Mudwoman

Mudwoman

Joyce Carol Oates

Dedication

For Charlie Gross,

my husband and

first reader

Epigraph

What is man? A ball of snakes.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,

Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,

And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

WALT WHITMAN,

“Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”

Time is a way of preventing all things from happening at once.

ANDRE LITOVIK,

“The Evolving Universe: Origin, Age & Fate”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Mudgirl in the Land of Moriah.

Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

Mudgirl Saved by the King of the Crows.

Mudwoman Confronts an Enemy. Mudwoman’s Triumph.

Mudgirl Reclaimed. Mudgirl Renamed.

Mudwoman Fallen. Mudwoman Arisen. Mudwoman in the Days of Shock and Awe.

Mudgirl in “Foster Care.” Mudgirl Receives a Gift.

Mudwoman Makes a Promise. And Mudwoman Makes a Discovery.

Mudgirl Has a New Home. Mudgirl Has a New Name.

Mudwoman Mated.

Mudgirl, Cherished.

Mudwoman, Bereft.

Mudgirl, Desired.

Mudwoman, Challenged.

Mudgirl: Betrayal.

Mudwoman in Extremis.

Mudwoman Ex Officio.

Mudwoman Amid the Nebulae.

Mudwoman Flung to Earth.

Mudwoman Bride.

Mudwoman Finds a Home.

Mudwoman Encounters a Lost Love.

Mudwoman: Moons beyond Rings of Saturn.

Mudwoman Not Struck by Lightning. Mudwoman Saved from Nightmare.

Mudwoman at Star Lake. Mudwoman at Lookout Point.

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Mudgirl in the Land of Moriah.

April 1965

You must be readied, the woman said.

Readied was not a word the child comprehended. In the woman’s voice readied was a word of calm and stillness like water glittering in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River the child would think were the scales of a giant snake if you were so close to the snake you could not actually see it.

For this was the land of Moriah, the woman was saying. This place they had come to in the night that was the place promised to them where their enemies had no dominion over them and where no one knew them or had even glimpsed them.

The woman spoke in the voice of calm still flat glittering water and her words were evenly enunciated as if the speaker were translating blindly as she spoke and the words from which she translated were oddly shaped and fitted haphazardly into her larynx: they would give her pain, but she was no stranger to pain, and had learned to find a secret happiness in pain, too wonderful to risk by acknowledging it.

He is saying to us, to trust Him. In all that is done, to trust Him.

Out of the canvas bag in which, these several days and nights on the meandering road north out of Star Lake she’d carried what was needed to bring them into the land of Moriah safely, the woman took the shears.

In her exhausted sleep the child had been hearing the cries of crows like scissors snipping the air in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River.

In sleep smelling the sharp brackish odor of still water and of rich dark earth and broken and rotted things in the earth.

A day and a night on the road beside the old canal and another day and this night that wasn’t yet dawn at the edge of the mudflats.

Trust Him. This is in His hands.

And the woman’s voice that was not the woman’s familiar hoarse and strained voice but this voice of detachment and wonder in the face of something that has gone well when it was not expected, or was not expected quite so soon.

If it is wrong for any of this to be done, He will send an angel of the Lord as He sent to Abraham to spare his son Isaac and also to Hagar, that her son was given back his life in the wilderness of Beersheba.

In her stubby fingers that were chafed and bled easily after three months of the gritty-green lye-soap that was the only soap available in the county detention facility the woman wielded the large tarnished seamstress’s shears to cut the child’s badly matted hair. And with these stubby fingers tugging at the hair, in sticky clumps and snarls the child’s fine fawn-colored hair that had become “nasty” and “smelly” and “crawling with lice.”

Be still! Be good! You are being readied for the Lord.

For our enemies will take you from me, if you are not readied.

For God has guided us to the land of Moriah. His promise is no one will take any child from her lawful mother in this place.

And the giant shears clipped and snipped and clattered merrily. You could tell that the giant shears took pride in shearing off the child’s befouled hair that was disgusting in the sight of God. Teasingly close to the girl’s tender ears the giant shears came, and the child shuddered, and squirmed, and whimpered, and wept; and the woman had no choice but to slap the child’s face, not hard, but hard enough to calm her, as often the woman did; hard enough to make the child go very still the way even a baby rabbit will go still in the cunning of terror; and then, when the child’s hair lay in wan spent curls on the mud-stained floor, the woman drew a razor blade over the child’s head—a blade clutched between her fingers, tightly—causing the blade to scrape against the child’s hair-stubbled scalp and now the child flinched and whimpered louder and began to struggle—and with a curse the woman dropped the razor blade which was badly tarnished and covered with hairs and the woman kicked it aside with a harsh startled laugh as if in wishing to rid the child of her snarly dirty hair that was shameful in the eyes of God the woman had gone too far, and had been made to recognize her error.

