Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
tion. Juliet never dared confront, let alone acknowledge. She wasn’t certain of the words but like any professional musician she glided past the fault-line of error so smoothly, with such assurance, you wouldn’t have detected error, or even uncertainty.
“Land of the pilgrims’ pride!
Land where our fathers died!
From every mountain-side
Let freedom ring.”
Later that evening Juliet brought up the subject of Stonecrop’s father, for it seemed unnatural not to speak of him. She asked Stonecrop what was wrong with his father exactly, had it been the beating, so severe that his brain was injured; but Stonecrop wasn’t yet in a mood to speak of his father. Shifting his shoulders in such misery, snuffling and swiping at his nose, so that Juliet quickly backed away from the subject. But a few days later, Stonecrop told her in his dour sidelong way, “ ‘Dementia.’ My dad. It’s called.”
“ ‘Dementia’? Oh.” Juliet had heard of this medical condition. But she knew virtually nothing about it. Was it senility, or something worse? She shuddered to think of it:
dementia
. The term must spring from the same root as
demon
.
Juliet’s heart went out to Stonecrop. Gently she touched his brawny forearm. But she said nothing, for there seemed to her nothing to say that was adequate to these painful circumstances.
Juliet’s third visit to Stonecrop’s home, the final visit, took place the following week, on a Sunday. This time it was raining and The Sergeant was indoors, where his smells were more concentrated, and his ravaged yet bulky body seemed to take up more space. He seemed to have been napping with his eyes open on a shabby plaid sofa whose seat cushions were covered prudently in oilcloth; his flaccid, boiled-looking face had been freshly washed by Stonecrop’s aunt Ava, and his jaws shaved, to a degree. A small black-and-white TV, tuned to a baseball game, blared in a corner of the room and when Stonecrop entered he went without a word to switch it off. Roused from his nap, The Sergeant made no protest. He seemed hardly surprised that his 460 W
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son was in the room, with a pony-tailed girl in a yellow print dress he stared at, trying to remember. Stonecrop winced and grunted, “Hey Dad. How ya doin’.” When The Sergeant grunted a vague reply, still staring at Juliet, Stonecrop said, “Remember Juliet, my friend?” Juliet smiled but said nothing. Stonecrop, uncharacteristically verbal, repeated to his father that Juliet was a singer, she had as good a voice as anyone on the radio or TV, she lived just around the corner on Baltic, her name was
Jully-ett Burn-a-by
. Stonecrop paused, breathing through his mouth. The Sergeant continued to stare at Juliet as if he’d never seen anything like her, working his mouth as if he were chewing, chewing, chewing something tough and cartilaginous he couldn’t swallow.
Her face warming, Juliet murmured hello and tried to smile as if this were an ordinary visit to an ordinary invalid. A sick man who was convalescing, and would become well again. She was determined to endure the visit for Stonecrop’s sake, it seemed to mean so much to him. She guessed that he must love his father very much; she was reminded of her own father, whom she hadn’t known but of whom she thought almost constantly.
He could be alive now. After that accident. He
could be alive like this, a living death
.
The thought made her light-headed, the heat and airlessness and stench of this place made her feel faint.
Stonecrop had brought cold drinks for the occasion. A can of cherry soda for Juliet and beers for him and his father. But Stonecrop’s father could no longer drink from a bottle and even drinking from a cup was a challenge, so Stonecrop ended up having to lift the cup to his father’s mouth, and to wipe his jaws when beer spilled over. Juliet hated the chemical taste of the cherry drink. The sensation of faint-ness grew stronger. Oh, she hoped Bud wouldn’t ask her to sing!
“ ‘Burn-a-by.’ ” The Sergeant spoke in wonder, and in dread.
Something flared up in his bloodshot eyes. He slapped the cup out of his son’s hand, and began screaming at Juliet, quaking and quavering on the sofa like a giant infant in a tantrum. His mottled skin flushed red, his teeth flashed like a pike’s. Juliet leapt back instinctively out of the range of The Sergeant’s flailing hands. Never had she seen such raw terror, such loathing in another’s face.
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Stonecrop reacted unhesitatingly: with the flat of his hand he shoved his father down, knocking him against the back rest of the sofa as he might have swatted a fly. He muttered what sounded like,
“Old fuck.” Within seconds he and Juliet were outside, headed for Stonecrop’s car.
