Affliction

13

THE SHRILL RING of the telephone tumbled Wade from light and heat — a blond dream of a beach town in summer— tossed him into darkness and cold, a bed and a room he could not at first recognize. The wrangling jangle of a telephone: he did not know where the damned thing was; it kept on ringing, still coming at him from all sides; some kind of maddened bird or rabid bat darting around his head in the darkness.

Then it stopped, and Wade heard Margie’s voice, realized he was in her bed, her house, phone, darkness, cold. He was naked, and the covers had slipped down to his waist, and his chest and shoulders and arms were chilled. He shivered his way under the covers and listened to her sleep-thickened voice.

“What? Who is this? Oh, yeah, he’s here. Wait a second,” she said, and she bumped Wade on the shoulder with the receiver. “It’s Gordon LaRiviere. He’s rip-shit about something.” She peered at the clock radio on the table beside the bed. “Christ. Four o’clock.”

Wade placed the receiver against his face, said, “Hello?” and remembered: the snow. Oh, Jesus, yes. It had been snowing all night, and here he was lying in bed, sound asleep. He had acted like any other citizen with a right to go to bed at night expecting the roads to be plowed in the morning when he woke up and made ready to drive himself and the family to church. Why had he forgotten? How had he been able to spend the night as if he did not work for LaRiviere?

It was the first time since LaRiviere got the contract to plow the town roads that this had happened to Wade; it alarmed him. What will you do next, when you have forgotten something this routine? It puzzled him; it made no sense. His life was essentially so simple and reactive that to do everything that was expected of him, Wade almost did not have to think: if it snowed, he went to LaRiviere’s garage and took either the truck or the grader and plowed the roads until they were clear; if the roads were covered with ice, he hooked the sander to the truck or grader and sanded the roads; and, of course, if it was a school day, he showed up at the school at seven-thirty and directed traffic at the crossing. After that, Monday through Friday, he spent the day doing whatever LaRiviere told him to — drill a well in Catamount, estimate a job in Littleton, clean the gear and stack pipe in the shop. Simple. A wholly reactive life.

Now, for the first time in that life, it had snowed and Wade had not reacted. A strange kind of memory lapse: he had behaved as if last night had been merely an ordinary clear cold Saturday night in November instead of a snowy one; and he had ended up in bed with Margie Fogg — because his daughter was not with him this weekend and Margie had made it clear that she wanted him to make love to her; and then he had fallen asleep — because he was sleepy. Only to find that somehow in the last eight or ten hours he seemed to have stepped out of his life and into some other person’s life, a stranger’s. And this scared him even more than LaRiviere’s predictable and justifiable wrath did. He realized that his hands were sweating. What the hell was going on with him? Maybe he really was fucked up, just like when he was in his twenties. Just like Jack. He had thought everything was going to be fine.

“Wade!” LaRiviere bellowed. “Boy, I hope to Christ you’re through getting your dick wet! You think maybe you could do a little work for me before the fucking sun comes up?”

“I… I didn’t realize…”

“No, I guess you didn’t. It’s only been snowing since suppertime. Where the fuck you been, Florida? For Christ’s sake, Wade, you know the goddamn drill. You know what to do on a goddamn night like this. You plow! You drive into town, and you take out the fucking plow, just like Jimmy did at eleven last night, and you plow, goddammit.” He paused for breath and started in again. “You plow till all the fucking roads in this town are cleared. And then I pay you for it. And then the town pays me. Very simple, Wade. I am the road agent, and I got a goddamn responsibility to the town, for which they pay me, and you got a responsibility to me, for which I pay you. That’s the drill. Got it?” He was panting. Wade pictured him red-faced and rounded in his rumpled pajamas at his kitchen table.

Wade said, “Jimmy’s already gone out?”

“Wade, it’s fucking after four A.M.! He’s been out since eleven last night.”

“I suppose he’s got the truck, and I get to go out in the grader again.”

“You think he oughta swap, maybe? Where the fuck you been the last five hours, tell me that! No, I’ll goddamn tell you where you been: while Jimmy’s been out there plowing snow, you been tucked in bed plowing Margie Fogg!”

