Little Bird of Heaven

by Joyce Carol Oates

Focus on “Men Friends”—“Visitors”

  Later, headlines would diminish, and their tone would subtly alter in tone:

  BLUEGRASS SINGER’S PRIVATE LIFE YIELDS “SURPRISES”

  Sparta Detectives Continue Investigation Following “Leads”

  In our household, no one spoke of Zoe Kruller. It was a time—I guess it wasn’t the first time—when Daddy was often working late, or had to stay away overnight “on business”—and Mommy was edgy and impatient with Ben and me if we asked about him—“He’s away. He’s working. How do I know where he is, ask him yourself!”

  Which was so illogical, even Ben couldn’t think how to reply.

  The phone, which had not often rung, rang often now. And Mom, who hadn’t often used the phone, was using it often now. At a distance from us, upstairs in the big bedroom into which we were not welcome except by invitation—when I helped my mother houseclean and vacuum, for instance—or in the kitchen with the door so oddly, unnaturally closed—the maple wood cedar door which Daddy had installed in the kitchen was never closed.

  Except now, sometimes it was. When Ben and I returned from school on the school bus and tramped into the mudroom at the rear with our snow-wetted boots, there was the kitchen door closed over, and we could hear our mother speaking on the phone in her low urgent accusing panicky voice that was a warning to us, not to approach her But what—? What will—happen? What does this mean? Will there be an—arrest? How can there be an arrest, if—A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer? Oh God a lawyer—we can’t afford a—

  Ben was stony-faced, kicking off his boots and stomping away upstairs loud enough so that Mom might hear. Ben ignored my entreaties as he ignored my stricken look, my wounded thumb shoved to my mouth so that I could gnaw at the nail and cause the cuticle to bleed a little more.

  What does he say, you know what he says! Well he won’t talk to me—maybe he’ll talk to you—But no lawyer, that’s—No that’s crazy—

  This excited voice of my mother’s—this tone of reproach, bewilderment, humiliation, anger—suggested that she was speaking with her older brother, or with one of her sisters. I didn’t want to hear!—quickly I pressed my hands over my ears and stomped upstairs after my brother.

  Well, say! Thought it was you.

  What can I do you for, Krissie?

  Tried to make myself cry staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and speaking in Zoe Kruller’s throaty-scratchy voice but I didn’t cry, not one tear.

  9

  DADDY, we could not ask.

  Not Krista, not Ben. Not our mother.

  Not about Mrs. Kruller-whose-picture-was-in-the-paper. Not about the homicide.

  There were no words for me to speak of such a thing to my father. As at any age I could not have spoken frankly to him about the physical life, or about sex; I would never have dared ask my father how much money he made, how much our house had cost, if he was insured and how much was he insured for. I could not have asked him about God: Is there a God, and what has God to do with us? These were taboo subjects, though the word taboo did not exist in our vocabulary and if it ever came to be known in Sparta, by way of advertisements and popular culture, it would be the perfume Taboo.

  In any case children did not ask about death. Children could watch death on TV, gunfire, explosions, planes shot wantonly from the sky to fall in a filigree of flame, but children could not ask about death. Only very young children who would quickly learn their mistake.

  When Grandpa Diehl had died, and I was four years old and too little for school. When Daddy wasn’t at work he’d kept to himself in the basement of our house in his workshop where we would hear his power tools wailing through the floorboards and in the days, weeks following Grandpa’s funeral Daddy did not speak to us about Grandpa Diehl except evasively to say that Grandpa had “gone away.” By the look in Daddy’s face, my brother and I had known not to ask where Grandpa Diehl had gone.

  Mom had warned us: don’t ask Daddy about Grandpa, Daddy is upset. On the phone Mom said Eddy’s taking it pretty hard. You know how he is, it’s all inside.

  The words struck me: It’s all inside.

  Taking it pretty hard. All inside.

  At school, people were talking about Zoe Kruller, who was Aaron Kruller’s mother, or had been Aaron Kruller’s mother. Now Mrs. Kruller too had gone away.

