Russell Banks - Affliction

“How have you been heating the house?” she inquired, as if idly curious. “Not with just this stove.”

“No. There’s a furnace.”

“You’re not using it today? It’s awful cold inside, don’t you think?”

“Yes. It’s … broke, I guess. Didn’t kick in last night. There’s an electric heater in the bedroom.”

“Maybe Wade can take a look at it,” Margie suggested. “Would that be okay? Your pipes’ll freeze. You’re lucky they’re not frozen already.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Wade,” Margie said, “could you do that? Check the furnace? They shouldn’t be way out here with just this stove for heat.”

Wade looked at her as if he had not heard and said, “Yeah, sure. Listen, Pop, I’m going to see if Ma’s all right,” he said suddenly, and he moved toward the door. He hated the sound of his voice. Pop raised a hand, as if to stop him, then let it fall slowly to his side, and Wade left the room.

Wade hesitated briefly at the doorway, then crossed the living room to the bedroom, where he paused for a second and knocked lightly on the door. In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Ma? It’s Wade. Can I come in?”

There was no answer. Margie had come to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, while behind her, Pop, his hands buried in his pockets, looked down at the stove.

Wade slowly opened the door a few inches and saw that the room was dark. It was as cold and damp as a cave, and his breath puffed out in front of him. The window shades were pulled down, but he could make out the furniture in the room, positioned where it had always been — the sagging double bed against the far wall, the bed tables and lamps beside it, the cluttered old high-top dressers that had belonged to Uncle Elbourne, Sally’s sewing chair and table by the window. Around the floor several articles of clothing were scattered, Glenn’s shoes and dingy bathrobe, Sally’s cardigan sweater, and on the floor next to the sewing chair there were a cut-glass ashtray spilling over with butts and ashes and a brown whiskey bottle and a tumbler with about an inch of whiskey in it.

Wade could see Ma in the bed, on the far side, where she always slept, covered with a heap of blankets. He walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at her. She lay on her side, facing away from him, and all he could make out was the outline of her body, but he knew that she was dead. He thought the words, Ma’s dead —when suddenly he heard a click and a loud whir from the floor beside him, and he leapt away, as if startled by a growling watchdog. It was the fan of a small electric heater coming on, and the spring coils began to glow like evil red grins behind the fan, and a hot wind blew at his ankles.

Stepping carefully away from the thing, he crossed to the head of the bed, where he could see the woman clearly. Beneath a mound of blankets and afghans, she wore her wool coat over her flannel nightgown and lay curled on her side like a child, with her tiny hands in mittens fisted near her throat, as if in enraged prayer. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open slightly. Her skin was chalk white and dry-looking, almost powdery, as if her face would crumble to the touch. Her body resembled a feather-light husk more than an actual human body, and it seemed incapable of holding up the weight of the blankets that covered her to the shoulders and wrists. “Oh, Lord,” Wade whispered. “Oh, Lord.” He came forward and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, like a small boy, facing her.

Margie stood at the door, watching in silence, instantly comprehending. The room was icebox cold, and she could see her own breath, and she knew that the old woman had frozen to death in bed. She closed the door and walked slowly back to the kitchen, where Pop stood staring down at the stove.

“Coffee’s perked,” he said in a low voice.

Margie got a potholder and plucked the pot from the stove and filled a cup for herself and one for Pop. When she handed it to him, she said, “Mr. Whitehouse, when did she die?”

Holding the steaming cup in his shaky hands, he looked up into her eyes as if confused by her question. “Die? I don’t know,” he said. “She’s dead, then.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t there, I was out here most of the time. It was snowing, and cold, and the furnace wouldn’t kick in.”

“Did you check on her?”

“Yes, I checked on her. But she was asleep. She had the electric heater in there, and I had the wood stove out here, so it wasn’t all that cold. The cold don’t bother me as much as her, though. Which is why I give her the heater.”

“Don’t you have a telephone?” She looked around the room for one.

“Yes. In the living room.” He pointed feebly to the door.

“Well, why didn’t you call someone to fix the furnace? Wade or somebody?”

“Wade,” the man said, as if it were the name of a stranger. “I thought she was all right,” he went on. “I thought till this morning she was all right. I was … I fell asleep out here, and then I woke up and went in to the bedroom, but she didn’t wake up. So I sat in there with her for a long time. Until you and Wade come by.” He drew a chair out from the table with the toe of his foot and sat down and sipped noisily at his coffee.

“Are you sad, Mr. Whitehouse?” Margie asked.

He looked at his coffee. “Sad. Yes. Sad. I wish, I wish it was me in there instead of her.” He put his cup down and placed his large red hands on his knees. “That’s what makes me sad. I’m the one should’ve froze to death.”

Margie turned and walked to the sink and placed her cup and saucer on the drainboard. She reached over and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Canadian Club and a water glass and carried them back to the table and placed them next to the man. “You are right,” she said firmly. Then she left him alone in the room and went into the living room, looking for the telephone.

THE DAY OF THE FUNERAL was almost springlike: one rose in the early morning and crossed to the window, opened it and listened in vain for birdsong and scrutinized the bare trees for buds. The snowline crossed New Hampshire from west to east near Manchester, a third of the way up the state, and as the temperature rose, the line retreated northward to about Concord, where it would finally settle by midmorning over snow too deep to melt quickly.

In the woods and on the fields on both sides of the interstate, the snow thickened, softened and compacted under the weight of its own melt, making it difficult for the deer hunters out there, the latecomers and the persistent ones who had not yet shot their deer. North of Concord and west of the Merrimack Valley, the land lifted gradually into humpbacked hills, and there were few houses and farms visible from the highway, and only occasionally now, from the church spires poking through treetops, could one infer from his car the presence of small towns, like Warner and Andover, with a north-country souvenir shop, motel and filling station huddled together at the infrequent cloverleafs and exits. It is poor and lonely but undeniably lovely country; yet in spite of its loveliness, there is an overabundance of madness and despair in those settlements and towns. So much deprivation and so much natural beauty combine in a life to make it sad and angry beyond belief to an outsider.

As I drove north to Lawford on that unseasonably warm November morning, I reflected not so much on the fact of our mother’s death as on Wade’s having chosen to include in his report of that death the announcement of his forthcoming marriage to Margie Fogg, whom at that time I had not met. When he told me over the telephone that our mother had died and told me how she had died, I felt myself flee, and then I watched myself do it. I fled to a place of safety where I had lived, it sometimes seemed, for most of my childhood and youth and where, it had always been clear to me, Wade never went himself. If I lived for the most part with only a slight and tangential and always tentative connection to my exterior life, Wade lived almost wholly out there on his skin, with no interior space for him to retreat to, even in a crisis or at a time of emotional stress or conflict. Perhaps we were merely mirror images of each other, our apposite modes of life twinned versions of the same radical accommodation to an intolerable reality. It was as if beneath Wade’s skin there were nothing but solid rock, an entire planet solid to the core that could not be penetrated by consciousness; while beneath mine there was only empty space that one could tumble through, rolling over and over in a plummet toward a cold and distant black star. Away, away — and free, free.