“You’re crossing a line,” Wade said quietly.

“You already crossed, you’ve crossed just about every goddamn line you can in this town and still get by, so don’t start warning me, buddy. You got fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes to get your ass down here to the shop and put that fucking grader out on the road. I spent the whole last hour on the phone and the CB trying to find out where the hell you were. Ever since Jimmy called in that none of your roads were plowed yet and he ain’t seen you anywhere.”

“I’ll be there,” Wade said, and he sighed loudly.

“Fifteen minutes. You got fifteen minutes, or you’re fired, Wade. From everything. You’re supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day. You’re the town cop, and you plow the town roads. It’s like that. I had a short talk with Mel Gordon, by the way. But we’ll settle that later, you and me. Right now, Wade, you haul your ass on down here to the shop.”

“I said I’ll be there,” Wade said in a dead voice, and he reached across Margie and slid the receiver into its cradle.

“He’s really pissed,” she said. “Isn’t he?”

“Yep.” Wade slid out of the bed and yanked his clothes on.

“He probably ought to be, though. I mean, I never really thought of it,” she said. “The plowing. How come you didn’t just do it? What happened?”

“I forgot.”

“Forgot? You forgot it was snowing?”

“No, no, I knew it was snowing, all right. I just forgot that I was the one who had to plow it off the roads. Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you’re sick of who you are,” he added, and he walked quickly from the bedroom, and Margie thought, Oh boy, trouble.

It was cold, but not uncomfortably so, and Wade was almost glad to be outdoors. Sometime earlier, probably around midnight, while he slept, the snow had stopped falling, and the sky had cleared. Now, as Wade drove toward town from Margie’s house, he could feel morning coming on, and he suddenly felt glad to be out of Margie’s bed and alone in his car with the heater fan clattering, the woods on either side of the road dark and impenetrable behind a white skirt of snow, the car head-lights splashing bright light ahead of him, like a wave washing up on a beach.

LaRiviere sat glowering out his kitchen window when Wade drove into the lot and parked his car next to the grader, but he did not come out to holler or to threaten him, and Wade simply went about his business and drove back out in the grader. He knew his route, and he knew that it would take him four to five hours in this snow, barely six inches of light powder. There was no school today: he would not have to worry about being out in front of the school in time to direct traffic and could just go on plowing until the job was done.

It was not long before Wade began actually to enjoy himself; it was almost fun, huddled up there in the grader alone in the cockpit with the four headlamps peering like monstrous eyes over the top of the huge front tires, casting nets of light across the smooth soft unbroken snow. The pain from his tooth was steady and familiar, like an old friend, and Wade felt calm and competent and not at all lonely.

Headed north on Main Street, he chugged past Alma Pittman’s house. Under a white mantle, the house was dark as a tomb, and Wade imagined the tall thin woman lying in her bed in the upstairs bedroom where she had slept alone her whole life, straight out and on her back, her hands crossed over her flat chest — not as if dead, exactly, but in a state of suspended animation, waiting for dawnlight, when she would rise, dress, make herself a pot of tea and go back to her work of keeping the town records. For as long as Wade could remember, back into his childhood, Alma Pittman had been the town clerk. She ran for the post, with only token opposition, every year, her election a simple annual renewal, as if no one else could be trusted to log the births and deaths, record the marriages and divorces, list the sales and resales of land and houses, register the voters and issue the permits and licenses for hunting and fishing and calculate and collect the taxes and fees, and in that way connect the town to the larger communities — the county, the state and even the nation — and make the people of Lawford into citizens, make them into more than a lost tribe, more than a sad jumble of families huddled in a remote northern valley against the cold and the dark.

Wade knew the inside of Alma Pittman’s house well: she was his ex-wife’s aunt, and after Lillian’s father had died and her mother had remarried and moved up to Littleton, Lillian, who still had two years of high school left, had moved in with her aunt. That was the summer Wade got his driver’s license, and every Sunday he drove Lillian out to the Riverside Cemetery, where she placed wildflowers in a plastic vase by her father’s gravestone and then stood silently for a few moments at the foot of his grave, wringing her hands and fighting off tears. She followed the routine precisely every Sunday afternoon, as if the whole enterprise — wildflowers, silence, hand wringing, heaving chest and wet eyes — were a spiritual exercise, a weekly purification rite that had nothing to do with her father.