For it was wrong of her to curse—God damn!

To take the name of the Lord in vain—God damn!

For in the Herkimer County detention facility the woman had taken a vow of silence in defiance of her enemies and she had taken a vow of utter obedience to the Lord God and these several weeks following her release, until now she had not betrayed this vow.

Not even in the Herkimer County family court. Not even when the judge spoke sharply to her, to speak—to make a plea of guilty, not guilty.

Not even when the threat was that the children would be taken forcibly from her. The children—the sisters—who were five and three—would be wards of the county and would be placed with a foster family and not even then would the woman speak for God suffused her with His strength in the very face of her enemies.

And so the woman took up a smaller scissors, out of the canvas bag, to clip the child’s fingernails so short the tender flesh beneath the nails began to bleed. Though the child was frightened she managed to hold herself still except for shivering as the baby rabbit will hold itself still in the desperate hope that is most powerful in living creatures, our deepest expectation in the face of all evidence refuting it, that the terrible danger will pass.

For—maybe—this was a game? What the spike-haired man called a game? Secret from the woman was the little cherry pie—sweet cherry pie in a wax-paper package small enough to fit into the palm of the spike-haired man’s hand—so delicious, the child devoured it greedily and quickly before it might be shared by another. There was splash-splash which was bathing the child in the claw-footed tub while the woman slept in the next room on the bare mattress on the floor her limbs sprawled as if she’d fallen from a height onto her back moaning in her sleep and waking in a paroxysm of coughing as if she were coughing out her very guts. Bathing the child who had not been bathed in many days and mixed with the bathing was the game of tickle. So carefully!—as if she were a breakable porcelain doll and not a tough durable rubber doll like Dolly you’d just bang around, let fall onto the floor and kick out of your way if she was in your way—and so quietly!—the spike-haired man carried the child into the bathroom and to the claw-footed tub that was the size of a trough for animals to drink from and in the bathroom with the door shut—forcibly—for the door was warped and the bolt could not be slid in place—the spike-haired man stripped the child’s soiled pajamas from her and set her—again so carefully!—a forefinger pressed to his lips to indicate how carefully and without noise this must be—set her into the tub—into the water that sprang from the faucet tinged with rust and was only lukewarm and there were few soap bubbles except when the spike-haired man rubbed his hands vigorously together with the bar of nice-smelling Ivory soap between his palms and lathered the suds on the child’s squirmy little pale body like something soft prized out of its shell in what was the game of tickle—the secret game of tickle; and amid the splashing soon the water cooled and had to be replenished from the faucet—but the faucet made a groaning sound as if in protest and the spike-haired man pressed his forefinger against his lips pursed like a TV clown’s lips and his raggedy eyebrows lifted to make the child laugh—or, if not laugh, to make the child cease squirming, struggling—for the game of tickle was very ticklish!—the spike-haired man laughed a near-soundless hissing laugh and soon after lapsed into an open-mouthed doze having lost the energy that rippled through him like electricity through a coil and the child waited until the spike-haired man was snoring half-sitting half-lying on the puddled floor of the bathroom with his back against the wall and water-droplets glistening in the dense wiry steel-colored hairs on his chest and on the soft flaccid folds of his belly and groin and when finally in the early evening when the spike-haired man awakened—and when the woman sprawled on the mattress in the adjacent room awakened—the child had climbed out of the tub naked and shivering and her skin puckered and white like the skin of a defeathered chicken and for a long time the woman and the spike-haired man searched for her until she was discovered clutching at her ugly bareheaded rubber doll curled up like a stepped-on little worm in skeins of cobweb and dustballs beneath the cellar stairs.

Hide-and-seek! Hide-and-seek and the spike-haired man was the one to find her!

For what were the actions of adults except games, and variants of games. The child was given to know that a game would come to an end unlike other actions that were not-games and could not be ended but sprawled on and on like a highway or a railroad track or the river rushing beneath the loose-fitting planks of the bridge near the house in which she and the woman had lived with the spike-haired man before the trouble.

This is not hurting you! You will defame God if you make such a fuss.

The woman’s voice was not so calm now but raw-sounding like something that has been broken and gives pain. And the woman’s fingers on the child were harder, and the broken and uneven nails were sharp as a cat’s claws digging into the child’s flesh.

The child’s tender scalp was bleeding. The hairs remaining were stubbled. Amid the remaining sticky strands of hair haphazardly cut and partly shaved were tiny frantic lice. By this time the child’s soiled clothes had been removed, wadded into a ball and kicked aside. It was a tar paper cabin the woman had discovered in the underbrush between the road and the towpath. The sign from God directing her to this abandoned place had been a weatherworn toppled-over cross at the roadside that was in fact a mileage marker so faded you could not make out the words or the numerals but the woman had seen M O R I A H.

