Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Door’s locked. That’s peculiar.” He tried again, but the door did not give. He stepped to the side, cupped his hands around his face and peered through a porch window into the dark kitchen, where everything looked normal—a few dirty dishes in the sink, coffeepot on the wood stove, Merritt’s Shell Station calendar on the wall showing November.

  Margie came along beside him and looked into the room and said, “Do you think they’re okay?”

  “Of course!” he snapped. “I would’ve heard.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, for Christ’s sake!” he said, and he turned back to the door and knocked loudly on it. In silence, Margie came and stood behind him. After a few seconds, they heard the door being unlocked at last, and when it swung open, they saw Pop standing in the gloom of the room, a puzzled look on his face, as if he did not recognize his son. He wore long underwear and a pair of stained woolen trousers held up by green suspenders, and he had a pair of ancient slippers on his bare feet. His thin white hair was disheveled, and his face was unshaven and gray. He looked elderly and fragile, and he said nothing to Wade, just turned and shuffled away from the open door toward the stove, which he bent over and opened, as if to check the fire.

  “Pop?” Wade said from the doorway. “Pop, you okay?”

  The old man did not respond. He clanked the door of the cold stove closed and walked slowly to the woodbox and started to pull out a batch of old newspaper and several pieces of kindling. Wade looked at Margie and sucked his lips against his teeth, nodded for her to enter ahead of him, and the two of them came inside and closed the door.

  Silently, Pop built the fire, while Wade and Margie watched, their breath puffing out in small clouds in front of them. The kitchen was as cold as it was outdoors, but dark, and consequently it seemed colder. “Jesus, Pop, how the hell can you stand the cold, dressed like that?” The old man did not answer.

  Wade looked into the living room and saw nothing amiss; the door to the bedroom beyond, however, was shut. “Where’s Ma?” Wade asked.

  Pop struck a match on the top of the stove and lit the fire, then stood stiffly up and for the first time looked at his son and the woman with him. “Sleeping,” he said.

  Wade unzipped his coat but did not take it off. Dragging a chair from next to the table, he sat down and crossed one leg casually over the other. “This’s Margie Fogg, Pop. You remember her, don’t you?”

  Pop looked steadily at Margie for a second. “Yes. From Wickham’s,” he said. “Been a while.”

  Margie crossed the kitchen and shook the old man’s hand, but his gaze had drifted away from her and seemed focused on some point halfway into the living room beyond.

  “You want some coffee or tea?” he blurted, as if suddenly realizing that they were in the room with him. “Or a beer?”

  As if joking, Wade laughed lightly and said, “What I’d like is to know how you and Ma are doing. I haven’t seen you in town in a while, and I was wondering.” His voice was high and tight, the way it always was when he talked to his father.

  “Oh. Well, we’re all right, I guess. Your ma is fine. She’s sleeping. You want me to get her?” Pop asked.

  Wade said yes, and the old man shuffled from the room. Quickly, Margie moved close to the stove and held her hands out to it, as the fire crackled and popped through the kindling. She unzipped her down jacket, then changed her mind and zipped it back up. Wade got a chunk of heavier wood from the woodbox and tossed it into the stove and stood next to her.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Margie said nothing. She could see that Wade was frightened but knew that he did not want to say it.

  “This house. Lots of memories associated with this house. Not much has changed, I’ll tell you that. Except that the place is getting more and more decrepit. They’re too old for this house,” he said.

  Then Pop was back, alone. The bedroom door was still shut. “Where’s Ma?” Wade asked, his voice high and tight again, like a scared adolescent’s.

  “She’s coming. I told her you was here.” The old man took the coffeepot from the stove and rinsed it out at the sink, handling it clumsily, as if he were unfamiliar with its shape and parts.

  “Here, Mr. Whitehouse, let me do that,” Margie said, and she plucked the coffeepot from his gnarled hands and proceeded briskly to clean it out. Pop backed away, hesitated a minute, then brought her a can of coffee and set it next to her on the drainboard, where there was a half-empty bottle of Canadian Club.

