Little Bird of Heaven (19 page)

(Like Ben. Like my mother. Like most of our Bauer relatives.)

Adultery
was a word I’d come to know, also.
Adulterer.

There was consolation in this you would have to be an
adult
to commit
adultery,
wouldn’t you?

“Your father is an adulterer, Krista. You may as well be told. Your father betrayed his marriage vows, that he’d pledged in church, before God. He betrayed the sanctity of this family. He betrayed all of us. Whatever
his relations were with that woman—I feel sorry for her because I guess he betrayed her, too.”

Waiting for Mom to add
But your father did not kill her.

She didn’t, though. It was a somber moment between us—we were in the kitchen just the two of us—Ben had started working after school part-time, at about this time—shortly before Daddy moved to Port Oriskany—and often it was just Mom and me in the kitchen preparing supper which we would eat promptly at 6:00
P.M.
—Mom, Ben and me—and solemnly now Mom leaned over me to press her lips that looked chewed-at, dry and chapped, against the top of my head, the wavering part in my hair, as if blessing me.

“A
ARON
.”

Secretly I spoke his name. This beautiful mysterious name out of the Bible, I had never dared speak aloud to anyone.

In the fall when I was a student at Sparta Middle School which adjoined the older, red-brick Sparta High School sometimes I was able to catch sight of Aaron Kruller at a distance. He was in tenth grade, a sophomore; he’d been kept back a year. Now Ben who was Aaron’s age—going on sixteen—was a year ahead of Aaron, in the junior class. I thought it must be humiliating to Aaron, to be kept back with younger kids. (Each year there were three or four
Indian-looking kids
who were kept back, girls as well as boys. They would keep one another company at the rear of classrooms and in tight little clusters in the cafeteria. Though it was forbidden, they would smoke cigarettes at the rear of the school waiting for the special Herkimer County bus that took them out to the reservation.) I had to wonder if Aaron Kruller knew that I existed: Ben Diehl’s younger sister. If he hated me, the way he hated Ben.

Did I dare to follow Aaron Kruller? I did not.

Yet somehow it happened, there was Krista Diehl in the 7-Eleven on Chambers Street where Aaron Kruller sometimes dropped by after school. There was Krista Diehl pretending to be on an errand for her
mother frowning at milk cartons displayed in the refrigerator—trying to read the labels, the expiration dates. There was Aaron Kruller opening a Coke, devouring something doughy and mashed in a cellophane wrapper, out of his hand. In the 7-Eleven there was likely to be an air of frantic festivity—kids from the high school crowding the aisles—calling out loudly to one another, flirting, exchanging mock-obscenities—while quietly, shyly blond Krista decided against buying a carton of milk, slipped out the front door without being noticed.

He saw me! He knows who I am.

Those afternoons I didn’t take the school bus home. I walked home. Avoided my friends with whom I’d have been sitting on the bus who would have said
Krista are you crazy?
and might have guessed it was a boy, an older boy, in whom I was interested.

Those terrible years, your happiness can only be
He saw me! He knows who I am.

The rubble-strewn alley where Aaron Kruller sometimes rode his bicycle, out to the Quarry Road. The asphalt pavement in front of the train depot where older boys and a few girls, loud-laughing, excitable, hung out together after school to drink beer out of cans carelessly tossed into the weeds, to smoke cigarettes, or “pot.”

I knew what “pot” was: marijuana. I knew the sweet-acrid smell, that clung to the clothes and hair of certain of the older girls.

Aaron stayed only a brief while with these friends of his. Aaron smoked with them, drank with them, laughed with them. You could see that Aaron Kruller was one of them but Aaron never stayed long, he had to get home to work at his father’s auto shop out on the Quarry Road.

Pot
was common, at Sparta High.
Weed. Getting high.

I thought it must be nice:
getting high.
Like a helium balloon rising above the rooftops, treetops where no one could hurt you.

Ben spoke disdainfully of kids at the high school who were
dopers.

Dopers, stoners, druggies. Losers.
Ben scorned drugs, drinking.

