The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Though few living persons have claimed to have actually seen these terrifying birds—(for “birds” they are classified, with the capacity for limited periods of flight)—it is evidently the case, according to a biologist at the university whom I have consulted, that they must be descendants of Archaeopteryx, an extinct “flying reptile” of the Jurassic period. Such creatures are to be found today primarily in the Florida Everglades (where they are companions of the Everglade kite), in the Ogeechee region of Georgia, in the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, and, closer to home, in both the remote Pine Barrens of southeastern New Jersey (encompassing more than seventeen hundred square miles) and the smaller Great Bog, or Crosswicks Bog, several miles south and west of Princeton.

  THE CURSE INCARNATE

  How exhausted I am, and drained of emotion, following the account by Annabel Slade of her nightmare adventure in the Bog Kingdom! Though I have read it numerous times, each reading leaves me more upset, and with a fear that my objectivity as an historian might be jeopardized.

  And a feeling of great sympathy for poor Josiah, who recorded this upsetting material verbatim, over a period of hours, often near-overcome by emotion as well, with such fury that his hand ached and his fingers could scarcely clutch at his pen.

  If only it could be that this book of The Accursed might end with Annabel’s return home, her family’s forgiveness of her and great relief to have her back, and the birth of her child—her child, and not the Fiend’s.

  Yet, unfortunately, it was not that way. So far as I have been able to determine, Annabel died in, or shortly after, childbirth; near the end of her labor she lapsed into a coma, and did not awaken; with the effort of the skilled midwife Cassandra, the baby was “born”—but did not live for more than a few seconds.

  Called to the Manse, Dr. Boudinot could do nothing for the young mother, who had ceased breathing, and whose skin had begun to chill; the distraught physician signed a death certificate declaring that Annabel had died of “complications” following childbirth. (Which certificate I have located, in the Princeton Borough Records; but I was not able to locate any birth or death certificate for the unnamed and unbaptized Slade infant, the great-grandson of Winslow Slade.)

  Both Annabel and her infant son were interred in the Slade family mausoleum in Princeton Cemetery, in a private ceremony attended only by family and barred to all others, by a special decree of the Princeton police which the Slades had arranged.

  So it was said, and so it was widely believed.

  THE TURQUOISE-MARBLED BOOK contains nothing but Annabel’s words, as I have said; so, for a comprehension of the confused events that follow, the historian is obliged to consult a miscellany of sources of which no single one, unfortunately, can be thoroughly trusted.

  Though all concur that Annabel Slade passed away in her childhood bed, after an arduous delivery, and was entombed shortly thereafter, yet there is considerable disagreement about the infant: was it a monster, or a normal infant?

  The Beige Morocco Book, Josiah’s diary, contains no entries for this time, but several pages have been raggedly torn out.

  Mrs. Johanna van Dyck’s Ivory Book devotes a dozen pages to the subject; but, having had no firsthand experience of the events at Crosswicks, and dependent solely upon gossip and rumor, her account is of limited value. It seems to have been Mrs. van Dyck’s assumption, which was common in Princeton, that the baby was a “premature birth” precipitated by the mother’s physical ordeal. So the unhappy tale winds to its close Mrs. van Dyck wrote. God have mercy on these poor souls!

