Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work Read online

  Praise for

  Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

  “In this fine story collection, the inhabitants of Vaughn, Maine are stalked not by Stephen King horror but by intimate afflictions of blood, accident, and history. Yet their stories are too vivid to be entirely bleak. Maine’s woods and rivers, its changing light, are the beautifully rendered constants in a harsh, even malevolent, world.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work links gem-cut stories of troubled youths, alcoholics, illicit romances, the burden of inheritance, and the bane of class, all set in the dense upper reaches of Maine, and delivers them with hope, heart, and quiet humor.”

  —Elle

  “The fact that Brown’s stories read like allegories makes them no less surprising; what is most original about them is, in fact, their sincerity. . . . Imagine The Virgin Suicides within an ethical framework. These are stories that truly have some weight to them.”

  —Bookforum

  “There’s an unnerving, hazy human darkness that Jason Brown explores so well in these stories, all set around a small Maine town full of weary, complicated souls. Often Brown fixates on those just entering adulthood, an age when the twin forces of temptation and regret are most potent.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A-)

  “The narrators of Brown’s second book of stories are mostly watchers—witnesses to sordid events in the fictional town of Vaughn, Maine. Through their eyes, the familiar routines of small-town life are transmogrified into emblematic ugliness. Some of the stories deal with Maine’s twin preoccupations with boats and lumber, but the strongest anatomize the town with stunning emotional precision.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Some of these stories are so devastating that you may need, after finishing them, to set the book aside and simply be still. . . . Brown’s ability to make your heart ache is a rare gift. . . . An exceptionally beautiful and devastating book.

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Like Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, Brown tells tales that are a morbid pleasure for those fond of both schadenfreude and horror stories. The perverse thrill of Brown’s stories . . . is that they fail to trace a redemptive arc between failure and triumph, and they rarely pair kindness with gratitude. Instead, they treat human cruelty and shame, and they show that absolution should be sought, but not given.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Readers of this collection will revel in these stories set in a single Maine town. Bordering on allegory, they offer a timeless look at the ways people confront bleak circumstances. Like the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brown’s stories render the Gothic mysteries of Maine’s forests, homing in on psychological evils rather than the demented horrors of Stephen King. But as Sherwood Anderson did in Winesburg, Ohio, Brown also captures the pulse of rural life and its small, hidden disturbances.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The title of Jason Brown’s Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work promises the text as a collective explanation. Here, in this ‘linked collection’ (all tales have roots in the fictional Vaughn, Maine), we’ll find evidence of some native Northeastern immorality. . . . The devil might not demand evil as a prerequisite, but he’d surely want a people who could be swayed. Brown’s characters don’t disappoint.”

  —San Francisco Bay Guardian

  “[Brown] has a gift for crisp, angular sentences, some of which are embedded with a quiet humor. . . . What pushes the book far beyond sturdy realism, though, is its eerie grasp of the tensions between people and their assumptions (often wrong-headed) about each other. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brown is fascinated by the shunned citizen, but here the clashes are not dictated by religion so much as faulty suspicion.”

  —Time Out New York

  ALSO BY JASON BROWN

  Driving the Heart and Other Stories

  WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE

  NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK

  Stories by

  JASON BROWN

  Copyright © 2007 by Jason Brown

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  These stories were originally published in the following publications: “She” in Harper’s; “Trees” in Fish Stories; “The Lake” and “Life During Peacetime” in TriQuarterly; “Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work” in Epoch; “Dark Room” in StoryQuarterly; “River Runner” in Portland Magazine; “North” in Open City; and “Afternoon of the Sassanoa” in The Atlantic.

  Map by Kirstin Valdez Quade

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007935190

  ISBN-13: 978-1-890447-64-9

  OPEN CITY BOOKS

  270 Lafayette Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.opencity.org

  08091011121098765432

  Open City Books are published by Open City, Inc., a nonprofit corporation.

  For K. V. Q.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SHE

  TREES

  THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM

  THE LAKE

  WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK

  DARK ROOM

  A FAIR CHANCE

  RIVER RUNNER

  LIFE DURING PEACETIME

  NORTH

  AFTERNOON OF THE SASSANOA

  SHE

  Everything Natalie said seemed, to herself, to have been said better by him. He was less fond of speaking, however, than he was of hitting people in the face, which seemed a more likely source of her love to those of us who were in speech class with him. It could be, we reasoned, she was in love with the kind of things he might say if he spoke more often.

  It was easy for someone like David Dion to be casual about fate. He was still in junior high, but high school girls picked him up in their daddies’ cars and had sex with him out at the pit. No one I spoke to on a regular basis had even been to the pit. He was not anyone’s boyfriend, didn’t need to be. It was hard to guess how old he was if you didn’t already know, if he hadn’t tumbled down into your grade from the grade above when he was held back. He couldn’t be that smart, you could tell, from the way he grinned at himself, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have to be loyal to any one girl.

