100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1969 JOYCE CAROL OATES. By the River from December

JOYCE CAROL OATES was born in Lockport, New York, in 1938 and was raised on her parents’ farm. She was fourteen when her grandmother gave her her first typewriter. Oates went on a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she majored in English.

After Oates stumbled upon the fact that one of her stories had been cited in the honor roll of The Best American Short Stories, she assembled the fourteen stories in her first book, By the North Gate. It was the first of almost seventy books. In addition to short stories and novels, she regularly publishes poems, plays, literary criticism, and essays. Of her prolific nature, she once said, “A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.” Among her numerous awards are the National Book Award, the Rea Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and five lifetime achievement awards.

Oates was once asked, “What is the function of violence in your work?” She replied, “Given the number of pages I have written, and the ‘violent’ incidents dispersed throughout them, I rather doubt that I am a violent writer in any meaningful sense of the word… Real life is much more chaotic.”

Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978.

★

HELEN THOUGHT: “Am I in love again, some new kind of love? Is that why I’m here?”

She was sitting in the waiting room of the Yellow Bus Lines station; she knew the big old room with its dirty tile floor and its solitary telephone booth in the corner and its candy machine and cigarette machine and popcorn machine by heart. Everything was familiar, though she had been gone for four months, even the old woman with the dyed red hair who sold tickets and had been selling them there, behind that counter, for as long as Helen could remember. Years ago, before Helen’s marriage, she and her girl friends would be driven in to town by someone’s father and after they tired of walking around town they would stroll over to the bus station to watch the buses unload. They were anxious to see who was getting off, but few of the passengers who got off stayed in Oriskany — they were just passing through, stopping for a rest and a drink, and their faces seemed to say that they didn’t think much of the town. Nor did they seem to think much of the girls from the country who stood around in their colorful dresses and smiled shyly at strangers, not knowing any better: they were taught to be kind to people, to smile first, you never knew who it might be. So now Helen was back in Oriskany, but this time she had come in on a bus herself. Had ridden alone, all the way from the city of Derby, all alone, and was waiting for her father to pick her up so she could go back to her old life without any more fuss.

It was hot. Flies crawled languidly around; a woman with a small sickly-faced baby had to keep waving them away. The old woman selling tickets looked at Helen as if her eyes were drawn irresistibly that way, as if she knew every nasty rumor and wanted to let Helen know that she knew. Helen’s forehead broke out in perspiration and she stood, abruptly, wanting to dislodge that old woman’s stare. She went over to the candy machine but did not look at the candy bars; she looked at herself in the mirror. Her own reflection always made her feel better. Whatever went on inside her head — and right now she felt nervous about something — had nothing to do with the way she looked, her smooth gentle skin and the faint freckles on her forehead and nose and the cool, innocent green of her eyes; she was just a girl from the country and anyone in town would know that, even if they didn’t know her personally, one of those easy, friendly girls who hummed to themselves and seemed always to be glancing up as if expecting something pleasant. Her light brown hair curled back lazily toward her ears, cut short now because it was the style; in high school she had worn it long. She watched her eyes in the mirror. No alarm there really. She would be back home in an hour or so. Not her husband’s home, of course, but her parents’ home. And her face in the mirror was the face she had always seen — twenty-two she was now, and to her that seemed very old, but she looked no different from the way she had looked on her wedding day five years ago.

But it was stupid to try to link together those two Helens, she thought. She went back to the row of seats and sat heavily. If the old woman was still watching, she did not care. A sailor in a soiled white uniform sat nearby, smoking, watching her but not with too much interest; he had other girls to recall. Helen opened her purse and looked inside at nothing and closed it again. The man she had been living with in the city for four months had told her it was stupid — no, he had not used that word; he said something fancy like “immature”—to confuse herself with the child she had been, married woman as she was now, and a mother, adulterous married woman… and the word adulterous made her lips turn up in a slow bemused smile, the first flash of incredulous pride one might feel when told at last the disease that is going to be fatal. For there were so many diseases and only one way out of the world, only one death and so many ways to get to it. They were like doors, Helen thought dreamily. You walked down a hallway like those in movies, in huge wealthy homes, crystal chandeliers and marble floors and… great sweeping lawns… and doors all along those hallways; if you picked the wrong door you had to go through it. She was dreamy, drowsy. When thought became too much for her — when he had pestered her so much about marrying him, divorcing her husband and marrying him, always him! — she had felt so sleepy she could not listen. If she was not interested in a word her mind wouldn’t hear it but made it blurred and strange, like words half-heard in dreams or through some thick substance like water. You didn’t have to hear a word if you didn’t want to.

