Affliction

16

THE DAY OF THE FUNERAL was almost springlike: one rose in the early morning and crossed to the window, opened it and listened in vain for birdsong and scrutinized the bare trees for buds. The snowline crossed New Hampshire from west to east near Manchester, a third of the way up the state, and as the temperature rose, the line retreated northward to about Concord, where it would finally settle by midmorning over snow too deep to melt quickly.

In the woods and on the fields on both sides of the interstate, the snow thickened, softened and compacted under the weight of its own melt, making it difficult for the deer hunters out there, the latecomers and the persistent ones who had not yet shot their deer. North of Concord and west of the Merrimack Valley, the land lifted gradually into humpbacked hills, and there were few houses and farms visible from the highway, and only occasionally now, from the church spires poking through treetops, could one infer from his car the presence of small towns, like Warner and Andover, with a north-country souvenir shop, motel and filling station huddled together at the infrequent cloverleafs and exits. It is poor and lonely but undeniably lovely country; yet in spite of its loveliness, there is an overabundance of madness and despair in those settlements and towns. So much deprivation and so much natural beauty combine in a life to make it sad and angry beyond belief to an outsider.

As I drove north to Lawford on that unseasonably warm November morning, I reflected not so much on the fact of our mother’s death as on Wade’s having chosen to include in his report of that death the announcement of his forthcoming marriage to Margie Fogg, whom at that time I had not met. When he told me over the telephone that our mother had died and told me how she had died, I felt myself flee, and then I watched myself do it. I fled to a place of safety where I had lived, it sometimes seemed, for most of my childhood and youth and where, it had always been clear to me, Wade never went himself. If I lived for the most part with only a slight and tangential and always tentative connection to my exterior life, Wade lived almost wholly out there on his skin, with no interior space for him to retreat to, even in a crisis or at a time of emotional stress or conflict. Perhaps we were merely mirror images of each other, our apposite modes of life twinned versions of the same radical accommodation to an intolerable reality. It was as if beneath Wade’s skin there were nothing but solid rock, an entire planet solid to the core that could not be penetrated by consciousness; while beneath mine there was only empty space that one could tumble through, rolling over and over in a plummet toward a cold and distant black star. Away, away — and free, free.

Wade called me, as usual, late at night. Even before answering the phone, I knew it was he — no one else calls me at that hour — and I was ready to listen to another chapter in one or both of his ongoing sagas, which by now, as I have said, I was more than casually interested in. There was possibly a third story that connected the first two, but mainly there was the detective story concerning the shooting of Evan Twombley, and there was the family melodrama about Wade’s custody fight with Lillian.

But not this time. Wade was telling a different story tonight, or so it seemed then, one in which I myself was a character, for he had called to tell me that early that morning or sometime during the previous night our mother had died, and he had discovered the body when he had gone over to visit herand our father with Margie Fogg. Pop was okay but kind of out of it, he told me. Worse than usual, maybe, though no drunker than usual.

Naturally, I wanted to know the details, and he provided them, his voice growing thinner and thinner as he talked, as if the connection were fading. He spoke very rapidly, and I could barely make out what he was telling me anyhow, but I was moving away fast, which made it worse. I was in my old free-fall, losing contact, and soon I would be in deep space, unable to hear any human voice or perceive anyone’s emotion, even my own. I heard him say something urgent and slightly, almost inappropriately, gay about his friend Margie Fogg and the old house and Pop, and then he mentioned the funeral. I heard the word, funeral, and a few sentences about our sister Lena, but his words were coming to me from a much greater distance now and rapidly, like electronic signals blipping across a screen, and then there was nothing but static, and finally not even that. Silence, except for the cold wind blowing across millions of miles of empty space.

It was not until later — months later, actually — that I had assembled enough information to let me understand what, in his remarks about Margie and the old house and our father, Wade was trying to describe to me. That Sunday afternoon out at the house, Margie had called the fire department, and the emergency vehicle — a five-year-old rusted Dodge van outfitted with oxygen, splints, bandages and plasma and driven by Jimmy Dame, with Hector Eastman riding shotgun — had raced out from the Lawford fire station. The two told Wade and Margie to stand back and had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation first, as they were trained to do, and then quickly gave up and carried Ma out of the house on a stretcher to the van and drove off to the Littleton Hospital, where she could be legally pronounced dead. Cause of death: hypothermia. Time of death: sometime between 1 and 7 A.M., Sunday, November 2.

