Affliction

1

THIS IS THE STORY of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and his disappearance. No one urged me to reveal these things; no one asked me not to. We who loved him simply no longer speak of Wade, not among ourselves and not with anyone else, either. It is almost as if he never existed, or as if he were a member of some other family or from some other place and we barely knew him and never had occasion to speak of him. So that by telling his story like this, as his brother, I am separating myself from the family and from all those who ever loved him.

In numerous ways I am separated from them anyhow, for while each of us is ashamed of Wade and burdened with anger — my sister, her husband and kids, Wade’s ex-wife and his daughter, his fiancée and a few friends — the others are ashamed and burdened in ways that I am not. They are dismayed by their shame, astonished by it, as they should be (he is one of them, after all, and they are good people, in spite of everything); and they are confused by their anger. Which is perhaps why they have not asked me to keep silent. I myself am neither dismayed nor confused: like Wade, I have been ashamed and angry practically since birth and am accustomed to holding both those skewed relations to the world: it makes me, among those who loved him, uniquely qualified to tell his story.

Even so, I know how the others think. They are secretly hoping that they have got Wade’s story wrong and that I can somehow get it right or at least get it said in such a way that we will all be released from our shame and anger and can speak lovingly again of our brother, husband, father, lover, old friend, around the supper table or in the car on a long drive or in bed late at night, wondering where the poor man is now, before we fall asleep.

That will not happen. Nevertheless, I tell it for them, for the others as much as for myself. They want, through the telling, to regain him; I want only to be rid of him. His story is my ghost life, and I want to exorcise it.

As for forgiveness: it must be spoken of, I suppose, but who among us can hope to proffer it? Even I, at this considerable distance from the crimes and the pain, cannot forgive him. It is the nature of forgiveness that when you forgive someone, you no longer have to protect yourself from him, and for the rest of our lives we will have to protect ourselves from Wade. Regardless, it is too late now for forgiveness to do him any good. Wade Whitehouse is gone. And I believe that we will never see him again.

Everything of importance — that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story — occurred during a single deer-hunting season in a small town, a village, located in a dark forested valley in upstate New Hampshire, where Wade was born and raised and so was I, and where most of the White-house family has lived for five generations. Think of a village in a medieval German folktale. Think of a cluster of old and new but mostly old houses and shops and a river running through and hillside meadows and tall trees. The town is named Lawford, and it is one hundred fifty miles north of where I live now.

Wade was forty-one that fall and in bad shape — everyone in town knew it but was not particularly upset by it. In a village, you see people’s crises come and go, and you learn to wait them out: most people do not change, especially seen from up close; they just grow more elaborate.

Consequently, everyone who knew Wade was waiting out his gloom, his heavy drinking, his dumb belligerence. His crisis was his character in sharp relief. Even I, down south in the suburbs of Boston, was waiting him out. It was easy for me. I am ten years younger than Wade, and I abandoned the family and the town of Lawford when I graduated high school — escaped from them, actually, though it sometimes feels like abandoned. I went to college, the first in the family to do that, and became a high school teacher and a man of meticulous routine. For many years, I regarded Wade as a gloomy, alcoholic and stupidly belligerent man, like our father, but now he had gotten into his forties without killing himself or anyone else, and I expected that he would, like our father, get into his fifties, sixties and maybe seventies the same way, so I did not worry about Wade.

Though he visited me twice that fall and called me on the telephone often and at great length, several times a week and usually late at night, after he had been drinking for hours and had sent everyone near him scurrying for safety, I was not moved much one way or the other. I listened passively to his rambling tirades against his ex-wife, Lillian, and his mournful declarations of love for his daughter, Jill, and his threats to inflict serious bodily harm on many of the people who lived and worked with him, people whom, as the town police officer, he was sworn to protect. Preoccupied with the details of my own life, I listened to him as if he were a boring soap opera on TV and I was too busy or distracted by the details of my own life to get up and change the channel.

