Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “I guess I’m the one who has to take care of things now,” Wade said. “Being the oldest and all.”

  “What things?”

  “The funeral. Calling folks, Rolfe and Lena and so on. And Pop. I’ve got to do something about Pop,” he said, and he turned in the couch and peered back into the kitchen at the old man, who seemed lost in his thoughts or, without thoughts, was merely counting out the seconds until he felt it was appropriate for him to take another sip of whiskey. Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three …

  “After us kids left home and he had to retire—from the drinking, I suppose—after that he was Ma’s problem. Now … well, now I guess he’s mine.”

  “He’s a problem, all right,” Margie said.

  Wade lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I think,” he said, his brow furrowed, as he stared thoughtfully at the burning cigarette in his hand, “I think maybe I ought to move out here to the house. Put my trailer up for sale. I’m going to need some money I don’t have, for that custody suit business, you know. And there’s no way Pop can live out here alone.”

  Margie said, “He’s not easy, Wade. He’s especially never been easy for you.”

  “He’s old. And Jesus, look at him, he’s out of it. But give him his bottle, put him by the fire or in front of the television, and he’s okay. I can move in upstairs, fix the place up a little, clean and paint the place, get the furnace working, and so forth. You know. Make it nice.” The picture in his head was filling out quickly with details: he saw the house renovated, almost elegant in its New England farmhouse simplicity, with his father peacefully semiconscious and more or less confined to Uncle Elbourne’s room and the kitchen and living room, and Wade free to do with the rest of the house whatever he pleased, as if it were his own. Rolfe surely would not object, and Lena would be relieved to hear it. One of the upstairs bedrooms could be decorated nicely for Jill, and he could share the other with Margie.

  “What do you think?” he asked her.

  “About what?”

  “About living here with me.”

  “With you, maybe. With you and your father, though?”

  “He’ll be all right,” Wade said firmly. “I promise you. I can control him. He’s like a child now, a kid who’s lost his mother, almost.”

  “Are you talking about getting married, Wade? You and me? Like you were last night?”

  “Well … yeah. Yes, I guess I am.”

  Margie got up from the sofa and crossed the room to the doorway to the kitchen, where she stood looking at the old man. Slowly, he turned his head and looked back at her. He was like an old bony abandoned dog—skinny neck, dark sad eyes, slack mouth and slumped shoulders.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Whitehouse?” she said.

  His eyes filled with tears, and he opened his mouth to answer but was unable to make words come. He moved his head from side to side, like a gate, and lifted his open hands to the woman as if asking for coins. She walked forward and embraced him and stroked his tousled white hair. “I know, I know, you poor thing,” she said. “It’s hard. It’s very hard.”

  Then suddenly Wade was beside her, and he wrapped his large arms around both of them, enclosing his father and the woman he would soon marry. He held the old man he would take care of from now on and the woman who would be his helpmate and partner in life, the woman whose presence in his life, in this old house way out in the woods, would help make Wade’s life a proper father’s life, one he could happily bring his daughter home to at last.

  By the time I arrived at the house, three days later, Wade and Margie had already moved in. It was eleven in the morning, and the funeral was scheduled for one in the afternoon—at the First Congregational Church, Reverend Howard Doughty officiating.

  Wade had been a busy fellow, I later learned. Sunday night, he had fixed the furnace and stayed over at the house with Pop, sleeping on the couch. Before going to bed, while Pop sat and drank by the fire in the kitchen, Wade went through our parents’ scattered papers and dug up, among other useful things, the documentation that he needed to make the insurance claim and finance the funeral, burial and gravestone. The next morning, he arranged all three. He notified the Littleton Register and the remaining members of the family—Lena and Clyde down in Massachusetts and Lillian and, of course, Jill, although he asked Lillian to “break the news to her,” as he put it, when she got home from school. Then he telephoned the dozen or so people in Lawford whom Ma would have wanted at her funeral, leaving it to them and to the newspaper to pass the word on to the outer circle of friends and acquaintances.

