Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (14 page)

At the top of the hill, Eddie said, “My brother showed me this spot. No one else knows about it except him and me.” Andrew knew this wasn't the case. His father had wanted him to swim there just a few days ago—his father went there every summer, following the
stream through the woods to a clearing where an old white oak towered over a deep pool. Everyone knew the guys who hayed for old man Vaughn swam in the stream at lunch. Eddie had lied, but there was nothing about his lie that made it seem untrue.

Eddie ran down the slope of the green hill toward the water and called for Andrew to hurry as he tugged his shirt over his head. He waved Andrew on and pulled the rope away from the tree, backing up the hill to swing out and up, his long bony toes cutting into the blue sky then knifing into the water. He crawled onto the bank, shook his hair, and scrambled over to the trunk of the oak, where he shimmied easily to the uppermost branch.

Eddie stood straight up, hanging in the air like a hawk, and pointed his fingers to the sky. Without warning, he pitched forward—and here he seemed to pause like a memory before he vanished into the brown envelope of the pool. Andrew was still undressing on the bank when Eddie came out of the water and dropped onto the grass, hands on his knees, his chin lowered. He brushed his hands down his wet cheeks and narrow nose to his mouth. Andrew could see that Eddie's thoughts were elsewhere, but there was no getting out of it: he had to climb now, and he gripped onto the rough bark, which scraped at the inside of his knee. He wanted Eddie to look over and watch him climb, and eventually Eddie did look. Andrew stood on the branch and stared straight up. Instead of flying through
the air like Eddie, he closed his eyes and stepped off the limb. His body lost its weight, his thoughts vanished. The cold stung his skin, and he came up for air, the water curling up against his chest. He was relieved it was over and thrilled as he looked up at the tree. It seemed like an unbelievable distance to have fallen.

Eddie floated out into the current of the stream, drifting on his back, and Andrew followed, turning around in the gentle rapids of the shallows. The treetops revolved as the flow pulled at his ankles, pushing at his neck, bearing him up and setting him down on slippery round stones that nudged his back. He thought of Eddie soaring down from the branch, and the image seemed to broaden in his sight until it covered the sky, making every day before and after partly this day, as if they had always known each other. Andrew held his breath and sank. Through the surface of the water, he watched the tree limbs and the sky pitch in the ripples. The cold numbed the skin of his fingers.

After some time, they floated against the bank and sat up together. Andrew reached over and briefly touched Eddie on the shoulder. Eddie looked down at Andrew's hand, and his expression softened as his cheeks colored.

“What happened to my sister?” Andrew asked. He was afraid to hear the answer, but he was sure Eddie was the only person who knew.

“She drowned,” Eddie said with a low growl, and his lips closed over his horrible pale teeth, his skin reflected in the water turning suddenly yellow, his eyes black. Andrew jolted and buried his face in the stream and pushed away from the bank, holding his breath underwater for as long as he could. When he looked back, Eddie had already pulled on his shirt and was walking away.

Andrew heard the sound of the train approaching down the valley, and he ran panting to catch up with Eddie. He found him on the other side of the hill sitting on his haunches and tossing stones over a granite ledge that dropped twenty feet down to the tracks. Eddie closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side as if someone had told him a story that he knew wasn't true. Andrew crouched next to him and tried to catch his breath. The train came into view, louder, closer, the horn blasting, and the locomotive passed below them. The gust brushed Eddie's bangs to the side as he turned his head and opened his mouth to say something that Andrew couldn't hear over the roar of the engine.

Suddenly, Eddie clamped his eyes shut and his face balled into a knot. Something was wrong; Andrew didn't know what. Eddie stood up as the caboose passed and looked down at the tracks with his mouth open and his lower lip hanging dumb as a leaf.

