Mudwoman

  Is Momma waiting to take me back?—this was a more likely question, that Jewell did not ask, either.

  “God will bless you now, Jewell. From this day forward.”

  There was no available birth date for Jewell Kraeck, as there was none for her younger sister Jedina Kraeck, so the child’s birthday would be celebrated by her adoptive parents on the date when the adoption procedure was finalized in the Beechum County courthouse: September 21.

  Presumed birth date: 1961.

  Now, Jewell had a new mother, and a new father. The adoption procedure went smoothly once the Neukirchens had made their decision for all who knew of the abandoned child pitied her greatly and were happy that this very nice Quaker couple wished to adopt her.

  “God-damn. That brat is lucky. Thanks to us!”

  On that last day Mr. and Mrs. Skedd and their children and foster children filed out onto the front porch to say good-bye to Jewell being taken from them by the Neukirchens to live a few miles away in Carthage that might as well have been a thousand miles, for they would never see one another again. Her hand gripped by Mrs. Neukirchen’s moist warm hand Jewell stared at them as if memorizing them—their strange livid smiling faces soon to sink into oblivion recalled if fleetingly in rapid hypnogogic images that flashed to M.R. on the brink of exhausted sleep but were lost in virtually the same instant. Yet at the time, as the child was being taken from them forever, how wildly they waved at her!—how happy they appeared, for her!—for any occasion for waving, hooting, whistling—what Mrs. Skedd called a damn ruckus—was a good one. All of their faces were split with smiles except for Mrs. Skedd whose face was stiff like something about to shatter and her eyes glistened with tears—“Oh shit! I am not going to bawl, this is a God-damn happy time.”

  Mrs. Skedd had to run after Jewell in the driveway to hug her so hard her ribs hurt. No matter that Mrs. Neukirchen was gripping the child’s hand, Mrs. Skedd grabbed her away if but for a moment. And there was Mr. Skedd following them too, smirking and winking saying, “You ain’t a good li’l girl, Jew-ell, these nice people’re gonna bring you back here. Dump you in the driveway. See?”

  And in the car in the backseat there was the Neukirchens’ thick-bodied dog quivering and whimpering with excitement. Damp adoring eyes and a soft damp tickling tongue eager to lick Jewell’s face, hands, arms and legs so she squealed with sudden startled laughter.

  “Puddin’ loves you too, Jewell! If you will let him.”

  “ ‘Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.’ ”

  This was her new name. Jewell was no longer her name.

  Only vaguely could she recall—Jedina.

  (And where Jedina had gone, she could not recall. It was not possible for her to remember so far back in time as even at the time of what had happened she could not have said clearly, absolutely if much that had happened had truly happened to her or to the other; nor could she have said if Jedina had been her, or the other.)

  (Enough to know that Jedina had vanished.)

  “ ‘Meredith Ruth’—‘Merry’—for you are meant to be merry.”

  In the Neukirchens’ house there was not the wild-rippling laughter of the Skedds’ house but not the shouting, cuffing and slamming of doors, thumping feet on the stairs, either.

  Nor the girls’ cramped beds, the boys’ pummeling hands.

  When they’d come for her she’d had virtually nothing to bring with her. A frayed tote bag Mrs. Skedd filled with a few articles of clothing that were worn thin with many launderings. A pink plastic comb, some plastic barrettes. Mismatched colored shoelaces no one else wanted.

  Mrs. Neukirchen shook these items out onto a bed, frowning.

  “We’ll get you some nice new things, dear! You’re growing.”

  It was a good thing, to grow.

  Perceiving, even as a child, that you must grow, or you will vanish.

  Momma was fading now. Momma’s anger and outrage.

  Momma’s grip—her fingers like ice.

  For now she was Meredith Ruth Neukirchen—“Merry”—and in a new and faraway place where Momma could not follow. Not every night now did she lie awake in the night waiting for Momma to appear at the foot of the bed.

  And in this new place there were fewer crows at dawn. Sometimes there were no crow-cries at all that Jewell—that is, “Merry”—could hear.