Ben would never be one of those kids expelled from school for bringing beer onto school property, drinking out of his locker, smoking dope in
the lavatories. Ben scorned any kind of weakness. This year he meant to work hard in all his classes. The spring before, with our father gone, and
the trouble
fucking up our lives, Ben’s concentration had been shattered and he hadn’t done so well on final exams and for this he blamed our father, he would never forgive our father and so he’d decided he would not be a God-damned carpenter like Eddy Diehl, not a cabinet-maker, fuck working with his hands, fuck home-building and construction, Ben signed up for mechanical drawing and college-entrance math. He’d stopped hanging out with his old friends—not that these were doper-kids, they were not—but they were not college-entrance kids—and he didn’t make new friends. He didn’t have time for friends. He worked after school at Laird’s Groceries. He would impress his teachers. He would impress the Sparta High principal, the guidance counselor. He would overcome their curiosity about him—their pity—possibly, their mild aversion—for the name
Diehl
accrued to him like an obscene scrawl across his back.

Already in his junior year of high school Ben was plotting where he’d go after graduating, not Herkimer County Community College where most of his classmates would go, if they went to “college” at all, but somewhere away from Sparta: Rensselaer Polytech in Troy, and if not Rensselaer the State University of New York at Canton where there was a good technical school.

Where the name
Diehl
would not evoke any disagreeable association, like a bad smell.

I
WAS SAD
—sometimes, I was angry—mostly I was bewildered—how had it happened, I’d once had an older brother who had been my friend—who had seemed to like me—to “be on my side”—but now I had not.

“Are you mad at me, Ben? Why are you mad at me?”—it did no good to ask, such questions only embarrassed my brother, and annoyed him. More and more during his high school years Ben stayed away from home, working at the grocery store or at another part-time job; hoping to avoid
his lonely sister and his mother, as much as he could; saving money for his escape from Sparta.

In my dreams—that felt, sometimes, too large for my head as if my head might burst—my brother Ben and Aaron Kruller were strangely confused. The hot-pulsing dream would seem to be insisting
This is Ben
but the person I saw was Aaron Kruller as if by some authority beyond my control Aaron Kruller was meant to be my brother, and not Ben.

The uncanny authority of dreams! It has always astonished me, how we surrender ourselves to these nocturnal presences, so trusting and vulnerable as if the outermost layer of our skin has been peeled away! In sleep there is no protection, nowhere to flee, to hide; there can be no solace, if the dream is not a solace.

In eighth grade, at age thirteen when with increasing boldness—recklessness?—I followed Aaron Kruller after school, if I happened to sight him. And if at the 7-Eleven he glanced toward me quizzically, frowning or blank-faced—quickly I looked away, a hot blush rising in my face.

He saw me! Maybe he saw me! I was a shy girl, or gave that impression. I was a very young girl, in eighth grade. I had silky-pale blond hair and doll-like features, a “pretty” girl—a “good” girl—if Aaron Kruller noticed me at all, he’d have dismissed me in the same instant. I was both relieved and disappointed telling myself
He doesn’t know, whose daughter I am. He doesn’t know me as he knows Ben.

Then again thinking, with a thrill of dread
Does he?

In Sparta in those days, no matter your age, unless you were really young, you were likely to think that, if Delray Kruller had not murdered his wife in “a fit of jealous rage” you were likely to think that Eddy Diehl had murdered her for more or less that reason. There were other “persons of interest”—“suspects”—“leads”—but essentially it was Kruller, or it was Diehl. As with sports teams, people chose sides. It was a matter of family loyalties, neighborhoods, friends: allegiance to one man, or to the other. Both Delray Kruller and Eddy Diehl had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances known to them from high school—they’d both gone
to Sparta High at about the same time in the late 1950s—and from their work; both men had large, sprawling families in Herkimer County; Delray Kruller had even his Seneca-Indian relatives, from whom it was said he’d long been estranged. (Maybe it was the Caucasian wife Zoe, who’d caused the rift? If there’d been a rift?) Lacking what’s called “hard evidence” linking either Kruller or Diehl to the murder, the Sparta PD was said to more strongly suspect Eddy Diehl because he’d “made enemies” of them at the start of their investigation, by lying to them: like a fool he’d tried to deny being Zoe Kruller’s lover, visiting her in the duplex on West Ferry Street…. Whereas Delray Kruller had seemed to cooperate with the police. Or maybe Delray Kruller had a friend or two in the Sparta PD who spoke of him sympathetically as a man badly treated by his wife—treated like shit by his wife! And there was Delray’s fourteen-year-old son Aaron who swore to police in a formal statement that his father had been with him “all that night”—the night of Zoe Kruller’s death—providing an alibi for his father while for some of that same time, for several crucial hours, my father Eddy Diehl had no one to provide an alibi for him.

