Little Bird of Heaven

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In a haze of incomprehension I’d been listening to my mother’s words in faltering little rushes. Like a person unsteady on his legs—one whose legs are about to give out—my mother was capable of sudden little rushes, an air of desperation underlaid by a determination not to collapse. By this time her fingers were so tightly gripping mine, I’d had to pull away from her. She scarcely noticed. She was trying not to—cry?—not to laugh? Her face was mottled with heat and the glassy sheen in her eyes, that appeared lashless, naked, was painful to see.

  Bitterly now she said, “Oh—how do I know? What can I know? Why am I telling my daughter such things, when I don’t know? There are things I do know: he wasn’t home with his family that night. The night that woman died, in the early hours of Sunday morning, it’s said—my husband Edward Diehl was not home. He’d asked me to lie for him, to say that he was home, and he was in our bed, but that was not—that is not—true, Krista! I refuse to lie to the police, as he’d asked me to. I refuse to lie because I won’t lie for him, an adulterer. D’you know what an adulterer is, Krista? One who betrays. One who betrays his vows to his wife and to his family and is not then to be trusted. Not ever to be trusted. He had been lying to me for years about that woman, first he’d lied denying there was anything between them, he was ‘mostly just friends’ with the husband Delray, but that was a lie, he’s been lying to all of us for years knowing how he could get away with it, Eddy Diehl can get away with anything, through his life from high school he’d gotten away with—with murder. Why should I lie for him? Because I am his wife—Lucille? Because I am the left-behind wife he’d betrayed, I should lie for him? Why should anyone lie for such a man, or love him? You and Ben, Krista—why?”

  Why?—because he is my father. Because I love him, more than I love you.

  Because all that he tells me, I will believe.

  We were in school when, in early March, Daddy came to the house to take away the rest of his things.

  For much of a frenzied day my mother had enlisted our aid, Ben’s and mine, in packing Daddy’s things—clothes, shoes, manual and power tools from his basement workshop—into cardboard boxes which were then dragged out onto the back porch so that Daddy would have no need to come inside the house.

  “It’s trash, let him haul away his trash. It’s the trash of that man’s life, I want nothing to do with it.”

  So like a county sanitation worker my father was made by my mother to come to our house and take away his things without coming inside.

  So we knew that Daddy would not be coming back to live with us for a long time. And maybe never.

  In my heartsick daze, I didn’t cry. I don’t think I cried.

  Ben said, sneering, “Why’s he need his big-deal ‘power tools’ where he’s going?” and I asked where was Daddy going?—and Ben said with his new hateful laugh, “To hell, stupid. Where’d you think.”

  13

  FOUR YEARS LATER my father’s chiding words echoed in my thoughts like loose sharp gravel flung against something soft.

  If you don’t want to take the risk. Maybe you shouldn’t be playing at all.

  14

  349 WEST FERRY STREET. Where Zoe Kruller was found.

  It was a brownstone row house at the corner of West Ferry and a one-way street called Mercy. It had a dull-brown soft-crumbling façade and stark staring windows and its bleak snow-cratered front yard was hardly more than the size of a card table, trod upon by myriad feet and pissed-upon by myriad neighborhood dogs. Though it was approximately two and a half miles from our house on Huron Pike Road, you could not get there directly.

  There were circuitous ways. Ways I would learn in secret, in the late winter/early spring of that year.

  You could hike along the railroad tracks through marshy woodlands and fields in which, in early April, the eerie high-pitched cries of peepers assailed the ear from all sides; you could avoid roads and being seen by anyone driving on roads, and make your way into the city limits of Sparta across the Black River on a plank footbridge that ran close beside the railroad bridge hoping that no locomotive would rush by, shaking and rattling the footbridge, while you were on it.

