An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [70]
"He says he wasn't the one we paid three thousand dollars."
"Our Bobby Lee kept a lock of his daughter's hair in his saddlebag. It was magic, that lock of hair. It protected him from the minié balls."
I just stood there, feeling sleepy in that dim light, enjoying the show. The two of them could have talked like this for hours, I bet, their meanings barely intersecting, until they arrived, always, at the end of the evening, at the necessary common ground.
"I believe him, Wesley," Lees Ardor said. "I think he's telling us the truth."
"Then I believe him, too, my love," Mincher said. He reached over and held out his hand, and she took it. They held hands for the rest of my time there, as though I weren't there at all, or as though I were there only to bear witness to their hand-holding.
I got exactly one piece of evidence that day, but it took hours and hours to get it. Mostly, Mincher told me the story of how they first met. They had been on the faculty at Heiden together for eight years, but they had never really noticed each other because they had each been walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls. Lees Ardor was the only woman in the department, which was perhaps (she admitted) what made her say "cunt" so often. As for Wesley Mincher, he was the only southerner on the faculty ― the only one who had a bachelor's degree from Sewanee and a PhD from Vanderbilt as opposed to Amherst and Harvard-and it was difficult for Wesley Mincher to see anyone else in the department over the high ramparts of his defensiveness. That was his phrase ― "the high ramparts of my defensiveness" ― and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.
Anyway, it was Mincher who noticed Lees Ardor first, at a faculty meeting, the subject of which was a conference to be held at Heiden dedicated to the topic "Mark Twain: The Problem of Greatness." At the faculty meeting there'd been a long discussion on plenary and breakout sessions and keynote speakers, and at the end of all this, Lees Ardor had said, loudly, "Mark Twain is a cunt."
Her colleagues, of course, had heard Lees Ardor say this kind of thing many times before, and her ability to shock them, as with her students, was close to nil. They ignored her, but Mincher did not. There was something lovely, fragile, and mysterious about the way she said, "Mark Twain is a cunt," and after the department meeting was over, Wesley Mincher chased down Lees Ardor in the hallway and asked, "Do you have any interest in drinking red wine with me and talking about Confederate currency and maybe looking over my rare lithograph of the Confederate mint in Richmond, Virginia?" To her own great surprise, Lees Ardor said, "Yes" (she did not remember, she admitted to me, the last time she had said yes to anything). Over the course of the next six months, Lees Ardor said yes many more times to Wesley Mincher (she blushed when he said this, but she wasn't displeased, you could tell), until finally he asked her why she'd said what she said about Mark Twain.
"I'm afraid of becoming Aunt Polly," Lees Ardor had confessed. She was talking, of course, about the shrewish spinster in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I had read those books, could easily see what she was afraid of, and realized that she was probably right to be afraid. "I don't want to be Aunt Polly," she'd told Mincher.
"I don't want that, either," Mincher had said to her, way back then, and also to me, in his house years later. "So I turned to chivalry, as men in my family always have." Thus he began to tell a long story about the many chivalric Minchers through the ages, leading, finally, to himself, Wesley Mincher, who decided to have the Mark Twain House torched as proof of his love for Lees Ardor. He had remembered reading about a young man who had destroyed the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts (it had apparently reduced one of their colleagues ― an expert in lyric poetry ― to tears). So he wrote the arsonist a letter at