Russell Banks - Affliction

“And ice ballet.”

“Great.”

She smiled warmly at him, and waved, and moved off with her mother and her stepfather, who, Wade realized, had a new Tyrolean hat, just like the other.

For a few moments, Wade stood alone by our mother’s grave. I watched his dark slump-shouldered figure from the black Buick down below, with Pop sitting in silence beside me. Wade seemed terribly lonely to me then. He must still love that woman, I thought. How painful it must be for him, to have his mother buried and to stand and watch the woman he loves and his only child walk away from him. I was glad that I did not have to endure such pain.

Not surprisingly, Lena and her family headed back down to Massachusetts right after the burial. I rode out to the house with Wade and Margie and Pop, however, because my car was parked out there, but also to talk over a few financial matters with Wade. It was clear that Wade now intended to take responsibility for the house and for Pop, but it was a little vague to me as to who would bear the costs for this. Far better, I felt, to discuss and clarify these changes now than to let debts, real or imagined, and resentments, just or unjust, accumulate.

We left Margie with Pop in the kitchen and walked outside to the porch. It was midafternoon but already growing dark and, with the sunlight gone, getting cold fast. A pair of snow shovels leaned against the wall of the porch, and Wade grabbed one and handed me the other.

“Let’s dig out Pop’s truck before the skin of the snow freezes up,” he said.

I said okay and followed him around to the side of the house, where we commenced to break apart the drift that had nearly buried the vehicle. The snow had thickened during the day and was heavy, packed tightly by its own weight, and we were able to cut it into neat blocks that flew solidly through the air when we heaved them. It was pleasant warming work, and the talk came easily to us, perhaps because the tensions of the funeral were now behind us and we were able to mourn privately and alone.

Wade seemed grateful for my interest in his plans. He would pay for all the funeral expenses with a small insurance policy that our mother had taken out years ago. He had checked the deed and other papers he had found in her dresser drawers and learned that there was no mortgage or lien on the house. He was not sure about the taxes but would stop by and ask Alma Pittman tomorrow, he assured me. Wade explained that he planned to live in the house and pay for any renovations or repairs himself, along with the taxes and insurance, and when Pop died, which he said could be tomorrow or twenty years from now, he would probably want to buy out my and Lena’ two thirds, after having the place properly appraised, of course. I said that I was agreeable to the arrangement, and I was sure Lena would feel the same. Pop had hissocial security check, a bit more than five hundred dollars a month, which Wade said should more than cover his expenses for food and booze. It all sounded reasonable and even kind.

“What about Margie?” I asked.

“What about her?”

We had ceased work for a minute, and we were leaning on our shovel handles, face to face. “Well, do you plan to get married?”

“Yes,” he said, although they had not yet set a date for it. Meanwhile, she would be living with him. “She’ll probably quit her job and stay out here at the place with Pop,” he added. “We leave him alone here, he’ll set the damned place on fire. And of course Jill will be here a lot, so it’ll be good to have Margie around then. Things are going to change there, by the way,” he said, and he briefly updated me on his legal maneuvers. “I got an appointment Saturday in Concord with my lawyer, and after that all hell’s going to break loose for a while. And dammit, it’s worth it,” he said. But then he sighed, as if it were not worth it, and we went back to work.

In a short while, we had the truck free of the snow and had driven it out to the cleared part of the driveway while we cleaned up the area. Then Wade suggested that we shovel out the driveway all the way to the barn, so he could put Pop’s truck inside and leave it till spring. “Or whenever. I don’t want the bastard driving drunk, and he’s always drunk now, so it’s best to put the damned thing out of the snow, in the barn. Empty the gas tank and hide the keys.”

The barn was still more or less intact at the front, although open to the weather in back, where the roof had collapsed and where years ago Pop and Wade and Charlie had torn off most of the boards in Pop’s short-lived attempt to close up the building. When we had cleared the driveway from the front of the house around to the back, all the way to the large open door of the barn, Wade got in Pop’s truck and drove it inside. It was dark by now, and the truck headlights illuminated the skeletal interior of the structure. It looked like the backstage area of a long-unused opera house.

I walked behind the truck, and when I entered the barn, with the light bouncing and sliding off the lofts and beams overhead, I was suddenly out of the winter wind and early darkness and found myself surprisingly comfortable there; I wanted to stay, to make my home in the wreckage and rot of the old building; I liked the barn, decrepit and falling down, better than the house.

Wade kept the motor running for a few moments, as if he, too, were reluctant to break the spell cast by the lights and the strange interior space of the barn. He got out and stood beside me and, with me, looked up at the roof, at the old empty haylofts and through the exposed beams and timbers at the back at the dark sky beyond. There was a familial comfort to the place, and one could almost smell the cattle and other livestock that had once been housed here. But there was also a mystery to the place, as if an unpunished crime had been committed in this space.

Pop’ shaky old red truck, a Ford stake-body rusted out at the fenders and the bottom of the cab, idled quietly, while Wade and I walked in careful silence through the splash of light, touching the splintery unpainted wood of the walls, as if looking for clues. Wade lit a cigarette and stopped walking and, with his back to me, stared out the open end of the barn at the brush-cluttered field behind it. The lights from the truck sent a wash of pale light over the snow to the far woods. Beyond the woods the land rose sharply on the left toward Parker Mountain and fell away on the right toward Saddleback Ridge. The old farm lay halfway between them and in years past, when the land was cleared of trees, must have offered lovely views out here. There were over a hundred acres of high sloping brushy fields and woodlands that had belonged once to Uncle Elbourne and then to Pop and now, in a way, to Wade. The dark hillside and woods stirred me profoundly in a way I could not name, and Wade must have felt as I did, for we continued to stare out from the wreck of the barn in silence.

“Wade,” I said. “That was a nice gesture, with the flowers, at the cemetery.”

“Yeah, well, it seemed like something was … needed. You know. For Ma.”

“I was wondering, I wondered if maybe you felt the way I did, when we put the flowers on top of the coffin.”

“How’ that?”

“Well, sort of like she was there, for just a minute longer, giving us some kind of message. About Pop. About taking care of Pop, maybe.” This was not working: Wade and I are incapable of talking about the things that matter most to us. Still, it seemed important to try.

“Taking care of Pop, eh? You want to take care of him? Be my guest. I suppose what I‘m doing for him is what Ma would have wanted, but if it was up to me alone, I‘d take the bastard out behind the barn and shoot him. I kid you not.”