Affliction (13 page)

Five minutes later, he was up inside the flapping canvas cab of the grader, driving it across the parking lot and down the driveway to the road, the long narrow plow blade bouncing along under the high belly of the machine like a gigantic straight razor.

 

Jack Hewitt stood at the lip of the incline and peered across the tops of the trees through the dip in Saddleback all the way to Lawford Center. The wind had shifted slightly, or perhaps the falling snow had eased somewhat, for he could see the spire of the Congregational church and the roof of the town hall in the valley below. He might have been trying to figure out where among the distant trees his father's house was located, when Twombley come puffing up behind him.

Red-faced and out of breath from the effort of trying to keep up with the younger man, Twombley was about to speak, no doubt with irritation, but Jack lifted one finger to his mouth and silenced him. Then, stepping off the edge of the low ledge,
he leaned into Twombley's ear and said, “Stay here, stand where I am.”

Twombley took two steps forward, peered over the edge at the lumber trail twenty feet below and the field of strewn boulders beyond it.

Jack came up alongside him and whispered that he was going to circle back around the ledge on the west. He would cut down to the trail through a stand of pines there and drive the deer back along the trail to where the animal would come into clear view just below Twombley and fifty yards to his left. He told him to make sure he was ready to shoot, because he would only have one shot.

Twombley unslung his rifle, checked the chamber and flicked off the safety. “What'd you see?” he asked.

Jack told him about the tracks and the moist dark-brown pellets of deer shit.

“Fresh?” Twombley said.

“Yup. And wicked big, too. This here's your buck, Mr. Twombley. The one you been thinking about all fall, right?”

Twombley nodded and edged closer to the drop-off. “Get going,” he said to Jack. “You only got a little while if you want that extra hundred.”

Jack looked at the man for a second, and his mouth curled into a slight sneer. Then he turned abruptly away, as if to hide the sneer, and started walking toward the stand of pines that ran in a ragged line uphill from the ledge. On the farther side of the pines the ground sloped more softly, and the trail nearly flattened out for a ways, and there were several head-high heaps of dead branches and brush that had been stacked along-side the trail some years back by the lumbermen. Jack knew that the big buck was hiding in one of those brush piles, that he was lying down, listening to gunfire in the distance and the snap of a twig fifty feet away, sniffing for the sour smoky odor of humans, large brown eyes wide open and searching for any movement in his field of vision that did not fall into the familiar rhythm of a world without humans. Jack was adjusting, narrowing, his own field of vision, bringing his gaze to a sharp focus on the tangled heaps of brush so that he could determine which of the three hid the big deer, when he heard Twombley cry out, and he started to turn. At the same instant, he heard the gun go off, and he knew that the stupid sonofabitch had slipped and had shot himself.

He thought about it that way and that way only, and he walked slowly, angrily, back to the edge of the incline where Evan Twombley had stood, and he looked down at the man's body splayed in the snow below him. He shouted at the body, “You're an asshole! A fucking asshole!”

Twombley lay face down, with his arms and legs spread as if he were free-falling through space. His new rifle lay beside him, a few feet to his right, half buried in the snow.

Jack pulled out a cigarette and lit it and stuffed the crumpled pack back into his pocket. He dearly hoped the man was dead, stone cold dead, because if he was still alive, Jack would have to lug the stupid sonofabitch all the way back up to the truck and probably haul him all the way to Littleton. “Stupid, arrogant sonofabitch,” he said in a low voice, and he started down, slowly, carefully, to find out if indeed, and as he hoped, Evan Twombley had killed himself.

 

Not until he reached Toby's Inn did Wade—hunched over the large steel steering wheel in the painfully cold windblown cab of LaRiviere's blue grader—finally catch up to Jimmy Dame in the dump truck. This was as far as the town plows went; they and the state DPW plows met and turned around at Toby's and went back to their respective territories. Jimmy had zipped a few complimentary passes over Toby's lot and was sitting in the truck in the far corner of the lot, enjoying coffee and Danish from Toby's kitchen and watching Wade as—compulsively and with great difficulty, because of the size and awkwardness of the grader—he finished scutting Jimmy's residue off to the side of the rutted parking lot.

