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

“And then the bond analysts burned down the Robert Frost Place.”

“The what? And who ?” Anne Marie said, and then before I could answer, she said, “Forget it. I don’t want to hear about any fucking bond analysts. I don’t want to hear about anything anymore.”

“But Anne Marie,” I said, “it’s true.”

“Oh, Sam,” Anne Marie said. “Why don’t you take some responsibility for once?”

“For burning down those houses?”

“For everything,” she said. Then she turned around and walked through the snow back to Thomas’s Jeep. I didn’t chase after her, didn’t call out to her, didn’t tell her to come back, come back. Talking had gotten me into nothing but trouble. Maybe the best way to get Anne Marie to come back was just to stand there in the snow and not say anything and wait for her. It worked, too. She spun her wheels in the snow, did a ragged three-point turn, and pointed the Jeep in my direction. Come back to me, I said in my head. Come back to me. And she did. Anne Marie pulled up right next to me, reached across the front seat, rolled down the passenger side window, and said, “You’re going to go see your mother, aren’t you?”

I admitted that I probably was.

“Then you should go home and change first,” she said. “Shower, too. You look terrible, Sam. You don’t smell so good, either.” And then she rolled up the window and drove away.

As everyone knows, you can’t go home again. That famous book told us so, even if it took way too many pages to do it. But what that book didn’t tell us, and mine will, is that you can’t go home again even to change your clothes and shower before meeting your mother at the Student Prince, because if you do, you’ll find Detective Wilson sitting at your dining room table, waiting for you. He was baggy eyed and armed with another large coffee, the way I was baggy eyed and armed with another large beer, which is just further proof that all men are but slight variations on the very same theme.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said. Because I wasn’t: after all, there had been so many non-Pulsifers showing up at my home the last few days that I’d have to expand the definition of home to include people who didn’t actually live there, in addition to the people who were supposed to live there but didn’t. “I’m not surprised at all,” I told him. I raised my bagged beer in toast, then sat down across the table from him. Between us was a bulky manila envelope that I figured was mail for one of my parents.

“You’ve been busy, Sam,” Detective Wilson said. He took several envelopes out of his jacket pocket, withdrew pieces of paper from each envelope, and then spread them on the dining room table, covering the manila envelope. The pieces of paper and the envelope looked dirty, torn, abused, and I was pretty sure I knew what they were without reading them, even though I did read them, if for no other reason than to buy myself a little time. They were the rest of my father’s missing letters, from people who wanted me to burn down these writers’ houses: Edith Wharton’s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, as well as a replica log cabin at Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The letter writers had gotten what they wanted, too: someone had burned down all those houses the night before, one after the other, and someone had then left the pertinent letter near the place where the house had just been. Detective Wilson told me this as I pretended to read the letters. I knew the bond analysts had done the burning, of course — I could picture their route south from New Hampshire and east toward Boston as they burned, could hear Morgan saying, He’ll be sorry, as he produced and planted the letters. I should have told Detective Wilson about the bond analysts; I should have produced Morgan’s book and the postcards and then explained their reasons for burning these houses and framing me. Then I would have gone on and admitted to Detective Wilson that I didn’t know any of the bond analysts’ last names except for Morgan’s, nor did I know exactly where in Boston they lived. But Anne Marie hadn’t wanted to hear about the bond analysts, and I could imagine Detective Wilson reacting the same way, could imagine him agreeing with the Writer-in-Residence: he would clearly think the whole thing was a cheap trick, and that the bond analysts didn’t sound like real people. So instead of telling him the whole truth, I told the simplest part of it—“It wasn’t me”—and then slid the letters back toward him.

“Yes, it was,” Detective Wilson said. He put the letters back in their envelopes and returned them to his coat pocket. I looked down at the table where the letters had just been. There was that manila envelope. I looked at it rather than at Detective Wilson and noticed what I hadn’t before: in the upper left-hand corner, in official letterhead style, it read: “Wesley Mincher, English Department, Heiden College, Hartford, CT 06106.” There was no postmark on the envelope, no proper mailing address, either, but there was, in the middle of the envelope, in big block letters so you couldn’t miss it, my name: “SAM.” I looked back at Detective Wilson, and while I was doing so, I reached down and turned over the envelope so that my name was facing the table and not me or him.

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

“Of course it was, Sam,” he said, and then patted his coat pocket where the envelopes were, the incriminating letters inside them.

“If it were me,” I said, “then why would I leave the letters behind?”

It was clear that Detective Wilson hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t thought about the evidence except that it existed and that it proved what he wanted it to prove, evidence — as I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide — being just a more concrete form of wishful thinking. “Because you wanted to get caught,” he said weakly. He hit his coat pocket, but harder this time, as though punishing the letters for letting him down.

“Why would I want to get caught?”

“Maybe you left the letters by accident,” he said.

It made me feel so good to hear someone else say “accident” that I nearly forget about all of my own, which is why I then had another one. An accident, that is. “Come on. You can do better than that. I burned down five houses and then accidentally left letters at all of them?”

“I only named four houses,” Detective Wilson, recouping quickly.

“Oh,” I said.

“But you’re right. There was a fifth house torched last night.” I knew which one it was and so didn’t bother to listen to him say it. I did, however, think of Peter Le Clair’s letter in my pocket, could hear it calling to its siblings in Detective Wilson’s pocket across the table. “I didn’t find a letter there. But I know it was you who burned that house, too. Do you want to know how I know?”

“No,” I said. After all, I knew everything Detective Wilson was going to tell me, knew what Thomas Coleman had told him, knew that he’d driven to New Hampshire to find me. What I didn’t know was what was in the manila envelope, and how it got on my table in the first place, and whether Detective Wilson had already looked inside.

“Are you listening to me?” Detective Wilson asked.

“No,” I said. “Should I have been?”

“Yes,” Detective Wilson went on. “I was telling you how your Thomas Coleman called me and said you were about to burn down the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.”

“How did he know that?” I asked him.

“That’s not important,” he said, and when Detective Wilson said that, I was sure he didn’t know the answer, “not important” being just one of the things we call that which we don’t know. “What are you smiling at?”