Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Wade sat in the car and let the sun beat down on his face and chest, let it warm and soothe him, while through his sunglasses he watched Lillian remove the old dead stems and leaves from the plastic vase next to the gravestone and replace them with the new. She walked quickly to a spigot in the ground a short distance away and returned with the flowers in water and gently set the vase down to the right of the marker, adjusting it carefully, as if making it easier for her father to admire them. Then she stood, clasping her hands together at her waist, like a woman in prayer, and looked steadily at the gravestone, as if it were her favorite portrait of her father.

  Wade thought, I wish my father was dead. Dead and buried. He savored the image: he drives out here on Sundays, just like his girlfriend, Lillian, dutiful and loving, and he stands at the foot of his father’s grave for hours at a time, contemplating the man’s confinement down there, locked inside a heavy wooden coffin, buried under six feet of dirt with a three-hundred-pound headstone on top, just to make sure.

  Wade was still young, and Elbourne and Charlie had not died yet, so he imagined death as either absence or confinement or, in some cases, both, which was what he wanted for our father, both. He wanted the furious redheaded man gone to someplace else, and he wanted him imprisoned there, locked up, manacled, bound so that he could not ball those hard fists of his and could not lash out with them, could not swing his arms, kick his feet, grab and push and toss and kick a person. The man would have to lie in his box flat on his back, arms crossed over his chest and wrapped tightly, legs bound at the ankles, and then the cover is thumped down and padlocked, and maybe a chain is wrapped around the coffin and padlocked, like Houdini’s. Then the coffin is lowered by a backhoe into the grave, which has been dug extra deep, so that you cannot see the bottom without shining a flashlight directly into it, even during the day. And then dirt gets shoved into the grave, rocks and all, and afterwards the backhoe is driven back and forth over the filled-in grave, flattening and smoothing and tamping down the dirt with the weight of the machine. Sod is placed over the raw dirt, and soon it has woven its roots into the roots of the grass surrounding the grave, making a tough green quilt to cover it. And finally Wade lowers the gravestone from the backhoe, a huge boulder dug out of the woods up behind the cemetery, a gray boulder as big as a car.

  Wade shuts off the engine of the backhoe and clambers down from his seat and comes and stands at the side of the boulder, places a hand on it as if it is the shoulder of an old friend, and he listens for the sound of movement, any kind of movement, from below, almost hoping to hear something, a crumbling of clods of dirt, the scrape of a rock against another. He hears his father squirm. The sound stops, and now all he can hear is the breeze off the valley below sweeping over the grassy meadow to the trees. A pair of blue jays call raucously in the distance to one another. A dog from the village barks, once. Then silence. Delicious silence.

  Lillian had returned to the car and sat next to him, staring straight ahead, clearly ready to leave the cemetery. She shifted restlessly in the seat but said nothing. Then Wade turned to her and pulled off the sunglasses, and in a voice that was almost a whisper, he said, “I didn’t get into any fight. It was my father. My father did this to me.”

  His legs felt like sand, and his hands were trembling. Quickly, he replaced the sunglasses; he looked through them and out over the hood of the car and held on to the steering wheel with both hands, as if he were driving at great speed. Outside the open window, the soft wind blew, and the sun was shining; the meadow grass glowed green and gold, and from the pine trees at the far side of the cemetery, the same pair of jays called.

  Lillian reached both hands toward Wade’s face, and when, without looking at her, he pulled away, she dropped her hands back to her lap and studied them for a second. She said, “I don’t … I don’t understand.” She looked at his face again. “You mean, he hit you?” She could not picture it, could not visualize any scene in which Wade, who seemed so large and male to her, so impregnable, like a stone wall, could be struck and hurt by his father, who was actually smaller than Wade and seemed old and fragile compared to him.

  Wade said, “Yes. He hit me.”

  “How could he … do that? I don’t understand, Wade.”

  “Simple. He just hit me. He does that.”

  “What … what about your mother?”

  “She doesn’t hit me.”

  “I mean, doesn’t she … stop him? Can’t she say something?”

