The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For Zacharias, he’d had to type in a name for the father. Could not see a way around it. Any suggestions? he asked Hazel and she said all smiling and without thinking�Willie? I mean, William.

  William�what?

  We could say Judd.

  Christ he was pleased by this. Flattered to hell.

  But that might make for complications, Willie observed. Maybe it would be wiser to reverse these. Hazel Judd, William Jones. And so, Hazel Jones when married.

  Hazel laughed, a wild stricken cry. Her son’s birth certificate would read Zacharias August Jones born November 29, 1956 Port Oriskany New York mother Hazel Jones father William Jones.

  Now her own name�her name�would be, not Hazel Jones, but Hazel Judd. Yet only on this stiff sheet of paper with the Chemung County Courthouse letterhead.

  Thanking the old man, Hazel burst into tears. No one had been so kind to her in a long long time.

  (Nobody was to know. Not Ethel, even. The woman had a mouth on her, she’d blab. She’d be proud of her brother interceding like he’d done on behalf of Hazel Jones, she’d blab and get them into trouble. This way, Hazel has the documents, nobody will challenge them, why’d anybody challenge them?

  Each year he lived, Willie Judd came to see there was no clear logic to why things happened as they did. Could’ve just as easy happened some other way.

  You typed out a form. You typed out another form. You signed your name. Administered the seal of the State of New York, Notary Public. That’s it.)

  At the Blue Moon Café next evening Willie Judd came in earlier than usual for supper and stayed later. Ordered the chicken pot pie which was a Blue Moon special. Sat in Hazel Jones’s row of booths as always elbows on the table gazing smiling at the waitress with his tea-colored eyes. It was raining outside like hell, Willie’d worn his black oilcloth slicker people kidded him made him look like a sea lion. This enormous shiny garment he’d hung at the coatrack dripping wet onto the floor. He would ask Hazel Jones to marry him. He had not married, the only one in the family who had not and why exactly he’d never known. Shy, maybe. Beneath his Willie mask. He’d been damn proud of himself rising to head clerk. Only one of the family till then to graduate from high school. So it was a curse, maybe! Willie was the special son, hadn’t found a girl to marry him like the others had done with lower expectations. Time’s a whirlpool, Christ he was sixty-four. Would retire next birthday. Pensioned off by the county, that was a good thing but melancholy, too. Enough to sober you. He had seen in Hazel’s eyes a certain warmth. A certain promise. She’d made him the father of her son. Hazel was always so sweet and transparent smiling at everybody like who’s it Doris Day but there was a touch-me-not air about the girl, everybody remarked upon. A man had to respect. Bringing Willie a draft ale foaming to the top of the heavy stein and over. Bringing Willie one of the least flyspecked menus with blue moon specials stapled to the front like Willie who’d been coming to the Blue Moon half his lifetime needed to be reminded what to order. And bringing Willie extra butter to smear on his Parker House rolls, and the rolls piping-hot.

