The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In all, Miss Lutter would be obliged to buy several more dresses for Rebecca, pairs of shoes, gloves. For goodness how the girl grew!

  And her hair that was thick, coarsely wavy, inclined to snarls�Miss Lutter insisted that Rebecca brush, brush, brush it with a wire handbrush until it shone, and her wrist ached with weariness. Like a horse’s mane, Miss Lutter sighed. Yet she touched Rebecca’s hair, with a fascinated repugnance.

  “Sometimes I think you’re part-horsy, Rebecca. A wild roan pony.”

  Rebecca laughed, uneasily. She was never certain whether Miss Lutter was joking, or meant such extravagant remarks.

  When manly Reverend Deegan strode to the pulpit to preach his sermon, Miss Lutter sat upright in the pew before him, rapt with attention as if she were the sole person in the room. The minister had been a U.S. Army chaplain, he’d served in the war, in the Pacific. So it was frequently noted, in Reverend Deegan’s sermons. He spoke in a gliding-and-dipping voice, a voice trained as a singer’s; he frowned, he smiled. Almost inaudibly Miss Lutter murmured Yes yes yes. Amen, yes. Her lips parted moist as a child’s, her eyelids fluttered. Rebecca tried very hard to hear what Miss Lutter was hearing for she wanted very badly to believe for if she failed to believe, Jesus would not enter her heart and her soul would be as nettles cast upon the earth, and not seeds. And the stones that the Jews took up to throw at Jesus for His blasphemy would be her lot.

  How hard Rebecca tried, week following week! Still it was like trying to haul herself up by her arms onto the shed roof, when she’d been a little girl and her brothers had scrambled ahead of her laughing at her.

  It was strange: how when Rebecca was alone, it was not so difficult to believe in Jesus Christ. Almost she could sense that Jesus was watching her, smiling His enigmatic smile. For Jesus, too, had laughed at Rebecca, on the Quarry Road. Yet Jesus had forgiven her. Yet Jesus had saved her life and for what reason?

  Miss Lutter had promised that they would discover, one day.

  Miss Lutter had taken her to her parents’ grave site, that was so plain, and covered in weeds. Miss Lutter had taken no notice (out of tact, or because her eyes were weak) of the factual errors in the marker. They had no religion, I was told. But we will pray for them.

  But here in church all that was difficult to believe. Though Rebecca tried to concentrate. The more earnestly Reverend Deegan spoke of Jesus, the less real Jesus seemed. Amid this congregation of good decent people. Amid the polished hardwood pews, robust voices uplifted in song. Women’s talcum powder, men’s hair oil and shaving lotion.

  Time to take up the hymnal. Reverend Deegan’s smile flashed wetly white. “My brothers and sisters in Christ, make a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

  They stood. Miss Lutter sang as earnestly as the others. Her weak soprano voice. Her head uplifted in hope, her mouth like a hungry little beak, working. A mighty fortress, a mighty fortress is our Lord. The lady organist with the snow-white floating hair struck her shrill chords. The crinoline beneath Miss Lutter’s rayon dress quivered. Rebecca sang, shutting her eyes. She loved the swell of the music, that mixed with the roar of the water over the gigantic lock. Her heart beat strangely, she became excited. Oh, suddenly there was hope. Shut her eyes tight in hope of catching a glimpse of the remote Jesus, in his filmy white robe, floating. She did not like to think of the crucifixion, she wanted Jesus to be remote, like an angel; like a beautiful high-scudding cloud, borne by the wind overhead; for the most beautiful clouds were shaped above the lake, and scattered by the wind in all directions; and no one except Rebecca Schwart saw. She would explain to Miss Lutter: for she loved Miss Lutter, and was so grateful for Miss Lutter having saved her life, having taken her in, a ward of Chautauqua County, a charity case, almost she could not look Miss Lutter in the face, almost she could not speak without stammering. She loved Jesus that he was remote and ascended to the Father but like a willful child she hated it more and more that Jesus was a dead body on a cross like any other dead body dripping blood and shortly it would begin to decompose, and smell. Jesus need not be resurrected if He had not died and He need not have died if He had not submitted to His enemies, and escaped. Or better yet why had He not struck His enemies dead? For was not Jesus the Son of God, possessed of the power of life and death?

