An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  My father stared at me for a good half minute until his blanket slipped from his lap again. He leaned over slightly in his chair to catch the blanket before it hit the floor, and that movement, that one little thing, caused me to remember what for so many years I’d been trying not to: that moment when my father had bent over, opened the end table drawer next to him, pulled out a Converse shoe box, and shown me those letters asking me to burn down those writers’ houses. There was the end table, still in the same place; there was the drawer, inside the end table. Was the shoe box still in the drawer? Were the letters still in the shoe box? I hadn’t thought of those letters for years, but now they were in my head again and they were alive, making noise, joining the chorus of my neighbors’ lawn mowers, the Emily Dickinson House fire, and other sounds of the past. And among those sounds was my father’s voice, telling me those many years earlier, “Sam, you are an arsonist,” which was why I blurted out now, so many years later and out of the blue, “You’re wrong.”

  “Wrong,” my father repeated, doing his best to keep up.

  “Yes, wrong,” I said. “I work at Pioneer Packaging. I make containers, good ones.”

  My father pursed his lips and made a derisive raspberry sound; a glob of spittle landed on his chin and I tried very hard not to wipe it off for him.

  “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” I said. And it didn’t, not even when I told my father, in some detail, about the tennis ball can I’d just designed, a can that was vacuum sealed by soft plastic and not by the sharp metal top that you always sliced your finger on. He made another raspberry sound and there was more spit on his chin.

  “No … greatness … in … tennis … ball … cans,” he said over the course of what might have been half an hour. Greatness! Me! What son doesn’t want to hear his father say he could be great, if that’s what he was saying? What son doesn’t dream of such a thing? What wouldn’t a son do or give to hear these words come out of his father’s mouth, especially a son like me at a time like this, when I was so down and most needed a kind word or two from my dad? It was as though I’d taken the words I most needed to hear, placed them in my father’s mouth, and watched them come out again, slowly and haltingly and coated with saliva.

  “Are you really saying I’m great?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, clearly, very clearly. And then, “Could … be.”

  “Could be if what?”

  “You … could … help … people,” he said.

  This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I’ll admit, because up to now I’d done not much more than be, and when I wasn’t just being, I’d caused some pain, too. There was the Emily Dickinson House, of course, and the pain that everyone knows all about by now. Then there was Thomas Coleman, still in his agony after all these years—I couldn’t forget about him, especially since he seemed determined to ruin my life as I had his. And then Anne Marie, whom I had hurt so badly and had practiced hurting for years. There was the time, for instance, at our next-door neighbors’ daylight-savings party when I found Sheryl (I have no memory of her last name, and if my memory is to be trusted, she might not even have one) weeping in the butler’s pantry because (as I found out) her husband had just left her for another woman, and now she was staring down the barrel of those dark, late afternoons all by herself and she didn’t know how she was going to manage. I hugged her—it seemed the right, bighearted thing to do—and in breaking the hug I kissed her, too. It was a comforting, “there, there” sort of kiss, but I confess that in getting to her cheek I might have touched her lips, briefly. This felt wrong, very wrong, and so to lighten my heart and conscience, I went and found Anne Marie at the party, interrupted her conversation, and told her—in front of a half dozen or so people—that I’d kissed Sheryl, and that it was an accident and well intentioned, but that I thought I should tell her about it because of the guilt I felt because of the way our lips brushed and maybe even briefly lingered—even though it was an accident and well intentioned—and I could hear soft, embarrassed noises coming from some of the guests who were listening. Immediately I knew I’d done something wrong, because of the noises and also because of the pain I saw on Anne Marie’s face just before she turned away from me and returned to her conversation. That same pain was in her voice, on the telephone, when she called me a cheater and told me not to come home. I had made Anne Marie’s pain, just as surely as I’d made that mayonnaise jar that wasn’t quite plastic and wasn’t quite glass, either, but in any case was unbreakable. It was solid, the jar, not unlike the pain. Yes, it would be nice to help someone and not hurt them.

  “But wait,” I said, coming back to my true self in a rush. “I can’t help people. I’m a bumbler.” My father didn’t seem to understand this—his eyes went even glassier—and so I said, being helpful, “I bumble.”

  “Bumbling,” my father said, “not … a … permanent … condition.”

  “Of course you’d say that,” I told him. Because I was thinking of the garden my father had bumbled and how he’d left us for three years to try to prove he wasn’t one. A bumbler, that is.

  And where did my father go during those three years? He went everywhere, did everything, and then sent us postcards to let us know exactly where he’d been and what he’d done.

