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

So Springfield was out, but we had to go somewhere. One day Anne Marie said, “I hear Amherst is nice. What about Amherst?”

It should be said here that I hadn’t told Anne Marie about my past, and right then I wanted to, badly: I wanted to tell Anne Marie everything — about the Emily Dickinson House and how I’d burned it, accidentally, and the people I’d killed — and by the way, it wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to tell her such a thing. I should have told her right away, I know this now and I knew it then, but new love is so fragile and I thought I would wait until it got stronger. But then time and more time went by, and now my original crime was compounded by the crime of not telling her about it for so many years and things were too complicated and I couldn’t tell her the truth.

So I said yes. Amherst. Why not? We put the kids in the minivan and headed up to Amherst. On the drive up I convinced myself of things, crazy things. I told myself that we’d get to the town and find an old, lovely New England house in old, lovely New England Amherst, move in, then present my house, my wife, my kids, my job, myself, to my parents, who would have by this point begun to miss me. I’ve changed, I would say. And they would say, Us, too. Welcome home. Because the heart wants what the heart wants, and the heart was telling me, Don’t be ridiculous, they’ve forgiven you, all of them. Saying, It’s time, it’s time, it’s time.

It wasn’t time. This was on a Friday. Amherst was exactly as I’d remembered it: the leafy, prosperous streets, which were filled with so many Volvo station wagons it was like mushrooms in a cave; the two-hundred-year-old houses with their genteelly overgrown lawns, their tiger lilies and blue mums and birch trees and historical markers; the white college boys with dreadlocks playing their complicated Frisbee games on the sweeping town green; the white clapboard Congregational churches and the granite Episcopal churches and the soaring spires of the college everywhere visible over the high tree line; the well-scrubbed college girls barely dressed in workout clothes; and the boat-shoed and loafered professors drinking their coffee on the sort of wrought iron outdoor patio furniture that looks too delicate to sit on even if you were as wafer thin as most of the college girls were. All of this was familiar to me, but it didn’t make me feel happy, didn’t make me feel at home. I felt like a cousin once removed, which meant, I guess, that you weren’t really a cousin at all: you were estranged from blood relation in some permanent way, and my remove from Amherst was that I had burned down the most significant of its significant, beautiful, aged houses, had killed two of its loafered citizens. A cousin once removed was not a cousin; a criminal citizen was not a citizen.

This was a big disappointment, the biggest, because I’d taken up packaging science, and I’d forgotten my literature, forgotten that you can’t go home again, and so I thought that Amherst — the town where I’d grown up, the town where both my parents had grown up, the town where both their families had lived for two hundred years — would still be my hometown. How could it not? Was I not the town’s own humbled prodigal son? Did not every town need someone like me, someone — as the song says — who was lost but now was found? But from the driver’s seat of our minivan, I had the definite feeling that Amherst would never be my town again, that the town itself wouldn’t stand for it, that they didn’t need a prodigal son, that a prodigal son was exactly what they didn’t need. We drove past my old high school: there were bars on the windows where there hadn’t been before I went to prison, armed uniformed guards out front where before there’d been old-lady hall monitors with whistles, and I imagined that the bars and the guards were there to protect the students from me and not some teenage crazy in a trench coat stuffed with homemade ordnance. I could hear the principal during assembly that morning: We were not vigilant and he burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed two people in the bargain. But we are ready for him now. I imagined that after school the students and their parents, and for that matter the whole town, would—à la Frankenstein —take up their torches and pitchforks and drive me out of town and leave me — lurching, grunting, monstrous with my scarred and stitched body and the bolt through my head — wandering, lost in the strange, cruel world, never to be heard from again.

“What do you think?” Anne Marie asked me, her face happy and expectant, about the opposite of how mine surely looked.

“Pitchforks!” I said. “Torches! Monster!”

“What?” she asked. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” I said, and I kept driving, in a kind of trance, so that Anne Marie’s cries of “Wait!” and “Where are you going?” and “We haven’t looked at any houses yet — hold on!” were something out of the faint, distant past and I had trouble hearing them. Yes, I kept driving, right past Chicopee Street, where my parents lived, and then out of town, and for five more years I was pretty glad I had. Soon we were on Route 116 and out of Amherst proper, and this, too, was familiar — the small brick ranch houses that housed the Asian grad students at the state university, and the student laundromats and the family-owned greengrocers and the tiny, poorly stocked nonchain video stores in which you couldn’t ever find the movies you wanted. But soon things began to change. First, there came the river of superstores: the super garden-supply stores and super toy stores and super children’s clothing stores and super building-supply stores and super furniture galleries and super supermarkets and so on. The buildings that housed these superstores were as cheap looking as they were big, just oversize tin pole barns with parking lots so huge that the entire town of Amherst could have fit comfortably inside. Amherst didn’t seem big enough to justify all these superstores and their parking lots; it was like building a sub without first building the urb.

But these stores were just an introduction to what had really changed: what had really changed were the subdivisions beyond the stores, the subdivisions where ten years before there had been only broadleaf tobacco and corn fields, subdivisions with signs at the gated entrances that said MONACO ESTATES and STONEHAVEN, and with streets named Princess Grace Way and Sheep Meadow Circle. I drove around these subdivisions, looking for a FOR SALE sign and not finding one until we turned into a subdivision named Camelot — so said the wooden sign carved into the shape of a castle.

Camelot was beautiful. There were no trees anywhere — it was as though Camelot had been nuked or had been the brainchild of the logging industry maybe — and each house was exactly the same except that some had powder blue vinyl siding and others had desert tan. There were elaborate wooden playgrounds in the backyards and mini — satellite dishes on every roof, and each driveway was a smooth carpet of blacktop and there wasn’t a sidewalk crack to trip over because there were no sidewalks, and each house had a garage that was so oversized it could have been its own house. There was the constant, soothing hum of lawn maintenance coming from somewhere, everywhere, even though the grass seed in front of most houses hadn’t matured yet and I couldn’t spot a lawn mower anywhere, and the sprinkler systems were all activated even though it was late September and too late for grass watering, the spray arcing and dancing in the streetlights, of which there looked to be about 150, all of them on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.