The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was the first time Rebecca had mentioned her mother to Jesus.

  It was the first time ( her mind rapidly calculated, she knew that Jesus too must be thinking this) she had alluded to her father, indirectly.

  Jesus said, an edge of irritation to His voice, “Nothing will happen that is not meant to be, my child.”

  But this was no consolation! Rebecca turned in confusion, and saw Jesus staring at her. The man looked nothing like Jesus on the Bible cards. He wasn’t wearing a flowing white robe after all, nor a headdress. He was bareheaded and his hair was straggling and greasy, tinged with gray. His jaws were stubbled, his face was creased with deep wrinkles. In fact Jesus resembled the scummy-eyed men, derelicts they were called, bums, who hung about the railroad yard and the worst of the taverns on South Main Street. Those shabbily dressed men of whom Rebecca’s mother warned her repeatedly to keep clear, to avoid.

  This Jesus resembled Jacob Schwart, too. Smiling at her in angry mockery If you believe me you are indeed a fool.

  And then a car came rattling along the Quarry Road, and He vanished.

  22

  Nothing will happen that is not meant to be.

  These were the words of the mocking derelict Jesus. Rebecca heard them taunting her through that long winter and into the freezing spring of 1949 which would be her final year in the old stone house in the cemetery.

  It would be said in Milburn that the end came for the Schwarts soon after Herschel’s criminal behavior, and his flight as a fugitive, but in fact eight months intervened. This was a time of stasis and confusion: when one is locked in the paralysis of sleep, even as the dream is broken, disintegrating. Rebecca knew only that her father’s episodes of fury and despair, anxiety and sodden alcoholic depression, alternated more frequently, and were not to be predicted.

  More and more, Jacob Schwart found fault with his remaining son. The boy’s very name filled him with contempt: “‘Gus.’ What is this ‘gus’�‘gas’? Who is named ‘gas’?” Jacob laughed, this was very amusing. Even when he hadn’t been drinking he tormented the boy:

  “If our Nazi enemies took one of my sons, why not you? Eh?”

  And, “God is a joker, we know: taking my firstborn son and leaving behind you.”

  Strange, Jacob Schwart’s English speech was becoming ever more heavily accented, as if he’d been living in the Chautauqua Valley only a few weeks and not more than a decade.

  Gus mumbled, to Rebecca, “Why’s he hate me? I never made Herschel go nuts like that.”

  Unlike Herschel, Gus could not seem to stand up to their father. And Jacob Schwart was a man who, when unopposed, grew yet more contemptuous, cruel. Rebecca had seen how at school if she tried to ignore the other children’s taunts, the taunts were only intensified. You could not placate a bully. You could not wait for a bully to tire of his cruelty, and find another target. Only if Rebecca fought back immediately did her tormentors let her alone.

  Temporarily, at least.

  Poor Gus, who had no work outside the cemetery. No life outside the stone cottage. Their father refused to let him get a job, as Herschel had done, and earn his own wages. Nor did Gus have the strength to break away from home, for their mother was dependent upon him. By the age of nineteen he’d become Jacob Schwart’s (unpaid) assistant. “Get out here! Get your ass here! I am waiting.” In the smallest matters, Gus must obey his father; Rebecca thought he was craven as a boy-soldier, terrified of disobeying his superior officer. She’d loved Gus when they were younger, now she shrank from him in disgust. By degrees Gus had become a captive animal, his spirit was squelched. His hair that was thin, fawn-colored, was seriously thinning, he scratched his scalp so. His forehead was becoming furrowed as an old man’s. He suffered from mysterious skin rashes, always he was scratching with his nails. Rebecca cringed seeing Gus poke his forefinger deep, deep into his ear canal to scratch wildly as if hoping to claw out his brains.

  Since Herschel had left home, the persecution was worsening. But it had begun years before when Jacob Schwart insisted that Gus quit school on his sixteenth birthday.

  Jacob had said, matter-of-factly, “Son, you are not bright. School does nothing for one like you. On the terrible sea voyage, you were afflicted with dysentery and fever. Once the brain starts to melt like wax there is no recovery of intelligence. At that school you are surrounded by our enemies. Crude, coarse peasants who laugh at you, and through you laugh at your family. At your mother! It is not to be tolerated, son!” When Pa worked himself up into righteous anger, there was no reasoning with him.

