Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Grandpa Wolpert, grunting and cursing, wrestled the horse away. With a slam of his fist against her head he seemed to stun her, and I was freed.

  A miracle, everyone said, my toes hadn’t been crushed, every bone in my foot broken.

  Rare for Grandma Wolpert to speak directly to my mother, fixing her eyes upon my mother’s strained face, but she spoke so that day, in angry contempt, “That silly little thing, she’s a girl. She’s not to do men’s things on this farm.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A MAN WAS making love to me and I fell asleep. A toxic cloud drifted across my brain. I was trying to explain, but I could not speak. I want to love you, I pleaded. Help me love you. I felt the slap slap slap of the cornstalks against my damp face. I felt the dried, crumbling earth beneath my running feet. I heard the slap slap slap of the raw bread dough Grandma Wolpert slammed onto the plank counter. Her flour-smeared fingers, wrists the size of a man’s, hefty thighs and that single shelf of bosom like a camel’s hump it must have been so heavy, awkward, to bear. Her graying skinned-back hair and the unexploded fury in her face. The bread dough like unshaped life thrown down, kneaded, and twisted—slap! slap! slap!—and after it was baked in blackened tins there was something crabbed and gnarled about these coarse, whole-grain breads with thick crusts that seemed to speak of Grandma’s soul. Here I am—food. But I won’t nourish you.

  A man was making love to me and I fell asleep. But I woke almost immediately, laughing. “Well, it is funny,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “Isn’t it?” But I was the only one laughing in that silence.

  A VIVACIOUS PUBLIC MANNER suggests happiness in private. Or its opposite.

  Why does Grandma Wolpert hate us, Mommy? I’d asked her innocently when I was three or four. At that age when you don’t yet know what you’re allowed to acknowledge you know and what you aren’t. And seeing their exchange of glances, Mommy’s quick frown. Nobody hates us, what a thing to say! Isn’t that a silly thing to say. But I remember a kerosene lamp exploding in Grandma’s kitchen. Though they would laugh at such a memory. Exploding? don’t be silly, one of you kids knocked it off the table.

  At Grandma Wolpert’s funeral many years later I embarrassed my family by falling asleep. My head slumped, my mouth opened, I died. That delicious black-pit sleep. Maybe I’d had a few glasses of red wine beforehand, though the funeral was at 10:00 A.M., a February morning dark as twilight. I was twenty years old, or ten. I was three or four years old. Trying not to cry, I’d been pinched. Or was I trying not to laugh because I’d been tickled? Trying not to wet my panties, which is the hardest, most urgent thing not to do when you are three or four years old and sometimes older, as old as ten and no longer a baby.

  She had a shiny creased face of perpetual fury. They said she was near-sighted but refused to be examined and fitted for glasses. She saw enough of what was there, by God. More than enough. It wasn’t just the kerosene lamp she’d caused to explode but a slippery, soapy china platter that was wrenched from my fingers to shatter on the floor. Clumsy! look what you’ve done. (Helping with the dishes after one of the long, heavy Sunday afternoon meals when the air was still thick with food smells, waning clouds of tobacco from the men’s pipes.) Mommy’s bleeding finger, the knife-gouge in the ball of the thumb, oh, how did this happen? Oh, what happened? There was a way, brisk, efficient, you cut noodle dough in three-inch strips, flat on the table, a long, sharp-bladed knife moving in flashes. And eviscerating chickens after they’d been steamed and their feathers plucked, their scrawny necks lacking heads. There was a trick to it but what the trick was, Mommy never quite caught on. Here, let me do it. Give me that knife. In warm weather she sweated like a man, wiping globules of grease from her forehead and her upper lip, where coarse dark hairs, so few you could count them, sprouted. Her eyes, nearsighted or not, were fierce as slivers of glass reflecting fiery light. Body like a fortress trussed in a girdle with numerous straps, hooks, and eyes, and a “brassiere” (I would not learn this strange, exotic word until years later) like a horse harness. Her fleshy raddled legs, pulp-pale with broken blue veins like cobwebs, that had to be encased in flesh-colored “support” stockings. Muscular arms, stubby strong fingers. A blood-smeared apron. For she butchered chickens—this was her task and she took a zestful pride in it, almost, her only playfulness, ordering whichever boys were around (my brothers, or my cousins Joey, Luke, Jake) to round up several selected chickens, good specimens they had to be, not scrawny, lice-ridden, feathers missing where they’d been pecked and made to bleed by other hens but healthy-looking, with red combs, clear eyes, an alert hop to their step. The boys caught the squawking, wing-flailing red hens and brought them to Grandma at the chopping block with her ax. This was Grandma’s ax and not Grandpa’s and there’d be hell to pay if you messed with it. She was frowning now, grim and vexed, angry, scolding the very chicken laid upon the chopping block, for of course the creature was in a panic, of course the creature knew very well what was coming, and I saw the boys grimacing and grinning and biting their lips, and I saw Grandma’s face as she lifted, swung the ax, bringing the already stained blade down onto the chicken’s neck, and I thought, It helps to kill if you’re angry. I understood this to be a principle of adult life.

