Russell Banks - Affliction

Finally, after a week of it, Wade had snapped at me, “Hey, c’mon, Rolfe, we all know the story. Whyn’t you think of something new to say? Besides, it’s kind of disgusting when we’re eating.”

Pop had held his fork in midair between his plate and mouth and said, “Leave him be, Wade. Don’t be such a candyass, anyhow. Rolfe probably won’t ever see nothing that stupid again.”

“I hope not,” Ma had said.

Wade had shut up, but sensing the source of my brother’s discomfort, I did not tell the story again.

The following spring, Lillian’s mother married Tom Smith, a divorced drinking buddy of Lillian’s father, another housepainter, who lived up in Littleton and owned a triple-decker apartment house there. The woman took her two younger daughters to Littleton with her, leaving Lillian behind, to complete high school and live with her spinster aunt, Alma Pittman, the hardworking dour pinch-faced older sister of her dead father, a woman who was regarded as necessary to the town but a little overeducated, because she had studied accounting for two years at Plymouth State before coming back to Lawford during the war to take care of her ailing parents.

Lillian did not particularly like her cheerless aunt, but the woman left her alone, gave her a room upstairs and allowed Wade to come over whenever he wanted and even let them spend hours alone in Lillian’s room with the door closed, where they passionately kissed and hugged and groped through each other’s clothing to their virginal bodies. And after a while, exhausted, they would cease to struggle with the angels of their adolescent consciences; they fell away panting and talked in whispers of their fears and longings; and sometimes they came downstairs and sat side by side on the couch, with Alma in her ladder-back rocker, and the three of them watched television together. And though Wade and Lillian did not actually make love in those steamy sessions upstairs (perhaps because they never actually made love), it was during those summer months, when Wade was sixteen years old and Lillian fifteen, that they decided to marry as soon as they graduated from high school. It was the same summer that Wade first spoke to anyone of our father’s violence.

In the years that our father had been beating him, Wade had not spoken of it to anyone, not to his friends at school or on the football and baseball teams, who often joked, the way boys in cars or in locker rooms will, about how their old man used to beat the shit out of them but he damn well better not try it now or he will damn well get his ass kicked. And he could not imagine talking about it with our mother, though at times it seemed clear that she wanted him to. Whenever she brought the subject up, he felt his heart race, as if she had asked him something about his sex life or told him something about hers, and he always said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Our sister, Lena, suffered only her father’s verbal assaults, so Wade knew she could not possibly understand. It was bad for her, but different. And though he sometimes wanted to warn me, now seven and not yet beaten by the man, Wade felt somehow that if no one spoke of it, if no one acknowledged it, then it might never happen again. It might turn out to be ancient history.

As for his older brothers, they seemed to Wade to regard our father’s occasional, predictable and, for the most part, avoidable attacks as just one more of the many brutalities of our life so far, as one small corner of the rough terrain of childhood, something we were supposed to endure and then pass through and become scornful of, which was why, goddammit, Elbourne had gone, and next month Charlie was going, straight into the army without even waiting to graduate from high school. So that if Wade had spoken of it to them, he would only have been pointing out his inadequacies, revealing to his older brothers, as to himself, his lesser status as a human being.

Besides, for Wade, even when he believed he was thinking clearly about it, the beatings were still too confusing and complicated to talk about with Elbourne and Charlie. All Elbourne would say is, “Don’t come to me with your problems, Wade. You’re big enough now to wipe the floor with the sonofabitch, if you want to. Do like I did. After that, believe me, he’ll never lay a hand on you.” And Charlie would say, “You don’t even have to wipe the floor with him, you just got to make him think you’re willing to. Like I did. After that, he’ll back off. Remember?” And Wade did remember.

It was four years earlier, and one spring weekend our father decided to save the barn, which had been falling down for a decade, by tearing off the fallen part and rebuilding the rest with whatever timbers and boards he could salvage from the half-collapsed back loft and the old cow stalls below. The framing timbers were still for the most part unrotted, and many of the aged wide pine boards, silvery gray and bearded with splinters, were reusable, and our father’s notion of shortening the barn by thirty feet and squaring up the rest, with no expenditure except for nails, was an attractive one — even to his sons, who knew they would have to provide the free labor.

Elbourne got out of it — he was sixteen and had a weekend job already, pumping gas for Chub Merritt, but Charlie, who was fourteen then and large for his age, had nothing better to do on a cloudy April Saturday, and Wade, though only twelve, was able to pull nails and haul boards and timbers alongside a grown man. I have no memory of the event. I was too young to help in any way and probably stayed inside the whole day.

Wade and Charlie liked the idea: the barn had been ugly to them for years, an embarrassment, even before the roof had collapsed at the rear from the weight of the snow one particularly bad winter, and they had learned to avert their gaze from the decrepit leaning unpainted structure, to pretend that it was not sagging there in the lot between the house and the woods. Now they could look at it and imagine a crisply squared handsome old barn made tight against the weather and clean enough inside to use as a garage and workshop.

Pop had told them at breakfast, “I figure a couple, three weekends is all, and we’ll have us a brand-new barn built out of the old one. We can store a winter’s wood in it then, and you boys want to work on some goddamned old clunker there, no problem.”

Wade and Charlie had gone out to the barn and had started ripping off and hauling boards from the back to the front before Pop had even finished breakfast: it was rare that people in the Whitehouse family worked on something together, and each of the boys was secretly pleased by the chance to work alongside his father and brother on a project that so clearly would benefit them all. In a short while, Pop had joined them, had set up his table saw a short ways outside the barn door and was cutting the boards to size and nailing them over old gaps and holes. He was no carpenter, but it was not a difficult job, and by noon they could see a difference: most of the skeleton of the rear half of the barn had been exposed, and most of the holes in the front had been covered over.

They broke for lunch, leftover macaroni and cheese, and the boys sat at the table so they could look over Pop’s wispy red hair and out the window behind him to the barn, and while they ate they kept glancing up to admire what they had done so far. They finished eating before Pop did and returned to work, and when he joined them he was lugging a six-pack of Schlitz, which he set on the ground next to his table saw. He popped open the first and said, “Might’s well make this enjoyable.” He said it glumly, as if he believed it was impossible to make anything enjoyable.

The boys said nothing. They looked at each other, then resumed pulling down the boards and knocking out the bent rusted nails and hauling the boards forward and stacking them neatly a few feet from the saw, where Pop went on measuring, and trimming them and nailing them into place. A cutting breeze had come up, and the smooth gray sky had roughened and lowered somewhat. At one point, the saw stopped its whine, and Wade heard the wind hiss through the pines, reminding him of winter, and he suddenly smelled wood smoke. He looked over at the house and saw a silver ribbon of smoke unravel from the chimney and knew that Ma had started a fire in the kitchen stove, and for the first time that day he wished he were not doing what he was doing.