Jimmy liked watching Wade try to use the grader as if it were a pickup with a flat plow on the front, driving the enormous and grotesquely shaped vehicle forward ten feet, then backward ten feet, short half turn to the right, short half turn to the left, wrenching that huge steering wheel like the captain of a ship trying to avoid an oncoming iceberg. It was crazy, Jimmy thought, and Wade was crazy. He did it every winter: got to LaRiviere's shop late the first day of a snowstorm because of directing traffic at the school, then got stuck with the grader, which naturally pissed him off, since it was like being in an icehouse up there, except that then he'd drive the damned thing like he was glad to have it, really pleased to have
the chance to show folks what this here grader could do when it came to plowing snow. After knowing him all his life, Jimmy still did not know if he liked Wade or not.

Jimmy Dame, like Jack Hewitt, was one of Wade's helpers on the well-drilling crew. Wade was the foreman and had been for a decade. But when they were not drilling wells, they all three tumbled to the same level and were paid accordingly. When the ground froze solid and well drilling was no longer feasible, LaRiviere put them to work first on snowplowing, and when that was done, on maintaining equipment, vehicles, tools and materiel, and when everything LaRiviere owned had been brought up to his fastidious snuff, which is to say, in as-new condition, and the garage and toolboxes and storage bins had been swept and squared as smartly as a marine barracks, LaRiviere promptly laid off Jimmy. A few weeks later, he laid off Jack, and last of all, Wade. This usually occurred late in February, which meant that Wade was out of work no more than six weeks.

It was hard to know what factors determined LaRiviere's policy of laying off first Jimmy, then Jack, then Wade. Both Jimmy and Wade had worked for LaRiviere since getting out of the service, and Jack had come on only three years ago, so it was not seniority. And it was not age, either, as Jimmy was two years older than Wade, twenty-two years older than Jack. And it was not on the basis of who had the widest range of skills, because Jack could type and Wade could not, and when given the opportunity to do it, Jack liked office work, whereas Wade felt worse than peculiar, he felt downright terrified, when, as inevitably happened on a cold dark snowy day in February, LaRiviere asked him to come into the office, get out the calculator and an architect's scale and take measurements off a blueprint stretched across the drafting table and help prepare a bid on some spring work for the state. Wade pulled off his jacket and cap and sat on the stool and went to work, listing sizes and lengths of pipe and fitting required, converting those figures into man-hours, calling Capitol Supply in Concord for prices, clicking away on the calculator and every time, without fail, coming up with totals that were so much over or under what simple horse sense told him the job should cost that he felt compelled to start the process all over again. The second time through, his totals once again were so far off, and in the opposite direction of the first set, that Wade could
trust nothing—not the drawings and not the architect and engineer who made them, not the calculator, not the supplier and, most of all, not himself. He knew the work, the figures for the materials were all fixed in black and white, and he could read blueprints with ease; but somehow, every time he added up his figures he fumbled, skipping a whole column of figures one time, doubling sums the next. Was he brain-damaged, missing a few crucial cells someplace? Was there something wrong with his eyes, some mysterious affliction? Or was he just made so nervous by LaRiviere sitting a few feet away from him that he could not concentrate on the rows of numbers in front of him? Usually, after a dozen failed attempts to come up with an estimate that approximated his commonsense knowledge of the cost of a job, Wade would start to growl audibly from his stool at the drafting table, a low rumbling canine growl, and LaRiviere would look up from his desk, blink his tiny pale-blue eyes three or four times and tell Wade to go on home for the rest of the winter.

