Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

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      Suttis froze in his tracks. Suttis stood like one impaled. Suttis could not hide his eyes and refuse to see. Suttis could not press his hands over his ears and refuse to hear.

      SSS’ttisss come here! Here!

      The King of the Crows was the largest crow Suttis had ever seen. His feathers were the sleekest and blackest and his wingspread as wide as any hawk’s and his yellow eyes glared in urgency and indignation. Like a hunted creature Suttis made his way along the riverbank, as the King of the Crows shrieked in his wake, flying from tree to tree behind him as if in pursuit. For it would not be true as Suttis would claim that he had followed the King of the Crows to the child abandoned to die in the mudflat but rather that the King of the Crows had driven Suttis as a dog might drive cattle. Suttis could not hide, could not escape from the King of the Crows for he knew that the King of the Crows would pursue him back to the Coldham farm and would never cease harassing and berating him for having disobeyed him.

      Suttis stumbled and staggered along a three-foot-high embankment that jutted out into the vast mudflat. Not long ago the last of the winter snows had melted and the mudflat was puddled with water, as the Black Snake River was swollen and muddy and swift-rushing south out of the mountains. Everywhere was a buzzing-thrumming-teeming of new life, and the rapacity of new life: blackflies, wasps, gnats. Suttis swatted at the air about his head, a cloud of new-hatched mosquitoes. Underfoot was the ruin of a road. Ahead was the ruin of a mill. Suttis knew the mudflats—the Coldhams hunted and trapped here—but Suttis had no clear idea what the purpose of the mill might have been at one time, or who might have owned it. His grandfather would know, or his father. His older brothers maybe. The ways of adults seemed to him remote and inaccessible and so their names were blurred and of little consequence to him as to any child.

      Come here! Come here S’ttis come here!

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      On the narrowing embankment Suttis moved with caution. The King of the Crows had so distracted him, he’d left his trapping gear behind—the burlap sack which bore the limp broken bloodied bodies of several dead creatures—but still he had his knife, sheathed in his jacket which was Amos Coldham’s Army-issue jacket of a long-ago wartime, badly stained and frayed at the cuffs. On his head he wore a knit cap, pulled down onto his narrow forehead; on his lower body, khaki workpants; on his feet, rubber boots from Sears, Roebuck. Passing now the part-collapsed mill with its roof covered in moss that made him uneasy to see—any building, however in ruins, Suttis Coldham was inclined to think that something might be hiding inside, observing him.

      In the mountains, you might be observed by a man with a rifle, at some distance. You would never know how you were viewed in a stranger’s rifle-scope even as the stranger pulled the trigger and for what reason?—as the Coldhams liked to say For the hell of it.

      Suttis cringed, worried that he was being observed and not by just the King of the Crows. Entering now into a force field of some other consciousness that drew him irresistibly.

      Broken things in the winter-ravaged grasses, rotted planks, chunks of concrete, a man’s single boot. A shredded tractor tire, strips of plastic. In the vast mudflat tracks ran in all directions with a look of frenzied determination—animal tracks, bird tracks—and on the embankment, what Suttis identified as human-being footprints.

      Suttis’s eye that gazed upon so much without recognition, still less interest, for instance all printed materials, seized at once upon the human-being footprints on the embankment which Suttis knew to be, without taking time to think, not the footprints of his brothers or any other trapper or hunter but female footprints.

      Suttis knew, just knew: female. Not even the boot-prints of a young boy. Just female boot-prints.

      There were other prints, too—mixed with the female. Possibly a child. Suttis knew without calculating, with just-seeing.

      Not that these tracks were clear—they were not clear. But Suttis understood that they were fresh for no other tracks covered them.

      What was this! Suttis whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

      A piece of cloth—a scarf—of some crinkly purple material, Suttis snatched up and quickly shoved into his pocket.

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      Atop a skeletal larch the King of the Crows spread his wings. The King of the Crows did not like it that Suttis had paused to pick up the crinkly-purple scarf. For the King of the Crows had flown ahead of Suttis, to bade him to hurry to that point, to see.

      And now Suttis saw—about twelve feet from the base of the embankment, amid a tangle of rushes—a doll?

      A child’s rubber doll, badly battered, hairless, unclothed and its coloring mostly flaked off—too light to sink in the mud and so it was floating on the surface in a way to cause Suttis’s heart to trip even as he told himself Damn thing’s only a doll.

      Was he being mocked? Had the King of the Crows led him so far, to rescue a mere doll?

      Suttis drew nearer and now—he saw the second figure, a few yards from the first. And this, too, had to be a doll—though larger than an ordinary doll—discarded in this desolate place like garbage or trash.

      Pulses beat in his head like spoons against some wooden vessel. A doll! A doll! This had to be a doll, like the other.

      As so much was tossed away into the Black Snake mudflats that were an inland sea of cast-off human things of all kinds. Here you could find articles of clothing, boots and shoes, broken crockery, plastic toys, even shower curtains opaque and stained as polyurethane shrouds. Once, Suttis had found a pair of jaws in the mud—plastic teeth—he’d thought were dentures but had had to have been Hallowe’en teeth and another time the wheel-less chassis of a baby buggy filled with mud like a gaping mouth. Mostly these cast-off things accumulated at the edge of the mudflat where borne by flooding water they caught in exposed roots amid the debris of winter storms, the skeletons of small drowned creatures and the mummified fur-remnants with blind pecked-out eyes like gargoyles fallen from unknown and unnameable cathedrals while farther out in the mudflats such objects were likely to sink and be submerged in mud.

      Lurid tales were told in Beechum County of all that was “lost”—discarded and buried and forgotten—in the mudflats.

      Bodies of the hated and reviled. Bodies of “enemies.”

      Humped outlines of dead logs in the mudflat like drowsing crocodiles.

      Cries of smaller birds silenced by the furious shrieking of crows.

      Was this a doll, so large? It looked to be the size of a small child—Suttis had no clear idea how old—two years? Three?

      Weak-kneed Suttis approached the very edge of the bank.

      The King of the Crows shook his wings, jeering, impatient.

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      The King of the Crows was very near to speaking, now. Human speech the great bird could utter, that Suttis could not stop his ears from hearing.

      As the wide black-feathered wings of the King of the Crows fluttered wind and shadows across Suttis’s slow-blinking eyes.

      “Jesus!”

      A little girl, Suttis thought, but—dead?

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