Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  A heavy-duty outboard, a company boat, came up from behind. Not the hippie film crew but a bunch of hard hats.

  “You all right there old man?” A fat kid yelled from the helm. Two others stood behind him with big grins. “You got rough water up ahead, you know.”

  Some fink of a company man on the Machias once said to him: “Harry, you’re through, you’re a shit disturber.” Harry flew through the air feet first and thunked his spiked boots into the man’s chest. A little logger’s smallpox to remember him by. He could see himself doing the same thing now, but his legs would no more obey his thoughts than the river.

  “I wasn’t brought up to wear the seat of my pants out,” he yelled, but it didn’t come out right. He sounded weak.

  “Old man, the boss sent us up to get you outta the way. He wants you in the rear.”

  “I already told him I ain’t picking the rear, and I have to get downriver—wife’s having a baby. I gotta get back in time.” The end of his sentence trailed off. He couldn’t be sure now what he was saying. The guys in the boat laughed, but not as much as the previous group of guys, and he wanted to kill them for not laughing enough, or for laughing at all.

  “That’s funny, old man, but we’re serious,” one of them said.

  The boat pulled up alongside and one of the kids reached forward with a rope to tie onto the bateau. Harry swung the point of his peavey down onto the gunnels right between the kid’s fingers.

  “Christ!”

  Another grabbed onto Harry by the shoulder and pulled him half over into the outboard. Harry smacked the kid in the jaw with the handle of his peavey. The one driving the boat lunged for him, and Harry dodged and swung a full circle with the peavey’s iron hook gaping like a bear jaw. They all ducked as the weight of the peavey carried Harry off his feet into the bow of the bateau where his arm cracked against the seat, and he smacked his jaw on the bottom.

  The driver of the launch gunned them a safe distance away as Harry pulled himself to his feet.

  “I ain’t going upriver!” he shouted. He had to go downriver. He had no choice; he was already late.

  “Have it your way, old man.”

  Their engine roared back. The wrong Christly way. Like to see those kids at Garfield Falls, where the river dropped forty, fifty feet, and the logs piled up at the bottom, cribbed right into the woods, and it was a job someone had to do. That’s what he would tell those kids. It was a job someone had to do, and that meant someone was going do it. That someone was Dan Bosse or Harry, someone who had been chucked on the side of the road when he was sixteen, married when he was seventeen, a father at eighteen, going through life loaded for bears. Someone had to lower down on a rope into Garfield Falls. Melinda would say let someone else, but if someone had to go, there was no choice for any of them, was there? On a rope to the bottom of Garfield Falls with an axe, forty feet below the crib-work of logs, he chopped one handed at the key log until it snapped and the whole forest came down, logs whipping by inches in front of his face as the boys pulled him up through the cascade.

  It wasn’t just that there was no one else to do it. She didn’t understand. It was what he did. You wouldn’t end up in a cask, would you, not if you were good, if you were quick, if you were lucky. The time three of them stood on top of the sluice at Upper Dam when a sixteen-foot log popped and shot at them sideways like a missile, someone whistled and all three jumped three feet straight up in the air one after another, landing again one, two, three after the log had passed under.

  The peavey in Harry’s left hand dropped into the bottom of the boat. His hand wouldn’t open or close. He picked the peavey up with his right hand and leaned on it. The pain was nothing but a tight vibration along his collar, but the worst was coming. In a fight yesterday or years ago (or was it an accident?), Danny Sumner drove the iron point of his peavey right through the soft part of Harry’s foot, pinning him to a log up by Twenty-Six Islands. The name was right, anyway, and the place. It had happened.

  “You all right?” Dan Bosse said.

  “Don’t feel a thing,” Harry said, looking down at his foot pinned to the log. Nothing more true. Nine hours in the river, walking on dead man’s legs. “Let the gutters run with whiskey, boys.”

  Pulled out the iron spike, dried his foot, and poured Dan’s rum over the hole. Like a vacation until it thawed.

