Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She sawed through knee joints. She sawed through hip joints. Blood coursed from the mutilated body, into the drain of the ancient sink. She was becoming drunk—drugged—by the stench of blood but by degrees she ceased to smell it as in the mudflats she had ceased to smell as she had ceased to see and to hear and to feel.

  The genitals she would leave intact. The bloated and sunken torso she would leave intact. She could not bear the prospect of sawing open the chest cavity, or the midriff; she could not bear the prospect of removing internal organs, stomach and intestines and all that lay within of utter foulness.

  She recalled the beliefs of certain Eastern religions, that the human soul is located in the bowels.

  All this while, the fallen-back head was hideous to her. She tried not to glance at the face. The eyes now accusing, astonished. The slack-jawed grin of sexual idiocy. She was very tired, and she was swaying on her feet, and she was not thinking clearly for it occurred to her only now—she must detach the head from the torso, to hide the face.

  It was not easy to detach the head from the body. She used both the handsaw and one of the razor-sharp chef’s knives. She shut her eyes for she could not bear to see the man’s eyes. She shut her eyes appalled and dismayed for it had seemed to her—in just an instant, she did not dwell upon the possibility—that the face was not the face of her university colleague G. Leddy Heidemann but the face of a stranger. A ravaged face, the face of a stranger.

  Here was a miscalculation: when she managed to sever the head from the body a sudden spillage of dark blood ensued—an artery of the thickness of a supple young snake had been cut, and gushed blood for several terrible seconds. As if the dead man had come alive again, in this final spasm of fury.

  Another miscalculation: she’d failed to ensure that the head would fall inside the sink. Instead its very heaviness caused it to fall back, and outside the sink-rim, and onto the gritty concrete floor with a thud of surprise.

  “Oh! Forgive me.”

  She forced herself to lift the head—both hands were required. Yet she did not quite look at it. Her vision was blurred, evasive. She could not have forced herself to peer closely at the face even to identify it. Quickly instead she dropped the head into one of the black plastic bags.

  What relief—now the torso was anonymous, only just male.

  For hours through the night she labored. She had ceased to think as she’d ceased to smell the corpse. An almost pleasurable work-rhythm came to her out of the very effort of her arms, shoulders, and back—out of her very genes, peasant-American stock bred to hard and futile and inevitable labor for a pittance. She was not a weak woman, nor had her mother been a weak woman—physically.

  Handsaw, knives, shears. Hip joints, shoulder joints. Smiling to wonder if there’d been a butcher in her family—how many generations ago. Thick suety flesh oozing blood, globules of fat oozing and draining out of the sink, she hoped to God would not be stopped-up too quickly. When the saw blade or the knife blade struck bone, a tremor ran through her arm to the elbow like an electric shock.

  In a dozen or more plastic bags the parts of the body were neatly placed and the bags tied shut, knotted. Soon, it would be concluded—the “disarticulation.”

  Out of instinct she had acted, and not choice. As one desperately sucking at air has no choice but to breathe.

  She had not reasoned clearly—a single, singular body would be difficult to dispose of but body parts, each weighing no more than twenty or twenty-five pounds, would not be difficult.

  She had not reasoned clearly but she had acted upon this reasoning and with each bag tied and knotted there came a measure of relief. For the man was no threat to her now. She had conquered him!

  She carried the bags upstairs and through the kitchen and outside, to her car. She thought—how strange it would be, if her uninvited visitors were still in the living room, waiting for her to join them! And the one who had slipped away, to hide from her and to torment her.

  She thought—but then this could not have happened. And this did happen.

  Earth-time is irreversible. Earth-time runs in one direction only.

  At her car she set the bags onto the asphalt driveway. A single floodlight burned at the corner of the garage. Carefully she sheared open several trash bags to smooth flat on the floor of the trunk of her car and on these she set the bags. No observer could have guessed what was inside the tidily knotted plastic bags.

  Not a drop of blood—not a hair—would remain behind in the trunk of her car, to incriminate her.

  She had always been the good schoolgirl. She had done tasks perfectly, she had been the reliable one whom others had taken for granted. Not often but sometimes, they had laughed at her for her plain scrubbed face and her plain scrubbed soul.

  It was 3:53 A.M. A high pale moon shone in the sky. Soon, it would be dawn: she must act quickly, and she must make no mistakes.

  She drove out of the University town. It seemed to her a banal impoverishment of imagination—virtually all of the houses were darkened and why?—only because it was night, and human beings must sleep at night.

  There is the nocturnal soul, that comes alive at night. She was of this breed!