Out of Niagara Falls they drove, north past Lewiston, past Fort Niagara, to Four Mile Creek. On the bluff above Lake Ontario they walked.
“. . . it’s from syphilis. What’s wrong with him. ‘Dementia.’ People think it was the beating he took, which wasn’t by any Negroes but by fellow cops turning on him, but it was this other, the last stage of syphilis when you haven’t had the shots for it, your brain rots away, see? He can’t remember new things. He won’t remember what happened today. You won’t see him again but if you did, he wouldn’t remember any of it. Older memories, maybe. For a while. But the new things, it’s like a clock hand moving but there’s no hours on the clock, just the hand moving, see?—and nothing adding up.
“The doctor says he just forgot how to go to the bathroom. He forgot. It will get to be, in a while, he’ll forget how to eat. Some food in his mouth, on his tongue, he won’t know what it is, they spit it out. The doctor says not to be surprised.
“Fuck him, it’s O.K. with me. See, he wasn’t ever a nice guy. He wasn’t a decent man. That was his actual soul you saw, I wanted you to see. I wanted you to know him. There’s a reason, you need to know.
He used to beat us kids. It wasn’t that rare in the family, or in our neighborhood, probably you know this, but he was purely a bastard.
He beat my mom. She used to be pretty, he broke her face with my brother’s baseball bat. Another time he would’ve strangled her but we stopped him. Being a cop, he got away with it. And a lot more.
“He got promoted in the NFPD because he was smart, he knew to look the other way. Lots of the top-rank cops that was true of. It’s supposed to be a cleaner department now. But the same bastard is still police chief. He’s on the mob payroll, the Pallidino family in Buffalo.
This is no secret. Everybody knows this.
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“Him and his buddies, they’d pistol-whip Negroes for just the hell of it. A fourteen-year-old kid almost died. They said it was a gang thing. Might’ve been a riot, this was around the time Martin Luther King was shot, but it blew over here. The kid’s family disappeared from here. They knew, you don’t fuck with the cops. Dad used to brag about this. It was what you did, if you were a cop.
“He beat me till I got too big. I don’t tell people, I’m almost blind in my left eye from him slugging me. ‘Detached retina.’ I’m O.K. now, I don’t hardly notice it. I’m grateful not to be blind, see? If I was blind I couldn’t be a cook. I’m always cutting myself anyway. Burning myself. What the fuck, it’s O.K.
“Once, he shot a dog in the neighborhood that was barking too much. It was his story, the dog attacked him. So he had to shoot it.
This was around the time he killed your father.
“Him and this other guy, driving a truck. My dad was driving a police cruiser. They ran him off the highway into the river. That’s how your father died, in the river. I guess you know that. Somebody wanted your father dead, see? My dad was contacted and took the job.
“People say ‘Stonecrops.’ I know that look in their faces. Well, they’re not wrong. And they don’t know the half of it.
“I always knew it. I mean, I knew something. Living in the same house with him, you picked it up. I’d hear him on the phone. He was never worried he’d be caught. Who’d catch him? Where was the evidence? He did other jobs like that, probably. Then he started getting weird. More weird than the department could handle. Nobody knew it was the syphilis. He’d never go to a doctor, he was scared shitless of doctors, hospitals. He still is. Practically we have to tie him down, taking him to the doctor.
“He got weird, and pissed people off in the department. So they beat him. Should’ve killed him but they didn’t. It was written up in the paper when my old man retired from the force. The mayor, the police chief, all these guys praising him. What a laugh! You have to laugh. I’m going to kill him for you, Juliet.
“See, I been thinking about it for a long time. My aunt Ava and me, we’ve discussed it. I mean, sort of. Him dying ‘by accident.’ Or
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his heart stopping, in his sleep. Nobody would give a fuck. A few times I’ve almost strangled him, he starts screaming and breaking things like he did today. But I wouldn’t, my hands would leave marks.
I’d use a pillow. He isn’t strong, I’m a lot stronger. A few minutes pressing a pillow over his face, he’d be dead. And nobody would know.
