Affliction (42 page)

“Meanwhile, Wade must've found out that Hettie wasn't home. Which he could have found out by asking me, of course. But he wouldn't do that. Although he sure was not making any particular secret out of his checking for her at her apartment upstairs. What with his daughter right there and me knowing who comes and goes up those stairs. Something I'd sometimes just as soon not know, frankly. This being one of those times.

“Then, like he was covering for himself, he came down the stairs and into the store and asked me did I know if Jack Hewitt had got his deer yet. And I said no, Jack Hewitt did not get his deer yet. Which I happened to know was true, since I have to tag every deer shot in this township, my store being the only official tagging station, and Jack would've had to bring his deer in for tagging. So, ‘No,' I said, ‘Jack did not get his deer yet.'

“Then Wade asked me did I happen to know where Jack Hewitt was hunting. Like I was supposed to believe he had stopped off at Hettie's to find out where Jack was. Sure, you believe that and I'll tell you another one, I thought to myself.

“So I told him. Not that I knew exactly. But Jack had stopped by early and picked up a box of shells, and we had exchanged a few words. Mostly about his being the new town cop and getting his license back and all. Which frankly I thought was good for the town, knowing what I knew then about Wade Whitehouse and what I know now. Anyhow, Jack had mentioned he was going up to Parker Mountain, where he
had spotted a huge buck that we both knew had not been shot yet. Since the biggest buck that had come in so far was only a hundred-and-fifty-pound ten-pointer. Not your monster buck.

“So that's more or less what I told Wade. ‘Jack's up on Parker Mountain somewhere,' I told him. That and nothing more exact than that, because I didn't know anything more exact than that. And I only told him as much as I did because he asked, and I figured he asked only because he was trying to make it look like he had legitimate business with Hettie. When he did not have legitimate business with Hettie. Actually, it figured that the one person in town Wade would want to avoid would be Jack Hewitt. So I didn't see anything wrong in telling him where Jack was. Anyhow, he said thanks, and the kid paid me for the milk and left without finding any cookies that met her standards. Not that I particularly gave a damn.”

 

“I hurried—oh, Lord, I was frantic hurrying trying to get out of there before he came back. I was just tossing my clothes and things every which way into suitcases and plastic bags and boxes and stuffing them into my car trunk and the back seat; I felt guilty—leaving like that, without telling him or explaining anything; of course I felt guilty; but I figured I could explain later, and I also thought that maybe once it was done, once I was gone from the house, he wouldn't mind so much. It was the actual leaving, doing it in his face, that I figured would bother him the most; I was sure it would make him crazy— crazier, actually, because he was already pretty crazy, you know that; that was why I was leaving in the first place. I don't think he wanted me around, but I was afraid that he would literally come apart if he thought I was abandoning him, and that's why I was trying to get out of there before he came back with Jill, which I had learned from Nick, who had called me out at the house as soon as Wade left the restaurant. Well, it's more complicated than that. But you understand. It had to do with Pop too, I have to admit—or, more accurately, it had to do with the combination of Wade and Pop in that house: they were both getting worse, and so far as I could see, it was because of each other. Pop mostly sat in front of the TV set in the living room watching wrestling; once in a while he opened up a new bottle of booze, which he drank from until he got drunk enough to start talking cracked; and about then Wade
usually showed up, or for the first time would start to act like Pop was in the room—having ignored the man up till that point: and then the two of them would go at it hammer and tong. That was no place for a woman. Not with Wade chasing people through the woods and cracking up his boss's truck like that, it wasn't. His obsession with that stupid hunting accident of Jack's: it was like he thought it explained
everything
, but in order to do so, it had to practically be invented all over from the beginning—by him! And the
w
ildness
he was displaying, like the way he pulled his own tooth out with pliers, which practically made me sick when he told me that's what he had done, although I had already figured it out for myself, thank you, when I found the bloody tooth and pliers on the bathroom sink. Well, you know how he was acting: you were in touch with him then. But you didn't
see
it. Except for the day of Ma's funeral, you were never here to see it and deal with him and Pop up close on a day-to-day basis. I guess I'm saying this because I feel guilty, guilty for leaving him right then, abandoning him, actually, when he had been fired from his job and fired from being the town cop, which was a very important position to him, never mind how he himself described the position; I feel guilty for leaving him alone up there in the house when he was so upset, so beaten down by his life, which he blamed mostly on his father, as you know; I feel guilty because I left him when he was feeling so frustrated by that stupid court case, that custody suit he was trying to bring against Lillian—although I did not at that time know what you told me about that: about how his lawyer had advised him to drop the case, so he still felt dependent on Lillian in order to see his own child—not that I thought he was an especially fit father at that time, believe me.

^”
So there I was, with most of my stuff packed and my car almost filled to the gills, when Wade drives up with Jill. Too late to hide, I figured, so I just stood there, with the trunk and the car doors wide open, and he drove past, looking out the window at the car full of my stuff, not making any sign of recognition, and drove the truck into the barn and parked it. Then he and Jill came walking back along the driveway from the barn to the front where I was—Jill lagging behind and lugging her little suitcase, looking forlorn—and I thought, Oh, Lord, what that child's been through; and I forgot all about getting out of there right then and leaving that child alone
with those two men, one of them drunk and crazy and the other probably on his way to drunk and crazy—although I did not at that moment think either of them was particularly dangerous, which is why I decided that I should stay at the house for another night and day, or at least as long as Jill was there. So when Wade came up to me and looked over the items I had packed into the car, boxes and suitcases and plastic bags full of my things, and said, ‘Going somewhere, Margie?' I tried to lie. Not only because I was leaving him right then, but also because I had changed my mind, due to seeing Jill. It was a stupid thing to do, I know: it was obvious what I was up to; but I was suddenly divided in my emotions between wanting to leave and wanting to stay, and I had not anticipated feeling that way, which is really probably the stupid part. But you get caught in these things: you make one small decision, and pretty soon you're stuck with a bunch of other decisions that you're not so sure of, and then you act stupid. So I lied to Wade and tried to tell him that I was taking a bunch of things to the church rummage sale and a bunch more to the cleaners and laundromat in Catamount, it being Saturday. And of course it didn't work; he saw right through me. He said, ‘Don't lie to me. You're leaving me, I can see that.' I tried to change the subject and said for him not to be silly, or something light like that, and said hi to Jill, who smiled—or tried to smile—looking pathetic and miserable in spite of it—or because of it.

