The Lost Landscape (8 page)

Once, not at the Big Tree Inn but at a place called Koch's Paradise Grove, by chance on my way to a women's restroom adjacent to the bar, amid a barrage of loud music, a din of voices, laughter, I came across a sight that was shocking to me, and that I have never forgotten: my father speaking with another man, a man of about his age, a stranger whom I was sure I'd never seen before, and they were standing close together, faces flushed and voices raised in anger, and the frightening thought came to me—
They are going to fight, they are going to hurt each other;
but in the next instant my father turned, and saw me, and the expression on his face altered, and the moment passed.

A child is very frightened—viscerally, emotionally—by the raised voices of adults. Even when anger isn't involved but rather excitement, hilarity.

I might have registered—
They have been drinking. But Daddy is not drunk!

It was not unknown, that men became
drunk
. But that was very different from being classified as a
drunk.

So often it seemed to happen in my life as a child and a young girl, such arrested and abbreviated moments—the scene that is interrupted by the girl blundering into it. If there were words exchanged the intrusion of the girl silenced these words and so it is not words that remain but the sound of a voice or voices, uplifted in anger or in hilarity, essentially indecipherable. It is the child's experience to blunder into scenes between adults and to become a witness to something inexplicable to her though it is (probably) a quite ordinary episode in what are not extraordinary lives after all; it remains that the child or young adolescent will make of these broken-off and
mysterious fragments some sort of coherent narrative. What is fleeting and transient in time, no doubt soon forgotten by the adults, or rendered inconsequential in their lives, may burrow deep into the child-witness's soul, whatever is meant by “soul” that is not fleeting and transitory but somehow permanent, and inextricable. And so, decades later I am still seeing my father and the unknown, unnamed man, a man who resembled my father, and both of them flush-faced and prepared to fight; I am remembering how my mother's father died, in a tavern fight in Black Rock in 1917, though long before I was born; I am remembering a casual remark of my father's—
A man never backs down from a fight. You just can't.

And there were other occasions, like this. Like the Sunday drives, beyond estimation. A child sees her father at a little distance, a figure among other figures; a man among men; a child is baffled and thrilled by her father in precisely those ways in which the father eludes the child. It is as if my father had said to me—
You will not ever know me, but it is allowed that you can love me.

The mother is the
known
, or so the child imagines. (This would turn out to be not exactly true, or not true in the fullest degree, but it was not the case that my mother was inaccessible to me emotionally, as often, in those years, my father was.) But the father is the
lesser-known
, the more obvious figure of romance.

How many times returning late from Sunday drives into the countryside beyond Lockport, in Niagara County; a nighttime drive back to Lockport and up the long steep glacier hill to the wide bridge over the Erie Canal at the junction of Main Street and Transit Street; and so onto Transit Road (NY Route 78) and another long, steep glacier hill and our house seven miles away in the countryside just across the Tonawanda Creek. Often, my brother and I would drift off to sleep in the backseat of the car. Often, it seemed to be raining. We would hear the slap of windshield wipers, and my parents' low
ered voices in the front seat. Headlights of oncoming cars sweeping into the back of our car, across the ceiling and gone . . .

On a map of the region—(I would not examine a detailed map of Erie and Niagara counties until 2014 while composing this memoir)—the space of our Sunday drives is compressed like something in a children's storybook. Lake Ontario, that had seemed so romantically far from our home, is fewer than twenty miles away, to the north; Niagara Falls is only twenty-five miles away, to the west. The landscape of my childhood that had seemed so vast, so fraught with mysteries, could be contained within something like a thirty-mile radius.

Sunday drives! You'd think they would continue forever but nothing continues forever. Like gas selling for twenty-eight cents a gallon, that's gone forever.

“DADDY! CAN I TRY?”

And your father will hand you one of his smaller brushes, its thick-feathery tip dipped in red paint, and a piece of scrap plywood, and on the plywood you will try conscientiously to “letter” as your father lettered—precisely and unhesitatingly, with deft twists of his wrist. But in your inexpert hand the paintbrush wavers, and the lettering is wobbly—childish. The bright red flourish of Daddy's letters, the subtle curls and tucks of his brushstrokes, will be impossible for you to imitate at any age.

