The Gravedigger’S Daughter (5 page)

A voice in Rebecca’s ear harsh and urgent: “Jesus, watch out!”

She woke from her trance. She laughed nervously. Her right hand, bulky in the safety glove, had been trailing dangerously near the stamping machine.

She thanked whoever it was. Her face flushed with embarrassment, indignation. God damn it had been like this most of the morning: her mind trailing off, losing her concentration. Taking risks, like she’d just begun the job and didn’t know by now how dangerous it could be.

Clamoring machines. Airless air. Heat tasting of singed rubber. Sweat inside her work clothes. And mixed with the noise was a new urgent sound she could not decode, was it hopeful, was it seductive, was it mocking. HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES.

The foreman came by. Not to speak with Rebecca but to let her see him: his presence. Son of a bitch, she saw.

No one at Niagara Tubing knew much about her. Even Rita, who was her friend. They might have known that she was married, and some of them might have known to whom she was married, the name Niles Tignor was known in some quarters in Chautauqua Falls. All they knew of Rebecca was that she kept to herself. She had a stubborn manner, a certain stiff-backed dignity. She wouldn’t take bullshit from anybody.

Even when she was tired to the point of dazedness. Unsteady on her feet and needing to use the lavatory, to splash tepid water on her face. It wasn’t just the few women workers who became light-headed at Niagara Tubing but men, too. Veterans of many years on the line.

The first week she’d begun in the assembly room, Rebecca had been nauseated by the smell, the rapid pace, the noise. Noise-noise-noise. At such a decibel, noise isn’t just sound but something physical, visceral, like electric current pumping through your body. It frightens you, it winds you tight, and tighter. Your heart is racing to keep pace. Your brain is racing but going nowhere. You can’t keep a coherent thought. Thoughts spill like beads from a broken string…

She’d been terrified, she might go crazy. Her brain would break into pieces. You had to shout to be heard, shout in somebody’s ear and people shouted in your ear, in your face. It was the raw, pulsing, primal life. There were no personalities here, no subtleties of the soul. The delicate soul of the child, like Niley, would be destroyed here. In the machines, in the hellhole of the factory, there was a strange primal life that mimicked the pulse-beat of natural life. And the living heart, the living brain, were overcome by this mock-life. The machines had their rhythm, their beat-beat-beat. Their noises overlapped with the noises of other machines and obliterated all natural sound. The machines had no words, only just noise. And this noise overwhelmed. There was a chaos inside it, though there was the mechanical repetition, a mock-orderliness, rhythm. There was the mimicry of a natural pulse-beat. And some of the machines, the more complicated, mimicked a crude sort of human thought.

Rebecca had told herself she could not bear it!

More calmly telling herself she had no choice.

Tignor had promised Rebecca she would not have to work, as his wife. He was a man of pride, easily offended. He did not approve of his wife working in a factory and yet: he no longer provided her with enough money, she had no choice.

Since summer, Rebecca was better adjusted. But, Christ she would never be adjusted.

It was only temporary work of course. Until…

He had looked at her with such certainty! HAZEL JONES.

Seeming to know her. Not Rebecca in her filth-stiffened work clothes but another individual, beneath.

He’d known her heart. HAZEL JONES HAZEL ARE YOU HAZEL JONES YOU ARE HAZEL JONES ARE YOU. In the long morning hours HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES lulling, seductive as a murmurous voice in Rebecca’s ear and in the afternoon HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES had become a jeering din.

“No. I am not. God damn you leave me alone.”

Him removing his glasses. Prissy tinted glasses. So she could see his eyes. How sincere he was, and pleading. The injured iris of one eye, like something burnt-out. Possibly he was blind in that eye. Smiling at her, hopeful.

“Like I was somebody special. ‘Hazel Jones.’”

She had no wish to think about Hazel Jones. Still less did she want to think about the man in the panama hat. She’d have liked to scream into his face. Seeing again his shock, when she’d torn up his card. That gesture, she’d done right.

But why: why did she detest him?

She had to concede, he was a civilized man. A gentleman. A man who’d been educated, who had money. Like no one else she knew, or had ever known. And he’d made such an appeal to her.

He was kind-hearted, he meant to do right.

“Was it just I’m ‘Hazel Jones’ or�maybe, it was
me
.”

