Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Again the triumphant cry which you hear in your sleep. I am alive, I am here, I am myself and I am hungry.

  Each morning it has been happening. The widow wakes with a sudden violence as if she has been yanked into consciousness.

  A hoarse croaking cry from the lake.

  A blinding light flooding the brain.

  She is furious with the (deceased) husband. She has told no one.

  Why did you go away when you did? Why did you not take better care of yourself? Why were you careless of both our lives?

  How can I forgive you….

  Why had he died, why when he might not have died. As he’d lived quietly, unobtrusively. Always a good person.

  Always kind. Considerate of others.

  He’d had chest pains, a spell of breathlessness and light-headedness but he had not wanted to tell her. He’d promised he would pick up his sister’s son at Newark Airport and drive him to relatives in Stamford, Connecticut; no reason the nineteen-year-old couldn’t take a bus or a taxi but James had insisted, no trouble, really no trouble, in fact it is a good deal of trouble, it is a trip of hours, and some of these in heavy traffic. Already as he was preparing to leave she’d seen something in his face, a sudden small wince, a startled concentration, with wifely concern asking, Is something wrong? and quickly he’d said No, it’s nothing, of course James would quickly say It’s nothing for that is the kind of man James was. And that is why (the widow thinks bitterly) James is not that man any longer, he is not is, he is was. And she might have known this. She might have perceived this. Asking, But are you in pain?—and he’d denied pain as a wrongdoer would deny having done wrong for that is how he was.

  She was saying, there was pettishness in her voice (she knows), Why don’t we hire a car service for your nephew, explain that the drive is just too much for you, and then you have to turn around and return and we would pay for it ourselves of course, but James said Certainly not, no, he’d promised to pick up his nephew and drive him to Stamford, it would be an opportunity for him and Andy to talk together, for they so rarely saw each other in recent years. And he said my sister and brother-in-law wouldn’t allow us to pay for a car service which seemed beside the point to Claudia who said exasperated, Then they should pay for the car! Why are we quarreling, what is this about?

  Well, she knew. She knew what it was about: James’s feelings of obligation to his family. James’s habit of being good. His compulsion to do the right thing even when the right thing is meaningless.

  Even when the right thing will cost him his life.

  The husband’s compulsion to be generous, to be kind, to be considerate of others because that is his nature.

  And the pains had not subsided but increased as James drove along the turnpike and in a nightmare of interstate traffic his vehicle swerved off the highway just before the exit for Newark Airport. And he was taken by ambulance to an ER in Newark where he would survive for ninety-six minutes—until just before the terrified wife arrives.

  Exhausted insomniac hours at her husband’s death going through accounts, bank statements, paying bills.

  Not death, desk. She’d meant.

  The brother-in-law has left a glossy Sotheby’s brochure.

  The brother-in-law has left a glossy brochure for a “genetic modification” research institute in Hudson Park, New Jersey, across which he has scrawled Terrific opportunities for investment here but it’s “time sensitive”—before the stock takes off into the stratosphere.

  The brother-in-law has left a snide phone message—Claudie? You must know that I am your friend & (you must know) you have not so many friends now that Jim is gone.

  She is not unhappy! She has grown to love rain-lashed days, days when there is no sun, mud days, when she can tramp in the wetlands in rubber boots. In an old L.L. Bean jacket of her husband’s with wonderful zippered pockets and flaps into which she can shove tissues, gloves, even a cell phone.

  She will not usually answer the cell phone if it rings. But she feels an obligation to see who might wish to speak with her. Whom she might call back.

  Not the brother-in-law. Not him.

  She is returning to the house when she sees his vehicle in the driveway—a brass-colored Land Rover. She knows that he is ringing the doorbell, rapping his knuckles smartly on the door. She sees him peering through a window, shading his small bright eyes. Claudie? Claudie it’s me—are you in there?

  Amid dripping trees at the corner of the house the widow waits, in hiding.

