Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “‘Infinity.’ Ex nihilo nihil fit.”

  It wasn’t clear what Mr. Carmichael wanted to show me. He’d wandered into the living room, sprawled heavily on a badly worn corduroy sofa, tapping at the cushion beside him in a gesture you might make to encourage a child to join you, or a dog. Tentatively I sat on the sofa, but not quite where Mr. Carmichael wanted me to sit.

  This room was not nearly so cluttered as the other rooms. You could see that Mr. Carmichael often sprawled here at his end of the sofa, which had settled beneath his weight. Close by was a small TV with rabbit ears on a portable stand and beside it a hi-fi record player, with long-playing records in a horizontal file, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, a piano quintet by Mozart, a piano sonata by Schubert…. These were only names to me, we never heard classical music in our household; eagerly I asked Mr. Carmichael if he would play one of his records?—but Mr. Carmichael said, “Fuck ‘Mr. Carmichael.’ You’d like to, eh?” Seeing the shock and hurt in my face quickly Mr. Carmichael laughed, and in a tender voice said: “Anyway, call me ‘Luther.’ No ‘Mr. Carmichael’ here.”

  Mr. Carmichael passed the icy-cold beer bottle to me, and I managed to swallow a mouthful without choking. Hesitantly I tried the name: “‘Luther.’” Biting my lower lip to keep from laughing, for wasn’t “Luther” a comic-strip name?—then I did begin to cough, and a trickle of beer ran down inside my left nostril that I wiped away on my hand, hoping Mr. Carmichael wouldn’t notice.

  Another time I wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael who he’d been visiting at the hospital, and where his family was, but didn’t dare. Against a wall was an upright piano with stacks of books and sheet music on its top. I could image a girl of my age sitting there, dutifully playing her scales. The living room looked out upon the vast front yard now overgrown with tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers. The walls were covered in faded once-elegant wallpaper and in this room too was sculpted molding in the ceiling. On the coffee table near the sofa were ashtrays heaped with butts and ashes. I resolved, if Mr. Carmichael lit another cigarette, I would ask if I could have a “drag” from it as girls were always doing with older boys they hoped to impress. Mr. Carmichael took back the beer bottle from me and drank again thirstily and asked me which year of high school I would be in, in the fall, and I told him that I was just starting high school: I would be in tenth grade. “That sounds young,” Mr. Carmichael said, frowning. “I thought you were older.”

  To this I had no ready reply. I wondered if I should apologize.

  “You were my student years ago, not recently. How’s it happen you’re just going into tenth grade?”

  Our math teacher’s displeasure showed itself in a quick furrow of Mr. Carmichael’s forehead and a crinkling of his nose as if he were smelling something bad—and who was to blame? He asked if I had a boyfriend and when I said no, the bad-smell look deepened. Stammering, I said, “People say—I have an ‘old’ soul. Like maybe—I’ve lived many times before.”

  This desperate nonsense came to me out of nowhere: it was something my grandmother had told me when I’d been a little girl, to make me feel important, I suppose, or to make herself feel important.

  Still frowning, Mr. Carmichael said suddenly, “The Stoics had the right goddamn idea. If I was born a long time ago, that’s what I was—‘Stoic.’ Y’know who the Stoics were? No? Philosophers who lived a long time ago. Marcus Aurelius—name ring a bell? ‘In all that you say or do recall that the power of exiting this life is yours at any time.’”

  “You mean—kill yourself?” I laughed uncertainly. This didn’t sound so good.

  Mr. Carmichael was in a brooding mood so I asked him if he thought there might be memory pools that collected in certain places like the hospital, the way puddles collect after rain; in places where people have had to wait, and have been worried, and frightened; if there were places where you left your trace, without knowing it. Mr. Carmichael seemed to consider this. At least, he did not snort in derision. He said, “‘Memory pools.’ Why not. Like ghosts. Everywhere, the air is charged with ghosts. Hospitals have got to be the worst, teeming with ghosts like germs. Can’t hardly draw a deep breath, you suck in a ghost.” Mr. Carmichael made a sneezing-comical noise that set us both laughing. “Could be, I am a ghost. You’re a sweet trusting girl, coming here with a ghost. Or maybe you’re a ghost yourself—joke’s on me. Some future time like the next century there’ll be explorers looking back to now, to 1959—what’s called ‘lookback time’—y’know what ‘lookback time’ is? No?” Mr. Carmichael’s teacherly manner emerged, though as he spoke he tapped my wrist with his forefinger. “‘Lookback time’ is what you’d call an astronomical figure of speech. It means, if you gaze up into the night sky—and you have the look of a girl eager to learn the constellations—what you see isn’t what is there. What you see is only just light—‘starlight.’ The actual star has moved on, or is extinct. What you are looking into is ‘lookback time’—the distant past. It’s only an ignorant—innocent—eye that thinks it is looking at an actual star. If our sun exploded, and disappeared, here on earth we wouldn’t know the grim news for eight minutes.” Now Mr. Carmichael was circling my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, gently tugging at me to come closer to him on the sofa. “Eight minutes is a hell of a long time, to not know that you are dead.”

