Little Bird of Heaven Read online

  In retrospect it appears inevitable, and awful. At the time it seems just haphazard.

  How Daddy was gone from our household and living with his brother in East Sparta and one day Ben said meanly, “If he’s gone thirteen days he’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”

  Zoe Kruller was not a name to be uttered in our household. Yet Zoe Kruller was a name uttered everywhere in Sparta.

  On the Sparta radio station local DJ’s were playing songs by Black River Breakdown. Zoe Kruller’s unmistakable voice—throaty, intimate, just-this-side-of-teasing—was suddenly everywhere. The most popular Zoe Kruller songs were “Footprints in the Snow”—the words of which had an eerie prescience, describing what appears to be the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman—

  I traced her little footprints in the snow

  I found her little footprints in the snow

  Now she’s up in heaven she’s with the angel band

  I know I’m going to meet her in that promised land

  I found her little footprints in the snow

  and “Little Bird of Heaven” which was my favorite, and I guess it was Daddy’s favorite too since it was the one Daddy played most often when he was driving one of his vehicles. Zoe Kruller’s voice was airy and playful in this song but melancholy too, you’d find yourself drawing in a breath and biting back a little cry, these words were so beautiful—

  Well love they tell me is a fragile thing

  It’s hard to fly on broken wings

  I lost my ticket to the promised land

  Little bird of heaven right here in my hand.

  So toss it up or pass it round

  Pay no mind to what you’re carryin’ round

  Or keep it close, hold it while you can

  There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

  In Sparta it came to be thought that Zoe Kruller had left a message—“a nest of clues”—in this song. Especially by girls and women it was thought that Zoe had “named her murderer” in the song and if you listened closely, or wrote the lyrics down and took note of the first letters, or the last letters, of each line, you would know who the man was.

  Fallen hearts and fallen leaves

  Starlings light on the broken trees

  I find we all need a place to land

  There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

  In Mom’s car we were driving and there came breathy and urgent in our ears amid gushing heat from the heater—for it was a vicious-windy March morning—the murdered woman’s voice Little bird of heaven right here in your hand—and with a cry my mother switched off the radio.

  “Her! That terrible woman.”

  Why is Zoe Kruller a terrible woman?

  Is it because Zoe Kruller is a slut?

  And does a terrible-slut woman deserve to die?

  No one could understand why Black River Breakdown had never made a commercial record, never had a contract with a New York City or Los Angeles recording agency, or been invited to perform outside the Adirondack region. Now their girl-singer had been murdered, the dazed little band of musicians found themselves touched with a kind of lurid tabloid glamour like a spotlight beamed into their faces. The fiddler, who was the group’s oldest musician, at forty-six, had gone into hiding and refused to be interviewed by the media except to say he’d known Zoe Kruller “since she’d been the prettiest baby you could imagine”—while the young guitarist with his Elvis sideburns and shoulder-length hair turned up anywhere you’d look—on late-afternoon local TV, in the “entertainment features” pages of the Sparta Journal facing the comic strips, baring his soul saying he hadn’t slept a night since Zoe was murdered, he hoped to God the police would find whoever did this, and fast; he was composing a ballad in memory of Zoe he hoped he and the group could perform sometime soon….

  This newspaper article, and others, I would keep in my notebook, in secret. Seeming to know This will be with me all my life. This will change my life.

  No one had been murdered in Sparta, or in all of Herkimer County, for a long time: nine years. If you didn’t count—as the media did not—several killings at the Seneca Indian reservation designated manslaughter which had been settled without trials and publicity. And rarely had anyone in Herkimer County been murdered in such a way: in the victim’s residence, in her bed, to be discovered on a Sunday morning by her own son.

  The previous murder, in Sparta, had been during a robbery at the Sunoco station on route 31; before that, a homeless man had been hammered to death by another homeless man, in a Sparta shelter. Both killers had been identified and arrested by police within a day or two.

  How different this was—The murderer of Zoe Kruller remains at large.

  And—Suspects but no arrests yet, Sparta detectives decline to comment.

