Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mudgirl Reclaimed. Mudgirl Renamed.

  April–May 1965

  In the hilly countryside south and west of the Adirondacks in Herkimer and Beechum counties quickly the grim news spread: one of the little Kraeck girls had been found in the mudflats by the Black Snake River abandoned by her mother and left to die.

  No it could be no accident. No one would leave a child by chance. Not thrown into the mudflats and her battered little doll beside her . . .

  For they’d seen on TV news a photograph of the unidentified child approximately three years of age in the hospital at Carthage.

  Even with a crude-shaved head, bruised face, swollen and mournful eyes the child was recognized by residents of Star Lake who’d known the mother Marit Kraeck—had to be the younger girl, they thought.

  Unless it was the elder, the five-year-old, emaciated, near-death and speechless as if the rapacious mud had sucked away her breath.

  Not until the child was found had it been known that the child was lost.

  As decades later she would propose a teasing proposition at a philosophy colloquium If words cease to exist do their meanings cease to exist too?

  If names are nullified are the named nullified—or, renamed, reconstituted?

  Excited calls were placed to the county sheriff’s office. Residents of Star Lake reported that the Kraeck woman hadn’t been seen in or around Star Lake for at least a week and the picture of the little girl on TV—the one found in the mudflats—could have been either of the little Kraeck girls.

  And there was the stammering young man—a trapper along the Black Snake River—who’d found and rescued the girl—interviewed on local TV a dozen times and one of these times standing on the embankment above the mudflat to which he’d brought sheriff’s deputies to show them exactly where he’d found the little girl in the mud—as well as the rubber doll he’d described, that was still there in a tangle of mud and rushes.

  And so on TV the shocking sight of this naked and hairless castaway doll revealed there in the rushes like a castaway child.

  The Kraeck girls were Jewell and Jedina.

  There was no known father, or fathers. There were none to come forward to claim the little girl in the hospital at Carthage.

  Neither girl had gone to any school. No birth certificates or any documents pertaining to them could be discovered in either Herkimer or Beechum counties or, in time, in any county in New York State. Star Lake neighbors testified as to their probable ages.

  When finally after several weeks in the hospital the little girl regained her ability to speak—in a hoarse whisper at first, comprehensible only to the nurses who most cared for her—she would say that she was Jewell.

  She did not seem to know her last name. But she knew that she was not Jedina, but Jewell.

  Of Jedina, she did not speak. Of Jedina, she could not be coaxed to speak.

  Nor of her mother, she could not be coaxed to speak.

  So terribly emaciated, near death. And her head shaved and stippled with bruises, scabs.

  Yet insisting yes she was Jewell.

  Her injured eyes blinking up from the small battered face both fear and in steely resolution Not Jedina but Jewell.

  Jewell. Jewell!

  Of Jedina truly the child seemed to know nothing. Of Jedina the child would never speak for words had been taken from her, and her mouth filled with mud.

  And so it was, the surviving girl was noted to be Jewell Kraeck. The birth date for Jewell Kraeck was believed to be 1960 but this could not be official for no official certificate seemed to exist.

  Naturally then it was wondered where was the other sister—whose name was Jedina?

  And where was their mother Marit Kraeck?

  The mudflats beside the Black Snake River were searched by rescue workers. The desolate countryside of northern Beechum County, hills of shattered shale, glacial rock-ruins, beech forests part collapsed as by a mysterious plague and their exposed roots gnarled as arthritic fingers—fleetingly these images appeared on TV news, sometimes from the aerial perspective of a helicopter and at such times the rapid-gliding shadow of the helicopter was observed on the ground below like that of a gigantic predator-bird.

  And there was long-armed gangling Suttis Coldham staring into the TV camera licking his lips trying for Christ sake not to succumb to a stammer like a man trying to contain a large writhing snake encased inside his body saying—insisting—“There was just—the one little girl in the mud. There was just the one. If there’d been two I’d seen two but—there was just one.”

