Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  At home, Melissa reeled around the house (my father said) like a drunken bear.

  “My life is over. It’s over!” she screamed, and I burst into tears before collapsing on the floor. I had wanted Melissa to miss the race, I had wanted her to fail.

  “It’s his fault! He did it,” I screamed and pulled at my hair until my mother held my arms at my sides. “I thought I hated you, but I don’t!” I managed to say to Melissa before I broke into sobs again. I loved her and now it was too late because her life was ruined. Melissa wrapped her arms around my head. She told me everything would be fine and that she loved me, too. But I knew she was lying—everything would not be fine and she couldn’t really love me. My heart was too hard.

  I said William’s name under my breath and thought she nodded in response, though probably she didn’t hear, or she thought I said something else.

  “Now stop this,” our mother said. “Your life is not ruined. It’s only your shins.”

  “Can you believe she said only my shins?” Melissa said.

  “What did he do to you? What did he do?” I screamed.

  “Who?”

  I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe anyone. I ran to my room, locked myself inside, and would not come out for dinner. My father knocked and said they had all been tried enough, but I said I would not come out until they all admitted I was right. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead of pleading, my mother threatened to ground me if I didn’t come out. When my mother left, Melissa came to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Please, please, I’m sorry. Just come out.” She sobbed, but still I would not open the door.

  “Why don’t you tell me the truth? When you tell me the truth, I’ll come out,” I said, staring at the doorknob.

  “The truth about what?” she said.

  “About William.”

  She was silent, so I opened the door. But she was gone.

  “I know what happened out on Litchfield Road,” I yelled through her door.

  “I had shin splints,” she yelled back.

  “You got in the car with him.” She didn’t answer. I had thought that he pulled her into the car, but of course Melissa knew William, had spoken to him weeks before when she was interviewed for the paper. I had seen them stand next to each other after a race as the sweat dried on her cheeks; he said her name to her and asked her questions about the team after the interview was over. Then he asked her to pose in front of the field and rest her hands on her hips while he raised the lens to his face and snapped the shutter. He was on his way back from shooting the accident when he saw her walking along the side of the road with a limp—that much, the shin splints, was true.

  More than anything, I wanted to know what William had felt when he saw Melissa alone on the road. I wanted to feel compelled like that—to be taken over. He almost drove away from her but couldn’t. He squeezed his eyes shut but saw her face in the blood black; his hands froze, his breath seized, he couldn’t speak. He didn’t want to be there, he had to be there, and this was something no one would understand, he thought. After he pulled over, Melissa leaned her head through his open window, the wet strands of her hair brushing his cheeks as he closed his eyes. “I’m freezing,” Melissa said to him, and rushed over to the passenger side to open the door. That’s when it happened, and because she had agreed to get in the car, she blamed herself.

  I pounded on Melissa’s door and demanded that she come out and tell me the truth about William. I could see what had happened in my thoughts, but I had to hear it from her. I had to know.

  I sat down outside Melissa’s door and said I would not move. I would not eat or breathe. Finally, if she didn’t tell me, I would show her and the rest of them—I would stop loving them.

  I realized as I said it that I had always wanted an excuse to stop feeling and thinking—to be nothing but a pane of glass in the open air—and in many ways, this fantasy has come true for me. I am the librarian, here in Vaughn, the custodian of several thousand books. Hundreds of them pass through my hands each year, though I don’t read them anymore. The kids come down here after school, but they don’t check out the books, or look between the covers. They don’t see me just as they don’t see the books. They creep back into the stacks and slip their hands up under sweaters and shirts to feel the heat of each other’s bodies. Or they sit at the long oak tables and stare at each other, occasionally bursting out with laughter that echoes high into the rafters—like half the buildings in this town, the library used to be a church.

  “You got in the car and he attacked you,” I whispered into the keyhole of Melissa’s door.

  “He didn’t attack me,” she hissed.

  “But you just wanted a ride home.”

  Her door opened a crack, and I saw her lips. She whispered so our mother wouldn’t hear. “No,” she said. “No.”

  I thought I finally had my answer—she had crossed the seat to him, her pupils expanding like drops of blood in a basin of water.

  “But it’s his fault—it’s his fault?” I said.

  Melissa’s door closed and the lock turned. She would say no more.

  That winter, the winter after Melissa missed the big race, was the worst winter I had known. Melissa said if I didn’t stop asking her questions, I would no longer be her sister, and I believed her. It snowed almost all the time, and when it didn’t snow, it was too cold to snow, the wind coming down like a fist from up north, drawing a sheath of ice east over the river. I had pneumonia because no matter what my mother said, I always left the house with my hair wet and no hat or coat. I couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat. My fever burned until the plows scraping up Central Street seemed to dig through my head. For a long time I thought I would die in the middle of the night and my parents would find me in the morning with frost-rimmed nostrils. I didn’t die, though, and Melissa’s stress fractures healed enough for her to walk to school with her friends.