It would pass, I felt, with the pain of his divorce from Lillian and of her remarriage and departure from town with Jill in tow. Six more months, I felt, would do it. That would put him three full years beyond the divorce, two years beyond Lillian’s move south to Concord, and well into springtime: snowmelt running off the hills, the lakes breaking free of ice, daylight lingering into evening. Maybe he will fall in love with someone else, I thought. There was a woman he said he slept with now and again, a local woman named Margie Fogg, and for the most part he spoke fondly of her. If nothing else, I thought, Jill will eventually grow up. Children often force parents to grow up by first growing up themselves. Though I am childless and unmarried, I know this.

Then one night something changed, and from then on my relation to Wade’s story was different from what it had been before, since childhood. That night willed detachment got replaced by — what? — sympathy? More than sympathy, I think, and less. Empathy. A dangerous feeling, to both parties.

I mark it by the change I heard in Wade’s tone of voice during a phone call he made to me a night or two after Halloween. It may have been the first or second of November by then. He was in the middle of one of his garrulous complaints, and I heard something that I had not heard there before, and for an instant I wondered if I had misperceived my brother all along. Perhaps I had misjudged him, and he was not so predictable after all; perhaps his character and this crisis were not one thing, were instead quite distinct from one another, or the nature of the crisis was such that it would soon make them distinct; perhaps my brother was as real as I, a man whose character was as I understood my own: process, flux, change. This was a new thought to me and not an altogether welcome one. And I did not know where it came from, unless it was from the simple accumulated weight of familiarity; for, without my being aware of it, a subtle balance had shifted, as if in my sleep, so that suddenly I was no longer distantly monitoring my brother’s confused painful life but was instead practically living it. And I despised Wade’s life. Let me say it again. I despised Wade’s life. I fled the family and the town of Lawford when I was little more than a boy to avoid having to live that life. That is only one of the differences between Wade and me, but it is a huge difference.

Wade was making the ex-husband’s complaint about the ex-wife’s infinite capacity for cruelty — the result of some minor humiliation a night or two before. I had not quite got it but had not asked for clarification, either — when suddenly I heard a shift in his tone of voice, a change of register and pitch, little enough to notice ordinarily, but for some reason enough to sit me up straight in my chair to listen to him closely, to gather my wandering attention, and instead of regarding his life as merely a minor part of mine, I saw the man in his own context for a change. It was as if the story he was telling were enlarging and clarifying my story: the chronic toothache he had complained of earlier in the conversation, though worse and significantly different from my periodic headaches, suddenly became a troublesome echo, and his financial difficulties, though described practically in another language than mine, rhymed anxiously with mine, and his ongoing troubles with women, parents, friends and enemies, grotesquely reversed versions of my troubles, gave mine painful articulation.

He had been describing the events of Halloween Eve, and he began to speak of the weather that night, colder even than usual, well below freezing, colder than a witch’s tit, he said, that first cold night when you know winter’s a-coming in and there is nothing you can do about it and once again it is too goddamned late to head south. You just put your head down, bub, and you accept it.

The change, the shift, may well have been in me, of course, not Wade. He used the same words he always used, the same clichés and oddly reflective expressions; he affected the same weary stoicism he has affected since adolescence; he sounded, to all intents and purposes, the same as always — yet I heard him differently. One minute his story did not matter to me; the next minute it mattered in every way. One minute my mind and eyes were focused on the television screen in front of me, a Boston Celtics game with the sound turned off, and then suddenly I was visualizing Lawford Center on Halloween Eve.

Which is not difficult for me to do: in the fifteen years since I last spent a Halloween there, which is to say, since I was in high school, the place has not changed much. In fifty years it has not changed much. But visualizing the place, going there in memory or imagination, is not something I care to do. I studiously avoid it. I have to be almost tricked into it or conjured. Lawford is one of those towns that people leave, not one that people come back to. And to make matters worse, to make it even more difficult to return to, even if you wanted to go back — which of course no one who has left the town in this half century wants to do — those who remain behind cling stubbornly as barnacles to the bits and shards of social rites that once invested their lives with meaning: they love bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, funerals, seasonal and national holidays, even election days. Halloween, as well. A ridiculous holiday, and for whom, for what? It has absolutely no connection to modern life.

