Little Bird of Heaven

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Baby, no. You don’t ever give up.”

  Daddy wasn’t staying with relatives or friends here in Sparta but, surprising to me, in the Days Inn on route 31. Maybe there was a reason for this, he’d explained. He was going to be “in the vicinity” until the following Monday—“seeing people”—“doing some business”—“tying up loose ends.” I hoped that this didn’t include trying to see my mother or any of her family. None of the Bauers wanted to see Eddy Diehl, ever again.

  Your father is not welcome with us.

  Your father is dead to us.

  Some of my father’s business in Sparta had to do with “litigation”—he’d been trying for years, with one lawyer or another, to sue local law enforcement officers and the Herkimer County prosecutor’s office on grounds of harassment, character assassination, criminal slander and misuse of authority. So far as anyone knew, nothing had come of my father’s lawsuits except legal fees.

  I dreaded to hear that he might be seeing yet another lawyer. Or that he might be planning on speaking again with the police, the prosecutors, the local newspapers and media. Demanding that his name be cleared.

  Whatever my father’s specific business in Sparta, I knew better than to ask about it. For though Daddy seemed always to be speaking openly and frankly and in a tone of belligerent optimism you could not speak like this to him, in turn. I’d come to recognize a certain mode of adult speech that, seeming intimate, is a way of precluding intimacy. I am telling you all that you need to know! What I don’t tell you, you will not be told.

  We’d exited the eerily humming suspension bridge from downtown Sparta to East Sparta, a no-man’s-land of small factories, gas stations, vacated warehouses, acres of asphalt parking lots creased and cracked and overgrown with gigantic thistles. In litter-strewn fields, in trash-choked gutters you saw lifeless bodies—you saw what appeared to be bodies—trussed and wrapped in twine, humanoid, part-decomposed. You saw, and looked again: only just garbage bags, more trash. East Sparta had lost most of its industries, now East Sparta was filling up with debris.

  I asked my father where was he living now?—and my father said, “Me? Living now?” meant to be a joke and so I laughed nervously.

  Maybe he wanted me to guess? I guessed Buffalo, Batavia, Port Oriskany, Strykersville…. He said, “I’m between habitats, right now. Left some things in storage in Buffalo. Mostly I’m in motion, y’know?—in this car that’s my newest purchase/investment. Like it?”

  Though I was listening intently to my father yet I seemed not to know what he was asking me. This car? Do I like—this car?

  I had already told my father yes, I liked this car. This was a beautiful car. But he wasn’t living in his car, was he? Was he living in his car?

  The backseat was piled with things. Boxes, files, folders. A pair of men’s shoes, what appeared to be clothing: outer garments. Suitcase. Suitcases. Duffel bag. More boxes.

  Dead to us. Doesn’t he know it?

  Damn dumb ghost wish to hell he’d die.

  “Anywhere I am, Krista. In my—y’know—soul. Like in my thoughts, except deeper. That’s what a soul is. In my soul I’m here, in Sparta. Lots of times in my sleep in our house, on the Huron Road. That’s where I wake up, until—I’m awake and I see hey no—nooooo!—that isn’t where I am, after all.”

  To this, I had no idea how to reply. I was thinking how I loved my Daddy, and how strange it was that a girl has a Daddy, and a girl loves a Daddy, a girl does not judge a Daddy. I was thinking how I hated my brother Ben, who was free of having to love Daddy.

  Ben didn’t love me, either. I was sure.

  “It’s my birthplace here,” Daddy said. “My birthright. Nights when I can’t sleep I just shut my eyes, I’m here. I’m home.” “I wish…”

  “Yes? What d’you wish, Puss?”

  “…you could come live with us again, Daddy. That’s what I wish.”

  Daddy laughed, kindly. Or maybe Daddy’s laugh was resigned, wounded.

  “…wish you could come back tonight…. It isn’t the same without you, Daddy. Anywhere in the house. Anywhere…” I was wiping at my eyes, that ached as if I’d been staring into a blinding light. Maybe one of the guards on the opposing team had thumbed my eye, out of pure meanness.

  Pissy little white girl get out of my face! “I miss you, Daddy. So does Ben. He doesn’t say so, but he does.”