  It was true, Gus had to concede. His grades were poor, he had few friends, the majority of his classmates avoided him. Yet he’d never caused trouble, he’d never hurt anyone! It was his inflamed skin that exuded a look of fury. It was his small close-set eyes that regarded the world with such distrust.

  So Gus obeyed his father, and quit school. Now he had no life outside the cemetery, beyond Jacob Schwart’s domain. Rebecca worried that one day her father would insist that she, too, quit school. He had so bitterly repudiated the world of learning, of books, words. And Rebecca’s mother would wish it, too. You are a girl, you don’t want something to happen to you.

  ( Rebecca was puzzled: would she be punished because she was a girl, or because she was the gravedigger’s daughter?)

  One day in late March, when Gus was helping their father clear away storm debris from the cemetery, Jacob Schwart became impatient with his son, who worked clumsily and distractedly; Jacob cursed him, and feinted with his shovel as if to strike him. Of course, Jacob was only joking. But Gus’s cringing response, the look of abject fear in his face, infuriated the older man who lost his temper and struck Gus on the back with the flat of the shovel�“Fool! Donkey!” The blow wasn’t a hard one, Jacob Schwart would insist, yet out of perversity Gus fell, striking his head against a gravestone and cutting himself. A short distance away, several visitors to one of the grave sites were watching. A man called over asking what was wrong, what was going on, but Jacob Schwart ignored him, cursing his fallen son and commanding him to get up�“You are shameful, to behave so. Pretending to be hurt like a baby.” When Gus struggled to his feet, wiping at his bleeding face, Jacob raged at him. “Look at you! God-damn baby! Go, go to your mama, suckle Mama’s teats. Go!”

  Gus turned to his father, staring. There was no look of abject fear in his face now. Bleeding from a cut in his forehead, Gus regarded the older man with an expression of hatred. His fingers twitched, gripping a wide-pronged metal rake.

  “Do you dare! Do you! You! You do not dare, go suckle Mama’s teats!”�so Jacob Schwart raged, as his son advanced upon him with the uplifted rake. At the same time, the man who’d called to them was now approaching them, cautiously, speaking calmly, trying to dissuade them from more violence. At the grave site, two women clutched at each other, whimpering in alarm.

  “Try! Try to strike your father! You cripple-baby, you cannot.”

  Gus held the rake in his trembling hands and then, abruptly, let it fall. He had not spoken, and would not speak. As Jacob Schwart continued to rage at him, he turned and walked away, unsteady on his feet, dripping blood on the snow, determined not to fall like a man making his way across the deck of a pitching ship.

  When Gus entered the house, there was Anna Schwart awaiting him, quivering with emotion.

  “He? He did this to you?”

  “Ma, no. I fell. I did it to myself.”

  Anna tried awkwardly to embrace her son, who would not be embraced or impeded at this time.

  She was begging, pleading. “He loves you, August! It is just his way, to hurt. To harm where he loves. The Nazis�”

  “Fuck the Nazis. He’s a Nazi. Fuck him.”

  Anna soaked a towel in cold water, to press against Gus’s bleeding forehead. But he had no patience with her nursing, he seemed hardly to feel pain, the bleeding was only annoying to him. “Shit, Ma, let me go. I’m O.K.” With surprising roughness he shoved Anna asid
e. In his bedroom he emptied bureau drawers onto his bed, yanked his few items of clothing out of his closet, threw everything into a pile. He would fashion a crude bundle out of a flannel blanket, and tie up his meager possessions inside. His distraught mother could not believe what she was seeing: her wounded son, her only remaining son, so elated? Smiling, laughing to himself? August, who’d rarely smiled since the terrible morning of the swastikas.

  On the kitchen floor, in the hallway and in the bedroom, bloodstains would gleam in August Schwart’s wake like exotic coins Rebecca would discover when she returned home from school to the silent, devastated stone house.

  Like the other he never said goodbye. Left without seeing me never said goodbye.

  23

  Both his sons were gone. In his fury he would come to think they had abandoned him�“My plans for them. Betrayers!”

