The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Read online

  Once, on the creek road to Rapids, when my father wasn’t with us, my mother behind the wheel suddenly said: “In that house, a terrible thing happened.”

  Mommy slowed the car. No one appeared to be visible in the house, observing us.

  (Had this been an ordinary-seeming dwelling? Not a farmhouse but a smaller, shanty-like structure with a tar paper roof, set back from the road on a badly rutted driveway. In the front yard, straggly trees. Rusted hulks of cars in the scrubby grass. Decades later the name of the family who lived there is still vivid in my memory—not Reichling but a name that slant-rhymes with it.)

  A man had been murdered, my mother said. The father of a girl with whom she’d gone to school.

  At first it was believed that the man had “disappeared”—his wife claimed not to know where he was. But then his body was discovered in the creek behind the house; it had been forced inside a barrel, and the barrel had been nailed shut, and rolled down to the creek where it only partially sank in about five feet of water close to shore.

  “The wife and her man-friend murdered him. Stabbed him. It was a terrible thing.”

  Why did they kill him, I wanted to know. Were they arrested, were they in prison, who had discovered the body in the barrel—many questions sprang to my lips which my mother was vague about answering, whether because Mommy thought I should not be so curious, or because she didn’t know. Enough for our mother to have surprised us by saying—It was a terrible thing.

  (I HAVE TO CONCEDE that I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness. For instance, I can remember my mother’s tantalizingly brief account of the murder on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Rapids only a few miles from our house but I can’t fit this memory into a sequence of memories of that drive, that day, that week or even that year; our memories seem to lack the faculty for chronological continuity, in which case an episodic and impressionistic art most accurately replicates the meanderings of memory, and not chronological order. What is vivid in memory is the singular, striking, one-of-a-kind event or episode, encapsulated as if in amber, and rarely followed by the return home, that evening’s dinner, exchanged remarks, the next morning; not routine but what violates routine.

  Which is why the effort of writing a memoir is so fraught with peril, and even its small successes ringed by melancholy. The fact is—We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time.)

  WHEN MY FATHER TOOK us on Sunday drives, it was more likely that he would take us much farther, as he drove faster; on Transit Road, which Daddy traveled all too frequently, he was inclined to drive above the speed limit, and to pass slower cars with some measure of irritation. My sense of maleness, based solely and surely unfairly upon my father Fred Oates, is that the male more than the female is inclined to impatience.

  Where Mommy drove us on country roads never very far from the Tonawanda Creek, that cut through her childhood, as through mine, and fixed us comfortingly in place, Daddy had little interest in the familiar countryside of Erie County, apart from his visits to Lee’s Airfield. The landscape of Fred Oates’s boyhood was Niagara County: he’d been born in Lockport, in the least affluent area of the small city known informally as “Lowertown,” and had lived in Lockport all of his life until he’d married my mother and came to live with her in Millersport. (There had been an earlier domestic life in Lockport, about which I knew nothing, and which had always seemed to me romantic, as it had to have been short-lived. Only a scattering of snapshots allowed me to see my young parents, an infant bundled in their arms, photographed in a waste of snow behind a rented apartment in Lowertown near the canal. Where we lived before Millersport—was the terse description. Before we came to live with your grandparents.)

  Daddy’s drives may have reflected his restlessness. The same restlessness that motivated him to fly airplanes, even to experiment one summer with a glider at Lee’s Airfield. (Gliders are far more dangerous than small aircraft and Daddy may have had some close calls with this glider, about which my brother and I would not have been told.) Though Daddy did not drive slowly past houses and name to us their inhabitants and hint to us of the mysteries of lives within, yet Daddy’s drives into Niagara County were more interesting than Mommy’s drives in Erie County, as they were farther-ranging, and fraught with the kind of urgency my father brought to most things.