  Her senses alert as if she’d only just now awakened after hours of restful sleep she drove north along the state highway past a succession of darkened storefronts, small businesses and houses, fields and forests and along the Interstate where there was very little traffic and the moon drifted overhead like a child’s paper lantern. At rest stops illuminated by a single light on a tall lamppost she exited the Interstate and in the Dumpsters of these rest stops she disposed of the trash bags one by one. Behind a Shop-Rite on Route 11 she left a single bag in the Dumpster and in the Dumpster behind a CVS drugstore on that same highway she left a single bag. And in a Dumpster behind a Ramada Inn at exit 6 of the Interstate she left a single bag. And in a Dumpster behind a Taco Bell on North Hamilton Boulevard she left a single bag she had reason to believe contained the man’s head—the eyes aghast in that look of utter astonishment, fury. For even as she could not quite believe what she had done—and would fail to recall it, in any detail, later—so too the man could not believe what had been done to him, against all expectations.

  “It was not your fault, truly. It was not mine.”

  With each bag removed from the trunk of her car her car became just perceptibly lighter. With each bag removed from the trunk of her car her soul became just perceptibly lighter. She drove in a wavering circle the circumference of which was approximately forty miles. She did not drive above the speed limit. She did not venture out of the right-hand lane. She took care to dim her bright lights when another vehicle approached even as, in the case of locomotive-like trailer trucks careening through the night, the drivers of these vehicles failed to lower theirs.

  And now she was reasoning more clearly. She was beginning to see the logic of the past several hours. The body parts, widely scattered, would be picked up by local waste disposal trucks and carried to local landfills. The body parts would be compacted in vast acres of trash. Never could the body be re-assembled, as in one of the horror tales of Grimm.

  Never would the woman be accused, the perpetrator of such a deed.

  By 5:18 A.M. she ascended the curving drive to Charters House. Within the pine trees surrounding the house it was still night. The housekeeper Mildred would arrive no earlier than 8 A.M.—M.R. had requested this for she valued her early-morning privacy. It was a warm, overcast May morning. The pale moon had vanished, a ceiling of pitted and granulated clouds like Styrofoam hid the sun. She was both very tired and exhilarated. She was nearing the end, now! Entering the house by the rear, kitchen door she experienced a moment’s fright for she heard—she was certain she heard—a clatter of voices; but when she stepped across the threshold there was silence.

  She returned to the basement and with paper towels and sponges sh
e cleaned all that she could see. She was relieved to discover that hot water gushed from one of the faucets.

  She’d worked within the sink, mostly. She’d taken care. And so the basement floor wasn’t so very dirty.

  She opened the basement windows, she aired out the rooms. These were niggardly little windows thick with grime, that opened just a few inches, at a slant. Still, you could smell an odor of—something. An animal—raccoon, opossum—might have crawled into the basement, become trapped and died. This had happened numerous times in Charters House, she’d been told.

  She did not clean the sink too thoroughly—she did not scour it—for it had been a filthy sink, and if it were clean, one of the household staff might notice.

  As she ascended the stairs to the kitchen she cleaned the stairs with wetted paper towels. Upstairs in her private quarters she removed at last her sweaty stained clothing that had become repulsive to her. She dropped it into a bathroom sink to soak in hot water and Woolite.

  Very hot water, and so much Woolite suds! She had no doubt, the stains would fade.

  Then in water as hot as she could bear she showered for a half hour. She scrubbed herself vigorously. Between her breasts that were bruised and reddened she scrubbed herself and between her legs where short wiry hairs sprouted from her like the hardiest of weeds.

  She shampooed her hair, she cleaned beneath her nails with a metal nail file.

  In the drain of the shower at her feet, a fan of loose hairs.

  She was forgetting something—was she?

  Already the events of this terrible night were fading. As the high pale-glowering moon had vanished, by day.

  They would call on her this evening—the “delegates.” They would appeal to her, to see them and to listen to them ex officio.

  If the man came with them, to slip away into the library and to torment her after the others had gone, she would be prepared—she would not be so frightened.

  But what remained now? Was there—“evidence”?

  She tried to think. She could not think.

  Yet instinctively she returned to the kitchen and at the top of the basement stairs she stood gazing into the darkness. She heard nothing below—the man had ceased his struggles, his hoarse breathing had ceased. Yet she was uneasy, he was waiting for her somewhere. He might have slipped past her and would be waiting for her upstairs in her private quarters where few visitors ever came.

  She remembered now: it had already happened.

  In the library he’d awaited her. In the brown leather chair he’d appropriated as his own.

  Returning to the library and switching on the light and the leather chair was empty but there on the hardwood floor she saw the prints—partial footprints, blood-prints. Her own.

  She laughed, in nervous relief. For she had almost missed these!

  And quickly now with wetted paper towels she cleaned away these prints, too.

  And now there remained—“Nothing.”

  In the chill dawn out of tall trees surrounding the house came the soul-chilling cries of the King of the Crows.

  Mudwoman Ex Officio.

  May 2003

  Earth-time is irreversible. Earth-time runs in one direction only.

  Earth-time is a way of assuring that all things do not happen simultaneously.

  “ . . . must be something wrong. This isn’t like her.”

  In the morning at Salvager Hall they were awaiting the University president.

