The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Rebecca shook her head, no. She wasn’t planning on hearing one if she could help it.

  Katy told Rebecca, with the air of one confiding a secret, that Leora had boyfriends, guys she met at the hotel. “We ain’t supposed to know but hell, we do.”

  These men gave Leora things, or left things in their hotel rooms for her, Leora passed on to her daughters. Or they’d give her actual money which was, in Leora’s voice, that was lyric and teasing as a radio voice, “Always wel-come.”

  It was true, Leora drank sometimes and could be a real bitch picking and nagging her kids. But mostly she was so nice.

  Asking Rebecca one day, out of the blue it seemed, “There ain’t anything wrong over at your place, hon, is there?”

  Five of them were playing cards at the Grebs’ kitchen table covered in sticky oilcloth. At first, just Katy and Rebecca were playing double solitaire which was a fad at school. Then Leora came home, and got the younger kids, for a game of gin rummy. Rebecca was new to the game but picked it up quickly.

  Basking in Leora’s casual praise she had a natural ap’tude for cards.

  Rebecca had to adjust, what to expect of a family. What to expect of a mother. At first it shocked her how the Grebs crowded together at the table, jostling one another and laughing over the silliest things. Leora could get in a mood, she wasn’t much different from Katy and Rebecca. Except she smoked, one cigarette after the other; and drank Black Horse ale straight from the bottle. ( Yet her mannerisms were fussy, ladylike. Sticking out her little finger as she lifted the bottle to her mouth.) Rebecca squirmed to think what Anna Schwart would say of such a woman.

  And the way Leora snorted with laughter when the cards turned against her, as if bad luck was some kind of joke.

  Leora dealt first. Next, Katy. Then Conroy, Katy’s eleven-year-old brother. Then Molly who was only ten. Then Rebecca who was self-conscious at first, fumbling the cards in her excitement at being included in the game.

  She was surprised by Leora’s casual question. She mumbled something vague meant to convey no.

  Leora said, briskly dealing out cards, “Well, O.K. I’m real glad to hear that, Rebecca.”

  It was an awkward time. Rebecca was close to crying. But Rebecca would not cry. Katy said, that whiny edge to her voice, “I told Rebecca, Momma, she could stay with us. If she didn’t, y’know, want to go home. Some night.”

  There was a buzzing in Rebecca’s head. Must’ve told Katy some things she had not meant to tell. How she was afraid of her father, sometimes. How she missed her brothers and wished they’d taken her with them.

  Rebecca’s exact words had been reckless, extravagant. Like somebody in a comic strip she’d said Wished they’d taken me with them to Hell if that’s where they went.

  Leora said, exhaling smoke through her nostrils, “That Herschel! He was a real character, I always favored Herschel. Is a real character, I mean. He’s alive, ain’t he?”

  Rebecca was stunned by the question. For a moment she could not respond.

  “I mean to ask, did you people hear from him? That you know?”

  Rebecca mumbled no. Not that she knew.

  “’Course if your pa heard from Herschel, he might not tell you. Might not want word to get out. Account of, y’know, Herschel’s fugitive status.”

  This was a term, both alarming and thrilling, Rebecca had never heard before: fugitive status.

  Leora went on in her rambling way, to speak of Herschel. Katy said of her mother if you listened to her she’d tell you plenty, a lot of it maybe not intended. It was a revelation to Rebecca, Leora seemed to know Herschel so well. Even Bud Greb had known Herschel, before being sent away to prison. And Herschel had even played gin rummy and poker, right here at this table!

  Rebecca was moved, to see how her brother was known to people in ways not-known to his family. It was a strange thing, you could live close to somebody and not know as much about him as others did. It made Rebecca miss him all the more, though his way of teasing had not been nice. Leora was saying, with girlish vehemence, “What Herschel did, hon, those bastards deserved. Taking the damn law in your own hands sometimes you got to do.”

  Katy agreed. So did Conroy.

  Rebecca wiped at her eyes. It made her want to cry, Leora saying such things about her brother.

  Like shifting a mirror, just a little. You see an edge to something, an angle of vision you had not known. Such a surprise!

  At school, nobody ever said a nice thing about Herschel. Only he was a fugitive from justice, wanted by the police and he’d be sent to Attica for sure where Ne-gro prisoners from Buffalo would cut him up good, himself. Get what he deserved.