So she had telephoned her father the night before and told him the three-fifteen bus and now it was three-thirty; where was he? Over the telephone he had sounded slow and solemn, it could have been a stranger’s voice. Helen had never liked telephones because you could not see smiles or gestures and talking like that made her tired. Listening to her father, she had felt for the first time since she had run away and left them all behind — husband, baby girl, family, in-laws, the minister, the dreary sun-bleached look of the land — that she had perhaps died and only imagined she was running away. Nobody here trusted the city; it was too big. Helen had wanted to go there all her life, not being afraid of anything, and so she had gone, and was coming back; but it was an odd feeling, this dreamy ghostliness, as if she were really dead and coming back in a form that only looked like herself… She was bored, thinking of this, and crossed her bare legs. The sailor crushed out a cigarette in the dirty tin ashtray and their eyes met. Helen felt a little smile tug at her lips. That was the trouble, she knew men too well. She knew their eyes and their gestures — like the sailor rubbing thoughtfully at his chin, now, as if he hadn’t shaved well enough but really liked to feel his own skin. She knew them too well and had never figured out why: her sister, four years older, wasn’t like that. But to Helen the same man one hundred times or one hundred men, different men, seemed the same. It was wrong, of course, because she had been taught it and believed what she had been taught; but she could not understand the difference. The sailor watched her but she looked away, half-closing her eyes. She had no time for him. Her father should be here now, he would be here in a few minutes, so there was no time; she would be home in an hour. When she thought of her father the ugly bus station with its odor of tobacco and spilled soft drinks seemed to fade away — she remembered his voice the night before, how gentle and soft she had felt listening to that voice, giving in to the protection he represented. She had endured his rough hands, as a child, because she knew they protected her, and all her life they had protected her. There had always been trouble, sometimes the kind you laughed about later and sometimes not, that was one of the reasons she had married Paul, and before Paul there had been others — just boys who didn’t count, who had no jobs and thought mainly about their cars. She had called her father from a roadhouse sixty miles away once, when she was fifteen; she and her best friend Annie had gotten mixed up with some men they had met at a picnic. That had been frightening, Helen thought, but now she could have handled them. She gave everyone too much, that was her trouble. Her father had said that. Even her mother. Lent money to girls at the telephone company where she’d worked; lent her girl friends clothes; would run outside when some man drove up and blew his horn, not bothering to get out and knock at the door the way he should. She liked to make other people happy, what was wrong with that? Was she too lazy to care? Her head had begun to ache.

