The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 8

  No one knew where I went. No one could have guessed how far I wandered. Did my parents inquire, and if so, what did I say? Just walking. Back the lane. Down by the creek. Our answers are vague and self-protective. We learn young to obfuscate the truth even when the truth is not harmful to us.

  My father would never have asked me where I’d been, because my father was away much of the time. If my mother inquired where I’d been, I would have answered in a way to deflect her curiosity. I was an articulate, verbal child for whom language was both a means of communication and a scrim behind which I might hide, unseen. Of course like all children of that era I had numerous chores—feeding chickens, gathering eggs, even mowing the lawn (with a hand-mower, no joke in tough sinewy crabgrass) as well as more common household chores like helping with meals and dishes.

  Still, I seemed to have had ample time to be alone. I could not have explained to any adult what drew me to descend the steep hill to the Tonawanda Creek and to walk for miles along the rocky bank—if to the right, I would have to make my way beneath the bridge, on a crumbling concrete ledge just above the water, surely no more than twelve inches wide. Overhead were exposed rusted girders and the desiccated nests of birds (barn swallows?); when vehicles passed on the bridge the entire structure shook and echoed in a way that made the hairs at the nape of my neck rise. In the fast-moving, rippling creek, the bridge’s reflected underside quavered like something that is forbidden to see, which is yet seen. There was a certain fearfulness involved in inching across the ledge beneath the bridge—a quickening of the heartbeat. Was there danger? The water beneath the bridge wasn’t as deep as elsewhere—concrete and other debris had been left there by the construction crew. The water’s surface was luridly broken by rusted shafts and rods which had become dulled by time. Once on the other side of the bridge I could follow a faint, worn path, a fisherman’s path, that would continue for a few hundred yards until it disappeared into underbrush.

  Often there were men fishing on the creek bank beside the bridge. There might be two men, or there might be a solitary man; they were not likely to be residents of the area. You would see their cars parked on the grassy shoulder of the road by the bridge. My memory of these strangers is utterly blank—I can’t think that I approached them, yet I don’t recall turning back to avoid them. It is possible that, from time to time, one of the solitary men spoke to me, asked my name and where I lived—that would not have been unusual, and it would not have been alarming. But beyond that, I have no memory.

  Did my mother think to warn me—-Joyce, don’t go near the fishermen! Stay on our side of the bridge.

  To recall the sight of an individual fishing on the creek bank is to feel a thrill of apprehension. The graceful arc of a fishing line cast out into the creek, the sound of the hooked bait and sinker dropping into the water—these are exciting to me, somehow fascinating, suffused with a kind of dread.

  In the fisherman’s plastic bucket near shore, live fish, rock bass, trapped and squirming in a few inches of bloody water.

  Our side of the bridge was the safer side. The other side of the bridge was the “other” side.

  On the safer side was a similar path along the creek bank but it was wider, more defined. This was an area in which as a young child I had played with other children amid a scattering of large boulders and rocks that extended well out into the creek. Close by was a makeshift dam of rocks built by a neighboring farmer across which, if we were very careful, we could make our way to the other side.

  At any point where a path led up from the creek, usually up a very steep hill, I could ascend and explore fields, woods, stretches of land that seemed to belong to no one. Within a mile’s radius from our house on Transit Road was this other, deeply rural, uncultivated and “wild” place containing abandoned houses, barns, silos, corncribs. There were badly rusted tractors, hulks of cars with broken windows and no tires, rotted hay wagons, piles of rotted lumber. A kind of dumping-ground, at the edge of an overgrown and no longer tended pear orchard. Why NO TREPASSING signs exerted such a powerful fascination, I don’t know; even today such signs are complex signifiers that stir atavistic memories and cause my pulse to quicken. Yet more attractive because more forbidding was the sign WARNING—BRIDGE OUT. Or, DANGER—DO NOT TRESPASS. Everywhere were NO HUNTING NO FISHING NO TRESPASSING signs and many of these were riddled with buckshot, for adults too were contemptuous of such admonitions.

