Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

Andre loved “Meredith”—as the young woman not his wife, and not the mother of his (damaged) son. He loved her—(M.R. wanted to concede this, out of fear that it was true)—as a way of revenge on the other woman.

  But this was too crude, too reductive. Andre was capable of the most extravagant emotions, it wasn’t possible for M.R. to fully comprehend him. Hadn’t he said to her Better if I come to you. In some way we can reasonably work out, for now.

  “I will believe that. I will have faith.”

  At a crossroads M.R. saw bullet-ridden road signs: ALEXANDRIA BAY, WATERTOWN, CASTORLAND.

  Canton was not so far from Watertown. To the west of Watertown was Lake Ontario, the massive inland sea.

  And here was a sign for smaller towns: HERKIMER JUNCTION, SLABTOWN, SPRAGG, STAR LAKE.

  STAR LAKE 9 MILES.

  Star Lake! Only nine miles away . . .

  Gradually Route 41 had veered away from the Black Snake River. But if M.R. turned onto the Star Lake road, soon again she would be driving beside the river.

  Reasoning There will be another entrance to I–81, farther south.

  Reasoning No one is waiting for me today. Tonight.

  Next morning, M.R. had a sequence of appointments in Salvager Hall starting at 8:30 A.M.

  Next morning was the first of September and but thirteen days before the start of the fall semester at the University.

  Later she would think It was a decision. It was not impulse.

  And so, turning onto Star Lake Road which was a narrow blacktop road bringing her through stretches of densely wooded countryside alternating with farmland, or the remains of farmland; long sweeping hills of surpassing beauty and strangeness as on a facing hill a quarter-mile away where the road ascended, a dark-swooping-winged shadow like a gigantic crow moved toward her—the shadow of a cloud.

  M.R. ducked, as the shadow rushed toward her.

  Nine miles to Star Lake. But the road was circuitous, tortuous. In the foothills of the Adirondacks, no route is direct.

  Strewn by the roadside and frequently in the road were broken tree limbs, storm debris from the previous night. No one seemed to have driven on this road since the storm. A ditch fraught with muddy water had overflowed and puddles like leprous lesions had invaded the road.

  Several times M.R. had to get out of her car to drag aside broken branches to make a space for her car to pass. Soon her hands were stinging from thistles, thorns. In the bright sunshine she felt both anxious and exhilarated, curious. There was a purpose in visiting Star Lake, she knew: the tar paper dwelling behind the Gulf station on the highway. Bare floorboards part-covered in loose patches of linoleum—“remnants”—and a Formica-topped kitchen table from Goodwill with mismatched vinyl chairs that could be made to skid across the floor, if the spike-haired man was provoked to kick. And the big deep stained bathtub in the closet-sized bathroom. And on all the walls of the little house “crosses”—“crucifixes”— “Jesus Our Savior”—which as a small child she’d seen without seeing—upon which her eyes moved without knowing, identifying—“crosses” and “crucifixes”—“Jesus Our Savior”— mysterious words that fluttered in her brain like nighttime moths drawn to lamplight. Yet the fact must have been that at the time, when she’d been Jedina—(so young! lacking all volition)—she had never heard such words as crosses—crucifixes—she was sure.

  If her mother had identified these objects at all it would be to speak of them as special signs of God.

  Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus cannot know that we have failed to see it.

  That was the human predicament, was it?—the effort to remain human.

  The blacktop road so twisted, so turned back on itself to accommodate the hilly landscape, M.R. lost her sense of how far she was from Star Lake knowing only that, practicably speaking, she could not turn back: the road was too narrow, the overflowing ditch too close to the road.

  The effort to attain civilization. To resist delusion. Even as the very mud-muck beneath the floorboards of civilization is delusion.

  Nervously M.R. smiled. It seemed to be so—M. R. Neukirchen had made an (academic) career out of such paradoxes.

  She could not be lost of course—so long as she stayed on this poorly maintained road.

  She calculated she was about four miles from Star Lake when she crossed a wood-plank bridge—(not over the Black Snake River, which had veered away from the road again)—but over a fast-running, swollen creek. And in her rearview mirror she saw—(she’d been seeing, without exactly registering the fact)—a vehicle approaching on the blacktop road.

