Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But something was wrong with this. The thought came a second time, to correct—She has put us inside that one. She has shut the door.

  There came a frenzy of crows, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, as if the child had spoken aloud and said a forbidden thing.

  The woman cried shaking her fist at the birds, God will curse you!

  The raucous accusing cries grew louder. More black-feathered birds appeared, spreading their great wings. They settled in the skeletal trees fierce and clattering. The woman cried, cursed and spat and yet the bird-shrieks continued and the child was given to know that the birds had come for her.

  These were sent by Satan, the woman said.

  It was time, the woman said. A day and a night and another day and now the night had become dawn of the new day and it was time and so despite the shrieking birds the woman half-walked half-carried the child in the torn paper nightgown in the direction of the ruined mill. Pulling at the child so that the child’s thin pale arm felt as if it were about to be wrenched out of its socket.

  The woman made her way beyond the ruined mill which smelled richly of something sweetly rancid and fermented and into an area of broken bricks and rotted lumber fallen amid rich dark muddy soil and spiky weeds grown to the height of children. In her haste she startled a long black snake sleeping in the rotted lumber but the snake refused to crawl away rapidly instead moving slowly and sinuously out of sight in defiance of the intruder. At first the woman paused—the woman stared—for the woman was awaiting an angel of God to appear to her—but the sinuous black-glittering snake was no angel of God and in a fury of hurt, disappointment and determination the woman cried, Satan go back to hell where you came from but already in insolent triumph the snake had vanished into the underbrush.

  The child had ceased whimpering, for the woman had forbade her. The child barefoot and naked inside the rumpled and torn pale green paper gown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION. The child’s legs were very thin and stippled with insect bites and of these bites many were bleeding, or had only recently ceased bleeding. The child’s head near-bald, stubbled and bleeding and the eyes dazed, uncomprehending. At the end of a lane leading to the canal towpath was a spit of land gleaming with mud the hue of baby shit and tinged with a sulfurous yellow: and the smell was the smell of baby shit for here were many things rotted and gone. Faint mists rose from the interior of the marsh like the exhaled breaths of dying things. The child began to cry helplessly. As the woman hauled her along the land-spit the child began to struggle but could not prevail. The child was weak from malnutrition yet still the child could not have prevailed for the woman was strong and the strength of God flowed through her being like a bright blinding beacon. Light flared off the woman’s face, she had never been so certain of herself and so joyous in certainty as now. For knowing now that the angel of God would not appear to her as the angel of God had appeared to both Abraham and Hagar who had borne Abraham’s child and had been cast into the wilderness by Abraham with the child to die of thirst.

  And this was not the first time the angel of God had been withheld from her. But it would be the last time.

  With a bitter laugh the woman said, Here, I am returning her to You. As You have bade me, so I am returning her to You.

  First, Dolly: the woman pried Dolly from the child’s fingers and tossed Dolly out into the mud.

  Here! Here is the first of them.

  The woman spoke happily, harshly. The rubber doll lay astonished in the mud below.

  Next, the child: the woman seized the child in her arms to push her off the spit of land and into the mud—the child clutched at her only now daring to cry Momma! Momma!—the woman pried the child’s fingers loose and pushed, shoved, kicked the child down the steep incline into the flat glistening mud below close by the ugly rubber doll and there the child flailed her thin naked limbs, on her belly now and her small astonished face in the mud so the cry Momma was muffled and on the bank above the woman fumbled for something—a broken tree limb—to swing at the child for God is a merciful God and would not wish the child to suffer but the woman could not reach the child and so in frustration threw the limb down at the child for all the woman’s calmness had vanished and she was now panting, breathless and half-sobbing and by this time though the ugly rubber doll remained where it had fallen on the surface of the mud the agitated child was being sucked down into the mud, a chilly bubbly mud that would warm but grudgingly with the sun, a mud that filled the child’s mouth, and a mud that filled the child’s eyes, and a mud that filled the child’s ears, until at last there was no one on the spit of land above the mudflat to observe her struggle and no sound but the cries of the affronted crows.

  Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

  October 2002

  Readied. She believed yes, she was.

  She was not one to be taken by surprise.

  “Carlos, stop! Please. Let me out here.”

  In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes moved onto her, startled.

  “Ma’am? Here?”

  “I mean—Carlos—I’d like to stop for just a minute. Stretch my legs.”

  This was so awkwardly phrased, and so seemingly fraudulent—stretch my legs!

  Politely the driver protested: “Ma’am—it’s less than an hour to Ithaca.”

  He was regarding her with a look of mild alarm in the rearview mirror. Very much, she disliked being observed in that mirror.

  “Please just park on the shoulder of the road, Carlos. I won’t be a minute.”

  Now she did speak sharply.

  Though continuing to smile of course. For it was unavoidable, in this new phase of her life she was being observed.

  The bridge!

  She had never seen the bridge before, she was sure. And yet—how familiar it was to her.

