The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Well, she had learned!

  Forced herself to compose the Suicide Note. In her thoughts for a long time (it seemed so, now!) Jude had been composing this with care knowing its importance. It was addressed to you assholes for there was no one else.

  Smiling to think how you assholes would be amazed.

  On TV and online and in all the papers including The New York Times front page.

  Whywhy you’re asking here’s why her hair.

  I mean her hair! I mean like I saw it in the sun . . .

  So excited! Heart beating fast like she’d swallowed a dozen E’s. Unlocking the padlock with trembling hands. If Denise had told, already! Should have killed them both last night. When I had the chance. Inside the storage room, the Corn Maiden had shifted from the lying-on-her-side position in which Jude had left her that morning after making her eat. This was proof, the Corn Maiden was shrewdly pretending to be weaker than she was. Even in her sickness there was deceit.

  Jude left the storage room door open, to let in light. She would not trouble to light the scented candles, so many candles there was not time. And flame now would be for a different purpose.

  Squatting breathless over the Corn Maiden, with both thumbs lifting the bruised eyelids. Milky eyes. Pupils shrunken.

  Wake up! It’s time it’s time.

  Feebly the Corn Maiden pushed at Jude. She was frightened, whimpering. Her breath smelled of something rotted. She had not been allowed to brush her teeth since coming to Jude’s house, she had not been allowed to bathe herself. Only as Jude and her disciples had bathed her with wetted soapy washcloths.

  Know what time it is it’s time it’s time it’s timetimetime!

  Don’t hurt me please let me go . . .

  Jude was the Taboo Priest. Seizing the Corn Maiden’s long silky hair in her fist and forcing her down onto the bier scolding No no no no no like you would scold a baby.

  A baby that is flesh of your flesh but you must discipline.

  The immolation would have to be done swiftly, Jude knew. For that traitor-cunt Denise had babbled by now. Fat ass Anita had babbled. Her disciples had betrayed her, they were unworthy of her. They would be so sorry! She would not forgive them, though. Like she would not forgive the Corn Maiden’s mother for staring at her like she was a bug or something, loathsome. What she regretted was she would not have time to cut out the Corn Maiden’s heart as the Sacrifice demanded.

  Lay still, I said it’s time.

  A new thought was coming to her now. She had not hold of it yet, the way you have not yet hold of a dream until it is fully formed like a magnificent bubble inside your head.

  Jude had dragged the gasoline can into the storage room, and was spilling gasoline in surges. This could be the priest blessing the Corn Maiden and her bier. The stink of gasoline was strong, that was why the Corn Maiden was revived, her senses sharpening.

  No! no! Don’t hurt me let me go! I want my mother.

  Jude laughed to see the Corn Maiden so rebellious. Actually pushing free of Jude, so weak she could not stand but on hands and knees naked crawling desperately toward the door. Never had Jude left the door open until now and yet the Corn Maiden saw, and comprehended this was escape. Jude smiled seeing how desperate the Corn Maiden was, stark naked and her hair trailing the floor like an animal’s mane. Oh so skin-and-bones! Her ribs, bony hips, even the ankle bones protruding. Skinny haunches no bigger than Jude’s two hands fitted together. And her hinder. Hinder was a funny word, a word meant to make you smile. A long time ago a pretty curly-haired woman had been humming and singing daubing sweet-smelling white powder onto Jude’s little hinder before drawing up her rubber underpants, pulling down Jude’s smock embroidered with dancing kittens or maybe it had been a nightgown, and the underpants had been a diaper.

  Jude watched, fascinated. She had never seen the Corn Maiden disobey her so openly! It was like a baby just learning to crawl. She had not known the Corn Maiden so desired to live. Thinking suddenly Better for her to remain alive, to revere me. And I have made my mark on her she will never forget.

  The Priest was infused with the power. The power of life-and-death. She would confer life, it was her decision. Climbing onto the bier spilling gasoline in a sacred circle around her. The stink of gasoline made her sensitive nostrils constrict, her eyes were watering so she could barely see. But she had no need to see. All was within, that she wished to see. It will only hurt at first. Then it will be too late. Click-click-clicking the silver lighter with gasoline-slippery fingers until the bright little flame-tongue leapt out.

