The Gravedigger’S Daughter (14 page)

A bright summer day. The blinds in the parlor were drawn. Rebecca would recall this day trying to calculate how old she’d been, how old her mother had been, how many months before Anna Schwart’s death. Yet she could not, the brightness of the air so dazzled her even in memory.

It was summer, she knew: a time of no school. She had been tramping through a sprawling wooded area behind the cemetery, she’d been tramping along the canal towpath watching the barges, waving at the pilots who waved at her, as she’d been forbidden. She’d been at the township dump, too. Alone, and not with her friends.

For Rebecca had friends now. Mostly they were girls like herself, living at the edge of Milburn. Quarry Road, Milburn Post Road, Canal Road. These girls lived in run-down old farmhouses, tar paper shanties, trailers propped up on concrete blocks amid weedy trash-strewn yards. To such girls Rebecca Schwart was not scorned as the gravedigger’s daughter. For the fathers of such girls, if they had fathers, were not so very different from Jacob Schwart.

Their brothers, if they had brothers, were not so very different from Herschel and Gus.

And their mothers…

“What’s your ma like?”�so Rebecca’s friends asked her. “Is she sick? Something wrong with her? Don’t she like us?”

Rebecca shrugged. Her shut-up sullen expression meant
None of your damn business
.

None of Rebecca’s friends had ever had a glimpse of Anna Schwart, though their mothers might recall having seen her, years ago, in downtown Milburn. But now Anna Schwart no longer ventured into town, nor even left the vicinity of the stone cottage. And of course Rebecca could not bring any friends home.

That day there was a funeral in the cemetery, Rebecca saw. She paused to watch the slow procession of vehicles from behind one of the sheds, not wanting to be seen. Her coarse dark hair straggled down her back like a mane, her skin was rough and tanned. She wore khaki shorts and a soiled sleeveless shirt covered in burrs. Except for her hair she might have been mistaken for a lanky, long-legged boy.

The hearse! Stately, darkly gleaming, with tinted windows. Rebecca stared feeling her heart begin to beat strangely.
There is death, death is inside
. Seven cars followed the hearse, their tires crackling in the gravel drive. Rebecca glimpsed faces inside these cars, women with veiled hats, men staring straight before them. Now and then a younger face. Especially, Rebecca shrank from being seen by anyone her age, who might know her.

A funeral in the Milburn cemetery meant that, the previous day, Jacob Schwart had prepared a grave site. Most of the newer graves were in hilly terrain at the rear of the cemetery where tall oaks and elms grew and their roots were tangled in the rocky soil. Gravedigging was an arduous task. For Jacob Schwart had to dig the graves with a shovel, it was back-breaking labor and he hadn’t mechanical tools to aid him.

Rebecca shaded her eyes sighting her father at the rear of the cemetery. A troll-man, Jacob Schwart was. Like a creature who has emerged from the earth, slightly bent, broken-backed and with his head carried at an awkward angle so that he seemed always to be peering at the world suspiciously, from the side. He’d torn a ligament in his knee and now walked with a limp, one of his shoulders was carried higher than the other. Always he wore work clothes, always a cloth cap on his head. He was one to know his place among funeral directors and mourners whom he called
sir
,
ma’am
and with whom he was unfailingly deferential. Herschel spoke of seeing their father downtown on Main Street headed for the First Bank of Chautauqua, what a sight the old guy was in his gravedigger clothes and boots, walking with his head down not seeing how he was being stared at, and not giving a damn if he walked into somebody who didn’t get out of his way fast enough.

Herschel warned Rebecca, if she was in town and saw Pa, not to let Pa see her�“That’d make the old bastid mad as hell. Like us kids is spyin’ on him, see, goin’ into the bank? Like anybody give a shit what the old bastid is up to, he thinks nobody knows.”

So many millions dead and shoved into pits, just meat
.

Ask why: ask God why such things are allowed.

Gazing upon her father when he wasn’t aware of her, Rebecca sometimes shuddered as if seeing him through another’s eyes.

“Ma…?”

The interior of the stone cottage was dim, humid, cobwebby on this sun-bright day. In the kitchen dishes were soaking in the sink, the frying pan remained on the stove from breakfast. A smell of grease prevailed. Since her illness Rebecca’s mother had become careless about housekeeping, or indifferent. Since the
Marea
, Rebecca thought.

Blinds were drawn on all the windows, at midday.

From the parlor came a strange sound: rapid and fiery like breaking glass. The door was shut.

Now that Pa no longer listened to the news every night after supper, the radio was rarely played. Pa would not allow it when he was in the house grumbling
Electricity doesn’t grow on trees, want not waste not
. But Rebecca heard the radio now.