To Wade that summer, Lillian was a nun touched by tragedy. She was tall and slender, still a girl, with long oak-colored hair that, brushed a hundred strokes every night and fifty more in the morning, hung straight as rain almost to her waist. Her father had been a housepainter who had not drawn a sober breath in years, people said. The previous autumn he had been painting the flagpole at the newly built elementary school, and in sight of half the children in town he had fallen from the top of the pole, had smashed his back and skull and had died right there on the playground.

I was in the first grade then, my first year at school, and had been among the fifty or sixty kids who had seen the man fall (or heard it, or were close enough to have seen it but did not — I am not sure even today whether I actually did see it) and told the story over and over at supper—”I’m out there at third base, so I got this wicked good view of the flagpole, which is right behind the batter’s cage, and all of a sudden, it’s like a plane crashing, eerroo-oom! Whap!”

Finally, after a week of it, Wade had snapped at me, “Hey, c’mon, Rolfe, we all know the story. Whyn’t you think of something new to say? Besides, it’s kind of disgusting when we’re eating.”

Pop had held his fork in midair between his plate and mouth and said, “Leave him be, Wade. Don’t be such a candyass, anyhow. Rolfe probably won’t ever see nothing that stupid again.”

“I hope not,” Ma had said.

Wade had shut up, but sensing the source of my brother’s discomfort, I did not tell the story again.

The following spring, Lillian’s mother married Tom Smith, a divorced drinking buddy of Lillian’s father, another housepainter, who lived up in Littleton and owned a triple-decker apartment house there. The woman took her two younger daughters to Littleton with her, leaving Lillian behind, to complete high school and live with her spinster aunt, Alma Pittman, the hardworking dour pinch-faced older sister of her dead father, a woman who was regarded as necessary to the town but a little overeducated, because she had studied accounting for two years at Plymouth State before coming back to Lawford during the war to take care of her ailing parents.

Lillian did not particularly like her cheerless aunt, but the woman left her alone, gave her a room upstairs and allowed Wade to come over whenever he wanted and even let them spend hours alone in Lillian’s room with the door closed, where they passionately kissed and hugged and groped through each other’s clothing to their virginal bodies. And after a while, exhausted, they would cease to struggle with the angels of their adolescent consciences; they fell away panting and talked in whispers of their fears and longings; and sometimes they came downstairs and sat side by side on the couch, with Alma in her ladder-back rocker, and the three of them watched television together. And though Wade and Lillian did not actually make love in those steamy sessions upstairs (perhaps because they never actually made love), it was during those summer months, when Wade was sixteen years old and Lillian fifteen, that they decided to marry as soon as they graduated from high school. It was the same summer that Wade first spoke to anyone of our father’s violence.

In the years that our father had been beating him, Wade had not spoken of it to anyone, not to his friends at school or on the football and baseball teams, who often joked, the way boys in cars or in locker rooms will, about how their old man used to beat the shit out of them but he damn well better not try it now or he will damn well get his ass kicked. And he could not imagine talking about it with our mother, though at times it seemed clear that she wanted him to. Whenever she brought the subject up, he felt his heart race, as if she had asked him something about his sex life or told him something about hers, and he always said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Our sister, Lena, suffered only her father’s verbal assaults, so Wade knew she could not possibly understand. It was bad for her, but different. And though he sometimes wanted to warn me, now seven and not yet beaten by the man, Wade felt somehow that if no one spoke of it, if no one acknowledged it, then it might never happen again. It might turn out to be ancient history.

As for his older brothers, they seemed to Wade to regard our father’s occasional, predictable and, for the most part, avoidable attacks as just one more of the many brutalities of our life so far, as one small corner of the rough terrain of childhood, something we were supposed to endure and then pass through and become scornful of, which was why, goddammit, Elbourne had gone, and next month Charlie was going, straight into the army without even waiting to graduate from high school. So that if Wade had spoken of it to them, he would only have been pointing out his inadequacies, revealing to his older brothers, as to himself, his lesser status as a human being.