  Time passed, and still Ma did not appear. Margie got the coffee perking, cleaned the few dishes in the sink and put four cups out on the table, while Wade smoked a cigarette and moved restlessly around the room, from the window to the door to the living room and back to the table, where he sat down for a moment before jumping up again. He and Pop did not speak to one another, but Margie filled the silence by asking the old man a few questions, and he answered her slowly and vaguely.

  “How have you been heating the house?” she inquired, as if idly curious. “Not with just this stove.”

  “No. There’s a furnace.”

  “You’re not using it today? It’s awful cold inside, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. It’s … broke, I guess. Didn’t kick in last night. There’s an electric heater in the bedroom.”

  “Maybe Wade can take a look at it,” Margie suggested. “Would that be okay? Your pipes’ll freeze. You’re lucky they’re not frozen already.”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Wade,” Margie said, “could you do that? Check the furnace? They shouldn’t be way out here with just this stove for heat.”

  Wade looked at her as if he had not heard and said, “Yeah, sure. Listen, Pop, I’m going to see if Ma’s all right,” he said suddenly, and he moved toward the door. He hated the sound of his voice. Pop raised a hand, as if to stop him, then let it fall slowly to his side, and Wade left the room.

  Wade hesitated briefly at the doorway, then crossed the living room to the bedroom, where he paused for a second and knocked lightly on the door. In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Ma? It’s Wade. Can I come in?”

  There was no answer. Margie had come to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, while behind her, Pop, his hands buried in his pockets, looked down at the stove.

  Wade slowly opened the door a few inches and saw that the room was dark. It was as cold and damp as a cave, and his breath puffed out in front of him. The window shades were pulled down, but he could make out the furniture in the room, positioned where it had always been—the sagging double bed against the far wall, the bed tables and lamps beside it, the cluttered old high-top dressers that had belonged to Uncle Elbourne, Sally’s sewing chair and table by the window. Around the floor several articles of clothing were scattered, Glenn’s shoes and dingy bathrobe, Sally’s cardigan sweater, and on the floor next to the sewing chair there were a cut-glass ashtray spilling over with butts and ashes and a brown whiskey bottle and a tumbler with about an inch of whiskey in it.

  Wade could see Ma in the bed, on the far side, where she always slept, covered with a heap of blankets. He walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at her. She lay on her side, facing away from him, and all he could make out was the outline of her body, but he knew that she was dead. He thought the words, Ma’s dead—when suddenly he heard a click and a loud whir from the floor beside him, and he leapt away, as if startled by a growling watchdog. It was the fan of a small electric heater coming on, and the spring coils began to glow like evil red grins behind the fan, and a hot wind blew at his ankles.

  Stepping carefully away from the thing, he crossed to the head of the bed, where he could see the woman clearly. Beneath a mound of blankets and afghans, she wore her wool coat over her flannel nightgown and lay curled on her side like a child, with her tiny hands in mittens fisted near her throat, as if in enraged prayer. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open slightly. H
er skin was chalk white and dry-looking, almost powdery, as if her face would crumble to the touch. Her body resembled a feather-light husk more than an actual human body, and it seemed incapable of holding up the weight of the blankets that covered her to the shoulders and wrists. “Oh, Lord,” Wade whispered. “Oh, Lord.” He came forward and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, like a small boy, facing her.

  Margie stood at the door, watching in silence, instantly comprehending. The room was icebox cold, and she could see her own breath, and she knew that the old woman had frozen to death in bed. She closed the door and walked slowly back to the kitchen, where Pop stood staring down at the stove.

  “Coffee’s perked,” he said in a low voice.

  Margie got a potholder and plucked the pot from the stove and filled a cup for herself and one for Pop. When she handed it to him, she said, “Mr. Whitehouse, when did she die?”

  Holding the steaming cup in his shaky hands, he looked up into her eyes as if confused by her question. “Die? I don’t know,” he said. “She’s dead, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t there, I was out here most of the time. It was snowing, and cold, and the furnace wouldn’t kick in.”

  “Did you check on her?”