  It was not a distinguished or even an unusual bridge but an old-style truss bridge of the 1930s, with a single span: wrought-iron girders marked with elaborate encrustations of rust like ancient and unreadable hieroglyphics. Already M.R. knew, without needing to see, that the bridge was bare planking and would rattle beneath crossing vehicles; all of the bridge would vibrate finely, like a great tuning fork.

  Like the bridges of M.R.’s memory, this bridge had been built high above the stream below, which was a small river, or a creek, that flooded its banks after rainstorms. To cross the bridge you had to ascend a steep paved ramp. Both the bridge and the ramp were narrower by several inches than the two-lane state highway that led to the bridge and so in its approach to the bridge the road conspicuously narrowed and the shoulder was sharply attenuated. All this happened without warning—you had to know the bridge, not to blunder onto it when a large vehicle like a van or a truck was crossing.

  There was no shoulder here upon which to park safely, at least not a vehicle the size of the Lincoln Town Car, but canny Carlos had discovered an unpaved service lane at the foot of the bridge ramp, that led to the bank of the stream. The lane was rutted, muddy. In a swath of underbrush the limousine came to a jolting stop only a few yards from rushing water.

  Some subtle way in which the driver both obeyed his impulsive employer, and resisted her, made M.R.’s heart quicken in opposition to him. Clearly Carlos understood that this was an imprudent stop to have made, within an hour of their destination; the very alacrity with which he’d driven the shiny black limousine off the road and into underbrush was a rebuke to her, who had issued a command to him.

  “Carlos, thank you. I won’t be a—a minute . . .”

  Won’t be a minute. Like stretch my legs this phrase sounded in her ears forced and alien to her, as if another spoke through her mouth, and M.R. was the ventriloquist’s dummy.

  Quickly before Carlos could climb out of the car to open the door for her, M.R. opened the door for herself. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to being treated with such deference and form
ality!—it wasn’t M.R.’s nature.

  M.R., whom excessive attention and even moderate flattery embarrassed terribly; as if, by instinct, she understood the mockery that underscores formality.

  “I’ll be right back! I promise.”

  She spoke cheerily, gaily. M.R. couldn’t bear for any employee—any member of her staff—to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

  As, teaching, when she’d approach a seminar room hearing the voices and laughter of the students inside, she’d hesitate to intrude—to evoke an abrupt and too-respectful silence.

  Her power over others was that they liked her. Such liking could only be volitional, free choice.

  She was walking along the embankment thinking these thoughts. By degrees the rushing water drowned out her thoughts—hypnotic, just slightly edgy. There is always a gravitational pull toward water: to rushing water. One is drawn forward, one is drawn in.

  Now. Here. Come. It is time. . . .

  She smiled hearing voices in the water. The illusion of voices in the water.

  But here was an impediment: the bank was tangled with briars, vines. An agonized twisting of something resembling guts. It wasn’t a good idea for M.R. to be walking in her charcoal-gray woolen trousers and her pinching-new Italian shoes.

  Yet if you looked closely, with a child’s eye, you could discern a faint trail amid the underbrush. Children, fishermen. Obviously, people made their way along the stream, sometimes.

  A nameless stream—creek, or river. Seemingly shallow, yet wide. A sprawl of boulders, flat shale-like rock. Froth of the hue and seeming substance of the most nouveau of haute cuisine—foam-food, pureed and juiced, all substance leached from it, terrible food! Tasteless and unsatisfying and yet M.R. had been several times obliged to admire it, dining at the Manhattan homes of one or another of the University’s wealthy trustees, who kept in their employ full-time chefs.

  The creek, or river, was much smaller than the Black Snake River that flowed south and west out of the southern Adirondacks, traversing Beechum County at a diagonal—the river of M.R.’s childhood. Yet—here was the identical river-smell. If M.R. shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, she was there.

  Here was an odor of something brackish and just slightly sour—rancid / rotted—decaying leaves—rich damp dark earth that sank beneath her heels as she made her way along the bank, shading her eyes against the watery glitter like tinfoil.

  Mingled with the river-smell was an odor of something burning, like rubber. Smoldering tires, garbage. A wet-feather smell. But faint enough that it wasn’t unpleasant.

  All that M.R. could see—on the farther bank of the stream—was a wall of dark-brick buildings with only a few windows on each floor; and beyond the windows, nothing visible. High on the sides of the buildings were advertisements—product names and pictures of—faces? human figures?—eroded by time and now indecipherable, lost to all meaning.

  “ ‘Mohawk Meats and Poultry.’ ”

  The words came to her. The memory was random, and fleeting.

  “ ‘Boudreau Women’s Gloves and Hosiery.’ ”

  But that had been Carthage, long ago. These ghost-signs, M.R. could not read at all.

  Carlos was surely correct, they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca—which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University where M.R. had been an undergraduate twenty years before and had graduated summa cum laude, in another lifetime. Yet she had no idea of the name of this small town or where exactly they were except south and west of Ithaca in the glacier-ravaged countryside of Tompkins County.

  It was a bright chilly October day. It was a day splotched with sumac like bursts of flame.