  The game continued. Slap-slap-slap of sticky cards. Leora offered Rebecca a sip of her ale and Rebecca declined at first then said O.K. and choked a little swallowing the strong liquid and the others laughed, but not meanly. Then Rebecca heard herself say, as if to surprise, “My pa’s some damn old drunk, I hate him.”

  Rebecca expected Katy to burst into giggles as Katy always did when a girlfriend complained in harsh comic tones of her family. It was what you did! But here in the Grebs’ kitchen something was wrong, Leora stared hard at her holding an uplifted card and Rebecca knew to her shame that she’d misspoken.

  Leora shifted her Chesterfield from one hand to the other, scattering ashes. Must’ve been the Black Horse ale that had provoked Rebecca to utter such words, making her want to choke and laugh at the same time.

  “Your pa,” Leora said thoughtfully, “is a man hard to fathom. People say. I would not claim to fathom Joseph Schwart.”

  Joseph! Leora didn’t even know Rebecca’s father’s name.

  Rebecca shrank, in shame. The harsh monosyllable Schwart was stinging to hear. To know that others might utter it, might speak of her father in a way both impersonal and familiar, was shocking to her.

  Yet Rebecca heard herself say, half in defiance, “You don’t have to ‘fathom’ him, I’m the one. And Ma.”

  Carefully Leora said, not looking at Rebecca now, “What about your ma, Rebecca? She keeps to herself, eh?”

  Rebecca laughed, a harsh mirthless sound.

  Katy said, to Leora, in a whiny triumphant voice as if the two had been arguing, and this was the crushing point, “Momma, see? I told R’becca she can stay with us. If she needs to.”

  Too slowly, Leora sucked on what remained of her cigarette.

  “Well…”

  Rebecca had been smiling. All this while, smiling. The hot sour liquid she’d swallowed was a gaseous bubble in her gut, she could feel it and worried she might vomit it back up. Her cheeks were burning as if they’d been slapped.

  All this while, Conroy and Molly were fiddling with their cards, oblivious of this exchange. They had not the slightest awareness that Rebecca Schwart had betrayed her parents, nor that Katy had put it to Leora, with Rebecca as a witness, that Rebecca might come live with them, and Leora was hesitant, unwilling to agree. Not the slightest awareness! Conroy was a large-boned child with sniffles and a nasty habit of wiping his nose every few minutes on the back of his hand and the mean thought came to Rebecca If he was mine, I’d strangle him and the wish to tell this to Leora was so strong, Rebecca had to grip her cards tight.

  Hearts, diamonds, clubs…Trying to make sense of what she’d been dealt.

  Can a king of hearts save you? Ten of clubs? Queen-and-jack pair? Wished she had seven cards in the same suit, she’d lay them down on the table with a flourish. The Grebs would be goggle-eyed!

  Wanting nothing more than to keep playing rummy forever with Katy’s family. Laughing, making wisecracks, sipping ale and when Leora invited her to stay for supper Rebecca would say with true regret Thanks but I can’t, I guess, they want me back home but instead there was Rebecca tossing down her cards suddenly, some of them falling onto the floor, Rebecca pushed her chair away from the table skidding and noisy, God damn if she was going to cry! Fuck the Grebs if they expected that.

  “I hate
you, too! You can all go to hell!”

  Before anyone could say a word, Rebecca slammed out the screen door. Running, stumbling out to the road. Inside, the Grebs must have stared after her, astonished.

  There came Katy’s voice, almost too faint to be heard, “Rebecca? Hey c’mon back, what’s wrong?”

  Never. She would not.

  In April, this was. The week after Gus left.

  My pa’s some damn old drunk, I hate him.

  She could not believe she had uttered those words. For all the Grebs to hear!

  Of course they would tell everyone. Even Katy who liked Rebecca would tell everyone with ears.

  At school, forever afterward Rebecca ignored Katy Greb. Would not look at Katy Greb. In the morning, her strategy was to wait until Katy and the others were out of sight walking along the road, before she followed behind them; or, she took one of her secret routes through fields and pine woods and, her favorite, along the railroad embankment that was elevated by five feet. So happy! She was a young horse galloping, her legs so springy and strong, she laughed aloud out of very happiness, she could run-run-run forever arriving reluctantly at school, nerved-up, sweaty, itching for a fight, bad as Herschel wanting somebody to look at her cross-eyed or mouth Gravedigger! or some bullshit like that, Christ she was too restless to calm down to fit into a desk! Herschel had said he’d have liked to break the damn desk, squeezing his knees under and lifting, exerting his muscles, and Rebecca felt the same way, exactly.