  Daddy liked to follow the Erie Barge Canal westward in the direction of the beautiful turbulent Niagara River or eastward into hilly Orleans County, in the direction of Brockport and Rochester; he liked to drop in on a small airfield in Newfane, where he had friends; he liked to drop in at the Big Tree Inn near Newfane, or the Inn at Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario; there was the excitement of the Niagara County Fair at the Fairgrounds, and the excitement of volunteer firemen’s picnics scattered through the county where food and drinks—especially beer—were served. Daddy’s drives were not without direction like Mommy’s but intended to bring him to places where, when he approached, voices lifted happily—“Fred! Jesus, here’s Fred Oates.”

  In such places there were jukeboxes. Clouded mirrors behind the bar where men who resembled my father turned to welcome him. Pervading smells of beer, cigarette smoke. Plastic ashtrays filled with ashes and butts. Small bowls in which greasy fragments of potato chips remained. If such places were on the vast, wind-lashed lake, there was a sandy beach littered with broken shells. There were picnic areas with tables, benches. Summertime smell of wet sand, wet bathing suits and towels. Burnt charcoal, grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and mustard and ketchup. Broken rinds of watermelon on the ground, corncobs buzzing with flies. Discarded Coke bottles, beer bottles. Music from car radios.

  If summer, and if near Lake Ontario, there was always a chance of lightning and thunderstorms. You started off in Millersport on a sunny blue-skied summer day, you ended at Lake Ontario in pelting rain beneath a boiling-black sky in autumnal chill. Even when we had plenty of time to return home, Daddy tended to ignore our pleas and continue driving. Or, if we were already at Lake Ontario, and the sky began to darken ominously, Daddy was likely to delay leaving until the last possible moment.

  There came flashes of heat lightning, soundless. Then actual lightning, thunder. Deafening thunder like cymbals crashing. We were chastened waiting for the storm to pass beneath the overhangs of strangers’ roofs, beneath tall windswept trees.

  At the Big Tree Inn on a promontory above the lake there was indeed an enormous tree—probably an elm tree. The novelty of the “big tree” was that it had been many times struck by lightning. My mother feared lightning, as her older sister Elsie (my “Aunt Elsie” who lived in Lockport) had in fact been injured when lightning struck a doorway in which she was standing: Elsie’s face, throat, and arm were riddled with slivers from the shattered doorframe; but my mother could not prevail against my father who thought a thunderstorm was an occasion for rejoicing and not cowering indoors.

  My mother was not an assertive person. Especially she was not assertive with my father. Mommy might suggest turning back to avoid a storm but she could not insist, and if she had, our father would have ignored her; if she’d insisted more adamantly, our father would have defied her.

  Once, not at the Big Tree Inn but at a place called Koch’s Paradise Grove, by chance on my way to a women’s restroom adjacent to the bar, amid a barrage of loud music, a din of voices, laughter, I came across a sight that was shocking to me, and that I have never forgotten: my father speaking with another man, a man of about his age, a stranger whom I was sure I’d never seen before, and they were standing close together, faces flushed and voices raised in anger, and the frightening thought came to me—They are going to fight, they are going to hurt each other; but in the next instant my father turned, and saw me, and the expression on his face altered, and the moment passed.

  A child is very frightened—viscerally, emotionally—by the raised voices of adults. Even when anger isn’t in
volved but rather excitement, hilarity.

  I might have registered—They have been drinking. But Daddy is not drunk!

  It was not unknown, that men became drunk. But that was very different from being classified as a drunk.

  So often it seemed to happen in my life as a child and a young girl, such arrested and abbreviated moments—the scene that is interrupted by the girl blundering into it. If there were words exchanged the intrusion of the girl silenced these words and so it is not words that remain but the sound of a voice or voices, uplifted in anger or in hilarity, essentially indecipherable. It is the child’s experience to blunder into scenes between adults and to become a witness to something inexplicable to her though it is (probably) a quite ordinary episode in what are not extraordinary lives after all; it remains that the child or young adolescent will make of these broken-off and mysterious fragments some sort of coherent narrative. What is fleeting and transient in time, no doubt soon forgotten by the adults, or rendered inconsequential in their lives, may burrow deep into the child-witness’s soul, whatever is meant by “soul” that is not fleeting and transitory but somehow permanent, and inextricable. And so, decades later I am still seeing my father and the unknown, unnamed man, a man who resembled my father, and both of them flush-faced and prepared to fight; I am remembering how my mother’s father died, in a tavern fight in Black Rock in 1917, though long before I was born; I am remembering a casual remark of my father’s—A man never backs down from a fight. You just can’t.

