Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ Beechum County it would be told—told and retold—how Mudgirl was saved by the King of the Crows.

      How in the vast mudflats beside the Black Snake River in that desolate region of the southern Adirondacks there were a thousand crows and of these thousand crows the largest and fiercest and most sleek-black-feathered was the King of the Crows.

      How the King of the Crows had observed the cruel behavior of the woman half-dragging half-carrying a weeping child out into the mudflats to be thrown down into the mud soft-sinking as quicksand and left the child alone there to die in that terrible place.

      And the King of the Crows flew overhead in vehement protest flapping his wide wings and shrieking at the retreating woman now shielding her face with her arms against the wrath of the King of the Crows in pursuit of her like some ancient heraldic bird-beast in the service of a savage God.

      How in the mists of dawn less than a mile from the place where the child had been abandoned to die there was a trapper making the rounds of his traps along the Black Snake River and it was this trapper whom the King of the Crows summoned to save the child lying stunned in shock and barely breathing in the mudflat like discarded trash.

      Come! S’ttisss!

      Suttis Coldham making the rounds of the Coldham traps as near to dawn as he could before predators—coyotes, black bears, bobcats—tore their prey from the jaws of the traps and devoured them alive weakened and unable to defend themselves.

      Beaver, muskrat, mink, fox and lynx and raccoons the Coldhams trapped in all seasons. What was legal or not-legal—what was listed as endangered—did not count much with the Coldhams. For in this desolate region of Beechum County in the craggy foothills of the Adirondacks there were likely to be fewer human beings per acre than there were bobcats—the bobcat being the shyest and most solitary of Adirondack creatures.

      The Coldhams were an old family in Beechum County having settled in pre-Revolutionary times in the area of Rockfield in the Black Snake River but scattered now as far south as Star Lake, and beyond. In Suttis’s immediate family there were five sons and of these sons Suttis was the youngest and the most bad-luck-prone of the generally luckless Coldham family as Suttis was the one for whom Amos Coldham the father had the least hope. As if there hadn’t been enough brains left for poor Suttis, by the time Suttis came along.

      Saying with a sour look in his face—Like you’re shake-shake-shaking brains out of some damn bottle—like a ketchup bottle—and by the time it came to Suttis’s turn there just ain’t enough brains left in the bottle.

      Saying—Wallop the fuckin’ bottle with your hand won’t do no fuckin’ good—the brains is all used up.

      So it would be told that the solitary trapper who rescued Mudgirl from her imminent death in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River had but the mind of a child of eleven or twelve and nowhere near the mind of an adult man of twenty-nine which was Suttis’s age on this April morning in 1965.

      So it would be told, where another trapper would have ignored the shrieking of the King of the Crows or worse yet taken shots with a .22 rifle to bring down the King of the Crows, Suttis Coldham knew at once that he was being summoned by the King of the Crows for some special purpose.

      For several times in his life it had happened to Suttis when Suttis was alone and apart from the scrutiny of others that creatures singled him out to address him.

      The first—a screech owl out behind the back pasture when Suttis had been a young boy. Spoke his name SSSuttisss all hissing syllables so the soft hairs on his neck stood on end and staring up—upward—up to the very top of the ruin of a dead oak trunk where the owl was perched utterly motionless except for its feathers rippling in the wind and its eyes glaring like gasoline flame seeing how the owl knew him—a spindly-limbed boy twenty feet below gaping and grimacing and struck dumb hearing SSSuttisss and seeing that look in the owl’s eyes of such significance, it could not have been named except the knowledge was imparted—You are Suttis, and you are known.

      Not until years later came another creature to address Suttis and this a deer—a doe—while Suttis was hunting with his father and brothers and Suttis was left behind stumbling and uncertain and out of nowhere amid the pine woods there appeared the doe about fifty feet away—a doe with two just-born fawns—pausing to stare at Suttis wide-eyed not in fright but with a sort of surprised recognition even as Suttis lifted his rifle to fire with a rapidly beating heart and a very dry mouth—Suttis! SuttisSuttisSuttis!—words sounding inside his own head like a radio switched on so Suttis was given to know that it was the doe’s thoughts sent to him in some way like vibrations in water and he’d understood that he was not to fire his rifle, and he did not fire his rifle.

      And most recent in January 1965 making early-morning rounds of the traps, God damn Suttis’s brothers sending Suttis out on a morning when none of them would have gone outdoors to freeze his ass but there’s Suttis stumbling in thigh-high snow, shuddering in fuckin’ freezing wind and half the traps covered in snow and inaccessible and finally he’d located one—one!—a mile or more from home—not what he’d expected in this frozen-over wet-land place which was muskrat or beaver or maybe raccoon but instead it was a bobcat—a thin whistle through the gap in Suttis’s front teeth for Suttis had not ever trapped a bobcat before in his life for bobcats are too elusive—too cunning—but here a captive young one looked to be a six-to-eight-months-old kitten its left rear leg caught in a long spring trap panicked and panting licking at the wet-blooded trapped leg with frantic motions of its pink tongue and pausing now to stare up at Suttis in a look both pleading and reproachful, accusatory—it was a female cat, Suttis seemed to know—beautiful tawny eyes with black vertical slits fixed upon Suttis Coldham who was marveling he’d never seen such a creature in his life, silver-tipped fur, stripes and spots in the fur of the hue of burnished mahogany, tufted ears, long tremulous whiskers, and those tawny eyes fixed upon him as Suttis stood crouched a few feet away hearing in the bobcat’s quick-panting breath what sounded like Suttis! Suttis don’t you know who I am and drawn closer risking the bobcat’s talon-claws and astonished now seeing that these were the eyes of his Coldham grandmother who’d died at Christmas in her eighty-ninth year but now the grandmother was a young girl as Suttis had never known her and somehow—Suttis could have no idea how—gazing at him out of the bobcat’s eyes and even as the bobcat’s teeth were bared in a panicked snarl clearly Suttis was made to hear his girl-grandmother’s chiding voice Suttis! O Suttis you know who I am—you know you do!

      Not for an instant did Suttis doubt that the bobcat was his Coldham grandmother, or his Coldham grandmother had become the bobcat—or was using the bobcat to communicate with Suttis knowing that Suttis was headed in this direction—no more could Suttis have explained these bizarre and improbable circumstances than he could have explained the “algebra equations” the teacher had chalked on the blackboard of the one-room school he’d attended sporadically for eight mostly futile years even as he had not the slightest doubt that the “algebra equations” were real enough, or real in some way that excluded Suttis Coldham; and so Suttis stooped hurriedly to pry open the spring-trap fumbling to release the injured left rear leg of the bobcat kitten murmuring to placate the spirit of his girl-grandmother who both was and was not the elderly woman he’d known and called Gran’maw and the bobcat bared her teeth, snarled and hissed and squirmed and clawed at his hands in leather gloves shredding the gloves but leaving Suttis’s hands mostly unscathed and raking his face only thinly across his right cheek and in the next instant the bobcat kitten was running—limping, but running—on three swift legs disappearing into the snow-laden larch woods with no more sound than a startled indrawn breath and leaving behind nothing but a scattering of cat feces and patches of blood-splattered silver-tipped fur in the ugly serrated jaws of the trap and a sibilant murmur S’ttus! God bless.

      And СКАЧАТЬ