  Dion fought high school boys all the time; that was nothing; once he broke his fist against the face of a man in his twenties before getting his own nose smashed against the pavement. In school he sat two seats away from me in homeroom, where he spilled over his desk, stroking his thin mustache and cracking his knuckles, one handed, one finger at a time. In wood shop we were partners, making a gun rack. I made the rack, he kept it. He slouched back in his chair, his elbows on the sill, looking out the window from the corner of his eye like a prisoner. Not even the shop teacher said anything. They were related, kids said. He was related all over, mostly in the next county, where every other ice fisherman was an uncle, every other woman behind the cash register an aunt, and the rest cousins. He could walk into any store out there and borrow ten bucks; he owed everyone, even me, at least that much. I lent him one dollar at a time. He rolled the bills into joints and smoked them or sold them for two dollars, making a few bucks, he said, for later at the bar.

  When Mr. Dawson of Dawson’s Variety was told by one of his basketball players that Dion, their center, was in love with Natalie, he pictured the ridge of her muscle extending up from her knee into her track shorts. He had seen her the day before with Ron, the high school boy she went with, who was going to drop out to start in the air-conditioning business with his father so he and Natalie could get married as soon as possible. Her best friend,
Denise, whose information was no better than second hand at this point, said, Well, it wasn’t Love with Ron. Mr. Dawson overheard this. Denise was standing in his store with her friends Kristy and Francis waiting to buy a diet soda.

  “I thought,” Mr. Dawson said from behind the counter, “she was with that boy Ron.”

  “Well, she was,” Denise said, secretly pleased at being the center of attention. “It just wasn’t love,” she said, her voice rising. “Anything but. Just a thing. This is Love.”

  My friend Andy’s mother said, shaking her head while sitting at their kitchen table with a half dozen of her friends, that Natalie had bloomed too early. That’s why people thought she should stay with Ron, who was a good thing in the long run, even though he was homely, with a protruding jaw and blemishes over his cheeks, and he was older. He was one of the Catholic boys, who would wait, and by the time they were ready and married she would have lost her looks, be heavy and distended, those legs thick as posts; just when no one else wanted her he would be there with enough desire stored up to blind his true sight for a lifetime.

  One of the things Natalie loved about Dion was that he always let the other guy have the first shot. He never in his life coldcocked a guy. He let them know first, sometimes days in advance. Someone would tell the guy, and they would meet. If the guy went down, the fight was over. That was one of the things she loved about him. Dion walked away, or sometimes helped the guy to his feet. Once you get over the fear of getting hit, the same every time, he told me in wood shop, it doesn’t matter what happens.

  When Natalie’s mother first heard that her daughter was in love with Dion, she said nothing, only stared at the wall. She was one of the last to know; people were afraid to tell her at first. Finally Mrs. Dawson called up to tell her while pretending she must already know. “You mean you don’t know? Oh, my.” Maybe, Mrs. Dawson was thinking, Natalie’s mother will do something now.

  Most of Natalie’s clothes came directly from her mother’s sewing machine, but they were not cheap looking on her. Every article was made to fit every precocious curve. Her father, on disability from the Bath Iron Works, was rarely seen except at the Wharf having a few or driving around in his truck scratching his beard with his CAT hat low over his brow. He could only see out of one eye.

  Before Dion, she and Ron would walk down the hill after school, passing my house, crossing the tracks, on their way to the public library, which was where a lot of us went, strange to say, when we had nothing else to do. They walked alone, holding hands, had been going out since she was in sixth grade, he in junior high. In sixth grade people kissed on the playground, Missy D. and Kevin R. yelling at each other across the lunch room, the curses from their lips exactly the opposite of the intoxicated delight and fear on their faces, and there was even a story of David M., the short calm kid, getting a hand job at the movie theater. But no one went out, went steady, held hands in public at that age, except them. Ms. Hegel, the librarian, had no worries when they sat down to hold hands across the top of the reading table. Others had to be watched and checked on, would be up to nasty business in the stacks among the geography books. Ron and Natalie would only kiss each other for half a minute on the grass in front of the library while waiting for his mother to pick him up for dinner, and then her mother would come pick her up. Later they would talk on the phone for thirty minutes, no longer, according to his mother’s rules. His mother worried that her mother made no rules. A girl should have rules, his mother said.

  Occasionally people saw them kissing in front of the library. Mr. Wally drove by and happened to stop at the corner and look in their direction. Mr. Dawson, on his way to practice, saw them once. Her father saw them once, other kids saw them. I saw them, as I stepped out of the library door. They did not realize I was there. They sat on the steps two feet apart and strained their necks sideways to have their lips meet for this one moment, no more, before he checked to see if his mother was rounding the corner yet. Her mother was often late, and once did not arrive at all. Mr. Dawson, returning from practice, just before dusk, saw her sitting there, knees pulled up, and offered her a ride home.

