The Gravedigger’S Daughter (38 page)

Even as a small child he was shrewd enough to know
It’s like she and I have died
.
And now nothing can hurt us
.

At first it was play. He believed it must be play. Like singing, humming. Under your breath. In secret. A way of being happy, the two of them needing no one else.

Speaking to strangers in her quiet proud voice
His name is Zacharias
.
A name from the Bible
.
He was born with a musical gift
.
His father is dead, we never speak of it
.

He believed it had to do with
keeping-going
. She spoke of what their lives were as
keeping-going
, for now. The names of towns, mountains, rivers, counties ever changing. Never in one place for more than a few days. One day Beardstown, the next Tintern Falls. One day Barneveld, the next day Granite Springs. The Chautauqua River became the Mohawk River, the Mohawk River became the Susquehanna. He saw the signs beside the highway. He was eager to pronounce the names for he loved the sounds of new names strange in his mouth and he was eager too to learn their spellings but the names so frequently changed he could not remember and she seemed to have no wish that he remember as she had no wish that he remember his old name now that he was
Zack
,
Zack-Zack
she hugged and adored telling him solemnly
Now you are Zack
.
My son Zacharias
.
Blessed of God for your father
�her eyes vague, bemused�
has returned to Hell where they’ve been waiting for him
. Laughing, and lifting his hands inside hers in the patty-cake game she’d begun when he was a baby clapping the soft palms of his hands together inside hers so that he was made to laugh and their laughter mingled breathless, joyous.

As he could not recall when memory began. When first he’d opened his eyes. When first he’d drawn breath. When first he’d heard music, that startled him, quickened his pulse. When first she’d sung and hummed with him. When first she’d danced with him. Though recalling how in one of the cafés there had been a piano, a jukebox and a piano and the jukebox an old Wurlitzer, wide, squat, stained-glass colors darkened by a patina of grime through which a glaring light shone throbbing with the beat of simple loud percussive popular songs, when in the late evening the jukebox lapsed into silence Mommy led him (so sleepy! his head so heavy!) to the old upright yellow-keyed Knabe back beside the bar, Christmas tinsel and strings of red lights, a powerful smell of beer, tobacco smoke, men’s bodies, Mommy was saying in her excited voice clear as a bell for others to hear
Try it, Zack! See if you can play piano
gripping him in her strong warm arms so he would not slip from her lap, her sturdy knees, at such times he was a clumsy child, a stricken-shy-mute little rat of a child, the badly scruffed piano stool too low for him he could have barely reached the keyboard, there were men looking on, always there were men in these cafés, taverns, bars to which Mommy brought him, the men were uttering words of hearty encouragement
Come on, kid! Let’s hear it
and her breath was hot and beery against the back of his neck, trembling with excitement she seized his small pliant hands and placed them on the keyboard, never mind the ivory keys were stained and warped and their sharp edges hurt his fingers, never mind the black keys had a tendency to stick, the piano was stained and warped and out of tune, Mommy knew to place her son’s hands at the center of the keyboard, Mommy knew to place his right thumb at middle C, each of his fingers sought its key by instinct, there was comfort to it
He was born with the gift, God has designated him special
.
He don’t always talk so well
. At such times she spoke strangely, forcefully, with such certainty and her eyes unwavering and her mouth shaped in a smile of such raw hope, though he was hurt at her words, he felt the falsity of her words even as he supposed he understood their logic
Feel sympathy for us! Help us
he was frightened for her, not for himself that he had no gift, he had been born with no gift and no god had designated him special, it was for her sake he was frightened that the men who’d seemed captivated by her a few minutes before should suddenly laugh at her, but when he began to strike the keys at once he would cease to hear the men’s jokes and laughter, he would cease to hear his father’s low mocking outraged voice in the voices of these strangers, he would cease to be aware of the tension in his mother’s body and the heat radiating from her, depressing the keys, those that weren’t sticking, in a rapid run, the scale of C major executed with childish enthusiasm though he had no idea it was the scale of C major he played, almost harmoniously both hands together though the left trailed the right by a fraction of a second, now he was striking chords, trying to depress the sluggish keys, striking black keys, sharps, flats, no idea what he was doing but it was play, piano was play, play-for-Zack, what he did felt right, felt natural, out of the piano’s unfathomable interior (he imagined it densely wired and with a glowing tube, like a radio) these wonderful sounds emerged with an air of surprise, as if the old upright Knabe shoved into an alcove of a roadside café in Apalachin, New York, had been silent for so long, unused except for purposes of drunken keyboard banging for so long, the very instrument had been startled into wakefulness, unprepared.