  Though Wade managed to direct traffic at the school Monday morning, he did not go in to work—when he called to explain, LaRiviere was surprisingly understanding and sympathetic, Wade thought. By noon, he had put his trailer up for sale, and that afternoon he carted his and Margie’s clothes and personal belongings out to the house and stashed them in the larger of the two upstairs bedrooms. When Margie arrived, after work at Wickham’s, the two of them cleaned the house thoroughly. Ma’s effects—her clothes and personal papers and photographs and her knitting tools and yarns; there was not much else—they boxed and stored in the attic.

  Tuesday morning, he directed traffic at the school and then drove to work as usual, and when he walked into the shop, LaRiviere told Wade, in front of Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame, that he could forget about well drilling for the rest of the winter, Jack could handle the work they had left till the ground froze, while Wade worked inside. “Learning the business from the business end,” LaRiviere said, with a beefy arm slung over Wade’s shoulder. Wade slipped from under the arm and stepped away, suspicious: this was a very different tone from the one Wade had long ago grown used to.

  Jack glowered and lunged into the cold to finish the well they had started the previous week in Catamount, and Wade, as instructed, pulled off his coat and, clipboard in hand, started to make an inventory of all of LaRiviere’s material stock, equipment and tools. “I want to know my assets, Wade,” LaRiviere said in a confiding tone, “and I want you to know them too. I want to know what we need for a year’s work and don’t have on hand, buddy, and then I want you to sit yourself down and order it.” When Wade asked him if he could have Wednesday off, for the funeral, LaRiviere told him not to worry about it, and then added that from now on Wade was going to be paid a salary, instead of by the hour, same as if he were working a forty-hour week, whether he put in forty hours or not. And notto worry, buddy, about being paid for Monday and Wednesday this week: it was done. Wade almost heard him say “partner.”

  He wants something from me, Wade thought, and I won’t find out what it is unless I smile and go along with him.

  During his lunch break, Wade mailed his divorce decree and a check for five hundred dollars, borrowed the day before from Pop’s modest savings account, to Attorney Hand, and afterwards, by telephone from Wickham’s, he informed Hand that he would soon be getting married and was moving with his fiancée into his father’s “farm.” He also mentioned, as if in passing, his discovery that Lillian was having an extramarital love affair with Hand’s colleague Jackson Cotter, and Attorney Hand said that was a very interesting aspect to the case. “Tantalizing,” he said, and Wade could almost hear him smack his lips, the way he had almost heard LaRiviere say “partner.”

  By Wednesday, the day of the funeral, so much had happened in Wade’s life that it seemed Ma had been dead for months.

  Out at the house, the freshly plowed driveway and a specially cleared parking area by the side porch were full of cars, as if a celebration were going on. I parked my Volvo behind what I assumed was the minister’s car—a maroon station wagon with REV on the vanity plates—and got out and stretched and smelled the silvery wood smoke drifting from the kitchen chimney. I heard the sounds of distant gunfire crackle erratically against the wind in the pines, and I suddenly remembered that the forests and fields just beyond the house and in the hills and valleys for miles around were still dangerously populated by
deer hunters.

  There were a few cars and a blue pickup truck, LaRiviere’s, that I did not recognize and several that I knew— Wade’s Ford with the police bubble on top and Pop’s old pickup, still covered with snow and parked in the deep drift at the side of the house, as if stuck there permanently. I spotted the VW microbus that belonged to Lena and her husband, their fifteen-year-old recidivist hippie van plastered with born-again Christian bumper stickers instead of peace signs. The emblem of the Rapture—a black arrow shaped like a fishhook descending in a silver field against a vertical arrow ascending—and the cryptic question “Are You Ready for the Rapture?” and “Warning: Driver of This Vehicle May Disappear at Any Moment!” along with the more usual crosses and fishesin profile and mottoes like “Jesus Saves” and “Christ Died for Our Sins” were stuck all over the sides of the van, as if the vehicle were a huge cerulean cereal box promoting apocalypse and everlasting life and promising redeemable gift certificates inside.

