Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (9 page)

“Last night—I thought that door on the boat led to a deck. I was just going out for some air,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “I thought this might be the right time to come around. The parents wouldn't recognize anything about me anyway.”

“Sure they would.”

“Look,” he said, “I wanted to let you know I was all right. But I also want you to do something for me. I don't want you to tell them you saw me. Mishy agreed. You don't have to lie for me. You just have to keep quiet.”

“I saw them follow you into the woods,” I said.

He shook his head.

“I thought they might push you around,” I said, “but I—”

“No,” Henry said. “No.”

I pictured how our mother would react when it became clear they wouldn't find the body. Over the last ten years she had been wearing down. I asked Henry if he couldn't just forgive them, our parents. I begged him to.

“It has nothing to do with that,” he said, and I nodded. I thought I knew what he meant. I, too, had grown into a person I didn't know or even like very much, and it was far too late to blame or forgive anyone for that.

“Just let them forget about me,” he said. “It's the best thing for everyone.”

On the way to the bus station in Augusta, he leaned down low in the passenger seat, his face tense until he found the country station on the radio. The farther upriver we drove, the more he relaxed. By the time we pulled into the terminal, he was tapping on the dash and pointing out where I should park. I realized he had been through here a few times in the last ten years, maybe even walking right by our parents' house, as he decided whether to come back or disappear forever.

He grabbed for the handle, and I asked if he couldn't just come home anyway—just put it all aside. “For her,” I said, “for Ma. Think about what this will do to her.”

“What makes you think she wants to see me like this?” he said. “She doesn't want to know who I am now. Neither of them do.”

I hesitated long enough for him to nod and take off. After several minutes sitting frozen in the car, I ran out and found him in line for the bus. I didn't know what to say, though. I couldn't be sure that he wasn't right. He must have known what I was thinking because he smiled in the way he once had.

“You can't leave,” I said.

“I already did,” he said, and boarded the bus.

He was right, he had left, when he was seventeen, and I hadn't known what to do since then. I loved my brother, and he was being swept away from me again. I watched his bus descend the hill, and I wanted to think that everything would have been different if I had only followed my first instinct years before, the better part of myself, and sped through the woods to warn him about Rod and Denny. But despite what our father had always said about General Wolfe, I didn't believe that a single event could determine the course of our lives. It seemed more likely that we were swept up in the momentum of currents that reached back farther than we could see.

A message at the house said they had all gone over to the lake, and when I arrived at the shore the beach was nearly full: Chuck Sheldon, the Sheriff; all my uncles, aunts, and cousins; and all the people who had been at my father's party, crowded the dock. People Henry had known in school lined up along the shore with many of the local schoolteachers. The police boats landed and dragged their equipment up the beach.

I stared at my mother's back, wrapped tightly in her gray cardigan. She had underestimated our father years before, and now, no doubt, Henry was underestimating her, but we had all been wrong about each other for so long that I was afraid of what the truth would do to us.

The sun lowering into the trees on the opposite shore shot a fan of orange light out over the lake, turning
the surface a deep purple. A few moments later the sun blinked below the horizon, and the lake fell under the shadow of the trees. I don't think any of us had expected it to end like this, my father's career and my brother's life. They had to end, though, everyone knew that, and I think a few of us felt relieved it was over.

My mother held her arms folded, her elbows gripped in her palms. When she saw me, she stared until I was sure she could read what I was trying to keep from her. Her eyes dimmed, and she came forward to wrap her arms around me.

“Oh Paul, I thought he was finally coming back to us,” she said as she leaned unsteadily on my shoulder, and I said nothing.

My mother and I walked down the slope to where my father stood on the beach with his hands hanging open at his sides and his chin on his chest. The three of us joined the others looking out through the slate-gray haze. No one spoke, and not a breath stirred the smooth surface of the water.

A hockey game started near shore, mostly fathers and sons and brothers in plaid jackets and blue caps, choosing sides according to size. Two boys set rocks two feet apart as a goal. It had rained and frozen over, the end of the season, and the ice was smooth.

