An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  “Good-bye, Sam,” she said. “Please forgive your father. That poor man loves you so much.” Then she pulled out a lighter, flicked it, and grabbed a clump of her hair. Deirdre was setting herself on fire, not starting at the feet the way the people at Salem did to their supposed witches, but starting with her hair. With her hair. Even now, seven years later, it’s the memory of Deirdre clutching her hair and setting it on fire—the dry snick of the lighter; the way Deirdre tugged on her hair, as though she were a child whose hair was being pulled by an especially mean teacher or classmate; the way burning hair makes the smell of gasoline almost welcome, like perfume; the terrible, sad, patient look on Deirdre’s face as she waited for the fire to creep up her hair toward her head, her face; the way her face screamed and then disappeared in the fire; the way I stood there, watching her do it—it’s that memory that wakes me up from a deep sleep shouting and crying, or prevents me from falling into one in the first place. If I could pick one moment, one detail I wish I couldn’t remember, it’s this one, and that is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don’t want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don’t deserve to forget.

  “Deirdre, don’t!” I yelled, but who knows if she actually heard me. By then the flames had already crawled up the wick of her hair, and her hat burst into flames. And then her head was on fire, her head was fire, a ball of fire, and for a moment it was the only part of Deirdre on fire. The rest of her body was standing still, and her head, on fire, was cocked to the side as if she were listening to her own inner voice, except that her inner voice wasn’t asking, What else? What else? but instead was telling her, Nothing, nothing.

  “Sam, do something!” I heard a voice say, but it wasn’t my voice, it wasn’t that voice inside me, it was Detective Wilson’s, who was all of a sudden right next to me. He, as I found out later, had read the note in the envelope after all and knew to show up at midnight. And he had. But I had shown up early, and so had Deirdre, and she was on fire because of it. Together, Detective Wilson and I ran toward her. Detective Wilson tackled her, and she landed with a hiss in the snow. “Give me your coat!” he yelled (he was only wearing his hooded sweatshirt). I did, and he started patting Deirdre down with it, saying soft, comforting things to her under his breath as he patted.

  “This is your fucking fault, Sam,” he said to me over his shoulder. I caught a glimpse of Deirdre lying there: her red jacket had turned black, and her face had turned black, too. The only thing of hers not black and scorched were her eyes: they were white and blank and staring skyward, at the birches, at the stars, or at nothing. I looked away and then at the gas can lying next to her body. I could tell, even in the darkness, that it was one I’d helped design back when I was still a person who designed things. And then I looked away from the gas can, too, and closed my eyes. They immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes’ way of forbidding you to look away, of forcing you to look at the world you’ve made or unmade.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said, and started backing away, the way we do when we’re not brave enough to do anything else. “She set herself on fire.”

  “Fuck you anyway,” Detective Wilson said, still furiously patting her through my coat. “I saw her do it. So what? You didn’t fucking stop her.”

  “She asked me to meet her here,” I said. “She wanted me to save her and my father.”

  “You could have saved her,” he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you’ve done everything else, and then I started crying, crying also being that thing you do when you haven’t done enough and you’re afraid it’s too late to start.

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “You could have saved her,” Detective Wilson said, “and you didn’t.”

  At that, I turned and broke into a sprint. Deirdre had wanted me to save her and I showed up too early and didn’t. But Deirdre had also wanted me to save my father. My mother was only a few blocks away, at our house, with him. I ran as fast as I could, but even so, when I got there I was too late.

  26

  You wouldn’t expect a burning house to look like a burning woman, and you’d be right: it doesn’t. There is nothing beautiful about a woman on fire, but there is plenty that is beautiful about a house burning hot and high in the dark, cold night: the way flames shoot out of the chimney like a Roman candle; the way the asphalt roof shingles sizzle and pop; the way the smoke pours and pours and pours heavenward like a message to the house’s great beyond. There is something celebratory about a house fire, which is why so many people always gather to watch it, just as there were so many people gathered to watch my parents’ house burn that night. The crowd was three or four deep, and I had to push my way through, jostling and shoving until I got to the front row, next to my mother, who was standing there, holding a forty-ounce Knickerbocker, regarding the fire thoughtfully, as though it were an especially difficult question that she was this close to solving.

