Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mitch said it isn’t that big a deal killing somebody who deserves it except for all that comes afterward. People make so much of it, Jesus! That’s what he hadn’t guessed, how his life would be fucked up afterward.

  It was his freedom he missed. Worse than in the navy, once you get arrested. Fuck Sheryl, she had it coming.

  Cold-blooded murderer lacking a soul it was said of Mitch Dungarve but anybody who knew Mitch, his family and relatives, his close friends, knew Mitch wasn’t all that different from anybody else.

  What had happened to Arvin Huehner was different, it never got beyond what was reported in the papers. A “special education” student at the Rapids school had a “fatal accident” coming home from school. He’d tried to cross a deep ravine on some rotted logs but fell and injured himself on rocks below, fractured his skull and died. Arvin had been a clumsy boy even his family conceded. They could not understand why he hadn’t come home from school on the bus as he always did. It was revealed that, that day, the special ed. teacher had had to discipline Arvin for harassing a girl in their class, and Arvin had been upset about that and hadn’t wanted to ride the bus home. There was no witness to what had happened to Arvin but Sheryl Ricks was a different situation, plenty of people had seen Mitch Dungarve with her at a tavern in Alcott the night she’d died.

  In the prison at Attica, Mitch gave interviews. He said he was not afraid to die, he’d done what needed to be done and that was all. His lawyer told him show remorse but that was bullshit, he would not.

  He never spoke of Arvin Huehner, never told our names, that we were involved. It came to me one day, he’d forgotten.

  The ravine and the logging road in the woods have not changed much in twenty years. I drove out once, to investigate. We’d all moved into town by then. I was married and had my girls by then. What is strange is how much of Red Rock Road is abandoned now, houses collapsed in tall weeds and scrub trees and the Huehner house, what there was of it, hardly visible from the road. Some people live in our old house but the Dungarves’ house next-door is boarded up. Properties like my grandfather’s old farm are overgrown like jungles. The big interstate I-81 cuts a swath through the countryside north of Rapids so there’s heavy traffic only just a mile or so from the ravine but not even an exit at Rapids.

  Arvin was found in the ravine the next day, after seven hours of searching it was said.

  Everybody in the special ed. class was asked about him. And kids on the bus. The driver was questioned, why hadn’t he waited for Arvin, or gone to look for him. Arvin’s teacher was questioned, and made to look bad in the paper. Even the school principal. Arvin’s sister and brothers riding the school bus had not seemed to miss him. Acted like they hadn’t noticed Arvin wasn’t there.

  Some of us, who lived on Red Rock Road, were asked if we’d seen Arvin after school, where he’d gone, and we said no we had not seen Arvin Hugh-ner, he wasn’t in our classes and wasn’t our friend and nobody we knew had much to do with him or with any of the Hugh-ners.

  That poor boy not right in the head was how people spoke of Arvin afterward. Like my mother, and my aunt Elsie. You’d think his parents would keep a closer watch, a retarded boy like that wandering and getting lost.

  In Herkimer where I live now, I see Steve and Dan sometimes. I see their families at the mall. Steve married a girl I knew from school, they have two children at least. I think they live on Buell Road, Steve works for a contractor. Dan Burney was in the navy with Michie, got sent overseas and when he came back he got married and later divorced and he works at the stone quarry where my husband Frank Schmidt is foreman. Dan is grown to three hundred pounds muscle-and-fat and shaves his head so his head and face look swollen like something made of hard rubber. Dan lives with his mother who has some wasting disease like Parkinson’s.

  We see each other at Kroger’s, or Eckerd’s, or at the mall. There’s a glaze over our eyes when we meet. Steve Hauser, Dan Burney. If they tried to call me DeeDee, I’d tell them no: I am Diane. But they don’t call me any name at all. We talk together trying to remember why we know each other. The guys always ask about Mitch but there’s nothing to say about Mitch, he will spend the rest of his life in “death row” at Attica. The death penalty in New York State is lethal injection but no one has been executed for a long time.

  Steve Hauser and Dan Burney and me, there’s a nagging feeling between us. But we don’t know what.