  For the Neukirchens did not live in the country but in Carthage, in a neighborhood. They did not live on a road but on a street and strangely close to their neighbors’ houses—(mostly brick houses of dark red, dark orange, beige with steep shingled roofs and narrow paved driveways leading back to single-car garages)—that so resembled the Neukirchens’ house you could not have told them apart except for Mrs. Neukirchen’s front-yard garden—a jumble of bright flowers and flowering shrubs of which some were “real” but others “store-bought—artificial.” (Sometimes Mrs. Neukirchen planted real geraniums among the artificial whose vivid red blossoms never turned brown and fell off.) On Mt. Laurel Street there were tall shade trees and each property was far smaller than the Skedds’ sprawling backyard and there was no ravine at the rear.

  “This is your home now, dear child. ‘Eighteen Mount Laurel Street, Carthage, New York’—you need never leave.”

  Mr. Neukirchen made this pronouncement in his rotund kindly voice that was like a radio voice, just slightly elevated, formal.

  “Oh, Konrad! What a thing to say! Of course our daughter will leave—one day—not for many years we hope, but—one day—and if we’re very fortunate, ‘Merry’ will return to live in Carthage, because she has been so happy there.”

  Mrs. Neukirchen spoke in a voice that was breathy, exclamatory. Though her movements were stately and studied often Mrs. Neukirchen sounded as if she’d just rushed up a flight of stairs.

  “Please, dear child—will you memorize your new address? In case you are ever lost.”

  “Oh, Konrad! What a thing to say! It isn’t very likely that our daughter will be lost—so quickly. . . .”

  “I don’t mean quickly, Agatha. I mean—well, what do I mean?—in time.”

  Time was a subject of unusual interest to Mr. Neukirchen who timed his walk to and from work each weekday morning—a “fast-walk” of precisely twenty-six minutes. (Except that Mr. Neukirchen’s walk was hardly what you’d call “fast.”)

  Time was a subject in many of the paperback books—“sci-fi” novels—Mr. Neukirchen read in his easy chair beside the living room fireplace. Time travel. Time paradoxes.

  “For instance, Meredith: if you travel back to the time before you were born, you would discover a world in which you did not exist; but if you travel back to the time after you’d been born, you would discover a world in which a younger twin self of your own existed! Only think.”

  If Mrs. Neukirchen happened to overhear, very likely Mrs. Neukirchen would cry, “Oh Konrad! Don’t confuse our little girl with your ridiculous ‘paradoxes’! Don’t even listen to him, Meredith—‘Merry.’ It’s just some brainteasers of his.”

  “If Puddin’ returned to Puddin’ of—say—just last week, imagine how Puddin’ would sniff and whine! Dogs have much more sense than human beings do, in these matters.”

  In the kitchen, Mrs. Neukirchen dissolved into peals of laughter.

  “A dog’s olfactory sense is far, far more developed than a human being’s olfactory sense.” Mr. Neukirchen spoke gravely to his daughter, laying a finger beside his nose that was a large lumpy nose with wide, dark nostrils in which hairs bristled, like the bristling hairs in Mr. Neukirchen’s ears. “D’you know what ‘olfactory sense’ is, Meredith?”

  The child did not know. But the child guessed, smelling.

  “Yes! One hundred percent correct!” Mr. Neukirchen called out to Mrs. Neukirchen in the kitchen: “Our little girl is very smart, Agatha.”

  Mrs. Neukirchen’s breathy-girlish voice
replied: “Of course she is, Konrad. And very pretty, too.”

  In the hallway, there came sudden silvery-sounding chimes—a clock?—Mr. Neukirchen’s grandfather clock he had inherited from his parents. Always hearing these chimes—which were both delicate and singularly defined—Mr. Neukirchen would pause, stroking his whiskery chin. To his little daughter he said gravely, “You know, Meredith—‘Time heals all wounds.’ ” He paused, frowning. “Well—modify to: ‘Time does not heal all—but, significantly, some—wounds.’ Dear child, that is a fact.”

  It was strange to the child—initially—how the Neukirchens spoke to each other in their special elevated language that was both playful/teasing and serious/urgent. Much of what Mr. Neukirchen said seemed to be with the intention of making Mrs. Neukirchen laugh—Mrs. Neukirchen’s laughter was so quick and warm, and good to hear. Soon, their little adopted daughter would learn to laugh in mimicry of Mrs. Neukirchen’s soft breathy-girlish laughter.

