The Falls

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The big gray clapboard house was the property of Stonecrop’s father who was spoken of, on the premises, as The Sergeant. Only his older sister and his mother called him Bud, Sr.; Stonecrop referred to his father as “Dad” or “my old man”—“the old man.” Stonecrop never spoke of his father without grimacing, scowling, twitching or grinning. He tugged at the soiled collar of his T-shirt, he picked at the scabs and burns on his battered cook’s hands. It was impossible for Juliet to gauge whether Stonecrop loved his father, or felt very sorry for him. Whether he was upset by his father’s condition, or furious. Stonecrop often seemed ashamed, and angry; maybe he was angry because he was ashamed, or ashamed because he was angry. She wondered uneasily when she would meet The Sergeant. But she knew better than to ask.

  A shifting population of Stonecrops lived in the big clapboard house, including a half-dozen lively children who were presumably Stonecrop’s young nieces and nephews. There were surly, unshaven young men Stonecrop’s age who appeared downstairs, yawning and scratching their underarms, drinking from bottles of beer, then disappeared, shuffling away upstairs. Stonecrop made no effort to introduce Juliet to this shifting population and she soon learned to smile brightly and say, with a high school cheerleader’s sincere-seeming enthusiasm, “Oh, hi. I’m Juliet. Bud’s friend.” The first time Stonecrop brought Juliet home, he introduced her to his aunt Ava, his father’s oldest sister who was a registered nurse and took care of The Sergeant; the second time he brought her home, he introduced her to his grandmother, his father’s eighty-year-old mother; at last, after much hesitation, and a good deal of sighing, scowling, and nose-swiping, on Juliet’s third visit he took her to meet his dad. By this time Juliet had become mildly anxious.

  It was a warm July afternoon, shading into evening. Juliet wore white shorts, a soft pink floral shirt, her long untidy hair fastened into a tidy ponytail. She hoped her facial scars weren’t glistening as they sometimes did in humid weather.

  The Sergeant was in the weedy back yard, dozing in the waning sun beside a portable plastic radio blaring primitive pop music. On the grass beside his canvas lawn chair was a pile of comic books, Captain Marvel and Spider-man on top. And scattered glossy pages of automobile and boat advertisements. Juliet’s sensitive nostrils pinched at the smell—bacon, cigarette smoke, stale tired flesh, dried urine. Oh, she was trying not to be distracted by the loud, brainless music. (It wasn’t even rock. It was some confectionary teenage pop of the 1970’s, jingly repetitive tunes and rhythms stolen from the Beatles.) The Sergeant half-lay in a soiled canvas lawn chair, his hairless head drooping. He was a shocking sight, like a bloated baby. His face was flaccid and oily, his scalp looked as if it had been singed and smoked, his eyes were dull, vacant. There were curious scabs, gnarls and knots in the veins of his bare legs and forearms. His arms and legs were spindly but his torso bulged as if he’d swallowed something large and indigestible. He wore filthy shorts and a dingy undershirt and lay without moving, only just breathing harshly, until Stonecrop approached him. When Stonecrop’s massive shadow fell over The Sergeant, the older man stirred uneasily, squinted up at him. His eyes that had seemed vacant showed now a quick glisten of fear.

  Stonecrop mumbled a greeting. “Dad. Hey. You O.K. out here?”

  The Sergeant blinked at him, and smiled hesitantly. His lips drew back from big, stained teeth damp with saliva. Stonecrop repeated his question several times, louder, leaning over his father, before the older man seemed to hear.

  “Hey Dad? You been sleeping, I guess.”

  Juliet saw a slow dull flush rise in Stonecrop’s bulldog neck, of the kind she saw sometimes at the restaurant, when Stonecrop’s irascible uncle bullied him. Her heart went out to her friend, he was trying so hard. Always, it seemed, Stonecrop was trying hard.

  Saying now, stooped to his father’s red-veined ear, “Hey, see? Got a visitor, Dad.” Stonecrop cleared his throat loudly.