  An early memory divorced of all context and explanation as a random snapshot discovered in a drawer is of trying to walk, then crawling on hands and knees across the skeletal rusted girders of an ancient bridge across the creek, tasting fear, fear like the swirling foam-flecked water below, trying not to glance below where jagged rocks and boulders emerged from the water. A possibly fatal place to fall, a place that might have left me maimed, crippled for life, yet a kind of logic demanded that the girders had to be crossed and, more fearfully, recrossed. I could not have said why such a mad feat of daring had to be performed, as if it were a sacred ritual, unwitnessed.

  In the company of other children, I was compelled to be the most reckless. Once, I jumped from the roof of a small, boarded-up shanty-house to land on hard, grassless ground fifteen feet below. What an impact! I remember the sledgehammer blow that reverberated through my legs, spine, neck, head. My companions changed their minds about jumping and I was left with a dazed, headachy elation.

  The stupidity of childhood, that reverberates through decades.

  The realization—How close you came to killing yourself, and how unknowing you were! In adulthood we have no way of measuring the illogic of our young selves except to hope that we have outgrown it.

  Close by our property, on the far side of a dirt lane, was a boarded-up old cider mill on a sloping bank of the creek. (“Millersport” is named for this mill, whose owner went bankrupt in the Depression.) Within my mother’s memory the mill was operated but I never knew it to be otherwise than abandoned and haphazardly boarded up as if in haste or in disdain—planks crossed like giant X’s over empty windows, through which any child or teenager could crawl very easily. Of all places the cider mill was forbidden and was festooned with signs warning DANGER—NO TRESPASSING. Yet how many times alone or in the company of others I would push through a cellar window at the rear of the mill that was hidden by tall grass and debris, crawling into the wreck of a building with no heed that I might cut myself on broken glass or exposed nails. What a wonderland this was! The very odor—chill, dank, sour-rotten on even the freshest days—was exhilarating. No children’s play-world could be more fascinating than the cider mill where fantastical machines (presses? conveyor belts?) in various stages of rust and decrepitude dwarfed me as if I were no larger and of no more significance than a prowling cat. Here was a stillness in which no adult had set his foot in years.

  Though steps were missing from the rotted staircase it seemed necessary to climb to the second floor. And to walk—slowly, cautiously—across this swaying floor, to stare out a high window at the creek. Behind the mill was an immense compost pile of rotted apples like an avalanche. In this rich dark pungent-smelling soil fishermen sought worms to use for bait on their hooks. From the high window I might watch them, unseen and waiting until they had safely departed.

  Or maybe I had been hiding there. The memory is blurred like newsprint in water.

  BUT IT WAS ABANDONED houses that drew me most. A hike of miles in hot, muggy air through fields of spiky grass and brambles, across outcroppings of shale steeply angled as stairs, was a lark if the reward was: an empty house.

  Some of these empty houses had been recently inhabited as “homes”—they had not yet reverted to the wild. Others, abandoned during the 1930s, had long begun to collapse inward engulfed by morning glory and trumpet vines.

  To push open a door to such silence: the emptiness of a house whose occupants had departed.

  Fire-scorched walls, ceiling. A stink of wet smoke. Part of the house has been gutted by fire but s
trangely, several downstairs rooms are relatively untouched.

  Broken glass underfoot. Drone of flies, hornets. Rapid glisten of a garter snake gliding silently across the floorboards. It is hurtful to see the left-behind remnants of a lost family. Broken child’s toy on the floor, mucus-colored baby bottle. Rain-soaked sofa with eviscerated cushions as if gutted by a hunter’s knife. Strips of wallpaper like shredded skin. Broken crockery, a heap of smelly tin cans in a corner, beer cans, whiskey bottles. Scattering of cigarette butts. A badly scraped enamel-topped kitchen table. Icebox with door yawning open. At the sink, a hand-pump. (No “running water” here!) On a counter a dirt-stiffened rag that, unfolded like precious cloth, is revealed to be a girl’s cheaply glamorous “see-through” blouse.

  When I was too young to think The house is the mother’s body. You can be expelled from it and forbidden to re-enter.