Always her thoughts ran one way, fast and innocent, but her body did other things. It got warm, nervous, it could not relax. Was she afraid of what her father’s face would tell her? She pushed that idea away, it was nonsense. If she had to think of something, let it be of that muddy spring day when her family had first moved to this part of the country, into an old farmhouse her father had bought at a “bargain.” At that time the road out in front of the house had been no more than a single dirt lane… now it was wider, covered with black top that smelled ugly and made your eyesight shimmer and sweat with confusion in the summer. Yes, that big old house. Nothing about it would have changed. She did not think of her own house, her husband’s house, because it mixed her up too much right now. Maybe she would go back and maybe not. She did not think of him — if she wanted to go back she would, he would take her in. When she tried to think of what had brought her back, it was never her husband — so much younger, quicker, happier than the man she had just left — and not the little girl, either, but something to do with her family’s house and that misty, warm day seventeen years ago when they had first moved in. So one morning when that man left for work her thoughts had turned back to home and she had sat at the breakfast table for an hour or so, not clearing off the dishes, looking at the coffee left in his cup as if it were a forlorn reminder of him — a man she was even beginning to forget. She knew then that she did not belong there in the city. It wasn’t that she had stopped loving this man — she never stopped loving anyone who needed her, and he had needed her more than anyone — it was something else, something she did not understand. Not her husband, not her baby, not even the look of the river way off down the hill, through the trees that got so solemn and intricate with their bare branches in winter. Those things she loved, she hadn’t stopped loving them because she had had to love this new man more… but something else made her get up and run into the next room and look through the bureau drawers and the closet, as if looking for something. That evening, when he returned, she explained to him that she was going back. He was over forty, she wasn’t sure how much, and it had always been his hesitant, apologetic manner that made her love him, the odor of failure about him that mixed with the odor of the drinking he could not stop, even though he had “cut down” now with her help. Why were so many men afraid, why did they think so much? He did something that had to do with keeping books, was that nervous work? He was an attractive man but that wasn’t what Helen had seen in him. It was his staring at her when they had first met, and the way he had run his hand through his thinning hair, telling her in that gesture that he wanted her and wanted to be young enough to tell her so. That had been four months ago. The months all rushed to Helen’s mind in the memory she had of his keen intelligent baffled eyes, and the tears she had had to see in them when she went out to call her father…

Now, back in Oriskany, she would think of him no more.

A few minutes later her father came. Was that really him? she thought. Her heart beat furiously. If blood drained out of her face she would look mottled and sick, as if she had a rash… how she hated that! Though he had seen her at once, though the bus station was nearly empty, her father hesitated until she stood and ran to him. “Pa,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you.” It might have been years ago and he was just going to drive back home now, finished with his business in town, and Helen fourteen or fifteen, waiting to go back with him.

“I’ll get your suitcase,” he said. The sailor was reading a magazine, no longer interested. Helen watched her father nervously. What was wrong? He stooped, taking hold of the suitcase handle, but he did not straighten fast enough. Just a heartbeat too slow. Why was that? Helen took a tissue already stained with lipstick and dabbed it on her forehead.

On the way home he drove oddly, as if the steering wheel, heated by the sun, were too painful for him to hold. “No more trouble with the car, huh?” Helen said.

“It’s all right,” he said. They were nearly out of town already. Helen saw few people she knew. “Why are you looking around?” her father said. His voice was pleasant and his eyes fastened seriously upon the road, as if he did not dare look elsewhere.

“Oh, just looking,” Helen said. “How is Davey?”

Waiting for her father to answer — he always took his time — Helen arranged her skirt nervously beneath her. Davey was her sister’s baby, could he be sick? She had forgotten to ask about him the night before. “Nothing’s wrong with Davey, is there, Pa?” she said.

“No, nothing.”

“I thought Ma might come, maybe,” Helen said.

“No.”

“Didn’t she want to? Mad at me, huh?”

In the past her mother’s dissatisfaction with her had always ranged Helen and her father together; Helen could tell by a glance of her father’s when this was so. But he did not look away from the road. They were passing the new high school, the consolidated high school Helen had attended for a year. No one had known what consolidated meant or was interested in knowing. Helen frowned at the dark brick and there came to her mind, out of nowhere, the word adulterous, for it too had been a word she had not understood for years. A word out of the Bible. It was like a mosquito bothering her at night, or a stain on her dress — the kind she would have to hide without seeming to, letting her hand fall accidentally over it. For some reason the peculiar smell of the old car, the rattling sun shades above the windshield, the same old khaki blanket they used for a seat cover did not comfort her and let her mind get drowsy, to push that word away.

She was not sleepy, but she said she was.

“Yes, honey. Why don’t you lay back and try to sleep, then,” her father said.

He glanced toward her. She felt relieved at once, made simple and safe. She slid over and leaned her head against her father’s shoulder. “Bus ride was long, I hate bus rides,” she said. “I used to like them.”

“You can sleep till we get home.”

“Is Ma mad?”

“No.”

