The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Those others you must never trust, our enemies.

  “Rebecca?”�her name was being called but amid the confusion of voices and laughter Rebecca could not be expected to hear. She was headed for a side door marked exit.

  “Rebecca Schwart? Please come over here.”

  Someone clutched at her. She was surrounded by adults. A woman with a bronze helmet-head and staring eyes. And there was the man with the glittery glasses and striped necktie, principal of Milburn High School, who gripped Rebecca firmly by the elbow and led her to a group of students and adults being photographed for the Milburn Weekly Journal and the Chautauqua Valley Gazette. Rebecca, the youngest and smallest of the spelling bee winners, was made to stand in front, center. She was told to smile, and so she smiled. Cameras flashed. Her startled squinting smile she held, the cameras flashed again. Hearing and not-hearing a murmured conversation not quite out of earshot.

  “That Schwart girl�where are her parents?”

  “Not here.”

  “For God’s sake why not?”

  “They just aren’t.”

  And then Rebecca was released, and headed for the exit. From somewhere behind her she heard Miss Lutter calling�“Rebecca, don’t you need a ride home?”�but this time she didn’t turn back.

  She had not planned to show the dictionary to them. Not to anyone in the family. She’d told her father about the spelling bee and the awards ceremony and he’d scarcely listened, nor had her mother listened. And now, she would hide the dictionary beneath her bed knowing how they would scorn it.

  And there was the danger that one of them might toss it into the stove.

  A long time ago Jacob Schwart had hoped that his sons would do well in school but neither Herschel nor Gus had done well and so he had become indifferent to the schooling of his children, he was contemptuous of Rebecca’s primer school books leafing through them sometimes saying they were fairy tales, trash. Newspapers and magazines he brought home he was likely to read thoroughly, with a perverse ardor, yet these too he dismissed as trash. Since the war had ended he no longer listened to the radio after supper yet he did not wish others in the family to listen to it. “Words are lies.” This pronouncement he made often, with a jocular screwing-up of his face. If he was chewing tobacco, he spat.

  For so much since the war was a joke to him. But you could not always know what would be a joke, and what would not. What would make him laugh so hard his laughter shaded into wheezing coughing spasms, or what would set Pa off.

  Something in the newspapers, maybe.

  Shaking the front page of the paper, face contorted in derision and outrage. Slamming his fist against the paper flattening it onto the oilcloth cover of the kitchen table. Jacob Schwart had a particular loathing for the sleek-black-haired black-mustached little-man governor of New York State, his mouth worked in speechless fury seeing the governor’s photograph. Why exactly, no one in the family knew. Jacob Schwart detested Republicans, yes but Jacob Schwart detested F.D.R. and F.D.R. was a Democrat, wasn’t he. Rebecca tried to keep these names straight. What meant so much to Pa should mean something to her, too.

  Those others. Our enemies. We are dirt to them, to scrape off their shoes.

  “What the hell’s this? You?”

  It was a shock, Pa tossing the Milburn Weekly onto the table, flattening it with his fist and confronting his daughter.

  He was incensed, insulted. Rebecca had rarely seen him so upset. For there was Rebecca Esther Schwart of Milburn District #3, in a group photograph on the front page of the paper. Spelling Bee Winners. Awards Ceremony at Milburn High. Pa yanked Rebecca to the table, to stare at herself, a diminutive and startled image of herself, amid the gathering of smiling strangers. She had forgotten the occasion, she could not have anticipated that anything real would come of the flashbulbs and the jocular, jokey Smile, please! And now her father was demanding to know what was this! what this meant! Saying, wiping at his mouth, “I never knew anything about this, did I? God damn to hell, I don’t like any child of mine acting behind my back.”

  Rebecca stammered saying she had told him, she had tried to tell him, but Pa continued to rage. He was one whose rage fed on itself, ecstatic. He wrenched the newspaper toward the light, at differing angles, to see the incriminating front page more clearly. Finally turning to Rebecca, disbelieving, “It’s you, huh! God damn to hell. Behind my back, my daughter.”

  “I t-told you about it, Pa. The spelling bee.”

  “‘Spelling’�what?”

  “‘Spelling bee.’ Words you spell. In school.”

