Affliction

4

ONE MIGHT LEGITIMATELY ask how, from my considerable distance in place and time from the events I am describing, I can know all that I am claiming to be a part of my brother’s story. How can I know what Wade said to Jill and she to him when they were alone in his office? How can I know what Wade thought about Hettie and Jack out there in the parking lot by the town hall, or who won the costume contest? Who indeed?

And the answer, of course, is that I do not, in the conventional sense, know many of these things. I am not making them up, however. I am imagining them. Memory, intuition, interrogation and reflection have given me a vision, and it is this vision that I am telling here.

I grew up in the same family and town as Wade, side by side with him, practically, until I was eighteen years old, so that when I yanked myself away from both, I took huge chunks of them with me. Over the years, family and town have changed very little, and my memories of them, which are vivid, detailed, obsessive — as befits the mind of one who has extricated himself from his past with the difficulty that I have — are reliable and richly associative, exfoliating, detail upon detail, like a crystal compulsively elaborating its own structure.

And, too, I have been able to listen to my brother Wade during all the years of my adult life that preceded the events set down here and especially during the weeks when they were actually taking place, when I was able to hear Wade’s version of his story as it unfolded. I was able to listen to him, and once I started paying serious attention to him, which, as I said, occurred shortly after Halloween, I asked him questions. Interrogated him. Later, after his disappearance, when I pitched myself wholeheartedly into learning everything I could about the strange complex violent acts that led to his disappearance, I interrogated everyone even slightly involved, all the people mentioned in this account who survived those acts and even a few not mentioned here — police and legal officials, firearms experts, psychiatrists, journalists, teachers. I investigated land records, local histories, family traditions. I accumulated a roomful of documents and tape recordings, upsetting my domestic order, jeopardizing my job, curtailing my social contacts — in short, I allowed myself to become obsessed. Why I did this I cannot say, except to observe that when Wade began in early November to come undone, I understood it too well, too easily, as if I myself were coming undone in exactly the same way. Or, perhaps, as if I myself could have come undone, had I not left home when I did and the way I did, abruptly, utterly, blasting the ground with the force of my departure, with no goodbyes and never again returning — until after Wade, too, had left.

The third factor in the making of my vision — intuition— might be better understood as an uncanny ability to know fully how things must have been, how and what people must have said or felt at a moment when neither I nor Wade, my main witness, was present. There are kinds of information, sometimes bare scraps and bits, that instantly arrange themselves into coherent, easily perceived patterns, and one either acknowledges those patterns, or one does not. For most of my adult life, I chose not to recognize those patterns, although they were the patterns of my own life as much as Wade’s. Once I chose to acknowledge them, however, they came rushing toward me, one after the other, until at last the story I am telling here presented itself to me in its entirety.

For a time, it lived inside me, displacing all other stories, until finally I could stand the displacement no longer and determined to open my mouth and speak, to let the secrets emerge, regardless of the cost to me or anyone else. I have done this for no particular social good but simply to be free. Perhaps then, I thought, my own story and, at last, not Wade’s will start to fill me, and this time it will be different: this time I will truly have left that family and that town. Will I marry then? Will I make a family of my own? Will I become a member of a tribe? Oh, Lord, I pray that I will do those things and that I will be that man.

A half hour before dawn the wind drops, and the temperature rises quickly from fifteen degrees above zero to thirty. It is the first of November; the night is nearly over. Four miles south of Lawford Center, on the eastern shore of a small gravel-and-rock-bottomed lake puddled among a pile of wooded hills, there begins to emerge from the silken darkness the rough cluttered profile of a trailer park — ten or twelve dingy mobile homes set parallel to one another alongside the lake and perpendicular to a paved lane running at a right angle off Route 29.