  With time, with brooding, drinking late into the night staring toward his blurred reflection in a window, that looked like a drowning man, he would come to see that his sons had been taken from him.

  It was a conspiracy. A plan. For they hated Jacob Schwart. His enemies.

  Wandering in the cemetery, amid the thawing dripping trees.

  He read aloud: “‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’” It was a blunt statement, wasn’t it?�a remarkable claim of power, and consolation. Words carved into a weatherworn gravestone from the year 1928.

  Jacob’s voice was playful but hoarse. Nicotine had scorched the interior of his mouth. He was thinking how, when Herschel had been still in school, years ago, he’d been working with his son here and he’d read these very words aloud to Herschel and Herschel had scratched his head asking what the hell was that�“‘Rez-rectshun’”�and Jacob said it meant that a Messiah had come to save the Christians, only the Christians; also it meant that the Christians expected to be resurrected in their own bodies, when Jesus Christ returned to earth.

  Herschel made a sniggering noise, perplexed.

  “What th’ fuck bodiez, Pa? Like, dead bodiez inna grave?”

  Yes, that was it. Dead bodies in graves.

  Herschel laughed his breathy heehaw laugh. As if this was a joke. Jacob Schwart had to smile: his elder, illiterate son had an eye for the tragic farce of human delusion as perceptive as that of the great German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. He did!

  “Jeezus, Pa, they’d be nasty-lookin, eh? An how in fuckin hell they gonna get out?”

  Herschel struck the rounded curve of a grave with the flat of his shovel as if to waken, and to mock, whatever lay inside, beneath the grass.

  God damn: he missed Herschel. Now his son (whom he’d been barely able to stomach, in fact) had been missing for months, now Jacob missed Herschel like something eaten out of his gut. To Anna he might grunt, “All of that, that we had then. Gone with him.”

  Anna did not reply. Yet Anna knew what Jacob meant.

  All that we had then, when we were young. In the old country. When Herschel was born. Before the Nazis. Gone.

  Here was a theory: Herschel had been hunted down like a dog, shot in a ditch by Chautauqua County sheriff’s deputies. Gestapo. They would claim self-defense. “Resisting arrest.” In the mountains, it might’ve been. Often you heard gunfire from the mountains�“hunters.”

  Herschel hadn’t been armed, so far as Jacob knew. Maybe a knife. Nothing more. He’d been shot, left to bleed to death in a ditch. Residents of Milburn would never forgive Herschel for beating and scarring their Nazi-sons.

  “I will exact justice. I will not be unarmed.”

  It was a freezing spring! A hell of a spring. Too many funerals, the gravedigger was kept busy. This accursed year 1949. He missed his younger son, too. The puny whining one with the skin rashes�“August.”

  “August”�named for a favorite, older uncle of Anna’s who had died at about the time Anna and Jacob were married.

  For a while he was furious with August for behaving so insolently and stupidly and running off where Jacob Schwart could not find him to talk sense into him but then it seemed to him only logical, August too had been taken from him, to render Jacob Schwart helpless. For hadn’t the boy been beaten, streaming blood from a nasty gash in his face…

  A slow-witted boy but a good worker. A good son. And August could read, at least. August could do grade-school arithmetic.

  “I will not be unarmed…I will not be ‘meek.’”

  Strange, and terrible: the paralysis that had overcome those declared enemies of the German Reich. Like hypnotized creatures, as the predator approaches. Hitler had not obfuscated. Hitler had been forthright, unambiguous. Jacob Schwart had forced himself to read Mein Kampf. At least, he had read into Mein Kampf. The lunatic certainty! The passion! My battle, my campaign. My struggle. My war.

  Set beside Hitler’s rantings, and Hitler’s demon logic, how flimsy, how vulnerable, how merely words were the great works of philosophy! How merely words the dream of mankind for a god!

  Among his enemies here in the Chautauqua Valley, Jacob Schwart would not be hypnotized. He would not be surprised, and he would not be unarmed. History would not repeat itself.

  He blamed his enemies for this, too: that he, Jacob Schwart, a refined and educated individual, formerly a citizen of Germany, should be forced to behave in such a barbaric manner.

  He, a former math teacher at a prestigious boys’ school. A former respected employee of a most distinguished Munich printing firm specializing in scientific publications.

