The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Of course she had never attacked another. She had never hurt any of her classmates not really, even the ones who’d deserved to be hurt. But she didn’t doubt that if she was desperate enough fighting for her life she could hurt another person, bad.

  Ah! the point of the steel was sharp as an ice pick. She would have to stab it deep into the man’s chest, or throat…

  “Think I can’t do it, asshole? I can.”

  Rebecca wondered if the man in the panama hat, a stranger to her, was someone Tignor knew. Someone who knew Tignor.

  Her husband was in the brewery business. He was often on the road for days, even weeks. Usually he appeared to be prospering but sometimes he complained of being short of cash. He spoke of the business of brewing, marketing, and delivering beer and ale to retailers through New York State as cutthroat competitive. The way Tignor spoke, with such zest, you were made to think of slashed and bleeding throats. You were made to think that cutthroat competitive was a good thing.

  There were rivalries in the brewery business. There were unions, there were strikes and layoffs and labor disputes and picketing. The business employed men like Niles Tignor, who could handle themselves in difficult situations. Tignor had told Rebecca that there were enemies of his who would never dare approach him�“But a wife, she’d be different.”

  Tignor had told Rebecca that he would murder with his bare hands anyone who approached her.

  The man in the panama hat, Rebecca wanted to think, did not really look like a man in the brewery business. His sporty straw hat, tinted glasses, and cream-colored trousers were more appropriate for the lakeshore in summer than the industrial edge of Chautauqua Falls in autumn. A long-sleeved white shirt, probably high-quality cotton or even linen. And a bow tie. A bow tie! No one in Chautauqua Falls wore bow ties, and certainly no one of Tignor’s acquaintance.

  It was like seeing Bing Crosby on the street, or that astonishing agile dancer: Fred Astaire. The man in the panama hat was of that type. A man who didn’t look as if he would sweat, a man who might smile if he saw something beautiful, a man not altogether real.

  Not a man to track a woman into a desolate place and accost her.

  (Was he?)

  Rebecca was wishing it wasn’t so late in the afternoon. In full daylight, she would not feel so uneasy.

  Each day now in September, dusk was coming earlier. You took notice of the days shortening, once Labor Day was past. Time seemed to speed up. Shadows rose more visibly from the underbrush beside the canal and the snaky-glittery dark water like certain thoughts you try to push away except in a weak time you can’t. The sky was massed with clouds like a fibrous substance that has been squeezed, and then released. There was a strange quivering malevolent livingness to it. Through the cloud-mass, the sun appeared like a fierce crazed eye, that glared, and made each grass blade beside the towpath distinct. You saw too vividly, your eyes dazzled. And then, the sun disappeared. What had been distinct became blurred, smudged.

  Heavy thunderheads blowing down from Lake Ontario. Such humidity, flies were biting.

  Buzzing close to Rebecca’s head, so she gave little cries of disgust and alarm, and tried to brush them away.

  At Niagara Tubing, the air had been sultry hot as in midsummer. Stifling at 110° F. Windows opaque with grime were shoved at a slant and half the fans broken or so slow-moving they were useless.

  It was only temporary work, at Niagara Tubing. Rebecca could bear it for another few months…

  Punching in at 8:58 A.M. Punching out at 5:02 P.M. Eight hours. Five days a week. You had to wear safety goggles, gloves. Sometimes a safety apron: so heavy! hot! And work shoes with reinforced toes. The foreman inspected them, sometimes. The women.

  Before the factory, Rebecca had worked in a hotel: maid, she was called. She’d had to wear a uniform, she had hated it.

  For eight hours, Rebecca earned $16.80. Before taxes.

  “It’s for Niley. I’m doing it for Niley.”

  She wasn’t wearing a watch, never wore a watch at Niagara Tubing. The fine dust got into a watch’s mechanism and ruined it. But she knew it was getting on toward 6 P.M. She would pick up Niley at her neighbor’s house just after 6 P.M. No son of a bitch trailing her on the towpath was going to prevent her.