Remembered you
.
In his will
.

Legacy
.

“See, I am not her. The one you think I am.”

Must remember me, Dr. Hendricks’s son
.

“I told you, I don’t.”

God damn she’d told him
no
, she’d been truthful from the start. But he’d kept on and on like a three-year-old insisting what could not be, was. He’d continued to speak to her as if he had heard
yes
where she’d been saying
no
. Like he was seeing into her soul, he knew her in some way she didn’t know herself.

“Mister, I told you. I’m not
her
.”

So tired. Late afternoon is when you’re susceptible to accidents. Even the old-timers. You get slack, fatigued. SAFETY FIRST!�posters nobody glanced at anymore, so familiar. 10 SAFETY REMINDERS. One of them was KEEP YOUR EYES ON YOUR WORK AT ALL TIMES.

When Rebecca’s vision began to waver inside the goggles, and she saw things as if underwater, that was the warning sign: falling asleep on her feet. But it was so…It was so lulling. Like Niley falling asleep, his eyelids closing. A wonderment in it, how human beings fall asleep same as animals. What is the
person
in
personality
and where does it go when you fall asleep. Niley’s father Tignor sleeping so deeply, and sometimes his breath came in strange erratic surges she worried he might cease breathing, his big heart would cease pumping and then: what? He had married her in a “civil ceremony” in Niagara Falls. She’d been seventeen at the time. Somewhere, lost amid his things, was the Certificate of Marriage.

“I am. I am Mrs. Niles Tignor. The wedding was real.”

Rebecca jerked her head up, quickly. Where’d she been…?

She poked her fingers inside the goggles, wiping her eyes. But had to take off her safety gloves first. So awkward! She wanted to cry in frustration….
hurt
.
Or were told you were
.
I don’t judge
. He was watching her from the doorway, he was speaking about her with one of the bosses. She saw him, in the corner of her eye; she would not stare, and allow them to know that she was aware of them. He wore cream-colored clothes, and the panama hat. Others would glance at him, quizzically. Obviously, he was one of the owners. Investors. Not a manager, not dressed for an office. Yet he was a doctor, too…

Why’d Rebecca rip up his card! The meanness in her, taking after her gravedigger father. She was ashamed of herself, thinking of how he’d been shocked by her, and hurt.

Yet: he did not judge.

“Wake
up
. Girl, you better
wake up
.”

Again Rebecca had almost fallen asleep. Almost got her hand mangled, left hand this time.

Smiled thinking crazily: the fingers on the left hand you would not miss so much. She was right-handed.

She knew: the man in the panama hat wasn’t in the factory. She must have seen, in the blurry corner of her eye, the plant manager. A man of about that height and age who wore a short-sleeved white shirt, most days. No bow tie, and for sure no panama hat.

After work she would almost-see him again. Across the street, beneath the shoe repair awning. Quickly she turned away, walked away not looking back.

“He isn’t there. Not Tignor, and now not him.”

No one saw: she made sure.

Looking for pieces of Hendricks’s card she’d ripped up. On the towpath she found a few very small scraps. Not certain what they were. Whatever was printed on them was blurred, lost.

“Just as well. I don’t want to know.”

This time, disgusted with herself, she squeezed the pieces into a pellet and tossed it out onto the canal where it bobbed and floated on the dark water like a water bug.

Sunday passed, and Tignor did not call.

To distract the restless child she began telling him the story of the man-on-the-canal-towpath. The man-with-the-panama-hat.

“Niley, this man, this strange man, followed me along the towpath, and guess what he said to me?”

The Mommy-voice was bright, vibrant. If you were to color it in crayons it was a bold sunny yellow tinged with red.

Niley listened eagerly, uncertain if he should smile: if this was a happy story, or a story to make him worry.

“Mommy, what man?”

“Just a man, Niley. Nobody we know: a stranger. But�”

“‘Stang-er’�”

“‘Stranger.’ Meaning somebody we don’t know, see? A man we don’t know.”

Niley glanced anxiously about the room. (His cubbyhole of a bedroom with a slanted ceiling, that opened onto her bedroom.) He was blinking rapidly peering at the window. It was night, the single window reflected only the blurred undersea interior of the room.