His shoulder wasn’t as comfortable as it should have been. But she closed her eyes, trying to force sleep. She remembered that April day they had come here — their moving to the house that was new to them, a house of their own they would have to share with no one else, but a house it turned out had things wrong with it, secret things, that had made Helen’s father furious. She could not remember the city and the house they had lived in there, but she had been old enough to sense the simplicity of the country and the eagerness of her parents, and then the angry perplexity that had followed. The family was big — six children then, before Arthur died at ten — and half an hour after they had moved in the house was crowded and shabby. And she remembered being frightened at something and her father picking her up right in the middle of moving, and not asking her why she cried — her mother had always asked her that, as if there were a reason — but rocked her and comforted her with his rough hands. And she could remember how the house had looked so well: the ballooning curtains in the windows, the first things her mother had put up. The gusty spring air, already too warm, smelling of good earth and the Eden River not too far behind them, and leaves, sunlight, wind; and the sagging porch piled with cartons and bundles and pieces of furniture from the old house. In that old dark house in the city, the grandparents had died — her mother’s parents — and Helen did not remember them at all except as her father summoned them back, recalling with hatred his wife’s father — some little confused argument they had had years ago, that he should have won. That old man had died and the house had gone to the bank somewhere mysterious, and her father had brought them all out here to the country. A new world, a new life. A farm. And four boys to help, and the promise of such good soil…

Her father turned the wheel sharply. “Rabbit run acrost,” he said. He had this strange air of apology for whatever he did, even if it was something gentle; he hated to kill animals, even weasels and hawks. Helen wanted to cover his right hand with hers, that thickened, dirt-creased hand that could never be made clean. But she said, stirring a little as if he had woken her, “Then why didn’t Ma want to come?”

They were taking a long, slow curve. Helen knew without looking up which curve this was, between two wheat fields that belonged to one of the old, old families, those prosperous men who drove broken-down pickup trucks and dressed no better than their own hired hands, but who had money, much money, not just in one bank but in many. “Yes, they’re money people,” Helen remembered her father saying, years ago. Passing someone’s pasture. Those ugly red cows meant nothing to Helen, but they meant something to her father. And so after her father had said that — they had been out for a drive after church — her mother got sharp and impatient and the ride was ruined. That was years ago, Helen’s father had been a young man then, with a raw, waiting, untested look, with muscular arms and shoulders that needed only to be directed to their work. “They’re money people,” he had said, and that had ruined the ride, as if by magic. It had been as if the air itself had changed, the direction of the wind changing and easing to them from the river that was often stagnant in August and September, and not from the green land. With an effort, Helen remembered that she had been thinking about her mother. Why did her mind push her into the past so often these days, she only twenty-two (that was not old, not really) and going to begin a new life? Once she got home and took a bath and washed out the things in the suitcase, and got some rest, and took a walk down by the river as she had as a child, skipping stones across it, and sat around the round kitchen table with the old oil cloth cover to listen to their advice (“You got to grow up, now. You ain’t fifteen anymore”—that had been her mother, last time), then she would decide what to do. Make her decision about her husband and the baby and there would be nothing left to think about.

“Why didn’t Ma come?”

“I didn’t want her to,” he said.

Helen swallowed, without meaning to. His shoulder was thin and hard against the side of her face. Were those same muscles still there, or had they become worn away like the soil that was sucked down into the river every year, stolen from them, so that the farm Helen’s father had bought turned out to be a kind of joke on him? Or were they a different kind of muscle, hard and compressed like steel, drawn into themselves from years of resisting violence?

“How come?” Helen said.

He did not answer. She shut her eyes tight and distracting, eerie images came to her, stars exploding and shadowy figures like those in movies — she had gone to the movies all the time in the city, often taking in the first show at eleven in the morning; not because she was lonely or had nothing to do but because she liked movies. Five-twenty and he would come up the stairs, grimacing a little with the strange inexplicable pain in his chest: and there Helen would be, back from downtown, dressed up and her hair shining and her face ripe and fresh as a child’s, not because she was proud of the look in his eyes but because she knew she could make that pain of his abate for a while. And so why had she left him, when he had needed her more than anyone? “Pa, is something wrong?” she said, as if the recollection of that other man’s invisible pain were in some way connected with her father.

