The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tignor would return perhaps on Sunday.

  Why Rebecca thought this, she didn’t know. Just a premonition.

  Except: it was possible that Tignor would show up outside the factory gate on Friday afternoon, or Monday afternoon. His silver-green 1959 Pontiac idling at the curb.

  Hey kid: here.

  Almost, Rebecca could hear his voice. She smiled, as she would smile when she heard it.

  Hey you night owl folks out there this is Buffalo Radio Wonderful WBEN Zack Zacharias broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee hours.

  Niley fell asleep most nights listening to this program. Yet she couldn’t enter his room to switch off the radio because he woke so easily; she couldn’t enter his room even to switch off the light. If Niley was wakened at such times he was likely to be frightened, and Rebecca would end up having to stay with him.

  At least in the night Niley allowed the radio volume to be kept low. He could lie very quietly in his bed a few inches from the radio and take consolation from it.

  At least with the door shut between their rooms Rebecca wasn’t kept awake by the light.

  “When Daddy returns, all this will stop.”

  Beside Niley’s bed was a lamp in the shape of a milk glass bunny from a Chautauqua Falls furniture store. The bunny had upright ears and a pink nose, a small peach-colored shade in some fuzzy fabric. Rebecca admired the lamp, the wan warm glow on the child’s sleeping face was comforting to her. The bulb was only sixty watts. You would not want a harsher light in a child’s room.

  She wondered: had her mother stood over her, gazed upon her as she’d slept? So long ago. She smiled to think yes, maybe.

  The danger in motherhood. You relive your early self, through the eyes of your own mother.

  In the doorway watching Niley sleep. Long entranced minutes that might have been hours. Her heart pounded with happiness, certainty. A mother knows only that the child is. A mother knows only that the child is because she, the mother, has made it so.

  Of course there is the father. But not always.

  Niles, Jr. She hoped he would take on some of his father’s strength. He seemed to her a child of yearning, impulse. A spring was wound tight in him, like the spring of a toy that clatters about, deranged. Except when he slept, then Niley was fine. His tight-wound soul was quiet.

  A glisten of saliva on his mouth like a stray thought. She wanted to kiss it away. But better not.

  Strand of damp hair stuck to his forehead. She wanted to brush it away but no, better not.

  Hazel Jones’s secret son.

  The radio on the windowsill was turned low. The music was jazz. The radio, like the lamp, emitted a comforting glow. Rebecca was becoming adjusted to it, no longer so annoyed. The announcer’s voice was nothing like the daytime radio voices. Was Zack Zacharias a Negro? His voice was softly modulated, a singing sort of voice, rather playful, teasing. An intimate voice in your ear.

  And the music. Rebecca was coming to like the music.

  Cool, moody jazz. Seductive. Rebecca recognized piano music of course but knew few other instruments. Clarinet, saxophone? She hated it, that she knew so little.

  An ignorant woman, a factory worker. Wife, mother. Had not graduated from high school, even. So ashamed!

  Only once had she heard classical music on her father’s radio. Only once, in her mother’s company. Her father had not known and would have forbidden it. This radio is mine. This news is mine. I am the father, all facts are mine. All knowledge of the world outside this house of sorrow is mine to keep from you, my children.

  Tignor had not asked much about Rebecca’s parents. He knew a little, and might not have wanted to know more.

  Rebecca’s brother Herschel used to say, Christ that ain’t even his name. “Schwart” ain’t even our fuckin’ name.

  It was all a joke to Herschel. Baring his big wet braying-donkey teeth.

  Rebecca asked what was their name, then? If it wasn’t “Schwart” what had it been?

  Herschel shrugged. Who the hell knew, who the hell cared?

  Old-world bullshit, Herschel said. Nobody gives a damn about it in the U.S. of A., I sure don’t.

  Rebecca begged to know their name if it wasn’t Schwart but Herschel walked away with a rude gesture.

  If Jacob Schwart had lived, he would now be sixty-three.

  Sixty-three! Old, but not really old.

  Yet in his soul the man had been elderly even then. Rebecca could remember her father only as old, worn-out.