“Ma? Can I�come in?”

There was no answer. Cautiously Rebecca pushed the door open.

Her mother was inside, seated close beside the floor-model Motorola as if for warmth. She’d pulled a stool close beside it, she was not sitting in Pa’s chair. Rebecca saw how the radio dial glowed a rich thrumming orange like something living. Out of the dust-latticed speaker emerged sounds so beautiful, rapid yet precisely rendered, Rebecca listened in amazement. A piano, was it? Piano music?

Rebecca’s mother glanced toward her as if to ascertain this wasn’t Jacob Schwart, there was no danger. Her eyelids fluttered. She was lost in concentration, and did not want to be distracted. A forefinger to her lips signaling
Don’t speak! Be quiet!
So Rebecca kept very still, sitting at her mother’s feet and listening.

Beyond the Motorola, beyond the dim-lighted mildew-smelling parlor of the old stone cottage in the cemetery, there was nothing.

Beyond Ma leaning to the radio, nodding and smiling with the piano music, beyond this moment, beyond the happiness of this moment, there was nothing.

When there came a break in the music, the briefest of breaks between movements of the sonata, Rebecca’s mother whispered to her, “It is Artur Schnabel. It is Beethoven that is played. ‘Appassionata’ it is called.” Rebecca listened eagerly, with no idea what most of her mother’s words meant. She had heard of Beethoven, that was all. She saw that her mother’s soft-raddled girl’s face shone with tears that were not tears of hurt or grief or humiliation. And her mother’s eyes were beautiful eyes, dark, lustrous, with a startling intensity, that made you uneasy, to see close up. “When I was a girl in the old country, I played this ‘Apassionata.’ Not like Schnabel I played, but I attempted.” Ma fumbled for Rebecca’s hand, squeezing her fingers as she had not done in years.

The piano music resumed. Mother and daughter listened together. Rebecca held on to her mother’s hand as if she were in danger of falling from a great height.

Such beauty, and the intimacy of such beauty, Rebecca would cherish through her life.

“Pa! Get the hell out here.”

There came Herschel careening and panting in the kitchen door. He was a tall lumbering horsey boy with unshaven jaws and a raw braying voice. He was breathing on his knuckles, it was a cold autumn morning.

It was the morning of Hallowe’en, 1948. Rebecca was twelve years old and in seventh grade.

It was shortly past dawn. In the night there had been a frost and a light dusting of snow. Now the sky was gray and twilit and in the east beyond the Chautauqua mountains the sun was a faintly glowing hooded eye.

Rebecca was helping Ma prepare breakfast. Gus hadn’t yet emerged from his bedroom. Pa in coveralls stood at the sink pumping water, coughing and noisily spitting in that way of his that made Rebecca feel sickish. Pa looked up at Herschel sharply, asking, “What? What’s it?”

“You best come outside by y’self, Pa.”

Herschel spoke with uncharacteristic grimness. You looked to see if he’d wink, screw up his eyes, wriggle his mouth in that comical way of his, give some sign he was fooling, but he was serious, he did not even glance at Rebecca.

Jacob Schwart stared at his elder son, saw something in the boy’s face�fury, hurt, bafflement, and quivering animal excitement�he had not seen before. He cursed, and reached for the poker beside the cast-iron stove. Herschel laughed harshly saying, “It’s too late for any fuckin poker, Pa.”

Pa followed Herschel outside, limping. Rebecca would have followed but Pa turned as if by instinct to warn her, “Stay inside, girl.” By this time Gus had stumbled out of the bedroom, spiky-haired and disheveled; at nineteen he was nearly Herschel’s height, six feet two, but thirty pounds lighter, rail-thin and skittish.

Anna Schwart, at the stove, looking at no one, removed the heavy iron frying pan from the burner and set it to the side.

“Fuck! Fuckers.”

Herschel led the way, Pa followed close behind him swaying like a drunken man, staring. The night before Hallowe’en was known as Devil’s Night. In the Chautauqua Valley it seemed to be an old, in some way revered tradition. “Pranks” were committed by unknown parties who came in stealth, in the dark. “Mischief.” You were meant to take it as a joke.

The Milburn cemetery had long been a target for Devil’s Night pranks, before Jacob Schwart became caretaker. So they would tell him, they would insist.

“Think I don’t know who done this, Chrissake I
do
. I got a good idea, see!”