  Wade barked a laugh. “Sure. She can say any damned thing she wants. So long as she doesn’t mind getting belted for it herself.”

  “I … I don’t understand, Wade.”

  “I know you don’t,” he said.

  She was silent for a second, and then suddenly she was weeping, tears running down her cheeks, and she felt so sorry for this boy that she thought she would break. “Oh, Wade, couldn’t you stop him? Why? Why did he do that? It’s awful,” she said, and she reached once again for him, and again he cringed and pulled away, but this time she persisted, placing one hand on his shoulder and with the fingertips of her other hand touching his cheek and then removing the sunglasses. She caught her breath at the sight of him, and said, “Oh-h!”

  He let her examine him, as if he were a sideshow freak, and said nothing. He drew his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and with trembling hand lit one and inhaled deeply. See the freak smoke a cigarette. See his hand shake. See how his lips and mouth function normally, while the rest of his face is misshapen and discolored. Read this map of pain and humiliation.

  He said quietly, “Bang, bang, bang,” and then he, too, was weeping, great wrenching sobs surging from his stomach and chest, and he brought his face forward and placed his forehead against the cool rim of the steering wheel.

  Lillian wrapped her arms around his shoulders. How she hated that man Glenn Whitehouse, who had done this awful thing to a boy. Wade was a boy to her at this moment, a child injured by his parent and betrayed and abandoned at the deepest level imaginable. She knew, too, that Wade’s pain went on and on, way beyond her imaginings, for she had never been beaten by her father or mother, and though her father may indeed have never drawn a sober breath, as everyone in town said, he had also never raised his hand, or even his voice, against anyone. Her father was weak and sweet, and he had not frightened a soul. The most alarming moments she had endured with her father came on those rare occasions when she realized that, if he was not drunk, he was thinking about getting drunk and so was not in fact present to her, did not actually see or hear her in the room. Those moments made her feel as if she did not exist and so lonely that she got dizzy and had to sit down and babble to him, make him lift his head and smile benignly at her, a big sleepy horse of a man, while she chattered on about school, about her sisters and her mother, making up events and whole conversations with neighbors, teachers, friends, madly filling with words the hole in the universe that he made with his presence, until, at last, her father rose from the kitchen table, patted her on the head and said, “I love you a whole lot, Lily, a whole lot,” and went out the door, leaving her alone in the kitchen, a speck of bright matter whirling through a dark turbulent sky. And now her father was dead, and she believed that she did not feel that pain anymore, because she missed him so.

  They sat in Wade’s car for a long time, while the sun moved across the summer sky and touched the topmost branches of the trees and the air began to cool. In a quiet dispassionate voice, Wade tried telling it to her as if it had happened to someone else. It was the only way he could tell it without crying.

  He had come home last night late, after having gone to the movies in Littleton with Lillian, where they had stopped by for a short visit with her mother and stepfather and her sisters, and when he got home and had walked into the kitchen, tired, sleepy, head still buzzing with memories of his and his girlfriend’s hot good-night kisses, he had been greeted by the sight of his mother, hair wildly streaming, in her flannel nightdress, rushing across t
he room to him. She was terrified, eyes red from crying, arms extended, and she swiftly got behind Wade, between his bulky body and the closed door, and wrapped her arms around his middle and clung to him.

  Pop sat at the kitchen table with a smile on his face that the boy found oddly calming: Nothing is wrong, it said. But Ma was sobbing hysterically, clutching him from behind, and suddenly Wade was afraid of his father’s smile. Nothing is wrong, it continued saying. We men understand how women are: hysterical, weird. She will calm down in a minute, and you will see that she is all worked up over nothing again.

  Wade turned his back on his father and held his mother to him, wrapping her in his arms and smothering her sob against his chest. “What happened?” Wade asked her. “What happened, Ma? What’s the matter?”

  He heard Pop growl, “That is none of your goddamned business, mis-ter.” He was drunk, mean drunk, dangerous as a trapped animal. Far more than the sight of his mother crazed, it was the way his father spoke, the way he emphasized the wrong words in his sentence—the first, “that,” and the last, “mis-ter,” hanging on to it, savoring its flavor—that set off Wade’s alarms and made him stiffen with fear.