After Ma’ body was out of the house, Wade slowly came back to himself. Pop had not once left his chair in the kitchen and throughout had continued to drink whiskey, a half inch at a time, from a water glass. Margie stayed away from the old man and tried to comfort Wade, which, oddly, was not difficult. He said, “I knew the second we pulled up in the car that something was wrong, and the only thing I could think of was that Ma was dead. I don’t know why, but that was the only thing I could think of.” He and Margie were sitting side by side on the sagging green sofa in the living room, the dead eye of the television staring at them. The room was still cold, in spite of the fire in the kitchen stove, and they had their coats on.

“It’s like I almost expected it,” he continued. “So that when I went into the bedroom and found her like that, I wasn’t surprised or shocked or anything. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

She said yes, but sometimes people had premonitions about things like this. So, yes, she said, it was strange, but not unusual. She stroked his back in slow circles across his shoulder blades, as if he were a child, and laid her other hand tenderly on his knee, and wondered what was really going through Wade’s head. His family relations, she believed, were very different from hers. To her, Wade seemed intensely involved with his various family members, even with his father, whereas she was not. She had a younger sister she thought was a lesbian, who was in the navy and stationed in the Philippines, and her older brother managed a video rental outlet in Catamount and had a wife and seven kids who kept him too busy to participate in her life in any regular way. Since both of her parents were still alive up in Littleton, she did not really know what Wade was feeling about his mother’s death, but God, it must be awful. Her mother, whom she never saw anymore (she had Alzheimer’s and had not recognized Margie in years), lived in an old motel converted into a nursing home and financed by the state; her father, whom she dutifully visited once a month, lived alone in a dark small filthy apartment over the Knights of Columbus hall and spent a lot of time in the VA hospital in Manchester. He had been a lifelong cigarette smoker and had lost one lung to cancer and was still smoking and coughing with every third breath. Margie knew that soon one and then both of her parents would die, and she wondered what she would feel then. Abandoned? Relieved? Angry? All three, probably. Maybe that was how Wade felt today, and maybe that was why he seemed to be feeling none of them. You must feel frightened too, she reasoned, terrified — because when your parent dies, you know that, even if you squeeze out a normal three score and ten, you are next. That seemed to be what Wade was feeling most, now that she thought about it— frightened. It must get in the way of grief, that thick mix of abandonment, relief and anger, which no doubt came later, when you got used to the idea of being the next one to die.

“I guess I’m the one who has to take care of things now,” Wade said. “Being the oldest and all.”

“What things?”

“The funeral. Calling folks, Rolfe and Lena and so on. And Pop. I’ve got to do something about Pop,” he said, and he turned in the couch and peered back into the kitchen at the old man, who seemed lost in his thoughts or, without thoughts, was merely counting out the seconds until he felt it was appropriate for him to take another sip of whiskey. Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three …

“After us kids left home and he had to retire — from the drinking, I suppose — after that he was Ma’s problem. Now … well, now I guess he’s mine.”

“He’s a problem, all right,” Margie said.

Wade lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I think,” he said, his brow furrowed, as he stared thoughtfully at the burning cigarette in his hand, “I think maybe I ought to move out here to the house. Put my trailer up for sale. I’m going to need some money I don’t have, for that custody suit business, you know. And there’s no way Pop can live out here alone.”

Margie said, “He’s not easy, Wade. He’s especially never been easy for you.”

“He’s old. And Jesus, look at him, he’s out of it. But give him his bottle, put him by the fire or in front of the television, and he’s okay. I can move in upstairs, fix the place up a little, clean and paint the place, get the furnace working, and so forth. You know. Make it nice.” The picture in his head was filling out quickly with details: he saw the house renovated, almost elegant in its New England farmhouse simplicity, with his father peacefully semiconscious and more or less confined to Uncle Elbourne’s room and the kitchen and living room, and Wade free to do with the rest of the house whatever he pleased, as if it were his own. Rolfe surely would not object, and Lena would be relieved to hear it. One of the upstairs bedrooms could be decorated nicely for Jill, and he could share the other with Margie.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“About what?”

“About living here with me.”

“With you, maybe. With you and your father, though?”

“He’ll be all right,” Wade said firmly. “I promise you. I can control him. He’s like a child now, a kid who’s lost his mother, almost.”

“Are you talking about getting married, Wade? You and me? Like you were last night?”

“Well … yeah. Yes, I guess I am.”

Margie got up from the sofa and crossed the room to the doorway to the kitchen, where she stood looking at the old man. Slowly, he turned his head and looked back at her. He was like an old bony abandoned dog — skinny neck, dark sad eyes, slack mouth and slumped shoulders.

“How are you doing, Mr. Whitehouse?” she said.