But Lawford has no connection to modern life, either. There is a kind of willed conservatism that helps a remnant people cope with having been abandoned by several generations of the most talented and attractive of its children. Left behind, the remnant feels inadequate, insufficient, foolish and inept — everyone with brains and ambition, it seems, everyone with the ability to live in the larger world, has gone away. So that with the family, with the community as a whole, no longer able to unify and organize a people and provide them with a worthy identity, the half-forgotten misremembered ceremonies of ancient days become all the more crucial to observe. As in: Halloween. The rites affirm a people’s existence, but falsely. And it is this very falsity that most offends those of us who have left. We know better than anyone, precisely because we have fled in such numbers, that those who refused or were unable to leave no longer exist as a family, a tribe, a community. They are no longer a people — if they ever were one. It is why we left in the first place and why we are so reluctant to return, even to visit, and especially on holidays. Oh, how we hate going home for the holidays! It is why we have to be coerced into it by guilt, or tricked, if not by ourselves, then by the wider, sentimental culture. I teach history; I think about these things.

Wade rambled on, half drunk, as usual, calling from his wind-battered trailer by the lake up there in Lawford, and I envisioned the town he was talking about, the people he alluded to, the hills and valleys, the forests and streams he passed in his car on his way home every night and out again in the morning to work, the diner where he stopped for breakfast, the well-drilling company he worked for, the town hall where his part-time police chief’s office was located: I visualized the setting for my brother’s life as it had been a night or two before, when the events he was describing to me had taken place.

The air was dry, and the sky clear as black glass, with belts and swatches of stars all over and in the southeast a crescent moon grinning. I remember those cold fall nights, with the smell of oncoming snow in the air. On the side of the hill, between the spruce woods climbing the eastern ridge of the valley and the long yellow meadow that slopes toward the river at the bottom, a bony thicket of birches clings like a brief porous interval. The river below is narrow, rock-strewn, noisy, with a forested moraine on the farther bank and a two-lane road running north and south along the near. This is the town I grew up in.

There is a row of large, mostly white houses that face the road from the east. Vehicles following pale wedges of light roamed north and south along the road. Some of them pulled in and parked at the center of town, where there are three steepled churches, a two-story wood-frame town hall and an open square and a ball field; others stopped in front of one or another house in the settlement; while short strings of small dark figures raveled and unraveled along the shoulders of the road and entered and departed from the same houses visited by the cars.

Imagine with me that on this Halloween Eve up along the ridge east of the settlement it was still and silent and very dark. The wind was down, as if gathering for a storm, and from the houses below not even a watchdog’s bark floated this far. The moon had just slipped behind the spruce-topped black ridge. Suddenly out of the thicket of birches a small gang of boys, five or six short shadowy figures, emerged running from the woods. Their breath trailed behind them in white streaks, and they darted like a pack of feral dogs downhill over the crumbly ground of the meadow, then sneaked across the scoured backyard of a neat white Cape Cod house with barn and sheds attached at the far side, where, as if at last sighting their prey, the boys dashed around the corner of the barn toward the front.

They wore knit caps and brightly colored jackets and were ten or twelve years old. Twenty years before, I might have been among them, or ten years before that, Wade himself. Indian file, they slipped along the side of the house that faced Main Street, ducking under windows and around a single Scotch pine. At the edge of the porch, they gathered into a group and ran straight to the front steps and seized two large lighted jack-o’-lanterns that had been posted there.

The boys lifted the tops of the pumpkins with purpose, as if releasing imprisoned spirits, and for a second their small faces were transformed, turning them orange and wild. With a puff, they extinguished the candles and raced with the dead jack-o’-lanterns back into darkness, grinning to one another with fear and pleasure, as if they had stolen a giant’s beloved goose.