This evening after supper in a season when the sky is still light. When you have left your room upstairs in the farmhouse and crossed to your father's sign shop in the old hay barn—not a “shop” but just a corner of the barn that has been converted to a two-vehicle garage with a sliding overhead metal door. The shop isn't heated of course. Your father seems virtually immune to cold (never wears a hat even in winter when icy winds lower the temperature to below zero, often doesn't wear an overcoat) though he has to briskly rub his hands sometimes when he's painting signs. When he isn't working at Harrison Radiator in Lockport, forty-hour weeks plus “time-and-a-half” on Saturdays, Fred Oates is a freelance sign painter whose distinc
tive style is immediately recognizable in the Lockport/Getzville/East Amherst area, particularly along the seven-mile stretch of rural Transit Road from Lockport to Millersport.

It is fascinating to you, to observe your father preparing his signs. Some are so large they have to be propped up on a bench against a wall, smooth rectangular surfaces on which he has laid two coats of shiny white paint. Then, bars straight-penciled with a yardstick, between which he will inscribe his flawless letters:

GARLOCK'S FAMILY RESTAURANT
5 Miles

EIMER ICE
We Deliver

FULLENWEIDER DAIRY

KOHL'S FARM PRODUCE
2 Miles

CLOVERLEAF INN

He'd begun as a sign painter for the Palace Theater in Lockport, when silent movies were shown there. In fact, he'd begun as an usher at the Palace, and a Wurlitzer player. (Silent movies were not “silent” of course but required live music initially.) How, at age fourteen, had Fred Oates been hired for such responsibilities? Soon he was working
at the Palace and painting signs for local businesses—“I don't remember how I got started. Just one thing led to another.”

The lives of our parents, grandparents, ancestors—
Just one thing led to another.

Vertiginous abyss between then and now.

After the Palace, Fred Oates went to work in the machine shop at Harrison's, a short block or two from the Palace Theater on Main Street, Lockport. There he would work for the next forty years until retiring at sixty-five, all the while painting signs in his spare time, to amplify his income.

Difficult not to feel unworthy of such parents, who'd come of age as young adults in the Great Depression. Their lives were work. Their lives were deprivation. Their lives have led to
you.

As he paints, Daddy hums. He has never complained of the circumstances in his life for possibly it has not occurred to him that there might be legitimate grounds for complaint. Work has been much of his life, and in this, his life is hardly uncommon for its time and place. Painting signs is work of a kind but it is also pleasurable, like playing the organ at the country church or, when he'd been a boy, playing the piano at the Palace Theater.
Work to do
is not, as some might think, a negative but rather a strong positive for
work to do
means purpose, and the pleasure of having completed something. In this case, something for which Fred Oates will be paid.

You must be quiet when Daddy is wielding the paintbrush, and you must be still. A restless child isn't wanted here in Daddy's “sign shop.” You are fascinated by your father's utter concentration as he paints. You can see that there is a distinct pleasure in precisely shaping the subtly curving letters and you will absorb this pleasure in precision, in “lettering,” that might translate into a pleasure in “writing”—for a writer is after all someone who
writes words
in succession, and words are shaped out of
letters.

In the sign shop there is a strong smell of paints, turpentine. And a smell of damp earth—(the barn's floor is hard-packed dirt). On Daddy's work bench are paintbrushes of varying sizes, and all kept in good condition. For Daddy can't afford to use brushes carelessly; each brush is valuable. There is no excitement quite like taking a camel's-hair brush from your father's fingers and dipping it into paint to “letter” on a piece of plywood—
-Joyce Carol Oates.

Is it a magical name, that Daddy and Mommy have given you? That has often seemed a gift to you, out of the magnanimity of their love.

“Can I try?”—not once but many times.

