Affliction

by Russell Banks

  All those solitary dumb angry men, Wade and Pop and his father and grandfather, had once been boys with intelligent eyes and brightly innocent mouths, unafraid and loving creatures eager to please and be pleased. What had turned them so quickly into the embittered brutes they had become? Were they all beaten by their fathers; was it really that simple?

  There is no way of knowing about any of them but Wade. Pop was orphaned when he was ten and sent to live with an elderly aunt and uncle in Nova Scotia, and when he was fourteen he had run away, following the reapers west across Canada, chasing the harvest all the way from the Maritimes to British Columbia. When the crews had returned east, he had come back with them and had crossed down into New Hampshire to work in a paper mill in Berlin, and when he was twenty he married a Lawford girl, because he had got her pregnant. He took a job in the Littleton Coats mill, so she could stay near her family, he said, but also because she had a house, Uncle Elbourne’s house, where they could live. Later, when we were children and Pop now and then spoke of his father, it was as if he were speaking of a distant relative who had died before he was born, and when he spoke of his mother it was as if she were a figure in an almost forgotten dream, an emblematic stand-in for someone who might once have been important to him. So it was as if he had no parents, no past, no childhood, even. His father had not even a name—Pop’s father’s and mother’s graves were in Sydney, Nova Scotia, we were told: they had been killed one winter night when a kerosene stove exploded and their house burned down. That was the whole story.

  As for Pop’s grandfather and grandmother, there was nothing: they were as lost in history as if they had lived and died ten thousand years ago. Pop had sisters and brothers, we knew, although we did not know how many, and they, too, had been farmed out with Canadian relatives and friends, but he had never seen them again after the fire, for reasons he never explained. And we never thought to ask, did we? The children of a man like him and a woman whose only life was her secret unspoken life, we thought it was normal to be alone in the world, normal to have sisters and brothers and dead parents and grandparents that one never spoke of. And by the time we were old enough to understand that such a life was not normal at all, we were too angry and hurt to ask. It was unimaginable to us that we ask our father, “Why did you separate yourself forever from your family?”

  The door swung open, and Wade looked up: Lillian held back the glass storm door and waved for Jill, who stood in the hall a short ways behind her, to come along. The child’s face was sober, a little sad or possibly frightened, as if she were being sent away to summer camp. Lillian said to Wade, coldly, clipping her words, “Is there snow on the ground up there?”

  “Yeah, lots.”

  “See,” Lillian said to Jill, and she pointed down at the rubber boots on the child’s feet. “Keep them on whenever you go out.”

  “Hi, honey,” Wade said, and he extended one hand toward Jill. She was carrying a small overnight bag and wore mittens and a bright-blue down parka with the hood up.

  “Hi,” she said, and she passed Wade her suitcase and walked by him to the sidewalk, where she paused for a second at the rear of the truck, as if looking for his car, then stood beside the door on the passenger’s side, waiting for him.

  In a trembling voice, Lillian said to Wade, “Have her back here tomorrow by six. We have something to do at six.”

  “No problem. Look, I …,” he began, not sure what he wanted to say, only that he was sorry somehow, for something he could not name. What had he done? Why did he feel so guilty all of a sudden? An hour before, he was angry at her; now he wanted her forgiveness: he could not, for the life of him, connect the two emotions, rage and shame.

  “You make me sick,” she spat at him. Though her gaze was flinty, she seemed ready to burst into tears. “I can’t believe you’ve sunk so low,” she told him.

  “As what? Low as what? I mean, what the hell have I done, Lillian? It’s bad to want to see Jill? It’s bad to want to see your own daughter?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said. She suddenly pasted a smile onto her face and waved at Jill and called, “’Bye, honey! Call me tonight if you want!” Then her face filled with anger again, and her chin crinkled the way it used to when she was about to cry, and she said, “If I could have you killed, Wade Whitehouse, believe me, I would.”

  “For … for what? What did I do?”