  Miriam’s baby was born a boy, Andrew. On those winter nights, I pictured William rising to look down at his son’s limbs pumping in the dark. While Miriam slept, he would cradle Andrew in his arms for three or four hours waiting for him to fall asleep. But I knew that even during those brief respites, when Andrew quieted and slowly uncurled his fists in silence, William could still hear his son scream his one indecipherable note, his only bleating message.

  In the spring, William came to photograph our school. Vaughn Elementary had scored first in the region in the standardized test we took every year. Our picture was going to be in the paper. We filed onto the playground where the teachers tried to arrange us in three rows: the taller kids in the back, and the smallest ones, like me, in the front. I was sullen, sitting cross-legged with a bunch of third graders while my friends held hands somewhere behind me. William arrived with his tripod and camera and began to set up while we shivered. He seemed in no hurry as he adjusted his equipment. Only when he looked through the lens and focused did his back stiffen, and only I knew why. He returned to his bag of equipment for a light meter, which he pointed at us like a weapon, and looked at me from around the side of his camera. This time he could not turn away, his eyes flashing white and his mouth open as he stared right at me. He lowered his head behind the camera again as I was brought to my feet by an urgency moving through me. I could no more have stopped myself from raising my finger than stop a train. Mrs. Douglas yelled for me to sit down, but I walked forward while pointing at the lens of William’s camera. Right before I reached him, he slipped on a patch of ice and flew back as if from the force of my accusation: “You, you, you!” I said as he tried to stand but slipped again. “I’m telling what you did to my sister. Her life is over now!” I screamed. I held him down with my eyes until Mrs. Douglas lifted me up and ushered me to the principal’s office, where I waited for Mr. Wheeler’s heels to snap down the hall. In my mind, I dared him to punish me in the worst way he knew how. I might be sent home, they might call my mother, but that’s all. Only after
he straightened his tie and swept aside the few strands of hair covering his pate, as hideous, I thought, as a dog’s belly, did he ask what on earth had gotten into me. I wanted to tell about William, but I was no longer sure what to tell, and I was sure Melissa would never speak to me again if I did. I didn’t care about the rest of them, but I needed my sister.

  “I don’t know,” I said, sitting upright, as tall as I could in the low chair. Just the thought of William made me want to hold my hand against a wood stove. I couldn’t explain to Mr. Wheeler any more than I could explain to myself that William filled me with hatred and terror because he was the person I might become. He had tumbled into the bottomless hole of a single fixation, Melissa, and it was just a matter of time before the same thing happened to me with someone or something else. Only I wasn’t going to let it happen. I promised myself at that moment that I wouldn’t let it.

  A few months after William took that picture of our school, he disappeared without a word to anyone. He went downriver to Gardner to shoot a warehouse fire and never came back. William’s mother helped with Andrew and assured Miriam and everyone else that she knew her son; the boy would come back. When he didn’t, however, come back after several months, and his car was found abandoned in Boston, William’s mother insisted on a service at Saint Catherine’s, where William and Andrew had been baptized. No body was found, but the minister agreed, even though I think he suspected, as I did, that William was still out there somewhere, vanished but not gone.

  Most of the town walked up the hill to the church that day: William’s friends from the paper, his cousins, my parents, Melissa, and Mr. Dawson, who had been a friend of William’s father. Of course Miriam was there, too, in a black dress with silk ruffles that Sara Mills had borrowed from her sister, who had also lost a husband young. Miriam cried the way people sometimes do in books, without making a sound or moving her lips, her frozen complexion crested with a black lace hat, her eyes framed by purple rings. At the end of the service, she quietly bowed. It was the end of a summer Sunday, and Mr. Dawson had set up food from his store outside. People filed out of the gray church, collected around the tables, and stood with lowered heads picking at the rectangular ham and chicken sandwiches. One of the deacons had planted roses along the walkway, and in the flannel gown of the August air people seemed as shy around each other as if they had never met.

  On her way home, carrying her son in her arms, Miriam passed by where I stood under an old maple at the far edge of the church lawn, and I told her I was sorry for her loss. She looked up and said thank you, though I could see she was not sorry he was gone. None of us were.

  A FAIR CHANCE

  Pete stood in front of his parents’ house clapping his gloved hands together in the falling snow. For the first time in the six months Pete had been working for him, Jack was late, and when he did appear from around the corner in his old Ford Ranger, he had a man the size of a moose in the seat next to him. Jack was busy shouting at the man, and he showed no sign of slowing. The passenger door flew open while they were still moving, and the truck spun in a slow circle, passing right in front of Pete. They came to a halt in the middle of the road facing the wrong direction, and Jack leaned over the steering wheel with his eyes closed. The man next to him looked at Pete and pulled a smile across his face as if his mouth were a trigger and his dark, closely set eyes the double barrel of a shotgun.

  Pete threw his gear in the bed with the saws and gas and tried to squeeze in next to the man’s knees, which folded into his chest and pressed against the dash. Up close, the man looked like the largest kid Pete had ever seen.

  “You probably heard of me,” he said, looking at Pete out of the corner of one eye.

  “Heard of you?”

  “I’m the one that killed that guy up in Bangor—drove a hammer right through the back of his melon.”

  Jack slowly shook his head.

