Affliction

by Russell Banks

  The family lived from the start in an inherited house, Sally’s uncle’s place, a small run-down Cape farmhouse on 125 acres of rocky overgrown scrub four miles west of the center of Lawford on the north slope of Parker Mountain. Sally and Glenn moved into the place right after they were married, ostensibly in order to take care of her sick and long-widowed childless uncle Elbourne, but in reality they moved in because they had no other place to live and Sally was already pregnant. By the time Glenn declared that the name of his firstborn son was going to be Elbourne, he had already talked the crippled increasingly senile old man into putting the house in his and Sally’s name—in exchange for payment of three years’ back taxes, Glenn explained, and for safety’s sake. When, a year later, Uncle Elbourne died in his bed in the cold urine-smelling downstairs bedroom, Glenn and Sally Whitehouse were able to believe that they had made the old man’s final days cheerful, a belief backed now by the name of their firstborn son and by their legal ownership of the house.

  From such circumspect beginnings, then, did the ramshackle old farm come eventually to be known as the White-house place, where we five Whitehouse kids were raised, where we argued and fought and suffered together and in our own gnarled fashion loved one another, the place that, finally, as soon as we were able, all five children fled—Elbourne and Charlie running to Vietnam, where they died, Lena to marriage with the Wonder Bread truck driver and obesity and charismatic Christianity and five squabbling children of her own, and I, Rolfe, whom the others regarded as the successful one, to the state university.

  Wade, the dreamer, fled the Whitehouse place first for the young tenderhearted and beautiful Lillian Pittman; and a few years later, believing he was running from his marriage, he tried to follow his brothers and got sent to Korea instead; then he fled back to Lillian; and a few years after that, believing again that he was in flight from his marriage, he arrived at his trailer by Lake Minuit, Toby’s Inn, Margie Fogg, his job with LaRiviere, his love of his daughter Jill.

  Meanwhile, our father, Glenn Whitehouse, was forced to retire early, at sixty-three, when the Littleton Coats mill was sold, and he and our mother remained out there alone in the old Cape, which we children regarded with dark suspicion and rarely visited, especially not on holidays. The old couple grew slowly silent, passing whole long days and nights without saying a word to one another, Ma knitting afghans for Lena’s children down in Revere and church bazaars here in town, Pop cutting and stacking wood for the winter, drinking steadily from midmorning until he fell asleep in his chair in front of the flickering eye of the television.

  Usually, at three or four in the morning, the cold woke him with a start, and stumbling to the stove, he shoved a chunk of wood into it as if angry at the thing. He adjusted the damper, shut off the TV and shuffled to the kitchen, where in the dark he poured himself two fingers of Canadian Club and drank it down. Then he eased his brittle body to the bed that he still shared with his wife. He did not understand what had happened, why everyone, everyone except his wife, had gone away from him; and even she, who did understand what had happened, in her own way had long ago gone away from him too: and she lay next to him cold with rage, while he burned, burned.

  But hadn’t he always burned? Isn’t that what people who knew him years ago said of him? That before he became a prematurely old man and drank only to stay drunk, Glenn Whitehouse had seemed even then to burn, and not just when he stumbled into bed, as now, and lay there awake till dawn— but all the time, day and night. He had been redheaded when younger, and red-faced, with eyes and lips like glowing coals, a man who went hatless and in his shirtsleeves when other men wrapped themselves in parkas. And when he drank, which was every few nights, even when Wade was a child and probably long before that, the man seemed to burst into flame. His normally dark low voice lifted and thinned, and suddenly his mouth filled to overflowing with words that tumbled past his large teeth into the cool night air of empty parking lots and the cabs of pickup trucks, spattering among hisses and steam and flashes of light, making his listeners laugh nervously and dance away and back again, fascinated and a little frightened. For despite his heat, Glenn Whitehouse, sober, in his manner and bearing was ordinarily a glum silent sort, a workingman who hated his job and whose cross impoverished family only served to remind him of his failings, a man who made friends with difficulty and kept them not at all.