As long as you can remember as a girl, the landscape within an approximate fifteen-mile radius has always contained your father's signs. Mommy will point as we drive past—“See? That's Daddy's new sign.” In a vehicle with others, someone might say—“See? That's one of Fred's signs.” To a neutral eye these signs are of no special distinction. One would not even know that they are hand-painted and not rather manufactured in some way. They are mere signs, distractions that interrupt the mostly rural landscape of Transit Road. Yet, to you, the sign-painter's daughter, these signs are beautiful. There is something bold and dramatic about a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree. On the side of a barn. You can pick out Fred Oates's signs anywhere—the curve of the
S
's and
O
's that suggest almost human figures. The way Daddy crosses his
T
's. Once you asked your father, “Why is there a dot over the
i
?” and your father gave this childish question some thought before saying, “Maybe because without the dot the
i
would look too small, like something was left out.”

For many years after he'd ceased to paint them Fred Oates's signs remained on Transit Road. Then, one by one, they were removed, or replaced, or faded into the oblivion of harsh weather and time. And now, I have not driven along Transit Road in years in fear and dread of what I will not see.

I MUST HAVE BEEN
a lonely child. I know that I was a secretive child.

Yet I must have loved my aloneness. Until the age of twelve or thirteen my most intense, happiest hours were spent tramping desolate fields, woods, creek banks near my family's farmhouse in Millersport, New York.

No one knew where I went. No one could have guessed how far I wandered. Did my parents inquire, and if so, what did I say?
Just walking. Back the lane. Down by the creek
. Our answers are vague and self-protective. We learn young to obfuscate the truth even when the truth is not harmful to us.

My father would never have asked me where I'd been, because my father was away much of the time. If my mother inquired where I'd been, I would have answered in a way to deflect her curiosity. I was an articulate, verbal child for whom language was both a means of communication and a scrim behind which I might hide, unseen. Of course like all children of that era I had numerous chores—feeding chickens, gathering eggs, even mowing the lawn (with a hand-mower, no joke in tough sinewy crabgrass) as well as more common household chores like helping with meals and dishes.

Still, I seemed to have had ample time to be alone. I could not
have explained to any adult what drew me to descend the steep hill to the Tonawanda Creek and to walk for miles along the rocky bank—if to the right, I would have to make my way beneath the bridge, on a crumbling concrete ledge just above the water, surely no more than twelve inches wide. Overhead were exposed rusted girders and the desiccated nests of birds (barn swallows?); when vehicles passed on the bridge the entire structure shook and echoed in a way that made the hairs at the nape of my neck rise. In the fast-moving, rippling creek, the bridge's reflected underside quavered like something that is forbidden to see, which is yet seen. There was a certain fearfulness involved in inching across the ledge beneath the bridge—a quickening of the heartbeat. Was there danger? The water beneath the bridge wasn't as deep as elsewhere—concrete and other debris had been left there by the construction crew. The water's surface was luridly broken by rusted shafts and rods which had become dulled by time. Once on the other side of the bridge I could follow a faint, worn path, a fisherman's path, that would continue for a few hundred yards until it disappeared into underbrush.

Often there were men fishing on the creek bank beside the bridge. There might be two men, or there might be a solitary man; they were not likely to be residents of the area. You would see their cars parked on the grassy shoulder of the road by the bridge. My memory of these strangers is utterly blank—I can't think that I approached them, yet I don't recall turning back to avoid them. It is possible that, from time to time, one of the solitary men spoke to me, asked my name and where I lived—that would not have been unusual, and it would not have been alarming. But beyond that, I have no memory.

Did my mother think to warn me—
-Joyce, don't go near the fishermen! Stay on our side of the bridge.

To recall the sight of an individual fishing on the creek bank is to feel a thrill of apprehension. The graceful arc of a fishing line cast out
into the creek, the sound of the hooked bait and sinker dropping into the water—these are exciting to me, somehow fascinating, suffused with a kind of dread.

In the fisherman's plastic bucket near shore, live fish, rock bass, trapped and squirming in a few inches of bloody water.

Our side of the bridge was the safer side. The other side of the bridge was the “other” side.

On the safer side was a similar path along the creek bank but it was wider, more defined. This was an area in which as a young child I had played with other children amid a scattering of large boulders and rocks that extended well out into the creek. Close by was a makeshift dam of rocks built by a neighboring farmer across which, if we were very careful, we could make our way to the other side.