His eyes filled with tears, and he opened his mouth to answer but was unable to make words come. He moved his head from side to side, like a gate, and lifted his open hands to the woman as if asking for coins. She walked forward and embraced him and stroked his tousled white hair. “I know, I know, you poor thing,” she said. “It’s hard. It’s very hard.”

Then suddenly Wade was beside her, and he wrapped his large arms around both of them, enclosing his father and the woman he would soon marry. He held the old man he would take care of from now on and the woman who would be his helpmate and partner in life, the woman whose presence in his life, in this old house way out in the woods, would help make Wade’s life a proper father’s life, one he could happily bring his daughter home to at last.

By the time I arrived at the house, three days later, Wade and Margie had already moved in. It was eleven in the morning, and the funeral was scheduled for one in the afternoon — at the First Congregational Church, Reverend Howard Doughty officiating.

Wade had been a busy fellow, I later learned. Sunday night, he had fixed the furnace and stayed over at the house with Pop, sleeping on the couch. Before going to bed, while Pop sat and drank by the fire in the kitchen, Wade went through our parents’ scattered papers and dug up, among other useful things, the documentation that he needed to make the insurance claim and finance the funeral, burial and gravestone. The next morning, he arranged all three. He notified the Littleton Register and the remaining members of the family — Lena and Clyde down in Massachusetts and Lillian and, of course, Jill, although he asked Lillian to “break the news to her,” as he put it, when she got home from school. Then he telephoned the dozen or so people in Lawford whom Ma would have wanted at her funeral, leaving it to them and to the newspaper to pass the word on to the outer circle of friends and acquaintances.

Though Wade managed to direct traffic at the school Monday morning, he did not go in to work — when he called to explain, LaRiviere was surprisingly understanding and sympathetic, Wade thought. By noon, he had put his trailer up for sale, and that afternoon he carted his and Margie’s clothes and personal belongings out to the house and stashed them in the larger of the two upstairs bedrooms. When Margie arrived, after work at Wickham’s, the two of them cleaned the house thoroughly. Ma’s effects — her clothes and personal papers and photographs and her knitting tools and yarns; there was not much else — they boxed and stored in the attic.

Tuesday morning, he directed traffic at the school and then drove to work as usual, and when he walked into the shop, LaRiviere told Wade, in front of Jack Hewitt and Jimmy Dame, that he could forget about well drilling for the rest of the winter, Jack could handle the work they had left till the ground froze, while Wade worked inside. “Learning the business from the business end,” LaRiviere said, with a beefy arm slung over Wade’s shoulder. Wade slipped from under the arm and stepped away, suspicious: this was a very different tone from the one Wade had long ago grown used to.

Jack glowered and lunged into the cold to finish the well they had started the previous week in Catamount, and Wade, as instructed, pulled off his coat and, clipboard in hand, started to make an inventory of all of LaRiviere’s material stock, equipment and tools. “I want to know my assets, Wade,” LaRiviere said in a confiding tone, “and I want you to know them too. I want to know what we need for a year’s work and don’t have on hand, buddy, and then I want you to sit yourself down and order it.” When Wade asked him if he could have Wednesday off, for the funeral, LaRiviere told him not to worry about it, and then added that from now on Wade was going to be paid a salary, instead of by the hour, same as if he were working a forty-hour week, whether he put in forty hours or not. And notto worry, buddy, about being paid for Monday and Wednesday this week: it was done. Wade almost heard him say “partner.”

He wants something from me, Wade thought, and I won’t find out what it is unless I smile and go along with him.

During his lunch break, Wade mailed his divorce decree and a check for five hundred dollars, borrowed the day before from Pop’s modest savings account, to Attorney Hand, and afterwards, by telephone from Wickham’s, he informed Hand that he would soon be getting married and was moving with his fiancée into his father’s “farm.” He also mentioned, as if in passing, his discovery that Lillian was having an extramarital love affair with Hand’s colleague Jackson Cotter, and Attorney Hand said that was a very interesting aspect to the case. “Tantalizing,” he said, and Wade could almost hear him smack his lips, the way he had almost heard LaRiviere say “partner.”

By Wednesday, the day of the funeral, so much had happened in Wade’s life that it seemed Ma had been dead for months.

Out at the house, the freshly plowed driveway and a specially cleared parking area by the side porch were full of cars, as if a celebration were going on. I parked my Volvo behind what I assumed was the minister’s car — a maroon station wagon with REV on the vanity plates — and got out and stretched and smelled the silvery wood smoke drifting from the kitchen chimney. I heard the sounds of distant gunfire crackle erratically against the wind in the pines, and I suddenly remembered that the forests and fields just beyond the house and in the hills and valleys for miles around were still dangerously populated by deer hunters.

