Joyce Carol Oates - We Were The Mulvaneys Read online

  There was the rooster weathervane on the peak of the hay barn. Creaking in the wind: looked like north-northeast. It was October already. A smell of deep cold, snow to come.

  In the barn one of the horses whinnied. Another horse answered. Those quizzical, liquid sounds. A third horse! What were they doing awake at this hour? It wasn't possible they heard me, or smelled me. Clover, my horse, always knew me by some mysterious means (my way of walldng, my smell?) when I approached his stall, before I actually came into his sight.

  Something streaked past me and disappeared into the grass-one of the barn cats? Or a raccoon? My heart thumped in immediate reaction, though I wasn't scared. The night was so alive.

  I was a little worried my parents might notice me out here. The floodlights might come on, illuminating the upper drive. Dad's voice yelling, "Who's Out there?" And the dogs barking.

  But no. I waited, and nothing happened.

  It's like I was invisible.

  The house looked larger now in night than it did in day. A solid looming mass confused with the big oaks around it, immense as a mountain. The barns too were dark, heavy, hulking except where moonlight rippled over their tin roofs with a look like water because of the cloud shreds blowing through the sky. No horizon, solid dark dense-wooded ridges like the rim of a deep bowl, and me in the center of the bowl. The mountains were only visible by day. The tree lines. By night our white-painted fences gleamed faintly like something seen underwater but the unpainted fences and the barbed wire fences were invisible. In the barnyard, the humped haystack, the manure pile, I wouldn't have been able to identify if I didn't know what they were. Glazed-brick silo shining with moonlight. Barns, chicken coop, the sheds for the storage of machinery, much of it old, broken-down and rusted nuchinery, the garage, carports- silent and mysterious in the night. On the far side of the driveway the orchard, mostly Winesap apples, massed in the dark and the leaves quavering with wind and it came to me maybe I'm dead? a ghost? maybe I'm not here, at all?

  But I didn't turn back, kept on, following the deer, now passing the strawberry patch (my sister Marianne had taken over, since I'd done only a mediocre job fertilizing, weeding the summer before) and there was Mom's garden we all helped her with, anyway Patrick, Mananne and me, sweet corn, butternut squash, a half dozen pumpkins still remaining, and mangolds beginning to fade, for we'd had a frost or two already. That look as Mom characterized it of an autumn garden-"So melancholy, you want to cry." Along the fence, the sunflowers crowding one another, most of them beginning to droop, going ragged, heads bowed, swaying in the wind like drunken figures. Birds had pecked out most of the seeds and the flowers were left torn and blind-looking yet still it was strange to me to pass by them-sunflowers seem like people!

  I was following the deer though I couldn't see them. The earth was puddled and the puddles glittered like minors. Smells are sharper by night-I smelled a rich mud-smell, wet-rotted leaves and manure. I wasn't much aware of my feet, cold now, and going numb, so if they were being scratched, cut by stones or spiky thorns, I didn't know. I was scared, but happy! Not-Judd, nou'. Not-known.

  I crept up to the pond, which was only about three feet deep at this end. Draining out of the meandering brook that connected with Alder Creek. Every few years the pond choked up with sediment, tree debris and animal droppings, and Dad had to dredge it out with a borrowed bulldozer.

  A single doe was drinking at the pond! I crouched in the grasses, watching from about fifteen feet away. I could see her long slender neck outstretched. Her muzzle, lowered to the water. By moonlight the doe was drained of color and on the pond's surface light moved in agitated ripples from where she drank. Where were the other deer? It was unusual to see only one. They must have continued on, into the woods. The doe lingered, lifting her head alert and poised for flight. Her ears twitched-did she hear me? Maybe she could smell me. Her eyes were like a horse's eyes, protuberant and shiny, black. Tension quivered in her slender legs.

  I loved the wild creatures. I could never hunt them. They had no names the way the animals of High Point Farm had names. You could not call them, nor identify them. As soon as you sighted them, by day, they would vanish. As if to refute the very authority of your eyes. Theirs was the power to appear and to disappear. It was meant to be so: not as in Genesis, where Adam names the creatures of the earth, sea, and is granted dominion over them by God. Not like that.

