Too Close to the Falls (26 page)

I then quickly darted behind stage and changed from my
moderator first-communion dress to my French costume and led the portage. Father Hennepin, our school's namesake, played by Patrick Hyla, the angelic head altar boy, was a Franciscan explorer who came here as a missionary to convert the Indians. Our class loaded up our white cardboard canoes with some of our mothers' old furs, fox pelts worn over their suits in the fall, replete with feet and heads. We wee Frenchmen, in our stocking caps and knickers, all the girls dressed as men since there were no roles for girl explorers, were paddling along, in our folding chairs with the cardboard canoes attached and suddenly we would find ourselves on the edge of the Falls. The great cataract was represented by a fan behind a blowing blue curtain. Father Hennepin and Father Jacques Cartier would pray to God who, just in the nick of time, would inspire Father Hennepin into suggesting portaging around the Falls through Lewiston. Then we would march around the lunchroom holding the canoe over our heads reciting different passages from history. One year I was a Seneca fighting the Mohawks, another I was a Brit during the French and Indian war. This past year I was an American colonist fighting the British.

The play came to life for me today as I crawled over those rocks. I realized how hard it must have been to portage on this cliff carrying your canoe over your head filled with everything you owned. I wondered how many must have gone over the Falls until they figured out the rushing currents and how early you had to get off the river before being swept away. I thought of all the countries and wars fought and lives lost over this portage that has again reverted to wilderness. Now no one valued it except for Warty.

Little did Warty or I know that the steep Lewiston hill and its dramatic escarpment would disappear within a few short years.
The only thing left of the geology is the memory of it. Even the fossils that lay buried in the earth, the layers of sea life, the dawn of man, the Indians, the portage, the geophysical remnants of civilization up through the 1950s, were dynamited for the New York Power Project. Even the Maid of the Mist would have trouble finding her way because the Falls has been rerouted.

It hadn't occurred to me that it was noon already, and if I walked home right then I could barely get there before school was over. On I trudged, chatting to Uncas, darting behind trees, ducking the redcoats until I emerged in a clearing where wild crocuses had been trampled, and I smelled smoke.

Suddenly Dalmatians came running toward me, showing their fangs and shaking with rage. Surrounded by barking, I was sure I was going to be eaten — I'd wind up another carcass in Warty's pet cemetery. Anyone who had ever been this close to Warty's before, and that couldn't have been many, because I had to squeeze between two rocks which no adult could have done, would be frozen in their tracks by these hounds. One of them had white foam in the edges of his mouth. It was moments like this when I wished I'd travelled with dog biscuits like Alexander Hamilton, the bread man. I remembered Roy said that when a dog barks at a customer's door, never look it in the eye because that's a challenge. So I looked up and stood still. Looking around, I realized Warty had built a brilliant fortress high on a stone cliff with whirlpools beneath her. The pass was hard to find and too narrow for an adult to get through. Once you scaled the wall there was the modern equivalent of a medieval moat. Her dragons were spotted and leapt out over the rocks. I was too terrified to descend, and my legs were shaking like a newborn colt's. Finally
I heard a shrill whistle from Warty, and the dogs begrudgingly returned to the house.

Warty, still fifty feet away, motioned me to go away with her arm as she turned to walk into her house. I knew it was now or never so I piped up, “Warty! Warty, it's Cathy McClure.” She turned around, nodded, as if to say that she
knew
who I was, but still wanted me to go away. “I'd like to talk to you for a minute.” Suddenly the idea of interviewing Warty as a saint seemed really far-fetched, to say the least. Warty kept walking away into her diminutive shed, which I later surmised was her home. It looked like a dormitory for the seven dwarves, no more than four or five feet high and long, like a chicken coop. The dogs followed her to the door but circled outside whining, hovering, and scratching at the earth, waiting for Warty to tell them they could attack me.