  We were frightened but we were thrilled, too. We were made to come home directly from school and our mothers drove us places where just recently we’d had to walk or, in warmer weather, to ride our bicycles. We could not know it—perhaps in a way we did know it, we sensed it—and this was part of the thrill—that this interlude would mark a turn in our lives as in the small-city life of Sparta, a sense that We will not be safe again, there is no one to protect us always.

  Boys were allowed more freedom than girls, of course. This was always the case but now more than ever for whoever had killed Zoe Kruller had to be a man and this man would not wish to kill a boy or another man, only a woman or a girl. Even a child of eleven understood this logic.

  Girls were warned always to be wary of strangers. Never be talked into climbing into a stranger’s car, never reply to a stranger, never make eye contact with a stranger, if a stranger approaches you, run!

  Or: it might be someone you know. Not a stranger but an acquaintance. An adult man.

  For whoever had killed Zoe Kruller, it was believed that he had known her and that she had let him into her residence willingly. One of Zoe Kruller’s male companions.

  Or, Mrs. Kruller’s husband Delray.

  Sometimes identified as her estranged husband Delray.

  In a dictionary in our school library I looked up estranged. There was an exotic sound to this word, that contained the more familiar strange inside it like something blunt and commonplace—a pebble, say—inside a colored Easter egg.

  Separated, divided, hostile, alienated, indifferent, severed, sunder: estranged.

  “Is Daddy ‘estranged’ from us?”—with the cruel simulated naivete of the very young I dared to ask my mother this question one evening when Daddy had been gone from the house for a week; I saw the wincing hurt in my mother’s face; how I escaped being slapped across the mouth, I don’t know.

  How exciting our lives had become, so quickly! Breathless and unpredictable and yet the excitement left behind a sick sensation like that you felt on a roller coaster when you were a young child: you’d thought you had wanted this, you had clamored and begged for this, but maybe you had not wanted it, not this. You’d wanted to be frightened, and you’d wanted to be thrilled; you’d wanted something to rush through you like an electric current; you’d wanted to scream in an ecstasy of panic but maybe—maybe you had not really wanted this.

  And maybe by the time you realized, it was too late.

  “Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”

  Already my mother had spoken with Ben, when he’d come home from school. I’d heard his sharp raised voice and then he slammed out of the house and Mom called after him just once, a sharp little cry like a shot bird,

  “Benjamin!”

  From a window I saw Ben running stooped over, in the slanted sunshine of late afternoon, without his jacket. My stricken brother stomping through foot-high snow to the old barn, a short distance behind the two-car garage my father had built adjoining our house; the barn was used for storage and as a second garage for my father’s succession of vehicles. I saw Ben’s breath turn to vapor as he ran. I thought that I might not have recognized Ben runnin
g in that way, like something wounded, looking younger than his age, smaller.

  From the upstairs hallway, I saw this. I’d hurried upstairs as soon as I came home from school, I’d brought my after-school snack with me—a bowl of cereal, with milk and raisins—so that I could begin my homework while I ate. The cereal was bite-sized shredded wheat; it had to be eaten quickly or it would become soggy, sodden like mush, and the milk would become discolored, and what should have been delicious would become faintly nauseating, an effort to eat.

  I was beginning to realize that all that I loved to eat—my special childhood treats like Honeystone’s ice-cream cones—could very easily turn nauseating, disgusting.

  Since my father had moved out of the house I’d become susceptible to wild bouts of hunger. Especially in the afternoons, after the strain of school. I would devour a bowl of cereal like a starving animal. A childish elation came over me as if nothing else mattered except this: eating.

  By which I meant solitary eating. Not at mealtimes. Not with my mother and Ben. With Daddy missing from his place at the end of the table, I’d come to hate mealtimes. I would eat standing in front of the opened refrigerator, I would eat sitting on the lower steps of the stairs, I would eat in my room or even in the bathroom, my mouth flooding with saliva. As quickly now at the little desk in my room—a desk Daddy had built for me from smooth whorled oak wood, left over from a construction site—I tried to spoon the shredded wheat into my mouth, before my mother called me as I knew she would.

