Russell Banks - Affliction

Then Charlie’s other hand, the left, wandered back toward the table, as if curious and a little stupid, and it lay on the table palm down. And when Pop saw it there, he said, “Hold it! Hold it!” He let go of Charlie’s right hand and lifted his elbow off the table and stood up straight. He brushed his hair back with both hands and said, “You cheated. It’s a default.”

Charlie looked at his left hand in disgust. “Aw, c’mon, Pop, I could’ve just put it back. All you had to do was say. I didn’t get no advantage.”

“Sorry, Charlie. Rules is rules, m’ boy,” Pop said, and he smiled cheerfully, turned and walked out the huge open door and peered up at the sky. “Still raining,” he called back, “and looks like it’s going to keep on. I’m going in, where it’s warm,” he said, and he hitched up his baggy pants and disappeared from view.

The boys were silent for a moment. Charlie said, “I could have beat him, you know. I was beating him.”

“Yeah.”

“He knows it, too. He knows I was beating him.”

“Yeah. He does.”

“The bastard.”

“Yeah. The bastard.”

They stood in the middle of the barn floor a few minutes longer, listening to the rain and the swallows and staring out the rear of the barn, which was wide open to the dark-gray sky and the meadow and pinewoods at the far side of the building, where they had ripped down all the boards. They knew that now the job would never be done, that tomorrow our father would find other things for himself to do and other chores for them, and the barn would stay the way it was, its ribs and spine exposed to the weather, the rest slowly rotting off, as rain blew in and snow fell. It would be like a huge long-dead animal come upon in the woods when the snow melts, half in the ground and half out, half bones and half flesh and fur, and when you walk up on it, you see what it is and remember what it was, and you look away.

LILLIAN WANTED TO SEE Wade’s face, but he kept as much of it as he could out of sight: he wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled down low, and as he drove he kept glancing out the window on his left and talked to her without looking at her. They were on the way to the Riverside Cemetery, their regular Sunday afternoon visit to her father’s grave, and Wade had picked her up at her aunt Alma’s, as usual, right after lunch. It was a bright sunny day with a cloudless blue sky and high dry air, and in spite of the somber occasion, Lillian had come out of her aunt’s house whistling a song from South Pacific.

She stopped whistling as soon as she got into the car, Wade’s ten-year-old Ford sedan, which he had salvaged from the parts of three different Fords. They had all been wrecks, bought from Chub Merritt last fall when Wade was fifteen for a hundred bucks apiece and worked on at home throughout the winter and spring in what remained of the old barn behind the house. He had got his license in May but did not drive the car until late June, not until he had it running smoothly and had painted it cherry red, with his initials, WW, pin-striped onto the front doors just below the window frame, a gold monogram slanted to the right and made to look like lightning bolts.

“Wade, what’s the matter with your face?” she asked, and tried to see.

He turned his face to his left and said, “Nothing’s the matter.”

She saw, however, that his cheeks were swollen and discolored; she instantly knew that behind the dark glasses his eyes were blackened. “Oh, Wade!” she cried. “You got into a fight!”

He denied it, but she persisted. He had promised he would not drink or fight. He had promised. Many times they had decided together that these were stupid activities, drinking and fighting, fine for their stupid insensitive friends to indulge in, perhaps, but not for Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, who were superior to all that, who were finer, nobler, more intelligent than their friends. Because they had each other, they did not need anyone else; they believed that. They did not need their parents, though she did wish her father were still alive — he would have understood and admired Wade; and not their friends; and not any of their teachers at school, who were dull and hopelessly out of touch with what was important and moving to teenagers; and not her aunt Alma or Gordon LaRiviere, Wade’s new boss, or anyone else in town, either. They needed only each other, exclusively and totally, and they had each other, more or less, so they were free to ignore everyone else, which meant, among other things, that Wade did not have to drive around at night with the other boys his age drinking beer and getting into brawls in Catamount or at the Moonlight Club down in Sunapee or with summer kids from Massachusetts at the Weirs in Laconia. He had promised. He hated that stuff, he had told her, just as much as she did. It was stupid. It was brutal. It was humiliating.

It was also dangerous and, if they were fighting over a girl, as they often were, sexual; consequently Lillian and Wade kept track of who had fought whom over the weekend. They listened to Monday morning hallway gossip as eagerly as their classmates did, and sometimes Lillian secretly imagined Wade getting into a fight with, say, Jimmy Dame, who had told her once in the hallway that she had great tits, why didn’t she show them off more? And when she told him what Jimmy had said to her, Wade had secretly imagined slamming him up against the lockers and punching him once, twice, three times, quick hard hits to the chin that snapped Jimmy’s head back against the lockers, making a loud metallic clang every time Wade hit him.

Lillian reached across the seat to Wade and brushed his cheek with her fingertips.

He pulled away and said, “Don’t!”

At the bend in the Minuit River, where the land rises gradually from the eastern bank to a high meadow, Wade turned off the road and drove along the rutted lane that leads uphill to the cemetery. The light fell in planes tinged with pink, great broad sheets of it that reflected off the dry mintgreen leaves of maples and oaks and the meadow grass shuddering in the breeze. Where the meadow bellies and the rise eases somewhat, the lane passes through a cut-stone gate into the cemetery, and Wade pulled the old Ford off to the right and parked it.

Lillian got quickly out, taking her bouquet of daisies and Indian paintbrush with her, and strode away from the car. Wade watched her cross in front of him again, fifty feet farther into the rows of graves, and pass between the Emerson and Locke family plots, graves that went back a hundred and fifty years. Lillian did not cross the graves; she always walked along the proper paths laid between them, taking sharp rights and lefts, until she had zigzagged her way to the far corner of the cemetery and stood at last at the foot of her father’s grave. A small red-granite stone marked it: Samuel Laurence Pittman 1924–1964.

Wade sat in the car and let the sun beat down on his face and chest, let it warm and soothe him, while through his sunglasses he watched Lillian remove the old dead stems and leaves from the plastic vase next to the gravestone and replace them with the new. She walked quickly to a spigot in the ground a short distance away and returned with the flowers in water and gently set the vase down to the right of the marker, adjusting it carefully, as if making it easier for her father to admire them. Then she stood, clasping her hands together at her waist, like a woman in prayer, and looked steadily at the gravestone, as if it were her favorite portrait of her father.

Wade thought, I wish my father was dead. Dead and buried. He savored the image: he drives out here on Sundays, just like his girlfriend, Lillian, dutiful and loving, and he stands at the foot of his father’s grave for hours at a time, contemplating the man’s confinement down there, locked inside a heavy wooden coffin, buried under six feet of dirt with a three-hundred-pound headstone on top, just to make sure.