  Words are bullshit, lies. Every word that has ever been uttered, has ever been used is a lie.

  The singing was over. The congregation was seated. Rebecca opened her eyes, and Jesus had vanished. Ridiculous to think that Jesus would ever be here, summoned by Reverend Deegan of the First Presbyterian Church of Milburn, New York.

  Rebecca tried to forestall a yawn. One of those powerful jaw-breaking yawns that spilled tears down her cheeks. Miss Lutter would notice and be hurt (for Miss Lutter was easily hurt) and would afterward scold in her elliptical-nasal manner.

  Now Rebecca was restless, itchy. Each Sunday it was worse.

  She tried to sit still. Tried to be good. Oh but it was so stupid! Bullshit it was, all of it. Yet telling herself how grateful she was. To Miss Lutter, grateful. Grateful to be alive. Damn lucky. She knew! She might be mistaken for retarded but she was an intelligent girl with eyes in the back of her head and so she knew exactly how Milburn viewed her, and spoke of her. She knew how Rose Lutter was admired, and in some quarters resented. The retired schoolteacher who’d taken in the gravedigger’s daughter, the orphan. Her underarms were itching, and her ankles in the little white anklet socks she hated. She rubbed one ankle against the other, beneath the pew. Hard. Except for where she was and who might be watching she would’ve dug at the patch of wiry hair between her legs, hard enough to draw blood.

  28

  She would not wait until her sixteenth birthday to quit school.

  She would be expelled in November 1951, and she would not return.

  She would break Rose Lutter’s heart, for it could not be helped.

  For that day she’d had enough. Fuck it she’d had enough. Long they had harassed her at the high school. Her teachers knew, and the principal knew, and did nothing to intervene. In the tenth grade corridor at the stairs the older Meunzer girl shoved Rebecca from behind and instead of behaving as if she hadn’t noticed, turning the other cheek as Miss Lutter advised, walking quickly away without a backward glance, Rebecca turned and threw her books at her assailant and began to hit her, striking with her fists as a boy might strike, not overhand but from the shoulder, and beneath. And a second assailant flew at her, a boy. And others joined in against Rebecca. Cursing, scratching, punching. A thrill as of wildfire spread through the corridor, once Rebecca was wrestled down to the floor and kicked, and kicked, and kicked.

  They hated her that she was Herschel Schwart’s sister, and Herschel had left Jeb Meunzer’s face disfigured by scars. They hated her that she was the daughter of the gravedigger Jacob Schwart who’d killed a man named Simcoe, a name well known in Milburn, and had escaped by killing himself and would not die in the electric chair. Long they’d resented Rebecca, that she persisted among them. That she would not humble herself. That her manner was often arrogant, aloof. Both with her classmates, and with her teachers who were uneasy in her presence, and seated her with other misfits and troublemakers at the back of their classrooms.

  All who’d been involved in the fight were expelled from Milburn High and ordered by the principal to leave the school premises at once. It made no difference that Rebecca had been first attacked, he would allow no fighting at his school. There was a possibility of appealing the principal’s decision, in the new year. But Rebecca refused.

  She was out, she would not return.

  Miss Lutter was stunned by the news, devastated. Rebecca had never seen the older woman so distraught.

  “Rebecca, you can’t mean this! You’re upset. I will talk with the principal, you must graduate from high school. You were the one who was attacked, you were only defending yourself. This is a dreadful injustice that must be rectified…” Miss Lutter pressed a tremulous hand against her
chest, as if her heart were beating erratically. Almost in that moment Rebecca weakened, and gave in.

  But no: she’d had enough of Milburn High. She’d had enough of the same faces year following year, the same staring impudent eyes. Imagining that they knew her, when they only knew of her. Imagining that they were superior to her, because of her family.

  Her grades were only average, or poor. Often she cut classes out of boredom. The course she disliked most was algebra. For what did equations have to do with actual things? In English class they were forced to memorize poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, ridiculous singsong rhymes, what did rhymes in poems have to do with things? She’d had enough of school, she would get a job in Milburn and support herself.

  For days Miss Lutter pleaded with Rebecca. You would have thought that Rose Lutter’s future itself was endangered. She told Rebecca that she should not let those ignorant barbarians ruin her life. She had to persevere, to graduate. Only if she had a high school degree could Rebecca hope to find a decent job and lead a decent life.

