Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Of course, it was Matthew Quinn she’d loved. It was Matt she’d always loved. For the other, she’d felt no more than a fleeting/disquieting attraction.

  Not sexual. Or maybe sexual.

  Who would remember…

  After they were married and moved away from Madison, Wisconsin, and were living in New Haven, Connecticut, in the early 1970s—Matt was enrolled in the Yale Law School, Sophie was working on a master’s degree in art history—rumors came to them that Jeremiah Kolk had been badly injured in an accidental detonation of a “nail bomb” in a Milwaukee warehouse.

  Or had Kolk been killed. He and two others had managed to escape the devastated warehouse but Kolk died of his injuries, in hiding in northern Wisconsin.

  No arrests were ever made. Kolk’s name was never publicly linked to the explosion.

  All that was known with certainty was that Jeremiah Kolk had never returned to study classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, after he’d dropped out in 1969. Long before the bombing incident he’d broken off relations with his family. He’d broken off relations with his friends in Madison. He’d disappeared.

  Years later when they were living in New Jersey, one morning at breakfast Sophie saw Matt staring at a photograph in the New York Times and when Sophie came to peer at it over his shoulder saying, with a faint intake of breath, “Oh that looks like—who was it?—‘Kolk’—‘Jeremiah Kolk’—” Matt said absently, without looking up at her, “Who?”

  The photograph hadn’t been of Kolk of course but of a stranger years younger than the living Kolk would have been, in 1989.

  SOPHIE—

  PLEASE will you come to me Sophie this is the most alone of my life.

  KOLK

  P.O. Box 71

  Sourland Falls MINN

  5. APRIL

  Her April plans! Now the surviving spouse was sleepless for very different reasons.

  Thinking It will be spring there, or almost. The worst of the ice will have thawed.

  These were reasonable thoughts. There was the wish to believe that these were reasonable thoughts.

  From Newark Airport she would fly to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis she would take a small commuter plane to Grand Rapids and there Kolk would meet her and drive her to his place—not home but place was the word Kolk used—in the foothills of the Sourland Mountains. By his reckoning Kolk’s place was one hundred eighty miles north and west of the small Grand Rapids airport.

  By his reckoning it would take no more than three hours to drive this distance. If weather conditions were good.

  Sophie asked if weather conditions there were frequently not-good in that part of Minnesota.

  Kolk said guardedly that there was a “range” of weather. His jeep had four-wheel drive. There wouldn’t be a problem.

  Several letters had been exchanged. Sophie had covered pages in handwriting, baring her heart to Jeremiah Kolk as she’d never done to another person. For never had she written to her husband, always they’d been together. The person I am is being born only now, in these words to you, Jeremiah.

  Kolk had been more circumspect. Kolk’s hand-printed letters were brief, taciturn yet not unfriendly. He wanted Sophie to know, he said, that he lived a subsistence life, in American terms. He would not present himself as anything he was not only what he’d become—A pilgrim in perpetual quest.

  In practical terms, Kolk worked for the Sourland Mountain State Preserve. He’d lived on a nine-acre property adjacent to the Preserve for the past seven years.

  Speaking with Kolk over the phone was another matter. Sophie heard herself laughing nervously. For Kolk’s voice didn’t sound at all familiar—it was raw, guttural, oddly accented as if from disuse. Yet he’d said to her—he had tried to speak enthusiastically—“Sophie? That sounds like you.”

  Sophie laughed nervously.

  “Well. That sounds like you.”

  After years of estrangement, when each had ceased to exist for the other, what comfort there was in the most banal speech.

  They fell silent. They began to speak at the same time. Sophie shut her eyes as she’d done as a young girl jumping—not diving, she’d never had the courage to dive—from a high board, into a pool of dark-glistening lake water. Thinking If this is happening, this is what is meant to be. I will be whoever it is, to whom it happens.

  Kolk had invited Sophie to visit him and to stay for a week at least and quickly Sophie said three days might be more practical. Kolk was silent for a long moment and Sophie worried that she’d offended him but then Kolk laughed as if Sophie had said something clever and riddlesome—“Three days is a start. Bring hiking clothes. If you like it here, you will want to stay longer.”

