Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  There are photos of my grandmother (the surfaces peel off like fly wings), and a tin photo of my great-grandfather sitting in a chair on the lawn (which has since overgrown with thistle and bayberry) just after he returned from the war. He sits in the chair as if in the saddle of a horse, his beard covering all but his stolid eyes. I often carry the tin type around in my pocket. If I turn it in the direct light, the image disappears. I carry several photos with me—I don’t know why—and occasionally I exchange the ones I have for others in the pile, depending on how I feel. Maybe I carry them because there are no photos of me anywhere in the house. I do worry that I might not be here at all.

  My favorite picture is of my father when he was younger than I am now, sitting in a wicker chair with his eyes peacefully closed and his legs crossed and hands folded in his lap like an old man.

  My mother turns and says I should stop sneaking up behind her, to act my age, and busy myself with the toys she has bought for me. She covers up what she has been doing, as if embarrassed, goes downstairs to put a record on the phonograph, and sits in a wicker chair leaned up against the edge of the house near the open window. She falls asleep by the time the record finishes and doesn’t hear the needle scratching over the middle of the disc. The sound reminds me of certain moments in old movies when an actor enters a room where someone they love has died.

  I stand over her while she sleeps and ask her to stop waiting for my father, but she often stays up all night reading a novel and can’t be woken until the afternoon. Someone has to be awake in case he does come home, so I run outside to drag a branch along the jagged surface of the old stone wall, clicking off the seconds and holding my breath when I see barbed wire passing right through the middle of a tree trunk. It’s bad luck otherwise.

  I hear a car braking down the road, and the voices of kids from town passing through the leaves, but I see no one except the man now climbing to the upper field, a very fat man who used to be mayor before I was born. He ambles up the slope each day at this time, stopping every five or six steps to breathe. After a few minutes standing in the middle of the field, looking down the hill to the sluice and below that to the stream, he lies down and rests the back of his hand over his eyes. The starlings seem drunk in the grass. The yarrow and aster are past their bloom and the thrush’s flute, so welcome a month ago, has started to strain. I think I can hear the webbed feet of the ducks pushing through the current of the river below the lower field.

  My mother comes outside and rubs her eyes, looking into the old pool, which has been dry and cracked since long before I was born. Speaking softly, as if to herself, she says my name and that she wants to go for a drive. I have been no farther north than the Schoodic Peninsula and no farther south than Kittery Point, both times with my mother in our light-blue sedan. The air has cleared and cooled by the time she pulls out of the barn. She has not wanted to drive much this summer; I had almost forgotten the feeling of the trees whipping by and the sudden hard glances of the people in town whom we rarely see.

  As she puts the car in gear and coasts toward Water Street, I hold my hand out the window and pretend we are flying on the wing of my fingers. At moments like these, I am conscious of being happy, and I turn to her to ask if she is happy. This is a game we used to play, and she flinches and looks out the window, trying to make me think she doesn’t want me to go on, though I know she does. “You are happy, Mother,” I say, and she pretends not to hear as we cross the Augusta Bridge, suspended seventy feet up, in midair. “You are so, so happy, Mother,” I say again, and she breaks out in tears, though she smiles as she wipes her face.

  On the way back, she pulls off the road across the river from our town and looks out over the water.

  “It’s as if I’ve always lived here,” she says.

  “We can leave,” I say.

  But she is afraid that if we drive down the road any farther (in the direction of the city and the state where she was born), we will travel forever forward in a straight line until even this moment is forgotten. She turns right across the river and climbs the hill back to the house.

  I wish we had kept driving. I don’t say anything. She is sad enough without the burden of my disappointment.