  Next month was deer-hunting season in the Chautauqua Valley and from dawn to dusk we'd hear the damned hunters' guns going off in the woods and open fields, see their pickups parked by the side of the road and often on our own property. Every year (this was county law, favoring "hunters' rights") Dad had to post new bright orange NO HUNTING NO FISHING signs on our property if we wanted to keep hunters off, but the signs, every fifty yards, made little differ- ence-hunters did what they wanted to, what they could get away with. Through the winter we'd see almost no deer near the house, and rarely bucks. Bucks were killed for their "points" and their handsome antlered heads stuffed as trophies. Ugly glass eyes in the sockets where living eyes had been. Mom wept angrily seeing killed deer slung as dead meat across the fenders of hunters' vehicles and sometimes she spoke to the hunters, bravely, you might say recklessly. To kill for sport Mom said was unconscionable. She was of a farm family where all men and boys hunted, out in Ransoinville, and she could not abide it-none of the women could, she said. Once, long ago, Dad himself had hunted-but no longer. There were bad memories (though I did not know what these were) having to do with Dad's hunting and the men he went hunting with, in the area of Wolf s Head Lake. Now, Dad belonged to the Chautauqua Sportsmen's Club-for "business" reasons-but he didn't hunt or fish. It was Dad's position he called "neutral" that since human beings had driven away the wolves and coyotes that were natural predators of deer in this part of the state there was an imbalance of nature and the deer population had swollen so that they were malnourished, always on the verge of starvation, not to mention what predators they'd become, themselves-what damage they caused to crops. (Including Ours.) Yet, Dad did not believe in hunting-animals hunted animals, Dad said, but mankind is superior to Nature. Mankind is made In the image of God, not Nature. Yet he didn't seriously object when Mike wanted to buy a.22-caliber rifle at the age of fifteen, for "target practice," and he still had his old guns, untouched now for years.

  The doe was staring toward me across the pond. Forelegs bent, head lowered.

  Then I heard what she must have been hearing-something trotting, trampling through the meadow. I heard the dogs' panting before I saw them. A pack of dogs! In an instant the doe turned, leapt, and was running, her tail, white beneath, lifted like a flag of distress. Why do deer lift their tails, running for their lives? A signal to predators, glimmenng white in the dark? The dogs rushed into the pond, splashing through it, growling deep inside their throats, not yet barking. If they were aware of me they gave no sign, they had no interest in me but only in the doe, five or six of them, fero- cious in the chase, ears laid back and hackles raised. I thought I recogmzed one or two of our neighbor's dogs. I shouted after them, sick with horror, but they were already gone. There was the sound of panicked flight and pursuit, growing fainter with distance. I'd stumbled into the pond and something stabbed into my foot. I was panting, half sobbing. I could not believe what had happened-it had happened so quickly.

  If only I'd had a gun.

  The does, fawns, their carcasses we found sometimes in the woods, in our cornfields and sometimes as close as the orchard.

  Once, a part-devoured doe, near Mom's antique sleigh. Throats and bellies ripped out where they'd fallen. Usually they were only partly devoured.

  If only I had a gun. One of Dad's guns, locked in a closet, or a cabinet, in a back room somewhere. The Browning shotgun, the two rifles. There was Mike's nfle, too. Mike had lost interest in target shooting pretty quickly and Patrick hated guns and Dad hadn't taught me to use either the shotgun or the rifles, hadn't allowed me even to touch them. (
Though I'm not sure, maybe I never asked.) Still, I believed I would know how to use the guns.

  How to aim, pull the trigger, and kill.

  Instead, I ran back to the house crying.

  Helpless little kid! eleven years old! Babyface, Dimple!

  Ranger, roaming the night. Wiping tears, snot from his face.

  In the downstairs bathroom, trembling, I ran hot water in the sink. I was trying not to think what had happened to the doe-what the dogs might be doing to her-what I couldn't see happening, and couldn't hear. Back in the woods it would be happening if she had not escaped (but I did not think she had escaped) but maybe I would never know. Don't think about it Morn would say. Sometimes even with a smile, a caress. Don't think about it, Mom will take care of it. And if Mom can't, Dad will. Promise!

  I was terrified the hot-water pipe would make its high-shrieking noise and wake my parents. What the hell are you doing downstairs, Judd?-I could hear Dad's voice, not angry so much as baffled. Going on four in the morning?

  My damned foot, my right foot, was bleeding from a short, deep gash. Both my feet were covered in scratches. For Christ's sake, why didn't you put on shoes? I had no answer, there was no answer. I sat on the lowered toilet seat staring at the underside of my feet, the smeary blood, the dirt. I lathered soap in my hands and tried to wash my feet and there was this uh-uh-uh sound in my throat like choking. It came over me, I'd trailed blood into the house! For sure. Into the back hall. Oh God I'd have to clean it up before somebody saw.

