An arsonist's guide to writers' homes in New England: a novel - By Brock Clarke Page 0,10

stop, and I had to send the kids to stay with Anne Marie's parents while she worked it out. But even Anne Marie seemed happy enough after a while, and if prison was my first not entirely unpleasant exile from the world, then this was my second, and not once was I recognized as the man who burned down the Emily Dickinson House, et cetera, and not once did I hear that voice, the voice inside me that asked, What else? What else? Not once, that is, until the man whose parents I accidentally killed in the Emily Dickinson House fire appeared at my front door one day, and then the voice returned and then I moved back in with my parents and reread those letters, and then the bond analysts showed up and started giving me a God-and-country hard time, and then people (not me! not me!) started setting fire to writers' homes all over New England, and that's when all the trouble started.

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First, there was the man, the son whose mother (she was one of the Emily Dickinson House tour guides) and father happened, unknown to me, to be sharing a private, after-hours moment on Emily Dickinson's bed when I accidentally burned the house down and killed them those many years before. He showed up in early November, on a Saturday, which was about right, since nothing ever happened in Camelot during the week. During the week, everyone worked and went to bed early and got up early and you couldn't clip your toenails on your front porch for fear of bothering someone with the noise.

Weekends were different, our chance to prove that we could pour gas out of a spout and into a hole and pull a cord and make noise and then cut some grass. I'd just finished cutting mine. There wasn't much to say about it. It was short, and I'd cut it with a mower, the kind of mower all my neighbors used: one of those self-powered, space-age things where you stood on a platform and steered with levers at the handles. The mower moved so fast that it seemed to hover and basically did all the work for you. But still, I managed to work up a sweat while riding it, which caused me to take off my shirt, which got me in some trouble with my neighbors, my male neighbors (no women mowed lawns in Camelot; in this we were like the Muslims), who all wore big, padded recording-studio-type headphones while they mowed, and also huge, floppy hats and safety goggles and heavy-duty gardening gloves and long-sleeved oxford shirts and paint-spattered khaki pants tucked into the top of work boots. Except for tiny swatches of upper cheek and neck, there was no skin visible on them at all. My barechestedness ran counter to some unwritten subdivision behavioral code and had earned me some hard, disgusted stares from my neighbors. Every Saturday I reminded myself to remain fully clothed, but once I started sweating I could never remember to keep my shirt on and in this way fell into my own little unintentional piece of rebellion. I was like the patriot who kept forgetting not to dump the king's tea into the harbor. This is not to say that because I sweated and took off my shirt and unintentionally rebelled, I was better than my neighbors. I wasn't. I can't remember any of their names, but they were all good people. I hope they're well.

I was sitting on my front porch, which was really just a concrete slab that we called a porch because we liked to sit on it. I'd just turned off my mower, the roar of it still in my ears, and so I didn't hear the son of my accidental victims drive up, park his jeep on the street, then walk up the driveway, didn't know he was there at all until he was right in front of me. His name was Thomas, Thomas Coleman, although I didn't know this yet. I was looking down in thought when he came up to where I was sitting, and so I saw his feet before I saw the rest of him. He was wearing hiking boots, the waterproof kind.

"Are you Sam Pulsifer?" he said. At the sound of the voice, a stillborn lump caught in my throat, because I thought I knew who this voice and those feet belonged to. I was sure it was a reporter. I hadn't spoken to