“How I knew about your dad for sure, he told me. My aunt Ava came to see me, she says the old man is bawling, saying he did something bad. I asked him what it was and he’s shaking his head like he can’t remember. So I asked him about your dad, and he caved in and told me yes that was him. He’s bawling, he’s kind of crazy. My aunt says maybe we should call a priest, he could confess to the priest, but I said fuck that, no way a fucking priest is coming into our house. So she agreed. So he just told me. ‘This thing I did.’
“The other guy, driving a truck, he’s dead. I couldn’t make much sense of what my dad said. Maybe he killed the other guy, to shut him up. Or maybe somebody else ordered the hit. The other guy is nobody whose name I know. I only know my dad. I want to kill him for you.”
Stonecrop ceased speaking. The lake was cobalt-blue below them, white-capped waves washed against the pebbly beach. Juliet had been listening to her friend in astonishment. Never had she heard Stonecrop speak more than a few muttered words, now he’d spilled his guts to her. He was earnest, and anxious. Juliet understood that he was making a gift of his father’s life to her, or wished to make such a gift. It would be the most extraordinary gift offered to her, in her life.
She understood that Bud Stonecrop loved her, and this was a declara-tion of love. Not just that he was in love with her, as anyone might fall in love with her, but he loved her, too. As a brother might love her, out of long knowing, intimacy. As if they’d grown up in the same house. In the same family.
Juliet said, “Bud, no.”
“No? You sure?”
Juliet took Stonecrop’s hands in hers. They were twice the size of hers, big-knuckled hands, with discolored nails, marred with fresh scabs, older scratches, burns from years of kitchen work. She smiled, she’d never seen such beautiful hands.
“I’m sure.”
1
I
can’t be part of it. Don’t make me.”
It isn’t like Ariah to beg. Her son Chandler stares at her in disbelief. Later, he’ll feel guilt. (How natural guilt seems, to a devoted elder son of Ariah Burnaby.) When first he tells her about the memorial ceremony being planned to honor Dirk Burnaby. For, as Chandler reasons, someone has to tell her: and soon.
Poor Ariah. Staring at Chandler as if he has uttered incomprehensible yet terrifying words. Deathly white in the face, groping for a chair. Her eyes wild, glassy-green, unfocused.
“I can’t, Chandler. I can’t be part of it.”
And, later: “If any of you love me. Don’t make me!”
In the intervening weeks, as September approaches, and plans for the memorial for Dirk Burnaby are becoming more ambitious, and are written of in the
Niagara Gazette,
Ariah will not speak of it. She shrinks from speaking of the future, of the imminent autumn, at all.
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Does the telephone ring more frequently at 1703 Baltic? Ariah refuses to answer it. Only her piano students engage her deepest, most intense and abiding interest. And her piano: at which she sits for long hours playing those pieces, some of them mournful, some of them vigorous and passionate, her fingers have long ago memorized.
You are gone. You abandoned me. I am not your wife. I am not your widow.
No one can make me. Never!
2
A lway s , Royall will remember: how on the balmy afternoon of September 21, when he pulls his car up to the crumbling curb at 1703
Baltic, there is Ariah waiting with Juliet on the front porch. Like the high school kid he believes, he knows, he has outgrown, Royall exclaims aloud, “Holy shit.”
Later, he’ll ask Juliet why she hadn’t warned him. Given him a call. And Juliet will say, But I didn’t know, really. Until the very last minute I didn’t know myself that Mom would come. I did not.
Ariah Burnaby wearing not stylish black, nor even somber dark blue or gray, but a white cotton shirtwaist of a kind fashionable in the 1950’s, with embroidered pink rosebuds scattered in the fabric and a pink silk ribbon-belt and a wide-brimmed straw hat, lacy white gloves, white patent leather pumps. Though by the calendar the season is officially autumn, the weather in Niagara Falls today is warm, sunny, summery, and so Ariah’s eccentric costume is not inappropriate. (Has the dress been purchased at the Second Time ’Round, or discovered at the rear of Ariah’s crammed closet?) And Ariah has made up her wanly freckled middle-aged girl’s face to look almost robust, and glamorous; and Ariah has had her shamefully straggly faded-red hair professionally cut into a glossy bob, to astonish her children.
Too surprised to be tactful, or mindful that neighbors might overhear, Royall calls out, “Mom? You’re coming with us?”