  “I’m just playin’. But there was a guy up in the county done his mother that way—with a friggin’ hammer. Believe that?”

  Obviously, this was Jack’s son, Doug. Pete had heard of Doug, who had grown up with an aunt in Gardner, where he was known to have thrown a kid out of a moving car. The dashboard heater blasted against Doug’s tattered snowmobile suit, filling the cab with the smell of rotten venison. Pete only wished Jack had told him he was going to hire his son, though it wouldn’t have changed anything. After the accident, Jack was the only person around willing to give him a job.

  They passed between low white hills and distant gray tree lines. Jack headed west out of Vaughn toward a new stand outside Eutis, not far from the Maine-Quebec border. Pete hadn’t seen it yet, but according to Jack it was supposed to have a slope of ten degrees, no more, up from the road; there was very little birch or alder and no stumpage to the owner, as long as they pum-yarded, burning the brush as they worked. The owner, some guy from Massachusetts, was going to put a hunting camp in and just wanted part of it cleared. They’d get a lot of sixteen-fours out of those trees for boards, the rest for stud, Jack had said. Even if they paid someone to skid the logs to the road, they’d come out double their usual take, and Jack was going to give him a share this time instead of paying him by the hour. Jack thought he was taking Pete on as a partner, but if Pete could bank enough, this would be his last job. After a year of sleeping up in his old bedroom and eating his mother’s eggs across from his father every morning, he could leave Vaughn for good and move down to Portland.

  The land rose toward the White Mountains. The snow was deeper up here, and the sky lightened as they passed through Eutis, turned down a dirt road, and after a few minutes, stopped. A southerly breeze moved through the woods, and though it wasn’t even April yet, the air was warmer than it had been since last September. They all stood next to the truck looking at the sky and up the slope of the hill where they had to go. It didn’t seem like a 10 percent grade, not from down here. Fifteen, at least, or twenty. Doug tied the arms of his snowsuit around his waist and, following Jack’s lead, Pete stripped down to his T-shirt. One way or another, Pete thought, Doug was going to cut into his share. There were only two saws, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get stuck yarding all day on a sucker’s cut.

  There was deep sloppy snow at the bottom, but up above it dried out in the duff. Jack set his load down and waved his hand to the west. Pete dropped to his knees, filled the saw with gas and chain oil, tightened the chain on the bar, and headed out half a dozen paces to start limbing the large pines and spruce while Jack walked in a widening circle around their gear, blazing most of the bigger trees with his axe. If a tree didn’t need to come down, he wasn’t going to take it down just to make it easier to fell the big ones. Jack was supposed to be one of the best in the woods, the great-grandson of a Finnish stonecutter from Hurricane Island, who used to timber cruise for Great Northern up in the Kingdom before he got sick of working for people and became a small-time jobber between the Saint John and the Dead Rivers. Jack would do all the felling after Pete and Doug ran the saw up and down the outside of the trunks, stripping off the lower limbs. Pete was sure Doug knew not to limb pulling the saw up (the chain could easily snag and pitch the bar back into your face), but he did it anyway. Jack took the saw from Doug and face cut and back cut out a wedge so there would be no split in the butt of the log. Pete waited for the first tree to fall. For some reason, no one had done any high-grading here over the years. Everywhere else they had worked over the last six months had been stripped of the best wood every twenty-five years for the last hundred and fifty, leaving the cull of each generation to reproduce for the next. Pete felt an unexpected excitement as he took his finger off the trigger of the saw and looked up at the long straight trunks hurling through the pale sky. They’d be able to use all the log—no blue stain or red rot. These weren’t old growth trees, but old growth was often useless—spike topped and full of heart rot. These trees were tall and straight, in their prime. There was some hackmatack up the hill mixed in with useless popple, but
hardly any puckerbrush to fight through. The owner had no idea what kind of wood he was giving away, and Pete felt a certain pleasure in his knowledge of the woods, though it had been hard won in the last year.

  Jack had taken Pete to his first AA meeting, and a few months later given him work. Pete didn’t want to tell Jack he was leaving after this job. He felt guilty about it, because Jack would just end up going it alone, and he was too old for that. Maybe Doug would keep working with the old man, though Pete doubted it.

  A shudder passed up the trunk of the first tree and the top swayed for a moment before falling along the path Jack had chosen for it. Pete dragged the bar of the saw along the flanks of the trunk, stripping off the limbs. At four lengths of the saw and the orange tail sticking off the back, he bucked a log at sixteen-four and rolled it over with his heel to limb the underside. Doug picked up the logs and tossed them into piles as if they weighed no more than two-by-fours. At this pace, they could level the stand in three weeks, maybe a month.

  “This is great for me,” Doug yelled above the noise of the saw. “I need the money, and I need the money bad. There’s a guy starting a garage over in Londonderry. I need a thousand bucks to go in with him. He’s the surgeon, I’m the body man.”

  Pete just stared at him for a minute. It was Jack’s unspoken rule that they keep the talk to a minimum until it was time for coffee at ten thirty, and Pete liked the rules, he realized. He liked the predictability. Doug was the opposite of that.

  “Hey,” Doug said. “You get high? You do, don’t you?”