An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [57]
The farmers, apparently, were another part of the past that was gone. There wasn't a pickup truck or a cigarette to be seen. The produce was organic ― signs told me so ― and ugly from not having been grown with the fertilizers and insecticides that make fruits and vegetables look and taste so good. It made me sad to see the apples and green beans sitting there, gnarled and unhappy, sold out of the hatchback trunks of Volkswagens, and it also made me sad to see the men and women who sold them, the obviously rich but filthy men and women who could have been the bond analysts' kissing cousins, were their union suits and beards and fleece and flowing skirts and ratty but expensive sandals not largely in the way. My breath left me for a while when I realized how often and fast the world changes, something not even a career in a technologically advanced field like packaging science can prepare you for. It didn't take a genius to see that someday I, too, would be like the farmers, cast aside and obsolete and so completely lost without a world that needed me.
But here, too, no one recognized me; no one seemed to know who I was. As I left the farmers' market, I even walked up to one woman I thought I recognized from high school, a fit woman in expensive running shoes, walking her three children in their complicated, rickshaw-style stroller with its many mesh pockets and cup holders, and I said, "Hello, I'm Sam Pulsifer."
"That's fantastic," she said, and then veered around me on her fast-walking way through the farmers' market and around the town green.
"That is fantastic," I shouted after her. She didn't recognize me; no one recognized me! It was like Nero coming back to Rome years later and the few singed citizens who remained not knowing who he was.
There was one more thing to do to test my anonymity, one more bit of final accounting. I walked a couple of blocks to the east, to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. They'd cleared away the charred wreckage, of course, the yellow emergency tape, too, but they hadn't built a new house to take the place of the old one. Instead they had planted trees, which were now decent-size eighteen-year-old birches and white pines and maples, and in the midst of this arbor there was a bronze plaque on a four-foot-high metal pole, probably explaining what had once been there and why it wasn't there anymore. I didn't read what was on the plaque, and if you didn't, you probably would have thought that there was nothing there before those trees except for other, older trees. You wouldn't have known about Emily Dickinson or her house, or about my accidentally burning it down and killing those poor Colemans.
And if you saw me standing there, chances are you wouldn't have recognized me as the boy who, some twenty years earlier, et cetera, even though, as mentioned, I'd once achieved a good deal of local celebrity. Was this so strange? After all, I no longer looked like the boy who had done what he had done: my face was redder even than it had been then, with more wrinkles and some flab and the beginning of jowls; my hair was both higher and curlier on my head and retreating backward; plus, I'd just started growing a beard, which promised one day soon to truly cover large parts of my face. I looked nothing like a boy anymore: I looked like someone else ― a grown-ass man, maybe, who had a family he loved and had hurt, and who'd been exiled because of it and quit his job and moved back in with his parents and was now ready ― no, determined ― to make amends. Finally I really was a grown-ass man, and it was about time. I had waited so long to become one.
And what does one do when one finally becomes a grown-ass man? Why, one goes back to the people he's loved and lost and tells them, as the poet says, the whole truth and nothing but and then refuses to go anywhere until he is forgiven for lying in the first place. It was time. Hopefully