Herschel spoke in disgust, his voice trembling. Jacob Schwart was barely listening to his son. The night before, he’d dragged the iron gates to the front entrance shut and fastened them with a chain, of course he knew what Devil’s Night was, there’d been damage to the cemetery in past years, he’d tried to stay awake to protect the property but (he’d been exhausted, and he’d been drinking) he’d fallen asleep by midnight and in any case he had no weapon, no gun. Men and boys as young as twelve owned rifles, shotguns, but Jacob Schwart had not yet armed himself. He had a horror of firearms, he was not a hunter. A part of him had long cautioned against the irrevocable step.
Arm yourself! One day it will be too late
. A part of him wanted neither to kill nor to be killed but in the end his enemies were giving him no choice.

Vandals hadn’t been deterred by the shut gates, they’d only just climbed over the cemetery wall. You could see where they’d knocked part of the wall down, a hundred or so yards back from the road.

There was no keeping them out. Marauding young men and boys. Their faces would be known to him, maybe. Their names. They were Milburn residents. Some were likely to be neighbors on the Quarry Road.
Those others
who despised the Schwarts. Looked down upon the Schwarts. Herschel seemed to know who they were, or to suspect. Jacob Schwart stumbled behind his son, wiping at his eyes. A twitch of a smile, dazed, ghastly, played about his lips.

No keeping your enemies out, if you are unarmed. He would not make that mistake again.

Crockery and flowerpots had been broken amid the graves. Pumpkins had been smashed with a look of frenzied revelry, their spilled seeds and juicy flesh looking like spilled brains. Already, crows had been feasting on these spilled brains.

“Get away, fuckers! Sonsabitches.”

Herschel clapped his hands to scatter the crows. His father seemed scarcely to notice them.

Crows! What did he care for crows! Brute, innocent creatures.

A number of the younger birch trees had been cruelly bent to the ground, and were now broken-backed, and would not recover. Several of the oldest and most frail of the gravestones, dating back to 1791, had been kicked over, and were cracked. All four tires on the caretaker’s 1939 Ford pickup had been slashed so that the truck sagged on its wheel rims like a beaten, toothless creature. And on the truck’s sides were marks in tar, ugly marks with the authority of jeering shouts.

And on the caretaker’s sheds, and on the front door of the caretaker’s stone cottage, so that the ugly marks were fully visible from the gravel drive, and would be seen by all visitors to the cemetery.

Gus had run outside, and Rebecca followed, hugging herself in the cold. She was too confused to be frightened, at first. Yet how strange it was: her father was silent, while Herschel cursed
Fuck! fuckers!
Her father Jacob Schwart so strangely silent, only just blinking and staring at the glistening tar marks.

“Pa? What’s it mean?”

Pa ignored her. Rebecca put out her hand to touch the tar where it had been scrawled on the side of a shed, the tar was cold, hardened. She couldn’t remember what the marks were called, something ugly�sounding beginning with
s
, but she knew what they meant�Germany? Nazis? The Axis Powers, that had been defeated in the war?

But the war had been over for a long time now, hadn’t it?

Rebecca calculated: she’d been in fourth grade when the Milburn fire siren had gone off, and all classes at the grammar school were canceled for the day. Now she was in seventh grade. Three years: the Germans had surrendered to the Allies in May of 1945. This seemed to her a very long time ago, when she’d been a little girl.

She wasn’t a little girl now. Her heart pounded in anger and indignation.

Herschel and Gus were talking excitedly. Still, Pa stood staring and squinting. It was not like Jacob Schwart to be so quiet, his children were aware of him, uneasy. He had hurried outside without a jacket or his cloth cap. He seemed confused, older than Rebecca had ever seen him. Like one of those homeless men, derelicts they were called, who gathered at the bus station in Milburn, and in good weather hung about the canal bridge. In the stark morning light Pa’s face looked battered, misshapen. His eyes were ringed in fatigue and his nose was swollen with broken capillaries like tiny spiderwebs. His mouth worked helplessly as if he couldn’t chew what had been thrust into it, couldn’t swallow or spit it out. Herschel was saying again how he had a damn good idea who the fuckers were who’d done this and Gus, aroused and indignant, was agreeing.

Rebecca wiped at her eyes, that were watering in the cold. The eastern sky was lightening now, there were breaks and fissures in the clouds overhead. She was seeing the ugly marks�“swastikas,” she remembered they were called�through her father’s eyes. How could you remove them, black tar that had hardened worse than any paint? How could you clean them off, scrub them off,
tar
? And how upset Ma would be! Oh, if they could hide the marks from Ma, somehow…

But Rebecca’s mother would know. Of course, she already knew. Anna Schwart’s instinct was to fear, to suspect the worst; by now she would be cowering behind the window, peering out. Not just the swastikas but the birch trees, that tore at your heart to see. And the broken flowerpots, and smashed pumpkins, cracked gravestones that could not be replaced.

“Why do they hate us?”

