Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Sophie?”

  There came a man’s voice, at a little distance. Someone was speaking her name through a shut door.

  Now he opened the door, just slightly. Not wanting to upset or offend her he spoke through the crack, that mutilated mouth she couldn’t see from where she lay.

  “Sophie? Can you wake up? It’s almost nine.”

  In a daze Sophie opened her eyes. The lashes were crusted together with dried mucus. Her mouth was parched, aflame. In her stuporous sleep she’d been breathing through an opened mouth, for hours. How long? Nine o’clock? The wicked little two-foot-square window framed a tarry-black night.

  Asprawl she lay in tangled bedclothes smelling of her body. At first she couldn’t recognize her surroundings, this cave-like interior she was certain she’d never seen before. The ceiling overhead was low like heavy clouds pressing near to the earth. Tendrils of cobweb trailed from the ceiling. Something wispy crawled across her forehead—Sophie brushed it away with panicked fingers.

  “Sophie—hey? You must be starving. We should eat soon. I’ve made us something to eat. D’you need anything?”

  Quickly Sophie said No! No she didn’t need anything. She was awake, she would join him in five minutes.

  Her joints ached. Her neck ached. Her upper lip itched, badly. Beneath the rumpled linen shirt and sweater, a flaming sort of rash across her belly.

  In a rush it returned to her—memory of where she was, and with whom. Who had summoned her.

  The heavy down comforter had slid partway onto the floor. Sophie’s shoe-boots were tangled in it—she fumbled to put them on. She dreaded walking on this floor, without shoes.

  In the tiny lavatory that smelled of drains and disinfectant she peered at her reflection in a mirror so cheap it appeared to have warped. Its lead backing had begun to poke through, like leprosy. She saw that her eyes were bloodshot and swollen and her mouth—her upper lip—was terribly swollen, enflamed.

  Something had bitten her, in that bed.

  “My God! A spider bite…”

  She shuddered, in revulsion. She ran cold water into the sink, and wetted her swollen lip. How it throbbed, and burned! In the mirror she saw with dismay her dazed and sallow face, the bloodshot eyes with deep shadows beneath, the shiny-swollen upper lip.

  The man would not find her attractive, sexually. Yet that morning early when she’d set out on her journey—her pilgrimage?—she’d been an attractive dark-haired woman with a ready if unfocused smile of whom it was said by those who wished her well How rested you’re beginning to look, Sophie! How young.

  How rested was a sort of code, Sophie supposed. Such words were only pronounced to widows, convalescents, survivors of terrible disasters. How rested and not rather how devastated.

  How rested and not rather how dead.

  Hurriedly Sophie combed her hair, that was snarled at the nape of her neck. She fumbled to put on makeup squinting into the leprous mirror. Her fingers were oddly clumsy, she dropped the tube of lipstick not once but twice onto the grimy linoleum floor.

  Blood rushed into her face as she stooped to retrieve the lipstick. Groping in the cobwebby corner of the tiny lavatory. So it has come to this, Sophie! Such desperation.

  No time to unpack her suitcase. Kolk was waiting for her. She could hear the panting little pig-dog snuffling and clawing at the base of the door she had no choice but to force open.

  “S’reebi! Come over here, damn you sit.”

  Kolk growled at the dog, that reluctantly obeyed him. How like a TV sitcom this was—was it? Sophie’s mouth smiled, hopeful.

  Kolk had lighted a fire in the fireplace. He’d laid cutlery, plates, swaths of paper towels on a crude wood-plank table in front of the fireplace. Not a TV sitcom but a romantic scene, this was. In the Sourland Mountain Preserve, in snowy April.

  Sophie would have thought that the prospect of eating would nauseate her. In fact, the aroma of something meaty and gamey stewing on the stove made her mouth water.

  Kolk said, with forced exuberance: “Soph-ie! How d’you feel?”

  “I—I—I feel—wonderful.”

  Was this so? Light-headed with hunger Sophie leaned against the table smiling. Wonderful! Wonderful. Wonder-ful.

