and his mother mopped the floors at the Wharf. He was nice looking but too poor to look nice, Melissa’s friend Becky had said.

  Though it was nine in the morning, it might have been dusk, and as they disappeared down the path that snaked through the woods, Doug searched the leaders. There were too many girls from other schools who looked the same, running away. Rain curled from branches in loping drops, but I was sure that in Doug’s mind Melissa did not hear them hit the ground, nor did she hear the sound of her own breath, nor the heels of her sneakers over the packed mud, as she pulled ahead. Runners appeared in groups of twos and threes, their eyes drunk on exhaustion and stunned with the sudden glare of the metallic light as they pushed with the last of their will toward the line.

  When Melissa’s friend Merrill said Melissa hadn’t come out of her house since the morning of the day before, William, the photographer, rushed over.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Yesterday morning. She runs every morning, every morning,”—a fact everyone knew from the article in the Journal, for which William had done the photographs people raved about. His pictures of Old Vaughn Day were all right, but operating that one-touch camera couldn’t be any harder, I thought, than spitting on your own shoe. And he couldn’t see anything with a camera that I didn’t already know: I knew Melissa thought Doug was a “total mistake,” I knew she waxed her arm hairs and pictured herself (God knows why) someday married to a man who owned a Ford dealership, just as I knew that old Mrs. McDermott across the street mailed letters to herself from Augusta and slept in the nude. I knew most of what went on in our town (I was the short one standing with her arms crossed in the edge of people’s vision), but on the morning of the big race I had no more idea than anyone why Melissa had locked herself in her room with the shades drawn and the lights out while our mother sat by the door speaking into the keyhole with her most conciliatory voice.

  Melissa was still not answering when I got home. It was impossible not to defy our mother whose voice plucked at my nerves like the yowl of a cat in heat. But our poor mother did her best, trying to say it was nothing—teenage stuff—even though Melissa had never given in to melodrama before. She was a normal girl, our mother said, she did well in school, she had boyfriends (never too serious), she went to the movies, to dances, to parties, to football games, and always, for the last two years, she ran. She ran seventy-five miles a week.

  Melissa’s two best friends, Merrill and Becky, arrived in Merrill’s boyfriend Billy’s car. Billy stayed in the car while they knocked on the door.

  “What’s wrong? Why won’t she come out?” Merrill said to me, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t talk to girls who went out with Billy. Someday Billy would regret that his father had ever given him that car, because it would have taken him too long to learn there was nothing else to him.

  Our father paced in the kitchen; he didn’t look so much angry as bewildered, until there was a knock and Doug’s face leaned into the window of the front door. Our father grabbed him hard by the shirt and Doug screamed Melissa’s name as our father pushed him against the banister and screamed it again with such desperation that our father stepped back and looked at his hands, wondering what he had done.

  Back then I used to think it was unbelievable how stupid people were. Our parents seemed to have no idea that (before she dumped him) Melissa had been sneaking out to see Doug almost every night. More than once, I had seen them park down the street and had seen him turn off the headlights to fall over in her direction.

  Melissa had not had many boyfriends before Doug. He was the first semiserious one but only because he made it that way. She wasn’t even sure she liked him that much (she told Merrill when I could hear them talking in her room through the radiator pipes). He was insistent, Melissa said, with his use of the word love, tossing it at her on a daily basis until she was fairly certain on at least a couple of occasions that it might be true. And she had to admit (as most people would if pressed) that it’s not bad being loved by someone cute but poor, even if some of his people were mentally ill (his father was locked in his own room at the Augusta Mental Health Institute, a place so infamous for what my mother called its “dirt basement ways” that perfectly sane people visiting their unfortunate relatives were known to have fallen apart behind its walls and never come out).

  The phone started ringing before my father let go of Doug and it did not stop. People who had been at the race, or whose children or parents or brothers and sisters and cousins had been there, called to find out what was wrong. Our father picked up the phone the first two times and yelled louder than he should have that he didn’t know what was wrong. He was about to pick it up a third time when our mother came down and unplugged it from the wall.

  No one was thinking about William, the photographer, except me. I had seen him drive away after the race. At that time of day, his wife Miriam would have been out for a walk. She couldn’t go very far, in the seventh month, without having to pee, so she would have stopped to use the bathroom at Boyton’s Market. She had mentioned to her friend, Mrs. Pomeroy, a teacher at my school (who passed everything on to my mother), that her husband was worried about money. Miriam had also been a teacher (my favorite) at my school until that fall, when she quit because of the baby.

  William had photographed Melissa dozens of times at races, but I did not think anything of it until he parked down the street from our house the night of the race. I might have thought he had come for me because, as usual, I expected something catastrophic to happen to me, something so awful that for generations people would close their eyes and shake their heads whenever my name was mentioned. But no one ever came for me. My light was off, my window as dark as William’s car. I would not have seen him except for the light shining from Melissa’s room spreading out into the road. Melissa could not stand to be off her feet for long (today she is a nurse in Augusta), and I heard her pacing in front of her window, her foot landing with an ugly clump on every other step as if she had a cane or a wooden leg. William slid over into the passenger seat of his car and pressed his face against the glass, looking up at her window.

