The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Pawing through untidy stacks of Gazettes. Also the Buffalo Evening News, and the Buffalo Courier Express, which had surely covered the Love Canal case. Royall’s hands were smudged from newsprint. He was encountering mouse droppings, tiny black pellets the size of caraway seeds. And the dessicated husks of insects. Occasionally a live, rapidly fleeing silver fish. The fate of the dead. But I’m not dead.

  Back issues of newspapers, 1973, 1971, 1968…How naive he’d been, thinking he could drop by the library here, read about his father, learn some interesting facts, and depart. But his task wasn’t so easy. Somehow, the past wasn’t there.

  In the near distance was a steady dripping. Every four seconds. Yet, when Royall listened, the four seconds became five, or more. Then again the drip came more rapidly. Royall pressed his fingers against his ears. “God damn. Fucker.” Royall missed the Devil’s Hole already, and he hadn’t been off a week. In his waterproof uniform, in his visored cap, passengers depending upon Lieutenant Captain Royall. It was a Disney cartoon and yet: the thunderous water below The Falls was real.

  Sometimes, though, Royall felt himself not-real in that place. In the midst of spray, squeals of passengers, the heaving bucking boat. His thoughts drifted away, he slipped into an eerie dream of flailing his arms and legs underwater. The glassy-green, beautiful water of the Horseshoe Falls. Royall’s long hair trailing like seaweed. He was naked, and his eyes were opened wide, as a corpse’s eyes are opened wide.

  Yes, Royall had seen corpses hauled from the Niagara River. He’d seen his first “floater” at the age of twelve. Mom never knew. Like hell, he’d have mentioned this to anyone in his family or even to neighbors on Baltic Street. A floater was a submerged corpse swollen with rot like a meat balloon, rising to the surface.

  No, Royall hadn’t thought much about it. That his own father had died in that river. Not ever a morbid-minded boy.

  Royall rubbed his aching eyes. Glanced up from blurred columns of newsprint. The drip-drip-drip had entered his bloodstream. Someone was gliding silently behind a row of steel mesh stacks. He smelled her scent! A warm sensation began in his groin, of hope. Though his actual arm was too heavy to lift, Royall saw his hand outstretched to the woman in yearning.

  “Wake up. C’mon!”

  Royall shook his head to wake himself from his trance.

  He pushed himself harder. He was frightened of failing. Of giving up, moving back to Baltic Street. He was panting, determined. He returned to the stacks, making his way laboriously on his haunches, checking every paper on the lowest shelf, every date. His thighs pounded in pain. Yet, by luck, he finally located copies of the Gazette dating back to 1961–1962. Individual pages were missing but the bulk of the newspapers appeared to be intact. Royall carried armfuls to a wooden plank table in the center of the room. He began to search, methodically.

  There!—the first Love Canal headline. September 1961.

  “You were still alive. Then.”

  Two hours and forty minutes Royall read, and re-read. He was beyond exhaustion. He could not have said if he was exhilarated, or frightened. There was so much more than he’d known, so much more than he’d been capable of imagining. He felt as if a door had suddenly opened in the sky, where you had not known there could be a door. A massive opening through which light shone. As light often shone, through fissures in thunderclouds, if only for a few tantalizing minutes, in the sky above the Great Lakes. It was blinding light, hurtful, not yet illuminating. But it was light.

  7

  ONE DAY HE DROVE out Portage Road, and there was the abandoned stone church. And there was the cemetery, that looked abandoned but was not, entirely. He parked his car and entered the cemetery as he’d done earlier in the month on a warm October morning, now it was later in the month and later in the season, a damp chill to the air and the sky overcast. There were fewer leaves on trees. The wind had blown them off. Wind had cracked tree limbs, overturned flower pots, twisted those little American flags stuck beside veterans’ graves so they were barely recognizable as flags. Royall had learned, from the library, that Dirk Burnaby had been a veteran. Of World War II. There was no grave for Dirk Burnaby but if there had been, a flag might signal it.

