Russell Banks - Affliction

That ridge — in profile, a wide black rip in the western half of the overcast sky — is named for its shape, Saddleback, and it terminates in a tree-covered monadnock called Parker Mountain, named after Major Rubin Parker, the man whose eloquence convinced the Abenakis, and whose shrewd lobbying convinced the New Hampshire provincial legislature, that the Indians, not the British monarch, owned the mountain and thus could sell it and the tall trees on it to him. Which they did — for two chests of hatchets, a dozen hand mirrors, fifty wool blankets, one hundred five-dollar gold pieces and a clock.

Parker Mountain, or seven thousand acres of it, which is essentially all of it, is more hill than mountain. But because it is a monadnock, a single lump of dirt and stone disgorged whole by the retreating glacier, it bears no geological or visual relation to the White Mountains farther north and east or to the Green Mountains west and south, and thus — more or less isolated in a lumpy bed of lesser hills and ridges — it stands out and does indeed resemble a mountain.

Parker Mountain, then, and not Parker Hill, seemed to the white people to be an appropriate name, more so at least than the Abenaki name for it, which early maps translate as Place of the Serpents. The land stayed in the sole possession of Major Parker until his death in bed at age ninety-seven in 1842, when it passed into the shared possession of his seven children, who sold the hill and what little uncut timber remained on it to the Great Northern Wood Products Company of Newburyport, Massachusetts. The Parker heirs promptly moved south to Concord and Manchester, where they disappeared into Victorian bourgeois respectability, setting the precedent for a later pattern of migration.

Ninety years and three generations later, in 1932, after a long decline, Great Northern finally declared bankruptcy, and the Shawmut National Bank and First Boston auctioned off the hill in large slabs for one hundred dollars an acre. These parcels of land were purchased for the most part by local people who owned adjacent farmland. By the Great Depression, family farming in northern New England had diminished almost to a vanishing point, however, and the fields grew quickly back in wild berries and scrub, until crumbling stone walls wandered lost and forgotten in the shade of third-and fourth-growth pine and spruce forests. Widows, children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, first and second cousins, friends and even enemies inherited the land, as one generation passed the physical world on to the next.

By the late 1980s, these seven thousand acres of rocky forested hillside were in the hands of the members of perhaps a hundred different families. Most of the mountain was still owned and sometimes even lived on by local people, but many of the owners now resided elsewhere, often as far away as California and Hawaii, and were barely aware of the existence of their few acres of useless stony northern New Hampshire countryside, except when the tax bill came in. Questioning the wisdom of holding on to the land, they usually made a few halfhearted attempts to find a buyer and, finding none, either paid the modest tax to Alma Pittman or did not, but in any case forgot about the land for another year. By now, deeds, bills of sale, surveyors’ reports, maps and tax assessments were so tangled and in such conflict and disagreement with one another that it was difficult if not impossible to ascertain who owned how much of what. Consequently, people who used the land, either to live on or for hunting and fishing or as woodlots or berry fields, avoided selling the part of it that they used, and they could not imagine buying up anyone else’s — so that, more than two centuries after Major Parker’s purchase of Parker Mountain from the Abenaki Indians, proprietary rights had come full circle. Once again, ownership of the land was determined more by use than by law. With no one complaining, town officials taxed the users accordingly and were grateful for what got collected.

The lights had not yet come on in any of the trailers when snow started to fall, specks of it like luminous bits of ash against the black ridge and mountain on the far side of the lake and against the dark circle of open water out near the center. In minutes the snow was coming down harder, straight down in the windless air as if on threads — the first snow of the year, and early, even for this far north, where from the tops of the hills you could look away and see Canada, frigid and rigid and dour as schist.

Soon the ground surrounding the trailer park was white, and the roofs and hoods of cars and trucks and of outbuildings, shanties, porches and toolsheds were covered as if with crisp new bedsheets. The snow brought daylight faster than did the whitening sky, and what the sky would have exposed, the snow hid. It blotted out the clutter of the yards and scrub beyond, the sad and disordered look of the place, with the swift efficiency of amnesia.

In the trailer nearest the road, then in another farther in, finally in a half dozen, lights went on, casting small patches and strips of yellow light against the snow-covered ground. One could discern shuffling and bumping noises as the inhabitants rose from their sleep and prepared to begin the day. One heard the muffled sounds of a baby’s cry, a radio, the whine of an electric shaver, a woman’s cross shout from the kitchen back down the trailer to a child still huddled in bed, eyes closed and feigning sleep under blankets in darkness and warmth against the light and the cold.

The trailer at the very end, a light-blue two-bedroom unit with rust gathering at the seams, was parked on what might have been promoted in the beginning as the most desirable lot in the park. It was next to a short crescent of beach and, on the other side, a sharply narrowing point of land, so there was no room for adjacent trailers. This was the home and lot that Wade Whitehouse had purchased from his boss, Gordon LaRiviere, two years before, shortly after his final departure from the bungalow in the birch grove on Lebanon Road that he had built himself and shared with his wife, Lillian, and daughter, Jill, for close to eight years.

Wade had run the well-drilling crew that put in the well for the park, a deep-water artesian that cranked out fifty gallons a minute at one hundred thirty feet, and the idea of living by the lake had appealed to him, especially since he hated the alternative idea (the only one he could imagine after the divorce) of staying in one of the apartments over Golden’s store in town. Wade was broke, but LaRiviere offered to hold a twenty-year mortgage with no down payment, and he gave Wade the first choice of all twelve trailers in the park. It was July, and Wade thought he liked to fish; and the little beach next to the light-blue Bide-a-Wile looked like something he would enjoy, especially in the warm summer evenings after work.

As it turned out, however, he never got around to buying a fishing rod. And he had not used the beach once in two years, partly because he was so busy in the summer months, frequently drilling wells for LaRiviere out of town and not getting home till after dark, but also because, except for maybe six short weeks in July and August, the lake was too cold to swim in comfortably. Then came his first winter at the trailer park, and with that it became obvious that the place at the end of the row of trailers out on the point was in fact the worst location in the park. It was the place most exposed to the cold winds that swept off Parker Mountain and, picking up speed as they crossed the lake, banged like hammers against the tin sides of the unprotected trailer before swooping on toward the White Mountains beyond. It took two winters before Wade decided that LaRiviere probably had known when he sold him the trailer that it was the least desirable of the fourteen trailers in the park and that if Wade had not eagerly, even gratefully, bought it for $22,000, LaRiviere would have been forced to sell it for much less.