  “‘Words’ I tell you words: bullshit. Every word that has ever been uttered by mankind is bullshit.”

  Herschel and Gus, drawn by the commotion, examined the scandalous front-page photograph and article, amazed. Gus said it was good news wasn’t it?

  Pa said, sputtering, “Bring the damn ‘prize’ out, I want to see this damn ‘prize’ for myself. Fast!”

  Rebecca ran to get the dictionary where she’d hidden it. Beneath her bed. Shame-shame, she’d known it would get her into trouble, why she’d hidden the dictionary beneath her bed.

  As if anything could be hidden from Jacob Schwart. As if any secret would not be exposed, like soiled underwear or bedclothes, in time.

  Rebecca’s face was very warm, her eyes stung with tears. (Where was Ma? Why wasn’t Ma here, to intercede? Was Ma hiding away in the bedroom from Pa’s raised voice?)

  Rebecca brought the Webster’s Dictionary to her father, she would obey him even as she feared and hated him. Seeming to know beforehand, with a child’s resignation to fate, as a doomed animal bares its throat to a predator, that he would toss the dictionary into the stove with a curse.

  Almost, Rebecca would remember he’d done this. Tossed her dictionary into the stove, and laughed.

  In fact, Pa did not. He took the heavy book from her, and laid it on the table, suddenly quieter, as if intimidated. Such a heavy book, and so obviously expensive!

  His mind would calculate rapidly what a book this size might cost: five dollars? Six?

  Gilt letters on the spine and cover. Marbleized endpapers. Almost two thousand pages.

  With a flourish Pa opened the front cover, and saw the bookplate:

  SPELLING CHAMPION MILBURN DISTRICT #3

  *** 1946 ***

  REBECCA ESHTER SCHWART

  Immediately Pa saw the misspelling, he laughed harshly, and was triumphant. “Eh, you see? They are insulting you�‘Eshter.’ They are insulting us. This is no accident, this is calculated. Spelling the child’s name wrong to insult who named her.” Pa showed the bookplate to Herschel, who peered at it, unable to read. In frustration he poked the dictionary as you’d poke a snake with a stick, saying, “Jezuz. Keep the fuckin thing from me, I’m lergic.” This provoked Pa to laugh heartily, he had a weakness for his older son’s crude humor.

  Gus objected. “God damn, Hersch’l, somebody in this family got something for once, I think it’s damn nice.” Gus would have liked to say more, but Pa and Herschel ridiculed him.

  Pa shut the dictionary. Now was the moment, Rebecca knew, when he would lean over with a grunt, and open the stove door, and toss the dictionary inside…

  Instead, Pa said, brooding, “God damn I don’t like for any child of Jacob Schwart sneaking behind my back like a weasel. In this hellhole where everybody’s watching us, you can be sure. Damn picture in the paper for everybody to see. Next time…”

  Desperately Rebecca said, “I won’t, Pa! I won’t do it again.”

  Seeing with relief that her father seemed to be losing interest in the subject, as he often did when no one opposed him. Suddenly he was bored, and shoved the dictionary aside.

  “Take the damn thing, just don’t let me see it again.”

  Rebecca snatched up the heavy book. Pa and her brothers had to laugh at her, she was so desperate, and so clumsy nearly dropping the book on herself.

  She hurried back to her bed. She would hide it ag
ain, beneath her bed.

  Hearing behind her Jacob Schwart haranguing his sons: “What are words, words are bullshit and lies, lies! You’ll learn.”

  There came Herschel’s insolent laugh.

  “So tell us somethin that ain’t bullshit, Pa, you’re the fuckin jeen-yus, eh?”

  19

  A bright summer day. The blinds in the parlor were drawn. Rebecca would recall this day trying to calculate how old she’d been, how old her mother had been, how many months before Anna Schwart’s death. Yet she could not, the brightness of the air so dazzled her even in memory.

  It was summer, she knew: a time of no school. She had been tramping through a sprawling wooded area behind the cemetery, she’d been tramping along the canal towpath watching the barges, waving at the pilots who waved at her, as she’d been forbidden. She’d been at the township dump, too. Alone, and not with her friends.

