Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

Yet with his unshaven jaws and something heavy-lidded, sulky, about his eyes Daddy exuded a sharkish air; here was a man of pride, to whom you did not condescend; the voice on the jukebox, penetrating the smoky interior of the crowded County Line Tavern on a weekday evening, was the very voice of this man’s soul, and you did not condescend to such a soul. I felt a warning shiver of the kind a swimmer might feel as something not-quite-visible—dark, finned, silent—passes close beneath him, he can’t quite see.

The jukebox song was ending. There was a deep-baritone masculine robustness that seemed inappropriate to its subject:

So if your woman’s devilish

You can let her run,

Or you can bring her down and

Do her like Delia got done.

Delia’s gone, one more round!

Delia’s gone

Daddy was nodding with grave satisfaction, chewing French fries. Big lardy-greasy fries the size of his big fingers lavishly doused with ketchup. Whatever the Johnny Cash song meant to him, it had struck a powerful chord. He’d finished his shot of whiskey and signaled for another. Took a hearty swig from the bottle of ale. Fixed me with a squinting wink and a terse Daddy-smile to finally ask what he’d been putting off asking, since I’d returned to the booth. “Well, Krista: what did your mom say?”

Mom! I had not heard this word in my father’s mouth for a very long time. I saw that he’d been hopeful that my mother would be joining us, his eyes shone with a crazy hope.

MARCH 1983

THE TROUBLE corroding our lives like deep pockets of rust in the hulks of abandoned vehicles. The trouble sucking all the joy out of our lives. And the very awareness the trouble slow to be absorbed by us, who wished each day to think that this! this would surely be the day when the trouble is cleared up.

In retrospect it appears inevitable, and awful. At the time it seems just haphazard.

How Daddy was gone from our household and living with his brother in East Sparta and one day Ben said meanly, “If he’s gone thirteen days he’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”

Zoe Kruller was not a name to be uttered in our household. Yet Zoe Kruller was a name uttered everywhere in Sparta.

On the Sparta radio station local DJ’s were playing songs by Black River Breakdown. Zoe Kruller’s unmistakable voice—throaty, intimate, just-this-side-of-teasing—was suddenly everywhere. The most popular Zoe Kruller songs were “Footprints in the Snow”—the words of which had an eerie prescience, describing what appears to be the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman—

I traced her little footprints in the snow

I found her little footprints in the snow

Now she’s up in heaven she’s with the angel band

I know I’m going to meet her in that promised land

I found her little footprints in the snow

and “Little Bird of Heaven” which was my favorite, and I guess it was Daddy’s favorite too since it was the one Daddy played most often when he was driving one of his vehicles. Zoe Kruller’s voice was airy and playful in this song but melancholy too, you’d find yourself drawing in a breath and biting back a little cry, these words were so beautiful—

Well love they tell me is a fragile thing

It’s hard to fly on broken wings

I lost my ticket to the promised land

Little bird of heaven right here in my hand.

So toss it up or pass it round

Pay no mind to what you’re carryin’ round

Or keep it close, hold it while you can

There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

In Sparta it came to be thought that Zoe Kruller had left a message—“a nest of clues”—in this song. Especially by girls and women it was thought that Zoe had “named her murderer” in the song and if you listened closely, or wrote the lyrics down and took note of the first letters, or the last letters, of each line, you would know who the man was.

Fallen hearts and fallen leaves

Starlings light on the broken trees

I find we all need a place to land

There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

In Mom’s car we were driving and there came breathy and urgent in our ears amid gushing heat from the heater—for it was a vicious-windy March morning—the murdered woman’s voice Little bird of heaven right here in your hand —and with a cry my mother switched off the radio.

“Her! That terrible woman.”

Why is Zoe Kruller a terrible woman?

Is it because Zoe Kruller is a slut?

And does a terrible-slut woman deserve to die?

No one could understand why Black River Breakdown had never made a commercial record, never had a contract with a New York City or Los Angeles recording agency, or been invited to perform outside the Adirondack region. Now their girl-singer had been murdered, the dazed little band of musicians found themselves touched with a kind of lurid tabloid glamour like a spotlight beamed into their faces. The fiddler, who was the group’s oldest musician, at forty-six, had gone into hiding and refused to be interviewed by the media except to say he’d known Zoe Kruller “since she’d been the prettiest baby you could imagine”—while the young guitarist with his Elvis sideburns and shoulder-length hair turned up anywhere you’d look—on late-afternoon local TV, in the “entertainment features” pages of the Sparta Journal facing the comic strips, baring his soul saying he hadn’t slept a night since Zoe was murdered, he hoped to God the police would find whoever did this, and fast; he was composing a ballad in memory of Zoe he hoped he and the group could perform sometime soon…

This newspaper article, and others, I would keep in my notebook, in secret. Seeming to know This will be with me all my life. This will change my life.

No one had been murdered in Sparta, or in all of Herkimer County, for a long time: nine years. If you didn’t count—as the media did not—several killings at the Seneca Indian reservation designated manslaughter which had been settled without trials and publicity. And rarely had anyone in Herkimer County been murdered in such a way: in the victim’s residence, in her bed, to be discovered on a Sunday morning by her own son.

The previous murder, in Sparta, had been during a robbery at the Sunoco station on route 31; before that, a homeless man had been hammered to death by another homeless man, in a Sparta shelter. Both killers had been identified and arrested by police within a day or two.

How different this was— The murderer of Zoe Kruller remains at large.

And— Suspects but no arrests yet, Sparta detectives decline to comment.

We were frightened but we were thrilled, too. We were made to come home directly from school and our mothers drove us places where just recently we’d had to walk or, in warmer weather, to ride our bicycles. We could not know it—perhaps in a way we did know it, we sensed it—and this was part of the thrill—that this interlude would mark a turn in our lives as in the small-city life of Sparta, a sense that We will not be safe again, there is no one to protect us always.

Boys were allowed more freedom than girls, of course. This was always the case but now more than ever for whoever had killed Zoe Kruller had to be a man and this man would not wish to kill a boy or another man, only a woman or a girl. Even a child of eleven understood this logic.