  She will say It is very quiet at the lake. It is lonely at the lake.

  Most days.

  “Stop! Stop that….”

  Cupping her hands to her mouth, shouting at the boys throwing rocks out onto the lake at the waterfowl.

  It is amazing to the widow—she is shouting.

  Not for years, not in memory has she shouted. The effort is stunning, her throat feels scraped as with a rough-edged blade.

  “Stop! Stop. …”

  Most of the rocks thrown by the boys fall short. Only a few of the youngest, most vulnerable birds have been struck—ducklings, goslings. The boys, who appear to be between the ages of ten and thirteen, are not wading in the water—(it’s as if they are too lazy, too negligent to hunt their prey with much energy)—but run along the lake shore hooting and yelling. The adult mallards, geese, swans have escaped toward the center of the lake, flapping their wings in distress, squawking, shrieking. The boys laugh uproariously—the birds’ terror is hilarious to them. Claudia is furious, disgusted.

  “Stop! I’ll call the police….”

  Boldly Claudia approaches the boys hoping to frighten them off. She is panting, her heart is pounding with adrenaline. She seems oblivious to the possibility that the boys might turn to throw rocks at her.

  Their crude cruel faces are distorted with glee. They seem scarcely human to her. They glare at her, leer at her, trying to determine (she guesses) if she is someone who might recognize them and tell their parents; if she is someone whose authority they should respect.

  “Don’t you hear me? I said stop! It’s against the law, ‘cruelty to animals’—I will report you to the sheriff’s office….”

  The words sheriff’s office seems to make an impression on the older boys who begin to back off. Claudia hears them muttering Go to hell lady, fuck you lady amid derisive laughter but they have turned away and are tramping back through the marsh to the road.

  Six boys in all. It is disconcerting to see how unrepentant they are, and how young.

  Claudia supposes the boys live nearby. Not on the lake but near. Their laughter wafts across the marsh. She is shaken by their cruelty, and the stupidity of their cruelty. What would James have done!

  On the lake the terrified birds continue their protests, craw-craw-craw. They are swimming in frantic circles. They can’t comprehend what has happened to their young, what devastation has rained down upon them. The widow is terribly upset and can’t come closer to the carnage. A number of the young birds must have been killed in the barrage of rocks. Others must have been injured. She does not want to see the living, injured creatures floating in the lake. She does not want to see their writhing little wings, she does not want to see the distress of the elder birds, this has been enough, this has been more than enough, she does not want to feel anything further, not at this time.

  And yet: pursuing the boys from the air. Beating her great wings, that are powerful with muscle. Glancing up they see her bearing upon them, their faces are rapt with astonishment, shock, terror. It would seem to them (perhaps) that the creatures they had tormented had taken a single, singular shape to pursue them. It would seem to them (perhaps) that a primitive justice is being enacted. The creature that swoops upon them is not a large predator, not an eagle. But her slate-colored outspread wings are as large as the wings of an eagle. Her beak is longer than the beak of an eagle, and it is sharper. The screams of the cruel boys will not deter her—nothing will deter her.

  The b
oys run, stumble, fall to their knees before reaching the road. They try to shield their faces with their uplifted arms. She is fierce in her assault, she attacks them with both her wings as an aroused swan would attack, beating them down, knocking them to the ground. And once they are on the ground they are helpless to escape the talon-claws that grip them tight as with her pitiless beak she stabs, stabs, stabs at heads, scalps, faces, eyes.

  The boys’ cries are piteous, pleading. Blood oozes from a dozen wounds and darkens the marsh grasses beneath them.

  Her dreams have become agitated, she is afraid to sleep.

  Especially, she is afraid to sleep in the large bedroom in the upstairs rear of the house overlooking the lake.

  She moves to another, smaller room, a guest room overlooking the front lawn of the house. This room has pale-yellow chintz walls, organdy curtains. She keeps the windows shut at night. She is determined, she will regain her soul.

