Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
mother nor Ben ever knew, I never told them. That the end of the driveway wasn’t blocked as usual must have made no distinct impression on my mother, when she drove her car out.
Another time, a more careless/desperate time he’d parked at the end of the driveway, very likely he’d been drinking and so forgot to switch off his headlights and Ben happened to notice from an upstairs window and shouted to my mother: “It’s him, Mom! Damn bastard, I hate him!”
In a panic my mother called the number the Herkimer County sheriff had given her for such emergencies and within minutes a squad car careened along Huron Pike Road with a flashing red light like on TV—unresisting, Eddy Diehl was arrested, taken away in handcuffs and in the morning his car was towed away.
Why Lucille declined to press charges, she would not explain.
“It’s over.”
He was gone, then. Except: one afternoon months later again he was sighted driving slowly past the small shopping center where my mother had begun part-time work at the Second Time ‘Round Shop—a “consignment” shop to which women brought no-longer-wanted clothing to be resold; he was sighted in the parking lot at the rear, just sitting in the car, smoking, possibly drinking; it would turn out, he’d told one of his Diehl cousins that he was wanting “just to see her, from a distance”—“not even to try to talk”—but Lucille didn’t appear, and after an hour or so he drove away.
It was Daddy’s statement made frequently to relatives, meant to be conveyed to Lucille: “She knows that I love her and the kids. That isn’t going to change. However she feels about me, I can accept it.”
SPARTA RESIDENT DIEHL, 42, RELEASED FROM POLICE CUSTODY “NO CHARGES AT THIS TIME”
Because my mother prowled in my room in my absence—I knew! I’d set devious Mom-traps in my sock-and-undies drawer and in my clothes closet—I kept my cache of clippings about my father in a school notebook, carried back and forth in my backpack. This clipping, from the Sparta Journal for April 29, 1983, commemorated the final time Edward Diehl’s photograph would appear prominently on the front page of that paper.
For that reason, and for the reason that it so clearly stated that Edward Diehl had been released from police custody, for lack of evidence linking him to the murder of Zoe Kruller, this clipping was precious to me.
Not that I failed to note—no one could fail to note, who was even skimming the article—the begrudging No Charges at This Time.
The conspicuous omission of Suspect Cleared.
Edward Diehl had been in police custody more than once, more than twice, possibly more than three times. He’d been identified—numberless times!—as one of the prime suspects; yet he’d never been arrested. (Another man, the murdered woman’s husband, had been arrested—but later released.) It was a season of misery and public humiliation for all of the Diehls, the Bauers, and their friends; for Ben and me, having to go to school where everyone seemed to know more about our father—our father and a woman named Zoe Kruller, who’d been “murdered”—“strangled in her bed”—than we did. For months the police investigation continued, very like a net being dragged in one direction and then in another, a nightmare net trapping all in its path, as virtually anyone who knew my father was “interviewed,” often more than once. After a year, two years, several years this case was still open; by November 1987, no one had been definitively arrested, and the name Zoe Kruller had vanished from the newspaper; Edward Diehl was no longer a prime suspect, evidently—yet no public announcement had ever been made by Sparta police or by the county prosecutor that Edward Diehl’s name had been cleared.
My mother never spoke of the case any longer. Like a woman who has endured a ravaging cancer, and managed to survive, she would not speak of what had almost killed her, and became white-faced with fury if anyone tried to bring it up. Lucille, d’you mind my asking how is—
Yes. I do mind. Please.
At the time, I had not been told much about what my mother and her family chose to call the trouble. I was believed to be an overly sensitive, excitable girl and so, more than my brother Ben, I was to be spared. But I knew that my father, who was no longer living with us, was a suspect in a local murder case, that he’d had to hire a lawyer, and in time he’d had to fire that lawyer and hire another lawyer; and, inevitably, he’d come to owe both lawyers thousands of dollars more than he could have hoped to pay them; for he was obliged to continue to support his family, which meant my mother, my brother, and me; and he’d lost his job at Sparta Construction, Inc. where he’d worked since the age of twenty, first as a carpenter’s assistant, then as a carpenter, then he’d been promoted to foreman/manager by his employer who was also his friend or had been his friend until he’d been taken into police custody.
All these facts, I knew. Though no one had told me openly.
The trouble was as good a way as any of pointing to what had happened. The trouble that has come into our lives my mother would say, as Daddy would say The trouble that has come into my life.
Like lightning from the sky. A catastrophe from out there.
When he’d been released from police custody for the second and final time—in late April 1983—my father was told that he was free to leave Sparta, and so he moved to Watertown, sixty miles to the north on the St. Lawrence River, where he got a job as a roofer; then he moved to Buffalo, two hundred miles to the west, where he worked construction. There was a time he lived in the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, working for a logging company. And later, we heard he had a job with Beechum County, which was adjacent to Herkimer—snow removal, highway construction. In our lives my father appeared, and disappeared; and again appeared, and disappeared. He sent birthday cards to Ben and me—though never quite in time for our birthdays. He sent Christmas cards to LUCILLE, BENJAMIN & KRISTA DIEHL, R.D. # 3, HURON PIKE RD., SPARTA N.Y. signed in a large childlike scrawl LOVE, DADDY. Sometimes just LOVE DADDY. (These cards I scavenged from the trash where my mother had thrown them, to hide away in my secret Daddy-notebook.)
There came months of silence. No one spoke of Eddy Diehl, no one seemed to know where he was. But one evening the phone would ring and if our mother answered it we’d hear a sharp intake of breath and then Mom’s steely response: “No. It’s over. It’s finished. No more.”
If Ben answered, quickly he’d hang up the phone. White-faced and quivering Ben slammed out of the room—“That sick, sorry bastard. Why doesn’t he let us alone.”
If I answered—if Mom wasn’t there to hear me, and to snatch away the receiver—Daddy and I might talk, a little. Awkwardly, eagerly. My voice was tremulous and low-pitched and my heart beat hard hard hard like the wings of that little bird of heaven in the song Zoe Kruller once sang.
“KRISTA. CLIMB IN.”
Outside, at the rear exit of the school, Daddy’s car was waiting.
A vehicle unknown to me, I was sure I’d never seen before. A shiny expanse of dark-coppery metallic finish, gleaming chrome fixtures, new-looking, you might say flashy-looking, with whitewall tires and hubcaps like roulette wheels: one of Eddy Diehl’s specialty-autos.
These were purchases of secondhand cars of some distinction which Daddy would rebuild or “customize”—drive for a while, and resell, presumably at a profit. They were older-vintage cars—Caddies, Lincolns, Olds—or newer-vintage Thunderbirds, Corvettes, Stingrays, Mustangs, Barracudas; they were mysteriously acquired through a friend of a friend needing money suddenly, or bankruptcy sales, police auctions. Through my childhood these specialty-autos were both thrilling and fraught with peril for the purchases upset my mother even as they were wonderful surprises for my brother and me. Typical of Daddy to simply arrive home with a new car, without warning or explanation. There in the doorway stood Daddy rattling car