  How unlike the Skedds, who aimed words at each other like flailing fists, and whose laughter hurt the ears. Never did the Neukirchens raise their voices to anyone—always they were polite in a way that would have made the Skedds hoot with laughter. For if Mr. Neukirchen asked a favor he would say, “Excuse me, may I trouble you—” and after you’d brought him what he had requested, graciously he would say, “Thank you manifoldly.” Mrs. Neukirchen behaved like a mirror-twin except often Mrs. Neukirchen would include a kiss on the cheek, also. “My darling husband”—“My darling wife”—“My dear little daughter”: these were playful and meant to make you smile but were not jokes.

  Where most things in the Skedds’ household were jokes but not funny, many things in the Neukirchens’ household were funny but not jokes.

  Early each weekday morning Mr. Neukirchen walked in his slow-rolling but steady amble downtown to the Beechum County Courthouse where for “the past two hundred years” he’d been head of the “Department of Public Futilities”—which Mrs. Neukirchen would have to translate for a baffled listener: “ ‘Department of Public Utilities.’ It’s a very responsible job!”

  “True: all the lights in Beechum County would go out, were it not for me. Plus all water would cease to flow—except sewage. But my job isn’t nearly so responsible as yours, dear Agatha. You officiate in the realm of the most wondrous—books.”

  In the Neukirchens’ house there was a great respect for books. By Mr. Neukirchen’s estimate—(or was Mr. Neukirchen being playful?)—there were 11,677½ books scattered through the two storeys of the house as well as into the attic and into the basement. Books were crammed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves, some lying horizontally and some in double rows, books behind books, so you could not see their titles. Beside leather-bound sets of the Iliad and the Odyssey, The Complete Works of Shakespeare and volumes by such authors as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy were paperback books—shelves of mystery and detective fiction, science fiction with such titles as The War of the Worlds, I, Robot, The Martian Chronicles and The Voyage of the Space Beagle. There were reference books of all kinds—The Book of the Year for 1952, 1955, 1959, 1964; a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and random copies of Time-Life Books; an entire wall given over to works of philosophy from Abelard to Zoroaster—volumes of Plato, Swedenborg, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Augustine, Aquinas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There was a shelf devoted to very old books that looked as if they had not been opened in decades—Journal, Letters & Sermons of George Fox—amid newer books with such titles as A History of the Society of Friends, The Quaker Heritage, “Speaking Truth to Power.” At Mr. Neukirchen’s easy chair, which had shaped itself to the contours of his hefty body, there were more stacks of books to be read, mostly works of philosophy, history, and what Mr. Neukirchen called moral uplift, with here and there something lighter-hearted—Mark Twain’s Library of Humor, H. L. Mencken’s Damn: A Book of Calumny—and paperback mysteries by Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Cornell Woolrich. At Mrs. Neukirchen’s matching chair, on the other side of the fireplace, were biographies and novels mostly by women writers—Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Taylor Caldwell—gardening, sewing, and cooking books; and of course there were children’s books, both new and secondhand as well as from the library where Agatha Neukirchen worked.

  “Merry! Look what I’ve selected for us”—Mrs. Neukirchen would wave a book with an illustrated cover, excitedly—The Wind in the Willows, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tales of Mother Goose, Heidi—“for bedtime reading tonight.”

  Often, the child saw her “parents” kissing—not hard and messy on the mouth but lightly, smilingly, on the cheek; and if they saw her they would beckon to her, with wide-flung arms—“Merry! Come and be kissed.”

  She would not: she did not want to be kissed.

  She would hide her face. Run away, and hide. Back away staring and speechless and repelled—these strangers acting so silly and making so much of themselves.

  I am not—Merry. I am Jewell.

  “Merry, come! Hurry!”

  “Better hurry, Merry—kisses are going fast!”

  And so—somehow—with a breathy little laugh blindly she stumbled forward.

  Ran to the Neukirchens who stooped to swaddle her in all their arms.

