Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  Time passed, and winter did indeed turn eventually into spring, soggy and swollen and ravaged, which is almost always the case with New Hampshire springs. Renewal seems almost impossible, except as survival alone indicates a potential for it. Noni saw no more of Jesus during these months, but she thought of Him frequently, and she read her Bible, and along about the end of March she started attending services at a small white building located on one of the side streets in town. It was a single-story building that once had been a paint store, just a half-block off Main Street, and the two large windows facing the street had been painted over dark green and a sign in white, wobbly letters had been made in each of them. The one on the right said: CHURCH OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST; on the other side were the words, FOR WHERE TWO OR THREE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER IN MY NAME, THERE AM I IN THE MIDST OF THEM. The people who attended prayer meetings and listened to sermons here were all local people, about twenty in all, and except for Noni, working people. Noni didn’t work because she was supported by her mother who, in turn, was supported by her dead husband who, in his turn, had been supported by the selling of life insurance. Nevertheless, she felt comfortable with these people, mostly because they had been unhappy once, too, and now they were not, and when they talked about their time of unhappiness she knew they had felt then just as she felt now, stupid and unimaginative, with no gifts for the world and no belief that her love was worth giving. It was Jesus, they said, who had changed their lives, for He had found their love to be of infinite worth and their gifts, no matter how slight, to be of great value, and their intelligence and imaginative powers to be apocalyptically superior to the intelligence and imagination of the rest of the people in town. They said to her, when she wept, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes’?” And then in mid-April, shortly after Easter, Noni saw Jesus a second time, this time in the form of a body of light. He appeared to her one night late while she lay in her bed and tried to sleep. Since joining the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ she had given up smoking marijuana, along with alcoholic beverages, sex, cigarette smoking, cursing and cosmetics. All her anxieties and grief fell immediately away, and she came to be filled with the light of Jesus, and when He had passed through her and had gone from her room, she remained filled—but filled now with love, her love of Jesus Himself, and the inescapable logic of that love. From then until now Noni Hubner was a different person. That much was obvious to anyone who knew her, and that much, of course, she told the police when they interrogated her.

  She did not quote Him directly, and not just because they didn’t happen to ask her what, exactly, Jesus had asked her to do for Him. It was at the Wednesday evening prayer services, while Brother Joel was preaching, that she had received her instructions, or what she regarded as instructions. Brother Joel was in the front of the room, holding the open Bible in one hand, pointing at the ceiling with the other, shouting and beseeching, berating and explicating, imploring and excoriating to the assembled group of about seventeen or eighteen persons, mostly women of middle age and a few men of various ages, and several of the women were shaking their bodies up and down and rolling their heads back and around, as Brother Joel, a young man from Maine who had settled here last year to commence his ministry, moved to the text of Matthew, chapter eighteen, and read the words of Jesus that begin, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” and when he reached the place where Jesus says, “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost,” Noni felt herself leave her body behind, watched it fall like an emptied husk to the floor next to her chair, as she ascended into a rosy cloud, where she saw the outstretched hand of Jesus, and into His hand she placed her own, while He pointed with His other hand beyond the cloud and down. She thought for a second to check for the wounds in His hands, as Thomas had done, and a cold wind blew against her and took the doubting thoughts with it. She let her gaze flow to where Jesus indicated, beyond the cloud and down, and in the far distance she saw her father’s grave. It was a summer afternoon, just as it had been when they had buried him, and she knew it was her father’s grave, all right, even though it was covered with grass now and the stone, a common gray granite stone, was too far away for her to read the inscription, for she knew the location, even though she had not been out to his grave in the cemetery on the hill above the river since the afternoon of his burial. Nor had her mother. His grave was at the top of the hill, near a grove of young maple trees, and when the service had been completed by Reverend Baum, her mother’s Congregational minister, Noni and her mother had turned and had got quickly into her mother’s Japanese fastback coupe, and they had driven away and had not come back. From that day till now, almost five years later, Noni’s mother had spoken of her dead husband as if he were merely absent, as if he had driven downtown to get the paper, and Noni had screamed at her several times that first year, “He’s dead! Face it, Mother, Daddy’s dead! Dead! Dead!” And then, after the first year, Noni had ceased screaming, had ceased correcting her mother, had ceased even to reflect on it, and in the end had ceased to observe that, to her mother, the man was neither dead nor alive, for to Noni that’s how it was also—her father was neither dead nor alive. But when she came back to her body lying there on the wood floor of the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ, she knew her father was waiting for her, his hand reaching out to her, so she rose to her feet, and she left the building.

  At the cemetery, standing with the shovel in the circle of light cast by her mother’s coupe, she waited and listened and heard Jesus moving in the darkness behind her, heard His bare feet press against the wet grass, while He watched over her, and when the policemen came forward and crossed into the circle of light, walking over her father’s grave to her, one of them taking the shovel from her hands, the other holding her arms tightly, as if she might run away, she had no fear. The one holding her arm asked what she thought she was doing, and she told him that she had come to show her mother that her father was dead, so that her mother could be free, as she was free. When they asked where her mother was, Noni was silent for a second and heard Jesus shift His weight in the shadows, and then she told them. While the second policeman went to the coupe and released Noni’s mother from her bonds, Noni silently thanked Jesus for His guidance.