  Sophie’s eyes were still shut. Sophie drew a deep breath.

  “Well. Maybe.”

  They would fall in love, Sophie reasoned. She would never leave Sourland.

  She wanted to ask Kolk if he lived alone. (She assumed that he lived alone.) She wanted to ask if he’d been married. (She assumed that he’d never been married.) She wanted to ask how far his place was from the nearest neighbor. And what he meant by saying he was a pilgrim in perpetual quest.

  Instead—boldly—impulsively as she’d reached out to touch Kolk years ago when they’d both been young—Sophie asked Kolk what she might bring him.

  Quickly Kolk’s voice became wary, defensive.

  “‘Bring me’—? What do you mean?”

  She’d blundered. She’d said the wrong thing. With a stab of dismay she saw Kolk—the figure that was Kolk—at the other end of the line in remote northern Minnesota—a man with a shadowy half-hidden face and soot-colored eyes behind dark glasses watching her as if she were the enemy.

  “I meant—only—if you needed anything, Jeremiah. I could bring it.”

  Jeremiah. Sophie had never called Kolk by this name, in Madison. The very sound—multi-syllabic, Biblical and archaic—was clumsy in her mouth like a pebble on the tongue. But Kolk laughed again—after a moment—as if Sophie had said something witty.

  “Bring yourself, Sophie. That’s all I want.”

  Sophie’s eyes flooded with tears. To this remark she could think of no adequate reply.

  Of course she would tell no one—not her closest friends, nor those relatives who called her frequently because they were worried about her—of her plans to fly a thousand miles to visit a man she had not seen in a quarter-century. A man whom she’d never known. A political-radical outlaw believed to be dead, who had died twenty years before in the clandestine preparation of a bomb intended to kill innocent people.

  In the cemetery amid the damp grasses she stood before the small rectangular grave marker, she had not visited in months.

  MATTHEW GIDEON QUINN

  On this misty-cool and sunless April morning she was the only visitor in the cemetery.

  The air was so stark! So sharp! Her eyes stung with tears like tiny icicles. She felt a flutter of panic, at all that she’d lost that was reduced to ashes, buried in the frozen ground at her feet.

  Waiting for a revelation. Waiting for a voice. Of release, or condemnation.

  I will protect you forever dear Sophie!

  Was this Matt’s voice? Had she heard correctly? Had he ever made such an extravagant promise to her, he could never have kept?

  Sophie was feeling light-headed, feverish. She hadn’t slept well the previous night. Her brain was livid with plans, what she would pack to take with her, what she would say to Jeremiah Kolk when they were alone together. Early the next morning she was flying out from Newark, west to Sourland, Minnesota.

  “Matt? I will be back, I promise. I won’t be gone long.”

  Plaintively adding, “I need to do this. Kolk needs me.”

  How silent the cemetery was! Sophie felt the rebuke of the dead, their resentment of the living.

  Sophie are you so desperate? Maybe you should kill yourself, instead.

  6.

  And then, in the small grim airport at G
rand Rapids, she didn’t see Kolk.

  In a shifting crowd of people, most of them men, not one seemed to bear much resemblance to Jeremiah Kolk.

  The flight from Minneapolis to Grand Rapids had been turbulent and noisy. For the past forty minutes which were the most protracted forty minutes of Sophie’s life the small commuter plane had shuddered and lurched as if propelled through churning water and as the plane descended at last to land Sophie felt her heart beating hard, in primitive terror. Of course, this was a mistake. Anyone could have told her, this was a mistake. Grief had made her a desperate woman.

  Yet chiding herself with a sort of dazed elation No turning back! You have brought yourself to this place, where a man wants you.

  The commuter plane disembarked not at a gate but on the tarmac in a lightly falling snow. One by one passengers made their perilous way down steep metal steps, that had been wheeled to the plane. There was an elderly woman with a cane, who had to be assisted. There was a heavyset Indian-looking man with a splotched face, whose wheezing breath was frightening to Sophie, who had to be assisted. Sophie had the idea—it was a comforting idea—or should have been a comforting idea—that her friend must be just inside the terminal watching—watching for her—and so she made her way down the metal steps calmly if in a haze of anticipation, a small mysterious smile on her lips.