Rebecca spoke aloud, but too softly for her brothers or father to hear.

Yet her father heard her, it seemed. He turned toward her, and came limping toward her. “You! God damn what’d I tell you, girl! Get inside with your God damn
ma
.”

Jacob Schwart had become furious suddenly. He lunged at her, even with his bad knee he moved swiftly. Grabbing Rebecca by her upper arm and dragging her back to the house. Cursing her, hurting her so that Rebecca cried out in protest, and both her brothers protested, “Pa, hey�” though keeping their distance and not daring to touch him. “In-side, I
said
. And if you tell your God damn
ma
about this I will break your ass.”

His fingers would leave bruises in Rebecca’s flesh, she would contemplate for days. Like swastika marks they were, these ugly purplish-orange bruises.

And the fury with which he’d uttered
ma
. That short blunt syllable in Jacob Schwart’s mouth sounding like a curse.

He is the one who hates us
.

But why?

That day. Hallowe’en, 1948. Her mother had wanted her to stay home from school but no, she’d insisted upon going to school as usual.

She was twelve, in seventh grade. She knew, at the school, that some of her classmates would know about the desecration to the cemetery, they would know about the swastikas. She didn’t want to think that some of her classmates, in the company of their older brothers, might have been involved in the vandalism.

Names came to mind: Diggles, LaMont, Meunzer, Kreznick. Loud jeering boys at the high school, or dropouts like Rebecca’s own brothers.

In town, among children at Rebecca’s school, there was always excitement about Hallowe’en. Wearing masks and costumes (purchased at Woolworth’s Five-and-Dime, where there was a front-window display of witches, devils, skeletons amid grinning plastic jack-o’-lanterns), going door to door in the darkness calling out
Trick or treat!
There was something thrilling about it, Rebecca thought. Hiding behind a mask, wearing a costume. Beginning in first grade she’d begged to be allowed to go out on Hallowe’en night, but Jacob Schwart would not allow it, of course. Not his sons, and certainly not his daughter. Hallowe’en was a pagan custom, Pa said, demeaning and dangerous. Next thing to begging! And what if, Pa said with a sly smile, some individual fed up with kids coming to his door and annoying him decided to put rat poison in the candy treats?

Rebecca had laughed. “Oh, Pa! Why’d anybody do such a mean thing?” and Pa said, cocking his head at her as if he meant to impart a bit of wisdom to a naive little girl, “Because there is meanness in the world. And we are in the world.”

There had been Devil’s Night mischief in Milburn, Rebecca saw as she walked to school. Toilet paper tossed up into tree limbs, pumpkins smashed on the front steps of houses, battered mailboxes, soaped and waxed windows. (Soaped windows were easy to clean off but waxed windows required finicky labor with razor blades. Kids at school spoke of waxing the windows of neighbors they didn’t like, or anybody who didn’t give them very good treats. Sometimes, out of sheer meanness, they waxed store windows on Main Street because the big plate glass windows were such targets.) It made Rebecca nervous to see the Devil’s Night mischief in the unsparing light of morning. At the junior high school, kids stood about pointing and laughing: many ground-floor windows had been waxed, tomatoes and eggs had been thrown against the concrete walls, yet more pumpkins smashed on the steps. Like broken bodies they seemed, destroyed in a gleeful rage. You were made to realize, Rebecca thought, how mischief could be committed all the time, each night, if there was nobody to stop it.

“Look! Lookit here!”�someone was pointing at more damage to the school, a jagged crack in the plate glass window of one of the front doors, that had been crudely mended with masking tape by the school janitor.

Yet there were no tar marks in town, anywhere Rebecca had seen. No “swastikas.”

Why, Rebecca wondered. Why were the swastikas only at the cemetery, only at her family’s house?

She would not ask anyone. Not even her close girlfriends. Nor would anyone speak to her about the swastikas, if they knew.

In English class, God damn! Mrs. Krause who was always trying to make her seventh grade students like her had this idea, they would read aloud a short story about Hallowe’en and ghosts: a shortened version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by some old dead author named Washington Irving. It was like Mrs. Krause, whose gums sparkled when she smiled, to make them read some old-fashioned prose nobody could follow; damn big words nobody could pronounce let alone comprehend. (Rebecca wondered if Mrs. Krause comprehended them.) Row after row, student after student stumbled through a few paragraphs of dense, slow-moving “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; they were faltering and sullen, especially the boys who read so poorly that the exasperated teacher finally interrupted to ask Rebecca to read. “And the rest of the class, sit quietly and listen.”

Rebecca’s face burned. She squirmed in her seat, in misery.

Wanting to tell Mrs. Krause she had a sore throat, she couldn’t read. Oh, she couldn’t!