  “Yes, I checked on her. But she was asleep. She had the electric heater in there, and I had the wood stove out here, so it wasn’t all that cold. The cold don’t bother me as much as her, though. Which is why I give her the heater.”

  “Don’t you have a telephone?” She looked around the room for one.

  “Yes. In the living room.” He pointed feebly to the door.

  “Well, why didn’t you call someone to fix the furnace? Wade or somebody?”

  “Wade,” the man said, as if it were the name of a stranger. “I thought she was all right,” he went on. “I thought till this morning she was all right. I was … I fell asleep out here, and then I woke up and went in to the bedroom, but she didn’t wake up. So I sat in there with her for a long time. Until you and Wade come by.” He drew a chair out from the table with the toe of his foot and sat down and sipped noisily at his coffee.

  “Are you sad, Mr. Whitehouse?” Margie asked.

  He looked at his coffee. “Sad. Yes. Sad. I wish, I wish it was me in there instead of her.” He put his cup down and placed his large red hands on his knees. “That’s what makes me sad. I’m the one should’ve froze to death.”

  Margie turned and walked to the sink and placed her cup and saucer on the drainboard. She reached over and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Canadian Club and a water glass and carried them back to the table and placed them next to the man. “You are right,” she said firmly. Then she left him alone in the room and went into the living room, looking for the telephone.

  16

  THE DAY OF THE FUNERAL was almost springlike: one rose in the early morning and crossed to the window, opened it and listened in vain for birdsong and scrutinized the bare trees for buds. The snowline crossed New Hampshire from west to east near Manchester, a third of the way up the state, and as the temperature rose, the line retreated northward to about Concord, where it would finally settle by midmorning over snow too deep to melt quickly.

  In the woods and on the fields on both sides of the interstate, the snow thickened, softened and compacted under the weight of its own melt, making it difficult for the deer hunters out there, the latecomers and the persistent ones who had not yet shot their deer. North of Concord and west of the Merrimack Valley, the land lifted gradually into humpbacked hills, and there were few houses and farms visible from the highway, and only occasionally now, from the church spires poking through treetops, could one infer from his car the presence of small towns, like Warner and Andover, with a north-country souvenir shop, motel and filling station huddled together at the infrequent cloverleafs and exits. It is poor and lonely but undeniably lovely country; yet in spite of its loveliness, there is an overabundance of madness and despair in those settlements and towns. So much deprivation and so much natural beauty combine in a life to make it sad and angry beyond belief to an outsider.

  As I drove north to Lawford on that unseasonably warm November morning, I reflected not so much on the fact of our mother’s death as on Wade’s having chosen to include in his report of that death the announcement of his forthcoming marriage to Margie Fogg, whom at that time I had not met. When he told me over the telephone that our mother had died and told me how she had died, I felt myself flee, and then I watched myself do it. I fled to a place of safety where I had lived, it sometimes seemed, for most of my childhood and youth and where, it had always been clear to me, Wade never went himself. If I lived for the most part with only a slight and tangential and always tentative connection to my exterior life, Wade lived almost wholly out there on his skin, with no interior space for him to retreat to, even in a crisis or at a time of emotional stress or conflict. Perhaps we were merely mirror images of each other, our apposite modes of life twinned versions of the same radical accommodation to an intolerable reality. It was as if beneath Wade’s skin there were nothing but solid rock, an entire planet solid to the core that could not be penetrated by consciousness; while beneath mine there was only empty space that one could tumble through, rolling over and over in a plummet toward a cold and distant black star. Away, away—and free, free.

  Wade called me, as usual, late at night. Even before answering the phone, I knew it was he—no one else calls me at that hour—and I was ready to listen to another chapter in one or both of his ongoing sagas, which by now, as I have said, I was more than casually interested in. There was possibly a third story that connected the first two, but mainly there was the detective story concerning the shooting of Evan Twombley, and there was the family melodrama about Wade’s custody fight with Lillian.

  But not this time. Wade was telling a different story tonight, or so it seemed then, one in which I myself was a character, for he had called to tell me that early that morning or sometime during the previous night our mother had died, and he had discovered the body when he had gone over to visit herand our father with Margie Fogg. Pop was okay but kind of out of it, he told me. Worse than usual, maybe, though no drunker than usual.