  First my father went to South Carolina, because he’d never been in South Carolina before and his own inner voice said that he had to—had to!—visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime. He also attended a game at every major league ballpark. He traveled to Yosemite and Badlands and Sequoia and every other national park of note. He went to the site of every Civil War battle that was supposed to be pivotal and especially bloody. He made a point of listening for the whispering ghosts of our dead boys at Gettysburg and Antietam and Vicksburg but could hear only a creaky voice squawking from rental cassette guides in the other cars as they crept at a reverential speed along the battlefields and cemeteries. My father scrutinized his Rand McNally Road Atlas and then made a point of driving every famous roadway made obsolete by the federal superhighway system and mourned daily on National Public Radio. He rented a canoe and paddled fifteen miles on the Erie Canal. He walked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Pennsylvania before packing it in after being menaced by two hunters sitting in a deer stand just south of Carlisle. He went out of his way to have a drink in every bar in North America in which Hemingway was rumored to have imbibed. He drove up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and then bought a bumper sticker as testimony. He kept track of every march commemorating every civil rights atrocity and victory and then made sure he attended the march, no matter how much of a hardship it was to do so. My father went to the site of an oil spill off the coast of Washington and bought a vial of oil and a poster of a baby seal mired in the slick and looking wistful and tragic. He went to Wounded Knee and to his great surprise found himself conflicted about the lessons to be learned there. He visited the book depository and the grassy knoll in Dallas and bought what was supposed to be an authorized copy of the Zapruder film, although he had no notion of who had authorized it. Zapruder himself, my father supposed, or maybe a close relative.

  But my father was no dilettante, or didn’t want to be thought one, and had to make a living somehow. Besides, it was his uncertainty about his purpose here on this planet that took him from us in the first place. Sure, he was a book editor by training, but he could pretend to be other things and then tell us about them in the postcards. He pretended to be a large animal veterinarian in Enid, Oklahoma, and found the job less onerous and foul than you might think. He pretended to be an air traffic controller in Newark and was admired by his co-workers for his cool-headedness and his new variations on old raunchy jokes. He pretended to be a music instructor in Mississippi and led the Dream of Pines High School Marching Band to the state championship. He excavated dinosaur bones in South Dakota as a member of the state university’s Archaeology Department. He was an emergency room surgeon, conducted minor surgeries in four Rocky
Mountain states, and didn’t botch a single stitch. He was a funeral director in Delray Beach, Florida, and found the corpses inoffensive but their survivors unbearable. He was a pediatrician in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and found that this job was more dangerous and less rewarding than being a large animal veterinarian in Enid, Oklahoma. He was a charter fishing-boat captain in Rumson, New Jersey, and named his boat the Angry Clam. To my father’s surprise, his customers cared nothing about catching fish and everything about buying a T-shirt silk-screened with the boat’s namesake—a scowling littleneck clam with a cigar hanging out of its mouth—for sixteen dollars a pop. He was a real estate agent in Normal, Illinois, and found married couples highly erotic when they whispered in bathrooms and hallways about what they could and could not afford. He was a Palatine priest in Platteville, Wisconsin, and found he could take confessions for hours and not hear a single sinner confess to anything but habitual self-abuse. He was a stock car driver based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and found it even more boring and pointless a pursuit than he’d ever imagined it would be.

  When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing—or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don’t and can’t get anyway. In any case, I knew that greatness was the thing my father had left us to find.

  And then he came back. Maybe What else? What else? had been the question before my father left us, and maybe he thought by leaving us he’d answer the question or at least stop hearing it, and maybe he never stopped hearing it; maybe none of us ever do. I can’t say for sure: neither of my parents mentioned why he came home, and I never asked, and together, through our silence, we conspired to make it one of those family secrets that had to remain secret if we were to remain a family. My mother had told me, after my father came back, that my father was “sensitive” about what he’d done while he was gone and that I should never mention the postcards to him. She never told me why my father should be so “sensitive” about the postcards, and again, I never asked. I put the postcards in an envelope and stowed them way toward the back of my highest closet shelf and never mentioned them again. But no matter what his reasons, my father came home and got his job back at the university press, and we forgave him, or at least I did. Because he was my father, and I’d missed him.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said.

  “Mother,” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “Yes, Bradley,” said a voice from behind me. “What about me?”

  It was my mother, of course, I knew this without turning around, and so I didn’t, at first. I sat there with my back to her, imagining all the things I’d say to my mother, all the well-deserved grief I’d give her about my poor, crippled dad and the filthy house she’d left him in and the stories she’d told me when I was a boy and what a ruin they’d made of me and my life and so on. When I turned around to face her, I would be eloquent and fierce, I knew that much. Maybe it was remembering the arson letters and their possible proximity that made me feel this bold—the letters and my father’s talk of my could-be greatness. Maybe it was because I’d seen this mother-son moment so often in the books my mother had made me read, and so I knew how it was supposed to go. Whatever the reason, I felt powerful and righteous, like an avenging angel or something. And what do you do when you become an avenging angel? You turn around and tell your mother about it.

  So I turned around to tell my mother about it. There she was, standing in the doorway. I couldn’t get a good look at her—maybe because it was late and my contacts were dry and cloudy, and because the hall light behind my mother made her seem hazy and mysterious and bathed in white, like the Lady of the Lake, whom my mother had also made me read about those many years before. I couldn’t see her clearly, is the point, and so I couldn’t see the expression on my mother’s face when she said, “Your wife kicked you out of the house, didn’t she?”

  One of the things that mothers are good for, of course, is cutting to the heart of the matter, and in cutting to the heart of the matter, my mother had also sliced off some of my good feeling. Whether I was an avenging angel or not, my wife still thought I was a cheater and a liar and still hated me, I still couldn’t see my kids, and I still couldn’t go home to Camelot. Anne Marie had kicked me out, maybe for good. That was the truth, and my mother saw it, and suddenly I was tired, so tired.