He reached down vaguely and touched her hand. She was surprised at this. The movie images vanished — those beautiful people she had wanted to believe in, as she had wanted to believe in God and the saints in their movie-world heaven — and she opened her eyes. The sun was bright. It had been too bright all summer. Helen’s mind felt sharp and nervous as if pricked by tiny needles, but when she tried to think of what they could be no explanation came to her. She would be home soon, she would be able to rest. Tomorrow she could get in touch with Paul. Things could begin where they had left off — Paul had always loved her so much, and he had always understood her, had known what she was like. “Ma isn’t sick, is she?” Helen said suddenly. “No,” said her father. He released her fingers to take hold of the steering wheel again. Another curve. Off to the side, if she bothered to look, the river had swung toward them — low at this time of year, covered in places with a fine brown-green layer of scum. She did not bother to look.

“We moved out here seventeen years ago,” her father said. He cleared his throat: the gesture of a man unaccustomed to speech. “You don’t remember that.”

“Yes, I do,” Helen said. “I remember that.”

“You don’t, you were just a baby.”

“Pa, I remember it. I remember you carrying the big rug in the house, you and Eddie. And I started to cry and you picked me up. I was such a big baby, always crying… And Ma came out and chased me inside so I wouldn’t bother you.”

“You don’t remember that,” her father said. He was driving jerkily, pressing down on the gas pedal and then letting it up, as if new thoughts continually struck him. What was wrong with him? Helen had an idea she didn’t like: he was older now, he was going to become an old man.

If she had been afraid of the dark, upstairs in that big old farmhouse in the room she shared with her sister, all she had had to do was to think of him. He had a way of sitting at the supper table that was so still, so silent, that you knew nothing could budge him. Nothing could frighten him. So, as a child, and even now that she was grown up, it helped her to think of her father’s face — those pale surprised green eyes that could be simple or cunning, depending upon the light, and the lines working themselves in deeper every year around his mouth, and the hard angle of his jaw going back to the ear, burned by the sun and then tanned by it, turned into leather, then going pale again in the winter. The sun could not burn its color deep enough into that skin, which was almost as fair as Helen’s. At Sunday school she and the other children had been told to think of Christ when they were afraid, but the Christ she saw on the little Bible bookmark cards and calendars was no one to protect you. That was a man who would be your cousin, maybe, some cousin you liked but saw rarely, but he looked so given over to thinking and trusting that he could not be of much help; not like her father. When he and the boys came in from the fields with the sweat drenching their clothes and their faces looking as if they were dissolving with heat, you could still see the solid flesh beneath, the skeleton that hung onto its muscles and would never get old, never die. The boys — her brothers, all older — had liked her well enough, Helen being the baby, and her sister had watched her most of the time, and her mother had liked her too — or did her mother like anyone, having been brought up by German-speaking parents who had had no time to teach her love? But it had always been her father she had run to. She had started knowing men by knowing him. She could read things in his face that taught her about the faces of other men, the slowness or quickness of their thoughts, if they were beginning to be impatient, or were pleased and didn’t want to show it yet. Was it for this she had come home? — And the thought surprised her so that she sat up, because she did not understand. Was it for this she had come home? “Pa,” she said, “like I told you on the telephone, I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I went. That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, I’m sorry for it, isn’t that enough? Did you talk to Paul?”

“Paul? Why Paul?”

“What?”

“You haven’t asked about him until now, so why now?”

“What do you mean? He’s my husband, isn’t he? Did you talk to him?”

“He came over to the house almost every night for two weeks. Three weeks,” he said. Helen could not understand the queer chatty tone of his voice. “Then off and on, all the time. No, I didn’t tell him you were coming.”

“But why not?” Helen laughed nervously. “Don’t you like him?”

“You know I like him. You know that. But if I told him he’d of gone down to get you, not me.”

“Not if I said it was you I wanted…”

“I didn’t want him to know. Your mother doesn’t know either.”

“What? You mean you didn’t tell her?” Helen looked at the side of his face. It was rigid and bloodless behind the tan, as if something inside were shrinking away and leaving just his voice. “You mean you didn’t even tell Ma? She doesn’t know I’m coming?”