  Like a singer dreading her performance before a difficult audience, in terror of failing and yet determined not to fail, Juliet came forward smiling foolishly and licking her lips that felt dry and cracked. She had no idea why Stonecrop had brought her here, but here she was. She would try not to let her friend down. Raising her voice to be heard over the din of the radio she said, “H-Hello, Mr. Stonecrop. I’m—Juliet.”

  What a hopeful, pretentious name! The hope and the pretension had been Ariah’s.

  (Yet: hadn’t Juliet committed suicide, a reckless young teenager?)

  The Sergeant now took notice of Juliet, the diminutive pony-tailed girl he might have supposed was a child inhabitant, a relative of some kind, of his ramshackle house. He blinked, scowled, stared at her uncomprehending as if she’d spoken foreign words. Juliet wondered what the poor man could possibly see, seeing her materialized beside him: his eyes looked so ruined, his vision must be askew. And he’d been wakened rudely from a comfortable doze, his thoughts scattered like scraps of paper blown by the wind. Juliet almost could see Stonecrop’s father frantically chasing these scraps, trying to fit them back together into some kind of coherence.

  And there was the distracting pop music on the radio. Melodies simple and repetitive as nursery tunes given a synthetic erotic beat and bizarrely amplified. Stonecrop said, disgusted, “That shitty stuff, Dad likes. It’s music he can hear, I guess.”

  Since The Sergeant continued to stare at her in silence, Juliet had no choice but to smile again, a little harder, in that bright American-girl way that hurt her face, and extend her hand tentatively. “Mr. Stonecrop? S-Sergeant? I’m h-happy to meet you.”

  The Sergeant made no response. Juliet glanced sidelong at Stonecrop in dismay.

  Stonecrop grunted, and turned down the radio. He fumbled with the knob, and turned the radio off. The Sergeant reacted like a hurt, insulted child, by lashing at Stonecrop with his feeble fist, which Stonecrop ignored, with such cool aplomb that, a moment afterward, Juliet, a witness to this exchange, might doubt that it had ever happened. Stonecrop cleared his throat again and loomed tall over his father and said stubbornly, “This is Juliet, Dad. My friend Jully-ett.”

  The Sergeant looked suspicious, and then intrigued. His damp lips moved as if he were shaping a mysterious sound. Jully-ett?

  Stonecrop was unrelenting. You could see him shouldering a boulder twice his size, pushing it up a hill. Up, and up, panting and wheezing and unrelenting. “My friend Juliet. Lives on Baltic.”

  “ ‘Jully-ett’?” The older man spoke doubtfully, in a voice like dried rushes being shaken. Juliet recalled that, in the tales told of Sergeant Bud Stonecrop, he’d been beaten with tire irons, his windpipe crushed. “ ‘Bal-tic’?”

  Stonecrop said patiently, “That’s where she lives, Dad. You know where Baltic is.” Though it wasn’t at all clear that The Sergeant did know. “Her name is Jully-ett Burn-a-by, Dad.”

  Another awkward pause. The Sergeant now seemed to be focusing his eyes on Juliet, with an effort that appeared to be muscular.

  Stonecrop repeated “Jully-ett Burn-a-by” in an aggressive singsong that grated at Juliet’s nerves like the strings of a piano crudely plucked. He then added, to her alarm, “Dirk Burnaby’s daughter. Dad.”

  Now suddenly The Sergeant was alert, vigilant. Like a blind man roused from sleep. He gaped and blinked at his son’s friend as if he wanted badly to speak, but could not; something was wet and snarled in his throat. In a voice unusually firm and clear, Stonecrop repeated “Dirk Burnaby”—“Dirk Burn-a-by’s daughter”—while Juliet stood blushing and mystified.

  It wasn’t like Stonecrop to put Juliet into uncomfortable situations. There was something here she didn’t understand, and didn’t like.

