Mudwoman (8 page)

“Excuse me . . .”

Badly M.R. had to use a restroom. She left the fox-faced attendant staring rudely at her and climbed the steps to the café.

It was wonderful how the sign that had appeared so faded, derelict, was now lighted:
BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

Inside was a long counter, or a bar—several men standing at the bar—a number of tables of which less than half were occupied—winking lights: neon advertisements for beer, ale. The air was hazy with smoke. A TV above the bar, quick-darting images like fish. M.R. wiped at her eyes for there was a blurred look to the interior of the Black River Café as if it had been hastily assembled. Windows with glass that appeared to be opaque. Pictures, glossy magazine cutouts on the walls that were in fact blank. From the TV came a high-pitched percussive sort of music like wind chimes, amplified. M.R. was smelling something rich, yeasty, wonderful—baking bread? Pie? Homemade pie? Her mouth flooded with saliva, she was weak with hunger.

“Ma’am! Come in here. You look cold. Hungry.”

Out of the kitchen came a heavyset woman with a large round muffin-face creased in a smile. She wore a man’s red-plaid flannel shirt and brown corduroy slacks and over this a stained gingham apron. She was holding the kitchen door open, for M.R. to join her.

“Ma’am—mind if I say—you lookin’ like you had some kind a shock. You better come here.”

M.R. smiled, uncertainly. With a touch of her warm hand the heavyset woman drew M.R. forward as the men at the bar stared frankly.

Maybe—they liked what they saw. They approved of the girl-Amazon in city clothes, disheveled.

The woman was as tall as M.R.—in fact taller. Her hair was knotted and coiled about her head—a wan, faded gold like retreating sunshine. Her wide-set eyes were lighted like coins. And that wide, wet smile.

“Good you got here, ma’am. Out on that road after dark—you’d get lost fast.”

“Oh yes! Thank you.”

M.R. was dazed with gratitude. She felt like a drowning swimmer who has been hauled ashore.

In the kitchen, M.R. was given a chair to sit in. It was a familiar chair, this was comforting. The paint worn in a certain pattern on the back—the wicker seat beginning to buckle. And just in time for her knees had become weak.

Another comfort, the smell of baked goods. Simmering food, some kind of stew, on the stove. Like a sudden flame a frantic hunger was released in M.R.

“Hel-lo! Wel-come!”

“Ma’am! Wel-come.”

There were others in the kitchen, warmly greeting M.R. She could not see their faces clearly but believed that they were relatives of the older woman.

There came a bowl of dark glistening soup, placed steaming before M.R. She supposed it was some kind of beef soup, or lamb—mutton?—globules of grease on the surface but M.R. was too hungry to be repelled. Her lips were soon coated with grease, there was no napkin with which she might wipe her face. She’d become so civilized, it was awkward for her to eat without a napkin in her lap—but there were no napkins here.

“Good, eh? More?”

Yes, it was good. Yes, M.R. would have more.

She was seated at a familiar table—Formica-topped, simulated maple, with battered legs. The air in the kitchen was warm, close, humid. On the gas-burner stove were many pots and pans. On another table were fresh-baked muffins, whole grain bread, pies. These were pies with thick crusts and sugary-gluey insides. Apple pies, cherry pies.

A bottle of beer. Bottles of beer. A hand lifted the bottle, poured the foaming dark liquid into a glass. M.R. drank.

So 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

I
n 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 until years later came another creature to address Suttis and this a deer—a doe—while Suttis was hunting with his father and brothers and Suttis was left behind stumbling and uncertain and out of nowhere amid the pine woods there appeared the doe about fifty feet away—a doe with two just-born fawns—pausing to stare at Suttis wide-eyed not in fright but with a sort of surprised recognition even as Suttis lifted his rifle to fire with a rapidly beating heart and a very dry mouth—
Suttis! SuttisSuttisSuttis!—
words sounding inside his own head like a radio switched on so Suttis was given to know that it was the doe’s thoughts sent to him in some way like vibrations in water and he’d understood that he was not to fire his rifle, and he did not fire his rifle.

And most recent in January 1965 making early-morning rounds of the traps, God damn Suttis’s brothers sending Suttis out on a morning when none of them would have gone outdoors to freeze his ass but there’s Suttis stumbling in thigh-high snow, shuddering in fuckin’ freezing wind and half the traps covered in snow and inaccessible and finally he’d located one—one!—a mile or more from home—not what he’d expected in this frozen-over wet-land place which was muskrat or beaver or maybe raccoon but instead it was a bobcat—a thin whistle through the gap in Suttis’s front teeth for Suttis had not ever trapped a bobcat before in his life for bobcats are too elusive—too cunning—but here a captive young one looked to be a six-to-eight-months-old kitten its left rear leg caught in a long spring trap panicked and panting licking at the wet-blooded trapped leg with frantic motions of its pink tongue and pausing now to stare up at Suttis in a look both pleading and reproachful, accusatory—it was a female cat, Suttis seemed to know—beautiful tawny eyes with black vertical slits fixed upon Suttis Coldham who was marveling he’d never seen such a creature in his life, silver-tipped fur, stripes and spots in the fur of the hue of burnished mahogany, tufted ears, long tremulous whiskers, and those tawny eyes fixed upon him as Suttis stood crouched a few feet away hearing in the bobcat’s quick-panting breath what sounded like
Suttis! Suttis don’t you know who I am
and drawn closer risking the bobcat’s talon-claws and astonished now seeing that these were the eyes of his Coldham grandmother who’d died at Christmas in her eighty-ninth year but now the grandmother was a young girl as Suttis had never known her and somehow—Suttis could have no idea how—gazing at him out of the bobcat’s eyes and even as the bobcat’s teeth were bared in a panicked snarl clearly Suttis was made to hear his girl-grandmother’s chiding voice
Suttis! O Suttis you know who I am—you know you do!

