The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Blindly, Brad obeyed. At a distance of several feet Stacy Lynn whooped at him, kicked and feinted with the knife to drive him forward as you might drive a confused animal. Here the smell of organic rot, mold, and stone was overpowering. Surely it had to be, these were human bones, and broken fragments of bones, over which he was being made to crawl in abnegation like one before an idol-God. At the edge of the cemetery there was a sudden drop-off—a ravine—Stacy Lynn stood behind Brad and with her foot kicked, shoved, pushed him—forcing him over the edge—he fell, whimpering—the ravine was no more than twelve feet deep—a place of rocks, sharp stones, rubble and underbrush through which a shallow stream ran, icy water in glittering rivulets. In the clumsy fall Brad struck his head against a rock. Stunned he lay at the bottom of the ravine, his lips had gone numb with cold and he could hardly move like the stump of a person as the triumphant girl crouched above him. “You will be scourged of God—that’s why you have been called to this place where there is nowhere to hide.”

  Brad pleaded he was a diabetic. He was a sick man, he had to have his insulin shot soon or he would go into a diabetic coma and die. At this the girl laughed cruelly. The girl laughed derisively. “You! ‘Diabetic’! That’s a joke. Crude pigs like you don’t get sick—you make other, innocent people sick.” She paused. She was panting, ecstatic in her triumph, peering down at him. “I’ve been sick. Since my mother died I’ve been plenty sick. They never let me see her again after the crash. I was not allowed to go to the funeral. I’ve been in rehab. More than once, in rehab. In different states. I moved away from here. I’ve been taught to come to terms. I let my mother down—I was eleven when she died. That is not a little child—eleven. I was the same person I am now, at eleven. In my heart I have not changed. In my soul. My mother was ‘sick unto death’ because of you—moving out the way you did, not even saying good-bye—she was wanting to die she was so unhappy and lying in bed all day like she was too weak to get up and dressed and I screamed at her I hated her—I said to her—you love him better than you love me, that nasty pig go live with him. You love him go live with him. Here—”

  Stacy Lynn had been rummaging in her pockets. In the pockets of her jeans. She tossed down to Brad a notepad. And a pen. The pad—at first Brad had thought it was a pack of cigarettes—was a small spiral notebook with lined pages. By moonlight Brad could just discern this. In the rubble he was fumbling for the pen. He understood now—the girl was insane—he had no choice but to cooperate with her or he would die.

  “Take this dictation, man! C’mon, man! Say—‘I, Bradford Shiftke, resident of’—you can fill that in later, man—also the date—‘am the cause of Linda Gutshalk’s death in June 1985. I was a molester of her daughter Stacy Lynn when Stacy Lynn was a little girl between the ages of five and eleven. I molested that pathetic little girl sticking my fingers inside her and I made her touch my ugly nasty thing and hold it, and squeeze it—until white stuff came out of it like pus. I made her beg for food like her mother had to beg for love.’”

  Like a figure in a silent film—contorted by pain, despair—yet the provocation of hilarity, in the observer—bizarrely Brad was trying to write, as the girl crouched above him dictating in a high-pitched urgent voice. His stiffened fingers could barely grasp the plastic ballpoint pen. He didn’t know what he was writing—trying to write—yet he persevered, as if his life depended upon it. High overhead rubble-shaped clouds shuttered the moon briefly. Then, there came patches of moonlight like muffled cries. How long Brad wrote in the little notepad—how long, his legs twisted beneath him, he tried to write—he could not have said; yet though he persevered, suddenly his tormentor said, as if this were the punch line of a joke: “Hey asshole—desist! You’ll retract any confession you make—think I don’t know that? It’s worthless. It’s shit. Anything you touch is shit. You believed me did you—you pathetic old man. You’re old now, you’d believe any shit to save your worthless life.”

  “Stacy—I won’t retract it—I promise.”

  “My name is Stacy Lynn not Stacy! Fuck you have any right to utter my name or my mother’s name—you’re trash. Your soul is trash. Even Christ would spit upon you, you poison everyone you touch.”