“No.”

The nervous prickling in her brain returned suddenly. Helen rubbed her forehead.

“Pa,” she said gently, “why didn’t you tell anybody? You’re ashamed of me, huh?”

He drove on slowly. They were following the bends of the river, that wide shallow meandering river the boys said wasn’t worth fishing in any longer. One of its tributaries branched out suddenly — Mud Creek, it was called, all mud and bullfrogs and dragonflies and weeds — and they drove over it on a rickety wooden bridge that thumped beneath them. “Pa,” Helen said carefully, “you said you weren’t mad, on the phone. And I wrote you that letter explaining. I wanted to write some more, but you know… I don’t write much, never even wrote to Annie when she moved away. I never forgot about you or anything, or Ma… I thought about the baby, too, and Paul, but Paul could always take care of himself. He’s smart. He really is. I was in the store with him one time and he was arguing with some salesmen and got the best of them; he never learned all that from his father. The whole family is smart, though, aren’t they?”

“The Hendrikses? Sure. You don’t get money without brains.”

“Yes, and they got money too, Paul never had to worry. In a house like his parents’ house nothing gets lost or broken. You know? It isn’t like it was at ours, when we were all kids. That’s part of it — when Paul’s father built us our house I was real pleased and real happy, but then something of them came in with it too. Everything is spost to be clean and put in its place, and after you have a baby you get so tired… but his mother was always real nice to me. I don’t complain about them. I like them all real well.”

“Money people always act nice,” her father said. “Why shouldn’t they?”

“Oh, Pa!” Helen said, tapping at his arm. “What do you mean by that? You always been nicer than anybody I know, that’s the truth. Real nice. A lot of them with those big farms, like Paul’s father, and that tractor store they got — they complain a lot. They do. You just don’t hear about it. And when that baby got polio, over in the Rapids — that real big farm, you know what I mean? — the McGuires. How do you think they felt? They got troubles just like everybody else.”

Then her father did a strange thing: here they were seven or eight miles from home, no house near, and he stopped the car. “Want to rest for a minute,” he said. Yet he kept staring out the windshield as if he were still driving.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sun on the hood of the car…”

Helen tugged at the collar of her dress, pulling it away from her damp neck. When had the heat ever bothered her father before? She remembered going out to the farthest field with water for him, before he had given up that part of the farm. And he would take the jug from her and lift it to his lips and it would seem to Helen, the sweet child Helen standing in the dusty corn, that the water flowed into her magnificent father and enlivened him as if it were secret blood of her own she had given him. And his chest would swell, his reddened arms eager with muscle emerging out from his rolled-up sleeves, and his eyes now wiped of sweat and exhaustion… The vision pleased and confused her, for what had it to do with the man now beside her? She stared at him and saw that his nose was queerly white and that there were many tiny red veins about it, hardly more than pen lines; and his hair was thinning and jagged, growing back stiffly from his forehead as if he had brushed it back impatiently with his hand once too often. When Eddie, the oldest boy, moved away now and lost to them, had pushed their father hard in the chest and knocked him back against the supper table, that same amazed white look had come to his face, starting at his nose.

“I was thinking if, if we got home now, I could help Ma with supper,” Helen said. She touched her father’s arm as if to waken him. “It’s real hot, she’d like some help.”

“She doesn’t know you’re coming.”

“But I… I could help anyway.” She tried to smile, watching his face for a hint of something: many times in the past he had looked stern but could be made to break into a smile, finally, if she teased him long enough. “But didn’t Ma hear you talk on the phone? Wasn’t she there?”

“She was there.”

“Well, but then…”

“I told her you just talked. Never said nothing about coming home.”

