Joyce Oates: Sourland

Sophie asked what was the dog’s name? — she couldn’t quite make out what Kolk called him.

“‘S’reebi’ — ‘Cerberus.’”

Cerberus! — the three-headed dog of Hades.

Sophie remembered, Jeremiah Kolk had once studied classics,

Kolk took Sophie’s arm, to lead her in the direction of the cabin. Again this sudden intimacy between them, as in the airport when he’d taken her arm without a word and linked it through his own in a husbandly/proprietary manner.

The touch of his hand — his hands — was like static electricity, coursing through Sophie’s body.

Sophie heard herself stammer how beautiful it was in this place — “But so remote.”

She couldn’t bear to look at the man — the melted-away jaw, the exposed stubby teeth.

Flatly Kolk said: “No. A place isn’t ‘remote’ except in relationship to another place, or places. The longer you remain here, you will see it is just here . There is nothing ‘remote’ about it.”

Kolk led Sophie into the chilly cabin, carrying her suitcase. The thought came to her — a ridiculous thought — utterly unwarranted — that if she’d balked at the threshold of the cabin like a panicked animal resisting confinement, the man would have forced her into the cabin.

Here, a prevailing odor struck her — grease, scorch — cooking smells — the sweetish-yeasty smell of unlaundered clothes, bedsheets. The interior of the log cabin was a single large room with a low ceiling and few windows, like a cave; there was both a stone fireplace and an antiquated wood-burning stove; scattered on the floor by the fireplace were piles of crudely hewn logs with dried cobwebby bark still attached. A breeding place for spiders Sophie thought, appalled.

Yet the interior of Kolk’s cabin was attractive, in its way. Cozy, comfortable. A kind of nest. The bare-plank floor was uneven, and haphazardly covered with small woven grime-saturated rugs — one felt hidden here, protected. In a corner was a brass bed with a sunken mattress — Kolk’s bachelor bed? — heaped with blankets and bedclothes; in a narrow alcove, a small kitchen with open shelves to the ceiling, a two-burner stove and a dwarf-refrigerator.

She would be preparing meals in that kitchen — would she? Sophie smiled to think so.

Kolk’s furniture was mostly of brown leather — a massive sofa, matching chairs — furniture of the kind one might expect to see in an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club — once of excellent quality but now so badly worn its color had nearly vanished. There was a tarnished brass floor lamp with a parchment-colored lampshade, there were mismatched tables. These were items Kolk had purchased in a used-furniture store, Sophie supposed. Or rescued from a dump. Prominent on the wall beside the fireplace were unframed photographs of Kolk’s — wilderness scenes of the kind he’d sent her. Sophie saw how haphazardly they’d been mounted — tacked in place, or taped, as if the photographer had no wish to take time, to display his work as art.

She would do that, if things worked out between them.

Most of the wall-space was taken up with bookshelves. These were makeshift shelves of bricks and planks. So many books! — Kolk saw Sophie peering at one of the shelves — a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Other shelves were waterstained Modern Library classics — Plato, Euripides, Homer, Catullus, Augustine’s City of God , Marx’s Das Kapital , Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. There was an entire shelf of Latin titles. Seeing Sophie peer at these books Kolk said he’d bought the discards from the Latin Academy, a private school in St. Paul where he’d taught briefly — “and not very happily” — in the 1980s.

All these books, Kolk said. And more, in the next room. And journals in boxes, he’d never unpacked. All for ninety dollars.

In fact there was an addition to the cabin, at the rear — a “guest room” as Kolk called it — which, he said, he tried to keep in better condition than the room in which he and S’reebi lived. It was into this addition that Kolk led Sophie, switching on a light.

This was a small room, quite narrow, with a single small square window looking out into the woods. Beside the bed — a girl’s bed, less than adult-sized, built low to the floor — there was a space heater, which Kolk switched on. The bed was covered with an attractive blue-striped goose-down comforter — Sophie believed it was goose-down, testing it with her fingers — she wondered if Kolk had made this purchase especially for her, at a secondhand store? The comforter did not appear to be very soiled, nor did it appear to be worn. Even secondhand goose-down comforters were not cheap, Sophie knew. She felt a touch of vertigo, like sickness.

He will come here. He will make love to me here.

On the plank floor in this room was a handwoven Indian carpet of red, beige, and black patterns like lightning bolts. Here too the floor was tilted, just slightly, as in a fun house. There was a bureau of old cedar wood, badly scarred but with a subtle, beautiful smell — Kolk pulled one of the drawers open an inch, as if to encourage his reluctant visitor to unpack.

The crude plank wall was insulated in panels. On one of the panels was a row of pegs for clothes to be hung on. Sophie saw that a woman’s robe, of some dark-green satin material, with a peacock-tail appliqué on the back, was hanging here.

He wants me to know. There have been others. His life is an entirety, I will never realize.

“Here. This is new, this summer.”

It was a tiny bathroom — a lavatory — in an alcove behind the cedar bureau. It was hardly the size of a telephone booth. Sophie wondered how she was to bathe, if there was a shower elsewhere in the cabin. She could not bring herself to ask. Enough that there was a tiny sink in the room, and faucets; a toilet. On a towel rack, towels! Sophie heard herself thanking Kolk — how grateful she was sounding!

The towels appeared to be clean, she saw. There were only two of them and they were not very thick but for this, she was grateful.

In the corner of her eye she’d seen — something moving — quivering — the impress of a body on the blue-striped comforter — a female body — slender, girl-sized.

Sophie Quinn was herself a slender woman. Since her husband’s death she’d lost fifteen pounds. She felt her bones thinning like the bones of a sparrow.

Kolk said why didn’t she sleep, for a while. Kolk said she was looking tired.

“I’ll make supper. I’ll wake you for supper.”

Sophie was having a difficult time remembering — for the moment — where she was, and why she was in this place. Kolk? Jeremiah Kolk? Her frantic smiling eyes were fastened to the man’s upper face, she dared not look elsewhere.

Her companion too was tired from the drive — a six-hour round-trip in the jeep. But he was a stoic, he would not complain. With half his bewhiskered face he smiled at her — that was what it was meant to be, a smile — Sophie believed. Sophie wondered if one of the man’s legs was shorter than the other, a portion of muscle and cartilage blown away in the detonation. She thought He will sleep with me. He knows I can’t refuse him.

She wondered how it would be — to hold a man so mutilated, disfigured. There would be much more scar tissue than you could see, hidden beneath his clothes. Waves and rivulets of scar tissue, terrible to the touch.

Kolk left the room limping, without a backward glance.

Quickly Sophie shut the door. It had no lock! At least, not from the inside.

How exhausted she was, as Kolk had perceived. The touch of vertigo that had seemed to her sexual was sheer exhaustion, on the cusp of nausea.