When, at last, Wade had finished plowing the parking lot of Toby's Inn, he drew the grader alongside the dump truck, cut the engine back and flopped open the canvas door. He was a few feet higher than Jimmy in the truck and swung around in his narrow seat and kicked down at the closed window of the truck several times.

Jimmy rolled the window down and hollered, “What the fuck you want, Wade? What you want?”

Wade felt a wave of petulance roll over him, a warm self-satisfied pout, and he kicked his booted feet, right, then left, into the space of the open window below him.

Jimmy dodged Wade's feet and yelled, “What the fuck? Knock that shit off, will you?” He started rolling the window up, but Wade stuck one boot into the window far enough to stop it a few inches from the top. Jimmy peered up at Wade, puzzled, angry, a little scared. “Hey, c'mon, will you?”

Wade said nothing. His face was expressionless, but he was suddenly happy, feeling playful almost, unexpectedly released from the anger and grief that had weighed on him all morning. Even his toothache had eased back. Wade somehow knew that this nearly miraculous and strangely innocent feeling of release would last only as long as he could strike dumbly out, refusing to explain his blows, refusing to rationalize them,
refusing even to connect them to anger, to particular offense given or taken: so he pulled his foot free of the nearly closed window and swung both of them hard against the glass.

Jimmy said, “Jesus Christ, Wade! You bust this glass, Gordon'll kick my ass too!” He rapidly rolled the window down again and slid away from the opening and Wade's swinging feet. From his position halfway across the passenger's seat, Jimmy reached over to the steering wheel and stretched to place his feet against the clutch and gas pedal, and he managed to shove the truck into low gear and got it to lurch unsteadily away from the grader. But as the truck moved away, Wade simply stepped up onto the roof of the cab, and now he stood atop the vehicle, legs spread, fists at his hips, banging his feet against the roof in a wild awkward dance.

Below him, Jimmy slid into proper place behind the wheel, and shifting it into second gear, got the truck quickly up to about twenty-five miles an hour and headed straight for the snowbank at the far end of the lot. Then he hit the brakes hard and had the pleasure of watching Wade, like some gigantic dark-blue bird of prey, sail past, over the hood of the truck, over the top of the plow and straight into the high pile of hard-packed snow.

As soon as Wade had landed, Jimmy cut the wheel hard to the left, dropped the truck back into first and pulled quickly out of the parking lot onto Route 29 toward town and commenced plowing the right lane in that direction, as nonchalantly and purposefully as he had plowed the other lane coming out.

After half a minute, Wade managed to extricate himself from the snowbank and stood covered with snow and hunched over in the middle of the lot, freezing, with chunks of snow inside his clothes, down his neck and back, up his sleeves and pants legs and inside his boots, gloves and hat.

Jimmy and the truck were out of sight now; the great unwieldy blue grader chortled at the other side of the lot. Wade reached down and picked up a hard-packed chunk of snow the size of his fist, and just as he was about to throw it—at the windshield of the grader, he supposed, although he hadn't actually decided on a target yet—he heard the sirens.

A few seconds later, two state police cruisers and a long white ambulance came speeding along Route 29 from the interstate,
and as they passed Toby's Inn, Wade whirled with them, and he hurled the snowball, splattering it against the passenger-side window of the cruiser in front. The pair of cruisers and the ambulance kept going, however, as if Wade were not there.

FOR YEARS IT WAS A FAMILIAR winter morning sight: people glanced out their living room windows or paused a second with an armload of firewood halfway from the woodshed to the back porch and watched the big ugly machine chug slowly toward them. It tickled and mildly reassured folks to see Wade Whitehouse out plowing the town roads with LaRiviere's blue grader.

You usually heard it before you saw it—a low grinding sound slapped rapidly by a hammer—and then you saw through the falling snow the dull waxy glow of the headlights like a hungry insect's eyes, and gradually the beast itself emerged from behind shuddering white waves, a tangle of thighbones and plates of steel with six huge black corrugated tires munching implacably along the road.