  Lena and her husband, Clyde, had made Christ their personal savior, apparently the result of a visit from Him—a type of house call was the way they explained it—one night of despair four or five years earlier, and while the chaos of their life had not changed one iota, it had gained significant meaning, since they and their five children were now devoted to the life of the spirit and the next world instead of to the body and this one. Their disheveled and deprived daily lives were now regarded as evidence not of incompetence, as in the past, but of their new priorities. I did not pretend to understand the nature of the conversion experience, of being “saved,” one way or the other, or the teachings of the Bible Believers’ Evan-gelistical Association, to which they belonged, but it was clear to me that whereas before they had been depressed and frightened, for what seemed very good reasons, such as poverty, ignorance, powerlessness, etc., they were now optimistic and unafraid. Of course, according to the pamphlets Lena mailed to me from time to time, what they were looking forward to was the imminent end of the world, to earthquake and famine, to seas turned to blood, to plagues of sores, to legions of demons and the writhing demise of the antichrist, events that those of us who were not scheduled for rescue by the Rapture might find even more depressing and frightening than poverty, ignorance and powerlessness.

  As I moved from my car toward the house, I passed the three younger of Lena’s and Clyde’s children, who were pushing huge snowballs through the soft wet snow of the front yard. Though they wore sneakers and thin jackets and were hatless and without mittens and their clothes were wet and their hands and faces bright red from the cold, they were evidently happy and, in spite of running noses, seemed healthy. They saw me coming along the driveway and waved, and I waved back.

  A boy, the largest of the three, six or seven years old, smiled sweetly and said, “Hi. Who’re you?”

  “I’m your uncle Rolfe,” I said, and I smiled. “You don’t remember me, eh?” In fact, we had never met, which factembarrassed me slightly. I did not know his name—Stephen or Eben, or maybe Claude—and did not care to ask it.

  “Nope, but I heard of you,” he said.

  “What are you building there? A snowman?”

  All three laughed as if I had said something hilariously funny. “No!” the boy exclaimed. “A citadel!”

  “Oh.”

  His sister, her puffy cheeks chapped scarlet from the wet snow, said, “Are you here to say goodbye to Grandma?”

  “Grandma’s in hell!” the youngest one shouted. He appeared to be a male child but was wearing some kind of kilt made from an adult’s woolen scarf, so one could not be sure.

  The other boy somberly said, “That’s why we say goodbye.”

  “We’re going to be in heaven with Jesus,” the little girl explained to me, “and Grandma’s in hell with Satan, who is Jesus’ enemy. That’s why we have to say goodbye, Uncle Rolfe.”

  “Grandma wasn’t saved,” her brother said, a note of regret touching his voice.

  “I see.”

  “Are you saved, Uncle Rolfe?” the girl asked.

  “No, I‘m not.”

  “Then you’ll be cast into hell with Grandma.”

  “Yes, I guess I will. Me and Grandma and Uncle Wade and Grandpa. We’ll all be there together,” I said. “And when we die, you’ll have to come and say goodbye to us too, won’t you?”

  The older boy nodded his head up and down. This was a drag, families breaking up all the time. He did not understand it and wished that it could be different, but he did not want to spend eternity in hell, no, sir, he did not, no matter who was there.

  As if bored by me, the three went back to building their citadel of snow, and I continued on to the house. Before I had a chance to knock, the door was opened by an attractive woman who introduced herself as Margie Fogg and shook my hand warmly. She gazed straight into my face, and I liked her at once.

  Wade stood in the center of the crowded kitchen, looking competent and serious, if a little uncomfortable. He was wearing a white shirt and tightly knotted jet-black tie and navy-blue gabardine sport coat, with dark-brown slacks and shoes, andhis face and hands were red and seemed huge and constricted by his mismatched clothing. In one hand he held a can of Schlitz and in the other a cigarette. The room was hot from the wood stove, crowded and close. I saw faces I recognized— Lena and Clyde and their two older children, adolescents whom I had not seen in years, and in the corner by the stove, Pop—and I saw the faces of three strangers, everyone standing, as if waiting to be called to attention and given marching orders.

