The Gravedigger's Daughter

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Hey, Herschel said, snapping his fingers in Rebecca’s blank face.

  Hey you think I’m fuckin’ lyin’ or somethin’? Lookin’ at me like that?

  Rebecca tried to smile. There was a roaring like thousands of mosquitoes in her ears.

  You askin for the boa ’stricter, honey, are you?

  Not the boa ’stricter, oh! Please not him.

  Herschel liked to see his sister scared, it calmed him some. Saying she maybe thought he was makin all this up, but he wa’nt. How’d you think you got born, eh? You somebody special? How’d you think anybody gets born? Out of their Ma’s hole. Not her asshole, nah not like a shit, that’s somethin else, there’s this other hole it starts out small then gets bigger, girls and wimmen got ’em, you got one too, want me ta show ya?

  Rebecca shook her head no. No no!

  You’re just a li’l gal so you got one but it’d be real small like pea-size but for sure it’s there inside your legs where you go pee-pee and where you’re gonna get pinched, see? You don’t b’lieve your brother Hershl.

  Quickly Rebecca said, yes she believed him! She did.

  Herschel scratched his chest, frowning. Trying to recall. The shit-hole cabin they was stayin’ in, on the ship. Size of a dog house. No windows. “Bunk beds.” Damn mess of rags, squashed roaches an’ stale puke from Gus being sick, and everywhere stinkin’ of shit. Then, Ma’s blood. Stuff comin out of her layin’ in the bunk bed. At last they was in New York harbor and everybody crazy to leave the stinkin’ boat except them, they had to stay behind, ’cause of her wantin’ to be born. Pa said you wa’nt spost to be born for another month, like he could argue with it. We was all starvin’, Christ sake. Ma got so ’lirious, it was like she wudna h’self but some wild animal-like. Screamin, some muscle or somethin in her throat broke, why she don’t talk right now. An you know she ain’t right in the head neither.

  Some old lady was gonna help Ma get you born, but there we wuz “embarkin” so she had to leave the boat, see. So it was just Pa. Poor Pa out of his head. All along, Pa was goin’ nuts with worry he said. Sayin’ what if they wudna let us land? in the Yoo Ess? what if they send us back to fuckin’ Nazizz they’re gonna kill us like hogs. See, these Nazizz was comin’ after Pa at where he worked, he hadta leave. We hadta leave, where we was livin’. We didn’t always live like animals, see, we wa’nt like this…Shit, I don’t remember too well, I was just a little kid scared all the time. They was tellin us there’s Nazizz submarines�“torpedoes”�tryin to sink us, why we was zigzaggin an took so long to cross. Poor Pa, all the time he’s lookin through this “money-belt” thing he got around his middle checkin the papers, the vissas. God damn you got to have them vissas with all kinds-a stamps an things, you ain’t a Yoo Ess cit’zen, see the fuckers won’t let you in if they can. Fuckers sure didn’t want us lookin at us like we stunk! Like we was worse’n hogs ’cause we cudna speak right. All Pa could worry about on the boat was this papers gonna be stolen. Everybody stealin what they could, see. That’s where I learned, snatchin things. You run, old people ain’t gonna run after you. You’re little enough, you can hide like a rat. A rat is littler than I am, I learned from em. Pa goes around sayin his guts was eat out by rats on that crossin. It’s some joke of Pa’s you got to ’preciate the old man’s sense-humor. My guts was eat out by rats on the ’Lantic Ozean I heard him sayin to some old lady in the cemetery here she’s puttin flowers on some grave an Pa gets to talkin to her, like he says for us never to do, talkin to those others you can’t trust, but he’s talkin an laughin that dog-bark laugh of his so she’s lookin at him like she’s scared of him. So I was thinkin Pa is drunk, he ain’t got his right judgment.

  On the boat, we had to eat what they give us. Spoiled food with weevils in it, roaches. You pick em out, squash em under your foot and keep on eatin, you’re hungry enough. It’s that or starve. All our guts was eat out by the time we landed and everybody shittin bloody stuff like pus but Pa was the worst ’cause of ulcers he said the fuckin Nazizz give Pa ulcers way back years before. Pa’s guts ain’t normal, see. Look at Pa, he wa’nt always like he is now.

  Rebecca wanted to know how Pa used to be.