  Upsetting to think such thoughts. It was rare for her, in her new life, to think such thoughts.

  Hazel Jones did not think such thoughts.

  “Mamama…”

  Niley moaned in his sleep, suddenly. As if he’d become aware of Rebecca standing over him.

  His smooth child-face was wizened, ugly. Oh, he looked like an elderly man! His skin was waxy-pale. His eyelids fluttered, and that nerve in his forehead. As if a wrong-sized dream, all sharp corners, had poked itself into his brain.

  “Niley.”

  Rebecca’s heart was torn, seeing her son trapped in a dream. Her instinct was to save him from such dreams, immediately. But no, better not. Mommy could not always be saving him. He must learn to save himself.

  The dream was passing, and would pass. Niley would relax in another minute. He was a child of the new era: born in 1956. You would not call Niles Tignor, Jr. “post-war” (for everything was “post-war”) but “post-post-war.” Nothing of the past could matter much to him. As World War I was to Rebecca’s generation, so World War II would be to Niley’s. Old-world bullshit as Herschel said.

  Nothing of the Schwarts would prevail in him who had never known them.

  That line was extinct, the old, rotted European lineage was broken.

  Niley’s dream seemed to have vanished. He was sleeping as before, breathing wetly through his mouth. The bunny lamp glowed on his bedside table. The radio on the windowsill emitted a steady, soothing sound of piano-jazz. Rebecca smiled, and backed away. She too would sleep, now. Niley would be all right, she had no need to wake him. Wouldn’t kiss him, as she wanted to do. Still he would know (she was sure) that his mother loved him, always his mother was close by, watching, protecting him. Through his life, he would know.

  “I have no God to witness. But I vow.”

  Sunday, in three days. Rebecca counted on her fingers. She smiled to think that Niley’s daddy would return to them then. She had a premonition!

  4

  Gypsy girl. Jewess…

  Tignor’s voice was a low helpless moan, a sliding-down moan, delicious to hear. His thick-muscled body quivered with desire as if electric currents ran through it.

  Rebecca smiled, recalling. But the blood beat hard and hot in her face. She was no gypsy-girl, and she was no Jewess!

  And the blood beat hard and hot between her legs, where she was so lonely.

  “God damn.” She was having trouble sleeping. In her and Tignor’s bed. All this day, these days since the canal towpath, oh Christ her nerves were strung tight like wire.

  The weather was turning at last. Wind from the great roiling-dark lake forty miles to the north seemed to push against the windowpanes of the old farmhouse. By morning the dreamy Indian-summer weather would have been blown away, the air would be sharper, colder, damp. That taste of winter to come. Winter in the Chautauqua Valley, in the foothills of the mountains…

  But no. She would not think about it. Not the future beyond the next few days.

  As her parents had gradually ceased thinking about the future.

  Like animals they’d become, at the end. With no future, that was what happened to you.

  Desperate to sleep! Within a few hours she’d have to get up, return to Niagara Fiber Tubing. Not the thin pale froth-sleep that washed over her aching brain and brought little nourishment but the deeper more profound sleep she required, the sleep that slowed your heartbeat toward death, the sleep that stripped from you all awareness of time, pla
ce, who you are or have ever been.

  “Tignor. I want you! I want you inside me. I want you…”

  He’d urged her to say his special words to him: fuck, fuck me. Hurt me some.

  The more hesitant she’d been, the more embarrassed, shame-faced, the more Tignor had loved it. You could see that the man’s pleasure was increased immeasurably, a tall stein into which ale was being poured, poured-poured-poured until, foaming, it overflowed.

  He’d been her only lover. Niles Tignor. What he did to her, what he taught her to do to him. How painful it was to lie here in this bed and not think of him, not think of those things, her heartbeat quickened in desire.

  Futile, this desire. For even if she touched herself it was not Tignor.

  Before Tignor she had never slept in so large a bed. She didn’t feel that she deserved so large a bed. (Yet it was just an ordinary bed, she supposed. Secondhand, bought here in Chautauqua Falls. It had a slightly tarnished brass frame and a new, hard, unyielding mattress that had quickly become stained with Tignor’s salty sweat.)