  It seemed that I would steel myself against being observed. A residue of early childhood when we believe that adults can see us at all times and can hear our thoughts. In an empty house, a face can appear at a high window, if but fleetingly. A woman’s uplifted hand in greeting, or in warning. Hello! Come in! Stay away! Run! Who are you? Often in an empty house there would be a glimmer of movement in the corner of my eye: the figure of a person passing through a doorway. He had hurt her badly, we knew. And the children. For they were his to hurt.

  We knew though we did not know, for no one had told us.

  The sky in such places of abandonment was of the hue and brightness of tin. As if the melancholy rural poverty of tin roofs reflects upward.

  No one had told me and yet I knew: it was a dangerous place to be a woman if you were not a woman protected by a man or men. If you were not a child protected by a father, a mother. If you were not of a family that owned a house—a “home.”

  A HOUSE IS A structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, and these rooms divided from one another by walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will survive it, reverting again to house when home has departed.

  In my life subsequent to Millersport I have not found the visual equivalent of these abandoned farmhouses of western New York in the north country of Erie County in the region of the Tonawanda Creek and the Erie Canal. You are led to think most immediately of Edward Hopper: those unsettling stylized visions of a lost America, houses never rendered as “homes,” and human beings, if you look closely, never depicted as anything other than mannequins. There is Charles Burchfield who rendered the landscapes of western New York and his native Ohio as visionary and luminous and excluded the human figure entirely. The shimmering pastel New England barns, fields, trees and skies of Wolf Kahn are images evoked by memory on the edge of dissolution. But the “real”—that which assaults the eye before the brain begins its work of selection, rearrangement, censure—is never on the edge of dissolution, still less appropriation. The “real” is raw, unexpected, unpredictable; sometimes luminous but more often not. Above all, the “real” is gratuitous. For to be a “realist” (in life as in art) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. No design, no intention, no aesthetic, moral, or teleological imprimatur. The equivalent of Darwin’s vision of a blind, purposeless, and ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ultimate “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction.

  How memory is a matter of bright, fleeting surfaces imperfectly preserved in the perishable brain.

  Where a house has been abandoned, too wrecked, rotted, or despairing to be sold, very likely seized by the county in default of taxes and the property held in escrow, there is a sad history. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of cautiously. How they went wrong. When did it begin. Why did she marry him, stay with him. Why, when he’d so hurt her. Why, when he’d warned her. Those people. Runs in the family. Shame.

  For the abandoned house contains the future of any house. The tree pushing like a tumor through the rotted porch in sinewy coils, hornets’ nests beneath sagging eaves, a stained and rain-soaked mattress on a floor of what was once a bedroom, a place of intimacy and trust; windows smashed, skeletal animal remains and human excrement dried in coils on what had once been a parlor floor. On a wall in what had once been the kitchen, a calendar of years ago with blocks of days exactingly crossed out in pencil, discolored by rain.

  I SEEM TO HAVE suggested that the abandoned houses were all distant from our house and that we did not know the families who were unfortunate enough to have lived in them. In fact, the fire-gutted house, the Judds’ house, was less than a mile from ours and so by the logic of rural communities, the Judds were—almost—“next-door neighbors” and Helen Judd was my “next-door friend.”

  The Judds lived on the Tonawanda Road between Millersport and Pendleton. If you took a shortcut to their house behind our barn and through our cornfield and a marshy stretch of trees, it was a walk of no more than ten minutes.

  This is a walk I often take in dreams. A stealthy walk. For my parents did not like me to “play” with Helen Judd.

  The Judds’ dog Nellie, a mixed breed with a stumpy energetic tail and a sweet disposition, sand-colored, rheumy-eyed, hungry for affection as for the food scraps we sometimes fed her, trotted over frequently to play with my brother and me, for the Judds did not feed their dog but expected her to hunt and scavenge food like a wild animal. Robin and I were very fond of Nellie but my grandmother would shoo her away if she saw her. None of the Judds was welcome at my grandmother’s house.