  Residents of Star Lake and vicinity who knew Marit Kraeck—only just slightly, for Marit Kraeck shunned her neighbors and any who made inquiries of her, as she feared and despised all individuals associated with the county or the state or any government or government service whether named to her or not or actual or only just imagined—these women—for nearly all were women—believed that the county ought to have done more than just food stamps for the poor mother and her little daughters. In Sparta she’d lived for a while at Lake Clear Junction and then at Star Lake she’d arrived with a spiky-haired long-distance trucker a dozen years older than she was who liked to laugh and his gums wetly bared when he laughed—Vietnam vet this man identified himself—rank of corporal and his first name Toby, or Tyrell— “shrapnel” in his legs he’d said and a “steel plate” in his head he’d joked about so you could not know if the ex-corporal was serious or not-serious and both of them heavy drinkers living together in a run-down place outside town until the ex-corporal disappeared then it began to seem that Marit Kraeck was excessively religious—“troubled” and “not right in her head”—initially she’d gone to several churches in the Star Lake area then finally just to the Methodist church—Sunday morning, Wednesday evening prayer service—and there was some incident at Star Lake Methodist involving Marit Kraeck and the minister of the church having to call the sheriff’s office to deal with the angry woman threatening him or threatening to harm herself in his presence. And there was Marit Kraeck arrested for impaired driving, public drunkenness and resisting arrest and so sentenced to a term in the women’s house of detention and subsequently released on parole and for the past fifteen months living in a squalid little rented house not much larger than a packing crate with a sequence of men taking advantage of her and at last—again—the ex-corporal Toby, or Tyrell the long-distance trucker who seemed to have returned to her before shortly again departing for—Florida?—and Marit Kraeck had gone with him.

  And the little girls, it was supposed. Gone with the adults to Florida.

  After the girl believed to be Jewell was discovered in the mudflat and at the time of the search for the girl believed to be Jedina it was revealed that the run-down place Marit Kraeck had lived in down behind the Gulf station on the highway had virtually every square inch of its walls covered in some kind of religious picture, or crucifix—carved-wood crucifixes, gold-foil crucifixes, aluminum-wrap crucifixes, crucifixes of plastic threaded with tinsel, a two-foot crucifix of crudely crocheted white lace—but no heat except a wood-burning stove crammed with ashes and debris and turned-off electricity and strips of soiled polyurethane over loose-fitting windows, slapping in the wind like flayed skin.

  Wherever Marit Kraeck had gone she’d left no discernible trace. The battered old Dodge she was seen to drive had vanished also. And now there was the child in the hospital at Carthage and no one to visit her or take crucial notice of her except Herkimer County Family Services which would place her in a foster home in the Carthage area.

  And so the question was everywhere asked in the spring of 1965 in upstate New York south and west of the Adirondacks—Where is the lost little girl Jedina Kraeck?

  Mudwoman Fallen. Mudwoman Arisen.

  Mudwoman in the Days of Shock and Awe.

  March 2003–April 2003

  Readied! She was.
>
  In her sleep, still alive.

  In astonished silence she fell. So suddenly she’d missed a step. So suddenly she hadn’t time to draw breath, to scream. Nor was there purpose in screaming—or in breathing—for there was no one in the vast darkened house to hear her.

  On the stairs she fell. Not on the staircase at the front of the house but on the steep narrow tight-curving staircase at the rear of the house that had been the servants’ staircase in long-ago days when a staff of servants had lived in Charters House.

  Striking the side of her head on the rungs of the railing, and her mouth. Striking her right shoulder. Something liquid and scalding splashed on her fingers, her exposed right forearm as she fell and continued to fall slip-sliding down the steps that were carpeted—but meagerly carpeted, with inches of exposed wood painted gray, ugly and unyielding—the side of her skull, the undersides of both elbows and the underside of her jaw striking these steps in rapid succession one-two-three and a sharp blow like a kick in her ribs and still she could not scream for the breath was struck from her though at last there came grunts, sobs of surprise, pain, humiliation—Alone. Alone—like this.