  Wade glanced back over his shoulder and made sure Pop was still seated at the table: he was pouring himself a drink from the bottle of Canadian Club. Wade saw through the doorway beyond into the living room, and huddled at the bottom of the stairs at the far side of the room were his little brother Rolfe and his sister Lena in pajamas. Lena sucked her thumb ferociously, and Rolfe, without smiling, flipped a wave to his brother.

  “Come on, Ma,” Wade said, “let’s just call it a night, okay? Come on,” he said gently, turning her toward the door into the living room. “Why don’t you ease on to bed now, okay? I’ll be right here.” He heard his father snort.

  “He just starts picking on me,” Ma cried. “Picking and picking, over nothing. Nothing.” She shuffled a few steps toward the door. Wade had one arm around her tiny shoulders and held one of her hands with the other, as if inviting her onto the dance floor.

  Slowly, carefully, he moved her out of the room, while she continued to talk brokenly. “It starts with nothing, nothing … and he, he gets mad at me. It was only for supper, he was mad because the casserole … it was a nice supper, it was, but he was late, so we ate without him. You know, you were here. He was late, and the casserole got all dried out, and he was mad because we didn’t wait for him. I explained, Wade, I told him you had a movie date and all, and he was late.”

  Wade said, “I know, I know. It’s all right now.” He tried to hush her as they moved one small step at a time across the living room toward the door to the bedroom, Uncle Elbourne’s room, they still called it, after all these years, as if our mother and father had never taken true possession of it, even though they had conceived all but one of their children in that room.

  “And then when I try to argue with him … all I did was try to explain, but he just gets madder and madder and starts yelling at me for all kinds of things. About money, and you kids. Wade, he blames me for everything! Nothing I say … nothing I say, …”

  “I know, Ma,” Wade said. “It’s okay now, it’s over.” They entered the darkened bedroom, and Wade turned on the lamp on the dresser by the door and closed the door behind them. He eased her over to the bed, drew back the covers, and when she had climbed into the bed, brought the blankets back over her. She looked like a sick child, her fingers clutching at the top of the blankets, her face looking mournfully up at him: so helpless and frail, so confused, so pathetically dependent, that—though he wanted to weep for her—he was filled instead with terror: he knew that he could not help her but had to try.

  He whispered, “Did he hit you, Ma? Did Pop hit you?”

  She shook her head no, turned down her mouth and stuck out her lower lip and started crying.

  “Ma, he didn’t hit you, did he? Tell me the truth.” Her face didn’t show any evidence of having been hit, but that did not mean much, Wade knew. He could have hit her someplace where it would not show.

  She caught her breath and said in a whisper, “No. No, he hasn’t done that in a long time. He stopped … he stopped doing that. Not since that last time … with you, when you got fresh. Oh, you poor thing!” she said, and she started crying again.

  Wade said, “He hasn’t done it since then? What about the other kids? I’m not here a lot, you know.”

  “You boys are all too big now,” she said.

  “No, I mean Rolfe and Lena.” He looked back nervously at the closed door.

  She shook her head. “No. He doesn’t do that now.”

  “You’re sure?” Wade did not believe her. “What about tonight?”

  She looked up at him, and her eyes filled again. “I thought … I was afraid. I thought he was going to do it again,” she said. “That’s when you came in. He had his fist up, he was going to do it. Just because … I was all upset, he was saying terrible things, things about me. I know it’s just the alcohol in him that’s talking and I shouldn’t react, but I can’t help it, the things he says upset me so, and I start crying and answering back, and that’s what he can’t stand. Answering back. Questioning his authority. He loses his temper.”

  “What did he say?” Wade asked; then he said, “No, never mind. I don’t want to know. He’s drunk. It doesn’t matter what he said, does it?” He smiled down at her and patted her hands. “You try to sleep now. Everything’s over now. He’ll be off on some other tangent, and in a minute he’ll be hollering at me for coming in late. You watch,” Wade said, and he smiled.