  Her joints still ached, she felt as if she’d been hiking for hours in her sleep. But she would betray no weakness to the man. Glancing about for something useful to do, some task to which she might be put—setting the table. And there were stubby candles she located on a shelf, to set on the table and light with trembling fingers.

  How romantic, candlelight! Sophie was thinking how, at home, a thousand miles away, she and Matt had eaten their evening meals by candlelight.

  Maybe at this very moment—was this possible?—the Quinns were sitting down to dinner, in that house in Summit, New Jersey. There was Sophie, and there was her husband Matthew Quinn. Could this be?

  “What happened to your face?”

  Kolk was staring at Sophie. He’d removed his dark glasses.

  “A spider bit me—I think.”

  “A spider? Where?”

  Where do you think? Where have I been?

  “While I was sleeping, I think.”

  Kolk came closer, peering at Sophie’s face. He was embarrassed, chagrined. His eyes were dark, puckered at the corners, deep-set and bruised-looking. It was something of a shock to Sophie, to see Kolk’s eyes, without his glasses. The man’s eyes fixed on her face. “Christ! I’m sorry.”

  “Oh no, no—it’s nothing. Really it’s nothing.”

  Sophie laughed, certainly it was nothing. She touched her lip that had swollen to twice its size. Beneath her clothes other bites itched violently, she dared not scratch for fear Kolk would be embarrassed further.

  Muttering to himself Kolk stomped into the other room, Sophie saw him on hands and knees peering beneath the bed, cursing and grunting. With a rolled-up newspaper he swatted at something beneath the bed.

  When he returned Kolk was flush-faced, frowning. He said that Sophie could sleep in his bed that night—he would sleep in the “guest room.”

  Now it was supper! A romantic supper by firelight.

  Kolk brought the stew-pan to the table. Self-consciously he ladled the rich dark liquid into bowls. There was also multigrain bread, he’d baked the previous day. And dark red wine, Kolk served in jam-glasses. Sophie thought I won’t drink, that would be dangerous.

  The stew contained chunks of fibrous root vegetables, onions and pieces of a chewy meat, a dank-flavored meat Sophie couldn’t identify. Hesitantly she asked Kolk if it was—venison?—and Kolk said no, it was not venison; she asked if it was—rabbit?—and Kolk said no, it was not rabbit.

  Other possibilities Sophie could think of—raccoon?—groundhog?—she did not want to ask about.

  Still, she was hungry. Her hand trembled, holding a spoon—Kolk reached out to steady it.

  Kolk said they could go hiking in the morning. Or snowshoeing, if the snow didn’t melt.

  “Snowshoeing! In April.”

  “This is northern Minnesota. We’re in the mountains.”

  Sophie laughed a little too loudly. Sophie saw that her jam-glass was in her hand, she’d been drinking after all. Thinking of her husband in his grave, reduced to ashes. She had done that—she’d signed the document, for the cremation. And yet, she’d gone unpunished. No one seemed to realize.

  On the drive from the airport Sophie had asked Kolk about his life since Madison, since he’d dropped out of school, and Kolk had answered in monosyllables, briefly. Discreetly she’d made no reference to the alleged bomb accident. She’d made no reference to Kolk’s anti-war activism, that had frequently crossed the line into civil disobedience. Now, Kolk began to speak. He told her about his father—who’d “disowned” him. He told her about his older brother—who’d been shot to pieces in Vietnam. He told her how he’d incurred the wrath of Sourland residents when he’d volunteered to speak at local high schools, explaining the “imperialist designs
” fueling the Gulf War. He’d been arrested, “roughed up” by Grand Rapids cops, for picketing the army enlistment office there.

  “And then—?”

  “‘And then—’ what?”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing happened then. As much as I’d expected.”

  Sophie had finished the wine in her glass. Sophie felt her swollen lip throb with heat. Inside her clothes, the spider’s-bite rash pulsed and flamed.

  He will touch me now. Now, it will happen.

  Beneath the table the fat panting dog, that had been clambering about their feet through the meal, gave a sigh like a grunt and fell asleep.

