Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

by Jason Brown

  Outside, she ran across the overgrown field for the road and the tracks, stopping only to catch her breath and look over her shoulder. No one followed. The tracks were empty, running between the fields and into the woods both in the direction from which she had come and where the train was still headed, all the way north, she assumed, to Canada. Everywhere she looked, down either direction of the tracks or across the field into the woods, she saw the starved image of Jeremy’s face. She ran for a few more minutes, stopping when she could no longer breathe, to bend over her knees and make a sound in her throat like the wheels of her father’s car crunching over the gravel of their driveway.

  A train would come eventually, if she kept walking in the direction of home, and if she kept her thoughts straight and parallel to the glinting edge of the rail, which drew her under a canopy of turning leaves. The tips of her sneakers slid forward over the chattering gravel until she was convinced the noise came from Jeremy or the other one following her, and she started to run again until she reached a bridge where the woods opened above a river.

  She thought she saw something moving through the trees to the right but instead of going back or freezing (as she told herself to do), she ran toward it, jumping over fallen trees and yelling Jeremy’s name. She stopped in a clearing above a stream and looked around, but there was nothing there. The blue sky paled around the edges. Pockets of warmth drifted in the cool air. She looked down the slope, feeling as though she could see inside the wind brushing through the grass. The distant pines leaned together in a sudden gust and were still again. When the breeze returned, it seemed to whistle through her limbs, and she realized that Jeremy had been here, in this clearing, in the grass. He had measured the wind by the movement of the branches.

  The train whistle bleated as it passed through Dennis, and she bolted toward the sound. The wheels ground against the rails, ticking off what little time she had left to get home before they knew where she had gone and what she had seen. The boxcars moved through the trees, speeding up as if the forest was rushing south. Some of the Boston-Maine cars were empty, doors slid back on both sides, the sunlight blinking through the openings as she ran to the bridge along a platform from where she leapt half onto the edge of a car. Inside, with her face pressed to the cold metal, she sensed him: Jeremy’s face with the stranger’s hat and long arms, both of them in the same body standing in one of the dark corners. She looked for their smile, and their eyes, glowing in the shadow, but there was nothing.

  The train slowed into each town, the tracks occasionally winding within fifteen feet of backyards and kitchen windows. It was not hard for her to determine the characters and even the thoughts of the people living inside the houses. People wanted you to think things were complicated when they weren’t. The train passed close to the window of someone’s kitchen where a woman looked up from doing the dishes. She’s thinking about her twelve-year-old son, Rebecca thought, who was caught stealing from a corner store. All the information was around her in the air, waiting for her to absorb it. Her own mother was frightened and vain; she always had been and she always would be. Her father was patient and simple near the surface and unhappy underneath. It couldn’t be any different than the facts she learned for tests: Pablo Picasso, born October 25, 1881. His first painting La fillette aux pieds nus. 1895. A poem she glanced at two weeks before, the “Song of Apollo,” with the second stanza, “Then I arise; and climbing Heaven’s blue dome, I walk over the mountains and the wave . . . I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.” The earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. The words cesium, curium, erbium, rhodium, argon, osmium, streamed through her head faster than the trees whipping by outside.

  She remembered a story her mother told of being a girl in the nineteen fifties and traveling on a freighter across the Atlantic to Europe with her father, who was a merchant marine. There was a storm—a hurricane—her mother had said, and described the ship rising up the mountainous waves, the wind faster than if you put your hand out of the car window on the highway. Her mother had been much younger than Rebecca was now, and as her mother’s father helped on the deck of the freighter, she sat alone in the dark cabin. Rebecca had heard her mother tell this story dozens of times over the years, and each time her mother stuck out her chin and wore a blank, put-upon face. Each time, Rebecca mistook her mother’s expression for boredom, as if she was being forced to tell the story again even though no one had asked her to. Now Rebecca could see the expression was thinly disguised pride. Rebecca’s father realized this, too, which was why he complained every time that it wasn’t actually a hurricane. “All right, it wasn’t,” her mother shouted at him one night in front of people from his work who were having dinner at their house. She stood up from the table with tears in her eyes. “It wasn’t, okay, it wasn’t officially a hurricane if that makes you happy. I was ten years old down in a square metal room with no lights or windows and with the boat practically upside down, back and forth for eighteen hours!” Her mother turned and left the table but came back in a moment to apologize and laugh lightly. “My, my,” she said when she sat, refolding her napkin. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

  Her mother had been terrified in that room, holding onto the edge of a metal bunk as everything lurched back and forth and the inner workings of the boat groaned. When Rebecca closed her eyes, she could see her mother clinging in the dark compartment with no idea if they would survive or if she would see her father again. The noises of the ship would not have been much different than the noises of the boxcars knocking together as she sped through the woods.

