Russell Banks - Affliction

“I mean it. I’ll kill you.” He lifted the skillet in his right hand and held it out and just off his shoulder, like a Ping-Pong paddle, and he suddenly felt ridiculous.

Without hesitation, Pop walked quickly around the table, came up to his son and punched him straight in the face, sending the boy careening back against the counter and the skillet to the floor. Grabbing him by his shirtfront, Pop hauled the boy back in front of him and punched him a second time and a third. A fourth blow caught him square on the forehead and propelled him along the counter to the corner of the room, where he stood with his hands covering his face. “Come on!” his father said, and he advanced on him again. “Come on, fight back like a man! Come on, little boy, let’s see what you’re made of!”

Wade yanked his hands away and thrust his face open-eyed at his father and cried, “I’m not made of what you’re made of!” and Pop hit him again, slamming Wade’s head back against the wall. Wade covered his face with his hands once more, and he began to cry.

Pop turned away in disgust. “You sure as shit ain’t,” he said, and he walked over to the door, where he turned back to Wade and said, “Next time you start telling your father what to do and what not to do, make goddamned sure you can back it up, buddy-boy.” Then he went out, slamming the door behind him.

Wade let himself slide slowly down to the floor, where he sat with his legs straight out, his head slumped on one shoulder, his arms flopped across his lap — a marionette with its strings cut.

It was like being asleep, he told Lillian, only he was not really sleeping. He did not know how long he remained there on the floor — hours, maybe — but at some point he heard his father’s pickup turn into the yard. He got up from the floor, wobbly-legged, and quickly made his way to the stairs, and by the time he heard his father bump his way into the kitchen, Wade was standing in the darkness in the middle of his bedroom. He listened to the man’s clumsy drunken movements below, heard him at last go into Uncle Elbourne’s room and close the door. Then, slowly, his face on fire, Wade took off his shirt and jeans and loafers and socks and got into his bed.

Lillian held his hands to her own face, as if to rub into her cheeks and brow the heat and pain that filled Wade’s face. “Did your mother see you this morning? Does she know?”

“No. I left early, before anyone was up,” he said. “I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. Not even you.”

“Oh, Wade. Why?”

He started to try to say it, and he spoke the word “shame,” but when he heard himself say the word, he knew that it meant something different to her, so he tightened his lips into a line and shook his head from side to side. “It’s over now, that’s all that matters. I only wish,” he said, “I wish I’d killed him when I had the chance. I should’ve busted his head open with that frying pan,” he said.

“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you fight back? You’re bigger than he is.”

Wade looked at her and withdrew his hands quickly and slapped them onto the steering wheel rim. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t ever ask me that again. You don’t understand. Nobody can understand. Okay?”

She said, “Okay. I’m … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

“Never mind I didn’t mean’ or ‘I’m sorry.’Just don’t ever ask me that again,” he said, and he started the motor of the old Ford. He reached over and flipped on the radio and ran the dial up and down for a few seconds, until he caught the Burlington station. It was a Supremes song, and he could not make out the words, but he liked the way the music sounded, tight and fast and clear, like a stream in spring, filled with snowmelt.

By the time they got back to town and were parked in front of Lillian’s aunt’s house, it was dark. “Do you want to come in for supper?” she asked. “I know Aunt Alma won’t—”

He said, “Lillian. No. Jesus.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. “I can’t. Ever.”

“I meant about how you look,” she said. She reached over and once again touched his swollen cheeks and brow, gently, as if verifying the truth of his story by touching his wounds. Then she got out of the car and went inside.

IN TERMS OF THE SOCIAL FORCES at play, in terms of our native environment, one might say, my life was not different from Wade’s. We were raised alike, until I left home and went down to the university, where, if I was not exactly transplanted, I grew and throve as if placed in the sun and under the care of a more kindly and talented gardener than any I had known so far. Since that time, however, because of the similarity of our early lives, every thought, memory and dream of my brother Wade has brought with it the painful unanswerable question “Why me, Lord?” Why me and not Wade? In my dreams of Wade, in my memories and thoughts of him, we are interchangeable.

After all, I was no more or less adapted than Wade to the soil and climate we were both born into — stingy soil, rocky and thin, and a mean climate. By the age of eighteen I was as much a tough little lichen as he and should have shriveled, should have curled up at the edges and died at the university, as he believed he would, which is why it never occurred to him to apply to the university when he was eighteen. And later, in the affluent suburban town where I have lived now for almost a decade, I should have been, as Wade would have been, merely a curious exhibit of foreign flora at the local museum of natural history or a figure in a diorama depicting life among the less advantaged peoples to the north. Yet here I am, a teacher, no less, a veritable pillar of a privileged community, member of benevolent and fraternal orders, welcome guest in the white colonial homes of physicians, dentists, real estate brokers and auto dealers. I even attend church regularly. Episcopal.

It makes no sense. Which is why the question “Why me, Lord?” has plagued my adult life. It makes me feel permanently and universally displaced, as much here as up in the village of Lawford. As if I were Chinese in Switzerland or Welsh in Brazil. We struggle to change our place in society, and all we manage to do is displace ourselves. It should be a simple matter: it is what this country was invented to do — to change our lives. Lift yourself up by the bootstraps, young fellow. Make yourself upwardly mobile, my dear. Rise like cream to the top, m’ boy.

And in a way it is a simple matter, if, like most people, a person is intelligent, organized and energetic. Certainly most of the people in the Whitehouse family possessed those qualities, especially as children. After all, every year thousands, maybe millions, of good citizens do change their lives for the better, in terms of class, just as I have done, and as my brother did not. From log cabin to president: it is our dominant myth. We live by it, generation after generation. Do not look back, look ahead. Keep your eye on the sparrow, your shoulder to the wheel, your feet on the ground. That is what I have done; it is how I have lived my life so far. And it is how my brother Wade lived his life too. That is why I ask, Why me, Lord?

Why did I apply to the university, when no one else in my graduating high school class aspired to an education higher than that offered at hairstyling or welding school in Littleton? Elbourne and Charlie joined the army. Wade, who was a better student than I, on graduation simply turned his summer job with LaRiviere into a full-time job and considered himself lucky. Lena got pregnant and married. But I left our parents’ home in a radically different way than my brothers and sister, for reasons I still cannot name, and when I got down there to the university and discovered that I did not know how to talk or dress or eat in the acceptable way, did not know how to write or read or speak in class, did not even know how to smile, why did I endure such inadequacy and not go running home to where my inadequacies were regarded as virtues and skills? Wade, had he got as far as enrolling, would have been expelled in a week for brawling in the cafeteria or would have quickly flunked out. Why did I go on, to graduate school in Boston, to the study of history — that place where no one lives, where everyone is dead now — to become a teacher, of all things, when all I wanted, all I want now, is to be left alone? I am not ambitious, I am not bookish, I am not even unusually intelligent, and I have no special gift. So why me, Lord?