Russell Banks - Affliction

I had no memory of it, which is not surprising: the machines we lived with — water heaters, furnaces, pumps, cars, trucks and refrigerators — were always old and decrepit, held together with tape and baling wire, and were always breaking down, and we frequently got along without one or more of them for months before we had enough money to fix or replace them. As a child of six, I would have been neither inconvenienced nor thrilled by having to bathe in a galvanized tub in the kitchen once a week. A forgettable experience.

“Well, I remember one afternoon, it must have been a Saturday, because Pop was home and that was when you took your baths anyhow, and you and Lena had already taken your baths. You got sent upstairs, as usual, while Ma took hers. I don’t know where I was, probably working for LaRiviere by then. Yeah, that was the summer I went to work for Gordon the first time. Anyhow, it was just you two and Ma and Pop who were at home. And you got it into your head to sneak down the stairs and out the door, the door off the living room, without anyone seeing you, except Lena, of course, who probably knew what you were up to. And you tippy-toed around the outside of the house to the porch and peeked through the window there into the kitchen, where Ma was taking her bath. It wasn’t exactly innocent, of course, but what the hell, you were only a little kid. ”

I tried to interrupt him, but he just rolled on with his story, so I let him finish.

“Well, Pop, he must have seen you from the living room or something, because he went out the back door himself and tippy-toed right up behind you, while you were staring at Ma, getting a real eyeful, probably, and he reached down and grabbed you right off the ground. Scared the bejesus out of you.

“And the old man, he lugged you screaming back into the house, by the living room door, of course, and he whaled on you, he truly lost it. You were only a little kid, and he knocked you around like you were me or Elbourne or Charlie, although by then he had laid off those two. He just lost it. I came home later, but I didn’t know anything was wrong, except that you had been a bad little boy and were upstairs in your bedroom being punished for it.

“But the next day I noticed that you weren’t around for breakfast, and then later in the day it came out, what you’d done, and what Pop had done. Ma was as usual real confused and upset, and Lena was scared shitless and wasn’t talking, but by afternoon Ma was worried because you were actually spitting blood and breathing funny. It was obvious the fucker had broken your ribs or something. I told Ma we had to take you into Littleton to the hospital, and she said okay, but we first had to concoct a story about your falling from the hayloft in the barn. We told the doctor you’d been playing in the barn, where you weren’t supposed to be, and you’d rolled off the loft to the floor and had banged yourself against some old boards or something out there when you fell. I don’t think the doctor bought it, but he bandaged you up, and you were okay by the end of the summer.”

“Wade, I hate to disappoint you,” I said quietly, “but it never happened. Not to me.”

“Of course it happened! Why would I lie about it?”

“You would not lie, necessarily. But you have got the story confused somewhat. What you described certainly did happen, but before I was born, and it happened to you, not to me. At least, that is how I heard the story, which I heard when I was about five or six, from you, or maybe it was from Charlie or Elbourne and he was telling it about you. Yes, it was Elbourne — it was he who told me. And you are right about the broken water heater and the baths in the kitchen. I remember now that we were bathing in the kitchen the summer I turned six, the summer Elbourne had enlisted and was home after basic training before leaving for Vietnam, so he must have been twenty. Charlie was out of the house by then, holing up in Littleton, and you were working for LaRiviere. But it was Elbourne who told the story, by way of a friendly warning, I suspect.”

Wade interrupted and insisted that I had it all wrong: a person should know, after all, whether something as interesting and dramatic as being beaten by his old man and having to go to the hospital for it actually happened to him. And it did not happen to him, he said: I was the child in the story, not he.

“No, you were the child, although I was a child when I heard the story, and I heard it from Elbourne, who was hanging out upstairs in the big bedroom where you guys slept. It was evening, I think, not afternoon, and Lena and I had already bathed down in the kitchen, and I was in my pajamas, and I started to walk downstairs, probably to get a cookie or something, you know, when Elbourne caught me at the head of the stairs, reached out and grabbed me from behind and lifted me right up — he was huge, you know, way bigger than you or Charlie or Pop, even — and he carried me into his room, very good-naturedly, and teased me about sneaking down the stairs to catch Ma taking a bath, which of course embarrassed me terribly. Then he went on to tell me what had happened to you years before, when you were my age. The story was essentially the same one you just told, except for the business about the hospital and the lie told to the doctors — that bit about your falling from the loft in the barn. I never heard that one before.”

Wade said that he had never heard this one before and laughed.

“Well, I remember it vividly, because the story terrified me. Up until then I had only seen Pop get mad, or heard him late at night from my bed, going against you or Ma, when he was drunk, and I had figured that Lena and I were somehow safe from him, although I was scared of him, of course. I guess I thought that somehow the drinking and anger were a part of your and Ma’s relationship with him and that it had nothing to do with me or Lena. Not particularly intelligent of me, I know, but I was only a child then. So when Elbourne told me what Pop had done to you when you, too, were a child, I was suddenly terrified. And from then on, I was careful. I was a careful child, and I was a careful adolescent, and I guess now I am a careful adult. It may have been a high price to pay, never having been carefree, but at least I managed to avoid being afflicted by that man’s violence.”

Wade laughed again. “That’s what you think,” he said.

Then he changed the subject. He went back to the reason he had called me in the first place, which, as it turned out, had nothing to do with Pop or Wade’s misadventures with LaRiviere’s truck but concerned instead, once again, Evan Twombley, Mel Gordon, Gordon LaRiviere and Jack Hewitt — Wade’s hobbyhorse.

The next morning, shortly after seven, Wade drove away from the house in Margie’s car, gone at the usual time on a weekday to direct traffic at the school, as if everything were normal, in spite of numerous signs to the contrary: Margie either had feigned sleep or had stayed asleep when he had come to bed and had kept her back to him all night long, and in the morning, when he awoke, she appeared not to, and while he washed and shaved and dressed, she stayed in bed, head buried in the pillow. He had acted his part, not turning on the bedroom light while he dressed, tiptoeing out and closing the door quietly, leaving a note for her on the kitchen table when he left: I’ve gone to the school, borrowed your car, will check back later. Pop, too, had stayed in his room until after Wade had left. Pop’s habit was to rise at six, regardless of how late he had gone to bed the night before and how drunk: for Pop, there was now sufficient alcohol in his veins and cells that most of his acts had been reduced to the level of compulsion or involuntary reflex actions, giving, at best, only the appearance of volition.