The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Royall felt light-headed, for just a moment. His whistling slowed, then took heart and continued.

  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.

  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 injustice 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 engraved 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—behavior. Royall didn’t take any of it that seriously. He couldn’t see why anybody did, especially the part about hell.

  In Niagara Falls the joke was, who needs hell? We have Love Canal.

  Royall craned his neck looking up at a ten-foot Jesus Christ on a stone cross. A bird’s nest of twine and straw had been built at the cross staves. This Christ had a beautifully shaped head, crowned with thorns but triumphant. Yet I Shall Rise Again. Royall shivered, there was something thrilling here. Yet he was grateful he hadn’t been baptized a Christian. Too much was expected of you! Nearby were several stone angels. One or two were so decrepit you couldn’t tell if they were intended to be female or male. Or wasn’t there any sex distinction, among angels? The angel Royall liked best was a boy-angel with muscular-looking hawk-wings and a pugnacious upper lip. A little like Royall himself. Bird shit glowed a faint radium green on the angel’s head and wings but the angel gazed upward undaunted. Flights of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest. Royall wondered what wild yearning had inspired the original idea of angels.

  “Probably it was a dream somebody had?”

  Royall spoke aloud in wonderment as often he did when he was alone. It was a habit he’d had since childhood like whistling, humming loudly, even singing. Hearing him, people were inclined to smile. A happy, uncomplicated soul, they thought Royall Burnaby.

  But not very mature, and not ambitious. He’d managed just to scrape through high school despite the fact (as his teachers insisted) that he was intelligent enough, only just lazy. He had a reputation at school for being a good-natured boy who’d volunteer for any task, like pushing tables and chairs around the cafeteria, hauling cartons of supplies up flights of stairs. He’d changed flat tires for more than one teacher, he’d helped push teachers’ cars out of snowbanks. The kind of boy who failed a course because on the day of the final exam a friend needed a favor done, and Royall volunteered. Last year he’d almost failed to graduate with his class, Royall Burnaby who’d been voted “best-looking” senior boy. Except his attention was so scattered, he might have been one of the ten or twelve seniors out of one hundred eleven at NFH to go to college. He hadn’t even graduated with a New York State regents diploma, only a local diploma.

  Not like his brother Chandler who’d been an honors student at NFH, but who’d want to be Chandler? Poor guy, too brainy for his own good. And possibly, when it came down to it, not brainy enough. He’d almost flunked out freshman year at Buffalo State, as a scholarship student, suffering from “nerves.” Now he was teaching junior high in Niagara Falls and probably making less money than Royall who piloted shrieking tourists into the churning Niagara Gorge and brought them back alive again.

  Royall saw a movement at the farther side of the cemetery, nearest the church, where someone was tending a grave. A solitary individ
ual, kneeling and working rapidly with a clippers.

  That sharp sudden sexual pang in his groin, again. Out of nowhere it struck.

  Royall ran up a hill at the rear of the cemetery, where grave markers were dated as recently as August 1977. There were not many of these for the cemetery was nearly filled. In this raw, grassless section plots were laid out in a more orderly, mundane fashion than elsewhere, and the markers, of various sizes, were uniformly upright. Their facades were sleek as Formica. Mourners had brought pots of geraniums and hydrangea, most of the flowers long dead. There were plastic Easter lilies and plastic ivy wreaths. Small drooping U.S. flags on sticks. Royall’s eyes rapidly and nervously skimmed the graves as if seeking a familiar name yet, if you’d asked him what the name was he sought, Royall could not have said.

  He’d have made a joke of the question, like Ariah.

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  And there was the woman in black waiting for him, at the foot of the hill.

  Royall was slip-sliding down the eroded slope, grabbing exposed tree roots to steady his balance. He had about five minutes to get to work. Typical! Just like Royall! He’d lost track of time entirely. An easy, glib excuse would spring to his lips when he got to the Devil’s Hole Cruise Line landing, he wasn’t going to worry. He was striding along the rows of graves taking little heed where his heavy feet struck when he saw the woman standing no more than twenty yards away, watching him. She was very intent upon him. Was this someone Royall knew, and should politely greet? Someone who knew him? The woman wore layers of black clothing, down to her ankles. Her untidy black hair was laced with gray like cracks. Her lips twitched in a dreamy smile.