One man raised his heavy arms and skated backward with his eyes closed, drifting out and around a rocky point where kids in the summer used a rope swing. He opened his eyes as he turned in a circle, watching the lake come into view, the gray sky above, and finally the pine forest. The chirps and scrapes of the hockey game drifted from around the corner as he skated farther out and saw a girl sitting with her stockinged knees pulled up and her mittens hoarded in her lap—Jacob Small's youngest, Katie, watching him skate. The crisp air all but swallowed a cheer—someone's goal—before it reached this skater who had just headed north when with an abrupt vanishing the ice gave way.

Underwater, his body convulsed. He thrashed once, but his gloved fist only grazed the ice before his limbs grew sluggish. He extended his hand, palm up, as he did every day at the store where he worked, waiting for the customer's money, and he saw where the ice thinned along a crack leading to the hole where he had fallen through. But it was too late for this kind of clarity. The ice, a luminous gray cap, pressed down, and he pictured Jacob Small's daughter, her small eyes watching the hole in the ice where he had vanished. He knew she would not come to the edge and reach into the water; she would not be able to without falling in herself. She ran errands to the store for her mother every other day, paying him for milk and bread, saying thank you. Otherwise he had known her only as a girl waiting for the bus with the rest, maybe standing slightly apart.

Katie Small could not stand up. For a few moments it was as if she were under water. She sat holding her breath and staring at the hole where Franklin Crawford had suddenly disappeared. She stood, ready to yell, but no one was close enough to hear her. Her new black boots crunched over the old path, breaking through the thin crust and snapping branches beneath before she was on the icy trail again slipping down the gentle slope toward the field behind the McKinley's house, where tufts of hay stood shoulder-high out of
the snow. She was only a hundred yards from the hockey game, but they couldn't see around the point.

Dennis, her brother's friend, stood in the McKinley's driveway to the side of the barn kicking at something on the ground. He looked up when Katie came into view and looked right at her as he rarely did at anyone, even the girls in his own class, two years above Katie. She stopped running without realizing she had and stared at him. She rarely spoke to him when he came over to the house to see her brother. Dennis started running toward her over the thick snow of the field, raising his knees high in the air. In moments he stood beside her, brushing his pants.

“Why aren't you down playing hockey?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said and stomped his heel into the packed trail. At night kids Dennis's age, Dennis himself, came down this trail to drink beer in the woods. In the steam of Dennis's breath, at the sight of his red palms fumbling with a handful of snow, she had forgotten Franklin.

“I gotta go,” Dennis said and ran off toward the lake, leaving her alone. Her legs wouldn't move. She saw the boys on the lake weaving in circles chasing a black dot. Mothers stood by a coffee thermos someone had brought down to the edge. Katie slipped once on the snow bank next to the road. Her mother and father were nowhere in sight; she saw her brother Jamie, out on the ice, his cheeks red and mouth gaping open, a look of abandoned excitement in his eyes as he prepared to
defend the goal. Mrs. Johnson was the first person she reached. Katie pulled on her arm, but Mrs. Johnson was yelling to her son out on the ice to put his hat back on.

“Just a minute, hon,” she said to Katie and screeched at her son again, who paid no attention.

A voice on the other side of the game rose above all the noise. “Someone has gone under the ice. Someone has gone under!” Everyone fled for shore and stumbled around in the snow on their skates as if suddenly crippled at the knees. Parents groped through the crowd for their children while a few of the men began running for their trucks and some rope. Mrs. Johnson left to find her other son while Katie stood still until her mother grabbed her arm and shook her.

“You scared me!” her mother shouted, eyes darting around as if the lake might reach out and steal Katie from the shore.

Someone shouted Franklin's name.

“Franklin Crawford,” Katie's mother said. “He lived in an apartment above Dawson's.”