  My mother must have forgotten, she said, with her hands clamped between her knees, palms out. But Mr. Dawson suspected it was more than that—everyone suspected, and he asked her if everything, honestly, everything, was all right. Everyone knew everything was not what it should be in that vinyl-sided house at the edge of a field her grandfather had once owned but father had sold off one piece at a time. Mr. Dawson, Ron’s former coach, said she could talk candidly, that she could trust him, but not even Ron had ever been inside her house. When asked this time by Mr. Dawson, she responded in the same way she always did: Everything is fine. I’m just tired is all.

  At first it was hard to believe she and Dion were together at all. No one saw them holding hands or even talking in the daylight. Denise reported seeing them kissing in the dark behind the school, and she was the first to confront Natalie about it, about Ron. Ron’s over, she said. How? Denise wanted to know. How did this happen? Natalie shrugged her shoulders.

  When she and Dion first got together, she insisted: Not in the daylight, not on Central Street by Dawson’s or Tom’s Pizza, not in his brother’s car, which he drove only at night because he didn’t have a license, even if his father’s brother was a cop and didn’t care. People saw them, though, at the fringe of the bonfire’s light out at the pit or down by the river at the landing on one of the benches out of reach of the fluorescent lights.

  At the same time Mr. Dawson heard that she was in love with Dion, he heard that Dion had quit his basketball team. He went into the back room after Denise and her friends left and leaned his forehead into his hand. They are in love, Denise had said. Nothing from her mouth had ever interested him before this statement. He tried not to think of Natalie. She ran track; she had been into the store with her mother, with Ron. Ron with acne. When he closed his eyes he saw her tanned thigh last summer as she sat on the bench outside the store, her blue shorts scrunched up above a pale line, the knob of her shoulder beneath her yellow sweater, and the curve at the corner of her mouth, which would harden into a battered smirk, he knew, by the time she was his age—by the time she was half his age.

  That afternoon the basketball team stood on the court in their practice gear, not bouncing the ball, staring off in different directions, in disbelief that Dion had quit for her. Mr. Dawson was late; he was never late. They couldn’t believe Dion was with her right now. Maybe off in his brother’s car or at his cousin’s house, where both parents worked, or off in Vaughn woods by the pond, or out by the pit waiting for it to get dark, or down by the river near the landing waiting for it to get dark. Any of them would have traded places with Dion. The game of basketball suddenly seemed pointless next to the thought of his hand on her hip, and she in her green slacks and yellow sweater burying her face in his flannel shirt, curling her fingers into his back, closing her eyes to hide, even from herself, how much she loved him.

  When Mr. Dawson arrived, the team was sitting on their practice balls and on the bench, with their heads low. They hadn’t noticed him come in, fingers splayed out in the air. The game of basketball seemed to him a cruel drama written to parody his frustration, and now he was forced to be its director.

  They had only been together for a day, but it seemed to Natalie as if they had been together forever. There seemed no need to tell him anything; with one glance she knew he knew the years they had not been together were little more than preparation for this moment. She could tell from the turn of his hand hanging out the window of his brother’s car what he was thinking about. He was thinking about her. When he looked at her she had to look away. When he thought about her, she was thinking about him. When he looked away, she looked at him; when she looked away, she could feel him looking at her. She realized now that she had always been looking for him, even though they had been in school together, sitting just a few seats away, standing across the playground from each
other, he with his friends at the corner of the school parking lot by the Dumpster, she with hers by the swing sets. She had seen him but not seen him. She had been alive but not alive, until now.

  On the second day she was not in school in the yellow linen shorts her mother had sewn together from Mrs. Nason’s old drapes. There were only a few places she could be.

  Two days later there was a teacher’s meeting after school to discuss the situation, about which no one, least of all the principal, a tall man with Baptist visions, had anything to say. What can we do? Mr. Wally pleaded, his voice gruffer than usual. This was not, in other words, a passing thing. They could not just hold their breaths. The basketball team would not get to the championship, and every day, the men knew, glancing quickly at each other, they would have to see her leaving at the end of the day, as the days got warmer toward June, in her pink flannel shorts, or the blue satin ones, and the white silk shirt or the tank tops, the red bands holding her hair back from her cheeks, walking down the hill, not with Ron, but to be with him in all the dark crannies of the town, wrapped in nothing but his old jacket, arcing her pale stomach toward the moon, her open mouth barely giving voice to her thought: Dion.

  “What about your mother?” Dion asked as they were walking by the river. “She comes to pick you up outside the library.”

  She was surprised he knew this, that he had been paying attention to her long before today. Maybe she was right about the way love worked; it had been planned all along.

  “My mother can wait,” she said and pulled him forward, down toward the trees. She leaned into him with her hands flat against his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Her lips tasted a little of spaghetti sauce. He pulled her closer and she let her body stand flat against his for a moment before pushing away. He reached for her pants, but she pushed his hand back, explaining to him that love has its natural course. She took both his hands in hers and stood very close to him without touching him. She explained that if they rushed love it would shatter like glass.