  She turned, to lie on her back. In the adjacent room, turned low, the damn radio was playing. She couldn’t hear the music but she felt the beat. She spread out her arms, her armpits were wet. Her thick hair dense as a horse’s mane had dried at last and was fanned out around her head on the pillow in that way that Tignor, face taut with a hard, sensual pleasure, sometimes arranged it with his clumsy hands.

  This is what you want, Gypsy-girl, eh? Is it?

  He had other women, she knew. She’d known before she married him what he was. In the hotel in which she’d worked there were tales of Niles Tignor. Through the Chautauqua Valley, and beyond. She understood it wasn’t reasonable for any woman of Tignor’s to expect a man like him to be faithful in the way that ordinary men are faithful to women. Hadn’t Tignor said to Rebecca, shortly after they were married, not cruelly but with an air of genuine surprise that she should be jealous: “Jesus, kid�they like me, too.”

  Rebecca laughed, remembering. Knuckles jammed against her mouth.

  But it was funny. You had to have a sense of humor to appreciate Niles Tignor. He expected you to make him laugh.

  She lay on her back now. Sometimes that worked. Her muscles began to twitch. There was her damn hand drifting near the God damn stamping machine…She drew it back just in time.

  In some other universe it might’ve happened. Her hand mangled like meat. Severed from her arm. What she deserved, stupid cunt not watching what she was doing.

  How Tignor would stare! Rebecca had to laugh, imagining.

  He’d hated her big-whale belly. Staring in fascination, and couldn’t keep his hands off.

  The way the wind blew in the yew trees. A sound like voices jeering. This was the old Wertenbacher farm, so-called still in the neighborhood. By now, three years later, Rebecca would have thought they would have their own house.

  He did love them. Her and Niley. In his heart he was not unfaithful.

  In his heart, her father Jacob Schwart had loved her. He had loved them all. He had not meant to hurt them, he had only meant to erase history.

  You are one of them. Born here.

  Was this so? She hugged herself, smiling. Drifting at last into sleep as into a stone well so deep it had no bottom.

  milburn, new york

  1

  November 1936. By bus the Schwart family arrived in this small town in upstate New York. Out of nowhere they seemed to have come, with bulging suitcases, valises, bags. Their eyes were haggard in their faces. Their clothes were disheveled, their hair uncombed. Obviously, they were foreigners. “Immigrants.” It would be said of the Schwarts that they looked like they’d been on the run from the Führer (in 1936, in such places as Milburn, New York, it was possible to think of Adolf Hitler with his mustache and military posture and stark staring eyes as comical, not unlike Charlie Chaplin) without stopping to eat, breathe, wash.

  The smell that came off ’em!�the bus driver would so comment, rolling his eyes.

  It seemed appropriate that Jacob Schwart, the head of the family, would find work as caretaker of the Milburn Township Cemetery, a nondenominational cemetery at the ragged edge of town. He and his family�wife, two sons, infant daughter�would live in the weathered stone cottage just inside the cemetery gates. This “cottage” was rent-free, which made the job attractive to a man desperate for a place to live.

  Mr. Schwart was profusely grateful to the township officials who hired him though he’d had no experience as a cemetery caretaker, nor even as a gravedigger.

  He was a good worker, he insisted. With his hands, and with his head.

  “You will not regret, sirs. I will assure you.”

  At the time they’d moved into the cobwebby stone cottage in the cemetery, that had been only casually cleared after the departure of the previous tenants, and smelled strongly of something like liquid lye, the Schwarts’ youngest child Rebecca was a sickly five-month-old infant tightly wrapped in her mother’s filthy shawl. For much of the bus ride from downstate New York, this shawl had functioned as a sort of secondary diaper for the fretting infant.

  So little she was, her brother Herschel would afterward recall, she looked like some hairless thing like a baby pig, and smelled like one, too. “Pa wouldna look at you hardly, he was thinkin you would die I guess.”