At any point where a path led up from the creek, usually up a very steep hill, I could ascend and explore fields, woods, stretches of land that seemed to belong to no one. Within a mile's radius from our house on Transit Road was this other, deeply rural, uncultivated and “wild” place containing abandoned houses, barns, silos, corncribs. There were badly rusted tractors, hulks of cars with broken windows and no tires, rotted hay wagons, piles of rotted lumber. A kind of dumping-ground, at the edge of an overgrown and no longer tended pear orchard. Why
NO TREPASSING
signs exerted such a powerful fascination, I don't know; even today such signs are complex signifiers that stir atavistic memories and cause my pulse to quicken. Yet more attractive because more forbidding was the sign
WARNING
—
BRIDGE OUT
. Or,
DANGER
—
DO NOT TRESPASS
. Everywhere were
NO HUNTING NO FISHING NO TRESPASSING
signs and many of these were riddled with buckshot, for adults too were contemptuous of such admonitions.

An early memory divorced of all context and explanation as a random snapshot discovered in a drawer is of trying to walk, then
crawling on hands and knees across the skeletal rusted girders of an ancient bridge across the creek, tasting fear, fear like the swirling foam-flecked water below, trying not to glance below where jagged rocks and boulders emerged from the water. A possibly fatal place to fall, a place that might have left me maimed, crippled for life, yet a kind of logic demanded that the girders had to be crossed and, more fearfully, recrossed. I could not have said why such a mad feat of daring had to be performed, as if it were a sacred ritual, unwitnessed.

In the company of other children, I was compelled to be the most reckless. Once, I jumped from the roof of a small, boarded-up shanty-house to land on hard, grassless ground fifteen feet below. What an impact! I remember the sledgehammer blow that reverberated through my legs, spine, neck, head. My companions changed their minds about jumping and I was left with a dazed, headachy elation.

The stupidity of childhood, that reverberates through decades.

The realization—
How close you came to killing yourself, and how unknowing you were!
In adulthood we have no way of measuring the illogic of our young selves except to hope that we have outgrown it.

Close by our property, on the far side of a dirt lane, was a boarded-up old cider mill on a sloping bank of the creek. (“Millersport” is named for this mill, whose owner went bankrupt in the Depression.) Within my mother's memory the mill was operated but I never knew it to be otherwise than abandoned and haphazardly boarded up as if in haste or in disdain—planks crossed like giant
X
's over empty windows, through which any child or teenager could crawl very easily. Of all places the cider mill was forbidden and was festooned with signs warning
DANGER
—
NO TRESPASSING
. Yet how many times alone or in the company of others I would push through a cellar window at the rear of the mill that was hidden by tall grass and debris, crawling into the wreck of a building with no heed that
I might cut myself on broken glass or exposed nails. What a wonderland this was! The very odor—chill, dank, sour-rotten on even the freshest days—was exhilarating. No children's play-world could be more fascinating than the cider mill where fantastical machines (presses? conveyor belts?) in various stages of rust and decrepitude dwarfed me as if I were no larger and of no more significance than a prowling cat. Here was a stillness in which no adult had set his foot in years.

Though steps were missing from the rotted staircase it seemed necessary to climb to the second floor. And to walk—slowly, cautiously—across this swaying floor, to stare out a high window at the creek. Behind the mill was an immense compost pile of rotted apples like an avalanche. In this rich dark pungent-smelling soil fishermen sought worms to use for bait on their hooks. From the high window I might watch them, unseen and waiting until they had safely departed.

Or maybe I had been hiding there. The memory is blurred like newsprint in water.

BUT IT WAS ABANDONED
houses that drew me most. A hike of miles in hot, muggy air through fields of spiky grass and brambles, across outcroppings of shale steeply angled as stairs, was a lark if the reward was: an empty house.

Some of these empty houses had been recently inhabited as “homes”—they had not yet reverted to the wild. Others, abandoned during the 1930s, had long begun to collapse inward engulfed by morning glory and trumpet vines.

To push open a door to such silence: the emptiness of a house whose occupants had departed.

Fire-scorched walls, ceiling. A stink of wet smoke. Part of the
house has been gutted by fire but strangely, several downstairs rooms are relatively untouched.