  The Judd house it would be called for years. The Judd property. As if the very land (which the Judds had not owned in any case but had only rented) were somehow imprinted with the father’s surname, a man’s identity, infamy.

  For tales were told in Millersport of the father who drank, beat and terrorized his family, “did things to the girls,” at last set the house on fire either deliberately or in a drunken stupor and fled on foot and was arrested by Erie County sheriff’s deputies and caused to disappear forever from the community. There was no romance in Mr. Judd though he “worked on the railroad”—at least, in the railroad yard in Lockport. My father knew him only slightly and despised him as a drinker, a wife- and child-beater. Mr. Judd seemed to work only sporadically though he always wore a railway man’s cap and work clothes stiff with dirt or grease. His face was broad and sullen, vein-swollen and flushed with a look of alcoholic reproach. He chewed tobacco and craned his head forward to spit between his booted feet. He and his elder sons were hunters, owning among them a shotgun and one or two deer rifles. He was of moderate height, shorter than my father, heavyset, with straggly whiskers that sprouted from his jaws like wires. Often, he was to be seen walking at the roadside. His eyes swerved in their sockets seeking you out when you could not escape quickly enough. H’lo there little girl! Little-Oates-girl, eh? Are you?

  The name Oates was hostile and jeering in his mouth.

  Mrs. Judd was a woman at whom we never looked directly. There was something hurt and abject about Helen’s mother, it would pain you to see. She had been a “pretty” woman once—(my mother said)—but seemed bloated now as with a perpetual pregnancy. She had had seven or eight babies—even Helen wasn’t sure—of whom six had survived. Her bosom had sunk to her waist. Her legs were encased in flesh-colored support hose. How can that poor woman live with him. That pig. There was disdain, disgust in this frequent refrain. There was pity, indignation, disapproval. Why doesn’t she leave him. Did you see that black eye? Did you hear them, the other night? She should take the girls away, at least. For Mrs. Judd was the only one of the family who worked regular shifts, as a cleaning woman in the Bewley Building in Lockport and later in a canning factory north of Lockport.

  A shifting household of relatives and “boarders” lived in the Judd house. Of the six children remaining at home, four were sons and two daughters and all were under the age of twenty. Helen was a year older t
han I was, and Dorothy two years younger. There was an older brother of Mr. Judd’s who walked with a cane, said to be an ex-convict from Attica. (What was Attica? A men’s maximum security prison in upstate New York.) The oldest Judd son had been in the navy briefly, had been discharged and returned to Millersport where he worked from time to time in Lockport as a manual laborer; he owned a motorcycle, which he was always repairing in the driveway. There were frequent disputes at the Judds’ house. Tales of Mr. Judd chasing his wife with a butcher knife, a claw hammer, the shotgun. Threatening to “blow the bitch’s head off.” Mrs. Judd and the younger children fled outside in terror, hid in the hayloft of a derelict old barn behind the house where Mr. Judd couldn’t climb to find them.

  Sheriff’s deputies were summoned to the Judd house. No charges were pressed against Mr. Judd for Mrs. Judd refused to speak with any law enforcement officers, nor would any of the children speak with them. Until the fire that was so public that it could not be denied.

  There was the summer day, I was eleven years old. When Mr. Judd shot Nellie.

  At first we had no idea what was wrong, what creature was it wailing, moaning and whimpering intermittently for hours somewhere at the rear of our property. For sometimes in the orchard and woods behind our house there were wild creatures—raccoons, we thought—that sent up strange, caterwauling cries. There were shrieking cries of rabbits seized by owls. But finally we realized, the cries were Nellie’s, and we remembered having heard several rifle shots earlier in the day.

  When my father came home from work that evening he went to speak to Mr. Judd though my mother begged him not to. By this time poor Nellie had dragged herself under the Judds’ cellarless house to die. Mr. Judd was furious at my father’s intrusion, drunk, defensive—Nellie was his “goddam dog” he said, she’d been “pissing him off,” whining and whimpering, she was “old.” But my father convinced him to put the poor dog out of her misery.