  “You know damned well for what. For what you’ve done to me, and what you’re doing to that child you say you love so much. Love,” she sneered. “You’ve never loved anyone in your life, Wade. Not even yourself. Whatever you once had, you’ve ruined it,” she said, and she yanked the glass door closed, stepped back and slammed the inner door.

  Slowly, Wade turned and walked down the path to the truck.

  “Are we going in this?” Jill asked.

  “Yeah. My car, it’s in the shop. This’ll be fine,” he said.

  “It’s okay. It’s pretty old.”

  “It belongs to Pop.”

  “Pop?”

  “Grandpa. My father. It’s his.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she opened the door and climbed up onto the seat. Wade slung the suitcase in beside her and closed the door, walked around the front of the truck and got in and started the motor. Reaching in front of Jill, he switched on the heater, and the fan began to chirp loudly.

  “You eat lunch yet?” he asked.

  “No.” She sat up straight and stared out the windshield.

  “How about a Big Mac?” he said, winking.

  “Mommy won’t let me eat fast food. You know that,” she said without looking at him. “It’s bad for you.”

  “C’mon, we always sneak a Big Mac. And a cherry turnover. Your favorite. C’mon, what do you say?”

  “No.”

  Wade sighed. “What do you want, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing. You can’t have nothing, Jill. We need lunch. Mr. Pizza? Want to stop at Mr. Pizza’s?”

  “Same thing, Daddy. No fast food,” she said emphatically. “Mommy says—”

  “I know what Mommy says. I’m in charge today, though.”

  “Okay. So we’ll get what you want. What do you want?” she said, continuing to look straight ahead.

  Wade released the hand brake and pulled away from the curb. At the intersection at the end of the street, he stopped the truck and said, “Nothing, I guess. I guess I can wait till we get home, if you can. Maybe we’ll stop by Wickham’s for a hamburger when we get to Lawford. That suit you? You always like Wickham’s.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Fine.” He turned right and headed north on Pleasant Street, toward the interstate. They remained silent, as the old truck stuttered along the winding road. Then, after a few moments, Wade looked over at Jill and realized that she was crying. “Oh, Jesus, Jill, I’m sorry. What’s the matter, honey?”

  She turned her face away from him. Her shoulders heaved, and she held her head down. Her hands were clenched in fists shoved hard against her legs.

  “I’m sorry,” Wade repeated. “Please don’t cry. Please, honey, don’t cry.”

  “What are you sorry for?” she asked. She had gained control of herself, had managed to stop crying, and she wiped her cheeks with her sleeve and looked grimly ahead.

  “I don’t know. For the food business, I guess. I just thought, you know, we’d sneak a Big Mac on Mommy, like we used to.”

  “I don’t like doing that anymore,” she said.

  “Okay. So we won’t.” He tried to sound cheerful. “Whatever Jillie wants,” he said, using her baby name, “Jillie gets.”

  She was silent for a few seconds, and then she said, “I want to go home.”

  “You can’t,” Wade snapped back. His face stiffened, and he clenched the wheel with both hands, as they came to the Hopkinton interchange and drove up onto the turnpike. Soon he had the truck up to its top speed of fifty miles per hour, shaking and shuddering in prot
est. The wind blew in under the floorboards and fought the puffs of heat from the heater, chilling the air inside the truck. Jill curled up on the seat as far from her father as she could get and dropped into sleep, waking only when they stopped in West Lebanon for gas and for Wade to pee, and at the Catamount exit, where Wade picked up a six-pack of beer and a Coke at a roadside grocery. Jill declined the Coke with a shake of her head and watched while Wade, heading back up the ramp onto the interstate, cracked open a can of beer and took a long slug from it and stuck the can between his legs.

  “That’s illegal, you know,” Jill said quietly.

  “I know.” Wade glanced over at her, saw that she was looking out the side window at the snow-covered fields and woods, and took a second pull from the beer.

  “You’re a policeman,” she said without turning.

