Free Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work by Jason Brown Page A

actually they were just the kind of students our father gave up on the minute he saw them.
    I walked home by the side of the road and was behind the house when Henry came out of the woods, limping slightly, holding his elbow. I thought maybe Rod and Denny had pushed him around a little, but I didn’t think for a moment that they could have beaten him up. I waved, somehow feeling that he and I would be even now for what he had said to me. He didn’t wave back, though, and the door slammed behind him. Everything was quiet. The smell of cut hay swelled in the air.
    After the fight, as my father called it, Henry wouldn’t get out of bed for a week, and he wouldn’t talk to any of us. My father gave a speech, as my mother and I listened in the hall, on how there was no shame in taking a beating. In fact, my father said, a beating like the one Henry had just taken—nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises, nothing broken—was a good thingfor a boy. It sharpened the teeth. When Henry didn’t respond to this, our father told him to buck up.
    â€œDamnit Henry, this is only the beginning of the fight for you! You think everything will come easy? You can’t let one beating knock you down. You have to get back out there. People are counting on you.”
    Our mother had a very different idea of what should be done about it: they would call Sheriff Chuck Sheldon and have the two boys arrested. She knew who they were, she said. “Those two hoodlums who drive around in that red car.” And then they would call Jerry MacDonnell, the district attorney, and press charges. When my father came out of the bedroom, pale and shaken, my mother rushed in and shut the door. No one but Henry knows what she said to him, for she wouldn’t tell us, but she never mentioned calling Chuck again. She wouldn’t even let the subject of what had happened cross our lips, and just as she predicted, Henry came down to breakfast the next morning dressed for school. He did not, however, get back out there, as our father had told him to. He left for school early to avoid walking with me and first thing broke up with Michele and quit all his activities and sports.
    That night our father lost control of himself in a way I had never seen before, screaming in Henry’s face that he didn’t even recognize his own son. He threw a tantrum, sweeping a whole shelf of books out of the bookcase and kicking them into the fire while we allstood there watching. Finally, he leaned against the mantle, his back heaving. I could see from under his armpit that his nose was dripping like a child’s, and I felt sorry for him, more sorry than I felt for Henry, who sat on the couch with a blank expression frozen on his face. Our mother squeezed her hands together.
    â€œIt’s going to work out,” she said. “We need to look forward.”
    â€œI don’t understand!” our father said, pleading.
    Michele came to the house and tried to get Henry to speak to her; the coach stopped by, along with a number of Henry’s friends. Henry stayed in his room reading books he had borrowed from our father’s shelf, books on war, though not for school, my parents soon discovered: he would drop from being second in the class to below the top 20 percent—the cutoff point, the guidance counselor said, for out-of-state colleges.
    After he came home from serving overseas, Henry stopped speaking to our parents, who blamed it on some kind of shell shock, as my mother called it, though they both knew Henry hadn’t seen any combat. He and his unit had patrolled a fence in Korea.
    In the ten years after the army, he would call me, somehow finding me wherever I was at the time, from wherever he was at the time—Boulder, Denver, San Jose—and tell me about the latest place he had just traveled to. He had a long list of places he wanted to visit, he said. I never found out what he did for a living, but he seemed