  And there were other occasions, like this. Like the Sunday drives, beyond estimation. A child sees her father at a little distance, a figure among other figures; a man among men; a child is baffled and thrilled by her father in precisely those ways in which the father eludes the child. It is as if my father had said to me—You will not ever know me, but it is allowed that you can love me.

  The mother is the known, or so the child imagines. (This would turn out to be not exactly true, or not true in the fullest degree, but it was not the case that my mother was inaccessible to me emotionally, as often, in those years, my father was.) But the father is the lesser-known, the more obvious figure of romance.

  How many times returning late from Sunday drives into the countryside beyond Lockport, in Niagara County; a nighttime drive back to Lockport and up the long steep glacier hill to the wide bridge over the Erie Canal at the junction of Main Street and Transit Street; and so onto Transit Road (NY Route 78) and another long, steep glacier hill and our house seven miles away in the countryside just across the Tonawanda Creek. Often, my brother and I would drift off to sleep in the backseat of the car. Often, it seemed to be raining. We would hear the slap of windshield wipers, and my parents’ lowered voices in the front seat. Headlights of oncoming cars sweeping into the back of our car, across the ceiling and gone . . .

  On a map of the region—(I would not examine a detailed map of Erie and Niagara counties until 2014 while composing this memoir)—the space of our Sunday drives is compressed like something in a children’s storybook. Lake Ontario, that had seemed so romantically far from our home, is fewer than twenty miles away, to the north; Niagara Falls is only twenty-five miles away, to the west. The landscape of my childhood that had seemed so vast, so fraught with mysteries, could be contained within something like a thirty-mile radius.

  Sunday drives! You’d think they would continue forever but nothing continues forever. Like gas selling for twenty-eight cents a gallon, that’s gone forever.

  FRED’S SIGNS

  “DADDY! CAN I TRY?”

  And your father will hand you one of his smaller brushes, its thick-feathery tip dipped in red paint, and a piece of scrap plywood, and on the plywood you will try conscientiously to “letter” as your father lettered—precisely and unhesitatingly, with deft twists of his wrist. But in your inexpert hand the paintbrush wavers, and the lettering is wobbly—childish. The bright red flourish of Daddy’s letters, the subtle curls and tucks of his brushstrokes, will be impossible for you to imitate at any age.

  This evening after supper in a season when the sky is still light. When you have left your room upstairs in the farmhouse and crossed to your father’s sign shop in the old hay barn—not a “shop” but just a corner of the barn that has been converted to a two-vehicle garage with a sliding overhead metal door. The shop isn’t heated of course. Your father seems virtually immune to cold (never wears a hat even in winter when icy winds lower the temperature to below zero, often doesn’t wear an overcoat) though he has to briskly rub his hands sometimes when he’s painting signs. When he isn’t working at Harrison Radiator in Lockport, forty-hour weeks plus “time-and-a-half” on Saturdays, Fred Oates is a freelance sign painter whose distinctive style is immediately recognizable in the Lockport/Getzville/East Amherst area, particularly along the seven-mile stretch of rural Transit Road from Lockport to Millersport.