  You could pause on the bridge leaning against the railing feeling a touch of vertigo, giddiness. You could stare down at the swift thinly rippling water flowing north and west in the direction of Lake Ontario with the relentless unyielding suction of water down a bathtub drain. You could note where the river was relatively shallow near shore and there were protrusions of shale strata like ribs of ancient beasts and your fear—an instinctive animal-fear engendered by this place—was that it might be the footbridge that was moving, and the thin-rippling water that was still. And the thought might come to you This is a place and a time I can always come back to. This will always remain.

  On the farther side of the rippling-dark river there came a powerful stench of fertilizer from the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad yard. Loud jarring noises that made the air shudder, of freight cars being coupled together by force. Men’s uplifted voices sounding both angry and jocular.

  Even the laughter of men working outdoors has an air of anger about it.

  Beyond the railroad yard—which was massive, sprawling on several acres of fenced-off riverfront land—there was the old train depot on Denver Street, that had not been used for a decade; a derelict crumbling-brick structure of about the size of a single freight car, with boarded-up windows covered in a lacy filigree of graffiti in which even obscene words—fuck cunt shithole—bore the air of a mysterious secret code. Close about this abandoned Denver Street depot there was broken glass scattered on the pavement and there was a smell of stale urine and sometimes the mysterious figures—usually solitary, huddled on benches or sprawled comatose on the pavement—of vagrants, homeless men in layers of clothing, wrapped in makeshift blankets; at times there were younger men, in their twenties, high school-aged boys, likely to be swarthy-skinned, Indian-looking, gathered in the evenings to sell and buy drugs and to get high on pot, speed, “crystal meth”—so Ben told me. Ben sneered at “dopers”—“druggies”—“junkies.” Ben had higher plans for himself that involved leaving Sparta as soon as he graduated from high school, entering an engineering school like Rensselaer Polytech.

  Yet to me, an air of perverse romance clung to the abandoned depot, raw and overexposed in daylight, as an air of perverse romance clung to the ruins of rotting woodframe bungalows and dilapidated buildings in the old riverfront neighborhood beneath the Black River suspension bridge. I wondered if Zoe Kruller’s son Aaron was one of the teenaged boys who hung out at the depot. And if, after Zoe’s death, Aaron continued to return to the depot, that could not have been more than a half-mile from the brownstone on West Ferry Street.

  That poor boy! Imagine! My mother spoke of Mrs. Kruller’s son with an air of vehement concern as if what had happened to him, what he’d happened upon, was Zoe Kruller’s fault.

  This trouble that came into all our lives.

  It was an afternoon in April 1983, two months after Mrs. Kruller’s body had been found. The air was sunny and warm enough to rouse the peepers to their frantic din in the wetlands near our house, I felt a powerful yearning to leave the house, to slip away without telling my mother where I was going; to hike along the railroad tracks taking care to step on the railroad ties and not on the coarse gravel between the ties that hurt my feet through the soles of my boots; bravely I crossed the footbridge hoping that no train would rush up behind me and overhead and cause the footbridge to tremble convulsively; and within the Sparta city limits I descended from the footbridge to a no-man’s-land bordering the railroad yard, I passed the abandoned depot with its zigzag slashes of graffiti and a rear door agape—was anyone inside? I could not see—and so across unpaved Denver Street and to West Ferry Street breathless and excited. This was forbidden territory! This was a terrible thing that I was doing! And yet, how ordinary the brownstone at 349 was, almost I could not believe that this rundown residence with its mutilated-lo
oking front yard and blank blind windows, a scattering of advertising flyers on the front walk, was the place in which Zoe Kruller had been murdered in an upstairs room.

  At one time decades ago these brownstones had been millworkers’ homes. The West Ferry neighborhood had been what my mother would have identified as a “not-bad” neighborhood, “not run-down” like so much of inner Sparta. But the riverside mills—cotton goods, hosiery—had shut down in the late 1960s, before I was born.

