Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

be joking.

      Now in Beechum County M.R. switched on the car radio. She hoped to tune in to a Watertown station—WWTX. Once an NPR affiliate but now M.R. couldn’t locate it on the dial only just deafening patches of rock music and advertisements—the detritus of America.

      On one FM station there appeared to be news—news from Washington—but static swept it away like ribald laughter.

      News from Washington—but the U.S. Congress wouldn’t yet be voting on the war resolution, would it? This was too soon. There had to be days yet of debate.

      M.R. couldn’t quite believe that legislators in Washington would authorize the bellicose Republican president to wage war against Iraq—this would be madness! The U.S. hadn’t entirely recovered from the debacle of the Vietnam War of which little ambiguity remained—the war had been a terrible mistake. Still, excited war rumors in the media—even the more liberal media like the New York Times—flared and rippled like wildfire in dried brush. There was a terrible thrillingness to the possibility of war.

      It was astonishing how effectively the administration had lied to convince the majority of the American public that there was a direct link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For since that catastrophic episode a near-palpable toxic-cloud was accumulating over the country, a gradual darkening of logic—an impatience with logic.

      Madness! M.R. could not think of it without beginning to tremble.

      She was an ethicist: a professional. It was criminal, it was self-destructive, it was cruel, stupid, quixotic—unethical: waging war on such flimsy pretexts.

      What was the appeal of war?—the appeal of a paroxysm of sustained and collective violence repeated endlessly, from the earliest prehistory until the present time? It was not enough to say Men are bred to war, men are warriors—men must perform their role as warriors. It was not enough to say Humankind is self-destructive, damned. Of all the species, damned.

      As a liberal, as an educator, M.R. did not believe in such primitive determinism. She did not believe in genetic determinism at all.

      Very likely she had young relatives scattered through Beechum County who were in the National Guard or in a branch of the armed services. Some might even now be stationed in the Middle East awaiting deployment to battle, as in the Gulf War of some years ago. Like the more southern Appalachian region Beechum County was the sort of economically depressed rural-America that provided fodder for the military machine.

      M.R.’s immediate family—Agatha and Konrad—were Quakers, if not “active” in the nearest Friends’ congregation, which was some distance from Carthage. (“Too lazy to drive,” Konrad said. “You can ‘Quaker’ at any time and any place.”) None of the other Neukirchens were Quakers and certainly none were pacifists like Konrad who’d been granted the status of conscientious objector during the Korean War and instead of being incarcerated in a federal prison was allowed to work in a VA hospital in Baltimore.

      Konrad was a kindly man, short and squat as a fireplug and fierce in declaring that if somehow he’d found himself in the army—in combat—he could never fire at any “enemy.” He could not even hold a gun, point a gun at anyone.

      M.R. smiled, recalling her father. She was recalling Konrad not as he was at the present time—an aging ailing man—but as he’d been in her earliest memories, in the mid-and late 1960s.

      The one thing they can’t make you do is kill another person. They can’t even make you hate another person.

      There was a sign—CARTHAGE 78 MILES. But M.R. could not drive to Carthage today.

      Uneasily she was thinking—is it time to turn back? Some instinct kept her from checking the time….

      How strange she was feeling! This sensation she’d felt as a girl inching out—with other, older children—onto the frozen river; so darkly swift-flowing a river, like a black snake with glittering scales, that water froze only at shore and continued to rush along at the center of the stream.

      Unmistakably, there was a thrill to this. Daring and reckless the older boys crept out onto the ice, toward the unfrozen center. Younger children stayed behind out of timidity.

      You must not let them entice you, Meredith! If you are injured they will run away and abandon you for that is their kind—they are cruel, can’t help themselves for their God is a God of conquest and wrath and not a God of love.

      There was a dislike, a resentment of Meredith’s parents—not to their faces but behind their backs—for Konrad’s unmanly pacifism. For Beechum County was a gun culture. Hunters, warriors.

      M.R. felt a mild headache coming on. She hadn’t eaten since early that morning and then at her desk at home, answering e-mails.

      Solitary mealtimes are not very pleasurable. Solitary mealtimes are best avoided.

      The deficiency of philosophy is that it has no stomach, no guts. In all of classic philosophy not a single pulsebeat of feeling.

      Oh why hadn’t she invited Agatha and Konrad to Ithaca for this evening! It would have been so easy to have done, and would have meant so much to them.

      M.R. loved her parents but often seemed to forget them. Like clouds sailing overhead, they were—snowy-white clouds of surpassing and unearthly beauty at which no one thinks to look.

      “I will do better. I will try harder. I hope they will forget me.”

      She meant forgive of course. Not forget.

      In fact she was—just now—crossing the Black Snake River. The wrought-iron truss bridge vibrated beneath the lightweight Toyota. The river was thirty or more feet below the bridge, rushing like something demented. Wheels—spirals—of light—like defects in the eye. You could imagine a giant serpent in that molten liquid—lifting its head, tawny eyes and fanged jaws.

      Look again, the serpent has vanished beneath the water’s surface.

      Farther to the west, at Carthage, in layers of crusted shale there were fossils M.R. had searched for, as a girl. Ancient crustaceans, long-extinct fish. Her biology teacher had sent her out: he’d identified the fossils for her. M.R. had drawn them in her notebook, with particular care.

      A string of A-pluses attached to Meredith Neukirchen like a comet’s long tail.

      Here the river’s shore was less rocky, more marshy. The river did not appear to be the river of her girlhood and yet—it was strangely familiar to her, like the serpent’s head.

      Off the bridge ramp was a sign for RAPIDS—5 MILES. SLABTOWN—11 MILES. RIVIERE-DU-LOUP—18 MILES. In the near distance Mount Moriah—one of the highest peaks in the southern Adirondacks—and beyond, shadowy peaks whose names M.R. couldn’t recall with certainty: Mount Provenance, Mount Hammer? Mount Marcy? It was geology—nineteenth-century geology—that had first shaken the Christian creation-myth so deeply entrenched in Europe, and in the blood-steeped soil of Europe, you would never think it might be extirpated like rotted roots; eruptions of human certainty like eruptions of volcanic lava scouring everything in its path. For what was the earth but a mass of roiling lava—not a “created” thing at all.

      Within a few decades, the old faith was shaken utterly. All was devastation.

      Except, as Nietzsche so shrewdly observed, the devastation was ignored. Denied. Knowledge of Earth’s position in the universe had entered the blind-visual field of neglect.

      She would not be a party to such denial, such blindness. She, empowered as the first woman president of a great university, would speak the truth as she saw it.

      For in her vanity she wished to align herself with the great truth-tellers—not with those who spoke to placate.

      In high school M.R. had been drawn to geology as to other sciences but in subsequent years her passion for the abstract—for philosophy—“ethics”—had driven out the hard concrete names like irreducible ores—igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic.

      Science