  How strange it seemed to us, who’d known Zoe Kruller from both Honeystone’s Dairy and from the Chautauqua Park music-nights, that a woman so friendly, so pretty and glamorous would be strangled in her bed, murdered. How wrong it seemed to us that you could be the girl-singer for Black River Breakdown and applauded and whistled at and made to sing encores, yet someone could still hate you enough to beat, strangle you in your bed.

  Some worse things were done to Aaron’s mother than just killing her, know why?—’cause she was a slut.

  We were made to come home immediately from school. Our mothers would not allow us to stay for after-school activities nor did school authorities encourage such activities, in the months following Zoe Kruller’s death. Patrol cars swung by the schools, cruising through the parking lots like friendly sharks. Bus drivers counted heads before shutting the bus doors and leaving the school property, determining that we were all present and accounted for. The older boys objected, they weren’t damn girls.

  Ben said: “Some things I heard, about Aaron’s mother, it was just her he was after, the ‘strangler.’ He wouldn’t be after any of us.”

  I asked Ben who’d told him this. I asked Ben what else he’d heard at his school and Ben shrugged evasively and said just some things—“Not for you to know.”

  In Sparta—unlike the rest of the world where people were dying and being killed in terrible ways all the time—it seemed rare that anyone died and yet more rare that anyone died in a way to cause such upset, dread, wonder. Of course the “natural” deaths were sad and people cried, especially women. Women were adept at crying, as men were humbled and stymied by crying. Women were cleansed by crying, as men were smudged and stained by crying. But the person who’d died was usually elderly, or had died after a long illness, or both; or had died in a car crash on the highway, or a boating accident on the river or one of the numerous lakes surrounding Sparta. These were sad deaths but not frightening deaths. Because you knew, if you were a child, that nothing like those deaths would ever happen to you.

  Except now, people were frightened. Adults were frightened. There is such a profound difference between dying and being killed.

  At Honeystone’s Dairy it wasn’t so much fun any longer. Without Zoe Kruller leaning on her elbows on the counter, smiling.

  The ice cream was still delicious, greedily we devoured it.

  The smell of the fresh-brewed coffee was pungent, disagreeable. To my sensitive nostrils, disagreeable. Since my ice-cream cone infested with nasty weevils Daddy hadn’t taken Ben and me back to the dairy all summer, I had to wonder if there was some connection.

  At Honeystone’s I hadn’t much wanted to overhear my mother speaking with old grumpy-grandma Mrs. Honeystone. The two shaking their heads in disapproval, bonded in that moment by a swell of indignation like dirty water swishing about their ankles. And leaving her family, too! How could she.

  The mysteries you live with, as a child. Never solved, never resolved. Utterly trivial, petty. Like a tiny pebble in your shoe, that causes you to walk crookedly.

  ZOE KRULLER. Zoe Kruller. Zoe Kruller.

  Now in late February and early March of 1983 the white clapboard house on the Huron Pike Road quivered with this name, unspoken. In the household upstairs and down and in my father’s workshop in the basement in which he spent much of the truncated time he now spent at home there was the taut tense silence that follows a lightning-flash when you wait for the thunder to roar in.

  Across Lake Ontario, great armadas of winter-storm clouds. Blown eastward and south out of Canada, the air too bitter-cold for snow. The silence-before-the-storm where you wait not knowing
what you are waiting for.

  In their bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall—the door shut tight, only a meager band of light beneath—our parents spoke together in their low urgent alarmed voices. For hours.

  We sank into sleep, Ben and me, to the sound of those voices. We were wakened from sleep, to the sound of those voices. I think this was how it was. I am trying not to mis-remember, and most of all I am trying not to invent.

  Zoe Kruller. How could you! How many times! Oh why.

  Those hours, middle-of-the-night. Those vibrations in the air as when the old furnace clicked on, heaving itself into life like an enlarged and failing heart.

  Or maybe: my parents’ bedroom door opening, and my father’s footsteps in the hall, on the stairs to the first floor. So I was wakened dry-mouthed and frightened.

  “Daddy? Where are you going?”

