An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (8 page)

He was an invalid and in bad shape; this was obvious at first glance. His face was shrunken and drawn back, and he had a plaid wool blanket on his lap. When he saw me, my father made a kind of wounded-animal noise that I took to mean one-third surprise, one-third
Welcome home
, one-third
Please don’t look at me, I’m hideous
, and the blanket slid off his lap and onto the floor, kicking up a good amount of dust that floated there in the sunlight like something beautiful and precious and then sank to the wide-planked pine floor.

I returned the blanket to his lap and asked, “Oh, Dad, what happened to you?” even though it was obvious what had happened to him: he’d had a stroke. There is no mistaking a stroke victim, even if you haven’t seen one before, which I hadn’t. I didn’t know what else to say, so I repeated, “Oh, Dad.” He seemed to appreciate my awkward position, because he made the wounded-animal noise again, but this time it was much more soothing, and I was calmed by it.

“Don’t say another word,” I told him. “Relax. Let me do the talking and get you up to speed.” I told him about college and my switch from English to packaging science, and I told him about Anne Marie and Katherine and Christian and about my job at Pioneer Packaging and our house in Camelot and how much I missed him and Mom. I didn’t tell him, though, about the voice that asked,
What else?
or Thomas Coleman or Anne Marie’s kicking me out, because I figured he already had enough to worry about. But even so, this story must have overwhelmed him a little in its detail and scope, because by the time it was done he seemed to be asleep. I shook my father by the arm, gently at first, but then harder and harder until he woke up with an alarmed snort. From then on I asked only short, factual questions, like “Where’s Mom?” to which he responded in a two-syllable grunt that I took to mean,
She’s out
.

We sat there for a while in silence. It got darker and I turned on the light. I didn’t feel the need to talk, maybe because whatever I might have said wouldn’t have been as smart as the silence. My father had a holy-man quality to him: he struck me as having the sort of deep wisdom cripples seem to get with their crippling, and I was prepared to sit there and soak up whatever knowledge he might emanate. It was nice. But the place really was a mess. Even my father’s bedroom was littered with beer cans and empty wine bottles, and there were even a few boxes of wine, the sort that comes with its own spigot. I was certain they were my mother’s because she would always have a drink with dinner and my father never did. Besides, I couldn’t imagine him drinking anything now without a straw and I didn’t see any of them scattered around.

And on the topic of my mother, where in the hell was she? Where did she get off, leaving my crippled father alone in his condition and not even cleaning the house before she left it? Did her crippled husband not deserve a little more dignity, a little less filth? The more I ruminated on it, the more I realized how typical this was of my mother. She, as mentioned, was always the hard-hearted one, and even when my father left us for those three years, she didn’t shed a tear. My mother wasn’t exactly the welcome wagon when my father came back, either, and my old man really wore himself out trying to get back in her good graces. Thinking about it now, I decided there was a direct connection between his stroke and that difficult time, too. And then there were those Emily Dickinson House stories she used to tell me, the ones that ruined so many lives, and I was really getting worked up about her, my callous mother, who had now apparently abandoned my father in his time of need. Where did she get off? I might have said this out loud, because my father nearly raised his eyebrows at me and for a second I thought he was going to chastise me for being rude to my mother, but instead he said, “Man.”

“Man what?” I said.

“Grown,” my father said, or that’s what I thought he said, and then he raised his finger as if to point at me. Or that’s what I thought he was doing. The finger made it only about an inch off his lap and then fell back again. Of course, this could all have been a big misunderstanding. But then again, maybe misunderstanding is what makes it possible to be in a family in the first place. After all, when I was eight I understood my father all too clearly: he was scared, and so he left us. My mother was lonely and angry at his leaving, and so she told me those stories about the Emily Dickinson House. I understood that, too. Maybe we had understood too much about one another; maybe if we’d misunderstood one another, then we’d have been more of a family. Maybe if we’d been more of a family, I would have seen my father in the last ten years and he wouldn’t have to marvel at how much I’d grown. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“I
am
a grown man,” I said to my father. And then, remembering Terrell in prison, I clarified: “I’m a grown
-ass
man.”

