Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
jawline, his skin was weathered and creased with a look like hard-baked bread. The thick rust-red hair threaded with mica-gray was in fact thinning at the back of his head where he was spared having to see it as he was spared having to see, and kept hidden from the world, the mass of swirling scar tissue, of the color of lard, that disfigured much of his right leg and knee.
Never did Eddy Diehl wear shorts, on the hottest days of summer. Never had he gone swimming with us, at Wolf’s Head Lake.
Though I’d glimpsed the injured leg, from time to time. I’d had to wonder if my mother saw it often, in my parents’ bedroom; if my mother was suffused with love for Daddy, for having suffered in wartime combat, or whether she felt a subtle revulsion for the disfigured flesh.
If she felt a subtle revulsion for my father’s maleness. His sexuality.
Daddy was saying now, how he’d been missing me. How he’d missed his “beautiful daughter”—how “God-damned depressed and in despair” he’d been missing his daughter he loved “more than anything on this earth.”
Steering the car through deep puddles of rainwater with one hand and with the other groping for my hand, capturing both my hands, clasping both hands together in his single hand, hard.
I tried not to wince. I loved such sudden pain!
I said, shyly, “Daddy, I missed you, too. I don’t know why Mom—”
“No ‘Mom,’ Krista. Not right now.”
Despite his unshaven jaws and slightly disheveled hair threaded with gray, my father was looking handsome, I thought. Even with his battered face, discolored pouches of skin beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, or had been rubbing his fists into his eyes, and his forehead creased in thought or worry, Eddy Diehl was a handsome man. The suede coat he wore seemed to be padded with a woolly down like a large upright tongue—what comfort such a burly coat could give, if you were squeezed against it. And dark-graying hairs sprouting up from Daddy’s chest visible at his throat, what comfort in pressing my face against that throat, hiding my face there.
We’d ascended from the rain-pelted dark of Depot Street, the warehouse district, the scrubby waterfront of the Black River, now turning onto the Highlands Bridge that was a beautiful suspension bridge above the river with a wire-net surface that hummed beneath our car tires. A wild happiness was loosed inside the 1976 Caddie Seville with the cream-colored leather interior, Canyon Red finish and whitewall tires—“Fasten your seat belt! Taking off!” Daddy was laughing, of sheer delight, or defiance; I heard myself laugh, excited and uneasy.
Where was Daddy taking me? Across the suspension bridge, into a now lightly falling rain, mist rising from the invisible river below and a blurred vision of lights along the river, the dim stretch of derelict riverfront brick mills and factories shut down for as long as I could remember—Link Ladies Luxury Hosiery, Reynolds Bros. Paper Goods, Johnston Tomato Cannery.
These familiar Sparta landmarks I’d been seeing all my life long before the trouble had destroyed my family.
“—damned proud, Krista. Seeing my li’l girl mixing it up with those big hulking girls.”
Big hulking girls seemed to mean something other than its words. Big hulking girls contained something sexy, sniggering.
I asked Daddy how he’d known where I was? That I’d stayed after school, and was in the gym? Daddy tapped the side of his nose saying, “Your old man has you on his radar, Krista. Better believe it.”
Was he drunk, I wondered. Growly-teasing voice, his words just perceptibly slurred.
And yet: there is no happiness like being fifteen years old and being driven by your (forbidden) father to a destination you can’t—yet—guess. Your handsome (forbidden) father so clearly exulting in your presence as in his possession of you as a thief might gloat over having made away with the most precious of valuables, and no one in pursuit.
I was thinking how no one else loved me like this. No one else would wish to possess me.
Years ago before my father had moved from Sparta, in that interregnum of confusion and nightmare when Edward Diehl was being “taken into police custody”—“released from police custody”—banished from our household but living with relatives locally, it would happen that, as if by accident, Daddy would turn up at places where Ben and I were: boarding the school bus after school, at the mall while our mother was shopping for groceries, riding our bicycles along the Huron Pike Road. I was thrilled to see Daddy waving at us but Ben stiffened and turned away.
Muttering under his breath Like some damn ghost haunting us. Wish he would die!
It was a nasty side of Ben, I’ve never forgiven him, the eager way he reported back to our mother: “Daddy was following us! Daddy waved at us!” My mother was terrified—or wished to declare that she was terrified—that my father might “kidnap” us, such incidents left her semihysterical with indecision. Should she call the police, should she call my father’s family, should she try to ignore Eddy Diehl’s “harassment” or—what should would a responsible mother do?
No one knew. Many opinions were offered but no one knew. If you believed that Edward Diehl might have murdered—“strangled in her bed”—a Sparta woman who’d been his “mistress”—yes, “mistress” was the very term, boldly printed in local papers and pronounced on local radio and TV—you would naturally think that Edward Diehl should be forbidden to approach his children; if you believed that Edward Diehl was an innocent man, in fact a “good and loving” father to those children, you naturally felt otherwise.
A family splits apart just once, all that you learn will be for the first time.
“…but if you want to hold your own with tough girls like that, sweetie, you need to be more aggressive. You aren’t actually the shortest girl I saw on the court but you’re the least ‘developed’—I mean that muscularly—and you need to be meaner, and to take more chances. A good athlete isn’t thinking of herself but the team. If you’re cautious thinking you might be hurt—‘cause you can always be hurt, for sure, in any sport—you’ll be a deficit not an asset to your teammates.”
Deficit. Asset. In my father’s voice was an echo of a long-ago high school coach.
I was hurt, Daddy was criticizing me! Daddy was not praising me as I’d expected he would.
“I was watching those girls. Three or four of them are pretty impressive for their age. The one with the black hair shaved up the sides like a guy, must be a Seneca Indian?—yes?—the way she was ducking, using her elbows, twisting in midair tossing the basket—she’s dynamite. You can tell she’s been playing with guys, out there on the rez. And that big busty gal, with the peroxide streaks, the way she got the ball from you, just whipped it out of your hands. And that six-foot girl who almost trampled you, straight black hair and face like a hatchet—”
“Dolores Stillwater.”
“She’s Indian, right? From the rez?”
Why are we talking about these girls! Why aren’t we talking about me!
“If you want athletes like that to take you seriously, Krissie, you’ll have to work a little harder. Not just shooting baskets—from a stationary position, that isn’t hard. But on the run, playing defensively, holding your own, showing them you’re willing to hurt them—foul them—if those little bitches get in your way. An athlete has to make a decision, early on—Coach told us, in junior high—‘Either it’s you, or it’s them.’ Either you spare yourself the risk, and they take the risk—or you take it, and run right over them. A player who gets fouled all the time isn’t worth crap. If you don’t want to take the risk, Puss, maybe you shouldn’t be playing any sport at all.”
I was remembering: how like our father this was. Ben’s father, and mine. You thought you might be praised for something—anyway, not found lacking—but somehow, as Daddy pondered the subject, turning it this