  Now he could hear the white water up ahead, and for the first time in his life on a river he didn’t know where he was. The easy bend, the gray humped-back hills to the south. Fields came right down to the river, and the pulp moved forward in the churning current at the same pace as the bateau. He didn’t even know where they sent this short poke: Anson, North Anson, Norridgewock? The names of places—the sounds in his mouth—didn’t match the images flipping through his head; the Nezinscott, the Webb above Berry Mills. Alder stream into the Dead or Sandy stream into the Carrabasset into Gilman stream, Misery River, Martin stream—all flowing into the Kennebec. Weir Falls, Sorrow Falls, Island Falls. All flowing into the Kennebec. The Kennebec, he was on the Kennebec, or flowing into it. Because that’s where he lived, where he was going: raspberries, and along the stone walls, wild currants, gooseberries, the first Pippins, Summer Sweetings. Running barefoot along the cow path of his grandfather’s place in New Portland. Stewed beans and biscuits or fried pork and potatoes. You could smell it cooking from the brook.

  He steadied himself in the bateau and looked up to see a girl running through the field along the shore. She held her skirt in one hand and waved to him with the other. Her father walked behind her, loping with his hands in his pockets, hat tilted back on his head.

  Melinda had said “I want to have a word with you,” and he turned around like a schoolboy. But you might as well wish for the day of his death/For he’ll drink rum as long as he draws his breath—that song the boys sang. Only the boys in camp knew what it was like, dying to get away from home and dying to get back.

  The white water appeared in a line across the river along with a rising grumble creeping back along the banks and through the grass. He had no bowman, no paddle to shoot the rapids. The girl in the field ran and ran, jumping over stones and reaching higher with her arm, waving to him. Her father yelled for her to slow down and be careful. Harry waved back, lifting his peavey into the air, and he remembered a day like this one, cold and sharp, when a solid jam built up right across the river above the falls, ice coming over the top and plowing into the woods, driving logs through trees. Old Danny ran out with dynamite and waited on the jam to make sure. The blast sent him ten feet in the air and back down with two boots steady on the same log. They made for out and she broke. Harry stepped and for the first time ever there was nothing there. He fell deep, buried in black water under a raft of birling logs. He could reach up and touch them, but the water was so cold his hands were already numb and there was no light shining through. He scratched at the bark and pounded the eighteen-inch stumps with his fists, but he might as well have been trying to dig his way out of a grave. His limbs went slack, he stopped fighting, and he opened his eyes on darkness.

  The current swept him faster than the logs and shot him straight out over the falls thirty feet down through the crystal air. He sank into the pool below and knew enough to hold his breath and stay down and push his way until he grounded out. He started drinking on the ride into Portland where he bought a new suit and got a room and stayed drunk three days until he surfaced penniless and bruised to a pulp and remembered he was supposed to be home. That had been his last thought before falling through the gap between those logs: Melinda is waiting, she’s due any day now. A baby. He was still drunk by the time he hitched home, and she yelled at him until he went out to the barn for another bottle, which he kept beneath the hay in one of the empty stalls where the dog now slept. He was supposed to bring his pay home this time. Before he left she had said, “I want to have a word with you. A word. For once, we need that pay here, Harry.”

  She screamed at him in th
e rain while he marched right by her into the house where the stove blasted in the kitchen. His son, the youngest, and the two daughters, wasting his firewood. He cut it, he split it. Melinda right behind him. The kitchen was no bigger than a man’s grave. He whipped around, just trying to thrash his way out, just trying to come up for air, and suddenly she was on the floor where he had thrown her against the wall, blood gushing out from between her legs. The smell of it, the taste of metal. No phone then. He stumbled out into the field, trying to run for help, but his legs gave out and on his knees in the rain he began to turn as numb as he had to the spike of the peavey driven through his foot. When his oldest daughter arrived at his side, all he could do was point down the valley toward town. She started running across the field, between the old apple trees grown wild, and along the trail that followed the river. Lighting flashed once on her pale arms churning through the rain. She ran but not fast enough for the baby, not fast enough to keep Melinda and the rest of them from dying to him. He never spoke to any of them again. Melinda made sure of that.

