Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ not have spoken frankly to him about the physical life, or about sex; I would never have dared ask my father how much money he made, how much our house had cost, if he was insured and how much was he insured for. I could not have asked him about God: Is there a God, and what has God to do with us? These were taboo subjects, though the word taboo did not exist in our vocabulary and if it ever came to be known in Sparta, by way of advertisements and popular culture, it would be the perfume Taboo.

      In any case children did not ask about death. Children could watch death on TV, gunfire, explosions, planes shot wantonly from the sky to fall in a filigree of flame, but children could not ask about death. Only very young children who would quickly learn their mistake.

      When Grandpa Diehl had died, and I was four years old and too little for school. When Daddy wasn’t at work he’d kept to himself in the basement of our house in his workshop where we would hear his power tools wailing through the floorboards and in the days, weeks following Grandpa’s funeral Daddy did not speak to us about Grandpa Diehl except evasively to say that Grandpa had “gone away.” By the look in Daddy’s face, my brother and I had known not to ask where Grandpa Diehl had gone.

      Mom had warned us: don’t ask Daddy about Grandpa, Daddy is upset. On the phone Mom said Eddy’s taking it pretty hard. You know how he is, it’s all inside.

      The words struck me: It’s all inside.

       Taking it pretty hard. All inside.

      At school, people were talking about Zoe Kruller, who was Aaron Kruller’s mother, or had been Aaron Kruller’s mother. Now Mrs. Kruller too had gone away.

      How strange it seemed to us, who’d known Zoe Kruller from both Honeystone’s Dairy and from the Chautauqua Park music-nights, that a woman so friendly, so pretty and glamorous would be strangled in her bed, murdered. How wrong it seemed to us that you could be the girl-singer for Black River Breakdown and applauded and whistled at and made to sing encores, yet someone could still hate you enough to beat, strangle you in your bed.

       Some worse things were done to Aaron’s mother than just killing her, know why?—‘cause she was a slut.

      We were made to come home immediately from school. Our mothers would not allow us to stay for after-school activities nor did school authorities encourage such activities, in the months following Zoe Kruller’s death. Patrol cars swung by the schools, cruising through the parking lots like friendly sharks. Bus drivers counted heads before shutting the bus doors and leaving the school property, determining that we were all present and accounted for. The older boys objected, they weren’t damn girls.

      Ben said: “Some things I heard, about Aaron’s mother, it was just her he was after, the ‘strangler.’ He wouldn’t be after any of us.”

      I asked Ben who’d told him this. I asked Ben what else he’d heard at his school and Ben shrugged evasively and said just some things—“Not for you to know.”

      In Sparta—unlike the rest of the world where people were dying and being killed in terrible ways all the time—it seemed rare that anyone died and yet more rare that anyone died in a way to cause such upset, dread, wonder. Of course the “natural” deaths were sad and people cried, especially women. Women were adept at crying, as men were humbled and stymied by crying. Women were cleansed by crying, as men were smudged and stained by crying. But the person who’d died was usually elderly, or had died after a long illness, or both; or had died in a car crash on the highway, or a boating accident on the river or one of the numerous lakes surrounding Sparta. These were sad deaths but not frightening deaths. Because you knew, if you were a child, that nothing like those deaths would ever happen to you.

      Except now, people were frightened. Adults were frightened. There is such a profound difference between dying and being killed.

      At Honeystone’s Dairy it wasn’t so much fun any longer. Without Zoe Kruller leaning on her elbows on the counter, smiling.

      The ice cream was still delicious, greedily we devoured it.

      The smell of the fresh-brewed coffee was pungent, disagreeable. To my sensitive nostrils, disagreeable. Since my ice-cream cone infested with nasty weevils Daddy hadn’t taken Ben and me back to the dairy all summer, I had to wonder if there was some connection.

      At Honeystone’s I hadn’t much wanted to overhear my mother speaking with old grumpy-grandma Mrs. Honeystone. The two shaking their heads in disapproval, bonded in that moment by a swell of indignation like dirty water swishing about their ankles. And leaving her family, too! How could she.

      The mysteries you live with, as a child. Never solved, never resolved. Utterly trivial, petty. Like a tiny pebble in your shoe, that causes you to walk crookedly.

       ZOE KRULLER. Zoe Kruller. Zoe Kruller.

      Now in late February and early March of 1983 the white clapboard house on the Huron Pike Road quivered with this name, unspoken. In the household upstairs and down and in my father’s workshop in the basement in which he spent much of the truncated time he now spent at home there was the taut tense silence that follows a lightning-flash when you wait for the thunder to roar in.

      Across Lake Ontario, great armadas of winter-storm clouds. Blown eastward and south out of Canada, the air too bitter-cold for snow. The silence-before-the-storm where you wait not knowing what you are waiting for.

      In their bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall—the door shut tight, only a meager band of light beneath—our parents spoke together in their low urgent alarmed voices. For hours.

      We sank into sleep, Ben and me, to the sound of those voices. We were wakened from sleep, to the sound of those voices. I think this was how it was. I am trying not to mis-remember, and most of all I am trying not to invent.

       Zoe Kruller. How could you! How many times! Oh why.

      Those hours, middle-of-the-night. Those vibrations in the air as when the old furnace clicked on, heaving itself into life like an enlarged and failing heart.

      Or maybe: my parents’ bedroom door opening, and my father’s footsteps in the hall, on the stairs to the first floor. So I was wakened dry-mouthed and frightened.

      “Daddy? Where are you going?”

      Calling down the stairs to him, and he’d tell me to get back to bed, back to sleep. And if I followed him to the stairs, and halfway down the stairs he’d speak more sharply to me: “Go back to sleep, Krista. This is not for you.”

      EARLIER THAT WINTER, WHAT we hadn’t wanted to remember. What would be blurred and smudged in our memories—Ben’s, and mine—like a blackboard across which a fist has been dragged, carelessly.

      Later we would realize that these were the days before.

      Days, nights before Zoe Kruller’s death.

      After Thanksgiving, through the long siege of Christmas and through snow-dazzled January those days we had no idea were before.

      Those days when Daddy seemed to be away much of the time. He’d been hours late for Thanksgiving dinner—“dinner” was at 4:00 P.M.—at my aunt Sharon’s house and he had not shown up at all for a birthday dinner at another relative’s house. Weekdays he’d call home to say he’d be late for supper or maybe СКАЧАТЬ