this is the story of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and disappearance. we who loved him no longer speak of wade. it's as if he never existed. by telling his story like this, as his brother, i separate myself from his family and those who loved him. everything of importance -- that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story -- occurred during a single deer-hunting season in a small town in upstate new hampshire where wade was raised and so was i. one night something changed and my relation to wade's story was different from what it had been since childhood. i mark this change by wade's tone of voice during a phone call two nights after halloween. something i had not heard before. let us imagine that around eight o'clock on halloween eve, speeding past toby's, route 29, comes a pale green eight-year-old ford fairlane with a police bubble on top. a square-faced man wearing a trooper's cap is driving the vehicle. beside him sits a child, a little girl with a plastic tiger mask covering her face. the man is driving fast --
pop, the kids are waiting for us.
please, pop. let's go back.
we'll work at it everyday, promise.
wade?
there was something. it happened up your way.
wade, it's late. i know you're probably at toby's, but i'm in bed reading. we got different habits.
he was scheduled to testify for a committee investigating organized crime in new england and the construction business.
twombley.
you think jack shot him?
they were out deer hunting, right? jack probably heard the gun go off, then came back and found the body.
huh?
how was she?
who?
what happened?
don't think about it. you're exhausted.
get some sleep.
haven't you already done a bit of that?
wade called me, as usual, late at night. i knew it was wade -- no one else calls me at that hour -- and i was ready to listen to another chapter in one of his ongoing sagas. there was the detective story concerning the shooting of evan twombley and the family melodrama about wade's custody fight with lillian. but not this time.
wade was telling a different story, or so it seemed then, one in which i myself was a character. he had called to tell me that sometime the previous night our mother had died, and he had discovered the body when he'd gone over to visit her and our father with margie fogg. pop was okay, but kind of out of it. worse than usual, maybe, though no drunker than usual.
what about jill? is lillian bringing her?
no thanks. i don't drink.
well.
wade, just leave it.
the day of the funeral was almost springlike. the snowline crossed new hampshire west to east, retreating northward to concord where it melted by midmorning.
what about margie?
well, do you still plan to get married?
anything new about the shooting? twombley?
want to know what i think happened?
i think your first response to the twombley shooting was the correct one.
that it wasn't an accident.
well, your friend, i think. jack hewitt.
money.
they wouldn't deal with a guy like jack. who else benefits if twombley is suddenly dead?
okay. it's likely there are people in the union who don't want twombley to testify. they probably include his son-in-law who's vice-president and will probably be the next president. i read that in the papers. what's his name, mel gordon?
here's my theory. twombley, unaware of illegal union loans or whatever, starts nosing around cause of the investigation and finds out. finds out his son-in-law is involved.
a hunting accident is perfect.
not particularly.
i care about what happened. the truth. i'm a student of history, remember?
i was thinking about that story you told me, about pop and chopping the firewood out of the ice and after.
i hate to disappoint you, but i don't think it happened.
it may have happened, but not the way you said.
it wasn't me. i wasn't there, but i heard about it. when i heard about it, it was about elbourne.
and elbourne and mom took you to the doctor and told him you fell from the hay loft.
i remember clearly cause when i heard i became real careful around pop. i was a careful child and i became a careful adult, but at least i wasn't afflicted by that man's violence.
i gotta head back. it's a long drive.
wade, are you alright?
for what?
take care of the little things first, the things that are distracting you from taking care of the big things. call chub merritt, get your car back, call a dentist, for god's sake, and get your tooth pulled, don't trust the locals, get your facts straight and go straight to the state police. let them work on this.
you will say i should have known terrible things were about to happen, and perhaps i should have. but even so, what could i have done by then? wade never went inside. he lived almost wholly out there on his skin, with no interior space to retreat to, even in a crisis.
the historical facts are known by everyone -- all of lawford, all of new hampshire, some of massachusetts. facts do not make history. our stories, wade's and mine, describe the lives of boys and men for thousands of years, boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth and whose best hope, if any, for connection with other human beings lay in an elegiac detachment, as if life were over.
it's how we keep from destroying in turn our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us; how we absent ourselves from the tradition of male violence; how we decline the seduction of revenge.
jack's truck turned up three days later in a shopping mall in toronto. even without the footprints, the bullet, wade's utter disappearance seemed evidence enough of his guilt.
lariviere and mel gordon were indeed in business. the parker mountain ski resort is now advertised all across the country. jimmy dame tends bar at the lodge. chub merritt opened a snowmobile dealership, nick wickham runs the new burger king. margie fogg moved to littleton, nearer her mother; lillian and jill went with bob horner to a new job in seattle.
we want to believe wade died, died that same november, froze to death on a bench or a sidewalk. you cannot understand how a man, a normal man, a man like you and me, could do such a terrible thing. unless the police happen to arrest a vagrant who turns out to be wade whitehouse -- or maybe he won't be a vagrant; maybe he will have turned himself into one of those faceless fellows working at the video store and lives in a town-house apartment at the edge of town until his mailman recognizes him from the picture at the post office -- unless that happens, there will be no more mention of him and his friend jack hewitt and our father. the story will be over. except that i continue.