  Adelaide Burr in the Crimson Calfskin Book seems to have been in possession of more bits of information, presumably by way of gossiping friends and tattling servants, or of Dr. Boudinot’s breach of confidence; for, though suffering from some undiagnosed fever, which Mrs. Burr feared might be incipient Laotian sleeping sickness, the invalid devotes some thirty close-written pages to what she calls THE TRAGEDY OF CROSSWICKS MANSE. So enthralled is Mrs. Burr by her salacious subject matter, there are passages in which she neglects to write in her usual crabbed hieroglyphic but lapses into English as she speculates on the “nature of the misshapenness” of the infant, which she had heard from “reliable sources” was black-skinned; whether this “cruelty of nature” should be interpreted as a “just & necessary Act of God” for the sin of forbidden “race-mixing”; or whether such a phenomenon was a sort of natural “mutant”—like conjoined twins, or dwarfs. Adelaide’s earliest entries deal with the “new & piteous fact that horrifies all of Princeton”—that poor Annabel Slade, returned to her family, has died in childbirth, having given birth to a stillborn baby; it is not until a day later, having been informed of a “fresh onslaught” of news, that the diarist adds that the baby’s skin is black; not until several days later that she writes that the baby had indeed been a “freakish prodigy of nature” born with two heads and foreshortened, flipper-like arms and certain of its vital organs, heart, liver, kidneys, carried on the outside of the body. “How merciful, there is God—to deny breath to such affliction.” (Adelaide then indulges herself in an unwholesome sort of speculation, questioning whether, if she and Horace had had a child, “it would have been in the shape of anything decently Human; or so mischievously deformed, as Horace sometimes appears to me in his disheveled state, I would have been locked away in a madhouse forever, like the legendary Mrs. Andrew West.” ) (For so cruel rumors circulated about Dean West’s wife, who had passed away twenty years before.)

  At Prospect, the Wilsons were naturally shocked and grieved over what Woodrow referred to as the “undeserved tragedy of the Slades”; for he had been very fond of Annabel, as of Josiah, and believed that the young woman’s “fall from grace” was to be attributed to the growing immorality of the secular world—indeed, in the very heart of Presbyterian orthodoxy. Dwelling in what observers slightingly called “Dr. Wilson’s petticoat haven,” with a wife and daughters and a frequently visiting mother-in-law, Woodrow was of two minds concerning Woman, and doubted that the “natural propensities” of the sex could include a moral and rational depth equivalent to Man’s. So, the mysterious behavior of Annabel Slade seemed to him but a vindication of certain doubts, and a warning to all, that years of Christian upbringing cannot always overcome the biological fact of ab initio femaleness.

  Jessie Wilson, Annabel’s friend from school, was deeply shaken by news of her death; but did not want to talk about it, nor certainly about the rumor of a “misshapen black-skinned baby,” except to say that, since Annabel’s death, her nightmares seem to have lessened, for which she was grateful. “Instead of Annabel, I dream about—nothing! As if Annabel drew all with her of my emotions, and I am left behind.”

  Jessie’s pink satin bridesmaid’s dress would hang in her closet at Prospect for years, unworn a second time; for the young woman sincerely believed that there was a curse on the dress, that would afflict her should she ever dare to wear it.

  In her Brown-Dappled Book, Wilhelmina Burr set down an emotional account of what she was able to learn of her dear friend’s ordeal; initially, she records her dismay at being denied entry to the Manse, to visit Annabel; she records her concern, that Annabel might be very ill; then, a number of rumors: that Annabel had succumbed to madness, and tried to injure herself and her baby with an overdose of laudanum; that Annabel had not died in childbirth, but some days later, while nursing her misshapen baby; that the Fiend had come for his son, and taken away the infant, from all the Slades who dared not lift a finger to prevent him . . . Then, news came that Annabel had died: which Wilhelmina at first refused to believe.

  Like other West End residents, Wilhelmina would be “baffled & incensed” by not being invited to Annabel’s funeral, and lapsed into melancholy, that she would never see her friend again; but began to dream, that in fact Annabel had not died; and that she and Annabel would be reunited one day soon, this side of the grave.

  Wilhelmina would hear of the burial in Princeton Cemetery that, as the mauso
leum doors were slowly closed, Josiah broke into sobs and refused to be comforted by his mother, or anyone; and Todd woke from a transfixed state to rush at the mausoleum, clawing at the doors and wrestling with the attendants who were shutting them, crying angrily that his cousin Annabel should not die, and would not die; because Todd would not allow it, and Todd would bring her back.

  Among Princetonians, by this time, every sort of crazed rumor was circulating, the most bizarre being relayed to Amanda FitzRandolph by a neighbor on Edgehill Road, that the infant born to Annabel Slade was no human creature at all, but a black snake; with a blunt bullet head, topaz eyes, and a length of at least two feet, thick, muscular, with “diamond” scales covered in its mother’s blood. Amanda had felt faint with disgust, and disbelief; asking what had become of this hideous thing she was told that it had escaped.