I didn't know what to do since she had gone in, and the dogs — I counted nine — would never let me approach. I inched my way toward the house where the dogs stood, eyeing me. Finally I must have taken one baby step too many, and they went berserk. I imagine I'd been closer than anyone had ever been to the house and the dogs vacillated between rage and shock. Warty walked out and shooed them all away from the door and motioned me to come in. I must have been standing outside for about twenty minutes and she figured it had been enough of a standoff. I walked up to the white cinder-block shed that probably had been used as a depot for the gas company many years ago. The whole place was no bigger than my bedroom. This one-room home boasted no modern amenities. It had no electricity nor any kerosene lamp, no running water, and no bathroom. For some reason she had three ladders going to the roof.

I tried to explain why I was there, but for one of the first times in my life, words failed me. The climb, the dogs, the proximity to Warty, the wacky saint idea had finally caught up to me. I fumbled for an explanation but wound up mumbling incoherently. I had no way of making myself understood. I made several introductions — I had come to visit her . . . to talk to her . . . to interview her. Finally I ground to a halt as I looked at the terror in her one visible droopy eye. Her pupil had dilated and she was breathing as though she were about to engage in a battle to the death. My assumption, which I was rapidly revising, had been that she was lonely and would ultimately welcome guests. It had never occurred to me, until I smelled the fear in that tiny room, that Warty might be as frightened of others as they were of her. It hadn't occurred to me, until I was standing there, that she might not
want
company. After all, her space was all she had. Probably no one had talked to her before, and I'm sure no one had visited her before.

One of the things fear does is speed things up, and that includes learning. Suddenly I realized that if no one had been nice to Warty, of course she wouldn't miss them. She probably stopped longing for guests, friends, or any human company, about five minutes after she was born! Boy, had I been stupid. It hit me that I had tried to imagine what Warty wanted, but only from my own perspective. I had no idea before that moment that there were different vantage points. People had been nice to me so I'd miss them. Loneliness was a concept totally dependent on one's previous experience. I was shocked to realize that yet again the rules were falling away. “Everyone needs a friend” or “All the world is lonely” are lines for samplers, but that was about it as far as
truth
went. I had a feeling of vertigo and didn't want to look over the
edge of the escarpment again. How would I get home? I felt myself slipping. Everything depended on something else. At that second, a line from one of Roy's jazz songs came into my mind. The line was sung in a defiant staccato at the end of each verse and Roy and I used to sing it together — “Real, compared to what?” I understood what that line meant at that exact moment in Warty's house.

I decided to back off from explanations and just look around until she got a little used to me. Her chair was two potato sacks filled with straw, one for the cushion and one for the back. The rest of the furniture was from the dump. The bed was old and had obviously been thrown out when a child had outgrown it, for it had been painted white and was covered with decals of nursery rhymes on the headboard. There was a blue cow jumping over a yellow moon. The bed was topped with an air mattress, the type I used when I floated around on Lake Erie, drinking a Coke in the summer. When I saw the nursery-rhyme decals, I recited aloud pointing to the illustrations. “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumps over the moon.” Warty's face softened slightly, so I continued, pointing in sequence to the decals of the dog, the dish, and the spoon with legs: “The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.” She stopped looking so frightened and smiled and pointed to another one of an egg in a tuxedo jacket with skinny legs perched on a wall. I said, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again.” She clapped and smiled her toothless grin. Her one eye was dancing merrily.

We went around the bed and I did “Little Jack Horner,” “Old
King Cole,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and “Old Mother Hubbard.” Then she pointed to them again and we did it all over. By the third time she was humming the rhythm with me and nodding her head as the floppy growths on her skull moved from side to side. I wondered if this was the only thing she remembered from her childhood. Maybe her mother had told her nursery rhymes before she died, or left her, or whatever. Maybe Warty had been looking at the decals for years and wanted to put words to the pictures. It would definitely be hard to make a story of an egg with legs, an old woman who lived in a shoe with children hanging off the shoelaces. I thought these characters might have been her only friends. Who knows? Maybe she just liked the rhythm of the nursery rhymes. That wasn't so weird. After all,
I
certainly did and so had thousands before me.

