Free After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates

Cabinetmaker
    39 S Main, Yarrow Lake

    On a map of Yarrow Lake and vicnity I locate Deer Isle Road north of town. This isn’t an area of Yarrow Lake that I know. My aunt and my uncle don’t seem to have any friends there. On a Saturday afternoon in early October, kind of windy-blustery and threatening rain, I bicycle approximately a mile and a half to Deer Isle Road and another half mile to locate Crow’s house, which surprises me. It’s in a mostly rural area of small wood-frame houses and shanties, mobile homes propped up on cement blocks, ramshackle old farmhouses like Crow’s, which is set back from the road on a long rutted lane, partly hidden behind a stand of scrubby pines. This time of autumn in New Hampshire, sumac is blazing crimson, goldenrod is blazing in the fields, when the sun is shining it’s a kind of dazzling-beautiful setting, but today is sunshine, then clouds, more sunshine and more clouds, windy and unpredictable. At the front of Crow’s property is a pasture in which a single swaybacked gray-speckled horse is grazing, her only companion a black goat with a wispy beard. Straddling my bicycle at the end of the rutted driveway, I see the horse and the goat eyeing me with interest. I’m hoping that Crow doesn’t suddenly appear in the lane or come up behind me on Deer Isle Road.
    “So this is where you live. Crow.”
    Deer Isle is a romantic name for the potholed blacktop country road leading out of town, away from the upscale neighborhoods near Yarrow Lake. Crow lives in what is called the foothills of the White Mountains. Poor whites comes to me, a term I’ve heard frequently since coming to live in New Hampshire. Worse, trailer trash .
    At Tarrytown Day almost everyone came from the same sort of background though there were rich girls, even “really rich” girls, among us. At Yarrow High it’s surprising how there is such a mixture: jocks, preppies, nerds/dorks, “trailer trash.”

    Crow’s family doesn’t live in a trailer, but this Deer Isle Road is trailer territory. I’m thinking, You’re poor! You don’t matter.
    I’m ashamed to be thinking this way. I wasn’t brought up by my mother to think this way. But Crow hurt me, I need to be avenged. This is a crude kind of revenge, but it’s all I have.
    By this time the shaggy black goat has trotted to the fence to peer at me closely. His eyes are a luminous gray-glimmering with irises like thin black rods. So strange! Suddenly he opens his jaws and emits a loud bossy baaa ing, shoving his snout through the fence in my direction. Like saying, Hey, I’m hungry. Feed me. To my alarm, the mare is approaching the fence, too. Back at the farmhouse somebody could be observing.
    “Oh, I don’t have anything for you. I’m sorry!”
    Hurriedly I pedal away. Don’t want to be seen. Behind me comes a loud baa-baa-baa ing like disappointment.
     
    I’m halfway back home when the sky darkens and rain begins to pelt down. By the time I turn onto Plymouth Street, my flannel shirt and sweater, my jeans, my sailor cap are soaked. But I’m smiling. Don’t know why, I’m smiling. When I come dripping into the kitchen, Aunt Caroline scolds: “Jenna, where on earth have you been? Becky said you went out on your bicycle but—why now? When we invite you to come bicycling with us, on beautiful days, you’re ‘too busy.’ When it rains, there you go.”
    Aunt Caroline isn’t scolding exactly. All this while she’s dabbing at my wet hair with a towel.
    “I was going to visit a friend out in the country,” I tell her, breathless. “Except it started raining, so I had to turn back.”

16
    “Know what they are, those bikers? Trailer-trash meth heads.”
    These words erupt from Ryan Moeller so vehemently I’m taken by surprise. I know what crystal meth is, but I pretend not to so that Ryan will tell me. She’s a big-boned girl with a broad freckled face and a penchant for moral indignation that seems to mark her as older somehow, though