A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

sense to know that. What Carleton liked was peace, quiet, calm, the way Clara would crawl up on his knee and tell him about school or her girlfriends or things she thought were funny, or the way Nancy embraced him and stroked his back.
    Carleton was hungry. He headed back toward the cabin. The square now was filled with children and women airing out quilts and blankets on the clotheslines. Bert's wife was flapping something out the doorway. She had a beet-red face and surprised, tufted hair. “Nice day!” she said. Carleton nodded. Two boys ran shrieking in front of him. He saw Clara and Rosalie by the men who were playing cards. Clara ran out to him and took his hand. He thought how strange that was: a girl runs out and takes his hand, he is her father, she is his daughter. He felt warm. “Rosalie's pa won somethin an's goin to give it to her!” Clara cried. Carleton let himself be led over reluctantly to the cardplayers. Bert was making whopping noises as he tossed down his cards. He chortled, he hooted, he tapped another man's chest with the back of his fingers, daintily. Carleton's shadow fell on his head and shoulders and he grinned up at Carleton. Behind Bert were the rest of his kids. The girl's hair was a frantic red-brown, like her father's, and she had her father's friendly, amazed, mocking eyes. “Here y'are, honey,” he said. He dropped some things in her opened hands. Everyone laughed at her excitement.
    “What's this here?” Rosalie said. She held up a small metallic object. Clara ran over and stared at it.
    “That's a charm,” said Bert.
    One of the men said: “Don't you know nothin? That ain't a charm!”
    “What is it, then?”
    “A medal,” the man said. He was a little defensive. “A holy medal, you put it somewheres and it helps you.”
    “Helps you with what?”
    Rosalie and Clara were examining it. Carleton bent to see that it was a cheap religious medal, in the shape of a coin, with the raised figure of some saint or Christ or God Himself. Carleton didn't know much about these things; they made him feel a little embarrassed.
    “It's nice, I like it,” Rosalie said. The other things her father had given her were a pencil with a broken point and a broken key chain.
    “How does it work?” said Clara.
    “You put it in your pocket or somethin, I don't know. It don't always work,” the man said.
    “Are you Cathlic or somethin?” Bert said, raising his eyebrows.
    “Shit—”
    “Isn't that a Cathlic thing?”
    “It's just some medal I found laying around.”
    Carleton cut through their bickering by saying something that surprised all of them, even him. “You got any more of them?”
    “No.”
    “What're they for?”
    “Jesus, I don't know.… S'post to help a little,” the man said, looking away.
    Carleton went back to the shanty, where Nancy was sitting in the doorway. She wore tight faded slacks and a shirt carelessly buttoned, and Carleton always liked the way she smoked cigarettes. That was something Pearl hadn't done. “Y'all moved in?” Carleton said. He rubbed the back of her neck and she smiled, closing her eyes. The sunlight made her hair glint in thousands of places so that it looked as if it were a secret place, a secret forest you might enter and get lost in. Carleton stared at her without really seeing her. He saw the gleaming points of light and her smooth pinkish ear.
    Finally he said, “Don't think you made no mistake, huh, comin up here with me? All this ways?”
    She laughed to show how wrong he was. “Like hell,” she said.
    “You think New Jersey looks good, huh?”
    “Better than any place I ever was before.”
    “Don't never count on nothing,” Carleton said wisely.
    Which turned out to be good advice: that evening the crew leader, a puffy-faced, lumpy man Carleton had always hated, came to the camp to tell them it was all off.
    “Come all the way here an' the fuckin bastard changed his mind, says he's gonna let them rot out there,” the man