  We go over to sit with my grandfather while he drinks his afternoon tea, and he talks to us about Patton’s rush to Berlin and the German girl he met in Freiburg and almost married, as if we have never heard these stories before. He tells my mother that she is as beautiful as the day she first came to town. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder and leaves it there while he turns to me with hazy eyes. His skin smells of pipe smoke as he pulls me over. His hands are bent and spotted and dirty. Even though he is almost blind, he is the only one who sees me, so I have to believe what he says. We live in two worlds, he says. The one we fight for, and the one we fight against. And he starts in on all the people he thinks are ruining this town. After so many years, he has quite a list, and I know all the names: the Dawsons, who own the store and overcharge and no longer make their own bread; Willoughby, the tax assessor just down the road; the Nasons; Mrs. Molloy; the MacDonalds, both of them; and so on. Someone wants to build a new school, someone lets their kids chase his cows through the field, someone’s father said to my grandfather in a town meeting thirty-five years ago that he was a fool.

  As my mother and I walk back across the road, I think that someday, if I am fortunate, I will have a few friends and sometimes, coming home with them after school, will think of myself as one of them. But even then as I walk along, led down the slope of the valley by the dark chimneys against the metal sky, it will be impossible not to remember this time, standing above the house with my fingertips resting on the high grass as I look up and see a single-engine plane bank over the river, disappear in the late afternoon glare, and reappear downriver, heading east toward Richmond. There is something in this moment, beyond the sight of the plane’s white wings turning in the currents, that recalls a time I can’t quite reach, leaving me with the sense that I have been here before.

  I walk through the side door and pass the portraits in the dark stairwell leading up to the third floor, where discarded furniture is stored in the spare rooms, the spindles and legs cluttered together like piles of weapons from a defeated army. No one ever painted portraits of mothers, grandmothers, daughters or the boys who died young (no one will ever paint me), but we live here, too, in the contours of the buckling plaster.

  My mother goes back to bed downstairs, and I sit in an armless rocking chair to wait for her to get up. I listen for the door in case I have to speak for her if someone knocks—I’ve learned to speak as adults do. Today I hear only the strange calls of the cicadas in the grass; my mother also hears them as she closes her eyes and pulls the frayed white sheet up around her neck. We wait so long for summer this far north that it seems to last forever when it arrives, bloating the air with the smell of wet mud at low tide. My mother is tired; I am tired, too, but I need to slow every moment of daylight against the coming dusk, when it will feel as though the river is everywhere all around me while what little I remember—the last year, the last two years—will expand to fill more than the history of my name in this town. Even now, there is still time left (after the heat has silenced the birds and if the train is not coming and if the river is at the turn of the tide and if the breeze is still) for it to be quiet before dark. I can hear my grandfather mowing the small lawn in front of his house with his rusty push mower, but then he stops, and the cicadas are silent.

  When he forgets that I am listening and talks as if to himself, this is what my father tells me in the upper field: There’s an old man who lives a mile down from the entrance to our property. He was in the war in Europe, but he was not a hero. He drove supplies to the front. Now he sits on a narrow patch of trimmed grass in a metal lawn chair and listens to his transistor radio. In the morning the sun beats down on his face and on the white face of his house. By midday, the angle of the light has passed over the peak of his roof and he go
es inside. For forty years he was a stonecutter—a granite cutter. I think of him at least once a day. When the sun doesn’t come out, he doesn’t come out. He is no more aware of us than the clouds are aware of him. His body holds what he is thinking in the way the town holds all of us: with a kind of indifferent affection. I am like that man, my father says.

  This is what I tell my father in the upper field: Jim Wally, the junior high reading teacher, and George Sumner, the high school guidance counselor, meet for a beer before dinner at the Wharf, across the street from my father’s office. Both men are basketball coaches. They get together every week. The chief of police, Chuck Sheldon, joins them. His daughter plays for Jim Wally. They stare out at the river. Mr. Dawson stands in back of Dawson’s Variety right now staring out at the river and having a cigarette. Across town, Mrs. Molloy shakes her head at her youngest son who has come home again with dirt on his hands. Show me your hands, she says to him, show me—but he won’t take them out of his pockets. A mile west Missy wakes from a nap in her bed on what had been her grandfather’s farm twenty years before. She feels sure she has woken to a noise, but as she sits there upright listening to the sun go down she hears nothing, neither her mother coming back from working at the hardware store, nor her father coming home from Bath Iron Works, nor her older brother back from his friend’s house where they all drink beer.

