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

“Wesley,” Lees Ardor said, “there is someone here to see you.” He didn’t answer her, even though they were only a body length apart. “Wesley,” she said again, but with more sweetness in her voice, as though she loved the way he didn’t answer her. She said his name five more times, her voice sounding as if she were saying not, “Wesley, Wesley,” but rather, “Love, Love.” Still no response. It wasn’t that Mincher was deaf; no, he was one of those distracted academics who are so lost in their own heads that it takes them a long time to realize that they might be needed in the world outside their skulls. But finally he did hear: he looked up and saw her and gave her a big, fond smile. He even put down his book, or rather he slid it into a protective plastic sleeve, the way Anne Marie might have slid a sandwich for Katherine’s lunch into a plastic sandwich bag. I had designed both kinds of bags, by the way, or at the very least worked with someone who had.

“Wesley,” Lees Ardor said, “this is Sam Pulsifer.”

“I am a fourth-generation Mincher from the North Carolina foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains,” Wesley Mincher said, apropos of nothing. He had a southern accent, the gentle, lilting kind. My father had edited many books by southern historians about southern history for the university press, and I’d met a few of what he called “his authors,” had heard him talk about those authors, and so I immediately pegged Wesley Mincher for what he was: he was a character, too, the sort of southern character who believed that being a southern character had something to do with misdirectional doublespeak, and losing the Civil War and not wanting others to talk about it but not being able to stop talking about it yourself, and having wise, lugubrious old folks and front porches for them to sit on, and black people, always black people, about whom you knew everything and about whom no one else knew shit, and the idea that self-criticism is art but criticism from outside is hypocrisy, and wise, folksy sheriffs and God and farm animals and good food that wouldn’t be good if you ate it in a restaurant and not in your mama’s kitchen, and a set of whitewall tires leaning up against the barn that would look good on the 1957 Buick that you had a funny story to tell about.

“Mr. Pulsifer has something to tell us regarding the Mark Twain House, Wesley,” Lees Ardor said gently, so gently. You could feel the fondness pouring out of her the way those tears had an hour earlier.

“The so-called hillbilly of the Appalachians speaks an English closer to true proper English than any Yankee who went to Harvard.”

“He says he wasn’t the one who burned down the house, or tried to.”

“My mother could make a poultice out of the sap of a piney tree that could take away your toothache before you even knew you had one, buddy-ro.”

“He says he wasn’t the one we paid three thousand dollars.”

“Our Bobby Lee kept a lock of his daughter’s hair in his saddlebag. It was magic, that lock of hair. It protected him from the minié balls.”

I just stood there, feeling sleepy in that dim light, enjoying the show. The two of them could have talked like this for hours, I bet, their meanings barely intersecting, until they arrived, always, at the end of the evening, at the necessary common ground.

“I believe him, Wesley,” Lees Ardor said. “I think he’s telling us the truth.”

“Then I believe him, too, my love,” Mincher said. He reached over and held out his hand, and she took it. They held hands for the rest of my time there, as though I weren’t there at all, or as though I were there only to bear witness to their hand-holding.

I got exactly one piece of evidence that day, but it took hours and hours to get it. Mostly, Mincher told me the story of how they first met. They had been on the faculty at Heiden together for eight years, but they had never really noticed each other because they had each been walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls. Lees Ardor was the only woman in the department, which was perhaps (she admitted) what made her say “cunt” so often. As for Wesley Mincher, he was the only southerner on the faculty — the only one who had a bachelor’s degree from Sewanee and a PhD from Vanderbilt as opposed to Amherst and Harvard — and it was difficult for Wesley Mincher to see anyone else in the department over the high ramparts of his defensiveness. That was his phrase—“the high ramparts of my defensiveness”—and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

Anyway, it was Mincher who noticed Lees Ardor first, at a faculty meeting, the subject of which was a conference to be held at Heiden dedicated to the topic “Mark Twain: The Problem of Greatness.” At the faculty meeting there’d been a long discussion on plenary and breakout sessions and keynote speakers, and at the end of all this, Lees Ardor had said, loudly, “Mark Twain is a cunt.”

Her colleagues, of course, had heard Lees Ardor say this kind of thing many times before, and her ability to shock them, as with her students, was close to nil. They ignored her, but Mincher did not. There was something lovely, fragile, and mysterious about the way she said, “Mark Twain is a cunt,” and after the department meeting was over, Wesley Mincher chased down Lees Ardor in the hallway and asked, “Do you have any interest in drinking red wine with me and talking about Confederate currency and maybe looking over my rare lithograph of the Confederate mint in Richmond, Virginia?” To her own great surprise, Lees Ardor said, “Yes” (she did not remember, she admitted to me, the last time she had said yes to anything). Over the course of the next six months, Lees Ardor said yes many more times to Wesley Mincher (she blushed when he said this, but she wasn’t displeased, you could tell), until finally he asked her why she’d said what she said about Mark Twain.

“I’m afraid of becoming Aunt Polly,” Lees Ardor had confessed. She was talking, of course, about the shrewish spinster in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I had read those books, could easily see what she was afraid of, and realized that she was probably right to be afraid. “I don’t want to be Aunt Polly,” she’d told Mincher.

“I don’t want that, either,” Mincher had said to her, way back then, and also to me, in his house years later. “So I turned to chivalry, as men in my family always have.” Thus he began to tell a long story about the many chivalric Minchers through the ages, leading, finally, to himself, Wesley Mincher, who decided to have the Mark Twain House torched as proof of his love for Lees Ardor. He had remembered reading about a young man who had destroyed the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts (it had apparently reduced one of their colleagues — an expert in lyric poetry — to tears). So he wrote the arsonist a letter at his home address. Then he waited. Months and years passed; he fell deeper and deeper in love with Lees Ardor, and she with him. But there was that Mark Twain House: they passed it every day on their way to school (she’d moved in with him a year after they first fell in love), and it served as a reminder of his failures as a man, of how Lees Ardor still wasn’t totally rid of her Aunt Polly nightmares.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted at this point in the story. “Why didn’t you just ask her to marry you? She wouldn’t have been Aunt Polly if you’d married her.”

“I wanted to prove I was worthy of her first,” Mincher said. “The destruction of the Mark Twain House would have proved my worthiness.” This struck me as the most ridiculous sentiment I’d ever heard, the sort of absurd romantic hooey that Lees Ardor would have scoffed at if her students had expressed it or if she’d read it in a book. But when Mincher said this, Lees Ardor didn’t scoff. She reached over and gently put her hand on his yellow neck and left it there; he shivered noticeably, as though her touch were the best kind of ice.