Russell Banks - Affliction

He spoke rapidly, not drawing a breath, it seemed, giving no one a chance to answer his questions or respond to his declarations. “I’ve got sons, goddammit, oh my God, have I got sons! I’ve got a hell of a bunch of sons, all of them going to be big men too, right, boys? Right, Elbourne? Charlie? Wade? Rolfe? You love me, boys? Do you love your daddy? Do you love your Pop? Of course you do. Sure you do.

“And what about you, daddy’s girl? What about you? Where have you been all my life, eh? You love your daddy, Lena? Come here, child. You love your Pop? Of course you do.”

Lena came shyly toward him and let him lift her onto his lap, where she sat uncomfortably on his jumpy knees for a few seconds before wriggling back down as soon as the man had gone on to something else, usually his wife and our mother, whom he characterized as beautiful and wise and good. “Oh, Jesus, Sally, you are such a goddamned good person! I mean Good. Capital G. I truly mean it, the goddamned fucking truth! Sally, you are so much better than I am, I who am no good at all, you who are a good person, a truly good person, like a fucking saint. Beyond fucking com-pare. I’m sorry, excuse the language, but I mean it, and I’m sorry but there’s no other way to say it, because you are so fucking good you don’t even make me feel bad. You are. Which is about as good as anyone can be and still be human! And you are totally human, Sally. A woman human. Oh, Sally, Sally, Sally!”

Later on, after we smaller children, Lena and I, had been put to bed, Pop either ran out of whiskey or drank so much of it that when he stood, he nearly fell, and he permitted Ma to put him to bed in the downstairs bedroom in which old Uncle Elbourne had died and which, afterwards, they had painted and moved into themselves. The older boys and Wade, who was eleven now and stayed up as late as he wanted, watched television in the living room with Ma, who sat on the old greasy green sofa in her housecoat and slippers and ate homemade popcorn, while the boys sat on the floor and competed with one another’s smartass comments on the television program.

Without turning around, they knew he was watching them from the doorway of the bedroom, and they went suddenly silent. All of them knew he was there and said nothing, Ma, Elbourne and Charlie, and even Wade. Although at that time Wade had never actually been hit by Pop, except of course for the usual spankings when he was little, he nonetheless had watched his older brothers being hit and heard Ma being hit late at night while the boys cowered in their beds and said not a word to one another until it was over, when they spoke rapidly of other things.

They went on watching the television show as if the man were not standing in the bedroom doorway behind them — it was Gunsmoke , with James Arness as Matt Dillon, a tall loose-limbed man whose big lantern-jawed face comforted Wade somehow, although it was like no face he knew personally. Even so, Wade let himself dream over that large kindly strong face, wishing not that his father looked like U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon but that his father knew such a man, that’s all, had a friend whose good-natured strength would quiet him down and at the same time cheer him up a little, make his father less turbulent and unpredictable, less dangerous.

“Shut that goddamn thing off!” Pop said. He had a crumpled pack of Old Golds in his hand and was wearing only underwear, baggy dark-green boxer shorts and a tee shirt. Behind him, the bedroom was in darkness, and the man’s small pale wiry body looked almost fragile in the dim light from the lamp on the low table next to the couch. He dropped his cigarettes, and when he bent down to pick them up, Wade saw the bald spot at the back of Pop’s head, which he usually covered by combing his straight reddish hair from the left side all the way across to the right, and Wade decided that he liked looking at Pop this way. He would never have said it, he knew no one he could say such a strange thing to, but he thought at that moment that his father grabbing at the floor for a pack of cigarettes, knobby-kneed, all pointy elbows and shoulders, flat-chested and red-faced, with his one sign of vanity exposed, was cute-looking, a man you could not help liking, even when he was sour-faced and shouting at you.

Elbourne jumped to his feet from the floor beside the couch and snapped off the television set. “Okay, okay, for Christ’s sake,” he mumbled in a barely audible voice, and he headed for the stairs. Charlie silently followed.

“We’ll keep it turned down,” Ma said. She sat facing the fading gray image on the screen, one hand buried in the bowl of popcorn on her lap. “Wade,” she said, “turn it back on. Just keep the sound low so your father can sleep.”

Wade unlocked his crossed legs and got up and reached for the knob, and Pop said, “I said shut the fucking thing off. Shut. It. Off.”

Wade thought for a second that Pop sounded like Marshal Dillon in Miss Kitty’s bar daring a drunken gunfighter to reach for his gun. The boy held his hand still, six inches from the knob.

“Go ahead, it’s all right,” Ma said. “Just keep it low so your father can sleep.” She drew several pieces of popcorn from the bowl and pushed them into her mouth and chewed slowly.

Pop took a step into the room and pulled a cigarette from the pack and placed it between his lips, and as he lit it, he said to Wade, “Go ahead, you little prick, don’t do what your father tells you. Do what your mother tells you.” He inhaled deeply and blew the smoke at his feet, as if he were now thinking of something else.

Wade moved his hand a few inches closer to the knob. Where were his brothers? Why had they given up so easily?

Ma, chewing on the popcorn, said to Wade, “Honey, turn on the show, will you?” Wade obeyed, and his mother turned around on the couch and said to his father, “Go on back to sleep, Glenn, we’ll be—” when he passed her by quickly and reached out for the boy with both hands and shoved him hard, away from the television set and back against the couch. Wade let himself fall into a sitting position beside his mother; his father snapped the television off again.

“You little prick!” Pop yelled, his eyes narrowing, and he raised his fist over Wade’s head.

“ Don’t !” Ma cried, and the fist came down.

There was no time to hide from the blow, no time to protect himself with his arms or even to turn away. Pop’s huge fist descended and collided with the boy’s cheekbone. Wade felt a terrible slow warmth wash thickly across his face, and then he felt nothing at all. He was lying on his side, his face slammed against the couch, which smelled like cigarette smoke and sour milk, when there came a second blow, this one low on his back, and he heard his mother shout, “Glenn! Stop!” His body was behind him somewhere and felt hot and soft and bright, as if it had burst into flame. There was nothing before his eyes but blackness, and he realized that he was burrowing his face into the couch, showing his father his backside as he dug with his paws like a terrified animal into the earth. He felt his father’s rigid hands reach under his belly like claws and yank him back, flinging him to his feet, and when he opened his eyes he saw the man standing before him with his right hand cocked in a fist, his face twisted in disgust and resignation, as if he were performing a necessary but extremely unpleasant task for a boss.

"Glenn, stop!” Ma cried. “He didn’t do anything.” She was behind Pop, standing now but still holding the bowl of popcorn before her, as if she were his assistant and the bowl contained certain of his awful tools.

Pop held Wade with one hand by the front of his shirt, like Matt Dillon drawing a puny terrified punk up to his broad chest, and he took his left fist, swung it out to the side, opened it and brought it swiftly back, slapping the boy’s face hard, as if with a board, then brought it back the other way, slapping him again and again, harder each time, although each time the boy felt it less, felt only the lava-like flow of heat that each blowleft behind, until he thought he would explode from the heat, would blow up like a bomb, from the face outward.