  In those early days, before he finally lost his ability to distinguish between being sober and drunk, while our father drank, and for as long as he kept on drinking, he became brilliantly and shamelessly incoherent. The danger, the violence, came late in the evening, when he stopped drinking, so that, while he was never one of those men who got into barroom brawls and, when sober, he had not once raised a hand against his wife or children, his wife and his children nonetheless ran and hid from him when he first arrived home at night, especially on Friday nights, after he had been paid and had spent some of his pay at Toby’s Inn or on a fifth of CC at the Littleton package store with the men riding back down from the mill to Lawford together. Ma and her children would come out of hiding only when one of the children had sneaked into the kitchen and had reported back that the old man was drinking again.

  “It’s okay,” young Elbourne would say. “He’s got his bottle out, and he’s sitting at the table pretending to read the paper,” he said, and he laughed.

  Then one by one we drifted into the kitchen from the barn or the upstairs bedrooms to warm ourselves at the man’s fire—Elbourne and Charlie, Wade and Lena, and Sally and even me, barely old enough to walk, seeking our father’s heat.

  As soon as he saw us, he began to speak. “Elbourne, my boyo! Elbourne, big boy! Get yourself over here by your dear old daddy and let’s have a good look at you, eh? Big boy, what the hell have you been up to now, what the hell sort of trouble have you been getting yourself into? You love me, son? Does Big Boy love Daddy? Does he love his Pop? Sure he does.

  “You probably don’t know it, son, but I have ways of finding things out about you. You don’t realize, you poor thing, but all your teachers, you see, all of them, oh yes, first they all see me in the store or down at Toby’s or even up in Littleton, first they see me and then they come right out with it, Elbourne, my big boy bursting the seams of his jeans, so you must tell me yourself, you see, so I can go back to these funny folks, these teachers and preachers and so forth, and not seem quite so … quite so ignorant, yes, ignorant of my own child’s puny adventures.”

  He spoke rapidly, not drawing a breath, it seemed, giving no one a chance to answer his questions or respond to his declarations. “I’ve got sons, goddammit, oh my God, have I got sons! I’ve got a hell of a bunch of sons, all of them going to be big men too, right, boys? Right, Elbourne? Charlie? Wade? Rolfe? You love me, boys? Do you love your daddy? Do you love your Pop? Of course you do. Sure you do.

  “And what about you, daddy’s girl? What about you? Where have you been all my life, eh? You love your daddy, Lena? Come here, child. You love your Pop? Of course you do.”

  Lena came shyly toward him and let him lift her onto his lap, where she sat uncomfortably on his jumpy knees for a few seconds before wriggling back down as soon as the man had gone on to something else, usually his wife and our mother, whom he characterized as beautiful and wise and good. “Oh, Jesus, Sally, you are such a goddamned good person! I mean Good. Capital G. I truly mean it, the goddamned fucking truth! Sally, you are so much better than I am, I who am no good at all, you who are a good person, a truly good person, like a fucking saint. Beyond fucking com-pare. I’m sorry, excuse the language, but I mean it, and I’m sorry but there’s no other way to say it, because you are so fucking good you don’t even make me feel bad. You are. Which is about as good as anyone can be and still be human! And you are totally human, Sally. A woman human. Oh, Sally, Sally, Sally!”

  Later on, after we smaller children, Lena and I, had been put to bed, Pop either ran out of whiskey or drank so much of it that when he stood, he nearly
fell, and he permitted Ma to put him to bed in the downstairs bedroom in which old Uncle Elbourne had died and which, afterwards, they had painted and moved into themselves. The older boys and Wade, who was eleven now and stayed up as late as he wanted, watched television in the living room with Ma, who sat on the old greasy green sofa in her housecoat and slippers and ate homemade popcorn, while the boys sat on the floor and competed with one another’s smartass comments on the television program.

  Without turning around, they knew he was watching them from the doorway of the bedroom, and they went suddenly silent. All of them knew he was there and said nothing, Ma, Elbourne and Charlie, and even Wade. Although at that time Wade had never actually been hit by Pop, except of course for the usual spankings when he was little, he nonetheless had watched his older brothers being hit and heard Ma being hit late at night while the boys cowered in their beds and said not a word to one another until it was over, when they spoke rapidly of other things.

