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

“That’s right,” I told Detective Wilson. “I burned my parents’ house. It was me.”

“You were the one who tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House. And the next day, you left the letter with that old man.”

“Mr. Frazier,” I said. “That’s right, I did.”

“And then you tried to burn down the Mark Twain House. That’s where all that money came from in the envelope. And you left your driver’s license with the people who paid you to do it.”

“Yes,” I said, “I did.”

“People saw you at the Robert Frost Place the day you burned it. You made quite a scene.”

“I told my story,” I said. “That’s true. And I left the letters behind at the other four fires. I wanted to get caught. You were right about that.”

“You set all the fires,” Detective Wilson said. “This fire and all the other ones, too.”

“All of them,” I said.

“Sam,” he said softly, “is your father inside that house?”

“He is,” I said quickly, before I could give myself time to think about what I was admitting to, and this is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: the mouth moves fast because the mind will not.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you didn’t know he was in there when you set the fire. That it was an accident.”

I took a deep breath. There was that word, my very favorite: I held it in my mouth for a second, savoring it, knowing that I would miss it so much when it was gone, miss it the way I would miss my father, the way I already did, the way I still do, the way I always will. “It wasn’t an accident,” I finally said.

“Thank you,” Detective Wilson said, his voice full of relief. I was happy for him, happy to give him the illusion that he’d gotten something right and was no longer a bumbler. And for that matter, now that I’d taken some responsibility, I didn’t feel like a bumbler anymore, either. It felt as though bumbling was a disease for which we’d found a cure.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“You finally told the truth,” he said.

“I really did.”

“Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth?” Detective Wilson asked, but then he yanked my hands behind my back and cuffed them before I could decide whether it felt better or not.

So here I am again, in prison, a medium-security one this time. This time I’m not locked up with white-collar criminals, and not really blue-collar ones, either, since none of my fellow inmates seems to have had the sort of job on the outside that would require him to wear blue-collared shirts. But the story of the soft hero doing hard time is one you’ve heard before, so I won’t bother to tell it to you here. Besides, I’m nearly a third of the way through my twenty years (the rest of the sentence says “to life,” but who can think about that and still care about living it?), and my time hasn’t been all that hard so far. The other inmates know I’m writing a book, that I’m telling my story, and they respect that and pretty much leave me alone. After all, they can’t stop telling their own stories, either: to one another, the guards, their families, their lawyers, the parole board. Even if they’ve never actually read a story before, they can’t bring themselves to stop telling their own. Who knows, maybe this lack of reading will help them the way all my reading and my mother’s reading didn’t exactly help us. I wish them well.

It’s hard to write in here, though, harder than you’d think. For one thing, I get letters, lots and lots of them. Wesley and Lees Mincher (they’re married now and she’s taken his name) write me every month or so, always on English Department letterhead, and always demanding their three thousand dollars back. I write them back and tell them that I appreciate their testifying against me in exchange for their immunity from prosecution, and that the three thousand dollars have gone the way of my parents’ house and they’re out of luck. They don’t seem to believe me; they seem to think that, as in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I’ve hidden their treasure in some cave. At least that’s what I think they think. It’s hard to tell from their letters. When Wesley writes them, the letters are so thick with verbiage that you need an explanatory footnote just to understand his “Dear’s” and “Sincerely’s.” And when Lees writes, she calls me a cunt so often I’ve started to think that’s her nickname for me, the way Coleslaw was for the Mirabellis. Other than their missing three thousand dollars, however, they seem happy.

Once in a while, I get letters from Peter Le Clair. He, too, testified against me in exchange for immunity and feels guilty about that in the extreme. I know this because his letters say, “Sorry,” and that’s all they say. I send him long letters back about nothing in particular, just so he’ll have something to read besides his library books, and then something to burn in his woodstove once he’s through with them. Occasionally, after sending him one of these letters, I get one back that says, “Thanks,” which I appreciate.

Mr. Frazier didn’t testify at my trial — maybe because he hadn’t done anything wrong and had no need for the immunity they offered him — but I’ve not heard from him, not once, and since he seemed like a guy who would take great pride in writing long, formal letters with his antique fountain pen, I have a feeling he is dead and his house in Chicopee already broken up into apartments. Maybe he’s with his brother, in some happier place. Last year I finally read that book his brother loved so — Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward —and Mr. Frazier was right: it’s about a utopia, a perfect, egalitarian Boston of the future, so perfect that I found it wide eyed and goofy and more than a little boring. But if that’s where Mr. Frazier and his brother want to be, who am I to say they shouldn’t?

That’s not all: every day I get letters and more letters, not just from people who are angry about the houses I confessed to burning, but also about the houses I didn’t burn. For instance, I keep getting letters from a woman who’s furious that I tried to burn down the Mark Twain House but not the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, which was right next door. I didn’t know that, as I’ve explained to her in my letters over and over again, but she won’t listen. She insists that I didn’t think enough of Stowe as a writer to burn down her house and how this is just typical and another slap in the face for Stowe and for women readers and writers everywhere, another example of how the world undervalues Stowe and her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and overvalues Twain and his books. If there were any justice in the world, she writes, I would have torched Stowe’s house and not Twain’s. I agree with her, every time, but this doesn’t stop her from writing her angry letters, each of which she signs “Professor Smiley,” which I can only assume is a pseudonym.

So the letters keep me busy, as do my many visitors. The bond analysts visit me once a week because they feel so bad that I’ve taken the fall for them; they successfully blamed me for the fires they set, and this makes them feel guilty, not happy at all. They don’t understand that I’ve taken the fall for them intentionally, willingly, that this is a sacrifice and not a mistake. They don’t understand this because sacrifice is an alien concept to them, having made only one sacrifice themselves.

“Take our story,” they tell me. “You’ve already taken the blame for our fires; go ahead and take credit for it now. Write a book about it. We owe you one, dude; you have our permission.”

“But what about the truth?” I ask them. “‘Just tell the truth, dude. You’ll feel better afterward.’ Remember that?”