The Falls (58 page)

“ O u r s u b j e c t t o d ay is The Falls. And erosion.”

On the front blackboard of Mr. Burnaby’s ninth-grade science classroom is a simplified but accurate map of the Niagara River, drawn with rapid strokes of chalk by Mr. Burnaby (who must carry such a map, to scale, in his head). Still on the board from last week is:

EROSION TIME EROSION TIME

Mr. Burnaby says, pointing with the chalk, “The Falls are currently here, at Niagara Falls. Our city. A little more than two miles from this classroom. But The Falls weren’t always here, and will not remain here. The Falls is in motion.”

The Falls originated downriver, north of the city at Lewiston, approximately twelve thousand years ago. Not very long ago in geological time; but earth erosion moves swiftly.

“An inch a century? Yes, that’s ‘swiftly.’ ”

Chandler Burnaby, master of arcane knowledge that impresses certain of his smarter students. Mr. Burnaby, ninth-grade science teacher in the Niagara Falls public school system, bravely striding across chasms of geological time, a stick of chalk in his fingers like a talisman.

Mr. Burnaby, whom certain of the ninth-grade girls (it’s hardly a secret which ones) have crushes on.

Mr. Burnaby, wearing his Mr. Burnaby face. Speaking his Burnaby voice.

Telling these young adolescents, some of them looking hardly more than children, terrible heartrending profound truths of time, mortality, human isolation in a godless universe. Truths of loss, anni-hilation. As the red minute hand of the clock on the wall moves placidly, a wheel forever turning.

Mr. Burnaby draws an inch-long line. How short it is on the black-The Falls X 405

board, almost invisible. “Yes. A mere inch a century. But it’s a slow inexorable wearing-away of the riverbed along forty miles. When our man-made devices to impede erosion fail, The Falls will resume its movement. One day it will have moved all the way upstream, past l’Isle Grand, past Tonawanda, past Buffalo; one day, a very long time from now, The Falls will be at the source of the strait (for in fact the Niagara River isn’t a river, but a strait, connecting the two lakes) at Lake Erie.”

Chandler wants to think that several of his students are absorbing this. Feeling it in their guts. The Falls, they’ve learned to take for granted, even to scorn, isn’t
permanent
?

A bright boy waves his hand. Asks what the city will be called, if The Falls are gone from it? “Just ‘Niagara’? And no ‘Falls’?”

“Probably,” Chandler says, “it won’t be called anything. There won’t be anyone here to take note of it. Like the great glaciers of the Ice Age, our city, and these other cities, will very likely have fallen into ruins, hidden in underbrush, inhabitants long gone. You’ve seen enough science-fiction to know the scenario. Things wear out, civi-lizations wear down, species vanish. Who knows where?”

His students stare at him. There’s an uncomfortable silence.
Who
knows where?
seems to hover in the air. He has frightened these young people for a few fleet seconds before the bell clamors and releases them and he seems to have frightened himself, too. Laying his chalk-stub into the tray beneath the blackboard but fumbling, it slips and falls shattering to bits at his feet.

10

H a d n ’ t c a l l e d M e l i n d a .

He could take pride in his restraint, at least.

He’d been writing to Melinda, however. Coming to know her, and to know himself, intimately, from writing these letters though he put them away in a drawer without sending them.

It wasn’t until after meeting Joseph Pankowski that he decided to send a few lines to Melinda. Terse as poetry: 406 W
Joyce Carol Oates

I am sorry.

I think of you constantly.

Yes I was wrong, to value my life so cheaply.

I hope you can forgive me.

How to sign it but
Love, Chandler
? There seemed no other way.

He hated the many “I’s” in what he’d written. He was sick of his ego, his self trapped like a fly in a bottle.

Yet he had to send this message. He’d written and rewritten each line numerous times, he couldn’t seem to improve it.

Melinda didn’t reply, didn’t call. Yet somehow he felt encouraged.

He would not harass her. He would not drive past her apartment building on Alcott Street. He would not dial her number, and listen to the ringing, and hang up quietly if the receiver was lifted.