  Before Mom saw, coIning downstairs at 6 A.M. Whistling, singing to herself.

  There were some Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet, I tried to put on my feet. Tetanus! What if I got tetanus? Mom was always warning us not to go barefoot. It would serve me right, I thought. If my last tetanus shot was worn out, if I died a slow terrible death by blood poisoning.

  Don't think about it: back in the woods, what's happening. Or not happening. Or has happened already. Or a thousand thousand times before even you were born, to know of it.

  Outside, Mike pulled up, parked. Quiet as he could manage. He'd driven up our driveway with only his parking lights on, slowly. Getting Out of his car, he hadn't slammed the door shut.

  I couldn't get away in time, there was my older brother in the doorway, blinking at me. Face flushed and eyes mildly bloodshot and I smelled beer on his breath. Blackbeny-color smeared around his mouth, down onto his neck-a girl's lipstick. And a sweet smell of sweat, and perfume. Good-looking guy girls stared after in the street, Mule Mulvaney himself, the one of us who most resembled our father, and with Dad's grin, slightly lopsided, teasing-reproachfulaffectionate. Mike hadn't shaved since morning so his beard was pushing out, his jaws shadowy. His new suede jacket was open and his velvety-velour gold shirt was partly unbuttoned, showing matted-fizzed red-brown hair at the V. A zipper glinted coppery in the crotch of my brother's snug-fitting jeans and my eye dropped there, I couldn't help it.

  Mike said quizzically, "Hey kid what the hell: what's going on? You cut yourself?" There were splotches of blood on the floor, blood-soaked wadded tissues, I couldn't hide.

  I had to tell Mike I'd been outside, just looking around-"For the hell of it."

  Mike shook his head, disapproving. "You've been outside, this time of night? Cutting up your feet? Are you crazy?"

  My big brother, who loved me. Mikey-Junior who was the oldest of the Mulvaney kids, Ranger who was the youngest. Always there'd been a kind of alliance between us-hadn't there?

  Mike, who was slightly drunk, like Dad good-natured, funny and warm when he'd been drinking in an essentially good mood, and nobody was crossing him, and he was in a position to be generous, crouched down and examined my feet. "If they know you're running around outside, barefoot, like some kind of weird, asshole Indian, there'll be hell to pay. You know how Mom worries about danm ol' tetanus." He gave the word "tetanus" a female trill, so al ready he was treating this as some kind of joke. Weird, but some kind ofjoke. Nothing for him to get involved in, anyway.

  Of course, Mike wouldn't tell on me, that went without saying. Any more than I was likely to tell on him, mentioning to Mom what time he'd come home tonight.

  Lifting me beneath the arms like a bundle of laundry, Mike removed me from the toilet seat, suppressing a belch. Lifted the seat, unzipped and urinated into the bowl with no more self-consciousness than one of our Holsteins pissing into the very pond out of which she and the other cows are drinking. Mike laughed, "Christ am I wasted," blowing out his cheeks, rolling his eyes, "-gotta go crash."

  Too sleepy to wash his hands, his fly unzipped and penis dangling he stumbled across the hall to his room. The little bathroom, closet-sized, was rank with the hot fizzing smell of my brother's urine and quickly I flushed the toilet, wincing at the noise of the plumbing, the shuddering of pipes through the sleeping house.

  I was shaky, felt sick to my stomach. Don't think! Don't. I wetted some paper towels and tried to clean the hall, blood-smears on the linoleum which wasn't too clean, stained with years of dirt, as for the braided rug-it was so dirty, maybe nobody would notice. I heard a quizzical mewing sound and it was Snowball pushing against my leg, curious about what I was doing, wanting to be fed, but I only petted her and sent her away and limped back upstairs myself and to my room where the door was half-open!-and in my room where the dark was familiar, the smells familiar, I crawled back into bed beside E.T. who made a sleepy gurgling cat-noise in his throat and Little Boots who didn't stir at all, wheezing contentedly in his sleep. So much for the vigilance of animals. Nobody knew I'd been gone except my brother who not only would not tell hut would probably not remember.

  The wind had picked up. Leaves were being blown against my window. It was 4:05 AM. The moon had shifted in the sky, glaring through a clotted mass of clouds like a candled egg.

