Affliction

by Russell Banks

  This has been the case since the autumn of the year of the first appearance of human beings in the region—late-arriving bands of Pleistocene hunters drifting south and east all the way from Asia behind the herds of elk and woolly mammoths—and it remains true today, so that, not surprisingly, the lives of the people residing south of that line from the beginning seem to have reflected the generosity and temperance of the climate there, while those who have lived north of it have reflected in their daily lives the astringency, the sheer malignity and the dull extreme of the climate there. It is the difference, let us say, between China and Mongolia, or between England and Scotland, Michigan and Manitoba: people adapt, or they quickly die. Or they move.

  Thus, when in autumn in the town of Lawford the first ice and snow of winter arrive—usually in early November, sometimes even earlier—the natives, whether Pleistocene or modern, do not look up in surprise and dismay and hurry to prepare their houses for the coming season. No, they barely notice winter’s arrival. They barely noticed its absence in the first place. The ice in the deeper lakes did not break up until late April, and there were gray patches of old snow in the deep woods and on the north slopes well into May. The nights were not reliably free of frost until June, and then it returned by late August, when leaves of maple trees and sumacs near water turned red and birches turned gold. Every day long black V’s of Canada geese flew over, and soon the leaves of the oaks and hemlocks, elm, hawthorn and birch, were turned out in brilliant colors—deep red, flame yellow, pink, purple and scarlet. By the first week of October, whole long gray days passed without the temperature’s rising above freezing, while the leaves, their colors dulled by the cold, tumbled from the trees and swirled in the autumn winds, and stalks and reeds clattered in the icy clasp of the marshes and ponds, and animals drew into their caves for a six months’ sleep.

  When the snows do come, it is as natural and as inescapable and in some sense as welcome as gravity. Starting long after midnight, a clear starry sky with a sickle of moon in the southeast fills slowly with low dark gray clouds, until the sky is covered from horizon to horizon and all the light seems to have been wiped from the valley, every dot of it, every pale reflection, every memory. The first scattered flakes drift almost accidentally down, as if spilled while carted by a high wind to somewhere east of here, to the Maritimes or New Brunswick: a single hard dry flake, then several more, then a hundred, a thousand, too many to be seen as separate from one another anymore: until at last the snow is falling over the valley and the hills and lakes like a lacy soft eiderdown billowing out and settling over the entire region, covering the trees, the rocks and ridges, the old stone walls, the fields and meadows behind the houses in town and out along Route 29, the roofs of the houses, barns and trailers, the tops of cars and trucks, the roads, lanes, driveways and parking lots: covering and transforming everything in the last few moments of the night, so that when at dawn the day and the month truly begin, winter too will have arrived, returned, seeming never to have left.

  The burgundy 4x4 pickup driven by Jack Hewitt left Route 29 at Parker Mountain Road and lunged down to the narrow wooden bridge, where it crossed the Minuit River and headed uphill, through the woods and past occasional trailers, half-finished ranch houses and now and then, set in among the trees, a tar-paper-covered shack with a rusty tin stovepipe sticking out of the roof, a gray string of wood smoke disappearing quickly into the falling snow. The truck headed toward Saddleback, moving fast along the rough unpaved road, blowing high fantails of snow behind and kicking up loose stones and dirt with its huge knobby tires.

  It rumbled past the Whitehouse place, the house where Wade and I grew up and where our parents still lived, crossed Saddleback and continued on to Parker Mountain. Seated next to Jack was a man named Evan Twombley. He was a large burly man dressed in brand-new scarlet wool pants, jacket and cap. He smoked a cigarette that he kept jammed into the right side of his mouth while he talked out of the left. It was a very busy man’s way of talking and smoking at the same time, and it had the desired effect: even when he spoke idly, he was listened to.

  Although one could not be sure Jack was listening. His head was canted slightly to the side, a characteristic pose, and his lips were pursed, as if he were silently whistling and was listening to the tune in his head instead of to Twombley, who, after all, was only expressing slight anxiety about the weather and its effect on the deer hunting, and this after Jack had already assured him that it would have no effect whatsoever, except to make it easier for the hunters.