There were a few cars and a blue pickup truck, LaRiviere’s, that I did not recognize and several that I knew— Wade’s Ford with the police bubble on top and Pop’s old pickup, still covered with snow and parked in the deep drift at the side of the house, as if stuck there permanently. I spotted the VW microbus that belonged to Lena and her husband, their fifteen-year-old recidivist hippie van plastered with born-again Christian bumper stickers instead of peace signs. The emblem of the Rapture — a black arrow shaped like a fishhook descending in a silver field against a vertical arrow ascending — and the cryptic question “Are You Ready for the Rapture?” and “Warning: Driver of This Vehicle May Disappear at Any Moment!” along with the more usual crosses and fishesin profile and mottoes like “Jesus Saves” and “Christ Died for Our Sins” were stuck all over the sides of the van, as if the vehicle were a huge cerulean cereal box promoting apocalypse and everlasting life and promising redeemable gift certificates inside.

Lena and her husband, Clyde, had made Christ their personal savior, apparently the result of a visit from Him — a type of house call was the way they explained it — one night of despair four or five years earlier, and while the chaos of their life had not changed one iota, it had gained significant meaning, since they and their five children were now devoted to the life of the spirit and the next world instead of to the body and this one. Their disheveled and deprived daily lives were now regarded as evidence not of incompetence, as in the past, but of their new priorities. I did not pretend to understand the nature of the conversion experience, of being “saved,” one way or the other, or the teachings of the Bible Believers’ Evan-gelistical Association, to which they belonged, but it was clear to me that whereas before they had been depressed and frightened, for what seemed very good reasons, such as poverty, ignorance, powerlessness, etc., they were now optimistic and unafraid. Of course, according to the pamphlets Lena mailed to me from time to time, what they were looking forward to was the imminent end of the world, to earthquake and famine, to seas turned to blood, to plagues of sores, to legions of demons and the writhing demise of the antichrist, events that those of us who were not scheduled for rescue by the Rapture might find even more depressing and frightening than poverty, ignorance and powerlessness.

As I moved from my car toward the house, I passed the three younger of Lena’s and Clyde’s children, who were pushing huge snowballs through the soft wet snow of the front yard. Though they wore sneakers and thin jackets and were hatless and without mittens and their clothes were wet and their hands and faces bright red from the cold, they were evidently happy and, in spite of running noses, seemed healthy. They saw me coming along the driveway and waved, and I waved back.

A boy, the largest of the three, six or seven years old, smiled sweetly and said, “Hi. Who’re you?”

“I’m your uncle Rolfe,” I said, and I smiled. “You don’t remember me, eh?” In fact, we had never met, which factembarrassed me slightly. I did not know his name — Stephen or Eben, or maybe Claude — and did not care to ask it.

“Nope, but I heard of you,” he said.

“What are you building there? A snowman?”

All three laughed as if I had said something hilariously funny. “No!” the boy exclaimed. “A citadel!”

“Oh.”

His sister, her puffy cheeks chapped scarlet from the wet snow, said, “Are you here to say goodbye to Grandma?”

“Grandma’s in hell!” the youngest one shouted. He appeared to be a male child but was wearing some kind of kilt made from an adult’s woolen scarf, so one could not be sure.

The other boy somberly said, “That’s why we say goodbye.”

“We’re going to be in heaven with Jesus,” the little girl explained to me, “and Grandma’s in hell with Satan, who is Jesus’ enemy. That’s why we have to say goodbye, Uncle Rolfe.”

“Grandma wasn’t saved,” her brother said, a note of regret touching his voice.

“I see.”

“Are you saved, Uncle Rolfe?” the girl asked.

“No, I‘m not.”

“Then you’ll be cast into hell with Grandma.”

“Yes, I guess I will. Me and Grandma and Uncle Wade and Grandpa. We’ll all be there together,” I said. “And when we die, you’ll have to come and say goodbye to us too, won’t you?”

The older boy nodded his head up and down. This was a drag, families breaking up all the time. He did not understand it and wished that it could be different, but he did not want to spend eternity in hell, no, sir, he did not, no matter who was there.

As if bored by me, the three went back to building their citadel of snow, and I continued on to the house. Before I had a chance to knock, the door was opened by an attractive woman who introduced herself as Margie Fogg and shook my hand warmly. She gazed straight into my face, and I liked her at once.