  ST. VALENTINE'S 1976

  No one would be able to name what had happened, not even Marianne Mulvaney to whom it had happened.

  Corinne Mulvaney, the mother, should have detected. Or suspected. She who boasted she was capable of reading her husband's and children's faces with the patience, shrewdness and devotion of a Sanslu-it scholar pondering ancient texts.

  Yet, somehow, she had not. Not initially. She'd been confused (never would she believe: deceived) by her daughter's behavior. Marianne's sweetness, innocence. Sincerity.

  The call came unexpectedly Sunday midaftemoon. Fortunately Corinne was home to answer, in the antique barn, trying to restore to some semblance of its original sporty glamor a hickory armchair of "natural" tree limbs (Delaware Valley, Ca. 1890-1900) she'd bought for thirty-five dollars at an estate auction-the chair was so battered, she could have cried. How people misuse beautiful things! was Corinne's frequent lament. The antique barn was crowded with such things, most of them awaiting restoration, or some measure of simple attention. Corinne felt she'd rescued them but hadn't a clear sense of what to do with them-it seemed wrong, just to put a price tag on them and sell them again. But she wasn't a practical businesswoman, she hadn't any method (so Michael Sr. chided her, relentlessly) and it was easy to let things slide. In the winter months, the barn was terribly cold: she couldn't expect customers, when she could barely work out here, herself. Her breath steamed thinly from her nostrils, like slow- expelled thoughts. Her fingers stiffened and grew clumsy. The three space heaters Michael had installed for her quivered and hummed with effort, brightly red-coiled, determined to warm space that could not, perhaps, be warned. On a bright winter day, cold sun glaring through the cobwebbed, uninsulated windows, the interior of the antique barn was like the vast universe stretching on, on and on where you didn't want to follow, nor even think of- except God was at the center, somehow, a great undying sun-wasn't He?

  These were Corinne's alone-thoughts. Thoughts she was only susceptible to when alone.

  So the phone rang, and there was Marianne at the other end, sounding perfectly-normal. How many years, how many errands run for children, how many trips to town, to
school or their friends' houses, wherever, when you had four children, when you lived seven miles Out In the country. Marianne was saying, "Mom? I'm sorry, but could someone come pick me up?" and Corinne, awkwardly cradling the receiver between chin and shoulder, interrupted in the midst of trying to glue a strip of decayed bark to a leg of the chair, failed to hear anything in the child's voice that might have indicated distress, or worry. Or controlled hysteria.

  It's true: Corinne had more or less forgotten that Mananne's date for last night's prom (you would not want to call Austin Weidnian Marianne Mulvaney's "boyfriend") had been supposed to dnve her back home, after a visit at Trisha LaPorte's-or was it perhaps the boy's father, Dr. Weidman the dentist?-no, Connne had forgotten, even whether Austin had his own car. (He did not.) Connne prided herself on never having been a mother who fussed over her children; it wasn't just that the Mulvaney children were so famously self-reliant and Capable of caring for themselves (Corinne's women friends who were mothers themselves envied her), Connne had a hard time fussing over herself. She'd been brought up to consider herself last, and that seemed about right to her. She didn't so much rush about as fly about, always breathless, not what you'd call perfectly groomed. Her women fiends liked her, even loved her-but shook their heads over her. Corinne Mulvaney was an attractive woman, almost pretty-if you troubled to look closely. If you weren't put off by first impressions. (Those who were invariably asked, with almost an air of hurt, how handsome Michael Mulvaney Sr. could have married that woman?) Corinne was tall, lanky, loose-jointed and freckled, somewhere beyond forty, yet noisily girlish, with a lean horsey face often flushed, carrot-colored hair so fizzed, she laughingly complained, she could hardly draw a curry comb through it. On errands in town she wore her at-home clothes- overalls, rubberized L.L. Bean boots, an oversized parka (her husband's? one of her sons'?). She was a nervous cheerful woman whose neighing laugh, in the A & P or in the bank, turned people's heads. Her eerily bright-blue lashless eyes with their tendency to open too wide, to stare, were her most distinguishing feature, an embarrassment to her children. Her fluttery talk in public, her whistling. Her occasional, always soembarrassing talk of God. ("God-gush," Patrick called it. But Corinne protested isn't God all around us, isn't God in us? Didn't Jesus Christ come to earth to be our Savior? Plain as the noses on our faces.)