  This was a lie. Why I said it, impulsively, I don’t know: to make Daddy happy, maybe. A little happier.

  “Well, honey. Thank you. I miss you, too. Real bad.” There was a pause, Daddy pondered. “And your brother.”

  I said yes, I’d tell him. I’d tell Ben.

  It had been one of the shocks of my father’s life, how his son had turned against him. His son, against him.

  And maybe he’d loved Ben better than he’d loved me. Or he’d wanted to. Having a son was the card you led with, in Daddy’s circle of men friends.

  “…she’s getting along, O.K.? Is she?”

  She. We were talking about my mother, were we? All along, since I’d scrambled to climb into the Caddie Seville, the subject had been my mother.

  “…to that church? The new one? How’s that turning out?”

  I told him it was turning out all right. My mother had joined a new church, my mother had “new friends” or claimed to have. I had not yet met these “new friends” but one of them was named Eve Hurtle or Huddle, the brassy-haired dump truck–shaped woman who owned Second Time ’Round.

  I was uneasy thinking that my father might ask if my mother was “seeing” anyone—any man—and I prepared what I might say. Daddy I don’t know! I don’t think so. Hoping he wouldn’t ask, this would be demeaning to him.

  But Daddy didn’t ask. Not that. If Eddy Diehl felt sexual jealousy, sexual rage, he had too much manly pride to ask. Though I could sense how badly he wanted to ask.

  “…doesn’t pass on much information about me, I guess? To you and Ben?”

  Information? I wasn’t sure what Daddy meant.

  “It’s like I’m dead, yes? ‘Dead to me’—that’s what she says?”

  It’s over. Finished. That’s what she says.

  Carefully I told Daddy I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe he was right, she didn’t pass on much information to Ben and me but then she didn’t confide in us on “personal” things. I didn’t think that she confided in anyone, there was too much shame involved.

  Naked female strangled in her bed. Eddy Diehl’s tramp mistress.

  On the highway ahead of us was a school bus, carrot-colored, Herkimer Co. School District, red lights flashing as it braked to a stop to let several passengers out. Almost too late, Daddy braked the Caddie. He’d been distracted, cursing and gripping the steering wheel.

  “Fuck! God damn school buses.”

  Both Daddy and I were wearing seat belts. Daddy was sharp-eyed about seat belts. Daddy had had a friend, an old high school friend, who’d been killed in some awful way like impaled on a steering wheel or his head half sheared off from his shoulders by broken glass, Daddy had always warned Ben and me about belting in.

  “She cashes my checks, though. I hope she tells you that.”

  Cashes his checks? Was this so? All I knew, or was made to know by my mother and the Bauers, was that my father was derelict in his duty. Neglects his family. Behind on alimony/child support.

  “Of course, it’s the least I can do. I don’t begrudge her. I mean, you are my family. What kind of crap ‘salary’ would she get from selling secondhand clothes? Least I can do, ruining that woman’s life….”

  Daddy’s voice trailed off, embarrassed. And angry. Clumsily he was lighting up a cigarette, sucking in a deep deep breath like the sweetest purest oxygen he’d been missing.

  You could not tell if Daddy’s embarrassment provoked his anger or whether the anger was always there, smoldering like burnt rubber in the rain, and embarrassment screened it fleetingly as a scrim of clouds screens a fierce glaring sun.

 
“…I never said I wasn’t responsible, for that. Not…not the other, Krissie, but…that. Your mother, and you and Ben…ruining your lives. Jesus! If I had to do it over again….”

  This was new, I thought. I was uneasy, hearing such words from my father. Ruining your lives. Ruining that woman’s life. For a moment I hadn’t known which woman my father was speaking of, my mother or—the other woman.

  My father had never once spoken of Zoe Kruller to me, or to Ben. I was sure he had not spoken of her to Ben. In his claims of innocence and his protestations that he’d had nothing to do with that woman’s death he had never given a name to Zoe Kruller. And he would not now, I knew.

