Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates
Another powerboat passed by, trailing drunken laughter. Vaguely it seemed to me that my name had been called—Madelyn! Madelyn! At the blues festival there had been several boys whom I knew from school, older boys at the high school, they’d called to me Madelyn! Madelyn Fleet! But I’d only just waved to them, I’d been standing with my father listening to a black jazz quartet playing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Now I seemed to hear my name in a faint, failing voice, my father’s voice, but unlike my father’s voice as I had ever heard it. Quickly I closed The Time Machine, and returned to the car.
My father had been inside the building for more than a half hour, I thought. A ripple of pain pulsed in my eyes. How garish the Cadillac Eldorado looked, the cream-colored luxury car with Spanish red leather interior, parked amid rubble. I tossed The Time Machine onto the passenger’s seat and entered the building, into dim, humid heat and despite the heat I began to shiver. There was the elevator in the foyer: I could not bring myself to take it up to the eighth floor. What if the power failed, what if I was stuck between floors? Instead I took the stairs. Only dimly was the stairwell lighted by naked lightbulbs at each landing. The heat in the stairwell was stifling and by the time I reached the eighth floor I was panting and sweating. My Rangers T-shirt clung to my sticky skin. My hair stuck to the nape of my neck. On the eighth floor I struggled with the heavy door and another time the cruel taunt came to me Now the door will be locked against you, this is your punishment. But another time the door wasn’t locked against me, I ran down the corridor to my father’s office where the door was open….
At first I thought that my father had fallen somehow, struck his head against the sharp edge of a desk. He was bleeding from a head wound and from cuts to his face. His white cotton shirt was dappled with blood, and torn. His melon-colored seersucker trousers were dappled with blood, and torn. One of his sporty white shoes had been wrenched off. He was conscious, trying to sit up. I could hear his terrible labored breathing and his grunting with the effort of maneuvering himself into a sitting position. “Daddy—,” I called, and ran to him, and his glassy eyes fixed on me without seeming to recognize me: “Get away, get out of here”—“Don’t touch me.” Drawers had been yanked out of his desk and out of the green filing cabinet against the wall. There was a sharp, rank animal sweat of panic, male sweat. And a prevailing smell of cigarette smoke. By the time my father managed to stand shakily, he was calling me “Madelyn”—“honey.” He assured me he was all right—“Nothing to worry about, honey.” He was wiping at his dazed and bloody face with the front of his ruined shirt. When I asked him what had happened, had someone hurt him, he seemed not to hear. I asked if I should call an ambulance or the police and quickly he said no. In his stricken and disheveled state my father hovered over me. I could feel the heat of his skin. He was trying to explain through swollen lips that someone whose face he hadn’t seen had forced his way into the office and tried to rob him, he had not seen who it was because he’d been attacked from behind. Yet then my father said whoever it was had been waiting for him in his office when he’d unlocked the door, surprised him with a blow to the head. And maybe there was more than one of them, he hadn’t seen. I asked him what had been taken from the office and he said nothing had been taken because he’d surprised the thieves. I asked him if I should call the police and he said, with an angry laugh: “Didn’t I say no police?”
Now he would wash up, he said. As if his injuries could be washed away! Like a drunken man he leaned heavily on me, making his way to the men’s restroom outside in the corridor. “Stay out here. I’ll be all right. Don’t look so scared, your old man isn’t going to die.” My father spoke disdainfully, dripping blood. And in the restroom he remained for what seemed like a long time. I could hear water rushing from faucets, a groaning of aged pipes. I heard a toilet flush several times. I stood at the door calling, Daddy? Daddy? in a plaintive voice until he staggered back out. His face was washed, his hair dampened though not combed; he’d removed the torn and bloodstained shirt, and was in his sleeveless undershirt of ribbed cotton, which was also bloodstained. Fistfuls of wiry dark hair bristled on his chest, covering his forearms like pelt. He was walking lopsided because he’d left his left shoe back in his office, where I fetched it for him. I also shut the door, and locked it. Afterward I would realize that my father hadn’t seemed to be afraid that his assailant or assailants would return, and do more injury to him. He’d seemed to know that his daughter wasn’t endangered. The beating was finished, and would not be repeated.
