Affliction

by Russell Banks

  Nonetheless, the facts of a life, even one as lonely and alienated as Wade’s, surely have meaning. But only if that life is portrayed, only if it can be viewed, in terms of its connections to other lives: only if one regards it as having a soul, as the body has a soul—remembering that without a soul, the human body, too, is a mere fact, a pile of minerals, a bag of waters: body is nothing. So that, in turn, if one regards the soul of the body as a blood-red membrane, let us say, a curling helix of anxiously fragile tissue that connects all the disparate name- able parts of the body to one another, a scarlet firmament between the firmaments, touching and defining both, one might view the soul of Wade’s or any other life as that part of it which is connected to other lives. And one might grow angry and be struck with grief at the sight of those connections being severed, of that membrane being torn, shredded, rent to rags that a child grows into adulthood clinging to—little bloody flags waved vainly across vast chasms.

  Oh, I know that in telling Wade’s story here I am telling my own as well, and that this telling is my own bloody flag, the shred of my own soul waving in the wintry dusk, and it might sound self-centered, peculiar, eccentric for that; but our stories, Wade’s and mine, describe the lives of boys and men for thousands of years, boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth and whose best hope for a connection to other human beings lay in elaborating for themselves an elegiac mode of relatedness, as if everyone’s life were already over. It is how we keep from destroying in our turn our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us; it is how we absent ourselves from the tradition of male violence; it is how we decline the seductive role of avenging angel: we grimly accept the restraints of nothingness—of disconnection, isolation and exile—and cast them in a cruel and elegiac evening light, a Teutonic village in the mountains surrounded by deep dark forests where hairy beasts wait for stragglers and deer thrash wild-eyed through the deep snow and hunters build small fires to warm their hands so as to handle their weapons gracefully in the cold.

  Wade’s life, then, and mine, too, is a paradigm, ancient and ongoing, and thus, yes, I do know the rest, as Margie said, and I will tell it to you.

  Against the sound of the wind cutting through the pines, Wade heard laughter, a harsh cackle that at first he thought came from the crows, Haw, haw, haw! but then he realized that it was human, and when he looked up from the blood-spattered snow, he saw Pop standing on the porch—shirt loose and unbuttoned, trousers drooping, suspenders looped to his knees; he was unshaven, hair tousled, eyes ablaze and face bright red and, although grinning, held tight as a fist: as in triumph—a triumphant athlete, warrior, thief, a man who had come through harrowing adversity and risk with his bitterness not only intact but confirmed, for it was the bitterness that had got him through, and the grin and the crackled laughter was for the confirmation, a defiant thanksgiving gloat. The son finally had turned out to be a man just like the father. Ah, what a delicious moment for the lonely long-suffering father! Gunfire rattled the air in the distance. He waved the whiskey bottle at Wade, then turned it and held the bottle by the base with both hands and pointed it at him—a primitive masculine act, this affectionate mockery of aiming a weapon at a beloved son, this bitter tease: as if to say, You! By God, you finally made it! And you did it the way I taught you! I love you, you mean sonofa-bitch!

  With a swipe, Wade waved the image away, turned and trudged from the trampled snow onto the driveway, and moved, head down, hands in his jacket pockets, toward the barn. He heard Pop hollering behind him, words mixed in the wind, loud broken demands: Where the hell are you going now? You leave my truck where it is! I need … Give me the goddamned keys! I need to go to town! Wade pushed on, and the voice thinned and diminished. Nothing in the stinking house to drink … my house, my money, my truck … stolen! The words evaporated in the darkness of the barn; a pair of crows lifted from a crossbeam at the back and fluttered clumsily out the open roof to the sky; the truck motor ticked quietly as a clock, still cooling from the long drive north. Wade placed his chilled hands on the hood and warmed them against the flaked metal. He leaned forward as if to pray and placed his right cheek between his hands and felt the last wave of heat from the motor pass through the metal and enter his face. After a few moments, the metal went cold and began to draw heat back from his cheek, and Wade sighed and straightened and moved to the truckbed, where he lifted out two cardboard boxes, the contents of his desk and office closet, and set them on the ground next to the rear tire. Moving slowly and with scrupulous care, like an old man on ice, he opened the door on the driver’s side and reached for the three guns that he had carried back from town side by side, the butts on the floor of the cab, the blue-black barrels leaning against the seat between him and Jill: a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30/30 rifle and an old Belgian 28-gauge that had once belonged to brother El- bourne. He lined them up and gathered them together like oars, with the stocks slung under his arm, and backed out of the cab, when he felt a sharp blow in the center of his back, a stunning blow that shook him through to his chest and arms and sent the guns clattering to the ground and threw Wade against the open door of the truck.