From a distance, a half mile down the road, the trailer park in the dim new light looks like an abandoned migrant workers’ camp or a deserted military post. At half that distance, the trailers resemble metal coffins awaiting shipment. From the side of the road, where the mailboxes are posted, one distinguishes short driveways and squares of lawn bleached yellow by the autumn cold. And as one passes into the park itself, the trailers — pastel-colored iron boxes held above the hard dirt by stacked cinder blocks — seem to bristle in pale skins of frost. Rubbish, toys and old broken tools crowd the steps and driveways; piles of sand, stacks of bricks and blocks and odd-sized boards are left uncovered in the yards; rusting cars and pickups are parked in the driveways, and parts of cars and trucks lie randomly about. In front of many of the trailers there are spindly frost-burnt bushes, and in back, dead gardens looped by half-collapsed wire fences intended to keep the deer out.

In the history, in the development and even in the geology of the place, there is the appearance of disorder, clutter, abandonment. Despite this and despite the ramshackle neglected look of the trailers, the Mountain View Trailer Park and the entire town of Lawford and the valley as well are held in the grip of deep and necessary symmetries that, like death itself, order the casually disordered world that seems to surround it. In an ultimate sense, the place is enclosed by a fierce geometry of need, placement, materials and cold.

The lots and trailers were owned by Gordon LaRiviere and were laid out on a map three years earlier in a calculated and efficient way on a brush-covered rocky spit of land, an ancient meadow sown with glacial rubble that extended tentatively from the road down to the lake. In the gray half light of dawn one can look from the shore across the pale ice and see a black amoeba-shaped body of open water whose form bears no clear relation to the long narrow teardrop of the lake itself or to the north-south axis of the low hogback hills here on the near side and the higher moraine on the far.

That ridge — in profile, a wide black rip in the western half of the overcast sky — is named for its shape, Saddleback, and it terminates in a tree-covered monadnock called Parker Mountain, named after Major Rubin Parker, the man whose eloquence convinced the Abenakis, and whose shrewd lobbying convinced the New Hampshire provincial legislature, that the Indians, not the British monarch, owned the mountain and thus could sell it and the tall trees on it to him. Which they did — for two chests of hatchets, a dozen hand mirrors, fifty wool blankets, one hundred five-dollar gold pieces and a clock.

Parker Mountain, or seven thousand acres of it, which is essentially all of it, is more hill than mountain. But because it is a monadnock, a single lump of dirt and stone disgorged whole by the retreating glacier, it bears no geological or visual relation to the White Mountains farther north and east or to the Green Mountains west and south, and thus — more or less isolated in a lumpy bed of lesser hills and ridges — it stands out and does indeed resemble a mountain.

Parker Mountain, then, and not Parker Hill, seemed to the white people to be an appropriate name, more so at least than the Abenaki name for it, which early maps translate as Place of the Serpents. The land stayed in the sole possession of Major Parker until his death in bed at age ninety-seven in 1842, when it passed into the shared possession of his seven children, who sold the hill and what little uncut timber remained on it to the Great Northern Wood Products Company of Newburyport, Massachusetts. The Parker heirs promptly moved south to Concord and Manchester, where they disappeared into Victorian bourgeois respectability, setting the precedent for a later pattern of migration.

Ninety years and three generations later, in 1932, after a long decline, Great Northern finally declared bankruptcy, and the Shawmut National Bank and First Boston auctioned off the hill in large slabs for one hundred dollars an acre. These parcels of land were purchased for the most part by local people who owned adjacent farmland. By the Great Depression, family farming in northern New England had diminished almost to a vanishing point, however, and the fields grew quickly back in wild berries and scrub, until crumbling stone walls wandered lost and forgotten in the shade of third-and fourth-growth pine and spruce forests. Widows, children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, first and second cousins, friends and even enemies inherited the land, as one generation passed the physical world on to the next.