  Except in the shadowy front parlor where we were rarely invited, even on Sundays, she didn’t want us fussing in there, you kids causing a ruckus, and the men trailing in mud and manure (of course they wiped their feet before entering the house and it was Sunday, they hadn’t been mucking about the barnyard, but no matter), on the wallpapered wall above the rock-hard horsehair sofa there was Grandma’s and Grandpa’s wedding photograph, which I contemplated in wonder and maybe in fear, for how could that girl, that square-jawed but almost pretty young girl, be Grandma Wolpert? With her solemn dark eyes, thick dark hair gathered in an elegant thick braid like a crown, with a shy half-smile, in a white wedding gown with a high neck, lace, satin ribbons, a bouquet of roses clutched in her white-gloved hand; and her handsome bridegroom beside her, taller by several inches, Hiram Wolpert in his early twenties with startling black thick-tufted hair, sideburns, a neatly trimmed mustache, in a suit and a tie, a white carnation in his lapel. “Is that really you, Grandma?” I asked, pointing, and my mother tugged at my arm saying quickly, mortified, “Miss! Mind your manners,” but Grandma Wolpert just laughed, loud gut-laughter without evident malice, “That’s me as I used to be. Gramma before she was Gramma. Before she was Ma. Nearer in age to you right now than your Ma is to you,” and this scared me, for Grandma talked like a riddle sometimes, her silence bursting out into such puzzlements; you knew she meant something but what? Saying with a look of satisfaction, “Before she turned sow for breeding and suckling litters of you-know-what.” And she laughed again, at the look on my mother’s face.

  You-know-what. What?

  I was intrigued to learn that the girl in the wedding photograph had had a name of her own: Katrina. And a ‘maiden’ name: Sieboldt. One day I would learn that Katrina Sieboldt had been married to my grandfather Hiram Wolpert at the age of sixteen, she’d become a mother for the first time at seventeen (though the baby, a boy named Hiram, Jr., would live only a few months, his name to be passed on to the next-born boy, my father); of six known pregnancies she’d had two miscarriages and four children who survived. In her early thirties she had began to suffer from “female trouble” (of which no one in those days spoke openly, even within the family), by thirty-eight she’d become a grandmother, and old. The summer I was ten, Grandma Wolpert must have been only fifty-two. Fifty-two!

  3. The Cornfield

  I DIDN’T SEE the bloody corncob. If that was blood. I believe I didn’t see it.

  This was the summer I was ten.

  My father came out to the farm Saturdays to help his father and Tyrone, for Grandpa Wolpert had had a hernia operation and was semi-crippled, cursing his bad luck. Repairing rotted fences, shoring up the old barns, slaughtering pigs. Harvesting bushel upon bushel of tomatoes, sweet peppe
rs, squash to be trucked into Ransomville to a farm stand. There were fields of potatoes, wheat, corn to be harvested. Goddamned exhausting work, my father called it, yet he seemed to find it exhilarating, too. He was restless with his work in town (clerking weekdays in the hardware store he part-owned, with its dour, dusty front window whose display had been unchanged for as long as I could remember) and craved working outdoors. Sometimes, not often, out of duty or guilt or because my father insisted, Mom came along to help Grandma Wolpert with her endless task of canning, but my brothers and sister never came any longer. Grandpa Wolpert would ask, “Where’s them kids?” staring as if surprised each time, but Grandma Wolpert, pursing her mouth as if she’d been proved correct in some old quarrel, never said a word.