  “Nope. Not anymore. I’m not nothing anymore.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  By the time they reached the Lawford exit, Wade had finished two cans of beer and was halfway through a third. The empties rolled back and forth on the floor, banging lightly against one another as the truck followed the curving ramp down to Route 29, turned left and chugged alongside the river into Lawford.

  23

  “WADE COME IN HERE LOOKING STRANGE, sort of like he always does—you know, with that kind of distracted nervous face he wears all the time, only worse this time, like he was a little drunk, maybe. Which was not unusual, even though it was only a little after lunchtime. The place was still pretty busy, it being the next to last day of deer season and all these Massachusetts assholes who hadn’t got their deer yet up for one last crack at shooting a goddamned cow or a paperboy on a bike and hoping it was a deer—that happened, you know: couple years ago, some individual shot a kid on a bike delivering papers over near Catamount. Astounding.

  “Anyhow, Wade was looking peculiar, you might say, like he hadn’t gotten any sleep for a few nights, big humongous circles under his eyes; only he was all dressed up, like he was going to a funeral, coat and tie and all; and he had his kid with him, this nice little kid, I seen her lots of times, what’s-her-name, Jillie: he goes, ‘Jillie, you want a cheese grilled sandwich? You want a cheese grilled sandwich?’ he says. He always says it that way, ‘cheese grilled sandwich,’ and normally I just leave the guy alone—what the hell, everybody talks funny sometimes. Only this time I have to correct him, I guess as a kind of joke. ‘It’s grilled cheese sandwich, you dub,’ I tell him, because I was pissed he made such a big deal out of my sign a few weeks before just when I was putting the damned thing up. The sonofabitch cost me a hundred and fifty bucks and it come out wrong and Wade seen it and pointed it out to me in what you might say was an aggressive way.

  “So I go, ‘It’s grilled cheese sandwich, you dub,’ friendly, sort of, but like I said, pissed a little—probably mostly because we were busy as hell right then and Margie, as you know, had taken the day off at my suggestion for very good reasons, which you can use my story to illustrate the wisdom of my recommendation, because the sonofabitch reaches across the counter and grabs me by the shirtfront. He’s sitting there on a stool, you know, right where you are, or a few stools down—I don’t recall that exactly; and his kid is sitting next to him, looking bored like kids do—until this happens, of course, which is when all hell breaks loose. Wade looks up at me with his face suddenly gone red, and he just grabs my shirt, like this.”

  And here Nick Wickham reached across the counter and grasped my shirtfront and yanked, hard. Slowly, he let go and went on. I sat back, my legs suddenly watery.

  “Everybody in the place goes silent. What the hell, this is unusual, right? This is really un-usual. And the little kid—I mean, she’s just a kid, you know, a goddamned urchin, and she’s naturally terrified. Her face goes all white, and she starts to cry, so Wade lets go of me—and listen, I was plenty scared myself, not to mention ticked off. I figure, the place is full of guys, so Wade can’t do too much damage, but just the same, I’m a goddamned marshmallow; I don’t need that kind of stuff, especially not in my restaurant. Guys come in drunk and start trouble, I sweet-talk them right out the door: let them settle it in the parking lot. Wade, though, there was no sweet-talking that guy that day. It’s like he had this glaze over his eyes, like he couldn’t see out right, and you couldn’t see in at all; when the kid starts to cry, he looks over at her, surprised and puzzled, like he’s this gorilla, some kind of King Kong who hears a strange musical sound off to his side just as he’s about to bite off the head of some guy; he lets go of me, acts like he was only hanging up his coat or something instead of physically attacking a fellow human being. Very strange. Very strange and weird. Of course I knew already about LaRiviere firing him, and I knew about Jack replacing him as town cop and all—everybody knew about it by then—but just the same, it was very strange, the way he was acting.

  “He makes like he’s comforting his kid: wipes her nose with a napkin, that sort of thing—like a regular loving father and nothing’s happened; and she says she wants to go home. He got up, stiff—like she slapped him and he’s holding back his impulse to slap her back because she’s a kid—and he goes, ‘Okay, let’s go home, then.’ Now this worries me more than a little, because I happen to know that Margie’s out there at the house this very minute packing up and moving the hell out, like I told her to do. I mean, I know the individuals we’re talking about here are your father and your brother, but—no offense—I was plenty worried about Margie living up there on the hill with those two acting the way they were. You can understand that. You would have done the same thing, probably: told her to move the hell out, I mean.