By the late 1980s, these seven thousand acres of rocky forested hillside were in the hands of the members of perhaps a hundred different families. Most of the mountain was still owned and sometimes even lived on by local people, but many of the owners now resided elsewhere, often as far away as California and Hawaii, and were barely aware of the existence of their few acres of useless stony northern New Hampshire countryside, except when the tax bill came in. Questioning the wisdom of holding on to the land, they usually made a few halfhearted attempts to find a buyer and, finding none, either paid the modest tax to Alma Pittman or did not, but in any case forgot about the land for another year. By now, deeds, bills of sale, surveyors’ reports, maps and tax assessments were so tangled and in such conflict and disagreement with one another that it was difficult if not impossible to ascertain who owned how much of what. Consequently, people who used the land, either to live on or for hunting and fishing or as woodlots or berry fields, avoided selling the part of it that they used, and they could not imagine buying up anyone else’s — so that, more than two centuries after Major Parker’s purchase of Parker Mountain from the Abenaki Indians, proprietary rights had come full circle. Once again, ownership of the land was determined more by use than by law. With no one complaining, town officials taxed the users accordingly and were grateful for what got collected.

The lights had not yet come on in any of the trailers when snow started to fall, specks of it like luminous bits of ash against the black ridge and mountain on the far side of the lake and against the dark circle of open water out near the center. In minutes the snow was coming down harder, straight down in the windless air as if on threads — the first snow of the year, and early, even for this far north, where from the tops of the hills you could look away and see Canada, frigid and rigid and dour as schist.

Soon the ground surrounding the trailer park was white, and the roofs and hoods of cars and trucks and of outbuildings, shanties, porches and toolsheds were covered as if with crisp new bedsheets. The snow brought daylight faster than did the whitening sky, and what the sky would have exposed, the snow hid. It blotted out the clutter of the yards and scrub beyond, the sad and disordered look of the place, with the swift efficiency of amnesia.

In the trailer nearest the road, then in another farther in, finally in a half dozen, lights went on, casting small patches and strips of yellow light against the snow-covered ground. One could discern shuffling and bumping noises as the inhabitants rose from their sleep and prepared to begin the day. One heard the muffled sounds of a baby’s cry, a radio, the whine of an electric shaver, a woman’s cross shout from the kitchen back down the trailer to a child still huddled in bed, eyes closed and feigning sleep under blankets in darkness and warmth against the light and the cold.

The trailer at the very end, a light-blue two-bedroom unit with rust gathering at the seams, was parked on what might have been promoted in the beginning as the most desirable lot in the park. It was next to a short crescent of beach and, on the other side, a sharply narrowing point of land, so there was no room for adjacent trailers. This was the home and lot that Wade Whitehouse had purchased from his boss, Gordon LaRiviere, two years before, shortly after his final departure from the bungalow in the birch grove on Lebanon Road that he had built himself and shared with his wife, Lillian, and daughter, Jill, for close to eight years.

Wade had run the well-drilling crew that put in the well for the park, a deep-water artesian that cranked out fifty gallons a minute at one hundred thirty feet, and the idea of living by the lake had appealed to him, especially since he hated the alternative idea (the only one he could imagine after the divorce) of staying in one of the apartments over Golden’s store in town. Wade was broke, but LaRiviere offered to hold a twenty-year mortgage with no down payment, and he gave Wade the first choice of all twelve trailers in the park. It was July, and Wade thought he liked to fish; and the little beach next to the light-blue Bide-a-Wile looked like something he would enjoy, especially in the warm summer evenings after work.

As it turned out, however, he never got around to buying a fishing rod. And he had not used the beach once in two years, partly because he was so busy in the summer months, frequently drilling wells for LaRiviere out of town and not getting home till after dark, but also because, except for maybe six short weeks in July and August, the lake was too cold to swim in comfortably. Then came his first winter at the trailer park, and with that it became obvious that the place at the end of the row of trailers out on the point was in fact the worst location in the park. It was the place most exposed to the cold winds that swept off Parker Mountain and, picking up speed as they crossed the lake, banged like hammers against the tin sides of the unprotected trailer before swooping on toward the White Mountains beyond. It took two winters before Wade decided that LaRiviere probably had known when he sold him the trailer that it was the least desirable of the fourteen trailers in the park and that if Wade had not eagerly, even gratefully, bought it for $22,000, LaRiviere would have been forced to sell it for much less.

Ah, what a terrible year that was — the year of the second divorce, the year of losing the house to Lillian, the months of living in the dingy apartment over Golden’s and the day he bought the damned trailer from LaRiviere. Then, six months later, came Lillian’s decision to move down to Concord with Jill in tow, and her marriage to Horner. It is a wonder he survived at all.

