An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (26 page)

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?”

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?”