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

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.

So no sex, and no sex club. Of course, I can’t say how far Mr. Coleman got with Mrs. Coleman that night. After the fire was through with them, they were just so much bone and connective tissue. That much I know.

And it was not true that I was, as my first-grade teacher testified, a “little firebug.” Not true! As proof, she told, in court, about the time on the playground when I was six, when she found me burning an anthill with a magnifying glass, or trying to (there were clouds that day, too many of them). Let me tell you, I was not the only kid in Miss Frye’s class that tried to torch an anthill and learn a little something about solar power in the bargain. And let me tell you, what happened in first grade had no bearing whatsoever on what happened in and to the Emily Dickinson House. I had forgotten all about the anthill, in fact, and wasn’t thinking of fire at all that night when I broke into the Emily Dickinson House. I was thinking of my mother’s stories — like the one in which Emily Dickinson’s corpse was hidden in one of the house’s many secret compartments and came to life (or at least became ambulatory) only when there was a full moon. There was a full moon that night, and out of nervousness I was smoking a cigarette — which was a new habit, a short-lived one, too — when I heard a noise. Who knows what it was? It could have been the house creaking or a tree moving in the wind. It could have been the Colemans, enjoying their last private moment on earth together. Or it could have been Emily Dickinson, as glassy eyed as your best movie zombie, breaking out of her secret compartment and heading full steam in my warm-blooded direction. Whatever, I dropped my cigarette at the noise and hightailed it out of the house and so didn’t notice that my dropped cigarette had lit a heavy living room drape on fire, which set the living room rug on fire, and so on. So. Accidental fire starter? Yes. Firebug? No.

But you know what is true? My mother’s stories were good, or must have been. The judge pointed this out at my trial, the sentencing part, when my defense attorney was again explaining why I was in the Emily Dickinson House in the first place, and I was explaining again about my mother’s stories. The judge interrupted and said, “Those must have been some good stories.”

“I guess they were,” I said.

“But then again,” the judge said — and he was really editorializing here, but I guess his robes and his elevated seat and his handsome wooden gavel gave him the right—“if a good story leads you to do bad things, can it be a good story after all?”

“Come again?” I said. “I’m not following.”

“I’m afraid I’m not, either, Your Honor,” my lawyer said.

“I agree,” said the prosecutor, who was exactly the same as my lawyer except that he wore a cheaper suit and was touchier because of it.

“Bear with me,” the judge said. “It’s an interesting question, is it not? Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Should we expect it to? Can we blame the story for anything? Can a story actually do anything at all?” Here he looked at me learnedly, over his glasses, and you knew right then that he’d always longed to be a college English professor instead of a judge and that he subscribed to all the right literary periodicals and magazines. “For instance, Mr. Pulsifer, can a story actually be blamed for arson and murder?”

“Huh,” I said, then acted as if I were thinking about the question, which I should have been; instead I turned and looked at my mother, who was sitting behind me in the courtroom. There might as well have been a neon sign on her forehead that flashed the words DEFIANCE, OUTRAGE, REGRET, much like our driveway would flash the words MURDERER and FASCIST in the years to come.

“Huh,” I said again.

“You’ll have plenty of time to think about the question in prison, Mr. Pulsifer,” the judge said to me. “Make sure you do.”

“I will,” I said. Because it was an interesting question, to the judge.

But I hadn’t thought about the question, and I wasn’t really thinking about it in the morning, either, when I woke up in my old bedroom for the first time in ten years. I wasn’t thinking about any of the things I should have: my wife, my kids, Thomas Coleman, or his dead parents. No, I was thinking about those letters, couldn’t stop thinking about them — maybe because I’d stopped myself from thinking about them for so long. Or maybe I was thinking about the letters because it’s easier and safer to think about the things we shouldn’t than the things we should. The voice asking, What else? What else? knew that truth, too. There I was, lying in my childhood bed, and when the voice asked me, What else? it didn’t mean, What about your wife, your kids? What about going home and telling them the truth? It meant, What about the letters? Where are the letters? Yes, that voice was a coward, just like me.

I put on my pants and shirt from the day before, then crept down the stairs and into my father’s room. The lights were off in the room, the bed was made, my father wasn’t anywhere to be seen or heard. I opened the end table drawer, and there it was, the shoe box, and inside it were the letters, just as I remembered. It wasn’t so much a dramatic moment as it was comfortable, reassuring: the house and my father had changed, but at least the letters were in the same place. They were more tattered, smudged, and used than I remembered, and I could picture my father, sitting in his chair, reading the letters and reading them again and again and thinking of me, somewhere out in the world. It was a touching father-son moment in my head. Then I heard a noise — a sputter of a cough — coming from the living room, and I took it as a warning of sorts. So I put the letters back in the box, put the box back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and followed the noise.