  For all who were in attendance at the delivery in Annabel’s room, it was reported, had been stunned by horror and incredulity, and too frightened to take hold of the snake, or beat at it with any weapon. “So that the horrible thing slithered from the bed, made its way downstairs, and out of Crosswicks Manse. And it was the sight of the snake that so terrified Annabel, she sank into a coma, and never awakened.”

  Mrs. FitzRandolph cried: “Ridiculous! It is utterly absurd, such a rumor.”

  So her neighbor went away chastened; but would relay to others that, as she’d told of the hellish birth, Mandy FitzRandolph had not looked nearly so surprised as one might have expected.

  PART III

  “The Brain, within Its Groove . . .”

  THE WRITER MUST APPEAL TO PHYSICIANS

  & TO MEN CONVERSANT WITH THE LATENT

  SPRINGS & OCCASIONAL PERVERSIONS, OF

  THE HUMAN MIND.

  —Charles Brockden Brown, Advertisement for Weiland, 1798

  “VOICES”

  Following his sister’s death Josiah Slade was generally noted to be “gravely altered” and to “behave strangely”; yet observers, seeing only the outward man, had no idea how very much altered and how strange the young heir to Crosswicks Manse had become.

  Where before Annabel’s death Josiah had been frantic with activity in searching for her, and hoping to exact revenge upon Axson Mayte, now he became a virtual hermit sequestered away at Crosswicks, rarely consenting even to dine with his family. He had tried to locate the Bog Kingdom in which Annabel had been held captive, but without success; nor did maps of New Jersey, of early eras, suggest any such vast marshy area, apart from the Pine Barrens and the smaller marshland in Crosswicks Forest, covering only a few acres, which Josiah had explored numerous times, to no avail.

  Many times, Josiah fantasized having murdered Axson Mayte when he’d been introduced to the man, by Woodrow Wilson, on the university campus; except of course, he would never have committed such a mad act.

  “Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”

  Through the winter and spring of 1906 Josiah spent most of his time locked away at the Manse, brooding and berating himself for his failure; for he did truly believe that he was to blame for his sister’s death, as he had not prevented it. Through the long nights he read and reread such books as he considered crucial to his understanding of human nature, and possibly illuminating in suggesting a course of action for him to take: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; the 1818 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus; and not least, Milton’s epic Paradise Lost and such tragedies of Shakespeare—Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet—that seemed to pertain particularly to his situation. So restless was Josiah, he could rarely sit still for more than a half hour, but had to pace about, or rush outside to walk hurriedly by moonlight; it was his habit to read several books at once; no sooner did he begin a book than he pushed it aside to take up another—now Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, now Jack London’s The Call of the Wild; now Plato, Thucydides, Goethe and Hegel, from his grandfather Winslow’s library; now, the magnificent if rather shopworn Gutenberg Bible enshrined in the library, that could never be removed from it. (At such times, Winslow Slade sat silently nearby, observing his frowning grandson, but making little comment; for, like Josiah, Winslow seemed to have felt that he was in some way to blame for Annabel’s death, in having failed to prevent it; and, since his stroke of some months before, the elderly man had lost much of the vigor and goodwill for which he’d been renowned and seemed rather more simply a melancholy individual whom life had left behind, marooned amid the debris of his old, former life and reputation.) “Do you have any question, Josiah?”

  “Question? What question?”

  “About what you’re reading . . . You look as if you might have a question.”

  Winslow Slade spoke in a kindly and unassuming voice, having seen his grandson grimace, in perusing the Bible; for there is much in the Bible to provoke grimaces of incomprehension. But Josiah only just shrugged.

  “I have plenty of questions, Grandfather. But not questions the Bible can answer.”

  But Josiah’s concentration was poor, no matter the ferocity of his intention, for his thoughts assailed him increasingly, in the form of alien “voices.”

  You will, will you?—eh? Yes of course you will—you!

  When the voices rose to a din, Josiah had to flee the house and wander into the forest, or tramp along back roads; his nerves were so tightly strung, he could not bear the company of other people; he had ceased seeing, or even speaking with, his male friends in Princeton, who had ceased trying to contact him after numerous rebuffs. He’d have liked to visit Pearce van Dyck in his office at the university but could not bring himself to step onto the college campus. The fatuous college boys roused him to impatience and contempt, and the intelligent, serious-minded college boys roused him to envy, and a yearning for his lost youth.

