Free We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

Guys exaggerate. They were all drunk. In the Mt. Ephraim Cemetery—wild! You can’t believe everything you hear. Della Rae Duncan went out with all kinds of guys including guys in their twenties, and older. Or it was her sister, or one of her sisters—the one with the baby. Baby pitch-black as tar. No, that’s the one that died. Wasn’t it a hole in the heart?
    On Monday morning we began to hear of it. First on the school bus, then at school. Nobody knew exactly. None of the younger kids knew. Their older brothers wouldn’t tell and it wasn’t clear if their older sisters knew: they’d frown, look away. There was the exciting promise something had happened which was a still more exciting promise somebody’s going to get into trouble. Either Della Rae Duncan had had something happen to her or she was going to get into trouble or both.
    Della Rae was one of the big girls on the bus. Fifteen years old and still in ninth grade. She wasn’t in special ed like a cousin of hers, a tall hulking boy with a harelip. Some of us believed she’d started off in special ed, in seventh grade possibly, but she was in regular ninth-grade classes now.
    Della Rae was a dirty girl we’d hear. It was just something you knew. There were certain dirty girls and Della Rae Duncan was one of them. Some of us thought that Della Rae was a dirty girl because her skin was dirty, and her clothes. Her skin looked stained, like wood. She was a short heavyset girl with sizable breasts. A bulldog face. Large thick-lidded eyes and a snaky scar on her swollen upper lip. She was almost nice-looking except she was ugly. She was shy except for her quick temper. She wore boys’ jeans and a khaki jacket every day through the winter and she smelled of woodsmoke and underarms. She smelled of the inside of a trailer that doesn’t get aired. Her hair was stiff with grease and fitted like a cap over her head, not like normal hair we thought. You could see it was black hair yet it didn’t look black exactly, more like it was coated with a thin film of dust.
    Della Rae wasn’t waiting for the school bus with the other kids at the trailer village, Monday morning. Nor Tuesday. Nor Wednesday. Thursday she was back again, same bulldog face. Dark-stained skin. Puffy-lidded eyes. That pea-colored jacket with a drawstring hood that looked like it’d been used to wipe hands on. Della Rae stared through us making her way to the back of the bus where she sat with another girl they said was part Indian or possibly part Negro. Or both.
    At the senior high there was talk, but only in secret. Whispering, sniggering. Guys told one another in the lavatories or at their lockers, heads bent, faces creasing in amazement, lewd grins. There was much laughter. There were expressions of incredulity. How many? How long? When? The girls, of course, knew nothing about it. Especially the nice girls knew nothing about it. They did not want to know for just to know of certain things was to be sullied by the knowledge. It was possible to pray sincerely and passionately for an afflicted person (like Della Rae Duncan) to be aided by Jesus Christ without knowing exactly why.
    Maybe, in fact, it was better not to know why? You could feel sorry for that person, and generous. You didn’t shrink away in disgust.
    Â 
    A year or so before, an older brother of Della Rae Duncan’s was reported killed in Vietnam. His name would eventually be engraved, with other “casualties” from Mt. Ephraim, on a granite marker in front of the post office.
    His name was Dwight David Duncan and he was a private first class in the United States Army, twenty years old at the time of his death. Since dropping out of high school he’d worked for Mulvaney Roofing. When his picture appeared on the front page of the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger , Dad exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! Dwight Duncan! Poor kid.”
    We gathered around to stare at the