Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

his boots. It didn’t matter that he had fed them only half an hour before, or that their feeding time was hours away. “Get out! Scat! You dirty things!” Jesse would whisper. He had begun to talk to himself, usually in whispers. “Dirty. Dirty. Dirty things,” he said, hating them. He especially hated to collect their eggs. Still warm from the hens’ bodies, some of them damp, with feathers or excrement on them … he so hated collecting these eggs that he had no appetite to eat them, he felt like gagging over a plateful of eggs, though he had liked them well enough in the past. His mother had made them scrambled eggs on Sunday. Chickens … fluidy droppings freezing to stones … their eggs half-hidden in straw … their perky heads, their little beaks, their scaly legs and feet—His scalp crawled when he had to feed them.
    The animals he liked best were the horses, his grandfather’s twoaged horses that had no interest in him, big, gentle, stupid animals with great eyes, eyes nearly as big as Jesse’s fist, black and bulging. These eyes fascinated Jesse: they were so huge, and yet they were used to see very little. As if there were little to see. As if the world contained nothing more than hay, feed, a water trough. Jesse liked to feed the horses, and he lingered in the horse barn, sometimes pressing himself against the horses’ sides, his warm face against their cool sleek sides, his eyes starkly open and unthinking, unseeing. The horses were so still you did not have to think of anything. They munched hay, their heads were lowered almost permanently, they were still, silent, occasionally shifting their weight on their eroded hoofs, but there was nothing to think about or to remember, nothing. So heavy, the horses were like life that had run down into pure flesh, enormous muscular mounds of flesh, perfectly obedient and indifferent. Unlike the chickens, they were still, as if sleeping on their feet. There was no change in them.
    Yet he felt their separation from him, their isolation. He could not cross over into it. What was massive in them, the powerful neutrality of their legs and shoulders and backs, was separate from him and baffled him.… It did no good for him to embrace their necks, to rub his face against their rippling necks, their dry, fine, stinging manes, even to talk to them, because they did not notice him, not really. There was nothing in
him
, nothing in Jesse himself, that could touch them.
    He would walk quickly through the yard, his face turned away from the scurrying chickens. He spent less time with Duke now—the dog was a nuisance. He seemed to be always dragging Jesse back to Jesse’s own childhood, a time in his life when he had been wriggling and stupid with energy, like the dog—a scrawny black Labrador retriever who had never been much good at hunting. Jesse’s father had kicked the dog once in disgust.…
    Since the day he discovered what was kept inside it, Jesse walked by one of the small barns quickly. The door was padlocked. Furniture from his parents’ house was in the barn, piled up. Jesse had peered through the cracks to see the old sofa, the chairs, the floor-model radio, the kitchen table, some beds. On the floor, wrapped carelessly in newspaper, were plates and silverware and what looked like Christmas tree ornaments, though Jesse couldn’t be sure. He had felt nothing, seeing these things for the first time. He had simply walked away. But after that, crossing the yard, he had been unable to even look at thebarn. His mouth twisted upward into a grin just to think of it, of himself peering through the cracks and seeing what he had seen.
    On Sundays he and his grandfather went to services at the Benton Center Methodist Church, about ten miles away. Jesse sat in the drafty old church and did not look at the people around him, who might have been curious about him,
Jesse Harte … you know what happened to him
.… He could almost hear their crackling thoughts,