  “…grateful to be alive. And free. That’s the miracle, Krissie—I am not in Attica, serving a life sentence. They say you go crazy in a few months in Attica, the inmates are crazy especially the older ones, the white ones, the guards are crazy—who else’d be a C.O. at Attica? You can’t make it alone, I’d have had to join up with the Aryan Nation—there’s some bikers in Attica, guys I knew from the army, already they’d sent word to me—if I got sent to Attica, I’d be O.K. Imagine, Krissie, my ‘future’ was being prepared for, this was what I had to look forward to, as some kind of good news.” My father laughed, harshly. His laughter turned into a fit of coughing, in disgust he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray that opened out of the dashboard beside his knee. “What I am trying to determine, Krissie, is: maybe there is a God, but does God give a shit for justice on earth? For any of us, on earth? I was reading some science discovery, that God is a ‘principle’—some kind of ‘equation’—so there is a God, but what kind of a God is that? A man has got to forge his own justice. As a man has got to forgive his own soul. This justice can’t spring forth too fast, it has to bide its time. So when it’s least expected. Most of humankind, they don’t give any more of a shit than ‘God.’ I guess you can’t blame them, there’s hurricanes, floods, every kind of terrible thing erupting out of the earth, every time you see a paper or turn on TV—how’d you keep up with it? I was a kid, I had to go to Sunday school for a while, till I was eleven when I wouldn’t go any more, I remember how we were told about Jesus performing his miracles, how impressed everyone was, it was ‘miracles’ that impressed them not Jesus as a preacher, anyway—my point is—you are made to think that Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could save his people, but in actual fact, how could Jesus ‘save’ the teeming multitudes that populate the world now? There’s millions—maybe billions—of people alive, and they are all in peril. As for the God-damned ‘authorities’—the ‘leaders’—they don’t give a damn. It’s all about power. It’s about raking in cash, hiding it in Switzerland. Some banks where they don’t reveal your identity. You don’t pay taxes. The ‘authorities’—they’d sell their own grandmother’s soul, to put an innocent man in prison, or on death row—bottom line is, they want to ‘close the case.’ God-damned hypocrite fuckers…”

  I was confused, frightened. It had seemed at first—hadn’t it?—that my father was speaking of something painful with which he’d come to terms, something for which he acknowledged responsibility; he’d sounded remorseful at the outset of his speech but then abruptly the tone shifted, he’d become angry, indignant. His jaw jutted like a fist. His eyes stared straight ahead. Despite warm air from the Caddie’s heater I felt a sensation of chill wash over me.

  Can’t trust a drinker. Krista promise me never never get in any vehicle with a drinker you will regret it.

  Hadn’t my mother warned me, many times! For surely her mother had warned her, too; and she had not listened.

  It seemed that we were headed into the country on route 31, a two-lane state highway north of Sparta. The strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels where the Days Inn was located was behind us. I thought that, if Daddy had intended to kidnap me, he would not be driving in this direction—would he? In a more genial Daddy-voice he was saying now that for my sixteenth birthday just maybe he’d give me a car—“How’s about a convertible coupe? Just right for sweet sixteen.”

  Was Daddy joking? A car, for me? I wondered if Daddy even knew when my birthday was.

  From a cloverleaf ramp I could look into the fleeting rears of houses: sheds, animal pens, clotheslines drooping in the rain. A dispirited-looking trailer “village,” a smoldering trash dump that smelled of burning rubber.

  We were headed east on route 31, we seemed to have a destination. I had to wonder if Daddy was planning to meet up with someone, there was such urgency in his driving. Those places that Zoe Kruller had frequented were miles behind us: Tip Top Club, Chet’s Keyboard Lounge, Houlihan’s, the Grotto, Swank’s Go-Go, bars at the new Marriott and the Sheraton-Hilton. There was the HiLo Lounge at the Holiday Inn. There was Little Las Vegas at the traffic circle. These were neon-glamorous places by night and by day mostly deserted. In the raw light of day you were made aware of the crude unlit signs sporting semi-nude female figures like cartoon drawings and of overflowing Dumpsters, parking lots littered like acne. After Eddy Diehl had been taken into police custody it would be revealed that he had not been the only “family man” who moved in such circles, as his friends and companions were made to inform upon him and upon one another. No one was arrested for any crime. Yet lives were ruined.

  I’d been too young then to know. I was still too young at fifteen to have a grasp of what it might be, that I didn’t yet know.