  She will make amends.

  “Why, Claudia! Hello.”

  “Claudia! What a surprise….”

  Greetings are warm at the private girls’ school to which she returns for a visit. It has been too long, she says: four months, two weeks, six days! She has missed them all.

  Unable not to see how, irresistibly, uncannily, every colleague she meets, everyone who shakes or grips her hand, embraces her, exclaims how much she has been missed, glances at the third finger of her left hand: the rings the widow (of course) continues to wear.

  Do you expect to see nothing there? But of course I am still married.

  In the seminar room she meets with her honors students.

  These are bright lovely girls who have missed their favorite instructor very much. They all know that her husband has died and are shy in her presence. Several girls had written to her, halting little letters she’d read with tears in her eyes, and had set aside, meaning to answer some time in the future as she means to answer all of the letters she has received some time in the future.

  The girls do not glance at the widow’s rings, however. They are too young, they have no idea.

  (But—what is wrong? Is something wrong? In the midst of an earnest discussion of that poem by Emily Dickinson that begins After great pain, a formal feeling comes the widow begins to feel faint, light-headed.)

  Perhaps it is too soon for the widow to return to the school where she’d once been so happy, as she’d been younger. Too soon to be talking animatedly with bright young girl students as if she were as untouched as they, stretching her wound of a mouth into a smile.

  Later, speaking with colleagues in the faculty lounge she feels an overwhelming urge to flee, to run away and hide. Her arms ache at the shoulders, badly she wants to spread the enormous muscled wings and fly, fly away where no one knows her.

  She excuses herself, stumbling into a restroom. All her colleagues are women, their voices are pitched low in concern she wishes avidly not to hear—Poor Claudia! She looks as if she hasn’t been sleeping in weeks.

  Jangling at the front door. The widow would run away to hide but she cannot for she is powerless to keep the intruder out of her home.

  Claudie he calls her in his mock-chiding voice laying his heavy hand on her arm as if he has the right.

  Has she made a decision about the house?—the brother-in-law inquires with a frown.

  Listing the property with Sotheby’s as he has urged. Exceptional private homes, estates. The brother-in-law has contacted a realtor who can come to meet with them within the hour if he is summoned.

  No she has told him. No nono.

  And the pharmaceutical research company? It is “urgent” to invest before another day passes, the brother-in-law has tried to explain.

  The brother-in-law is bemused by her—is he? Or is the brother-in-law exasperated, annoyed?

  Badly he wants to be the executor of his deceased brother’s estate for (of course) the grieving widow is not capable of being the executrix.

  I will help you, Claudie. You know Jim would want you to trust me.

  She sees how he is eyeing her, the small bright eyes running over her like ants. He is very close to her, looming over her about to seize her by the shoulders to press his wet fleshy mouth against her mouth but she is too quick for him, she has pushed away from him, breathless, excited.

  Claudie! What the hell d’you think you are doing….

  He is flush-faced and panting. He would grab her, to hurt her. But she eludes him, her arms lengthening into wings, her slender body becoming even thinner, pure muscle. Her neck lengthens, curved like a snake.

  And there is the beak: long, sharp, lethal.

  The brother-in-law is dazed and confounded. In quicksilver ripples the change has come over her, it is the most exquisite sensation, indescribable.

  She is above the enemy, plunging at him with her sharp long beak. So swiftly it has happened, the enemy has no way of protecting himself. The great blue heron is swooping at him, he is terrified trying with his arms to shield his head, face, eyes as the beak stabs at him—left cheek, left eye, moaning mouth, throat—blood spurts onto the beautiful slate-gray feathers of the heron’s breast as the enemy screams in terror and pain.

  Afterward she will wonder whether some of the terror lay in the brother-in-law’s recognition of her—his brother’s widow Claudia.

  The exhilaration of the hunt! The heron is pitiless, unerring.