  He crumpled and fell to his knees and turned. His father stood over him, a chunk of rusted iron pipe the length and thickness of a man’s arm in his hands: the man was huge, an enraged giant from a fairy tale with legs like tree trunks, and above his enormous chest and shoulders filled and made solid with calibrated rage his head nearly touching the rafters of the barn was so far in the distance that though Wade could barely make out the expression on the face he saw that there was no expression other than one of mild disgust in the mouth and eyes of a man compelled to perform a not especially pleasant task, the decision to do it having been made long ago in forgotten time by a forgotten master, the piece of iron pipe in his meaty hands a mighty war club, a basher, an avenging jawbone of an ass, a cudgel, bludgeon, armor-breaking mace, tomahawk, pike, maul, lifted slowly, raised like a guillotine blade, sledgehammer, wooden mallet to pound a circus tent stake into the ground, to slam the gong that tests a man’s strength, to split the log for a house, to drive the spike into the tie with one stroke, to stun the ox, to break the lump of stone, to smash the serpent’s head, to destroy the abomination in the face of the Lord.

  Wade crouched and twisted away from the colossal figure of his father; he turned like a heretic prepared for stoning; he saw and in one motion grabbed and clutched the rifle barrel with both hands and with the weight and force of his entire body uncoiling behind it swung the thing—the heavy wooden stock sweeping in a quick powerful arc from the frozen ground into the air—and smashed it against the side of his father’s head, whacked and broke it from jaw to temple: the crack of bone, a puff of air and a groan, Oh! and the old man fell in pieces and died at once, eyes wide open—a leathered corpse unearthed from a bog.

  Wade looked down at the body of his father: it was small, curled in on itself, the size and shape of the body of a sleeping child. There was no chunk of old pipe, no cudgel—only an empty whiskey bottle dropped to the hard ground and rolled against the wall. Wade lifted the rifle slowly and slipped the butt against his right shoulder; he aimed down the barrel at the exact center of his father’s forehead. /love you, you mean sonofabitch. I have always loved you. He shoved the bolt forward and back and with his thumb flipped the safety, and he squeezed the trigger and heard the dry click when the hammer fell. He smiled. A wintry smile, ice cracking. Then he lowered the rifle, leaned down and touched the man’s crinkled throat with his fingertips; he caressed the lips and grizzled chin and cheeks, touched the small hooked beak of the nose; he traced the bony ridge above the eyes and smoothed back the stiff gray hair. The body was an accumulation of separated parts. Its soul was dead, murdered, gone to absolute elsewhere. He had never touched his father this way, had not once in his entire life identified his father with his hands, named the man’s face gently, lovingly, and taken it into h
im, made it his own face. Made the dead face his.

  He stood and leaned the rifle against the fender of the truck. For a few seconds he peered around the barn as if bewildered to find himself there; then abruptly he reached down and slipped his hands under his father’s body and with grace and ease lifted it; he carried it to the back of the dark enclosed space and laid the corpse out on the workbench. He crossed the hands on the chest. Returning to the truck, he went directly to one of the cardboard cartons and pulled out a small green box and removed a handful of rifle shells from it and dropped them into his jacket pocket. He grabbed up the rifle, got into the truck; he started the motor and backed the vehicle out of the barn into the blinding sunlight. Then, leaving the motor running, he got out of the truck and returned to the barn.

