Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

now Suttis saw—about twelve feet from the base of the embankment, amid a tangle of rushes—a doll?

      A child’s rubber doll, badly battered, hairless, unclothed and its coloring mostly flaked off—too light to sink in the mud and so it was floating on the surface in a way to cause Suttis’s heart to trip even as he told himself Damn thing’s only a doll.

      Was he being mocked? Had the King of the Crows led him so far, to rescue a mere doll?

      Suttis drew nearer and now—he saw the second figure, a few yards from the first. And this, too, had to be a doll—though larger than an ordinary doll—discarded in this desolate place like garbage or trash.

      Pulses beat in his head like spoons against some wooden vessel. A doll! A doll! This had to be a doll, like the other.

      As so much was tossed away into the Black Snake mudflats that were an inland sea of cast-off human things of all kinds. Here you could find articles of clothing, boots and shoes, broken crockery, plastic toys, even shower curtains opaque and stained as polyurethane shrouds. Once, Suttis had found a pair of jaws in the mud—plastic teeth—he’d thought were dentures but had had to have been Hallowe’en teeth and another time the wheel-less chassis of a baby buggy filled with mud like a gaping mouth. Mostly these cast-off things accumulated at the edge of the mudflat where borne by flooding water they caught in exposed roots amid the debris of winter storms, the skeletons of small drowned creatures and the mummified fur-remnants with blind pecked-out eyes like gargoyles fallen from unknown and unnameable cathedrals while farther out in the mudflats such objects were likely to sink and be submerged in mud.

      Lurid tales were told in Beechum County of all that was “lost”—discarded and buried and forgotten—in the mudflats.

      Bodies of the hated and reviled. Bodies of “enemies.”

      Humped outlines of dead logs in the mudflat like drowsing crocodiles.

      Cries of smaller birds silenced by the furious shrieking of crows.

      Was this a doll, so large? It looked to be the size of a small child—Suttis had no clear idea how old—two years? Three?

      Weak-kneed Suttis approached the very edge of the bank.

      The King of the Crows shook his wings, jeering, impatient.

      SSS’ttisss! Here!

      The King of the Crows was very near to speaking, now. Human speech the great bird could utter, that Suttis could not stop his ears from hearing.

      As the wide black-feathered wings of the King of the Crows fluttered wind and shadows across Suttis’s slow-blinking eyes.

      “Jesus!”

      A little girl, Suttis thought, but—dead?

      Her head was bare as if shaved—so small! So sad!

      Nothing so sad as a child’s bare head when the head has been shaved for lice or the poor thin hair has fallen out from sickness and it seemed to Suttis, this had happened to him, too. Many years ago when he’d been a small child.

      Lice, they’d said. Shaved his head and cut his scalp with the razor cursing him as if the lice were Suttis’s fault and then they swabbed the cuts with kerosene, like flames too excruciating to be registered or gauged or even recalled except now obliquely, dimly.

      Poor little girl! Suttis had no doubt, she was dead.

      Maybe it was lice, they’d punished her for. Suttis could understand that. The small face was bruised, the mouth and eyes swollen and darkened. Blood-splotches on the face like tears and what was black on them, a buzzing blackness, was flies.

      Only the head and torso were clearly visible, the lower body had sunk into the mud, and the legs. One of the arms was near-visible. Suttis stared and stared and Suttis moved his lips in a numbed and affrighted prayer not knowing what he was saying but only as he’d been taught Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name bless us O Lord for these our gifts and help us all the days of our lives O Lord thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven! Amen.

      Suttis had seen many dead things and was not uncomfortable with a dead thing for then you know, it is dead and cannot hurt you. Only a fool would lay his bare hand upon a “dead” raccoon or possum and that fool would likely lose his hand in a frantic rake of sharp curved claws and a slash of razor-teeth.

      A dead thing is a safe thing and only bad if it has started to rot.

      The poor little girl in the mudflat had started to rot—had she? For something smelled so very bad, Suttis’s nostrils shut tight.

      It was a wild extravagant prayer of Suttis Coldham, he’d never have believed he could utter:

      God don’t let her be dead. God help her be alive.

      For cunning Suttis knew: a dead child could mean that Suttis would be in trouble. As an older boy he’d been beaten for staring at children in a wrong way, or a way deemed wrong by others, by the children’s mothers for instance who were likely to be his Coldham relatives—sisters, cousins, young aunts. Staring at his baby nieces and nephews when they were being bathed in the very presence of their young mothers and such a look in Suttis’s face, of tenderness mixed with brute yearning, Suttis had somehow done wrong in utter innocence and been slapped and kicked-at and run out of the house and in his wake the cry Nasty thing! Pre-vert! Get to hell out nasty pre-vert Sut-tis shame!

      And so now if this little girl is naked Suttis will turn and run—but it looks as if on what he can see of the little body is a nightgown—torn and grimy but a nightgown—isn’t it?—for which Suttis is damned grateful.

      The King of the Crows has been screaming for Suttis to bring the little girl to shore. In a crouch half-shutting his eyes groping for something—a long stick, a pole—a piece of lumber—with which to prod the body loose.

      Suttis has it!—a part-rotted plank, about five feet long. When he leans out to poke at the doll-figure in the mud he sees—thinks he sees—one of the swollen eyelids flutter—the little fish-mouth gasping for breath—and he’s stricken, paralyzed—The little girl is alive!

      A terrifying sight, a living child—part-sunken in mud, a glint of iridescent insects about her face—has to be flies—suddenly Suttis is panicked, scrabbling on hands and knees to escape this terrible vision, moaning, gibbering as the King of the Crows berates him from a perch overhead and like a frenzied calf Suttis blunders into a maze of vines, a noose of vines catches him around the neck and near-garrots him the shock of it bringing him to his senses so chastened like a calf swatted with a stiff hunk of rope he turns to crawl back to the edge of the embankment. There is no escaping the fact that Suttis will have to wade into the mudflat to rescue the girl as he has been bidden.

      At least, the sharp stink of the mud has abated, in Suttis’s nostrils. The most readily adapted of all senses, smell: almost, Suttis will find the mud-stink pleasurable, by the time he has dislodged and lifted the mud-child in his arms to haul back to shore.

      Suttis slip-slides down the bank, into the mud. Makes his way to the mud-child lifting his booted feet as high as he can as the mud suck-suck-sucks at him as in a mockery of wet kisses. Above the mud-child is a cloud, a haze of insects—flies, mosquitoes. Suttis brushes them away with a curse. He’s shy about touching her—at first. He tugs at her arm. Her exposed shoulder, her left arm. She’s a very little girl—the age of his youngest niece Suttis thinks except the little nieces and nephews grow so quickly, he can’t keep them straight—can’t keep their names straight. Lifting this one from the mud requires strength.

      Crouched over her, grunting. He’s in mud nearly to his knees—steadily sinking. Rushes slap against his face, thinly scratching his cheeks. Mosquitoes buzz in his ears. A wild sensation as of elation sweeps over him—You are in the right place at the right time and no other place and no other time will ever be so right for you again in your life.

      “Hey! Gotcha now. Gonna be okay.”

      Suttis’s voice is raw as a voice unused for years. As it is rare for