In this foul place where they had slept wrapped in the woman’s rumpled and stained coat there was no possibility of bathing the child. Nor would there have been time to bathe the child, for God was growing impatient now it was dawn which was why the woman’s hands fumbled and her lips moved in prayer. The sky was growing lighter like a great eye opening and in most of the sky that you could see were clouds massed and dense like chunks of concrete.

Except at the tree line on the farther side of the mudflats where the sun rose.

Except if you stared hard enough you could see that the concrete clouds were melting away and the sky was layered in translucent faint-red clouds like veins in a great translucent heart that was the awakening of God to the new dawn in the land of Moriah.

In the car the woman had said I will know when I see. My trust is in the Lord.

The woman said Except for the Lord, everything is finished.

The woman was not speaking to the child for it was not her practice to speak to the child even when they were alone. And when they were in the presence of others, the woman had ceased speaking at all and it was the impression of those others who had no prior knowledge of the woman that she was both mute and deaf and very likely had been born so.

In the presence of others the woman had learned to shrink inside her clothing that hung loosely on her for at the time of her pregnancies she had been ashamed and fearful of the eyes of strangers moving on her like X-rays and so she had acquired men’s clothing that hid her body—though around her neck in a loose knot, for her throat was often painful, and she feared strep throat, was a scarf of some shiny crinkly purple material she had found discarded.

The child was naked inside the paper nightgown. The child was bleeding from her razor-lacerated scalp in a dozen tiny wounds and shivering and naked inside the pale green paper nightgown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION that had been cut by the giant shears to reduce its length if not its width so that the paper nightgown came to just the child’s skinny ankles.

A paper gown to be tracked to the Herkimer County medical unit attached to the women’s detention home.

In the rear seat of the rattling rusted Plymouth which was the spike-haired man’s sole legacy was the child’s rubber doll. Dolly was the name of the doll that had been her sister’s and was now hers. Dolly’s face was soiled and her eyes had ceased to see. Dolly’s small mouth was a pucker in the grim rubber flesh. And Dolly too was near-bald, only patches of curly fair hair remaining where you could see how the sad feathery fawn-colored hairs had been glued to the rubber scalp.

Seventy miles north of Star Lake as remote to the woman and the child as the farther, eclipsed half of the moon, the shadowed mudflats beside the river.

So meandering and twisting were the mountain roads, a journey of merely seventy miles had required days, for the woman feared to drive the rattling automobile at any speed beyond thirty. And urgent to her too, that her obedience to God was manifest in this slowness and in this deliberateness like one who can only read by drawing his forefinger beneath each letter of each word to be enunciated aloud.

The child did not fret. But the woman believed, in her heart the child did fret for both the children were rebellious. No comb could be forced through such snarled hair.

In harsh jeering cries the crows reviled God.

Jeering demanding to know as the (female, middle-aged) judge had demanded to know why these children have been found filthy and partly clothed pawing through a Dumpster behind the Shop-Rite scavenging for food like stray dogs or wild creatures shrinking in the beam of a flashlight. And the elder of the sisters clutching at the hand of the younger and would not let go.

And how does the mother explain and how does the mother plead.

Proudly the woman stood and her chin uplifted and eyes shut against the Whore of Babylon there in black robes but a lurid lipstick-mouth and plucked eyebrows like arched insect wings. No more would the woman plead than fall to her knees before this whorish vision.

The children had been taken from her and placed in temporary custody of the county. But the will of God was such, all that was rightfully the woman’s was restored to her, in time.

In all those weeks, months—the woman had never weakened in her faith that all that was hers, would be restored to her.

And now at dawn the sky in the east was ever-shifting, expanding. The gray concrete-sky that is the world-bereft-of-God was retreating. Almost you could see angels of wrath in these broken clouds. Glittering light in the stagnant strips of water of the mudflats of the hue of watery blood. Less than a half mile from the Black Snake River in a desolate area of northeastern Beechum County in the foothills of the Adirondacks, where the hand of God had guided her. Here were the remains of an abandoned mill, an unpaved road and rotted debris amid tall snakelike marsh grasses that shivered and whispered in the wind. Exposed roots of trees and collapsed and rotting tree trunks bearing the whorled and affrighted faces of the damned. And what beauty in such forlorn places, Mudgirl would cherish through her life. For we most cherish those places to which we have been brought to die but have not died. No smells more pungent than the sharp muck-smell of the mudflats where the brackish river water seeps and is trapped and stagnant with algae the bright vivid green of Crayola. Vast unfathomable acres of mudflats amid cattails, jimsonweed and scattered litter of old tires, boots, torn clothing, broken umbrellas and rotted newspapers, abandoned stoves, refrigerators with doors flung open like empty arms. Seeing a small squat refrigerator tossed on its side in the mud the child thought She will put us inside that one.

But something was wrong with this. The thought came a second time, to correct—She has put us inside that one. She has shut the door.