He would not go to the hospital to see if . . . Well, to see.

He would not send flowers, with a card saying only
Love, C
. He believed that, to a woman, flowers from a man might be perceived as sexually aggressive.

Instead, he sent her carefully chosen cards, scenic views of The Falls and the Gorge. These were meant to suggest an unearthly beauty. And the danger of such beauty.

I can change, I think.

I love you, and I love Danya.

Will you give me another chance?

In early May he searched for gently comical cartoon cards featur-ing nurses and patients, but found none that weren’t vulgar. He drew his own card, a man lying flat on his back on a gurney, a nurse extracting blood from the man’s arm.

Melinda! I’m in your hands utterly.

Have mercy.

He waited.

Our Lady of The Falls

W
hy can’t it be true? Why can’t we believe? Some things in which we don’t believe must be true . . .”

In the spring of 1891 in Niagara Falls there lived a fifteen-year-old dairy maid lately settled to live with relatives in the area from County Cork, Ireland. This girl was said to be of a “neutral” religious disposition: she believed in the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its sacraments, but was not one of those passionate believers who attend mass and take holy communion on days other than Sunday.

Within a year of the dairy maid’s arrival in Niagara Falls she was deeply troubled, pale and distraught and sleepless. Abruptly she withdrew from the boisterous company of her relatives. She was drawn to The Falls to expiate her sin which was a sin of the flesh perpetrated upon her by the dairy owner’s son. This young man swore he loved the dairy maid, in the early days of their acquaintanceship; in time, he swore he would strangle her with his hands that were tough-408 W
Joyce Carol Oates

ened from milking the slippery teats of cows lowing and moaning to be milked as (the young man crudely believed) the dairy maid had wished to be “milked” by her lover: ejaculated into, his creamy semen coating her insides as she whimpered and sobbed in pain, thrashed her thighs from side to side, bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

This girl, a virgin until so seduced, and impregnated, was not the cause of that sin; yet she carried the consequence of it inside her belly hard as a nut that would not be dislodged. (To her shame, the girl did try to abort the unwanted baby in her womb. Oh she tried, she tried! Stamping her heels, striking herself in the belly, running until she collapsed panting like a stricken deer. And in this she knew herself doubly a sinner, and rightly despised by God.) In a delirium of sorrow, malnourished, self-loathing, in the third month of her pregnancy when all who knew her shunned her, and the dairy owner barred her from his property, the shamed girl made her way on foot to the Niagara River, and to The Falls, of which she’d heard it was a place for sinners to cleanse themselves, by way of ridding the world of themselves. She removed her shoes as a penitant walking in dirt, sharp stones, tall grasses to the very edge of the rushing river, that acted upon her like a spell. Never had she gazed upon such a sight as the rapids, The Falls, the Gorge billowing mist like clouds of steam that seemed to her in her distraught state “as if it must be boiling hot, like the bowels of Hell.”

The dairy maid had made her decision, and was calm in her actions. She would commit herself to the river as, she’d heard, numerous others had done, to be borne swiftly over The Falls. In this way she would spare her family the burden of shame she must bring them, and the unwanted bastard child no one (except perhaps the dairy maid) could love. Yet staring at the clouds of mist the dairy maid smiled to perceive several small rainbows, shimmering in thin rays of sunshine against an overcast sky. And with that innocent smile she felt her “heart leap” and was granted a vision of a radiant female figure rising before her above the great gorge at a distance of perhaps forty feet, hovering in the air. The feet of this figure disappeared in the mist generated by the Horseshoe Falls, and her haloed head
The Falls
X 409

touched the very sky. The dairy maid was stricken to the heart, and fell to her knees exclaiming
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
for she had recognized the Virgin immediately by her serene, beautifully composed face and her royal-blue robe that fell in graceful folds about her slender body. As she had been taught in childhood in the great church of her baptism the dairy maid surrendered herself to this vision with not a moment’s hesitancy or doubt, praying in a loud ecstatic voice
Holy Mary, Mother of God! Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our
death, Amen
.