  Calling down the stairs to him, and he’d tell me to get back to bed, back to sleep. And if I followed him to the stairs, and halfway down the stairs he’d speak more sharply to me: “Go back to sleep, Krista. This is not for you.”

  EARLIER THAT WINTER, WHAT we hadn’t wanted to remember. What would be blurred and smudged in our memories—Ben’s, and mine—like a blackboard across which a fist has been dragged, carelessly.

  Later we would realize that these were the days before.

  Days, nights before Zoe Kruller’s death.

  After Thanksgiving, through the long siege of Christmas and through snow-dazzled January those days we had no idea were before.

  Those days when Daddy seemed to be away much of the time. He’d been hours late for Thanksgiving dinner—“dinner” was at 4:00 P.M.—at my aunt Sharon’s house and he had not shown up at all for a birthday dinner at another relative’s house. Weekdays he’d call home to say he’d be late for supper or maybe he wouldn’t be having supper with us at all. And those nights when he didn’t call home. And when he didn’t come home.

  And Ben and I persisted Where’s Daddy? though seeing in our mother’s hurt and furious eyes Don’t ask! Shut up and go away but of course we asked, we could not stop ourselves from asking. No one so pitiless as children sensing something wrong, smelling blood and eager for someone to blame.

  Where Daddy was: at work. Or, meeting with a customer. Or, at the construction site.

  I worried that Daddy wouldn’t have any supper, Daddy would be hungry. Where would Daddy eat?

  Ben said not to worry, there’s plenty of taverns between here and wherever Daddy might be. And Daddy knew them all.

  Our mother said: “Your father is taking on more work. ‘Managerial’ work. Paul Cassano”—(our father’s employer at Sparta Construction)—“is semi-retired, you know he’d had a minor heart attack last winter. So your father has more responsibilities.”

  Still I set Daddy’s place at the table. Dark green “woven” plastic place mats, paper napkins neatly folded and fork, knife, spoon positioned properly.

  And I helped Mom prepare dinner. When I’d been a little girl, this was such a special time! Being entrusted with stirring macaroni as it boiled in a pot on the stove, cleaning carrots and potatoes at the sink, regulating the Mixmaster at its various magical speeds—not too fast, so that mashed potatoes or frosting splattered out of the bowl; setting the oven, usually at 375° F, for casseroles and cakes. What I liked was, at such times, nudging against my mother’s warm fleshy thighs, as if accidentally in our small kitchen. My mother had a crisp biscuity smell unlike the harsher perfume-smell of some of the mothers of my classmates, who lived in Sparta and in whose homes I sometimes stayed overnight, as my mother dressed more casually than these mothers did—in Kmart stretch slacks, pullover shirts and sweaters, wool socks (in cold weather), sneakers. For just at home my mother never wore makeup but before Daddy returned from work, late afternoons on weekdays, she took care to put on lipstick—the same shade of Revlon pink-frosted-plum she’d been wearing since high school—and to fluff out her flattened hair, pinch at her sallow cheeks.

  It was a time when my mother boasted of my father, to anyone who came into our house: “These maple wood cupboards, this counter and floor—all this Eddy did by himself. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  And: “Eddy put in the deck by himself. That built-in grill—Eddy did that. Saved us thousands of dollars he says. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  No longer did my mother speak of my father in this way, when the trouble began. Rarely did my mother speak of my father at all except in blunt flat statements of fact Your father won’t be back tonight, don’t set a place for him.

  During the lengthy, confused and unsettling Christmas season—how endless it seemed, being “recessed” from the safe, secure routines of school—the serious arguments began. These were eruptions of words not strictly confined to my parents’ bedroom and therefore particularly alarming to Ben and me as the sight of, for instance, our parents’ unclothed bodies would have been to us. Or, these were voices rising through furnace vents and into my room, from the kitchen; sometimes, late at night, from the living room where, a single lamp burning, TV turned low, my mother would be awaiting my father on the sofa, alone, like a sick woman curled up beneath an afghan.

