Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

Though I was young for eleven, young in the ways of the (adult, even the adolescent) world yet the admonition came to me She should not have been smiling like that.

The early headlines were enormous banner heads running the width of the Sparta Journal.

SPARTA WOMAN, 34, FOUND BEATEN, STRANGLED

Death of Local Bluegrass Singer Investigated by Police

Focus on “Men Friends”—“Visitors ”

Later, headlines would diminish, and their tone would subtly alter in tone:

BLUEGRASS SINGER’S PRIVATE LIFE YIELDS “SURPRISES”

Sparta Detectives Continue Investigation Following “Leads”

In our household, no one spoke of Zoe Kruller. It was a time—I guess it wasn’t the first time—when Daddy was often working late, or had to stay away overnight “on business”—and Mommy was edgy and impatient with Ben and me if we asked about him—“He’s away. He’s working. How do I know where he is, ask him yourself!”

Which was so illogical, even Ben couldn’t think how to reply.

The phone, which had not often rung, rang often now. And Mom, who hadn’t often used the phone, was using it often now. At a distance from us, upstairs in the big bedroom into which we were not welcome except by invitation—when I helped my mother houseclean and vacuum, for instance—or in the kitchen with the door so oddly, unnaturally closed—the maple wood cedar door which Daddy had installed in the kitchen was never closed.

Except now, sometimes it was. When Ben and I returned from school on the school bus and tramped into the mudroom at the rear with our snow-wetted boots, there was the kitchen door closed over, and we could hear our mother speaking on the phone in her low urgent accusing panicky voice that was a warning to us, not to approach her But what—? What will—happen? What does this mean? Will there be an—arrest? How can there be an arrest, if—A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer? Oh God a lawyer—we can’t afford a—

Ben was stony-faced, kicking off his boots and stomping away upstairs loud enough so that Mom might hear. Ben ignored my entreaties as he ignored my stricken look, my wounded thumb shoved to my mouth so that I could gnaw at the nail and cause the cuticle to bleed a little more.

What does he say, you know what he says! Well he won’t talk to me—maybe he’ll talk to you—But no lawyer, that’s—No that’s crazy—

This excited voice of my mother’s—this tone of reproach, bewilderment, humiliation, anger—suggested that she was speaking with her older brother, or with one of her sisters. I didn’t want to hear!—quickly I pressed my hands over my ears and stomped upstairs after my brother.

Well, say! Thought it was you.

What can I do you for, Krissie?

Tried to make myself cry staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and speaking in Zoe Kruller’s throaty-scratchy voice but I didn’t cry, not one tear.

DADDY, we could not ask.

Not Krista, not Ben. Not our mother.

Not about Mrs. Kruller-whose-picture-was-in-the-paper. Not about the homicide.

There were no words for me to speak of such a thing to my father. As at any age I could not have spoken frankly to him about the physical life, or about sex; I would never have dared ask my father how much money he made, how much our house had cost, if he was insured and how much was he insured for. I could not have asked him about God: Is there a God, and what has God to do with us? These were taboo subjects, though the word taboo did not exist in our vocabulary and if it ever came to be known in Sparta, by way of advertisements and popular culture, it would be the perfume Taboo.

In any case children did not ask about death. Children could watch death on TV, gunfire, explosions, planes shot wantonly from the sky to fall in a filigree of flame, but children could not ask about death. Only very young children who would quickly learn their mistake.

When Grandpa Diehl had died, and I was four years old and too little for school. When Daddy wasn’t at work he’d kept to himself in the basement of our house in his workshop where we would hear his power tools wailing through the floorboards and in the days, weeks following Grandpa’s funeral Daddy did not speak to us about Grandpa Diehl except evasively to say that Grandpa had “gone away.” By the look in Daddy’s face, my brother and I had known not to ask where Grandpa Diehl had gone.

Mom had warned us: don’t ask Daddy about Grandpa, Daddy is upset. On the phone Mom said Eddy’s taking it pretty hard. You know how he is, it’s all inside.

The words struck me: It’s all inside.

Taking it pretty hard. All inside.

At school, people were talking about Zoe Kruller, who was Aaron Kruller’s mother, or had been Aaron Kruller’s mother. Now Mrs. Kruller too had gone away.

How strange it seemed to us, who’d known Zoe Kruller from both Honeystone’s Dairy and from the Chautauqua Park music-nights, that a woman so friendly, so pretty and glamorous would be strangled in her bed, murdered. How wrong it seemed to us that you could be the girl-singer for Black River Breakdown and applauded and whistled at and made to sing encores, yet someone could still hate you enough to beat, strangle you in your bed.

Some worse things were done to Aaron’s mother than just killing her, know why?—‘cause she was a slut.

We were made to come home immediately from school. Our mothers would not allow us to stay for after-school activities nor did school authorities encourage such activities, in the months following Zoe Kruller’s death. Patrol cars swung by the schools, cruising through the parking lots like friendly sharks. Bus drivers counted heads before shutting the bus doors and leaving the school property, determining that we were all present and accounted for. The older boys objected, they weren’t damn girls.

Ben said: “Some things I heard, about Aaron’s mother, it was just her he was after, the ‘strangler.’ He wouldn’t be after any of us. ”

I asked Ben who’d told him this. I asked Ben what else he’d heard at his school and Ben shrugged evasively and said just some things—“Not for you to know.”

In Sparta—unlike the rest of the world where people were dying and being killed in terrible ways all the time—it seemed rare that anyone died and yet more rare that anyone died in a way to cause such upset, dread, wonder. Of course the “natural” deaths were sad and people cried, especially women. Women were adept at crying, as men were humbled and stymied by crying. Women were cleansed by crying, as men were smudged and stained by crying. But the person who’d died was usually elderly, or had died after a long illness , or both; or had died in a car crash on the highway, or a boating accident on the river or one of the numerous lakes surrounding Sparta. These were sad deaths but not frightening deaths. Because you knew, if you were a child, that nothing like those deaths would ever happen to you.

Except now, people were frightened. Adults were frightened. There is such a profound difference between dying and being killed.

At Honeystone’s Dairy it wasn’t so much fun any longer. Without Zoe Kruller leaning on her elbows on the counter, smiling.

The ice cream was still delicious, greedily we devoured it.

The smell of the fresh-brewed coffee was pungent, disagreeable. To my sensitive nostrils, disagreeable. Since my ice-cream cone infested with nasty weevils Daddy hadn’t taken Ben and me back to the dairy all summer, I had to wonder if there was some connection.