The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Had to be. I don’t regret it.

  Oh, shit: I will always regret it. But it had to be.

  11 June 1962

  Had to be, had to be. What choice?

  At about midnight of this day that Dirk Burnaby could not have named the sky above the Niagara River began to clear after a fierce pelting rain and suddenly a full moon emerged, so bright it hurt his eyes. Yet Dirk found himself smiling, to see it. A man who rarely smiled except at such unexpected times. Alone, like this. Driving alone late at night (or was it very early in the morning) with no clear sense of the hour, the date, except a guilty sense that he was falling behind.

  Not quite two weeks after Dirk Burnaby’s public humiliation, his act of “assault” and his arrest.

  Driving his luxury car, now splattered with mud, along the broad puddled Buffalo–Niagara Falls Highway. Beside the Niagara River. West and north in the direction of Niagara Falls. Home! He meant to go home. He saw a night sky above the city mottled with cloud as with a radioactive luminosity.

  He wasn’t drunk. Since the age of sixteen he’d been one to hold his liquor, as he was one to accept responsibility for his actions.

  He hoped his children would understand. He believed they would, one day. You might not redeem yourself by accepting responsibility for your actions, but you can’t redeem yourself otherwise.

  That night, Dirk Burnaby was driving in the direction of Luna Park and so naturally the speculation would be that Dirk Burnaby had been headed home.

  Anxious in wondering if he’d be welcome at that home. May I speak with Mommy? he’d inquired of Royall and the child ran away breathless and returned after at least ten long seconds breathless and chagrined crying Daddy! Mommy says she isn’t home. Daddy, you can talk to me! And so Daddy did talk to Royall, until at the other end of the line someone came up silently (Dirk tried not to envision who, and with what expression on her pale freckled face) and took the receiver from the four-year-old and hung up.

  Dirk had been absent from 22 Luna Park for several days. He’d been in Buffalo, conferring with lawyer-colleagues. Defeated in the Love Canal case but only temporarily, he believed. He could initiate an appeal, and he could help raise money for the Colvin Heights Homeowner’s Association, though disbarred from practicing law himself. Since that afternoon in the courtroom Dirk Burnaby’s life had become mysterious to him, he had only his instinct to follow. He’d become a specimen in a jar. He smelled of formaldehyde. Yet as a specimen he wasn’t quite dead.

  Disbarment was certain. He’d decided to enter a plea of guilty in the assault. He had posted $15,000 bail and he was “free” and he would be sentenced in less than a week, and he would accept the sentence. Probation, or prison time.

  Prison! In more than twenty years of Dirk’s law practice, not one of his clients had gone to prison.

  He’d had to plead guilty to the charge of assault because he was guilty. He might have claimed self-defense, but it had not been self-defense, only just a vicious reflexive blow. Breaking the face of an innocent man. Dirk was ashamed, and knew the shame would outlive him. Yet in the Niagara Gazette as in the Buffalo newspapers Dirk Burnaby was emerging as something of a heroic figure, however reckless, self-destructive.

  LOVE CANAL LAWYER BURNABY

  PROTESTS JUDGE’S DECISION

  Courtroom Assault Leads to Arrest

  And,

  LOVE CANAL LAWSUIT DISMISSED,

  ATTORNEY BURNABY CHARGED WITH

  COURTROOM ASSAULT

  Since that day, Ariah had not spoken to him. Dirk understood that Ariah might never speak to him again.

  He was driving at about sixty-five on the nearly deserted highway when he saw the reflection of a large truck in his rearview mirror, no more than twelve feet from his rear bumper. An enormous diesel rig it appeared, with an unnaturally high cab. Dirk pressed down on his gas pedal and accelerated to pull away. The heavy Lincoln plowed into and through puddles of water, sending up sheets of blinding spray like a racing boat. Dirk switched on his windshield wipers, beginning to panic. The vehicle behind him accelerated as well. It couldn’t be a coincidence, there was the truck looming again in Dirk’s rearview mirror, nearly nudging his bumper. Again, Dirk pressed down on the gas pedal. He was now traveling at seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Dangerous, under these road conditions. Of course, he could outspeed the truck, if necessary; but why was it necessary? Though he couldn’t identify the truck the chilling thought came to him Swann Chemicals. One of their rigs.

