Russell Banks - Affliction

Wade was still young, and Elbourne and Charlie had not died yet, so he imagined death as either absence or confinement or, in some cases, both, which was what he wanted for our father, both. He wanted the furious redheaded man gone to someplace else, and he wanted him imprisoned there, locked up, manacled, bound so that he could not ball those hard fists of his and could not lash out with them, could not swing his arms, kick his feet, grab and push and toss and kick a person. The man would have to lie in his box flat on his back, arms crossed over his chest and wrapped tightly, legs bound at the ankles, and then the cover is thumped down and padlocked, and maybe a chain is wrapped around the coffin and padlocked, like Houdini’s. Then the coffin is lowered by a backhoe into the grave, which has been dug extra deep, so that you cannot see the bottom without shining a flashlight directly into it, even during the day. And then dirt gets shoved into the grave, rocks and all, and afterwards the backhoe is driven back and forth over the filled-in grave, flattening and smoothing and tamping down the dirt with the weight of the machine. Sod is placed over the raw dirt, and soon it has woven its roots into the roots of the grass surrounding the grave, making a tough green quilt to cover it. And finally Wade lowers the gravestone from the backhoe, a huge boulder dug out of the woods up behind the cemetery, a gray boulder as big as a car.

Wade shuts off the engine of the backhoe and clambers down from his seat and comes and stands at the side of the boulder, places a hand on it as if it is the shoulder of an old friend, and he listens for the sound of movement, any kind of movement, from below, almost hoping to hear something, a crumbling of clods of dirt, the scrape of a rock against another. He hears his father squirm. The sound stops, and now all he can hear is the breeze off the valley below sweeping over the grassy meadow to the trees. A pair of blue jays call raucously in the distance to one another. A dog from the village barks, once. Then silence. Delicious silence.

Lillian had returned to the car and sat next to him, staring straight ahead, clearly ready to leave the cemetery. She shifted restlessly in the seat but said nothing. Then Wade turned to her and pulled off the sunglasses, and in a voice that was almost a whisper, he said, “I didn’t get into any fight. It was my father. My father did this to me.”

His legs felt like sand, and his hands were trembling. Quickly, he replaced the sunglasses; he looked through them and out over the hood of the car and held on to the steering wheel with both hands, as if he were driving at great speed. Outside the open window, the soft wind blew, and the sun was shining; the meadow grass glowed green and gold, and from the pine trees at the far side of the cemetery, the same pair of jays called.

Lillian reached both hands toward Wade’s face, and when, without looking at her, he pulled away, she dropped her hands back to her lap and studied them for a second. She said, “I don’t … I don’t understand.” She looked at his face again. “You mean, he hit you?” She could not picture it, could not visualize any scene in which Wade, who seemed so large and male to her, so impregnable, like a stone wall, could be struck and hurt by his father, who was actually smaller than Wade and seemed old and fragile compared to him.

Wade said, “Yes. He hit me.”

“How could he … do that? I don’t understand, Wade.”

“Simple. He just hit me. He does that.”

“What … what about your mother?”

“She doesn’t hit me.”

“I mean, doesn’t she … stop him? Can’t she say something?”

Wade barked a laugh. “Sure. She can say any damned thing she wants. So long as she doesn’t mind getting belted for it herself.”

“I … I don’t understand, Wade.”

“I know you don’t,” he said.

She was silent for a second, and then suddenly she was weeping, tears running down her cheeks, and she felt so sorry for this boy that she thought she would break. “Oh, Wade, couldn’t you stop him? Why? Why did he do that? It’s awful,” she said, and she reached once again for him, and again he cringed and pulled away, but this time she persisted, placing one hand on his shoulder and with the fingertips of her other hand touching his cheek and then removing the sunglasses. She caught her breath at the sight of him, and said, “Oh-h!”

He let her examine him, as if he were a sideshow freak, and said nothing. He drew his cigarettes from his shirt pocket and with trembling hand lit one and inhaled deeply. See the freak smoke a cigarette. See his hand shake. See how his lips and mouth function normally, while the rest of his face is misshapen and discolored. Read this map of pain and humiliation.

He said quietly, “Bang, bang, bang,” and then he, too, was weeping, great wrenching sobs surging from his stomach and chest, and he brought his face forward and placed his forehead against the cool rim of the steering wheel.

Lillian wrapped her arms around his shoulders. How she hated that man Glenn Whitehouse, who had done this awful thing to a boy. Wade was a boy to her at this moment, a child injured by his parent and betrayed and abandoned at the deepest level imaginable. She knew, too, that Wade’s pain went on and on, way beyond her imaginings, for she had never been beaten by her father or mother, and though her father may indeed have never drawn a sober breath, as everyone in town said, he had also never raised his hand, or even his voice, against anyone. Her father was weak and sweet, and he had not frightened a soul. The most alarming moments she had endured with her father came on those rare occasions when she realized that, if he was not drunk, he was thinking about getting drunk and so was not in fact present to her, did not actually see or hear her in the room. Those moments made her feel as if she did not exist and so lonely that she got dizzy and had to sit down and babble to him, make him lift his head and smile benignly at her, a big sleepy horse of a man, while she chattered on about school, about her sisters and her mother, making up events and whole conversations with neighbors, teachers, friends, madly filling with words the hole in the universe that he made with his presence, until, at last, her father rose from the kitchen table, patted her on the head and said, “I love you a whole lot, Lily, a whole lot,” and went out the door, leaving her alone in the kitchen, a speck of bright matter whirling through a dark turbulent sky. And now her father was dead, and she believed that she did not feel that pain anymore, because she missed him so.

They sat in Wade’s car for a long time, while the sun moved across the summer sky and touched the topmost branches of the trees and the air began to cool. In a quiet dispassionate voice, Wade tried telling it to her as if it had happened to someone else. It was the only way he could tell it without crying.

He had come home last night late, after having gone to the movies in Littleton with Lillian, where they had stopped by for a short visit with her mother and stepfather and her sisters, and when he got home and had walked into the kitchen, tired, sleepy, head still buzzing with memories of his and his girlfriend’s hot good-night kisses, he had been greeted by the sight of his mother, hair wildly streaming, in her flannel nightdress, rushing across the room to him. She was terrified, eyes red from crying, arms extended, and she swiftly got behind Wade, between his bulky body and the closed door, and wrapped her arms around his middle and clung to him.

Pop sat at the kitchen table with a smile on his face that the boy found oddly calming: Nothing is wrong, it said. But Ma was sobbing hysterically, clutching him from behind, and suddenly Wade was afraid of his father’s smile. Nothing is wrong, it continued saying. We men understand how women are: hysterical, weird. She will calm down in a minute, and you will see that she is all worked up over nothing again.