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

“Move out?” my father repeated. “I wouldn’t exactly say she has. Her clothes are here, after all, or at least most of them. She comes back here to drink most every night.”

“Dad,” I said, “I saw her apartment tonight. I saw her in her apartment in Belchertown, in the Masonic temple. I know all about that.”

“Oh,” he said. His face fell a little and began to look more like the face of the stroked-out father I believed and wanted him to be and he perhaps wanted to be, too. “I’m sorry you have to know all about that.”

“Are you still even married?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“What is?” I said.

“Marriage,” he said.

“Do you still love her?”

“I love her very much,” my father said automatically. Did this mean he did, or he didn’t? If he had asked me the same question about Anne Marie, I would have given him the same answer, and I would have given it automatically. “I wish your mother weren’t in that apartment,” he said. “I wish she were here, with us.”

“So why isn’t she?”

“It’s complicated,” my father said again. I could see that “complicated” was the word he used to describe that which he didn’t understand, the way I used “accident.” My father dropped his eyes and then returned them to the letters. He picked one up and I could see his hand shake. He seemed more and more feeble and distracted with each passing second, and I thought I’d better finish asking questions before he fully reverted to the stroked-out father I’d been thinking he was.

“Dad, how many people have seen these letters?”

“Too many to count,” he said, and this seemed to please him. He rallied a little bit and started walking around the kitchen, waggling beer cans to see if they had any beer left in them, drinking out of the ones that did.

“Does anyone know where you keep the letters?”

“Of course,” he said. He sat down at the table and started flipping through the letters again. “Lots of people do.”

“Does anyone suspicious know where you keep the letters?” I asked. This was a weak question, and my father gave me a look as if to say, They all were, and so I thought about how to be more specific. What would a suspicious person look like, exactly? I asked myself, and immediately Thomas Coleman came to mind, especially since he’d seemed to know my father, knew where his bedroom was, and had been in this same home only the day before. Plus, I’d already fingered him as guilty to Detective Wilson, so I had some stake in his guilt. Plus, I didn’t think I had anyone else to name except my mother, and I didn’t want to name her, not unless I had to.

“Do you know someone named Thomas Coleman?” I asked him.

“I know lots of people,” my father said.

“He has blond hair,” I said. “He’s thin, has blue eyes.” I thought about it some more, wished there were more ways to physically describe the people who are ruining our lives. “Really thin,” I said again. “Does that sound like someone who has seen the letters?”

“Lots of thin people have seen the letters,” my father said, talking more to the letters than to me.

“Dad, pay attention!” I barked, the way a parent does to a child, and the way every child eventually does to his parent, too, taking revenge for being barked at so many years earlier, revenge being yet another one of the many kinds of sadness. My father’s head jerked up and he held it there, at attention. “Thomas Coleman’s parents died in the Emily Dickinson House fire,” I told him.

“They did,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I killed them.” It felt good to admit this finally, although every good feeling exists only long enough for you to ruin it, and I ruined this one by adding, “By accident.”

“By accident,” my father said.

“Do you know Thomas Coleman?” I asked. “Has he seen the letters? I’m pretty sure someone who has seen the letters tried to set fire to both the Bellamy House and the Twain House. They probably have the five other letters, too. Dad, please, think hard. Do you know a Thomas Coleman? This is important.”

My father thought hard; I could tell by the way the worry lines on his forehead deepened and multiplied. He even brought his index finger to his lips and left it there. Finally he said, “I have no idea. I’m sorry, Sam, but I don’t.”

“OK,” I said, and I believed him, and that will also go in my arsonist’s guide: don’t trust a man who says, “I have no idea,” but also don’t underestimate his capacity not to have one. “Dad,” I said, “you don’t think it could be Mom who tried to burn those houses, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you ask something like that?”

“Because I’m pretty sure it’s a woman,” I said. “If it’s not this guy Thomas Coleman, then I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, throwing his favorite word back at him. “But trust me, I’m pretty sure it’s a woman.”

“Why would it be your mother?” my father said. He was really lucid now, his eyes suddenly clear of the booze and the letters and who knows what else that had been fogging them.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’s not happy I came back. Maybe it’s because of me.”

“Don’t you ever say that!” my father yelled. I mean, he really yelled this, and then banged on the table, giving his fist the opportunity to yell, too. I don’t think he ever banged or yelled once when I was a child; usually he moped and then fled. I’m not sure which was worse, or better. Were these my only choices? Shouldn’t you get more than two choices? “Your mother would never do something like that to you,” he told me. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“OK,” I said.

“She loves you, you idiot,” he said. “You have no idea how much.”

“OK, OK,” I said. “But I’m still pretty sure it’s a woman, though.”

“Then it’s another woman,” my father said. “Go find another woman.” Of course he said this, and of course I listened, finding another woman being both the hope that keeps most men going and the hope that eventually does them in.

That was the end of that. After he told me to go find another woman, my father seemed to stroke out again. He put the letters back in the shoe box, tucked the shoe box under his arm, got up from his chair, and shuffled toward his bedroom. Before he left the kitchen, though, he reached with his free hand and picked up a book on the counter. “By the way,” he said. He held up Morgan Taylor’s memoir, then tossed it at me. I didn’t react quickly enough, and it hit me right in the gut, which, coincidentally, is exactly where the book jacket promised the book would hit me. “I read this. Am I supposed to be in here?”

“Well, not you exactly,” I said. “But the things you did, the places you went after you left Mom and me. Those are your stories.”

“If you say so,” my father said. He shrugged and then shuffled off to bed.

LIKE THE MANY SAD-SACK young male narrators of the books my mother made me read when I was a sad-sack young male, I went to bed that night without my supper, and for that matter without my lunch, too. My stomach was rumbling angrily, keeping pace with the rumbling in my head. There were so many things to think about that I couldn’t properly think about any of them. When this happens, the only thing you can do is to locate one thought, the simplest one, the one nearest to you, and do your very best to eliminate it and then go on to thinking about the next thought you want to eliminate.

The thought closest to me that night was this: Morgan Taylor had stolen my father’s stories for his memoir. My father had read the memoir and said he wasn’t in it, even though those postcards he’d sent me said otherwise. When I was a child, I kept the postcards my father had sent in my closet, on the top shelf, in a manila envelope. I got out of bed, dragged a desk chair over to the closet, climbed up on the chair, reached up to the top shelf, and found the envelope. The postcards were inside: I read them like that, standing on the chair. They were exactly as I remembered, in my father’s handwriting, the handwriting I recognized from the “Drink Me” notes he left in the morning beside my hangover potion. I’d remembered the handwriting so clearly, in part, because it was the only time I’d ever really seen either of my parents write anything except for the illegible marginal comments they made on student papers and manuscripts, and even that writing wasn’t writing at all but rather symbols telling the writer to indent or not to. The way I figured it, my parents scribbled so much at work that they couldn’t bring themselves to write anything at home — not even a grocery list or a birthday card. Except for my father’s postcards. My father might not have remembered the postcards clearly, but here they were, written proof that something important had happened as I remembered it happening. Each postcard was signed, “Love, Your Dad.”