  The Lincoln was traveling now at eighty. Dirk gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands. Beside the highway, on Dirk’s left, the Niagara River rushed, raged. Always it was a shock to see the river so close beside the road, here at the upper rapids. The Deadline. Beyond was Goat Island, deserted and featureless in the dark; and beyond Goat Island, The Falls and the Gorge lit up in carnival colors for the summer tourist trade, shifting as in a kaleidoscope Dirk found distasteful, vulgar. He had not intended to follow the highway past Goat Island, he’d intended to turn off onto Fourth Street, which would take him to Luna Park.

  “Hey. What the hell are you doing!”

  Dirk managed to keep a safe distance between his speeding car and the speeding rig behind him, but the Lincoln had begun to shudder with the strain. Dirk’s hands gripping the steering wheel were suddenly clammy with sweat. He couldn’t calculate how he might slow to exit the highway with the God-damned truck so close behind, already he was in the right-hand lane and had nowhere to go except the shoulder. And the shoulder of the highway was deeply puddled, and dangerous. And Dirk seemed to know that the driver in the truck, invisible behind his high windshield, wouldn’t allow Dirk to ease over onto the shoulder.

  For another mile they traveled like this, Dirk’s Lincoln and the unidentified rig, as if locked together.

  Then Dirk saw, moving swiftly from behind, at his right, noiseless as a shark, a second vehicle. A police cruiser? No light was flashing on the roof, and Dirk heard no siren. Yet he recognized the vehicle as an NFPD cruiser. It was moving up beside him, on the shoulder, at Dirk’s speed of eighty-two miles an hour.

  Dirk glanced over at the driver in alarm, and saw an individual in dark glasses, visored cap pulled low over his forehead. A single police officer? That struck Dirk as a bad sign. He’d switched on his right-turn signal, but couldn’t maneuver to exit. He couldn’t increase his speed sufficiently, and he couldn’t slow down, he was boxed in by the cruiser to his right, the diesel rig behind him. They want to kill me. They don’t know me! The thought came swift and almost calm and though it was a thought as logical as the geometry theorems Dirk had memorized in high school, and had taken solace in, somehow he didn’t believe it, his lips drew back from his gritted teeth in a smile of derision. It couldn’t be! It could not be. Not like this, with such rude abruptness. Not now. Not when I have so much more work to do. I’m still young. I love my wife. I love my family. If you knew me! The police cruiser was edging into Dirk’s lane. Dirk sounded his horn, shouting and cursing. His bladder pinched. His body was flooded with adrenaline like neon acid. The Lincoln was up to eighty-six miles an hour, faster than Dirk had ever driven any vehicle. It could not go faster, yet Dirk pressed down on the gas pedal harder. He was trying to save his life, steering away from the cruiser, aiming for the middle lane of the highway, and at last the left-hand lane, hoping to Christ no one would slam into him head-on. The Lincoln’s tires plowed into a wide, deep puddle, water streamed over his windshield like flame, he saw the guard rail rushing toward him, illuminated by his headlights. The car was shuddering, skidding. He saw the Niagara River choppy and wind-ravaged in the unnatural glare from the sky, so strangely close to the highway you would think the river was flooding.

  And that was all Dirk Burnaby saw.

  Poor fool. Threw away your life, and for what?

  Part III

  Family

  Baltic

  Family is all there is on earth. Seeing there’s no God on earth.”r />
  We went to live in a crumbling brick-and-stucco rowhouse at 1703 Baltic near Veterans’ Road. In a residential neighborhood that bordered, on the east, acreage belonging to the Buffalo & Chautauqua Railroad. We were below Fiftieth Street, miles from Love Canal. Our house had been built in 1928. A house of “poignant ugliness” Ariah would call it.

  The other house, on Luna Park, had had to be sold soon in the late summer of 1962. Anyway, our mother sold it.

  “Near-destitute” she described us. We would grow up clinging to this mysterious phrase without knowing what it meant, exactly. Except that near-destitute was a permanent condition, possibly a spiritual condition, special to us. The fatherless Burnaby children.

  “If they ask of him, tell them: it happened before I was born.”

