My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates
to tell her parents that “something bad” had happened to her. After they’d released her she’d slipped into her house by a rear door and was discovered by her mother in a flushed and disheveled state, clothes soiled and torn and misbuttoned, and her face smeared with blood. At once, confronted by her frightened mother, Liza burst into tears and began stammering and sobbing.
It was the “worst day” of their lives, Mrs. Deaver said. They would “never, not ever” recover from what had been done to their daughter whose fault was she was “too friendly” to people who were not her friends.
The Deavers lived in a ramshackle house on Carvendale Road, at the edge of the school district. On one side of the road was the township of South Niagara, on the other side an unincorporated region of scrubby farmland, overgrown pastures and derelict dwellings.
The Deavers were a large family but not as the Kerrigans were a large family. For the Deavers were a welfare family whose father could not provide for his wife and many children—nine? Ten? And of these, what a pity, what a shame, unless it was a crime, as people said, several were not right in the head—what the kids called retards.
Mr. Deaver, when he was employed, worked at the railroad yard. Mrs. Deaver worked part-time at a local mall. Several of their children were out of school and only intermittently employed and the youngest had not yet begun school.
At Family Court, Liza initially sat mute and frightened as others spoke on her behalf. Her deep-shadowed eyes were swimmingly magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. After a while she began to answer questions in a hushed, hoarse voice. Eventually she began to speak louder. And then she began to cry, to sob, to stammer, to stutter and to choke. Her splotched-turtle face was flushed and puffy, saliva glistened at her lips. Family Court officials who tried to make transcripts of her not-very-coherent and contradictory accounts would insist afterward that they felt sorry for the “poor, mentally disabled girl”—and for the Deavers, who accompanied Liza and never let her out of their sight—(Mrs. Deaver went with Liza several times to the restroom during the course of the session)—were nonetheless unconvinced that Liza was telling the truth or even that with her impaired cognition she had a clear conception what truth might be.
It was generally conceded—Boys will be boys. And—These boys’ lives might be ruined … How much worse the situation might have turned out for the boys, if the girl had been seriously hurt!
There were extensive interviews with the accused boys by Family Court officers, with the boys’ fathers and their attorney present. (The fathers of the accused boys hired a single lawyer to represent their sons, a local lawyer with connections to the Kerrigan family.) In this way a public hearing in juvenile court was avoided. There were no arrests. No formal charges were made against the boys who were suspended from school for one week.
Liza Deaver was placed on suspension for the remainder of the school year for it was believed that her presence would be “distracting” and “hazardous,” in the words of the school principal; Liza herself was known to have a raging temper, and to strike out furiously, in frustration, at younger and smaller children when she believed they didn’t respect her. (Liza was usually intimidated by individuals older than herself.) As it happened Liza Deaver never returned to school but was allowed to drop out for “medical reasons.”
All this my sister Katie and I would learn, much later. At the time, we knew little.
No one in the family talked about Liza Deaver, so far as we knew.
No one talked about the trouble. For weeks Jerr and Lionel were subdued around our mother and wary of our father, like kicked dogs. But cunning kicked dogs. They had 9:00 P.M. curfews. Jerr wasn’t allowed to drive for six weeks. Both boys had extra chores around the house. On the phone my mother said, incensed, “It was all that girl’s fault! She did it deliberately! Those Deavers better get her fixed! Before it’s too late.”
When my mother hung up I asked what “fixed” meant. I wondered if whatever the boys had done to her, Liza might need fixing like a broken clock.
Disdainfully my mother said, “Like a cat, spayed. So it can’t have kittens people have to drown.”
GROWING UP, WE KERRIGAN KIDS KNEW THAT OUR DADDY would die for us. No one had to tell us, we knew. Of course, the concept “to die for” was not in our vocabularies. Still, we knew.
In our father’s big Irish Catholic family in Niagara Falls he’d been raised with the conviction that families stuck together. Irish immigrants had had a hell of a hard time coming to America, hadn’t even been considered “white” in some quarters, like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, until even the 1950s. And so, the Irish stuck together, in theory at least.
Not in theory, but in reality, and crucially, a family had to protect its own. You might quarrel with relatives, a brother or a sister, you might quarrel with your parents but essentially you stuck together, you never deserted or betrayed one another. You never went outside the family—that was unforgivable.
Inside the family you never lied when it really mattered, and you never cheated.
Siding with your brother against your cousin, but with brother and cousin against the stranger.
You would die for your family and you would (maybe) die for your (close) friends the way soldiers would die for their (close) buddies.
Something like this, Jerome Kerrigan had truly seemed to feel for his immediate family, if not all of the Kerrigans. And for the guys in his platoon in Vietnam, he dared not recall without his eyes welling with tears and his mouth working to keep still.
If Daddy was suspicious of strangers he was almost naively trusting of relatives and friends. Often he did household repairs for no payment, wouldn’t hear of being paid except in drinks, hospitality, reciprocal favors. That was friendship—loyalty, paying back what you owed. Being generous.
He lent money to people who, he had reason to know, probably wouldn’t be able to repay him; he lent money without interest, knowing that this was a disadvantage, for those to whom he’d lent money would repay the lenders who’d demanded interest, and not him. Yet, Daddy could not bring himself to lend money with interest—that was not how he saw himself.
And so, Daddy lent money to his heavy-drinking brothers. He provided bail bond for Kerrigans who found themselves on the wrong side of the law—business fraud, bad checks, failure to pay alimony, embezzlement. He did favors for guys in the plumbers’ union, for guys he’d gone to school with who’d had bad luck. He respected bad luck—it could happen to anyone.
The more kids you have, the more possibilities for bad luck. That was a grim fact.
The most extravagant thing Daddy did, that I remember from my childhood, was helping one of his younger sisters buy a house in Buffalo, so that she and her husband could live near her husband’s family, who would help her nurse her husband afflicted with some terrible wasting disease like multiple sclerosis. Our mother had not liked this arrangement, she’d sighed and fretted and all but wept over the phone, for a large amount of money was involved, but in Daddy’s presence she did not dare complain for, as Daddy would’ve pointed out to her, he was the one with a salary.
At the same time, you did not wish to cross Jerome Kerrigan.
You did not wish to find yourself on his shit list. For there were many on this list who were, in Daddy’s eyes, fucked.
Forgiving was rare. Forgetting, rarer.
And the closest you were to Daddy, the harder for Daddy to forgive.
He liked to quote an Italian adage—Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Another remark he favored from the boxing world was What goes around comes around. Which was more hopeful for