Affliction

by Russell Banks

  It was four years earlier, and one spring weekend our father decided to save the barn, which had been falling down for a decade, by tearing off the fallen part and rebuilding the rest with whatever timbers and boards he could salvage from the half-collapsed back loft and the old cow stalls below. The framing timbers were still for the most part unrotted, and many of the aged wide pine boards, silvery gray and bearded with splinters, were reusable, and our father’s notion of shortening the barn by thirty feet and squaring up the rest, with no expenditure except for nails, was an attractive one—even to his sons, who knew they would have to provide the free labor.

  Elbourne got out of it—he was sixteen and had a weekend job already, pumping gas for Chub Merritt, but Charlie, who was fourteen then and large for his age, had nothing better to do on a cloudy April Saturday, and Wade, though only twelve, was able to pull nails and haul boards and timbers alongside a grown man. I have no memory of the event. I was too young to help in any way and probably stayed inside the whole day.

  Wade and Charlie liked the idea: the barn had been ugly to them for years, an embarrassment, even before the roof had collapsed at the rear from the weight of the snow one particularly bad winter, and they had learned to avert their gaze from the decrepit leaning unpainted structure, to pretend that it was not sagging there in the lot between the house and the woods. Now they could look at it and imagine a crisply squared handsome old barn made tight against the weather and clean enough inside to use as a garage and workshop.

  Pop had told them at breakfast, “I figure a couple, three weekends is all, and we’ll have us a brand-new barn built out of the old one. We can store a winter’s wood in it then, and you boys want to work on some goddamned old clunker there, no problem.”

  Wade and Charlie had gone out to the barn and had started ripping off and hauling boards from the back to the front before Pop had even finished breakfast: it was rare that people in the Whitehouse family worked on something together, and each of the boys was secretly pleased by the chance to work alongside his father and brother on a project that so clearly would benefit them all. In a short while, Pop had joined them, had set up his table saw a short ways outside the barn door and was cutting the boards to size and nailing them over old gaps and holes. He was no carpenter, but it was not a difficult job, and by noon they could see a difference: most of the skeleton of the rear half of the barn had been exposed, and most of the holes in the front had been covered over.

  They broke for lunch, leftover macaroni and cheese, and the boys sat at the table so they could look over Pop’s wispy red hair and out the window behind him to the barn, and while they ate they kept glancing up to admire what they had done so far. They finished eating before Pop did and returned to work, and when he joined them he was lugging a six-pack of Schlitz, which he set on the ground next to his table saw. He popped open the first and said, “Might’s well make this enjoyable.” He said it glumly, as if he believed it was impossible to make anything enjoyable.

  The boys said nothing. They looked at each other, then resumed pulling down the boards and knocking out the bent rusted nails and hauling the boards forward and stacking them neatly a few feet from the saw, where Pop went on measuring, and trimming them and nailing them into place. A cutting breeze had come up, and the smooth gray sky had roughened and lowered somewhat. At one point, the saw stopped its whine, and Wade heard the wind hiss through the pines, reminding him of winter, and he suddenly smelled wood smoke. He looked over at the house and saw a silver ribbon of smoke unravel from the chimney and knew that Ma had started a fire in the kitchen stove, and for the first time that day he wished he were not doing what he was doing.

  Then it started to rain, a cold prickly windblown rain, and Pop hollered for the boys to come help him haul the table saw and extension cord inside the barn. They got the saw inside, and the three of them stood silently in the cold gloom and listened to the rain drum against the roof. Ancient rotted hay in the lofts overhead smelled sourly of failure and disappointment to all three of them, and Pop polished off the last of the six-pack and said, “Fuck it, let’s call it a day.”

  “Maybe it’ll stop in a few minutes,” Charlie said. Besides, he pointed out, the extension cord to the house was long enough for them to run the saw inside the barn as well as out, and a lot of the boards and some of the framing could be pulled down without going out in the rain.

