Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (6 page)

The secret they shared had, over time, earned him a mythical power in her mind. No one, however, not even Don, could take away what had never been given by her own marriage, by her own body. And, in the end, she didn't want to lose what she did have. Her years with Robert were all she had. Each time Don called, the silence on the other end of the line was the sound of Robert, her friends, the priest, and the parish vanishing into the ether of pure white snow. After he finally stopped calling, though, she felt emptiness inside her that she hadn't noticed before.

She was here at Don's house (if you could call it a house, with a hole in the roof and half the windows boarded over) to ask his help in saving the last of what she had feared losing: the trees her husband had loved maybe more than he had been able to love her.

The man in the doorway didn't look familiar, though it was Don. He was shorter, much shorter,
hunched, and his dry cheeks had faded into a delicate onion skin. He wore a stiff blue cap, which he took off and quickly put back on again, and he made a grunting noise—not quite a greeting—before backing away from the door, leaving it open. She wasn't sure she wanted to go inside, but she did, and removed a metal object the size and shape of a fist (some part of a car, she guessed) from a wooden chair before sitting down. Don sat on a filthy old couch and turned his head to the side, as if he expected someone to come out of the next room.

She started talking frantically about the woods behind the house. “The trees,” she said. “My nephew's cutting them all down. I know he is. They were my husband's trees.” She described what kind they were, or what kind she thought they were—hemlocks, pines, maples. She didn't know what to do to stop her nephew, she said. She had asked him to stop, or at least she thought she had asked him to stop. She went on longer than she intended to, describing how her husband had loved the trees and never wanted them to be cut. Finally, with all her will, she stopped herself from talking and saw that Don wasn't listening—he couldn't listen. His eyes, staring right at her, were like small green stones in a clear brook. The same thing had happened to Robert before he died.

She looked around and saw an old cot in the corner and piles of opened cans on a crumbling sink counter. Flies buzzed above a mound of half-filled trash bags.
For some reason, he had stuffed some of the cans into the wood stove. The stench was overwhelming now, and the worst of it was the smell of urine coming from his filthy pants. He looked down at his hands (which alone remained unchanged after more than twenty years) and back up at her.

“Oh, Don,” she said, and his face softened into a smile almost of recognition. While Don sat in his old chair looking from his hands, to her, and back to his hands, she carried trash bags full of cans and rotting food scraps out to the road. She pumped water into a bucket, and scrubbed the floor and the counters. Finally, she hand washed what clothes she found in cardboard boxes, and hung them to dry on a rope she tied from a branch to the shell of an old porch light next to the front door. Don watched her work for the rest of the day. It was late afternoon when she finished, the sun low in the trees when she squeezed Don's hand to say goodbye, and he looked up at her to smile again. Someone had been coming by to drop off food for him—some distant kin, probably—but they were doing little else. Don stood on his stoop and waved once as she backed out of the drive.

Tomorrow she would call Elsie, she thought, as she drove up the hill. Elsie would help him. She had worked in hospice care in Augusta and was now in charge of a group of women from the parish who looked after old people who had no one else. Of course,
Lucy would have to explain why she was at Don's in the first place, and she wasn't a good liar.

She entered her house and put her bag down on the table before she heard the absence of the saws buzzing down the hill. Maybe they had quit early. As she walked along the trail behind the house to the woods, she thought about what she would say to Elsie, and all the women in the congregation Elsie would talk to about how Lucy had started doing old Don Small's laundry. She could say she was just driving by and saw what a state the place was in, but driving by on the way to where? She could say she had heard he needed help, but heard from whom? Who would talk to her about the old mechanic who had once lived above his shop where he drank and befriended no one? She decided she wouldn't explain anything. Damn them all. She would tell Elsie there was a man out Litchfield Road before the MacRitchie place, who lived alone and needed help. She wouldn't even name him. She would tell Elsie that no one should die dirty and all alone. It lacked any dignity at all. In fact, she would volunteer to go down there herself and check on him once or twice a week.

Lucy followed the path through a thin wall of trees into the open light. Except for a few spindly birches and maples, no wider than her calf, all the trees had been cut down on the hill that sloped to the river. Long-armed branches lay strewn waist high around stacks of sixteen-foot logs, reminding her of a photograph
she had seen of a field of fallen soldiers. The vast maze, so dense that it had seemed impenetrable, was now bare and washed by the sun. She leaned against the butt end of an old pine, the still damp wood staining her fingers with sap. It would take a lifetime—more than a lifetime—for the trees to grow as tall again. No one now living would survive to see them cover the sky. She had always known that her nephew would cut them down, but she had hoped that he would wait until she was gone. It seemed so little to ask, she thought, just to wait.

I belonged to a large family that had lived in the same town in Maine for over two hundred years. When those who had moved away came back in August to visit, we treated them as if they had never left, and in some ways they hadn't. No matter where they had moved to or what they had done with their lives, they still looked and acted like Ingersolls, at least while they were among us. Even those we called married-ins seemed to acquire the tense Ingersoll jaw and the officious presence that I have only otherwise noticed in school crossing guards and the managers of fast food restaurants.

Our family had never been wealthy or influential (our ancestors first came to Vaughn to farm for the original Vaughn family), but we liked to think we were intelligent and sturdy, if nothing else, as evidenced by our determination to stay in one place for such a long time. We also liked to think that we had always, from the beginning, come down on the right side of things,
even when it was dangerous to do so. A distant uncle, a deacon of Newbury, spoke out against the witch trials while they were happening, not afterward when it was safe. Half a dozen of us died fighting King Phillip's men; one Ingersoll actually reached Quebec with Arnold on his treacherous winter expedition (though it's never been clear, to me at least, what that says about us); another defied our employer, the founders of the town, to oppose the English during the Revolution; another refused to serve on ships involved in the rum trade, choosing instead to work in the woods for a fraction of the pay.