  Royall slowed like a deer struck by an arrow. Not a fatal blow, but enough to make him pause. He didn’t want to stare rudely at the woman, but couldn’t look away. From a distance she might have been mistaken for a girl as young as Juliet but at closer range, in this stark whitish sunshine, you could see she was much older, in her early forties perhaps. Yet her manner was girlish, breathless. Her skin was papery-pale and her eyes were slightly sunken in their sockets. High on her thin cheeks were two delicately blended spots of rouge. She was attractive in a wan, subtly ravaged way, like a 1940’s film star years after her prime. Her black hair that was laced with gray fell past her shoulders, tangled and wavy. Her clothes were the strangest clothes ever worn by any visitor to a cemetery: a shimmery black sheath that cascaded down her thin body to her ankles like a nightgown, and over this an unbuttoned black satin jacket with feathery black trim. The jacket’s buttons were made of darkly winking rhinestones. Around the woman’s neck was a black crocheted scarf flimsy as cobwebs. The woman’s feet were bare, long and narrow and very white. Royall swallowed hard, seeing those bare feet in the matted grass. And the expectant way in which the woman was standing, leaning against the back of a weather-stained gravestone, watching him approach.

  Royall realized that the woman must have been waiting for him. She’d seen him climb the hill, and she’d waited for him to come back down. She’d let drop her clipping shears back by the grave she’d been tending.

  “Hello.” The woman’s voice was low, husky, breathless.

  Royall, blushing, mumbled what sounded like “H’lo.”

  “We know each other, don’t we?”

  “I—don’t think so, ma’am.”

  “Oh, I think we do.” The woman smiled, and a fierce, tawny light came up in her eyes. Royall wondered if she was drunk or drugged or mildly deranged. With the spread fingers of her tense right hand she was pressing an end of the cobwebby scarf against her right breast, in a way to suggest a pounding heart inside. Royall’s knees quivered.

  He was having an uneasy feeling about this. A sensation of fiery throbbing had begun in his groin, which he knew was wrong. Which he knew was out of place. A woman old enough to be Royall’s mother! And she did look familiar to him, somehow. One of those women who’d befriended Ariah at one or another of the little churches Ariah had attended over the years. Or a neighbor from Baltic Street. Or the mother of a high school friend of Royall’s. An ex-girlfriend’s mother, who would say in the next breath how she and her daughter missed him? Royall was a careless boy who’d never taken time to learn the names of most people he met, reasoning with childish logic that he’d be meeting them again, or, if he never met them again, what was the purpose in remembering their names? Especially, Royall was likely to forget the names of older persons. He couldn’t remember the names of his so-called aunts who lived on l’Isle Grand and in school he’d been capable of forgetting his teachers’ names over a summer.

  As if she could read these scattered thoughts on the brink of adolescent panic, the woman moved swiftly to Royall, and took his hand firmly in hers. She tugged at him, smiling. She was several inches shorter than Royall, and looked up at him with the raw heedless yearning of a flower seeking the sun. She whispered, “I do know you. Yes. You’re his son. Oh, this is so—such a miracle.” Tenderly the woman framed Royall’s face in her thin hands, and leaned boldly against him, and kissed his mouth lightly, as a mother might do. Royall was too shocked to respond. His instinct was to push away, for this must be a ruse, a trick, yet he was a boy so trained to be courteous to his elders, especially a woman who seemed needful of him, he stood mute, rooted to the spot, like a hapless character in a children’s cartoon. And the woman, at such close quarters, gazed at him so warmly. Her eyes were shadowed and faintly bloodshot yet they seemed to him luminous eyes, darkly bright, with a tawny hazel glow, and beautiful. Her skin appeared translucent, stretched tight across the delicate bones of her face; at her temples, there were faint blue veins. The woman’s face was lightly powdered, her lips were dark crimson and fleshy and beautiful to him. At its neckline the shimmery black sheath was loose, and Royall could see the woman’s pallid, ghostly skin inside, the tops of her bare breasts. Royall felt an overwhelming sensation of warmth, tenderness. His eyes flooded with moisture, he was so suddenly happy.

  “Darling boy. I knew it was you. Come here. Here!”

