Читать книгу We Were the Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 10

Like whispering the furtive rustle. Judd. Judd. Judd.

I must have been eleven years old, that night I was wakened by the deer, and followed them back to the pasture pond. Wakened not by hooves outside my window (I had no idea the sound was hooves) but by a rustling in the tall dry grasses. Judd. Oh Judd!

Judd sleeps so hard, Mom used to tease, when he was a baby his dad and I would lean over the crib every few minutes, to check if he was breathing!

It was so: up to the age of about thirteen, I’d sleep so hard, I mean—hard. Sunk to the bottom of a deep, deep well.

Wonder why? Weekdays at High Point Farm never began later than 6 A.M. when Mom hollered up the stairs, “WAKE UP! RISE ’N’ SHINE, KIDDOS!” And maybe whistled, or banged a pot. Barn chores before breakfast (my God it could take as long as an hour to wash the cows’ filth-encrusted milk-swollen udders, hook up the milking machine to each cow, drain their heavy milk bags dry, empty the milkers into pails) and barn chores after school (horses, mainly—as much work, but at least I loved our horses), approximately 4:30 P.M. to 6 P.M. And then supper—in our family, intense. Just to hold my own around our table, for a kid like me, the youngest of the Mulvaneys, used up energy, and staying power, like keeping on your toes through twelve rounds of a featherweight boxing match—it might look almost easy to outsiders but it isn’t easy, for sure. And after supper an hour or so of homework, also intense (Mom insisted that Patrick or Marianne oversee my efforts: worrying I wasn’t the high-nineties student it was her conviction I should be) and more excitement among the family, watching TV for a while if something “worthwhile, educational” was on: history, science and biography documentaries on public television were favored by our parents. And we’d discuss them during, and afterward—we Mulvaneys were a family who talked. So when around 10 P.M. I staggered upstairs to bed it was with the gravity of a stone sinking slowly through deep, dark water. Sometimes I fell asleep half in my pajamas, lying sideways on my bed, and Little Boots curled up happily beside me. Sometimes I fell asleep in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. “Oh, Judd! Goodness! Wake up, honey!” Mom might cry, having pushed open the door I’d neglected to lock.

No privacy at High Point Farm.

What with the six of us, and the dogs and cats and frequent visitors and overnight guests (my parents were what’s called hospitable, and Marianne was always inviting girlfriends to stay the night—“The more, the merrier!” Mom believed)—privacy just wasn’t an option.

Patrick was the self-declared loner of the family. He’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden at the age of twelve and often camped out overnight on Alder Creek, in the woods—even so, he’d have one of the dogs with him, or more than one. In his room, there was always a dog or a cat and I’d peek in on him sometimes (the kind of dumb-admiring thing a kid brother does) to see him asleep twisted in his bedclothes with a heavy furry shape slung across his chest, both of them snoring softly.

God, did I sleep hard as a kid! Everything in those days was stark and intense and almost hurtful—I mean, it had the power to make me so happy, so excited. I’d fall into bed and a switch in my brain turned off and I was gone, out. And if anything suddenly woke me in the night (you’d be surprised, it was never the wind: High Point Farm was buffeted constantly by wind that made the oak limbs creak, rattled windowpanes and whined under the eaves and down the chimneys, but we never heard it, only if the wind died down we’d get a little anxious) it was like someone shone a flashlight into my face. My eyes would fly open and I’d lie in bed with my heart pounding, covered in sweat. The time of quick terror when you don’t know who you are, or where.

Then I would recall my name, my true name: Judson Andrew Mulvaney. Dad liked to hint I’d been named after a “rich, eccentric” relative of his, an “Irish landowner of County Kildare” but I guess that was some kind of joke, Dad hadn’t any relatives at all in Ireland that he knew, nor any relatives in this country he’d acknowledge. But what a name for a little boy! What promise of dignity, worth! Just the sound of it, shaping the words aloud—it was like Dad’s new overcoat, camel’s hair, Mom’s Christmas present for him she’d bought on sale the previous March in Yewville’s best department store, that coat so many sizes larger than anything scrawny Ranger might wear yet a coat I might grow into one day. Like Dad’s classy riding boots, another bargain-sale item, and Dad’s fur-lined leather gloves. His Ford pickup, and Mom’s Buick station wagon, and Mike’s lipstick-red Olds Cutlass and the Jeep Wrangler and the John Deere tractor and other farm machinery and vehicles I might one day be capable of driving. All these, Judson Andrew Mulvaney summoned to mind.

Shivering with excitement I stood at my window staring down at the deer. Counting six, seven—eight?—cautiously making their way single file through our yard. They were white-tailed deer probably headed for our pasture pond where it extended twenty feet or so beyond the fence. Where by day our small herd of Holsteins drank, grazed, drowsed on their stolid feet slowly filling their enormous milk-bags, near-motionless as black-and-white papier-mâché beasts, only the twitching of their tails, warding off flies, to give you the idea they’re alive.

