Too Close to the Falls (27 page)

“Warty's got friends outside,” she said, walking out into the spring air. She showed me her collection of bees and her beehives. “Don't even use gloves or smoke. They know Warty's their friend, never been stung. These are Warty's girls, and those,” she said, pointing to the Dalmatians, “are Warty's boys.”

As we returned inside, I timidly got out my notebook and offered to share my Three Musketeers bar with her. She said, “Warty eats alone.” I realized, looking at the pendulous growth on her lower lip, that she might not be able to keep her mouth closed when she chewed and she had no desire to embarrass herself. I wondered what it would be like to never share a meal with another human.

Finally I just dove in. “Warty, your life has been pretty hard.” She made a face pooh-poohing that idea and looked around the room as though for an escape route. I realized I needed more of an opener. “Warty, I'm doing a paper on a woman in Lewiston who is good.”

“Keep looking,” she said, cackling and shaking her head.

I could see her eye was starting to get its wariness back so I changed tactics. I decided to say nothing good about her at all, as she just saw that as fawning at best and outright lies and attempts to humiliate her at worst. Best to just ask her straight questions which I believed she would cooperate in answering. “How did you start out at the dump?”

“Warty's not leaving. Warty got squatter's rights here. Lawyer Scovell told Warty so.”

After assuring her that no one wanted her to leave, I asked, “Did you come by your garbage system all on your own or did you learn it somewhere? My dad says you're ahead of your time on waste disposal and the streets would be littered with roadkill if you didn't go around town with your wheelbarrow and pick them up.

“Warty likes studying rotting things. Warty knows that anything that doesn't rot in the summer will freeze in the winter and we've got to start all over again. So Warty arranges the live stuff to get sunlight. Warty puts everything for the rag picker in one pile to get paid for by the bag and Warty uses the old appliances to store things like tools. Warty doesn't mind doing the garbage but she's not going to handle a big mess that can cause diseases or catch on fire.”

“Who set up your clothing box in the post office?” I inquired.

“Mr. Scovell.”

“It must have been before I was born. How did Mr. Scovell get involved?”

“He was the lawyer when Warty came here and the county was after Warty for this and that.”

“Like what?”

“They wanted Warty to move on, but Warty got him to write that Warty's needed in Lewiston and filling a job that no one else can do and they went away.”

“Mr. Scovell's a good man,” I ventured about the venerable lawyer who was what my mother referred to as “civic-minded.” People turned to him in a dispute whenever there was a legal
question like wills or how big signs should be, but they also turned to him in moral disputes such as when Niagara University fraternity boys made Vinny Carmichael, who was pledging for them, eat raw meat and he choked to death. It never went to trial. It was Mr. Scovell who settled issues like that. Warty remained quiet. “Don't you think?” I prompted her.

She looked away and said, “He got paid.”

“By whom?” Not wanting to say more, she again cackled in her high-pitched caterwaul. I knew that I was onto something. Warty had not been evasive up to this point. Why be evasive about who paid Mr. Scovell?

Warty began rifling through old rusty junk. Then she opened one of her old freezers which she used for documents and brought out two sheets of cardboard that were used for dry-cleaned shirts when they were folded.

“He knew that Warty wanted to be on her own.” She pulled out a picture of a woman who looked remarkably like her, only less deformed. The woman in the picture had the smooth warts but not the giant cauliflower growths. It was a professional picture taken at the Peach Festival by a barker-photographer with a backdrop of Niagara Falls. On the back of the picture it said in black fountain ink,
Scovell 1908.
“Mr. Scovell gave Warty that picture.”

“Who was your father?”

“A local man.”

“Is it someone in Lewiston?”

“Yes it is.”

“Who?”

“He paid Mr. Scovell to be Warty's benefactor and he thinks Warty doesn't know who he is but Warty knows. He doesn't want
to know Warty . . . so . . . that's the way it is. Do alright on Warty's own. Kept it quiet this long, might as well keep on. Only living soul that knows is Mr. Scovell and the only soul who knows Mr. Scovell knows is you.”

“Warty, I'll never tell anyone. I promise.”

“It doesn't matter to Warty, he'd just deny it.”

“Everyone has all these silly ideas about how you came into the world. Wouldn't it be better if they knew the truth?”

“Warty don't care what they think. If Warty cared she'd be dead long ago.” She didn't say this with malice but only as a point of fact. She
had
to give up caring for the kindness of others. I suddenly saw her point. If she needed anyone they wouldn't be there for her. It was better to never need them. I guess she trained herself not to care the same way I trained myself to high jump — by discipline.

“Did you want friends when you were little?”

“Not that Warty remembers. Warty went to school until Warty couldn't do it anymore. They thought Warty was stupid because of the speech which was a lot better then, if you can believe it,” she said, resuming her cackle. “Warty was meant to be with her spotted boys.” She smiled and petted the cataract-fogged Dalmatian. I realized that to have asked her about loneliness would have been ridiculous. She only felt an absence of pain. “Stayed long enough to read and then got out, but brought a dictionary, and Warty used to sit in the post office mailroom when crazy Eddie let her in and Warty'd listen to people and learn how they talked.” She looked at the picture again. “Ma sounded like Warty.”

“How long have you been on your own?”

“Long time.”

“Where did your mom go?” I asked timidly.

Warty laughed. “She got more warts than Warty and died when her growths took over her lungs. She choked when one took over her windpipe when Warty was little. Warty's been here since.”

“How little were you?”

“Young. Don't rightfully know.”

