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

At first I didn’t remember that Bellamy was a writer, and, by extension, that his house was a writer’s house. The headline read LOCAL LANDMARK RECEIVES MINOR FIRE DAMAGE, as though the minor fire damage had come in the mail. Only after reading a little bit did I discover that Bellamy had been a writer and that his most famous book was Looking Backward. Only then did the author’s name and his book sneak through the fog of my hangover and appear in my memory bank. I put down the paper, walked to my father’s room, opened the end table drawer, rifled through the box of letters, and finally found it: a letter from Mr. Harvey Frazier of Chicopee, Massachusetts, asking me to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. The letter had been mailed only fifteen years ago (so said the postmark on the envelope), but it was so crinkled and smudged and creased that it looked like an ancient artifact. I put the letter in my shirt pocket, put the shoe box back in its not-so-secret hiding place, then went back to the newspaper article: it said that the fire damage was minor and that the fire department said the cause of the fire was “suspicious.” I knew what that meant: they’d called my fire “suspicious,” too, even after they already knew I was the one who’d accidentally set it.

A confession: my mother never let me read detective novels when I was a child, not even child detective novels. Once, when my mother caught me reading an Encyclopedia Brown book (it was, I believe, about the neighbor’s cat and who had caused it to go missing), she confiscated it and said, “If you want to read a mystery, read this.” She handed me Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, which, as far as I could tell, was not a mystery but instead a book about black people who weren’t, and white people who weren’t, either, and an outcast New York fingerprinter and some Europeans and Virginians in Missouri, and the only mystery as far as I was concerned was how these non-Missourians got to the state in the first place, and why they then stayed there for as long as they did.

My point: if I’d ever read a real detective novel, about a real mystery, then maybe I’d have known what to do next. Instead I muddled through the best I could. I seemed to remember hearing, or maybe seeing on TV, that detectives drank impressively, even (especially) while on the case. So I had a drink, the last beer in the fridge, left over from the previous night’s family binge. While drinking, I thought about who might possibly have set fire to the Bellamy House. Thomas Coleman was the first person I thought of, obviously. I knew he was going to make more and greater trouble for me, and maybe this was it. He would burn down the Bellamy House and somehow blame it on me. But then again, how would he even know someone wanted me to burn down the Bellamy House in the first place? After all, the letter was here, in my shirt pocket; I patted it to make sure.

But if not Thomas Coleman, then who? Could it have been Mr. Harvey Frazier himself? After all, he’d been waiting such a long time, and maybe he felt he couldn’t wait anymore. Or maybe it was someone else entirely, someone I obviously hadn’t yet thought of. I didn’t know, but I decided to visit Mr. Harvey Frazier and find out. How I would find out, I had no idea. Again, if I’d read the right books, I might have known how to be a proper detective. And if I hadn’t quit my job at Pioneer Packaging and had something else to do, then maybe I would have been too busy to try to be one. And if I hadn’t been all alone, if there had been someone else in the house, then maybe they would have warned me: maybe they would have told me not to go near the Edward Bellamy House, just to stay put and not go anywhere.

But then again, maybe that’s who a detective is: someone with nothing else to do but act like a detective and with no one around to tell him not to.

MR. HARVEY FRAZIER of Chicopee, Massachusetts, was awfully cagey for an old guy and pretended not to recognize me or my name at first. And he was old, at least eighty, and spooky, too, because he opened his door just as I was ready to knock on it, as if he were expecting me right at that moment. Even though I was startled, I managed to say, “Sir, it’s me, Sam Pulsifer,” then unclenched my knocking fist and extended my hand for Mr. Frazier to shake. He didn’t shake it; instead he said, “I was about to walk,” and then he did, right past me and down the street. He was difficult to read, all right, and suddenly I wanted not only to know whether he’d set the fire or not, but also to know him , to really know why he wanted what he wanted, to know him in a way I hadn’t known anyone else — not my parents or Anne Marie or the kids — and you could say I was making up for lost time and missed opportunities as I chased after Mr. Frazier.

He was fast, too. For an old guy. Or maybe the speed was part of his anger at me for not responding to his letter for so long. I jogged until I caught up with him, and then said, “A walk, huh?” and when he didn’t take this conversational bait, I asked, “Where to?”

“Store,” he said. He spoke with that serious, terse Yankee accent that always makes me feel I’ve done something wrong, and when he said “store,” he sounded so ancient and formal that I imagined he was walking to an old-fashioned family-owned store, where he was going to buy something obsolete, like dry goods, whatever dry goods might be, or maybe tobacco, maybe some good-smelling pipe tobacco. But no, scratch that; Mr. Frazier didn’t smoke and never had, I was guessing, not even before it was known to cause cancer, because tobacco was expensive or at least an expense and Mr. Frazier was a tight-ass. I knew this because Mr. Frazier was wearing brown wool pants and a brown cardigan sweater and a houndstooth sport coat that were worn down to the last thin layer of fabric. He probably hadn’t bought new clothes in thirty years, and he’d probably bought the clothes he had on at a department store whose name he wouldn’t be able to remember, nor its location, although no doubt it was in a downtown somewhere, and no doubt it had gone out of business by now. Mr. Frazier would think the idea of new clothes silly. Absolutely ridiculous. Especially if you bought clothes made out of good, durable wool, which his had probably been before he’d worn them all to hell, which was how I knew he was a tight-ass. I mean no disrespect when I say this. I was merely trying to get into his head, trying to get a bead on his whole psychology.

“What are you getting at the store?”

“Newspaper,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t use articles, either, and I added that to his psychological profile. A few blocks ahead of us I could see a big chain supermarket, a Super Stop and Shop, and not a “store” at all. If this was where we were headed, I would add delusional to his profile while I had it out and was working on it.

Another thing about Mr. Frazier’s getup: it was excessively heavy for the very warm Indian summer November day that it was, and it was also an excessively formal getup for a daily trip to the supermarket or store or wherever it was we were headed. Or maybe it was just our immediate surroundings that made it seem so. Because the neighborhood was really gone, and Mr. Frazier was the best-looking thing in it. There was garbage everywhere — bottles, egg cartons, diapers — and almost no cans to put it in. On the sidewalk someone had written in pink chalk, “Shamequa eat pussy.” It was too bad because the neighborhood had once been very pretty, you could tell. The big white houses had probably been Victorian at one point, but they had been added onto so often that they now defied architectural classification. Yes, I bet the houses had once been owned by families, good, respectable families, and they’d probably all dressed like Mr. Frazier, and the families had made sure that the houses had straight ridgepoles and well-pointed chimneys and elm trees and squirrels, and they, the families, could do this because they had jobs at Pratt and Whitney making airplanes or at the Indian motorcycle plant making Indian motorcycles or at Monarch making insurance premiums. But at some point between the wars, people started losing their jobs. It’s an old story. They lost their jobs and then couldn’t afford to keep their ridgepoles straight or their chimneys erect or their homes single-family, and the elm trees began dying and so did the people, or they moved and then died, and the houses were aluminum-sided and divided into apartments — the multiple mailboxes, the tangled and bunched telephone and power lines, and the rusted cars parked curbside told me so. The neighborhood wasn’t Mr. Frazier’s anymore, it didn’t need him, and how could this not make him good and mad?