  Somehow it happened. Willie must’ve had too much ale. Not like Willie who’d used to be a drunk but had reformed, to a degree. Could not burn off the alcohol like he’d done. Your liver starts to weaken. Once you turn fifty. Telling Hazel when she brought him his chocolate cream custard pie and coffee about the old days in Horseheads, when him and Ethel had been kids. And Hazel nodding and smiling politely though she had other customers to serve, and tables to clear. And Willie hears this loud old-man’s voice asking, “D’you know why Horseheads is named like it is, Hazel?” and the young woman smiles saying no she guesses she don’t, Willie is all but touching her elbow to keep her from running off saying, “There was actual horseheads here! I mean actual horse-heads. A long time ago, see. We’re talking like�1780s. Before the settlers came. Some of ’em were Judds, see. My people. Me and Ethel’s people. Great-great-great-great somethin’, if you figured it. A long time ago. There was this General Sullivan fighting the Iroquois. Had to come up from Pennsylvania. There was three hundred horses for the soldiers and to carry things. They fought the damn Indians, and had to retreat. And the horses collapsed. There was three hundred of ’em. It was said the soldiers had to shoot ’em. But didn’t bury ’em. You can see you wouldn’t, huh? You would not bury three hundred horses if you were near to collapsing yourself, huh? Fighting the Iroquois that’d as soon tear out your liver and guzzle it as look at you. They did that to their own kind, other Indians. Tried to wipe ’em out. The Iroquois was the worst, like the Comanches out west. Sayin’ then it was the white man brought evil to this continent, bullshit! The evil was in this continent in this actual soil when the white man showed up. My people came from somewhere in north England. Landed in New York right where you was born, Hazel, ain’t that a coincidence? ‘New York harbor.’ There ain’t many folks born in ‘New York harbor.’ I b’lieve in coincidences. The settlers pushed all the way out here. Damn if I know why. Must’ve been a wilderness then it ain’t exactly Fifth Avenue, New York, now, huh? Anyway, the settlers come out here, a year or so later, first damn thing they see is these horse skeletons all over. Along the riverbank and in the fields. Three hundred horse skulls and skeletons. They couldn’t figure what the hell it was, there was not much knowledge of history in those days. You’d hear things by rumor I suppose. You could not turn on the radio, TV. Three hundred horse skulls all bleached in the sun so they called it ‘Horseheads.’” Willie was panting by this time. Willie had reached out to grasp the waitress’s elbow by this time. In the Blue Moon everybody had ceased talking and even the jukebox had gone abruptly silent where Rosemary Clooney had been singing just a minute ago. Could hear a pin drop it would be reported. Ethel Sweet would be stricken to the heart next day. Hearing how her big brother Willie had gotten drunk and lovesick over Hazel he’d done a favor for and would have reason to think she would do some favor for him not wishing to consider would a woman that young and pretty wish to marry a man his age, and girth.

  So Willie starts to stammer. Flush-faced, knowing he’s made a spectacle of himself. But not knowing how to back out of it saying, guffawing, “Anyway, Hazel. That’s how ‘Horseheads’ came to be. What you got to wonder, is why’d they stay here? Why the hell’d anybody stay here? Poke through the grass there’s not one or two or a dozen horse heads there’s three hundred. And you decide to stay, settle down and stake out a claim, build a house, plow the land and have your kids and the rest is history. That’s the twenty-four-dollar question, Hazel, God damn ain’t it?”

  Hazel was startled by Willie’s vehemence. Loud-laughing and red in the face as she’d never seen him. Murmuring some muffled words not overheard by anyone except Willie, the waitress slipped away from his grasp and hurried through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  Willie’d seen the repugnance in her face. All that talk of horse skeletons, skulls, “Horseheads”�he’d ruined any beauty the moment might have had.

  Next morning, Hazel Jones and the child were gone forever from Horseheads.

  It was an early, 7:20 A.M. Greyhound bus they’d caught out on route 13 with all their suitcases, cardboard boxes, and shopping bags. The Greyhound was southbound from Syracuse and Ithaca to Elmira, Binghamton and beyond. Hazel would leave their room spic-and-span Ethel Sweet would report. Her bed and the child’s cot stripped of all linens including the mattress covers and these neatly folded for the wash. The bathroom Hazel and the child had shared with two other boarders, Hazel left equally clean, the bathtub scrubbed after she’d used it very early that morning, her towels folded for the wash. The single closet in the room was empty, all the wire hangers remaining. Every drawer of the bureau was empty. Not a pin, not a button remained. The wicker wastebasket in the room had been emptied into one of the trash cans at the rear of the Inn. On the bureau top was an envelope addressed to mrs. ethel sweet. Inside were several bills constituting full payment for the room through the entire mont
h of April (though it was only April 17) and a brief note, heartbreaking to Ethel Sweet who was losing not just her most reliable boarder but a kind of daughter as she was coming to think of Hazel Jones. The neatly handwritten note would be shown to numerous individuals, read and reread and pondered in Horseheads for a long time.

  Dear Ethel�

  Zacharias and I are called away suddenly, we are sorry to leave such a warm good place. I hope this will suffise for April rent.

  Maybe we will all meet again sometime, my thanks to you and to Willie from the bottom of my heart.