  Twombley seemed unable to accept Jack’s reassurances. “I mean, it’s not enough snow, and won’t be for a while. Not for tracking the bastards,” Twombley said. “There’s no advantage there, kid. And it’ll be hard, you know, to see very well in the damned stuff.”

  Three rifles, two with scopes, hung in the rack against the rear window of the cab, and all three swung and clunked against the rack in tandem as the truck dipped into a gully and out. The incline got steeper, and Jack double-clutched and shifted down, and the truck leapt ahead.

  Jack said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Twombley, I know where those suckers are. Rain or shine, snow or no snow, I know where they hide. I know deer, Mr. Twombley, and this particular piece of land. We’ll kill us a buck today. Guaranteed. Before ten.” He laughed lightly.

  “Guaranteed, eh?”

  “Yep,” he said. “Guaranteed. And it’s because of the snow. We’ll be still-hunting, see, instead of stand-hunting. This here is your best snow for tracking, actually, real powdery and dry, couple inches deep. You don’t want no foot-deep wet stuff. Right about now the does are holing up for the day in brush piles, and the bucks’re right behind them. And here we come right behind the bucks. I guarantee,” he said, “this gun gets fired before ten o’clock.”

  Jack crooked his thumb at the rifle hung from the bottom hook of the rack behind him. “Whether it kills a deer or not is more or less up to you, of course. I can’t guarantee that much. But I’ll put you inside thirty, thirty-five yards of a buck the first four hours of the season. That’s what you’re paying me for, ain’t it?”

  “Damn straight,” Twombley said. He yanked the cigarette from his mouth and rubbed it out in the ashtray. The windshield wipers clacked back and forth, and large beads of melted snow skittered like water bugs across the wide flat hood of the truck.

  At first glance and often for a long time after you got to know him, Evan Twombley gave the impression of being a physically and personally powerful man, and most people tried to give him whatever he seemed to want from them. Often, later on, they realized that they had been foolishly intimidated, but by then it was too late and they would have other reasons for continuing to give him what he wanted. He was one of those American Irishmen who find themselves in their mid-fifties with a body that, in its bloat and thickened coarsened face, looks large, bulky, formidable, when in fact it is a small body, even delicate, with fine hands, narrow shoulders and hips, small precise ears, eyes, mouth. Forty years of heavy consumption of whiskey and beefsteak can turn a dancer’s body and a musician’s face into those of a venal politician. That other, much younger man, the dancer, the musician, was nonetheless still there and was wide awake somewhere inside and making trouble for Twombley now by questioning the venal politician’s right to bully people with his loud voice, by mocking his swagger and brag, his claims of physical fearlessness, and finally making the loud burly red-faced man often come off as hesitant, conflicted, vulnerable, even guilty. In the end, although one neared Twombley feeling intimidated by him and wary of and possibly hostile toward him, up close one quickly discovered a fellow feeling for him and a genuine sympathy, sometimes a protectiveness.

  Twombley himself, of course, knew nothing of this transition; he only perceived its effects, the most useful being that it gave him power over people: at first, people were afraid of him; then they warmed to him. In human relations, this is a sequence that invites dominance and creates loyalty. And in Twombley’s part
icular line of work—which, after a long careful climb from the local organizing level, had come to be that of the president of the New England Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, AFL-CIO—dominance and loyalty were extremely useful, not to say essential, for without them he would have been forced back long ago to working with the wrenches in the trenches.

  The truck entered a flat S curve in the road, and the rear wheels broke loose, and the vehicle fishtailed from one side of the road to the other; Jack hit the accelerator and nonchalantly flipped the front wheels in the direction of the slide and anchored the truck to the road again.

  “You done much shooting with that rifle of yours yet?” Jack reached behind him with his right hand and patted the stock of Twombley’s gun.