  See what I can do assholes, you never could.

  SEPTEMBER

  THE LITTLE FAMILY

  It was their first outing together, at the Croton Falls Nature Preserve. The three of them, as a family.

  Of course, Zallman was quick to concede, not an actual family.

  For the man and woman were not married. Their status as friends/lovers was yet undefined. And the girl was the woman’s child, alone.

  Yet if you saw them, you would think family.

  It was a bright warm day in mid-September. Zallman who now measured time in terms of before/after was thinking the date was exactly five months after. But this was a coincidence merely.

  From Yonkers, where he now lived, Zallman drove north to Mahopac to pick up Leah Bantry and her daughter Marissa at their new home. Leah and Marissa had prepared a picnic lunch. The Croton Falls Nature Preserve, which Leah had only recently discovered, was just a few miles away.

  A beautiful place, Leah had told Zallman. So quiet.

  Zallman guessed this was a way of saying Marissa feels safe here. Leah Bantry was working now as a medical technician at Woman/Space, a clinic in Mahopac, New York. Mikal Zallman was temporarily teaching middle school math at a large public school in Yonkers where he also assisted the soccer/basketball/baseball coach.

  Marissa was enrolled in a small private school in Mahopac without grades or a formal curriculum in which students received special tutoring and counseling as needed.

  Tuition at the Mahopac Day School was high. Mikal Zallman was helping with it.

  No one can know what you and your daughter went through. I feel so drawn to you both, please let me be your friend!

  Before Zallman had known Leah Bantry, he had loved her. Knowing her now he was confirmed in his love. He vowed to bear this secret lightly until Leah was prepared to receive it.

  She wanted no more emotion in her life, Leah said. Not for a long time.

  Zallman wondered: what did that mean? And did it mean what it meant, or was it simply a way of saying Don’t hurt me! Don’t come near.

  He liked it that Leah encouraged Marissa to call him Uncle Mikal. This suggested he might be around for a while. So far, in Zallman’s presence at least, Marissa did not call him anything at all.

  Zallman saw the girl glance at him, sometimes. Quick covert shy glances he hesitated to acknowledge.

  There was a tentative air about them. The three of them.

  As if (after the media nightmare, this was quite natural) they were being observed, on camera.

  Zallman felt like a tightrope walker. He was crossing a tightrope high above a gawking audience, and there was no safety net beneath. His arms were extended for balance. He was terrified of falling but he must go forward. If at this height your balance is not perfect, it will be lethal.

  In the nature preserve in the bright warm autumnal sunshine the adults walked together at the edge of a pond. To circle the pond required approximately thirty minutes. There were other visitors to the preserve on this Sunday afternoon, families and couples.

  The girl wandered ahead of the adults, though never far ahead. Her behavior was more that of a younger child than a child of eleven. Her movements were tentative, sometimes she paused as if she were out of breath. Her skin was pale and appeared translucent. Her eyes were deep-socketed, wary. Her pale blond hair shimmered in the sun. It had been cut short, feathery, falling to just below her delica
te eggshell ears.

  After her ordeal in April, Marissa had lost much of her beautiful long hair. She’d been hospitalized for several weeks. Slowly she had regained most of the weight she’d lost so abruptly. Still she was anemic, Leah was concerned that there had been lasting damage to Marissa’s kidneys and liver. She suffered from occasional bouts of tachycardia, of varying degrees of severity. At such times, her mother held her tight, tight. At such times the child’s runaway heartbeat and uncontrollable shivering seemed to the mother a demonic third presence, a being maddened by terror.

  Both mother and daughter had difficulty sleeping. But Leah refused prescription drugs for either of them.

  Each was seeing a therapist in Mahopac. And Marissa also saw Leah’s therapist for a joint session with her mother, once a week.

  Leah confi ded in Zallman, “It’s a matter of time. Of healing. I have faith, Marissa will be all right.”

  Leah never used such terms as normal, recovered.

  Mikal Zallman had been the one to write to Leah Bantry of course. He had felt the desperate need to communicate with her, even if she had not the slightest wish to communicate with him.