He rose from his tangled sheets and blankets like a porpoise surfacing, shocked by the fact of wakefulness itself, and then by cold air, by the sight of his cluttered room, by the smell of stale beer and cigarette butts and his own night breath, by the sound of Kenny Rogers croaking from the clock radio on the blue plastic milk carrier next to the bed — so that the dream he had been dreaming disappeared almost instantly, like the memory of an earlier, less evolved and less vivid life spent drifting between wedges of shadow and beams of pale-green light.

He checked the time, ran his tongue across mossy teeth, reached for a cigarette and lit it and lay in bed for a few moments, hands under his head, smoking and running a fragmentary narrative of the end of last night in front of his eyes. Sitting in the dark by the window in his office at the town hall. Driving out to Toby’s Inn in his car. Slumping silently in a booth with Jack Hewitt and his girlfriend, Hettie Rodgers, and three or four other men and women, and later, his toothache anesthetized by alcohol, yakking and laughing in a loud hearty voice with one or two kids he knew only vaguely. Then drinking at the bar alone, and at last, just before the sudden blackness at the end of the loop, standing in the parking lot, examining his pale-green car as if it were a stranger’s, finding it unaccountably ugly. Then nothing.

But no memories — and no visible signs — of argument, he thought with relief. An advertisement for a Chevrolet dealer in Concord came on, and he snapped off the radio. He touched his face with the fingertips of his right hand, felt no pain and no swelling in his hands or above the eyes or around the mouth, and plucked his cigarette from his lips and tapped the ash into an empty Budweiser bottle next to the radio. Across from the bed was a plastic-and-aluminum picnic chair — with his clothes laid neatly over the back and arms, he noted. No torn or bloody shirt — he could tell that much from bed. He refolded his arms and slid his hands under his head and spread out his legs, and for a moment Wade thoroughly enjoyed his nakedness under the rumpled sheet and blanket. His tooth ached only a little, a hum, and he did not once think of his daughter or of his ex-wife.

It was not until after he had showered and shaved and was standing in his faded blue terry-cloth robe at the kitchen counter, stirring a cup of instant coffee, that the unique and vaguely familiar quality of the silence that surrounded the clink of his spoon against the coffee cup made him realize that it was snowing outside. He glanced at the window behind the sink, where a week’s dirty dishes and pans were stacked, and saw the haze of snow, for it was falling heavily now, like a gauze curtain, and he could make out no more than the rough outline of Saddleback Ridge and Parker Mountain.

He looked at his watch — six-forty. “Shit,” he said aloud, and he walked quickly to the frayed plaid couch, where he sighed, sat down and picked the telephone off a tipped pile of newspapers on the end table and dialed a number.

After a few seconds, he began to speak into the receiver. “Lugene? This’s Wade. How you doing?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, said, “Hey, Lugene, look, I was wondering, with the snow and all, you got school today?”

He listened, lit a cigarette from a pack on the crowded coffee table and said, “How the hell do I know? You’re the principal, damn it. You’re the one who’s supposed to know how much it’s going to snow, not me. All I’m supposed to do is direct traffic from seven-thirty to eight-thirty, for Christ’s sake.”

He listened again. “Yeah, okay, I’m sorry, Lugene. I’m running late,” he said, “and I only just now saw it was snowing, that’s all. My whole day is fucked. I was just hoping you’d have called school off. You know? Because I got to plow all day, and if I don’t get over to LaRiviere’s early enough, I get stuck with the grader. Whyn’t you check the weather bureau? Maybe you should cancel school.”

Wade paused a second. “Fuck. You check the weather bureau?”

Lugene agreed to call the weather bureau, but no matter what the prediction, he said, there would certainly be school today. He might decide to send the children home at noon, but clearly not enough snow had fallen or would fall in the next hour to keep the buses from getting safely into town. Then he asked Wade if he talked to everyone that way.

“Okay,” Wade said, ignoring the question. “I’ll be over in a bit.”