  “So I say to him, ‘Wade, I got a message for you.’ He goes, ‘A message.’ Like it’s in a foreign language. I say, ‘Jack Hewitt, he’s looking for you. Wants you to clear your stuff out of his office down to the town hall.’ I do this real careful, standing back there, way the hell over by the coffee machine, so he can’t reach me. Like I say, I’m a real marshmallow, and this guy is a hand grenade with the goddamned pin pulled; but I figure Jack can handle him all right, and most importantly, I don’t want Wade to catch Margie moving out on him. She’s a hell of a sweet woman, as you no doubt know by now. Heart as big as a house. So I tell Wade about Jack wanting him to clear his stuff out—which happened to be true. Jack was in that morning early. He had his license back, and there was only one more day for him to get his deer, so he was heading out; and Jack, he says to me, ‘If you see Wade, tell him to get his shit out of my office,’ was how he put it. I put it to Wade somewhat more politely, let us say. Although I did make the mistake of calling it ‘his’ office. Jack’s.

  “Wade picked right up on that. My mistake. I didn’t realize—or I might not have said it—but at that particular time he had not yet been informed about Jack being the new town cop: which of course was Gordon LaRiviere’s doing, him and Chub Merritt, the selectmen. Wade says to me, ‘His office. You mean my old office?’ And what can I say? I tell him what he surely does not want to hear. He looks at me for a second like his stack is going to blow, and then he grabs his kid’s hand and heads out the door—and I’m thinking, ‘Oh boy, more trouble.’ I didn’t have any idea how much more, of course. But that was the last time I saw Wade Whitehouse. Ever. And I can’t say I’ve missed him. No offense, him being your brother and all, but I expect you don’t particularly miss the individual, either.”

  It was a question more than a statement, and I did not intend to answer it. Actually, I did not know how to answer it, without lying to the man. I switched off the tape recorder and reached for my check, which Nick had placed next to my coffee cup.

  “Actually, yes, I did see him that day. Not to talk to. But I saw him from my driveway, as he passed by the house. I was filling the bird feeders in my front yard, and I looked up as he drove by, because of all the noise that old truck of his father’s made. He had my grandniece in the truck with him—Jill—so naturally I noticed. And I always thought well of Wade, in
spite of everything. He suffered. He had a terrible time growing up. And I never thought that Lillian was particularly good for him, although I loved Lillian and still do. She’s my niece, after all. But that Saturday, when Wade and Jill drove past, there was nothing unusual—really, nothing worth commenting on.”

  “Well, sure, I was scared of him. Of course I was scared of him. Who wouldn’t be? But it was like a long time ago, and I don’t remember a lot. I remember Daddy took me out of the restaurant there, and we went down to his office. Big deal. Well, I know, it was a big deal—that’s where he got the gun; he took his guns from his office. It used to be his office, I mean—which made him really mad. I didn’t say anything anymore—once we left the restaurant, I mean. I guess I was too scared.

  “He seemed sort of okay; I mean, I guess he was acting the way he usually did. Except when he got so mad at the guy in the restaurant that I thought there would be a fight. I mean, usually when I came up to stay with him, he was sort of nervous and wicked grouchy one minute and really nice the next, and that’s how he was acting that day when we drove up in that really old truck. It was his father’s truck. Sorry, I guess you know that. Then at the restaurant he lost his temper, and I really got scared. But then he calmed down a little, I guess because I started crying and all, and probably because everyone was looking at us; and then the restaurant guy told him about having to clean out his office or something like that; and then he lost his temper again; but this time he didn’t do anything to the restaurant guy. He just grabbed me by the arm and we left, and then we went to his office. And that’s it. Nothing happened.”