Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

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      The child was naked inside the paper nightgown. The child was bleeding from her razor-lacerated scalp in a dozen tiny wounds and shivering and naked inside the pale green paper nightgown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION that had been cut by the giant shears to reduce its length if not its width so that the paper nightgown came to just the child’s skinny ankles.

      A paper gown to be tracked to the Herkimer County medical unit attached to the women’s detention home.

      In the rear seat of the rattling rusted Plymouth which was the spike-haired man’s sole legacy was the child’s rubber doll. Dolly was the name of the doll that had been her sister’s and was now hers. Dolly’s face was soiled and her eyes had ceased to see. Dolly’s small mouth was a pucker in the grim rubber flesh. And Dolly too was near-bald, only patches of curly fair hair remaining where you could see how the sad feathery fawn-colored hairs had been glued to the rubber scalp.

      Seventy miles north of Star Lake as remote to the woman and the child as the farther, eclipsed half of the moon, the shadowed mudflats beside the river.

      So meandering and twisting were the mountain roads, a journey of merely seventy miles had required days, for the woman feared to drive the rattling automobile at any speed beyond thirty. And urgent to her too, that her obedience to God was manifest in this slowness and in this deliberateness like one who can only read by drawing his forefinger beneath each letter of each word to be enunciated aloud.

      The child did not fret. But the woman believed, in her heart the child did fret for both the children were rebellious. No comb could be forced through such snarled hair.

      In harsh jeering cries the crows reviled God.

      Jeering demanding to know as the (female, middle-aged) judge had demanded to know why these children have been found filthy and partly clothed pawing through a Dumpster behind the Shop-Rite scavenging for food like stray dogs or wild creatures shrinking in the beam of a flashlight. And the elder of the sisters clutching at the hand of the younger and would not let go.

      And how does the mother explain and how does the mother plead.

      Proudly the woman stood and her chin uplifted and eyes shut against the Whore of Babylon there in black robes but a lurid lipstick-mouth and plucked eyebrows like arched insect wings. No more would the woman plead than fall to her knees before this whorish vision.

      The children had been taken from her and placed in temporary custody of the county. But the will of God was such, all that was rightfully the woman’s was restored to her, in time.

      In all those weeks, months—the woman had never weakened in her faith that all that was hers, would be restored to her.

      And now at dawn the sky in the east was ever-shifting, expanding. The gray concrete-sky that is the world-bereft-of-God was retreating. Almost you could see angels of wrath in these broken clouds. Glittering light in the stagnant strips of water of the mudflats of the hue of watery blood. Less than a half mile from the Black Snake River in a desolate area of northeastern Beechum County in the foothills of the Adirondacks, where the hand of God had guided her. Here were the remains of an abandoned mill, an unpaved road and rotted debris amid tall snakelike marsh grasses that shivered and whispered in the wind. Exposed roots of trees and collapsed and rotting tree trunks bearing the whorled and affrighted faces of the damned. And what beauty in such forlorn places, Mudgirl would cherish through her life. For we most cherish those places to which we have been brought to die but have not died. No smells more pungent than the sharp muck-smell of the mudflats where the brackish river water seeps and is trapped and stagnant with algae the bright vivid green of Crayola. Vast unfathomable acres of mudflats amid cattails, jimsonweed and scattered litter of old tires, boots, torn clothing, broken umbrellas and rotted newspapers, abandoned stoves, refrigerators with doors flung open like empty arms. Seeing a small squat refrigerator tossed on its side in the mud the child thought She will put us inside that one.

      But something was wrong with this. The thought came a second time, to correct—She has put us inside that one. She has shut the door.

      There came a frenzy of crows, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, as if the child had spoken aloud and said a forbidden thing.

      The woman cried shaking her fist at the birds, God will curse you!

      The raucous accusing cries grew louder. More black-feathered birds appeared, spreading their great wings. They settled in the skeletal trees fierce and clattering. The woman cried, cursed and spat and yet the bird-shrieks continued and the child was given to know that the birds had come for her.

      These were sent by Satan, the woman said.

      It was time, the woman said. A day and a night and another day and now the night had become dawn of the new day and it was time and so despite the shrieking birds the woman half-walked half-carried the child in the torn paper nightgown in the direction of the ruined mill. Pulling at the child so that the child’s thin pale arm felt as if it were about to be wrenched out of its socket.

      The woman made her way beyond the ruined mill which smelled richly of something sweetly rancid and fermented and into an area of broken bricks and rotted lumber fallen amid rich dark muddy soil and spiky weeds grown to the height of children. In her haste she startled a long black snake sleeping in the rotted lumber but the snake refused to crawl away rapidly instead moving slowly and sinuously out of sight in defiance of the intruder. At first the woman paused—the woman stared—for the woman was awaiting an angel of God to appear to her—but the sinuous black-glittering snake was no angel of God and in a fury of hurt, disappointment and determination the woman cried, Satan go back to hell where you came from but already in insolent triumph the snake had vanished into the underbrush.

      The child had ceased whimpering, for the woman had forbade her. The child barefoot and naked inside the rumpled and torn pale green paper gown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION. The child’s legs were very thin and stippled with insect bites and of these bites many were bleeding, or had only recently ceased bleeding. The child’s head near-bald, stubbled and bleeding and the eyes dazed, uncomprehending. At the end of a lane leading to the canal towpath was a spit of land gleaming with mud the hue of baby shit and tinged with a sulfurous yellow: and the smell was the smell of baby shit for here were many things rotted and gone. Faint mists rose from the interior of the marsh like the exhaled breaths of dying things. The child began to cry helplessly. As the woman hauled her along the land-spit the child began to struggle but could not prevail. The child was weak from malnutrition yet still the child could not have prevailed for the woman was strong and the strength of God flowed through her being like a bright blinding beacon. Light flared off the woman’s face, she had never been so certain of herself and so joyous in certainty as now. For knowing now that the angel of God would not appear to her as the angel of God had appeared to both Abraham and Hagar who had borne Abraham’s child and had been cast into the wilderness by Abraham with the child to die of thirst.

      And this was not the first time the angel of God had been withheld from her. But it would be the last time.

      With a bitter laugh the woman said, Here, I am returning her to You. As You have bade me, so I am returning her to You.

      First, Dolly: the woman pried Dolly from the child’s fingers and tossed Dolly out into the mud.

      Here! Here is the first of them.

      The woman spoke happily, harshly. The rubber doll lay astonished in the mud below.

      Next, the child: the woman seized the child in her arms to push her off the spit of land and into the mud—the child clutched at her СКАЧАТЬ