The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It would be pointed out that harassment of the cemetery caretaker predated Jacob Schwart’s arrival. His predecessor had been similarly taunted, and his predecessor’s predecessor. In Milburn, as in other country towns in that era, harassment of gravediggers and acts of vandalism in cemeteries were not uncommon.

  Some of the schoolboys who harassed Jacob Schwart were as young as ten, eleven years old. In time, others would be older. And some weren’t schoolboys any longer, but young men in their twenties. Not immediately, in the 1930s, but in later years. Their shouts wayward and capricious and seemingly brainless as the raucous cries of crows in the tall oaks at the rear of the cemetery.

  Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!

  5

  “Anna?”

  He’d had a premonition. This was in the early winter of 1936, they’d been living here for only a few weeks. Clearing away storm debris from the cemetery he’d paused as if to hear…

  Not jeering schoolboys. Not that day. He was alone that day, the cemetery was empty of visitors.

  Run, run! His heart plunged in his chest.

  He was confused. Somehow thinking that Anna was having the baby now, the baby was stuck inside her distended body now, Anna was screaming, writhing on the filthy blood-soaked mattress…

  Even as he knew he was elsewhere. In a snow-encrusted cemetery amid crosses.

  In a place he could not have named except it was rural, and had a fierce desolate beauty now that most of the leaves had been blown from the trees. And the sky overhead massed with clouds heavy with rain.

  “Anna!”

  She wasn’t in the kitchen, she wasn’t in the bedroom. Not in any of the four cramped rooms of the stone cottage. In the woodshed he found her, that opened off the kitchen; in a shadowy corner of the cluttered shed, crouched on the earthen floor�could that be Anna?

  In the shed was a strong smell of kerosene. Enough to make you gag but there was Anna huddled with a blanket around her shoulders, matted hair and her breasts loose and flaccid inside what looked to be a dingy nightgown. And there was the baby on her lap, partly hidden in the filthy blanket, mouth agape, eyes watery crescents in the doll-face, unmoving as if in a coma. And he, the husband and the father, he, Jacob Schwart, trembling above them not daring to ask what was wrong, why in hell was she here, what was she hiding from now, had something happened, had someone knocked at the door of the cottage, what had she done to their daughter, had she smothered her?

  For he was frightened, yet also he was furious. He could not believe that the woman was collapsing like this, after all they had endured.

  “Anna! Explain yourself.”

  By degrees Anna became aware of him. She had been asleep, or in one of her trances. You could snap your fingers in Anna’s face at such times and out of stubbornness she would scarcely hear you.

  Her eyes shifted in their sockets. In this place called Milburn amid the crosses and stone angels and those others staring after her in the street she’d become furtive as a feral cat.

  “Anna. I said…”

  She licked her lips but did not speak. Hunched beneath the filthy blanket as if she could hide from him.

  He would yank the blanket from her, to expose her.

  Ridiculous woman!

  “Give me the little one, then. Would you like me to strangle her?”

  This was a jest of course. An angry jest, of the kind Anna could drive a man to.

  It was not Jacob Schwart speaking but�who? The cemetery man. Gravedigger. A troll in work clothes and boots stuffed with rags grinning at her, clenching his fists. Not the man who’d adored her and begged her to marry him and promised to protect her forever.

  It was not the baby’s father, obviously. Hunched above them panting like a winded bull.

  Yet, without a word, Anna lifted the baby to him.

  6

  In America. Surrounded by crosses.

  He’d brought his family across the Atlantic Ocean to this: a graveyard of stone crosses.

  “What a joke! Joke-on-Jay-cob.”

  He laughed, there was genuine merriment in his laughter. His fingers scratching his underarms, his belly, his crotch for God is a joker. Weak with laughter sometimes, snorting with merriment leaning on his shovel until tears streamed down his whiskery cheeks and dribbled the shovel with rust.

  “Jay-cob rubs his eyes, this is a dream! I have shat in my pants, this is my dream! Am-er-i-ka. Every morning the identical dream, eh? Jay-cob a ghost wandering this place tending the Christian dead.”