To my amazement my father insisted upon returning to the car and driving home. “I can handle this. My head is clear.” Though he was obviously weak, dazed, swaying on his feet. Though his eyes seemed to be swerving out of focus even as he spoke to me in such emphatic terms. So we took the elevator down to the foyer, and returned to the cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado parked so conspicuously behind the building. In the west the sun resembled a lurid red egg yolk bleeding into banks of dark thunderhead clouds. I was reminded of the “huge red-hot dome of the sun” the Time Traveller had encountered hundreds of millions of years in the future, swollen to one-tenth of the sky. Once in the car, my father tried to behave as if nothing had happened. He was muttering to himself, giving himself instructions. The fingers of his right hand were strangely swollen; I had to insert the ignition key and turn it for him. By this time I’d begun to cry. I was trembling badly, my bladder pinched with a panicked need to pee. Another time I asked my father if we shouldn’t call an ambulance or the police and another time he said no—“No police.” This seemed strange to me, for my father was friendly with the chief of police and with other men on the Sparta police force. Yet it seemed to infuriate him, the prospect of summoning police. Another time I asked him if he’d seen who had beaten him and another time he said Goddamn no, he hadn’t seen. Strange it seemed to me that my father’s anger was directed at me, not at whoever had hurt him.
“They jumped me from behind. They were waiting inside. I never saw their faces. It was over before it began.”
And, “Might’ve been just one person. All I know is, he was white.”
On Route 31 headed east, the cream-colored Cadillac drifted out of its lane. My father had forgotten to switch on the headlights. He winced with pain, his injured head and face had to be throbbing with pain. At the hospital it would be revealed that he’d suffered a concussion, several of his ribs were cracked, his right wrist and fingers sprained. Teeth had loosened in his jaws, deep cuts would leave scars in both his eyebrows. He’d been beaten with something like a tire iron, and he’d been kicked when he’d fallen. In our wake on the river road the horns of other vehicles sounded in reproach. I begged my father to pull over to the side before we had an accident and at last he did, after a mile or two. He was too dazed and exhausted to keep going. On the littered shoulder of the highway the cream-colored Caddie limped to an ignoble stop. Traffic passed us by. My father slumped over the steering wheel like an avalanche suddenly released, a stream of bright blood trickling down his neck. I scrambled out of the car to stand at the edge of the highway waving frantically until at last a Sparta police cruiser appeared. “Help us! Help my father! Don’t let him die.”
The cry that came from me was brute, animal. I had never heard such a cry before and would not have believed that it had issued from me.
Madelyn, tell us what you know.
Anything you can remember, Madelyn. If you saw a car anywhere near. If you saw someone. In the street behind the building. Entering the building. If your father mentioned anyone. Before your father passed out, all that he said to you. Whatever he said to you. Tell us.
In July 1959. That wild ride into the countryside, when my father was still alive.
Mr. Carmichael asked me where I lived and I told him. Then he said we were taking the long way round, a little ride out into the country, how’d I like that; and I said yes, I loved the country, loved riding in a car with the windows rolled down and t
He hadn’t forced me to drink, I would say afterward. None of what happened he’d forced me to do.
Exiting the hospital by the rear revolving door. Inside, the sickish refrigerated air and outside, hot-humid-sticky midsummer sunshine. “Know what a hospital is, Madelyn?—a petri dish breeding germs. Have to get the hell out, sometimes. Save your own life.”
I think it was then—on our way to the parking lot—I asked Mr. Carmichael if someone in his family was in the hospital, and Mr. Carmichael, rummaging for his car keys in his trouser pocket, took no more notice of my question than in our seventh-grade class he’d taken notice of certain students who were not his favorites, waving their hands in the air to ask silly questions.
Repeating in a brisk staccato voice tugging at my ponytail:
“Save—your—own—goddamn—life.”
Mr. Carmichael’s 1955 Dodge station wagon had faded to a dull tin color and was stippled with rust like crude lace. The front bumper was secured by ingenious twists of wire. I might have thought that it was strange, my former math teacher Mr. Carmichael was driving such a vehicle, very different from any vehicle my father, Harvey Fleet, would have driven. Mr. Carmichael was clapping his hands as you’d clap your hands to hurry a clumsy child, or a dog: “Got to keep moving. Like the shark, perpetual motion or it drowns. Chop-chop, Maddie!” Exuberantly Mr. Carmichael gathered up clothes, empty beer bottles, a single shoe out of the front passenger’s seat of the station wagon, tossed out into the already messy rear.
