Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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
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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.
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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.
1
T
his 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.
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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.
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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 baked 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.
Royall felt light-headed, for just a moment. His whistling slowed, then took heart and continued.
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Was someone watching him? He glanced around, frowning. He remembered seeing a low-slung Ford, older than his own car, parked by the side of the church. Royall’s car, his newly repainted (sky-blue, with ivory trim) 1971 Chevy sedan purchased for $300 from his boss at the Devil’s Hole Cruise Line, was parked at the cemetery gate.
His boss Captain Stu, like his mom Ariah, would be exasperated seeing Royall drifting about this useless place. Whistling, and his shoes squishing in damp soil. Of course Royall should be in his car driving to work. (Royall assisted the cruise ship pilot, Captain Stu.
Royall wore a nautical-looking waterproof uniform and his title was Lieutenant Captain Royall and since he was twenty years younger and way more good-looking than Captain Stu, it was Royall who was most frequently photographed with beaming female tourists and children. Even before graduating from Niagara Falls High in 1976, Royall had been working at the Devil’s Hole and making good money.)
Royall wasn’t one to ask of himself
Why the hell have I stopped here?
Royall wasn’t one to calculate his every move like a chess player.
Not one to ask
Why, why now? When I’m going to be married tomorrow
morning.
Royall was discovering more graves, and newer graves. These dead were beginning to be born in the early 1900’s and some of them had not died until the 1940’s: killed in the war. There was a winged cement angel with blank blind eyes and a chipped-off ear guarding the grave of a man named Broemel who’d been born in 1898 and had not died until 1962 which was very recent.
Careful now
Royall was being warned.
You want to be careful, son
. This voice, crafty yet kind, he sometimes heard when he might be drifting into a mistake.
Mostly Royall had no idea what the voice was saying. If he tried to listen closely, the voice vanished. Yet he was comforted hearing it. As if someone was thinking of him, Royall Burnaby, even when common sense told him no one was.
Royall’s sister, Juliet, told him she heard voices too, sometimes.
Telling her to do hurtful things.
Hurtful things! Royall laughed, Juliet wasn’t any kind of girl to do a hurtful thing to a spider.
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Why’d a voice give you such advice? Royall asked. And Juliet said like it was the most matter-of-fact statement, Because there is a curse on us. Our name.
Curse! Like a mummy’s curse? Frankenstein? Royall had to laugh, this conversation was so ridiculous. There’s no such thing as a curse.
Ask Chandler. Ask Mom.
In that quiet stubborn way Juliet said, It’s only what the voices say, Royall. I can’t tell them what to say.
Well. Royall didn’t believe in any damn curse. No more than Chandler, who was the brains of the family, did.
But he’d begun walking fast, as if he had a destination and wasn’t just prowling. Overhead the sky was bleached-out. The sun burned through, whitish-hot. Like something melting. The slanted light indicated autumn. By the Niagara Gorge the air would smell of chill, vaporous moisture but here, inland, a sweet rotted-earthy odor rose from the grass. Royall paused, shutting his eyes. What did it remind him of—tobacco? Sweet Corona cigars. Royall didn’t smoke (Ariah boasted she’d drummed it into her children’s heads that smoking was a filthy habit bad as heroin) but he’d tried a couple of cigars offered by the older gambling men he sometimes hung with, downtown.
He’d coughed and choked, tears stung his eyes, he’d decided that cigars weren’t for him yet still he was drawn to the dark earthy tobacco smell.
A sexual pang in his groin, at the thought of being married tomorrow. Royall’s first full night with Candace McCann in an actual bed.
A narrow graveled lane led through the opened gate into the center of the cemetery but if you followed it, you came to an abrupt stop. The lane just ended. Rows of gravestones here belonged to people who’d been born in the early decades of the twentieth century and had died mostly in the 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s. It was a strangely warm day for October. Sunshine, and no wind. You wouldn’t know that The Falls was less than two miles away.
The cemetery, Royall decided, was like a city. It continued the in-justice of the city and of life. Most of the grave markers were ordinary stone, weather-worn and soiled with bird lime, while others were more expensive, larger, made of granite or marble with shiny en-284 W
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graved facades. This was Christian ground, no doubting it. Everywhere were inscriptions to signal the joy of death, and heaven.
The
Lord Is My Shepherd I Shall Not Want.
And,
This Day I Shall Be With You
In Paradise.
Did Christians truly believe in the resurrection of the body? It was a mystery to Royall, what Candace tried in her faltering way to explain to him.
Ariah was always saying scornfully there was no God on earth, and yet—“There might be a God watching.” This made the human predicament worse. For God was tricky, unpredictable. In gambling terms, God held all the good cards. God owned the casino. The casino was God. You couldn’t ever hope to know God or His plan but still He might be there, so you had to be vigilant. In one of the religious fevers that overcame her at unexpected times, like an onslaught of flu, Ariah might insist that her children accompany her to church, but most of the time she disdained such superstitious—craven—