Wade stood in the center of the crowded kitchen, looking competent and serious, if a little uncomfortable. He was wearing a white shirt and tightly knotted jet-black tie and navy-blue gabardine sport coat, with dark-brown slacks and shoes, andhis face and hands were red and seemed huge and constricted by his mismatched clothing. In one hand he held a can of Schlitz and in the other a cigarette. The room was hot from the wood stove, crowded and close. I saw faces I recognized— Lena and Clyde and their two older children, adolescents whom I had not seen in years, and in the corner by the stove, Pop — and I saw the faces of three strangers, everyone standing, as if waiting to be called to attention and given marching orders.

Wade first, I thought — the easiest. And I reached out with both hands and placed them on his muscular shoulders and drew him to me. We hugged, self-consciously, with our butts sticking out so as to keep light shining between our bodies from shoulders to toes. That is the way we men are, we New England men, we Whitehouse men, Wade and I: we want light between us at all times.

He said my name, and I said his, and we let go of one another and withdrew. Not ready yet to deal with Lena and Clyde and their strange-looking children — both the boy and the girl had modified Mohawk haircuts and resembled barnyard fowl with acne, Rhode Island reds, maybe — and certainly not ready to greet Pop, I first introduced myself to the strangers in the room, who turned out to be the Reverend Doughty, a slender blond man in his thirties wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an avocado-green double-knit suit, and Gordon LaRiviere, appropriately somber, mentioning that he remembered me from my high school days and offering gruff condolences as we shook hands, and a skinny young man in a black suit who was a representative of Morrison’s Funeral Home in Littleton, on hand, I guessed, to escort the rest of us to the church on time.

It was unclear to me why LaRiviere was there or why he was behaving in such a solicitous manner toward Wade: “How you holding up, Wade?” he asked at one point, when Wade, after tossing his empty beer can into the trash, stood for a second with his back to the rest of us and stared after it.

Wade turned quickly and said, “I’m fine, fine.” He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t we get this show on the road, now that Rolfe’s here?” he asked the room.

No one knew. We all looked to him for an answer.

He shrugged. “Pointless to stand around in the church with nothing to do, I guess.”

“What about Jill?” I asked. “Is Lillian bringing her?”

In a low voice, Margie said that they would be at the church.

Wade walked quickly to the refrigerator and pulled out another beer. “Anyone else want one?” he asked. “Rolfe?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t drink.”

“Yeah, right. I guess I forgot.”

Indeed. My question about Lillian and Jill had irritated him. He knew better than anyone else in the family that I had not drunk anything alcoholic since college and in fact had drunk almost not at all even then. We never discussed it, Wade and I, any more than we discussed his drinking, but I think we both knew that they were equal and opposite reactions to the same force.

I nodded to Lena’s and Clyde’s children, both the girl, Sonny, and the boy, Gerald, noted their matching dark-red tufts of hair, gray scalps, crosses dangling from their earlobes and around their scrawny necks, and passed them by swiftly on my way to Lena, huge as a purple tent in her muumuu, with a black scarf covering most of her hair, which, to my surprise, had turned almost completely gray. She looked shockingly older than when I had last seen her: how many years had it been — seven, eight? I could not remember, I suddenly realized, how many years it had been since I last stood in the same room with my father, brother and sister. I knew that I would never again stand in a room with them and my mother, certainly not in heaven and not in hell, either.

Lena wore no makeup or jewelry, and her hair was chopped off bluntly at shoulder length. There was nothing about her person that was designed to disguise, or to distract one from, her girth and plainness, and she showed no signs of being either happy or sad to see me — merely grim acceptance. Embracing her was like hugging a barrel, and I instantly let go and stepped away and almost with relief shook the hand of her husband, Clyde, which felt like a piece of firewood, dry, heavy, dead to the touch.

Clyde is a tall thick-hipped pear-shaped man with a large pointed Adam’s apple and small shoulders and chest, so that his body seems to be constructed of the lower half of a fat man and the upper half of a thin man welded together at the waist. Clyde’ appearance, too, surprised me, for he now looked a full decade older than Wade, whose age he was. His face wasdrawn in and tight, puckered around blue eyes and a flat red-lipped mouth. He said, “Hello, Rolfe. It’s good you came now. We were about to pray. Will you join us in prayer, Rolfe?” His eyes blazed intently into mine, and I looked to Wade, whose expressionless face seemed to be saying, No help here, buddy, you are on your own, and on to Margie, who looked sharply away from me, as if embarrassed.

“Well,” I said, “I just got here. Give me a minute, will you?” I tried to smile graciously, but Clyde did not meet my smile. I stepped to my father then and found myself actually glad to see him there — small, silent, inattentive, like the only child in a room full of angry adults.

“This is nuts,” Wade muttered.

“Wade,” Margie said sharply.

When I hugged my father, the force of my embrace caused his head to bob like a puppet’s, and I drew away from him, afraid. Wade was right — it was nuts.