  “Hey, R’becca�”

  Go to hell. Leave me alone.

  Hatred for Katy Greb and for Leora Greb and all of the Grebs and many others became a strange, potent consolation, like sucking something bitter.

  Hardening her heart against dopey Katy Greb. Friendly good-natured not-too-bright girl who’d been Rebecca Schwart’s closest friend from third grade on, till Katy stared at Rebecca in hurt, in bewilderment, and finally in resentment and dislike. “Fuck you too, Schwart. Fuck you.”

  A group of girls, Katy at the center. Smiling in scorn speaking of Rebecca Schwart.

  Well, Rebecca had wanted this, didn’t she? Wanted them to hate her and leave her alone.

  All that spring, their enmity wafted after her like the stink of smoldering rubber Gravedigger’s daughter she can go fuck herself.

  25

  “Ma? Ma�”

  In the end she would not need to run away from home. It was her home that would expel her. Always she would recall that irony: her punishment at last.

  May 11, 1949. A weekday. She’d stayed away after school for as long as she’d dared. In dread of returning home as if sensing beforehand what awaited.

  She called for her mother. Her voice rose in childish terror. She was panicked stumbling to the front door that was partly open…The crude wooden door he’d painted over after the Hallowe’en vandalism in thick furious swaths of dark green paint to obscure the markings beneath that could not be obscured. “Ma…? It’s me.” Beyond a corner of the house as if in mockery of her alarm was a vision of laundry on the clothesline, frayed towels and a sheet stirring in the wind and so it was logical for Rebecca who believed in magical thinking to tell herself If Ma has hung out wash today…

  …if today, laundry on the line, Ma’s washday…

  Still she was short of breath. She’d been running. From the Quarry Road, she’d been running. It was hours after school had ended for the day. It was near six o’clock, and still the sun was prominent in the sky. Her heart was pounding in her chest like a deranged bell. As an animal smells fear, injured flesh, spilled blood she knew instinctively that something had happened.

  At the edge of her blurred vision, in the interior of the cemetery, some distance away a car or cars were parked on the graveled lane and so she’d thought possibly there had been a funeral, and something had gone wrong, and Jacob Schwart had been blamed through no fault of his. Even as she was plunging toward the front door of the house. Even as she was hearing raised voices. With childish obstinacy not wishing to hear a woman crying, “Don’t go in there!�stop her!”

  She was thinking of her mother Anna. Her mother trapped in that house.

  For how could Rebecca not enter, knowing that her mother was inside, trapped.

  Ask God why: why such things are allowed. Not me.

  In that spring, that season of desultory and defiant wandering. Like a stray dog she wandered. Reluctant to return to the stone house in the cemetery which she would one day recall having been built into the side of a massive hill like a cellar or a sepulchre though in fact it was neither, only just a weatherworn stone-and-stucco dwelling with few windows, and those windows small, and square, and coated on the outside with a near-opaque winter grime.

  Hating to return to the house though she knew her mother was waiting for her. Hating to return since Herschel had left, since Gus had left hitching a ride with a trucker bound for somewhere west. Both her brothers had left without a word, not a word of affection or regret or explanation or even farewell for their sister who’d loved them. Now in fury thinking I hate them, both of them. Fuckers!

  This angry language she was beginning to savor. At first under her breath, and then aloud. A pulse beat hard and hot in her throat in the angry joy of hating her brothers who’d abandoned her and their mother to the madman Jacob Schwart.

  She knew: her father was mad. Yet not raving-mad, not helpless-mad, so that someone in authority might come to help them.

  Yet: they know, but they don’t care. Even that he has bought a shotgun, they don’t care. For why should they think of us, who are but jokes to them.

  One day soon, Rebecca would run away, too. She didn’t require Katy Greb to take her in. Didn’t require anyone to take her in or feel sorry for her. Fuckers they were all of them, she turned from them in scorn.