Silence. A moment later a yellow Ford station wagon, seams and rocker panels rotted by rust, pulled up in front of the same house, and the driver, a thick-bodied young woman wearing a cloth coat and blue ski cap and gloves, got out, opened the back door and helped two tiny costumed children — one a fairy godmother with a wand, the other a vampire wearing huge blood-tipped plastic incisors — exit from the car. Lugging shopping bags, the children followed the mother to the front door of the house, where they climbed the steps and the mother rang the bell.

The door opened, and a woman with crisp features and short white hair stood in the doorway. A person of indeterminate age, somewhere between fifty and seventy, she wore green twill trousers and shirt and men’s work shoes, and her pointy face was expressionless for a second. From the bottom of the steps the children held their bags out to be filled and shrieked, “Trick or treat!” and the white-haired woman opened her eyes wide, as if startled. Flopping long hands in front of her chest, the woman, whose name is Alma Pittman, feigned alarm. She is the town clerk and a certified public accountant and notary public and is not skilled at amusing children. I knew her when I was a boy, and she has changed not at all.

“You, now,” she said to one child, “you must be an angel. And you,” she said to the other, “you’re a wolf-man or something, I bet.” She stared down at them from her considerable height, and the children withdrew their bags and looked at their feet. “Shy,” Alma observed.

The mother smiled apologetically through blotches of freckles. The mother’s name is Pearl Diehler. She has been living on welfare and food stamps since her husband left her and moved to Florida two years ago — Alma Pittman knew this, of course, and Pearl knew she did. Everyone knew it. Small towns are like that.

Alma quickly smiled back and swung open the door and waved the children and their mother inside. As the three passed by her into the warmly lit living room, Alma glanced down at her stoop and saw that her jack-o’-lanterns were gone. Both of them.

For a few seconds she stared at where they had been, as if trying to remember placing them on the stoop earlier, trying to recall carving them out herself that afternoon on her kitchen table, trying to remember buying them from Anthony’s Farm Market last Friday — a solitary irritable woman more organized and better educated than most of her neighbors, and though somewhat intolerant of them, trying nonetheless to be kind to them, to join them somehow in their holiday.

As if waking from sleep, she blinked, turned quickly around and went inside her house, closing the door firmly behind her.

A fast-flowing river, the Minuit, runs south through the town, and most of the buildings in Lawford — homes, stores, town hall and churches, no more than fifty buildings in the center in all — are situated on the east side of the river along a half-mile stretch of Route 29, the old Littleton-Lebanon road, replaced a generation ago by the interstate ten miles east.

The Minuit was named and then fished for centuries by the Abenaki Indians, until in the early 1800s woodcutters from Massachusetts came north and started using the river to float tree trunks south and west to the Connecticut. By the time the burgeoning muddy lumber camp had evolved into a proper village and shipping point called Lawford, there was a pair of small brick mills on the river manufacturing wood shingles and spools. For a brief period the town prospered, which accounts for the dozen or so impressively large white houses strung along the road at the south end of town, where the valley widens somewhat and the glacial rubble, filtered by a long-gone primeval lake, becomes glacial till and, cleared by those early lumbermen, for a few years offered speculators several thousand acres of good salable farmland.

In the Great Depression, the mills got taken over by the banks, were shut down and written off, the money and machinery invested farther south in the manufacture of shoes. Since then, Lawford has existed mainly as someplace halfway between other places, a town people sometimes admit to having come from but where almost no one ever goes. Half the rooms in the big white colonial houses that face the river and the high dark ridge in the west have been emptied and sealed off against the winter with polyurethane and plywood, imprisoning in the remaining rooms elderly couples and widows and widowers abandoned by their grown children for the smarter life in the towns and cities. There are, of course, grown children who stay on in Lawford, and others who — after serving and being wounded in one of the wars or messing up a marriage elsewhere — come back home to live in the old house and pump gas or style hair in town. Such children are regarded by their parents as failures; and they behave accordingly.