  Pop rummaged through his jacket pocket and pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. The familiar smell of the cigarette relaxed Wade, and he leaned back against the wall and inhaled and wished he were old enough to carry his own cigarettes. He had smoked numerous times at school, and he liked it, liked the taste and smell, the way it made him slightly dizzy for a few seconds, then calm, and he liked the way he thought a butt dangling from his mouth made him look—like a grown man. But he knew that if he started carrying his own cigarettes around and pulling one out and smoking it at times like this, Pop would not object; he would only laugh at him.

  Above them, swallows made a quiet gurgling sound from somewhere in the mossy darkness of the rafters, and Wade remembered summer afternoons, when the hay was dry and not so ancient and sour as now, wrestling in the lofts with his older brothers, the three boys pretending they were pirates boarding a Spanish galleon, where they fought in the rigging over the division of the spoils: the jewels for Elbourne, the doubloons for Charlie, and for Wade … whatever was left over. He tried dollars, and they laughed at him for his stupidity, no dollars in those days; he tried watches and rings, and Charlie said those were jewels; and so somehow he got his pick of the women, which seemed like nothing worthwhile to him, so he refused, and before he knew why or how, he was made to walk the plank, his brothers behind him poking him with their wooden swords, as, blindfolded, he edged his way along a beam high up in the barn, felt the end of it with his toes, stopped, got shoved from behind by the point of one of the swords and was falling through space, in blackness pitching into the hay, scratchy and full of dust, hugging him like a huge pillow.

  “Charlie,” Pop said. “How much arm you got on you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know something, Charlie-boy, you been getting awful big for your britches lately. So I was wondering how much arm you got on you. Wondering if you think you can put your old man’s arm down.” He smiled playfully, and Charlie grinned.

  “Why? You want to arm wrestle?”

  “‘Why? You want to arm wrestle?’”the man mimicked the boy. “Of course I want to arm wrestle. Just to set you right on who’s still the boss here, who says when we go in and so forth. Come on,” he said, “let’s go,” and he rolled up his right sleeve.

  Charlie looked around him. “Where?”

  “Right here. On the saw.” Our father reached under the steel tabletop and cranked down the jagged eight-inch blade, made it disappear below the slot, so that the flat of the table was waist-high between him and Charlie. He leaned over and placed the point of his right elbow on the table next to the blade slot, his hand open and grasping at air.

  “Come on, let’s go,” the man said, grinning. “Keep your elbow the other side of the blade slot, though. You cross it, you lose. And keep your other hand behind your back, like I am,” he said, and he grandly swung his left hand behind him and smacked it against the small of his back. “You’re not allowed to hold on to anything for leverage.”

  “You worried, Pop?” Charlie looked over at Wade and smiled and rolled his eyes. Both boys knew that the man was going to beat him easily, which made Pop’s obsession with the rules of the game amusing: it was one of the few aspects of his character that they liked, this occasional pointless fastidiousness, which may have been all he had for a moral code. Whenever the family saw him subject himself to it, we were comforted.

  “Shit no. No, I’m not worried. I just don’t want you claiming later that I didn’t beat you fair and square. Right’s right, boy. For both of us. So come on, let’s get to it,” Pop said, and he smiled warmly int
o his son’s round face.

  Charlie rolled up his sleeve and placed his right elbow on the steel table. “Cold,” he observed, and he grabbed Pop’s hand. They were the same height, Charlie maybe an inch or two taller, but the boy was skinnier than the man, and his arm and hand were still a boy’s.

  “Wade, you give the signal,” Pop said, and Wade came around to stand at the end of the table, like an umpire. “You ready to get whipped, Charlie?” the man asked.

  “Yep.”

  Wade said, “One. Two. Three. Go.”

  The man’s arm stiffened, and the muscles and ligaments swelled, as the boy pulled on it with his own. Our father smiled and said, “You know what they call this where I come from?”

  Charlie was holding his breath and trying with all his strength to pull our father’s arm off the vertical; he could not speak: he shook his head no.

