The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks Read Free Book Online

surprised by how easily he can injure a woman with his hands. Although I myself have never hurt a woman with my hands.
    But you know how men talk to one another. Surprise is one of our main motifs. We like to pretend we’re surprised by common knowledge.
    I remember one night shortly after my wife, Lydia, went into the hospital to stay, I gathered up all her clothing and spread it across our bed dresses, blouses and skirts, jeans and shirts, nightgowns, her underwear, even and folded everything neatly and boxed it and carried the boxes out to the garage, where we have a storage room in back.
    I don’t know why I did that; she hadn’t died yet, although I knew of course that in a few weeks at most she would be dead from the cancer.
    But I could not bear to look at her clothes hanging in our closet or see them whenever I opened a dresser drawer; I could not bear even to walk past the closet or dresser and know that her clothes were inside, hanging or neatly folded in darkness like some foolish hope for her eventually return.
    That night, without planning it, I made myself a double sized drink of Scotch and water (the twins had finally fallen off to sleep), and I walked back to our bedroom and simply started to pack her clothing, and at once it seemed deeply correct somehow, and so I went on doing it until the job was done. I must have known this was a task that I would have to do soon anyhow, and I must have sensed that it would be much more painful for me later, with her dead, so I did it now, while she was still alive, while I could keep myself from weeping with self pity.
    It was not so bad, it was almost a kindness, as if she were about to leave me and the children for a long journey, and as I held up her thin blouses and nightgowns one by one and studied them, I was amazed at how small they were, what bare scraps of cloth they were, seen like that, without her body inside to fill them out and give them weight.
    I remember that night and standing there beside our bed and holding up my wife’s articles of clothing as clearly as if it were last night; it was a discovery of an aspect of her deepest reality and, through it, a discovery of a part of my own. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. And if you loved the person a great deal, as I loved Lydia and my children, your sense of who you are will have been clarified many times, and so you will have many such moments to remember. I have learned that.
    Nights now I can sit in my living room alone, looking at the glass of the picture window, with the reflection of my body and the drink in my hand and the chair and lamp beside me glaring flat and white back at me, and I am in no way as real in that room as I am in my memories of my wife and children. Sometimes it’s not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and have become a ghost.
    You might think that remembering those moments is a way of keeping my family alive, but it’s not; it’s a way of keeping myself alive. Just as you might think my drinking is a way to numb the pain; it’s not; it’s a way to feel the pain.
    Four years ago-well, four years before the accident, the year before Lydia died she and I and the twins spent two weeks on the island of Jamaica. It was late in the winter, early March, which is when if you’re going to get out of Sam Dent at all, you get out then. I don’t care how much you think you like the snow and ice and darkness of upstate New York; after four or five months of it, nobody in this region manages to keep from being depressed that late in the winter.
    And unless you drive a snowplow or run a ski lift, you’re not making any money here anyhow, so if you can afford it, you leave for anywhere south of Albany. That March, for the first time in my life I could afford it, the garage was finally running in