Russell Banks - Affliction

As I moved from my car toward the house, I passed the three younger of Lena’s and Clyde’s children, who were pushing huge snowballs through the soft wet snow of the front yard. Though they wore sneakers and thin jackets and were hatless and without mittens and their clothes were wet and their hands and faces bright red from the cold, they were evidently happy and, in spite of running noses, seemed healthy. They saw me coming along the driveway and waved, and I waved back.

A boy, the largest of the three, six or seven years old, smiled sweetly and said, “Hi. Who’re you?”

“I’m your uncle Rolfe,” I said, and I smiled. “You don’t remember me, eh?” In fact, we had never met, which factembarrassed me slightly. I did not know his name — Stephen or Eben, or maybe Claude — and did not care to ask it.

“Nope, but I heard of you,” he said.

“What are you building there? A snowman?”

All three laughed as if I had said something hilariously funny. “No!” the boy exclaimed. “A citadel!”

“Oh.”

His sister, her puffy cheeks chapped scarlet from the wet snow, said, “Are you here to say goodbye to Grandma?”

“Grandma’s in hell!” the youngest one shouted. He appeared to be a male child but was wearing some kind of kilt made from an adult’s woolen scarf, so one could not be sure.

The other boy somberly said, “That’s why we say goodbye.”

“We’re going to be in heaven with Jesus,” the little girl explained to me, “and Grandma’s in hell with Satan, who is Jesus’ enemy. That’s why we have to say goodbye, Uncle Rolfe.”

“Grandma wasn’t saved,” her brother said, a note of regret touching his voice.

“I see.”

“Are you saved, Uncle Rolfe?” the girl asked.

“No, I‘m not.”

“Then you’ll be cast into hell with Grandma.”

“Yes, I guess I will. Me and Grandma and Uncle Wade and Grandpa. We’ll all be there together,” I said. “And when we die, you’ll have to come and say goodbye to us too, won’t you?”

The older boy nodded his head up and down. This was a drag, families breaking up all the time. He did not understand it and wished that it could be different, but he did not want to spend eternity in hell, no, sir, he did not, no matter who was there.

As if bored by me, the three went back to building their citadel of snow, and I continued on to the house. Before I had a chance to knock, the door was opened by an attractive woman who introduced herself as Margie Fogg and shook my hand warmly. She gazed straight into my face, and I liked her at once.

Wade stood in the center of the crowded kitchen, looking competent and serious, if a little uncomfortable. He was wearing a white shirt and tightly knotted jet-black tie and navy-blue gabardine sport coat, with dark-brown slacks and shoes, andhis face and hands were red and seemed huge and constricted by his mismatched clothing. In one hand he held a can of Schlitz and in the other a cigarette. The room was hot from the wood stove, crowded and close. I saw faces I recognized— Lena and Clyde and their two older children, adolescents whom I had not seen in years, and in the corner by the stove, Pop — and I saw the faces of three strangers, everyone standing, as if waiting to be called to attention and given marching orders.

Wade first, I thought — the easiest. And I reached out with both hands and placed them on his muscular shoulders and drew him to me. We hugged, self-consciously, with our butts sticking out so as to keep light shining between our bodies from shoulders to toes. That is the way we men are, we New England men, we Whitehouse men, Wade and I: we want light between us at all times.

He said my name, and I said his, and we let go of one another and withdrew. Not ready yet to deal with Lena and Clyde and their strange-looking children — both the boy and the girl had modified Mohawk haircuts and resembled barnyard fowl with acne, Rhode Island reds, maybe — and certainly not ready to greet Pop, I first introduced myself to the strangers in the room, who turned out to be the Reverend Doughty, a slender blond man in his thirties wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an avocado-green double-knit suit, and Gordon LaRiviere, appropriately somber, mentioning that he remembered me from my high school days and offering gruff condolences as we shook hands, and a skinny young man in a black suit who was a representative of Morrison’s Funeral Home in Littleton, on hand, I guessed, to escort the rest of us to the church on time.

It was unclear to me why LaRiviere was there or why he was behaving in such a solicitous manner toward Wade: “How you holding up, Wade?” he asked at one point, when Wade, after tossing his empty beer can into the trash, stood for a second with his back to the rest of us and stared after it.

Wade turned quickly and said, “I’m fine, fine.” He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t we get this show on the road, now that Rolfe’s here?” he asked the room.

No one knew. We all looked to him for an answer.

He shrugged. “Pointless to stand around in the church with nothing to do, I guess.”

“What about Jill?” I asked. “Is Lillian bringing her?”

In a low voice, Margie said that they would be at the church.

Wade walked quickly to the refrigerator and pulled out another beer. “Anyone else want one?” he asked. “Rolfe?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t drink.”

“Yeah, right. I guess I forgot.”

Indeed. My question about Lillian and Jill had irritated him. He knew better than anyone else in the family that I had not drunk anything alcoholic since college and in fact had drunk almost not at all even then. We never discussed it, Wade and I, any more than we discussed his drinking, but I think we both knew that they were equal and opposite reactions to the same force.

I nodded to Lena’s and Clyde’s children, both the girl, Sonny, and the boy, Gerald, noted their matching dark-red tufts of hair, gray scalps, crosses dangling from their earlobes and around their scrawny necks, and passed them by swiftly on my way to Lena, huge as a purple tent in her muumuu, with a black scarf covering most of her hair, which, to my surprise, had turned almost completely gray. She looked shockingly older than when I had last seen her: how many years had it been — seven, eight? I could not remember, I suddenly realized, how many years it had been since I last stood in the same room with my father, brother and sister. I knew that I would never again stand in a room with them and my mother, certainly not in heaven and not in hell, either.

Lena wore no makeup or jewelry, and her hair was chopped off bluntly at shoulder length. There was nothing about her person that was designed to disguise, or to distract one from, her girth and plainness, and she showed no signs of being either happy or sad to see me — merely grim acceptance. Embracing her was like hugging a barrel, and I instantly let go and stepped away and almost with relief shook the hand of her husband, Clyde, which felt like a piece of firewood, dry, heavy, dead to the touch.

Clyde is a tall thick-hipped pear-shaped man with a large pointed Adam’s apple and small shoulders and chest, so that his body seems to be constructed of the lower half of a fat man and the upper half of a thin man welded together at the waist. Clyde’ appearance, too, surprised me, for he now looked a full decade older than Wade, whose age he was. His face wasdrawn in and tight, puckered around blue eyes and a flat red-lipped mouth. He said, “Hello, Rolfe. It’s good you came now. We were about to pray. Will you join us in prayer, Rolfe?” His eyes blazed intently into mine, and I looked to Wade, whose expressionless face seemed to be saying, No help here, buddy, you are on your own, and on to Margie, who looked sharply away from me, as if embarrassed.