Read Online The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

belligerent military formation. In the shadow of the Pitcairn Bridge rising hunched above the river and running parallel with the New Jersey Transit railroad bridge that in turn ran parallel with the elevated Turnpike bridge blotting out much of the eastern sky above Red Rock. In the sandstone tenement buildings like corroded pueblo dwellings of an ancient time jutting up against the elevated spiraling lanes of the Turnpike. In Hicks Square, in Polk Plaza, in the weedy no-man’s-land littered with bottles, cans, styrofoam containers, junkies’ needles and used condoms like shrunken sea slugs abutting the Passaic River at Washburn where the city had intended a park. In the drab factory-like Pascayne South High School where Sybilla Frye was a tenth-grade student and in Edson Middle School and in even Edson Elementary where she’d been a student when younger it began to be told, and retold.
    That Frye girl gone missin you hear she been found? In that fish-factory cellar she left for dead all tied-up and bleedin these white cops grabbed her comin out of school Thu’sday sayin they got warrants to arrest her she be missin school an take her away in the police van. We saw it—right outside the school.
    Left her for dead, they’d been beating and raping and starving her. She’d lost more’n half her blood. Branded KKK in her skin with hot irons. Carved nasty words on her back. They’d picked her up outside the high school there was witnesses saw the white cops takin her away in a cop van tryin to say she a nigger hooker her pimp give to them for payment. Kept the girl tied up for three days while her mother lookin for her on every street, we seen that poor woman showin pictures of the girl to anybody who would look. They raped her, beat and kicked her an rolled her in dog shit an told her they would cut her throat an her family’s if she told and they told her nobody would ever believe her, take the word of a nigger slut against the word of white cops and they left her to die in that nasty place where in ’67 they dumped people they’d shot in the street and nobody found the bodies for a long time. But this girl didn’t die.

“S’quest’d”
    W here my baby? She s’quest’d. She aint here. She sick, and she gon get well. You leave my baby alone!
    In the brownstone row house at 939 Third Street the agitated mother scarcely opened the front door but shouted through a narrow crack for would-be visitors to go away. Initially, Mrs. Frye had tried to determine who it was ringing the bell or rapping loudly at the door when the buzzer-bell failed to sound, a familiar face, relatives, girlfriends of Sybilla’s, incensed and sympathetic neighbors or strangers—so many strangers!—then in a frenzy of fear and dismay she turned them all away slamming the door in their faces.
    Through the windows Ednetta Frye could be seen, a shifting shadow-shape, peeking out at the edges of the drawn blinds. Her figure was both hulking and tremulous. Muttering to herself God help us. God help us through this mis’ry.
    It was known, Sybilla Frye was being kept home from school. Days in succession following the news of her discovery in the Jersey Foods factory she was absent from Pascayne High South where she was a sophomore with what school authorities were acknowledging was a spotty record —a history of sporadic and unexplained absences already since the start of the fall term after Labor Day and the previous year in ninth grade as well.
    Questioned by authorities about the assaulted girl, the principal of the high school had no recollection of her nor did her teachers speak of “Sybilla Frye” with much certainty—classes at Pascayne South were overcrowded, students sat in seats not always assigned to them, Sybilla’s homeroom teacher had taken sick days in September during which time substitutes had monitored the thirty or more students in the homeroom and none of these had any clear recollection of “Sybilla Frye” still less