  A pickup truck, painted a bright royal blue. And with oversized tires, that lifted the truck-chassis to a daunting height.

  M.R. slowed her car and moved as far to the right of the narrow road as she dared. Roadside grasses and underbrush scraped noisily against the fenders and underside of her car.

  How like a child’s crude painting of an adult vehicle, tank-sized, bright blue, looming large above the road!

  The pickup was moving at a speed greater than M.R.’s, jolting and lurching in potholes, crashing through debris in the roadway without slowing. M.R. felt a frisson of panic, the bright-blue vehicle would collide with her smaller vehicle, crash and crush and run over it like a tank.

  M.R. was driving at a slow speed, to allow the pickup to pass. But the bright-blue vehicle had slowed also and did not pass her looming so large in her rearview mirror that she could see only a portion of it, a windshield blinding with sunshine, obscuring the driver within.

  She thought Why doesn’t he pass me! What does he want of me!

  The front of the pickup was about eighteen inches from M.R.’s rear fender. Deliberately the driver was matching his speed to M.R.’s reduced speed. Was this—harassment? A kind of game? Did the driver know her, or believe he knew her?

  Playful, in the rough careless way of the men of this region.

  Or maybe it was a kind of gallantry?—the driver would accompany M.R., a solitary woman, along this poorly maintained route to Star Lake.

  M.R. wished to think this. Though she’d begun to perspire with unease. Staring into the rearview mirror. She could make out a figure behind the windshield—not clearly—seemingly an adult man with a blurred face, thick dark hair.

  Calmly she drove. She did not increase her speed, to try to escape.

  Impossible to escape! You must have faith.

  A tangle of underbrush had worked its way around her right-front tire, bringing her almost to a stop. Only by pressing down hard on the gas pedal—frantically hard—could M.R. force the tire to turn.

  Her car was limping! But the driver behind her registered no sign of impatience, or derision. Rather there was the sense—M.R. felt, staring into the rearview mirror at the haze of bright-blue—that she was being protected.

  A foolish mistake, to have taken this road. The driver of the pickup wants to make certain that nothing happens to my car—to me.

  Someone who knows me? Recognizes me?

  Someone who knows it is wrong for me to be here?

  There came a strong smell of pine needles, wet rotting leaves and wet earth. Ditch-water leaked like pus into the road causing M.R.’s wheels to churn, slide and slip.

  The pickup slowed, waiting for M.R.’s vehicle to recover the road.

  M.R. saw the driver’s face through the windshield—then, glaring sunlight intervened.

  Mudwoman’s bridegroom! He had followed her here.

  Slowly and in tandem the vehicles moved along the narrow blacktop road, that had begun to descend to the lake. To her relief M.R. saw mailboxes at the side of the road—narrow lanes leading into the underbrush—and caught glimpses of log cabins, tar paper shanties, corroded-looking house trailers mounted on cement blocks. Cheery signs were affixed to trees: HAPPY HUNTIN
CAMP—“MY BLUE HEAVEN”—DAISY & MAC—7TH HEAVEN—KAMP KOMFORT.

  No people were visible. Only just parked vehicles. If M.R. had been in danger she could not have risked abandoning her car in the road, running back one of the lanes crying for help.

  Thinking But he does not want to hurt me. That is not his intention.

  Thinking If that were his intention, he would have hurt me by now.

  Entering the village of Star Lake M.R. glanced into the rearview mirror and saw to her surprise—the bright-blue pickup had vanished from the road.

  The driver must have turned off, onto a side road. Or, into one of the lanes.

  Of course, the driver must live in Star Lake. In one or another of the dwellings in the woods. He had not been following M.R. but only just returning home.

  M.R. felt both relief and disappointment. Her heartbeat had quickened with the prospect of—she didn’t know.

