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

The old man didn’t look at his wife when she said this; instead he looked at the ax resting in the corner, and he looked at it in such a resigned, meaningful way that it was clear that he wouldn’t chop wood with it but would instead use the ax to commit some horrible violent act against his wife or his son or both and that the violence was inevitable. The story ended with him staring at the ax, and then the Writer-in-Residence left the podium and reclaimed his seat next to the Director.

There were several minutes of big, thunderous applause. It was like the time I spoke to Katherine’s first-grade class for career day. I’d brought in the ziplock plastic bag I’d invented for show-and-tell, and I showed the kids how it zipped and locked, zipped and locked, and then told them how I’d made the bag that way and why. Afterward the kids gave me a sustained, raucous ovation, not because they were so impressed by the bag, but because they were competing with one another to see who could clap the loudest and the longest. The ovation in the Robert Frost Place was like that. Even I slapped my hands together, in the spirit of the thing and to be agreeable. The only person in the audience not clapping was Peter. At first I thought it was just that he clapped the way he talked. But then I noticed he was staring at the Writer-in-Residence, really staring at him, squint eyed and furious, as if the Writer-in-Residence were an especially hateful eye exam. Instead of clapping, Peter was grinding his right fist into his left palm in such a way that it made me feel very sorry for the palm.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“I hate him,” he growled.

“Why?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me, not even a shrug. That’s how angry he was.

And after thinking about it a few moments — the applause continued, which was good because I think better with the help of white noise, the way some people sleep better with the help of a fan — I was pretty sure I knew why he hated the Writer-in-Residence. I had a clear picture of Peter sitting at home — the stove blazing away, his plunger and dog close by — and reading book after book after book. Maybe he’d read the Writer-in-Residence’s books, too, and they — with the help of Ethan Frome —were telling him not what sort of person he could be but what sort of person he was and always would be: grim, beaten down, violent, inarticulate. Maybe this was what the Director meant by the true spirit of New England, spirit being not that thing that helps you rise above, but that which weighs you down. Maybe this was why Peter wanted me to burn down the Robert Frost Place: because they kept bringing in Writers-in-Residence like this Writer-in-Residence, kept bringing in men who told Peter who he was and who he wasn’t, and not who he might yet be, and Peter was sick of it. This I knew for certain, as though I had Peter’s letter in front of me and had read it many times and knew his reasons by heart, which of course I hadn’t and didn’t.

Because if I had, if I knew then what I know now (I recovered Peter’s letter, a story I’ll get to soon), I’d have known that Peter wanted me to burn down the Robert Frost Place because of the Director, who, of course, was sitting right next to the Writer-in-Residence. Six years earlier (Peter had written me the letter after I’d been released from prison), the Director had hired Peter to fix a leak in the roof. A week after Peter had fixed it and been paid for the fixing, the roof had started to leak again, and Peter refused to fix it again unless he was paid again. The Director not only didn’t pay him again but also made it known that Peter was unreliable and shouldn’t be hired, and now Peter couldn’t get work. Even six years later, he apparently couldn’t get work. And so he wanted me to burn down the Frost Place because he wanted revenge on the Director. The letter didn’t say why Peter couldn’t just burn the house down himself, but the bumbled condition of his bathroom gave me a pretty good idea. In any case, his wanting me to burn down the Frost Place had nothing to do with the Writer-in-Residence, just as the Writer-in-Residence had nothing to do with Frost himself, even though he was there under Frost’s name. I wonder if this is why writers die: so they don’t have to sit around and have people misconstrue what sort of writer they are. I wonder if this is why people do it, too. Die, that is.

As for why Peter read so much and had so many books scattered around his house, his letter didn’t say. Maybe because he couldn’t get any work, he had so much time to kill, and reading helped him do that. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he liked to read. Maybe because the books were from the library and free, the way so few things are. Or maybe his reasons were private, if private means not that someone else wouldn’t understand our reasons, but that we don’t entirely understand them ourselves.

In any case, I thought I knew who Peter hated and why he hated him, and I felt for Peter and wanted to do something to help him, something besides what he wanted me to do. Meanwhile, the applause kept going on and on and the Writer-in-Residence sat there looking more and more severe and drinking more and more bourbon, and the Director was looking more and more pleased, and Peter’s face was getting redder and redder, and you could tell his resentment was getting hotter and hotter, and let’s just say I felt I had to do something. If that’s not good enough, let’s just say that if the spirit of New England was in the Writer-in-Residence, then the spirit of my mother — book reader and storyteller — was in me.

“I have a question,” I said, standing up as I said it. I don’t know if anyone heard me over the applause, but sooner or later a group of people sitting will take notice of one man standing. When this group noticed me a few minutes later, they stopped clapping. “I have a question,” I repeated.

“No questions, no questions,” the Director said, standing up. When he did that, Peter growled audibly, which I appreciated, and kept growling until the Director sat down. The Writer-in-Residence didn’t seem to care one way or the other. He looked weary and dulled out, as though he knew exactly who I was, as though he’d played his Mercutio to my Tybalt too many times before. Even his drinking from the Jim Beam seemed to come at planned, regular intervals, as though part of the stage directions.

“Why does your character have to be such a”—and here I paused for just the right words, and not able to find them, I chose from the many inadequate words at my disposal—“mopey jerk?”

The Writer-in-Residence took another pull off his bottle of Jim Beam and said that he didn’t feel it was his business to say why his characters were the way they were.

“Whose business is it?”

“It’s nobody’s business, and I mean nobody’s,” the author said.

This must have been a line from one of his books, because everyone around him cheered and hooted. This is the most terrifying thing about speaking in front of a crowd: not that you’ve lost them, but that you never had them in the first place and never will. My face felt so hot, so red, and I bet that if I’d touched my cheek to the floor, the whole house would have gone up in smoke, and Peter would have gotten what he wanted that way. But I didn’t do that: I stood there and waited for the crowd’s noise to finally subside, and then said, “But it is your business. You made him that way.”

“I didn’t make him that way,” the Writer-in-Residence said. “That’s the way he is.”

“The way he is,” I repeated. I borrowed this tactic from my mother. When I was a child and I would say something stupid, she would repeat it back to me so I could hear for myself how stupid it was.