  Your friend “Hazel”

  5

  It was an old river city on the St. Lawrence at the northeast edge of Lake Ontario. It looked to be about the size of the city of his earliest memory on the barge canal. On the far side of the river which was the widest river he’d ever seen was a foreign country: Canada. To the east were the Adirondack Mountains. Canada, Adirondack were new words to him, exotic and musical.

  Observers would have assumed she’d traveled south with the child. Instead she’d changed buses at Binghamton, traveled impulsively north to Syracuse, and to Watertown, and now beyond to the northernmost boundary of the state.

  “To throw them off. Just in case.”

  That shrewdness that had become instinctive in her. In no immediate or discernible relationship with available logic or even probability. It was keeping-going, the child knew. He’d become addicted to keeping-going, too.

  “Come on come on! God damn it hurry.”

  Gripping his hand. Pulling him along. If he’d run ahead on the cracked and potholed pavement impatient after the long bus ride she’d have scolded him for she always worried he might fall, hurt himself. He felt the injustice of her whims.

  She walked swiftly, her long legs like scythes. At such times she seemed to know exactly where she was going, to what purpose. There was a two-hour layover at the Greyhound station. In several lockers she’d stored their bulky possessions. The keys were safe in her pocket wrapped in tissue. She’d zipped up his jacket in haste. She’d tied a scarf around her head. They’d left the Greyhound station by a rear exit opening onto a back street.

  He was out of breath. Damn he couldn’t keep up with her!

  He’d forgotten the name of this place. Maybe she hadn’t told him. He’d lost the map on the bus. Much-folded, much-wrinkled map of New York state.

  Keeping-going was the map. Staying in one place for so long as they’d done back there (already he was forgetting the name Horseheads, in another few days he would have forgotten it entirely) was the aberration.

  “See, there’s been a sign. There might be more.”

  He had no idea what she meant. The excited glitter of her eyes, the set of her jaws. She walked so quickly and so without hesitation people glanced at her in passing, curious.

  Mostly men. There were mostly men here, at the river’s edge.

  He was thinking again he’d never seen such a wide river. She’d told him there were a thousand islands in that river. He shielded his eyes against splotches of sunshine like fiery explosions on the choppy water.

  Drowsing on the bus his head knocking against the smeared window and he’d seen through half-shut eyes long featureless stretches of countryside. At last farmland, human habitations. A cluster of mobile homes, tar paper shanties, auto graveyard, railway crossing and granary, Jefferson Co. Farm Bureau, banners wind-whipping at a Sunoco gas station, a railway crossing. Wherever they were traveling was less green than wherever they’d been hundreds of miles to the south.

  Backward in time? There was a wintry glare to the sun here.

  The countryside ended abruptly. The road descended between three-storey brick buildings steep-gabled and gaunt looking like elderly men. There was a jarring ascension to a hump-backed old iron bridge above a railroad yard. Quickly he told himself We are safe, it won’t fall in. He knew this was so because his mother showed no alarm, not the slightest interest or even much awareness of the old nightmare bridge across which the massive Greyhound was moving at less than ten miles an hour.

  “See! Over there.”

  She was leaning eagerly across him to look out the window. Always when they entered any town, any city, whether they were going to disembark or remain on the bus, his mother became alert, excited. In such close quarters she gave off a damp sweetish odor comforting to him as the odor of his own body in slept-in clothes, underwear. And there was the harsher smell of her hair in those days just after she’d had to dye it, not wanting Hazel Jones’s hair to be black but dark brown with “russet-red highlights.”

  She was pointing at something outside the window. Below was a vast lot of freight cars BALTIMORE & OHIO, BUFFALO, CHAUTAUQUA & NEW YORK CENTRAL, ERIE & ORISKANY, SANTA FE. Words he’d long ago learned to recognize having seen so often though he could not have said what they meant. Exotic and musical such names seemed to him, the province of adult logic.

  His mother was saying, “Almost I’d think we have been here before except I know we have not.”