Besides, for Wade, even when he believed he was thinking clearly about it, the beatings were still too confusing and complicated to talk about with Elbourne and Charlie. All Elbourne would say is, “Don’t come to me with your problems, Wade. You’re big enough now to wipe the floor with the sonofabitch, if you want to. Do like I did. After that, believe me, he’ll never lay a hand on you.” And Charlie would say, “You don’t even have to wipe the floor with him, you just got to make him think you’re willing to. Like I did. After that, he’ll back off. Remember?” And Wade did remember.

It was four years earlier, and one spring weekend our father decided to save the barn, which had been falling down for a decade, by tearing off the fallen part and rebuilding the rest with whatever timbers and boards he could salvage from the half-collapsed back loft and the old cow stalls below. The framing timbers were still for the most part unrotted, and many of the aged wide pine boards, silvery gray and bearded with splinters, were reusable, and our father’s notion of shortening the barn by thirty feet and squaring up the rest, with no expenditure except for nails, was an attractive one — even to his sons, who knew they would have to provide the free labor.

Elbourne got out of it — he was sixteen and had a weekend job already, pumping gas for Chub Merritt, but Charlie, who was fourteen then and large for his age, had nothing better to do on a cloudy April Saturday, and Wade, though only twelve, was able to pull nails and haul boards and timbers alongside a grown man. I have no memory of the event. I was too young to help in any way and probably stayed inside the whole day.

Wade and Charlie liked the idea: the barn had been ugly to them for years, an embarrassment, even before the roof had collapsed at the rear from the weight of the snow one particularly bad winter, and they had learned to avert their gaze from the decrepit leaning unpainted structure, to pretend that it was not sagging there in the lot between the house and the woods. Now they could look at it and imagine a crisply squared handsome old barn made tight against the weather and clean enough inside to use as a garage and workshop.

Pop had told them at breakfast, “I figure a couple, three weekends is all, and we’ll have us a brand-new barn built out of the old one. We can store a winter’s wood in it then, and you boys want to work on some goddamned old clunker there, no problem.”

Wade and Charlie had gone out to the barn and had started ripping off and hauling boards from the back to the front before Pop had even finished breakfast: it was rare that people in the Whitehouse family worked on something together, and each of the boys was secretly pleased by the chance to work alongside his father and brother on a project that so clearly would benefit them all. In a short while, Pop had joined them, had set up his table saw a short ways outside the barn door and was cutting the boards to size and nailing them over old gaps and holes. He was no carpenter, but it was not a difficult job, and by noon they could see a difference: most of the skeleton of the rear half of the barn had been exposed, and most of the holes in the front had been covered over.

They broke for lunch, leftover macaroni and cheese, and the boys sat at the table so they could look over Pop’s wispy red hair and out the window behind him to the barn, and while they ate they kept glancing up to admire what they had done so far. They finished eating before Pop did and returned to work, and when he joined them he was lugging a six-pack of Schlitz, which he set on the ground next to his table saw. He popped open the first and said, “Might’s well make this enjoyable.” He said it glumly, as if he believed it was impossible to make anything enjoyable.

The boys said nothing. They looked at each other, then resumed pulling down the boards and knocking out the bent rusted nails and hauling the boards forward and stacking them neatly a few feet from the saw, where Pop went on measuring, and trimming them and nailing them into place. A cutting breeze had come up, and the smooth gray sky had roughened and lowered somewhat. At one point, the saw stopped its whine, and Wade heard the wind hiss through the pines, reminding him of winter, and he suddenly smelled wood smoke. He looked over at the house and saw a silver ribbon of smoke unravel from the chimney and knew that Ma had started a fire in the kitchen stove, and for the first time that day he wished he were not doing what he was doing.