  The crossing bells went off one after another as she drew closer to Vaughn, and she expected someone she knew, a friend of her mother or her guidance counselor, to look up from their gardening or their steering wheel to see her face in the open door of the boxcar. When she leapt from the train onto the grass near the town library, she expected the bell at the Catholic church up the street to ring for the six p.m. service or the Baptist church for their seven p.m. service or at least the more distant sound of the town hall clock bell sounding on the hour. But it wasn’t Sunday night, there were no services, and it wasn’t on the hour. She sat on the grass watching the train pick up speed as it left town, the lights of the caboose fading into the darkening pines, and the crossing bells growing silent, one after another, in the distance.

  In the kitchen, the heat from her mother’s cooking clung to her cheeks and palms.

  “I put all the dish towels in the laundry. Would you grab me one from upstairs?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “You’re home late,” her mother called after her.

  “I was at Kathleen’s.”

  “Hurry up and wash your hands and you can help me set the table.”

  Her mother took the forks and spoons, moving back and forth deftly between the stove and the table with the same urgency she brought to every night’s dinner.

  “Okay,” her mother said after everyone sat, reaching out to take Rebecca’s and Grandmame’s hands. “Someone say grace, please.”

  As Rebecca’s father started, her mother squeezed Rebecca’s hand so hard the bones of her fingers pinched together. Her mother pulled her jaw in and cinched her eyes shut, tears welling up over her bottom lids and washing down her face. She always feels so much, it’s as if she feels for all of us, Rebecca thought.

  “I think I’m coming down with the flu,” her mother said. “I’ll go lie down for a while.” She plucked her hands away from them and stood up from the table as if from an insult.

  “Do you want one of us to come with you, with some food?” her father said. “There is something going around at work. Maybe you have it.”

  Rebecca knew from the tone of his voice that he didn’t think she had the flu, and that he had no intention of comforting her.

  “Go ahead and eat,” her mother said.

  Grandmame stared across the room for a few minutes while her father unfolded his napkin and arranged hi
s silverware in a perfect row.

  “Don’t let your mother’s hard work go to waste,” he said as he started cutting into the pork chop. After a few more minutes, after Grandmame had started eating, humming faintly to herself, as she sometimes did, a tune no one recognized and which probably wasn’t a real tune at all, her father leaned back and asked Rebecca what she had done at school that day.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Nothing?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Well, that’s good. They’re getting you used to the working world. You’ve got three and a half hours—less a coffee break or two—of nothing before lunch, but you don’t want to use it all up before lunch because you’ve got a good four of nothing after lunch. And then you want to be careful to have people see you shove nothing in your briefcase at the end of the day so they think you’re doing nothing at home, too.” He smiled through this, amused with himself.

  Grandmame went back to her room while Rebecca helped her father carry the dishes to the sink. He scraped the plates that she handed to him and stacked them neatly in one side of the double sink with the silverware piled in a basket. She was just turning back to the table for the salad bowl when he started humming a song she didn’t recognize. He caught her arm and pulled her toward him, swaying from left to right in a dance he must have learned before she was born—she had never seen him dance. A smile spread up from his chin until his whole face lifted, and he opened his eyes and chuckled before letting go, turning off the water, and picking up the Valley Journal from the counter on his way to the living room.

  “What about the rest of the dishes?” she asked.

  “Leave them, I’ll do them later,” he said, raising the back of his hand, though she knew he wouldn’t. “Go check on your mother.”

  Her mother lay on top of the covers in the dark bedroom, her arms spread wide, and her eyes closed. Rebecca thought she was asleep.

  “Come here,” her mother said, holding her hands out like a child wanting to be picked up. Rebecca pulled back at first but then held her hands out. Her mother’s crying passed up into her own arms and across the back of her neck.

  “He’s not coming back, is he?” her mother said. “It’s going to be winter soon. It will be so cold up there.”

  “Of course he’s coming back,” Rebecca lied, tumbling forward from the weight. Her mother wrapped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed as she buried her face in Rebecca’s neck. The smell of her mother’s hair was both familiar and distant, like the sight of her brother’s face, and the harder her mother squeezed, the more Rebecca felt as if she were far away from this moment, floating over their house and town.

  “Please, promise me you won’t ever become mixed up with the people your brother did.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “Of course you won’t,” her mother said. “You’re too smart for that.”

  Her mother rolled onto her back, lifted her hand to her forehead, and sighed. Rebecca waited for what she would say—when her mother lost control, she talked frantically afterward to cover it up.

  “I don’t know why I was thinking about your brother tonight,” her mother said. “Before dinner I was remembering a sailing trip your father and I took right before we were married, when I was already pregnant with your brother. Grandmame didn’t even want us to get married, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in telling you now—because I wasn’t Catholic—and she did not approve of taking a trip like that before the wedding, but the wedding was in the fall—it had to be, I forget why, I guess because I was already pregnant. I don’t know how we thought we were going to fool that woman. The trip was up the coast on an old tall ship. We sailed for ten days with three other couples. Every evening before dusk the captain and the crew anchored in a small harbor, and while they put everything away and made us supper, we sat on the deck and looked out at the ocean. We had absolutely nothing to do. I knew it would be rare in the life we were starting, but your father, who had worked on the farm from the day he started walking until he started college, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to sit still for so long staring at the sky and the water. I think the whole thing was torture for him. One evening before dinner, he stood up beside me, stripped down to his boxers, and dove off the bow. It was as if he just couldn’t sit still any longer and he had to make some work for himself. Watching the bottoms of his feet disappear, I just lost it for a moment. It was stupid, but I thought he wouldn’t come back up—that he was running away from me. That time on the boat was the longest we had ever spent together, and I felt this desperation of not wanting to lose him. When I saw him crash up a little ways out, shivering and waving with a big smile on his face, I was so happy, I almost jumped in after him, and I probably would have if that water wasn’t cold enough to stop your breath forever.”

