Affliction Read Free

incisors—exit from the car. Lugging shopping bags, the children followed the mother to the front door of the house, where they climbed the steps and the mother rang the bell.
    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.
    â€œYou, 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 herkitchen 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.
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    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