Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (22 page)

This is what I tell my father in the upper field: Jim Wally, the junior high reading teacher, and George Sumner, the high school guidance counselor, meet for a beer before dinner at the Wharf, across the street from my father's office. Both men are basketball
coaches. They get together every week. The chief of police, Chuck Sheldon, joins them. His daughter plays for Jim Wally. They stare out at the river. Mr. Dawson stands in back of Dawson's Variety right now staring out at the river and having a cigarette. Across town, Mrs. Molloy shakes her head at her youngest son who has come home again with dirt on his hands. Show me your hands, she says to him, show me—but he won't take them out of his pockets. A mile west Missy wakes from a nap in her bed on what had been her grandfather's farm twenty years before. She feels sure she has woken to a noise, but as she sits there upright listening to the sun go down she hears nothing, neither her mother coming back from working at the hardware store, nor her father coming home from Bath Iron Works, nor her older brother back from his friend's house where they all drink beer.

It is high tide, it is supper time. Two boys three years older than me stand on a field at the edge of the school I will soon attend tossing a muddy baseball with frayed seams. The ball vanishes for a moment, soaring through a shadow, before slapping into one of their gloves.

I have tried hard not to believe in what I know is a boy's fantasy, nothing more, I tell my father in the upper field, and he solemnly nods. He knows that the war has spread like pollen through the neighborhood, over the valley and hills, sweeping us up in the flow of its course.

****

After dark, I climb into the attic and open my grandfather's GI trunk, pulling out his fatigues, rolling the cuffs, and tightening a string around my waist. The revolver he carried through the war used to feel as if it weighed more than me, but now it seems to get lighter every night.

I smear mud on my face before heading down the drive to look for the people my grandfather has accused over the years of ruining this town (they look like us, he has said, but they are not like us). Two streets away I slide along the side of a wall to a lighted window. A man in a plaid shirt, Larry Henry, a snowplow driver in winter and farmhand in summer, a man my grandfather has always accused of stealing apples from his orchard, stands over his sink. Each breath seems to exhale through my ears as I raise the pistol and pull back the trigger. Dozens of times over the last weeks I have killed this man, and each night he dies without knowing it. He keeps on, flawless in his method of scrubbing each plate, back and front, rinsing and drying, as if there is no war, as if his life were not about to end. I shoot and after the click, I move on quickly, feeling the dying beat of his heart in my own chest.

The Molloys sit hunched over at the table in their kitchen in their house on Winthrop Street like people who have outlived their desires. They die without a word to each other, as they did last night and the night
before. Kathy McDonald behind the half-canted blinds turns in her mirror before bed, turning her head with each revolution to meet herself. I shoot her as she pauses, captivated by her own stare, and move on to the next house on the street where I find the Dawsons sitting on opposite sides of a table looking into their drinks, whispering as if someone might overhear. I shoot them both and move on up the road, completing a grid, climbing the hood of a car to shoot one woman on the second floor, another man as he takes out the trash. It is hard to tell the enemy from the innocent in the dark where I can only see the outline of a face or a silhouette, and of course all these people will have to be killed again tomorrow night. It is not the kind of war anyone can win.

Tonight I take a different route home past my father's office. When he visits me in the upper field, my father makes me promise that I will not bother him down on Water Street. I can only visit you here in the upper field, he has said, if you promise not to interrupt my dream. So I promise, but I can no longer keep that promise. It is not the kind of war I can go on fighting alone.

In the reflection of the window of my father's office, I watch someone point a gun at me. Without warning, he shoots me, and I shoot him, but neither of us falls. I move as the reflection moves, bend as he bends, and, in one swift motion heave the pistol through the plate glass. The shatter tumbles down the empty street and
echoes with the snap of a distant shot. When I pull away from the gaping hole, a small shard sticks in the top of my wrist, and a black trickle flows down between my knuckles.

My father, who has been waiting all this time for an attack, comes out of the back room to see glass spread over his desk and the blue metal of his grandfather's pistol lying on the floor. He recognizes the gun, even if he doesn't recognize me. His hands shake. He is dirty and unshaven. He can't remember how the fighting started anymore than I can, but he has been fighting all along, I can see, rising and falling and rising, without rest, behind the locked door of his office.

The days are peaceful here in Vaughn, I try to explain to my father, in case he has forgotten, but after the sun falls over the western hill, all the people we have known in the daylight fight against us. I would gladly think otherwise, I say to him, but I cannot. I ask him to tell me to think otherwise, but he doesn't, and the distant voices of our enemies, whispered in bedrooms all over town, become the gathering threads of a current that pulls us east toward the mouth of the river.

Rebecca Sawyer was the first person from Vaughn to score a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. When the news hit the
Valley Journal
, Mr. Sumner, her adviser, who had always said she was honors material and who had recommended on more than one occasion that she aim for state college, maybe for elementary education because she seemed to have the patience to work with children, marched her by the arm into his office. She had never been one of the best students in the class, not even in the top ten, but Mr. Sumner was also the boy's basketball coach, and Rebecca knew that in his world, where people were either starters or substitutes she had just been called off the bench. He spoke to her with half-time urgency. He flattened his hands on his desk and shook his head. He called her young lady. He was incredibly excited, he said, about her future.

Rebecca couldn't see how a score a few hundred points one way or another could have much of an affect
on anyone's future, when five years before, a girl from Fort Kent, near the border of Quebec, had scored 1550, only to become a veterinarian's assistant.

“That's Fort Kent,” Mr. Sumner said, pointing to his right, at a bookcase lined with trophies. “
This
,” he said, pointing at his desk, “is Vaughn.”