“He isn’t here now, Niley. Don’t be afraid. He’s gone. I’m telling you about a nice kind man, I think. A friendly man. My friend, he wants to be. Our friend. He had a special message for me.”

But Niley was still anxious, glancing about. To capture his attention Mommy had to grip his little shoulders and hold him still.

A squirmy little eel, he was. She wanted to shake him. She wanted to hug him tight, and protect him.

“Mommy?
Where
?”

“On the canal towpath, honey. When I was coming home from work, coming to get you at Mrs. Meltzer’s.”

“Today, Mommy?”

“Not today, Niley. The other day.”

It was later than usual, the child hadn’t yet gone to bed. Ten o’clock and she’d only just managed to get him into his pajamas by making a game of it. Tugging off his clothes, his shoes, as he lay passive and not-quite-resisting. It had been a difficult day, Edna Meltzer had complained to Rebecca. At the delicate juncture of bones at the child’s forehead Rebecca saw a nerve pulsing.

She kissed the nerve. She resumed her story. She was very tired.

The three-year-old had been too cranky to be bathed in the big tub, Mommy had had to struggle to wash him with a washcloth, and then not very well. He was too cranky to be read to. Only the radio would comfort him, that damned radio Rebecca would have liked to toss out the window.

“A man, a very nice man. A man in a panama hat�”

“Mommy, what? A banana hat?”

Niley laughed in disbelief. Rebecca laughed, too.

Why the hell had she begun telling this story, she couldn’t imagine. To impress a three-year-old? Out of the crayon box she selected a black crayon to draw a stick-man and on the stick-man’s silly round head with the yellow crayon she drew a banana hat. The banana was disproportionately large for the stick-man’s head, and upright. Niley giggled and kicked and squirmed with pleasure. He grabbed at the crayons to draw his own stick-man with a tilted-over banana hat.

“For Dad-
dy
. Banana hat.”

“Daddy doesn’t wear a hat, sweetie.”

“Why not? Why doesn’t Daddy wear a hat?”

“Well, we can get Daddy a hat. A banana hat. We can make a banana hat for Daddy…”

They laughed together, planning Daddy’s banana hat. Rebecca gave in to childish nonsense, she supposed it must be harmless. The things that child imagines!�Mrs. Meltzer shook her head, you could not determine if she was amused, or alarmed. Rebecca smiled, Rebecca shook her head, too. She worried that Niley wasn’t developing as other children developed. His brain seemed to function like the jerky conveyor belt. His attention span was fierce but brief. You could not hope to follow through a line of thinking or of speaking, Niley had no patience for tales that went on for more than a few seconds. Unless you imposed your will upon the child, as Rebecca sometimes did, in exasperation. Otherwise the child led you wandering, stumbling. A blizzard of broken-off thoughts, snatches of misheard words. She felt at such times that she would drown in the child’s small fevered brain, she was a tiny adult figure trapped in a child’s brain.

She had wanted desperately to be a mother. And so she was a mother.

She had wanted desperately to be Niles Tignor’s wife. And so she was Niles Tignor’s wife.

These irrefutable facts she was trying to explain to the man in the panama hat who stood gazing at her with his small, hurt smile. His eyes were myopic, almost you could see the fine scrim of myopia over them, like scum on water. His gray-blond hair so curiously molded. Smile lines deep-etched in his face that was an old-young face, faded and yet strangely boyish, hopeful. He was a courteous man you could see, a gentleman. Convinced that the slatternly young woman in the factory clothes was lying to him yet appealing to her anyway.

A man of science and reason
.

At least take my card
.

If you should ever wish to
…

In the telephone directory for the Greater Chautauqua Valley she looked up
Jones
. There were eleven
Joneses
all of them male, or initials which might mean male or female. Not a single woman, so designated. Not a single listing
H. Jones
.

This didn’t surprise her. For obviously, Byron Hendricks must have consulted the directory, many times. He must have called some of these Joneses, in his search for Hazel Jones.

“Asshole! What a stupid thing to do.”

One night Rebecca woke from sleep to the realization, that struck her like a punch to the gut, that she was a careless mother, a bad mother: she’d stuck away the makeshift weapon, the seven-inch piece of steel, in a bureau drawer, where Niley who was always rummaging through her things might find it.