Out of Sparta we drove west along the Black River. On the radio, pop music blared, interrupted by loud jocular advertisements from a local radio station. Though I had told Mr. Carmichael where I lived, it did not seem that Mr. Carmichael had heard, or he’d forgotten. He was in very good spirits. It is unusual to see a man, an adult man, in such good spirits. The front windows of the station wagon were rolled down and wind in crazed gusts whipped at our heads. In the gauzy-humid sunshine the wide choppy river glittered like a snake’s scales. In Sparta you are always driving along the river, for the river intersects the city: you are driving on Route 31 East, or you are driving on Route 31 West; you are driving on Route 31A West, or you are driving on Route 31A East. Yet the river seemed always different, and sometimes it did not look familiar. That day there was a massive freighter on the river, ugly and ungainly as a dinosaur. Far away downtown were high-rise buildings and one of these was the Brewer Building but it was lost in haze. At Sentry Street beside the railroad trestle bridge a train was passing thunderous and deafening. Mr. Carmichael shouted to be heard over the noise but his words were blown away. It did not seem to matter if I replied to Mr. Carmichael or not. From the side, Mr. Carmichael did not resemble anyone I had ever seen. A faint doubt came to me, was this Luther Carmichael? My seventh-grade math teacher? This man’s face was flushed as if he’d been running in the heat. His skin looked as if it had been scraped by sandpaper. His silvery brown beard was poking through like tiny quills. The thought came to me If he brushes his face against my face…I laughed, and squirmed as if I was being tickled. By now the train had passed, Mr. Carmichael glanced sidelong at me, smiling. “Something funny, Maddie?” His smile was quick and loose and crinkled his face like a soft rag. More clearly I could see how the tinted lenses of Mr. Carmichael’s glasses were smudged, and his eyes beyond, staring. My hair was streaming in the wind, I had to blink tears from my eyes. How reckless I felt, and how happy: I was sitting as I’d never have dared to sit in my father’s cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado with the Spanish red-leather seats, my left leg lifted, the heel of my sneaker on the seat nudging the base of my left buttock. I saw how Mr. Carmichael’s gaze moved over my leg—the tanned smooth skin with fine brown hairs, the muscled calf and sudden milky white of my upper thigh.
“Open the glove compartment, Maddie. See what’s inside.”
Fumbling to remove from the glove compartment a quart bottle of amber liquid: whiskey. Mr. Carmichael instructed me to unscrew the top and take a drink and quickly I shook my head no, shyly I shook my head no, and Mr. Carmichael nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, winking: “Yes, you’d better, Maddie. Kills germs on contact and where we came from—” Mr. Carmichael shuddered, as if suddenly cold.
It is death he is taking me from, I thought. I had never loved anyone so much.
With a gesture of impatience Mr. Carmichael took the bottle from me, and drank. Fascinated I watched, the greedy movements of his mouth, his throat. Mr. Carmichael handed the bottle back to me with another nudge in the ribs and so—must’ve been, I lifted the bottle to my mouth, and drank cautiously. Searing-hot liquid flooded my mouth, down my throat like flames. My eyes leaked tears as I tried not to succumb to a spasm of coughing.
Here is a secret Mr. Carmichael was never to know: I knew where he lived, on Old Mill Road beyond the Sparta city limits. I knew for, with the cunning of a twelve-year-old girl in love with her seventh-grade math teacher, I had looked up “Carmichael”—“Luther Carmichael”—in the Sparta telephone directory. More than once I had bicycled past Mr. Carmichael’s house, which was approximately four miles from my house, a considerable distance. But I had done this, in secret. And I’d forgotten more or less, until now. On a mailbox at the end of a long driveway was the name CARMICHAEL. And the name CARMICHAEL, in black letters shiny as tar, seemed to me astonishing. So suddenly, so openly—CARMICHAEL. It had seemed to me a very special name. In secret I’d written it out, how many times. And sometimes with only my finger, tracing the letters on a smooth desktop. On the Old Mill Road where Mr. Carmichael lived with his family—for it was known, Mr. Carmichael had a wife and young children—I dared to bicycle past the end of his driveway, and once dared to turn into the driveway, hurriedly turning back when it seemed to me that someone had appeared at the house.
In math class when Mr. Carmichael handed back our test papers marked in red ink, though Mr. Carmichael spoke my name in a friendly way and may even have smiled at me I did not smile in return, I kept my eyes lowered out of superstition and dread for the red number at the top of the paper was my fate for that day: my grade. You would not have guessed, surely Mr. Carmichael would not have guessed, which of the seventh-grade girls was most desperately in love with him.
So long ago! You have to smile, to think that people like us took ourselves, and one another, so seriously.
