An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (37 page)

“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?”

They laugh at that one every time; the bond analysts found that telling the truth was as unsatisfying as burning down houses or writing a book, and they’re now back to analyzing bonds, whatever that means. But once a week they take time out of their busy schedules to visit me and help me write my arsonist’s guide. They tell me the best way to burn what sort of writer’s house, when you should pour gas down the chimney and when you should just throw a Molotov cocktail through the window, and what sort of life lessons readers might learn from each method. They remind me, too, that my arsonist’s guide is also a memoir and that one can’t write a memoir without a troubled childhood. Except they don’t think my childhood, as troubled as it was, was troubled enough. They want me to make one up. Mostly they want me to blame my father, who isn’t around to defend himself or protect his story. I tell the bond analysts that I love my father and I miss him and I don’t want to say anything about him that’s untrue and hurtful. They think this is ridiculous and won’t have any of it. So to get them off my back, I write sentences like this: “My father abused me as a child; no doubt that abuse contributed to my desire, in my later years, to burn.” This pleases them, and it also pleases me: because if I were to tell the truth about my father, if I were to say,
My father did some bad things, but I still love him, I still miss him so much
, and if I were to tell the truth about Deirdre, if I were to say,
My father loved another woman and I hated her for it, and so I let her die
, I would start crying and never stop. If you tell the truth, you will start crying and never stop, and what good will that do you, or anyone else for that matter? Besides, would anyone want to read a true story that made you start crying and never stop? Would
you
want to read such a story? Would you read it because it was true, or because it made you cry? Or would it make you cry because you thought it was true? And what would you do, what would you feel, who would you blame, if you found out it wasn’t?

Maybe one day I’ll know the answers to these questions, but for now I tell lies about my father and pass them off as the truth, and this makes the bond analysts happy. But it also fills them with nostalgia: when I read to them from my arsonist’s guide, I can see the bond analysts gaze longingly into the distance, as if my memoir is a ship at sea, and their bonds are the shore.

To be honest, though, I’m not just writing
one
book; I’m writing two of them. Both books begin with “I, Sam Pulsifer …,” and then one of them tells the story you know by now, and the other one is my arsonist’s guide; one is the story of the one house I actually burned and the ones I didn’t, and the other one is about how I
did
burn those houses and the details and lessons therein. I plan on calling the story you know a novel, and the arsonist’s guide a memoir. Why write both books? Maybe I just want the best of both worlds, which is exactly what both worlds usually
don’t
want you to have, and the bond analysts aren’t entirely sure they want me to have it, either, which is why they insist I call the story that includes them a novel and the story that doesn’t a memoir. They tell me, “You need to protect the innocent, dude,” which is what the guilty always say when they need to be protected.

And then there is Thomas Coleman. He’s living with Anne Marie and the kids now, but when he visits, he and I never talk about them. He comes by himself, every other week. Thomas has put on some weight: I can see the buttons on his shirt strain a little with his new gut, can see his shirt collar creep up and crowd his jowls, too. He always comes on Monday, always with a red face, always with that suburban man’s weekend yard-work tan, and I can imagine him on my self-propelled mower; no doubt he keeps his shirt on, and no doubt the other Camelotians like him for that. But we don’t talk about any of that stuff, either. We don’t talk about whether he knew, or suspected, that Deirdre had set those fires. We don’t really talk about anything at all when Thomas visits: we sit there in silence, just two ordinary men with fires and dead parents in their pasts, and a common family in their present, and who knows what in their future, and hearts with holes in them, holes that are in various stages of excavation and filling. I don’t understand why he visits me; when he does, I am sorry to see him come, and then I’m sorry to see him go. I don’t understand that, either.

Then there are Anne Marie and the kids. Sometimes Anne Marie brings the kids with her and sometimes she comes by herself. When all three of them are there, I talk to Katherine and Christian about their days and what goes on in them. Katherine is fifteen years old now, beautiful and tall and dark haired like her mother and something of a model citizen, too. Last week when they visited, I learned that she’d just been chosen to go to Girl’s State.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“What’s the difference between Girl’s State and Boy’s State?” I asked her.

“You must be kidding, right?” she asked back, and I said, “Yes,” because I must have been.

Christian is twelve years old, smack in the middle of the age of balls and bats. It’s not clear he can speak about anything else, and because we have so little time together, I don’t ask him to. Recently he’s become obsessed with athletic footwear and its latest innovations. For basketball, Christian told me last week, the soles of his shoes are filled with air; for baseball and soccer, his shoes have spikes that are made of something that isn’t metal and isn’t plastic, either.

“What are they made of, then?” I wanted to know.

Christian thought about this for a minute, hard. He has a head like mine, outsize for his body and a little blockish, and I could see it begin to corkscrew with the effort of his thinking. Finally he gave up and said, “Something
safe
.”

“I hope so,” I told him, and then, because I could sense the guard behind me about to remind us of the time and how we were out of it, I told them both, as I always do, “I love you,” and they both nodded, as
they
always do. A nod means,
Yes, we love you, too, Dad
, among children who are too shy to tell their father that they love him even though there are so many reasons not to. Everyone knows that the nod is the same as an “I love you, too.” This is the most common kind of knowledge. Is it not?

When the kids are around, Anne Marie and I don’t talk much. But when she comes by herself, as she did yesterday, we have plenty to say. They’re things we’ve said already, many, many times, although the questions don’t seem to lose their interest because of the repetition. I ask if she’s OK, if she has enough money, and she tells me yes, yes, she’s fine. I know they’ve promoted her to full-time manager at the home-supply superstore, and so I ask her about that, and she tells me about lumber that was supposed to be pressure treated and wasn’t, or that wasn’t supposed to be but was. I ask her if Thomas is still living at the house, and she tells me that he is, and I ask her why, and she tells me the truth: “Because we have a lot in common.”