Joyce Oates - Sourland

I thought of my cousin Sonny whom I loved. Whom I had not now seen in years. My boy cousin who’d been beaten in the youth facility yet refused to report the beatings out of what code of honor or fear of reprisal, I didn’t know. I thought of Sonny who’d killed a man out of another sort of honor, to protect my mother. Sonny had not needed to think, he’d only acted. He had traded his life for Momma’s, by that action. But he’d had no choice.

Dean Chawdrey persisted, “ Who was cheating, Aimée? You’ve done the right thing to report it but now you must tell me who the girl is.”

The girl! I wanted to laugh in the dean’s face, that she should imagine only one cheater at midterms.

I mumbled, “…can’t.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’? Or ‘won’t’?”

I sat silent, clasping my hands in my lap. Mickey Stecke had bitten fingernails, cuticles ridged with blood. One of my roommates had tried to manicure my nails, painted them passionflower purple, as a kind of joke, I’d supposed. Remnants of the nail polish could still be detected if you looked closely enough.

“What was your motive, then, Aimée, for writing to me? To report that ‘someone was cheating’ at midterms but to be purposefully vague about who? I’ve looked into your schedule. Perhaps I can assume that the alleged ‘cheating’ occurred during Mr. Werth’s biology midterm, last Friday morning? Is this so?”

Yes. It was so. By my sick, guilty look, Dean Chawdrey understood my meaning.

“I hope, Aimée, that there is merit to this? I hope that you are not making a false report, Aimée, to revenge yourself upon a friend?”

I was shocked. I shook my head. “No…”

“Or is there more than one girl? More than one of your ‘friends’ involved?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. The buzzing in my head had become frantic. I wondered if a blood vessel in my brain might burst. I was frightened recalling how my aunt Georgia had described finding an elderly relative seated in a chair in his home, in front of his TV, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood “leaking” out of one ear.

“Aimée, will you look at me, please! It is very rude, your way of behaving. By this time, you must certainly know better.”

Through the buzzing in my head I heard the Dean chide me for my “mysterious subterfuge.” Wondering at my “motive” in writing to her. If I refused to be more forthcoming, how was the Academy’s honor code upheld? “I wonder if, in your mutinous way, you are not making a mockery of our tradition. This, perhaps, was your intention all along.”

At this, I tried to protest. My voice was shocked, hushed. In classes, as Mickey Stecke, I was a girl whose shyness erupted into bursts of speech and animation. I was smart, and I was funny. My teachers liked me, I think. I was brash and witty and willing to be laughed at, but not rebellious or hostile; no one would have called me “mutinous” I did not challenge the authority of my teachers for I required them desperately, I adored my teachers who were all I had to “grade” me, to define me to myself and my aunt Agnes. Dean Chawdrey should have been one of these adult figures, yet somehow she was not, she saw through my flimsy pose as my cousin Sonny had once laughed at me in a Hallowe’en costume flung together out of Aunt Georgia’s cast-off fabrics What in hell’re you s’posed to be, kid?

Dean Chawdrey had dropped my letter onto her desk, with a look of distaste. It lay between us now, as evidence.

“I’ve looked into your record, ‘Aimée Stecke.’ You are a trustee scholar, your full tuition is paid by the Academy. Your grades are quite good. Your teachers’ reports are, on the whole, favorable. If there is one recurring assessment, it is ‘immature for her age.’ Are you aware of this, Aimée?”

I shook my head, no. But I knew that it was so.

“Tell me, Aimée. Since coming to our school, have you encountered any previous instances of ‘cheating’?”

I shook my head, yes. “But I…”

“‘But’?”

“…didn’t think it was so important. I mean, so many girls were cheating, not such serious cheating as lately, so I’d thought…”

“‘So many ’? ‘So many girls ’? What are you saying, Aimée?”

An angry flush lifted into the Dean’s fleshy face. I tried to explain but my voice trailed off miserably. So stared-at, by an adult who clearly disliked me, I seemed to have lost my powers of even fumbling speech. Thoughts came disjointed to me as to one tramping across a field of mud half-conscious that her boots are sinking ever more deeply into the mud, being actively sucked into the mud, not mud but quicksand and it’s too late to turn back.

“But why then, Aimée, did you decide just the other day to come forward? If it has been so long, so many instances of ‘cheating’, and you’d been indifferent?”

“Because…” I swallowed hard, not knowing where this was leading. “…I’d signed the pledge. To uphold the…”

“To uphold the honor code, Aimée. Yes. Otherwise you would not have been permitted to remain at the Academy. But the honor code is a contract binding you to report cheating at all times, and obviously you have not done that.” Dean Chawdrey’s small prim mouth was creasing into a smile.

I was sitting very still as if paralyzed. I was listening to the buzzing in my head. Remembering how, in the late winter of our first year of living with my aunt Georgia, Lyle and I had heard a low, almost inaudible buzzing in the plasterboard wall in our room. Above the furnace vent where, if you pressed your ear against it, you could hear what sounded like voices at a distance. My brother had thought it might be tiny people inside. I’d thought it had something to do with telephone wires. It was a warm dreamy sound. It was mixed in with our warm cozy room above the furnace, that Sonny had given up for us. Then one day Aunt Georgia told us with a look of amused disgust that the sound in the wall was only flies — “Damn flies nest in there, hatch their damn eggs then start coming out with the first warm weather.” And so it had happened one day a large black fly appeared on a windowpane, then another fly appeared on the ceiling, and another, and another until one balmy March morning the wall above the furnace vent was covered in a glittering net of flies so groggy they were slow to escape death from the red plastic swatter wielded in my aunt’s deft hand.

“You were one of them, Aimée. Weren’t you.”

This wasn’t a question but a statement. There was no way to defend myself except to shake my head, no. Dean Chawdrey said in the way of a lawyer summing up a case, “How would you know, otherwise? And until now, for some quaint reason, you haven’t come forward as you’d pledged you would do. What you’ve alleged, because it’s unprovable, is dangerously akin to slander. Mr. Werth will have to be informed. His integrity has been impugned, too.”

I said, faltering, “But, Dean Chawdrey — ”

“The only person who has reported cheating at midterms is you, Aimée,” Dean Chawdrey paused, to let that sink in. “Naturally, we have to wonder at your involvement. Do you claim that, since coming to the Amherst Academy, you have never participated in ‘cheating’? — in any infraction of the honor code?”

It was as if Dean Chawdrey was shining a flashlight into my heart. I had no defense. I heard myself stammer a confession.

“…sometimes, a few times, freshman year, I helped other girls with their term papers. I guess I helped my roommates earlier this fall, with…But I never…”

“‘Never’ — what?”

I lowered my head in shame, trying not to cry. I could not comprehend what had gone wrong yet I felt the justice of it. Honor was a venomous snake that, if you were reckless enough to lift by its tail, was naturally going to whip around and bite you.