Joyce Oates: Mudwoman

For Charlie Gross,

my husband and

first reader

Epigraph

What is man? A ball of snakes.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE,

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,

Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,

And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

WALT WHITMAN,

“Here the Frailest Leaves of Me”

Time is a way of preventing all things from happening at once.

ANDRE LITOVIK,

“The Evolving Universe: Origin, Age & Fate”

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Mudgirl in the Land of Moriah.

Mudwoman’s Journey. The Black River Café.

Mudgirl Saved by the King of the Crows.

Mudwoman Confronts an Enemy. Mudwoman’s Triumph.

Mudgirl Reclaimed. Mudgirl Renamed.

Mudwoman Fallen. Mudwoman Arisen. Mudwoman in the Days of Shock and Awe.

Mudgirl in “Foster Care.” Mudgirl Receives a Gift.

Mudwoman Makes a Promise. And Mudwoman Makes a Discovery.

Mudgirl Has a New Home. Mudgirl Has a New Name.

Mudwoman Mated.

Mudgirl, Cherished.

Mudwoman, Bereft.

Mudgirl, Desired.

Mudwoman, Challenged.

Mudgirl: Betrayal.

Mudwoman in Extremis.

Mudwoman Ex Officio.

Mudwoman Amid the Nebulae.

Mudwoman Flung to Earth.

Mudwoman Bride.

Mudwoman Finds a Home.

Mudwoman Encounters a Lost Love.

Mudwoman: Moons beyond Rings of Saturn.

Mudwoman Not Struck by Lightning. Mudwoman Saved from Nightmare.

Mudwoman at Star Lake. Mudwoman at Lookout Point.

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

April 1965

You must be readied, the woman said.

Readied was not a word the child comprehended. In the woman’s voice readied was a word of calm and stillness like water glittering in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River the child would think were the scales of a giant snake if you were so close to the snake you could not actually see it.

For this was the land of Moriah, the woman was saying. This place they had come to in the night that was the place promised to them where their enemies had no dominion over them and where no one knew them or had even glimpsed them.

The woman spoke in the voice of calm still flat glittering water and her words were evenly enunciated as if the speaker were translating blindly as she spoke and the words from which she translated were oddly shaped and fitted haphazardly into her larynx: they would give her pain, but she was no stranger to pain, and had learned to find a secret happiness in pain, too wonderful to risk by acknowledging it.

He is saying to us, to trust Him. In all that is done, to trust Him.

Out of the canvas bag in which, these several days and nights on the meandering road north out of Star Lake she’d carried what was needed to bring them into the land of Moriah safely, the woman took the shears.

In her exhausted sleep the child had been hearing the cries of crows like scissors snipping the air in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River.

In sleep smelling the sharp brackish odor of still water and of rich dark earth and broken and rotted things in the earth.

A day and a night on the road beside the old canal and another day and this night that wasn’t yet dawn at the edge of the mudflats.

Trust Him. This is in His hands.

And the woman’s voice that was not the woman’s familiar hoarse and strained voice but this voice of detachment and wonder in the face of something that has gone well when it was not expected, or was not expected quite so soon.

If it is wrong for any of this to be done, He will send an angel of the Lord as He sent to Abraham to spare his son Isaac and also to Hagar, that her son was given back his life in the wilderness of Beersheba.

In her stubby fingers that were chafed and bled easily after three months of the gritty-green lye-soap that was the only soap available in the county detention facility the woman wielded the large tarnished seamstress’s shears to cut the child’s badly matted hair. And with these stubby fingers tugging at the hair, in sticky clumps and snarls the child’s fine fawn-colored hair that had become “nasty” and “smelly” and “crawling with lice.”

Be still! Be good! You are being readied for the Lord.

For our enemies will take you from me, if you are not readied.

For God has guided us to the land of Moriah. His promise is no one will take any child from her lawful mother in this place.

And the giant shears clipped and snipped and clattered merrily. You could tell that the giant shears took pride in shearing off the child’s befouled hair that was disgusting in the sight of God. Teasingly close to the girl’s tender ears the giant shears came, and the child shuddered, and squirmed, and whimpered, and wept; and the woman had no choice but to slap the child’s face, not hard, but hard enough to calm her, as often the woman did; hard enough to make the child go very still the way even a baby rabbit will go still in the cunning of terror; and then, when the child’s hair lay in wan spent curls on the mud-stained floor, the woman drew a razor blade over the child’s head—a blade clutched between her fingers, tightly—causing the blade to scrape against the child’s hair-stubbled scalp and now the child flinched and whimpered louder and began to struggle—and with a curse the woman dropped the razor blade which was badly tarnished and covered with hairs and the woman kicked it aside with a harsh startled laugh as if in wishing to rid the child of her snarly dirty hair that was shameful in the eyes of God the woman had gone too far, and had been made to recognize her error.

For it was wrong of her to curse—God damn!

To take the name of the Lord in vain—God damn!

For in the Herkimer County detention facility the woman had taken a vow of silence in defiance of her enemies and she had taken a vow of utter obedience to the Lord God and these several weeks following her release, until now she had not betrayed this vow.

Not even in the Herkimer County family court. Not even when the judge spoke sharply to her, to speak—to make a plea of guilty, not guilty.

Not even when the threat was that the children would be taken forcibly from her. The children—the sisters—who were five and three—would be wards of the county and would be placed with a foster family and not even then would the woman speak for God suffused her with His strength in the very face of her enemies.

And so the woman took up a smaller scissors, out of the canvas bag, to clip the child’s fingernails so short the tender flesh beneath the nails began to bleed. Though the child was frightened she managed to hold herself still except for shivering as the baby rabbit will hold itself still in the desperate hope that is most powerful in living creatures, our deepest expectation in the face of all evidence refuting it, that the terrible danger will pass.

For—maybe—this was a game? What the spike-haired man called a game? Secret from the woman was the little cherry pie—sweet cherry pie in a wax-paper package small enough to fit into the palm of the spike-haired man’s hand—so delicious, the child devoured it greedily and quickly before it might be shared by another. There was splash-splash which was bathing the child in the claw-footed tub while the woman slept in the next room on the bare mattress on the floor her limbs sprawled as if she’d fallen from a height onto her back moaning in her sleep and waking in a paroxysm of coughing as if she were coughing out her very guts.