  It is fascinating to you, to observe your father preparing his signs. Some are so large they have to be propped up on a bench against a wall, smooth rectangular surfaces on which he has laid two coats of shiny white paint. Then, bars straight-penciled with a yardstick, between which he will inscribe his flawless letters:

  GARLOCK’S FAMILY RESTAURANT

  5 Miles

  EIMER ICE

  We Deliver

  FULLENWEIDER DAIRY

  KOHL’S FARM PRODUCE

  2 Miles

  CLOVERLEAF INN

  He’d begun as a sign painter for the Palace Theater in Lockport, when silent movies were shown there. In fact, he’d begun as an usher at the Palace, and a Wurlitzer player. (Silent movies were not “silent” of course but required live music initially.) How, at age fourteen, had Fred Oates been hired for such responsibilities? Soon he was working at the Palace and painting signs for local businesses—“I don’t remember how I got started. Just one thing led to another.”

  The lives of our parents, grandparents, ancestors—Just one thing led to another.

  Vertiginous abyss between then and now.

  After the Palace, Fred Oates went to work in the machine shop at Harrison’s, a short block or two from the Palace Theater on Main Street, Lockport. There he would work for the next forty years until retiring at sixty-five, all the while painting signs in his spare time, to amplify his income.

  Difficult not to feel unworthy of such parents, who’d come of age as young adults in the Great Depression. Their lives were work. Their lives were deprivation. Their lives have led to you.

  As he paints, Daddy hums. He has never complained of the circumstances in his life for possibly it has not occurred to him that there might be legitimate grounds for complaint. Work has been much of his life, and in this, his life is hardly uncommon for its time and place. Painting signs is work of a kind but it is also pleasurable, like playing the organ at the country church or, when he’d been a boy, playing the piano at the Palace Theater. Work to do is not, as some might think, a negative but rather a strong positive for work to do means purpose, and the pleasure of having completed something. In this case, something for which Fred Oates will be paid.

  You must be quiet when Daddy is wielding the paintbrush, and you must be still. A restless child isn’t wanted here in Daddy’s “sign shop.” You are fascinated by your father’s utter concentration as he paints. You can see that there is a distinct pleasure in precisely shaping the subtly curving letters and you will absorb this pleasure in precision, in “lettering,” that might translate into a pleasure in “writing”—for a writer is after all someone who writes words in succession, and words are shaped out of letters.

  In the sign shop there is a strong smell of paints, turpentine. And a smell of damp earth—(the barn’s floor is hard-packed dirt). On Daddy’s work bench are paintbrushes of varying sizes, and all kept in good condition. For Daddy can’t afford to use brushes carelessly; each brush is valuable. There is no excitement quite like taking a camel’s-hair brush from your father’s fingers and dipping it into paint to “letter” on a p
iece of plywood—-Joyce Carol Oates.

  Is it a magical name, that Daddy and Mommy have given you? That has often seemed a gift to you, out of the magnanimity of their love.

  “Can I try?”—not once but many times.

  As long as you can remember as a girl, the landscape within an approximate fifteen-mile radius has always contained your father’s signs. Mommy will point as we drive past—“See? That’s Daddy’s new sign.” In a vehicle with others, someone might say—“See? That’s one of Fred’s signs.” To a neutral eye these signs are of no special distinction. One would not even know that they are hand-painted and not rather manufactured in some way. They are mere signs, distractions that interrupt the mostly rural landscape of Transit Road. Yet, to you, the sign-painter’s daughter, these signs are beautiful. There is something bold and dramatic about a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree. On the side of a barn. You can pick out Fred Oates’s signs anywhere—the curve of the S’s and O’s that suggest almost human figures. The way Daddy crosses his T’s. Once you asked your father, “Why is there a dot over the i?” and your father gave this childish question some thought before saying, “Maybe because without the dot the i would look too small, like something was left out.”

  For many years after he’d ceased to paint them Fred Oates’s signs remained on Transit Road. Then, one by one, they were removed, or replaced, or faded into the oblivion of harsh weather and time. And now, I have not driven along Transit Road in years in fear and dread of what I will not see.

  “THEY ALL JUST WENT AWAY”

  I MUST HAVE BEEN a lonely child. I know that I was a secretive child.

  Yet I must have loved my aloneness. Until the age of twelve or thirteen my most intense, happiest hours were spent tramping desolate fields, woods, creek banks near my family’s farmhouse in Millersport, New York.