  Always there was a they, them. Always there was we, us.

  Ariah shut the door upon them. Locked all the windows and pulled down the blinds. Only her piano students were welcome into the house at 1703 Baltic, ushered into the parlor which was the music room for years, until a porch at the rear of the house was remodeled and winterized and became the “new” music room.

  It happened before I was born. So many times we spoke these words, they came to seem true.

  “Our catechism for today is: do you get what you deserve, or do you deserve what you get?”

  Her eyes like green gasoline on the verge of igniting and yet: you’d remember afterward that Ariah was smiling.

  Years of smiling. And her thin strong arms hugging us. And hot fierce flamey kisses to dispel a child’s nighttime terror of loss, dissolution, chaos.

  “Mommy’s here, honey. Mommy’s always here.”

  It was so. And Zarjo was her companion, bristly-haired, with alert anxious spaniel eyes. Nosing, nudging, clumsily caressing with paws that seemed almost human, in yearning.

  If Mommy couldn’t sleep with one of us wakened by a nightmare, Zarjo could. Snuggling, shivering with doggy pleasure. His cold damp nose gradually warming, in the crook of a child’s arm.

  “Mommy’s here.” Rolling her eyes skyward. (Really just roofward. It was an ongoing joke in the household, as in an ongoing radio program, that God-the-Father was a cranky presence hovering a few feet above the leaky shingleboard roof.) “Or maybe I mean the ghost of Mommy. Soldiering on.”

  Beyond the house was a weedy-marshy back yard, a scattering of rusted-wire chicken coops, a three-foot railway embankment. Freight trains hurtled past with jarring violence two or three times daily and often in the night. Buffalo & Chautauqua. Baltimore & Ohio. New York Central. Shenandoah. Susquehannah. Nothing beautiful in the locomotives belching black smoke and the freight cars rattling and rumbling through our heads except the names Chautauqua, Shenandoah, Susquehannah.

  “Never cry. Not in public, and not in this house. If ever I catch one of you kids crying, I will personally—” Ariah paused dramatically. The gasoline eyes glittered. Zarjo thumped his stubby tail in anticipation, eagerly watching his mistress. We were Ariah’s TV audience: meant to register the comical difference between Mother’s precise enunciation and cultivated manner, and the comic-strip vernacular of her speech at such times. “—knock your blocks off. Get it?”

  We did. We got it.

  In fact we never did, but we were vigilant.

  There was Chandler, of the three of us he was the eldest, and would always be so. There was Royall, seven years younger than his brother. There was Juliet, born in 1961. Which was too late.

  Those old rusted chickenwire coops! I still dream of them sometimes.

  Our next-door neighbors told us they’d been rabbit coops, once. The rabbits had been big soft-furred long-eared gentle creatures with glazed eyes, grown too large for their cramped quarters. Sometimes their fur pressed through the chickenwire and blew gently in the wind. The rabbits were solitary, one to a coop. We counted seven coops. There were more, badly rusted and broken, in the cellar of our house. Chandler asked what was the point of cooping rabbits in such small cages but the reply was unclear.

  Beneath the coops were calcified droppings, like semi-precious gems almost lost in the weeds.

  It happened before I was born. The body was never recovered. The car was dredged up out of the Niagara River near the twisted guard railings but the body was never recovered and so there was no funeral, there would be no grave site.

  There would be no mourning. No memory.

  Never would Ariah speak of him. Never would Ariah allow us to ask about him. It was not that our unnamed father was dead (and had died, as we would come to know, in mysterious circumstances) but there had been no father. Long before his death he’d been dead to us, by his own choice.

  He had betrayed us. He had gone outside the family.

  The Woman in Black

  1

  This cemetery!

  Royall was thinking the warm sunshine seemed wrong here. You couldn’t name it but definitely something was wrong here.

  He’d been meaning to stop for a long time. He had the kind of honeycomb mind where notions took a while to work their way through to being acted upon. But finally, if you didn’t get impatient, Royall would act upon them, maybe.

  It was a Friday morning in October 1977. Royall was nineteen years old and soon to be a married man.

  Heartsick Royall, who knew why? Mostly he kept it a secret.