  It was something of a shock to me, to see people on West Ferry Street. A run-down house being repaired, on Mercy Street. There was street traffic, there were mothers pushing small children in strollers, boys on bicycles shouting companionably to one another. I had been envisioning the house in which Zoe Kruller had been murdered as stark and isolated as a nightmare house in a horror movie but in fact the brownstone at 349 resembled other brownstones in the block: two floors, two narrow windows on each floor, a cramped front stoop, the cramped front yard bordered by cracked and uneven sidewalks. Some of the front yards on West Ferry Street looked as if they’d been tended, winter debris had been raked away, but at 349 there were only waterlogged and rotted flyers and dog-shit-littered grassless earth. In each of the four windows facing the street blinds had been drawn to different lengths as if to suggest an air of drunken revelry. There were glimpses of grayish curtains, like underwear.

  On the front door, the remains of a Christmas wreath of silvery tinsel and red plastic berries.

  A Christmas wreath! I wondered if Zoe Kruller had put the wreath up, I thought yes, that would be like Zoe. (But why hadn’t the wreath been taken down, after Zoe Kruller’s body had been carried through that doorway? This seemed wrong to me.)

  Slowly I walked past the brownstone. It was said that Zoe Kruller had left her family to live in a terrible inner-city neighborhood but this block of West Ferry wasn’t so very different from stretches of the Huron Pike Road where there were run-down old houses, trailers tilting on cement blocks and the hulks of abandoned vehicles in front yards.

  Next-door at 347 a family with young children must have been living for there were children’s toys on the front walk, an overturned tricycle. In the backyard, laundry hung on clotheslines.

  Dazzling-white sheets flapping in the wind.

  “Hey: you.”

  A thick-bodied girl of about twelve with sharp-chiseled Indian features, coarse dark hair, a mouth twisted in a grimace of a smile—friendly? mocking?—passed me on the sidewalk pushing a small child in a stroller, so close she brushed my leg with one of the stroller wheels. “Sor-ry!” I shrank away, wanting to think this was just accidental. I did not want to see the girl grinning at me.

  White girl! White bitch! What’re you doing here, pissy little white girl!

  Nervously I walked on. I did not think that the Indian-looking girl would turn the stroller around to follow me, and she did not. But I was conscious of older boys on bicycles, whooping and yelling in the street, not knowing if they were mocking me, or whether they were utterly indifferent to me…. After a while, the boys disappeared.

  As if casually then I turned, and walked back to Zoe Kruller’s former residence. My heart was pounding with anticipation—for exactly what, I could not imagine. I’d assumed that the brownstone was empty and yet: in one of the first-floor windows of the brownstone there was a sudden blurred movement as if someone inside was drawing back the blind to peer out.

  A woman’s hand, was it?—red-lacquered fingernails.

  Quickly I walked on. I began to run. I was not thinking That is the ghost of Zoe Kruller for I did not believe in ghosts, I was not a silly child at the age of eleven yet my heart thumped in my chest and the hairs at the nape of my neck stirred. Blindly I ran along West Ferry and to unpaved Denver and back along the railroad yard reeking of airborne toxins and to the footbridge above the river and I was thinking how Zoe Kruller’s fingernails had always been so beautifully manicured, always so perfectly polished, when she’d waited on us at Honeystone’s and sung for us in the blinding-hot lights of the bandstand stage: no matter the Sparta summer air was heavy with moisture, the temperature in the park still in the nineties how Zoe Kruller craved our attention, our love, our applause…. Every girl in the audience wished to be Zoe Kruller up there on the stage shaking and writhing her slim little body, hips and surprisingly sizable pointy breasts, tossing her strawberry blond crimped mane of hair and flashing those red-painted nails that had to be twice as long as the ordinary plain nails of Lucille Diehl, to match the luscious red-gleaming lipstick on Zoe’s widened mouth.

  Sayyyy there Krissie thought it was you

  And that car of your Daddy’s for sure

  What can I do you-all for today?

  And had Ben bicycled over to West Ferry Street, yes I was sure that Ben had. Long before I’d gone to West Ferry Street. I knew this, I had to know this, though I would not have asked Ben and if I’d asked him, he would have shrugged me off. Bullshit! was Ben’s way of coping with all of his life he could not now control. Laughing-shrugging Bullshit! like a jab in my ribs.