  “There you are,” she said. She offered me a sip of her beer and I took it, took more than a sip, then gave the can back to her. The wind shifted and the smoke blew toward us, and the crowd bent over, as one, until the wind shifted back and we all resumed our upright fire-watching position. There were firefighters everywhere now, looking puny and laughable with their axes and their floppy hoses. Even their helmets looked like a joke version of red next to the real red of the fire. The house was looking bigger and bigger, as though the flames were its fourth and fifth stories.

  “Here I am,” I told my mother. We were surrounded by people, at least ten people within earshot, but their hearing and all their other senses were fully devoted to the fire. Something exploded in the house—the furnace, maybe—and there was a terrible shriek of something metal becoming something not. The people in the crowd shrieked in response to the house, and the house shrieked back at them, the heat stoking the noise. I wasn’t worried about anyone listening to us when they could be listening to the house. “Where’s Dad?”

  “It was so easy,” my mother said. She was talking calmly, evenly, and I would have found this creepy and awful if I hadn’t been listening calmly, evenly, myself. And how could I have been so calm? you might want to know. I don’t have a good answer, not even now, seven years after the fact. Was it because of what had just happened to Deirdre? Was I thinking that nothing could be worse than Deirdre’s setting herself on fire? Was I thinking that no matter what happened to my father, it couldn’t have been as bad as what happened to Deirdre? When the worst thing happens, does it then make us calm in expectation of better things, or does it just prepare us for the next worst thing? “I dumped gasoline on the couch and lit it,” my mother said. “That’s all I needed to do.”

  “Mom,” I said, “where is Dad?”

  “I lit some of the curtains, too, in the dining room, just in case. But I didn’t need to. It was so easy. I didn’t expect it to be so easy.”

  “Mom,” I said, “where is my dad?”

  “Why wasn’t it more difficult?” my mother asked, still calm. “Shouldn’t some things be difficult?”

  This was the scariest thing my mother had said thus far. She’d set our house on fire; I knew that. That wasn’t so scary. But it came so easily to her, as easily as reading a book or busing a table or drinking a beer or pretending she had a happy family—that was the scary part. My mother is the most capable person I have ever met, even more capable than Anne Marie. She could do anything she wanted, which was why she’d always scared me and still does.

  “Mom,” I said, very, very slowly so that she’d understand me, so that there would be no confusion. “Dad left Deirdre to be with us. To be with you. He loves Deirdre, but he’s chosen you and me.”

  “I know,” my mother said, turning away from the fire and toward me. The fire lit up the left side of her face, making it glow, while the right side looked so cold, so white in comparison. “He told me the very same
thing. He said he wanted me to come home. He said he really meant it this time. He said I could believe him.” Then she turned back to the fire, her whole face glowing with the heat and the light, and I was glad, because she looked beautiful. I wanted her to look beautiful, and maybe this is what all children want: for their parents to look beautiful. And in order for them to look beautiful, you have to find ways to ignore their ugliness. It is easier to be ugly yourself than to admit to the ugliness of the people who made you; it is easier to love the people who made you if you are ugly and they are not. And it is easier to live on this earth if you love the people who made you, even if that means risking the love of the people you yourself have made. Even if.

  “Sam,” said a familiar voice behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to see who it was or to know what I had to tell him. Because I could also hear another voice, not my inner voice, not the voice that said, What else? and not Deirdre’s voice, the one that told her, Nothing, but Anne Marie’s voice, telling me that it was time to take responsibility for something, for everything.

  “It was me,” I said, not looking at Detective Wilson, still looking at my mother—who was looking at her house and her fire—still thinking about Deirdre’s burning herself to death and my doing nothing to save her. “I did it.” My mother didn’t say anything; she kept staring at the fire, as if she knew that it was making her beautiful, as if fire were the best kind of makeup.

  “You set fire to your parents’ house before you went to meet Deirdre,” Detective Wilson said, helping me out. “Before you watched Deirdre burn herself to death, you set fire to your home.” I was still looking at my mother when he said this. She closed her eyes for one, two, three beats and then opened them again. For years, my mother must have hated Deirdre; for years she must have wished her dead. And now that Deirdre was dead, my mother looked no different than she had when she thought Deirdre was alive—not guilty, nor relieved, nor happy. How was this possible? How could my mother know Deirdre was dead and still look at the world as if it were the same world, at the fire as though it were the same fire? But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company. Maybe if I’d hated Deirdre for longer, I wouldn’t have felt so bad about not saving her.

  “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.

  27

  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?