The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

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      Poor Wilhelmina, who struck the eye as distinctly disadvantaged, beside her beautiful friend!—for Mrs. Burr was always nagging at her, and complaining, and worrying that no one would ever wish to marry her, except for her family’s position and wealth. (Willy had “come out” in New York a year before Annabel but had, as yet, received only a scattering of unacceptable marriage offers, from either young men of no fortune, or young men of no family: which only amused the young woman, who commented that she looked forward greatly to declining an “irresistible” offer, like a governess in a romance novel, for the splash it would make in Princeton circles; but was being prevented by Fate.) So little did Willy care for feminine adornment, or for her own feelings, she did not take offense when Todd Slade, earlier in their walk, had presented his cousin with the exquisite water iris but gave to her a sprig of white baneberry, with the remark: “You shall have this, ‘Willy’—for it is said to be poison; and Todd senses, how you dislike him.” Indeed, so far from being offended by the boy’s curious, stiffly uttered words, Willy laughingly accepted the sprig from him, and tucked it into the chignon at the nape of her neck.

      IT IS TIME to acknowledge that Mrs. Adelaide Burr, “poor Puss,” had not been entirely misinformed, regarding an UNSPEAKABLE crime in the Princeton vicinity; and this not the ugly episode in Camden, New Jersey, but the disappearance of a young girl of thirteen, sometime during the night of April 30, out of her parents’ home on the Princeton Pike, about midway between Princeton and Trenton; after a search, the body of Priscilla Mae Spags was found floating in the Delaware-Raritan Canal, not far from the family home; though details concerning the nature of the crime were unclear, either because law enforcement officers did not wish to release them, or knew very little. Nor was there any mention of the sordid crime in the weekly Princeton paper. Trenton authorities had acted with commendable swiftness in apprehending and interrogating, in Trenton, a male of “unfixed” address, an immigrant from eastern Europe who handily provided them with a signed confession—signed, that is, with crudely executed initials, for the wretch seemed not to know how to read or write English, or speak English very coherently, nor seemed even confident of his birth date!

      So it was, or seemed, that the danger of further unspeakable outrages may have abated in the area; certainly, there should not have been any danger in the forested property belonging to the Slades, that stretched for several miles along Rosedale Road. (Crosswicks Forest, as it was locally known, and the adjoining countryside, were posted against all trespassers, of course; any hunter or poacher among the locals would have been very brash indeed, to set foot on the Slade property, and to risk the hot temper of the Slade gamekeeper, a close acquaintance of the county sheriff.)

      The young women strolled briskly, yet with their arms linked, as was their custom; trying not to be nettled by the commotion of Annabel’s young cousin and Thor rushing ahead into the woods; calling out to him, not chidingly, for like a part-bridled young horse the boy balked at being scolded even by Annabel whom he adored, but sweetly—“Todd! Please try to stay in sight, will you? Don’t make us fret over you”—even as the boy shouted back to them, out of the forest underbrush, of the “devils” he and Thor were scaring up—“witches”—“trolls”—the famed “Jersey Devil” itself;* then, with diabolic slyness, doubling back and rushing at them from behind, with Thor noisily barking at his heels, meaning to frighten them; and indeed, to a degree frightening them. In a high-pitched singsong voice Todd demanded of the tensely smiling young women: “The Jersey Devil asks: What is round, and flat, and blank, and tells no lies?”

      “ ‘Round, and flat, and blank, and tells no lies . . .’ ”

      Unlike her brother Josiah who was skilled at riddles, as at charades, and other parlor games, Annabel was at a loss at such times; and sought to deflect the boy’s intensity by brushing his damp hair from his fevered forehead, and picking burrs from his clothing, and declaring that his riddle was “too difficult” for her—which caused the boy to react in frustration, to gnash his teeth, leap into the air and clap his hands loudly; Annabel was accustomed to such childish tantrums, and only tried to laugh, while Willy shrank away, that the antic boy might not stumble into her. (It was true, as Todd sensed, that Willy did not quite share in Annabel’s indulgent affection for him.) And now Todd confronted Wilhelmina: “What is round, and flat, and blank, and, for you especially, tells no lies?”

      Willy tried to smile, as one tries to smile at the over-bright, unsettling children of relatives or friends; she offered the boy a fig bar which he accepted from her, and devoured within seconds; then rudely declared that, though she was “Willy” she had not the “wit” to solve a riddle. In childish contempt Todd said: “It is a mirror, Miss Burr. A mirror, and you know it. You big Burr: mirror. The reverse side of a mirror, its back. Like your back, telling no lies, as a face does. Now, give me another fig bar! Thor and I are hungry.”

      Annabel protested: “Todd! You must not be rude.”

      Todd said, “You must not be rude, the two of you, to pretend not to know my riddle.”

      So mercurial were Todd’s moods, however, he soon quieted after devouring the second fig bar, which he broke in half to share with the eager German shepherd; and insisted that Annabel and Willy stop where they were, for it was time for a story—had not Annabel promised Todd a story, if he was good on their walk; and he was sure that he had been good, for he and Thor might have been so much less good.

      The young women had not intended to sit down just at this time, or in this place; but Todd found for them some exposed, gnarled tree roots, that formed a kind of seat; so they sat down, beside the quietly flowing Stony Brook Creek, and Annabel took out of her straw bag a children’s book, to read to Todd that tale of Hans Christian Andersen’s which was Todd’s favorite, “The Ugly Duckling”; and taking care not to intrude, Willy sketched her friend in pastels; for she very much wanted an intimate portrait of Annabel as she was before her wedding, to keep as a memento; as Willy felt, for some reason, that she would lose her closest friend once the young woman became Mrs. Dabney Bayard and lived in the old Craven house.

      (Yes, it is strange that Todd, at eleven years of age, would request being read to, as if he were a very young child; but Todd did not easily “read,” claiming that letters and numerals were “scrambled” in his eyes, when he tried to make sense of them.)

      At the end of the story Todd clapped his hands and declared that when he became a swan, he wouldn’t be so kind to the ducklings who had mocked him—“For Todd has a very good memory for wrongs, and will not forget or forgive his enemies.” Which provoked Annabel to say, in reprimand: “But once you are a swan, Todd you will be a swan, and have a swan’s code of conduct—that is, you will be manly and noble.”

      “But will Todd be Todd, then?”—the child’s query was couched with some anxiety.

      “Why yes! Of course.”

      Resting in the grass, the boy considered this statement of his cousin’s, with an air of mock gravity; but responded then in typical Todd-fashion by rolling onto his back, kicking frantically, and protesting in a high-pitched whine as if he were being tickled, or attacked, by an invisible adversary.

      (POOR TODD SLADE!—the reader may be curious about him, particularly in the light of developments to follow; for surely of the “accursed,” Todd was primary.)

      Through Todd’s first two years he had seemed to be displaying superior traits—(walking, talking, even “reasoning” to a degree)—of a precocious sort, but then, for no reason anyone could know, he had seemed to “regress”—as if wishing to remain an infant a little longer, and a particularly difficult infant displaying flashes of brightness, СКАЧАТЬ