Seeing Aaron Kruller I thought
He is lying.
I thought
He wants to destroy my father.
Yet I was helpless to seek him out.

W
ON’T LIE FOR HIM
why should I! All I can tell the police is I don’t know. I can’t say. I was asleep. I don’t know when he came home. He did come home yes sometime in the night but I don’t know when, I was asleep.

And so I can’t say….

Ben and I would never know if it was true as our mother claimed, that our father had asked her to “lie” for him. To tell police he’d been home by at least midnight on the night that Zoe Kruller was murdered, some hours later. Ben himself said he’d been asleep—“Like Mom, I can’t say”—and whatever I seemed to remember, whatever I’d have been willing to tell police, to swear to police—that yes, I thought Daddy had been home by midnight at least—no one took seriously.

One glance at Eddy Diehl’s daughter, you’d see that here was a girl
desperate to lie for her daddy. Here was a girl who’d say anything for her Daddy. Here was a girl whose testimony you could not rely upon, even Eddy Diehl’s defense attorney doubted the worth of such an “alibi witness.”

For much of that night, Eddy Diehl claimed he’d been alone. He had not been “conscious” of the time. In his Jeep driving out into the country and feeling so bad—about Zoe—at one point possibly he’d been passed out in the Jeep in a parking lot—or by the roadside—where he’d pulled over to shut his eyes, a half-hour, forty minutes, motor still running—maybe someone had seen him but probably not—earlier that evening he’d been at the County Line, he’d been at the Iroquois—maybe at the River Tree Inn—drinking alone at the bar in his black depressed/anxious mood but there’d been guys who knew him—guys he knew—had to be—maybe a woman—women—Eddy Diehl was likely to know both women and men in any tavern he’d step into, in Herkimer County, on a Saturday night—but it was suspicious, how vague Eddy was about providing names—nor could bartenders recall exactly when he’d been drinking in their presence—and so Eddy Diehl couldn’t provide an “alibi” that the detectives could corroborate.

And he’d lied to them, initially. Like a fool, yes he’d lied. His hungover drunk, that quick ill-advised swallow of Jim Beam in his office before they’d come for him, makes you think you can say anything, get away with anything, if he’d been stone cold sober he would have known better, Eddy Diehl wasn’t a stupid man. Well, he’d wanted to “protect” his family—there was that. Out of embarrassment and shame—shame for what Lucille would be feeling, if so exposed—he’d lied to the detectives. In that way making enemies of them and of their superior officer at the precinct, all the way up to the Sparta chief of police.

Delray, on the other hand, had not lied. From the first, Delray’s story was exactly his son’s story: the two had been together all that night, in the house on Quarry Road from which, months previously, Zoe Kruller had departed.

Saying, what?—
I just need to get somewhere to breathe. I just need to live
my own life while I can, please don’t try to stop me and please don’t follow after me I am not coming back until it’s time.

This you would believe, if you believed Delray Kruller and his son Aaron. More or less, this is what you’d believe Zoe had told them.

Finally, my father Eddy Diehl had hired a lawyer. Days after he’d been interviewed by the Sparta detectives, when it was almost too late. And then, following his lawyer’s advice, my father had changed his statement to police: yes he had been “involved with” Zoe Kruller, for several years; yes he had “visited with” Zoe Kruller in the West Ferry residence on a number of occasions; yes he’d “had sex with her” on the night of February 11.

On that night! On the eve of Zoe’s death but no later than 11 P.M. he was sure.

Maybe 9 P.M. Maybe 10 P.M. It had not been late. She had not wanted him to stay. He had not stayed. This, Edward Diehl would swear.

All this would be revealed in large lurid headlines in the Sparta
Journal.
All this, to the horror, humiliation, disgust of Lucille Diehl who took comfort at least in the fact that she hadn’t lied for her adulterer husband. Another time the glamour-photo of Zoe Kruller on the front page of the paper, beside the darkish brooding photo of Edward Diehl.