Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work Read online

  Pete glanced over at Jack, who was busy sizing up a big spruce.

  “I’m gonna score a dime bag when we’re done with this day. I’ll have to get a ride up to Augusta for it, though. You got wheels?”

  Pete shook his head and turned back to the tree, hoping Doug would shut up. The saw turned off (he had hit the kill switch by accident, which he often did when he wasn’t paying attention), and Doug was right there again.

  “He doesn’t know half the shit I’ve been up to, Mr. AA,” he said, looking over at his father. “Let me take her for a spin.” He grabbed the saw away from Pete, holding it in his left hand and yanking on the cord with his right—another suicidal habit. He started limbing one of the trees Jack had felled, but he left two-inch stubs and got bored halfway up the trunk and turned to the base of a standing tree. Pete started to throw the limbs into piles they could burn later. After he finished, he looked around and saw a fifty-foot hairball of a juniper smash through the upper limbs of a spruce to hang up fifteen feet over Jack’s head. Jack stopped his saw, marched over to Doug, and started cursing at the top of his lungs.

  “You,” he said, pointing his finger at Doug, “come with me.” Doug made a conspiratorial face at Pete and trundled after his father, giving an exaggerated wag to his blocky head. Jack was a hard driver but fair. Even in his cups, Pete’s mother had said, Jack had never been a beater. “That’s the one thing I know, from Phyllis herself, before she died. But when he was still drinking,” his mother had said, “he would take off for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and he never had any money with him when he came out of the woods, he wasn’t there when Doug was born, and he wasn’t there when Phyllis was sick. Everyone knows he never even so much as said happy birthday to that boy after the cancer took Phyllis. Doug lived with that awful woman, Phyllis’s sister, until Jack got sober, and by then, I dare say, it was too late. But ever since Jack got sober, he’s done everything he could.” Pete had heard people in AA talk of how Jack was always lending money to Doug, giving him cars and, in one case, his own truck, which Doug drove into a graveyard and wrapped around a power pole.

  Jack set Doug up pulling the brush together and trudged back over to Pete with his lips pulled straight and tight. He gave Pete his saw back, and they went to work limbing and bucking to log length, some to stud length, Doug piling them up. The noise of the saw was the closest thing to total silence. As he often did, Pete thought he heard a voice in the whine of the blade cutting through a trunk. He stopped to look around and remembered again what had happened.

  Pete knew that a lot of people in Vaughn said the accident was exactly what they had expected of him, even though Jen had been the one driving. When he and Jen went up to Orono together to the state university, her parents tried to get her to break up with him, saying he had been no good from the beginning. At fifteen, he was kicked off the basketball team. A kid from Coney fouled him just before a layup, and when the ref didn’t call it, Pete cuffed the kid in the side of the head. They went at it in the middle of the floor for a minute before the refs pulled them apart and threw Pete out of the game. Pete waited for the kid in the parking lot and jumped him from behind. “What kind of kid jumps someone from behind?” Coach Dawson asked his parents. Then his senior year he was caught cheating on a math test. He would have been expelled if his mother had not pressured his father, the senior math teacher, to step in. Pete failed the course but graduated anyway, and everyone knew why. When he went to AA after the accident, people said (Jen’s father said, anyway) that Pete hadn’t really changed—he only went to meetings to get everyone off his back. Jen’s father ran the branch of the Gardner Savings Bank; he could tell people the river ran north and they would believe it.

  The first time Pete went back to drinking, a week after he started AA, everyone knew about it the next day. The bartender at the Wharf had thrown him out at nine thirty at night. AA was anonymous but his drinking wasn’t (after leaving the Wharf, he had walked up and down Water Street yelling at the dark windows of the shops). The people in AA took him back and told him to keep trying. They said the same thing two weeks later when he went out again, but after the third time people stopped coming up to him at meetings. They looked away when he walked into the room; they had given up on him, all except Jack who never once asked why Pete had gone back out.

  “When you come to pick me up, if I’m not there I guess you know where I am,” Pete said to him once.

  “Fair enough,” Jack said.