My father stared at me for a good half minute until his blanket slipped from his lap again. He leaned over slightly in his chair to catch the blanket before it hit the floor, and that movement, that one little thing, caused me to remember what for so many years I’d been trying not to: that moment when my father had bent over, opened the end table drawer next to him, pulled out a Converse shoe box, and shown me those letters asking me to burn down those writers’ houses. There was the end table, still in the same place; there was the drawer, inside the end table. Was the shoe box still in the drawer? Were the letters still in the shoe box? I hadn’t thought of those letters for years, but now they were in my head again and they were alive, making noise, joining the chorus of my neighbors’ lawn mowers, the Emily Dickinson House fire, and other sounds of the past. And among those sounds was my father’s voice, telling me those many years earlier, “Sam, you
are
an arsonist,” which was why I blurted out now, so many years later and out of the blue, “You’re wrong.”

“Wrong,” my father repeated, doing his best to keep up.

“Yes, wrong,” I said. “I work at Pioneer Packaging. I make containers, good ones.”

My father pursed his lips and made a derisive raspberry sound; a glob of spittle landed on his chin and I tried very hard not to wipe it off for him.

“I know it doesn’t sound like much,” I said. And it didn’t, not even when I told my father, in some detail, about the tennis ball can I’d just designed, a can that was vacuum sealed by soft plastic and not by the sharp metal top that you always sliced your finger on. He made another raspberry sound and there was more spit on his chin.

“No … greatness … in … tennis … ball … cans,” he said over the course of what might have been half an hour. Greatness! Me! What son doesn’t want to hear his father say he could be great, if that’s what he was saying? What son doesn’t dream of such a thing? What wouldn’t a son do or give to hear these words come out of his father’s mouth, especially a son like me at a time like this, when I was so down and most needed a kind word or two from my dad? It was as though I’d taken the words I most needed to hear, placed them in my father’s mouth, and watched them come out again, slowly and haltingly and coated with saliva.

“Are you really saying I’m great?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, clearly, very clearly. And then, “Could … be.”

“Could be if what?”

“You … could … help … people,” he said.

This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I’ll admit, because up to now I’d done not much more than be, and when I wasn’t just being, I’d caused some pain, too. There was the Emily Dickinson House, of course, and the pain that everyone knows all about by now. Then there was Thomas Coleman, still in his agony after all these years — I couldn’t forget about him, especially since he seemed determined to ruin my life as I had his. And then Anne Marie, whom I had hurt so badly and had practiced hurting for years. There was the time, for instance, at our next-door neighbors’ daylight-savings party when I found Sheryl (I have no memory of her last name, and if my memory is to be trusted, she might not even have one) weeping in the butler’s pantry because (as I found out) her husband had just left her for another woman, and now she was staring down the barrel of those dark, late afternoons all by herself and she didn’t know how she was going to manage. I hugged her — it seemed the right, bighearted thing to do — and in breaking the hug I kissed her, too. It was a comforting, “there, there” sort of kiss, but I confess that in getting to her cheek I might have touched her lips, briefly. This felt wrong, very wrong, and so to lighten my heart and conscience, I went and found Anne Marie at the party, interrupted her conversation, and told her — in front of a half dozen or so people — that I’d kissed Sheryl, and that it was an accident and well intentioned, but that I thought I should tell her about it because of the guilt I felt because of the way our lips brushed and maybe even briefly lingered — even though it was an accident and well intentioned — and I could hear soft, embarrassed noises coming from some of the guests who were listening. Immediately I knew I’d done something wrong, because of the noises and also because of the pain I saw on Anne Marie’s face just before she turned away from me and returned to her conversation. That same pain was in her voice, on the telephone, when she called me a cheater and told me not to come home. I had made Anne Marie’s pain, just as surely as I’d made that mayonnaise jar that wasn’t quite plastic and wasn’t quite glass, either, but in any case was unbreakable. It was solid, the jar, not unlike the pain. Yes, it would be nice to help someone and not hurt them.