He hung up the phone and barreled down the narrow hallway to his bedroom. He would not be drilling wells for LaRiviere today; he would be plowing snow for him. He dressed hurriedly in work clothes — long underwear, blue-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, green twill pants, heavy wool socks and insulated rubber boots with tan leather tops.

At the door, Wade grabbed his dark-blue trooper’s coat and cap off the hook, pulled the cap halfway over his ears and shrugged his way into the coat. He glanced at the thermostat on the wall and set it back ten degrees, to fifty-five, then stood briefly at the door and looked across the room with an empty expression on his face, as if running down a daily checklist.

Let us stop for a moment, while he stands by the door, and look at Wade up close. It is time for that. Examined from a certain angle, Wade’s face is a classic example of an ancient type of Northern European face. It is the broad high-cheekboned heavy-browed durable face that first appeared in this form twenty to thirty thousand years ago between ice ages in the marshes along the southern shores of the Baltic, among tribes of hunters and gatherers moving toward the western sea, driven from fertile estuarial homelands by a taller fairer fiercer people who possessed agrarian skills and tools, clever weapons and principles of social organization that allowed them to conquer and enslave others.

He would hate to hear me say this, but I am describing my own face as much as his. This is what we Whitehouse men and women (most of us, anyhow) look like. We wear a face shaped by thousands of years of peering into firelight, into cold mists rising off salt marshes, into deep waters where huge sturgeon cruise slowly past; a face tightened, crinkled and lined from having pursed thin lips thoughtfully for millennia over animal tracks and droppings, over individual wild grains counted into a wicker basket one by one, over small stone figures of women with large breasts and wide hips and bellies. And beyond these ancient habits of expression, there is something deeper and more ancient still, at least in Wade’s face. There is an intimacy and a tenderness, a melancholic vulnerability about his dark-brown eyes, especially in the way the heavy slightly protruding brow protects the delicacy of the eyes and allows them to stay wide open, alert to danger even in bright sunlight. The narrow mouth, tightened over large yellowed teeth, gives the impression of intelligence and sensitivity. It is not a noble face, not especially refined, either, but a passionate face, and thoughtful.

Wade’s body, like my own, is of a similarly ancient type, evolved over tens of thousands of years of holding the reins of another man’s horse in the cold rain while the horseman does business inside by the fire, of climbing rickety ladders with a load of bricks in a hod, of yanking back the head of a boar with one stout arm and reaching around with the other and slashing its throat with a single stroke, of drawing sticks on a cart from someone else’s woods to someone else’s fire. It is a compact hardy body, flat-muscled and round-shouldered, with a long wide back and short limbs, a body not so tall as to draw undue attention to itself, not so short as to be unfit for heavy lifting or long grueling marches carrying weapons and tents. It is, I suppose, the kind of body that made it possible for European princes and popes to wage war against one another for a millennium.

That is the face and body I see when I see Wade flick the switch by the door and turn off the overhead light in the living room and stand for a second more in the gloomy gray light of the trailer and study the room before him, a sad dirty cluttered room filled with the evidence of a sloppy man nearing middle age and living alone — empty beer bottles on the floor and coffee table, work clothes strewn around the room, ashtrays overflowing, newspapers tossed aimlessly about, empty food cartons and dirty dishes and coffee cups abandoned on the end tables and the TV in the corner.

For the first time in what even he knew must have been months, he looked at the room as if there were a stranger living here, a man he had never met, and he felt his stomach tighten with aversion. He would not want to meet such a man. No, sir. And then, suddenly, he saw how the room would have looked to Jill as she came through the door, tired and sleepy but very happy from all the fun trick-or-treating and afterwards going to the Halloween party with her dad. He would have carried her in from the car, worked the door open with his free hand and switched on the overhead light, and Jill would have turned on his shoulder and looked around, and this awful room, this stranger’s room, is what she would have seen.