  Talk to yourself, there’s no one else. Could not talk to Anna. Could not talk to his children. Saw in their eyes how they feared him. Saw in the eyes of those others how they pitied him.

  But there was the little one. He had not wanted to love her for he had expected her to die. Yet she had not died of the bronchial infection, she had not died of the measles.

  “Rebecca.”

  He was coming to speak that name, slowly. For a long time he had not dared.

  One day, Rebecca was old enough to walk unassisted! Old enough to play Not-See with her father. First inside the house, and then outside in the cemetery.

  Oh! oh! where is the little one hiding!

  Behind that grave marker, is she? He would Not-See her.

  She would giggle, and squeal in excitement, peeking out. And still Pa would Not-See.

  Eyes squinted and pinched for he’d lost his damn glasses somewhere. Taken from him and snapped in two.

  The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk.

  That was Hegel: the very priest of philosophy admitting the failure of human reason.

  Oh! Pa’s eyes scraped over the little one without seeing her!

  It was a wild tickle of a game. So funny!

  Not a large man but in his cunning he’d become strong. He was a short stocky man with the hands and feet, shameful to him, of a woman. Yet he wore the previous caretaker’s boots, cleverly fitted out with rags.

  To the Milburn officials he had presented himself with such courtesy, for a common laborer, they had had to be impressed, yes?

  “Gentlemen, I am suited. For such labor. I am not a large man but I am strong, I promise. And I am”�(what were the words? he knew the words!)�“a faithful one. I do not cease.”

  In the game of Not-See the little one would slip from the house and follow him into the cemetery. This was so delicious! Hiding from him she was invisible, peeking out to see him she was invisible, ducking back behind a grave marker quivering like a little animal, and his eyes scraping over her as if she was no more than one of those tiny white butterflies hovering in the grass…

  “Nobody. There is nobody there. Is there? A little ghostie, I see? No!�nobody.”

  At this early hour, Pa would not be drinking. He would not be impatient with her. He would wink at her, and make the smack-smack noise with his lips, even as (oh, she could see this, it was like light fading) he was forgetting her.

  His work trousers were tucked into his rubber boots, his flannel shirt loosely tucked into the beltless waist of his trousers. Shirt sleeves rolled up, the wiry hairs on his forearms glinting like metal. He wore the gray cloth cap. His shirt was open at the collar. His jaws moved, he smiled and grimaced as he swung the scythe, turning from her.

  “Little ghostie, go back to the house, eh? Go, now.”

  The wonderful game of Not-See was over�was it? How could you tell when the game was over? For suddenly Pa would not-see her, as if his eyes had gone blind. Like the bulb-eyes of the stone angels in the cemetery, that made her feel so strange when she approached them. For if Pa didn’t see her, she was not his little one; she was not Rebecca; she had no name.

  Like the tiny grave markers, some of them laid down flat in the grass like tablets, so weathered and worn you could not see the names any longer. Graves of babies and small children, these were.

  “Pa…!”

  She didn’t want to be invisible anymore. Behind a squat little grave marker tilting above a hillock of gras
s she stood, trembling.

  Could she ride in the wheelbarrow? Would he push her? She would not kick or squeal or act silly she promised! If there was mown grass in the wheelbarrow not briars or grave-dirt, he would push her. The funny old wheelbarrow lurching and bumping like a drunken horse.

  Her plaintive voice lifted thinly. “Pa…?”

  He seemed not to hear her. He was absorbed in his work. He was lost to her now. Her child-heart contracted in hurt, and in shame.

  She was jealous of her brothers. Herschel and August helped Pa in the cemetery because they were boys. Herschel was growing tall like his father but Gus was still a little boy, spindly-limbed, his hair shaved close to his bumpy skull so that his head was small and silly as a doll’s bald head.

  Gus had been sent home from school with lice. Crying ’cause he’d been called Cootie! Cootie! and some of the kids had thrown stones at him. It was Ma who shaved his head, for Pa would not come near.

