Affliction Page 6

  People leaving the town hall for the parking lot were now cutting a wide circle around the Audi and Jack’s truck, many of them staring as they passed, for this was another public and potentially exciting chapter in the ongoing twenty-year saga of Wade and Lillian Whitehouse.

  Horner had walked back around the front of the car to the driver’s side and opened the door. With his back to Wade, he said quietly, “Get in, Lillian.”

  “You motherfucker!” Wade said, and he grabbed Horner’s shoulder hard with his left hand and shoved him down into his seat, knocking his hat to the ground. “Jesus, Horner, you just fucking wait until we’re through, goddammit!”

  To Lillian, standing at the door on the other side, Wade said, “Don’t you say a fucking word. I didn’t hit him. I’m not going to hit anybody.”

  Her face had gone white and rigid. Slowly, she tightened her lips and shook her head from side to side, as if to deny having done anything that might have offended him, and in silence, she drew the car door carefully open and let herself in, then closed it and instantly leaned around and locked both rear doors and her own. Horner swiftly closed his door, and Lillian reached over his shoulder and locked it, then stared straight out the windshield, as Horner started the car and edged it through the crowd of people crossing the lane in front of them. The crowd parted for the silver Audi, and in a second the car was at the end of the dirt lane, turning right onto Route 29, and gone.

  Wade looked at the ground and saw Horner’s dark-green Tyrolean hat. Leaning down, he picked it up and examined it with care, as if unsure of its function.

  Hettie had rolled down the window next to her, and now Jack leaned across the girl’s lap and said to him, “Wade? Hey, you okay, man?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Sonofabitch lost his hat,” he said, and he started walking toward the town hall.

  “You want to get a beer, man? We’re going to Toby’s— you want to meet us there?”

  Wade didn’t answer. He heard Jack’s truck start up and lumber off. Then, in front of him, leaving the town hall, came Nick Wickham and, a few steps behind, Margie. Nick nodded agreeably as he passed, but Margie stopped and smiled.

  “Hi. Party’s over,” she said.

  “Yeah. I got to do some stuff in my office.”

  “New hat?” She pointed at the crumpled hat in his hand.

  He shook his head no.

  “Jill’s up, I see.”

  He said, “Yeah, for a while.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Okay,” he said. “She’s fine.”

  “Nice. Well, listen, give her my love, will you?” She took a step away from him.

  “Will do.”

  “You two want to do anything tomorrow you need a third party for, give me a call, okay? I got no plans, and I’m off tomorrow.”

  “Like hell you are,” Wickham interrupted from behind her. “It’s the first day of hunting season, and I’ll need you at least in the morning,” he said. “I thought I told you this morning already.”

  Margie slowly turned and faced him. “No, Nick, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, so long as you ain’t got any plans, whyn’t you come in at six and work through lunch. Take Saturday off instead.” He started walking away. “See you later, Wade,” he called back.

  “Yeah.”

  Margie shrugged helplessly and smiled. “Well, that’s that.”

  “Yeah. You be careful of that little bastard,” Wade said in a weary voice. “He’s dying to get into your pants, you know.”

  “No kidding. But don’t worry, I can protect my virtue okay. I mean, c’mon, Wade, give me a break.” She laughed and showed him her large good-humored face.

  He turned away and said, “Listen, I gotta go. See you tomorrow, maybe.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” He grabbed the door and pulled it open.

  “Well, give my love to Jill!”

  Wade nodded without turning around and went in. There were still a half-dozen people inside the hall, chatting and cleaning up—LaRiviere, Chub Merritt and his round little wife, Lorraine, and the Congregational minister and the priest from Littleton who served the Lawford parish part time and one or two others. Wade slipped by them and got up the stairs without anyone’s seeming to notice him and walked slowly down the long hallway to his office and let himself into the darkened room.

  Crossing to the window, he sat down in the chair Jill had dragged over from the desk, and he looked out the window at the parking lot below, the few remaining cars there, the one or two stragglers walking down the lane toward the road. He saw a Chevy sedan with raucous exhausts and a load of kids careen past, and he thought about all the damage the kids in town had done in the last few hours—minor damage, most of it, easily repaired, easily forgotten, but more than irritating. Even though they had done nothing to him, had destroyed or vandalized nothing of his, he could not keep himself from taking their acts personally, somehow, and he felt his stomach tighten with resentment. He tried to remember how he had felt when he was a kid doing that kind of damage on Halloween Eve, but he could not remember any of it, at least no more than the fact of it—that he and his friends and his older brothers and later his younger brother, Rolfe, had indeed in an organized way caused a considerable amount of damage around town. Why? he wondered. What were we so pissed at? Why are all these kids so damned mad? It is like the kids want to attack us adults for something that they think we did to them way back or something that we are going to do to them now first chance we get, but they are scared of us, so they wait until Halloween and they do it this way, making it look legitimate and almost legal.

  Below him, LaRiviere’s silver head exited from the door, with his large body following, and behind him came the Merritts and the others. LaRiviere waited until they had passed and then he locked the door, and together the group strolled down the path, their breath coming from their mouths in small white clouds as they walked. Wade heard the car doors open and thunk shut, saw the headlights come on, watched the cold cars one by one leave the lot and drive away.

  Then he was alone in the town hall, sitting in darkness upstairs by his office window. For the first time that day, he felt good, he told himself. All those plans; then the fears and worries and arguments and explanations that follow: it never seemed to change for him. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down and told himself again that he felt good. A few seconds passed, and the back of his bottom jaw began to throb with low-level pain; it was palpable but with very little heat, and it did not bother him much. He knew, though, that as the night wore on, it would get worse and then worse until the toothache would be the only thing he could think of, the only thing that could abide in his mind.

  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 th
e 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 fo
rgot 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.