Affliction Read Free Page A

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 smarterlife 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, whoevery 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.
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    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