What his mother meant by
designated by God
. Not his hands which were fumbling blind-boy hands, but the piano-sounds that were like no sounds he had ever heard so intimately. Out of the radio he’d heard music since infancy and some of this had been piano music but it was nothing like the strange vivid sound that sprang into life from his fingertips. He was dry-mouthed in wonder, awe. He was smiling, this was such happiness. Discovering the way individual notes fused with others as if his fingers moved of their own volition. Not a child to be at ease in the presence of strangers and the roadside places to which his mother brought him were populated exclusively by strangers and most of these were men perceiving him with the glazed-eyed indifference of the male for any offspring not his own. Except he had their attention now. For he was discovering in the maze of stained, warped, sticking and dead keys enough live keys to allow him to play a pattern of related notes he could not guess would be instantly familiar to these strangers’ ears, Bill Monroe’s “Footprints in the Snow” he’d been hearing repeated on the jukebox in that dreamy state between sleep and wakefulness his head lowered onto his mother’s folded coat in one of the café booths, he had no idea that the succession of notes constituted a song composed and performed by individuals unknown to him and that those who heard it would be drawn to marvel at it�“Jesus, how’s he do it? Kid so little, he don’t take lessons does he?”

He wasn’t listening to their voices. Eyes shut tight in concentration. The fingers of his right hand picked out the predominant pattern as if already it was familiar to him, the fingers of his weaker left hand provided chords, a filling-in of gaps in the sound. Play. Playing. This was happiness! The old piano’s notes running through him�fingers, hands, arms, torso�like an electric current.

“Ask can he play ‘Cumberland Breakdown.’”

Mommy told them he could not. He could only play songs he’d heard on the jukebox.

“‘Rocky Road Blues’? That was on the jukebox.”

He was discovering that he could play a cluster of notes and then replay it as an echo, in a different key: raised by a half-note, or lowered. He could change the pattern of the cluster by playing the notes faster or slower or with emphasis upon certain notes and not on others, yet the pattern remained recognizable.

He could not reach a full octave of course, his hands were far too small. He could not reach the pedals of course. Had no idea what the pedals were. Nor would his mother know. The piano-sounds were choppy, broken up. This was not the smooth music you heard on the radio.

The men who’d been drawn by the child’s piano playing began to lose interest. Began to drift away. Soon their loud voices resumed, their braying laughter. One man remained, and came closer. He placed his foot on the right-hand pedal and depressed it. At once the choppy sounds melted into one another.

“You need the pedal. You pump it.”

This man, a stranger. But not like the others. He was smiling, he’d been drinking but he knew something the others didn’t know. And he cared, he appeared to be genuinely interested in the child fumbling to play an instrument he’d never touched before, astonishing how raw and instinctive the child’s playing was. And there was the child’s young mother holding him in her arms, smiling, so proud, a glisten of madness in her face.

Afterward asking who they were, where they were from. And the young woman said evasively, though she was still smiling, “Oh, up farther north. Nowhere you would know.” And the man persisted, “Try me, honey: where?” and the young mother laughed fixing the man with her calm dark seemingly imperturbable eyes shadowed with tiredness and yet beautiful to him, saying, as if she’d rehearsed these words many times, “Nowhere is where we are from, mister. But somewhere is where we are going.”

A roadside café in Apalachin, New York. Just south of the Susquehanna River and a few miles north of the Pennsylvania border. It was late winter 1960, they had been in flight from Niles Tignor for nearly five months.

It was the first time he’d played any piano. The first time she’d led him to any piano. Possibly she’d been drinking, she had seen the piano shoved into an alcove of the café and the idea came to her as so many ideas came to her now: “The breath of God.”

Not that she believed in any god. Hell, no.

Still there were these wayward breezes, sometimes. Sudden gust of wind. Whipping-wind of the kind she’d grown up with, rushing at the old stone cottage from the vastness of Lake Ontario. A cruel suffocating wind, you could not breathe. Laundry was torn from the line, sometimes the very posts collapsed. But there were gentler winds, there were breezes gentle as breaths. These she was learning to recognize. These she awaited eagerly. These she would guide her life by.