  A vague look came over Herschel like a thought the wrong size for his skull. He scratched at his crotch.

  Oh shit, I dunno. He wa’nt so excitable I guess. He was more happy I guess. Before the trouble started. Before I got too big, he’d carry me around, see? Like he does with you. Used to call me Leeeb�somethin like that. Used to kiss me! Yeah, he did. And this music him an Ma liked, loud singin on the radio�“oper-a.” In the house they’d be singin. Pa would sing some, and Ma she’d be in some other room and she’d sing back, an they’d laugh, like.

  Rebecca tried, but could not imagine her parents singing.

  She could not imagine her father kissing Herschel!

  They was diffr’nt then, see. They was younger. Leavin where we lived wore em out, see. They was scared, like somebody was followin em. Like the police maybe. “Nazizz.” There was trains we rode on, real noisy. Real crowded. And the damn boat, you’d think the ’Lantic Ozean would be nice to look at, but it ain’t, all-the-time the wind’s blowin and it’s damn cold an people pushin you an coughin in your damn face. I was little then, not like now, see nobody gave a damn about a kid if they stepped on me the bastids! The crossing, that wore em out. Havin’ you ’bout killed Ma, an him, too. Nah it wa’nt your fault, honey, don’t feel bad. It’s the Nazizz. “Storm trooperz.” Ma had nice soft hair and was pretty. Talkin diffr’nt langidge, see. Christ I was talkin this diffr’nt langidge “Ger-man” it was, bettern I can talk what-the-fuck’s-this-now�“Eng-lish.” God damn why they got to be so diffr’nt I don’t know! Makin more trouble. I mostly forget that other now but I don’t know fuckin Eng-lish worth shit, either. Pa was like that, too. He knew to talk real well. He was a schoolteacher they said. Now, Christ they’d laugh! ’Magine Pa teachin in school!

  Herschel guffawed. Rebecca giggled. It was funny: seeing Pa in front of a classroom, in his old work clothes and cloth cap, a stick of chalk in his hands, blinking and squinting.

  No. You could not. You could not ’magine.

  Herschel had been nine years old at the time of the ’Lantic crossing and would not forget through his fuckin life except he could not remember, either. Not clearly. Some kind of mist came down over his brain that ain’t lifted since. For when Rebecca asked how long did it take to cross the ocean, how many days, Herschel began to count on his fingers slowly then gave up saying it was a long fuckin time an there was lots of people died an’ dumped over the side of the boat like garbage for the sharks to eat, you was always scared you would die, this “dyzen-tery” sickness in the guts�that’s all he knew. A long time.

  Ten days? Rebecca asked. Twenty?

  Nah it wa’nt days it was fuckin weeks, Herschel snorted.

  Rebecca was just a little girl but already she needed to know: numbers, facts. What was real and what was only made-up.

  Ask Pa, Herschel said, flaring up suddenly. Herschel would get mad if you asked him any question he couldn’t answer like he’d gotten mad at his teacher at school once, she’d run out of the classroom for help. That cobweb look in Herschel’s eyes and baring his yellow teeth like a dog. Saying, Ask Pa you’re so hot to know all this old crap.

  Looming over her, and his hand shot out, the edge of his hand, whack! on the side of her face so, next thing Rebecca knew, she was fallen over sideways like a rag doll, too surprised to cry, and Herschel was stomping out of the room.

  Ask Pa. But Rebecca knew not to ask their father anything, none of them dared approach Pa in any way likely to set him off.

  8

  Schwart! That’s a Jew-name, yes? Or do I mean�He-brew?

  No. A German name. He and his family were German Protestants. Their Christian faith derived from a Protestant sect founded by a contemporary of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

  A very small sect with very few followers in Amer
ica.

  9

  Swallow your pride like phlegm Jay-cob.

  In this American place mysterious and ever-shifting to him as a dream not his own: Milburn, New York.

  On the banks of that so strangely named canal: Erie.

  It was musical in its way�“Ear-ee”�both syllables equally stressed.

  And there was the Chautauqua River a quarter-mile north of the cemetery, beyond the town limits: an Indian name, “Cha-taa-kwa.” No matter how many times he pronounced this word he could not master it, his tongue was thick and clumsy in his mouth.