In the silence after the train passed, Andrew would have expected some kind of warning, though there
hadn't been any warning with Stephanie, not for the kind of thing she had been about to do. Eddie bared his teeth and his eyes turned to stones. He leapt off the ledge and into the sky—where, for a moment, his feet gripped the air—and Andrew thought Eddie might sail over the tracks to the opposite bank or keep rising above the trees. As clearly, though, as Andrew had known what would happen to Stephanie from the minute she arrived home from Portland, he knew that Eddie would fall, and he couldn't look.

He heard the awful crack of Eddie's bones—a sickening sound that was also, somehow, a relief. The sound of a body breaking. With Stephanie there had been no sound, just her empty room in the morning.

Eddie lay splayed on the tracks below, his chest slowly inflating. Andrew found a spot where the bank sloped and he scrambled down. Eddie's eyes opened halfway and stared beyond Andrew's face at the sky. His arm had snapped clean in half below the elbow, and the raw bone jutted out of his skin. Blood seeped from a cut in his head.

“What happened?” Eddie said, his face as open and pale as the moon in the daytime sky. A glaze of sweat covered his skin.

“You slipped,” Andrew lied.

Eddie's eyes widened with fear; he scrambled to his feet and searched the ground around him as if he had dropped something. “Come on,” he said and stumbled forward down the tracks.

Andrew caught up, and Eddie talked frantically about how they would do everything together now: swim after school, fish at the lake in Monmouth where his grandma lived, and play Frisbee down at the landing. They would meet outside Andrew's house in the morning and walk up to school together. Andrew didn't know why, but Eddie had chosen him.

When they reached the top of a rise, with a clear view of the steeple tops, Eddie abruptly stopped and looked down at his broken arm, and he gasped, his eyes closing over tears. Below the elbow his hand was twisted, and he shook his head either in disappointment or disbelief.

Eddie's knees buckled and Andrew tried to hold him up. He was too heavy, though, heavier than Andrew ever would have imagined, heavier, surely, than his sister. Andrew could no longer remember the sound of her voice, but as he tumbled under Eddie onto the tracks, he felt that the sudden and unfamiliar weight gave some shape to what Stephanie had left unsaid.

Just before the start, I walked up a back trail to the field and stood at the far edge of the finish line because I wanted to see my sister Melissa not run the big race. This was an important day for me because I was a mean person who wished that bad things would happen to those I loved. It was the year Amy Marsden grew an inch, making me the shortest kid in the sixth grade, and the year I told my friends Susan and Emma to “join the choir,” which was a phrase we had for just the opposite. Their mothers called my mother and I got a lecture, which led to this being the year I stopped talking to my mother unless my father made me, and then I only did so as if she wasn't there, calling her “the woman.”

I believed in God because I didn't think it was an option not to; I just didn't think, as my mother did, that He was Good. I had spent the week before the big race begging Him to keep Melissa from running. I also prayed that I would someday not ever see my family or
anyone from Vaughn again. When this day arrived I would never, not even in my dreams, visit the town where I had grown up and miraculously escaped from to become the person I would be.

I knew Melissa was not at the race, but other people didn't: they must have thought she was warming up in the back parking lot, as she sometimes did, or stretching in the girls' locker room. Even if I had wanted to tell them she wasn't there, they would not have believed me because people believed what they wanted to believe, and they all wanted Melissa to win. People from Vaughn generally didn't win things, but Melissa was exactly the kind of person everyone would want to win: she was beautiful but humble, she was smart but meek. She believed God was Good, and even though she was too busty and wide-hipped to be a real runner (and didn't even join the cross-country team until her sophomore year), she had placed third at states in her first season. Coaches, parents, other runners, and writers for the
Valley Journal
all agreed that she had terrible form, running on the balls of her feet, and no strategy, leaving the start at full speed each time and not pacing herself. She finished each race with her eyes narrowed (sometimes, she said, she could no longer even see by the end), and her head tilted down as if she were listening to a reprimand she had heard many times before. She won these races through sheer exertion of will and because, people said, she had heart, whatever that meant.