  Unable to hurt the person—or persons—who’d hurt him, Ben knew that he could always hurt me.

  “You, girl! You looking for—who?”

  The woman’s voice was mildly teasing, chiding: a Zoe Kruller kind of voice. There was an eagerness to it like a fishhook in flesh, in an instant of weakness you hesitate and the hook is in.

  It was another afternoon, later in spring. In the spring of that year—that interminable, terrible year—in which Zoe Kruller was murdered. Several times now I had hiked in secret along the railroad tracks and across the footbridge and back to West Ferry Street and each time I went alone and each time I was struck by the ordinariness of the neighborhood which was what Caucasians like my mother called mixed, a neighborhood of mixed races. There were numerous white-skinned people here, though not so many as what my mother would call those others, and if I felt some uneasiness it wasn’t because of the color of my skin, or theirs, but because on West Ferry and on surrounding roadways there were many trucks, there were many truck drivers and of these it was likely to suppose that some knew my father Eddy Diehl and, if they’d ever seen me, or knew me, they might recognize me and report back to my father, or to my mother, that the eleven-year-old Krista Diehl had been sighted in a Sparta neighborhood miles from her home where clearly she did not belong.

  As this woman had sighted me, and was calling to me. Recognizing me not as Eddy Diehl’s daughter but as a stranger who’d been walking—walking and staring—in the unpaved alley that ran behind the brownstones on West Ferry, pausing behind 349.

  How ramshackle the brownstone looked, from the rear! Shabby, run-down, rotting planks in the backyard, in mud puddles black-feathered birds—ravens, grackles—with long tails splashing and bathing like manic children.

  “Sweetie, hey: c’mon say hello. Nobody’s gonna bite you, promise.”

  Like an apparition the woman had appeared on the back porch of Zoe Kruller’s former residence. Maybe she’d been watching me through a window.

  At eleven I was still young enough, or appeared young enough, to be addressed as if I were a small child, by adults. I had not an adolescent’s presence of mind to simply turn away. I smiled, uneasily—I murmured Hello. The woman beckoned me to come forward, and so I did.

  And how strange this woman was! At first glance you would think that she was beautiful, glamorous—but no, she was neither beautiful nor glamorous so much as a mockery of “feminine” beauty, glamour—a cosmetic mask that has been disfigured. Her face was large, round, moon-shaped like my mother’s, but it appeared to be shiny as if rubbed with a greasy rag, and swollen. Her shoulder-length hair was a dyed-beet color that looked frizzy and matted as if she’d just gotten out of bed. Over her ample body she was wearing something lacy and black and slinky—a nightgown? “negligee”?—and over this a man’s flannel shirt carelessly buttoned so that you could see, without wishing to see, a swath of black lace and larg
e heavy lard-colored breasts. Like her face the woman’s body appeared swollen, goiterous. Yet she exuded a weird sexual assurance with an elaborately painted crimson mouth, plucked and pencil-thin eyebrows, doll-like features squashed together inside the fatty face. Here was a woman—a female—whose attraction for men would be powerful, I thought. Like certain of the older and more mature high school girls whom I knew, she seemed to belong to another species of being.

  Wanting to run from her but—I could not! So earnestly, so hopefully and so seductively she smiled at me.

  “Well, say—my name is Jacky. What’s yours?”

  Again, the uncanny echo of Zoe Kruller. Well, say!

  In an article in the Sparta paper about Zoe Kruller it had been noted that at the time of her death Zoe had been staying with a “woman friend” on West Ferry Street; and that this friend had been away, overnight, when Zoe was killed; yet police had reason to believe that the woman was one of the last people to have seen Zoe alive. Her name was Jacqueline DeLucca—I had memorized that name—and she’d been identified as a “cocktail waitress, unemployed.”

  Somehow it happened, I told “Jacky” DeLucca my name.

  “Krista’—what a pretty name. An unusual name, isn’t it!”