Stuck up inside the canvas cab like a telephone repairman perched on a pole, Wade hunkered over the steel steering wheel and shoved the gears and the blade-control levers back and forth, fitting the rigid unwieldy machine to the dips and bends and bone-rattling frost heaves in the old badly maintained
roads that ran along the river and crisscrossed the valley and the surrounding hills.

The chilled meat of his body had quickly thickened with numbness; his feet against the metal pedals were soon as cold as ingots; his gloved hands were stiff as monkey wrenches. He knew nothing of what had happened up on Parker Mountain this morning, nothing of anything beyond the immediate range of his body's diminishing senses, and he stared out the plexiglass square at the white road before him, and he dreamed.

As far back as he could remember, certainly as far back as I can remember, Wade was called a dreamer, but only by those who knew him well and had known him for a long time—our mother and father, our sister and us three brothers, and his ex-wife Lillian too, and lately Margie Fogg, good old Margie Fogg. We all thought of Wade as a dreamer. Most people saw him as tense, quick, unpredictable and hot-tempered, and indeed he was all those things too. But since childhood, he seemed, when he was alone or imagined that he was alone, sometimes almost to let go of consciousness and float on waves of thought and feeling of his own making. They were not fantasies, exactly, for they had no narrative and little structure, and not memories or wishes, but warm streams of dumb contentment that flowed steadily through his mind and remained nonetheless safely outside of time, as if they had no source and no end.

A country boy and the third child in a taciturn family that left children early to their own devices, as if there were nothing coming in adult life worth preparing them for, Wade from infancy had found himself, often and for long periods of time, essentially alone. Whether in our mother's company in the warm food-smelling kitchen or at night in his crib with his older brothers in the unheated upstairs bedroom where all three boys slept, he was generally ignored, treated like a piece of inherited furniture that had no particular use or value but might turn out someday to be worth something. Before long, he began to be discovered suddenly underfoot, noticed one morning or early afternoon when his older brothers were in school by our mother on her way out of the kitchen—a small boy seated silently in a corner facing the wall open-eyed as if studying the pattern in the wallpaper, until she scooped him up and held him tightly and, smiling down into his small dark
somber face, said, “Wade, honey, you are my dreamer.”

He squirmed and hardened his body until it became difficult to hold, and when she put him down again, he ran out of the room ahead of her, letting the screened door slam behind him, and went in search of his brothers, standing by the side of the dirt road and waiting for the school bus to ease up to the house and let the two older boys out.

Behind him, our mother brushed aside the curtain and peered out the kitchen window at him and saw that once again the boy had the dreaming look on his face—impassive, enduring, unworried and unfocused. Our mother's name was Sally, and she was pregnant then with Lena, her fourth child, and I was not born yet. Sally was barely thirty years old, and her husband, Glenn, our father, was a turbulent man who drank heavily, and though Glenn loved Sally, he beat her from time to time and had beaten the boys—not Wade, of course, he was still too young, but the older boys, Elbourne and Charlie, who could be provoking at times, even she had to admit it, especially when Glenn came home late on a Friday night and had been drinking and was truculent, though of course there was no excuse for beating her or the boys, none whatsoever, so Glenn was always sorry afterwards.

Consequently, when Sally watched her third son dream, she chose to believe that it was a sign of his blessed contentment and felt relieved that at least someone in this poor and troubled family was a happy person, and for that reason she thought of him as her favorite child. She believed that he was not like his father and, because he was a boy, not like her, either. When she gave birth to a boy she could barely believe that it had come from her body. Her fourth child would be a daughter, Lena, in whom Sally would see herself recreated wholly, poor thing. That is what she called her, “poor thing.” Then a year later, her fifth child would be born, a son they would name Rolfe, who Sally at first thought was like the first two, another chip off the old block, as Glenn said: and so for a few years he was—independent, troublesome, violent, male. Later, with excruciating difficulty, he would change, but no one in the family knew that, except possibly Wade.

