The Lost Landscape (9 page)

The Judds lived on the Tonawanda Road between Millersport and Pendleton. If you took a shortcut to their house behind our barn and through our cornfield and a marshy stretch of trees, it was a walk of no more than ten minutes.

This is a walk I often take in dreams. A stealthy walk. For my parents did not like me to “play” with Helen Judd.

The Judds' dog Nellie, a mixed breed with a stumpy energetic tail and a sweet disposition, sand-colored, rheumy-eyed, hungry for affection as for the food scraps we sometimes fed her, trotted over frequently to play with my brother and me, for the Judds did not feed their dog but expected her to hunt and scavenge food like a wild animal. Robin and I were very fond of Nellie but my grandmother would shoo her away if she saw her. None of the Judds was welcome at my grandmother's house.

The
Judd house
it would be called for years. The
Judd property
. As if the very land (which the Judds had not owned in any case but had only rented) were somehow imprinted with the father's surname, a man's identity, infamy.

For tales were told in Millersport of the father who drank, beat and terrorized his family, “did things to the girls,” at last set the house on fire either deliberately or in a drunken stupor and fled on foot and was arrested by Erie County sheriff's deputies and caused to disappear forever from the community. There was no romance in Mr. Judd though he “worked on the railroad”—at least, in the railroad yard in Lockport. My father knew him only slightly and despised him as a drinker, a wife- and child-beater. Mr. Judd seemed to work only sporadically though he always wore a railway man's cap and work clothes stiff with dirt or grease. His face was broad and sullen, vein-swollen and flushed with a look of alcoholic reproach. He chewed tobacco and craned his head forward to spit between his booted feet. He and his elder sons were hunters, owning among them a shotgun and one or two deer rifles. He was of moderate height, shorter than my father, heavyset, with straggly whiskers that sprouted from his jaws like wires. Often, he was to be seen walking at the roadside. His eyes swerved in their sockets seeking you out when you could not escape quickly enough.
H'lo there little girl! Little-Oates-girl, eh? Are you?

The name
Oates
was hostile and jeering in his mouth.

Mrs. Judd was a woman at whom we never looked directly. There was something hurt and abject about Helen's mother, it would pain you to see. She had been a “pretty” woman once—(my mother said)—but seemed bloated now as with a perpetual pregnancy. She had had seven or eight babies—even Helen wasn't sure—of whom six had survived. Her bosom had sunk to her waist. Her legs were encased in flesh-colored support hose.
How can that poor woman live with him. That pig
. There was disdain, disgust in this frequent refrain. There was pity, indignation, disapproval.
Why doesn't she leave him. Did you see that black eye? Did you hear them, the other night? She should take the girls away, at least
. For Mrs. Judd was the only one of the family who worked regular shifts, as a cleaning woman in the Bewley Building in Lockport and later in a canning factory north of Lockport.

A shifting household of relatives and “boarders” lived in the Judd house. Of the six children remaining at home, four were sons and two daughters and all were under the age of twenty. Helen was a year older than I was, and Dorothy two years younger. There was an older brother of Mr. Judd's who walked with a cane, said to be an ex-convict from Attica. (What was Attica? A men's maximum security prison in upstate New York.) The oldest Judd son had been in the navy briefly, had been discharged and returned to Millersport where he worked from time to time in Lockport as a manual laborer; he owned a motorcycle, which he was always repairing in the driveway. There were frequent disputes at the Judds' house. Tales of Mr. Judd chasing his wife with a butcher knife, a claw hammer, the shotgun. Threatening to “blow the bitch's head off.” Mrs. Judd and the younger children fled outside in terror, hid in the hayloft of a derelict old barn behind the house where Mr. Judd couldn't climb to find them.

Sheriff's deputies were summoned to the Judd house. No charges were pressed against Mr. Judd for Mrs. Judd refused to speak with any law enforcement officers, nor would any of the children speak with them. Until the fire that was so public that it could not be denied.

There was the summer day, I was eleven years old. When Mr. Judd shot Nellie.

At first we had no idea what was wrong, what creature was it wailing, moaning and whimpering intermittently for hours somewhere at the rear of our property. For sometimes in the orchard and woods behind our house there were wild creatures—raccoons, we thought—that sent up strange, caterwauling cries. There were shrieking cries of rabbits seized by owls. But finally we realized, the cries were Nellie's, and we remembered having heard several rifle shots earlier in the day.

When my father came home from work that evening he went to speak to Mr. Judd though my mother begged him not to. By this time poor Nellie had dragged herself under the Judds' cellarless house to die. Mr. Judd was furious at my father's intrusion, drunk, defensive—Nellie was his “goddam dog” he said, she'd been “pissing him off,” whining and whimpering, she was “old.” But my father convinced him to put the poor dog out of her misery.

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.