An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [31]
I did not, as the prosecutor argued at my trial, "case the joint" earlier on the day of the fire. I merely took the Emily Dickinson House tour, the official two-dollar tour, along with a group of students and their teacher from some school called Dickinson College ("No relation," the teacher joked, and oh, everyone laughed and laughed). The teacher tossed a pen from one hand to the other as she walked. The students all wore ski jackets. If I was guilty of "casing the joint," then so were they.
I was not, as the Hampden County Eagle suggested, a southerner who hated Yankees. True, before the tour began, I did sign the guest book "Sidney," from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but only as a joke and to sound mysterious. As Mrs. Coleman might have been able to tell you if I hadn't killed her in the fire, I regretted the joke immediately because she read what I had signed and said, "Nice to meet you, Sidney," and I didn't speak for the entire tour for fear of not sounding southern.
It was certainly not the case that, as one of the Dickinson College students testified in court, I was agitated and not a little maniacal during the tour. I was a kid, a normal kid, normal as kids get and as normal as I am now. It's probably so, however, that I was a little restless. I was restless because, after my mother's stories, I expected there to be something exceptional and sinister and mysterious about the house. There wasn't. We were shown a glass case displaying one of Dickinson's letters; we were shown her bedspread, which was red with white daisies; we were shown her furniture, which, Mrs. Coleman explained, was not actually her furniture but rather a faithful reproduction of what her furniture would have looked like. Oh, it was dull! Nothing like my mother's stories. So I was probably restless ― I remember yawning overloudly in boredom once and everyone looking at me ― and that's probably why I broke into the house later on that night: to see what I could see when the tour guide and the students and their teacher weren't around.
It was not true, again as the prosecutor argued, that I killed the Colemans "in cold blood." I didn't even know they were in the house. I've said this many times, although it seems to satisfy no one nor make them happy, which is the truth all over, which makes you wonder why everyone wants to hear it so badly.
It was not true, as rumor had it around my high school (I went back to the high school while I was out on bail, which was where I heard the rumor), that the whole thing had been some sort of sex club gone horribly wrong. It is correct that I'd thought of inviting this girl China, whom I knew well enough and wanted badly, in the way boys are supposed to want girls with exotic names and their own cars, which China also had. And it's true that, as far as China was concerned, I had sex on the mind, prominently, in the very front of the lobe. But I didn't invite her to break into the Emily Dickinson House with me that night. I knew better. I did! Do you think I wanted to have sex with someone in that house after the stories my mother had told me? Especially the story about the time two kids from the high school (again a boy and a girl ― "mere babes," my mother called them) bought a six-pack of Knickerbocker beer and decided to break into the Emily Dickinson House.
These were the same young children grown up, still nice but not quite as nice as they might have been. My mother stressed that these kids thought too much about what they were doing and what they'd like to do. Their fall lay in the calculation, and I took the lesson to be "Don't calculate," and to this very day I try not to. They walked and made out at the same time, a difficult trick, to be sure. The boy carried the six-pack in a plastic bag with handles; he had condoms in his wallet and a mini-crowbar in his jacket pocket. He was secure in his physical ability and in his equipment