  Jack kept taking Pete to meetings, and Pete kept going because he would have to move out of his parents’ house right away if he stopped—that was the agreement. His parents said he wasn’t trying hard enough; his father said Pete was trying to break his mother’s heart. Pete was trying, though. It didn’t help that his mother could barely look at him when he came home at night.

  It didn’t take long for Doug to look bored. He stretched his arms out and craned his neck, surveying the trees with the same vacant smile he had been wearing all morning. He was stoned, Pete realized. Doug shouted something at his father, who shook his head that he couldn’t hear. He shouted again and again until both Pete and Jack turned their saws off.

  “Have you seen my butts?” Doug said, still shouting.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—how the fuck would I know?”

  “Did you see them in the truck?”

  “Did I see your cigarettes in the truck? Why don’t you keep them with you?”

  “Cause I’m trying to quit.”

  Pete didn’t want to say anything, but he could see the outline of the pack in the pocket of Doug’s snowmobile suit.

  “Go down there and look yourself, and when you come back bring the extra gas and the tea.”

  Jack sat down on a stump and ran both hands over the top of his head.

  “Jesus, that boy’s gaumy,” he said after Doug had disappeared below. “I shouldna let him come. He’s saving money to move out west, he said, work on the oil rigs in Wyoming. It’s something different every time.”

  “He’s strong,” Pete said.

  “I had to say yes, when he called,” Jack said, looking up at Pete. His eyes seemed uncertain. “I had to give him another shot, despite what happened last time.”

  “What happened last time?” Pete asked, but Jack didn’t answer.

  Doug climbed back up the hill and stopped at one of the brush piles to turn the gas can upside down into the branches. The better part of five gallons soaked into the ground before Pete could get Jack to turn and look. Doug snapped off a match and tossed it into the pile. The fireball that rose into the trees knocked Doug onto his ass. He howled with pleasure and leapt to his feet.

  “You see that?” Doug yelled.

  There was still enough snow and slush around the pile to keep it from spreading, but it was burning so hot Pete could feel it on his face.

  “We don’t burn until the end of the day,” Jack said, clearly trying to restrain himself. “And we don’t waste the gas. Use newspaper.”

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “If you want to help, start histing those logs over there and don’t touch the gas and matches. You got that?” he said, and when Doug didn’t answer: “You hear me?”

  “Yes! Jesus. I don’t see why we gotta burn brush anyway.”

  “Yhteishyva,” Jack said.

  “Finnish wisdom,” Doug grumbled and went off to the row of logs Jack had left.

  “And because the owner wants it done, and the owner pays your salary. All right,” Jack said, nodding at Pete.

  The high sun shone through the hole they had cut in the sky and warmed them as if it were June. Jack and Pete took off their T-shirts. It was too early in the season yet for midges and black flies, but robins and whip-poor-wills flitted through the air. Squirrels cut paths along branches from tree to tree, moss dampened the toes of their boots and the tattered cuffs of their cutting pants. They ate while they worked, forgetting the coffee. A day like this, a forerunner of spring, mad
e the woods seem frantic with anticipation for the coming season, and Pete couldn’t keep from thinking about the kind of life he would set up for himself in Portland, where no one knew anything about him. He would find an apartment up on the east end, on Munjoy Hill, with a view of the bay. Things were still cheap up there, people said, and it was walking distance to downtown where he’d get some kind of job in a restaurant. Something to start with until he found a better position. Part of him would miss the woods, the smell of timber, running his hand along the defined grain of a juniper stump, and the crisp air filled with scorched sap. He had better things in mind, though. He would always associate Jack with Vaughn, and with Jen, and the accident. The longer he stayed in Vaughn, the more he felt time running out.

  Doug and Jack avoided each other for a couple hours until Doug pulled limbs away from a big pine Jack was still bucking, and they started getting in each other’s way. The chain caught Jack’s pants and cut open the cloth below the knee, leaving a thin red slice in the skin.

  Jack shut the saw off and motioned for Pete to come gas up. Pete filled his three-quarters full before the can went dry.

  “I thought I told you to bring up the full can of gas,” Jack said. He couldn’t speak to Doug without tension and frustration boiling in his voice.

  “That is the full can,” Doug said. “The other one’s empty.”