  As much as possible Josiah avoided the busyness of Nassau Street. For he imagined, not unreasonably, that, as he made his way along the sidewalk heads turned in his wake; in pity, in sympathy, yet in cruel satisfaction as well.

  Is that one of them?—the Slades?

  Think they’d be ashamed to show their faces . . .

  In Micawber Book Store, Josiah had formerly liked to browse in a pleasurable sort of trance, collecting an armload of books to purchase; now, he made a furtive course through the aisles, in search of a particular title that might strike his fancy and that he must own immediately, and read, as if his life depended upon it. So Josiah had, in recent weeks, impulsively purchased books as diverse as Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, whose “calendar” of sharply observed little ironies struck his fancy, and Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, that seemed to him a frank, fearless, yet melancholy document; and, belatedly, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that roused Josiah to emotions of sympathy and indignation, and settled for him, for all time, that the responsibility of “white” Americans was to establish a society in which “Negro” Americans might be freely at home, as equals.

  One slender book, Josiah had ordered, and picked up now, with much anticipation—Poems by Emily Dickinson. The little volume of mostly short poems had gone through several editions, Josiah saw, since its publication in 1890; the edition he held in his hand had been published in 1896. Yet, apart from Wilhelmina’s remarks, Josiah had never heard anything about the poetess, and was doubtful of the worth of his purchase until, on his way back to Crosswicks, a distance of about a mile, he leafed through the pages, and was struck by a “voice” of uncommon timbre, far from any poetic voice he had yet encountered:

  Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

  Success in Circuit lies

  Too bright for our infirm Delight

  The Truth’s superb surprise

  As Lightning to Children eased

  With explanation kind

  The Truth must dazzle gradually


  Or every man be blind—

  “If I am to be haunted by ‘voices,’ how wise it would be, to be haunted by this one!”

  Yet, there were times when Josiah felt that he must escape from Crosswicks, and from Princeton; not by train (where he would have encountered fellow Princetonians) but by motorcar he traveled to New York City, to walk the streets, marveling at the throngs of people of whom many appeared to be immigrants, speaking languages utterly foreign to him. Though Josiah had relatives and family friends who lived in mansions on Park Avenue, and overlooking Central Park on Fifth Avenue, he made no effort to contact these individuals but far more preferred to walk aimlessly along the teeming streets of the Bowery, as it was called—long ago, a verdant Dutch farm; equally attractive were the congested streets of the West Side, the open “fresh produce” markets and meat-packing district near the Hudson River, the garment district, the “fresh flower” district, the blocks of brownstone tenements of the Lower East Side filled with life as a hive is filled with bees . . . Simply to cross a street wide as lower Fifth Avenue, Sixth or Seventh Avenues, or the aptly titled, so cunningly slanting Broadway, upon which traffic rushed in ill-defined lanes of two general directions—horse-drawn cargo-trucks, horse-drawn fire trucks, carriages and taxicabs; a frequent incursion of motor-vehicles compounding the confusion, in a constant blaring of horns—was a challenge that made Josiah’s blood leap as at the prospect of battle. For the drivers of both cargo-trucks and fire trucks plunged forward into slower traffic, heedless of horns and the screams of pedestrians; the more whipping their frothing horses, as the congested way should have made them cautious. Josiah was several times almost struck by galloping horses, and by a brass-trimmed motorcar whose uniformed driver but glanced at him as it passed within inches as if the heir to the Slade fortune were of no more consequence than a luckless street cur; yet his most dangerous moment came when a careening fire truck pulled by four ill-matched horses veered out of the street, to avoid a head-on collision with a careening cargo-truck, and onto the crowded pedestrian walkway. Badly shaken Josiah shouted at the driver—“Damn you! Keep to the street!”—but within seconds the fire truck had plunged onward. Quickly one felt rage, but quickly rage subsided, for the fact of Manhattan street-life, Josiah saw, was its drumming vividness, and its transience.