The Gravedigger's Daughter Part 5

What most scared her, she might hurt Niley. Shake shake shake the obstinate little brat until his teeth rattled, eyes rolled back in his head. For so she'd been disciplined, as a child. She wanted to recall that it had been her father who'd disciplined her but in fact it had been both her mother and her father. She wanted to recall that the discipline had been deserved, necessary, and just but she wasn't so certain that this was so.

Tignor would return perhaps on Sunday.

Why Rebecca thought this, she didn't know. Just a premonition.

Except: it was possible that Tignor would show up outside the factory gate on Friday afternoon, or Monday afternoon. His silver-green 1959 Pontiac idling at the curb.

Hey kid: here.

Almost, Rebecca could hear his voice. She smiled, as she would smile when she heard it.

Hey you night owl folks out there this is Buffalo Radio Wonderful WBEN Zack Zacharias broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee hours.

Niley fell asleep most nights listening to this program. Yet she couldn't enter his room to switch off the radio because he woke so easily; she couldn't enter his room even to switch off the light. If Niley was wakened at such times he was likely to be frightened, and Rebecca would end up having to stay with him.

At least in the night Niley allowed the radio volume to be kept low. He could lie very quietly in his bed a few inches from the radio and take consolation from it.

At least with the door shut between their rooms Rebecca wasn't kept awake by the light.

"When Daddy returns, all this will stop."

Beside Niley's bed was a lamp in the shape of a milk gla.s.s bunny from a Chautauqua Falls furniture store. The bunny had upright ears and a pink nose, a small peach-colored shade in some fuzzy fabric. Rebecca admired the lamp, the wan warm glow on the child's sleeping face was comforting to her. The bulb was only sixty watts. You would not want a harsher light in a child's room.

She wondered: had her mother stood over her, gazed upon her as she'd slept? So long ago. She smiled to think yes, maybe.

The danger in motherhood. You relive your early self, through the eyes of your own mother.

In the doorway watching Niley sleep. Long entranced minutes that might have been hours. Her heart pounded with happiness, certainty. A mother knows only that the child is. A mother knows only that the child is because she, the mother, has made it so.

Of course there is the father. But not always.

Niles, Jr. She hoped he would take on some of his father's strength. He seemed to her a child of yearning, impulse. A spring was wound tight in him, like the spring of a toy that clatters about, deranged. Except when he slept, then Niley was fine. His tight-wound soul was quiet.

A glisten of saliva on his mouth like a stray thought. She wanted to kiss it away. But better not.

Strand of damp hair stuck to his forehead. She wanted to brush it away but no, better not.

Hazel Jones's secret son.

The radio on the windowsill was turned low. The music was jazz. The radio, like the lamp, emitted a comforting glow. Rebecca was becoming adjusted to it, no longer so annoyed. The announcer's voice was nothing like the daytime radio voices. Was Zack Zacharias a Negro? His voice was softly modulated, a singing sort of voice, rather playful, teasing. An intimate voice in your ear.

And the music. Rebecca was coming to like the music.

Cool, moody jazz. Seductive. Rebecca recognized piano music of course but knew few other instruments. Clarinet, saxophone? She hated it, that she knew so little.

An ignorant woman, a factory worker. Wife, mother. Had not graduated from high school, even. So ashamed!

Only once had she heard cla.s.sical music on her father's radio. Only once, in her mother's company. Her father had not known and would have forbidden it. This radio is mine. This news is mine. I am the father, all facts are mine. All knowledge of the world outside this house of sorrow is mine to keep from you, my children.

Tignor had not asked much about Rebecca's parents. He knew a little, and might not have wanted to know more.

Rebecca's brother Herschel used to say, Christ that ain't even his name. "Schwart" ain't even our f.u.c.kin' name.

It was all a joke to Herschel. Baring his big wet braying-donkey teeth.

Rebecca asked what was their name, then? If it wasn't "Schwart" what had it been?

Herschel shrugged. Who the h.e.l.l knew, who the h.e.l.l cared?

Old-world bulls.h.i.t, Herschel said. n.o.body gives a d.a.m.n about it in the U.S. of A., I sure don't.

Rebecca begged to know their name if it wasn't Schwart but Herschel walked away with a rude gesture.