  This was the way: blindly stumble forward, and be kissed.

  “You will always be safe, Meredith—if you look within. For the ‘light of the Lord dwells within us.’ ”

  The Neukirchens spoke of themselves as “Friends”—of the “Society of Friends”—but there was no Friends’ meetinghouse in Carthage. The closest meetinghouse was seventy miles away in Watertown.

  Just too far! The Neukirchens did not like driving such a distance.

  Especially, Agatha did not like driving. She’d had such a terrible time passing her driver’s test—at age twenty-nine, after Konrad had taught her—that she had no confidence in her driving skills; she drove too slowly, so that other drivers honked their horns at her; if she had to sit behind the steering wheel for a while, arthritis pains began in her back, neck, and arms.

  Nor did Agatha care for driving with Konrad who was, if anything, too good a driver—“He is so aggressive! It’s shocking, what comes out of a good man behind the wheel.”

  In any case, the Neukirchens were not “going-to-Meeting” Friends. Making such a journey just to sit still—and not speak—(when Konrad dearly loved to speak)—wasn’t worth the ordeal. They’d been married by a Quaker minister in the Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks in late summer, but that had been a unique occasion.

  “The minister said just a few words—the Friends’ service is not long. But he did ask if there was anyone ‘to object to this union’ and almost right away there was a terrible commotion—some Canada geese flying onto a lake nearby, all squawking and flapping their wings like crazed things. And everybody laughed, but sort of uneasily. And I was—I don’t know why—so embarrassed.”

  Konrad laughed. “Well, I wasn’t. Not in the slightest. If God had wanted to send a message, that He didn’t approve of our union, you can be sure He’d have sent it some less comical way.”

  It was Konrad who’d been a Quaker first, and Agatha who had “converted.” Their allegiance to the religion was in Quaker ideals and ethics; Konrad did not especially believe in “Christ Jesus”—of whom the Quaker founder George Fox had preached, and Agatha was “undecided” how much she believed.

  Both agreed that the Society of Friends was the only religion they could cleave to, since it was a religion that didn’t demand cleaving, and a religion in which “original sin”—in fact, any kind of “sin”—and Hell—did not figure greatly. Pacifism—which Konrad took to be a more human instinct than aggression—was only just, to them, “logical”—like the forswearing of vows to serve in the military. Konrad admired George Fox for his fearlessness in “speaking truth to power” in dangerous situations, and in acce
pting numerous imprisonments during his long campaign of preaching, often in risking death—but Konrad was not drawn to such displays of courage, and had no taste for martyrdom. Sincerely he believed that God was a vessel of “uncommon common sense” not to be found in slavish obedience to the state nor certainly in churches, rituals, or sacred sites: “God will come to you when you require Him. You do not have to travel a mile, to get to God.”

  Adding: “God is already inside you, Meredith! God is the ‘Merry’ inside you—that little spark of being. Think of God in this way, and God will be your friend through life.”

  All religions were pathways seeking God, thus all religions were to be respected.

  Though—Konrad had to add—some religions were more to be respected than others.

  “All breeds of dogs, for instance, are of the species Canis familiaris—but not all dogs are equal. You see?”

  Konrad winked at the little girl who gazed at him with a puzzled smile. If Konrad saw that the child was clutching—clenching—her hands in her lap, he pretended not to see; for Konrad was not the sort of father who wishes his child to see how much he knows of her innermost heart. Agatha, overhearing, said reprovingly, “Now Konrad! You don’t want to confuse the child with your silly paradoxes.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “Of course you don’t! Our little girl is very young, you know.”

  “How young is very young?”

  Meredith laughed in the breathy way wondering was she expected to answer such a question?

  She had no idea how old she was, really. It was believed that she was six years old for Jewell Kraeck would have been six years old. Yet even this alleged fact was not a certainty.

  “Well—if we can’t decide what is very young—can we assume that we know what is a paradox?”

  Still the child stared smiling, wide-eyed glancing from her new father to her new mother. She knew, if she did not reply, both Neukirchens would answer their question for her; they would not pursue any topic that too obviously baffled her, nor would they continue to look at her when it became clear she was uncomfortable with their scrutiny.