  By 10 A.M. the president had not yet arrived. Where ordinarily she was in her office before any of her staff (sometimes as early, it was rumored, as 7:30 A.M.) on this morning she had not been sighted in even the vicinity of Salvager Hall and already by mid-morning she had missed several appointments and a number of telephone calls and she had not replied to her assistants’ increasingly concerned calls to her cell phone and to the landline at Charters House and e-mails flying to her computer in Charters House less than a mile away went unanswered. And her chief assistant spoke with her housekeeper who reported that she hadn’t seen Mz. Neukirchen yet that morning, either—she’d assumed that Mz. Neukirchen had left for her office early.

  “Can you go upstairs? Can you knock on her door? Please—can you see if she’s there?”

  And so the housekeeper went upstairs and knocked on the door to Mz. Neukirchen’s quarters and there was no answer.

  Again she knocked, hesitantly—“Mz. Neukirchen? Are you there?”—and there was no answer.

  She reported back to Audrey Myles who asked her please to see if the president’s car was in the garage. And yes, the president’s car was in the garage.

  So far as anyone knew, the president had had no appointment earlier that morning, off-campus. No university driver had driven her anywhere and her schedule for this weekday did not involve an off-campus appointment.

  “Please—can you knock on her door again? And if she doesn’t answer—could you go inside?”

  Mildred agreed to knock again on the door. But Mildred refused to enter the president’s quarters without being asked to come inside.

  “But—she may be ill. She may need emergency aid. Please—at least open the door and look inside, from the hallway.”

  Sharply Mildred said no! she could not.

  Within ten minutes Audrey Myles arrived at Charters House accompanied by two young-women staffers, in a vehicle driven by the chief security officer at the University.

  At the front door the housekeeper awaited them speaking rapidly and excitedly saying that she hadn’t seen Mz. Neukirchen since the previous day in the late afternoon but that Mz. Neukirchen had been “looking tired”—“like usual.” Audrey Myles and the others ascended the stairs and at the door to the president’s quarters Audrey knocked sharply and her voice was sharp, anxious—“Hello? M.R.? This is Audrey. . . .”

  When there was no answer Audrey knocked a second time and again there was no answer and when Audrey turned the doorknob it was to discover that the door was locked.

  “She’s inside, then. And something has happened to her. We will have to remove the door.”

  The head of security made a call. You could see that the University was well prepared for such emergency situations: an individual who has failed to respond, a locked door.

  Within a quarter hour hinges were unscrewed from the door and the door was removed.

  Not Audrey Myles but the head of security entered the president’s quarters first.

  For you could see, the University was prepared for the worst.

  They found her on the floor in the farther room which appeared to be both a bedroom and a workroom.

  They could not rouse her, she was deeply unconscious.

  She’d fallen with her legs twisted beneath her. She’d fallen and seemed to have struck her head on the hardwood floor. Her face was drained of all color except where it was bruised and swollen around her mouth and her lips were a faint blue.

  Her breathing was shallow, erratic. It wasn’t clear to Audrey Myles whether she was breathing at all.

  At a distance they were calling her. The name that was her.

  At a distance at the earth’s surface they stood staring down into the deep muck-pit into which she’d fallen.

  Calling—the name that was her.

  She knew, she was expected to pull herself up, to daylight. Out of the loathsome muck-mud. To claw at the rough-rock sides of the pit and to haul herself up with broken and bleeding nails.

  To stand with the others. As if her back were not broken.

  She knew! Yet she was so very tired, she could not perform as they expected.

  It was shameful to her, to betray so many!

  But she was so very tired. What had entered her bloodstream in hot acid-swarms, she had not the strength to resist.

  Mudwoman Amid the Nebulae.

  May 2003


  Take me with you she begged.

  Not one to beg yet now in this time of crisis she was begging and no shame in such begging for she adored her astronomer-lover, she had given up her life as a woman for this man and she could not bear it that the man was not worthy of such adoration and so relenting then as a god might relent seeing the anguish in a mortal face he brought her with him on this voyage, he was a mariner in perpetual motion ever more fanatic and obsessive with the passage of years journeying continuously, restlessly, out of a fundamental metaphysical unease with the quotidian-life as with the particular domestic/marital/paternal life it was Andre Litovik’s fate to live and out of contempt for humankind he journeyed amid the most distant nebulae and his journeys were into Time as well—ever backward into the terrible abyss of Time before Earth existed and mere clock-time began. And like a lonely child eager to speak the speech of her elders in mimicry of her lover she murmured such mystery-words as redshift, quasar, light-years, Andromeda, Hubble constant, megaparsec, trigonometric parallax, Hydra and Centaurus. Cepheid variables, Ursa Major, Great Attractor, pulsars, black body, cold dark matter. And when she asked him what these mystery-words meant he had not the patience to explain saying Look them up. You can read. Or he said You wouldn’t have time, dear Meredith. I’ve used up most of my life trying to learn the meanings and mostly I have failed. And that effort has been my life.

  Mudwoman Flung to Earth.