  After the spring thaw it became increasingly difficult for Rebecca to stay in school for a full day. More and more she found herself abruptly walking out. Scarcely knowing what she did only that she could not bear the stifling classrooms, the cafeteria that smelled of milk and scorched and greasy food, the corridors in which her classmates passed jostling one another like brainless, blind animals rushing through a chute. She walked out a rear exit not caring who might be watching and would report her. If an adult voice called after her stern and admonishing�Rebecca! Rebecca Schwart where are you going!�she didn’t trouble even to glance back but broke into a run.

  Her grades were mostly C’s and D’s now. Even in English, that had been her best subject. Her teachers had grown wary of her as you’d be wary of a cornered rat.

  Like her brothers, Rebecca Schwart was becoming. This girl who’d once been so promising…

  Run, run! Through the weedy vacant lot adjacent to the school, along a street of brownstone row houses and small shops, into an alley, and so to an open field and the Buffalo & Chautauqua railroad embankment which she would follow downtown to Canal Street. The Canal Street bridge, off South Main, was so wide that parking was allowed on it. Where the taverns were. A block away on its peak of a hill was the General Washington Hotel. Several streets including South Main converged here at the bridge. In Milburn, all hills sloped down to the Erie Barge Canal and the canal itself had been out through bedrock, into the interior of the earth. At the bridge idle men leaned on the railings thirty feet above the rushing water, smoking, sometimes sipping from bottles hidden inside paper bags. This was a slipping-down place, a place inclined to muteness, like a cemetery where things came to rest.

  Why Rebecca was drawn here, she could not have said. She kept her distance from strangers.

  Some of the men were war veterans. There was a man of about Jacob Schwart’s age on crutches, with a melted-away face. Another wore thick glasses with one of the lenses blacked out, so you knew he was missing an eye. Others had faces that were not-old and yet deeply lined, ravaged. There were tremulous hands, stiffened necks and legs. An obese man with a stump-knee sometimes sprawled on a concrete ledge in good weather, sunn
ing himself like a reptile, repulsive and yet fascinating to observe. His hair was gray-grizzled and thin as Jacob Schwart’s hair and if Rebecca dared to draw close she could hear the man’s hoarse, moist breathing that was like her father’s breathing when he was agitated. Once, she saw that the reptile-man had wakened from his slumber and was observing her, with a sly little smile, through quivering eyelids. She wanted to turn quickly away, but could not. She believed that, if she ran, the reptile-man would become angry and call after her and everyone would see.

  There were no more than twelve feet separating them. Rebecca could not comprehend how she’d dared to come so close.

  “No school today, girlie? Eh? ’Sa holiday, eh?”

  He was teasing, though with an air of threat. As if he might report her for truancy.

  Rebecca said nothing. She was leaning against the bridge railing, staring down at the water far below. In the countryside, the canal was flat and placid-seeming; here at the forty-foot lock, the current was swift and perilous, rushing over the lock in ceaseless agitation, churning, frothy, making a noise like wildfire. Almost, you could not hear the sound of traffic on the bridge. You could not hear the metallic chiming of the hour from the bell tower at the First Bank of Chautauqua. You could not hear another’s voice unless he spoke loudly, provocatively.

  “I’m talkin to you, girlie. ’Sa holiday is it?”

  Still Rebecca did not reply. Nor did she turn away. In the corner of her eye she saw him, sprawled in the sun, panting. He chuckled and rubbed his hands over his groin that looked fattish, like a goiter.

  “I see you, girlie! And you see me.”

  Run, run! That spring of 1949.

  Always Milburn had been an old country town, you could see where post-war newness was taking hold. The gaunt red-brick facades of Main Street were being replaced by sleek modern buildings with plate glass windows. In some of the newer buildings were revolving doors, elevators. The old Milburn post office, cabin-sized, would be replaced by a beige-brick post office that shared its quarters with the YM-YWCA. Grovers Feed Mill, Midtown Lumber, Jos. Miller Dry Goods were being crowded out by Montgomery Ward, Woolworth’s, Norban’s, a new A & P with its own asphalt parking lot. (Jos. Miller Dry Goods had been the store to which Rebecca had come with her mother, to select material for the curtains Anna Schwart sewed in preparation for the Morgensterns’ visit nearly eight years before. Rebecca’s father had driven them into town in the caretaker’s pickup truck. It had been a rare outing for Anna Schwart, and her last. It had been the only time that Rebecca had been brought into town with her mother and she would afterward recall that trip and the excitement of that trip with faint disbelief even as, staring at the site of the old store, replaced now by another, she was having difficulty recalling it.)