  Harry sat down in the bateau and rested the peavey on his lap. On the riverbank, the girl stopped running as her father called for her to come back, and she waved to Harry one last time before turning to her father, who leaned against the fence looking across the water. Her skirt fanned out around her knees, and with each leap forward she seemed about to sail into the sky.

  LIFE DURING PEACETIME

  I can tell by the way she stands that my mother wants me to ride the bike she bought for my birthday. It is a shame to think of a new bike rusting against the side of the carriage house, so I sit on the seat and coast down the slope of the driveway toward her. At one point, I can’t remember when, I learned how to balance in motion.

  I have other toys—a kite, plastic cars—that she bought. For some reason, handing things to me is distasteful to her, so she usually leaves them in my room or outside the back door for me to find. If she is standing in the window or sitting in one of the chairs looking down over the river, I will sometimes push a toy car along the granite slab that once served as the foundation for the small barn before it burned down. I have no way of knowing if she derives any satisfaction from seeing me do such things, or if she sees me at all.

  I am supposed to start fourth grade in the fall, going to school for the first time, but I already know what it will be like to wait in line by the drinking fountain for Mrs. Nason to signal it is time to walk down the hall toward the lunchroom. I already hate the smell of steam rising off the asphalt playground after a thunderstorm and the dry smell of chalk in the damp classroom and the antiseptic smell of the boys’ bathroom. My mother has given me books at home until now and I don’t see why anything has to change, but she says I have to go—everyone has to at some point—even though she worries my father might come home while I’m away. I might miss him.

  He’s not coming home, I say when I ride past her.

  We have this argument every morning. I am convinced that he’s dead to us, while she thinks he is making his slow way back to us in the only way he can, because he wants, as we all do, for things to go back to the way they were before the war.

  It’s all right, I tell her, stepping off my bike. Let’s go wind the clocks.

  It has been a tradition since the Revolution for every generation who lives in this house to leave behind a clock, and, while my father sits in his office downtown, it is my mother’s job to wind them, a job she dutifully carries out once a week before the mechanism springs expire. It’s not hard to wind the clocks, and some day the job will be mine. For now, I hold open the doors as she inserts the keys, and for a while afterward, we sit together on the green couch listening to the knocks and clicks in the hollow boxes.

  The coil at the center of my father’s purpose unwound one afternoon and for him the ticking stopped. When the war came, he didn’t sign up, as his father had done and his father’s father had done, and so on. During one of the Sunday dinners we used to have together when my grandmother was still alive, my father told my grandfather that he wasn’t going to go. My grandfather stood up from the table and said, I don’t have a son. And he walked back across the road to the old dairy farm where he lives. In the Second World War, he carried with him in his tank as he crossed France the cavalry pistol his father had carried through the same country on horseback. He remembers those days as if they were yesterday, but he can’t remember yesterday. I often hear him nailing one board to another for no reason. He inspects the milking machines after the hired man has already inspected them.

  My father lives in his office on Water Street and has been living there since he did not sign up for the war. At night he lies flat with his arms at his sides and his mouth hanging open, the portrait of a man sleeping. When he speaks to himself, his voice is a trickle. During the day, when people knock on his door, as they rarely do anymore, he sits there in a plastic chair with his windbreaker in his lap, as quiet as an empty glass of water. He sits behind his name written in gold lettering across the wide pane of glass, behind the oak desk, behind the three pens, the blotter, the phone, the brass lamp.

  My father was born with exceptionally long flat feet and cannot walk more than a mile without having to sit down. He has to have special shoes made by a cobbler in Augusta. He is allergic to wool. Even if he had been drafted, they would have sent him home. At six-five, he is an enormous man, but when he sits, he hunches and his narrow limbs collapse inward like wings. It’s difficult to see him in his office at first, but he’s in there. He was exhausted by the fighting long before the war started, before I was born, and before he married a woman from a good family, my mother, and moved her back to the river town where he was born.

