Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He had bled all over Mrs. Brennan.…

  The fields opened and closed; the woods opened and closed. It was silent out there as if uncreated, unimagined. Except for the road itself, you would not suppose that anyone had been this way before. The winter fields looked crushed and obliterated, a jumble of ancient cornstalks, the irrigation ruts hard as iron, lined with jagged hunks of ice that gleamed hotly in the sun. An inhuman landscape. A healing landscape. Wheeled in the emergency ward … skimming along the floor on a creaking cart … the smell of rubber and metal and gas … the pumping of his heart, pumping blood out of him in gulping surges.… Now his grandfather drove the old truck slowly, but still it lurched in the road’s potholes and ruts, making Jesse’s wound ache. He said nothing. Once the old man glanced at him, as if just remembering him. “Your shoulder acting up?” he said.

  Jesse shook his head no.

  Almost there. He remembered the turn in the road. And now he saw the old farmhouse that would be his home—half a mile back from the road, at the end of a lane that led through two cow fields. No mailbox out front. Great oak trees lining the lane. The farmhouse itself was a surprise to Jesse, who had remembered it as being much larger. It was unpainted and its wood looked very dark, very damp, as if sour. He had the idea it would smell sour. It had originally been a small cabin, but other rooms had been added onto it over the years, so that now it had an uneven, unbalanced, lopsided appearance, as if its various parts had been jammed together by hand. Down a slight incline from the house was the outhouse, made of the same dark, unpainted wood. The door was ajar. The lightning rod on the peak of the house roof looked thin as a straw, a needle. I don’t want to live here, Jesse thought in a panic. It was very cold. Bitter cold. His heart pounded wildly, as if to warm his blood against this cold.

  His grandfather seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. Jesse said feebly, “Here we are.…” and was startled at the childlike sound of his voice. He stared at the house and the barns. Why did everything look so uncreated, so mean? Though the air was sunny, this place had the appearance of being in shadow, as if it were the underworld somehow, the bottom part of the real world, reflected in a substance like water. Would he have to live here? When his mother had brought them out to visit, long ago, the farm had looked larger, it had looked different.… Maybe it looked bad now because of the time of year. Their mother had brought them out in the summer; the air had been fresh and welcoming. The big hay barn had not looked so ugly and rotted. Jesse stared at the smaller barns, the dilapidated corn crib, the chicken coop, the pump on its concrete base, with its handle still up in the air, as if the old man, hearing the news, had flung the handle up and run.…

  A sudden barking. A dog’s yipping. Duke came running out of the woodshed, crouched low to the ground. His body shook as if with a convulsive terror. His ears were laid back close to his bony head.

  “Duke!” Jesse cried. “Hey, you Duke! Hey!”

  His dog froze, as if not recognizing him at first. Then he ran to Jesse, barking loudly. His body swayed with the violent motions of his tail.

  “Hey, you crazy dog, don’t you know me?” Jesse squatted and embraced Duke. He pressed his face against the dog’s cold fur. “It’s all right, it’s okay, I’m back now … it’s okay.…” Squatting, Jesse watched his grandfather approach him and tried to interpret the old man’s sorrowing, closed-up look. Grandfather Vogel wore black, an old black suit. Behind him the farm buildings he had put up shared that black; the snow was a painful glaring white, but beneath it was black, a black substance. Trees and bushes were black but ornately covered with white, their skeletons decorated with a fine hard white. It was a sight that transfixed Jesse. The dog’s wriggling in his arms brought him back to life.

  Stooping slowly, with little enthusiasm, Jesse’s grandfather patted Duke’s head. “He’s gun-shy now,” he said.

  Jesse nodded.

