My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

he had no care for worldly matters, nor any wishes, it seemed, of his own.
    ONCE, LONG AGO, in Old Muirkirk, in the last years of English rule, the Crown Governor Sir Charles Harwood had a beloved daughter he named Mina, who was dearer to him than anyone else on earth. So comely, and graceful, and gay was Mina Harwood, very few persons held it against her that she was the Governor’s daughter, and inclined at times to pride; or that, as a result of her playfulness, one could not always judge whether she spoke in earnest or in jest.
    If Sir Charles or his wife approached Mina with the kindly intention of wiping away her tears, she surprised them with a bright smile, and the admonition that they took too seriously what was but a whim; if they, or Mina’s fiancé, or one or another of her cousins, dared to smile at her outbursts, she charged them with cruelty, and not caring to know what was in her heart. Even as a child Mina threatened those who loved her with running away, as she called it, to her true home, but no one understood what she meant by these strange words; nor could Mina herself explain. Where was her true home, if not in Muirkirk?
    One midsummer day when Mina was eighteen years old, she and her fiancé and a small party of friends went picnicking on the riverbank, in the vicinity of the great Muirkirk marsh; and somehow it came about that Mina wandered off, being nettled, it was thought, by an inadvertent slight on the part of her fiancé . . . and disappeared for hours. Her friends called out her name, and searched for her, to no avail; not knowing if the headstrong young girl had lost herself in the marsh, or whether in a pique of childish temper she was simply hiding in order to frighten them.
    Finally Mina returned, appearing suddenly out of nowhere, flush-faced and smiling, saying in a chiding voice, “Why are you looking at meso strangely?—don’t you know your Mina?” If she had truly been hurt by a stray word or gesture of her fiancé’s, she now forgave the distraught young man (who indeed adored her); her arms were filled with things for her friends—violets, swamp lilies, purple lobelia, a strange pulpy fruit (of the size of a large apple, but a dark orangish-purple in hue, and disagreeably soft to the touch), which she pressed gaily upon them. For the remainder of the afternoon, and, indeed, for days afterward, Mina prattled with delight of the “secret wonders” of the great marsh. How unjust it seemed to her, that the swampland was feared and loathed, when it was a place of such exquisite beauty . . . .From childhood on Mina had heard ugly things whispered of the Muirkirk swamp: that it bred pestilence; that it was a place where unwed mothers might dispose of their infants; that, in former times, it had been the ceremonial ground for unspeakable tortures and executions practiced by the Mohawk Indians. But all she had glimpsed were wonders, like the flowers and fruit she had brought back, and the tall straight leafy trees she had seen (so very tall, Mina claimed, their tops were obscured in cloud), and the black and gold butterflies large as a man’s fist (in whose delicate wings glinted “eyes” of a sort), and the nameless birds whose songs were infinitely sweeter than any she had ever heard (a bird the size of a sparrow, but beautifully marked in crimson, gold, and blue, had perched on her forefinger, Mina claimed, and had showed no fear of her), and many another remarkable sight . . . .She had been able to walk on the surface of the plankton-encrusted water, she said, for a brief distance, a most uncanny sensation indeed, as if for her, and for her, Mina Harwood alone, the laws of Nature had been overturned.
    (Of the persons who had eaten the dark pulpy fruit, including Sir Charles and his wife, all reported disagreeable symptoms, vomiting, malaise, loss of appetite, which Mina dismissed with a wave of her hand, insisting that the fruit