  Now, a gravedigger. A caretaker of these others, his enemies.

  Their Christian cemetery he must maintain. Their grave sites he must keep trimmed. Crosses!�crucifixions!�ridiculous stone angels!

  He maintained the graves, oh yes. When no one observed there was Jacob Schwart “watering” the graves with his hot-acid piss.

  He and Herschel, years ago. Laughing wild as braying donkeys.

  Gus had never. You couldn’t joke with Gus, like that. Pissing with his father, unzipping his trousers and taking out his penis, the boy would be mortified, embarrassed. More like a girl, Jacob thought.

  That was his shame, he had lost his sons.

  For this, he would come to blame the Township board. For it was too confusing otherwise.

  “You will see. Soon, your blind eyes will be blasted open.”

  He’d memorized their names. They were Madrick, Drury, Simcoe, Harwell, McCarren, Boyd…He wasn’t sure of their faces but he knew names and he could learn where they lived, if necessary.

  So grateful, sirs. Thank you sirs!

  Rural idiots. Wrinkling their noses at his smell. Seeing that he was unshaven, a troll-man with a broken back, twisting his cloth cap in his hands…In pity of him, in contempt of him, explaining to him shameless in their duplicity that the budget, the budget was, budget cuts were, maybe next year Jacob, possibly next year we will see Jacob. Thank you for coming in, Jacob!

  Some kind of a long gun he would purchase. A deer rifle, or a shotgun. He had money saved. In the First Bank of Chautauqua, he had nearly two hundred dollars saved.

  “‘Genocide’ it is called. You are young now, you are ignorant and are being falsely educated in that school but one day you must know. In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. You must hide your weakness, Rebecca!”

  He spoke with alarming vehemence. As if she had dared to doubt him. Though in fact she was nodding, yes Pa.

  No idea what he was saying. Uneasy that in his excitement he might spit at her. For he chewed an enormous wad of tobacco, acid juices leaked down his chin. The more vehemently he spoke the more spittle flew from his lips. And if he should lapse into one of his coughing spasms…

  “You are listening, Rebecca? You are hearing me?”

  His sorrow was, he had no sons remaining. He had been castrated, unmanned. His shame.

  Only the girl. He must love the wretched girl, he had no one else.

  And so he told her, he lapsed into telling her, in the evenings sometimes, couldn’t recal
l what he’d said or when he’d begun instructing her, how in Europe their enemies had wished not only to kill him and his kind “as in an action of war” but to exterminate them utterly. For they were believed to be “pollutants”�“toxins.” And so it was not merely war, which is a political action, but genocide, which is a moral, you might say a metaphysical action. For genocide, if carried out, is an action that time cannot undo.

  “Here is a puzzle worthy of Zeno: that, in history, there can be actions that history�all of ‘time’�cannot undo.”

  A profound statement. Yet the girl merely stared at him.

  Damn, she annoyed him! Awkward child with skin olive-dark as his own. A Gypsy look. Beautiful dark-luminous eyes. Not-young eyes. Anna was to blame, obscurely he blamed Anna for the girl. Not that he did not love the girl of course. But, who knows why, in a family a mother is blamed sometimes, simply for giving birth.

  Another child? I cannot bear it. No.

  In the blood-soaked bunk bed, in that windowless “cabin” of unspeakable filth. How easily the infant girl might have been smothered. And what a mercy to smother her. An adult hand pressed over the small wizened face red as a boiled tomato. Before she could draw breath and begin to howl. Before the boys saw, and understood that they had a sister. And in the days of Anna’s dazed slovenly nursing she might have been suffocated as well. Might have been dropped onto the floor. Might have been lifted carelessly out of her crib, her disproportionately heavy head not supported on its fragile neck by an adult’s protective hand. (His!) The infant might have been taken sick, mucus might have clotted her tiny lungs. Pneumonia. Diphtheria. Nature has provided a wondrous assortment of exits from life. Yet somehow little Rebecca had not perished but survived.

  To bring a child into the hellhole of the twentieth century, how could it be borne!

  And now she was twelve years old. In her presence, Jacob felt his gnarled heart contract with an emotion he could not define.