  STAR LAKE VILLAGE

  POP. 475

  The Gulf station had vanished and in its place was a U-Haul rental and behind the U-Haul rental, down a steep incline amid a carelessly mown field was a small simulated-cedar cabin that looked as if it had been shellacked, shiny as Glo-Coat. Strewn about the driveway were children’s toys, a tricycle and a wagon. Directly in front of the house was a patch of top-heavy tomato plants, battered by the recent storm. M.R. parked at the top of the driveway uncertain what to do for clearly this dwelling wasn’t the squat little tar paper house in which Marit Kraeck had lived in the early 1960s.

  And so the special signs of God had vanished.

  Polyurethane strips over the loose-fitting windows like flayed skin, flapping in the wind. From outside, the little house had looked like its insides were coming out.

  The big stained claw-footed bathtub in the smelly bathroom. The game of tickle! M.R. only just remembered.

  She smiled, confused. A vein had begun to beat in her forehead, a warning-beat as, on the back stairs of Charters House she’d known perfectly well that it was a mistake to proceed as she’d done—yet, like a dreamer locked in a script not her own, she’d proceeded.

  The spike-haired man who’d played with Jewell, and with Jedina, the game of tickle.

  Cherry pie, out of the wax-paper wrapping. Gluey sugary cherry filling, mealy pie-dough and so delicious, M.R.’s mouth began to water. She’d hidden beneath the steps in a sort of—closet? storage area?—her knees pressed against her chest.

  Wrapped in something like a towel, or a bedsheet . . .

  He’d bathed her with such care—the spike-haired man. But maybe he had not been her father.

  Strange how M.R. never thought of her father—never thought of the very concept father—as if such were a distant galaxy, beyond her power of imagining as beyond her power of comprehension.

  “He might still be alive. And living here.”

  Awkwardly she’d been standing in the driveway clutching her car keys. A figure appeared behind a screen door in the cedar-cabin.

  The voice was female, friendly-seeming yet wary.

  “H’lo? You looking for someone?”

  “Yes! Thank you. I’m looking for . . .”

  M.R. could not think what name to provide. Her face was unpleasantly damp, her hair had come loose from the scarf in which, early that morning, she’d tied it. (For M.R.’s stylishly cut hair had grown out ragged in Carthage, she dared not cut it with a scissors as Konrad snipped at his hair.) For the long drive home she was wearing rumpled shorts, a parrot green Carthage Veterans Co-op T-shirt in need of laundering. She wondered if she resembled a madwoman, or a drunken woman, or a woman who has had a bad shock, who has been assaulted.

  The woman behind the screen door was waiting for a reply. A smaller figure had joined her, a child.

  With difficulty, like hauling a pail of water out of a deep well, M.R. said, “ . . . a family named ‘Kraeck.’ ”

  “ ‘Krae-chek’? I don’t think I know anyone named ‘Krae-chek.’ ”

  “Maybe—I’m not pronouncing it correctly. It might just have one syllable—‘Kraeck.’ ”

  The woman called to someone inside. There came a shouted reply M.R. couldn’t hear clearly.

  “You can try around town. Out by the lake, there’s lots of older places—people who live year-round, or been coming back thirty, even forty years. We’re here year-round but only for about five years. ‘Krae-chek’—‘Krick’—isn’t any name I know.”

  M.R. thanked the woman. The shiny cedar-cabin, children’s toys in the driveway, raggedly-mowed grass and the steep driveway—only the steep driveway was known to M.R. but as a dirt driveway, not gravel.

  M.R. returned to her car and drove through the village of Star Lake to the lakefront, past larger cabins and cottages and the Star Lake Inn & Marina. On the lake, a braying of outboard motors. Angry noises like maddened hornets. It was a shock to her, beautiful Star Lake should be silent.

  And a shock to her, nothing looked familiar. Yet very likely, neither Jewell nor Jedina had ever seen the lake, living in a ramshackle house a mile away.

  At a gas station adjacent to a convenience store M.R. stopped to have her car tank filled. The attendant was a burly boy of about eighteen with rabbity teeth, sleepy-lidded eyes. His brawny forearms were discolored with grease, he wore a mechanic’s cap reversed on his head. Sensing in M.R. a woman in some indefinable distress, old enough to be his mother yet not his responsibility, he listened to her stammering query with a shrug—“Maybe yeh, there’s some ‘Kray-chek’ somewhere, but nobody I know. Nobody around here.”