  We ask about one another’s families. Dan takes his mother to the Church of the Risen Christ some Sundays, helps the old woman with her walker. Dan doesn’t always sit in the pew with her but waits out in the parking lot, smoking. He’s a big man but soft and vague in the eyes. Sometimes he will push into the pew beside his mother. I see Dan Burney, I smile and wave and Dan will wave back. I wonder if Dan sings with the rest of us! The way some men sing under their breath like they don’t want anyone but Jesus to hear.

  I have two daughters: Kyra who will be in seventh grade next year and Tamara who will be in fourth.

  Their eyes! The most beautiful eyes. When I tell Steve Hauser and Dan Burney about my family I tell them my daughters are getting to be big girls but I don’t tell them how beautiful my daughters are, it’s hard for me to speak of it. The other day Frank said, You see those girls, you know why you were born.

  Out of nowhere Frank said this. It isn’t like him, or any of us to speak in such a way. But I’m hoping it is that simple, what Frank said. All I’d needed to do to be saved was have my babies, that is my purpose on earth. You would not need a soul for that!

  A feeling used to come to me sometimes, a true life is being lived somewhere, but I am not in that life. Since having my babies, I don’t feel this way. It’s a stronger feeling even than Jesus in my heart.

  Because you can backslide and lose Jesus. But you can never lose the fact you have given birth.

  Strange that it’s water moccasins I dream of, that I never saw. I never dream of Arvin Huehner. I dream of myself in the swamp and the snakes and the quicksand but I never dream of Arvin Huehner and there is probably nobody who knows that name Huehner where we live now.

  I saw the hood ornament on a four-wheel-drive pickup, a long time ago. I think it was the same kind.

  Things that scare me are any kind of snakes. Even a picture of a snake, a feeling like faintness comes over me. Also the shadows of clouds passing on the ground. In the countryside you can see these shadows miles away on the hills, it takes your breath away watching them move so fast. Sunshine and green fields and the swift shadow rolling toward you taking away the green. I think The valley of the shadow of death.

  Another thing that scares me: mammograms and pelvic exams. Pap smears. My legs tremble so, though I have given birth from my body yet I am frightened of the sharp instruments. I am frightened of the doctor seeing into me. For one day it will be revealed You have tested positive for cancer, Mrs. Schmidt. Your punishment was deferred but will now begin.

  And I am afraid of my own anger sometimes. Wanting to smash things, precious things to me like the girls’ faces when they are stubborn and mouth off at me. Kyra is the worst, the way her eyes slide over me in scorn. Beautiful eyes so liquidy-brown and their faces are beautiful yet I could grab these faces and squeeze until the bones broke. My husband says, God damn it, Diane, keep it down, you should see yourself, Jesus. Frank starts toward me and I back off, fast. Frank could break my face in his hand if I hurt the girls so this is O.K., this is good. I’m grateful for that.

  I asked Reverend Loomis what is the root of anger, why I am angry sometimes at my family I love, and Reverend Loomis said it is a test put to me. Every day and every hour of my life is a test, will Satan triumph, or Our Lord. Diane, it’s that simple!

  Soon as I heard those words, I was comforted.

  After you leave school, there are people you’d been seeing every day of your life you never see again. Even relatives.

  Last time I saw my cousin Michie close up, I guess he’d been Mitch by then, it was
at the 7-Eleven out on the highway and I was only just married then and not more than a few weeks’ pregnant which I hoped Mitch would not know. It was after 10 P.M., I was going for milk and cereal and cigarettes and Mitch was going for beer and cigarettes and there was no one else in the lot, the pavement was wet with snow. By then Mitch had been discharged from the navy and was back but not living with his family. It was rumored that Mitch was dealing in drugs. Also Mitch was said to be apprentice to a bounty hunter in Watertown. You had to have a license to be a bounty hunter, you were allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Mitch was wearing his hair long and tied in a pigtail and his jaws were covered in whiskers and in the midst of these whiskers he was smiling at me. Heat lifting from his skin and I could see the swell of his eyeballs moist and quivering like gasoline somebody might hold a match to, it would explode into flame.