The dairy maid then begged the Virgin Mary to forgive her, and the Virgin Mary smiled gently upon her and spoke so softly that her words were obscured by the roar of The Falls yet the sense of them was communicated to the dairy maid as clearly as if the Virgin had whispered into her ear saying
My child there is nothing to forgive. Love,
and you do God’s will
.

At these words, the dairy maid sank into a swoon and lost consciousness and was not discovered on the riverbank for several hours; and was afterward delirious, with a high fever, for days. Carried to a nearby home on Prospect Avenue, she was treated by a physician, and woke weeping in joy; she told her rescuers of the vision she’d been granted of The Virgin of The Falls, repeating her story numerous times to all who would listen, and to priests of the Roman Catholic Church, who were immediately summoned. The Irish dairy maid was uneducated and illiterate and yet, witnesses claimed, she spoke with such certitude, her face radiant, it was impossible to believe that she was not telling the truth. Almost, you could see the Virgin through the dairy maid’s eyes, so singularly did she convey the miraculous vision she’d been granted, and its special message for the faithful.
There
is nothing to forgive. Love, and you do God’s will.

On a hilly site three miles north of The Falls, a shrine was erected to commemorate the dairy maid’s vision: the Basilica of Our Lady of The Falls. In time, after numerous miracles of “healing” and “revelation” were said to occur there, the Basilica grew, and in 1949 a new, thirty-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, executed in Vermont marble 410 W
Joyce Carol Oates

and said to weigh more than twenty tons, was erected in such a position that it could be seen for miles, very like a vision, looking toward the city of Niagara Falls and the river.
You saw, and you wanted to believe.

You saw, and looked away, and laughed, and hot acid spilled into the back
of your mouth, you were sickened and ashamed and yet: you wanted to believe.

Heal me
.

The Voices

1

here’s a curse on our name.

T No. Our name is a curse.

The voices! The voices in The Falls . . . In winter The Falls are en-cased in ice and rainbows of ice glitter across the Gorge and mist is frozen like spun glass covering the trees and there is a frail ice bridge that forms across the river between Luna Island and Bridal Veil Falls and you want to believe you can cross that bridge and the voices are muted, almost inaudible, you have to hold your breath to hear. But with the thaw in late March, early April, the voices return, louder, harsher, yet seductive, and by June as the anniversary of his death approaches the voices became clamorous and impatient and you hear them in your sleep far from the rushing river.
Juliet! Juliet! Burn-a-by!

Shame, shame’s the name
.
You know your name. Come to your father in The
Falls.

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“Zarjo, no. Stay.”

Juliet whispers goodbye to Zarjo, roused from his warm inert sleep at the foot of her bed. Buries her face in the dog’s familiar coarse fur and allows him to lick her face, her hands, panting silently, shivering with doggy enthusiasm wanting to be taken with her—where?

In the stillness before dawn. In a twilight of rain that has gradually lightened to mist, to fog.

She must leave quickly before Ariah knows. Before Ariah can prevent her. For in her bed that night, as she tried to sleep, the voices pushed near, jeering, derisive
Burn-a-by! Burn-a-by!
and among them his voice, she’s convinced, the single voice among the others that’s calm, gentle—
Juliet! It’s time.

(Is that his voice? Juliet believes it is.)

(Though born too late. Her memory of him is transparent as falling water.)

Yet when she sings, Juliet sings for him. Secretly, for him.

In recitals, she imagines him somewhere in the audience. Not in the first several rows with parents and relatives and classmates, but somewhere, in the darkness. He would be sitting alone, and he would be listening attentively. When she sings beautifully, it’s because he listens so attentively.

Her solo in “The Messiah.” At the Music Hall. For which she’d been praised. And such applause. For him!

A shy girl, her eyes welling with emotion. Swiping at her eyes seeing him smile, a look of fatherly pride.

At other times, unpredictably, her voice quavers and loses its strength, she feels that panicked sensation, her throat on the verge of shutting up: she knows the futility of singing for a man she can’t remember, who died sixteen years ago.

We’re happy, but only while the music lasts.

So Ariah has conceded. And so it must be true.