  Preparing herself to run. If, suddenly. If he, behind her. She knew of a hiding place somewhere ahead, on the other side of the canal embankment, not visible from the towpath, a foul-smelling culvert: made of corrugated sheet metal, a tunnel about twelve feet in depth, five feet in diameter, she could duck and run through it and into a field, unless it was a marsh, the man in the panama hat would not immediately see where she’d gone and if he did, he might not want to follow her…

  Even as Rebecca thought of this escape route, she dismissed it: the culvert opened into a fetid marsh, an open drainage field, if she ran into it she would stumble, fall…

  The towpath was an ideal place to track a victim, Rebecca supposed. You could not see beyond the embankments. The horizon was unnaturally close. If you wished to see the sky from the towpath you had to look up. Had to lift your head, crane your neck. On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.

  Rebecca felt the injustice, he had followed her here! Where always she was relieved, grateful to be out of the factory. Always she admired the landscape, though it was slovenly, a wilderness. Always she thought of her son, eagerly awaiting her.

  She knew: she must not weaken. She must not show her fear.

  She would turn and confront him, the man in the panama hat. She would turn, hands on her hips, Tignor-style she would stare him down.

  She mouthed the words she would say to him: “You! Are you following me?”

  Or, “Hey mister: not following me, are you?”

  Or, her heart quickened in hatred, “God damn you, who are you to follow me?”

  She was not a shy young woman, and she was not weak. Not in her body, or in her instincts. She was not a very feminine woman. There was nothing soft, pliant, melting about her; rather she believed herself hard, sinewy. She had a striking face, large deep-set very dark eyes, with dark brows heavy as a man’s, and something of a man’s stance, in confronting others. In essence, she despised the feminine. Except, there was her attachment to Tignor. She did not wish to be Tignor, but only to be loved by Tignor. Yet Tignor was not an ordinary man, in Rebecca’s judgment. Otherwise, she despised the weakness of women, deep in her soul. She was ashamed, infuriated. For this was the ancient weakness of women, her mother Anna Schwart’s weakness. The weakness of a defeated race.

  At the factory, men let her alone, usually. Knowing she was married. Seeing she gave no signals to welcome their interest. She never met their eyes. What thoughts they might have of her, she did not consider.

  Yet: the week before she had had to confront a smirking asshole who was always passing close behind her as she stood at the assembly line, a man who eyed her up-and-down to embarrass her, she’d told him to leave her alone God damn she would complain to the foreman but in the midst of the rush of words she had suddenly swallowed and her voice choked and the smirking asshole just grinned at her. Mmmm baby! I like you.

  Yet she would not quit the factory. Damned if she would quit.

  Since March she’d been working at Niagara Tubing. Assembly line, unskilled labor. Still the factories paid better than most other jobs for women�waitress, cleaning woman, salesclerk. You had no need to smile at customers, to be “nice.” The work was only just temporary she’d told her friend Rita, who also worked on the line at Niagara Tubing, and Rita had laughed saying sure, Niagara Tubing was just temporary for her, too. “Going on seven years.”

  This foreshortened horizon, it made you anxious because you couldn’t plot an escape route. Into underbrush? There were briars, wild rose, tangles of poison ivy. Into the trees? And out of sight of the towpath, where anything might happen?

  The bridge at the Poor Farm Road was at least a mile away. How many minutes, she couldn’t est
imate: twenty? And she could not run. She wondered what would happen during those twenty minutes.

  The canal surface rippled like the hide of a great slumbering beast whose head you could not see. Only its length, stretching to the horizon.

  Except there was no horizon ahead, really. The canal faded into a shadowy haze in the distance. Like train tracks where your eyes trick you into thinking that the tracks narrow, shrink in upon themselves and disappear as if running out of the present time and into a future you can’t see.

  Hide your weakness. Can’t remain a child forever.

  She was hardly a child. She was a married woman, a mother. She had a job at Niagara Fiber Tubing in Chautauqua Falls, New York.

  She was not a minor dependent upon the charity of adults. She was not a ward of the county living in Milburn. The gravedigger’s daughter to be pitied.

