Little Bird of Heaven Page 3

  (Was this so? Neither Ben nor I had any idea. Photographs of our young parents showed two strikingly attractive individuals: a very pretty round-faced girl with a cheerleader-smile, glamorous teased hair and a sizable bust straining against silk “designer” blouses; a tall broad-shouldered rust-red-haired young man with a jaw like a mallet, wary eyes and a sly half-smile very like the signature smile of the young Elvis Presley. Neither Ben nor I would have wished to acknowledge what seemed obvious if you studied these photos, especially a wedding photo in which the groom’s husky arm is slung about the bride’s shoulders all but crushing her against him, the groom’s large male hand cupped about the bride’s bare upper arm beneath a white lace stole, and the thumb of that hand unobtrusively pressing against, very likely rubbing against, the sweet fatty talcumed flesh of the bride’s right breast. Sex! Our parents! That was it.)

  Over those eighteen years, Lucille had gained weight. And then, during the eighteen months preceding her divorce, Lucille had lost weight. Her moon-shaped face that had been such a pretty girl’s face well into her thirties became ravaged, cruelly lined; she’d lost weight too quickly for her skin to shrink, there were loose pockets and pouches of skin everywhere on her body she took pains to keep hidden. But Lucille had the sort of features that took well to make-up, still she could exude an aura of small-town glamour. She never left the house without dressing presentably: “primping.” She never left the house without fresh-applied lipstick. Not long after the divorce—in September 1984, on the very Tuesday public schools began classes—Lucille had her hair cut and restyled and “lightened” and overnight those single steely hairs like nails had vanished, to her adolescent daughter’s immense relief.

  Naively Ben said: “Mom looks different today, you notice?”

  “Maybe she was smiling.”

  “Ha-ha,” Ben said, in a way meant to convey heavy sarcasm. In all things having to do with my mother Ben flared up quickly, he hated our father for how our father had hurt our mother, thus had to love our mother blindly, without judgment and without nuance. If I persisted in criticizing Lucille, Ben had been known to punch me.

  Not that Lucille smiled, much. Not at home.

  Away from home, yes Lucille smiled. Returning to church—the First Presbyterian Church of Sparta, a grim triangle-shaped limestone structure that made my heart clutch like a fist, in adolescent resistance each time I was dragged into it—and to her “old, best friends” she’d “all but lost” while married to Eddy Diehl who “hadn’t any patience with nice people.”

  Boring people, Mom meant. Nice boring kind-Christian women whose boring husbands hadn’t left them, not yet. Or anyway so far as anyone knew. Yet.

  “Krista, Hilda Smith’s daughter Pearl—you must know her, she’s in your class at school?—belongs to Sparta Christian Youth Alliance—they have the most wonderful summer campground at Lake George, Hilda was telling me. I told her I’d speak to you….”

  O.K., Mom. You’ve spoken to me.

  “We need to put this behind us, Krista. This ugliness. Like an earthquake, or a flood, you’re in shock but then, you know, you galvanize. You come alive. The idea of the Gospels is—‘Good news is possible.’”

  Lucille spoke with a hard gritty optimism like one grinding away with her teeth at something lodged in her mouth—some careless taking-in of a substance not quite edible, grindable. But she would grind it down, she would swallow it. If you weren’t careful she would make you swallow it, too.

  The Herkimer County order of restraint against Edward Diehl had originally been issued in April 1984 and since that time reissued at least once. By this order Edward Diehl was forbidden to approach his (ex)-wife Lucille and his children Benjamin and Krista in any public or private place; he was forbidden to come closer than one hundred feet of any of them; he was forbidden to “trespass” on the Huron Pike Road property that he himself had purchased with a thirty-year mortgage, twelve years before. Of course he dared not approach the house, nor even make telephone calls to the house, which he’d partly remodeled and in which he’d executed so much carpentry over a period of years. (In an extravagant and reckless gesture my father had simply deeded the property over to my mother—“The least he could do,” my mother said bitterly.)

