Read Online An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke - Free Book Online Page B

were hoping all along that I would tell him when he should pick his vegetables. I was eight by this time, but even I could tell that my father didn’t know what he was doing, and also that he was in some real emotional trouble. Or maybe he didn’t want to harvest his crops because he was afraid that the vegetables would somehow be wrong . Anyway, that night my father told my mother (and later she told me) that he needed to go out in the world and find something worth doing, something that would make us — her and me — proud of him.
    My mother apparently told my father in response that if he sliced himself open, stuffed himself with his accordions, concertinas, and rotting vegetables, and then hung himself on a pole in the middle of his miserable little garden, then he would probably make one impotent, homely-looking scarecrow.
    My father left the next day and didn’t come back until three years later and then was rehired by the university press when he did. But right after he left, my mother starting telling me stories about the Emily Dickinson House and the terrible mysteries therein, and if those stories were supposed to lead me, eventually, to break into the Emily Dickinson House in the middle of the night and accidentally burn it down and kill Thomas Coleman’s parents in the process — if my mother’s stories were supposed to do all this and send me to prison and thus take away ten years of my life — then they did what they were supposed to.
    I got angrier and angrier in the car, just thinking about all this bad family history, and by the time I got to my parents’ house, I was ready to take my anger out on someone or something. So I took it out on the front door. I banged on the door and banged and banged until my fist hurt. No one answered, so I yelled out, “It’s me! Sam! I’m home!” Still no one answered, and my anger turned to dread, that sort of dread you feel when you go home and wonder whether everything has changed or nothing has.
    Then I opened the door — it wasn’t locked — and found that everything had changed: it looked nothing like the house I remembered. The house I remembered had the neat sort of disorder peculiar to the well-read and overeducated: in the house I remembered, there were books and magazines everywhere, but everything else — dishes, glasses, clothes — was in its proper place. This house, on the other hand, looked as though it had been strip-mined by Vikings. There were empty bottles — gin bottles, beer bottles, red wine bottles — scattered everywhere. There were even empty peach schnapps and wine cooler and white zinfandel bottles here and there — in between couch cushions, in the fireplace, on top of the microwave — which made me wonder if my parents had been drinking in the house with high school girls or sorority sisters. My parents had once been big believers in natural wood-work — the wainscoting, banisters, overwide windowsills — but now the wood looked pale and sickly, as though it were turning into linoleum. There were ashtrays on nearly every surface — the kind of shallow, thin metallic ashtrays that you could only get by stealing them from diners and restaurants — but since all the ashtrays were overflowing, some of the bottles had cigarette butts soaking in the remaining drops of booze. There were stacks of dishes in the sink and piles of pots and pans on the stovetop, and none of them had been washed; the food had been caked and dried on them for so long that the spaghetti sauce and the flecks of vegetable and meat matter looked as natural a part of the pots and pans as the handles and the lids. The pantry shelves were totally empty except for those things — confectioners’ sugar, toothpicks, tiny marshmallows — that you couldn’t ever get rid of, plus boxes and boxes of these candy-bar-looking things. They were called Luna bars, and I assumed they were some sort of health food for women because the boxes featured highly stylized