  He’d just jumped down from his pickup. Every vehicle I see, my eyes slide over the hood, I can’t stop myself looking for a shiny hood ornament, Mitch was driving a four-wheel pickup like a jeep, with no ornament on the hood. Smiling at me with just his teeth saying, Hey there, DeeDee, like there was something between us and it wasn’t that we were blood kin. I was smiling at Mitch quick and breathless which was my way around guys like Mitch, I felt this faintness come over me thinking He has a knife he carries, he can kill me any time. And my cousin’s hands were big-knuckled, and scarred. It was six months before he’d kill his girlfriend Sheryl Ricks at Alcott but there was no sign of that now. Seeing he’d scared me Mitch was in a teasing mood pushing close to me, laughing like there was some joke between us, I smelled beer on his breath, he’s saying, How’re you doing, DeeDee, you and Frank, and I said, trying to keep my voice even, not stepping back from Mitch like he was daring me, We’re doing really well, Mitch. But I’m not DeeDee these days.

  THE BARTER

  1.

  Let something of mine be taken from me! Let Father be returned to us.

  So the son David Rainey, thirteen years old, who prided himself on not-believing-in-God, prayed.

  2.

  In the medical center whose higher floors were frequently shrouded in mist, in the men’s lavatory in the eighth-floor cardiac unit, he hid away to cry. What he hated about crying was his face shattering into pieces like a pane of struck glass. His eyes turned to liquid. His ridiculous nose ran. In a fury he tore off a long strip of toilet paper in which to blow it. A Möbius strip, unending. In despair thinking I hate them all! For it seemed to him that all of the family, not only his stricken father, had betrayed him.

  His father would be nine days in the cardiac unit. On the first interminable day, David entered the lavatory to hide and realized too late he wasn’t alone. Somebody was in one of the stalls, sobbing. A helpless muffled sound as if the invisible person (a boy David’s age?) was jamming his knuckles against his mouth.

  Quickly, David retreated. He was in dread of meeting another so like himself.

  3.

  The father was down, the Rainey family was stricken.

  For years they’d been Meems and Dadda, Kit-Kit, the Goat, Pike, and Billy-o. They were Granmum Geranium, Auntie Bean, and Uncle Ike. (True, Pike and Billy-o had left home. Uncle Ike wasn’t married any longer to Dadda’s sister Bean.) These were their secret family names in the big old red-brick Colonial on Upchurch Street on the highest hill of the hilly city. David, who was the Goat, knew the secret names were sort of silly, but he hadn’t realized how sad-silly until Dadda was admitted to the medical center as “Mr. Rainey” (which was how the staff on the fifth floor referred to him, often as if he weren’t even present) or “Marcus J. Rainey” (which was imprinted on the stiff paper bracelet around his left wrist, along with a computer number). And suddenly there was Mother who’d been Meems for so long, a pretty, freckle-faced, flurried woman with corn-silk hair and a laugh like a tickle in her throat, that made you laugh with her, now overnight a wooden-faced not-young woman with bulgy eyes, rat’s-nest hair, and a misbuttoned black cashmere coat.

  Kit-Kit, the vigilant daughter, sixteen years old, scolded in an undertone as three Raineys ascended in an elevator to the eighth floor. “Mother. Your coat.” “What?” Mother blinked as if she’d become hard of hearing. Kit-Kit growled, “Your coat.” Still, Mother was confused. Her face visibly heated. “What—about my coat?” “The buttons!” Kit-Kit, exasperated, deftly rebuttoned the coat herself. There!

  Kit-Kit’s true name was Katherine. No one called her Kathy.

  David, the Goat, the youngest Rainey child, observed his mother and sister from a corner of the elevator. There were two or three strangers between himself and the stunned-looking woman and the tall girl who was breathing with an open mouth, so he might not be identified as belonging with them. Did all the Raineys resemble one another? Not the Goat! He was thinking how pointless to rebutton their mother’s coat since they were headed for Father’s hospital room where the coat would be unbuttoned and removed anyway.

  Nobody’s thinking clearly any longer except me, David thought grimly.

  4.

  The night before, he’d been working on geometry problems in his bedroom after he’d been supposed to turn off his lights at 11 P.M. weekdays. Then he’d gone to bed and was wakened, it seemed, almost immediately, by his mother’s panicked cry outside his door, and from that moment onward the world’s surfaces had become tilted and slip sliding. Always he would be hearing Help! Help us! in a woman’s terrified voice he’d hardly identified as belonging to his mother. Something has happened to my husband!