  Once your prey has fallen it will not rise to its feet again. It will not escape your furious stabbing beak, there is no haste in the kill.

  Once, two, three … The widow shakes out sleeping pills into the palm of her hand.

  Badly she wants to sleep! To sleep, and not to wake.

  On the cream-colored woolen carpet of the guest room with chintz walls, organdy curtains, just visible inside the doorway is the faintest smear of something liquid and dark the widow has not (yet) noticed.

  “My God. What terrible news….”

  Yet it is perplexing news. That the brother-in-law has been killed in so strange a way, stabbed to death with something like an ice pick, or attacked by a large bird—his skull pierced, both his eyes lacerated, multiple stab wounds in his chest, torso.

  The brother-in-law was discovered in his vehicle, slumped over in the passenger’s seat, several miles from his home.

  (But closer to his home than to the widow’s home on Aubergine Lake.)

  He’d been missing overnight. No one in his family knew where he’d gone. In the brass-colored Land Rover, at the side of a country road, the brother-in-law had died of blood loss from his many wounds.

  It was clear that the brother-in-law had died elsewhere, not in the vehicle in which there was not much blood.

  Hearing this astonishing news the widow is stunned. How is it possible, the brother-in-law is—dead? It doesn’t seem believable that anyone she knows can have been murdered, the victim of a “vicious” attack.

  A man with “no known enemies”—it is being said.

  Local police are describing the attack as “personal”—”a kind of execution.” Not likely a random or opportunistic attack for the victim’s wallet was not missing, his expensive new-model vehicle had not been stolen.

  There are no suspects so far. There seem to have been no witnesses on the country road.

  The murder of the brother-in-law has followed soon after the assault on six local boys by what two survivors of the assault described as “a big bird like an eagle” that flew at them “out of the sky with a stabbing beak”—injuries to the boys’ heads, faces, eyes, torsos that closely resemble the injuries of the brother-in-law.

  Four boys killed in the savage attack, two boys surviving in “critical condition.” They’d been attacked in a marshy area near Lake Aubergine where there are no eagles, no large hawks, no predator birds of any species capable of attacking human beings, or with any history of attacking human beings.

  Yet the survivors insist they’d been attacked by a big bird out of the sky with a stabbing beak.


  Like the brother-in-law, each of the boys was blinded in the attack.

  Their eyes badly wounded, past repair. Stabbed many times.

  Trembling, the widow hangs up the phone.

  She has heard about the boys—the deaths, the terrible injuries. She has not wanted to think that something so awful could take place so close to her own home and when police officers have come to ask her if she’d seen or heard anything, if she knew any of the boys or their families she’d said only that they were not neighbors of hers and her husband’s, they lived miles away and she knew nothing of them.

  I’m afraid that I have seen nothing, and I have heard nothing. It’s very quiet here at the lake.

  More astonishing to her is the news of her brother-in-law—dying so soon after her husband James.

  How devastated their family is! She is no longer the most recent widow among the relatives.

  The phone will continue to ring but the widow will not hear it for she has stepped outside the house. Her lungs crave fresh air, it has become difficult to breathe inside the house.

  Outside, the lawn has become overgrown. She has terminated the contract with the lawn service for she prefers tall grasses, thistles, wildflowers of all kinds—these are beautiful to her, thrilling.

  A shadow gliding in the grasses at her feet.

  She looks up, shading her eyes. She is prepared to see the great blue heron in its solitary flight but sees to her surprise that there are two herons flying side by side, their great slate-gray wings outstretched as they soar, the wing tips virtually touching.

  From below she can see the faint tinge of azure in the gray feathers. Such beautiful birds, flying in tandem! She has never seen such a sight, she is sure.

  Transfixed the widow watches the herons fly together across the lake and out of sight.

  That cry! Hoarse, not-human, fading almost at once. But in an instant she has been awakened.

  Cries of nocturnal birds on the lake. Loons, owls, geese. In the marshy woods, screech owls. Herons.