  This cemetery! It drew the eye, it fascinated, yet in the way of a dream in which individual details shimmer and fade, as you look closely at them. Royall had the impression that the cemetery was shabbier than it had been, as if months and even years had passed, and not less than three weeks.

  He spent some time searching the area where the woman in black had been trimming grass on a grave, but no grave looked as if it had been trimmed lately. Fallen branches lay everywhere. Broken clay pots, dead geraniums, plastic flowers. Nor could he find the hidden-away place where the woman had drawn him, and they’d lain together. No names on any of the gravestones were familiar, or meant anything to him. Kirk, Reilly, Sanderson, Olds. These were the names of strangers who’d lived decades ago, the most recent burial had been in 1943.

  Still, Royall didn’t want to give up. He wasn’t ready to leave. This was a Saturday morning, someone might come to the cemetery to visit a grave, to tidy up a grave, maybe the woman in black would return, Royall had so much to tell her.

  Pilgrims

  The madness of wind excites us. But we know to bring the flapping laundry inside, fast.”

  It was of the other house we sometimes dreamt. The knocking at the front door, our mother’s upraised voice, the indistinct voices of the police officers which we knew not to confuse with our father’s voice. Mother’s shrill strangulated cry.

  No. Go away. Get out!

  There were two of us awakened and crouching on the stairway landing. In the kitchen where he spent the night in his cushioned wicker basket, the puppy Zarjo began barking and whining anxiously.

  We disobeyed Mother, we didn’t go back upstairs. By the time the police officers left we were crying desperately.

  In the nursery where Bridget had been awakened, the baby began to cry.

  There were two brothers. Chandler who was eleven, Royall who was four.

  They could not know that their father was dead. On that morning when police officers came to 22 Luna Park it hadn’t yet been determined that Dirk Burnaby was dead. Only that the car registered in his name had been hauled from the Niagara River where it had skidded and smashed through a guard railing of the Buffalo–Niagara Falls Highway sometime in the early morning of June 11, 1962. Only that no body had yet been recovered.

  There were no witnesses to the alleged accident. Nor would witnesses come forward.

  An “accident” it would be ruled. For who could prove otherwise?

  And though the body of Dirk Burnaby would never be recovered, in time a “death certificate” would be issued by the county.

  It was of that other house we sometimes dreamt. We remembered how Mother fumbled and clawed at the lock of the door as soon as the police officers left. Before they’d returned to their car and driven away she’d locked the door. She was panting. We rushed at her in terror. Her eyes swung wildly in her face and her lips were white and ravaged like a fish’s mouth torn by the hook. We were not yet disciplined for crying, that would come later, and so Mother allowed us to cry, Mother tried to hold both of us, awkwardly stooped as if her backbone had been broken. Her voice lifted defiantly. Is that door shut? Is that door locked? Never open that door again.

  And so it was: none of us ever opened that door again.

  The body of Dirk Burnaby was never found in the Niagara River.

  And yet: at approximately 8 A.M. of June 11, 1962, a gathering of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Our Lady Of The Falls, a Roman Catholic basilica three miles north of Niagara Falls, would report having sighted what appeared to be “a man swimming in the river, downstream.” The pilgrims belonged to a Roman Catholic parish in Washington, D.C., and had made the trip to the basilica on a chartered bus; there were forty of them, ranging in age from thirty-nine to eighty-six, most of them infirm or ailing to a deg
ree. They claimed to have known absolutely nothing of the “vehicular accident” on the Buffalo–Niagara Falls Highway earlier that morning, nor that the Coast Guard and other rescue workers were searching the river for a man’s body.

  What they saw, or swore they saw, was a man swimming swiftly downriver, borne by the current in the middle of the river, and parallel with shore. The swimmer made no attempt to head toward shore. A few of the more able-bodied pilgrims shouted at him, waved their arms, ran along the riverbank until undergrowth prevented them. The swimmer took not the slightest notice. Some said it looked as if he were “swimming for his life.” He’d appeared “out of nowhere” and would disappear “into nowhere” as the pilgrims stared after him in dismay.