After my grandfather's death, my father became the head of our clan; he was the oldest living member of the family still in Vaughn, and for forty years he had taught history in the local high school. When he retired from teaching, he announced that he would throw a party for himself that he said would double as a family reunion. He hired an old boom towing barge converted into a tour boat to take us on an evening cruise across nearby Lake Sumner, where my great grandfather had built a log cabin. When I was young, my grandfather had maintained a raft with a diving board at the old camp, and my brother, cousins, and I had spent hours there swimming and warming our pale skin in the August sun. The lake was always cold, even in the middle of summer.

On the day of the party, more than a hundred extended family members and old friends climbed the
gangway and mingled in the cool breeze of a mild summer evening. August is the only time of year in Maine when the weather could be called ideal. The mosquitoes and black flies had taken a break and the air seemed braced for the coming fall. The tips of the spruce rocked in the reflection of the water, and the hills to the west balanced in the haze of the horizon. My mother and I leaned over the railing on the top deck and talked about what their lives would be like now that my father wasn't working. I thought they should travel somewhere, but she said nothing much would change. He would volunteer in the schools up and down the valley, and she would continue at the school library.

After my mother went down to the first deck to find my father, my brother Henry jumped out of an old Chevy that had pulled into the parking lot, thanked the driver for a ride, and boarded just as the captain was about to cast off. No one had expected my brother—he hadn't been home in more than ten years—and I don't think anyone else noticed him. Though he had a beard and dark shaggy hair now, he still moved with the same rolling gait. As we headed out into the lake, I tried to make my way toward him at the back of the boat, but it had been years, in some cases, since I had seen certain cousins and aunts who lived out of state, either in New Hampshire or Vermont, and others, too—friends of my parents from Vaughn, old teachers, my father's buddies. I visited Vaughn twice a year but only briefly.

My mother accosted me in a minor frenzy and asked me to come down to the lower deck and help at the food table. People were making a mess, she said. By then, I couldn't spot Henry, and I began to wonder if I had seen him at all.

Clouds swept over just before sunset and then it was pitch black in the middle of the lake. The former high school principal put his arm around my father and leaned forward to tell some anecdote to a small circle of people. I knew all the stories about my father: there was the time he leapt out of the classroom window to make some point. I couldn't remember what. Another time he made everyone eat hard tack and several students had to go home sick. No one ever complained. He convinced the conservative school board that he didn't need to have any tests in his U.S. history class. He gave his own kind of tests, often outdoors, where students were asked to reenact certain events and speak in the voice of important figures. Field tests, he called them.

I tried to get my mother to settle down and mingle, but she darted around the food, replacing finger sandwiches and cheese. Brendan Lee (head of the Maine Board of Education under two governors and my father's old roommate from Orono) brought the party to order by tapping his wine glass.

“I wish I could say we were all here just to have a good time,” he said. “But alas, school must begin, and today we have a history lesson on the history teacher
himself. Can we blame him for Old Vaughn Day, that rowdy mess that takes place on Water Street every July? And that green park down by the river? Yes, we can. Would the high school have lost its accreditation ten years ago if this man had not devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours to drawing up the changes that made the difference? The man to blame for all these catastrophes stands right over there. We all know him. Everyone knows him. He was born here and for forty years he has taught in the same classroom.

“Jack and I were roommates together up at Orono—before the Civil War. I remember thinking then that this guy could do
anything
he wanted to in life, and he chose to come back here, to Vaughn, and teach history to the children of this town. He could not have chosen a worthier path. His kingdom was his classroom, but he has been a leader to all of us who have known him.”

Brendan Lee stepped aside for my father to say a few words. My father waved him off at first but Brendan said, “I think we could all do with one more lesson.”

My father smiled and bowed his head, trying to pretend, I knew, that he hadn't rehearsed what he was about to say.

“Anyone who has taken one of my classes knows that the word ‘lesson' is second only to ‘wisdom' in my lexicon of useless words. But here I am. I am a freshman again, without lessons, leaving the life I have
known, the school I have known, for the unknown.” He paused, head bowed, lips pursed, and then he said something that I could tell he had not planned to: “The trouble with teaching,” he said, “if you're any good at it, is that you never grow older than your students.” He looked up, surprised at his own words, and before he could move on, my brother stepped out of the crowd behind me and edged along the wall. My father and brother eyed each other for a moment until my brother reached for the handle of a door I had not noticed and stepped out into the darkness. There was a splash, and then we were all quiet listening to the ambient hum of the engine beneath us. My mother ran forward into the space between my father and his audience and turned in a circle.

“What?” she said. She whirled around, looked frantically over my face and chest as if for signs of injury, and turned to my father. “Henry!” she yelled. “Did I see Henry?” The second call for her son sent everyone into action. My father came forward to comfort her, but she hit him hard in the chest and pushed him away.

Jim, the photographer from the
Valley Journal
, who had been quite a few years younger than me in school and an only child, did what I should have done and flung himself out into the lake with all three of his cameras wrapped around his neck. Doug Molloy, a kid I had known in school, and now the new history teacher, technically my father's replacement, followed, hitting the water in his sport coat and with his wine
glass still fixed in his hand. One of my father's brothers jumped in, along with two of my cousins. I prepared to go, too, taking off my jacket and my shoes and laying them next to the wall, but the captain pulled me back.