  Wade first, I thought—the easiest. And I reached out with both hands and placed them on his muscular shoulders and drew him to me. We hugged, self-consciously, with our butts sticking out so as to keep light shining between our bodies from shoulders to toes. That is the way we men are, we New England men, we Whitehouse men, Wade and I: we want light between us at all times.

  He said my name, and I said his, and we let go of one another and withdrew. Not ready yet to deal with Lena and Clyde and their strange-looking children—both the boy and the girl had modified Mohawk haircuts and resembled barnyard fowl with acne, Rhode Island reds, maybe—and certainly not ready to greet Pop, I first introduced myself to the strangers in the room, who turned out to be the Reverend Doughty, a slender blond man in his thirties wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an avocado-green double-knit suit, and Gordon LaRiviere, appropriately somber, mentioning that he remembered me from my high school days and offering gruff condolences as we shook hands, and a skinny young man in a black suit who was a representative of Morrison’s Funeral Home in Littleton, on hand, I guessed, to escort the rest of us to the church on time.

  It was unclear to me why LaRiviere was there or why he was behaving in such a solicitous manner toward Wade: “How you holding up, Wade?” he asked at one point, when Wade, after tossing his empty beer can into the trash, stood for a second with his back to the rest of us and stared after it.

  Wade turned quickly and said, “I’m fine, fine.” He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t we get this show on the road, now that Rolfe’s here?” he asked the room.

  No one knew. We all looked to him for an answer.

  He shrugged. “Pointless to stand around in the church with nothing to do, I guess.”

  “What about Jill?” I asked. “Is Lillian bringing her?”

  In a low voice, Margie said that they would be at the church.

  Wade walked quickly to the refrigerator and pulled out another beer. “Anyone else want one?” he asked. “Rolfe?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t drink.”

  “Yeah, right. I guess I forgot.”

  Indeed. My question about Lillian and Jill had irritated him. He knew better than anyone else in the family that I had not drunk anything alcoholic since college and in fact had drunk almost not at all even then. We never discussed it, Wade and I, any more than we discussed his drinking, but I think we both knew that they were equal and opposite reactions to the same force.

 
I nodded to Lena’s and Clyde’s children, both the girl, Sonny, and the boy, Gerald, noted their matching dark-red tufts of hair, gray scalps, crosses dangling from their earlobes and around their scrawny necks, and passed them by swiftly on my way to Lena, huge as a purple tent in her muumuu, with a black scarf covering most of her hair, which, to my surprise, had turned almost completely gray. She looked shockingly older than when I had last seen her: how many years had it been—seven, eight? I could not remember, I suddenly realized, how many years it had been since I last stood in the same room with my father, brother and sister. I knew that I would never again stand in a room with them and my mother, certainly not in heaven and not in hell, either.

  Lena wore no makeup or jewelry, and her hair was chopped off bluntly at shoulder length. There was nothing about her person that was designed to disguise, or to distract one from, her girth and plainness, and she showed no signs of being either happy or sad to see me—merely grim acceptance. Embracing her was like hugging a barrel, and I instantly let go and stepped away and almost with relief shook the hand of her husband, Clyde, which felt like a piece of firewood, dry, heavy, dead to the touch.

  Clyde is a tall thick-hipped pear-shaped man with a large pointed Adam’s apple and small shoulders and chest, so that his body seems to be constructed of the lower half of a fat man and the upper half of a thin man welded together at the waist. Clyde’ appearance, too, surprised me, for he now looked a full decade older than Wade, whose age he was. His face wasdrawn in and tight, puckered around blue eyes and a flat red-lipped mouth. He said, “Hello, Rolfe. It’s good you came now. We were about to pray. Will you join us in prayer, Rolfe?” His eyes blazed intently into mine, and I looked to Wade, whose expressionless face seemed to be saying, No help here, buddy, you are on your own, and on to Margie, who looked sharply away from me, as if embarrassed.