  The conceit that certain people, especially female people, resemble certain flowers is not very original, but then, it’s not without its uses either. Especially if you can obtain enough significant information about the flower to gain at the same time significant information about the person. For instance, Noni Hubner was like a kind of orchid that grows in northern New England—the pink lady’s-slipper, Cypripedium acaule. It may surprise you that orchids actually appear in these latitudes, but they do. And the pink lady’s-slipper, as it happens, is one of the more common members of the orchid family to appear in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, so that you often discover it in open pine woods, or on the east-facing slopes of riverbanks. It blooms in June when the plant’s delicate throat swells and turns pink. Sometimes the orchid is white, but then you’ll go back the following June and discover that it has bloomed a deep shade of pink, as if it had suffered a wound in your absence. People who love the sight of these orchids know that regardless of how plentiful they seem, you must not pick them. Nor should you transplant them, as they seldom survive a change of habitat for longer than a few years. In fact, most people who know where you can find such a lovely, fragile flower will not tell you the location, because they are afraid you will go there, and in your affection and delight, will pick the beautiful pink lady’s-slipper or will try to transplant it nearer your home.

  Comfort

  LEON LAROCHE, THE BANK TELLER, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his
late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain’s trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. It’s not so much that you will say things when drunk that you’d never say when sober, as much as you will try to say things you’d ordinarily know simply could not be said. It’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.

  The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he’d shared with his son for most of the kid’s life. Six months after the son had departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. The son never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered about what might have happened to Buddy Smith and wondered why his father, a sociable though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and you know how too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son’s departure and the father’s suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.

  “I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. The two men were seated at the Captain’s kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon had knocked on the door and had offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man had been grateful for the interruption—it was a frosty November night, and people generally didn’t go calling on people on nights like this—and when the first six-pack had been drunk, the Captain had started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they had found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn’t mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for chrissakes, you’re too uptight, boy. You remind me of myself when I was your age, he told Leon. Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally, he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.

  “No, I really liked Buddy, although I can’t say I knew him very well. He was a chess player. I never knew that until one night after work I went into the Hawthorne House for a drink, because I was angry, pissed off, from having been yelled at once too often by Bob Fosse at the bank. You wouldn’t believe that man, I don’t believe that man. After what, seven years, and he still treats me like shit. Anyhow, I went into the Hawthorne House, which is unusual for me, because that place can be kind of rough, you know, and I hate the smell of it, like urine and old beer, but like I said, I was angry at Bob Fosse and needed a drink to calm down.

  “Buddy was in a corner playing one of the pinball machines, alone, as usual. He never seemed to have any friends in town, even though there are plenty of kids his age in town, too many of them, who don’t seem to do anything except hang around drinking beer and flexing their muscles and getting themselves tattooed. Buddy was like that, or at least he seemed like that, but even so, he kept pretty much to himself. But then, too, Buddy didn’t exactly look like those guys, either. I mean, he was always clean-looking, and he wore his hair short, and he took good care of his clothes. He looked like a recruit in the army home on leave. Even so, he never seemed to do much except hang around the trailerpark or up at the Hawthorne House, as if waiting for someone supposed to pick him up there and take him to someplace far away and very different from this place. Those other guys his age were made in Catamount, New Hampshire, to stay in Catamount, New Hampshire, and eventually to die in Catamount, New Hampshire. It was stamped all over their faces, all over their bulky muscles, all over the way they talked and laughed and punched each other around.”

  The Captain knew the type. He shoved his paw across his white crewcut and sighed. Bring back the draft, he intoned, and in a year the streets of America will be cleared of that type and safe to walk in again.

  “Buddy had spent a year in the service, the Marines, I think he told me, and just as he was about to be shipped overseas to Germany or someplace, he was in an automobile accident that put a metal plate into his head and got him discharged. He told me that while we were sitting at the bar, but I don’t think I believed him, because while he was telling me all this, he kept smiling at me and watching my eyes, as if he was putting me on, just to see if I’d believe some lie.

  “He was a chess player. He said he wasn’t very good, but he liked to play, which is true as well for me, so I said we should get together to play chess sometime, and he thought that was a great idea. He knew no one who played chess around here, and neither did I. He had a way of watching the point of his cigarette while he smoked that was unusual. I bought him a second beer, and we talked about how hard it was living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was and how mean-minded the people were. He said he was leaving for the West Coast as soon as he got some money that was owed him by a guy in the Marines, and then he asked me why I stayed here, living in Catamount, going back and forth every day from the trailerpark to the bank. My mother lives in Concord, where I grew up, and this was the best job I could find when I got out of New Hampshire Commercial College, and I go to Boston sometimes on weekends, I told him. He was curious about that, about what I do in Boston on weekends, and I told him the truth, that I go around to the bars and maybe take a meal at a fancy restaurant and go to a movie. That’s all. He didn’t believe me, but he was very nice, very cheerful and friendly. He said I probably stayed home every weekend and watched TV.

  “By then the place was filling up and had got pretty noisy. The juke box was playing and two or three couples were dancing, and you had to holler to be heard, so I asked Buddy if he wanted to come back to my place for some supper and a few games of chess. He asked me if I had anything to drink, apologizing as he asked, explaining that he was broke or else he’d have offered to buy the beer. I had plenty of beer in the refrigerator, plus a bottle of scotch I keep around, and I had planned to go on home and cook up a couple of hamburgers for myself anyhow. I hadn’t played any chess in over a year, not since my brother was back East visiting my mother two Thanksgivings ago. Buddy said fine, so I paid, and we left in my car.

  “When we got to the trailer, he opened a beer and set up the chessboard in the living room while I cooked hamburgers. He had the television on and was watching it and drinking beer and seemed very relaxed to me. But he seemed sad, too. It’s hard to explain. He probably reminded me of myself somehow, sitting there alone, with the television set on and a chessboard set up in front of him. I walked into the living room to say something to him, I don’t know what, just something that wouldn’t make him seem so sad and alone to me, maybe, and when I passed behind his chair, I lay my hand on his shoulder in a friendly way. You know? Just lay my hand on his shoulder as I passed behind his chair.