  “Twisting wrists,” the man said, calmly, as if he were talking to his son on the phone. Then he slowly twisted the boy’s hand in his and drew it a few inches toward him and smiled again. He was not only stronger than his son, he was smarter.

  But suddenly Charlie twisted back, surprising our father, and he found himself able to draw the man’s bulging arm a few inches toward his own chest, off the vertical, and then he twisted his wrist back the other way and discovered that he had leverage on the man, and instead of pulling on his arm, he was pushing it.

  Wade was thrilled, astonished, and then he was frightened, and he imagined the saw blade coming up, whirring between their elbows, rising slowly as they grunted over it, inching closer and closer to where their arms joined at the wrists. He wanted them to let go, to let their clasped hands come unglued, before they were sliced neatly apart by the saw. He took a step back from the table and tried to look away from his father and brother, but he could not move his gaze.

  Pop still smiled, but now it seemed forced, pasted onto his face. “You … think … you got … me … eh?” he said, as he fought back against the force of his son’s arm, shoulder, back and legs, for now Charlie believed that he actually might beat our father in this game, and he had thrown his entire body into it. He said nothing, kept pushing down on our father’s declining arm.

  The rain fell against the roof of the barn; the swallows chuckled in the rafters. Down below, in the center of the open space between the lofts and stalls, the two bent figures faced each other intently over a small steel table, while Wade stood at the end of the table, bearing witness.

  Wade suddenly clapped his hands together and blurted, “Come on, Charlie! Come on!”

  Our father looked over at Wade and glared, and he redoubled his effort, twisting Charlie’s wrist and hand back toward him, then quickly away, so that he was able to shift the strain on his own arm and start to pull with the full strength of his bicep and shoulder, drawing the boy’s arm slowly back to a vertical position, where once again their clasped hands were held suspended above the slot that hid the blade of the saw.

  They stayed there, each unable to move the other, the veins in their foreheads standing out, faces and arms reddening from the effort. Neither of them smiled or said a word. They grunted now and again, and their breath came in hard gasps.

  Then Charlie’s other hand, the left, wandered back toward the table, as if curious and a little stupid, and it lay on the table palm down. And when Pop saw it there, he said, “Hold it! Hold it!” He let go of Charlie’s right hand and lifted his elbow off the table and stood up straight. He brushed his hair back with both hands and said, “You cheated. It’s a default.”

  Charlie looked at his left hand in disgust. “Aw, c’mon, Pop, I could’ve just put it back. All you had to do was say. I didn’t get no advantage.”

  “Sorry, Charlie. Rules is rules, m’ boy,” Pop said, and he smiled cheerfully, turned and walked out the huge open door and peered up at the sky. “Still raining,” he called back, “and looks like it’s going to keep on. I’m going in, where it’s warm,” he said, and he hitched up his baggy pants and disappeared from view.

  The boys were silent for a moment. Charlie said, “I could have beat him, you know. I was beating him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He knows it, too. He knows I was beating him.”

  “Yeah. He does.”

  “The bastard.”

  “Yeah. The bastard.”

  They stood in the middle of the barn floor a few minutes longer, listening to the rain and the swallows and staring out the rear of the barn, which was wide open to the dark-gray sky and the meadow and pinewoods at the far side of the building, where they had ripped down all the boards. They knew that now the job would never be done, that tomorrow our father would find other things for himself to do and other chores for them, and the barn would stay the way it was, its ribs and spine exposed to the weather, the rest slowly rotting off, as rain blew in and snow fell. It would be like a huge long-dead animal come upon in the woods when the snow melts, half in the ground and half out, half bones and half flesh and fur, and when you walk up on it, you see what it is and remember what it was, and you look away.