  These were boom times in American industry, post-war. So you were told. So it seemed. Factories working to capacity in Chautauqua Falls as in other cities and towns in upstate New York where the largest and most prosperous city was Buffalo. All day long the sky of the Chautauqua Valley was streaked with two kinds of cloud: the natural, horizontal clouds and the vertical columnar clouds of factory smoke. Distinctive hues they were, rising from identical smokestacks. Always you could recognize the steely-powder rubbery-smelling smoke erupting upward from Niagara Fiber Tubing.

  At work she wore her long thick hair coiled in loose braids around her head, covered with a head scarf. Yet when she brushed it out it smelled of the factory anyway. Her hair that had been beautiful glossy black, gypsy-hair Tignor called it, was becoming dry and brittle and corroded like iron. She was only twenty-three and already she was discovering gray hairs! And her fingers were calloused, her nails discolored, though she wore work gloves on the job. The heavy safety goggles left a pale imprint on her face and dents on the sides of her nose.

  She was a married woman, why was this happening to her!

  Tignor had been crazy for her once. She didn’t want to think that time had passed.

  He had not liked her pregnant. Belly swollen big and tight as a drum. Pale blue veins visible in her flesh looking as if they might burst. Her ankles, feet swollen. Her breath short. The heat of her skin that was a strange sexual heat, a fever that repelled a man.

  She was tall, five feet eight. She weighed about 115 pounds. Pregnant with Niley, she’d weighed 140. Strong as a horse Tignor had said of her.

  The man behind her would be led to think Rebecca was a tough woman, she thought. The kind of woman to fight back.

  She wondered if he knew her, in some way. And so maybe he knew she was living alone with her son. Living in an old remote farmhouse in the country. But if he knew these facts, he might also know that Rebecca’s son was watched during weekdays by a neighbor; and if Rebecca was late picking him up, if Rebecca failed to appear, Mrs. Meltzer would guess that something had happened to her.

  But how long a time would pass, before Mrs. Meltzer called the police?

  The Meltzers were not likely to call the police if they could avoid it. Any more than Tignor would call the police. What they would do is go out looking for you. And not finding you, they’d decide what to do next.

  How long this would require: maybe hours.

  If she’d brought the bread knife from home. That morning. The towpath was a desolate place. If Tignor knew, his wife walking along the canal like a tramp. Sometimes there were derelicts hanging out in the railroad yard. Solitary fishermen at the bridge over the canal. Solitary men.

  If the canal wasn’t so beautiful, she wouldn’t be drawn to it. In the morning the sky was likely to be clear and so the surface of the canal appeared clear. When the sky was heavy and leaden with clouds, the surface of the canal appeared opaque. Like you could walk on it.

  How deep the canal was exactly, Rebecca didn’t know. But it was deep. Over a man’s head. Twenty feet? Couldn’t hope to save yourself by wading out. The banks were steep, you’d have to lift yourself soaking wet out of the water by the sheer strength of your arms and if somebody was kicking at you, you were doomed.

  She was a strong swimmer! Though since Niles, Jr. she had not swum. She feared discovering that her body had lost its girlish buoyancy, its youth. Ignominiously she would sink like a rock. She feared that truth-telling you confront in water over your head exerting your arms and legs to keep afloat.

  She turned abruptly and saw: the man in the panama hat, at about the same distance behind her. He wasn’t trying to catch up with her, at least. But he did seem to be following her. And watching her.

  “You! Better leave me alone.”

  Rebecca’s voice was sharp, high-pitched. It didn’t sound like her own voice at all.

  She turned back, and walked faster. Had he actually smiled? Was he smiling at her?

  A smile can be taunting. A smile like her own, deceased father’s smile. Mock-eager. Mock-tender.

  “Bastard. You have no right…”

  Rebecca remembered now, she’d seen this man the previous day.

  At the time she’d taken little notice. She’d been leaving the factory at the end of her shift, 5 P.M., with a crowd of other workers. If she’d noticed the man in the panama hat, she’d have had no reason to suppose he was interested in her.

  Today, his following her, might be random. He couldn’t know her name�could he?

  Her mind worked swiftly, desperately. It was possible that the stranger had simply chosen a woman to follow at random. He’d been in the vicinity of the factory as a hunter awaits prey, alert to any possibility. Or, what was equally plausible: he had been waiting for someone else but she had not turned up or, if she had, it wasn’t practical for him to follow her at that time.

