An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [69]
She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me. Who knows, maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was a character, too, and if so, which one or ones.
"Shit," Lees Ardor finally said. "We'd better go see Wesley."
WESLEY MINCHER AND LEES ARDOR lived in West Hartford, in a home much like my parents': an old, musty colonial home full of rooms that all looked like studies and not the living and dining and parlor rooms they had probably been designed to be. Each room had towering, overflowing bookcases, and dim lighting, and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear. We found Wesley Mincher sitting in the biggest of all these rooms: he had his legs propped up on a settee, and he immediately struck me as someone who probably didn't get enough exercise and had diabetes. His face was yellow, although that might have been from the lighting. He was reading a book, an ancient-looking, clothbound book whose pages were probably as yellowed as Mincher's skin.
"Wesley," Lees Ardor said, "there is someone here to see you." He didn't answer her, even though they were only a body length apart. "Wesley," she said again, but with more sweetness in her voice, as though she loved the way he didn't answer her. She said his name five more times, her voice sounding as if she were saying not, "Wesley, Wesley," but rather, "Love, Love." Still no response. It wasn't that Mincher was deaf; no, he was one of those distracted academics who are so lost in their own heads that it takes them a long time to realize that they might be needed in the world outside their skulls. But finally he did hear: he looked up and saw her and gave her a big, fond smile. He even put down his book, or rather he slid it into a protective plastic sleeve, the way Anne Marie might have slid a sandwich for Katherine's lunch into a plastic sandwich bag. I had designed both kinds of bags, by the way, or at the very least worked with someone who had.
"Wesley," Lees Ardor said, "this is Sam Pulsifer."
"I am a fourth-generation Mincher from the North Carolina foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains," Wesley Mincher said, apropos of nothing. He had a southern accent, the gentle, lilting kind. My father had edited many books by southern historians about southern history for the university press, and I'd met a few of what he called "his authors," had heard him talk about those authors, and so I immediately pegged Wesley Mincher for what he was: he was a character, too, the sort of southern character who believed that being a southern character had something to do with misdirectional doublespeak, and losing the Civil War and not wanting others to talk about it but not being able to stop talking about it yourself, and having wise, lugubrious old folks and front porches for them to sit on, and black people, always black people, about whom you knew everything and about whom no one else knew shit, and the idea that self-criticism is art but criticism from outside is hypocrisy, and wise, folksy sheriffs and God and farm animals and good food that wouldn't be good if you ate it in a restaurant and not in your mama's kitchen, and a set of whitewall tires leaning up against the barn that would look good on the 1957 Buick that you had a funny story to tell about.
"Mr. Pulsifer has something to tell us regarding the Mark Twain House, Wesley," Lees Ardor said gently, so gently. You could feel the fondness pouring out of her the way those tears had an hour earlier.
"The so-called hillbilly of the Appalachians speaks an English closer to true proper English than any Yankee who went to Harvard."
"He says he wasn't the one who burned down the house, or tried to."
"My mother could make a poultice out of the sap of a piney tree that could take away your toothache before you even knew you had one, buddy-ro."