  First Ben, then Krista. There had to be some logic in our mother’s cruelty.

  Half-choking I swallowed chunks of shredded wheat, milk. Thinking I don’t know yet. What Ben knows, I don’t know.

  “Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”

  My mother stood at the foot of the stairs calling to me. Her voice was sharp as a knife-blade, I could see it glittering, I wanted to run away, to hide! But I was not a small child any longer, I was eleven years old.

  I could not have said if I was mature for my age, or immature. I may have looked younger than eleven but I felt older. I was the girl on the school bus who when the other, older girls shivered and shuddered whispering of That awful thing that was done to Zoe Kruller worse than being strangled sat very still and silent and seemed not to hear.

  When I came downstairs, my mother had returned to the dining room where she’d been seated at the drop-leaf cherrywood table which was a “family heirloom” always covered by a tablecloth. The dining room was a room rarely used, and then mostly on holidays. For privacy Mom had brought the kitchen phone into this room, on an extension. These were days before portable phones and cell phones and you were bound to a socket outlet and an extension cord. It was startling to see on the dining room table so many manila folders: financial statements, insurance policies, receipts and income tax forms, scattered official-looking letters, papers.

  “Mom? What’s all these things?”

  “Sit down, Krista. Never mind these things.”

  “But—”

  “Wipe your mouth, Krista, for heaven’s sake! It looks like you’ve been lapping milk. I said, sit down.”

  I hated the dining room chairs, that were so special. Hard cushions and wicker backs that weren’t comfortable, nothing like the worn vinyl kitchen chairs. Our family meals were always in the kitchen and the dining room was used only for special occasions, occasions of forced festivity arranged by my mother and her family to celebrate birthdays, holidays. There was an inflexible schedule by which Christmas eve, Christmas day, Thanksgiving, and Easter were rotated among my mother and her relatives.

  Daddy had used to tease Mom about the tablecloth: What’s the point of cherrywood if no one can see it?—and Mom had said what if someone left a glass ring, a stain or a burn on the table, this was a risk she couldn’t take.

  Since Daddy had gone to live with his brother Earl, Mom had become busy as we’d never seen her before. Always she was bustling about the house, up and down stairs; always she was on the phone. Bauer relatives came to see her every day, in the dining room with doors slid shut. There were several women friends who smiled grimly at me and looked as if they’d like to hug me against their droopy bosoms except I ducked away.

  A hawk-faced man in a suit and necktie Mom introduced to Ben and me as “my accountant.” Another man in a suit and tie—“Mr. Nagel, my lawyer.”

  Lawyer. I didn’t want to think what this might mean.

  Estranged. Separated. Divorced….

  “Krista? I want you to listen carefully—”

  With an awkward sort of tenderness my mother took hold of my chill squirmy hands. She was speaking in a quiet voice which was unsettling to me, a wrong-sounding voice, a forced voice, a voice in which something pleading quivered, though less than an hour ago I’d heard her on the phone speaking sharply, punctuating her words with bursts of what sounded like laughter. I wanted to shut my ears against her, thinking with childish stubbornness Daddy will come back and change all this. Anything that is being done, Daddy will change back to what it should be. Both Ben and I had noticed that our mother’s eyes had a weird glassy sheen for lately she’d been taking prescription medications to help her sleep and to settle her nerves. Not wanting to see Mom’s eyes I stared at our hands, locked so strangely together. As if we were in some dangerous place, on a rocky height for instance, it was our instinct to clutch at each other, in fear. And yet the fear I felt was for my mother. For those glassy red-rimmed eyes and for the smeared-lipstick mouth that might tell me something very ugly I would not wish to hear.

  Here was a surprising thing: my mother had removed her rings.

  The “white gold” engagement ring with the single square-cut small diamond, and the matching wedding band she said she didn’t think she could force off her finger any longer, she’d gained so much weight. These were gone, I had never seen my mother’s fingers without rings before.

  Something was trying to make me remember it: a smile tugged at my lips.