As I prepared to leave I wanted to say I was sorry for hiding under the covered porch at school when she walked down Main Street. As I started to rhyme off my apology, Warty looked stern for the first time and said she didn't want any of that stuff. Changing the subject, she said, “Your daddy's a good man. That's why Warty let you in today. One day years ago, before you were born and he'd just started up the store, he dropped off his garbage and surprised Warty by handing her some medicated cream. Warty never asked for it, but it helped a lot. He told Warty about the disease and about how it gets passed on if Warty were to have youngsters of her own. No one ever told her that before. He gave Warty something to help with the smell for Christmas every year. He dropped by a beautifully wrapped bottle.” She walked over to an old oven and pulled out a blue bottle of Evening in Paris. “Even Artie, the Niagara Falls bus driver, said Warty smelled better.”

For some reason the sight of the perfume bottle brought tears to my eyes. Warty tried to comfort me, hardly the point of my visit. “Warty's got a good job, her own boss, useful to everyone in the town. No matter how high and mighty you want to be you've got garbage. Warty never degraded herself. Only other people tried to do that. Why, Warty remembers once the Erie County Fair people found her, came all the way from Hamburg, when she was about your age and offered her a job in the freak show as ‘Lizard Woman.'
They said they'd pay her good if she'd nab live flies with her tongue and snap them in her mouth like a lizard. But Warty wasn't going to be someone else. Warty was born in the dump and she knew enough to stay here and just be Warty. God gave her the calling and she's done it to the best of her ability. There's good in that.”

Overwhelmed, I poured out, “Warty, how did you never get mean? Why didn't you figure you should treat people as they treated you? You know, an eye-for-an-eye kind of thing.”

“You know Saint Francis?”

“My God!” I said excitedly. “He's my favourite saint.”

“Saint Francis had to wear a hair shirt to suffer. Warty only had to wear her skin. He loved all the birds and the little creatures and they were his friends. So we have the same friends. Saint Francis had to get rid of all of his possessions, his clothes, and cover his good looks with stigmata. She had none of those problems.” We laughed at that. I could tell that both of us had been taught by the Franciscan nuns. We chatted on about Saint Francis because for both of us he was a hero who had sustained us each in different ways. She told me that she went to mass, for her a very long walk, every morning at six, sat in the back, and left after the consecration. During these daily visits she stood praying at the foot of the side altar of Saint Francis, beneath the statue of our favourite saint who looked on compassionately. She shared her feelings with him, the saint who helped her solve her every problem and never allowed her to be lonely. As she said, “No one could have a better friend.”

I had to walk home in the dark. Warty and the dogs walked to the tracks with me and I followed the monorail to the road going
down the hill. I had a hike ahead and my legs were already scraped and spent from scaling the escarpment. When I started down Main Street, Constable Lombardy pulled over, motioned me in the front seat, and proceeded to tell me that they were getting ready to dredge the river for me. I'd seen him in action before, so I wasn't overly concerned, as I knew he liked to ham it up. When he asked me how school had been, he used his
Father Knows Best
voice, so I knew better than to fall into that trap. I told him I hadn't gone to school. I said I had hid in the woods and played Davy Crockett and lost track of time. As he drove me home he said he'd let my mother deal with that big fat fib and that maybe I'd like to remember that it was against
the law
to miss school.

When I got home, I found my mother sitting in the dark, rocking in a chair in the dining room, clutching her rosary, looking out the window with tears streaming down her face. She said she had called Constable Lombardy after she called Maureen Toohey, who said that I hadn't been to her father's restaurant for lunch and in fact I hadn't been at school. I realized I'd caused my mother pain and worry but I was fairly determined not to say where I'd been. I knew if I mentioned Warty it would somehow be her fault and I didn't want that. Although Mom tried to poke holes in the pathetic Davy Crockett story, it matched the scrapes on my legs. She said she was disappointed because, although I was difficult in some ways, she had
thought
that deep down I was sensible. She sat silently rocking for an amazingly long time while neither of us spoke. She knew she hadn't approached hearing the real story, but said that if I needed a day off from my routine, she wasn't going to lose sleep over it nor had she called my father to worry him. (I guess she'd rather call the police.) Her only request
was that in the future I call and say that I'm alive or will be late. She never mentioned going out for supper so I just wandered through the dark house, went to my room, and curled up in my flannel sheets, trying to get warm and fighting off hunger.

When I wrote my essay on Warty, entitled “A Saint Walks Amongst Us,” I compared her to Saint Francis of Assisi and said she had offered up all her sufferings to Christ and she bore her own stigmata. Plus she forgave all of her tormentors, who were not the Romans, anti-Catholic kings, communists, or other atheists, but the people of Lewiston who felt she was possessed or contagious, when she was neither. While Warty crept through the dump, the catacombs of Lewiston, she was a martyr in that no one had more sufferings to offer up to God. Not only did she do it, she did it with grace.

I never mentioned our interview, Mr. Scovell, her mother, or her father who was
not
a saint, but was amongst us. He was one of us who passed her on the street. Yet she never blew his cover, not for her own revenge, nor for longing for a family or someone to assuage her own loneliness. Now,
that
was true sacrifice.

I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. I wrote it in one sitting with tears streaming down my face. I said that no one can be a martyr unless there is suffering. I was one of the people who had been cruel to Warty, but she forgave us as Christ forgave his tormentors. She echoed Christ's words to God the Father:
Forgive them for they know not what they do.
She used her suffering to cleanse her soul, which was only one of the features that made her a saint.