  No turning back!

  And then inside the terminal—her deranged girl’s heart was beating very hard now—she didn’t see him. At the lone baggage carousel she didn’t see him. No one? No Kolk? After their letter-exchanges, their telephone conversations? Sophie stared, at a loss. Several men who might have been Kolk—of Kolk’s age, or approximately—passed her by without a glance. A rat-faced youngish man with ragged whiskers and hair tied back in a ponytail passed so closely by Sophie that she could smell his body, without glancing at her.

  Sophie thought My punishment has begun. This, I have brought on myself.

  Kolk had provided her with a single telephone number, in case of emergency—not his home or cell phone number but that of the auto repair in Sourland Junction. Useless to her, now!

  And then, she saw a man approaching her. He was walking with a curious limp. Sophie stared, and began to feel faint.

  This man was middle-aged, bulky-bodied. For one who limped with a shuffling-sliding motion of his left foot he moved quite readily. He would have been a tall man of over six feet but his back appeared to be bent like a coat hanger wantonly twisted. His face glared like something hard-polished with a rag. His head looked as if it had been shaved with an ax blade. There were the schoolboy wire-rimmed glasses but the lenses were dark-tinted, hiding the eyes. From the lower part of his face metallic-gray whiskers sprang bristling yet as he drew closer Sophie could see that the left side of his face was badly scarred, disfigured—a part of the lower jaw was missing, a double row of teeth exposed as in a ghastly fixed smile. The right side of his face was relatively untouched, unlined. As he made his shuffling-sliding way forward people glanced at him—turned to stare after him—but he ignored them. Perhaps in fact he didn’t see them. Having sighted Sophie standing very still staring at him as he approached he smiled exposing stubby teeth that glistened, of the color of old piano keys.

  “Sophie. You came.”

  It was a blunt statement of triumph, elation. It was a statement of masculine appropriation.

  Sophie stammered hello. There was a deafening roar in her ears. She thought—they were in a public place, he could not harm her if she ran away. If she ran into the women’s room, and did not reappear. He would have to let her go.

  Seeing the look in Sophie’s face, Kolk smiled harder. “Am I the person you expected to see, Sophie? No? Or maybe—yes? If you are ‘Sophie.’”

  Sophie had no idea what this meant. She was staring at Kolk’s eyes—the dark-tinted lenses of his glasses, that hid his eyes—to avoid looking at his mutilated jaw. Weakly she said:

  “Are you—‘Jeremiah’? Is that what people call you—‘Jeremiah’?”

  “No. ‘Kolk.’”

  It was a blunt ugly name. It had not seemed to suit Jeremiah Kolk as a young man in Madison, Wisconsin, but it had come to suit him now in this middle-aged ravaged state.

  As Sophie hesitated, not knowing what to say, Kolk took her hand in greeting, squeezed her fingers hard as if claiming her. Now, could she run away? Could she hide from him? She was smiling confusedly, trying not to wince in pain. Though his spine seemed to be twisted, yet Kolk was taller than Sophie by several inches and loomed over her. He wore fingerless gloves, his exposed fingers were nicked with small cuts, scars and burns, Sophie was remembering how years ago she’d dared to touch Kolk’s arm and he’d thrown off her hand. Rudely he’d turned from her as if her touch had repelled him but now Sophie wondered if this strange awkward disfigured man expected her to embrace him in the way of people greeting one another in airports—to throw her arms around him, and brush her lips against the side of his face.

  But which side of Kolk’s face—the shiny-scarred melted-away side, or the more normal side—would Sophie kiss? She guessed that Kolk would be keenly aware of such a choice.

  Kolk asked if Sophie had anything more than the single suitcase at which she was clutching and Sophie said no she had not. Kolk frowned.

  “Let’s go, then. It’s good to get back before dark.”

  Something had disappointed him. The single suitcase, maybe.

  This lightweight suitcase, Kolk insisted on taking from Sophie. It was on rollers, but Kolk carried it.