  Her mother fell silent with her arms at her sides. Her toes and fingers twitched after a few minutes as her breath settled into the rhythm of sleep. Rebecca listened for her father’s footsteps, but she could tell from the distant flutter of a turning page that he was still down in the living room reading the paper.

  Rebecca stared at the bedroom ceiling and imagined standing with her mother as her father swam back to the boat and climbed up the ladder. Her father dressed, hopping on one leg, and whispered something in her mother’s ear as she bent over, laughing. Rebecca had never seen her mother laugh this way before. Her parents put their arms around each other and walked toward the stern as if Rebecca wasn’t there because, of course, she wasn’t. Then her father ran back toward Rebecca, but only for his jacket, which lay at her feet, and when he glanced up, there was no look of recognition on his face. Rebecca knew this feeling, had known it all along, of not being seen, but she would also remember the look on her father’s face that told of how even this brief moment away from his new wife was too much to bear.

  Rebecca went to bed, falling immediately asleep without undressing, and didn’t know what time it was when she sat straight up and looked out the dark window. Her clock radio was unplugged, probably from when her mother vacuumed, and her limbs felt heavy as she padded down into the kitchen. The moon hung low in the sky, everything silent except the dormant sounds of the house, the refrigerator, and the furnace in the basement.

  “Rebecca, is that you?” Grandmame called from her room. Even though Grandmame rose before dawn, she kept the blinds tightly drawn at night and the room pitch black, so that Rebecca had trouble finding her way to the ratty green chair.

  “Is that you?” Grandmame said again. She was only a foot away in her narrow bed, but Rebecca couldn’t see her face.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “There was something I wanted to tell you after dinner, but I didn’t get the chance.”

  Instead of going on, though, Grandmame’s breathing calmed, and the airless room filled with the musk of her skin and clothes. Rebecca leaned her head back and pictured herself on the train headed north toward Jeremy. She tried to remember his face in that house but could only see the strain of his neck and the cleft where there had not been one before. The harder she tried to remember his face, the more he looked like someone she didn’t know. She thought of what her mother had said about winter coming. In one afternoon of snow, everything she had seen up there—the pines, the field, and the low house—would be sheeted white against a white sky. He wouldn’t stay in Dennis for long, she guessed, and he wouldn’t come back to Vaughn. He would continue north on the train, hundreds of miles through the thick forest until there was nothing but rock covered with ice. She pictured him there, as far up as anyone could go, walking across a blank white plain extending out to the horizon. Her brother, she realized, had gone north not to run away from life, as her father had said, but to know everything. Because he had wanted her to follow, she would have to keep looking for him, even if she would never find him, and even if he was no longer there but somehow everywhere, all around them.

  Grandmame shook Rebecca’s leg, and Rebecca opened her eyes to the
morning light framing the shade.

  “An awful, awful thing has happened,” Grandmame said in such an urgent voice that Rebecca leaned forward to hear. But then Rebecca realized her Grandmame was about to tell the tale, once again, that she had read in the newspaper of the girl who had been buried in a backyard. There was nothing Rebecca could say to stop her, so she just listened and waited for the story to end.

  “I was only six years old when they buried me,” Grandmame said as tears soaked the moth wings of her cheeks. “My father wanted to put me next to his mother, but the people who bought the farm from us wouldn’t let him, so he dug my grave in their vegetable garden while they were sleeping, and no one knows. No one knows where I am.”

  The train whistle blew in the distance, the first warning of its approach from the north. Rebecca felt the air shiver from the force of the locomotive against the tracks as the second whistle blew and echoed down the valley, carried on its way south by the tide. The third whistle blew the final warning, though to Rebecca it was less a warning than a cry.

  “I don’t want to be buried in this place,” Grandmame said and squeezed hard on Rebecca’s arm. “Promise me you won’t let them.”

  A promise was easy to give, and as Rebecca whispered it, Grandmame sighed as if she had finally been relieved of an unbearable secret.

  AFTERNOON OF THE SASSANOA

  Jacob’s father had business in town that afternoon and the next morning. “Go with him,” Jacob’s mother said. “You two can spend the night and sign up for your preseason soccer in the morning before coming back. It will save me having to give you a ride down.”

  Jacob agreed to go, even though it took him away from the island and involved a trip with his father across to the mainland in the skiff and a seemingly endless hour’s drive. Not bothering to bring a change of clothes, Jacob jumped off the back porch and followed his father down to the island’s dock.