  It is high tide, it is supper time. Two boys three years older than me stand on a field at the edge of the school I will soon attend tossing a muddy baseball with frayed seams. The ball vanishes for a moment, soaring through a shadow, before slapping into one of their gloves.

  I have tried hard not to believe in what I know is a boy’s fantasy, nothing more, I tell my father in the upper field, and he solemnly nods. He knows that the war has spread like pollen through the neighborhood, over the valley and hills, sweeping us up in the flow of its course.

  ****

  After dark, I climb into the attic and open my grandfather’s GI trunk, pulling out his fatigues, rolling the cuffs, and tightening a string around my waist. The revolver he carried through the war used to feel as if it weighed more than me, but now it seems to get lighter every night.

  I smear mud on my face before heading down the drive to look for the people my grandfather has accused over the years of ruining this town (they look like us, he has said, but they are not like us). Two streets away I slide along the side of a wall to a lighted window. A man in a plaid shirt, Larry Henry, a snowplow driver in winter and farmhand in summer, a man my grandfather has always accused of stealing apples from his orchard, stands over his sink. Each breath seems to exhale through my ears as I raise the pistol and pull back the trigger. Dozens of times over the last weeks I have killed this man, and each night he dies without knowing it. He keeps on, flawless in his method of scrubbing each plate, back and front, rinsing and drying, as if there is no war, as if his life were not about to end. I shoot and after the click, I move on quickly, feeling the dying beat of his heart in my own chest.

  The Molloys sit hunched over at the table in their kitchen in their house on Winthrop Street like people who have outlived their desires. They die without a word to each other, as they did last night and the night before. Kathy McDonald behind the half-canted blinds turns in her mirror before bed, turning her head with each revolution to meet herself. I shoot her as she pauses, captivated by her own stare, and move on to the next house on the street where I find the Dawsons sitting on opposite sides of a table looking into their drinks, whispering as if someone might overhear. I shoot them both and move on up the road, completing a grid, climbing the hood of a car to shoot one woman on the second floor, another man as he takes out the trash. It is hard to tell the enemy from the innocent in the dark where I can only see the outline of a face or a silhouette, and of course all these people will have to be killed again tomorrow night. It is not the kind of war anyone can win.

  Tonight I take a different route home past my father’s office. When he visits me in the upper field, my father makes me promise that I will not bother him down on Water Street. I can only visit you here in the upper field, he has said, if you promise not to interrupt my dream. So I promise, but I can no longer keep that promise. It is not the kind of war I can go on fighting alone.

  In the reflection of the window of my father’s office, I watch someone point a gun at me. Without warning, he shoots me, and I shoot him, but neither of us falls. I move as the reflection moves, bend as he bends, and, in one swift motion heave the pistol through the plate glass. The shatter tumbles down the empty street and echoes with the snap of a distant shot. When I pull away from the gaping hole, a small shard sticks in the top of my wrist, and a black trickle flows down between my knuckles.

  My father, who has been waiting all this time for an attack, comes out of the back room to see glass spread over his desk and the blue metal of his grandfather’s pistol lying on the floor. He recognizes the gun, even if he doesn’t recognize me. His hands shake. He is dirty and unshaven. He can’t remember how the fighting started anymore than I can, but he has been fighting all along, I can see, rising and falling and rising, without rest, behind the locked door of his office.

  The days are peaceful here in Vaughn, I try to explain to my father, in case he has forgotten, but after the sun falls over the western hill, all the people we have known in the daylight fight against us. I would gladly think otherwise, I say to him, but I cannot. I ask him to tell me to think otherwise, but he doesn’t, and the distant voices of our enemies, whispered in bedrooms all over town, become the gathering threads of a current that pulls us east toward the mouth of the river.