“I have no particular talent for deception, and that's why I'm easily fooled—unless I'm just not very smart, since most people who are smart are good at deceiving people and are hard to fool. Gordon LaRiviere, for example. But Wade—no. He was more like me than like Gordon LaRiviere, say, or Nick Wickham, who is sweet but full of it—which is why I think I was first attracted to Wade, back when he was still married to Lillian: I know you know all about it; Wade told me that he once confessed about it to you, our little extramarital fling (or whatever you want to call it—it didn't last very long, at any rate, and we both felt plenty guilty for it). But he was a man I never tried to lie to, and I don't think he ever tried to lie to me; he kept some things to himself, naturally, and I did too, but that was different, wasn't it? What am I trying to say? I guess I'm trying to say how sad I was that afternoon when Wade drove up with Jill and I tried to lie to him about moving out of the house; it suddenly hit me that what we once had was
gone and could never return; I had finally learned how to be afraid of Wade, and the only way I could think of protecting myself was to lie to him. And because I was so bad at it, so inept, I only made things worse; I stirred up the situation and found myself having to protect myself against him even more than before I had lied; and I wasn't even able to make myself believable enough to protect anyone else from him. Meaning Jill. I realized that it was a lost cause, me and Wade, and that probably I would never again be with a man I did not have to lie to, as I had once been with Wade. And so I started to cry. Standing there beside my car in front of that old farmhouse, with the sun glaring off the snow, and Wade in front of me and his daughter watching—I started to cry. Like a baby. I actually bawled. I can hardly believe it now, but it's the truth: I started to bawl.

“Things got somewhat confused then—or I should say my memory of things gets somewhat confused: I know Wade tried to stop me from crying by putting his arms around me; he reached forward and drew me to him and patted my back; it was a gentle gesture meant to comfort me, although I remember the expression on his face as he came toward me—like a terrible sadness had come over him, a sadness greater even than my own: so that he must have been trying to join me in sadness but was unable to cry himself because he was a man, which resulted in his placing his arms around me and patting my back, as if I were a child. And that made me feel even lonelier than before he had tried to hold me. And so I pushed him away. I told him to leave me
alone
—I said it like that, with terrific emphasis, like he was doing something unpleasant to me: ‘Leave me
alone!'
Then Jill must have gotten frightened, because she started to hit Wade on the back and arms, yelling at him to leave me alone: ‘Leave her alone! Leave her alone!' I was weeping and shoving him away, and Jill was screaming at him and hitting him with her fists, and he moved like a bear then, covering his face with his arms and backing away in the snow. Jill kept after him; she was hysterical; she had him stumbling backwards into the snow. I went after them, and as I reached out to hold Jill off, Wade swung his arms wide and hit her, and she went flying backwards into me. Her nose was bleeding; he had caught her across the mouth and nose; she stood behind me and wailed. We did not say a word, Wade and I. I slowly backed away, facing him, but with my arms held
behind me touching Jill, guiding her toward the car. He looked at me stunned, like someone had hit him on the head with a rock. I've never seen anyone with that painful and bewildered a look on his face: his mouth hung open, his eyes were wild, his arms draped down at his sides. I watched him like he was a beast about to attack us, and I half turned and managed to move my avocado plant off the front seat to the floor and got Jill inside the car and closed the door—with the lock down: I remember that, locking the door as I closed it. Then I edged my way around the back of the car and slammed the trunk lid down and got in on the driver's side. And still, no one said a word. I locked my door. I started the car and backed it out of the driveway, and Jill and I drove away, without once looking back. No, that's not right. When I had the car on the road and aimed toward town, I looked over at the house: Wade stood there in the same spot in the snow beside the driveway, staring down at the snow, probably at the spots of blood from Jill's nose, although I don't really know that, but he stood staring down at the snow like he could not believe what he saw there, his fingers in his mouth, like a little boy, and up on the porch, I saw that Pop had come out—maybe he had been there all along and had seen everything—and he stood there looking at Wade with a smile on his face, like a devil. It was horrible to see that, and I wish I hadn't looked, and I hope that Jill did not see that. When I glanced over at her, she had her eyes closed, and she said in a calm voice that surprised me, ‘I want to go home. Will you take me home?' I said yes, I would, and I did. And I guess you know the rest.”

“YOU KNOW THE REST,” she said. But did I? I suppose that if there were anyone on this planet, other than Wade himself, who knew the rest, knew what happened in the remaining few- hours of that cold bright Saturday afternoon in November, it would be me. Especially now, after these several years of meditating, investigating, remembering, imagining and dreaming the subject.

The historical facts, of course, are known by everyone— all of Lawford, all of New Hampshire, even most of Massachusetts: anyone who knew any of the principals or happened to read the Sunday papers or watch the news on television knew the facts. But facts do not make history; facts do not even make events. Without meaning attached, and without understanding of causes and connections, a fact is an isolate particle of experience, is reflected light without a source, planet with no sun, star without constellation, constellation beyond galaxy, galaxy outside the universe—fact is nothing.

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-
b
itch!

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 him, 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.