In the hall outside his office, a group of junior girls stopped talking as Rebecca walked by on her way to the bathroom where she stood alone in front of the mirror looking at herself. Next to the morning's article about her scores, the paper had printed a photo of her at her kitchen table. She had large dark eyes, dark hair, and a round face. Some people said she looked Italian or Portuguese; everyone agreed she looked nothing like her parents, grandparents, cousins, or aunts. The bell rang for the beginning of the next period but she kept staring. Some part of her was speaking to some other part of her, deciding something without her permission.

On her way into Mr. Cunningham's U.S. history class, she accidentally slammed the door and felt everyone look up as she crossed the room to her assigned seat by the window. Mr. Cunningham continued talking, referring to the reading from the night before while pointing to the board with yesterday's quizzes held curled in his fist. He asked what had happened in 1865, and looked from Rebecca to the left side of the room and back to her. Mention of the year brought the text before her mind as if onto a screen, the words
scrolling down through her thoughts. She rarely spoke in class, but now, she felt, Mr. Cunningham and the other students waited for her to confess that she had always known the answers.

Rebecca's grandmother, Grandmame, was dying very slowly of old age, and every afternoon before dinner Rebecca spent a few minutes in her small room off the kitchen, which smelled of the hall closet and of burnt dust from the electric heater Grandmame turned all the way up. According to Rebecca's mother, it would have been cheaper for them to build their own power plant.

Rebecca sat in the green chair and looked with her Grandmame through the window across Central Street to the Methodist church and told her, as she did every day, how school went and what boys she liked. She made up the names of the boys.

“I thought of something to tell you,” Grandmame said, “and now I can't remember. Well.”

Grandmame removed her hand from Rebecca's and gripped the arm of her chair as if she were about to pull herself up.

“Have you heard anything from your brother?” Grandmame asked, and Rebecca shook her head. Grandmame asked this all the time, and the answer was always no. She dozed off again, her hands folded in her lap.

No one was allowed to speak of her brother in the house, except Grandmame, who did whatever she wanted. Even so, Grandmame always spoke about Jeremy in a whisper. Usually in the same breath she added that Rebecca's mother was cold. Everyone needed someone to blame, Rebecca supposed.

Jeremy's last visit, three months ago, had ended with a scene in the kitchen Rebecca would never forget. She didn't know how it started, or what the argument was about, but suddenly their mother's face turned red and she started screaming obscenities at the top of her voice. Jeremy's face drained for a moment, with his eyes closed, as if he had left his body, and then he flew through the air to punch their mother so hard in the face that her nose exploded with blood. Before Rebecca could even be sure what had happened, Jeremy ran out the door.

When he arrived home from work, her father cursed and threw his bag onto the kitchen table. “He can't keep running,” he yelled from the living room where he stood looking out the window toward the river. He said he thought Jeremy had probably hopped the train and gone north, as he had the last time he ran away, to a tiny place called Dennis where he knew people. Her father said he didn't think there was much up there now, or since the end of the seventies when they stopped driving logs down the river. Maybe abandoned logger's camps and old farms. Probably squatters.

****

“I remember what I wanted to tell you,” Grandmame said as Rebecca sat up. Rebecca thought it might be something new this time, even though Grandmame often got worked up over things she had just talked about the previous day. Rebecca was the only one who listened, and the only one Grandmame usually wanted to talk to.

“Not long after I was married to your grandfather, we bought this farm from a family who had seen trouble. I forget what kind now, money trouble. We gave them a good price I think, but they needed to sell in a hurry, so I believe we paid less than we might have.”

Rebecca had heard this before and felt annoyed for a moment. The story went along as usual: the family they bought the house from had a daughter who died, and they came to Rebecca's grandparents asking to bury the girl in the graveyard. Their family had lived on the land for a hundred years. But Rebecca's grandfather said no.

Grandmame leaned over as if she believed this was the first time she was telling Rebecca. Each time she told it she reminded Rebecca not to tell anyone, not even her parents.

“One afternoon I was working in the garden when I found a patch of loose ground. I dug deeper with the trowel until I hit something hard. I thought it was a stone. That ground was full of stones when we bought the place. But when I cleared the dirt away, it was a
girl's face. There was dirt in her mouth over her teeth, and over her eyelashes. Her skin was half rotted away. The smell was just the most horrible thing I had ever known. I went into the house for a sip of your grandfather's whiskey.”

Grandmame paused, shaking her head. It seemed like she was catching her breath to continue. Rebecca tried to think of something to say to stop her from going on.

“I covered her up. I put my garden on top of her. What else could I do? If I told your grandfather, he would have dug her up. I'm the only one who knows she's there.” Grandmame's face trembled slightly, and her eyes watered.

Rebecca rested her hand on Grandmame's arm. There was no girl buried in the ground. According to Rebecca's mother, the story had been circulating around the town for a hundred years, made up by the man who once owned the
Valley Journal
at the turn of the century as a Halloween tale for his daughter and her friends. It had been written up several years before to mark the anniversary of the paper.

Rebecca dressed and walked outside carrying her shoes. In the field behind the house, the morning light pinched her eyes and seemed to sap her strength. Wet grass slid between her toes; the sky at dawn had been orange, she could tell, from the white haze still on the horizon. The air held still for a moment over the farm,
waiting for the late morning breeze to sweep up from the ocean into the valley. Maybe it would be warm, or the clouds might roll back from the coast. She stood there until the breeze came up, sending the maple and oak leaves into a boil. She was waiting, but for what she didn't know.

The school sat on top of the hill, its windows dark, as if no one were there, though she knew everyone was already in first period, lined up in rooms watching the teachers. Rebecca's friend Kathleen waited for her outside the front doors, in the usual place. Kathleen didn't care about being the smartest girl in school, she didn't even take the SAT, but Rebecca couldn't be sure how much would change between them now.