Russell Banks - Affliction

The deer had long since moved into the deepest woods, far from the roads and houses, beyond the sound of the cars and pickups that still prowled the backwoods lanes and trails and the growl of ten-wheelers changing gears on the long slow rise of the interstate north of Catamount. Alone and in occasional pairs, the animals lay hidden, wide-eyed, ears tensed, motionless in dense stands of mountain ash and tangled knots of hawthorn and alder tucked into cirques and gullies, nearly invisible hollows located below scrabbled cliffs and scree, places too difficult to reach from the road in half a day. The deer lay in alerted peace from dawn to dusk, alarmed and quivering in fear only now and then, when the crack of a rifle shot and its echo drifted uphill on the wind, all the way from the more accessible valleys and overgrown fields below, where a few cold end-of-season hunters walking back from the woods toward their cars in the last remaining hour before sunset grumpily, almost randomly, fired their guns at hallucinated stragglers — an unexpected shadow in a birch grove and a mossy boulder browned in a patch of late afternoon sunlight and a sudden powdery spill of snow tipped from the branch of a pine by an errant breeze.

Though it was cold enough for Wade’s breath to stream from his mouth in a visible cloud, he did not seem to notice the freezing air up here on the mountain, in spite of his light clothing. His jacket was unbuttoned and flapped in the breeze, his tie was unknotted and lay back across his shoulder, and he held his rifle with bare exposed hands loosely in front of him, as if his body were generating ample heat from inside and he were on his way out to sentry duty. Every few steps, as he walked in from the road, he slipped on the rough snow- covered ground, but he seemed not to slow or hesitate a bit because of it and crossed recklessly along the crumpled edge of the frozen muskeg, moved through a spiky grove of silver birches and made his way clumsily in hard slick-soled shoes downhill to the dry riverbed below, a path of boulders and flat rocks that ran away from the road and LaRiviere’s cabin toward a row of spruce trees that blocked his view of the long north slope of the mountain beyond. It was as if his body were being drawn by a powerful external force, like gravity or suction, and to keep from falling he moved in a loose deflected way, ricocheting and careening off rocks and stumps and trash wood, keeping his balance like a broken-field runner by letting his body bounce off the barriers that arose one after the other to stop it.

Way behind him, halfway between the mountaintop and the town, the house remained dark, empty and closed up, and the barn went on burning. The fire had quickly spread up along the back wall to the timbers and into the lofts, igniting the ancient hay and then the remains of the roof. Great clouds of dark smoke billowed against the sky. There was a loud raucous music to the fire, a crackling erratic drumbeat against the steady howl of the wind from the cold air sucked off the snowy overgrown fields and yard surrounding the structure and hurled into the hot dark center. Flames licked across the timbers overhead, racing and leaping from dry roof boards and shakes that one by one let go and fell in scarlet-and-gold chunks to the dirt floor, where they shattered and splashed like coins. And in the roaring center of the inferno, as if carved from anthracite, lay the body of our father, his face a rictus yanked back in a fixed gaping grin. His terrible triumph.

At the line of spruce trees, Wade hesitated a moment, examining the ground. The snow below the trees was thinner than on the old riverbed, and patches of bare ground showed through; he had followed Jack’s footprints this far with ease and now had to search among the rust-colored spruce needles and rocks for the trail. A layer of ash-gray cirrus clouds had moved in quickly from the north, and a sharp breeze had come up, riffling the spruces overhead as he walked slowly, carefully, along the edge of the grove.

And then he saw what he was looking for, a break between the trees, a low broken dead branch and a cigarette butt rubbed out with a boot, and he passed under the trees and came out on the other side, where there was the remains of an overgrown switchbacking lumber road. There was more snow here, and he spotted the footprints at once, leading downhill to the right. It was easy walking, and he moved quickly now, gradually descending for several hundred yards to where the long-unused road bent back on itself and crossed in the opposite direction.

He stopped at the bend and looked down along the slope, over the tops of the trees below — all the way to Lake Minuit in the far distance, white and flat in the dark surrounding forest like a frozen wafer, where he could make out, at the farther shore, a cluster of pastel-colored boxes that was the trailer park. Mountain View Trailer Park — when he lived there he had been able to peer out his kitchen window and see the very spot where he stood now: a pale opening below a dark streak made by the spruce trees, and beyond that the lumpy summit of the mountain itself.

The clouds had spread and nearly covered the entire sky, a taut gray blanket stretched from the northern horizon to the dip of Saddleback in the west; there was a long shrinking ribbon of blue sky behind him, but even the rounded top of the mountain was in shade now. Specks of snow flew in Wade’s face and struck his hands and melted at once. He shifted the rifle, slipped the stock under his right arm and moved on.

Below, along Route 29 and the side roads off it and outside of town, the last hunters were emerging from the woods, giving up for another year their need to shoot and kill a deer. There may have been a lucky two or three hunters who managed in these waning hours of the season to sight a straggler, a confused or inexplicably careless buck that had managed to survive the hunt almost to the very end and then hungry and restless had stepped too soon from its hiding place in the last light, only to hear the explosion and feel the gut heat and swiftly die. But this late in the season these killings were rare. Most of the hunters now were out-of-state, inexperienced or inept and often merely lazy, so had counted on luck, coincidence, amusing ironies, to get their deer. They hurried to their cars and quickly got the heaters blowing and their stiff hands and feet warmed and drove straight into town to Wickham’s or on to Toby’s Inn for a whiskey or two before driving home.

Wade walked more slowly now, casting his gaze to his right, downhill, into the dense hardwoods — oak and maple trees, thick yellow birches and alder — that had replaced the spruce and hemlock above. He had to squint to see through the billowing snow: it came at him like lace curtains tossed by the wind and clung to his hair and clothing, wrapping him in a thin white caul. Occasionally, he stumbled on a rock in the old road or a fallen tree branch or slipped on the wet new snow, then lurched on, unperturbed, as if it had not happened and the road were smooth and dry.

Several hundred yards beyond the first switchback in the road, he came to the second bend, and the ground beyond the road fell away precipitously and for a great distance: an old mud slide had torn open a long slash of scree, dumping uprooted trees and glacial till into the deep gully below. Wade stopped abruptly and stood at the top and looked out over the rock-strewn gash and piles of brush and tangled tree trunks that filled the gully, downhill and across the tops of the hardwood trees beyond to the north, where the land dropped away for miles. The wind had momentum up here, where the road was exposed to nothing but sky, and was cold and drove the snow at him almost horizontally.

A mile and a half away and well out of sight behind the long narrow ridge that leaned against the mountain like a low buttress, the barn continued to burn, and a dark cloud of ashy smoke rose from the woods and blew away to the south— while, unheard and unseen from the mountainside, sirens howled and a pair of fire trucks and a dozen volunteer firemen in their own trucks and cars raced out along Parker Mountain Road from town. Where he stood, looking north, Wade could see — through the dip between Saddleback and the mountain — all the way into the valley to town, and although he could not see the town itself, he could easily make out the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall and the break in the trees, a dark meandering line, where the river ran through.