  Jesse got his suitcase from the truck and followed his grandfather to the house. He had to push the dog gently down from him; Duke was on his hind legs, pawing Jesse’s chest. He yipped hysterically. What if the bleeding starts again? Jesse thought weakly. It was such a struggle even to hold the dog. But he carried his own suitcase to the house. The kitchen was cold, unheated. His grandfather had evidently gone off that morning without heating it, to save fuel. Now he lit a fire in the big iron stove, grunting as he bent. Jesse looked around at the walls, which were just boards, and the wooden table in the middle of the room, and the tin sink with its short-handled pump. He was careful to show no disappointment. When the fire was started, Jesse’s grandfather went into the next room and shut the door. Probably going to change his clothes, Jesse thought. But what do I do now? What now? The few times his mother had brought him and Jean and Shirley and Bob to the farm, the old man had kept at a distance from them; it was their grandmother who liked them, loved them, fussed over them. But she had died three years ago. The old man had always been out in the fields, working. Only happy when working, they said of him. He worked the whole section without hired help, except at harvesttime, using two teams of horses—one for the morning, one for the afternoon. Jesse and the girls had run out to spy on their crabby old grandfather, giggling, and there he would be, half a mile away, behind his team of horses, plowing, endlessly plowing, absolutely alone, a bony-faced old man with a filthy straw hat drooping about his face, his shoulders rounded inside his overalls. They had stopped giggling when they saw him. He moved in absolute silence, alone, a kind of nullity in the midst of the green corn, moving as if in a trance or a dream, making their eyes film over with the starkness of his isolation and his indifference … how unlike their own father he was, to be so lonely, to move so slowly behind a team of plodding horses! Their own father needed talk, laughter, beer, speed, noise, other men, other people to complete himself.…

  I’ll work like hell for you, Jesse thought. I’ll show you.

  Every morning he woke before dawn. Sometimes he woke as if jerked out of sleep by a hand, his mother’s hand. Then he would sit up and not know where he was. Sometimes he woke because of his grandfather’s noises in the other room. The old man snored raspily and moaned in his sleep. Jesse would lie in the warmth of his bed for a while, dreading the freezing air of the room, hearing the birds, the wind, a constant flow of sound that was inhuman and soothing. Then he got dressed, stepped into his overalls, into his boots, and went out to the kitchen. The floor creaked. Gusts of cold air rose from it. Duke, sleeping behind the stove, shook himself awake and whimpered around Jesse’s legs as if questioning him—why were they here? What was this place?

  Outside, the birds sang in a maniac chattering as the sun rose. Faster and noisier. A frenzy of callings. Jesse listened to them, as if transfixed by their bright, staccato notes. The birds were almost screaming a human language; if he listened closely, very closely, he could almost hear words. He worked the hand pump and splashed water onto his face, sucking in his breath with the cold. He made himself coffee. In a while he would hear his grandfather getting up—the creaking of the old bedsprings, the creaking of the floor. In the country people moved, silently, unspeaking, against a background of noises—the chattering of small birds, the cries of crows, of owls, the sound of the wind, a dog’s distant barking. A car, passing along the road, was a surprise.

  One day a car had turned up the lane and a man and a woman came to see Jesse. They were from the Niagara County Welfare Board, the Department of Child Welfare. They asked Jesse questions about his life here; they looked around, prudently, with smiles. They asked Jesse about school. Why wasn’t he going to school? Was he still in pain? He was alone in the kitchen because his grandfather had walked out when the man and woman came in, not excusing himself, just walking out to show his disapproval of visitors. Jesse had been very nervous, left on his own. He had never spoken to adults like this, people who wanted him, who had something to say to him, plans for him. He said that his shoulder still hurt and that he wanted to stay home for a whil
e. He would go to school in the fall, he promised. In the fall. Wasn’t that soon enough?

  They left and his grandfather came back in the house. He never asked Jesse what they had wanted.

  Most of the time they did not speak.

  But Jesse felt that they were together in their silence, flowing the same way with the passage of each day, time itself a tangible element that carried them forward, always forward, away from the past. He helped the old man with everything. His arms and shoulders and chest ached from the heavy farm work, but he thought that this kind of pain was good for him; it made him sleep, it pitched him at once into a deep, dreamless sleep, which was healing. Time itself was healing. He woke every morning at four-thirty or five, and then the day would begin for him and there was no staying in bed, no going back to sleep. It began by jerking him awake so that his heart hammered as if sensing danger—had someone awakened him? taken hold of his shoulder to shake it? But it was good to sleep so heavily and good to wake up, good to work so hard.