  “Maybe we should leave, Bud? Your father is—isn’t—in a mood for—”

  But The Sergeant was making an effort now to respond to Juliet, blinking at her with watery, ravaged eyes. He lifted a shaky hand that Juliet forced herself to touch, with a little suppressed shudder, and he drew his lips back again in
to a smile. With great effort he managed to say, enunciating each syllable like a man picking up grains of sand with a tweezers: “ ‘Burn-a-by.’ ”

  Juliet asked with childlike candor, “Did you—know my father? I guess—lots of people did?”

  But The Sergeant fell back into the lawn chair exhausted. He was wheezing as if he’d been running uphill, and a faint froth showed on his lips. His hairless baby-head lolled on his bony shoulders. Stonecrop turned to yell over his shoulder a single word, or name, which Juliet couldn’t decipher, but concluded afterward must have been “Ava” or the run-on “AuntAva” because his middle-aged aunt appeared, smoking a cigarette, and suggested that the young couple leave now. The Sergeant had had enough of the back yard for the day. He’d have to be helped inside. It was time for his supper. And, obviously, he had to be “changed.”

  As Stonecrop led Juliet away, around the house to his car in the driveway, Juliet asked, “ ‘Changed’? What’s that mean?”

  Stonecrop mumbled, “Diaper.”

  This first visit with The Sergeant, which Juliet would have estimated had lasted at least an hour, had in fact lasted less than ten minutes. She was exhausted!

  They drove away. Juliet saw that her friend was deeply agitated. Rivulets of sweat ran down his big blunt face and a smell as of something rank and wetted exuded from him. He seemed hardly aware of her. He drove the Thunderbird fast, braking at intersections so that the car cringed and rocked. Tactfully Juliet dabbed at her own damp face before passing tissues to Stonecrop who took them from her, wordless.

  After a while Juliet said, for there seemed no way not to say such a thing, “Your poor father, Bud! I had no idea he was—well, so sick.”

  Stonecrop, driving, made no reply.

  “But he isn’t old, is he? I mean—” In her distress and confusion Juliet almost said Like your grandmother. It was a bizarre fact: those two Stonecrops, The Sergeant and his eighty-year-old mother, might have been the identical age.

  21

  THE VOICES! The voices in The Falls were mostly gone now. Remote as faded radio stations. You realize one day you haven’t been hearing these radio stations for a while, you cease to search for them on the dial.

  22

  YOU DON’T NEED TO, if you don’t want to.

  Yes but Juliet wanted to. If it meant so much to him.

  Casting his hopeful sidelong look at her. His forehead creased in worry, and in yearning. So that Juliet could not bring herself to protest Why are you doing this, what is the point?

  She halfway thought he wanted her to meet his only parent, as a way of knowing him. And so perhaps she must introduce him to Ariah, in turn.

  Juliet smiled to think of such a meeting. She shuddered!

  In all, Stonecrop would take Juliet to the ramshackle clapboard house on Garrison Street to visit with The Sergeant just three times that summer. And at last Juliet would know why he’d brought her. And she would never see The Sergeant again.

  The second time, ten days after the first visit, The Sergeant was in the back yard as before, lying motionless on the lawn chair with a wetted cloth on his head, listening to the radio. Again it was turned up high. But to a different station, at least. Not teenaged pop but country-and-western. As the young couple approached, The Sergeant took no notice of them. His eyes were shut and he was smiling and humming with the radio music in a high quavering voice. Stonecrop re-introduced Juliet to his father who gave no sign of remembering who she was and this time he told his father that Juliet was a singer, and she was as good as anyone on the radio, and somehow it happened that Juliet sang for The Sergeant. It must have been Stonecrop’s suggestion. Always she would recall the invalid’s mouth gaping in childlike wonder and his rheumy, staring eyes fixed avidly upon her as she stood before him clasping her hands like a choir girl, singing a song she’d first sung for school assembly in fifth grade.

  According to Stonecrop, this was his dad’s favorite song:

  “My country ’tis of thee

  Sweet land of liberty!

  Of thee I sing.”

  What came next? What were the words? Juliet was unnerved by the old man’s painfully intense stare and by Stonecrop’s look of adoration. 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 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 faintness 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.

  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.