Russell Banks - Affliction

“I’ll ride with you, Pop,” I said. Wade agreed and said that he and Margie would follow along in his car. Pop and I got into the back seat of the Buick, and the driver closed the door and got into the front. Pop sat silent and still, looking straight ahead. I wanted to ask him a question, it burned in my chest, but I could not for the life of me name it. I looked at him while we rode, hoping somehow that the sight of his face in profile would bring the question to me, but it did not.

THE FUNERAL AND THE BURIAL were relatively uneventful, thanks no doubt to Pop’s earlier outburst and Wade’s reaction to it. Reverend Doughty performed the obsequies with amiable competence, as if officiating at a retirement. No one wept over the coffin — Wade had insisted that it be a closed-coffin service: “There’s no way you can improve on a body that’s been frozen to death,” he told the mortician, “unless you keep it in the freezer and have the funeral there. Which you cannot do.” The mortician agreed, but with reluctance. It would have been easy to have presented the body beautifully: it had died so peacefully. Oh, well, the winter was young. Soon there would be plenty of bodies that had frozen to death in their sleep, and the bereaved would not be quite as belligerent as this one.

Lillian and her husband Bob Horner and Jill arrived at the funeral a few moments after it had started, and Wade did not see them until he and three others — Gordon LaRiviere, our brother-in-law Clyde and I — carried the coffin from the church to the hearse. Lillian and Horner had seated themselves by the aisle in the last row of the church, with Jill between them, gazing in wonderment at the coffin, and as Wade passed their aisle, he nodded somberly. Jill did not take her eyes off the coffin. Horner returned the nod, but Lillian, whose eyes appeared to be red from weeping, pursed her lips, as if sending Wade a kiss. Wade seemed surprised and puzzled by Lillian’s gesture and stared after her and almost stumbled at the door of the vestry.

And at the burial, no one shed more than a few perfunctory tears. It was held at the Riverside Cemetery, high on the slope near the ridge, where Elbourne and Charlie, whose remains had been shipped back from Vietnam two decades earlier, were buried. At the head of each grave, a tiny VFW flag fluttered next to a small gray-blue granite stone with the boy’s name and birth and death date carved into it. Our mother’s open grave lay just beyond her firstborn son’s, shockingly dark and deep against the white blanket of snow, a quick entry to another world, where neither snow nor sunlight ever fell.

At one point, after Reverend Doughty had said his final benign and appropriately ecumenical prayer and the coffin was at last ready for the descent, Wade crossed from where he had been standing with me and Margie and Pop to the opposite side of the grave, where Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner stood alongside most of the twelve or fifteen townspeople who had attended. As he passed one of the several floral arrangements provided by the funeral home, he plucked a long-stemmed white carnation, which he handed to Jill. Leaning down beside her, he whispered into her ear, and she stepped forward and laid the flower across the coffin.

Then Wade returned to the bouquet and drew out four more flowers, which he presented in turn to Lena, me and Pop, keeping one for himself. He nodded to Lena, and she followed Jill’s example; as did I. Then Wade placed his own flower on the coffin.

We all looked at Pop, who stood blinking in the sunlight, his flower held in front of him as if he were about to smell it. It was strange moment. We were suddenly and unexpectedly aware of our mother’s presence in a way that until this moment we had either denied or had been denied. Her sad battered life seemed to come clear to us, and for a few seconds we were unable to look away from her suffering. We had looked away, averted our gaze, for so many reasons, but mostly because we all three believed at bottom that we could have and should have saved her from our father’s terrible violence, the permanent wrath that he seemed unable to breathe without. But somehow, the sight of that shrunken old man holding the flower before him in trembling hands, unsure of what to do with it, made us briefly forgive ourselves, perhaps, and allowed us to see him as she must have seen him, which is to say, allowed us to love him, and to know that she loved him and that there was no way we could have saved her from him, not Lena, surely, and not I, and not Wade. And not even the old man himself could have saved her from the violence that he had inflicted on her and on us. If he had taken himself out behind the barn one morning during his life with her and shot himself in the head, inflicted on himself in one awful blow all the violence he had battered us with during the years we lived with him, it still would not have released us, for our mother loved him, and so did we, and that awful blow would have been inflicted on us as well. His violence and wrath were our violence and wrath: there had been no way out of it.

As if she were sitting up in her coffin with her arms reaching toward her husband, our mother drew our father slowly forward. He tottered a bit, blinked away tears, and held out the carnation, a pathetic and vain plea for forgiveness impossible to give, and placed it over the others. Then he withdrew, and the young mortician flipped the lever, and the coffin slowly descended into the grave, and our mother was gone.

One by one, the townspeople returned to their cars and pickup trucks parked below on the lane and drove off, until only we family members, including Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner and, of course, Margie Fogg, who had one large arm around Pop’s shoulders, remained at the gravesite.

Wade looked down at Jill, smiled and then hugged her closely. She let herself be held for a few seconds and stepped away.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Wade said to her. “Can you stay for a while?” He looked at Lillian for an answer.

She hesitated, as if she herself would like to stay on and were trying to think of a way to say it that would not mislead him. But then she shook her head no.

Wade inhaled deeply and held his breath, making a hard bubble in his chest, and looked off toward the ridge. “You ever come to your father’s grave anymore?” he asked Lillian.

She turned and followed his gaze up the slope. “No, not anymore. It’s too … it’s too far.”

She was remembering what Wade wanted her to remember, those summer Sunday afternoons when they were teenagers newly in love and the future was endless and full of hope for them — together and alone. They were going to turn into a marvelous man and powerful woman and brilliant couple: they were going to become successful at everything, but especially at love. And here they were, and now Wade wanted her to know, in the same way he knew, what in the intervening years had been lost and, if possible, to grieve with him for a moment. This might be the last time they could share something as tender and powerful as grief over their broken dreams.

But Lillian did not know that, because she did not know yet about Wade’s new lawyer, so she offered Wade only a quick pat on the shoulder and said, “Wade, I‘m sorry about your mother. I always liked her and felt sorry for her.” She glanced sharply over at our father; he had been turned by Margie; she was moving him with care down the slope toward Wade’s car.

“Come on, honey,” Lillian said to Jill. “We‘ve got to get back by four for your ice-skating lesson.”

“I’m taking ice-skating, Daddy!” Jill said, suddenly brightening.

“Great. Figure skating, I suppose.” He wondered where in hell she could take figure-skating lessons up here. Nowhere, probably.