  I shuddered. Then I laughed, this was meant to be funny.

  Somehow, we began arm wrestling. Before I knew it, with a gleeful chortle, Mr. Carmichael had kicked off his moccasins, worn without socks, slouched down on the sofa, and lifted me above him, to straddle his stomach. “Giddyup, li’l horsie! Giddyup.” My khaki shorts rode up my thighs, Mr. Carmichael’s belt buckle chafed my skin. Beneath the Rangers T-shirt he ran his hard quick hands, where my skin was clammy-damp; he took hold of my small, bare breasts, squeezing and kneading, running his thumbs across the nipples, and I slapped at him, shrieking in protest. Suddenly then Mr. Carmichael rolled me over onto the sofa, pinned me with his forearms, and gripped my thighs, between my legs he brought his hot, rock-hard face, his sucking mouth, against the damp crotch of my shorts and my panties inside my shorts, an act so astonishing to me, I could not believe that it was happening. Like a big dog Mr. Carmichael was growling, sucking, and nipping at me. “Lie still. Be still. You’ll like this. L’il bitch goddamn.” Wildly I’d begun to laugh, I kicked frantically at him, scrambled out of his grasp on my hands and knees—on the floor now, on a carpet littered with pizza crusts, dumped ashtrays, and empty beer bottles. Cursing me now, Mr. Carmichael grabbed hold of my ankle and pinned me again, mashing his mouth against mine, his mouth and angry teeth tearing at my lips as if to pry them open. By this time I’d become panicked, terrified. No boy or man had ever kissed me like this, or touched me like this, so roughly—“Why’d you come here with me? What did you think this was—seventh grade? You’re a hell of a lot older than you let on. Hot li’l bitch.” With each syllable of hot l’il bitch Mr. Carmichael struck the back of my head against the carpet, his fingers closed around my throat. Fumbling, he tried to insert his knee between my thighs, he pressed the palm of his hand hard against my mouth to quiet me, I struggled, desperate to free myself like a fish impaled on a hook desperate to free itself at any cost, I would have torn open my flesh to be free of Mr. Carmichael’s weight on me. Now he lurched above me, grunted and fumbled, unzipped his trousers, I had a glimpse of his thick engorged penis being rammed against my thighs, another time Mr. Carmichael grunted, and shuddered, and fell heavily on me; for a long stunned moment we lay unmoving; then he allowed me to extricate myself from him, to crawl away whimpering.

  Somehow next I was in a bathroom, and I was vomiting into a sink.

  Must’ve been, Mr. Carmichael had led me here. In this sweltering-hot little room, which was very dirty—shower stall, toilet, linoleum floor—I ran water from both faucets to wash away my vomit, desperate to wash all evidence away. I could not bring myself to look into the mirror above the sink, I knew my mouth was swo
llen, my face burned and throbbed. On the front of my T-shirt were coin-sized splotches of blood. (Was my nose bleeding? Always in school I’d been in terror of my nose suddenly beginning to bleed, and the stares of my classmates.) With shaking hands I washed away the sticky semen on my thighs, which was colorless and odorless. Outside the bathroom Mr. Carmichael was saying, in an encouraging voice: “You’ll be fine, Maddie. We’ll take you back. We should leave soon.” Yet the thought came to me He could kill me now. He is thinking this. When I come out of here. No one will know. But when I opened the bathroom door Mr. Carmichael was nowhere in sight. I heard him in the kitchen, he was speaking on the phone, pleading, and then silence, the harsh laughter, and the slamming down of a telephone receiver. A man’s raw aggrieved voice—“Fuck it. What’s the difference….”

  When Mr. Carmichael came for me, his mood had shifted yet again. In the kitchen he too had been washing up: his flushed face was made to appear affable, his disheveled hair had been dampened. His badly soiled sport shirt was tucked into his trousers, and his trousers were zipped up. The moccasins were back on his feet. It was with a genial-teacher smile that Mr. Carmichael greeted me: “Madelyn! Time to head back, I said we wouldn’t stay long.”

  In the Dodge station wagon, in late-afternoon traffic on Route 31 East, Mr. Carmichael lapsed into silence. He’d forgotten about driving me home, there was no question but that we were returning to Sparta Memorial Hospital. From time to time Mr. Carmichael glanced anxiously at me as I huddled far from him in the passenger’s seat, trying to stop my nose from bleeding by pinching the nostrils and tilting my head back. So distracted and disoriented was Mr. Carmichael, as we passed beneath the railroad trestle bridge, he nearly sideswiped a pickup truck in the left-hand lane of the highway; behind the wheel of the pickup was a contractor friend of my father’s. He saw me, and he saw Mr. Carmichael at the wheel beside me, not knowing who Mr. Carmichael was but knowing that it was very wrong for a fourteen-year-old girl to be with him, this flush-faced adult man in his mid-or late thirties. I thought, He sees us, he knows. With the inexorable logic of a dream it would happen then: my father’s friend would telephone my mother that evening, that very night Luther Carmichael would be arrested in the cobblestone house on Old Mill Road. Mr. Carmichael would be dismissed from his teaching position because of me, of what he’d done to me; because of this—having been seen with me, in the Dodge station wagon this afternoon. And now, telling this story, I remember: Mr. Carmichael hadn’t yet been dismissed from his teaching job, as I’d said. All that lay ahead of him. The remainder of his foreshortened life lay ahead of him. He would be arrested, he would be charged with sexual assault of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor; he would be charged with the forcible abduction of a minor, and with kidnapping. He would be charged with keeping me in his house against my will. Some of these charges would be dropped but still Luther Carmichael would kill himself in the ugly cobblestone house on Old Mill Road, hanging from a makeshift noose slung over a rafter in the smelly earthen-floored cellar.