  This cemetery on Portage Road he’d been driving past for over a year and had long meant to explore. An old neglected place beside an abandoned church that looked lonely and in need of visitors. Royall had an eye for such things. It wasn’t pity, he didn’t think, nor even curiosity. Like calling to like Ariah would say.

  Ariah would be exasperated seeing him here. But Ariah wouldn’t know.

  Royall entered the cemetery by the opened front gate. It was wrought iron, very rusted. You couldn’t make out the letters overhead, they were so rusted. Grave markers near the gate were old and weather-worn, dating back to—when? The earliest grave marker he saw was thin as a playing card, stooped over as if about to fall. The letters were so faint Royall could barely read them but the dates looked like 1741–1789. So long ago, it made Royall dizzy to calculate how many generations.

  The Falls and the Gorge were millions of years old, of course, like the earth, but these weren’t living things. They had never lived, and had not died. That was a crucial difference.

  Royall liked it that he knew no dead people. Never visited any cemetery to see any specific grave.

  Isn’t that unusual, his fiancée asked him. Most of us, we know lots of people who have died.

  Royall laughed and told her, as his mom would say, the Burnabys aren’t lots of people.

  Tall grasses, spiky thistles, briars were everywhere in the cemetery, crowding the grave markers and the crumbling rock wall where the grounds-keeper, if there was one, couldn’t mow. Royall had an urge to do some mowing here himself. (Sometimes he liked to mow. Not always but definitely sometimes. His back, shoulders, arms were muscled. His hands were so calloused they were almost gnarly. Big hands, and capable. With a hand mower, Royall was usually the one to mow the grass at home. If Royall procrastinated, you could be sure that Ariah would grab the mower and start pushing herself, panting and fuming and churning the mower’s dull blades in wet grass, to embarrass Royall.)

  A warm autumn day in this neglected place, it was a beautiful place and so seemed wrong to Royall. Because the dead can’t feel the sun. Because the mouths of the dead are filled with dirt. And their eyes stitched shut. Radioactive bones, glowing in the dark of the earth.

  Where do you get your strange ideas, his fiancée was always asking him. Quickly kissing him on the lips so that Royall wouldn’t take offense.

  Royall hadn’t wanted to say Out of my dreams. Out of the earth.

  In fact, Royall was sure he’d seen photographs of radioactive bones somewhere, in a book or a magazine. Maybe they’d been X-rays. And there was that photo of a Japanese family, all that remained of them shadowy silhouettes bak
ed into a wall of their home in Hiroshima in some long-ago time before Royall and Candace were born, when President Harry S. Truman ordered the A-bomb dropped on the Japanese enemy.

  Royall never told Candace things to upset her. Virtually as a baby he’d learned that there were things you didn’t say, and didn’t ask. If you made a blunder, Mom would stiffen and back away as if you’d spat on her. If you behaved the right way, Mom would hug, kiss, rock you in her thin but strong arms.

  Royall realized he’d been whistling. Out of a tall elm, a bird with a liquidy sliding call echoed him. Royall’s fiancée liked to say he was the most whistling-hearted boy she’d ever known.

  Fiancée! Tomorrow, shortly after 11 A.M., Candace McCann would be his bride.

  It was a strange custom. Royall had never given it any thought before. A new individual would enter the world: Mrs. Royall Burnaby. Yet now, that individual didn’t exist.

  In the brick-and-stucco rowhouse on Baltic, mail came sometimes for Mrs. Dirk Burnaby, or Mrs. D. Burnaby. Official-looking letters from the City of Niagara Falls, the State of New York. Ariah took them quickly away. Ariah Burnaby she was, if anyone cared to know.

  Royall was discovering that the cemetery was larger than you’d imagine from the road, covering about two acres. Tall oaks and elms partly dead, with split, drooping limbs and dried leaves. Briars, and wild rose running loose like barbed wire. That autumn smell of leaves and soft rotted things. The cemetery was hilly at the edges, and that seemed wrong, too. Graves on a hillside looked as if they might slide downhill in the next rainstorm. Where a wedge of raw red earth had caved in from erosion, tree roots were exposed. These roots had a look of anguish or threat, like somebody dead, trapped in the earth, was clawing to get free.