  “I’m so tired, Mom,” I said.

  “OK,” she said. My mother turned and walked out of the doorway and into the hall, and I followed her, wordlessly, through the blackened rooms, up the stairs, to my old bedroom. Because this is another thing mothers are good for: they know how to get at the truth, and then, when that truth makes you too tired to hear any more of it, they know when to guide you through the darkness and put you to bed. My mother opened the door to my bedroom, turned to me, put her hand on my cheek, and said, “Get some sleep, Sam.” I was so grateful for that, so very grateful, and to express my gratitude I did exactly what my mother told me to do. I slept.

  Part Two

  6

  Now that I’ve returned home, to the very bedroom where my mother told me all those stories about the Emily Dickinson House—the stories that, as you know, caused me to inadvertently burn the house to the ground—perhaps it’s time to clear up some misunderstood or misreported facts about that famous fire.

  I did not, as the prosecutor argued at my trial, “case the joint” earlier on the day of the fire. I merely took the Emily Dickinson House tour, the official two-dollar tour, along with a group of students and their teacher from some school called Dickinson College (“No relation,” the teacher joked, and oh, everyone laughed and laughed). The teacher tossed a pen from one hand to the other as she walked. The students all wore ski jackets. If I was guilty of “casing the joint,” then so were they.

  I was not, as the Hampden County Eagle suggested, a southerner who hated Yankees. True, before the tour began, I did sign the guest book “Sidney,” from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but only as a joke and to sound mysterious. As Mrs. Coleman might have been able to tell you if I hadn’t killed her in the fire, I regretted the joke immediately because she read what I had signed and said, “Nice to meet you, Sidney,” and I didn’t speak for the entire tour for fear of not sounding southern.

  It was certainly not the case that, as one of the Dickinson College students testified in court, I was agitated and not a little maniacal during the tour. I was a kid, a normal kid, normal as kids get and as normal as I am now. It’s probably so, however, that I was a little restless. I was restless because, after my mother’s stories, I expected there to be something exceptional and sinister and mysterious about the house. There wasn’t. We were shown a glass case displaying one of Dickinson’s letters; we were shown her bedspread, which was red with white daisies; we were shown her furniture, which, Mrs. Coleman explained, was not actually her furniture but rather a faithful reproduction of what her furniture would have looked like. Oh, it was dull! Nothing like my mother’s stories. So I was probably restless—I remember yawning overloudly in boredom once and everyone looking at me—and that’s probably why I broke into the house later on that night: to see what I could see when the tour guide and the students and their teacher weren’t around.

  It was not true, again as the prosecutor argued, that I killed the Colemans “in cold blood.” I didn’t even know they were in the house. I’ve said this many times, although it seems to satisfy no one nor make them happy, which is the truth all over, which makes you wonder why everyone wants to hear it so badly.

  It was not true, as rumor had it around my high school (I went back to the high school while I was out on bail, which was where I heard the rumor), that the whole thing had been some sort of sex
club gone horribly wrong. It is correct that I’d thought of inviting this girl China, whom I knew well enough and wanted badly, in the way boys are supposed to want girls with exotic names and their own cars, which China also had. And it’s true that, as far as China was concerned, I had sex on the mind, prominently, in the very front of the lobe. But I didn’t invite her to break into the Emily Dickinson House with me that night. I knew better. I did! Do you think I wanted to have sex with someone in that house after the stories my mother had told me? Especially the story about the time two kids from the high school (again a boy and a girl—“mere babes,” my mother called them) bought a six-pack of Knickerbocker beer and decided to break into the Emily Dickinson House.

  These were the same young children grown up, still nice but not quite as nice as they might have been. My mother stressed that these kids thought too much about what they were doing and what they’d like to do. Their fall lay in the calculation, and I took the lesson to be “Don’t calculate,” and to this very day I try not to. They walked and made out at the same time, a difficult trick, to be sure. The boy carried the six-pack in a plastic bag with handles; he had condoms in his wallet and a mini-crowbar in his jacket pocket. He was secure in his physical ability and in his equipment and calculated that if he couldn’t blow the door down, he’d pry the lock. The door usually gave way easily, though; it was an old door, slightly rotten, and swung open right when you kicked it the first time, as I know very well to be true.

  My mother told me this story when I was fourteen, after my father came back, and after my father came back my mother’s stories both hardened and became easier, less tense but more gruesome, as was the case with the story about the kids with the six-pack and the condoms. Oh, it was a mess. They walked into the house and started going at it, and soon enough, bits of bone, flesh, tendon, began flecking the walls, crawling under dressers, hopping into the mail slot and sticking there: a cruel change-of-address notification. Imitation gold rings, baseball caps, hair bands, condoms, and full beers were found conspicuously in view, leftovers, the breathing out after a long swallow. A reminder of the evil of illicit sex and its punishment. It was a scene, all right, a regular bloodbath those kids got themselves into, and it seemed obvious to me that if I were ever to have sex, it would never, ever be in the Emily Dickinson House.