Lots of homes in town double as businesses: insurance; real estate; guns ‘n’ ammo; haircutting; arts & crafts. Here and there a particularly well maintained and — discounting the greenhouse, the sauna in the barn and the solar heat panels— lovingly restored mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse accommodates the complex social, sexual and domestic needs of a graying long-haired man and woman with an adolescent child or two in boarding school, svelte couples who have come north from Boston or New York City to teach at Dartmouth, twenty miles south, or sometimes just to grow marijuana in their large organic gardens and live off inherited money in the region’s dead economy.

Most of the rest of the townspeople live outside the center, nowadays usually in mobile homes or small ranch-style bungalows built by the owners with borrowed money on rocky three-acre lots of hilly scrub. Their children attend the cinder-block elementary school on the outskirts north of town and the regional high school in Barrington, where the Lawford boys even today have enviable reputations as athletes, especially in the more violent sports, and the girls still have reputations for providing sexual favors at an early age and for going to their senior proms pregnant.

These are not the only people who reside in Lawford. There are a small number of part-time residents, summer people with houses built on the gravelly shores of the lakes in the area, sprawling wood-frame structures they call “camps,” built back in the 1920s by large wealthy families from southern New England and New York forcing themselves to spend time together. A few of these family compounds came later, in the 1940s and ’50s, but by then it was difficult to buy attractive lakeshore property from the early comers, and they often got built on marshy land with no easy access to the road.

Beyond this, there are only the deer hunters to speak of, and one must speak of them, for they will play an important role in Wade’s story. Almost all of the deer hunters are men from lower New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, who every November come north brandishing high-powered rifles with scopes and normally spend no longer than a weekend in the area. They drink all night in motels and roadhouses on Route 29 and tramp from sunup to sundown through the woods, firing at anything that moves, sometimes even killing it and hauling it back to Haverhill or Revere on the fender of a car. More often than not, they return home empty-handed, hung over and frustrated — but nonetheless sated from having participated, even if only marginally and ineptly, in an ancient male rite.

Near the center of Lawford, three houses north of the town hall and situated on a large flat lot, are a pair of incongruous buildings — a huge slate-blue hundred-year-old renovated barn and next to it a matching blue sixty-foot cathedral-ceiling mobile home — the pair of them surrounded by an acre of asphalt paving, as if the blue buildings were dropped by helicopter squarely into the middle of a shopping center parking lot. This is the business place and home of Gordon LaRiviere, well driller, who, unless you count those who went away, is Law-ford’s only success story — despite his motto, painted on every vehicle and building he owns: LARIVIERE CO. — OUR BUSINESS IS GOING IN THE HOLE!

LaRiviere’s story, too, will get told in due time, but at this particular moment, still early on Halloween Eve, let us picture six teenagers, four boys and two girls, out in the field behind LaRiviere’s blue barn — his combination office, workshop, garage and warehouse — working in darkness in LaRiviere’s garden, a meticulously laid out and maintained plot of earth half covered with black plastic and mulch for the winter, the other half, with rattling dry cornstalks and dead tomato plants and sprawling pumpkin vines, not yet turned over. The teenagers guzzle king-sized beers and laugh through harsh whispers as they strip the few remaining vines of the few remaining pumpkins. I know this because I myself did it, not to Gordon LaRiviere’s pumpkin patch but to someone else’s. And I did it because my older brother Wade did it, and he, too, had merely followed the example of an older brother, two of them.

Soon the teenagers are up and running, awkwardly, clutching beer cans and pumpkins, around the far side of LaRiviere’s house — impossible to call it a trailer or mobile home, for it is set on a permanent foundation and has shutters, porch, breezeway, chimney attached — racing toward the road out front, then down the road a ways to where a boy waits in a ten-year-old Chevy with dual exhausts gurgling.