  They went on watching the television show as if the man were not standing in the bedroom doorway behind them—it was Gunsmoke, with James Arness as Matt Dillon, a tall loose-limbed man whose big lantern-jawed face comforted Wade somehow, although it was like no face he knew personally. Even so, Wade let himself dream over that large kindly strong face, wishing not that his father looked like U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon but that his father knew such a man, that’s all, had a friend whose good-natured strength would quiet him down and at the same time cheer him up a little, make his father less turbulent and unpredictable, less dangerous.

  “Shut that goddamn thing off!” Pop said. He had a crumpled pack of Old Golds in his hand and was wearing only underwear, baggy dark-green boxer shorts and a tee shirt. Behind him, the bedroom was in darkness, and the man’s small pale wiry body looked almost fragile in the dim light from the lamp on the low table next to the couch. He dropped his cigarettes, and when he bent down to pick them up, Wade saw the bald spot at the back of Pop’s head, which he usually covered by combing his straight reddish hair from the left side all the way across to the right, and Wade decided that he liked looking at Pop this way. He would never have said it, he knew no one he could say such a strange thing to, but he thought at that moment that his father grabbing at the floor for a pack of cigarettes, knobby-kneed, all pointy elbows and shoulders, flat-chested and red-faced, with his one sign of vanity exposed, was cute-looking, a man you could not help liking, even when he was sour-faced and shouting at you.

  Elbourne jumped to his feet from the floor beside the couch and snapped off the television set. “Okay, okay, for Christ’s sake,” he mumbled in a barely audible voice, and he headed for the stairs. Charlie silently followed.

  “We’ll keep it turned down,” Ma said. She sat facing the fading gray image on the screen, one hand buried in the bowl of popcorn on her lap. “Wade,” she said, “turn it back on. Just keep the sound low so your father can sleep.”

  Wade unlocked his crossed legs and got up and reached for the knob, and Pop said, “I said shut the fucking thing off. Shut. It. Off.”

  Wade thought for a second that Pop sounded like Marshal Dillon in Miss Kitty’s bar daring a drunken gunfighter to reach for his gun. The boy held his hand still, six inches from the knob.

  “Go ahead, it’s all right,” Ma said. “Just keep it low so your father can sleep.” She drew several pieces of popcorn from the bowl and pushed them into her mouth and chewed slowly.

  Pop took a step into the room and pulled a cigarette from the pack and placed it between his lips, and as he lit it, he said to Wade, “Go ahead, you little prick, don’t do what your father tells you. Do what your mother tells you.” He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke at his feet, as if he were now thinking of something else.

  Wade moved his hand a few inches closer to the knob. Where were his brothers? Why had they given up so easily?

  Ma, chewing on the popcorn, said to Wade, “Honey, turn on the show, will you?” Wade obeyed, and his mother turned around on the couch and said to his father, “Go on back to sleep, Glenn, we’ll be—” when he passed her by quickly and reached out for the boy with both hands and shoved him hard, away from the television set and back against the couch. Wade let himself fall into a sitting position beside his mother; his father snapped the television off again.

  “You little prick!” Pop yelled, his eyes narrowing, and he raised his fist over Wade’s head.

  “Don’t!” Ma cried, and the fist came down.

  There was no time to hide from the blow, no time to protect himself with his arms or even to turn away. Pop’s huge fist descended and collided with the boy’s cheekbone. Wade felt a terrible slow warmth wash thickly across his face, and then he felt nothing at all. He was lying on his side, his face slammed against the couch, which smelled like cigarette smoke and sour milk, when there came a second blow, this one low on his back, and he heard his mother shout, “Glenn! Stop!” His body was behind him somewhere and felt hot and soft and bright, as if it had burst into flame. There was nothing before his eyes but blackness, and he realized that he was burrowing his face into the couch, showing his father his backside as he dug with his paws like a terrified animal into the earth. He felt his father’s rigid hands reach under his belly like claws and yank him back, flinging him to his feet, and when he opened his eyes he saw the man standing before him with his right hand cocked in a fist, his face twisted in disgust and resignation, as if he were performing a necessary but extremely unpleasant task for a boss.

