We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

Ephraim Patriot-Ledger, the Western New York Historical Society.

      On the wall of my office at the newspaper there’s a Historical Society calendar for 1975, opened permanently to October—“Pumpkin Time at High Point Farm!” A glossy picture of the scarecrow figure in the sleigh in Dad’s old red-plaid jacket, earflap cap, bunchy khaki trousers, surrounded by Day-Glo orange pumpkins of varying sizes including, on the ground, an enormous misshapen pumpkin that must have weighed more than one hundred pounds. Beyond the figure in the sleigh is the lavender-and-fieldstone farmhouse with its numerous windows and steep-pitched roofs.

      I’ve had the page laminated, otherwise it would long be faded and tattered.

      Our house was a rambling old farmhouse of seven bedrooms, verandas and porches and odd little turrets and towers and three tall fieldstone chimneys. Dad said of the house that it had no style, it was styles, a quick history of American architecture. Evidence showed that as many as six builders had worked on it, renovating, expanding, removing, just since 1930. Dad kept the exterior in Al condition, of course—especially the roofs that were covered in prime-quality slate of a beautiful plum hue, and drained with seamless aluminum gutters and downspouts. The old, central part of the house was fieldstone and stucco; later sections were made of wood. When I was very little, in the mid-Sixties it must have been, Dad and two of his Mulvaney Roofing men and Mike Jr. and Patrick repainted the wood sections, transforming them from gunmetal gray to lavender with shutters the rich dark purple of fresh eggplant. The big front door was painted cream. (Eighteen gallons of oil-base paint for old, dry wood had been required, and weeks of work. What a team effort! I’d wished I was big enough to use a brush, to climb up onto the scaffolding and help. And maybe in my imagination I’ve come to believe I had been part of the team.)

      Part of the house’s historic interest lay in the fact that it had been a “safe house” in the Underground Railroad, which came into operation after the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the most shameful legislative measures in American history. My mother was thrilled to discover documents in the Chautauqua County Historical Society archive pertaining to these activities, and wrote a series of pieces for the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger on the subject. How innocently vain she was! How captivated, as she said, by “living in a place of history”! She’d been born on a small farm about fifteen miles to the south where farm life was work, work, work and the seasons simply repeated themselves forever, never adding up to what you’d call “history.”

      It was after I started school that Mom became seriously interested in antiques. She’d furnished much of the house with authentic period items, those she could afford, and it became her notion to buy and sell. She acquired some merchandise, set up shop in a small converted barn just behind the house, advertised in one or another local antique publications and painted a sign to prop up beside the scarecrow in the sleigh—

      HIGH POINT ANTIQUES

      BARGAINS & BEAUTY!

      Not that many customers ever came. High Point Farm was too far from town, too difficult to locate. Sunday drivers might drop by, enthralled by the sight of the lavender-and-stone house atop the hill, but most of Mom’s visitors were fellow dealers like herself. If in fact someone wanted to buy an item of which she’d grown especially fond, Mom would seem to panic, and murmur some feeble apology—“Oh, I’m so sorry! I forgot—that item has been requisitioned by a previous customer.” Blushing and wringing her hands in the very gesture of guilt.

      Dad observed, “Your mother’s weakness as a businesswoman is pretty simple: she’s a hopeless amateur.”

      Scouring auctions, flea markets, garage and rummage sales in the Chautauqua Valley, not above browsing through landfill dumps and outright trash, about which Dad teased her mercilessly, Mom only brought home things she fell in love with; and, naturally, things she’d fallen in love with she couldn’t bear to sell to strangers.

      What is truth?—Pontius Pilate’s question.

      And how mysteriously Jesus answered him—Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

      Once I thought I understood this exchange but no longer.

      In setting forth this story of the Mulvaneys, of whom I happen to be the youngest son, yet, I hope, a neutral observer, at least one whose emotions have been scoured and exorcised with time, I want to set down what is truth. Everything recorded here happened and it’s my task to suggest how, and why; why what might seem to be implausible or inexplicable at a distance—a beloved child’s banishment by a loving father, like something in a Grimm fairy tale—isn’t implausible or inexplicable from within. I will include as many “facts” as I can assemble, and the rest is conjecture, imagined but not invented. Much is based upon memory and conversations with family members about things I had not experienced firsthand nor could possibly know except in the way of the heart.

      As Dad used to say, in that way of his that embarrassed us, it was so direct, you had to respond immediately and dared not even glance away—“We Mulvaneys are joined at the heart.”

       THE DOE

      Like whispering the furtive rustle. Judd. Judd. Judd.

      I must have been eleven years old, that night I was wakened by the deer, and followed them back to the pasture pond. Wakened not by hooves outside my window (I had no idea the sound was hooves) but by a rustling in the tall dry grasses. Judd. Oh Judd!

      Judd sleeps so hard, Mom used to tease, when he was a baby his dad and I would lean over the crib every few minutes, to check if he was breathing!

      It was so: up to the age of about thirteen, I’d sleep so hard, I mean—hard. Sunk to the bottom of a deep, deep well.

      Wonder why? Weekdays at High Point Farm never began later than 6 A.M. when Mom hollered up the stairs, “WAKE UP! RISE ’N’ SHINE, KIDDOS!” And maybe whistled, or banged a pot. Barn chores before breakfast (my God it could take as long as an hour to wash the cows’ filth-encrusted milk-swollen udders, hook up the milking machine to each cow, drain their heavy milk bags dry, empty the milkers into pails) and barn chores after school (horses, mainly—as much work, but at least I loved our horses), approximately 4:30 P.M. to 6 P.M. And then supper—in our family, intense. Just to hold my own around our table, for a kid like me, the youngest of the Mulvaneys, used up energy, and staying power, like keeping on your toes through twelve rounds of a featherweight boxing match—it might look almost easy to outsiders but it isn’t easy, for sure. And after supper an hour or so of homework, also intense (Mom insisted that Patrick or Marianne oversee my efforts: worrying I wasn’t the high-nineties student it was her conviction I should be) and more excitement among the family, watching TV for a while if something “worthwhile, educational” was on: history, science and biography documentaries on public television were favored by our parents. And we’d discuss them during, and afterward—we Mulvaneys were a family who talked. So when around 10 P.M. I staggered upstairs to bed it was with the gravity of a stone sinking slowly through deep, dark water. Sometimes I fell asleep half in my pajamas, lying sideways on my bed, and Little Boots curled up happily beside me. Sometimes I fell asleep in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. “Oh, Judd! Goodness! Wake up, honey!” Mom might cry, having pushed open the door I’d neglected to lock.

      No privacy at High Point Farm.

      What with the six of us, and the dogs and cats and frequent visitors and overnight guests (my parents were what’s called hospitable, and Marianne was always inviting girlfriends to stay the night—“The more, the merrier!” Mom believed)—privacy just wasn’t an option.

      Patrick was the self-declared loner of the family. He’d read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden at the age of twelve and often camped out overnight on Alder Creek, in the woods—even so, he’d have one of the dogs with him, or more than one. In his room, there was always a dog or a cat and I’d peek in on him sometimes (the kind of dumb-admiring thing a kid brother does)