The heat had begun to make Helen dizzy. Her father opened the door on his side. “Let’s get out for a minute, go down by the river,” he said. Helen slid across and got out. The ground felt uncertain beneath her feet. Her father was walking and saying something and she had to run to catch up with him. He said: “We moved out here seventeen years ago. There were six of us then, but you don’t remember. Then the boy died. And you don’t remember your mother’s parents and their house, that goddam stinking house, and how I did all the work for him in his store. You remember the store down front? The dirty sawdust floor and the old women coming in for sausage, enough to make you want to puke, and pig’s feet and brains out of cows or guts or what the hell they were that people ate in that neighborhood. I could puke for all my life and not get clean of it. You just got born then. And we were dirt to your mother’s people, just dirt. I was dirt. And when they died somebody else got the house, it was all owned by somebody else, and so we said how it was for the best and we’d come out here and start all over. You don’t remember it or know nothing about us.”

“What’s wrong, Pa?” Helen said. She took his arm as they descended the weedy bank. “You talk so funny, did you get something to drink before you came to the bus station? You never said these things before. I thought it wasn’t just meat, but a grocery store, like the one in…”

“And we came out here,” he said loudly, interrupting her, “and bought that son of a bitch of a house with the roof half rotted through and the well all shot to hell… and those bastards never looked at us, never believed we were real people. The Hendrikses too. They were like all of them. They looked through me in town, do you know that? Like you look through a window. They didn’t see me. It was because hillbilly families were in that house, came and went, pulled out in the middle of the night owing everybody money; they all thought we were like that. I said, we were poor but we weren’t hillbillies. I said, do I talk like a hillbilly? We come from the city. But nobody gave a damn. You could go up to them and shout in their faces and they wouldn’t hear you, not even when they started losing money themselves. I prayed to God during them bad times that they’d all lose what they had, every bastard one of them, that Swede with the fancy cattle most of all! I prayed to God to bring them down to me so they could see me, my children as good as theirs, and me a harder worker than any of them — if you work till you feel like dying you done the best you can do, whatever money you get. I’d of told them that. I wanted to come into their world even if I had to be on the bottom of it, just so long as they gave me a name…”

“Pa, you been drinking,” Helen said softly.

“I had it all fixed, what I’d tell them,” he said. They were down by the river bank now. Fishermen had cleared a little area and stuck Y-shaped branches into the dried mud, to rest their poles on. Helen’s father prodded one of the little sticks with his foot and then did something Helen had never seen anyone do in her life, not even boys — he brought his foot down on it and smashed it.

“You oughtn’t of done that,” Helen said. “Why’d you do that?”

“And I kept on and on; it was seventeen years. I never talked about it to anyone. Your mother and me never had much to say, you know that. She was like her father. — You remember that first day? It was spring, nice and warm, and the wind came along when we were moving the stuff in and was so different from that smell in the city — my God! It was a whole new world here.”

“I remember it,” Helen said. She was staring out at the shallow muddy river. Across the way birds were sunning themselves stupidly on flat, white rocks covered with dried moss like veils.

“You don’t remember nothing!” her father said angrily. “Nothing! You were the only one of them I loved, because you didn’t remember. It was all for you. First I did it for me, myself, to show that bastard father of hers that was dead — then those other bastards, those big farms around us — but then for you, for you. You were the baby. I said to God that when you grew up it’d be you in one of them big houses with everything fixed and painted all the time, and new machinery, and driving around in a nice car not this thing we got. I said I would do that for you or die.”

“That’s real nice, Pa,” Helen said nervously, “but I never… I never knew nothing about it, or… I was happy enough any way I was. I liked it at home, I got along with Ma better than anybody did. And I liked Paul too, I didn’t marry him just because you told me to. I mean, you never pushed me around. I wanted to marry him all by myself, because he loved me. I was always happy, Pa. If Paul didn’t have the store coming to him, and that land and all, I’d have married him anyway — You oughtn’t to worked all that hard for me.”

In spite of the heat she felt suddenly chilled. On either side of them tall grass shrank back from the cleared, patted area, stiff and dried with August heat. These weeds gathered upon themselves in a brittle tumult back where the vines and foliage of trees began, the weeds dead and whitened and the vines a glossy, rich green, as if sucking life out of the water into which they drooped. All along the river bank trees and bushes leaned out and showed a yard or two of dead, whitish brown where the waterline had once been. This river bent so often you could never see far along it. Only a mile or so. Then foliage began, confused and unmoving. What were they doing here, she and her father? A thought came to Helen and frightened her — she was not used to thinking — that they ought not to be here, that this was some other kind of slow, patient world where time didn’t care at all for her or her girl’s face or her generosity of love, but would push right past her and go on to touch the faces of other people.

