An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [10]
It wasn't time. This was on a Friday. Amherst was exactly as I'd remembered it: the leafy, prosperous streets, which were filled with so many Volvo station wagons it was like mushrooms in a cave; the two-hundred-year-old houses with their genteelly overgrown lawns, their tiger lilies and blue mums and birch trees and historical markers; the white college boys with dreadlocks playing their complicated Frisbee games on the sweeping town green; the white clapboard Congregational churches and the granite Episcopal churches and the soaring spires of the college everywhere visible over the high tree line; the well-scrubbed college girls barely dressed in workout clothes; and the boat-shoed and loafered professors drinking their coffee on the sort of wrought iron outdoor patio furniture that looks too delicate to sit on even if you were as wafer thin as most of the college girls were. All of this was familiar to me, but it didn't make me feel happy, didn't make me feel at home. I felt like a cousin once removed, which meant, I guess, that you weren't really a cousin at all: you were estranged from blood relation in some permanent way, and my remove from Amherst was that I had burned down the most significant of its significant, beautiful, aged houses, had killed two of its loafered citizens. A cousin once removed was not a cousin; a criminal citizen was not a citizen.
This was a big disappointment, the biggest, because I'd taken up packaging science, and I'd forgotten my literature, forgotten that you can't go home again, and so I thought that Amherst ― the town where I'd grown up, the town where both my parents had grown up, the town where both their families had lived for two hundred years ― would still be my hometown. How could it not? Was I not the town's own humbled prodigal son? Did not every town need someone like me, someone ― as the song says ― who was lost but now was found? But from the driver's seat of our minivan, I had the definite feeling that Amherst would never be my town again, that the town itself wouldn't stand for it, that they didn't need a prodigal son, that a prodigal son was exactly what they didn't need. We drove past my old high school: there were bars on the windows where there hadn't been before I went to prison, armed uniformed guards out front where before there'd been old-lady hall monitors with whistles, and I imagined that the bars and the guards were there to protect the students from me and not some teenage crazy in a trench coat stuffed with homemade ordnance. I could hear the principal during assembly that morning: We were not vigilant and he burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed two people in the bargain. But we are ready for him now. I imagined that after school the students and their parents, and for that matter the whole town, would ― à la Frankenstein ― take up their torches and pitchforks and drive me out of town and leave me ― lurching, grunting, monstrous with my scarred and stitched body and the bolt through my head ― wandering, lost in the strange, cruel world, never to be heard from again.
"What do you think?" Anne Marie asked me, her face happy and expectant, about the opposite of how mine surely looked.
"Pitchforks!" I said. "Torches! Monster!"
"What?" she asked. "What's that?"
"Nothing," I said, and I kept driving, in a kind of trance, so that Anne Marie's cries of "Wait!" and "Where are you going?" and "We haven't looked at any houses yet ― hold on!" were something out of the faint, distant past and I had trouble hearing them. Yes, I kept driving, right past Chicopee Street, where my parents lived, and then out of town, and for five more years I was pretty glad I had. Soon we were on Route 116 and out of Amherst proper, and this,