  Who was she: Rebecca? “Reb-ek-ah.” Ma said it was a beautiful name for it was the name of her great-grandmother who had lived a long time ago across the ocean. But Rebecca wasn’t so sure she liked her name. Nor did she like who-she-was: girl.

  There were the two: boy, girl.

  Her brothers were boys. So it was left to her to be girl.

  There was a logic to this, she could understand. Yet she felt the injustice.

  For her brothers could play in the marsh, in the tall snakeroot if they wanted. But she could not. (Had she been stung by a bee, had she cried hard? Or had Ma scared her, pinching her arm to show what a bee sting is?)

  Each morning Ma brushed her hair that was girl-hair, plaiting the hair to make her scalp hurt. And scolding if she squirmed. And if she tore her clothes, or got dirty. Or made loud noises.

  Rebecca! You are a girl not a boy like your brothers.

  Almost she could hear Ma’s voice. Except she was in the cemetery trailing after Pa asking could she help? Could she help him?

  “Pa?”

  Oh yes she could help Pa! Rebecca could yank out small weeds, drag broken tree limbs and storm debris to the wheelbarrow. She would not scratch herself on the damn briars as Pa called them or stumble and hurt herself. (Her legs were covered in bruises. Her elbows were scabbed.) She was desperate to help Pa, to make him see her again and make that luscious smack-smack noise that was a noise only for her.

  That light in Pa’s eyes, she yearned to see. That flash of love for her even if it quickly faded.

  She ran, and she stumbled.

  Pa’s voice came quick: “Damn you! Didn’t I say no.”

  He was not smiling. His face was shut up tight as a fist.

  He was pushing the wheelbarrow through the dense grass as if he hoped to break it. His back was to her, his flannel shirt sweated through. In a sudden terror of childish helplessness she watched him move away from her as if oblivious of her. This was Not-Seeing, now. This was death.

  Pa shouted to her brothers who were working some distance away. His words were scarcely more than grunts with an edge of annoyance, no affection in them and yet: she yearned for him to speak to her in that way, as his helper, not a mere girl to be sent back to the house.

  Back to Ma, in the house that smelled of kerosene and cooking odors.

  Deeply wounded she was. So many times. Till at last she would tell herself that she hated him. Long before his death and the terrible circumstances of his death she would come to hate him. Long she would have forgotten how once she’d adored him, when she was a little girl and he had seemed to love her, sometimes.

  The game of Not-See.

  7

  Herschel growled, Promise you won’t tell ’em?

  Oh, she promised!

  ’Cause if she did, Herschel warned, what he’d do is shove the poker up her little be-hind�“Red hot, too.”

  Rebecca giggled, and shivered. Her big brother Herschel was always scaring her like this. Oh no oh no. She would never tell.

  It was Herschel who told her how she’d been born.

  Been born like this was something Rebecca had done for herself but could not remember, it was so long ago.

  Never would Rebecca’s parents have told her. Never-never!

  No more speaking of such a secret thing than they would have disrobed and displayed their naked bodies before their staring children.

  So it was Herschel. Saying how she, just a tiny wriggly thing, had gotten born on the boat from Europe, she’d been born in New York harbor.

  On the boat, see? On the water.

  The only one of the damn family, Herschel said, born this side of the ’Lantic Ozean that never needed any damn vissas or papers.

  Rebecca was astonished, and listened eagerly. No one would tell her such things as her big brother Herschel would tell her, in all the world.

  But it was scary, what Herschel might say. Words flew out of Herschel’s mouth like bats. For in the Milburn cemetery amid the crosses, funerals, mourners and graves festooned with flowerpots, in the village of Milburn where boys called after him Gravedigger! Kraut! Herschel was growing into a rough mean-mouth boy himself. He hadn’t been a child for very long. His eyes were small and lashless and gave an unnerving impression of being on opposing sides of his face like a fish’s eyes. And his face was angular, with a bony forehead and a predator’s wide jaws. His skin was coarse, mottled, with a scattering of moles and pimples that flared into rashes when he was upset or angry, which was often. Like their father he had fleshy, wormy lips whose natural expression was disdainful. His teeth were big and chunky and discolored. By the age of twelve, Herschel stood as tall as Jacob Schwart who was a man of moderate height, five feet eight or nine, though with rounded shoulders and a stooped head that made him appear shorter. From working with his father in the cemetery, Herschel was acquiring a bull-neck and a back and shoulders dense with muscle; by degrees he was coming more and more to resemble Jacob Schwart, but a Jacob Schwart smudged, distorted, coarsened: a dwarf grown man-sized. Herschel had bitterly disappointed his father by doing poorly in school, “kept behind” not once but twice.

