Russell Banks - Affliction

Consequently, when Sally watched her third son dream, she chose to believe that it was a sign of his blessed contentment and felt relieved that at least someone in this poor and troubled family was a happy person, and for that reason she thought of him as her favorite child. She believed that he was not like his father and, because he was a boy, not like her, either. When she gave birth to a boy she could barely believe that it had come from her body. Her fourth child would be a daughter, Lena, in whom Sally would see herself recreated wholly, poor thing. That is what she called her, “poor thing.” Then a year later, her fifth child would be born, a son they would name Rolfe, who Sally at first thought was like the first two, another chip off the old block, as Glenn said: and so for a few years he was — independent, troublesome, violent, male. Later, with excruciating difficulty, he would change, but no one in the family knew that, except possibly Wade.

The family lived from the start in an inherited house, Sally’s uncle’s place, a small run-down Cape farmhouse on 125 acres of rocky overgrown scrub four miles west of the center of Lawford on the north slope of Parker Mountain. Sally and Glenn moved into the place right after they were married, ostensibly in order to take care of her sick and long-widowed childless uncle Elbourne, but in reality they moved in because they had no other place to live and Sally was already pregnant. By the time Glenn declared that the name of his firstborn son was going to be Elbourne, he had already talked the crippled increasingly senile old man into putting the house in his and Sally’s name — in exchange for payment of three years’ back taxes, Glenn explained, and for safety’s sake. When, a year later, Uncle Elbourne died in his bed in the cold urine-smelling downstairs bedroom, Glenn and Sally Whitehouse were able to believe that they had made the old man’s final days cheerful, a belief backed now by the name of their firstborn son and by their legal ownership of the house.

From such circumspect beginnings, then, did the ramshackle old farm come eventually to be known as the White-house place, where we five Whitehouse kids were raised, where we argued and fought and suffered together and in our own gnarled fashion loved one another, the place that, finally, as soon as we were able, all five children fled — Elbourne and Charlie running to Vietnam, where they died, Lena to marriage with the Wonder Bread truck driver and obesity and charismatic Christianity and five squabbling children of her own, and I, Rolfe, whom the others regarded as the successful one, to the state university.

Wade, the dreamer, fled the Whitehouse place first for the young tenderhearted and beautiful Lillian Pittman; and a few years later, believing he was running from his marriage, he tried to follow his brothers and got sent to Korea instead; then he fled back to Lillian; and a few years after that, believing again that he was in flight from his marriage, he arrived at his trailer by Lake Minuit, Toby’s Inn, Margie Fogg, his job with LaRiviere, his love of his daughter Jill.

Meanwhile, our father, Glenn Whitehouse, was forced to retire early, at sixty-three, when the Littleton Coats mill was sold, and he and our mother remained out there alone in the old Cape, which we children regarded with dark suspicion and rarely visited, especially not on holidays. The old couple grew slowly silent, passing whole long days and nights without saying a word to one another, Ma knitting afghans for Lena’s children down in Revere and church bazaars here in town, Pop cutting and stacking wood for the winter, drinking steadily from midmorning until he fell asleep in his chair in front of the flickering eye of the television.

Usually, at three or four in the morning, the cold woke him with a start, and stumbling to the stove, he shoved a chunk of wood into it as if angry at the thing. He adjusted the damper, shut off the TV and shuffled to the kitchen, where in the dark he poured himself two fingers of Canadian Club and drank it down. Then he eased his brittle body to the bed that he still shared with his wife. He did not understand what had happened, why everyone, everyone except his wife, had gone away from him; and even she, who did understand what had happened, in her own way had long ago gone away from him too: and she lay next to him cold with rage, while he burned, burned.

But hadn’t he always burned? Isn’t that what people who knew him years ago said of him? That before he became a prematurely old man and drank only to stay drunk, Glenn Whitehouse had seemed even then to burn, and not just when he stumbled into bed, as now, and lay there awake till dawn— but all the time, day and night. He had been redheaded when younger, and red-faced, with eyes and lips like glowing coals, a man who went hatless and in his shirtsleeves when other men wrapped themselves in parkas. And when he drank, which was every few nights, even when Wade was a child and probably long before that, the man seemed to burst into flame. His normally dark low voice lifted and thinned, and suddenly his mouth filled to overflowing with words that tumbled past his large teeth into the cool night air of empty parking lots and the cabs of pickup trucks, spattering among hisses and steam and flashes of light, making his listeners laugh nervously and dance away and back again, fascinated and a little frightened. For despite his heat, Glenn Whitehouse, sober, in his manner and bearing was ordinarily a glum silent sort, a workingman who hated his job and whose cross impoverished family only served to remind him of his failings, a man who made friends with difficulty and kept them not at all.

In those early days, before he finally lost his ability to distinguish between being sober and drunk, while our father drank, and for as long as he kept on drinking, he became brilliantly and shamelessly incoherent. The danger, the violence, came late in the evening, when he stopped drinking, so that, while he was never one of those men who got into barroom brawls and, when sober, he had not once raised a hand against his wife or children, his wife and his children nonetheless ran and hid from him when he first arrived home at night, especially on Friday nights, after he had been paid and had spent some of his pay at Toby’s Inn or on a fifth of CC at the Littleton package store with the men riding back down from the mill to Lawford together. Ma and her children would come out of hiding only when one of the children had sneaked into the kitchen and had reported back that the old man was drinking again.

“It’s okay,” young Elbourne would say. “He’s got his bottle out, and he’s sitting at the table pretending to read the paper,” he said, and he laughed.

Then one by one we drifted into the kitchen from the barn or the upstairs bedrooms to warm ourselves at the man’s fire — Elbourne and Charlie, Wade and Lena, and Sally and even me, barely old enough to walk, seeking our father’s heat.

As soon as he saw us, he began to speak. “Elbourne, my boyo! Elbourne, big boy! Get yourself over here by your dear old daddy and let’s have a good look at you, eh? Big boy, what the hell have you been up to now, what the hell sort of trouble have you been getting yourself into? You love me, son? Does Big Boy love Daddy? Does he love his Pop? Sure he does.

“You probably don’t know it, son, but I have ways of finding things out about you. You don’t realize, you poor thing, but all your teachers, you see, all of them, oh yes, first they all see me in the store or down at Toby’s or even up in Littleton, first they see me and then they come right out with it, Elbourne, my big boy bursting the seams of his jeans, so you must tell me yourself, you see, so I can go back to these funny folks, these teachers and preachers and so forth, and not seem quite so … quite so ignorant , yes, ignorant of my own child’s puny adventures.”