  Naturally, I wanted to know the details, and he provided them, his voice growing thinner and thinner as he talked, as if the connection were fading. He spoke very rapidly, and I could barely make out what he was telling me anyhow, but I was moving away fast, which made it worse. I was in my old free-fall, losing contact, and soon I would be in deep space, unable to hear any human voice or perceive anyone’s emotion, even my own. I heard him say something urgent and slightly, almost inappropriately, gay about his friend Margie Fogg and the old house and Pop, and then he mentioned the funeral. I heard the word, funeral, and a few sentences about our sister Lena, but his words were coming to me from a much greater distance now and rapidly, like electronic signals blipping across a screen, and then there was nothing but static, and finally not even that. Silence, except for the cold wind blowing across millions of miles of empty space.

  It was not until later—months later, actually—that I had assembled enough information to let me understand what, in his remarks about Margie and the old house and our father, Wade was trying to describe to me. That Sunday afternoon out at the house, Margie had called the fire department, and the emergency vehicle—a five-year-old rusted Dodge van outfitted with oxygen, splints, bandages and plasma and driven by Jimmy Dame, with Hector Eastman riding shotgun—had raced out from the Lawford fire station. The two told Wade and Margie to stand back and had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation first, as they were trained to do, and then quickly gave up and carried Ma out of the house on a stretcher to the van and drove off to the Littleton Hospital, where she could be legally pronounced dead. Cause of death: hypothermia. Time of death: sometime between 1 and 7 A.M., Sunday, November 2.

  After Ma’ body was out of the house, Wade slowly came back to himself. Pop had not once left his chair in the kitchen
and throughout had continued to drink whiskey, a half inch at a time, from a water glass. Margie stayed away from the old man and tried to comfort Wade, which, oddly, was not difficult. He said, “I knew the second we pulled up in the car that something was wrong, and the only thing I could think of was that Ma was dead. I don’t know why, but that was the only thing I could think of.” He and Margie were sitting side by side on the sagging green sofa in the living room, the dead eye of the television staring at them. The room was still cold, in spite of the fire in the kitchen stove, and they had their coats on.

  “It’s like I almost expected it,” he continued. “So that when I went into the bedroom and found her like that, I wasn’t surprised or shocked or anything. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

  She said yes, but sometimes people had premonitions about things like this. So, yes, she said, it was strange, but not unusual. She stroked his back in slow circles across his shoulder blades, as if he were a child, and laid her other hand tenderly on his knee, and wondered what was really going through Wade’s head. His family relations, she believed, were very different from hers. To her, Wade seemed intensely involved with his various family members, even with his father, whereas she was not. She had a younger sister she thought was a lesbian, who was in the navy and stationed in the Philippines, and her older brother managed a video rental outlet in Catamount and had a wife and seven kids who kept him too busy to participate in her life in any regular way. Since both of her parents were still alive up in Littleton, she did not really know what Wade was feeling about his mother’s death, but God, it must be awful. Her mother, whom she never saw anymore (she had Alzheimer’s and had not recognized Margie in years), lived in an old motel converted into a nursing home and financed by the state; her father, whom she dutifully visited once a month, lived alone in a dark small filthy apartment over the Knights of Columbus hall and spent a lot of time in the VA hospital in Manchester. He had been a lifelong cigarette smoker and had lost one lung to cancer and was still smoking and coughing with every third breath. Margie knew that soon one and then both of her parents would die, and she wondered what she would feel then. Abandoned? Relieved? Angry? All three, probably. Maybe that was how Wade felt today, and maybe that was why he seemed to be feeling none of them. You must feel frightened too, she reasoned, terrified—because when your parent dies, you know that, even if you squeeze out a normal three score and ten, you are next. That seemed to be what Wade was feeling most, now that she thought about it— frightened. It must get in the way of grief, that thick mix of abandonment, relief and anger, which no doubt came later, when you got used to the idea of being the next one to die.