  William had never spoken to me, though I had heard him speak. I had heard everyone’s voice at one time or another, and I hated his most of all. I hated him as much as I loved his wife Miriam. I hated him because he had made her pregnant so she no longer taught at my school and I couldn’t see her every day as I had before. I hated the look of his face, so thin and pointed at the chin, with a cleft that changed shape like a mouth when he spoke. Everyone was surprised when he got into art school in Boston with a full scholarship. I had no memory of him before he left Vaughn, but I remembered hating him the first time I saw him when he came back with the beautiful woman who was not from Vaughn: the “Boston girl” people called her. I didn’t care if she was a pagan witch; I loved her outfits and her pale hands and the absolutely pure elegance of what I later figured out was nothing but a Southie accent.

  William liked to tell the story to people he worked with at the paper (once to my father and other men at my house while they all sat drinking beer in the backyard and I listened from the kitchen window) of how he and Miriam first met in a bar on Newbury Street where he spontaneously broke into “My Lagan Love” after having a few too many boilermakers and noticed her sitting by herself, waiting for a friend (a date, it turned out) who never showed up. He asked her to dance; she declined. He persisted until the whole bar called for her to join him, though in her account (Willi
am admitted to my father) the bar was empty except for her, the bartender, and William and his two friends. When she moved to push him away, he saw the series of deep scars over the top of her right hand extending up into her sleeve. He stopped, stared at her face for a long moment, and said he was very sorry for bothering her while slightly drunk but that she really was so beautiful. He would be enormously grateful, he said, if she would dance with him just once because it was his birthday. She said of course it wasn’t his birthday. He waltzed her across the floor, though according to her version she helped him stagger back to his chair while he sang “Cavan Girl” and “Molly Malone” in honor of his old grandmamma.

  To me William was old, like my parents, part of a vast race I would never join. Miriam was another being entirely. When she still taught at my school, she wore skirts made of the same material as people’s fancy head scarves. Her long, perfectly straight hair reached all the way down to the small of her back.

  I could never understand why Miriam agreed to move to Vaughn from Boston. Susan and Emma had said it was obvious that she was so in love with William that she would move anywhere, even to the town where we lived, which no one moved to unless they had lived there before and had no choice but to come back. William had come back by choice, though, quitting college in Boston six months short of graduation and not long after he met Miriam. Apparently, no one explained to him that it’s easy to resent someone who leaves and impossible to respect anyone who comes back.

  Eventually, William started the car and drove away, but I did not sleep. Instead of going to school the next morning, I went to sit on the library steps across the street from the apartment where William and Miriam lived. I wanted to speak to him; I had no idea why, nor any idea what I would say. My palms burned red, which says something about how my cheeks must have looked. People talk about seeing red, but when I was that angry everything in town looked like a pencil drawing to me, black on white.

  It was still early when he drove by me, but instead of heading to the paper, he pushed down his left blinker and climbed Litchfield Road, rising up out of the valley. The dampness of the river flowed through the air as I stood to watch him. I didn’t know where he was going at first, but then I remembered that on the morning before the big race, there was a car accident down the road from where Melissa usually ran. William would have seen Melissa as he drove home from shooting the wreck. They knew each other from the races. Now he was headed back to the spot where the low fog collected on the pine needles and oak leaves, where he had veered off the road and pulled her into the car and the two of them fought with two or three times their strength. She tried to move her arms, but he held them down; she tried to scream, but he covered her mouth and pinned her across the front seat. He needed both hands to hold her down, she was so strong. Her legs, her runner’s legs, kicked at his legs. All the freedoms she had previously taken for granted, even her sight and her thoughts, were suffocated by his face bearing down on her. Her clothes stripped away, her pale skin white with terror.

  I waited outside his apartment for him to come back, and when he did, I stood but didn’t know what to do. Miriam came out onto the porch. Neither of them saw me, though I was in plain sight.

  “You were supposed to be here an hour ago,” she said. She stared impassively at his face, and he stared back, looking into her eyes.

  “Remember?” she said.

  “Of course I remember,” he said, and went inside.

  I wanted to warn Miriam—everyone knew she had suffered enough with what had happened in Philadelphia—but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. The thought of anything bad happening to her again was too much for me to bear, too much for any of us in Vaughn to bear. I sat down and hugged myself as the door closed behind William.

  Miriam would no longer talk about it, but when she first moved to town, people asked her about the scars on her arm and prodded her to tell them what had happened. I first heard it from my friend Becky (who had heard it from her mother, who had overheard Miriam telling Evan at Boyton’s) a month after Miriam started teaching in my school. At first I didn’t believe Becky, who said if I didn’t I could go over and ask Miriam, who stood in the corner of the playground with her chin pulled into her chest and her arms crossed. No one expected me to be this brave. It was late fall, almost too cold already on this day to snow, and Miriam was not dressed right. She was never dressed right for the weather, but this, along with her long hair and the hardness of her mouth from which we never once heard an unkind word either on the playground or in the classroom, was why we loved her. She had the glow by now of a war hero or the kind of apostle we had been told about every Sunday in the priest’s same droning voice. Becky and some of the other girls watched as I went up to Miriam and asked her if it was true.