  “Some,” Twombley said, and lit another cigarette and looked out the window at the spruce trees and thatches of cedar flashing past.

  Jack smiled. He knew that Twombley had not fired the rifle at all. It was a lovely thing, not a scratch or blemish on it, a Winchester M-94 pump-action, a .30/30 with a custom-carved stock. It must have set Twombley back two thousand bucks. Ah, sweet Jesus, these rich old guys and their toys! Jack seemed almost to sigh, but he ended by pursing his lips again as if to whistle. Men like Twombley, over-the-hill fat cats, cannot ever truly appreciate the beauty of things that they can afford to buy. And the men who can appreciate a gun like Twombley’s, guys like Jack Hewitt, say, who can remember the feel of a particular gun in their hands for years afterwards, as if it were a marvelous woman they slept with once, will never be able to own it.

  Next to Twombley’s gun, Jack’s new Browning looked utilitarian, ordinary, merely adequate. Yet to buy it he had been obliged to borrow money from the bank, had lied and said that the money was for his mother’s medical bills, which was true, in a sense, because he was still paying for her stay in the hospital last summer and the old man was still out of work, and if Jack did not take care of his parents, who would? He had bought the gun, and now he had yet another monthly payment to make. In addition to the $48 a month for the gun, he sent out $420 a month for his truck, $52 a month for insurance on the truck, $35 a month for the engagement ring he bought last May for Hettie, $50 a month to Concord Hospital for his mother, and $200 a month to his father directly, for household expenses and food, which was, after all, the least he could do, since, as his father had explained one drunken night—shortly after Jack went and ruined his arm and quit playing professional ball for the Red Sox farm team in New Britain, Connecticut, and came home to Lawford and parked his ass back in his room the same week the old man got laid off at the mill—there was just no way the old man was going to be able to support him. In fact, if Jack wanted to live with his parents, then he would have to support them. So that now, only a few years out of high school, where, because of baseball and his intelligent good looks, he had been one of the most promising Lawford kids ever to graduate from Barrington Regional, Jack was already mired in debt, a man who worked overtime to make enough money to pay interest on borrowed money, and he knew it, and that made a gun like Twombley’s fancy Winchester all the more attractive to him. He practically deserved Twombley’s gun. As a reward, for Christ’s sake!

  Twombley shifted in his seat and rubbed his red nose with a knuckle. “You get me close to a big buck by ten o’clock, kid, there’s another hundred bucks in it.”

  Jack nodded and offered a faint smile. A few seconds later he said, “You might not kill it.”

  “You think so.”

  “And I expect you’ll have to kill it, for me to get my extra hundred bucks, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t guarantee that, you know.”

  “What?”

  “That you won’t gut-shoot the deer, say, or cripple him up for somebody else to find and tag a mile downriver from where you shot him. Or maybe you’ll miss him altogether. Or just spook him before you even get a shot off. It happens. Happens all the time. Happens especially with a new gun. You want a dead deer, not a live one.”

  Twombley crossed his arms over his chest. “You take care of your end, kid, I’ll take care of mine.”

  “Yep.”

  “You understand what I’m saying? Like you say, I want a dead deer, not a live one.”

  “Yeah. I get it.” Jack was not stupid. He knew what Twombley was asking him to do. Shoot the deer for him, if necessary. Discreetly. “Okay,” he said in a voice just above a whisper. “No sweat. You’ll get yourself a deer, and you’ll get him dead. One way or the other. And you’ll have him by coffee time.”

  “And you’ll get your extra hundred bucks.”

  “Wonderful,” Jack said. “Wonderful.”

  The truck crested the hill, where the trees had thinned and diminished in size, scrawny balsams, mostly, and low reddish furze scattered around boulders. Beyond the boulders was a shallow high-country swamp, a muskeg, covered with ice. Barely visible through the falling snow, at the high end of a short rise, was a log cabin with a low overhanging shake roof set in under a stand of drooping snow-covered blue spruce and red pine.