Then it started to rain, a cold prickly windblown rain, and Pop hollered for the boys to come help him haul the table saw and extension cord inside the barn. They got the saw inside, and the three of them stood silently in the cold gloom and listened to the rain drum against the roof. Ancient rotted hay in the lofts overhead smelled sourly of failure and disappointment to all three of them, and Pop polished off the last of the six-pack and said, “Fuck it, let’s call it a day.”

“Maybe it’ll stop in a few minutes,” Charlie said. Besides, he pointed out, the extension cord to the house was long enough for them to run the saw inside the barn as well as out, and a lot of the boards and some of the framing could be pulled down without going out in the rain.

Pop rummaged through his jacket pocket and pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. The familiar smell of the cigarette relaxed Wade, and he leaned back against the wall and inhaled and wished he were old enough to carry his own cigarettes. He had smoked numerous times at school, and he liked it, liked the taste and smell, the way it made him slightly dizzy for a few seconds, then calm, and he liked the way he thought a butt dangling from his mouth made him look — like a grown man. But he knew that if he started carrying his own cigarettes around and pulling one out and smoking it at times like this, Pop would not object; he would only laugh at him.

Above them, swallows made a quiet gurgling sound from somewhere in the mossy darkness of the rafters, and Wade remembered summer afternoons, when the hay was dry and not so ancient and sour as now, wrestling in the lofts with his older brothers, the three boys pretending they were pirates boarding a Spanish galleon, where they fought in the rigging over the division of the spoils: the jewels for Elbourne, the doubloons for Charlie, and for Wade … whatever was left over. He tried dollars, and they laughed at him for his stupidity, no dollars in those days; he tried watches and rings, and Charlie said those were jewels; and so somehow he got his pick of the women, which seemed like nothing worthwhile to him, so he refused, and before he knew why or how, he was made to walk the plank, his brothers behind him poking him with their wooden swords, as, blindfolded, he edged his way along a beam high up in the barn, felt the end of it with his toes, stopped, got shoved from behind by the point of one of the swords and was falling through space, in blackness pitching into the hay, scratchy and full of dust, hugging him like a huge pillow.

“Charlie,” Pop said. “How much arm you got on you?”

“Huh?”

“You know something, Charlie-boy, you been getting awful big for your britches lately. So I was wondering how much arm you got on you. Wondering if you think you can put your old man’s arm down.” He smiled playfully, and Charlie grinned.

“Why? You want to arm wrestle?”

“‘Why? You want to arm wrestle?’”the man mimicked the boy. “Of course I want to arm wrestle. Just to set you right on who’s still the boss here, who says when we go in and so forth. Come on,” he said, “let’s go,” and he rolled up his right sleeve.

Charlie looked around him. “Where?”

“Right here. On the saw.” Our father reached under the steel tabletop and cranked down the jagged eight-inch blade, made it disappear below the slot, so that the flat of the table was waist-high between him and Charlie. He leaned over and placed the point of his right elbow on the table next to the blade slot, his hand open and grasping at air.

“Come on, let’s go,” the man said, grinning. “Keep your elbow the other side of the blade slot, though. You cross it, you lose. And keep your other hand behind your back, like I am,” he said, and he grandly swung his left hand behind him and smacked it against the small of his back. “You’re not allowed to hold on to anything for leverage.”

“You worried, Pop?” Charlie looked over at Wade and smiled and rolled his eyes. Both boys knew that the man was going to beat him easily, which made Pop’s obsession with the rules of the game amusing: it was one of the few aspects of his character that they liked, this occasional pointless fastidiousness, which may have been all he had for a moral code. Whenever the family saw him subject himself to it, we were comforted.

“Shit no. No, I’m not worried. I just don’t want you claiming later that I didn’t beat you fair and square. Right’s right, boy. For both of us. So come on, let’s get to it,” Pop said, and he smiled warmly into his son’s round face.

Charlie rolled up his sleeve and placed his right elbow on the steel table. “Cold,” he observed, and he grabbed Pop’s hand. They were the same height, Charlie maybe an inch or two taller, but the boy was skinnier than the man, and his arm and hand were still a boy’s.

“Wade, you give the signal,” Pop said, and Wade came around to stand at the end of the table, like an umpire. “You ready to get whipped, Charlie?” the man asked.