  The not-very-prosperous small town of faded-brick storefronts and cracked sidewalks reminded M.R. of the small city in which she’d grown up in Beechum County in the foothills of the southern Adirondacks. Vaguely she was thinking I should have planned to visit them. It has been so long.

  Her father lived there still—in Carthage.

  She had not told Konrad Neukirchen that she would be spending three nights within a hundred miles of Carthage since virtually every minute of the conference would be filled with appointments, engagements, panels, talks—and yet more people would request time with M.R., once the conference began. She had not wanted to disappoint her father, who’d always been so proud of her.

  Her father, and also her mother of course. Both the Neukirchens: Konrad and Agatha.

  How painful it was to M.R., to disappoint others! Her elders, who’d invested so much in her. Their love for her was a heavy cloak upon her shoulders, like one of those lead-shield cloaks laid upon you in the dentist’s office to shield you from X-rays—you were grateful for the cloak but more grateful when it was removed.

  Far rather would M.R. be disappointed by others, than to be the agent of disappointment herself. For M.R. could forgive—readily; she was very good at forgiveness.

  She was very good at forgetting, also. To forget is the very principle of forgiveness.

  Perhaps it was a Quaker principle, or ought to have been, which she’d inherited from her parents: forget, forgive.

  Boldly now she walked on the bank of the nameless river amid broken things. An observer on the bridge some distance away would have been surprised to see her: a well-dressed woman, alone, in this place so impractical for walking, amid a slovenly sort of quasi-wilderness. M.R. was a tall woman whom an erect backbone and held-high head made taller—a woman of youthful middle-age with an appealingly girlish face—fleshy, flush-cheeked. Her eyes were both shy and quick-darting, assessing. In fact the eyes were a falcon’s eyes, in a girl’s face.

  How strange she felt in this place! The glittery light—lights—reflected in the swift-running water seemed to suffuse her heart. She felt both exhilarated and apprehensive, as if she were approaching danger. Not a visible danger perhaps. Yet she must go forward.

  This was a common feeling of course. Common to all who inhabit a “public” role. She would be addressing an audience in which there was sure to be some opposition to her prepared words.

  Her keynote address, upon which she’d worked intermittently, for weeks, was only to be twenty minutes long: “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism.’ ” This was the first time that M. R. Neukirchen had been invited to address the National Conference of the prestigious American Association of Learned Societies. There would be hostile questions put to her at the conclusion of her talk, she supposed. At her own University where the faculty so supported her liberal position, yet there were dissenting voices from the right. But overwhelmingly her audience that evening would support her, she was sure.

  It would be thrilling—to speak to this distinguished group, and to make an impression on them. Somehow it had happened, the shy schoolgirl had become, with the passage of not so many years, an impassioned and effective public speaker—a Valkyrie of a figure—fiercely articulate, intense. You could see that she cared so much—almost, at moments, M.R. quivered with feeling, as if about to stammer.

  Audiences were transfixed by her, in the narrow and rarified academic world in which she dwelt.

  I am baring my soul to you. I care so deeply!

  Often she felt faint, beforehand. A turmoil in her stomach as if she might be physically ill.

  The way an actor might feel, stepping into a magisterial role. The way an athlete might feel, on the cusp of a great triumph—or loss.

  Her (secret) lover had once assured her It isn’t panic you feel, Meredith. It isn’t even fear. It’s excitement: anticipation.

  Her (secret) lover was a brilliant but not entirely reliable man, an astronomer/cosmologist happiest in the depths of the Universe. Andre Litovik’s travels took him into extragalactic space far from M.R. yet he, too, was proud of her, and did love her in his way. So she wished to believe.

  They saw each other infrequently
. They did not even communicate often, for Andre was negligent about answering e-mail. Yet, they thought of each other continuously—or so M.R. wished to believe.

  Possibly unwisely, given the dense underbrush here, M.R. was approaching the bridge from beneath. She’d been correct: the floor was planking—you could see sunlight through the cracks—as vehicles passed, the plank floor rattled. A pickup truck, several cars—the bridge was so narrow, traffic slowed to five miles an hour.

  She’d learned to drive over such a bridge. Long ago.

  She felt the old frisson of dread—a visceral unease she experienced now mainly when flying in turbulent weather—Return to your seats please, fasten your seat belts please, the captain has requested you return to your seats please.

  At such times the terrible thought came to her: To die among strangers! To die in flaming wreckage.

  Such curious, uncharacteristic thoughts M. R. Neukirchen hid from those who knew her intimately. But there was no one really, who knew M. R. Neukirchen intimately.

  In a way it was strange to her, this curious fact: she had not (yet) died.

  As the pre-Socratics pondered Why is there something and not rather nothing?—so M.R. pondered Why am I here, and not rather—nowhere?

  A purely intellectual speculation, this was. M.R.’s professional philosophizing wasn’t tainted by the merely personal.

  Yet, these questions were strange, and wonderful. Not an hour of her life when she did not give thanks.

  M.R. had been an only child. An entire psychology has been devised involving the only child, a variant of the first-born.

  The only child is not inevitably the first-born, however. The only child may be the survivor.