Russell Banks - Affliction

With a swipe, Wade waved the image away, turned and trudged from the trampled snow onto the driveway, and moved, head down, hands in his jacket pockets, toward the barn. He heard Pop hollering behind him, words mixed in the wind, loud broken demands: Where the hell are you going now? You leave my truck where it is! I need … Give me the goddamned keys! I need to go to town! Wade pushed on, and the voice thinned and diminished. Nothing in the stinking house to drink … my house, my money, my truck … stolen! The words evaporated in the darkness of the barn; a pair of crows lifted from a crossbeam at the back and fluttered clumsily out the open roof to the sky; the truck motor ticked quietly as a clock, still cooling from the long drive north. Wade placed his chilled hands on the hood and warmed them against the flaked metal. He leaned forward as if to pray and placed his right cheek between his hands and felt the last wave of heat from the motor pass through the metal and enter his face. After a few moments, the metal went cold and began to draw heat back from his cheek, and Wade sighed and straightened and moved to the truckbed, where he lifted out two cardboard boxes, the contents of his desk and office closet, and set them on the ground next to the rear tire. Moving slowly and with scrupulous care, like an old man on ice, he opened the door on the driver’s side and reached for the three guns that he had carried back from town side by side, the butts on the floor of the cab, the blue-black barrels leaning against the seat between him and Jill: a 12-gauge shotgun, a.30/30 rifle and an old Belgian 28-gauge that had once belonged to brother El- bourne. He lined them up and gathered them together like oars, with the stocks slung under his arm, and backed out of the cab, when he felt a sharp blow in the center of his back, a stunning blow that shook him through to his chest and arms and sent the guns clattering to the ground and threw Wade against the open door of the truck.

He crumpled and fell to his knees and turned. His father stood over him, a chunk of rusted iron pipe the length and thickness of a man’s arm in his hands: the man was huge, an enraged giant from a fairy tale with legs like tree trunks, and above his enormous chest and shoulders filled and made solid with calibrated rage his head nearly touching the rafters of the barn was so far in the distance that though Wade could barely make out the expression on the face he saw that there was no expression other than one of mild disgust in the mouth and eyes of a man compelled to perform a not especially pleasant task, the decision to do it having been made long ago in forgotten time by a forgotten master, the piece of iron pipe in his meaty hands a mighty war club, a basher, an avenging jawbone of an ass, a cudgel, bludgeon, armor-breaking mace, tomahawk, pike, maul, lifted slowly, raised like a guillotine blade, sledgehammer, wooden mallet to pound a circus tent stake into the ground, to slam the gong that tests a man’s strength, to split the log for a house, to drive the spike into the tie with one stroke, to stun the ox, to break the lump of stone, to smash the serpent’s head, to destroy the abomination in the face of the Lord.

Wade crouched and twisted away from the colossal figure of his father; he turned like a heretic prepared for stoning; he saw and in one motion grabbed and clutched the rifle barrel with both hands and with the weight and force of his entire body uncoiling behind it swung the thing — the heavy wooden stock sweeping in a quick powerful arc from the frozen ground into the air — and smashed it against the side of his father’s head, whacked and broke it from jaw to temple: the crack of bone, a puff of air and a groan, Oh! and the old man fell in pieces and died at once, eyes wide open — a leathered corpse unearthed from a bog.

Wade looked down at the body of his father: it was small, curled in on itself, the size and shape of the body of a sleeping child. There was no chunk of old pipe, no cudgel — only an empty whiskey bottle dropped to the hard ground and rolled against the wall. Wade lifted the rifle slowly and slipped the butt against his right shoulder; he aimed down the barrel at the exact center of his father’s forehead. / love you, you mean sonofabitch. I have always loved you. He shoved the bolt forward and back and with his thumb flipped the safety, and he squeezed the trigger and heard the dry click when the hammer fell. He smiled. A wintry smile, ice cracking. Then he lowered the rifle, leaned down and touched the man’s crinkled throat with his fingertips; he caressed the lips and grizzled chin and cheeks, touched the small hooked beak of the nose; he traced the bony ridge above the eyes and smoothed back the stiff gray hair. The body was an accumulation of separated parts. Its soul was dead, murdered, gone to absolute elsewhere. He had never touched his father this way, had not once in his entire life identified his father with his hands, named the man’s face gently, lovingly, and taken it into him, made it his own face. Made the dead face his.

He stood and leaned the rifle against the fender of the truck. For a few seconds he peered around the barn as if bewildered to find himself there; then abruptly he reached down and slipped his hands under his father’s body and with grace and ease lifted it; he carried it to the back of the dark enclosed space and laid the corpse out on the workbench. He crossed the hands on the chest. Returning to the truck, he went directly to one of the cardboard cartons and pulled out a small green box and removed a handful of rifle shells from it and dropped them into his jacket pocket. He grabbed up the rifle, got into the truck; he started the motor and backed the vehicle out of the barn into the blinding sunlight. Then, leaving the motor running, he got out of the truck and returned to the barn.

Groping in the darkness beneath the workbench, he retrieved the kerosene lantern. He stood over his father’s body like a priest blessing the host, unscrewed the cap on the base of the lamp and poured the kerosene over the body, from the shoes up along the torso and over the hands and face and hair, until the lamp was emptied. He moved to the end of the bench and looked up along the body from the feet. He had his cigarette lighter in his hand: he ignited it and extended it forward slowly, holding it before him like a votive candle, and instantly the body was wrapped in a shroud of yellow flames. Wade stumbled backward a few steps and watched the clothing catch fire and the hair and skin glow like gold inside the blue- and-yellow flames: the fire snaked across the oil-stained bench and leapt to the old boards behind it, growling and snapping, and the air darkened with the smoke and filled with the dry sour smell of burning flesh. The back wall of the barn was now burning, with the bench and the body on it a pyre, the flames fed by the wind blowing from behind him — the heat surging in huge noisy waves against his face, forcing him back step by step, closer and closer to the door. And then suddenly Wade was outside the barn, standing in the light, surrounded by fields of glistening snow and the black trees beyond, and above him, endless miles of blue sky, and the sun — a flattened disk, cold and white as infinity.

Wade drove the truck south on Parker Mountain Road, uphill and away from town, out of the valley and away from the darkened old house and the burning barn, drove not fast but at a deliberate speed — to all appearances a man on a civilized mission, wearing a rumpled sport coat and shirt and loosened tie, his face calm, thoughtful, kindly looking, as if he were remembering and humming to himself an old favorite tune.

Wade came over the rise, passed the frozen snow-covered muskeg and pulled in and parked behind Jack Hewitt’s Ford pickup on the left. Up the slope to the right, at the edge of the woods, was LaRiviere’s cabin. Wade got out of the truck and reached in behind him and brought the.30/30 out and slipped the six shells from his pocket into the clip. He chambered the first bullet and checked the safety. There were no tracks leading from the road to the cabin and no smoke from the chimney. Jack’s footprints in the snow went directly from his truck to the old lumber trail, then headed downhill through low scrub and brush in a northeasterly direction.