  (And that, too, was strange to his ears: My husband.)

  So Mr. Rainey who’d been Dadda, the children’s father, was taken away by ambulance in the night. Now the Raineys had to know themselves unprotected by God or by the general good fortune they’d taken for granted. As Kit-Kit told David, swiping at her nose with a look of somber disbelief, “I guess anything can happen to us now. Anything.”

  5.

  The father hadn’t died, though he’d been near unconscious and on an oxygen machine, three hours in the emergency room and eleven hours in intensive care and then transferred to room 833, a private room where at last anxious relatives could visit him, cautioned not to crowd around his bed and not to tire him. The diagnosis was not a heart attack exactly but severe atrial fibrillation, with a possibility of blood clots in the heart and elsewhere.

  It isn’t him, I don’t know him. Who is it? Amid the tense whispery talk it was the Raineys’ youngest son who held back, shyly staring at his father in the cranked-up hospital bed. Overnight the father had become strangely sunken chested and feeble lying there in a hospital gown through which his graying chest hair faintly glowered, only fifty-one years old (but, thought David, fifty-one is old) yet stricken as if with a sledgehammer. Into his bruised right forearm two IV tubes were running, attached to clear-liquid sacs on poles beside the bed; around his upper left arm a blood-pressure cuff was tightly wrapped, and this cuff was timed to take readings every few minutes with a peculiar whirring sound. (The patient’s vital signs, as they were called—heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure, heartbeat, blood pressure—were indicated on a monitor in his room and in a nurses’ station: if one of the readings dipped or soared too much, an emergency alarm would be sounded and help would come running.) When it was David’s turn to speak with his father, he didn’t know what to say as the pale, squinting man in the bed smiled at him, fumbling for his hand, icy cold the man’s fingers, poor Dadda—as if this stranger was Dadda or could ever have been. “Davy, don’t worry—I’m a little under the weather—all these drugs they’re pumping into me—” his father was saying, insisting, as if there weren’t a reason for the powerful drugs or for his being in this strange place, and David smiled anxiously and nodded, having to lean close to hear his father’s voice. For overnight the change was upon Mr. Rainey, you could see it, and you could smell it—“don’t worry, I’ll be home soon, I promise. Things will be as before. I love you”—this, David couldn’t be
certain he’d heard, his face crinkling suddenly like a baby’s, and this was the signal for his mother to embrace him, or to try, as if he weren’t thirteen years old—but the Goat was quick to sidestep her, mumbling words that might have been See you later! or Leave me alone.

  They let him go. Knowing he wouldn’t go far. To a men’s lavatory on the floor. To hide, to cry.

  It was like he’d been tricked. And he didn’t know who to blame.

  6.

  The Goat, or Little Goat, was so called because as a very small child he’d scampered up stairs before he could walk, on hands and knees like a frisky kid. Meems and Dadda laughed at him in delight and clapped. Look at that baby billy goat climbing the mountain! The Goat was proud of his talent, wouldn’t have known that such talent was only just showing off for the family. And long after he’d ceased scampering up stairs in the big old red-brick house on Upchurch Street, he’d be known within the family as the Goat, as his sister was Kit-Kit, and his brothers were Pike and Billy-o. And none of this sad, silly stuff mattered in the slightest in the real world.

  7.

  That night kneeling bare-kneed on the hardwood floor in a corner of his bedroom. Let something of mine be taken! He was breathless and fearful as if God in whom he didn’t believe might be in the very room with him. Let my father be returned to us.

  It would be a simple trade, barter. It would be a secret transaction. None of the others would know. Not even Father.

  For it was a fact: all was changed now. Even if his father’s heartbeat could be returned to normal. Even if there were no clots sifting through his blood to strike him dead like bullets. Even if the house on Upchurch Street that looked now as if winds had blown through the rooms, where the phone was forever ringing, returned to normal. His father had promised things would be as before but David no longer believed his father. For nothing could be as before. He was angry that they’d think him so young, and credulous, to believe such a lie.