Broken glass underfoot. Drone of flies, hornets. Rapid glisten of a garter snake gliding silently across the floorboards. It is hurtful to see the left-behind remnants of a lost family. Broken child's toy on the floor, mucus-colored baby bottle. Rain-soaked sofa with eviscerated cushions as if gutted by a hunter's knife. Strips of wallpaper like shredded skin. Broken crockery, a heap of smelly tin cans in a corner, beer cans, whiskey bottles. Scattering of cigarette butts. A badly scraped enamel-topped kitchen table. Icebox with door yawning open. At the sink, a hand-pump. (No “running water” here!) On a counter a dirt-stiffened rag that, unfolded like precious cloth, is revealed to be a girl's cheaply glamorous “see-through” blouse.

When I was too young to think
The house is the mother's body. You can be expelled from it and forbidden to re-enter.

It seemed that I would steel myself against being observed. A residue of early childhood when we believe that adults can see us at all times and can hear our thoughts. In an empty house, a face can appear at a high window, if but fleetingly. A woman's uplifted hand in greeting, or in warning.
Hello! Come in! Stay away! Run! Who are you?
Often in an empty house there would be a glimmer of movement in the corner of my eye: the figure of a person passing through a doorway. He had hurt her badly, we knew. And the children. For they were his to hurt.

We knew though we did not know, for no one had told us.

The sky in such places of abandonment was of the hue and brightness of tin. As if the melancholy rural poverty of tin roofs reflects upward.

No one had told me and yet I knew: it was a dangerous place to be a woman if you were not a woman protected by a man or men. If
you were not a child protected by a father, a mother. If you were not of a family that owned a house—a “home.”

A
HOUSE
IS A
structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, and these rooms divided from one another by walls, ceilings, floors. The
house
contains the
home
but is not identical with it. The
house
anticipates the
home
and will survive it, reverting again to
house
when
home
has departed.

In my life subsequent to Millersport I have not found the visual equivalent of these abandoned farmhouses of western New York in the north country of Erie County in the region of the Tonawanda Creek and the Erie Canal. You are led to think most immediately of Edward Hopper: those unsettling stylized visions of a lost America, houses never rendered as “homes,” and human beings, if you look closely, never depicted as anything other than mannequins. There is Charles Burchfield who rendered the landscapes of western New York and his native Ohio as visionary and luminous and excluded the human figure entirely. The shimmering pastel New England barns, fields, trees and skies of Wolf Kahn are images evoked by memory on the edge of dissolution. But the “real”—that which assaults the eye before the brain begins its work of selection, rearrangement, censure—is never on the edge of dissolution, still less appropriation. The “real” is raw, unexpected, unpredictable; sometimes luminous but more often not. Above all, the “real” is gratuitous. For to be a “realist” (in life as in art) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. No design, no intention, no aesthetic, moral, or teleological imprimatur. The equivalent of Darwin's vision of a blind, purposeless, and ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ultimate “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction.

How memory is a matter of bright, fleeting surfaces imperfectly preserved in the perishable brain.

Where a house has been abandoned, too wrecked, rotted, or despairing to be sold, very likely seized by the county in default of taxes and the property held in escrow, there is a sad history. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of cautiously. How they went wrong. When did it begin. Why did she marry him, stay with
him
. Why, when he'd so hurt her. Why, when he'd warned her. Those people. Runs in the family. Shame.

For the abandoned house contains the future of any house. The tree pushing like a tumor through the rotted porch in sinewy coils, hornets' nests beneath sagging eaves, a stained and rain-soaked mattress on a floor of what was once a bedroom, a place of intimacy and trust; windows smashed, skeletal animal remains and human excrement dried in coils on what had once been a parlor floor. On a wall in what had once been the kitchen, a calendar of years ago with blocks of days exactingly crossed out in pencil, discolored by rain.

I SEEM TO HAVE
suggested that the abandoned houses were all distant from our house and that we did not know the families who were unfortunate enough to have lived in them. In fact, the fire-gutted house, the Judds' house, was less than a mile from ours and so by the logic of rural communities, the Judds were—almost—“next-door neighbors” and Helen Judd was my “next-door friend.”