“Pa, let’s go home. Let’s go home,” she said.

Her father bent and put his hands into the river. He brought them dripping to his face. “That’s dirty there, Pa,” she said. A mad dry buzzing started up somewhere — hornets or wasps. Helen looked around but saw nothing.

“God listened and didn’t say yes or no,” her father said. He was squatting at the river and now looked back at her, his chin creasing. The back of his shirt was wet. “If I could read him right it was something like this — that I was caught in myself and them money people caught in themselves and God Himself caught in what he was and so couldn’t be anything else. Then I never thought about God again.”

“I think about God,” Helen said. “I do. People should think about God then they wouldn’t have wars and things…”

“No, I never bothered about God again,” he said slowly. “If he was up there or not it never had nothing to do with me. A hailstorm that knocked down the wheat, or a drought — what the hell? Whose fault? It wasn’t God’s no more than mine so I let him out of it. I knew I was in it all on my own. Then after a while it got better, year by year. We paid off the farm and the new machines. You were in school then, in town. And when we went into the church they said hello to us sometimes, because we outlasted them hillbillies by ten years. And now Mike ain’t doing bad on his own place, got a nice car, and me and Bill get enough out of the farm so it ain’t too bad, I mean it ain’t too bad. But it wasn’t money I wanted!”

He was staring at her. She saw something in his face that mixed with the buzzing of the hornets and fascinated her so that she could not move, could not even try to tease him into smiling too. “It wasn’t never money I wanted,” he said.

“Pa, why don’t we go home?”

“I don’t know what it was, exactly,” he said, still squatting. His hands touched the ground idly. “I tried to think of it, last night when you called and all night long and driving in to town, today. I tried to think of it.”

“I guess I’m awful tired from that bus. I… I don’t feel good,” Helen said.

“Why did you leave with that man?”

“What? Oh,” she said, touching the tip of one of the weeds, “I met him at Paul’s cousin’s place, where they got that real nice tavern and a dance hall…”

“Why did you run away with him?”

“I don’t know, I told you in the letter. I wrote it to you, Pa. He acted so nice and liked me so, he still does, he loves me so much… And he was always so sad and tired, he made me think of… you, Pa… but not really, because he’s not strong like you and couldn’t ever do work like you. And if he loved me that much I had to go with him.”

“Then why did you come back?”

“Come back?” Helen tried to smile out across the water. Sluggish, ugly water, this river that disappointed everyone, so familiar to her that she could not really get used to a house without a river or a creek somewhere behind it, flowing along night and day: perhaps that was what she had missed in the city?

“I came back because… because…”

And she shredded the weed in her cold fingers, but no words came to her. She watched them fall. No words came to her, her mind had turned hollow and cold, she had come too far down to this river bank but it was not a mistake any more than the way the river kept moving was a mistake; it just happened.

Her father got slowly to his feet and she saw in his hand a knife she had been seeing all her life. Her eyes seized upon it and her mind tried to remember: where had she seen it last, whose was it, her father’s or her brother’s? He came to her and touched her shoulder as if waking her, and they looked at each other, Helen so terrified by now that she was no longer afraid but only curious with the mute marble-like curiosity of a child, and her father stern and silent until a rush of hatred transformed his face into a mass of wrinkles, the skin mottled red and white. He did not raise the knife but slammed it into her chest, up to the hilt, so that his whitened fist struck her body and her blood exploded out upon it.

Afterward, he washed the knife in the dirty water and put it away. He squatted and looked out over the river, then his thighs began to ache and he sat on the ground, a few feet from her body. He sat there for hours as if waiting for some idea to come to him. Then the water began to darken, very slowly, and the sky darkened a little while later, as if belonging to another, separate time, the same thing as always, and he had to turn his mind with an effort to the next thing he must do.