  The man was never identified of course. No one had seen his face, he was too far from shore. It wasn’t clear—and this was a crucial point—whether he was bare-chested, or in fact clothed. Vaguely he was described as “not young”—“but not old.” He had “dark-blond hair”—“buff-colored hair”—“a fair, whitish hair.” All agreed that he was a “very good swimmer.”

  Coast Guard rescue workers on the river were contacted by radio, but the “swimming man” was never located.

  I grew up, and I moved from the house on Baltic Street, and at the age of twenty-three I became a volunteer at the Niagara County Crisis Intervention Center. I became a Red Cross emergency rescue worker, and a member of the Samaritans, a suicide-prevention organization. I would learn that reports like the pilgrims’ are not uncommon.

  Witnesses will swear—sincerely, adamantly, at times vehemently!—that they have seen a swimmer where (in fact) they’ve seen a corpse, born rapidly downstream by a current strong and turbulent as that of the Niagara River. Often these witnesses will claim to have seen a human swimmer when what they’ve seen (as evidence will bear out) is the corpse of a drowned dog or sheep. It’s because the rhythmic agitation of the corpse’s limbs, caused by the waves, mimics the motions of swimming.

  Invariably these “swimmers”—“excellent swimmers”—are swimming downstream, parallel with shore. Never do they turn, vary their swimming pattern, or head to shore. Never do they respond to observers shouting to them from shore. With tireless energy and determinism they “swim”—and disappear from view.

  Why? A Coast Guard rescue worker explained.

  “People want to see a ‘swimmer.’ Definitely they don’t want to see a corpse. Out there, in the river, someone like themselves, they’re going to want to see that he’s alive, and swimming. Whatever their brains might tell them, their eyes don’t see.”

  No body was ever recovered, identified as Dirk Burnaby. Years passed.

  Hostages

  1

  Why? Because I need to help others.

  Because I need to help. And there are others.

  Because I need. I need.

  Why?

  2

  EROSION TIME EROSION TIME

  He was twenty-seven, it was March 1978. Block-printing these words onto the blackboard at the front of his ninth grade general science classroom at La Salle Junior High. In this room, in this public school in downtown Niagara Falls, Chandler mostly felt himself of no specific time or age at all.

  Chandler was about to relate these terms to his students’ homework assignment when the summons came for him: “Mr. Burnaby, excuse me? Please call the County Crisis Prevention Center. I guess it must be an emergency.”

  The young woman from the principal’s office was breathless, concerned, sensing herself the bearer of urgent news.

  It wasn’t the first time that a summons from the Crisis Center had come to Chandler at La Salle, but usually these emergencies occurred at extreme hours. Late-night, early-morning. Weekends and holidays when the human will has frayed. Chandler murmured, “Janet, thanks!” Demonstrating to the twenty-eight students in the room how matter-of-factly their Mr. Burnaby dealt with “emergency,” placing the stick of chalk on the blackboard tray and informing them, in his usual quiet, mildly humorous voice, that they’ll be heartbroken, he has to leave before the end of class, something has come up. “I hope I can trust you? There are eight minutes left in the hour. Please remain in your seats until the bell rings. You can use the time to get started on your homework assignment and I’ll see you, God willing, tomorrow. O.K?” They smiled seriously, they nodded. This was an emergency, he could trust them. For eight minutes at least.

  God willing. Why’d Chandler say such a thing? He wasn’t one to dramatize danger, or himself. And he neither believed in God nor presented his subject to fourteen-year-olds in any way that might be construed as predicated upon a belief in God.

  Even Ariah’s God, the one with the cruel sense of humor.

  “Mr. Burn’by? Is it somebody going to jump into The Falls?”

  “I don’t think so, Peter. Not this time.”

  Downstairs in the principal’s office Chandler telephoned the Crisis Center and was given information, directions to the site of the “gunman/hostage” situation on the east side. Within minutes he was in his car, driving east on Falls Street past Tenth Street, Memorial Drive, Acheson Drive. All his senses were alert as if he’d been plunged into ice water. Feeling like an arrow being shot—swiftly, unerringly, as Chandler himself could never shoot an arrow—to its target.