  The woman tugged at his hand, laughing. She continued to caress his cheeks and to kiss him in her quick, light, fleeting way, like moths brushing against his lips, mysterious and elusive. He was fearful of taking hold of her. Yet she was touching him familiarly, companionably, as a mother touches a child, affectionate yet lightly chiding. “Hurry. Oh, hurry.” In a hiding place such as a child might discover, between two tall gravestones, one guarded by a melancholy angel with discolored wings, the other decorated with a frayed U.S. flag the size of a hand towel, the woman took hold of Royall’s elbows, and laughed at his expression of alarm; she kissed him now more forcibly; her eager lips parted his, and Royall felt her warm nudging tongue, snaky-quick, teasing. By this time Royall, who was an excitable young man, was very excited. At six feet two inches he was packed solid with blood and all of this blood had flooded into his groin which felt to him enormous as a mallet. A roaring came up in his ears. There were bees humming overhead and in the near distance on the far side of the cemetery a freight train approached, and passed: the identical train that was hurtling past the Burnabys’ house at 1703 Baltic, making the windowpanes vibrate and causing Ariah to press her fingertips against her temples in a gesture of pain and vexation. “Darling boy. You have his hair. His eyes. Oh, I knew.” The woman stood on tiptoe, bare white feet trembling with strain. Royall was beginning to clutch at her. Clumsily at first, then more forcibly. So happy! A delirium of happiness. As in a dream of a kind Royall would not have had the imagination to summon for himself this woman whose name was unknown to him opened the loose top of her dress in a gesture that pierced him like a knifeblade. Dazed, light-headed, Royall stooped to kiss her breasts, that were soft-skinned and pale, with rosy-brown nipples that puckered and hardened at the touch of his lips. The woman began moaning, and clutched at Royall’s head, pressing him against her. “I knew. I knew if I came this morning. Oh, this is a miracle. You.” They were lying down together i
n the damp matted grass. Royall’s brain seemed to have gone out like a light abruptly switched off. His hands were moving desperately across the woman’s body, clutching at the shimmery fabric of her dress, as she lay back in the grass, and lifted her hips, and lifted her long skirt, and tugged off her underpants. The matter-of-fact way in which she performed these gestures was deeply moving to Royall. He had a glimpse of the woman’s pale, slender thighs, and the dark patch of hair between her thighs.

  Stricken suddenly with shyness, Royall couldn’t bring himself to open his trousers. His hands were oversized, clumsy as hooks. The woman unzipped his trousers for him, smiling and whispering. “Darling boy. Darling.” The roaring in Royall’s ears grew louder. He was being drawn into the churning depths of the Gorge. The crazed water below the Devil’s Hole, where the tourist boat bucked and heaved and women and children screamed in fright, and Royall, when he was piloting the boat, steered them on their course, exactly on their prescribed course, and finally back to the landing. Now he and this woman unknown to him were lying on the ground together, in the sudden stark intimacy of individuals horizontal in each other’s arms. No turning back. No direction except forward. The world had shrunk to the approximate size of a grave, and there was no direction except forward. Royall knelt awkwardly over the woman, concerned that he might be too heavy for her, the hot heavy weight of his lanky muscled body on her slight body, but she pulled at him teasingly, murmured Hurry! hurry!, the cords in her neck taut with strain. Royall’s knees were shaking. He might have been fourteen years old, sexually inexperienced and panicked. Yet the woman plucked at him, stroked and caressed him, as if his tense quivering body were in her keeping, as familiar to her as her own. She guided his penis into her, into that rough swath of hair between her thighs, and then inside, deep inside her, where she was astonishingly soft; soft as Royall could never quite believe; soft as liquid flame; and Royall was obliterated in that flame, and near to losing control. The woman lay back in the grass, hair tangled behind her head in a silky outspread web. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” At once she’d begun to feel pleasure. This was astonishing: Royall was accustomed to girls who seemed almost to feel nothing, or who pretended to feel what they believed they should feel; but this woman, older, sensuous and eager as no girl Royall had ever made love with, fell into a rhythm of quickened, then languorous beats, kissing him, running her hands rapidly over his back, gently squeezing his penis as he pushed himself into her, until the flamey sensation overcame him and Royall pumped his life into her, between the strong slender legs that gripped him so firmly. The woman shuddered, writhed and clutched at him as if they were drowning together.