  Groping in the darkness beneath the workbench, he retrieved the kerosene lantern. He stood over his father’s body like a priest blessing the host, unscrewed the cap on the base of the lamp and poured the kerosene over the body, from the shoes up along the torso and over the hands and face and hair, until the lamp was emptied. He moved to the end of the bench and looked up along the body from the feet. He had his cigarette lighter in his hand: he ignited it and extended it forward slowly, holding it before him like a votive candle, and instantly the body was wrapped in a shroud of yellow flames. Wade stumbled backward a few steps and watched the clothing catch fire and the hair and skin glow like gold inside the blue- and-yellow flames: the fire snaked across the oil-stained bench and leapt to the old boards behind it, growling and snapping, and the air darkened with the smoke and filled with the dry sour smell of burning flesh. The back wall of the barn was now burning, with the bench and the body on it a pyre, the flames fed by the wind blowing from behind him—the heat surging in huge noisy waves against his face, forcing him back step by step, closer and closer to the door. And then suddenly Wade was outside the barn, standing in the light, surrounded by fields of glistening snow and the black trees beyond, and above him, endless miles of blue sky, and the sun—a flattened disk, cold and white as infinity.

  Wade drove the truck south on Parker Mountain Road, uphill and away from town, out of the valley and away from the darkened old house and the burning barn, drove not fast but at a deliberate speed—to all appearances a man on a civilized mission, wearing a rumpled sport coat and shirt and loosened tie, his face calm, thoughtful, kindly looking, as if he were remembering and humming to himself an old favorite tune.

  Wade came over the rise, passed the frozen snow-covered muskeg and pulled in and parked behind Jack Hewitt’s Ford pickup on the left. Up the slope to the right, at the edge of the woods, was LaRiviere’s cabin. Wade got out of the truck and reached in behind him and brought the .30/30 out and slipped the six shells from his pocket into the clip. He chambered the first bullet and checked the safety. There were no tracks leading from the road to the cabin and no smoke from the chimney. Jack’s footprints in the snow went directly from his truck to the old lumber trail, then headed downhill through low scrub and brush in a northeasterly direction.

  The deer had long since moved into the deepest woods, far from the roads and houses, beyond the sound of the cars and pickups that still prowled the backwoods lanes and trails and the growl of ten-wheelers changing gears on the long slow rise of the interstate north of Catamount. Alone and in occasional pairs, the animals lay hidden, wide-eyed, ears tensed, motionless in dense stands of mountain ash and tangled knots of hawthorn and alder tucked into cirques and gullies, nearly invisible hollows located below scrabbled cliffs and scree, places too difficult to reach from the road in half a day. The deer lay in alerted peace from dawn to dusk, alarmed and quivering in fear only now and then, when the crack of a rifle shot and its echo drifted uphill on the wind, all the way from the more accessible valleys and overgrown fields below, where a few cold end-of-season hunters walking back from the woods toward their cars in the last remaining hour before sunset grumpily, almost randomly, fired their guns at hallucinated stragglers—an unexpected shadow in a birch grove and a mossy boulder browned in a patch of late afternoon sunlight and a sudden powdery spill of snow tipped from the branch of a pine by an errant breeze.

  Though it was cold enough for Wade’s breath to stream from his mouth in a visible cloud, he did not seem to notice the freezing air up here on the mountain, in spite of his light clothing. His jacket was unbuttoned and flapped in the breeze, his tie was unknotted and lay back across his shoulder, and he held his rifle with bare exposed hands loosely in front of him, as if his body were generating ample heat from inside and he were on his way out to sentry duty. Every few steps, as he walked in from the road, he slipped on the rough snow- covered ground, but he seemed not to slow or hesitate a bit because of it and crossed recklessly along the crumpled edge of the frozen muskeg, moved through a spiky grove of silver birches and made his way clumsily in hard slick-soled shoes downhill to the dry riverbed below, a path of boulders and flat rocks that ran away from the road and LaRiviere’s cabin toward a row of spruce trees that blocked his view of the long north slope of the mountain beyond. It was as if his body were being drawn by a powerful external force, like gravity or suction, and to keep from falling he moved in a loose deflected way, ricocheting and careening off rocks and stumps and trash wood, keeping his balance like a broken-field runner by letting his body bounce off the barriers that arose one after the other to stop it.