  "Glenn, stop!” Ma cried. “He didn’t do anything.” She was behind Pop, standing now but still holding the bowl of popcorn before her, as if she were his assistant and the bowl contained certain of his awful tools.

  Pop held Wade with one hand by the front of his shirt, like Matt Dillon drawing a puny terrified punk up to his broad chest, and he took his left fist, swung it out to the side, opened it and brought it swiftly back, slapping the boy’s face hard, as if with a board, then brought it back the other way, slapping him again and again, harder each time, although each time the boy felt it less, felt only the lava-like flow of heat that each blowleft behind, until he thought he would explode from the heat, would blow up like a bomb, from the face outward.

  At last the man stopped slapping him. He tossed the boy aside, onto the couch, like a bag of rags, and said, “You’re just a little prick, remember that."

  Wade looked up and saw that Pop was still smoking his cigarette. Ma had her hands on the man’s shoulders and was steering him away from the couch, back toward the bedroom door, saying to him, “Just go on back to bed now, go on, go back to bed,” she said. “You’ve done enough damage for one night. It’s over. It’s over.”

  “When I say do something, goddammit, I mean it,” Pop said over his shoulder. His voice was high and thin, almost a whine. “I really mean it. When I say do something, I mean it.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “I know.”

  Then the man was gone into the darkness of the bedroom, and the door was closed on him, and Ma was able to attend to her son’s bleeding mouth and nose, his swelling cheeks. She reached toward him, to soothe and cool the heated flesh of his face, but he shoved her hands away, wildly, as if they were serpents, and backed wide-eyed from her to the stairs behind him, where he turned and saw his older brothers waiting for him, huddled in gloom on the stairs like gargoyles.

  He moved slowly past the two, and a few minutes later, when he had undressed and climbed into his bed, they came along behind him. For a long time, our mother sat on the couch, listening to herself break apart inside, while everyone else in the house, even Wade, let pain be absorbed by sleep— cool gray, hard and dry as pumice stone, sleep.

  8

  HOME MADE COOKING. Wade passed the sign and drew the grader carefully to the side of the road at the far end of Wickham’s parking lot, where he shut off the engine, clambered down to the ground as if descending from a tree house and started to walk back toward the restaurant. The sign, custom made for Nick
Wickham in pink neon by a bearded ponytailed glassblower over in White River Junction, bugged Wade.

  Wade knew something was wrong with it, had said so to Nick the first time he saw it, but he had not been able to say what it was. It was only a few weeks before, early one morning stopping in for a cup of coffee before work, that he had first noticed the sign. Today, with the snowstorm, that morning seemed not weeks but an entire season ago, early autumn, with leaves flashing brass-flecked light in his eyes. He had driven his car into the lot and had seen Nick up on a stepladder attaching the new sign to the low roof of the restaurant.

  “That don’t look right, ” Wade had said. “It looks like it’s spelled wrong or something.”

  Nick had glared down and said, “Fuck. Wade Whitehouse, it’s people like you that keep this fucking town from prospering. You got a perpetual hair across your ass, pardon the expression. No matter what an individual does to improve things around here, you got to find fault with it.”

  “I’m not finding fault with it,” Wade had said. “It’s a goddamned good idea, putting up a neon sign and all. Good for you, good for the town. Looks real modern too, like those new restaurants they got down to Concord,” he said. “Probably wasn’t cheap, neither, was it?” he asked. “I mean, them hippie craftsmen, they can cost you an arm and a leg. You think you’re getting a dish or something, you think you’re getting something you can use, something of true value, you think. Only it turns out it’s a goddamn work of art.”

  Nick got down to the ground and folded his ladder and stepped back a ways to admire his new sign. He smacked his lips, as if he had just eaten it. “This town,” he said, “sucks.”