  “No, please. I’ve never hurt anyone—not on purpose. I promise—”

  “Bullshit! Tell it to some other female you betrayed and caused to die. I’m going now. I’m leaving you in just the right place. You can crawl back to Star Lake like a worm or you can die here like a worm, nobody will miss you. I’m not returning to Star Lake. I’m not returning to Carthage. At the motel I gave them a false name. It was my birthday last Friday—I am twenty-five years old. I had a health scare a few months ago, I had a biopsy at the county medical clinic and it turned out negative. I drove three thousand miles for this. For this moment, I drove three thousand miles and I lived three thousand years—ninety days in rehab. No one knows where I am. No one knows where you are. You are being punished, Brad-Daddy. You’re shit, see? You don’t even have a soul. My soul is stunted and deformed like a plant that has been growing beneath a rock or in a crack but my soul can prosper, if there’s sun. If there’s nourishment, and sun. But not you. Not you. A man like you.” Stacy Lynn paused. Brad could hear her harsh, heavy breath. She laughed, striking the palms of her hands together in childish glee. “But know what?—I will let you live. God says forgive the worst enemies. Christ says forgive so I am letting you live, Brad.”

  He was alone. The girl had gone. The girl had heaved herself to her feet and departed. Half-conscious Brad could hear her making her way through the underbrush. Frantically he called after her to help him—not to leave him alone in this terrible place but to help him—but of course he was alone, his tormentor had left him alone in the ruins of the Beersheba Cemetery. In his fall into the ravine he’d struck his head, and his forehead—he was bleeding from a cut above his eye. He thought I am not blinded. My eye has been spared. His wounded leg was beginning to turn numb, as if it were the leg of another man. At a distance there was terrible pain but here Brad felt his body shake loose, float. He was very tired but the rocks were lifting him. The icy-glittering stream was related in some way to the coursing of his blood through his arteries and veins. His heart pounded like a fist against a locked door, he was breathing in shallow spurts like an old dog made to run by a cruel master. Yet she’d let him live. She’d had mercy on him, she’d given him back his life and he meant to take the gift of that life. When his strength returned he would crawl out of the ravine. When he was in the cemetery he would begin to call for help. He would drag himself to the road, he would call for help. His cries would be heard, eventually. He would not give up—he was not a crushed worm, to give up. Had the bleeding in his leg stopped? He thought possibly the bleeding had stopped. He thought If the bleeding is stopped that is a good sign.

  NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME

  for Ellen Datlow

  She was a precocious child, aged nine. She understood that there was danger even before she saw the cat with thistledown gray fur like breath, staring at her, eyes tawny-golden and unperturbed, out of the bed of crimson peonies.

  It was summer. Baby’s first summer they spoke of it. At Lake St. Cloud in the Adirondack Mountains in the summer house with the dark shingles and fieldstone fireplaces and the wide second-floor veranda that, when you stepped out on it, seemed to float in the air, unattached to anything. At Lake St. Cloud neighbors’ houses were hardly visible through the trees, and she liked that. Ghost houses they were, and their inhabitants. Only voices carried sometimes, or radio music, from somewhere along the lakeshore a dog’s barking in the early morning, but cats make no sound—that was one of the special things about them. The first time she’d seen the thistledown gray cat she’d been too surprised to call to it, the cat had stared at her and she had stared at the cat, and it seemed to her that the cat had recognized her, or in any case it had moved its mouth in a silent miming of speech—not a “meow” as in a silly cartoon but a human word. But in the
next instant the cat had disappeared so she’d stood alone on the terrace feeling the sudden loss like breath sucked out of her and when Mommy came outside carrying the baby, the pretty candy cane towel flung over her shoulder to protect it from the baby’s drool, she hadn’t heard Mommy speaking to her at first because she was listening so hard to something else. Mommy repeated what she’d said, “Jessica—? Look who’s here.”

  Jessica. That was the word, the name, the thistledown gray cat had mimed.