Katie's father seemed to know no better. He read aloud from the
Crier
, nodding his head at what they all knew. Katie sat at the table counting the crackers she had not used in her soup as her mother opened the door to the stove. Inside, a pile of orange coals the size of eyeballs glowed brighter as cool air from the kitchen rushed in. Katie pictured Franklin on the bottom of the lake, his body green and gray, half rotten, jaw hanging
by loose threads, dark empty sockets reflecting the world to which his soul had traveled.

Franklin's aunt told the reporter from the
Crier
that she thought he had a few friends other than the townspeople and those who lived around the lake. Yet no one in town seemed willing to come forward and admit to being his friend. She said he often went off on benders in other states where no one knew him at all. It was true he once spent six months in a county jail in New York state on charges of assault. This was news to people. He had never shown signs of this potential for deceit and violence in their village. People had always assumed Franklin was slotted to inherit his aunt's house and money, though she claimed never to have intended this at all. In fact, she told the reporter, she planned to live another sixty years, at least, and by then there would be nothing left of her money or her house. She would be one hundred and thirty.

There was no sign of the body all winter. When the ice melted, state people appeared with outboard boats and divers—a big commotion—but they found nothing.

“Surely they will find him,” Mrs. Small said one morning.

Mr. Small didn't stop reading the paper. “If they dredged for him and didn't find anything, he's not down there. He probably went down river. There's a strong current down there.”

“He could be caught on something at the bottom.” Her mother spoke idly, as if about one of her crossword puzzles.

Her father added, “I don't want you children swimming in there until this business is over.” None of the children were present, however, except for Katie.

It only rained a couple times all spring. When the air grew warm in early June, kids collected by the rope swing after school, though not as many jumped because the water was low. Mostly the boys jumped. They claimed to know where the rocks were.

Dennis backed up with the rope in his hand, swinging out and up, rising and turning straight into the air. He waved as he came around to face the shore, and for a moment Katie felt her eyes lock with his before he pointed his toes and sliced into the water. The other kids on the shore paid no attention, but Katie stared at the small patch of swirling bubbles marking the spot where Dennis had gone under. She had stepped forward enough to be noticed by two girls, who stopped talking and glared at the intruder. This was the older crowd. With a crash, Dennis's arm rose out of the water followed by his head.

“Franklin's got my leg!” he screamed and went back under. The girls to Katie's right chuckled, the one leaning back in her bikini and running a red-nailed finger over the tiny hairs leading up to her belly button.

This time Dennis waved both arms in the air.

“He's dragging me under! Someone help!”

Dennis swam under water to the edge and sprang out, his smooth, narrow chest glistening as he sauntered over the roots and pine needles to sit next to the two girls. He looked right through Katie as if she wasn't there; if he had looked again she would have been gone.

She sat down in the same spot where she had seen Franklin. She was the last one to see him alive; no one knew this. How much time had passed, she wondered, between when she saw him go under and when she reached Mrs. Johnson? Ten minutes? She had moved so slowly, as if walking to school, or to take in the laundry, or waist-deep through water at the beach in the summer. It felt as if she were still moving this slowly, still arriving too late.

Dennis came over, as he did almost every day after school, and stomped upstairs to the third floor to see her brother. After Katie finished helping her mother with chores, she went up to her room to write a letter to her friend, Julie. For six months now Katie had been sad about her best friend moving away with her parents to Vermont. Katie had asked her mother if she would drive her to Julie's new house, but her mother was too busy. So was Julie's mother. Katie had been writing every afternoon since Julie left, but Julie's letters had trickled down to every three weeks. Katie didn't care; she would write Julie if Julie didn't write back at all.
She wrote her about what she was thinking and about what people were doing around the lake. According to Julie's last letter, however, Katie didn't like people very much. Katie was currently thinking about what she would say. She couldn't remember exactly what she had said in many of the previous letters. Julie had them now. Katie loved those letters so much she wanted them back. It made her sad, thinking of them out there in the state of Vermont. They weren't hers anymore. She almost wanted them back more than she wanted Julie back. Julie seemed to know this.