  Here in the country, in a township of Herkimer County known as the Rapids, we were in hilly farmland where by day we’d be seeing herds of Guernsey cows grazing placid and near-motionless in pastures on either side of the road. There were odd-shaped hills called drumlins, exposed shale and limestone like bone broken through skin. Eddy Diehl had relatives who lived in the Rapids but we were not going to visit them, I knew.

  “Wish I could see where we were, Daddy. Where we’re going.”

  My voice was little-girl wistful, I took care not to sound whiny or reproachful. I guessed we were headed for the County Line Tavern which was one of Eddy Diehl’s places. I wished it was another time and Daddy was taking me for a sight-seeing drive along the Black River and into the countryside in his showy new car as he’d done when Ben and I were young children and sometimes our mother would come with us. This car! I can’t get over this car! What on earth are you going to do with this car! Oh Eddy. Oh my God.

  On Sunday drives Daddy would take us out to Uncle Sean’s farm.

  Uncle Sean was an uncle of my mother’s, an old man with stark white fluffy hair and skin roughened as the skin of a pineapple. Ben and I were allowed to stroke the velvety noses of horses in their stalls, in the company of our cousin Ty who kept a close watch over us—“Careful! Walk on this side”—and we were allowed to brush the horses’ sides with a wire brush, warm rippling shivery sides, always you are astonished at the size of a horse, the height of a horse, the ceaseless switching of the coarse mane and the coarse stinging tail, the fresh manure underfoot, horseflies hovering in the air, repulsive. Yet I had wanted a horse of my own. I loved to press my face against the horses’ warm sides. My favorite was a mare named Molly-O, one of my uncle’s smaller horses, pebble-gray, with liquidy dark eyes that knew me, I was certain.

  I wondered what it meant: here was a horse, but I was a girl.

  I wondered if it was just an accident, how we are born: horse, girl.

  The way after my father was lost to us in defiance of my mother I would bicycle into Sparta and past the row house where Zoe Kruller was said to have been strangled in her bed and the thought came to me unbidden, illogical If I’d lived here. Anyone who lived here. Death was meant to come here.

  You want to blame them, those who’ve been killed. Any woman naked and strangled in her bed you certainly want to blame.

  “…shouldn’t have shut me out like that. Your ‘Uncle Sean.’”

  “Uncle Sean” was uttered in a tone of contempt, hurt. Daddy seemed to have been following my thoughts.

  “All of your mother�
�s people, that I’d thought liked me. I mean, some of them. The men. Your ‘Uncle Sean’—”

  “He isn’t my uncle, Daddy. He’s Mom’s uncle.”

  “He’s your great-uncle. That’s what he is.”

  I wanted to protest, that wasn’t my fault!

  I wanted to protest, Uncle Sean was just an old, ignorant man. Why should Daddy care what he thinks…

  “…should know that I won’t give up. A guilty man, he’d give up, he’d move away. By now he’d be vanished from Sparta. But I’m not a guilty man—anyway not guilty of that—and I mean to alter the judgment of bastards like ‘Uncle Sean’ that had no faith in me. You tell your mother, Krista: I am not going to slink away like a kicked dog, I am still fighting this. It’s been—how long—going on five years—a guilty man would’ve given up by now, but not Eddy Diehl.”

  Moved by sudden emotion, Daddy reached out another time to grope for my arm, my hand. His fingers were strong, closing around my wrist. I felt a pang of alarm, a moment’s unthinking panic. Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.

  7

  “WELL, SAY! Thought it was you.”

  At Honeystone’s Dairy the person you hoped would wait on you was Zoe Kruller.

  Not heavyset Audrey with the sulky dark-purple mouth like a wound, not the steely-eyed grandma Mrs. Honeystone the owner’s wife, or in the height of summer temporary hired-help, high school girls who took little interest in the names of most customers or in recalling that a finicky child might prefer one type of ice-cream cone (lighter, less crunchy) over another (darker, grainier and chewier), and want her chocolate scoop on the bottom and her strawberry on top so that, melting, the strawberry would seep into the chocolate and not the other way around which seemed to the finicky mildly repugnant, unnatural; and on sundaes no nuts, and no maraschino cherries. But Zoe Kruller knew, Zoe Kruller always remembered.

  As Zoe remembered names: “Krissie, is it? H’lo there Krissie!”