Clyde was already down on his knees, and his two children had followed with alacrity, like acolytes, earnest assistants at the rite.

“Dear Lord Jesus,” Clyde began, his eyes jammed shut, head tilted toward the ceiling. “O my Lord Jesus in heaven! We come to thee on our knees today begging forgiveness for our sins and thanking thee for the blessing and the undeserved gift of thy salvation. We thank thee, Lord Jesus. For everlasting life by thy side in heaven, we thank thee, O Jesus, Lord of the Heavenly Hosts, whose blood was shed so that we may live!”

The boy, eyes tightly shut, moaned, “Praise the Lord!” and the girl followed, as did Lena, who was still positioning herself on her knees, not an easy job, given her bulk and awkwardness. Behind me, the Reverend Doughty, in a quiet shy voice, added his more restrained Praise the Lord, and I turned and watched him get down on his knees too, somewhat reluctantly, perhaps, but obediently, just in case.

What were the rest of us to do but follow suit? First the young man from the funeral home — more accustomed, perhaps, to scenes like this than we were — got down on his knees, and then Margie and Gordon LaRiviere, and finally Wade got down — all of them watching Clyde warily, as if playing Simon Says and expecting the next command to be a trick. That left only Pop standing, and me.

Pop’s gaze, for the first time since I had entered the house, had taken on a hard focus, and he directed it at everyone in the room, one by one, until it landed on me. I shrugged, as if to say, Why not? and hitched my trousers by the crease and got down on my knees with the others, expecting Pop to do the same.

He shook his head slowly from side to side — in disbelief? disapproval? disgust? I could not tell. Meanwhile, Clyde’s prayer went on, full of praise and gratitude for Jesus’ having interceded in the natural order of things by eliminating death for those sinners willing to turn their lives over to Him. As he prayed, Clyde glared up at the ceiling, as if at an accuser, while Lena and her children held their eyes tightly closed, their lips moving over a tumbling flow of words that were inaudible to the rest of us. Reverend Doughty, his hands clasped before his chest, seemed to be posing for a photograph, and though his eyes were open, he looked at nothing in particular and everything in general. Gordon LaRiviere, head bowed, eyes closed, hands appropriately clasped, had the appearance of a man who hoped he was not being seen by anyone he knew. Margie and Wade, too, were clearly going through the motions, nothing more, with their heads slightly bowed, eyes open, expressions reserved, all-purpose and noncommittal, and I tried to follow their example.

Turning away from us, Pop walked to the sink and took down from the cabinet his bottle of Canadian Club. He carefully poured a substantial drink into a glass, then spun around and took a gulp from the glass and set it down and crossed his arms over his chest and watched us. He said something, but I could not hear him over Clyde’s loud prayer and the numerous Amens and Praise the Lords that punctuated it. No one but me seemed to be observing Pop. He smirked in a way I remembered, and suddenly I felt not embarrassed but wildly ashamed to be seen this way, on my knees, hands pressed together, in the midst of fervent prayer. I saw us — me, Wade and Lena in particular, but the others as well — the way Pop saw us, and I cringed and tried to make myself smaller, hoping for invisibility, the way I had as a child. I could feel his wrath building, could almost smell it, a gray smell, like an electrical fire starting to smolder, when he spoke again, loud enough this time for me to make out his words: “Not worth a hair on her head,” he said.

The prayer went on, however, as if he had merely said “Praise the Lord.” There was a little more volume, perhaps,for Clyde now had tears running down his cheeks, and it looked as if Lena was about to join him. Reverend Doughty seemed to have caught the rhythm of it, his eyes clamped shut, his body swaying back and forth, his hands wringing with the beginnings of fervor, and even LaRiviere and the mortician seemed tied to the form of the prayer. I cut a glance at Margie and Wade, but they were both staring down at the floor in front of them, as if hoping for a trapdoor to open. Again Pop said it, louder still: “Not worth a goddamned hair on her head!”

Wade turned around and looked at him, puzzled. He scowled and shook his head no, as if to a fidgety child, and resumed his prayerful stance. Clyde rolled on. “Jesus, we beseech thee, thy children beseech thee, to please look down on this woman, our mother and friend, O Lord, and make her example known to us. Make her vivid to us, Lord! We know that it is too late for her to be saved, but let her be an example unto those of us who have forsaken thee. Make her vivid to us! Let her sufferings in hell, where she must burn even now, serve as a warning to those of us who still have time, Lord. Make her vivid to us who are dead in spirit only and who still have time to allow thee to enter us, to cleanse us and to lift us up into everlasting life!”