If Jacob Schwart had lived, he would now be sixty-three.

Sixty-three! Old, but not really old.

Yet in his soul the man had been elderly even then. Rebecca could remember her father only as old, worn-out.

Upsetting to think such thoughts. It was rare for her, in her new life, to think such thoughts.

Hazel Jones did not think such thoughts.

"Mamama..."

Niley moaned in his sleep, suddenly. As if he'd become aware of Rebecca standing over him.

His smooth child-face was wizened, ugly. Oh, he looked like an elderly man! His skin was waxy-pale. His eyelids fluttered, and that nerve in his forehead. As if a wrong-sized dream, all sharp corners, had poked itself into his brain.

"Niley."

Rebecca's heart was torn, seeing her son trapped in a dream. Her instinct was to save him from such dreams, immediately. But no, better not. Mommy could not always be saving him. He must learn to save himself.

The dream was pa.s.sing, and would pa.s.s. Niley would relax in another minute. He was a child of the new era: born in 1956. You would not call Niles Tignor, Jr. "post-war" (for everything was "post-war") but "post-post-war." Nothing of the past could matter much to him. As World War I was to Rebecca's generation, so World War II would be to Niley's. Old-world bulls.h.i.t as Herschel said.

Nothing of the Schwarts would prevail in him who had never known them.

That line was extinct, the old, rotted European lineage was broken.

Niley's dream seemed to have vanished. He was sleeping as before, breathing wetly through his mouth. The bunny lamp glowed on his bedside table. The radio on the windowsill emitted a steady, soothing sound of piano-jazz. Rebecca smiled, and backed away. She too would sleep, now. Niley would be all right, she had no need to wake him. Wouldn't kiss him, as she wanted to do. Still he would know (she was sure) that his mother loved him, always his mother was close by, watching, protecting him. Through his life, he would know.

"I have no G.o.d to witness. But I vow."

Sunday, in three days. Rebecca counted on her fingers. She smiled to think that Niley's daddy would return to them then. She had a premonition!

4.

Gypsy girl. Jewess...

Tignor's voice was a low helpless moan, a sliding-down moan, delicious to hear. His thick-muscled body quivered with desire as if electric currents ran through it.

Rebecca smiled, recalling. But the blood beat hard and hot in her face. She was no gypsy-girl, and she was no Jewess!

And the blood beat hard and hot between her legs, where she was so lonely.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n." She was having trouble sleeping. In her and Tignor's bed. All this day, these days since the ca.n.a.l towpath, oh Christ her nerves were strung tight like wire.

The weather was turning at last. Wind from the great roiling-dark lake forty miles to the north seemed to push against the windowpanes of the old farmhouse. By morning the dreamy Indian-summer weather would have been blown away, the air would be sharper, colder, damp. That taste of winter to come. Winter in the Chautauqua Valley, in the foothills of the mountains...

But no. She would not think about it. Not the future beyond the next few days.

As her parents had gradually ceased thinking about the future.

Like animals they'd become, at the end. With no future, that was what happened to you.

Desperate to sleep! Within a few hours she'd have to get up, return to Niagara Fiber Tubing. Not the thin pale froth-sleep that washed over her aching brain and brought little nourishment but the deeper more profound sleep she required, the sleep that slowed your heartbeat toward death, the sleep that stripped from you all awareness of time, place, who you are or have ever been.

"Tignor. I want you! I want you inside me. I want you..."

He'd urged her to say his special words to him: f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k me. Hurt me some.

The more hesitant she'd been, the more embarra.s.sed, shame-faced, the more Tignor had loved it. You could see that the man's pleasure was increased immeasurably, a tall stein into which ale was being poured, poured-poured-poured until, foaming, it overflowed.

He'd been her only lover. Niles Tignor. What he did to her, what he taught her to do to him. How painful it was to lie here in this bed and not think of him, not think of those things, her heartbeat quickened in desire.

Futile, this desire. For even if she touched herself it was not Tignor.