There came a frenzy of crows, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, as if the child had spoken aloud and said a forbidden thing.

The woman cried shaking her fist at the birds, God will curse you!

The raucous accusing cries grew louder. More black-feathered birds appeared, spreading their great wings. They settled in the skeletal trees fierce and clattering. The woman cried, cursed and spat and yet the bird-shrieks continued and the child was given to know that the birds had come for her.

These were sent by Satan, the woman said.

It was time, the woman said. A day and a night and another day and now the night had become dawn of the new day and it was time and so despite the shrieking birds the woman half-walked half-carried the child in the torn paper nightgown in the direction of the ruined mill. Pulling at the child so that the child’s thin pale arm felt as if it were about to be wrenched out of its socket.

The woman made her way beyond the ruined mill which smelled richly of something sweetly rancid and fermented and into an area of broken bricks and rotted lumber fallen amid rich dark muddy soil and spiky weeds grown to the height of children. In her haste she startled a long black snake sleeping in the rotted lumber but the snake refused to crawl away rapidly instead moving slowly and sinuously out of sight in defiance of the intruder. At first the woman paused—the woman stared—for the woman was awaiting an angel of God to appear to her—but the sinuous black-glittering snake was no angel of God and in a fury of hurt, disappointment and determination the woman cried, Satan go back to hell where you came from but already in insolent triumph the snake had vanished into the underbrush.

The child had ceased whimpering, for the woman had forbade her. The child barefoot and naked inside the rumpled and torn pale green paper gown faintly stamped HERKIMER CO. DETENTION. The child’s legs were very thin and stippled with insect bites and of these bites many were bleeding, or had only recently ceased bleeding. The child’s head near-bald, stubbled and bleeding and the eyes dazed, uncomprehending. At the end of a lane leading to the canal towpath was a spit of land gleaming with mud the hue of baby shit and tinged with a sulfurous yellow: and the smell was the smell of baby shit for here were many things rotted and gone. Faint mists rose from the interior of the marsh like the exhaled breaths of dying things. The child began to cry helplessly. As the woman hauled her along the land-spit the child began to struggle but could not prevail. The child was weak from malnutrition yet still the child could not have prevailed for the woman was strong and the strength of God flowed through her being like a bright blinding beacon. Light flared off the woman’s face, she had never been so certain of herself and so joyous in certainty as now. For knowing now that the angel of God would not appear to her as the angel of God had appeared to both Abraham and Hagar who had borne Abraham’s child and had been cast into the wilderness by Abraham with the child to die of thirst.

And this was not the first time the angel of God had been withheld from her. But it would be the last time.

With a bitter laugh the woman said, Here, I am returning her to You. As You have bade me, so I am returning her to You.

First, Dolly: the woman pried Dolly from the child’s fingers and tossed Dolly out into the mud.

Here! Here is the first of them.

The woman spoke happily, harshly. The rubber doll lay astonished in the mud below.

Next, the child: the woman seized the child in her arms to push her off the spit of land and into the mud—the child clutched at her only now daring to cry Momma! Momma!—the woman pried the child’s fingers loose and pushed, shoved, kicked the child down the steep incline into the flat glistening mud below close by the ugly rubber doll and there the child flailed her thin naked limbs, on her belly now and her small astonished face in the mud so the cry Momma was muffled and on the bank above the woman fumbled for something—a broken tree limb—to swing at the child for God is a merciful God and would not wish the child to suffer but the woman could not reach the child and so in frustration threw the limb down at the child for all the woman’s calmness had vanished and she was now panting, breathless and half-sobbing and by this time though the ugly rubber doll remained where it had fallen on the surface of the mud the agitated child was being sucked down into the mud, a chilly bubbly mud that would warm but grudgingly with the sun, a mud that filled the child’s mouth, and a mud that filled the child’s eyes, and a mud that filled the child’s ears, until at last there was no one on the spit of land above the mudflat to observe her struggle and no sound but the cries of the affronted crows.

Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

October 2002

Readied. She believed yes, she was.

She was not one to be taken by surprise.

“Carlos, stop! Please. Let me out here.”

In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes moved onto her, startled.

“Ma’am? Here?”

“I mean—Carlos—I’d like to stop for just a minute. Stretch my legs.”

This was so awkwardly phrased, and so seemingly fraudulent—stretch my legs!

Politely the driver protested: “Ma’am—it’s less than an hour to Ithaca.”

He was regarding her with a look of mild alarm in the rearview mirror. Very much, she disliked being observed in that mirror.

“Please just park on the shoulder of the road, Carlos. I won’t be a minute.”

Now she did speak sharply.

Though continuing to smile of course. For it was unavoidable, in this new phase of her life she was being observed.

The bridge!

She had never seen the bridge before, she was sure. And yet—how familiar it was to her.