  A woman named Janet Robinson thinks she looked in the window of his office last year (when helicopters were lifting people off the roof of the Saigon embassy on the front page of the Valley Journal) and saw him sitting behind his desk with tears washing down the slope of his face. She knocked on the door, she said, but he did not move. She mistook sadness for the reflection of the river in the glass, and mistook the man she saw inside for my father (he had the same reaching nose and anvil face), just as my mother has begun to mistake the man in her memory for the men in the portraits on the walls of our house. In her memory, he speaks, he sips his coffee, but she is not sure now if she can remember a word he has ever said.

  Mrs. Small saw him on Water Street early one morning when she got up to walk the dog. At four in the morning, he drives his rusty Chevrolet to Augusta to buy milk and cheese at an all-night convenience store.

  I am told that before I was born he would spend hours walking through the acreage, lying down when he felt like it and letting his arms sink into the wood sorrel and bluets. My grandfather has called him a dreamer. A man who has lost his way. His hair, Mrs. Small said, was down to his shoulders when she saw him. Janet Robinson thinks she heard music coming from the back room of his office. She could barely hear it, she said. She had to press her ear to the glass; for some reason she also thinks my father is carving pieces of wood back there, and he may be. Wood shavings pile up behind the building.

  After I help my mother with the clocks, I go to the upper field where my father talks to me as if he were there. He travels in his thoughts to Montana or California or Idaho as he talks to me, revealing the most banal details of the things he saw the summer before he met my mother. I tell him I would like to see Nebraska as he has seen it, and roll my eyes over the great central plain, but he doesn’t respond. At the end of our conversation, during which he has not listened to a word I have said (even though I shout over his voice), he reminds me that he has not been here to visit, and that we have not had a conversation. The house, the land, and all its history belong to you, he says. He calls me the child king, and then says goodbye.

  My mother pretends he is on his way home, and I pretend he visits me in the upper field.

  My last name is the name of the town where we live. The king granted us this land at a time w
hen our schooners crowded the docks along the banks of the Kennebec to haul hundred-foot pines, granite, and ice to England, Hong Kong, and Calcutta. The docks have rotted into the mud, the windows of our shoe factory are boarded up, the roads are cracked, and the clapboards of the old federals are soft to the touch. The last of our wealth is in the land, six hundred acres, part of which we let to a local farmer for the cost of groceries and part of which we open to the public as a park for a break on taxes so that it can remain ours, if in name only, and so that it might, when I have reached the proprietary age, become mine until the next generation when it will be someone else’s job to wind the clocks. But none of this may come to pass. It’s possible that no one will grow older here.

  My mother goes into the old study where the photographs are strewn over the floor. Though as a boy my father looked much the way I do now, I have held his photo while looking at myself in the beveled mirror and there is no way I can reproduce the smile he wears sitting on top of the five-foot wheel of the tractor. It makes me think I was never his age.

  She spreads the photos out, the ones of my father when he was young mixed with the ones she took of him when they first met. She picks them up, holds them close to her face, and puts them down. There were pictures of her, too, when she was twenty, but she has picked those out over time and burned them in the fireplace, presumably for the same reason she never looks in the mirror. Even when I stand in front of her and ask a question, she doesn’t look me in the eye.

  She’s pulled other photo albums out of the trunk, of my grandfather’s days after the war when he first met my grandmother, and they drove around town in their Packard and took the Woolwich down the Kennebec to Bath. My father was not supposed to be an only child, but my grandfather had an affair with a woman in Augusta when he was serving in the state legislature, and my grandmother found out about it. She didn’t talk to him for a whole year, even though they lived in the same house, and they never slept in the same bed again. I was an accident (at the beginning of the war), but I suppose that I wasn’t meant to be an only child, either.