Beyond this night there would be other cafés, taverns and restaurants, hotels. There would be other pianos. If circumstances were right, she would lead her gifted child Zacharias to play. If circumstances were not so right, sometimes she would lead her gifted child Zacharias to play anyway. For he must be heard! His musical gift must be heard!

Each time Zack played there was applause.

You don’t look closely into the motive for applause.

And each time there would be a man who lingered afterward. A man who marveled, admired. A man who had money if only a few dollars to spend on the strange young mother and her spindly-limbed little boy with his pale, intense face and haunted eyes.

Tell me your name, honey
.
You know mine
.

You know my son’s name
.
That’s enough for now
.

No
.
I need to know your name, too
.

My name is Hazel Jones
.

“Hazel Jones.” That’s a pretty name
.

Is it? I was named for someone
.
My parents kept the secret but now they are gone
.
But one day I will know, I think
.

“If we haven’t been killed by now, no reason to think we ever will be.”

She laughed, such delicious wisdom.

Fleeing with the child she had not looked back. This would be her strategy for weeks, months, eventually years.
Keeping-going
she called it. Each day was its own surprise, and reward:
keeping-going
was enough. From the house on the Poor Farm Road she’d taken money thrown at her body in contempt of her very body and in repudiation of her love as a naive young wife defrauded in marriage. She had this money, these crumpled bills of varying denominations, she might tell herself she’d earned it. She would supplement it by working when necessary: waitress, cleaning woman, chambermaid. Ticket seller, movie theater “usherette.” Salesclerk, shopgirl. On her knees gracefully slipping shoes onto men’s stockinged feet, Hazel Jones with her dazzling American-girl smile: “Now, sir, how does that feel?”

Frequently men offered to buy her meals, drinks. Her and her little boy. Frequently they offered to give her money. Sometimes she refused, sometimes she accepted but she provided no sexual favors for money: her puritanical soul was revulsed at such a thought.

“I’d rather kill us. Zack and me. And that will never happen.”

She felt no remorse for leaving the child’s father as she’d done. She felt no regret, and no guilt. She did feel fear. In that vague fading way in which we contemplate the fact of our own deaths, not imminent but impending.
So long as we keep going, he will never find us
.

It did not occur to Rebecca that the man who had beaten her and the child had committed criminal acts. No more would she have thought to flee to Chautauqua Falls police than Anna Schwart would have fled to Milburn police in terror of Jacob Schwart.

You made your bed, now lie in it
.

It was the wisdom of peasants. It was a gritty wisdom of the soil. It was not to be questioned.

Her wounds would heal, her bruises would fade. There remained a faint high ringing in her right ear at times, when she was tired. But no more distracting than the springtime trill of peepers or the midsummer hum of insects. There were angry reddened scabs on her forehead she fingered absently, almost in awe, a curious gratified pleasure. But these she could hide, beneath strands of hair. She worried more for the child than for herself, that the child’s father would be maddened with the need to reclaim him.

Hey you two: love ya
.

There was Leora Greb shaking her head, saying you don’t step between a man and his kids, if you want to stay alive.

This was Rebecca’s plan: to abandon Tignor’s car in a public place, that it would be found by authorities immediately and its ownership traced and Tignor would come into possession of it and have less reason to pursue her. She knew, the man would be infuriated by the theft of his car.

She laughed, thinking of the man’s rage.

“He would kill me now, would he? But I’m out of his reach.”

She smiled. She touched the scabs at her hairline, that were nearly painless now. She would not speak of Tignor to the child nor would she ever again tolerate the child whimpering and whining after
Dad-dy
.

“There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you, now.”

“But Dad-dy�”

“No. There is no Dad-dy. No more. Only just Mommy.”

She laughed, she kissed the anxious child. She would kiss away his fears. Seeing that she laughed, he would laugh, in childish imitation. Wishing to please Mommy and to be kissed by Mommy, he would quickly learn.

Never again would she utter aloud the name of the man who had masqueraded as her husband! He had tricked her into believing that they were married, in Niagara Falls. It had been her stupidity that tricked her, she would think no more of it. The man was dead now, his name erased from memory.