  Those nights when Mom insisted upon my going to bed by 9:30 P.M. and Ben by 10:30 P.M. but did not come upstairs to bed herself. Instead she was waiting for headlights to turn into our lane, from the river road. She was smoking—though Lucille Diehl did not smoke—and she might have been drinking—though Lucille Diehl certainly did not drink. She seemed to be watching television but no channel engaged her interest for long not even the Classic Movie Channel, and the sound was muted. Several times Ben came downstairs barefoot in his T-shirt and boxer shorts—Ben emulated Daddy, in nightwear—to say how “weird” she was getting, for God’s sake why didn’t she go to bed!

  Mom ignored Ben. Smoking in the darkened living room with just the TV screen glimmering and glowing like something phosphorescent at the bottom of the sea, a simulacrum of life that was not life. The acrid smell of her cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to my bedroom, I dreamt that the house was on fire, my legs were tangled in bedclothes and I could not escape.

  Sometimes sensing my mother’s mounting desperation—unless it was my own—I would sit at the top of the stairs. In pajamas, barefoot and shivering. It was midnight: so late. And then it was 1 A.M., 2:35 A.M., alarmingly late. I was waiting with Mommy, in secret.

  To see Mommy in the living room, on the sofa with her back to me, I had to slide down two or three stair steps. I had to be very quiet, hugging my knees. For if Mommy knew that I was there she would have been very angry. Can’t I have any privacy in this God-damned house for God’s sake! Go away and leave me alone you God-damned kids, having babies was the end of me, lost my figure, lost my looks, God damn you go away, just leave me alone.

  This was not our daytime mother, I understood. This was Mommy-at-night in the darkened living room and with the TV set turned to mute. And sometimes I would fall asleep on the stairs, and one of them—it might be Mommy, it might be Daddy—would discover me, and not be angry with me, but half-carry me back to my bed and tuck me into my bed and so it was part of my dream, and a happy part of my dream, or maybe it had not happened, at all.

  Krissie you naughty girl! Shut your eyes tight and sleep.

  10

  “YOUR FATHER WILL be staying with your uncle Earl for a while. No—don’t ask me about it, he will tell you himself.”

  No longer Daddy but your father. This subtle change. This abrupt change. Our mother speaking to us of your father as she might have been speaking of your teacher, your bus driver.

  This was three days after the news of Zoe Kruller was first released. Three days after the banner headlines in the Sparta Journal which my mother had snatched from my fingers.

  Three days, during which time Daddy had not been home very much, or had been home and gone away again, and had returned late at night when Ben and I were in bed and supposedly asleep.

  “Tell us—what?”


  We’d just returned from school. Ben let his backpack fall onto the floor. Since the news of Zoe Kruller had entered our lives Ben had been behaving strangely, loud-laughing, crude as the older boys on the school bus who tormented younger children.

  Ben’s face flushed with anger. “Bullshit.”

  Ben pushed past our mother, ran upstairs thudding his heels on the stairs and slammed the door to his room. Looking as if she’d been struck in the face our mother stared after him but didn’t call his name—didn’t scold him—so I knew that something was very wrong.

  “Mom? What is…”

  “I said. He will tell you, Krista. Your father. Soon.”

  I was stunned. I could not comprehend why Ben was so angry, and what it meant that your father was staying with a relative. I seemed to know that this must have something to do with Zoe Kruller but could not imagine what.

  The phone began ringing. We were in the kitchen and something, too, was wrong with the kitchen: there were dishes in the sink, soaking. There was a discolored sponge on the counter that looked as if it had been used to mop up coffee. There was an ashtray filled with butts, and the air stank of cigarette smoke and butts. And this was a wrong smell, for this house. And my mother’s face looked shiny and swollen and her mouth was greasy with fresh smears of Revlon lipstick as if she’d been expecting company or possibly company had come and departed and that was why there were dishes in the sink and cigarette butts smoldering in the ashtray and an air of frantic unease that felt like a churning in the guts. I was young enough then to react as a child would react—trying to push into my mother’s arms. But my mother was distracted, upset; she had no time for a needy daughter; the ringing phone seemed to stymie her as if she couldn’t recognize its sound. When I moved to pick up the receiver my mother gave a little slap at me: “No, Krista. Not for you. I’ll take it, you go away.”