The family lived from the start in an inherited house, Sally's uncle's place, a small run-down Cape farmhouse on 125 acres of rocky overgrown scrub four miles west of the center of Lawford on the north slope of Parker Mountain. Sally and
Glenn moved into the place right after they were married, ostensibly in order to take care of her sick and long-widowed childless uncle Elbourne, but in reality they moved in because they had no other place to live and Sally was already pregnant. By the time Glenn declared that the name of his firstborn son was going to be Elbourne, he had already talked the crippled increasingly senile old man into putting the house in his and Sally's name—in exchange for payment of three years' back taxes, Glenn explained, and for safety's sake. When, a year later, Uncle Elbourne died in his bed in the cold urine-smelling downstairs bedroom, Glenn and Sally Whitehouse were able to believe that they had made the old man's final days cheerful, a belief backed now by the name of their firstborn son and by their legal ownership of the house.

From such circumspect beginnings, then, did the ramshackle old farm come eventually to be known as the White-house place, where we five Whitehouse kids were raised, where we argued and fought and suffered together and in our own gnarled fashion loved one another, the place that, finally, as soon as we were able, all five children fled—Elbourne and Charlie running to Vietnam, where they died, Lena to marriage with the Wonder Bread truck driver and obesity and charismatic Christianity and five squabbling children of her own, and I, Rolfe, whom the others regarded as the successful one, to the state university.

Wade, the dreamer, fled the Whitehouse place first for the young tenderhearted and beautiful Lillian Pittman; and a few years later, believing he was running from his marriage, he tried to follow his brothers and got sent to Korea instead; then he fled back to Lillian; and a few years after that, believing again that he was in flight from his marriage, he arrived at his trailer by Lake Minuit, Toby's Inn, Margie Fogg, his job with LaRiviere, his love of his daughter Jill.

Meanwhile, our father, Glenn Whitehouse, was forced to retire early, at sixty-three, when the Littleton Coats mill was sold, and he and our mother remained out there alone in the old Cape, which we children regarded with dark suspicion and rarely visited, especially not on holidays. The old couple grew slowly silent, passing whole long days and nights without saying a word to one another, Ma knitting afghans for Lena's children down in Revere and church bazaars here in town, Pop cutting and stacking wood for the winter, drinking steadily
from midmorning until he fell asleep in his chair in front of the flickering eye of the television.

Usually, at three or four in the morning, the cold woke him with a start, and stumbling to the stove, he shoved a chunk of wood into it as if angry at the thing. He adjusted the damper, shut off the TV and shuffled to the kitchen, where in the dark he poured himself two fingers of Canadian Club and drank it down. Then he eased his brittle body to the bed that he still shared with his wife. He did not understand what had happened, why everyone, everyone except his wife, had gone away from him; and even she, who did understand what had happened, in her own way had long ago gone away from him too: and she lay next to him cold with rage, while he burned, burned.

But hadn't he always burned? Isn't that what people who knew him years ago said of him? That before he became a prematurely old man and drank only to stay drunk, Glenn Whitehouse had seemed even then to burn, and not just when he stumbled into bed, as now, and lay there awake till dawn— but all the time, day and night. He had been redheaded when younger, and red-faced, with eyes and lips like glowing coals, a man who went hatless and in his shirtsleeves when other men wrapped themselves in parkas. And when he drank, which was every few nights, even when Wade was a child and probably long before that, the man seemed to burst into flame. His normally dark low voice lifted and thinned, and suddenly his mouth filled to overflowing with words that tumbled past his large teeth into the cool night air of empty parking lots and the cabs of pickup trucks, spattering among hisses and steam and flashes of light, making his listeners laugh nervously and dance away and back again, fascinated and a little frightened. For despite his heat, Glenn Whitehouse, sober, in his manner and bearing was ordinarily a glum silent sort, a workingman who hated his job and whose cross impoverished family only served to remind him of his failings, a man who made friends with difficulty and kept them not at all.

