Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

I could hear Anne Marie suck in a breath, one, two, three times, as if she were inhaling the words love, honor, and cherish before exhaling loudly into the receiver, releasing those words into the mysterious fiber optics between us.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Don’t call back. I’m serious. Don’t come home, either.” She paused dramatically again, sucked in one more breath, and then said, “You’ve really fucked things up this time, Sam.”

“Wait …,” I said, but she didn’t and hung up.

I stood there in the gas station. It was a big one, right off the highway, with too many pumps. Suddenly the place seemed full of families, parents and their children, and there were a few extended families, too, grandparents with weak bladders who’d requested the pit stop, all of them so grateful to have a brood of their own. I hated them, the way you hate the morning after a night of not sleeping, when it comes up both blurry and sharp at the same time. It made me want to howl — howl about the world that wasn’t mine anymore and how I hated it, howl about the truth and how I wasn’t brave enough to tell it — and so I did exactly that: I howled right there in the gas station and was given a wide berth by the other gas pumpers.

But the howl had a fortuitous effect: it summoned the gas station attendant. I stopped howling long enough to tell him about locking the keys in my van, and he unlocked the door with his ingenious thin slice of metal. I paid him, climbed in, started the van, and then sat there. I had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. Nowhere to go! I started howling again, except the windows were rolled up and so it was as though I were howling in my own crypt, with the engine running. Oh, that was loneliness! I empathized with Thomas Coleman right then, even though he’d made a ruin of my life. Because the loneliness I felt was the loneliness of someone all alone, the loneliness of an orphan.

Except I wasn’t one. That thought stopped my howling, because after all, I had a father, a mother, too, and as far as I knew they were alive, which was a plus. So I would go to them, even if they didn’t want me. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.

That’s how I came to be driving on Amherst’s streets for the first time in five years, even though I lived only two miles from the center of town. I’d learned that I could drive the spur around town on the way to work, and Katherine’s school, which was called Amherst Elementary, was actually a new, sprawling red brick building outside of Amherst, and all the necessary superstores we shopped at weren’t in Amherst, either; they were on Route 116, which is to say they weren’t really anywhere. This is how it is these days: you can live in a place without having to actually have a life there.

And there was that voice, back as loud as ever, asking, What else? What else? The van was awfully quiet and lonely without the kids making noise and Anne Marie telling them not to, and so to fill the loneliness I listened to the voice carefully, maybe too carefully, and didn’t pay enough attention to my driving, and that’s how I ended up ramming into a K-Car in front of me. Luckily, it was a gentle ramming: the old lady driving the car wasn’t hurt and neither was her car, really, and after some initial confusion she seemed to remember that the bumper had been loose and hanging off the frame before I’d rammed it. I had, however, knocked over a few bags of vegetables and fruit in the backseat, and so I crawled into her car and tried to put the produce back in the bags. The bags were broken, though, and the produce ended up rolling all over the backseat and floor. Still, the old lady was very sweet about it, and even though I was pretty sure I remembered her from my younger days, she didn’t recognize me as the boy I’d been, the boy who burned down, et cetera, which I thought was promising indeed. We exchanged information — which by law we were required to do — and then parted ways. All in all, it was a very pleasant, civilized accident I got into on the way to my parents’ house. As the old lady pulled away, I had a vision of the fruit and vegetables happily rolling around her backseat, and I remembered that my father was a big fan of fresh produce and had once even started up a garden, which didn’t work out the way he’d planned.

And so, a few facts about my father and then his failed garden. My father was an editor for the medium-size university press in town. He mostly edited books on American history, but his subspecialty was the relationship between popular music and American culture. In addition to his books, my father also covered the area’s annual squeeze-box festival for the local newspaper.

“Sam,” he once asked me, “do you know why the accordion is so important? Do you?”

I was seven at this point. I didn’t know anything about anything and told my father as much.

“Because it is part of the history of music and immigration,” he said. “The Acadians played it, and when they moved from Canada to Louisiana, they brought their squeeze-boxes with them. The accordion is their instrument. It is their gift to the world.”

“It hurts my ears,” I told him.

This simple, seemingly innocent comment pretty much ruined my poor dad. He couldn’t stand knowing that his son did not admire his occupation. I was seven, let me remind you, and knew nothing about the relationship between a man’s lifework and his sense of self-worth, and my father should have ignored me. But he didn’t: instead, my father left the editing and musicology business and searched around for something else to do, something I might respect him for. Somehow he decided that I would respect him if he became a farmer. Amherst is not exactly the country, but my father turned our half-acre backyard plot into a minibreadbasket anyway. For six months — May to October — my father grew beets, zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkins, garlic. Our backyard was teeming. But we never ate any of it, because my father wouldn’t let us. He said we couldn’t “reap the harvest” until the time was right.

“When will the time be right?” I wanted to know.

When I asked this, my father looked at me in complete surprise, as if he were hoping all along that I would tell him when he should pick his vegetables. I was eight by this time, but even I could tell that my father didn’t know what he was doing, and also that he was in some real emotional trouble. Or maybe he didn’t want to harvest his crops because he was afraid that the vegetables would somehow be wrong. Anyway, that night my father told my mother (and later she told me) that he needed to go out in the world and find something worth doing, something that would make us — her and me — proud of him.

My mother apparently told my father in response that if he sliced himself open, stuffed himself with his accordions, concertinas, and rotting vegetables, and then hung himself on a pole in the middle of his miserable little garden, then he would probably make one impotent, homely-looking scarecrow.

My father left the next day and didn’t come back until three years later and then was rehired by the university press when he did. But right after he left, my mother starting telling me stories about the Emily Dickinson House and the terrible mysteries therein, and if those stories were supposed to lead me, eventually, to break into the Emily Dickinson House in the middle of the night and accidentally burn it down and kill Thomas Coleman’s parents in the process — if my mother’s stories were supposed to do all this and send me to prison and thus take away ten years of my life — then they did what they were supposed to.

I got angrier and angrier in the car, just thinking about all this bad family history, and by the time I got to my parents’ house, I was ready to take my anger out on someone or something. So I took it out on the front door. I banged on the door and banged and banged until my fist hurt. No one answered, so I yelled out, “It’s me! Sam! I’m home!” Still no one answered, and my anger turned to dread, that sort of dread you feel when you go home and wonder whether everything has changed or nothing has.