The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

  Mr. Judd commanded one of his sons to drag Nellie out from beneath the house, which was set on concrete blocks. He then loaded his rifle, panting and wheezing as he straddled the bloodied dog and shot her a second, and a third time, at close range. My father who had never hunted, who’d never owned a gun and felt contempt for those who did, backed off, a hand over his face.

  Afterward my father would say of that occasion that walking away from “that drunken son of a bitch with a rifle in his hands” was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Daddy expected the shot to hit between his shoulders.

  THE FIRE WAS THE following year, just before Thanksgiving.

  After the Judds were gone from Millersport and the part-collapsed house stood empty, I discovered Nellie’s grave. I’m sure that it was Nellie’s grave. Beyond the dog hutch in the weedy backyard, a sunken patch of earth measuring about three feet by four with one of Mrs. Judd’s whitewashed rocks at the head and on this rock, in what appeared to be red crayon, NELY.

  It was Helen’s writing, I was sure. Helen had always loved Nellie. In wild clusters vines grew on the posts of the sagging front porch. Mrs. Judd had had little time for gardening but she’d planted hollyhocks and sunflowers in the scrubby yard beside the house. Flowers that were beautiful and tough as weeds, that would survive for years.

  We’d played Parcheesi, Chinese checkers, and gin rummy on that porch. Helen and me, and sometimes one or another of Helen’s sisters. Helen was only a year older than I was but looked two or even three years older for she was a big-boned husky girl with a face that appeared to be sunburnt, her mother’s face, with her mother’s wide nose, thin-lipped mouth, chin. It had been said of Helen Judd and her sister Dorothy that they were “slow” but I did not think this was true of Helen who was a shrewd player of games, and who sometimes beat me fairly. (At other times, Helen cheated. I pretended not to see.) Helen was certainly not slow to fly into a rage when teased by boys at school or by her own older brothers. She waved her fists, rushed at the boys cursing and stammering—Fuck! Cocksucker!—words so shocking to me, yet thrilling, it was as if my friend was jabbing a knife at her tormentors.

  For only boys and men could utter such words—such savage gleeful syllables.

  At such times Helen’s face darkened with blood and her thin lips quivered with a strange sort of pleasure like the quivering of a cat’s jaws when it has sighted prey.

  The house the Judds rented was like a number of other, small wood-frame houses in the neighborhood. It was not a farmhouse like my grandparents’ house—it did not have an excavated cellar, nor did it have running water. (There was a small hand-pump at the kitchen sink.) At the rear of the property was an “outhouse” that smelled so fiercely, you would not want to come near.

  The Judds’ house had a small upstairs, just two bedrooms. No attic. No insulation. Steep, near-vertical stairs. The previous tenant had started to build a front porch of raw planks, never completed or painted. The roof of the house was made of sheets of tin scarred and scabbed like a diseased skin and the front of the house was covered in haphazard pieces of asphalt siding. Through all seasons windows were covered in translucent plastic and never opened. From a distance the house was the fading dun color of a deer’s winter coat.

  Unlike the Judds’ house ours had both a cellar and an attic. We had a deep well with a solid stone foundation, its water was pure and cold even in summer. There was pride in the upkeep of our house: my father did all of the carpentry, even the roofing, the painting, the masonry; even the electrical wiring.

  I would not know until I was much older that Fred Oates came from what is called a “broken home”—the image is a lurid one of a house literally broken, split in two, its secrets spilled out onto the ground like entrails.

  Yet, I was superior to Helen Judd. For I had a father who loved me.

  Think of the frail lifeline! It is all that separates us from heartbreak and chaos.

  Unlike Mrs. Judd who had to drive to Lockport in a battered old car to work as a cleaning woman to support her family, my mother could remain at home. At home was a continuous responsibility.

  Preparing meals, serving and cleaning up after meals. Cleaning house. Laundry. Hanging damp clothes on the clothesline in the backyard. Tilling the hard soil, planting rows of tomatoes, pepper plants, lettuce, strawberries, beds of flowers. Every day I helped my mother, especially in the kitchen.

  Now, it is sometimes lonely. In a kitchen. In a garden.

  Along the edge of our property were peony bushes which my mother had planted. Enormous crimson peonies my mother told me blossomed just in time for my birthday—June 16. For a long time I’d believed that this was so.

  At Christmas, my father brought home a fresh-cut evergreen tree that smelled of the forest. Our nostrils pinched, this smell was so strong and so wonderful.

  In a corner of our living room, upstairs in my step-grandparents’ farmhouse where our family lived, we decorated the tree with ornaments kept wrapped in tissue in a large cardboard box. Each Christmas, the same glass ornaments that seemed to me beautiful, wonderful—but breakable. Strings of colored lights. “Bubble lights.” And beneath the tree, wrapped presents. There are snapshots that bear record to these wonders.

  My mother, and my father. Mommy, Daddy.

  How hard my parents worked, and my Bush grandparents! A small farm, even a farm that is not very prosperous, is ceaseless work. Just to keep fences in repair, for a farmer, is ceaseless work. Just to maintain outbuildings, vehicles. To keep chickens from dying, from pecking one another to death. To maintain fruit orchards, devastated after a storm. There was happiness here of course and yet how fierce the need to declare We are not the Judds.

  VIVIDLY I REMEMBER THE night of the fire. A festive occasion to which children were not invited.

  Like all great events of long ago it was an adult occasion. Possessed, interpreted, judged by adults.

  Out of the night came suddenly the sound of a siren on Transit Road. And then, turning onto the creek road near our house. A fire siren! How few times in my life I’ve been wakened in such alarm and excitement, in dread of a frenzied world beyond my control and comprehension. I was wakened by shouts, uplifted voices—the frightening sound of adults shouting to one another. At a window I stood staring in the direction of the Judds’ house—an astonishing burst of flame. It was very late, past midnight. It was a summer night. The air was moist and reflected and magnified the fire like a nimbus. Hurriedly my father threw on clothes and ran to help the volunteer firemen of whom several were men from Swormville he knew. My mother told me to go back to bed, there was no danger to us. Yet my mother watched what she could see of the fire from an upstairs window of our house and did not send me away as I watched beside her.

  The fire had begun at about midnight and I would not get back to bed until after 4:00 A.M., stunned and exhausted.

  Do you think Helen could come live with us?—though I knew the answer, such a question must be asked.

  ABRUPTLY, THE JUDDS HAD disappeared from Millersport and from our lives.

  There was no question of neighbors taking in any of the Judds.

  It was said, and would be reported in the Lockport newspaper, that Mr. Judd had fled the fire “as a fugitive” and was being sought by police. Soon after, Mr. Judd was arrested in Cheektowaga, a small city near Buffalo. He was charged with arson, several counts of attempted murder, aggressive assault, endangerment of minors. The Judd family was broken up, scattered. The younger children were placed in county foster homes.

  That quickly. The Judds were gone from us.

  For a long time the smell of woodsmoke, scorch, a terrible stink of wet burnt wood, pervaded the air of Millersport. Neighbors complained that the Judd house should be razed, bulldozed over and the property sold. And good riddance! No one wished to say There is a curse on that house. And so the Judd house was one of the abandoned and condemned properties we were warned against. No Trespassing—Danger.

  It was a lesson,
I think I have never forgotten. How swiftly, in a single season, in fact within a few hours, a human habitation, a home, can turn wild.

  The rutted dirt driveway over which the oldest Judd boy had ridden his motorcycle, only a few days before the fire. In time, overgrown with weeds.

  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 sk
ills 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.