  For Rebecca had friends now. Mostly they were girls like herself, living at the edge of Milburn. Quarry Road, Milburn Post Road, Canal Road. These girls lived in run-down old farmhouses, tar paper shanties, trailers propped up on concrete blocks amid weedy trash-strewn yards. To such girls Rebecca Schwart was not scorned as the gravedigger’s daughter. For the fathers of such girls, if they had fathers, were not so very different from Jacob Schwart.

  Their brothers, if they had brothers, were not so very different from Herschel and Gus.

  And their mothers…

  “What’s your ma like?”�so Rebecca’s friends asked her. “Is she sick? Something wrong with her? Don’t she like us?”

  Rebecca shrugged. Her shut-up sullen expression meant None of your damn business.

  None of Rebecca’s friends had ever had a glimpse of Anna Schwart, though their mothers might recall having seen her, years ago, in downtown Milburn. But now Anna Schwart no longer ventured into town, nor even left the vicinity of the stone cottage. And of course Rebecca could not bring any friends home.

  That day there was a funeral in the cemetery, Rebecca saw. She paused to watch the slow procession of vehicles from behind one of the sheds, not wanting to be seen. Her coarse dark hair straggled down her back like a mane, her skin was rough and tanned. She wore khaki shorts and a soiled sleeveless shirt covered in burrs. Except for her hair she might have been mistaken for a lanky, long-legged boy.

  The hearse! Stately, darkly gleaming, with tinted windows. Rebecca stared feeling her heart begin to beat strangely. There is death, death is inside. Seven cars followed the hearse, their tires crackling in the gravel drive. Rebecca glimpsed faces inside these cars, women with veiled hats, men staring straight before them. Now and then a younger face. Especially, Rebecca shrank from being seen by anyone her age, who might know her.

  A funeral in the Milburn cemetery meant that, the previous day, Jacob Schwart had prepared a grave site. Most of the newer graves were in hilly terrain at the rear of the cemetery where tall oaks and elms grew and their roots were tangled in the rocky soil. Gravedigging was an arduous task. For Jacob Schwart had to dig the graves with a shovel, it was back-breaking labor and he hadn’t mechanical tools to aid him.

  Rebecca shaded her eyes sighting her father at the rear of the cemetery. A troll-man, Jacob Schwart was. Like a creature who has emerged from the earth, slightly bent, broken-backed and with his head carried at an awkward angle so that he seemed always to be peering at the world suspiciously, from the side. He’d torn a ligament in his knee and now walked with a limp, one of his shoulders was carried higher than the other. Always he wore work clothes, always a cloth cap on his head. He was one to know his place among funeral directors and mourners whom he called sir, ma’am and with whom he was unfailingly deferential. Herschel spoke of seeing their father downtown on Main Street headed for the First Bank of Chautauqua, what a sight the old guy was in his gravedigger clothes and boots, walking with his head down not seeing how he was being stared at, and not giving a damn if he walked into somebody who didn’t get out of his way fast enough.

  Herschel warned Rebecca, if she was in town and saw Pa, not to let Pa see her�“That’d make the old bastid mad as hell. Like us kids is spyin’ on him, see, goin’ into the bank? Like anybody give a shit what the old bastid is up to, he thinks nobody knows.”

  So many millions dead and shoved into pits, just meat.

  Ask why: ask God why such things are allowed.

  Gazing upon her father when he wasn’t aware of her, Rebecca sometimes shuddered as if seeing him through another’s eyes.

  “Ma…?”

  The interior of the stone cottage was dim, humid, cobwebby on this sun-bright day. In the kitchen dishes were soaking in the sink, the frying pan remained on the stove from breakfast. A smell of grease prevailed. Since her illness Rebecca’s mother had become careless about housekeeping, or indifferent. Since the Marea, Rebecca thought.

  Blinds were drawn on all the windows, at midday.

  From the parlor came a strange sound: rapid and fiery like breaking glass. The door was shut.

  Now that Pa no longer listened to the news every night after supper, the radio was rarely played. Pa would not allow it when he was in the house grumbling Electricity doesn’t grow on trees, want not waste not. But Rebecca heard the radio now.

  “Ma? Can I�come in?”