  Way behind him, halfway between the mountaintop and the town, the house remained dark, empty and closed up, and the barn went on burning. The fire had quickly spread up along the back wall to the timbers and into the lofts, igniting the ancient hay and then the remains of the roof. Great clouds of dark smoke billowed against the sky. There was a loud raucous music to the fire, a crackling erratic drumbeat against the steady howl of the wind from the cold air sucked off the snowy overgrown fields and yard surrounding the structure and hurled into the hot dark center. Flames licked across the timbers overhead, racing and leaping from dry roof boards and shakes that one by one let go and fell in scarlet-and-gold chunks to the dirt floor, where they shattered and splashed like coins. And in the roaring center of the inferno, as if carved from anthracite, lay the body of our father, his face a rictus yanked back in a fixed gaping grin. His terrible triumph.

  At the line of spruce trees, Wade hesitated a moment, examining the ground. The snow below the trees was thinner than on the old riverbed, and patches of bare ground showed through; he had followed Jack’s footprints this far with ease and now had to search among the rust-colored spruce needles and rocks for the trail. A layer of ash-gray cirrus clouds had moved in quickly from the north, and a sharp breeze had come up, riffling the spruces overhead as he walked slowly, carefully, along the edge of the grove.

  And then he saw what he was looking for, a break between the trees, a low broken dead branch and a cigarette butt rubbed out with a boot, and he passed under the trees and came out on the other side, where there was the remains of an overgrown switchbacking lumber road. There was more snow here, and he spotted the footprints at once, leading downhill to the right. It was easy walking, and he moved quickly now, gradually descending for several hundred yards to where the long-unused road bent back on itself and crossed in the opposite direction.

  He stopped at the bend and looked down along the slope, over the tops of the trees below—all the way to Lake Minuit in the far distance, white and flat in the dark surrounding forest like a frozen wafer, where he could make out, at the farther shore, a cluster of pastel-colored boxes that was the trailer park. Mountain View Trailer Park—when he lived there he had been able to peer out his kitchen window and see the very spot where he stood now: a pale opening below a dark streak made by the spruce trees, and beyond that the lumpy summit of the mountain itself.

  The clouds had spread and nearly covered the entire sky, a taut gray blanket stretched from the northern horizon to the dip of Saddleback in the west; there was a long shrinking ribbon of blue sky behind him, but even the rounded
top of the mountain was in shade now. Specks of snow flew in Wade’s face and struck his hands and melted at once. He shifted the rifle, slipped the stock under his right arm and moved on.

  Below, along Route 29 and the side roads off it and outside of town, the last hunters were emerging from the woods, giving up for another year their need to shoot and kill a deer. There may have been a lucky two or three hunters who managed in these waning hours of the season to sight a straggler, a confused or inexplicably careless buck that had managed to survive the hunt almost to the very end and then hungry and restless had stepped too soon from its hiding place in the last light, only to hear the explosion and feel the gut heat and swiftly die. But this late in the season these killings were rare. Most of the hunters now were out-of-state, inexperienced or inept and often merely lazy, so had counted on luck, coincidence, amusing ironies, to get their deer. They hurried to their cars and quickly got the heaters blowing and their stiff hands and feet warmed and drove straight into town to Wickham’s or on to Toby’s Inn for a whiskey or two before driving home.

  Wade walked more slowly now, casting his gaze to his right, downhill, into the dense hardwoods—oak and maple trees, thick yellow birches and alder—that had replaced the spruce and hemlock above. He had to squint to see through the billowing snow: it came at him like lace curtains tossed by the wind and clung to his hair and clothing, wrapping him in a thin white caul. Occasionally, he stumbled on a rock in the old road or a fallen tree branch or slipped on the wet new snow, then lurched on, unperturbed, as if it had not happened and the road were smooth and dry.