  Had she been Rebecca Esther Schwart then? She’d had no name and no identity, so young. Of those early days and weeks, months, and finally years in Milburn she would recall so little. For there was little memory in the Schwart family.

  There was Ma, who nursed her. Ma who sometimes pushed her away with a grunt, as if her touch was painful.

  There was Pa. “Jacob Schwart” he was. You could not predict Pa. Like the sky Pa was always changing. Like the ugly coal-burning stove in the kitchen Pa was smoldering sometimes, flaring-up sometimes. You would not wish to press your fingers experimentally against the stove when the fire was up inside.

  Other times, the stove was empty of fire. Cold, dead.

  Jacob Schwart was profusely grateful to be hired by strangers in this small country town. Yet Pa, brooding in the stone cottage, expressed a different sentiment.

  “Like a dog they wish to treat me, eh! ‘Jay-cob’ I am, eh! Because I am foreign, I am not-rich, I am not one of them! One day they will see, who is a dog and who is a man.”

  Already as an infant she would begin to acquire an instinctive sense that her father, this powerful presence that leaned over her crib, sometimes poked her with wondering fingers, and even lifted her in his arms, had been grievously wounded in his soul; and would bear the disfigurement of this wound, like a twisted spine, through his life. She seemed to know, even as she shrank from such terrible knowledge, that she, the last-born of the family, the little one, had not been wanted by Jacob Schwart and was an outward sign of his wound.

  She would not know why, a child does not ask why.

  She would remember her panicked mother stumbling to her crib, clamping a moist hand over her mouth to muffle her crying. That Pa not be wakened from his exhausted sleep in the next room.

  “No! Please no! He will murder us both.”

  2

  And so Jacob Schwart slept. Twitching and moaning in his sleep like an injured animal. After ten, twelve hours working in the cemetery in those early days he fell onto the bed in his work clothes, stinking of sweat, heavy mud-splattered boots still laced to his feet.

  These boots he’d found in the shed. They had belonged to the previous Milburn cemetery caretaker, he supposed.

  Too big for his feet. He’d stuffed the toes with rags.

  Like hooves they seemed to him, his feet in these boots. Heavy, bestial. He dreamt of plunging into water, into the ocean, wearing such boots and being unable to unlace them, to swim and save himself.

  3

  History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from one another as shattered vertebrae. T
hese words he hand-printed, gripping a pencil clumsily in his stiffening fingers. He had so many thoughts! In the cemetery his head was invaded by hornet-thoughts he could not control.

  Clumsily he wrote down these thoughts. He wondered if they were his. He stared at them, and pondered them, then crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it into the stove.

  4

  You saw him at a distance: the gravedigger Schwart.

  Like a troll he appeared. Somewhat hunched, head lowered.

  In the cemetery amid the gravestones. Grimacing to himself as he wielded a scythe, a sickle, a rake; as he pushed the rusted hand-mower in fierce and unvarying swaths through the dense crabgrass; as he dug out a grave, and carted away excess soil in a tipsy wheelbarrow; as he paused to wipe his forehead, and to drink from a jar he carried in his coverall pocket. Tipping back his head, eyes shut and gulping like a thirsty dog.

  Schoolboys sometimes squatted behind the cemetery wall that was about three feet in height, made of crude rocks and chunks of mortar, in poor repair. Briars, poison ivy and sumac grew wild along the wall. At the front entrance of the cemetery there was a wrought iron gate that could be dragged shut only with difficulty, and an eroded gravel drive, and the caretaker’s stone cottage; beyond these, there were several sheds and outbuildings. The oldest gravestones ran up practically to the rear of the cottage. To the grassy area where the caretaker’s wife hung laundry on clotheslines stretching between two weathered posts. If the schoolboys couldn’t get close enough to Mr. Schwart to taunt him, or to toss chestnuts or stones at him, they sometimes settled for Mrs. Schwart, who would give a sharp little cry of alarm, hurt, pain, terror, drop what she was doing in the grass, and run panicked into the rear of hovel-house in a way that was very funny.