  There was no answer. Cautiously Rebecca pushed the door open.

  Her mother was inside, seated close beside the floor-model Motorola as if for warmth. She’d pulled a stool close beside it, she was not sitting in Pa’s chair. Rebecca saw how the radio dial glowed a rich thrumming orange like something living. Out of the dust-latticed speaker emerged sounds so beautiful, rapid yet precisely rendered, Rebecca listened in amazement. A piano, was it? Piano music?

  Rebecca’s mother glanced toward her as if to ascertain this wasn’t Jacob Schwart, there was no danger. Her eyelids fluttered. She was lost in concentration, and did not want to be distracted. A forefinger to her lips signaling Don’t speak! Be quiet! So Rebecca kept very still, sitting at her mother’s feet and listening.

  Beyond the Motorola, beyond the dim-lighted mildew-smelling parlor of the old stone cottage in the cemetery, there was nothing.

  Beyond Ma leaning to the radio, nodding and smiling with the piano music, beyond this moment, beyond the happiness of this moment, there was nothing.

  When there came a break in the music, the briefest of breaks between movements of the sonata, Rebecca’s mother whispered to her, “It is Artur Schnabel. It is Beethoven that is played. ‘Appassionata’ it is called.” Rebecca listened eagerly, with no idea what most of her mother’s words meant. She had heard of Beethoven, that was all. She saw that her mother’s soft-raddled girl’s face shone with tears that were not tears of hurt or grief or humiliation. And her mother’s eyes were beautiful eyes, dark, lustrous, with a startling intensity, that made you uneasy, to see close up. “When I was a girl in the old country, I played this ‘Apassionata.’ Not like Schnabel I played, but I attempted.” Ma fumbled for Rebecca’s hand, squeezing her fingers as she had not done in years.

  The piano music resumed. Mother and daughter listened together. Rebecca held on to her mother’s hand as if she were in danger of falling from a great height.

  Such beauty, and the intimacy of such beauty, Rebecca would cherish through her life.

  20

  “Pa! Get the hell out here.”

  There came Herschel careening and panting in the kitchen door. He was a tall lumbering horsey boy with unshaven jaws and a raw braying voice. He was breathing on his knuckles, it was a cold autumn morning.

  It was the morning of Hallowe’en, 1948. Rebecca was twelve years old and in seventh grade.

  It was shortly past dawn. In the night there had been a frost and a light dusting of snow. Now the sky was gray and twilit and in the east beyond the Chautauqua mountains the sun was a faintly glowing hooded eye.

  Rebecca was helping Ma prepare breakfast. Gus hadn’t yet emerged from his bedroom. Pa in coveralls stood at the sink
pumping water, coughing and noisily spitting in that way of his that made Rebecca feel sickish. Pa looked up at Herschel sharply, asking, “What? What’s it?”

  “You best come outside by y’self, Pa.”

  Herschel spoke with uncharacteristic grimness. You looked to see if he’d wink, screw up his eyes, wriggle his mouth in that comical way of his, give some sign he was fooling, but he was serious, he did not even glance at Rebecca.

  Jacob Schwart stared at his elder son, saw something in the boy’s face�fury, hurt, bafflement, and quivering animal excitement�he had not seen before. He cursed, and reached for the poker beside the cast-iron stove. Herschel laughed harshly saying, “It’s too late for any fuckin poker, Pa.”

  Pa followed Herschel outside, limping. Rebecca would have followed but Pa turned as if by instinct to warn her, “Stay inside, girl.” By this time Gus had stumbled out of the bedroom, spiky-haired and disheveled; at nineteen he was nearly Herschel’s height, six feet two, but thirty pounds lighter, rail-thin and skittish.

  Anna Schwart, at the stove, looking at no one, removed the heavy iron frying pan from the burner and set it to the side.

  “Fuck! Fuckers.”

  Herschel led the way, Pa followed close behind him swaying like a drunken man, staring. The night before Hallowe’en was known as Devil’s Night. In the Chautauqua Valley it seemed to be an old, in some way revered tradition. “Pranks” were committed by unknown parties who came in stealth, in the dark. “Mischief.” You were meant to take it as a joke.