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

“Ready?” he asked. I was and said so. Peter threw the plunger into the corner of the room and then leaned over the couch. There was a dog curled up there, among the blankets; I assumed it was the same dog that had been howling from its doghouse earlier. Peter had obviously let him inside while I was in the bathroom. You could barely see the dog — it was, like everything else in the trailer, somewhere between brown and deep red — but you could hear it sigh happily when Peter placed his hand on its head and left it there for a moment, and this sound filled me with sadness of the worst, self-pitying kind. How was it that this mottled pooch had these most precious things — the love and affectionate touch of another, a couch to lie on, a place (two places) to call home — and I did not? Was this what it had come to? Was I lower and less fortunate than a dog? Was there a sadder person in New England, in the history of New England? Would even sad-sack Ethan Frome look at me and feel lucky to at least have his piss-poor land, his failing farm, his drafty house, his shrewish wife, his impossible true love, his barely functional vocabulary? Would even Ethan Frome be glad he wasn’t me? Yes, the self-pity was thick in the air; the room was full of it, the way I had been full of pee a few minutes earlier. Maybe that’s what the other toilet had been for. It was an interesting idea — having a place in which to deposit your self-pity — and it made me feel better, for a second, for having thought it.

Then whoosh, we went out through the cold and the snow and into the van. I can’t remember anything about it except that at first it wasn’t any warmer inside the van than out. Oh, was it cold! I can’t emphasize that enough. It was the kind of cold that makes you insane and single minded, thinking only about how to get warmer, warmer, warmer. The heater was so slow in its heating, and to keep myself from thinking about how cold I was, I concentrated on Peter’s directions to turn this way and that, and on the snow in the headlights, swirling and bouncing like molecules, and outside the snow the deep, deep darkness. Remembering it now, I realize it was nice: the world felt small and homey, just me and Peter and the snow and the darkness and the truck and the heat — because here it finally came, really blasting at us, just in time for me to pull up in front of the Robert Frost Place. The house was your standard old white farmhouse — the sort where you wouldn’t be able to keep the hornets out during the summer, or the heat in during the winter — and the only things truly notable about it were that it hadn’t been burned down yet, it was ringed by parked cars, and it was lit up like Christmas. Every light in the house must have been on, and even Mr. Frost must have been able to see it from his new and more permanent home in the Great Beyond.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

Peter shrugged, which I took to mean, I don’t know.

“Let’s go see,” I said. Peter shrugged again, which I took to mean, No.

“Why not?” I asked, and you already know what his answer was, or at least how he gave it, and so I won’t bother to interpret it for you.

But no matter what, I was going in that house: already that week I had been locked out of my house and my mother’s apartment, and I was not going to be kept out of this place, too. I got out of the van, walked up to and inside the house, and guess what? Peter followed me. This is yet another piece of necessary advice that’ll go in my arsonist’s guide: if you lead, they will follow, especially if it’s painfully cold outside and your followers don’t want to be left in the unheated van. If you lead, under exactly these kinds of circumstances, then they will follow.

Let me say now that between the then when this was happening and the now from which I’m writing, I’ve become something of a reader. Back then I hadn’t heard of the author who was inside the Robert Frost Place, about to read from his most recent book, but I’ve heard of him now and have read all his novels, too. Each of his novels is populated by taciturn northern New Hampshire countrymen with violent tendencies, doing violent things to their countrywomen and children, then brooding over the violence within them and how the harsh northern New Hampshire landscape is part and parcel of that violence. Recently the author moved to Wyoming to get away from the city folk who are moving to New Hampshire, and he’s now setting his books in Wyoming, where the men are also taciturn and violent, et cetera. And the books have won a few awards, and they’ve been made into major motion pictures — I should say that, too.

It was a good thing Peter and I arrived when we did, because we got two of the last available seats. I did a quick scan of the crowd for arsonists or potential arsonists, but I recognized no one, no one at all. There were a few women scattered around, but mostly the audience was composed of men. Some of the men were dressed like Peter and wore red plaid hunting jackets or bulky tan Carhartt jackets or lined flannel shirts, and all of those men were wearing jeans and work boots. Some of the men wore ski jackets and hiking boots and the sort of many-pocketed army green pants that made you want to get out of your seat and rappel. Some of the men wore wide-wale corduroy pants and duck boots and cable-knit sweaters and scarves. It was a regular United Nations of white American manhood. But all the men, no matter what they were wearing, were slouching in their chairs, with their legs so wide open that it seemed as though there must be something severely wrong with their testicles.

In front of all of us was a podium with a microphone sticking out of it. On the front of the podium — and all over the walls, too — were posters announcing the reading, and also announcing the reader’s position as the current Robert Frost Place’s Writer-in-Residence. There was a picture of the Writer-in-Residence on the poster, and from the picture I recognized him in person, sitting off to the right of the podium. He, too, was wearing a red plaid hunting jacket and had a big red beard and a pile of graying red curly hair. Sitting next to him was a thin, bald man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a yellow corduroy shirt so new that it looked as though it had just come out of the box. The thin, bald man got out of his chair, walked to the podium, and introduced himself as the Director of the Robert Frost Place. He talked about the history of the Robert Frost Place Writers-in-Residence, and how each Writer-in-Residence was chosen for the way he and his work embodied the true spirit of Robert Frost and of New England itself. The Director then talked for a while about what, exactly, the true spirit of New England was. I can’t say I listened to all, or any, of what he said, the way you don’t really listen to those car commercials when they tell you how their vehicle embodies the true spirit of America.

Anyway, this went on for a while, and at some point he must actually have introduced the Writer-in-Residence, because the Director suddenly sat down, there was some applause, and the Writer-in-Residence took his place at the podium. He took a bottle of Jim Beam the size and shape of a hip flask out of his jacket pocket and took a pull from it, and without saying a word of thanks to us for coming, he began to read. The story was about a woodpile and the snow falling on the woodpile and the old man who owned the woodpile and who wasn’t actually that old but who had been so beaten down by life that he looked old. The old man was sitting at his kitchen window drinking bourbon straight from the bottle and watching the snow wet the wood that he and his family needed for their heat and that needed to be chopped, pronto. His son was supposed to chop the wood, the son had promised, but he was off somewhere getting into trouble with a girl the old man didn’t much care for because she was a slut (she was a slut, it seemed, not because she’d actually had sex with someone or someones, but because who else but a slut would date the old man’s son?). The old man hated the girl and he hated the son and he hated the snow and he hated the unchopped wood, which clearly was some sort of symbol of how the man’s life hadn’t worked out the way he’d planned, and the old man hated the bourbon, too, which he kept drinking anyway. I couldn’t understand why the old man didn’t just get off his ass and chop the wood himself, and I also couldn’t understand why the author didn’t use metaphors or similes in his story, but he didn’t; the story was more or less an unadorned grocery list of the things the old man hated. And speaking of grocery lists, the old man’s wife entered the kitchen with her grocery list and told the old man that she was going to the store, and as an aside she looked at the dead woodstove and said, “Pa.” The old man didn’t answer her, maybe because he didn’t like to be called “Pa,” or maybe because he liked to be called “Pa” so much that he wanted his wife to call him that again, or maybe because men like him are only called “Pa” in books and he didn’t realize he was in one. In any case, his wife said it again—“Pa”—and then: “It’s cold in here. Why don’t you go out and chop some wood?”