  Rebecca laughed, this was ridiculous. Decent life! She had no hope of a decent life.

  As if what Jacob Schwart had done surrounded her like a halo. Everywhere Rebecca went, this halo followed. It was invisible to her but very visible to others. It gave off an odor as of smoldering rubber at the town dump.

  One day Rose Lutter confessed to Rebecca, she had retired early from teaching because she could not bear the ignorant, increasingly insolent children. She’d begun to be allergic to chalk dust, her sinus passages were chronically inflamed. She’d been threatened by white-trash parents. The principal of her school had been too cowardly to defend her. Then a ten-year-old boy bit her hand when she’d tried to break up a fight between him and a smaller boy and her doctor had had to give her a prescription for nerves and heart palpitations and the school district granted her a medical leave and at the end of three months when she’d re-entered the school building she had had a tachycardia attack and had nearly collapsed and her doctor advised the school district to retire her with a medical disability and so she had conceded, it was probably for the best; and yet she wanted so very badly for Rebecca not to give up, for Rebecca was young and had all her life before her.

  “You must not replicate the past, Rebecca. You must rise above the past. In your soul you are so superior to…”

  Rebecca felt the insult, as if Rose Lutter had slapped her.

  “Superior to who?”

  Miss Lutter’s voice quavered. She tried to take Rebecca’s stiff cold hands, but Rebecca would not allow it.

  Touch me not! Of the myriad remarks of Jesus Christ she had come to learn, since moving into Rose Lutter’s house, touch me not! had most impressed her.

  “…your background, dear. And those who are your enemies at the school. Throughout the world, barbarians who wish to pull the civilized down. They are enemies of Jesus Christ, too. Rebecca, you must know.”

  Rebecca ran abruptly from the room, to prevent herself from screaming at the nagging old woman Go to hell! You and Jesus Christ go to hell!

  “But she has been so good to me. She loves me…”

  Yet the end would come soon now, Rebecca knew. The break between them Rebecca halfway wished for, and dreaded.

  For she would not return to that school, no matter how Miss Lutter pleaded. No matter how Miss Lutter scolded, threatened. Never!

  More and more she began to stay away from the tidy beige-brick house on Rush Street, as once she’d stayed away from the old stone house in the cemetery. The potpourri fragrance seemed to her sickening. She stayed away from church services, too. After dark, sometimes as late as midnight, when every other house on Rush Street was darkened and utterly still, she returned guilty and defiant. “Why do you wait up for me, Miss Lutter? I wish you wouldn’t. I hate it, seeing all these lights on.”

  I hate you, I hate you waiting. Leave me alone!

  The tension between them grew tighter, ever tighter. For Rebecca refused to tell Miss Lutter where she went. With whom she spent her time. ( Now that she was out of school, she was making new acquaintances. Katy Greb had quit school the previous year, she and Katy were again close friends.) Since she’d been attacked at school, so viciously, so publicly, ugly welts and bruises lasting for weeks on her back, thighs, buttocks, even her breasts and belly, she had come to see herself differently, and she liked what she saw. Her skin shone with a strange olive pallor. Her eyebrows were so fierce and dark, like a man’s nearly touching above the bridge of her nose. A rich rank animal-smell accrued to her skin, when she sweated. With what sudden inspired strength she’d struck Gloria Meunzer and other of her assailants with her fists, she’d made them wince with surprise and pain, she’d drawn blood.

  Smiling to think how like the outlaw Herschel she was, in her heart.

  And there was Miss Lutter, persisting. “I am your court-appointed guardian, Rebecca. I have an official responsibility. Of course I want only what is best for you. I have been praying, I have been trying to think how I’ve failed you…”

  Rebecca bit her lip to keep from screaming.

  “You haven’t. You haven’t failed me, Miss Lutter.”

  The very name Miss Lutter made her smile, in derision. Rose Lutter, Miss Rose Lutter. She could not bear it.