  In the months following the divorce, so far as we knew, Daddy lived in Sparta with friends, or relatives; Daddy may even have been taken in by a woman friend; for there were many who knew Eddy Diehl well, who’d gone to high school with him, and been drinking-friends of his, scarcely known to Lucille or to us. These people—mostly men but not exclusively men—were convinced that Eddy Diehl hadn’t done what it was claimed by others that he had done, committed an act of murder: “homicide.” They would not cease to believe in Eddy Diehl’s innocence even after he’d been taken into Sparta police custody, even when it was leaked to the media that he’d “failed” a polygraph test; even when his picture began to appear in local papers and on local TV news in the company of the other “prime suspect” in the case, the father of a classmate of a Sparta man uncannily resembling Eddy Diehl in age, height, physical type.

  SUSPECTS IN KRULLER HOMICIDE QUESTIONED BY POLICE

  THOUGH MY MOTHER HAD had our telephone number changed, and removed from the directory, yet my father managed to acquire the number as if by magic, and called us. Sometimes when one of us answered he didn’t speak: you listened and heard only a crackling sort of silence, like flames about to erupt. Timidly I said, “Daddy? Is that—you?” but Daddy would not answer, nor would Daddy hang up the phone; at such times I did not know what to do, for I loved my father very much, and was frightened of him; I had been made to be frightened of him; among the Bauers it was whispered that he was a brute, a murderer. And there were many in Sparta who believed yes, my father was a brute, a murderer. If Ben answered his voice went shrill, he was furious, half-sobbing: “We don’t want you to call us, Dad,” but Ben’s voice weakened when he uttered Dad, though he’d steeled himself not to say Dad, yet Dad had come out. Once when I picked up the phone expecting to hear my friend Nancy’s voice instead the voice was a man’s, low and gravelly: “Krista? Just this, honey: I love you.” On trembling legs I stood in the kitchen dazed and blinking as the voice continued, “Is your mother nearby? Is she listening?” and I could not manage to answer, my throat had closed tight, “Don’t hang up yet, honey. Just want you to know I love—” but the look in my face was a signal to my mother, with an angry little cry Mom took the receiver from me and slammed it down without a word.

  So that the phone could not ring again, Mom removed the receiver from the hook.

  “How dare he! He’s been warned! I should call the police….”

  We could not sit down to our dinner! We were too excited to eat.

  My mother insisted, we must eat. We must not be upset by him, he must not have such power over us. Numbly we sat at the table, we passed platters of the food that my mother and I had prepared together, we tried not to see where my father stood brooding and smoking in a corner of the kitchen.

  My mouth was too dry, I could not chew or swallow. “Maybe he just wants to…” Numbly I spoke, my words were barely audible.

  In her cool calm voice my mother said, “No, Krista. It’s over.”

  And there were the times, how many times we had no idea, when my father drove past the house; when my father cruised slowly past the house, pausing at the end of the driveway; when my father dared to park at the side of the road, in a stand of straggly trees, not visible from the house. Word sometimes came back to us, from relatives. One of my mother’s cousins called. Virtually all of the Diehls supported Edward, their Eddy; the Bauers were less sure. (There was a split among the Bauers, in fact. Those who believed that Lucille’s husband might have been unfaithful to her, but not that he’d killed that woman: not Eddy! And those who believed yes, Eddy Diehl was capable of murder, if he’d been drunk enough. And angry, and jealous enough.) I knew that my father was close by because, some nights, I could feel his pres
ence. I could hear his voice Krista? Krissie? Where’s my Puss? I’m coming to get my little Krissie-puss. There was a sensation inside my head like fire about to erupt, crystal glass about to be shattered. Almost unbearable excitement like the terrible thrill of a vehicle made to speed too fast for the road, the spinning basketball aimed at your unprotected face: that instant before the ball hits, and your nose spurts blood.

  When I was thirteen, that Christmas when there’d been so much snowfall we were snowed in, and Herkimer County snowplows and tow trucks were on the Huron Pike Road through the night, that Christmas morning there was a vehicle parked at the end of the drive—just barely visible from my bedroom window—a pickup truck, it seemed to be—I saw a male figure climb out, and I saw this figure shoveling the end of our driveway where the snowplows had heaped up ridges of icy snow—at first I thought it must be someone from the county, though this wasn’t part of the usual snowplowing service—then I realized it had to be my father, coming to shovel out the end of the driveway as he’d always done after a heavy snowfall, when he’d lived with us.