  Kolk poured the remainder of the wine into their glasses. He’d eaten twice as much as Sophie had eaten, and drunk even more. His skin exuded a ruddy heat, like the heat of Sophie’s swollen lip. She found that she’d been looking at the disfigured flesh of his jaw, the exposed teeth, without feeling repelled. Suddenly she wanted very badly to touch Kolk’s jaw—the soft melted-away scar tissue.

  Kolk stiffened as if sensing Sophie’s thoughts.

  The yearning between them. Like molten wax, dripping and shapeless.

  Gently Sophie said, “Your—injury. It was an accident—?”

  Kolk shrugged. Kolk’s face was flushed still, stiff.

  Sophie said, uncertainly: “We’d heard about it—an accident. An explosion. We’d heard that you had been—killed.”

  Kolk laughed. Possibly, Sophie had taken him by surprise.

  “It was good, ‘believed dead.’ Nobody follows you there.”

  Kolk lurched from the table to fetch a bottle of whiskey—Canadian Club. Without asking Sophie if she wanted any he poured the amber liquid into their emptied wineglasses. Not what Sophie’s fastidious husband would have done, this was an act of barbarism. Sophie laughed, and tasted the liquid. So strong! Sophie was not a drinker of whiskey, Scotch or gin; she was not a drinker at all; a single, small glass of wine was her limit.

  In the shifting firelight Kolk’s ravaged face looked like the face of a devil reflecting flames. Sophie thought This is what the surviving spouse deserves. A demon missing half his face.

  She wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a demon missing half his face. The teeth!—if only the teeth would not touch her.

  Kolk drank, and Sophie drank. Kolk began to speak in a confiding manner. Sophie was curious, and moved. Sophie was eager to hear of Kolk’s life, that had been hidden from her. With an air of aggrieved irony Kolk spoke of the “accident”—the “explosion”—except there are “no accidents” in the universe. He spoke of the “logic” of history. Or was it the “illogic” of history—what has happened once, cannot happen again in quite that way. Yet, it cannot happen again in any way that is very different. Kolk spoke of the “great vision” of the 1960s and of the “betrayal of the vision”—the “revolution”—by its most fervent believers. He spoke of having sacrificed a “personal life” for—what?—so many years after the wreckage, it wasn’t clear what.

  Sophie said, “But I had a personal life. And that, too, is gone.”

  Kolk was leaning on his elbows, on the table. His forearms were dense with muscle, covered in wiry black hairs like an animal’s pelt. Yet his beard was a bristly steel-color, and the short tough quills on his scalp had no color at all. The young Jeremiah was trapped inside the older man, only his eyes were untouched, baffled and wary.

  Kolk was confiding in Sophie, he’d never been arrested. He’d left the state of Wisconsin within hours of the explosion and he’d never returned. He’d broken off contact with his friends—not “friends” but “comrades”—yet not “comrades” either—really. For years he’d moved about the country working with his hands. Learning skills with his hands: carpentry, plastering, roofing. He drove trucks, he learned to operate bulldozers. He used chain saws. He’d lived in Alaska, and in Alberta; he’d worked in New Orleans, and Galveston; he’d never returned to his family’s farm but he’d returned to the Midwest, to northern Minnesota, which was very like his home, yet isolated. And no one knew where he was. Only Sophie knew where he was, and who he was. In the Sourland Preserve he helped maintain the trails, kept roads open in winter. He was a forest ranger on the lookout for fires, in times of drought. He helped search for lost hikers. He brought back the injured, he knew CPR. He could go days—weeks—at a stretch in this place of utter solitude without encountering anyone or speaking with anyone. More than once he’d found bodies on the trails, in high ground where hikers weren’t likely to go in the winter. After the start of the spring thaw, he found them. Men—all had been young men, in their twenties or thirties—who’d gone out deliberately into the wilderness, into the snow, to lose themselves, to lie down and sleep in the numbing cold. He’d found them, lying motionless on the ground, so utterly still, peaceful as statuary, their faces strangely beautiful—for no decomposition had yet set in.

  Sophie shuddered. “But—that’s terrible. Finding someone like that—must be very upsetting.”

  Kolk shrugged. “Why? Whatever was rotten in them is gone—‘cauterized.’ That’s the point of killing yourself.”