In those early days, before he finally lost his ability to distinguish between being sober and drunk, while our father drank, and for as long as he kept on drinking, he became brilliantly and shamelessly incoherent. The danger, the violence, came late in the evening, when he stopped drinking, so that, while he was never one of those men who got into barroom
brawls and, when sober, he had not once raised a hand against his wife or children, his wife and his children nonetheless ran and hid from him when he first arrived home at night, especially on Friday nights, after he had been paid and had spent some of his pay at Toby's Inn or on a fifth of CC at the Littleton package store with the men riding back down from the mill to Lawford together. Ma and her children would come out of hiding only when one of the children had sneaked into the kitchen and had reported back that the old man was drinking again.

“It's okay,” young Elbourne would say. “He's got his bottle out, and he's sitting at the table pretending to read the paper,” he said, and he laughed.

Then one by one we drifted into the kitchen from the barn or the upstairs bedrooms to warm ourselves at the man's fire—Elbourne and Charlie, Wade and Lena, and Sally and even me, barely old enough to walk, seeking our father's heat.

As soon as he saw us, he began to speak. “Elbourne, my boyo! Elbourne, big boy! Get yourself over here by your dear old daddy and let's have a good look at you, eh? Big boy, what the hell have you been up to now, what the hell sort of trouble have you been getting yourself into? You love me, son? Does Big Boy love Daddy? Does he love his Pop? Sure he does.

“You probably don't know it, son, but I have ways of finding things out about you. You don't realize, you poor thing, but all your teachers, you see, all of them, oh yes, first they all see me in the store or down at Toby's or even up in Littleton, first they see me and then they come right out with it, Elbourne, my big boy bursting the seams of his jeans, so you must tell me yourself, you see, so I can go back to these funny folks, these teachers and preachers and so forth, and not seem quite so … quite so
ignorant
, yes, ignorant of my own child's puny adventures.”

He spoke rapidly, not drawing a breath, it seemed, giving no one a chance to answer his questions or respond to his declarations. “I've got sons, goddammit, oh my God, have I got sons! I've got a hell of a bunch of sons, all of them going to be big men too, right, boys? Right, Elbourne? Charlie? Wade? Rolfe? You love me, boys? Do you love your daddy? Do you love your Pop? Of course you do. Sure you do.

“And what about you, daddy's girl? What about you? Where have you been all my life, eh? You love your daddy,
Lena? Come here, child. You love your Pop? Of course you do.”

Lena came shyly toward him and let him lift her onto his lap, where she sat uncomfortably on his jumpy knees for a few seconds before wriggling back down as soon as the man had gone on to something else, usually his wife and our mother, whom he characterized as beautiful and wise and good. “Oh, Jesus, Sally, you are such a goddamned good person! I mean Good. Capital G. I truly mean it, the goddamned fucking truth! Sally, you are so much better than I am, I who am no good at all, you who are a good person, a truly good person, like a fucking saint. Beyond fucking com-pare. I'm sorry, excuse the language, but I mean it, and I'm sorry but there's no other way to say it, because you are so fucking good you don't even make me feel bad. You are. Which is about as good as anyone can be and still be human! And you are totally human, Sally. A woman human. Oh, Sally, Sally, Sally!”

Later on, after we smaller children, Lena and I, had been put to bed, Pop either ran out of whiskey or drank so much of it that when he stood, he nearly fell, and he permitted Ma to put him to bed in the downstairs bedroom in which old Uncle Elbourne had died and which, afterwards, they had painted and moved into themselves. The older boys and Wade, who was eleven now and stayed up as late as he wanted, watched television in the living room with Ma, who sat on the old greasy green sofa in her housecoat and slippers and ate homemade popcorn, while the boys sat on the floor and competed with one another's smartass comments on the television program.