  “What happened to all the gas?” Jack said, and looked at the pile of scorched limbs where Doug had started the fire. “You didn’t dump that whole can onto the pile? Tell me you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “Then what happened to all the friggin’ gas?”

  Doug knitted his brow and ground his jaw.

  “I don’t know,” he whined, his face twisting like a child’s until an idea seemed to come over him. “I’ll go get some more,” he said. “That store’s just a few miles down the road. Five minutes. Faster’n you guys burn through a tank.”

  He smiled at Pete and nodded a few times, as if they had some prearranged agreement.

  Jack mulled it over for a moment, sitting on his heels and pulling his finger through the pine needles. “Arright,” he said. “Hurry up. Couple hours before dark.”

  “I need the keys.”

  Jack dug the keys out of his pocket and handed them over.

  “I ain’t got no money.”

  “Course you ain’t,” Jack said and pulled out a twenty.

  Doug took off running down the hill, and they started up the saws. Either because Doug was gone or because the air was warm or because the wood was perfect, they worked faster than they ever had before, the trees tumbling and blocking up into neat symmetrical piles, the sky opening up more with every minute. A great spruce slammed into the ground and shivered. Pete loved to see them go down. It felt like progress. Maybe this was how the people who first came here, the pioneers, felt, when everything was covered with trees. With the logs spread out, some in piles and some lying where they had fallen, it was hard to tell how many cords they had cut. Jack worked tirelessly, even frantically, the sweat running down the channels on his narrow back as if it were summer already.

  Pete was hot, too; the salt dripped down into the corners of his mouth. After a long winter of cutting in five below, it was finally spring, and for the first time since the accident, Pete felt there was a shot for him. He thought about Portland again, allowing himself to imagine the people he would meet at bars. He would have to go to bars, because there was nowhere else to meet people. He wouldn’t mention Vaughn or Jen or any of it when he got there. He would be the person he decided to be.

  He had more than just his own life to get away from. Pete’s father had been ambitious—at least that was how Pete’s religious mother described it. Obsessed, Pete would say, with becoming principal of the high school. For years he had talked of little else, encouraging Pete’s mother to befriend the wives of people on the school board and getting her to host parties for them. When the long-time principal, Mr. Cunningham, retired four years after he was supposed to, his father finally had what he knew would be his one shot. He wasn’t even interviewed, though, and in retaliation, he gave an angry speech at a school assembly. His father never seemed obviously drunk after that, but his eyes were always watery and stunned, fixing on one object in the room after another as if he might spot at any moment the door through which he would flee. Pete’s father was no doubt driven by the shame of what had happened to his own father, who was caught embezzling thousands of dollars from the American Legion Post where he had been the treasurer for years. His wife, Pete’s grandmother, had to sell the car she had bought after thirty-five years of nursing, in order to pay back her husband’s debt. All of this happened, as everything did, in full view of the whole town.

  Pete didn’t realize it had started to rain until his saw quit. The sky had turned matte gray and the woods had darkened in the shadows. Jack worked on as the rain soaked his hair, and eventually his saw quit, too. Then it started to sleet. Pete found his wet T-shirt on a pile of wood and pulled it over his head. Jack walked toward him lugging the chain saw. His face was drawn and narrow, his mouth hanging open with steam pouring out.

  “We bucked a lot of board today,” he said, grinning. He didn’t seem to grasp yet that it was sleeting, and that it was cold. “Where’s Doug?” he said, setting the saw down and scanning the woods.

  “He never came back,” Pete said as he started to shake. The rest of their clothes were in the truck, with Doug and the matches.

  “He never came back,” Jack said flatly. As always, Pete waited for what Jack would say they should do next, and normally Jack never hesitated. Now, though, he set his jaw and stared listlessly down the hill. He looked straight up into the sky and closed his eyes as the rain and sleet hit his face. By the time he finally turned to Pete again, his cheeks had turned white.

  “Jack,” Pete said.