  It was 1:06 A.M. of March 22, 2003. In the early days of the Iraqi invasion—the days of Shock and Awe.

  And in the aftermath of Alexander Stirk’s (attempted) suicide.

  In her public appearances the University president spoke very carefully of course. She did not discuss “sensitive” University matters—(like Stirk)—and she did not speak openly of politics. Though she was always being questioned on these subjects, she did not declare herself publicly as strongly opposed to the President and his war. Since taking office she’d been cautioned. And she’d learned. Belatedly she’d learned: impulsiveness/impetuousness in a chief administrator is not a desirable trait. Rashness is not a desirable trait. To speak plainly, frankly—to speak one’s heart—is only possible when one is a private figure, not the representative of an institution. And so her anger, alarm, despair at the bellicose idiocy of the government smoldered beneath her bright animated public words. And her fury at the Bush administration’s cynical exploitation of a fear of “terrorist attacks” in the wake of 9/11—all that her Quaker parents had imbued in her, to abhor and to resist. And so if she alluded to This terrible news, this latest crisis it was strictly in private, among people she knew felt exactly as she did.

  Or, more daringly, she might allude to This new war! This death-knell for education . . .

  Maybe—maybe in her speech to the Chicago alumni organization earlier that day—she’d uttered such words. But not from the podium, only afterward, among individuals she knew to be fervent anti-war.

  In the country, in these early days of the Iraqi invasion, division between pro-war, anti-war was fierce and irreconcilable.

  As fierce and irreconcilable as pro-life, pro-choice.

  About which the University president had better not speak openly, either.

  And so in Chicago, as in Minneapolis—in Cleveland, in Columbus, in Milwaukee—in Seattle, in Portland—anywhere it was the University president’s duty to address University alumni groups as she did frequently through the academic year on the subject “The University in the Twenty-first Century: Challenges and Opportunities” M. R. Neukirchen was passionate on issues involving the University and issues involving education; her manner was unfailingly upbeat, optimistic; of course she smiled often, if not continuously; her face ached, so many smiles!—as, at commencement when she shook hands with each graduating senior and with the families of each graduating senior, her hand ached and throbbed. This is my role: to bring happiness to others. If I am strong enough!

  She was remembering now, with a tinge of dismay—self-rebuke—how her voice had quavered at the podium—though she’d continued smiling, and would not have seemed, to a neutral observer, to have lost any fraction of her composure. No one had asked a political question, all questions were about the University and one of these—she’d been prepared of course, she had known this might be imminent—had been asked point-blank about Alexander Stirk—“Is the University liable, d’you think?”

  It was not a hostile question. It was not even a challenging question. It was a quite natural question from a friendly older man, a Chicago alum-donor who’d endowed a professorship in economics at the University and had been negotiating with the University director of strategic partnerships and planning to endow an entire program in computational economics.

  “The University is not liable, we think.”

  M.R. spoke carefully. M.R. was not smiling now but utterly earnest, a sharp vertical line between her brows.

  “Leonard Lockhardt—our chief counsel—thinks we are not. But of course—it’s a terrible thing, a”—M.R. paused, fingers gripping the edges of the podium from beneath, invisible to her audience. There came a roaring in her ears as of a distant landslide—“a tragedy.”

  In the elegant dining room of the University Club with its high, ornamental ceiling and silk-wallpaper walls and crystal chandeliers (unlighted, for the sunshine falling from the sharp-blue sky above windswept Lake Michigan was so powerful, no artificial light was required) amid a tinkling of china cups, coffee spoons and a sound of china and cutlery being cleared deftly away by white-uniformed servants bred for such deftness—the syllables tragedy sounded strangely, like the syllables of an archaic gray-cobwebbed word.

  Tragedy. Trag-ed-y.

  “ . . . no one could have anticipated.”

