A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

his galloping, the remarkably thin shinbones, ankles; he could feel the soft earth give way beneath the stallion's hooves. That way a horse had of frolicking in an open field, making nick-nick-nicking noises to his friends grazing in another pasture but ignoring any human being trying to call him over … All this while, the girl beside him was talking. Nudging her hot skin against his. Carleton was trying not to listen because behind such female chatter he could sometimes hear Pearl, the way she'd been before—
    Carleton! Help me. I don't want to die.
    Months Pearl had hardly spoken to him, or to anyone. All she could rouse herself for was nursing the baby. Then pushing the baby from her, to Clara. No more! No more! Carleton must've been drunk, goddamn he must've been, hadn't meant to get Pearl pregnant one more time he'd vowed, yet somehow it had happened. Those last months she'd worked in the fields slow and clumsy andindifferent as any mental case you'd see and sometimes she would lie down in the dirt and shut her eyes and nobody could rouse her, Carleton would have to haul her back to the cabin like a sack of seed. So shameful! Christ, he'd hated her. Pearl had ceased to know him, so that she need not despise him, Carleton believed. Until at the end, when the hemorrhaging began, she had called for him in a panic clear-minded and her eyes alert with pain
Carleton! Help me
and he'd been shit-faced drunk and slow to be roused and later there was a doctor who'd been so disgusted with Carleton he refused to look at him. Carleton had been humbled, stone-cold sober. Three-day drunk, and three days' whiskers, and he hadn't eaten a morsel in those days and so shaky on his feet he near-about fainted, yet had to endure the doctor's scorn like he was a filthy concrete floor being hosed down. “This should never have happened,” the doctor was saying in a low, rapid voice, not meeting Carleton's eye, “this poor woman, in her condition, how many pregnancies did you say she'd had? And these living conditions.” Carleton had but a vague sense of the room that was smelling of blood, buzzing with flies; he was grateful that the kids had been taken to the foreman's cabin, and kept from seeing their mother in such a state. The doctor was a youngish man, he'd shoved his mended glasses against the bridge of his nose, furious, frustrated; for of course Carleton could not speak, would not speak, out of Walpole shame and humility. “What's wrong with you people? Don't you know about birth control? Don't you ever—” Carleton stood mute and repentant and his face shut up tight as a fist. He had not believed even then that Pearl would die, or could die; he had no capacity to imagine the world of what-might-be, there was so damn much to worry about in the world that was. So he tried to grasp what was happening: the baby in Pearl's belly was twisted wrong, or something was wrong with Pearl's blood, and there was an infection, or—
    All you can tell yourself, Carleton, it was Pearl's time. God took her back to Him.
This consolation one of Carleton's women friends gave him, Carleton cherished in his heart.
    Nancy was about eighteen. She was the daughter of a man Carleton knew and she wanted to leave Florida, so she just ran away with Carleton and his kids. She had dark hair cut very short and jaggedabout her face, exposing the tips of her soft ears, and when she laughed she squinted with hilarity—everything was so funny, she made you want to laugh along with her. That was one thing about the bus and the camps, Carleton thought; everyone was quick to laugh. They were good people. Right now they were laughing on the bus, carrying on. Just behind him was a family from Texas, Bert something and his wife, both of their faces tanned and round, and across the way were two of their children, Rosalie and Sylvia Anne, and behind them two more children—two boys. Carleton didn't like so many kids but he liked Bert and his wife because nothing got