My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

      An African American boy, basketball player and honors student at the high school. Beaten and left unconscious at a roadside. In critical condition in intensive care at South Niagara General Hospital …

      Our teachers were looking grim, cautious. You could see them speaking together urgently, in the halls. But not to us.

      Better to say nothing. Until all the facts are known.

      I was frightened for my brothers, I was in dread of their being arrested. I would tell no one what I knew.

      But already South Niagara police were making inquiries about my brothers, my cousin Walt, and Don Brinkhaus who was, like Jerr, no longer in school. Someone had provided them with the first three digits of the Chevrolet’s license plate and a partial description of the car which was traced to our father.

      No possible way that Jerome Kerrigan could deny that he’d given the car to his oldest son Jerome Jr., since any number of people knew this; but there was the off chance, Daddy probably told himself, and the police, that the Chevrolet had been stolen and whatever had happened, his sons were not to blame … For police officers had allowed Daddy to think initially that the situation was just an accident, a hit-and-run.

       Damn kids lost it and panicked.

      Both my brothers were picked up by police officers and brought to headquarters for questioning. Jerr, just as he was arriving late to work, groggy and distracted, in the Chevrolet with the dented front fender; Lionel at school, disheveled and anxious and determined to behave as if nothing was wrong. We would learn later that Daddy met Jerr and Lionel at the police precinct in the company of the very lawyer who’d so successfully defended the boys against charges of assault against Liza Deaver.

      At home our mother was preoccupied, nervous. Several times she hurried to answer the phone, taking it into a room where she could speak privately. By suppertime when Lionel and Daddy weren’t back I thought it would be expected of me to ask where they were? Was something wrong?—but my mother turned away as if she hadn’t heard.

      Where was Daddy, and where was Lionel?—my sisters, my brothers Les and Rick seemed not to know.

      In silence we sat with our mother to watch the local 6:00 P.M. news. The lead story was of a deadly attack on a local teenager by yet-unidentified assailants.

      The victim was Hadrian Johnson, seventeen. Popular basketball player and honors student, South Niagara High. Beaten, critical injuries, witness driving along Delahunt Road has allegedly reported “four or five white boys …”

      A likeness of Hadrian Johnson filled the screen, the photo that would be published with his obituary: young-looking, boyish, sweet smile, gat-teeth.

      Our mother was moaning softly to herself. She’d been in an agitated state since we’d come home from school and even now the telephone was ringing, she didn’t seem to hear.

      My sisters Miriam and Katie, my brothers Les and Rick, remained staring numbly at the TV screen though an advertisement had come on. They were quieter than I had ever seen them. Les said he knew Hadrian Johnson—sort of. Katie said she knew his sister Louise. Miriam, who never dared smoke at home, fumbled for cigarettes in a pocket, lit one with trembling hands and our staring blinking benumbed mother paid not the slightest heed.

      How much they all knew, or had guessed, I did not know.

      I did not understand how this terrible news could be related to my brothers. There was something I was forgetting—the baseball bat? In my confusion it seemed to me that Hadrian Johnson must have been beaten by the same persons who’d fought with my brothers—sons of bitches at the Falls.

      Niagara Falls was seven miles away. This beating had been here in South Niagara, on Delahunt Road.

      There were long-standing rivalries between the high school sports teams. Sometimes these spilled over into acts of vandalism, threats, fights. Beatings.

      That must have been it, I thought. Guys from Niagara Falls, invading South Niagara. Often there were attacks of graffiti on the South Niagara high school walls, obscene words and drawings after a weekend.

      From what my brothers had told me it sounded as if they’d been at the Falls and had been fighting there. Was it possible, I’d heard wrong?

       I won’t tell Dad. I won’t tell anyone. I promise!

      In the aftermath of the TV news our mother stood slowly, pushing herself up from the couch. With the stiff dignity of one in great pain who is resolved not to show it she made her way out of the room. We saw her lips moving wordlessly as if she were praying or arguing with someone. Her eyes had become glazed, as if she were staring at something pressing too close to her face, she could not get into focus.

      She would hide away in the house, in this benumbed state. She would hide like a wounded creature. As after what she called the trouble with the Deaver girl for weeks she’d been reluctant to leave the house knowing that she had to encounter friends, acquaintances, neighbors eager to commiserate with her about the terrible injustice to which the Kerrigan boys had been subjected …

      For it was not always clear, our mother knew: the distinction between commiseration and gloating.

      Eventually, the Deaver girl was forgotten. Or people ceased speaking of her to Lula Kerrigan.

      From that time onward, we noticed that Mom was becoming more religious. If that’s what it was—“religious.”

      At church she sat stiffly at attention. You would think that her mind was elsewhere, her expression was so vacant. Yet, she would suddenly cover her face with her hands as if overcome with emotion. As the mass was celebrated by slow painstaking degrees, as the priest lifted the small pale wafer in his hands to bless it, to transform it into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the ringing of the little silver bell seemed to prompt our mother to such behavior, mortifying to those of us who had to crowd into the pew with her—in recent years just the younger children, and Miriam.

      It was rare that Daddy came to mass with Mom. Rarer still that Jerr or Lionel came. But Les, sometimes. And Katie, and Rick. And Violet Rue who was usually squeezed between Katie and Mom, a fidgety child, easily bored.

      Violet Rue hated church. Oh but she feared church—the sharp-eyed God who dwelt inside the church, and who knew her innermost heart.

      Sometimes, when Mom lowered her hands from her face her eyes were brimming with tears.

      Tears of hurt, or fear?—triumph? Vindication? You could not say, you dared not look at the shining face.

      Making her way to the communion rail then, swaying like a drunken woman, oblivious of her children. She was in the presence of God, she had nothing to do with them at this moment.

      A mother’s public behavior can be a source of great mortification to her children, especially her daughters. (As our father’s never was.) (Maybe because we saw Mom much more frequently in public places than we saw Dad.) The red-lipstick mouth that stood out like a cutout mouth in her pale, fleshy face, the thin-plucked eyebrows that would never grow back, white vein-raddled bare legs in summer and spreading hips, hair beginning to grow gray in swatches—all these were shameful to sharp pitiless eyes. And the exasperating precision with which Mom parked her car, which required numerous attempts. The muffled exclamations, choked-back sobs.

       Oh, God. Help me!

      I adored my mother but also, I guess I hated her. More and more, as I grew older and Mom seemed never to change except to become more exasperatingly herself.

      After the TV news we went away stunned. It was as if a fire were burning somewhere in the house, no one knew where. I could hear Katie’s bewildered voice and Miriam telling her sharply just be still, not to bother Mom.

      I wanted to tell them: I knew much more than they did. Our brothers had entrusted me with a secret as they had not entrusted them.

      For seven hours my father remained with Jerr and