Before Tignor she had never slept in so large a bed. She didn't feel that she deserved so large a bed. (Yet it was just an ordinary bed, she supposed. Secondhand, bought here in Chautauqua Falls. It had a slightly tarnished bra.s.s frame and a new, hard, unyielding mattress that had quickly become stained with Tignor's salty sweat.) She turned, to lie on her back. In the adjacent room, turned low, the d.a.m.n radio was playing. She couldn't hear the music but she felt the beat. She spread out her arms, her armpits were wet. Her thick hair dense as a horse's mane had dried at last and was fanned out around her head on the pillow in that way that Tignor, face taut with a hard, sensual pleasure, sometimes arranged it with his clumsy hands.

This is what you want, Gypsy-girl, eh? Is it?

He had other women, she knew. She'd known before she married him what he was. In the hotel in which she'd worked there were tales of Niles Tignor. Through the Chautauqua Valley, and beyond. She understood it wasn't reasonable for any woman of Tignor's to expect a man like him to be faithful in the way that ordinary men are faithful to women. Hadn't Tignor said to Rebecca, shortly after they were married, not cruelly but with an air of genuine surprise that she should be jealous: "Jesus, kidthey like me, too."

Rebecca laughed, remembering. Knuckles jammed against her mouth.

But it was funny. You had to have a sense of humor to appreciate Niles Tignor. He expected you to make him laugh.

She lay on her back now. Sometimes that worked. Her muscles began to twitch. There was her d.a.m.n hand drifting near the G.o.d d.a.m.n stamping machine...She drew it back just in time.

In some other universe it might've happened. Her hand mangled like meat. Severed from her arm. What she deserved, stupid c.u.n.t not watching what she was doing.

How Tignor would stare! Rebecca had to laugh, imagining.

He'd hated her big-whale belly. Staring in fascination, and couldn't keep his hands off.

The way the wind blew in the yew trees. A sound like voices jeering. This was the old Wertenbacher farm, so-called still in the neighborhood. By now, three years later, Rebecca would have thought they would have their own house.

He did love them. Her and Niley. In his heart he was not unfaithful.

In his heart, her father Jacob Schwart had loved her. He had loved them all. He had not meant to hurt them, he had only meant to erase history.

You are one of them. Born here.

Was this so? She hugged herself, smiling. Drifting at last into sleep as into a stone well so deep it had no bottom.

milburn, new york

1.

November 1936. By bus the Schwart family arrived in this small town in upstate New York. Out of nowhere they seemed to have come, with bulging suitcases, valises, bags. Their eyes were haggard in their faces. Their clothes were disheveled, their hair uncombed. Obviously, they were foreigners. "Immigrants." It would be said of the Schwarts that they looked like they'd been on the run from the Fuhrer (in 1936, in such places as Milburn, New York, it was possible to think of Adolf Hitler with his mustache and military posture and stark staring eyes as comical, not unlike Charlie Chaplin) without stopping to eat, breathe, wash.

The smell that came off 'em!the bus driver would so comment, rolling his eyes.

It seemed appropriate that Jacob Schwart, the head of the family, would find work as caretaker of the Milburn Township Cemetery, a nondenominational cemetery at the ragged edge of town. He and his familywife, two sons, infant daughterwould live in the weathered stone cottage just inside the cemetery gates. This "cottage" was rent-free, which made the job attractive to a man desperate for a place to live.

Mr. Schwart was profusely grateful to the township officials who hired him though he'd had no experience as a cemetery caretaker, nor even as a gravedigger.

He was a good worker, he insisted. With his hands, and with his head.

"You will not regret, sirs. I will a.s.sure you."

At the time they'd moved into the cobwebby stone cottage in the cemetery, that had been only casually cleared after the departure of the previous tenants, and smelled strongly of something like liquid lye, the Schwarts' youngest child Rebecca was a sickly five-month-old infant tightly wrapped in her mother's filthy shawl. For much of the bus ride from downstate New York, this shawl had functioned as a sort of secondary diaper for the fretting infant.

So little she was, her brother Herschel would afterward recall, she looked like some hairless thing like a baby pig, and smelled like one, too. "Pa wouldna look at you hardly, he was thinkin you would die I guess."

Had she been Rebecca Esther Schwart then? She'd had no name and no ident.i.ty, so young. Of those early days and weeks, months, and finally years in Milburn she would recall so little. For there was little memory in the Schwart family.

There was Ma, who nursed her. Ma who sometimes pushed her away with a grunt, as if her touch was painful.