  She squatted down with her arms wrapped around her knees just as my friends and I did, huddling together when it was too cold to endure another second of recess.

  “What have you heard?” she said.

  I froze and couldn’t say. Even though she knew what I wanted to ask, she would not help me until I finally pointed at the scars on her arm and managed at least to open my mouth. My mitten had slipped off my hand and hung by its tether from my sleeve.

  “It probably is true,” she said, “if you heard it.”

  For some reason, I forgot to stop pointing at her arm. In the cold, my fingers turned pink and pale. Then she did something that gave me for a brief time the only kind of fame I would ever know, for kids would talk about me for the rest of the year as Miriam’s favorite: she leaned forward in a rush and wrapped her arms around me so that my face was buried in her beautiful soft sweater. She smelled of the ocean on a hot day, and her lips burned my ear.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Whatever you heard is true.”

  In what she called her first life, Miriam moved from South Boston to Philadelphia with her fiancé and taught at one of the downtown elementary schools. They lived near Temple and planned to get pregnant when he finished law school that spring. They didn’t have enough money to eat at restaurants, but they often ate in the park at dusk. One fall night they were on their way to the park when a man came up behind them and grabbed her fiancé by the shoulder to spin him around and push him against the wall. Miriam opened her mouth to scream, but panic overcame her voice. It was a boy, no bigger than her, with yellow eyes and burning red cheeks, wielding a knife as he spat demands she couldn’t understand.

  “Here, here,” her fiancé yelled and dropped his backpack. The boy didn’t seem to care about that and pressed the knife against his chest. Her fiancé fumbled for his wallet, but his hands shook as the boy’s rage grew. His demands had turned into a drumroll of curses that increased in rhythm and volume until his face exploded with anguish and he stabbed at her fiancé’s chest. Miriam tried to pull the boy off, but he seemed to have the strength of someone twice his size. She forced her way between them and took the blows of the knife on her forearm and wrist until the boy simply stopped as suddenly as he had attacked and ran down the street. The blade had struck her fiancé’s shoulder, chest, and neck. She shoved her hand over the gash in his neck and turned around as a car passed, the passenger in the front seat staring at them with a blank face. She waved at the second car with her free hand, but this one did not stop either. She tried to lift him under the armpits, but she couldn’t get him off the ground without taking her hand off his neck. Eventually, she managed to drag him into the middle of the street where a car had to stop, but it was too late.

  A week and a half after the incident, the boy who had attacked them scaled the side of a public housing complex and at two a.m. entered the fifth-story window of an elderly Jewish couple’s apartment. He raged through, overturning drawers and tables looking for money. When the old man tried to write a check, the boy stabbed him thirty times and then kicked the old woman to death. Police found him on the couple’s couch watching television and eating ice cream from their freezer.

  When my moth
er heard this story, she said it was exactly the kind of thing that only happened in cities, but I knew it could happen here, too.

  After a short time, William came out of their apartment and walked down Second Street. I followed a block behind. Mrs. Eliot, one of the high school guidance counselors, drove by in her husband’s truck and raised her hand from the steering wheel. Usually she drove the old station wagon with her kids buckled in the backseat. Mrs. Kemper, who worked at Boyton’s, stood out back having a cigarette and staring at her feet. William walked up the steps of the newspaper.

  I was there, waiting as it started to rain, when he came out fifteen minutes later. He stopped and stared right at me for a long minute, and I stared right back. I forced myself not to blink and dared him to speak. He shook his head, as if disagreeing with what I was thinking, and then started home through the rain by a shortcut down the hill between the rectory and the Methodist church. He paused on the slope next to the library overlooking his apartment, where Miriam worked at the counter in the kitchen window. Soaked through to the skin, I looked with him through the window at the blurred features of Miriam’s face. She might have been anyone, except that I knew it was she from the way she kept her hair pushed to one side. I thought that whatever he had done to my sister—who wouldn’t get the scholarship because she hadn’t won the race, who wouldn’t go to college—he would do to Miriam next.

  I ran and didn’t stop until I made it to Boyton’s, where I called my mother. When she finally pulled up in the car, I tried to get her to do something.

  “We have to save Miriam, we have to tell Chuck Sheldon,” I yelled at my mother, who only shook her head, telling me she had enough to deal with at the moment without worrying about where I had been all day. Melissa had come out of her room barely able to walk, with bad stress fractures in her right leg. “Poor girl,” my mother said, “she should have let up a long time ago. She must have been running in pain for months. Now they won’t heal, the doctor said, for a long time, and when they do, she probably won’t be able to run. She counted on that scholarship.”