The Lost Landscape (10 page)

What had happened to Roy Judd? (That was his name: I would murmur aloud, in secret—“Roy Judd.”) It was said that he'd joined the navy—but no, he had already been in the navy and had been discharged “for health reasons.” It was said that he'd gone to live with relatives in Olcott Beach but then he'd disappeared. He had given a sworn statement to the Erie County sheriff about the night of his father's “arson”—he was to have been a material witness—but he'd panicked, and disappeared.

We waited to hear of Mr. Judd. Such cases involve long waits.

Eventually, Mr. Judd was sentenced to prison. There was disappointment in this—the brevity of such a statement. For there had been no trial, no public accountability.
Pleaded guilty to charges, sentenced twenty years to life, Attica.

NOW THEY WERE GONE
, the Judds haunted Millersport.

No Trespassing—Danger.

Property Condemned by Erie County.

My brother and I were warned never to wander over onto the Judd property. There was known to be a well with a loose-fitting cover, among other dangers.

Even, in the back, a sinkhole—a smelly cesspool that had not been cleaned in decades.

Of course, neighbor children explored. Even my young brother explored. As if we would fall into a well! We smiled to think how little our parents knew us.

Have I said that my father never struck his children, as Mr. Judd struck his? And did worse things to them, to the girls—“When he was drunk. And afterward he'd claimed he didn't remember.”

And Mrs. Judd who'd seemed so vague-minded, so apologetic and ineffectual—it was revealed that Mrs. Judd too had beaten the children, screaming and punching them when she'd been drinking—(for it was revealed that Mrs. Judd drank too)—and Helen bore the mark of her mother's rage, a fine white scar in her left eyebrow.

County social workers came around to question neighbors in Millersport. Few neighbors knew anything of the Judds apart from what other neighbors had told them yet much seemed to be revealed, and was assiduously recorded.
Once you tell them something, it will never be erased
—this was my father's warning.

My father did not speak much with the authorities. My father did not trust authorities. But others spoke, including my mother. And my grandparents who'd known Mr. Judd from when he'd been young—younger.
He got that way from something that happened to him, not all of it was his fault. That's why they drink.

Like most children of that era I was disciplined sometimes—
“spanked.” Like most children, I remember such episodes vaguely. As if they'd happened to another child, not me.

How would you know if you'd been a bad girl, if you were not spanked? Specific
badness
is lost in memory but
spanking
remains.

Once I happened to see Mr. Judd urinating at the roadside. Might've been drunk, or anyway he'd been drinking, returning on foot from a country tavern on Transit Road. Afterward I would confuse the blurred stream of his urine with the flying streams of kerosene he'd flung about his house before setting the fire with a single wooden match. The one I had seen, the other I had to imagine.
Joycie-Oates c'mere! That your name, eh?—Joycie?

Had Mr. Judd really wanted to burn up his family in their beds? It was said that he'd sprinkled the kerosene haphazardly, sloppily—drunk and staggering on his feet.

Mrs. Judd insisted to police that they'd all been awake—they had all had time to run outside before the fire really started. Mrs. Judd insisted that they'd never been in any danger not even the youngest who was four years old.

Still, they were hospitalized. Trauma of the fire, smoke inhalation.

For a while, Mrs. Judd was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.

Yet for years afterward the
Judd house
remained standing. Something defiant about the ruin like an individual who has been killed but will not die.

The “see-through” blouse had not belonged to Helen but to an older relative. Some of Helen's clothes I'd recognized, in one of the back rooms. Socks, old shoes. Broken Christmas tree ornaments in a heap of broken things. Each time I dared to enter the house I discovered more things, for always there is more to be seen. One of the stained and water-soaked mattresses drew me to it with the fascination of horror. The most terrible punishment for a bad girl, I thought, would be to be forced to lie down on such a mattress.

It was in the ruin of their house that I thought of Helen, and of Dorothy. Mr. Judd had “done things” to them—what sort of things? Mrs. Judd with her swollen blackened eyes, bruised face. In Millersport hatred for Mrs. Judd was as fierce as hatred for Mr. Judd and possibly fiercer for there is the expectation that the mother will protect the children against the
goddamn no-good drunk son-of-a-bitch father.