  This Saturday I’m thinking of, the men were out working and my boy cousins Luke and Jake trudged into Grandma’s kitchen for some ice water. They lived only about a mile away on a country highway and bicycled to the farm to check out their trapline set along the creek. Luke was fifteen, Jake was twelve, husky boys with sand-colored hair, blunt, bullhead faces. They went shirtless all summer and were tanned, as Grandma said, in that way you couldn’t judge was admiring or disgusted, dark as niggers. I yearned to be noticed by my older cousins, but they rarely paid attention to me. Now Grandma was saying, “G’on, take her along. She’s got nothing better to do. I don’t need her here.” The boys balked, staring glumly at me. Grandma said, with that low, snorting laugh, “Nobody’s going to hurt your precious traps, you two.” These words would have been a riddle to me if I’d heard them, but I didn’t. Later I would hear them; or so I believe. But not then. Nor did the boys seem to hear. Luke muttered what sounded like “Shit,” and Jake whined, “We’re in a hurry, Gram.” They went out of the kitchen, letting the screen door slam, and Grandma yelled after them, “Big men, eh? You get the hell out of my house, you got no better manners.” To me she said, shoving my shoulder with the flat of her hand—so rarely did Grandma touch me that this shove had the force of a caress—“Go on, go. Curiosity killed the cat.”

  I thought, Good! Mommy isn’t here.

  My mother would never have allowed me to go tagging after the boys. She didn’t like them, and she didn’t like their mother, my father’s older sister Dell. Dell and Dad weren’t “on speaking terms” for some reason so tangled and bitter, dragging more and more relatives into it, it would never be sorted out through the years. All this was in Luke’s and Jake’s faces though probably they knew as little of the quarrel as I did. Years later at Aunt Dell’s funeral I would ask my mother what on earth that had been about, a quarter-century feud? And my mother would insist she knew nothing about it. “Those Wolperts! You know what they’re like. Crazy.”

  Yes. I knew.

  Though exactly what I knew, I’ve never been certain.

  Back behind my grandfather’s barns, along a rutted lane, there were my boy cousins Luke and Jake, walking fast. They reminded me of young horses trotting along. Not looking back. They weren’t going to wait for me; possibly they’d forgotten me. Whatever Grandma Wolpert had told them to do, they weren’t going to do it. I ran after them but I didn’t call to them. I was just a little girl in their eyes: in shorts, T-shirt, sneakers. At the farm, my fair, thin skin was vulnerable to sunburn, my arms and legs were stippled with insect bites, scratches from thorns and prickly bushes. The boys crossed through a cornfield, rows and rows of tall cornstalks, browning leaves and tassels blown in the wind, and on the ground crows pecking at fallen corncobs, so many crows. I was a little afraid of crows, mistaking them sometimes for sparrow hawks; these crows cawed angrily at us, annoyed by our intrusion, but didn’t fly off. Where crows were sometimes pecking, on a road for instance, in a ditch, you wouldn’t want to look for fear of seeing something dead, nasty. I’d looked, and I was always sorry. Now my eyes swung away from the crows and I thought They’re not big enough to hurt me. Their beaks aren’t sharp enough. But I doubt this was truly so.