  This region in which he and his family dwelt, this place in which they had taken temporary refuge, was the Chautauqua Valley. In the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains.

  A beautiful landscape, farmland, forests, open fields. If with a broken back and eyes smudged with dirt and your meanly beating troll-heart you wished to perceive it that way.

  And there was the U.S.: the “Yoo Ess.” You did not mumble or swallow such words but spoke them outright with an air of pride. You would not say “America”�“Ameri-ka”�for that was a word only immigrants used. Yoo Ess was the word.

  As he would one day learn to say “Ale-lied”: Allied. The Allied Forces. The Allied Forces that would one day “liberate” Europe from the Axis Powers.

  “Fascists.” That ugly word, Jacob Schwart had no difficulty saying though in public he would never say it.

  Nor “Nazi”�“Nazis.” These words too he knew well though he would not utter them.

  Swallow pride. Grateful is happy. You are a happy man.

  He was. For here in Milburn he was known: the caretaker of the cemetery, the gravedigger. The cemetery was several acres of hilly, rocky soil. By the standards of North America it was an old cemetery, the earliest markers dating from 1791.

  These were the most peaceful dead. Almost, you could envy them.

  A prudent man, Jacob Schwart did not inquire into the fate of his predecessor nor did anyone volunteer information about “Liam McEnnis.” (An Irish name? Miscellaneous pieces of mail had continued to arrive for McEnnis months after the Schwarts had moved in. Worthless items like advertising flyers but Jacob took care to print NOT HERE on each and place them in the mailbox by the road for the mailman to take away again.) He was not an inquisitive man, not one to pry into another’s business. He would do his work, he would earn the respect and the wages paid to him by the Milburn officials who’d hired him and persisted in calling him, in their awkward, genial, American way, “Jay-cob.”

  Like a dog they’d hired. Or one of their Negro ex-slaves.

  In turn, Jacob Schwart was careful to address them with the utmost respect. He’d been a schoolteacher and knew how important it was to assuage the pettiness of such officials. “Sirs”�“gentlemen”�he called them always. Speaking his slow, awkward English, very polite, at that time clean-shaven, in reasonably clean clothes. He had gripped his cloth cap in both hands and took care in lifting his eyes, that were not timid but fierce, brimming with resentment, hesitantly to theirs.

  Thanking them for their kindness. Hiring him, and providing him with a “cottage” in which to live on the cemetery grounds.

  So grateful. Thank you sirs!

  (Cottage! A strange word for that dank stone hovel. Four cramped rooms with plank floorboards, crude stone walls and a single coal-burning stove whose fumes pervaded the space drying their nostrils so they bled. There was his baby girl, his daughter Rebecca, it tore at his heart to see her coughing and spitting up her food, wiping blood from her nose.)

  This time of madness in Europe. I thank you in the name of my wife and my children also.

  He was a broken man. He was a man whose guts had been eaten out by rats. Yet he was a stubborn man, too. Devious.

  Seeing how these others smiled at him in pity, some slight revulsion. They would not wish to shake his hand of course. Yet he believed they were sympathetic with him. He would insist to Anna, these people are sympathetic with us, they are not scornful. They can see that we are good decent hardworking people not what is called “traz”�“trass”�in this country.

  For once they determined you were trass, they would not hesitate to fire you.

  Out on your ass�a colorful American expression.

  His papers were in order. The visa issued to him, after much delay, anguish, and the payment of bribes to key individuals, by the American consul in Marseilles. The documents stamped by U.S. Immigration at Ellis Island.

  What he would not tell those others: how in Munich he’d been a math instructor in a boys’ school as well as a popular soccer coach and when he’d been dismissed from the faculty he had been an assistant pressman for a printer specializing in scientific texts. His proofreading skills were extolled. His patience, his exactitude. He had not been paid so much as he might have been paid in other circumstances but it had been a decent wage and he and his family had owned their house, with their own furniture, including a piano for his wife, at a good address close by her parents and relatives. He did not tell those others whom he perceived to be his adversaries as early as 1936 that he was an educated man, for he understood that none of them was educated beyond what was called high school; he understood that his university degree, like his intelligence, would make of him even more of a freak in their eyes, and in addition make them suspicious.

  In any case Jacob Schwart wasn’t so educated as he wished and it became his plan that his sons would be better educated than he had been. It was not his plan for them to remain the sons of the Milburn gravedigger for long, his sojourn here would be temporary.