  There were two things on the farm that Jesse hated, though: the chicken coop and one of the barns. The chicken coop was a long, low structure, kept in fairly good condition, but Jesse hated the chickens and their clucking and their stink, the awful crusts of their droppings everywhere—on the ground, thick on their roosts and the dirt floor of their coop, everywhere. They were nervous, filthy things. They moved like women, tiny, feathered, dumpy women. He hated their bleary red eyes, which were sometimes diseased or surrounded by tiny grublike worms, he hated their quick, stealthy walk, their dirty feathers, their perpetual hunger. When he went out to feed them they rushed upon him, wings fluttering, their eyes darting, darting, their scrawny little feet rushing them inward, to him, as if he were the center of the world for them, existing only to toss out feed. Brown hens. White hens. Jesse stared at them in disgust. When he walked out anywhere, on any task, the chickens converged upon him, clucking and excited. A few of the bolder ones would peck at his boots. It didn’t matter that he had fed them only half an hour before, or that their feeding time was hours away. “Get out! Scat! You dirty things!” Jesse would whisper. He had begun to talk to himself, usually in whispers. “Dirty. Dirty. Dirty things,” he said, hating them. He especially hated to collect their eggs. Still warm from the hens’ bodies, some of them damp, with feathers or excrement on them … he so hated collecting these eggs that he had no appetite to eat them, he felt like gagging over a plateful of eggs, though he had liked them well enough in the past. His mother had made them scrambled eggs on Sunday. Chickens … fluidy droppings freezing to stones … their eggs half-hidden in straw … their perky heads, their little beaks, their scaly legs and feet—His scalp crawled when he had to feed them.

  The animals he liked best were the horses, his grandfather’s two aged horses that had no interest in him, big, gentle, stupid animals with great eyes, eyes nearly as big as Jesse’s fist, black and bulging. These eyes fascinated Jesse: they were so huge, and yet they were used to see very little. As if there were little to see. As if the world contained nothing more than hay, feed, a water trough. Jesse liked to feed the horses, and he lingered in the horse barn, sometimes pressing himself against the horses’ sides, his warm face against their cool sleek sides, his eyes starkly open and unthinking, unseeing. The horses were so still you did not have to think of anything. They munched hay, their heads were lowered almost permanently, they were still, silent, occasionally shifting their weight on their eroded hoofs, but there was nothing to think about or to remember, nothing. So heavy, the horses were like life that had run down into pure flesh, enormous muscular mounds of flesh, perfectly obedient and indifferent. Unlike the chickens, they were still, as if sleeping on their feet. There was no change in them.

  Yet he felt their separation from him, their isolation. He could not cross over into it. What was massive in them, the powerful neutrality of their legs and shoulders and backs, was separate from him and baffled him.… It did no good for him to embrace their necks, to rub his face against their rippling necks, their dry, fine, stinging manes, even to talk to them, because they did not notice him, not really. There was nothing in him, nothing in Jesse himself, that could touch them.

  He would walk quickly through the yard, his face turned away from the scurrying chickens. He spent less time with Duke now—the dog was a nuisance. He seemed to be always dragging Jesse back to Jesse’s own childhood, a time in his life when he had been wriggling and stupid with energy, like the dog—a scrawny black Labrador retriever who had never been much good at hunting. Jesse’s father had kicked the dog once in disgust.…

  Since the day he discovered what was kept inside it, Jesse walked by one of the small barns quickly. The door was padlocked. Furniture from his parents’ house was in the barn, piled up. Jesse had peered through the cracks to see the old sofa, the chairs, the floor-model radio, the kitchen table, some beds. On the floor, wrapped carelessly in newspaper, were plates and silverware and what looked like Christmas tree ornaments, though Jesse couldn’t be sure. He had felt nothing, seeing these things for the first time. He had simply walked away. But after that, crossing the yard, he had been unable to even look at the barn. His mouth twisted upward into a grin just to think of it, of himself peering through the cracks and seeing what he had seen.