“Yep.”

Wade said, “One. Two. Three. Go.”

The man’s arm stiffened, and the muscles and ligaments swelled, as the boy pulled on it with his own. Our father smiled and said, “You know what they call this where I come from?”

Charlie was holding his breath and trying with all his strength to pull our father’s arm off the vertical; he could not speak: he shook his head no.

“Twisting wrists,” the man said, calmly, as if he were talking to his son on the phone. Then he slowly twisted the boy’s hand in his and drew it a few inches toward him and smiled again. He was not only stronger than his son, he was smarter.

But suddenly Charlie twisted back, surprising our father, and he found himself able to draw the man’s bulging arm a few inches toward his own chest, off the vertical, and then he twisted his wrist back the other way and discovered that he had leverage on the man, and instead of pulling on his arm, he was pushing it.

Wade was thrilled, astonished, and then he was frightened, and he imagined the saw blade coming up, whirring between their elbows, rising slowly as they grunted over it, inching closer and closer to where their arms joined at the wrists. He wanted them to let go, to let their clasped hands come unglued, before they were sliced neatly apart by the saw. He took a step back from the table and tried to look away from his father and brother, but he could not move his gaze.

Pop still smiled, but now it seemed forced, pasted onto his face. “You … think … you got … me … eh?” he said, as he fought back against the force of his son’s arm, shoulder, back and legs, for now Charlie believed that he actually might beat our father in this game, and he had thrown his entire body into it. He said nothing, kept pushing down on our father’s declining arm.

The rain fell against the roof of the barn; the swallows chuckled in the rafters. Down below, in the center of the open space between the lofts and stalls, the two bent figures faced each other intently over a small steel table, while Wade stood at the end of the table, bearing witness.

Wade suddenly clapped his hands together and blurted, “Come on, Charlie! Come on!”

Our father looked over at Wade and glared, and he redoubled his effort, twisting Charlie’s wrist and hand back toward him, then quickly away, so that he was able to shift the strain on his own arm and start to pull with the full strength of his bicep and shoulder, drawing the boy’s arm slowly back to a vertical position, where once again their clasped hands were held suspended above the slot that hid the blade of the saw.

They stayed there, each unable to move the other, the veins in their foreheads standing out, faces and arms reddening from the effort. Neither of them smiled or said a word. They grunted now and again, and their breath came in hard gasps.

Then Charlie’s other hand, the left, wandered back toward the table, as if curious and a little stupid, and it lay on the table palm down. And when Pop saw it there, he said, “Hold it! Hold it!” He let go of Charlie’s right hand and lifted his elbow off the table and stood up straight. He brushed his hair back with both hands and said, “You cheated. It’s a default.”

Charlie looked at his left hand in disgust. “Aw, c’mon, Pop, I could’ve just put it back. All you had to do was say. I didn’t get no advantage.”

“Sorry, Charlie. Rules is rules, m’ boy,” Pop said, and he smiled cheerfully, turned and walked out the huge open door and peered up at the sky. “Still raining,” he called back, “and looks like it’s going to keep on. I’m going in, where it’s warm,” he said, and he hitched up his baggy pants and disappeared from view.

The boys were silent for a moment. Charlie said, “I could have beat him, you know. I was beating him.”

“Yeah.”

“He knows it, too. He knows I was beating him.”

“Yeah. He does.”

“The bastard.”

“Yeah. The bastard.”

They stood in the middle of the barn floor a few minutes longer, listening to the rain and the swallows and staring out the rear of the barn, which was wide open to the dark-gray sky and the meadow and pinewoods at the far side of the building, where they had ripped down all the boards. They knew that now the job would never be done, that tomorrow our father would find other things for himself to do and other chores for them, and the barn would stay the way it was, its ribs and spine exposed to the weather, the rest slowly rotting off, as rain blew in and snow fell. It would be like a huge long-dead animal come upon in the woods when the snow melts, half in the ground and half out, half bones and half flesh and fur, and when you walk up on it, you see what it is and remember what it was, and you look away.