  A year, possibly two. He would humble himself, he would save money. His boys would learn English and speak it like true Americans�quickly, even carelessly, not needing to be precise. There was public education in this country, they would study to be�engineers? doctors? businessmen? Maybe, one day Schwart & Sons Printers. Very fine printers. The most difficult scientific and mathematical texts. Not in Milburn of course but in a large, prosperous American city: Chicago? San Francisco?

  He smiled, it was rare that Jacob Schwart allowed himself the luxury of a smile, thinking such thoughts. Of Rebecca Esther, the little one, he wished to think less clearly. She would grow up, she would marry one of those others. In time, he would lose her. But not Herschel and August, his sons.

  In the night, in their lumpy bed. Amid the smells. Saying to Anna, “It is a matter of one day to follow another, yes? Do your duty. Never weaken. Never before the children, weaken. We must all. I will save pennies, dollars. I will move us from this terrible place within the year, I vow.”

  Beside him, turned toward the wall in whose stony crevices spiders nested, the woman who was Jacob Schwart’s wife made no reply.

  10

  Not Ma either. You lived in dread of setting Ma off.

  As Herschel said it was worsen Pa, somehow. With Pa, he’d haul off and hit you if you said the wrong damn thing but poor Ma, she’d quiver and quake like she was wettin her pants, and start to cry. So you felt like shit. So you wanted to run out of there, and keep on runnin.

  “Why’d you want to know that? Who is asking you such things? Somebody been askin you? Like at that school? Somebody spyin’ on us?”

  Like a match tossed into kerosene it was, how Ma would flare up excited and stammering if you asked the most innocent question. If you said some words Ma could not comprehend or had not even heard clearly (Ma was always humming and talking and laughing to herself in the kitchen, she’d pretend not to notice you when you came inside, not even glancing around, like a deaf woman) or asked some question she could not answer. Her mouth went ugly. Her soft sliding-down body began to tremble. Her eyes, that seemed to Rebecca beautiful eyes, immediately flooded with tears. Her voice was hoarse and cracked-sounding like dried cornstalks when the wind blows through them. Through her life she would speak her new language with the confidence of a crippled woman making her way across a patch of treacherous, cracking ice. She could not seem to
mimic the sounds her children learned so readily, and even her husband could mimic in his own brusque way: “Anna, you must try. Not ‘da’�‘the.’ Not ‘ta’�‘to.’ Say it!”

  Poor Anna Schwart spoke in a whisper, cringing in shame.

  (And Rebecca was ashamed, too. In secret. She would never laugh openly at Ma like her brothers.)

  There were stores in Milburn, the grocer’s for instance, and the pharmacy, even Woolworth’s, where Anna Schwart dared not speak but mutely handed over lists hand-printed by Jacob Schwart (initially, though in time Rebecca would make up these lists) so there could be no misunderstandings. (Still, there were misunderstandings.) Everybody laughed at her, she said. Not even waiting till her back was turned or she was out of earshot. Calling her “Mrs. Schwarz”�“Mrs. Schwartz”�“Mrs. Schwazz”�“Mrs. Warts.” She heard them!

  The boys, Herschel in particular, were embarrassed of their mother. Bad enough they were the gravedigger’s sons, they were the sons of the gravedigger’s wife. God damn!

  (Ma can’t help it, her nerves, Gus told Herschel, and Herschel said he knew it, fuck he knew it but that didn’t make it easier did it? Two of em not right in the fuckin head, but at least Pa could take care of himself, Pa could speak English so you could make sense of him at least and also Pa had, what’s it called, had to hand it to the old man, Pa had dignity.)

  Once, when Rebecca was a little girl too young yet for school, she was in the kitchen with Ma when a visitor knocked at the front door of the caretaker’s cottage.

  A visitor! She was a middle-aged woman with fattish hips and thighs, a wide, ruddy face like something rubbed with a rag, and a cotton scarf tied around her head.

  She was a farmer’s wife who lived about six miles away. She had heard of the Schwarts, that they were from Munich? She, too, was from Munich: she’d been born there, in 1902! Today she was visiting the cemetery to tend to her father’s grave, and she was bringing Anna Schwart an apple kuchen she’d baked that morning…