  She didn’t seem to mean the freight cars. She was pointing at a billboard erected above a giant oil drum. sealtest ice cream. A curly-haired little girl lifted a spoon heaped with chocolate ice cream to her smiling mouth. A flash came to him Ike’s FOOD STORE glimmering like a surfacing fish for the briefest of moments before sinking away again into oblivion.

  She was saying people had been good to them. All through her life when she’d needed them, people had been good to her. She was grateful. She would not forget. She wished that she could believe in God, she would pray to God to reward these people.

  “Not in heaven but here on earth. That’s where we need it.”

  He had no idea what she meant but he liked it that she was happy. Entering a town or a city she was always edgy but the little curly-haired girl in the Sealtest billboard had made her smile.

  “We’re actual people now, Zack. We can prove who we are like everybody else.”

  She meant the birth certificates. On the long journey from Binghamton she’d shown him these official-looking documents several times as if unable to believe that they existed.

  Zacharias August Jones born 1956. Hazel Esther Judd born 1936. He liked it that both birthdates ended in 6. He had not known that his middle name was August, that seemed strange to him, the name of a month like June, July. He had not known that his mother’s last name was Judd and wondered if this was so. And his father�William Jones?

  Drawing his thumb slowly over the stamp of the State of New York that was slightly raised, whorled like a thumbprint the size of a silver dollar.

  “That’s who we are?” He sounded so doubtful, Mommy had to laugh at him.

  She’d begun to complain he was getting so damned independent-minded, and not yet six years old! And not yet in first grade! Her little billy goat he was. Sprouting horns she’d have to saw off, that was what you did with billy goat horns growing out of a naughty boy’s forehead.

  Where was that, he’d asked. And Mommy had poked his forehead with two blunt fingers.

  Though she’d relented, seeing his face. She’d relented and kissed him for Hazel Jones never scolded her child or scared him without a ticklish wet kiss or two to make everything well again.

  “Yes. That’s who we are.”

  By the time they filed off the bus, she had replaced the birth certificates carefully inside the zippered compartment of her suitcase, between pieces of stiff cardboard to keep them from tearing.

  On the wharf was a weatherworn sign creaking in the wind.

  MALIN HEAD BAY

  He supposed that was the name of this town. He shaped the words silently malin head bay noting the rhythmic stresses.

  “What is a ‘bay,’ Mommy?”

  She was distracted, not listening. He would look up bay in the dictionary, later.

  She was walking more slowly now. She’d released his hand. She seemed to be sniffing the air, alert and apprehensive. On the massive river were fishing boats, barges. T
he water was very choppy. The barges were much larger than he’d ever seen on the canal. In the water fiery sun-splotches came and went like detonations. In the wind it was chilly but if you stood sheltered in the sun it was warm.

  In front of a tavern men stood drinking. There were men fishing from a pier. There were run-down hotels rooms day week month and on the crumbling steps of these hotels sickly-looking men sprawled in the sun. He saw his mother hesitate, staring at a man on crutches fumbling to light a cigarette. He saw her staring at several men of whom one was shirtless, basking in sunshine drinking from brown bottles. They walked on. She reached for his hand again, but he eluded her. He kept pace with her, however. Wanting to return to the bus station but knowing that they would not, could not until she wished it. For her will was all: vast as a net encompassing the very sky.

  Ma lin Head Bay. His fingers played the keys, the chords.

  All that he could make music of was a consolation to him. And there was nothing however ugly he could not make music of.

  His mother stopped suddenly. He nearly collided with her. He saw that she was staring at a grotesquely obese old man who sat sprawled in the sunshine, only a few feet away. He’d lowered his bulk onto an overturned wooden crate. His skin was white as flour, strangely whorled and striated, like reptile skin. His shirt was missing several buttons, you could see the scaly folds and creases of his flesh, warm-looking in the sun. In his fatty face his eyes were deep set and appeared to be without focus and when Hazel Jones passed before the man at a distance of no more than ten feet he gave no sign of seeing her only just lifted his bottle to his sucking hole of a mouth, and drank.

  “He’s blind. He can’t see us.”

  The child understood this to mean He can’t hurt us.

  Which was how Zack knew they would stay in Malin Head Bay, for a while at least.

  6