  In the convenience store M.R. bought a can of lukewarm soda. She asked the young-woman clerk if she knew of a family—or anyone—named “Kraeck” and the woman said, frowning, “This is—who? A man?”

  “Yes. It could be a man.”

  “How old?”

  “He’d be in his seventies, maybe.”

  A glaze-look came into the woman’s face: she was in her early thirties.

  “Can’t help you, ma’am. Maybe you could try. . . .”

  M.R. thanked the woman and left the store. She was gripped by the possibility—the probability—of her biological father still alive and living in this area. If she could locate someone who’d known her mother in the 1960s . . . But that was more than forty years ago.

  Star Lake, approximately sixteen miles in circumference, was one of the less developed of the Adirondack lakes, far less affluent than Lake Placid, Tupper Lake, Saranac. The village was at the southernmost point of the lake that appeared, on maps, to be less “star-shaped” than shaped like a vertical, upright flame. Its rough shore was mostly wilderness but there was a road of some kind that circled the lake and the mad thought came to M.R. in perfect calmness—she could drive around Star Lake stopping at each cabin, each cottage, each trailer, to ask about her father. (And yet—what had been her father’s name? Not Kraeck.) She felt a touch of vertigo, excitement. Forever she could drive around Star Lake in the southern Adirondacks in search of her lost father for there is no end to the circumference of any geometrical figure.

  Thinking I am breaking into pieces now. I must save myself.

  “No more. Enough. I have a father.”

  She threw the can of lukewarm soda into a trash bin. She returned to her car and drove through Star Lake in the direction of Route 41 east, that would bring her to I-81 within a half hour.

  Thinking You don’t have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

  At Lookout Point on I-81 she stopped to use a restroom.

  Lookout Point was an elevated peninsula of rocky land above the Black Snake River valley east of Sparta. Looking north M.R. could identify Mount Marcy, Mount Moriah, Thunder Bay Mountain—Adirondack peaks dissolving into mist. It was a striking view—you wanted
to stare, and stare. You did not ever want to look away.

  Below, nearer the highway was a small picnic area, weatherworn picnic tables and grills and trash bins overflowing with litter and on the trail leading to the lookout point litter had been blown into the underbrush in a filigree like dirty lace.

  Somehow it was late—nearly 3 P.M. M.R. had lost precious time in Star Lake. Yet for a long time she leaned over the lookout point railing, shivering. Her hair whipped in the damp cool wind. The sky was mottled, marbled—patches of sunshine like struck matches, appearing and disappearing, a sudden flare of light that abruptly vanished. Already, the air was autumnal, the sun had shifted in the sky.

  She felt a stir of half-pleasurable melancholy, yet of anticipation—she had made the right decision to leave Carthage. She did have faith in Andre Litovik who would come to her as he’d promised. She must resolve not to retreat from him, to be so diffident in the face of the man’s powerful personality. She must tell him bluntly, frankly—she would choose him. It was not just a matter, as it had been for so many years, of his choosing her.

  “Ma’am! Hi there.”

  The voice was low, unnervingly near, and familiar.

  M.R. looked around, startled. She’d believed herself alone at the rest stop except for a family—young parents, two young children—in the picnic area below. She was sure she’d seen no other vehicles. But here stood a tall lanky dirty-skinned boy of some indeterminate age—mid-twenties?—or older—slouched less than ten feet behind her on the trail. Ma’am! Hi there had been a sly sort of murmur like a caress across the back and shoulders of the solitary woman.

  So quietly the boy had come up behind her, it was as if he’d emerged out of the steep rocky path.

  His hair was stiff with grease and looked dyed—an unnatural caramel color. His bloodshot eyes were alert with ironic merriment. He wore a faded black T-shirt from which the sleeves had been torn and on the front of the T-shirt was a faded cartoon figure—a “superhero.” His well-worn jeans resembled the stylish designer jeans favored by University undergraduates, bleached at the knees, strategically torn and patched. On his feet were the rotted remains of what appeared to be expensive jogging shoes. On his left wrist, an American eagle tattoo that looked as if its inks had smudged.