  On Sundays he and his grandfather went to services at the Benton Center Methodist Church, about ten miles away. Jesse sat in the drafty old church and did not look at the people around him, who might have been curious about him, Jesse Harte … you know what happened to him.… He could almost hear their crackling thoughts, their curious poking questions. He kept a hymn book opened on his lap, though he never took part in the singing; his face went slack and dead in church. He tried to think of God, but his mind had no skill—it wobbled and shivered, confronted with such an idea. God. God. He needed something he could touch, turn over in his hands, get hold of. He needed to use his hands. He could believe only in things that had weight and toughness, that resisted him. When he tried to think of Christ, who had been a real man for a while, his mind leaped immediately to Christmas, to the tinsel and candy, the Santa Claus cutouts, the manger scenes with the Infant Jesus, the crepe-paper bells and candles; and then he thought of nothing at all, his mind going blank like a light that has been turned off.

  In the midst of the church’s small congregation, the country men and women and their children, some of them grown-up children, Jesse felt his strangeness. He and his grandfather were both strange. People glanced at them wondering. Curious. That there is the boy whose father … But old man Vogel was always pretty strange himself. Must run in the family. Jesse was grateful that his grandfather never lingered to talk with anyone except the minister, that he had no friends and had broken off ties with most of his own kin over the years, one squabble after another, the old man certain that he was right and everyone else wrong, out to cheat him. So there was a space about them, a dry, holy space that no one else entered. Jesse had little to say to the minister, Reverend Wilkinson, who always asked him and his grandfather how they were. Wilkinson was a man born for pitying, with mousy eyes that ran pink at the very sight of Jesse, a victim, someone who might be like Christ—“Christ, too, was a victim,” Wilkinson had said once to Jesse, out of nowhere, as if he had planned saying it for a long time. Jesse had not replied. He held himself apart, quiet, content. Everyone else sang—the old women off-key but loud—and the organ, pumped by foot, was played by a girl Jesse’s own age who labored with the hymns slowly and shrilly, her shoulders bent over the cold keyboard the way Jesse’s grandfather bent over his plate at meals. Thumping—the organ’s shrieking high notes—the slow rising voices of the people around him—the dusty maroon hymn books with their faded gold letters: Jesse took these things in but did not allow himself to be touched by them. He felt nothing, not the presence of God or of other people; he sensed nothing, no closeness, no intimacy. Confessing for Christ, some members of the congregation burst into tears and came forward to kneel befor
e the Reverend Wilkinson, but Jesse only stared at them through half-closed eyes, fearful of their ecstasy, their coming loose. He was terrified of people, strangers, coming loose in front of him. Better the horses. Yes, the horses and their heavy, massive indifference, their brainless slumber.

  But the rest of Sunday belonged to him. He and his grandfather did not work on that day and so Jesse was free to go out, tramping the fields in the misty suspension of Sunday, taking in the silence of the land. In late March the thaw began. Jesse walked for miles, his dog running with him, looking eagerly, alertly about into the fields where rivulets were draining into ditches, feeling a sense of excitement, almost dismay, in the bright sunlight. Everything was coming back to life! If he listened, he could hear the breathing of the damp earth, a soft oozing sound like a human sigh, a sucking. Jesse’s eyes began to water because he could not look closely enough at everything. He had to look closely, severely. It was important. The odor of late winter was hypnotic to him: the smell of timber, of the earth, of sunlight. He came upon the thawing carcasses of small animals that had died in the winter. Their shabby, inert bodies were like cast-off articles of clothing. They were so final, so still; he found himself staring at them while the dog sniffed eagerly. Closer to those dead animals than to the living dog. Irritated, he chased Duke away. “Leave them alone!” he said.

  He would come to a stop suddenly, not breathing. What was all that noise? The constant chatter of birds, the belligerent cries of crows. The wind. Branches came wildly to life in a sudden gust of wind, crushing against one another, tapping together. Was it a warning? What did it mean?