  The roaring in Sophie’s ears had only slightly abated. Was she going with this man, then? This disfigured man? At a first glance you might imagine that he was wearing animal hides. And on his feet, hobnailed boots. Before Sophie could pull away Kolk took her arm, and linked her arm through his. He said nothing as they walked through the terminal together. Sophie had no choice but to accompany him. She dared not pull away from him, such a gesture would offend him terribly.

  How likely it seemed to her, the disfigured must be vainer than the rest of us.

  Awkward to walk with Kolk who limped so markedly. And how self-conscious Sophie was made to feel, walking with a man at whom people—wide-eyed children, rude adults—stared openly.

  “S’reebi! Quiet. Sit.”

  In the rear of Kolk’s vehicle was a lunging barking dog—a bulldog mix—with splotched steel-colored fur, a milky right eye, quivering jowls and small flattened torn ears. Sophie felt her blood freeze, she feared and disliked such dogs.

  Kolk struck the lunging dog on its skull, so sharply you could hear the impact.

  “I said sit.”

  Sophie said, “He’s—handsome.” With forced warmth Sophie addressed the frantic barking dog, that was throwing itself against the back of the seat. His slobber shook in frothy droplets from his mouth—surreptitiously she wiped it from her face with a tissue.

  Kolk laughed. It wasn’t clear why Kolk laughed.

  Kolk said not to worry, S’reebi would not dare attack her.

  In swirling snow the drive from Grand Rapids north and west into the foothills of the Sourland Mountains took longer than Kolk had anticipated. Though it was early April yet the air was blustery and wintry, and tasted of metal. During the more than three-hour drive Kolk said little as if he were chagrined or resentful or possibly he’d forgotten his guest in the passenger’s seat beside him. Sophie could have wept. How miserable she was shivering in her attractive and inappropriate clothing—cream-colored cashmere coat, light woolen slacks, leather shoe-boots that came only to her ankles. It was clear that Kolk was accustomed to being alone in the jeep—driving long distances with a sort of stoic fortitude—punching in radio stations that came to life, prevailed for a while then faded into static—in the interstices of which Sophie chattered nervously, to fill the silence. The female instinct: to fill up silence. The (female) fear of (masculine) silence. Sophie heard her anxious voice like the palpitations of a butterfly’s wings, throwing itsel
f against a screen.

  Kolk said: “You don’t need to talk.”

  In profile, seen from the right, Kolk did not appear obviously disfigured. His face was strong-boned, his skin ruddy, weathered. The untrimmed whiskers looked charged with static electricity like those of a mad sea captain in a nineteenth-century engraving. His eyebrows, in profile, stood straight out, gunmetal-gray. His shaved head was stubbled with steel-colored quills. The scalp was discolored, blemished and bumpy as a lunar terrain. In the fingerless gloves his hands were twice the size of Sophie’s, the hands of a manual laborer, or a strangler. The short-cut nails were edged with the kind of grime that could never be removed.

  There was little of the young Jeremiah Kolk remaining. This was a fact, Sophie had to concede. Yet the old intimacy between them persisted, unmistakably. Though we are changed we are not different people. He knows this!

  Sophie saw that in the rear of the jeep there were miscellaneous articles of clothing—a lightweight jacket, a mangled-looking sweater, a single hiking boot, dirt-stiffened gray wool socks. There were advertising flyers, newspapers that had never been unfurled, unopened envelopes as if Kolk had grabbed his mail out of his P.O. and dumped it into the jeep without taking time to sort it. The frothy-mouthed bulldog lay atop the jacket panting as if he’d been running and had just collapsed in a partial doze. Sensing Sophie looking at him he began to pant more loudly and his pink-rimmed eyes opened wider, glistening.

  No!—no! Sophie looked quickly away before the dog began barking.

  They’d made their way through the despoiled suburban landscape outside Grand Rapids—mini-malls and shopping centers, motels, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, discount outlets. Beyond were desolate winter fields not yet stirred into life. Still the snow continued in lightly swirling white flakes like mica-chips, much of it melting on the pavement.