Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

TWO YEARS, seven months later on a snow-glaring Sunday morning in February 1983 Zoe Kruller was found dead in a brownstone rental on West Ferry Street, downtown Sparta.

On the front page of the Sparta Journal it was reported that Zoe Kruller had suffered blunt force trauma to the head as well as manual strangulation and so it was a case of foul play, homicide.

It was revealed that the murdered woman had been separated from her husband, no longer living with her family. It was revealed that the murdered woman had been discovered in her bed, by —

“Krista. Give that to me.”

“No! I’m reading this.”

“I said —”

She snatched the pages from me. Such agitation in her face, I surrendered the pages to prevent their being torn.

Such agitation in her face, I turned away frightened. But I’d seen—

Discovered in her bed by her fourteen-year-old son Aaron Kruller who ran into the street to summon help.

At this time, I was eleven years old. No longer a small child to be protected from what my mother called “ugly”—“nasty”—“disgusting” things. No longer a small child to tolerate such protection and so somehow I knew—I came to know—that the glamorous freckled friendly woman who’d waited on us at Honeystone’s was this very woman who’d been found strangled in her bed by her own son; I came to know, with a thrill of horror, and of fascination, that at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had not been living with her family, as other wives and mothers lived with their families; at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had been separated from, estranged from her husband Delray Kruller and her son Aaron who was in my brother Ben’s class at the middle school: separated from, estranged from, broken off communication with. Such delicious facts I came to know, that caused a sensation of numbness to pump through me, as if I were wading into a dream; a dream that resembled the Novocain injected into my tender gums, when I went to the dentist; a dream that left me short of breath, dazed and strangely aroused, headachey; a dream of the most intense yearning, and the most intense revulsion. For to these facts were added, in what was invariably an altered tone of voice, like the shifting of a radio station on the verge of dissolving into static, the fact that Zoe Kruller was sharing quarters with another woman, at 349 West Ferry.

Sharing quarters with a woman! Not living with her husband and son but with a woman! And the woman’s name too seemed exotic: DeLucca.

West Ferry Street was miles away from Huron Pike Road. West Ferry Street was not a street familiar to me. I thought it might be near the railroad yard. Off Depot Street, a block or two before the bridge. At the edge of the warehouse district, the waterfront. That part of Sparta. There were taverns there, late-night diners and restaurants. There was XXX-Rated Adult Books & Videos. There were rubble-strewn vacant lots, and there was a raw-looking windswept stretch along the river advertising itself as Sparta Renaissance Park where “high-rise condominiums” were being built.

And somehow too I knew that men came to visit Zoe Kruller in that brownstone, male visitors.

These male visitors were to be interviewed by Sparta police.

Why these facts so agitated my mother, I had no idea. Why my mother slammed and locked the door against me, against both Ben and me, refusing to answer our frightened queries— Mom? Mommy? What’s wrong? —I had no idea.

It was a very cold February. There were joke-cartoons in the local paper about the Ice Age returning. Comical drawings of glaciers, mastodons and woolly mammoths with curving ice-encrusted tusks. I was in sixth grade at Harpwell Elementary and my brother Ben was in ninth grade at Sparta Middle School which was also Aaron Kruller’s school. When my mother asked Ben if he knew Aaron Kruller quickly Ben said no: “He’s a year behind me at school.”

Adding, with a look of disdain: “He’s part-Indian, Kruller. He doesn’t like people like us.”

“He’s your age, isn’t he, Ben? In the paper it says ‘fourteen.’”

Irritably Ben said, “What’s that got to do with it, Mom? I told you, he’s a year behind me. I don’t know him.”

“But he isn’t from the reservation, is he? He isn’t a full-blooded Indian, is he? ‘Delray Kruller’—he isn’t an Indian.”

“Jesus, Mom! What difference does it make? What are we talking about?” Ben was becoming frantic, furious. This doggedness in our mother—this persistence, in the most trivial details—had a way of upsetting Ben even more than it upset me.

Let it go, Mom. Please let it go would be my silent plea.

Still our mother persisted: “That poor boy. That’s who I feel sorry for, in all this. Just a child, to discover— her. ” Even now, our mother could not bring herself to utter the name Zoe Kruller , only just her in a tone of disgust.

Ben turned away with a shrug. He hadn’t looked at me at all.

Of course, Ben knew Aaron Kruller. He’d known Aaron Kruller since grade school.

But it was like Ben, not to talk about things that upset him. The fact that Zoe Kruller had died, that someone we’d known had died, seemed to embarrass him. My brother was of an age when, if you couldn’t shrug and make a wisecrack about something, you turned away with a pained smirk.

To me he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Kruller’s mom—that ‘Zoe’—know what she was? A slut.”

Slut? I felt the word sharp and cracking like a slap across my silly-girl face.

“A slut is a female that fucks. Aaron Kruller’s mom was a slut , and a junkie , too. That was why she left the dairy. That was why she left off singing. And Aaron didn’t go running out to ‘summon help’—they found him with her, where she was dead, and”—Ben’s voice lowered even further, creased and cracked with hilarity—“he’d shit his pants. That news you won’t find in the paper.”

In the paper—in the succession of newspapers that would come into my hands—some of them hidden from us by our mother, in a drawer of her cedar bureau, others shared with me by my girlfriends at school—I would see Zoe Kruller’s smiling face gazing up at me, on the verge of winking at me Krissie! What can I do you for today?

That riddle to which there was no answer.

As she’d turn to Daddy lifting her fevered glamour-face like a flower taunting you to pick it Mis-ter Diehl! And what can I do you for—today?

The most commonly printed photograph of Zoe Kruller—which in time would find its way into state-wide newspapers though never into national publications nor syndicated by the Associated Press, so far as I knew—was the one in which Zoe posed with fellow musicians from Black River Breakdown, in her spangled low-cut girl-singer attire, and with her hair crimped and springy and electric-looking cascading over one semi-bare shoulder. Another more casual photo showed a younger Zoe smiling at the camera at a sly angle as if she’d been teasing the photographer, with the exuberant ease of a high school cheerleader or prom queen. How many times these and other likenesses of Zoe Kruller, Sparta murder victim would be reprinted, how many times I would stare at them in wonderment that I had ever known her—that of course I knew her, still—never in my life would Krista Diehl not-know Zoe Kruller from Honeystone’s—and each time it seemed to me a wrongful thing, a nightmare-thing, a cruel taunting joke that in these photographs Zoe had been smiling with such trust, never imagining that, one day, her picture would be printed—reprinted—in newspapers—shown on local TV news—with the identification Zoe Kruller, Sparta Murder Victim.