The thieves pile into the car with their pumpkins, hard goofy laughter now drifting back toward LaRiviere’s on the cold night air, and the kid driving pops the clutch and spins off the gravel shoulder onto the road, his tires burning rubber as they hit the pavement, the car fishtailing down the road toward the town hall, hurtling past it, the kids cackling out the windows and giving the finger to a large group of adults with children in costumes gathering outside the town hall.

Most of the adults have stopped moving and talking and stare bitterly at the old Chevrolet sedan as it blasts past. In seconds, the car has rounded the slow turn on the far side of town and is out of sight. The people clustering outside the town hall hesitate a second, as if waiting to hear a crash, then resume what they were doing.

A short ways north of the town hall and the Common and the three churches facing it — First Congregational, First Baptist and Methodist — and out along Route 29 beyond Alma Pittman’s house, from whose darkened door Pearl Diehler and her children had long since departed, there were a few straggling houses with porch lights still on for the last of the trick-or-treaters, kids whose parents had sat around the kitchen table drinking and arguing too long to drive them into town in time to join the others. This late they joined only a battalion of older greedier kids who would not stop until no one any longer answered the door, when they would commence their more serious work of the evening, what they had come out to accomplish in the first place: the gleeful destruction of private property. They intended to cut clotheslines, break windows, slash tires, open outdoor spigots so the wells would run dry and the pumps burn out.

A short ways beyond the settlement one comes to Merritt’s Shell Station — a cinder-block bunker, closed, dark, with car parts scattered around the building like rubble after a terrorist’s attack. On this night, a dim light from a rear window indicated that someone was still in the office — not Merritt, of course, who, as always, had gone home promptly at six and tonight was down at the town hall, attending the annual Halloween party in his official capacity as one of the selectmen. More likely it was Merritt’s mechanic, Chick Ward, leafing slowly, like a monk studying scripture, through a pornographic magazine from Sweden that normally he keeps hidden under the carpeting of the trunk of his car, a purple Trans Am that Merritt lets him work on in the garage after hours. Tonight he furrowed his narrow brow in concentration, smoked his cigarette, took a pull on his beer and turned the page on one type of pink contortion and began to examine another. He put his beer can on the floor and rubbed his hand across his crotch, back and forth, as if stroking the head of a sleeping dog.

Beyond Merritt’s Shell Station, the residents of the few remaining houses in town had finally shut their porch lights off, a signal to the trick-or-treaters that the night was nearly over. On the road there was only a scraggly group of small children in homemade costumes, brothers and sisters and cousins from the Hoyt place, a shack settlement on the river set in among the wreckage of an abandoned mill there. They traveled along the side of the road, gobbling their loot as they walked, now and then grabbing an apple or a piece of candy from one another’s sack — a hit and a kick and a cry; then a laugh — as they continued down the road toward town and the party.

A mile past the Hoyt kids on the right, where Route 29 bends sharply east, one passes Wickham’s Restaurant, still open but in the process of being closed for the night by Nick Wickham and his waitress, Margie Fogg. Back in the kitchen, Wickham, a lean dark man with a long wet mustache, poured three fingers of Old Mr. Boston vodka into a juice glass and knocked it back in two swallows, then stared intently at Margie Fogg’s wide rounded backside as she filled the napkin holders at the counter.

From Wickham’s all the way north practically as far as Littleton there are deep woods on both sides of the road, with the Minuit River still rushing through the darkness west of the road. The sky was a narrow black velvet band overhead, and there were no buildings visible from the road in those woods or overlooking the river, except for Toby’s Inn, three miles from town on the river side of Route 29. Toby’s is a battered two-story farmhouse converted into an inn when the Littleton-Concord Stage Line opened back in the 1880s, and it operated now as a roadhouse, with rooms for rent. Tonight the parking lot outside Toby’s had fewer than the usual ten or twelve local cars and pickups pulled up against the building and a surprisingly large number of out-of-state cars — surprising, until you remembered that tomorrow, the first day of November, was also the first day of deer-hunting season.