  And where was my father living then? Not in Sparta, I think—he must have made the drive early Christmas morning, in treacherous weather conditions, for this purpose.

  Neither my mother nor Ben ever knew, I never told them. That the end of the driveway wasn’t blocked as usual must have made no distinct impression on my mother, when she drove her car out.

  Another time, a more careless/desperate time he’d parked at the end of the driveway, very likely he’d been drinking and so forgot to switch off his headlights and Ben happened to notice from an upstairs window and shouted to my mother: “It’s him, Mom! Damn bastard, I hate him!”

  In a panic my mother called the number the Herkimer County sheriff had given her for such emergencies and within minutes a squad car careened along Huron Pike Road with a flashing red light like on TV—unresisting, Eddy Diehl was arrested, taken away in handcuffs and in the morning his car was towed away.

  Why Lucille declined to press charges, she would not explain.

  It’s over.”

  He was gone, then. Except: one afternoon months later again he was sighted driving slowly past the small shopping center where my mother had begun part-time work at the Second Time ’Round Shop—a “consignment” shop to which women brought no-longer-wanted clothing to be resold; he was sighted in the parking lot at the rear, just sitting in the car, smoking, possibly drinking; it would turn out, he’d told one of his Diehl cousins that he was wanting “just to see her, from a distance”—“not even to try to talk”—but Lucille didn’t appear, and after an hour or so he drove away.

  It was Daddy’s statement made frequently to relatives, meant to be conveyed to Lucille: “She knows that I love her and the kids. That isn’t going to change. However she feels about me, I can accept it.”

  SPARTA RESIDENT DIEHL, 42,

  RELEASED FROM POLICE CUSTODY

  “NO CHARGES AT THIS TIME”

  Because my mother prowled in my room in my absence—I knew! I’d set devious Mom-traps in my sock-and-undies drawer and in my clothes closet—I kept my cache of clippings about my father in a school notebook, carried back and forth in my backpack. This clipping, from the Sparta Journal for April 29, 1983, commemorated the final time Edward Diehl’s photograph would appear prominently on the front page of that paper.

  For that reason, and for the reason that it so clearly stated that Edward Diehl had been released from police custody, for lack of evidence linking him to the murder of Zoe Kruller, this clipping was precious to me.

  Not that I failed to note—no one could fail to note, who was even skimming the article—the begrudging No Charges at This Time.

  The conspicuous omission of Suspect Cleared.

  Edward Diehl had been in police custody more than once, more than twice, possibly more than three times. He’d been identified—numberless times!—as one of the prime suspects; yet he’d never been arrested. (Another man, the murdered woman’s husband, had been arrested—but later released.) It was a season of misery and public humiliation for all of the Diehls, the Bauers, and their friends; for Ben and me, having to go to school where everyone seemed to know more about our father—our father and a woman named Zoe Kruller, who’d been “murdered”—“strangled in her bed”—than we did. For months the police investigation continued, very like a net being dragged in one direction and then in another, a nightmare net trapping all in its path, as virtually anyone who knew my father was “interviewed,” often more than once. After a year, two years, several years this case was still open; by November 1987, no one had been definitively arrested, and the name Zoe Kruller had vanished from the newspaper; Edward Diehl was no longer a prime suspect, evidently—yet no public announcement had ever been made by Sparta police or by the county prosecutor that Edward Diehl’s name had been cleared.

  My mother never spoke of the case any longer. Like a woman who has endured a ravaging cancer, and managed to survive, she would not speak of what had almost killed her, and became white-faced with fury if anyone tried to bring it up. Lucille, d’you mind my asking how is—

  Yes. I do mind. Please.