Shouts and sirens in the night. The shock of a fire in the night. And nothing ever the same again, after that night.

No charges were ever filed against Mrs. Judd, in any case. The county social worker who knew my mother told her how Mrs. Judd continued to insist that her husband had not meant for the fire to hurt anyone, he had not done anything wrong really, he should not be in prison. Screaming, cursing at the woman. The names she'd called the nurses! A woman would not want to repeat such names even to another woman, even in a whisper.

Mrs. Judd was the wife of Mr. Judd. They'd had babies together made from their bodies. What right has the law to interfere? The law has nothing to do with what passes between a man and a woman.

As a woman whose primary expression is through language, I have long wondered at the wellsprings of female masochism. Or what, in place of a more subtle and less reductive phrase, we can call the predilection for self-hurt, self-erasure, self-abnegation in women. The predilection is presumably learned—“acquired”—“culturally determined”—but surely they must spring from biological roots, neurophysiological states of being. Such predilections predate culture. Indeed, shape culture. It is tempting to say, in revulsion—
Yes but the Judds are isolated, pathetic individuals. These are marginal Americans, uneducated. They tell us nothing about ourselves
. Yet they tell us everything about ourselves and even the telling, the exposure, is a kind of radical cutting, an inscription in the flesh.

Yet: what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of self-
hurt in a woman? Abnegation in the face of another's brutality, cruelty? Acquiescence to another's (perverted, mad) will? This terrifying secret of which women do not care to speak, or in some (religious, fundamentalist) quarters even acknowledge.

Don't speak. Don't ask. They will rise against you, they will tear you to pieces. Run!

SEVERAL YEARS LATER IN
junior high school, in Lockport—(where those of us from Millersport who'd gone to the one-room schoolhouse were now bused since the school no longer taught eight grades, as in my mother's time, but only five)—there Helen Judd appeared one day! It would turn out that Helen had gone to live with relatives in Newfane. And now, she'd moved, or had been moved, to Lockport. If I was fourteen now, Helen was fifteen. Like an adult woman she appeared, if you saw her at a little distance: big-hipped, big-breasted, with coarse hair inexpertly bleached.

Helen's homeroom was “special ed.”—in a corner of the school beside the boys' vocational shop classroom—but she was assigned to some classes with the rest of us, presumably because she was considered one of the brighter of the special ed. students.

We had home economics in common but if Helen recognized me she was careful to give no sign. Rarely did she look at any of us—at our faces—girls from “normal” classes.

(Home economics! For girls like us, a class so ridiculous with its instructions in the proper making of a model bed, the proper ironing of men's “dress shirts,” the preparation of simple meals involving a stove and an oven, the skills of vacuum-cleaning, even our teacher seemed embarrassed.)

“Helen?”—one day I dared to speak to her, my voice barely audible.

Barely audible too was Helen's reply as she turned quickly away with a cringing smile, a gesture of her hand that was both an acknowledgment and a rebuff, a tacit greeting and a plea to be invisible, let-alone, unnamed.

I would protect Helen, I thought. I would tell no one about her family. When we encountered each other at school, I gave no sign of knowing her. I saw that she was relieved, though she did not fully trust me. I thought—
She doesn't know what has happened to her, or she doesn't remember. She doesn't want me to remember.

There seemed to be a tacit understanding that “something had happened” to Helen Judd. Her classmates and her teachers treated her guardedly. She was “special” as a handicapped person is special. She was withdrawn, quiet; if she was still susceptible to sudden outbursts of rage, she might have been on medication to control it. Her eyes, like her father's, seemed always about to swerve in their sockets. Her face was round, somewhat coarse, fleshy as a pudding, her wide nose oily-pored. In her expression, her mother's meekness, and the baffled fury of such meekness. She wore dark lipstick, she wore “glamorous” clothing—nylon sweaters with rhinestone glitter, gauzy see-through blouses, patent leather belts that cinched in her thick waist. In gym class her large soft breasts strained at her T-shirt and the shining rippled muscles and fatty flesh of her thighs were amazing to us who were so much thinner and less female, as of another species.