“But wait,” I said, coming back to my true self in a rush. “I can’t help people. I’m a bumbler.” My father didn’t seem to understand this — his eyes went even glassier — and so I said, being helpful, “I bumble.”

“Bumbling,” my father said, “not … a … permanent … condition.”

“Of course you’d say that,” I told him. Because I was thinking of the garden my father had bumbled and how he’d left us for three years to try to prove he wasn’t one. A bumbler, that is.

And where did my father go during those three years? He went everywhere, did everything, and then sent us postcards to let us know exactly where he’d been and what he’d done.

First my father went to South Carolina, because he’d never been in South Carolina before and his own inner voice said that he had to — had to! — visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime. He also attended a game at every major league ballpark. He traveled to Yosemite and Badlands and Sequoia and every other national park of note. He went to the site of every Civil War battle that was supposed to be pivotal and especially bloody. He made a point of listening for the whispering ghosts of our dead boys at Gettysburg and Antietam and Vicksburg but could hear only a creaky voice squawking from rental cassette guides in the other cars as they crept at a reverential speed along the battlefields and cemeteries. My father scrutinized his Rand McNally
Road Atlas
and then made a point of driving every famous roadway made obsolete by the federal superhighway system and mourned daily on National Public Radio. He rented a canoe and paddled fifteen miles on the Erie Canal. He walked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Pennsylvania before packing it in after being menaced by two hunters sitting in a deer stand just south of Carlisle. He went out of his way to have a drink in every bar in North America in which Hemingway was rumored to have imbibed. He drove up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and then bought a bumper sticker as testimony. He kept track of every march commemorating every civil rights atrocity and victory and then made sure he attended the march, no matter how much of a hardship it was to do so. My father went to the site of an oil spill off the coast of Washington and bought a vial of oil and a poster of a baby seal mired in the slick and looking wistful and tragic. He went to Wounded Knee and to his great surprise found himself conflicted about the lessons to be learned there. He visited the book depository and the grassy knoll in Dallas and bought what was supposed to be an authorized copy of the Zapruder film, although he had no notion of who had authorized it. Zapruder himself, my father supposed, or maybe a close relative.

But my father was no dilettante, or didn’t want to be thought one, and had to make a living somehow. Besides, it was his uncertainty about his purpose here on this planet that took him from us in the first place. Sure, he was a book editor by training, but he could pretend to be other things and then tell us about them in the postcards. He pretended to be a large animal veterinarian in Enid, Oklahoma, and found the job less onerous and foul than you might think. He pretended to be an air traffic controller in Newark and was admired by his co-workers for his cool-headedness and his new variations on old raunchy jokes. He pretended to be a music instructor in Mississippi and led the Dream of Pines High School Marching Band to the state championship. He excavated dinosaur bones in South Dakota as a member of the state university’s Archaeology Department. He was an emergency room surgeon, conducted minor surgeries in four Rocky Mountain states, and didn’t botch a single stitch. He was a funeral director in Delray Beach, Florida, and found the corpses inoffensive but their survivors unbearable. He was a pediatrician in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and found that this job was more dangerous and less rewarding than being a large animal veterinarian in Enid, Oklahoma. He was a charter fishing-boat captain in Rumson, New Jersey, and named his boat the
Angry Clam
. To my father’s surprise, his customers cared nothing about catching fish and everything about buying a T-shirt silk-screened with the boat’s namesake — a scowling littleneck clam with a cigar hanging out of its mouth — for sixteen dollars a pop. He was a real estate agent in Normal, Illinois, and found married couples highly erotic when they whispered in bathrooms and hallways about what they could and could not afford. He was a Palatine priest in Platteville, Wisconsin, and found he could take confessions for hours and not hear a single sinner confess to anything but habitual self-abuse. He was a stock car driver based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and found it even more boring and pointless a pursuit than he’d ever imagined it would be.