  “I haven’t?” Miss Lutter spoke with mock wistfulness. Her thin faded hair had been crimped and wadded up somehow, flattened against her skull beneath a hairnet. Her soft skin that was lined terribly about her nearsighted eyes, and sagged at her chin, glistened with a medicinal-smelling night cream. She was in her nightgown, a royal blue rayon robe over it, tightly tied about her very narrow waist. Rebecca could not keep from staring at Miss Lutter’s chest that was so flat, bony. “Of course I have, dear. Your life…”

  Rebecca protested, “My life is my life! My own life! I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “But you must return to school, dear. I will see the principal, he’s a man of integrity whom I know. I will make an appeal in writing. I’m sure that he’s waiting for us to appeal. I can’t allow you to be treated unjustly.”

  Rebecca would have pushed past Miss Lutter in the narrow hall, but the older woman blocked her way with surprising firmness. Though Rebecca was taller than Rose Lutter and heavier by perhaps fifteen pounds, she could not confront her.

  “Your destiny, dear. It is bound up with my own. ‘Sow not your seed in a stony place.’”

  “Jesus didn’t say that! Not those words, you made it up.”

  “Jesus did say that. Perhaps not those exact words, but yes He did.”

  “You can’t make up what Jesus says, Miss Lutter! You can’t!”

  “It is the essence of what Jesus said. If He were here, you can be sure He would speak to you as I am. Jesus would try to talk some sense into you, my child.”

  In scrubby areas of Milburn you saw scrawled on walls and sidewalks and the sides of freight cars the words fuck fuck you fuk you which were not for girls to utter aloud. Boys uttered such words constantly, boys shouted them gleefully, but “good” girls were meant to look away, deeply embarrassed. Now Rebecca bit her lower lip, to keep such words back. FUCK FUCK YOU ROSE LUTTER. FUK FUK FUK ROSE LUTTER. A spasm of hilarity overtook her, like a sneeze. Miss Lutter stared at her, wounded.

  “Ah, what is so funny, now? At such a time, Rebecca, what is so very funny? I wish that I could share your mirth.”

  Now Rebecca did push past Miss Lutter, into her room slamming the door.

  Damned lucky and you know it. You! It was so, she knew. He was reproaching her. For a father had the right.

  Always in that dim-lighted room where time passed so swiftly she was missing something. Always she strained to see, and to hear. It was a strain that made her spine ache. Her eyes ached. Living again those confused fleeting seconds in the stone house that would mark the abrupt and irrevocable termination of her life in the stone house as a daughter of that house. The termination of what she would not have known to call her c
hildhood let alone her girlhood.

  The smell of potpourri confused her, mixed with the smells of that other bedroom. She struggled to wake breathing rapidly and sweating and her eyeballs rolled in her head in the agitation of trying finally to see…what lay on the floor, obscured in shadow.

  A wet glistening shadow beyond the bed. The soft fallen body that might have been (in the semi-darkness, in the confusion of the moment) simply discarded clothes, or bedclothes.

  Ma? Ma�

  No. She could not see. He was blocking her view. He would not allow it. When she was neither fully awake nor fully asleep she had the power to summon again the vision of her father Jacob Schwart smiling tightly at her and his eyes wet and fierce as he tried to maneuver the awkward weapon, trying to shift the barrels unobtrusively in that tight space, for he wanted to aim the gun at her and yet he did not want to touch her. For with his fatherly puritanical tact he would not wish to touch his daughter’s breasts even by way of an intervening object. Rebecca had seen her father staring at her chest, frequently in the past year, not knowing how he stared and that Rebecca saw, instinctively she turned aside, and thought no more of it. Nor would he wish to touch her throat with the gun barrels, where an artery was beating wildly. Still she tried to see past him, to where her mother lay unmoving. Where the upper body of what had been her mother dissolved into a shapeless darkness. She would see, she must see!�except not clearly. So long as her eyes did not open and she hovered in that twilight state between sleep and wakefulness she could see into that room and by an act of will she could see backward.

  Again approaching the stone house from the gravel drive. And there was the crudely painted front door. And there, in the backyard of the house, the clothesline, and on the clothesline laundry stirring in the wind for it was a windy May afternoon, the sky overhead was splotched with swollen rain clouds. Towels, a sheet, his shirts. His underwear. So long as the laundry flapped on the line it was an ordinary washday, always there is something comical and reassuring about laundry, there could be no danger waiting inside the house. Even as a stranger’s voice came urgent and jarring Don’t go in there!�stop her! A woman’s voice, distracting. And yet already it was too late. For in history there are actions that no act of history can undo.