The Falls (65 page)

cleared—but had soon given up, as he’d given up on the weedy, over-grown back yard. The front porch was cluttered with furniture and other objects cast off from the interior of the house, also with children’s bicycles, scooters, sleds. Several of the front windows were cracked and conspicuously mended with tape. The roof had the perpetually damp, rotted look of a roof that leaks in the mildest of rains; so close to The Falls, the mildest of rains might be torrential. Juliet had often wondered, passing this house: who lives inside? She’d seemed to know beforehand that this was a family very different from the family living in the squeezed-together rowhouse around the corner at 1703 Baltic.

Stonecrop’s mother, whom he called, in his embarrassed mumbly way his mom, had “gone away somewhere, south”—“maybe Florida”—a long time ago. When Juliet exclaimed he must miss her, Stonecrop shrugged and edged away.

Well: it was a thoughtless remark, probably. And stupid.

Later, not minutes or hours but days later, Stonecrop took up the subject of his mom, as if he’d been brooding all this time, and carrying on a conversation with Juliet in his head, saying, with a fierce swipe of his nose, “—it’s better than her dead. Going away. Like she did. Before—” Stonecrop searched for the remainder of this phrase, but came up with nothing. Juliet wondered if he’d meant to say
Before
something happened to her
.

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
The Falls
X 453

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 au-tomobile and boat advertisements. Juliet’s sensitive nostrils pinched at the smell—bacon, cigarette smoke, stale tired flesh, dried urine.

454 W
Joyce Carol Oates

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 Falls
X 455

The Sergeant now took notice of Juliet, the diminutive ponytailed 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 boul-der 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’?”

456 W
Joyce Carol Oates

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 into 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.

The Falls
X 457

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

T h e vo i c e s ! 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

Y o u d o n ’ t n e e d t o, if you don’t want to.

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

458 W
Joyce Carol Oates

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 adora-The Falls X 459