  God willing. That wry fatalism, which was Ariah’s fatalism, too. For you never knew, summoned by the Crisis Center, whether this would be the emergency from which you, the energetic volunteer, would not return.

  Penance, is it? This life of yours. But if you love me why would you do penance?

  He did love Melinda. He loved Melinda’s baby daughter to whom he hoped to be a father, someday. But he couldn’t answer her question.

  Ariah had ceased asking. In the season of Chandler’s first active involvement in the Crisis Center, his first year as a teacher in the Niagara Falls public school system, she’d registered her sharp disapproval of her elder son’s “reckless, dangerous” volunteer work, and Ariah wasn’t one to persist where she knew she could not succeed.

  These days, Chandler dealt with the problem by not telling Melinda, if he could avoid it. And certainly not telling Ariah.

  “Gunman/hostage.” Chandler had intervened in only one of these situations before, a deranged man holding two of his own children hostage in his home, and it had not ended happily. And it had lasted well into the night.

  Chandler’s volunteer work had begun when he’d been an undergraduate in the early 1970’s. He’d demonstrated against the Vietnam War and the bombings in Cambodia. He’d joined other young miliantidealists to campaign door to door for voter registration in poor Buffalo neighborhoods, and he’d helped set up Red Cross blood-giving booths at various sites in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and their affluent suburbs. He’d helped petition for school bond issues, “clean water” and “clean air.” (It was while working for the Red Cross that he’d first met Melinda Aitkins, a nurse.) Then, he’d been drawn into emergency work. Red Cross, Crisis Intervention Center, Samaritans. It was a small, intense community of individuals who soon became acquainted with one another. Most of them were unmarried, childless. Or their children were grown and gone. Or their children had disappointed them in some way. Sometimes, their children had died.

  Most of the volunteers Chandler knew were Christians, and they took their religion seriously. A Christian is one who “does good” for others. Jesus Christ had been a volunteer in the salvation of mankind, hadn’t He? Jesus Christ had been fearless in His intervention in the spiritual crises of mankind. The crucifixion was the earthly penance He had to pay for challenging the cyclical fatalism of mankind, but the resurrection was His reward, and an embled for all—wasn’t it? Chandler listened raptly to such ideas, expressed by the former Jesuit who headed the local branch of the Samaritans, but listened in silence.

  He told Melinda, “I wish I could believe. It would make everything so much easier.”

  Melinda said, “You don’t want things easier, Chand
ler. You want things exactly as difficult as they are.”

  During Chandler’s lifetime, Niagara Falls had become a sprawling, burgeoning, “prosperous” industrial city. It was boasted that the city’s population had doubled since the 1940’s. There were now more than fifty thousand industrial jobs in the area, and—a fact that was reiterated often, as if it were a special sign of merit—the highest concentration of chemical factories in the United States. The Niagara Falls Chandler had known, or had known to a degree, had been changed almost beyond recognition. Luna Park was the only “historic” residential neighborhood that remained, but it too had begun to deteriorate; the wealthy lived on l’Isle Grand, or beyond, in the affluent Buffalo suburbs of Amherst and Williamsville. The Niagara Gorge and land along the river approaching The Falls were protected by the state from commercial development because this was sacrosanct tourist territory, guaranteed to generate millions of dollars yearly.

  In this new Niagara Falls where a shift in the wind turned the very air sepia, made eyes smart and breathing difficult, “crises” had become commonplace, like crime. Rarely did these crises involve individuals who’d made pilgrimages to The Falls to commit a spectacular act of suicide; these were natives of the city, nearly always men. They acted upon impulse in sudden rage, despair, madness fueled by alcohol and drugs committing acts of unpremeditated violence, much of it domestic. Their weapons were guns, knives, hammers, fists. Often they committed suicide after their rage played out, or tried to.

  “Gunman/hostage.” The dispatcher at the Crisis Center had told Chandler that robbery or burglary didn’t seem to be involved. The motive had to be purely emotional, the most dangerous of motives.