  All I could see of Luke and Jake was their heads above the tall grasses, their sand-colored hair. They were descending an overgrown path leading steeply down to the creek. I was breathless, panting. It was a bright, heat-shimmering day. It was late August. I thought, They don’t want you, why are you following them? I did not really want to see the boys’ traps. I’d seen Grandpa’s rusty traps hanging in the barn, I knew what traps were. Luke and Jake trapped rabbits, muskrats, and raccoons and sold their pelts for a few dollars. I did not really want to see the creatures they’d trapped, whose bodies they would toss into a burlap bag. But I pursued them. I was excited, as if this were a game, maybe it was a game, my cousins were testing me by walking fast, testing me to see if I could keep up with them, if I wasn’t afraid. I’d come to the creek many times, often with my brothers, I loved the creek we called Grandpa’s creek for it wouldn’t occur to us that the creek wasn’t Grandpa’s, that everything on his property wasn’t his. At this time of summer the creek was low, yet its current ran swiftly, noisily, down a slope of enormous rocks; there were churning foam-specked pools of deeper water and splashing streams of white-water rapids as if the wide creek were several creeks flowing together. In a marshy area beside the creek, tall cattails and marsh grasses grew lushly. It was a jungle. Everywhere a buzz of wasps, dragonflies. The glitter of dragonflies in the sun. Small, quick-darting goldfinches in the scrub willow beside the creek. I shielded my eyes from the glare of long strips of water in the marsh like slivers of broken mirror. I heard my cousins’ voices murmuring in excitement; I found them crouched over something on the bank. “What is it? What did you catch?” I asked. Their backs were to me. Luke’s bare tanned back damp with sweat, and his hair damp at the back of his neck. Jake leered at me. He was a smallish boy, homely, with what Mom called the Wolpert nose, broad and snubbed. I’d seen older boys, including Luke, shove him around, and I’d seen his own father curse him out and cuff him like a dog. He said, jeering, “C’mon and see, nosy.” It looked like a soft, mangled cat with dark-streaked fur. But there was a long, curving, scaly tail—a rat? Muskrat? As Luke extricated the creature from the trap’s jaws, Jake pretended to be petting it, mock-crooning, “Pus-sssy,” enjoying my look of repugnance. Luke carelessly tossed the limp body into the burlap sack. “How much is that worth? Where do you sell them?” I asked. I was shivering with sudden cold but I hoped to show my cousins that I wasn’t afraid or disgusted. I’d asked a question anyone might reasonably ask, but the boys ignored it, baiting the trap with a piece of green pear and setting its ugly saw-toothed jaws apart again, replacing it at the very edge of the creek bank. I was struck by my cousins’ seriousness, this adult-male solemnity, so like the way my father worked using his hands, head lowered, intent upon his task so he wouldn’t hear my questions. “Was that a muskrat?” I asked. “Is that what it is? The poor thing.” Luke and Jake moved on, Luke with the sack over his shoulder, and I followed after. I was used to my brothers ignoring me, too. I said daringly, “Don’t you feel sorry for that animal? What if it happened to you? Caught in a trap.” The boys were stomping in the creek bed; the path on the bank was so overgrown with briars, after hesitating a moment I stepped into the creek too, in about four inches of lukewarm water. At once my toes felt strange, squishy. I didn’t like that feeling. It was as if there was something in the toes of my sneakers, something disgusting like mashed potatoes, oatmeal that made me feel sick to my stomach. My sneakers were water-stained and filthy anyway from playing in the creek. Nobody walked in Grandpa’s creek barefoot because of bloodsuckers, small filmy black worms that stuck between your toes, sharp rocks and chunks of broken glass that could cut your feet. There was swimming in the creek, but not here. “Somebody could come along,” I called after my cousins, splashing ahead of me, “and spring your traps. So the animals wouldn’t get hurt.” Luke called back, “Oh, yeah? Somebody hadn’t better or she’ll get her skinny ass warmed.” Jake, incensed, said, “Get her skinny ass broke.” “How would you know who did it?” I said, taunting. “Y
ou wouldn’t know.” The boys located their next trap and discovered that the jaws were sprung, the bait eaten—but no prey. “Shit,” Luke said. “Fucker,” Jake said, swearing like a grown man. I said, excited, “He got away! He’s too smart for you.” My face throbbed with heat, I was strangely excited as if this were a game. It seemed to me an accomplishment if my cousins took note of me, glared at me. Especially Luke. I watched him examining the trap as if it had deceived him, lifting and turning it in his grimy hands. His lank, sun-bleached hair fell into his face so that he was continually pushing it back. I saw a flash of kinky brown hair in his armpit, his tight-muscled arms, his skin tanned like stained wood, and the nipples of his chest darker, like berries. Why did men and boys have those things, I wondered, if they didn’t nurse babies? My cousins were sweating, giving off a rank animal odor. My mother teased my father, saying that his country Wolpert relatives bathed only once a week—“Whether they need to or not.” It was true you could sometimes see a film of grime on the backs of their hands, often on their necks like a grainy shadow. Grandpa Wolpert was like that. The dirt was most noticeable when rivulets of sweat trailed through it, like those streaking my cousins’ bare, tanned backs. There was a scattering of pimples on Luke’s back, some of them big as boils and some like little red berries that looked as if they’d be hot to touch.

  It was at the next trap, on a higher embankment, that I heard the boys murmur in surprise, and I pushed forward to see what they’d found—another limp furry body caught between the jaws’ teeth, a muskrat, its swollen belly slashed, and bloody, and a sac of wriggling hairless things no longer than my thumb inside. Was it slugs? Worms? Tiny babies? I didn’t scream but I made a sound, and Luke and Jake turned to look at me with odd, half-shamed expressions, and Luke quickly dropped the furry body into the sack, crushed it beneath his foot, and laughed harshly. “Shouldn’t look, you. Shouldn’t be seeing such things,” Luke said. His manner was strangely prim, his face flushed with blood. But Jake was giggling, “Yeah, you! You shouldn’t.” Jake reached out and grabbed at my arm and left a smear of slimy blood on it. I screamed.