  As soon as they’d arrived in Milburn, Jacob Schwart had forbidden the speaking of German by his family, for this was an era of German-hatred in America and a suspicion of German spies everywhere. Also, his native language had become loathsome to Jacob Schwart�“a language of beasts.” And so Herschel, who’d learned German as a child, was forbidden to speak it now; yet scarcely knew the “new” language, either. Often he spoke with an explosive stammer. Often it sounded as if he was trying not to laugh. Talkin, it was some kind of joke? Was it? You had to know the right sounds to talk, how to move your mouth, God damn they had to be the sounds other people knew, but how’d these people know? The connection between a sound coming out of a mouth (where your damn tongue got in the way) and what it was supposed to mean drove him wild. And printed words! Books! Fuckin school! That some stranger, an adult, would talk to him, he was expected to sit his ass in a desk where his damn legs didn’t fit, because it was New York state fuckin law, an look in their damn face? With them little kids, half his size? That stared at him scared like he was some kind of freak? And some old bitch titless female teacher? Why the hell? At the Milburn school where Herschel Schwart was ostensibly in seventh grade, by far the biggest boy in his class, he took “special education” courses and under state law would be allowed to quit at age sixteen. What a relief, to his teachers and classmates! As he could not speak any language coherently he could not read at all. His father’s effort to teach him simple arithmetic came to nothing. Printed materials aroused him to scorn and, beyond scorn, if they weren’t quickly removed from his glaring eyes, fury. His brother Gus’s textbooks and even his sister’s primers had been discovered torn and mutilated, tossed on the floor. In the Port Oriskany newspaper which Jacob Schwart occasionally brought home, only the comic strips engaged Herschel’s interest and some of these�“Terry and the Pirates,” “Dick Tracy”�gave him difficulty. Herschel had always been
fond of his baby sister the little one as she was called in the household and yet he often teased her, a wicked light came into his yellowish eyes and she could not trust him not to make her cry. Herschel would tug at her braids that had been so neatly plaited by their mother, he would grin and tickle her roughly beneath the arms, on her belly, between her legs to make her squeal and kick. Here he comes! Herschel would warn her. The boa ’stricter! This was a giant snake that wrapped itself around you but also had the power to tickle.

  Even with Ma in the room staring at Herschel he would so behave. Even with Ma rushing at him crying Schwein! Flegel! slapping and punching him about the head, he would so behave. Physical blows from their mother made him laugh, even blows from their father. Rebecca feared her hulking big brother yet was fascinated by him, those lips expelling the most astonishing words like spittle.

  That day, when Herschel told Rebecca the story of how she’d been born.

  Been born! She was such a little girl, her brain had yet to comprehend that she hadn’t always been.

  Yah she was a squirmy red-face monkey-thing, Herschel said fondly. Ugliest little thing you ever saw like somethin’ skinned. No hair, neither.

  ’Cause why it took so long, eleven damn hours, and everybody else dis-em-barkin’ the fuckin’ ship except them, her baby-head come out backwards and her arm got twisted up. So it took time. Why there was so much blood.

  So she got born. All slimy and red, out of their Ma. What’s it called�’gina. Ma’s hole, like. A hairy hole it is, Herschel had never seen anything like it. Nasty! Like a big open bloody mouth. Later he’d seen it, the hairs, between Ma’s legs and up on Ma’s belly like a man’s whiskers, in the bedroom by accident pushing open the damn door and there’s Ma tryin to hide, changin’ her nightgown or tryin’ to wash. You ever seen it? Thick hairs like a squirrel.