  A long-ago Daddy-game when I’d been a little girl. Daddy had hidden my hands inside his big-Daddy hands pretending they were lost, he couldn’t find them.

  Where are Puss’s little paws? Who’s seen Puss’s paws? Anybody seen two lost paws?

  “Why are you smiling, Krista? Is something funny?”

  Quickly I told my mother no. Nothing was funny.

  “I’m glad that someone thinks something is funny. Yes, that’s good to know.”

  When my mother was angry she pretended to be hurt. If you didn’t apologize immediately, and repeat your apology several times, my mother would become angry.

  I told her no nothing was funny. I wasn’t smiling. But I was sorry that I was smiling, if I was smiling.

  My mother drew a deep breath. My mother squeezed my chill squirmy hands as if to keep me from running away.

  “Well, Krista! You know that your father has been staying with your uncle Earl. And maybe you know that your father has been ‘cooperating’ with the Sparta police detectives who are investigating”—my mother’s brave voice began to falter, I couldn’t raise my eyes to her face—“the death of—that woman—the one who was hurt—Mrs. Kruller—you know who she is. Who she was. The one who was—killed.” My mother paused, and drew another deep breath. A vein pulsed in her throat like a frantic little blue worm. “They—the police—haven’t caught him yet—the one who hurt her—Mrs. Kruller—but they will. But, Krista, I wanted to tell you—and Ben—that your father has been—he has ‘cooperated’ with the police—he has told the police—first, he told me—that he had been a—a ‘close friend’ of that woman’s. And he had visited her where she was living…sometimes.” Now my mother was speaking in rapid little bursts and pauses, like one who is running, whose breath comes in pants; like one whose heartbeat has become erratic. She was squeezing my hands to make me wince. “He—your father—had told police at first that he hadn’t visited her—not for a long time—and that they weren’t friends—they had not
been friends for a long time—a few years ago yes, but not recently—this is what he’d told the police—and he had told me—but that was wrong of him because it wasn’t true—and it was wrong of him because the police would find out—because he should have known the police would find out—the police are questioning everyone who knew that woman and her family and everyone who worked with her or lived by her or any of the Krullers—any of that family—they are questioning them all, and so it was a mistake for your father to lie to them. Your father lied to the police, Krista, and your father lied to me. He was afraid, he said. He wanted to protect his family, he said. But the mistake was he has made some people think—he has made the police think—that he might have had something to do with…”

  My mother paused, breathing rapidly. The little blue vein fluttered in her throat. Something oily glistened at her hairline. She was wearing her shapeless black stretch-band jersey slacks, a shirt with a twisted collar and a cardigan sweater buttoned crookedly to her neck. Her hair looked matted on one side as if she’d been sleeping on that side of her head and had not checked her reflection in the mirror.

  The glassy eyes stung with tears. Yet these were glass-tears, that could not gather and fall.

  “Well, Krista! You should be told: your father was there, at that woman’s house, on that day. I mean—it was a night, your father has confessed that he was there. He had denied it previously, he had “sworn”…. But now, he has confessed he was there in her ‘residence’ on West Ferry Street and I need to tell you and Ben because it will be revealed, on tonight’s news and in tomorrow’s papers it will be revealed, and everyone will know. So your father wants you to know, Krista. From me. He can’t talk to you now, he is in ‘police custody.’ He wants me to tell you. You and Ben. How sorry he is. How ashamed he is. Your father was at that woman’s house where he’d been to see her some other times, too, he is confessing now. But he says he was not there then—when she was hurt. She was hurt in a terrible way, Krista. She was hurt in a terrible way she did not deserve, Krista, because no one deserves to be hurt like that, not even a woman like Zoe Kruller. Your father says he doesn’t know who hurt her, he has no idea who hurt her, but it was not him. He had seen her, but this was hours before—it happened. He says it was four or five hours before, at least. He has said, he has sworn, this time he is telling the truth—that someone came to Mrs. Kruller’s residence after he’d left, and what happened to her—what was done to her—happened then.” My mother paused, wiping at her eyes. “Oh Krista, your father has sworn. He did not hurt that woman, he has sworn. And I believe him….”