William, the staff photographer for the
Valley Journal
, was one of the first people at the meet, pacing up and down in front of the crowd with his camera raised in the air, his belly pushing against his wind-breaker. He photographed every sports event and was about as well known as someone could get in Vaughn for giving kids the only kind of fame they would ever see. He was anxious as he focused and refocused his lenses—more anxious, even, than Melissa's ex-boyfriend Doug, who leaned over the tape set up by the coaches and angled his mouth so she would hear his voice above all the others.

The girls lined up as a drizzle stung our cheeks. People craned their necks and squinted at the runners before turning to each other and shrugging—no Melissa. Some of them—especially the women, the other mothers—whispered to each other. William raised his camera but then let it drop against the neck strap. His face turned pale.

The pistol snap sent the runners forward in a wave under the gray November sky. Doug, the ex, gasped. Poor boy, I thought, though not out of compassion. He was poor. He didn't have a father and his mother mopped the floors at the Wharf. He was nice looking but too poor to look nice, Melissa's friend Becky had said.

Though it was nine in the morning, it might have been dusk, and as they disappeared down the path that snaked through the woods, Doug searched the leaders.
There were too many girls from other schools who looked the same, running away. Rain curled from branches in loping drops, but I was sure that in Doug's mind Melissa did not hear them hit the ground, nor did she hear the sound of her own breath, nor the heels of her sneakers over the packed mud, as she pulled ahead. Runners appeared in groups of twos and threes, their eyes drunk on exhaustion and stunned with the sudden glare of the metallic light as they pushed with the last of their will toward the line.

When Melissa's friend Merrill said Melissa hadn't come out of her house since the morning of the day before, William, the photographer, rushed over.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Yesterday morning. She runs every morning, every morning,”—a fact everyone knew from the article in the
Journal
, for which William had done the photographs people raved about. His pictures of Old Vaughn Day were all right, but operating that one-touch camera couldn't be any harder, I thought, than spitting on your own shoe. And he couldn't see anything with a camera that I didn't already know: I knew Melissa thought Doug was a “total mistake,” I knew she waxed her arm hairs and pictured herself (God knows why) someday married to a man who owned a Ford dealership, just as I knew that old Mrs. McDermott across the street mailed letters to herself from Augusta and slept in the nude. I knew most of what went on in our town (I was the short one standing with her arms
crossed in the edge of people's vision), but on the morning of the big race I had no more idea than anyone why Melissa had locked herself in her room with the shades drawn and the lights out while our mother sat by the door speaking into the keyhole with her most conciliatory voice.

Melissa was still not answering when I got home. It was impossible not to defy our mother whose voice plucked at my nerves like the yowl of a cat in heat. But our poor mother did her best, trying to say it was nothing—teenage stuff—even though Melissa had never given in to melodrama before. She was a normal girl, our mother said, she did well in school, she had boyfriends (never too serious), she went to the movies, to dances, to parties, to football games, and always, for the last two years, she ran. She ran seventy-five miles a week.

Melissa's two best friends, Merrill and Becky, arrived in Merrill's boyfriend Billy's car. Billy stayed in the car while they knocked on the door.

“What's wrong? Why won't she come out?” Merrill said to me, but I didn't answer. I didn't talk to girls who went out with Billy. Someday Billy would regret that his father had ever given him that car, because it would have taken him too long to learn there was nothing else to him.

Our father paced in the kitchen; he didn't look so much angry as bewildered, until there was a knock and Doug's face leaned into the window of the front door.
Our father grabbed him hard by the shirt and Doug screamed Melissa's name as our father pushed him against the banister and screamed it again with such desperation that our father stepped back and looked at his hands, wondering what he had done.

Back then I used to think it was unbelievable how stupid people were. Our parents seemed to have no idea that (before she dumped him) Melissa had been sneaking out to see Doug almost every night. More than once, I had seen them park down the street and had seen him turn off the headlights to fall over in her direction.