  I feel that we have shared a nightmare. We will never understand it. I don’t know what I can offer you other than sympathy, commiseration. During the worst of the nightmare I had almost come to think that I was responsible . . .

  After Marissa was discharged from the hospital, Leah took her away from Skatskill. She could not bear living in that apartment another day, she could not bear all that reminded her of the nightmare. She was surrounded by well-intentioned neighbors, and through the ordeal she had made several friends; she had been offered work in the area. If she’d wished to return to work at the Nyack clinic, very likely Davitt Stoop would have allowed her to return. He had reconciled with his wife, he was in a forgiving mood. But Leah had no wish to see the man again, ever. She had no wish to drive across the Tappan Zee Bridge again, ever.

  Out of the ordeal had come an unexpected alliance with her sister Avril. While Marissa was in the hospital, Avril had continued to stay in Skatskill; one or the other of the two sisters was always in Marissa’s hospital room. Avril had taken an unpaid leave from her job in Washington, she helped Leah find another job and to relocate in Mahopac, fifty miles north in hilly Putnam County.

  Enough of Westchester County! Leah would never return. She was so grateful for Avril’s devotion, she found herself at a loss for words.

  “Leah, come on! It’s what any sister would do.”

  “No. It is not what any sister would do. It’s what my sister would do. God damn I love you, Avril.”

  Leah burst into tears. Avril laughed at her. The sisters laughed together, they’d become ridiculous in their emotions. Volatile and unpredictable as ten-year-olds.

  Leah vowed to Avril, she would never take anyone for granted again. Never anything. Not a single breath! Never again.

  When they’d called her with the news: Marissa is alive.

  That moment. Never would she forget that moment.

  In their family only Avril knew: police had tracked Marissa’s elusive father to Coos Bay, Oregon. There, he had apparently died in 1999 in a boating mishap. The medical examiner had ruled the cause of death “inconclusive.” There had been speculation that he’d been murdered . . .

  Leah hadn’t been prepared for the shock she’d felt, and the loss.

  Now, he would never love her again. He would never love his beautiful daughter again. He would never make things right between them.

  She had never spoken his name aloud to Marissa. She would never speak it aloud. As a younger child Marissa used to ask Where is Daddy? When will Daddy come back? But now, never.

  The death of Marissa’s father in Coos Bay, Oregon, was a mystery, but it was a mystery Leah Bantry would not pursue. She was sick of mystery. She wanted only clarity, truth. She would surround herself with good decent truthful individuals for the remainder of her life.

  Mikal Zallman agreed. No more mysteries!

  You become exhausted, you simply don’t care. You care about surviving. You care about the banalities of life: closure, moving on. Before the nightmare he’d have laughed at such TV talk-show jargon but now, no.

  Of Leah Bantry and Mikal Zallman, an unlikely couple, Zallman was the more verbal, the more edgy. He was from a tribe of talkers, he told Leah. Lawyers, financiers, high-powered salesmen. A rabbi or two. For Zallman, just to wake up in the morning in Yonkers, and not in Skatskill, was a relief. And not in April, during that siege of nightmare. To lift his head from the pillow and not wince with pain as if broken glass were shifting inside his skull. To be able to open a newspaper, switch on TV news, without seeing his own craven likeness. To breathe freely, not-in-police-custody. Not the object of a mad girl’s vengeance.

  Mad girl was the term Zallman and Leah used, jointly. Never would they utter the name Jude Trahern.

  Why had the mad girl abducted Marissa? Why, of all the younger children she might have preyed upon, had she chosen Marissa? And why had she killed herself, why in such a gruesome way, self-immolation like a martyr? These questions would never be answered. The cowed girls who’d conspired with her in the abduction had not the slightest clue. Something about an Onigara Indian sacrifice! They could only repeat brainlessly that they hadn’t thought the mad girl was serious. They had only just followed her direction, they had wanted to be her friend. To say that the girl had been mad was only a word. But the word would suffice.