And so on Old Mill Road beyond the Sparta city limits it wasn’t surprising to me when Mr. Carmichael turned the station wagon onto the bumpy cinder drive leading back to his house. I knew, this was where we were headed. And there was the mailbox with CARMICHAEL in black letters on the sides, stuffed with newspapers—this wasn’t surprising to me. (So Mr. Carmichael hadn’t been bringing in his mail, reading the local paper. Which was why he hadn’t seen the front-page news of Harvey Fleet’s “savage” beating.) “Won’t stay long, Maddie,” Mr. Carmichael was saying, “—unless we change our minds, and we do.” The sweet warm sensation of the whiskey in my throat had radiated downward like sunshine into my belly, into my bowels, and below between my legs and my response to this was breathy laughter. Out of excitement—or anxiety—I was asking Mr. Carmichael silly questions, for instance, did he own horses?—(no, he did not own horses)—did he know a Herkimer County judge who was a friend of my father’s, who lived on Old Mill Road?—(yes, Mr. Carmichael knew the man, but not well). Surprising to see how much shabbier—sadder—Mr. Carmichael’s house looked now than it had two years before, when I’d dared to bicycle partway up the driveway. The large front lawn had become a field of tall grasses and wildflowers and the cinder driveway was badly rutted. The house that looked ugly but dignified from the road looked, up close, only just ugly; a squat two-story block-shaped cobblestone with a steep-slanted slate roof, the kind of house (I bit my lower lip to stop from bursting i
Mr. Carmichael parked the Dodge station wagon close beside the house. In the backyard was a children’s swing set among tall grasses. Cicadas were shrieking out of the trees. Close up the cobblestones were misshapen rocks that looked as if they’d been dredged up out of the earth with dirt still clinging to them. The back screen door was ajar as if someone in the house had rushed out without taking time to close it. One of the first-floor windows had been shoved open to the very top and a yellow-print muslin curtain had been sucked out by the wind, wanly fluttering now. The thought came to me He is living alone here. There is no wife now. With the cruelty of a fourteen-year-old female I felt a stab of satisfaction as if I’d known my math teacher’s wife, a youngish blond woman glimpsed by me only at a distance, years ago; a figure of idly jealous speculation on the part of certain of Mr. Carmichael’s girl students, in fact a total stranger to us. That Mr. Carmichael had young children was of absolutely no interest to us. “Won’t stay long,” Mr. Carmichael repeated, nudging me between the shoulder blades, urging me into the house, “but damn we are thirsty.”
It was true. I’d been drinking from the quart bottle out of the glove compartment and I was very thirsty now, my throat on fire.
All going to die. Why’s it matter exactly when.
This raw and unimpeachable logic emerges like granite outcroppings in a grassy field, at such moments. You will remember all your life.
“Welcome! ‘Ecce homo.’” Inside it looked as if a whirlwind had rushed through the downstairs rooms of Mr. Carmichael’s house. In the kitchen the linoleum stuck to my feet like flypaper. In grayish water in the sink stacks of dirty dishes were soaking. Every square inch of countertop was in use, even the top of the stove with filth-encrusted burners; in the hot stale air was a strong odor of something rancid. Flies buzzed and swooped. Mr. Carmichael seemed scarcely to notice, exuberantly opening the refrigerator door: “Voilà! cold beer! Not a moment to spare.” He grabbed a dark brown bottle, opened it, and drank thirstily and offered it to me but I could not force myself to take more than a cautious little sip. I hated the taste of beer, and the smell. I asked Mr. Carmichael if there was a Coke in the refrigerator and he said no, sorry, there was not: “Only just beer. Made from malted barley, hops—nutrients. Not chemical crap to corrode your pretty teen teeth.” I saw Mr. Carmichael’s eyes on me, his smile that looked just slightly asymmetrical as if one side of his mouth was higher than the other. Impossible to gauge if this smile was on your side or not on your side, I remembered from seventh grade: yet how badly you yearned for that smile. “C’mere. Something to show you”—lightly Mr. Carmichael slipped his arm around my shoulders and led me into a dining room with a high ceiling of elaborate moldings and a crystal chandelier of surprising delicacy and beauty, covered in cobwebs. This was the room with the opened window through which the yellow-print curtain had been sucked and here too flies buzzed and swooped. Around a large mahogany dining table were numerous chairs pulled up close as if no one sat here any longer, except at one end; the table was covered with books, magazines, old newspapers, stacks of what appeared to be financial records, bills, and receipts. On sheets of paper were geometrical figures, some of them conjoined with humanoid figures (both female and male, with peanut heads and exaggerated genitals), which I pretended not to see. Idly I opened a massive book—Asimov’s Chronology of the World. It came to me then: a memory of how Mr. Carmichael had puzzled our class one day “demonstrating infinity” on the blackboard. With surprising precision he’d drawn a circle, and halved it; this half circle, he’d halved; this quarter circle, he’d halved; this eighth of a circle, he’d halved; as he struck the blackboard with his stick of chalk, addressing us in a jocular voice, as if, though this was mathematics of a kind, it was also very funny, by quick degrees the figure on the blackboard became too small to be seen even by those of us seated in the first row of desks; yet Mr. Carmichael continued, in a flurry of staccato chalk strikes, until the chalk shattered in his fingers and fell to the floor where in a playful gesture he kicked it. No one laughed.