The child’s name, that was the father’s. A diminutive of the father’s. A curious name, that made others smile quizzically. She would never call him by that name again. She must re-name the child, that the break with the father would be complete.

Leaving Chautauqua Falls she’d driven the stolen Pontiac on back roads north and east through the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains and into and past the rolling farmland of the Finger Lakes region and at last into the Mohawk Valley where the river moved swift and sullen and steel-colored beneath shifting columns of mist. She had not dared to stop anywhere she and the child might be recognized and so she pushed on, pain-wracked and exhausted. In a shallow rocky stream beside one of the roads she washed the child and herself, tried to clean their wounds. She kissed the child repeatedly, overcome with gratitude that he hadn’t been seriously injured; at least, she didn’t believe he had been seriously injured. His small supple bones appeared to be intact, his skull that had seemed so delicate to his anxious mother, the eggshell-skull of infancy, was in fact tough and resilient and had not been cracked by the raging man.

Grateful too that the child couldn’t see his own swollen and blackened eyes, his distended scabby upper lip, his blood-edged nostrils. And that the child was so impressionable, he would take his emotional cues from her: “We got away! We got away! Nobody will ever find us, we got away!”

Strange how happy Rebecca was becoming, as the Poor Farm Road swiftly receded into the past.

Strange how jubilant she felt, despite her swollen face and aches in all her bones.

Leaning over to kiss and hug the child. Blow in his ear and whisper nonsense to make him laugh.

In cornfields they hid from the road and relieved themselves like animals. Afterward running and hiding from each other, shrieking with laughter.

“Mom-my! Mom-my where are you!”

Rebecca came up behind him, closed her arms about him in a swoon of happiness, possessiveness. She had saved her son, and she had saved herself. She would see that her life, though mauled and shaken as if in the jaws of a great beast, was blessed.

The child’s true name came to her then: “‘Zacharias.’ A name from the Bible.”

She was so very happy. She was inspired. She would abandon the stolen car in Rome, an aging city beyond Oneida Lake of about half the size of Chautauqua Falls. This was a city that meant nothing to her except the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had business dealings there, he’d spoken of Rome often. She would leave the car there to confound him, as a riddle.

Parked the car, gas tank near-empty, near the Greyhound bus station.
He will reason that we are traveling east. He will never find us
.

She reversed the course of their flight. At the Greyhound station she bought two adult tickets to Port Oriskany, 250 miles back west.

Adult tickets in case the ticket seller was queried about a fleeing mother and her child.

Neither she nor the child had ever ridden on a bus before. The Greyhound was massive! The experience was exhilarating, an adventure. Nothing to do on a bus but stare out the window at the landscape: rapidly passing in the foreground beside the highway, slowly passing at the horizon. Though she was very tired and her bones ached yet she found herself smiling. The child lay sleeping beside her, snug and warm. She stroked his silky hair, she pressed her cool fingers against his swollen face.

Will you take my card at least
.

If you should wish to contact me
.

Accept from me your legacy. Hazel Jones
.

“‘Dr. Hendricks’ is the name. ‘Byron Hendricks, M.D.’”

The uniformed man, very dark skinned, with a narrow mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, regarded her with surprise.

“Fourth floor, ma’am. Except I don’t b’lieve he is there.”

Rebecca had not thought of this possibility. It had seemed to her since that evening on the canal towpath that the man in the panama hat had so sought her, of course he was awaiting her.

Rebecca stared at the wall directory. Wigner Professional Building. There was
HENDRICKS
,
B
.
K
.
SUITE
414.

The child Zacharias was prowling about the ornate, high-ceilinged foyer of the Wigner Building, inquisitive and restless. Newly named, in this new city Port Oriskany beside an enormous slate-blue lake, he seemed subtly altered, no longer shy but frankly curious, staring rudely at well-dressed strangers as they pushed through the revolving doors entering from busy Owego Avenue. Until now he’d been a country boy, the only adults he’d seen had dressed and behaved very differently than these adults.

When he wasn’t staring at strangers rushing past him he was stooping to examine the polished ebony marble beneath his feet, so unlike any floor he’d ever walked on.

A dark mirror! Inside which, beneath his feet, the ghostly reflection of a boy whose face he could not see moved jerkily.

“Zack, come here with Mommy. We’re going up in an
elevator
.”

He laughed, the name
Zack
was so strange to him, like an unexpected pinch you didn’t know was meant to be playful or hurtful.

