Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

thirsty! So hungry! Her eyes welled with tears of childish gratitude.

      The heavyset woman served her. The heavyset woman had enormous breasts to her waist. The heavyset woman had a coarse flushed skin and sympathetic eyes. Her crown of braids made her appear regal yet you knew—you could not coerce this woman.

      When others—men, boys—tried to push into the kitchen to peer at M.R. in her rumpled and mud-stained clothes, the heavyset woman shooed them away. Laughing saying, Yall go away get the hell out noner your business here.

      M.R. was eating so greedily, soup spilled onto the front of her jacket.

      Her hands shook. Beer in her nostrils making her cough, choke.

      She’d had too much to drink, and to eat. Too quickly. Laughing became coughing and coughing became choking and the heavyset woman thumped her between the shoulder blades with a fist.

      It was the TV—or, a jukebox—loud percussive music. She could not hear the music, so loud. Something was entering her—lights?—like glinting blades. She wasn’t drunk but a wild drunken elation swept over her, she was so very grateful trying to explain to the heavyset woman that she had never tasted food so wonderful.

      Thinking I have never been so happy.

      For it was revealed to M.R. that there were such places—(secret) places—to which she could retreat. (Secret) places not known even to her that would comfort her in times of danger. A sudden expansion of being as if something had gotten inside her tight-braided brain and pumped air and light into it—fire, wind—laughter—music.

      Hel-lo. Hel-lo. Hel-lo!

      Don’t I know you?

      Hey sure—sure I do. And you know me.

      Feeling so very relieved. So very happy. A warmth spread in her heart. Clumsily M.R. tried to stand, to step into the embrace of the heavyset woman—press her face against the woman’s large warm spongy breasts and hide inside the warm spongy fleshy arms.

      You know—you are safe here.

      Waiting for you—here.

      Jewell!—Jedina. We are waiting for you—here.

      Yet there was something wrong for the heavyset woman hadn’t embraced her as M.R. had expected—instead the heavyset woman pushed M.R. away as you might push away an importunate child not in anger or annoyance or even impatience but simply because at that moment the importunate child isn’t wanted. There was a rebuke here, M.R. did not want to consider. She was thinking I must pay. I must leave a tip. None of this can be free. She was fumbling with her wallet—she’d misplaced her leather handbag but somehow, she had her wallet. And she was trying to see her watch. The numerals were blurred. In fact there were no hands on the watch-face to indicate the time. Let me see that, ma’am. Deftly the watch was removed from her wrist—she wanted to protest but could not. And her wallet—her wallet was taken from her. In its place she was given something to drink that was burning-hot. Was it whiskey? Not beer but whiskey? Her throat burned, her eyes smarted with tears. That’ll speak to you, ma’am, eh?—a man’s voice, bemused. There was laughter in the café—the laughter of men, boys—not mocking laughter—(she wanted to think)—but genial laughter—for they’d pushed into the kitchen after all.

      Ma’am where’re you from?—for her voice so resembles theirs. Ma’am where’re you going?—for despite her clothes she’s one of them, their staring eyes can see.

      Her heavy head is resting on her crossed arms. And the side of her face against the sticky tabletop. So strange that her breasts hang loose to be crushed against the tabletop. The rude laughter has faded. So tired! Her eyes are shut, she is sinking, falling. There’s a scraping of chair legs against the floor that sound unfriendly. A hand, or a fist, lightly taps her shoulder.

      “Ma’am. We’re closing now.”

      Mudgirl Saved by the King of the Crows.

      April 1965

      In Beechum County it would be told—told and retold—how Mudgirl was saved by the King of the Crows.

      How in the vast mudflats beside the Black Snake River in that desolate region of the southern Adirondacks there were a thousand crows and of these thousand crows the largest and fiercest and most sleek-black-feathered was the King of the Crows.

      How the King of the Crows had observed the cruel behavior of the woman half-dragging half-carrying a weeping child out into the mudflats to be thrown down into the mud soft-sinking as quicksand and left the child alone there to die in that terrible place.

      And the King of the Crows flew overhead in vehement protest flapping his wide wings and shrieking at the retreating woman now shielding her face with her arms against the wrath of the King of the Crows in pursuit of her like some ancient heraldic bird-beast in the service of a savage God.

      How in the mists of dawn less than a mile from the place where the child had been abandoned to die there was a trapper making the rounds of his traps along the Black Snake River and it was this trapper whom the King of the Crows summoned to save the child lying stunned in shock and barely breathing in the mudflat like discarded trash.

      Come! S’ttisss!

      Suttis Coldham making the rounds of the Coldham traps as near to dawn as he could before predators—coyotes, black bears, bobcats—tore their prey from the jaws of the traps and devoured them alive weakened and unable to defend themselves.

      Beaver, muskrat, mink, fox and lynx and raccoons the Coldhams trapped in all seasons. What was legal or not-legal—what was listed as endangered—did not count much with the Coldhams. For in this desolate region of Beechum County in the craggy foothills of the Adirondacks there were likely to be fewer human beings per acre than there were bobcats—the bobcat being the shyest and most solitary of Adirondack creatures.

      The Coldhams were an old family in Beechum County having settled in pre-Revolutionary times in the area of Rockfield in the Black Snake River but scattered now as far south as Star Lake, and beyond. In Suttis’s immediate family there were five sons and of these sons Suttis was the youngest and the most bad-luck-prone of the generally luckless Coldham family as Suttis was the one for whom Amos Coldham the father had the least hope. As if there hadn’t been enough brains left for poor Suttis, by the time Suttis came along.

      Saying with a sour look in his face—Like you’re shake-shake-shaking brains out of some damn bottle—like a ketchup bottle—and by the time it came to Suttis’s turn there just ain’t enough brains left in the bottle.

      Saying—Wallop the fuckin’ bottle with your hand won’t do no fuckin’ good—the brains is all used up.

      So it would be told that the solitary trapper who rescued Mudgirl from her imminent death in the mudflats beside the Black Snake River had but the mind of a child of eleven or twelve and nowhere near the mind of an adult man of twenty-nine which was Suttis’s age on this April morning in 1965.

      So it would be told, where another trapper would have ignored the shrieking of the King of the Crows or worse yet taken shots with a .22 rifle to bring down the King of the Crows, Suttis Coldham knew at once that he was being summoned by the King of the Crows for some special purpose.

      For several times in his life it had happened to Suttis when Suttis was alone and apart from the scrutiny of others that creatures singled him out to address him.

      The first—a screech owl out behind the back pasture when Suttis had been a young boy. Spoke his name SSSuttisss all hissing syllables so the soft hairs on his neck stood on end and staring up—upward—up to the very top of the ruin of a dead oak trunk where the owl was perched utterly motionless except for its feathers rippling in the wind and its eyes glaring like gasoline flame seeing how the owl knew him—a spindly-limbed boy twenty feet below gaping and grimacing and struck dumb hearing SSSuttisss and seeing that look in the owl’s eyes of such significance, it could not have been named except the knowledge was imparted—You are Suttis, and you are known.

      Not