  At the time, I had not been told much about what my mother and her family chose to call the trouble. I was believed to be an overly sensitive, excitable girl and so, more than my brother Ben, I was to be spared. But I knew that my father, who was no longer living with us, was a suspect in a local murder case, that he’d had to hire a lawyer, and in time he’d had to fire that lawyer and hire another lawyer; and, inevitably, he’d come to owe both lawyers thousands of dollars more than he could have hoped to pay them; for he was obliged to continue to support his family, which meant my mother, my brother, and me; and he’d lost his job at Sparta Construction, Inc. where he’d worked since the age of twenty, first as a carpenter’s assistant, then as a carpenter, then he’d been promoted to foreman/manager by his employer who was also his friend or had been his friend until he’d been taken into police custody.

  All these facts, I knew. Though no one had told me openly.

  The trouble was as good a way as any of pointing to what had happened. The trouble that has come into our lives my mother would say, as Daddy would say The trouble that has come into my life.

  Like lightning from the sky. A catastrophe from out there.

  When he’d been released from police custody for the second and final time—in late April 1983—my father was told that he was free to leave Sparta, and so he moved to Watertown, sixty miles to the north on the St. Lawrence River, where he got a job as a roofer; then he moved to Buffalo, two hundred miles to the west, where he worked construction. There was a time he lived in the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, working for a logging company. And later, we heard he had a job with Beechum County, which was adjacent to Herkimer—snow removal, highway construction. In our lives my father appeared, and disappeared; and again appeared, and disappeared. He sent birthday cards to Ben and me—though never quite in time for our birthdays. He sent Christmas cards to LUCILLE, BENJAMIN & KRISTA DIEHL, R.D. # 3, HURON PIKE RD., SPARTA N.Y. signed in a large childlike scrawl LOVE, DADDY. Sometimes just LOVE DADDY. (These cards I scavenged from the trash where my mother had thrown them, to hide away in my secret Daddy-notebook.)

  There came months of silence. No one spoke of Eddy Diehl, no one seemed to know where he was. But one evening the phone would ring and if our mother answered it we’d hear a sharp intake of breath and then Mom’s steely response: “No. It’s over. It’s finished. No more.”

  If Ben answered, quickly he’d hang up the phone. White-faced and quivering Ben slammed out of the room—“That sick, sorry bastard. Why doesn’t he let us alone.”

  If I answered—if Mom wasn’t there to hear me, and to snatch away the receiver—Daddy and I might talk, a little. Awkwardly, eagerly. My voice was tremulous and low-pitched and my heart beat hard hard hard like the wings of that little bird of heaven in the song Zoe Kruller once sang.


  6

  “KRISTA. CLIMB IN.”

  Outside, at the rear exit of the school, Daddy’s car was waiting.

  A vehicle unknown to me, I was sure I’d never seen before. A shiny expanse of dark-coppery metallic finish, gleaming chrome fixtures, new-looking, you might say flashy-looking, with whitewall tires and hubcaps like roulette wheels: one of Eddy Diehl’s specialty-autos.

  These were purchases of secondhand cars of some distinction which Daddy would rebuild or “customize”—drive for a while, and resell, presumably at a profit. They were older-vintage cars—Caddies, Lincolns, Olds—or newer-vintage Thunderbirds, Corvettes, Stingrays, Mustangs, Barracudas; they were mysteriously acquired through a friend of a friend needing money suddenly, or bankruptcy sales, police auctions. Through my childhood these specialty-autos were both thrilling and fraught with peril for the purchases upset my mother even as they were wonderful surprises for my brother and me. Typical of Daddy to simply arrive home with a new car, without warning or explanation. There in the doorway stood Daddy rattling car keys, with his foxy-Daddy grin: “Look out in the driveway. Who wants a ride?”

  We did! Ben and me! We adored our unpredictable Daddy!

  It was like that now, this abruptness. My father showing up at school, in the gym. And now here. The demand that if you loved him you leapt unquestioning into the happiness that Eddy Diehl was offering you—otherwise the foxy-smile would cease abruptly, a hard cruel light would come into the narrowed eyes.

  Without thinking—not a glimmer of caution—Do I want this? Where will he take me? What will happen to me?—nor recalling that my mother expected me home as usual within forty minutes, in this season in which dusk came early, before 5 P.M.—I climbed into the passenger’s seat of this impressive vehicle my father was driving and dropped my backpack onto the floor.