Zacharias
meant blessed, his mother had told him. Already he was going for his first elevator ride. Though he still limped from what the drunken man had done to him, and his small pale face looked as if it had been used as a punching bag, he knew he was entering a world of unpredictable surprises, adventures.

The uniformed man had entered the elevator and taken his position at the controls. He said, “Ma’am, I can take you to Dr. Hendricks’s office. But like I say, I don’t b’lieve he is there. I ain’t seen any of ’em for some time.”

It was as if Rebecca hadn’t heard this. In the elevator she gripped the child’s small-boned hand. A hot dry hand. She hoped that he wasn’t feverish, she had no time for such foolishness now. In Port Oriskany, about to see Byron Hendricks! He’d expressed surprise that Hazel Jones was married, what would he think that Hazel Jones had a child? Rebecca was feeling uncertain, confused. Maybe this was a mistake.

Her lips moved. She might have been talking to herself.

“Dr. Hendricks has to be there. He gave me his card only a few days ago. He’s expecting me, I think.”

“Ma’am, you want I should wait for you? Case you comin’ right back down?”

The uniformed man loomed over her. She had to wonder if he was teasing her, that she might become shaken, tearful; and he might comfort her. Yet he appeared to be sincere. He was wearing white gloves to operate the elevator. She smelled his hair pomade. She had never been in such proximity to a Negro man before, and she had never been in a position of needing help from a Negro man before. At the General Washington Hotel the “Negro help” had mostly kept to themselves.

“No. That isn’t necessary. Thank you.”

The uniformed man stopped the elevator at the fourth floor and opened the door with a flourish. Quickly Rebecca stepped out into the corridor, pulling the child with her.

He is thinking I want Dr. Hendricks to examine my son. That’s what he is thinking
.

“He down there, that dir’ection. You want for me to wait, ma’am?”

“No! I told you.”

Annoyed, Rebecca walked away without glancing back. The elevator doors clattered shut behind her.

Zack was fretting he didn’t want any old doctor, he
did not
.

Suite 414 was at the farther end of the medicinal-smelling corridor. On a door whose upper half was set with a sheet of frosted glass had been hand-lettered
BYRON K
.
HENDRICKS
,
M
.
D
.
PLEASE ENTER
. But the interior appeared to be darkened, the door was locked. There was a begrimed and derelict air to this end of the corridor.

Desperate, Rebecca knocked on the frosted glass.

She could not think what to do. In her fevered but vague fantasies of seeking out Byron Hendricks, anticipating that moment when the man’s eyes perceived her, when he smiled in delight in recognition of Hazel Jones, she had not anticipated him not being where he had promised he would be.

Zack was fretting he didn’t like the smell in this place, he
did not
.

Well, Rebecca had money. She had several hundred dollars in bills of varying denominations. She would not have to find work for a while, if she was careful with the money. She would find an inexpensive hotel in Port Oriskany, she and Zack would stay the night. They were badly in need of rest. They would bathe, they would sleep in a bed with clean, crisp sheets. They would lock themselves in a room in a hotel populated by strangers, they would be utterly safe. For three nights in succession they had slept in the Pontiac, parked beside a country road, shivering with cold. The bus trip from Rome had been five long hours.

“In the morning. I can telephone him. Make an appointment.”

Zack saw his mother was becoming anxious. Coming to nudge himself against her thighs murmuring Mom-
my
? in his plaintive child’s voice.

She was thinking it had been unwise to come directly to Dr. Hendricks’s office from the bus station. She should have telephoned to see if the doctor was in. She could look up his telephone number in a directory. It was what people did, normal people. She must learn from normal people.

Another time, Rebecca turned the knob of the locked door. Why wasn’t Hendricks here!

When he saw her, he would know her. She believed this. Whatever would happen next would happen without her volition. He had summoned her to him, he’d begged her. No one had ever begged her in such a way. No one had ever looked into her heart in such a way.

The man in the panama hat. He’d followed her from town, he had known her. He had altered the course of her life. She’d been a deluded young woman living with a man not her husband. A violent man, a criminal. She would not have had the courage to leave this man if she had not met Hendricks on the canal towpath.

Very possibly, she would not have aroused the jealousy of the man who’d masqueraded as her husband, if Hendricks had not approached her on the canal towpath.