Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ IN KRULLER HOMICIDE QUESTIONED BY POLICE

      THOUGH MY MOTHER HAD had our telephone number changed, and removed from the directory, yet my father managed to acquire the number as if by magic, and called us. Sometimes when one of us answered he didn’t speak: you listened and heard only a crackling sort of silence, like flames about to erupt. Timidly I said, “Daddy? Is that—you?” but Daddy would not answer, nor would Daddy hang up the phone; at such times I did not know what to do, for I loved my father very much, and was frightened of him; I had been made to be frightened of him; among the Bauers it was whispered that he was a brute, a murderer. And there were many in Sparta who believed yes, my father was a brute, a murderer. If Ben answered his voice went shrill, he was furious, half-sobbing: “We don’t want you to call us, Dad,” but Ben’s voice weakened when he uttered Dad, though he’d steeled himself not to say Dad, yet Dad had come out. Once when I picked up the phone expecting to hear my friend Nancy’s voice instead the voice was a man’s, low and gravelly: “Krista? Just this, honey: I love you.” On trembling legs I stood in the kitchen dazed and blinking as the voice continued, “Is your mother nearby? Is she listening?” and I could not manage to answer, my throat had closed tight, “Don’t hang up yet, honey. Just want you to know I love—” but the look in my face was a signal to my mother, with an angry little cry Mom took the receiver from me and slammed it down without a word.

      So that the phone could not ring again, Mom removed the receiver from the hook.

      “How dare he! He’s been warned! I should call the police…”

      We could not sit down to our dinner! We were too excited to eat.

      My mother insisted, we must eat. We must not be upset by him, he must not have such power over us. Numbly we sat at the table, we passed platters of the food that my mother and I had prepared together, we tried not to see where my father stood brooding and smoking in a corner of the kitchen.

      My mouth was too dry, I could not chew or swallow. “Maybe he just wants to…” Numbly I spoke, my words were barely audible.

      In her cool calm voice my mother said, “No, Krista. It’s over.”

      And there were the times, how many times we had no idea, when my father drove past the house; when my father cruised slowly past the house, pausing at the end of the driveway; when my father dared to park at the side of the road, in a stand of straggly trees, not visible from the house. Word sometimes came back to us, from relatives. One of my mother’s cousins called. Virtually all of the Diehls supported Edward, their Eddy; the Bauers were less sure. (There was a split among the Bauers, in fact. Those who believed that Lucille’s husband might have been unfaithful to her, but not that he’d killed that woman: not Eddy! And those who believed yes, Eddy Diehl was capable of murder, if he’d been drunk enough. And angry, and jealous enough.) I knew that my father was close by because, some nights, I could feel his presence. I could hear his voice Krista? Krissie? Where’s my Puss? I’m coming to get my little Krissie-puss. There was a sensation inside my head like fire about to erupt, crystal glass about to be shattered. Almost unbearable excitement like the terrible thrill of a vehicle made to speed too fast for the road, the spinning basketball aimed at your unprotected face: that instant before the ball hits, and your nose spurts blood.

      When I was thirteen, that Christmas when there’d been so much snowfall we were snowed in, and Herkimer County snowplows and tow trucks were on the Huron Pike Road through the night, that Christmas morning there was a vehicle parked at the end of the drive—just barely visible from my bedroom window—a pickup truck, it seemed to be—I saw a male figure climb out, and I saw this figure shoveling the end of our driveway where the snowplows had heaped up ridges of icy snow—at first I thought it must be someone from the county, though this wasn’t part of the usual snowplowing service—then I realized it had to be my father, coming to shovel out the end of the driveway as he’d always done after a heavy snowfall, when he’d lived with us.

      And where was my father living then? Not in Sparta, I think—he must have made the drive early Christmas morning, in treacherous weather conditions, for this purpose.

      Neither my mother nor Ben ever knew, I never told them. That the end of the driveway wasn’t blocked as usual must have made no distinct impression on my mother, when she drove her car out.

      Another time, a more careless/desperate time he’d parked at the end of the driveway, very likely he’d been drinking and so forgot to switch off his headlights and Ben happened to notice from an upstairs window and shouted to my mother: “It’s him, Mom! Damn bastard, I hate him!”

      In a panic my mother called the number the Herkimer County sheriff had given her for such emergencies and within minutes a squad car careened along Huron Pike Road with a flashing red light like on TV—unresisting, Eddy Diehl was arrested, taken away in handcuffs and in the morning his car was towed away.

      Why Lucille declined to press charges, she would not explain.

      “It’s over.”

      He was gone, then. Except: one afternoon months later again he was sighted driving slowly past the small shopping center where my mother had begun part-time work at the Second Time ‘Round Shop—a “consignment” shop to which women brought no-longer-wanted clothing to be resold; he was sighted in the parking lot at the rear, just sitting in the car, smoking, possibly drinking; it would turn out, he’d told one of his Diehl cousins that he was wanting “just to see her, from a distance”—“not even to try to talk”—but Lucille didn’t appear, and after an hour or so he drove away.

      It was Daddy’s statement made frequently to relatives, meant to be conveyed to Lucille: “She knows that I love her and the kids. That isn’t going to change. However she feels about me, I can accept it.”

      SPARTA RESIDENT DIEHL, 42, RELEASED FROM POLICE CUSTODY “NO CHARGES AT THIS TIME”

      Because my mother prowled in my room in my absence—I knew! I’d set devious Mom-traps in my sock-and-undies drawer and in my clothes closet—I kept my cache of clippings about my father in a school notebook, carried back and forth in my backpack. This clipping, from the Sparta Journal for April 29, 1983, commemorated the final time Edward Diehl’s photograph would appear prominently on the front page of that paper.

      For that reason, and for the reason that it so clearly stated that Edward Diehl had been released from police custody, for lack of evidence linking him to the murder of Zoe Kruller, this clipping was precious to me.

      Not that I failed to note—no one could fail to note, who was even skimming the article—the begrudging No Charges at This Time.

      The conspicuous omission of Suspect Cleared.

      Edward Diehl had been in police custody more than once, more than twice, possibly more than three times. He’d been identified—numberless times!—as one of the prime suspects; yet he’d never been arrested. (Another man, the murdered woman’s husband, had been arrested—but later released.) It was a season of misery and public humiliation for all of the Diehls, the Bauers, and their friends; for Ben and me, having to go to school where everyone seemed to know more about our father—our father and a woman named Zoe Kruller, who’d been “murdered”—“strangled in her bed”—than we did. For months the police investigation continued, very like a net being dragged in one direction and then in another, a nightmare net trapping all in its path, as virtually anyone who knew my father was “interviewed,” often more than once. After a year, two years, several years this case was still open; by November 1987, no one had been definitively arrested, and the name Zoe Kruller had vanished from the newspaper; Edward СКАЧАТЬ