  Her heart beat in fury. Yet she was frightened.

  “My husband will kill you…”

  She didn’t want to think that this man might know Tignor. That he had a score to settle with Tignor. One of those guys that think they know me.

  You never knew, with Tignor, what such a remark meant. That he had true enemies, or that there were men, unidentified, unreasonable, who believed they were his enemies.

  One of those guys, they’d like to cut off my balls.

  Tignor laughed, saying such things. He was a man who thought well of himself and his laughter was quick and assured.

  Futile for Rebecca to ask what he meant. Tignor never answered a question directly, and especially not from a woman.

  “No right! No right to follow me! Fucker.”

  In her right-hand pocket Rebecca stroked the piece of steel.

  She’d had the impression that the man, the stranger, had made a gesture to take off his hat.

  Had he smiled?

  She was weak with doubt, suddenly. For he’d made no threatening gesture toward her. He hadn’t called to her as a man might do, to unnerve her. He had made no move to catch up with her. She might be imagining danger. She was thinking of her little boy waiting for her and of how she wanted desperately to be with him to console both him and herself. At the treeline a crazed-eye sun appeared briefly between massed clouds and she thought, with the eagerness with which a drowning woman might reach for something to haul her up His clothes.

  Trousers of some unlikely cream-colored fabric. A white, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie.

  It seemed to her, the man in the panama hat possessed a light floating quality, a hopefulness, not like the mean concentrated look of a man who wants to sexually humiliate or hurt a woman.

  “Maybe he lives out here. He’s just walking home, like me.”

  The towpath was a public place. It was possible he was taking the identical shortcut Rebecca was taking. She’d just never seen him before. Parallel with the canal was the asphalt Stuyvesant Road and a half-mile ahead was the gravel Poor Farm Road that crossed the canal on a single-lane wooden bridge. At the juncture of the roads was a small settlement, Four Corners. A storefront post office, a general store with a large Sealtest sign in the wind
ow, Meltzer’s Gas & Auto Repair. An operating granary, an old stone church, a cemetery. Rebecca’s husband had rented a ramshackle farmhouse here, for her second pregnancy.

  They’d lost the first baby. Miscarriage.

  Nature’s way of correcting a mistake the doctor had told her, to suggest maybe it had not been a bad thing…

  “Fuck it.”

  Rebecca was thinking she should have taken off her jacket, soon as she’d left work. Now, it was too late. Couldn’t make any move like that, taking off an item of clothing with that bastard behind her watching. A signal, he’d interpret it. Sure. She could feel him watching her ass, her hips, legs as she walked fast guessing she wanted badly to start running but didn’t dare.

  It was like a dog: turn your back, start running, he’s on you.

  Fear has a smell. A predator can smell it.

  When she’d seen this man the previous day, he hadn’t been wearing a hat. He’d been standing across the street from the factory gate, leaning back against a wall beneath an awning. In that short block were a café, a shoe repair, a butcher shop, a small grocery. The man had been lounging between the café and the shoe repair. There were many people around, this was a busy time of day. Rebecca wouldn’t have taken the slightest notice of him except now, she was forced to.

  Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself…

  Traffic was always congested at 5 P.M. when the factories let out. Niagara Tubing, Empire Paper Products, Arcadia Canning Goods, Chautauqua Sheet Metal. A block away, Union Carbide Steel, the city’s largest employer. Hundreds of men and women working the day shift erupted out onto the streets, as if released from hell.

  Bats out of hell, it was an apt expression.

  Whenever Rebecca left Niagara Tubing, she looked for Tignor out on the street. When he’d been gone for a while she lived in a state that might be defined as waiting-for-Tignor and involuntarily, without knowing what she did, she sought his tall broad figure in any public place. She was hopeful of seeing him yet dreaded seeing him for she never knew what emotions she might feel nor could she guess what Tignor might be feeling. Twice since March he had re-entered her life in this way: casual-seeming, parked in his car, a 1959 silver-green Pontiac, at the curb waiting for her as if his absence from her and their son�days, weeks, most recently five weeks in succession�was no more than something Rebecca had imagined. He would call out, “Hey babe: here.”