With bottle and glass in hand, Pop stepped elaborately over the legs of the people in his path and made his way to the living room door, where he stopped short and in a voice that was practically a shout announced, “Not a one of you is worth a goddamned hair on that good woman’s head!”

Wade said, “Pop!” and he stood up. His face was white, and in a trembling voice, he said, “Don’t do this now, Pop.”

Clyde stopped praying, but he held his position, eyes shut, tears sliding down his cheeks. Lena and her children froze too, in silence, waiting. Margie dropped her hands to her sides but stayed on her knees, while LaRiviere slowly got up, and the mortician and Reverend Doughty followed.

“Maybe I’ll head on over to the church,” LaRiviere said, and edged toward the door.

“This is a difficult time,” Reverend Doughty said, backing away. “Emotions run high at a time like this.”

The mortician nodded with compassion and followed LaRiviere to the door, where he said, “I’ll wait in the car,” and all three men stepped outside and closed the door behind them.

Those of us left in the room were standing now. Our father’s face had reddened with rage and he began to sputter, a furious small man spattering us with his words, the way he had done it years ago, when we were children and were terrified of him, and now here we were, Wade and I and Lena, terrified again, as if we were still children, even including Margie, I realized, when I looked at her drawn white face, and Clyde too, whose eyes were opened at last, and the boy and the girl, who had moved around behind their parents and peered over their shoulders, wide-eyed, mouths slack.

Wade took a step toward our father and said, “Listen, it’s no big deal, Pop,” and our father swiftly put his bottle and glass on the floor and clenched his fists and came forward a few feet, his bony face shoved out in front of him like a battering ram.

“Come on, smart guy. Tell me how it’s no big deal,” he growled. “Tell me how a single one of you is worth a single hair on that woman’s gray head.”

He was right, and I knew it. And I was sure that Wade and Margie knew it, and that probably even Lena and Clyde and their children knew it too. Our mother was worth more than we. For she had suffered our father more than we. He was telling this to us, and he was proving it too. Our mother had endured our father’s wrath long after we had fled from it, endured it all the way to her death, and now here he was demonstrating it before us, his wrath, with his claim that we were morally inferior to her. The form of his claim, in that it was a form of wrath, was the proof of his claim.

I hung my head in shame and backed away, hoping that my example would influence the others — as I had done when we were children at times like this. It was something I had learned from my mother, this silent coercion. I had not used it for years.

In a shaky thin voice, Lena said, “Pop, Jesus is more powerful than any demon, and there is a demon in you, Pop. Give yourself to Jesus, and rid yourself of this demon.”

“Praise the Lord,” Clyde whispered.

“Go fuck yourself!” Pop snarled, and Lena stumbled backward, as if blown by the force of his words. She began to whimper, then to blubber, and her husband put his arms around her and moved her toward the door, with the boy and the girl close behind. As they passed through the door to the porch, all four looked fearfully back at our father — a brick-redtaut little man standing in the middle of the room with his fists clenched — as if they feared he would come charging after them or were about to hurl one of his raging demons into them.

But he had not once taken his eyes off Wade. That was who he wanted. The rest of us did not matter to him. Margie placed both hands on Wade’s shoulders and tried to draw him to her, but he wrenched himself loose and took another step toward our father. I moved in the opposite direction and in a low voice said, “Wade, just leave it.”

Pop, in that awful mocking tone of his, said, “Listen to your little brother. ‘Wade, just leave it.’ Candy-asses. All of you. That’s what I’ve got for children, Jesus freaks and candy-asses. ‘Wade, just leave it.’ ‘Praise the Lord’ ‘Just leave it.’ ‘Praise the Lord.’ “

Wade stepped forward, fists clenched, and suddenly Margie moved around and got in front of him, where she tried to push him back with one hand and reach out toward Pop with the other. Pop struck her hand away with his fist, and her face went gray, her mouth opened in amazement. Wade reached over her and grabbed one of Pop’s wrists and yanked him once toward him. Margie screamed, she actually screamed, and Wade let go of our father, but it was too late. The old man was flailing away at his son with his fists, his blows bouncing off Margie’s shoulders and neck, hitting Wade on the arms. I reached in and tried to grab Wade by the shoulders and pull him away, but he was too powerful for me and merely shrugged me off. He shoved Margie out of his way and locked our father into his arms. They panted furiously into each other’ face, glaring. Wade walked our father in a bear hug backward to the wall, where he pushed him with his chest and bounced the old man’s frail and suddenly flaccid body against the wall. He released him, and our father collapsed onto the floor.