He looked down and off to his right, a boxer dodging a blow, wrenched open the door and stepped quickly outside. There was about an inch of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down in a light dry powder but falling more heavily now than before, accumulating rapidly. Like a man trying to spot a particular friend in a crowd of strangers, he squinted across the lake at Saddleback and Parker Mountain, hazy dark lumps profiled indistinctly against the white sky, more like zones than solid objects, and he heard it, suddenly but without surprise, as if he had been listening for it, the first gunfire of the hunting season — a rapid series of four distinct shots crackling across the lake and echoing back again.

With his gloved hands, he brushed the snow off the wind-shield and exposed a rough skin of silvery ice underneath, got inside and inserted the key into the ignition, pumped the gas pedal hard twice and turned the key. The starter moaned but did not catch. He tried again, exactly as before, and still got nothing. This was part of the drill. The third time would do it, and indeed it did, turning the cold engine over once, several times slowly, then rapidly, until at last it caught and came coughing to life.

Sitting inside the car was like hunkering down inside a tent in the Arctic or an igloo — that is how Wade imagined it. Light managed to penetrate the ice on the windshield and windows, but it was an eerie white metallic light that did not so much illuminate the interior of the car as fill it with itself, like Wade’s breath, which drifted from his mouth and nostrils in wispy clouds. When the engine was running smoothly and would not stall, he reached forward and switched on the defroster fan. At first it chattered and whined, but in a few seconds it was humming from somewhere behind the dash, shoving air up against the windshield glass.

Wade waited, and before long the air coming from the defroster had melted a dime-sized circle on each side. Slowly the circles expanded, becoming quarters, then saucers, until Wade could look through the glass and see the snow coming down, could see the trailer, could even see the lake beyond.

The melting of his icy sanctuary made him feel oddly disappointed, a little saddened and, for a few seconds, apprehensive. Out in the middle of the lake, which was now a flattened white teardrop, he could see the black circle of open water. It would probably freeze solid and disappear into whiteness by tonight, even there, where the water was over fifty feet deep. Then there would be two utterly distinct worlds, the world above and the world below, with the ice in between like an impenetrable barrier protecting one from the other. He felt that split, that barrier between two worlds, abandon him now, as the ice on his windshield melted into a pair of rapidly enlarging circles, like eyes that could look out but also — as if that were the price he had paid for the privilege of looking out — eyes that allowed him to be seen.

Automatically, Wade flicked on the CB, and with the red dot of light dancing along the scanner, he backed the car down the driveway, spun the wheel and eased out of the trailer park, laying down the winter’s first set of tire tracks in the fresh snow. Turning left at Route 29, he passed the row of snow-crowned mailboxes lined up side by side on a two-by-four like miniature prairie schooners and headed toward town.

A quarter of a mile north of the trailer park, the Minuit River suddenly veers in close to the left side of the road, and from here all the way into town the road and the riverbed wind and loop in tandem through the narrow valley. Wade liked the way the river looked in the new snow and milky early morning light. That is a tourist’s idea of New Hampshire, he thought, with pine trees drooping over the water and snarls of icicle-laden birches clumped at the edges of eddies and pools, with large snow-covered boulders in the middle of the stream and dark-green water churning, swirling and splashing past and over them, raising a thick white crust of ice at the crest marks. At moments like this, Wade felt something like pride of place, a rare and deeply pleasurable feeling that started with delight in the sight of the country, passed through a desire to share that delight with someone else and abruptly ended in a fantasy in which he stands before the scene and spreads his arms wide as if to embrace it whole, then steps aside and reveals it to … to whom?

He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, put it in his mouth and reached to punch in the dashboard lighter, when, startled, he saw on the seat next to him a green Tyrolean hat. It was the hat he had picked off the ground the night before, after the owner of the hat and Lillian and Jill had driven away. Wade looked at the thing with dismay, as if it were a severed body part, a piece of irrefutable evidence linking him to a crime he had no knowledge of.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said aloud, and he cranked down the window next to him. He let the freezing air blow in and grabbed the hat and shoved it out. All the way into town he left the window open, as if pummeling himself with the cold wind to keep himself from falling asleep at the wheel and swerving and skidding off the narrow dangerously curving road into the icy river.