Russell Banks - Affliction

For it sometimes seems that there is no one in Lawford, except for me, whose life, seen from a certain angle, has not been changed more by the Northcountry Development Corporation than by Wade’s awful crimes. Hettie Rodgers, called a hostess, is a salesperson for time-share units in a huge pool-and-pavilion complex under construction on the south slope. Jimmy Dame, tossed out of work for a while when LaRiviere closed down the well-drilling operation to devote all his energies to Northcountry Development, tends bar nights at the main lodge on Lake Minuit, where the trailer park used to be, and he seems content. Nick Wickham has sold his restaurant to Burger King — they wanted the in-town lot — and Nick is talking about opening a video game arcade at Northcountry’s minimall at the new Route 29 cloverleaf. Frankie LaCoy started dealing cocaine and got nabbed in a sting operation in Nashua. Chub Merritt has opened a snowmobile and recreational vehicle dealership. Alma Pittman has announced that, because she does not want to move her office into the new brick municipal building going up on the site of the old town hall, she will not run for town clerk again; the truth is that she has no chance of beating the woman running against her, a bright young CPA, until recently a Dartmouth development officer, married to a geology professor and pregnant with her first child. The community, as such, no longer exists; Lawford is a thriving economic zone between Littleton and Catamount.

The lives of those who were closest to Wade have been altered in different ways, and I believe that, unlike the others, they are still stunned, perhaps permanently so, by the events of those few weeks and thus, having told their stories to me, wish now to remain essentially silent on the subject. I have not seen or talked to my sister Lena in recent months, not since she and her husband and children left Massachusetts for a religious community in West Virginia; when I did talk with her, she was unwilling to speak of our brother or of the death of our father. She would not speak even of the death of our mother. It was as if all three lives were inextricably wound together and, like a disease to which she was immune, excluded her. I let her alone and gathered my information for this account from other sources. Lillian and Jill and Bob Horner moved to Seattle, where Bob has a new position with Allstate Insurance, Lillian is studying for her real estate license and Jill, who has been legally adopted by her stepfather, is about to enter high school. Margie Fogg moved to Littleton, to be nearer her mother and tend to her dying father. She works at the women’s health center there, and when I last saw her, she seemed more interested in talking about her plans to adopt a baby from Central America than about Wade, so our meeting was brief.

Which leaves me. I carefully unfold and read again the tattered news clipping from the Boston Globe, and begin anew, knowing that you have read the same kind of story numerous times in your own newspaper: a man in a small town evidently went berserk and murdered a few people thought to be close to him, murdered them apparently without motive or warning.

TWO SLAIN IN NH

Local Man Sought for Questioning

Lawford, N.H., Nov. 15. In a related series of events over the weekend, two men were killed in this peaceful upstate town of 750. The body of Glenn Whitehouse, 67, a retired millworker, was pulled from the ashes of his barn, which burned to the ground Saturday in a fire of suspicious origin. Whitehouse had been killed by a blow to the head, authorities said.

The body of the second man, John Hewitt, 22, the town police officer, was found by State Police Captain Asa Brown in the woods of nearby Parker Mountain, where Hewitt was deer hunting. According to police, he was shot once by a high-powered rifle. Hewitt was the hunting companion of Massachusetts union leader Evan Twombley, whose accidental death here was widely reported two weeks ago.

Police are searching for Wade Whitehouse, 41, the son of the first victim. Hewitt had recently replaced the younger Whitehouse as town police officer. Brown said, “We have plenty of evidence. The man didn’t even try to hide his tracks.”

Townspeople are shocked by the twin killing, the first murder in Clinton County in more than a decade. The suspect is believed to have left the state in a burgundy Ford pickup owned by Hewitt. A nationwide manhunt, with Canadian authorities cooperating, is under way.

You read the account and move quickly on to news about the Middle East or a flash flood and train wreck north of Mexico City or a huge drug bust in Miami, and unless you are from the town of Lawford or in some other way knew one of the victims or the man suspected of killing them, you forget all about it. You forget it, because you do not understand it: you cannot understand how a man, a normal man, a man like you and me, could do such a terrible thing. He must not be like you and me. It is easier by far to understand diplomatic maneuvers in Jordan, natural calamities in the third world and the economics of addictive drugs than an isolated explosion of homicidal rage in a small American town.

And unless the police in some other small American town happen to arrest a vagrant who turns out to be Wade White-house — or maybe he won’t be a vagrant; maybe he will have turned himself into one of those faceless fellows we see working behind the counter at our local video rental store, or the gray-faced man who shoves circles of frozen dough into an oven at the Mr. Pizza at the mall and lives in a town-house apartment at the edge of town until his mailman recognizes him from the picture at the post office — unless that happens, and Wade Whitehouse finally receives justice, there will be no more mention in the newspapers of him and his friend Jack Hewitt and our father. No more mention of them anywhere. The story will be over. Except that I continue.

RUSSEL BANKSis the author of thirteen works of fiction, inlcuding Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone, The Sweet Hereafter , and continental Drift. He lives in upstate New York.

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