Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
been too young then to know. I was still too young at fifteen to have a grasp of what it might be, that I didn’t yet know.
Here in the country, in a township of Herkimer County known as the Rapids, we were in hilly farmland where by day we’d be seeing herds of Guernsey cows grazing placid and near-motionless in pastures on either side of the road. There were odd-shaped hills called drumlins, exposed shale and limestone like bone broken through skin. Eddy Diehl had relatives who lived in the Rapids but we were not going to visit them, I knew.
“Wish I could see where we were, Daddy. Where we’re going.”
My voice was little-girl wistful, I took care not to sound whiny or reproachful. I guessed we were headed for the County Line Tavern which was one of Eddy Diehl’s places. I wished it was another time and Daddy was taking me for a sight-seeing drive along the Black River and into the countryside in his showy new car as he’d done when Ben and I were young children and sometimes our mother would come with us. This car! I can’t get over this car! What on earth are you going to do with this car! Oh Eddy. Oh my God.
On Sunday drives Daddy would take us out to Uncle Sean’s farm.
Uncle Sean was an uncle of my mother’s, an old man with stark white fluffy hair and skin roughened as the skin of a pineapple. Ben and I were allowed to stroke the velvety noses of horses in their stalls, in the company of our cousin Ty who kept a close watch over us—“Careful! Walk on this side”—and we were allowed to brush the horses’ sides with a wire brush, warm rippling shivery sides, always you are astonished at the size of a horse, the height of a horse, the ceaseless switching of the coarse mane and the coarse stinging tail, the fresh manure underfoot, horseflies hovering in the air, repulsive. Yet I had wanted a horse of my own. I loved to press my face against the horses’ warm sides. My favorite was a mare named Molly-O, one of my uncle’s smaller horses, pebble-gray, with liquidy dark eyes that knew me, I was certain.
I wondered what it meant: here was a horse, but I was a girl.
I wondered if it was just an accident, how we are born: horse, girl.
The way after my father was lost to us in defiance of my mother I would bicycle into Sparta and past the row house where Zoe Kruller was said to have been strangled in her bed and the thought came to me unbidden, illogical If I’d lived here. Anyone who lived here. Death was meant to come here.
You want to blame them, those who’ve been killed. Any woman naked and strangled in her bed you certainly want to blame.
“…shouldn’t have shut me out like that. Your ‘Uncle Sean.’”
“Uncle Sean” was uttered in a tone of contempt, hurt. Daddy seemed to have been following my thoughts.
“All of your mother’s people, that I’d thought liked me. I mean, some of them. The men. Your ‘Uncle Sean’—”
“He isn’t my uncle, Daddy. He’s Mom’s uncle.”
“He’s your great-uncle. That’s what he is.”
I wanted to protest, that wasn’t my fault!
I wanted to protest, Uncle Sean was just an old, ignorant man. Why should Daddy care what he thinks…
“…should know that I won’t give up. A guilty man, he’d give up, he’d move away. By now he’d be vanished from Sparta. But I’m not a guilty man—anyway not guilty of that—and I mean to alter the judgment of bastards like ‘Uncle Sean’ that had no faith in me. You tell your mother, Krista: I am not going to slink away like a kicked dog, I am still fighting this. It’s been—how long—going on five years—a guilty man would’ve given up by now, but not Eddy Diehl.”
Moved by sudden emotion, Daddy reached out another time to grope for my arm, my hand. His fingers were strong, closing around my wrist. I felt a pang of alarm, a moment’s unthinking panic. Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.
“WELL, SAY! Thought it was you.”
At Honeystone’s Dairy the person you hoped would wait on you was Zoe Kruller.
Not heavyset Audrey with the sulky dark-purple mouth like a wound, not the steely-eyed grandma Mrs. Honeystone the owner’s wife, or in the height of summer temporary hired-help, high school girls who took little interest in the names of most customers or in recalling that a finicky child might prefer one type of ice-cream cone (lighter, less crunchy) over another (darker, grainier and chewier), and want her chocolate scoop on the bottom and her strawberry on top so that, melting, the strawberry would seep into the chocolate and not the other way around which seemed to the finicky mildly repugnant, unnatural; and on sundaes no nuts, and no maraschino cherries. But Zoe Kruller knew, Zoe Kruller always remembered.
As Zoe remembered names: “Krissie, is it? H’lo there Krissie!”
Zoe was glamorous, not merely pretty. Your eye moved onto Zoe with startled interest as your eye might be drawn to a billboard face posed above the highway, you would never imagine might have the slightest consciousness of you.
If you were a child, that is. A girl-child intensely aware of adult women: their faces, their bodies.
Zoe was an adult woman, a wife and a mother. Yet you would not have guessed that Zoe was much older than the high school girls who worked behind the counter at Honeystone’s. Her face was a girl’s face, just this side of beauty: her eager smile revealed a band of pink gum and her long hungry-looking teeth overlapped just perceptibly in front. Her skin was pale, warmly freckled. Her hair was “strawberry blond”—crimped, flyaway, shoulder-length. Her eyebrows had been carefully plucked and filled in with eyebrow pencil, her pale lashes were inky with mascara. Her nose was a little too long, with a waxy tip, and wide nostrils. Her chin was a little too narrow. Yet her eyes were beautiful, exotic: shades of amber like sherry at the bottom of a glass, or a certain kind of children’s marble, amber-glazed, changing its colors as you turned it in your fingers.
Zoe was a small woman, her figure was what’s called petite. She could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds nor was she more than five feet two. Yet she exuded an air of sexy funny-girl swagger that made her appear taller, like one accustomed to the spotlight. Behind the counter at Honeystone’s Zoe had a way of rising up on her toes when she locked eyes with a customer, smiling that glistening bared-gum smile and a light seemed truly to come into her face.
“Well, say! Thought it was you.”
Most remarkable was Zoe’s throaty purring voice. It was a voice so low and shivery it didn’t seem as if it was issuing from Zoe Kruller’s wide-lipped crimson mouth but from a radio. Here was a distinctive voice amid a clamor of voices of no distinction, that made you stop and stare at Zoe even more than her lit-up face might have warranted. Here is someone special you were made to think.
That red-embroidered ZOE on a tiny pocket above Zoe’s left breast.
‘“Zooh-ey.’ Not ‘Zoo-ey.’ Please!”
In Chautauqua Park on summer nights local musicians and singers performed at the bandstand and Zoe Kruller belonged to the most popular group, that called itself Black River Breakdown. Zoe was the only woman among several men—guitarist, banjo player, fiddler and piano-player.
Except for the Elvis-looking guitarist, a kid in his early twenties with dyed-black hair and cowboy boots with a prominent heel, they were all in their thirties, ardent, excitable, yearning for applause. Their music ranged from country-and-western classics (“Little Maggie,” “Down from Dover,” “I’ll Walk the Line”) to bluegrass (“Little Bird of Heaven,” “Her Little Footprints in the Snow”) and disco (“I Will Survive,” “Saturday Night Fever”).
Especially