Not for an instant did Suttis doubt that the bobcat was his Coldham grandmother, or his Coldham grandmother had become the bobcat—or was using the bobcat to communicate with Suttis knowing that Suttis was headed in this direction—no more could Suttis have explained these bizarre and improbable circumstances than he could have explained the “algebra equations” the teacher had chalked on the blackboard of the one-room school he’d attended sporadically for eight mostly futile years even as he had not the slightest doubt that the “algebra equations” were real enough, or real in some way that excluded Suttis Coldham; and so Suttis stooped hurriedly to pry open the spring-trap fumbling to release the injured left rear leg of the bobcat kitten murmuring to placate the spirit of his girl-grandmother who both was and was not the elderly woman he’d known and called
Gran’maw
and the bobcat bared her teeth, snarled and hissed and squirmed and clawed at his hands in leather gloves shredding the gloves but leaving Suttis’s hands mostly unscathed and raking his face only thinly across his right cheek and in the next instant the bobcat kitten was running—limping, but running—on three swift legs disappearing into the snow-laden larch woods with no more sound than a startled indrawn breath and leaving behind nothing but a scattering of cat feces and patches of blood-splattered silver-tipped fur in the ugly serrated jaws of the trap and a sibilant murmur
S’ttus! God bless.

And now it was the King of the Crows summoning Suttis Coldham unmistakably—
SSS’ttissss! SSS’ttiss!

Suttis froze in his tracks. Suttis stood like one impaled. Suttis could not hide his eyes and refuse to see. Suttis could not press his hands over his ears and refuse to hear.

SSS’ttisss come here! Here!

The King of the Crows was the largest crow Suttis had ever seen. His feathers were the sleekest and blackest and his wingspread as wide as any hawk’s and his yellow eyes glared in urgency and indignation. Like a hunted creature Suttis made his way along the riverbank, as the King of the Crows shrieked in his wake, flying from tree to tree behind him as if in pursuit. For it would not be true as Suttis would claim that he had followed the King of the Crows to the child abandoned to die in the mudflat but rather that the King of the Crows had driven Suttis as a dog might drive cattle. Suttis could not hide, could not escape from the King of the Crows for he knew that the King of the Crows would pursue him back to the Coldham farm and would never cease harassing and berating him for having disobeyed him.

Suttis stumbled and staggered along a three-foot-high embankment that jutted out into the vast mudflat. Not long ago the last of the winter snows had melted and the mudflat was puddled with water, as the Black Snake River was swollen and muddy and swift-rushing south out of the mountains. Everywhere was a buzzing-thrumming-teeming of new life, and the rapacity of new life: blackflies, wasps, gnats. Suttis swatted at the air about his head, a cloud of new-hatched mosquitoes. Underfoot was the ruin of a road. Ahead was the ruin of a mill. Suttis knew the mudflats—the Coldhams hunted and trapped here—but Suttis had no clear idea what the purpose of the mill might have been at one time, or who might have owned it. His grandfather would know, or his father. His older brothers maybe. The ways of adults seemed to him remote and inaccessible and so their names were blurred and of little consequence to him as to any child.

Come here! Come here S’ttis come here!

SSS’ttisss! Here!

On the narrowing embankment Suttis moved with caution. The King of the Crows had so distracted him, he’d left his trapping gear behind—the burlap sack which bore the limp broken bloodied bodies of several dead creatures—but still he had his knife, sheathed in his jacket which was Amos Coldham’s Army-issue jacket of a long-ago wartime, badly stained and frayed at the cuffs. On his head he wore a knit cap, pulled down onto his narrow forehead; on his lower body, khaki workpants; on his feet, rubber boots from Sears, Roebuck. Passing now the part-collapsed mill with its roof covered in moss that made him uneasy to see—any building, however in ruins, Suttis Coldham was inclined to think that something might be hiding inside, observing him.

In the mountains, you might be observed by a man with a rifle, at some distance. You would never know how you were viewed in a stranger’s rifle-scope even as the stranger pulled the trigger and for what reason?—as the Coldhams liked to say
For the hell of it.

Suttis cringed, worried that he was being observed and not by just the King of the Crows. Entering now into a force field of some other consciousness that drew him irresistibly.

Broken things in the winter-ravaged grasses, rotted planks, chunks of concrete, a man’s single boot. A shredded tractor tire, strips of plastic. In the vast mudflat tracks ran in all directions with a look of frenzied determination—animal tracks, bird tracks—and on the embankment, what Suttis identified as
human-being footprints
.

Suttis’s eye that gazed upon so much without recognition, still less interest, for instance all printed materials, seized at once upon the
human-being footprints
on the embankment which Suttis knew to be, without taking time to think, not the footprints of his brothers or any other trapper or hunter but
female footprints.

Suttis knew, just knew:
female
. Not even the boot-prints of a young boy. Just
female
boot-prints.

There were other prints, too—mixed with the
female.
Possibly a child. Suttis knew without calculating, with just-seeing.

Not that these tracks were clear—they were not clear. But Suttis understood that they were fresh for no other tracks covered them.

What was this! Suttis whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

A piece of cloth—a scarf—of some crinkly purple material, Suttis snatched up and quickly shoved into his pocket.

SSS’ttisss! Here!

Atop a skeletal larch the King of the Crows spread his wings. The King of the Crows did not like it that Suttis had paused to pick up the crinkly-purple scarf. For the King of the Crows had flown ahead of Suttis, to bade him to hurry to that point, to see.

And 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.