  Sophie was thinking: Matt had liked—loved—hiking in the wilderness, before she’d known him. Then abruptly he’d ceased. That part of his life had ended. Rarely would he talk about it, he hadn’t been one to reminisce. The walks they’d taken together—the “hikes”—hadn’t been very arduous, challenging. After law school, Matt had gone into corporate law. He’d been a brilliant and ambitious student at Yale and he’d gone into a corporate law firm immediately after law school, in Summit, New Jersey. Initially he’d been successful—always he’d been moderately successful—always competent, reliable. Always he’d been well paid. But he’d been disappointed with the nature of his work and with his associates—never would he have called them “friends,” still less “comrades”—and by degrees he’d lost all passion for his work. Servicing the rich, aiding the rich in their obsession to increase their wealth while giving away as little as possible to others. Sophie had no wish to confide in Kolk that her husband had never been happy in his work—possibly, in his life. By his late thirties he was becoming a middle-aged man, his body had gone slack, fleshy. He’d lost his youth though he had always loved Sophie—it was his wish, that they not have children. They’d lived a life of bourgeois comfort of the sort Kolk would find contemptible, Sophie thought.

  Strangely Kolk was looking at her now. Almost, a kind of merriment shone in his soot-colored eyes. In a voice that might have been teasing, or accusing, he said: “You’re a widow, are you! So, you must have money.”

  Or maybe he’d said—“You’re a widow. So, you must be lonely.”

  Money, lonely. It was logic, these fitted together.

  Sophie said yes, Matt had left her money—and their house of course—but she worked, also—she’d worked for years at a university press that specialized in academic/scientific books—though she was now on a leave of absence.

  Warmed by whiskey, Sophie told Kolk that she’d just finished copy-editing a manuscript for the press by an anthropologist/linguist on the subject of twins. Most fascinating was a decades-long study of twins through their lives, twins who’d cultivated “private languages,” twin-survivors after the death of a twin, iconic and symbolic meanings of twins, that varied greatly from culture to culture. Kolk listened in silence, drinking. Sophie heard herself say that grief too was a “private language”—when your twin has left you.

  Has anyone written about the “private language” of grief, Sophie wondered.

  It was then that Kolk said in a halting voice that he’d lost his father—that is, his father had lost him. His father had disowned him, after Madison. More recently, his father had died—not that it mattered to Kolk, belatedly.

  He’d lost his brother, that had been more painful. He’d been nineteen at the time. But a consolation to think that if his Vietnam War-hero-brother had lived, his brother, too, would have disowned him
.

  “Why?” Sophie asked..

  “Because he was a war hero. I was the enemy.”

  “I mean—why is it a ‘consolation’? I don’t understand.”

  “Because he’d have ‘lost’ me—eventually. When, doesn’t matter.”

  Kolk fell silent then, for some minutes. Beneath the table the bulldog snored wetly. The candles were burning down, luminous wax dripped onto the table like lava. Sophie saw that Kolk’s mouth moved as if he were arguing with someone. At last he said: “Friends I had here in Sourland, or thought I had—by degrees I lost them, too.”

  “And why?” Sophie asked. Her veins coursed with something warm, reckless. “Why did you ‘lose’ them?”

  Kolk shrugged. Who knew!

  Sophie thought You need a woman in your life. To give your life direction, meaning.

  You need a woman in your life to give you—your life.

  In his slow halting voice Kolk was saying that he’d been waiting for—wanting—someone here in Sourland with him. He’d had some involvements with women, that had not worked out. This past winter especially—he’d been the most alone he had ever been, in his life. And when he’d thought of someone he wanted—when he lay awake plagued by such thoughts—it was she—Sophie—who came to him.

  Sophie, whose face he saw.

  But which face? Sophie wondered. Kolk had not seen her face in twenty-five years.

  “You look the same. You haven’t changed. You…”

  Sophie stared at Kolk’s fingers, gripping the jam-glass. She could not bring herself to look up at him, at his eyes. Was he drunk? Did it require drunkenness, for Kolk to speak in such a way? Was what he said true?—how could it be true? Sophie could think of no reply that would not be facile, coy, clumsy—her heart had begun to beat absurdly, rapidly.