Russell Banks - Affliction

“Things got somewhat confused then — or I should say my memory of things gets somewhat confused: I know Wade tried to stop me from crying by putting his arms around me; he reached forward and drew me to him and patted my back; it was a gentle gesture meant to comfort me, although I remember the expression on his face as he came toward me — like a terrible sadness had come over him, a sadness greater even than my own: so that he must have been trying to join me in sadness but was unable to cry himself because he was a man, which resulted in his placing his arms around me and patting my back, as if I were a child. And that made me feel even lonelier than before he had tried to hold me. And so I pushed him away. I told him to leave me alone —I said it like that, with terrific emphasis, like he was doing something unpleasant to me: ‘Leave me alone!’ Then Jill must have gotten frightened, because she started to hit Wade on the back and arms, yelling at him to leave me alone: ‘Leave her alone! Leave her alone!’ I was weeping and shoving him away, and Jill was screaming at him and hitting him with her fists, and he moved like a bear then, covering his face with his arms and backing away in the snow. Jill kept after him; she was hysterical; she had him stumbling backwards into the snow. I went after them, and as I reached out to hold Jill off, Wade swung his arms wide and hit her, and she went flying backwards into me. Her nose was bleeding; he had caught her across the mouth and nose; she stood behind me and wailed. We did not say a word, Wade and I. I slowly backed away, facing him, but with my arms held behind me touching Jill, guiding her toward the car. He looked at me stunned, like someone had hit him on the head with a rock. I’ve never seen anyone with that painful and bewildered a look on his face: his mouth hung open, his eyes were wild, his arms draped down at his sides. I watched him like he was a beast about to attack us, and I half turned and managed to move my avocado plant off the front seat to the floor and got Jill inside the car and closed the door — with the lock down: I remember that, locking the door as I closed it. Then I edged my way around the back of the car and slammed the trunk lid down and got in on the driver’s side. And still, no one said a word. I locked my door. I started the car and backed it out of the driveway, and Jill and I drove away, without once looking back. No, that’s not right. When I had the car on the road and aimed toward town, I looked over at the house: Wade stood there in the same spot in the snow beside the driveway, staring down at the snow, probably at the spots of blood from Jill’s nose, although I don’t really know that, but he stood staring down at the snow like he could not believe what he saw there, his fingers in his mouth, like a little boy, and up on the porch, I saw that Pop had come out — maybe he had been there all along and had seen everything — and he stood there looking at Wade with a smile on his face, like a devil. It was horrible to see that, and I wish I hadn’t looked, and I hope that Jill did not see that. When I glanced over at her, she had her eyes closed, and she said in a calm voice that surprised me, ‘I want to go home. Will you take me home?’ I said yes, I would, and I did. And I guess you know the rest.”

“YOU KNOW THE REST,” she said. But did I? I suppose that if there were anyone on this planet, other than Wade himself, who knew the rest, knew what happened in the remaining few- hours of that cold bright Saturday afternoon in November, it would be me. Especially now, after these several years of meditating, investigating, remembering, imagining and dreaming the subject.

The historical facts, of course, are known by everyone— all of Lawford, all of New Hampshire, even most of Massachusetts: anyone who knew any of the principals or happened to read the Sunday papers or watch the news on television knew the facts. But facts do not make history; facts do not even make events. Without meaning attached, and without understanding of causes and connections, a fact is an isolate particle of experience, is reflected light without a source, planet with no sun, star without constellation, constellation beyond galaxy, galaxy outside the universe — fact is nothing.

Nonetheless, the facts of a life, even one as lonely and alienated as Wade’s, surely have meaning. But only if that life is portrayed, only if it can be viewed, in terms of its connections to other lives: only if one regards it as having a soul, as the body has a soul — remembering that without a soul, the human body, too, is a mere fact, a pile of minerals, a bag of waters: body is nothing. So that, in turn, if one regards the soul of the body as a blood-red membrane, let us say, a curling helix of anxiously fragile tissue that connects all the disparate name- able parts of the body to one another, a scarlet firmament between the firmaments, touching and defining both, one might view the soul of Wade’s or any other life as that part of it which is connected to other lives. And one might grow angry and be struck with grief at the sight of those connections being severed, of that membrane being torn, shredded, rent to rags that a child grows into adulthood clinging to — little bloody flags waved vainly across vast chasms.

Oh, I know that in telling Wade’s story here I am telling my own as well, and that this telling is my own bloody flag, the shred of my own soul waving in the wintry dusk, and it might sound self-centered, peculiar, eccentric for that; but our stories, Wade’s and mine, describe the lives of boys and men for thousands of years, boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth and whose best hope for a connection to other human beings lay in elaborating for themselves an elegiac mode of relatedness, as if everyone’s life were already over. It is how we keep from destroying in our turn our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us; it is how we absent ourselves from the tradition of male violence; it is how we decline the seductive role of avenging angel: we grimly accept the restraints of nothingness — of disconnection, isolation and exile — and cast them in a cruel and elegiac evening light, a Teutonic village in the mountains surrounded by deep dark forests where hairy beasts wait for stragglers and deer thrash wild-eyed through the deep snow and hunters build small fires to warm their hands so as to handle their weapons gracefully in the cold.

Wade’s life, then, and mine, too, is a paradigm, ancient and ongoing, and thus, yes, I do know the rest, as Margie said, and I will tell it to you.

Against the sound of the wind cutting through the pines, Wade heard laughter, a harsh cackle that at first he thought came from the crows, Haw, haw, haw! but then he realized that it was human, and when he looked up from the blood-spattered snow, he saw Pop standing on the porch — shirt loose and unbuttoned, trousers drooping, suspenders looped to his knees; he was unshaven, hair tousled, eyes ablaze and face bright red and, although grinning, held tight as a fist: as in triumph — a triumphant athlete, warrior, thief, a man who had come through harrowing adversity and risk with his bitterness not only intact but confirmed, for it was the bitterness that had got him through, and the grin and the crackled laughter was for the confirmation, a defiant thanksgiving gloat. The son finally had turned out to be a man just like the father. Ah, what a delicious moment for the lonely long-suffering father! Gunfire rattled the air in the distance. He waved the whiskey bottle at Wade, then turned it and held the bottle by the base with both hands and pointed it at him — a primitive masculine act, this affectionate mockery of aiming a weapon at a beloved son, this bitter tease: as if to say, You! By God, you finally made it! And you did it the way I taught you! I love you, you mean sonofa- b itch!