Her cupboards were empty appliances. She had taken the doors off old fridges and put the fridges in a row and now kept blankets and food in them. Cans that had been dropped off for her at a range of fifty feet had been carefully unpacked and sorted.

She had obviously picked things she liked out of the garbage and had quite a collection of stuff. She made an expansive gesture with her arms, encouraging me to look around. I found a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses which I held up and peered through. She then opened a box and displayed a pile of used binoculars that were in cracked, old leather cases with ripped satin interiors. I realized that looking out for enemies was a big thing for Warty. That's probably why she had the ladders up to the roof. When she was up there she could see anyone coming from a long distance if she could see over the cliff. There were three more old dogs in the shed with us; one had white frosty eyes,
while another limped with stiff hind legs, and the third never moved at all. Warty poked him and laughed and recited in a tiny squeak that I had to listen to with all my might in order to understand, “All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again,” and we laughed. I told her that the next time Roy and I came to the dump we'd bring her a book of nursery rhymes. “Roy don't read.” She swallowed air to say words.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“He always asks Warty when the dump is open and it's on the sign. People don't talk to Warty unless they have to.”

Even after I'd been there what seemed about half an hour she hadn't asked what I wanted, and as time went on I had less and less of an idea of how to bring it up. Finally I decided to just lay it on the line. “Warty, I have to write a paper for school and I have to interview someone I admire, so I chose you.” Warty just laughed and then showed me her pulley system for pulling cans out of the hot fire outside. I didn't know what more to say since she had obviously dismissed what I'd said as ridiculous. She must have understood the words, for she understood the nursery rhymes. I decided to forge ahead as though she had said, “Oh, an interview, what a lovely idea, I'm flattered.” “Some people chose Father Flanagan, some chose Dr. Laughton,” I explained. She made a face when I mentioned his name and I mimicked it in agreement. “Isn't he the worst? He always acts like I'm crazy or something.” She nodded in consensus. I told her the story about how Dr. Laughton said I was hyper, and how I'd wound up at a psychiatrist. I told the story of the disgusting dog cards and she really laughed out loud, a normal-sounding laugh, and she wanted me to tell the story about the disgusting dog cards again.
She never spoke in a full sentence but seemed to understand everything I said and could say it back to me. It was difficult to understand her because her speech was sort of belched in a high-pitched squeak. As if the growth-laden oesophagus wasn't enough, she had tumours on the roof of her mouth preventing her from forming certain words properly. She also had no available lower lip so she couldn't make a P, B, or M sound, each of which required the lips to meet. I had noticed she pronounced Humpty Dumpty “Huy Duy.”

She said, “When Warty went to Dr. Laughton, he shooed Warty out. Warty only went once when she broke her foot. Warty just wanted a cast. Instead Warty was an outcast.”

We laughed at this play on words. I wondered why she referred to herself as
Warty
instead of
I
. I didn't know if I should say anything, but I really wanted to help her. “Warty, you can say, ‘
I
want a cast.' It's the same as
Warty
when you are talking about yourself.” She responded with a faint smile as though she really didn't understand what I meant, so I let it go. (I later found out that if a child suffers extreme deprivation, like the Wild Boy of Avignon, or Kaspar Hauser of Germany, who were isolated from birth for ten years or more, then they will have the peculiar permanent linguistic impairment of not being able to refer to themselves through the first person. Kaspar Hauser's teacher reported that Kaspar himself had no idea that
he
was indeed Kaspar Hauser. No one knows if the problem is linguistic, philosophical, psychological, or all three.)

“Can you follow Warty's words?” she asked.

I knew I had to be truthful, as I could tell she was a lot sharper than she appeared. People must have been dismissing her for
years, assuming from her garbled speech that she was retarded. “I'm following more than half and the rest I'm filling in from the gist of things. I guess talking isn't the most important thing if you have no one to talk to.” I'd mean that as a comfort, but it hadn't come out right.