Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, dusk when Daddy arrived at last at my school. I had not given up waiting for him and yet it was a shock to me to see my father in the dark-coppery Caddie Seville as I’d last seen him a few days before. So this is real after all! Daddy is real.

Much of that day he’d been drinking. Now it was 4:40 P.M., he’d been drinking since late morning both whiskey and ale. He hadn’t slept for several days in succession. He’d made his decision.

“Krista sweetheart! Climb in.”

Quickly I ran to the new-looking Caddie Seville. Maybe I was being observed by some of my classmates—envied, I would have thought.

She has a father. He came to pick her up. Classy car!

Smelling whiskey on Daddy’s breath as he leaned over to hug me hard enough to knock the breath from me. I laughed excitedly, I loved Daddy’s whiskey-breath, Daddy’s stubbly chin.

“I knew you’d be here, Puss. Sorry I’m late. I had business to attend to. Now I’m clear. I knew you’d be the one not to let me down.”

We drove out of the parking lot. I saw that there was a change in my father since the last time I’d seen him: he was still wearing the suede jacket but it looked soiled, even torn. His graying-red hair was disheveled as if he’d been sleeping and had not combed it. His face was ravaged and yet radiant and his eyes were bleary, bloodshot yet alert and alive. Eddy Diehl was a desperate man but he was a righteous man. In history we’d been learning about John Brown the Abolitionist leader, the “bloodthirsty madman” reviled by others who’d sacrificed his life for a principle. He had been hanged, he’d become a martyr for the sake of ending slavery in the United States. In our textbook the photograph of John Brown resembled my father, I thought.

“From now on, it’s you and me, Krista. I need my girl with me.”

And I said, blinded by happiness Yes!

“But if you come with me now, see?—you can’t go back to her. You can’t go back to any of them, you will be with me.”

And I said, blinded by happiness Oh yes!

“Because she would never have you back. Your mother would never want to see you again.”

And I said I know this, oh Daddy this is what I want too.

At the Days Inn, he showed me the gun.

Calmly removing it from a duffel bag, where it was wrapped inside a white cotton T-shirt. The duffel bag—soiled, adorned with mysterious seals and insignia as if it had originally belonged to someone else—he’d set carefully onto the bed, to unzip. As his boyish grin unzipped in his battered face part-shy part-boastful. And his quickened breath.

A gun! A handgun! Many times I’d seen rifles up close, .22-caliber rifles, and boys’ air rifles: Ben had one, my father had bought him when he was twelve. And there was my grandfather’s shotgun, he’d used to hunt pheasants when he’d been younger, Ben and I were warned never to touch.

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