We did not think—
She is of childbearing age. And we are children.

The actions of adolescents are inexplicable even to them, and even in retrospect. I remember baffling my friends by going out of my way to be cordial to Helen Judd whom they knew only as one of the special ed. students. The pretense was that I did not know Helen but was coming to know her, greeting her warmly—“Helen! Hi”—as if such behavior were altogether normal on my part, and not an elaborate imposture.

If Helen could be urged to smile, her face lost its slack, sallow look, and so it was a challenge to me, to induce Helen Judd to smile. She appeared to be lonely, and miserable at school, and flattered by my attention. For “normal” students rarely sought out special ed. students except to tease or torment them. At first she may have been suspicious of my motives but by degrees, over a period of weeks and months, she became trusting. I saw her sitting alone in the cafeteria, and sat with her, when I might have sat with other girls, and she understood this, and must have been surprised as others were surprised. I thought of Nellie: trust shows in the eyes. I asked her where she lived now and she told me she lived on Niagara Street, but that she might be moving soon. I asked her about the house on the Tonawanda Creek Road, hadn't she lived there with her family, and they'd moved out, and Helen blinked at me, and creased her forehead as an adult might do, and told me that she had not ever lived there but only stayed for a while, it had been her uncle's house in Millersport. I said, “There was a fire, wasn't there? How did it start?” and Helen said, slowly, each word like a pebble sucked in the mouth, “Lightning. Lightning hit it. One night in a storm.”

I asked if she was living with her mother now and Helen shook her head vehemently, no. I asked her if she saw her mother and Helen shrugged and said she “wasn't sure” where her mother was. I considered asking about her father but did not for I knew that Helen would lie about him, and I did not want her to lie, and to see in my face that I knew she was lying, for I wanted to be her friend.

I asked about Dorothy. With a pained cringing smile Helen said that Dorothy was “somewhere else.”

I told Helen that my mother had always liked her mother and missed her when they'd moved away. Helen continued to smile at me without seeming to hear me. She had a nervous habit of scratching at her arms, which she was doing now.

(It did not go unobserved that each special ed. student had some habit, some mannerism, some tic or compulsion that set him or her apart from “normal” individuals. Helen Judd was one of the least conspicuous of these.)

“We miss you. We wonder how you are. I wish—I wish you would visit me, Helen.”

These words came spontaneously. I wanted to be Helen Judd's friend. And then a kind of slow horror came over me, for I seemed scarcely to know what I was saying.

Helen shrugged, and laughed. She gave me a sidelong glance, almost flirtatiously. Almost inaudibly she muttered what sounded like
OK.

“You will? You'll come to visit? Sometime . . .”

But Helen was distracted now. Vigorously she was scratching at her forearm in a way nearly to draw blood. If I'd scratched myself in such a way in my mother's presence, Mommy would have leaned over to clasp and stop my hand.
Honey, no. Don't hurt yourself.

Helen's nails were polished a shiny peach color, but were badly chipped and even bitten. And her hair, that had always been brown, was streaked now with blond like an animal's stripes.

“It seems strange and sad, nobody lives in your house now. Why did you all move away?”

Again Helen laughed. But there was no mirth or happiness in her face. Slowly she said, creasing her young forehead so that it resembled my grandmother's forehead, a shocking succession of deep wrinkles, as if she'd come to a conclusion to a puzzle that had long vexed her, “They all just—went away.”

I wanted to ask where. But the look in Helen's face, the agitation with which she scratched at her forearms, dissuaded me.

Another time, after pausing to sit with Helen at a cafeteria table at which a scattering of special ed. students were sitting, who stared
at me with faint, hopeful smiles, I left a plastic change purse with a few coins in it on the table; and when I returned, only a few minutes later, Helen was gone, and the change purse was gone. I asked the others at the table if they'd seen it and vehemently they shook their heads
no.