  Back home, in the city, all the houses on Prospect Street which was their street were exposed, like in glossy advertisements. The houses were large and made of brick or stone and their lawns were large and carefully tended and never hidden from one another, never secret as at Lake St. Cloud. Their neighbors knew their names and were always calling out hello to Jessica even when they could tell she was looking away from them, thinking I don’t see anybody, they can’t see me but always there was the intrusion and backyards too ran together separated only by flower beds or hedges you could look over. Jessica loved the summer house that used to be Grandma’s before she died and went away and left it to them though she was never certain it was real or only something she’d dreamt. She had trouble sometimes remembering what real was and what dream was and whether they could ever be the same or were always different. It was important to know because if she confused the two Mommy might notice, and question her, and once Daddy couldn’t help laughing at her in front of company, she’d been chattering excitedly in that way of a shy child suddenly feverish to talk telling of how the roof of the house could be lifted and you could climb out using the clouds as stairs. Daddy interrupted to tell her no, no Jessie sweetheart that’s just a dream, laughing at the stricken look in her eyes so she went mute as if he’d slapped her and backed away and ran out of the room to hide. And tore at her thumbnail with her teeth to punish herself.

  Afterward Daddy came to her and squatted in front of her to look level in her eyes saying he was sorry he’d laughed at her and he hoped she wasn’t mad at Daddy, it’s just she’s so cute, her eyes so blue, did she forgive Daddy? and she nodded yes her eyes filling with tears of hurt and rage and in her heart No! no! no! but Daddy didn’t hear, and kissed her like always.

  That was a long time ago. She’d only been in preschool then. A baby herself, so silly. No wonder they laughed at her.

  The terrible worry was, for a while, they might not be driving up to Lake St. Cloud this summer.

  It was like floating—just the name. Lake St. Cloud. And clouds reflected in the lake, moving across the ripply surface of the water. It was up to Lake St. Cloud in the Adirondacks when you looked at the map of New York State and it was up when Daddy drove, into the foothills and into the mountains on curving, sometimes twisting roads. She could feel the journey up and there was no sensation so strange and so wonderful.

  Will we be going to the lake? Jessica did not dare ask Mommy or Daddy because to ask such a question was to articulate the very fear the question was meant to deny. And there was the terror, too, that the summer house was after all not real but only Jessica’s dream because she wanted it so badly.

  Back before Baby was born, in spring. Weighing only five pounds eleven ounces. Back before the “C-section” she heard them speak of so many times over the telephone, reporting to friends and relatives. “C-section”—she saw floating geometrical figures, octagons, hexagons, as in one of Daddy’s architectural magazines, and Baby was in one of these, and had to be sawed out. The saw was a special one, Jessica knew, a surgeon’s instrument. Mommy had wanted “natural labor” but it was to be “C-section” and Baby was to blame, but nobody spoke of it. There should have been resentment of Baby, and anger and disgust, for all these months Jessica was good and Baby-to-be bad. And nobody seemed to know, or to care. Will we be going to the lake this year? Do you still love me?—Jessica did not dare ask for fear of being told.

  This was the year, the year of Mommy’s swelling belly, when Jessica came to know many things without knowing how she knew. The more she was not told, the more she understood. She was a grave, small-boned child with pearly blue eyes and a delicate oval of a face like a ceramic doll’s face and she had a habit of which all adults disapproved of biting her thumbnail until it bled or even sucking at her thumb if she believed she was unobserved but most of all she had the power to make herself invisible sometimes watching and listening and hearing more than was said. The times that Mommy was unwell that winter, and the dark circles beneath her eyes, and her beautiful chestnut hair brushed limp behind her ears, and her breath panting from the stairs, or just walking across a room. From the waist up Mommy was still Mommy but from the waist down, where Jessica did not like to look, the thing that was Baby-to-be, Baby-Sister-to-be, had swollen up grotesquely inside her so her belly was in danger of bursting. And Mommy might be reading to Jessica or helping with her bath when suddenly the pain would hit, Baby kicked hard, so hard Jessica could feel it too, and the warm color draining from Mommy’s face, and the hot tears flooding her eyes. And Mommy would kiss Jessica hurriedly, and go away. And if Daddy was home she would call for him in that special voice meaning she was trying to keep calm. Daddy would say Darling, you’re all right, it’s fine, I’m sure it’s fine, helping Mommy to sit somewhere comfortable, or lie down with her legs raised; or to make her way slow as an elderly woman down the hall to the bathroom. That was why Mommy laughed so much, and was so breathless, or began to cry suddenly. These hormones! she’d laugh. Or, I’m too old! We waited too long! I’m almost forty! God help me, I want this baby so badly! and Daddy would be comforting, mildly chiding, he was accustomed to handling Mommy in her moods, Shhh! What kind of silly talk is that? Do you want to scare Jessie, do you want to scare me? And though Jessica might be asleep in her room in her bed she would hear, and she would know, and in the morning she would remember as if what was real was also dream, with the secret power of dream to give you knowledge others did not know you possessed.