It was 3:25 A.M. A strange thrill, to think I was the only Mulvaney awake in the house.

There were many deer on our property, in the remoter wooded areas, but it was rare for any to pass so close to our house, because of the dogs. (Though our dogs never ran loose at night, like the dogs of certain of our neighbors and a small pack of semi-wild dogs that plagued the area. Mom was furious at the way people abandoned their pets in the country—“As if animals aren’t human, too.” And there were miserly farmers who didn’t believe in feeding their dogs so the dogs had to forage the countryside.) Mulvaney dogs were well fed and thoroughly domesticated and not trained to be hunters though they were supposed to be watchdogs “guarding” the property.

I wanted to follow the deer! Made my way barefoot out of my room and to the stairs thinking None of them knows where I am, Ranger is invisible. Little Boots slept so hard on my bed, he hadn’t even known I was gone.

Troy, sleeping somewhere downstairs, didn’t seem to hear me, either.

You could do an inventory of the Mulvaney staircase and have a good idea what the family was like. Staircases in old farmhouses like ours were oddly steep, almost vertical, and narrow. Our lower stairs, though, were always cluttered at their edges, for here, as everywhere in the house, all sorts of things accumulated, set down “temporarily” and not picked up again, nor even noticed, for weeks. Unopened mail for Dad and Mom, including, sometimes, bills. L.L. Bean catalogues, Burpee’s seed catalogues, Farm & Home Supplies circulars. Back issues of Farm Life, Time, Newsweek, Consumer Reports, The Evangelist: A Christian Family Weekly. Old textbooks. Single gloves, a single boot. Stiffened curry combs and brushes, thumbtacks, screws, stray buttons. Certain steps had been unofficially designated as lost-and-found steps so if you found a button, say, on the living room floor, you’d naturally place it on one of these steps and forget about it. And there it would stay for weeks, months. For a while there were two blue ribbons from the New York State Fair on the stairs, won by Patrick for his 4-H projects. There was a necktie of Mike’s stained with spaghetti sauce and wadded up, he’d tossed down and forgotten. Every few weeks when the staircase got so congested there was only a narrow passageway at the bottom, Mom would declare a moratorium and organize whoever was around to clear it; yet within days, or hours, the drift would begin again, things accumulating where they didn’t belong. Dad called this the fourth law of thermodynamics—“The propensity of objects at High Point Farm to resist any order imposed upon them.”

At the bottom of the stairs I paused to get my bearings. Except for the rattling and creaking of the wind which I didn’t hear, the house was silent.

I tiptoed through the dining room, pushed the swinging door open cautiously (it creaked!) and tiptoed through the kitchen hoping the canary wouldn’t wake up and make a noise. Off the back hall was a small bathroom, and across from it Mike’s room, his door closed of course. (Mike, the oldest child, was special, and had had special privileges for years. He didn’t sleep upstairs with the rest of us but had his own large room downstairs, near the back door so he had virtually his own entrance, his privacy. Now he was twenty years old, working for Dad at Mulvaney Roofing, he wasn’t a kid any longer but wanted to be considered an adult. Often he was out late at night, even on weekdays. I didn’t know if he was home even now, at this hour.) The back door of the house wasn’t locked, I smiled turning the knob it was so easy!—slipping from the house, and no one knew.

Ranger’s the baby of the family but he’s got some surprises for us. Wait and see.

How bright, glaring-bright, the moon. I hadn’t expected that. Shreds of cloud blowing across it like living things. Almost, the light hurt my eyes.

All those stars winking and pulsing. That look of being alive, too. So many! It made me dizzy, confused. Of the constellations Patrick had been trying to teach me, looking through his telescope he’d assembled from a kit, I could identify only the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion?—but where was Andromeda? The sky seemed to shift and swim the harder I stared. The wind seemed to make the stars vibrate.

The hard-packed dirt of the driveway was wonderfully cool and solid beneath my feet. My bare feet still toughened from summer when I ran around barefoot as much as I could. Up in my room it hadn’t seemed cold but now the wind fluttered my pajama legs and lifted my hair from my forehead, I was shivering. And the moon so bright it hurt my eyes.

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 walking, 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 machinery, 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, Marianne and me, sweet corn, butternut squash, a half dozen pumpkins still remaining, and marigolds 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 mirrors. 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, now. 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 difference—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 Ransomville, 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, glimmering 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, ferocious in the chase, ears laid back and hackles raised. I thought I recognized 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 rifle, 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 Mom 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, coming 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. Blackberry-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-reproachful-affectionate. 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-frizzed 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 damn ol’ tetanus.” He gave the word “tetanus” a female trill, so already he was treating this as some kind of joke. Weird, but some kind of joke. 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, closetsized, 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 but would probably not remember.

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