Affliction Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2

  LET US IMAGINE that around eight o’clock on this Halloween Eve, speeding west past Toby’s and headed toward town on Route 29 from the interstate turnoff, there comes a pale-green eight-year-old Ford Fairlane with a blue police bubble on top. Let us imagine a dark square-faced man wearing a trooper’s cap driving the vehicle. He is a conventionally handsome man, but nothing spectacular: if he were an actor, he would be cast as the decent but headstrong leader of the sheepherders in range-war westerns of the ‘50s. He has deep-set brown eyes with crinkled corners, the eyes of a man who works outdoors; his nose is short and hooked, narrow at the bridge, with large flared nostrils. He looks his age, forty-one, and though his mouth is small, his lips thin and tight and his chin boyishly delicate, his lower face, tinged gray by a five o’clock shadow, has the slight fleshiness of a healthy hardworking athletic man who drinks too much beer.

  Seated next to him is a child, a little girl with hair like flax and a plastic tiger mask covering her face. The man is driving fast, clearly in a hurry, talking and gesturing intently to the child as he drives. The child appears to be about ten years old.

  For anyone who lived in Lawford, the car would be instantly recognizable—it belonged to the town police officer, my brother, Wade Whitehouse. The child beside him was his daughter, Jill, and anyone would know that he was bringing her up from Concord, where she lived with her mother and stepfather, for the three-day weekend and the Halloween party.

  And Wade was running late, as usual. He had not been able to start the hour-long drive south on the interstate to Concord until finishing work for LaRiviere (besides being Lawford’s entire police force, Wade was also a well driller, Gordon LaRiviere’s foreman). Then down in Concord, after stopping at the shopping mall north of the city for a Halloween costume that he had promised but forgotten to purchase and bring with him, he had been compelled—again, as usual—to negotiate certain complex custodial arrangements with his ex-wife, Lillian, after which he had to pick up a Big Mac, strawberry shake, fries and cherry pie to go for Jill’s supper, all before even starting the drive back to Lawford.

  Now he was late, late for everything he had planned and fantasized about for a month: late for trick-or-treating with his daughter at the homes of everyone in town he liked or wanted to impress with his fatherhood; late for showing up at the party at the town hall, where, like all the other parents for a change, he could see his kid win a prize in the costume contest, best this or that, scariest or funniest or some damned thing; late for the sleepy drive back to the trailer afterwards, Jill laying her head on his shoulder and falling peacefully asleep while he drove slowly, carefully home.

  He tried to explain their lateness to her without blaming himself for it. “I’m sorry for the screw-up,” Wade said. “But I couldn’t help it that it’s too late to go trick-or-treating now. I couldn’t help it I had to stop at Penney’s for the costume,” he said, stirring the air with his right hand as he talked. “And you were hungry, remember.”

  Jill spoke through her tiger’s mask. “Whose fault is it, then, if it’s not yours? You’re the one in charge, Daddy.” She wore a flimsy-looking black-and-yellow tiger suit that W
ade thought looked less like a costume than a pair of striped pajamas with paws and a scrawny black-tipped tail, which she held with one paw and slapped idly into the palm of the other. The bulbous grinning mask looked more hysterical than fierce but was perhaps all the more frightening for it.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but not really. I’m not really in charge.” Wade worked a cigarette free of his pack with one hand, stuck it between his lips and punched in the dashboard lighter. They were coming into town now, and he slowed down slightly as they began to pass darkened houses. “There’s damned little I’m in charge of, believe it or not. It is my fault I had to stop for the costume, though, and we got slowed up some there.” He reached for the lighter and got his cigarette going. With the lighted cigarette bobbing up and down, he said, “I did screw that up, I admit it. Stopping for the costume. Forgetting it, I mean. I’m sorry for that, honey.”

  She said nothing, turned and looked out the window and saw the Hoyt kids in a loose group on the shoulder of the road, making their disorganized way toward the center of town. “Look,” Jill said. “Those kids are still trick-or-treating. They’re still out.”

  “Those’re the Hoyts,” he said.

  “I don’t care; they’re out.”

  “I care,” Wade said. “Those’re the Hoyts.” What he wanted to say was Shut up. He wanted credit, for God’s sake, not criticism. He wanted her cheerful, not whining. “Can’t you see … look out there,” he said. “Can’t you see that nobody’s got their porch lights on anymore? It’s late; it’s too late now. Those Hoyt kids, they’re just out to get in trouble. See,” he said, pointing past her mask to the right. “They put shaving cream all over that mailbox there. And they chopped down all of Herb Crane’s new bushes. Damn.” He slowed the car almost to a stop, and behind him the Hoyt kids scattered into the darkness. “Those damned kids tipped over Harrison’s toolshed. Jesus Christ.”