  He backed away from the bed and, still facing her, turned out the light, then reached behind him for the doorknob, opened the door and stepped out, closing it carefully, quietly, as if she had already fallen asleep. He looked over at his little sister and brother and flapped the backs of both hands for them to scoot upstairs to bed. Somberly, they obeyed and were gone.

  When Wade returned to the kitchen, Pop was standing by the sink, studying the half-filled glass in his hand as if he’d spotted a crack in it. “You get an earful?” he asked Wade.

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘What do you mean?’ You know what I mean. Did you get an earful?”

  Wade stood on the other side of the table with his arms folded across his chest. He said, “Listen, Pop, I don’t care what you guys fight about, it’s your business. I just don’t want—”

  “What? You just don’t want what? Let’s hear it.” He put the glass down on the counter next to him and glared at his son. “Pissant,” he said.

  Wade took in a deep breath. “I guess I just don’t want you to ever hit her again.”

  Pop stepped forward suddenly and said, “Guess. You guess.” He moved toward the table, then around it on the right, and Wade swiftly moved around it on the left, until they had reversed positions—Wade had his back to the kitchen sink, and his father was on the other side of the table, with his back to the door.

  “She tell you I hit her?” Glenn said. “She tell you that?”

  “I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about the future. And the past doesn’t matter. That’s all,” Wade added weakly. “The future.”

  “You’re telling me? You are trying to tell me what I’m supposed to be afraid of? You think I’m afraid of you?” He showed his large teeth and made a quick move toward Wade, and when Wade jumped, he stopped and folded his arms over his chest and laughed. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “What a candy-ass.”

  Without thinking it, Wade reached behind him into the dishrack, and his hand wrapped itself, as if of its own volition, around the handle of the skillet, heavy, black, cast iron, and he lifted it free of the rack and swung it around in front of him. The sound of his heart pounded in his ears like a hammer against steel, and he heard his voice, high and thin in the distance, say to his father, “If you touch her or me, or any of us, again, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  His father quietly said, “Jesus.” He sounded like
a man who had just broken a shoelace.

  “I mean it. I’ll kill you.” He lifted the skillet in his right hand and held it out and just off his shoulder, like a Ping-Pong paddle, and he suddenly felt ridiculous.

  Without hesitation, Pop walked quickly around the table, came up to his son and punched him straight in the face, sending the boy careening back against the counter and the skillet to the floor. Grabbing him by his shirtfront, Pop hauled the boy back in front of him and punched him a second time and a third. A fourth blow caught him square on the forehead and propelled him along the counter to the corner of the room, where he stood with his hands covering his face. “Come on!” his father said, and he advanced on him again. “Come on, fight back like a man! Come on, little boy, let’s see what you’re made of!”

  Wade yanked his hands away and thrust his face open-eyed at his father and cried, “I’m not made of what you’re made of!” and Pop hit him again, slamming Wade’s head back against the wall. Wade covered his face with his hands once more, and he began to cry.

  Pop turned away in disgust. “You sure as shit ain’t,” he said, and he walked over to the door, where he turned back to Wade and said, “Next time you start telling your father what to do and what not to do, make goddamned sure you can back it up, buddy-boy.” Then he went out, slamming the door behind him.

  Wade let himself slide slowly down to the floor, where he sat with his legs straight out, his head slumped on one shoulder, his arms flopped across his lap—a marionette with its strings cut.

  It was like being asleep, he told Lillian, only he was not really sleeping. He did not know how long he remained there on the floor—hours, maybe—but at some point he heard his father’s pickup turn into the yard. He got up from the floor, wobbly-legged, and quickly made his way to the stairs, and by the time he heard his father bump his way into the kitchen, Wade was standing in the darkness in the middle of his bedroom. He listened to the man’s clumsy drunken movements below, heard him at last go into Uncle Elbourne’s room and close the door. Then, slowly, his face on fire, Wade took off his shirt and jeans and loafers and socks and got into his bed.