  Jack slowed the truck and drew it over to the side of the road. “That there’s LaRiviere’s cabin he told you about,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the small one-room structure. “We can start a fire in the wood stove now, if you want, so’s it’ll be nice and warm when we come in. Or we can head out for that monster buck of yours right now. Up to you.”

  “You’re a cocky sonofabitch,” Twombley said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You only got two and a half hours till ten, and you’re willing to waste time building a fire.”

  “Just trying to please,” Jack said.

  “Let’s get going, then. Forget the fire. I want to kill a ‘monster buck’ first,” Twombley said with a derisive laugh. “Then I’ll worry about getting warm.”

  He swung open the door and stepped down to the ground and slammed the door behind him, while Jack stepped out on the driver’s side and started taking out the guns and gear.

  “C’mon, kid, let’s haul ass,” Twombley said, and he walked off the road a short ways and stood, hands on hips, facing downhill along an old lumber trail that ran past the frozen muskeg several hundred yards to where it intercepted a rocky dry riverbed pitching through brush off to the right.

  For a second Jack stopped gathering up the guns and his daypack and several pieces of loose equipment, and he glared at Evan Twombley’s broad back as if the man were his mortal enemy. Then his gaze dropped, and he went quickly back to the task at hand.

  At dawn, just before the pale smear of first light, the deer had already begun to move, and they moved generally away from the roads and fields along narrow twisting game trails into the deeper woods. In twos and threes and even fours—a buck and one or two does and their fawns, though just as often a buck traveling alone—the deer fled rapidly away from the sound and sight of dark prowling cars and trucks that ground up hills and down, that bumped and lurched as far into the woods as vehicles could go, where, with headlights slashing the predawn darkness, the cars and trucks stopped and let the hunters out, went back and on to another place and parked and let more hunters out, until soon the woods all over this part of the state were swarming with men carrying guns.

  As the snow fell, the men talked and sometimes called to one another across brooks and among the oak trees and brush. They laughed and smoked cigarettes and pipes while they walked in pairs along old railroad beds or, alone, set up hidden stands in fallen brush along ridges that gave a long clear view of a meadow and a copse of birch beyond or, ten feet up in an oak tree, perched in a Y in the branches, rubbed hands against the cold, poured coffee and brandy from a thermos into a plastic cup. It was as if, behind every tree, along every ridge, beside every stream, there was a man looking down the blue barrel of his gun, a chilled impatient man waiting for a deer to move into his sight. He saw it walk delicately, warily, through the curtain of falling snow. He saw it step from behind a fallen tree. He saw it e
merge from a pile of dead brush into full view, where it posed for one second in the crosshairs, a full-grown massive male deer holding itself absolutely still, ears like dark velvety leaves, white flag of a tail switching, large liquid eyes brushed by long lashes and soaking in as much visual detail as can register in the animal’s brain, wet nose searching the breeze for scent that is not tree bark, pine needle, resin, leaf, water, snow, hoof, urine, fur or rut. Then, all across the hills and valleys, up and down the gullies and over the boulder-strewn ridges and cliffs, from up in trees, hillsides, overlooks, bridges, even from the backs of pickup trucks, out of brush piles, over stone walls, behind ancient elms—throughout the hundreds of square miles of New Hampshire hill-country woods—trigger fingers contract one eighth of an inch and squeeze. There is a roar of gunfire, a second, a third, then wave after wave of killing noise, over and over, sweeping across the valleys and up the hills. Slugs, pellets, balls made of aluminum, lead, steel, rip into the body of the deer, crash through bone, penetrate and smash organs, rend muscle and sinew. Blood splashes into the air, across tree bark, stone, onto smooth white blankets of snow, where scarlet fades swiftly to pink. Black tongue lolls over blooded teeth, as if the mouth were a carnivore’s; huge brown eyes roll back, glassed over, opaque and dry; blood trickles from carbon-black nostrils, shit spits steaming into the snow; urine, entrails, blood, mucus spill from the animal’s body: as heavy-booted hunters rush across the frozen snow-covered ground to claim the kill.