Breathing heavily, Wade got down on his knees, as if to pray again. He looked into the old man’s face, which glowered back, as if out of a cave. “If you ever touch her again,” Wade said, “I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

The old man stared coldly at his son and said nothing.

Margie said, “Wade, it doesn’t matter now. None of it matters.”

From across the room, I watched them, the woman and the two men, as if they were characters in a play, and the play were half over and I had just entered the theater. Slowly, the old man got to his feet, and the younger man stood up, and the woman turned around, and all three faced me. The old man moved into line next to the woman, who now stood in the middle. They were breathing heavily and sweating. They looked from one to the other, shedding their roles and regaining themselves and in the process recognizing each other’s self. It was as if they had been possessed. They smiled at each other, shyly and almost with relief. Then the three of them looked out toward me and linked hands, and, I swear it, they bowed low. That is how I saw it. What else could I do? I applauded.

The mortician opened the door from the porch and announced that it was time to leave for the church.

“Okay,” Wade said. “We’ll be right there.”

Pop looked around him as if searching for something. Putting an arm over his shoulder, Margie said, “You want your coat? It’s not very cold today.”

“No, no,” he said. He seemed confused. “I thought … I was looking for Sally,” he blurted, and his eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, Glenn,” Margie said, and she hugged the old man.

Wade clapped him affectionately on the shoulder, then looked over at me, as if thinking, The poor sonofabitch. We keep forgetting that no matter what their life was like together, no matter how bad it was for Ma, it was the only life he had. The poor old sonofabitch probably loved her. There was no reason for Rolfe to make fun of him by clapping like that.

Wade’s hand moved to his jaw and touched it tenderly: his tooth had quieted down a bit for days, and now here it was again, buzzing like a stirred-up hornet’s nest. “You got any aspirin?” he asked Margie.

She shook her head no, and Wade reached down to the floor and retrieved Pop’s whiskey bottle and glass. There was a half inch of whiskey still in the glass, and he drank it off himself.

“Toothache,” he said, and put the bottle and glass down on the counter next to the sink.

“When are you going to get that thing fixed?” Margie asked.

“Soon. Soon. Soon as I’ve got half a day to kill,” he said, and he went to the door and held it open.

Margie walked Pop to the door slowly, carefully, as if he were breakable. He took tiny steps and seemed afraid of falling. How could this pathetic man cause such trouble in a family? Margie wondered, as she moved him across the room toward Wade. He was as weak as a child and as easily controlled. He had thrown a tantrum, that was all, which was perfectly understandable, under the circumstances. There was no need to get physical with him, to manhandle him the way Wade had, or run away from him as Lena had done, or just go limp, like Rolfe. It amazed her that they seemed so frightened of him. It was as if they still thought of themselves as small children and for that reason still saw him as a powerful and violent man, when of course, as anyone could see, it was he who was the child and they, Rolfe and Lena and Wade, who were the adults. Strange. And that business of Rolfe’s, the clapping, it was strange too. He was weird, even weirder in his own tight-assed way than Lena. Margie was starting to like the old man, even to feel protective toward him, though she could not imagine why that should be so.

Glenn Whitehouse passed through the door to the porch and stood there for a second, gazing out over the snow-covered yard. He saw the citadel the children had built, a biblical ruin in the snow. Lena’s and Clyde’s van was gone, as were the vehicles belonging to LaRiviere and the minister. The mortician stood by the open rear door of a black Buick sedan.

Pop turned to Wade and said, “Who’s going in the funeral car?” He did not want to ride in that car, but he knew that he had to. It looked like a death car, and he was afraid that if he rode in that car alone, with only the dummy from the funeral home up front driving, he might not arrive at his destination. He did not know where he would end up, but it would not be at the church with the other people. Maybe Wade or Margie would ride with him, or maybe even Rolfe, though Rolfe made him feel self-conscious when he was with him alone. Something about that boy set Pop off. He made him feel he was supposed to say something, as if there was a question the boy wanted answered and the first test was for him to figure out what the damned question was. He was cold, that boy, not like

Wade, who was pissed off all the time, but you always knew where you stood with him, or even Lena, who might be a Jesus freak married to a Jesus freak, but she was not cold, that was for sure. The woman had feelings. But Rolfe did not. Or at least he did not seem to have any feelings. He was the strange one, not Wade or Lena.

“I’ll ride with you, Pop,” I said. Wade agreed and said that he and Margie would follow along in his car. Pop and I got into the back seat of the Buick, and the driver closed the door and got into the front. Pop sat silent and still, looking straight ahead. I wanted to ask him a question, it burned in my chest, but I could not for the life of me name it. I looked at him while we rode, hoping somehow that the sight of his face in profile would bring the question to me, but it did not.