  Friendly-faced and yet affable, the gentleman spoke with just a hint of a steely edge. And his features that had seemed Midwest-generic like those of the older gentlemen of Norman Rockwell’s folksy paintings acquired a sudden sharpness.

  “Except it’s in the damn newspapers. In the God-damn media—‘cyberspace.’ And that’s a space where they don’t print retractions.”

  Light laughter spread across the gathering like ripples on a shallow and sequestered pond. M.R. was conscious of her unnatural grip on the edge of the podium and made an effort to relax her fingers one by one.

  Discreetly then the subject was changed. Another luncheon guest raised his hand to proffer a question to M.R. in the way of a pitcher pitching underhanded to a disabled batter.

  Always end on an upbeat note.

  Education is the—(hope? instrument? promise?) of the future. Education is—the future.

  And education at the University—the vanguard of the future.

  It had been a highly successful visit to Chicago arranged by the alumni organization of greater Chicago and the University’s alumni-liaison staff. In attendance were eighty-four University alums of widely divergent ages—the oldest, class of 1952, the youngest, class of 1998—of which more than two-thirds were established donors to the University. The occasion was luncheon at the University Club with “remarks” by President Neukirchen and two associates—the University vice president for campus life, an energetic young woman with flame-colored hair, and the vice president for development, who exuded an air of brisk and capable authority, like an Ivy League scoutmaster. When M.R. returned to her seat at the head table with her arms folded tight across her quick-beating heart almost immediately she ceased to actively listen: her warm-flushed face continued to exude light, but it was a fading light.

  I am so ashamed.

  I am sick with shame.

  No—I am triumphant. I will prevail.

  It was so. Despite Alexander Stirk, yet the president of the University had prevailed. More or less.

  The University was one of the great clipper ships of lore, the Cutty Sark of universities—a majestic artifact of a long-ago era, miraculously intact, invisibly empowered by engines to withstand storms at sea that would shatter lesser vessels.

  On the schedule printed for her, M.R. could now cross out Chicago.

  A downward arrow through the heart of Chicago.

  Her assistant had booke
d her for a 3:40 P.M. plane out of Chicago. Of course, she’d lost an hour, and more than an hour with flight delays, returning to the East.

  From Philadelphia airport to the “historic” president’s house at the edge of the University campus, an hour and forty minutes by car.

  Carlos was no longer M.R.’s personal driver: now, a younger, unfailingly cheerful black man named Evander. He was twenty-six years old and had come with his parents to the U.S. when he was a baby, from “D.R.”—Dominican Republic.

  M.R. was very fond of Evander who chattered at her like a six-foot shiny-black parrot that did not expect her to listen attentively, still less to reply. It was true, Evander called M.R. “ma’am”—occasionally, with touching awkwardness, “Mz. Neukit’chen”—but M.R. was relaxed with Evander in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln Town Car for Evander had not worked for M.R.’s predecessor and so had no notions of what a University president might/might not do. And M.R. liked it that Evander wore his thick black hair in astonishing snakelike coils that stuck out from his head as if greased.

  “My wonderful driver, with dreadlocks.”

  (Was this condescending? Was this racist?)

  M.R. knew about Evander’s young wife, his twin daughters Starr and Serena. She knew that Evander planned to study computer science at the Hunterdon County Community College in a few years.

  If M.R. chose to carry her own bags, wheel her own lightweight suitcase along briskly through the airport, Evander observed her bemused and not, like prim Carlos, with disapproval. It had become something of a joke—long-limbed Evander in his dark driver’s uniform pretending to have to trot to keep up with M.R. “Man, ma’am—you fast.”

  Rarely now, M.R. saw Carlos Lopes. He was semi-retired, worked only part-time, the senior driver on the president’s staff and the one entrusted to pick up VIP visitors at the airport and drive them about during their stays at the University. If Carlos was hurt by having been replaced by dreadlock-sporting Evander—M.R. had no reason to know.