  But Baby was born, and given a name: ____. Which Jessica whispered but, in her heart, did not say.

  Baby was born in the hospital, sawed out of the C-section as planned. Jessica was brought to see Mommy and Baby ____ and the surprise of seeing them the two of them so together Mommy so tired-looking and so happy, and Baby that had been an it, that ugly swelling in Mommy’s belly, was painful as an electric shock—swift-shooting through Jessica, even as Daddy held her perched on his knee beside Mommy’s bed, it left no trace. Jessie, darling—see who’s here? Your baby sister ____ isn’t she beautiful? Look at her tiny toes, her eyes, look at her hair that’s the color of yours, isn’t she beautiful? and Jessica’s eyes blinked only once or twice and with her parched lips she was able to speak, to respond as they wanted her to respond, like being called upon in school when her thoughts were in pieces like a shattered mirror but she gave no sign, she had the power, you must tell adults only what they want you to tell them so they will love you.

  So Baby was born, and all the fears were groundless. And Baby was brought back in triumph to the house on Prospect Street flooded with flowers where there was a nursery repainted and decorated specially for her. And eight weeks later Baby was taken in the car up to Lake St. Cloud, for Mommy was strong enough now, and Baby was gaining weight so even the pediatrician was impressed, already able to focus her eyes, and smile, or seem to smile, and gape her toothless little mouth in wonderment hearing her name ____! ____! ____! so tirelessly uttered by adults. For everybody adored Baby, whose very poop was delightful to them. For everybody was astonished at Baby, who had only to blink and drool and gurgle and squawk red-faced moving her bowels inside her diaper or, in her battery-operated baby swing, fall abruptly asleep as if hypnotized—isn’t she beautiful! isn’t she a love! And to Jessica was put the question again, again, again Aren’t you lucky to have a baby sister? and Jessica knew the answer that must be given, and given with a smile, a quick shy smile and a nod. For everybody brought presents for Baby, where once they had brought pre
sents for another baby. (Except, as Jessica learned, overhearing Mommy talking with a woman friend, there were many more presents for Baby than there had been for Jessica. Mommy admitted to her friend there were really too many, she felt guilty, now they were well-to-do and not scrimping and saving as when Jessica was born, now they were deluged with baby things, almost three hundred presents!—she’d be writing thank-you notes for a solid year.)

  At Lake St. Cloud, Jessica thought, it will be different.

  At Lake St. Cloud, Baby won’t matter so much.

  But she was wrong: immediately she knew she was wrong, and wanting to come here was maybe a mistake. For never before had the big old summer house been so busy. And so noisy. Baby was colicky sometimes, and cried and cried and cried through the night, and certain special rooms like the first-floor sunroom that was so beautiful, all latticed windows overlooking the lake, were given over to Baby and soon took on Baby’s smell. And sometimes the upstairs veranda where pine siskins, tame little birds, fluttered about the trees, making their sweet questioning cries—given over to Baby. The white wicker bassinet that was a family heirloom, pink and white satin ribbons threaded through the wicker, the gauzy lace veil drawn across sometimes to shield Baby’s delicate face from the sun; the changing table heaped with disposable diapers; the baby blankets, baby booties, baby panties, baby pajamas, baby bibs, baby sweaters, baby rattles, mobiles, stuffed toys—everywhere. Because of Baby, more visitors, including distant aunts and uncles and cousins Jessica did not know, came to Lake St. Cloud than ever before; and always the question put to Jessica was Aren’t you lucky to have a baby sister? a beautiful baby sister? These visitors Jessica dreaded more than she’d dreaded visitors in the city for they were intruding now in this special house, this house Jessica had thought would be as it had always been, before Baby, or any thought of Baby. Yet even here Baby was the center of all happiness, and the center of all attention. As if a radiant light shone out of Baby’s round blue eyes which everybody except Jessica could see.