  14

  LILLIAN WANTED TO SEE Wade’s face, but he kept as much of it as he could out of sight: he wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled down low, and as he drove he kept glancing out the window on his left and talked to her without looking at her. They were on the way to the Riverside Cemetery, their regular Sunday afternoon visit to her father’s grave, and Wade had picked her up at her aunt Alma’s, as usual, right after lunch. It was a bright sunny day with a cloudless blue sky and high dry air, and in spite of the somber occasion, Lillian had come out of her aunt’s house whistling a song from South Pacific.

  She stopped whistling as soon as she got into the car, Wade’s ten-year-old Ford sedan, which he had salvaged from the parts of three different Fords. They had all been wrecks, bought from Chub Merritt last fall when Wade was fifteen for a hundred bucks apiece and worked on at home throughout the winter and spring in what remained of the old barn behind the house. He had got his license in May but did not drive the car until late June, not until he had it running smoothly and had painted it cherry red, with his initials, WW, pin-striped onto the front doors just below the window frame, a gold monogram slanted to the right and made to look like lightning bolts.

  “Wade, what’s the matter with your face?” she asked, and tried to see.

  He turned his face to his left and said, “Nothing’s the matter.”

  She saw, however, that his cheeks were swollen and discolored; she instantly knew that behind the dark glasses his eyes were blackened. “Oh, Wade!” she cried. “You got into a fight!”

  He denied it, but she persisted. He had promised he would not drink or fight. He had promised. Many times they had decided together that these were stupid activities, drinking and fighting, fine for their stupid insensitive friends to indulge in, perhaps, but not for Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, who were superior to all that, who were finer, nobler, more intelligent than their friends. Because they had each other, they did not need anyone else; they believed that. They did not need their parents, though she did wish her father were still alive—he would have understood and admired Wade; and not their friends; and not any of their teachers at school, who were dull and hopelessly out of touch with what was important and moving to teenagers; and not her aunt Alma or Gordon LaRiviere, Wade’s new boss, or anyone else in town, either. They needed only each other, exclusively and totally, and they had each other, more or less, so they were free to ignore everyone else, which meant, among other things, that Wade did not have to drive around at night with the other boys his age drinking beer and getting into brawls in Catamount or at the Moonlight Club down in Sunapee or with summer kids from Massachusetts at the Weirs in Laconia. He had promised. He hated that stuff, he had told her, just as much as she did. It was stupid. It was brutal. It was humiliating.

  It was also dangerous and, if they were fighting over a girl, as they often were, sexual; consequently Lillian
and Wade kept track of who had fought whom over the weekend. They listened to Monday morning hallway gossip as eagerly as their classmates did, and sometimes Lillian secretly imagined Wade getting into a fight with, say, Jimmy Dame, who had told her once in the hallway that she had great tits, why didn’t she show them off more? And when she told him what Jimmy had said to her, Wade had secretly imagined slamming him up against the lockers and punching him once, twice, three times, quick hard hits to the chin that snapped Jimmy’s head back against the lockers, making a loud metallic clang every time Wade hit him.

  Lillian reached across the seat to Wade and brushed his cheek with her fingertips.

  He pulled away and said, “Don’t!”

  At the bend in the Minuit River, where the land rises gradually from the eastern bank to a high meadow, Wade turned off the road and drove along the rutted lane that leads uphill to the cemetery. The light fell in planes tinged with pink, great broad sheets of it that reflected off the dry mintgreen leaves of maples and oaks and the meadow grass shuddering in the breeze. Where the meadow bellies and the rise eases somewhat, the lane passes through a cut-stone gate into the cemetery, and Wade pulled the old Ford off to the right and parked it.

  Lillian got quickly out, taking her bouquet of daisies and Indian paintbrush with her, and strode away from the car. Wade watched her cross in front of him again, fifty feet farther into the rows of graves, and pass between the Emerson and Locke family plots, graves that went back a hundred and fifty years. Lillian did not cross the graves; she always walked along the proper paths laid between them, taking sharp rights and lefts, until she had zigzagged her way to the far corner of the cemetery and stood at last at the foot of her father’s grave. A small red-granite stone marked it: Samuel Laurence Pittman 1924-1964.