  NORTH

  Rebecca Sawyer was the first person from Vaughn to score a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. When the news hit the Valley Journal, Mr. Sumner, her adviser, who had always said she was honors material and who had recommended on more than one occasion that she aim for state college, maybe for elementary education because she seemed to have the patience to work with children, marched her by the arm into his office. She had never been one of the best students in the class, not even in the top ten, but Mr. Sumner was also the boy’s basketball coach, and Rebecca knew that in his world, where people were either starters or substitutes she had just been called off the bench. He spoke to her with half-time urgency. He flattened his hands on his desk and shook his head. He called her young lady. He was incredibly excited, he said, about her future.

  Rebecca couldn’t see how a score a few hundred points one way or another could have much of an affect on anyone’s future, when five years before, a girl from Fort Kent, near the border of Quebec, had scored 1550, only to become a veterinarian’s assistant.

  “That’s Fort Kent,” Mr. Sumner said, pointing to his right, at a bookcase lined with trophies. “This,” he said, pointing at his desk, “is Vaughn.”

  In the hall outside his office, a group of junior girls stopped talking as Rebecca walked by on her way to the bathroom where she stood alone in front of the mirror looking at herself. Next to the morning’s article about her scores, the paper had printed a photo of her at her kitchen table. She had large dark eyes, dark hair, and a round face. Some people said she looked Italian or Portuguese; everyone agreed she looked nothing like her parents, grandparents, cousins, or aunts. The bell rang for the beginning of the next period but she kept staring. Some part of her was speaking to some other part of her, deciding something without her permission.

  On her way into Mr. Cunningham’s U.S. history class, she accidentally slammed the door and felt everyone look up as she crossed the room to her assigned seat by the window. Mr. Cunningham continued talking, referring to the reading from the night before while pointing to the board with yesterday’s quizzes held curled in his fist. He asked what had happened in 1865, and looked from Rebecca to the left side of the room and back to her. Mention of the year brought the text before her mind as if onto a screen, the words scrolling down through her thoughts. She rarely spoke in class,
but now, she felt, Mr. Cunningham and the other students waited for her to confess that she had always known the answers.

  Rebecca’s grandmother, Grandmame, was dying very slowly of old age, and every afternoon before dinner Rebecca spent a few minutes in her small room off the kitchen, which smelled of the hall closet and of burnt dust from the electric heater Grandmame turned all the way up. According to Rebecca’s mother, it would have been cheaper for them to build their own power plant.

  Rebecca sat in the green chair and looked with her Grandmame through the window across Central Street to the Methodist church and told her, as she did every day, how school went and what boys she liked. She made up the names of the boys.

  “I thought of something to tell you,” Grandmame said, “and now I can’t remember. Well.”

  Grandmame removed her hand from Rebecca’s and gripped the arm of her chair as if she were about to pull herself up.

  “Have you heard anything from your brother?” Grandmame asked, and Rebecca shook her head. Grandmame asked this all the time, and the answer was always no. She dozed off again, her hands folded in her lap.

  No one was allowed to speak of her brother in the house, except Grandmame, who did whatever she wanted. Even so, Grandmame always spoke about Jeremy in a whisper. Usually in the same breath she added that Rebecca’s mother was cold. Everyone needed someone to blame, Rebecca supposed.

  Jeremy’s last visit, three months ago, had ended with a scene in the kitchen Rebecca would never forget. She didn’t know how it started, or what the argument was about, but suddenly their mother’s face turned red and she started screaming obscenities at the top of her voice. Jeremy’s face drained for a moment, with his eyes closed, as if he had left his body, and then he flew through the air to punch their mother so hard in the face that her nose exploded with blood. Before Rebecca could even be sure what had happened, Jeremy ran out the door.