  Jack opened his mouth, looked down the hill, and moved toward the pile of brush that had burned up with most of their gas. The fire was out, though, and the embers soaked. He turned and walked toward Pete but stopped for some reason and stepped back, as if he saw something in Pete’s face that frightened him. Pete had never seen Jack misstep in the woods, but he watched now as Jack slipped on a patch of ice and hit the ground, snapping his leg against a rock. Jack made his hands into fists and held them in front of his chest. His jaw clenched and his eyes clamped shut. It was sleeting more than raining now, the temperature dropping fast. They were soaked to the skin.

  “The coats, our clothes?” Jack asked but then seemed to remember.

  Pete tried to picture how far it was to the intersection where Doug had gone for gas. A few miles. It wasn’t far, Pete told himself. He was hazy from hours of the saw buzzing through his thoughts, and he couldn’t decide if they were really in danger or not. The sun had just been out, and it was only sleet and rain. It was almost spring, not the middle of the winter, but they might be more than a few miles from the intersection.

  Jack rolled over on his side. Dirt and sawdust funneled into the creases around his eyes and mouth.

  “It’s twisted. You walk it,” Jack said. “Down to the store at the crossing.”

  “I can’t leave you here,” Pete said.

  “You got to. We wasted too much time already.”

  The wind had swung around to the north and picked up force. On the way down the hill, Pete slipped and fell but pulled himself up by a branch. It had been an easy climb up earlier, but now he had to lower himself from tree to tree across a field of ice. It seemed to take forever, and when he reached the road, it was impossible to get his footing on the glassy surface. Maybe someone would come along, he thought, but this was a logging road and the paper company wasn’t cutting in this area anymore. There was no reason to come down this way.

  He lunged forward into a sluggish jog, his joints stiff, his whole body shaking, his arms dead weight. He couldn’t understand how he had gotten so cold so fast, and he slipped again, t
he road rising up like a fist and smacking him in the side of the head. The gray sky whirled and the ground pitched. He felt as drunk as he had been on the night of the accident, when Jen helped him out of the party and into the passenger seat. She had been drinking, too, but not as much. He passed out and didn’t wake up until the car was in a spin, and he curled his arms over his head just before he shot through the front windshield and landed in the grass. Both his arms were broken in several places, and his neck hurt. After a few minutes, he managed to roll onto his knees and stand, still drunk, to walk over to the car. The wet road shimmered in the glow of the one remaining headlight. Jen leaned against the steering wheel, her face torn and smashed. She was still breathing, he could tell, from the bubbles in the blood around her busted nose. When the police found him, he was down the road stumbling away with his broken arms flopping at his sides. Later, when they asked why he had run, he said he was going for help, but after a while, he was no longer sure. He might just have been running.

  He had no idea how long he had been on the ground by the time he pushed himself back up to his knees. He was afraid of the ground’s claim on him. In another hour, maybe less, it would be dark and even colder. His legs sliced forward in slow motion. In fits and starts, he managed a jog for a few minutes only to tumble down again. Panic thrummed in his chest. He wasn’t far away from people, but he might as well be in the middle of the north woods. The skin of his arms was pale around the scars from the injuries.

  When he finally made it up to his feet once more, he couldn’t be sure which direction led to the store. The shape of the woods didn’t help, the ice on the road showed no sign of his passing. The sleet pelted his eyelids. A white boulder looked familiar. He must have passed it already, but maybe when they first drove in. He took a step back from the boulder, which seemed to grow paler in the dimming light, and his arms and legs and shoulders broke into such a feverish shiver that the boulder shook out of his vision.

  He needed a rest, and he sat down and covered his face with his hands. The heat of a sob wouldn’t come to his eyes, as it hadn’t since he could remember; he bared his teeth, let out a low growl and then lay down on the side of the road to lean his head on the ice. For Jen’s parents, this would be final proof that everything he touched fell to pieces. No one would blame him for not getting up again. He stopped thinking and listened to the rain and sleet patter through the woods on either side of the road. The sound formed a blanket around his thoughts. He pictured Jen’s mother hearing about his death. Her eyes would close and her upper lip would curl. She would shake her head. “Well,” she would say, nothing more, not a note of pity in her voice. He had stayed away from Jen since the accident, not because of the injuries to her face, as she and everyone else probably thought, but because he had started to believe what her parents said about him.