  Zallman said in disgust, “To know all isn’t to forgive all. To know all is to be sickened by what you know.” He was thinking of the Holocaust, too: a cataclysm in history that defied all explanation. Leah said, wiping at her eyes, “I would not forgive her, under any circumstances. She wasn’t ‘mad,’ she was evil. She took pleasure in hurting others. She almost killed my daughter. I’m glad that she’s dead, she’s removed herself from us. But I don’t want to talk about her, Mikal. Promise me.”

  Zallman was deeply moved. He kissed Leah Bantry then, for the first time. As if to seal an understanding.

  Like Leah, Zallman could not bear to live in the Skatskill area any longer. Couldn’t breathe!

  Without exactly reinstating Zallman, the principal and board of trustees of Skatskill Day had invited him back to teach. Not immediately, but in the fall.

  A substitute was taking his place at the school. It was believed to be most practical for the substitute to finish the spring term.

  Zallman’s presence, so soon after the ugly publicity, would be “distracting to students.” Such young, impressionable students. And their anxious parents.

  Zallman was offered a two-year renewable contract at his old salary. It was not a very tempting contract. His lawyer told him that the school feared a lawsuit, with justification. But Zallman said the hell with it. He’d lost interest in combat.

  And he’d lost interest in computers, overnight.

  Where he’d been fascinated by the technology, now he was bored. He craved something more substantial, of the earth and time. Computers were merely technique, like bodiless brains. He would take a temporary job teaching math in a public school, and he would apply to graduate schools to study history. A Ph.D. program in American studies. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton.

  Zallman didn’t tell Leah what revulsion he sometimes felt, waking before dawn and unable to return to sleep. Not for computers but for the Zallman who’d so adored them.

  How arrogant he’d been, how self-absorbed! The lone wolf who had so prided himself on aloneness.

  He’d had enough of that now. He yearned for companionship, someone to talk with, make love with. Someone to share certain memories that would otherwise fester in him like poison.

  In late May, after Leah Bantry and her daughter Marissa had moved away from Skatskill—a departure excitedly noted in the local media—Zallman began to write to her. He’d learned that Leah had taken a position at a medical clinic in Mahopoc. He knew the area, to a degree: an hour
’s drive away. He wrote single-page, thoughtfully composed letter to her not expecting her to reply, though hoping that she might. I feel so close to you! This ordeal that has so changed our lives. He’d studied her photo graphs in the papers, the grieving mother’s drawn, exhausted face. He knew that Leah Bantry was a few years older than he, that she was no longer in contact with Marissa’s father. He sent her postcards of works of art: van Gogh’s sunflowers, Monet’s water lilies, haunted landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and gorgeous autumnal forests of Wolf Kahn. In this way Zallman courted Leah Bantry. He allowed this woman whom he had never met to know that he revered her. He would put no pressure on her to see him, not even to respond to him.

  In time, Leah Bantry did respond.

  They spoke on the phone. They made arrangements to meet. Zallman was nervously talkative, endearingly awkward. He seemed overwhelmed by Leah’s physical presence. Leah was more wary, reticent. She was a beautiful woman who looked her age, she wore no makeup, no jewelry except a watch; her fair blond hair was threaded with silver. She smiled, but she did not speak much. She liked it that this man would do the talking, as men usually did not. Mikal Zallman was a personality of a type Leah knew, but at a distance. Very New York, very intense. Brainy, but naive. She guessed that his family had money, naturally Zallman scorned money. (But he’d been reconciled with his family, Zallman said, at the time of the ordeal. They had been outraged on his behalf and had insisted upon paying his lawyer’s exorbitant fees.) During their conversation, Leah recalled how they’d first met at the Skatskill School, and how Zallman the computer expert had walked away from her. So arrogant! Leah would tease him about that, one day. When they became lovers perhaps.

  Zallman’s hair was thinning at the temples, there was a dented look to his cheeks. His eyes were those of a man older than thirty-one or -two. He’d begun to grow a beard, a goatee, to disguise his appearance, but you could see that it was a temporary experiment, it would not last. Yet Leah thought Mikal Zallman handsome, in his way rather romantic. A narrow hawkish face, brooding eyes. Quick to laugh at himself. She would allow him to adore her, possibly one day she would adore him. She was not prepared to be hurt by him.