  All this had not happened yet. There was no way to accurately foretell it. All I knew was, I had to return to my father’s bedside. I was desperate to return to my father’s bedside. Before Mr. Carmichael brought the station wagon to a full stop in the parking lot, I had jumped out, I was making my way into the chill of the hospital that never changes, taking the stairs two at a time to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, avoiding the elevator out of a morbid fear that, at this crucial time, the elevator might stall between floors, now breathless from the stairs and my heart pounding in my chest as if it might burst—

  Still alive! From the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

  BOUNTY HUNTER

  Is there a soul I have to wonder. Look inside myself like leaning over the rim of an old stone well and the danger is, you might lose your balance and fall and there is no water inside to break your fall. Hello? Hello? Anybody there? Old stone well with a broken hand pump, I’m thinking of. That well was old when I was a kid. My grandfather’s farm that’s just “acreage” now north of Herkimer waiting to be sold, how many years. Nobody wants to live in the country now, we’ve all moved to town.

  It’s a fact: there’s fewer people living in the country in this century than fifty years ago. New houses and a shopping mall going up south of Herkimer and along the highway halfway to Sparta. The new Church of the Risen Christ like a great shining ark rising out of the moldered earth, sailing the waves of the righteous as our pastor says. From the outside the prow of the ark is a beacon of light, inside there is a dazzle of shining surfaces, pinewood pews in long curving rows too many to count and in the balcony more pews rising farther than you can see. At the front of the ark is a great floating gold cross illuminated in light. Each service, three thousand individuals worship here. The Church of the Risen Christ is the fastest-growing church in all the Adirondack region. Started in a store front in downtown Herkimer, now there’s people coming from as far away as Utica, Rome, Watertown, Potsdam. Our tabernacle choir is on cable TV each Sunday morning. What is beautiful is the congregation singing hymns. Nobody laughs at my voice here. My voice is wavering as a girl’s but gains strength from the voices close about me, I am not so self-conscious here. Shut your eyes in the Church of the Risen Christ you could be any of these.

  In this pew with strangers but we are all children of God. Feeling my heart quicken because this is a secret time for me. My husband is not a churchgoer. I have not yet brought the girls, they would be restless and it makes me angry to see restless children at church. Is there a soul is a question I ask myself when I am alone, I am afraid of my thoughts when I am alone. One Sunday I asked Reverend Loomis and he gripped my hand in both his hands smiling he saying Who is it who asks this question, Diane? Who is it looks through your eyes that are such beautiful eyes? My face flushed like sunburn. My eyes filled with tears. It was after the service, so many of us anxious to speak with Reverend Loomis and waiting in the aisle for him to take our hands, ask our names and repeat our names as a blessing. So many of us and most of us are women wishing to “seek counsel” with our pastor but Reverend Rob Loomis’s time is limited. His special smile for women like me, oh God I hope it isn’t pity.

  A wife and mother, not yet thirty-five. Yet not young. You feel it at the waist, a bulge of flesh. Turning, and in the mirror a ridge of fat at the small of the back, a crease beneath my chin, I felt so hurt!—betrayed!—until the girls, until I got pregnant, I’d been lean like a boy. Is there a soul because if there is and I am lacking a soul, just this body going to fat, I am not like other people but a freak. But if there is a soul and there is one inside me waiting to emerge into the light this is a thing that scares me more.

  So what my cousin Michie Dungarve would say. Who gives a damn, why’s it a big deal. Michie who’d been in the navy and then apprenticed to a bail bondsman/bounty hunter up in Watertown, it would be said of him he was a cold-blooded killer without a soul and Michie conceded that was probably a fact.

  In the Church of the Risen Christ, three thousand of us lift our voices in a joyful noise to the Lord and to His Only Begotten Son that Jesus will drive out the devils from us and dwell in our hearts forever-more and I know this to be true. Rock of ages we are singing cleft for me let me hide myself in thee we are singing. I feel the waves buoying our ark, I feel how we are lifted like the gold cross floating in air. Reverend Loomis teaches us to laugh at sin, laugh away Satan for he is helpless in the face of Jesus. There is not a thing to regret nor even to remember once Jesus is in your heart. Like a light so bright and blinding why’d you even make an effort to see. I tell myself Jesus understands, He was in my heart even then.