Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

You love me. You must love me .

Why don’t you love me!

Hazel was charmingly dressed for their hike. She wore a windbreaker and a girl’s rubber boots and on her head was a fawn-colored fedora she’d found in a closet at the lodge. Gallagher was forced to recall how when he touched Hazel, in their tender, intimate moments, when he kissed her, she went very still; like a captive animal that does not resist, yet remains slightly stiff, vigilant. You would not guess that the woman’s body was so young, supple and tremulous with life. Behind her clothes the female body, hot-skinned.

Overhead, hawks were circling. Always there were wide-winged sparrow hawks on Grindstone Island, along the river’s edge. They swooped to their prey in open areas, it was rare for a hawk to penetrate the pine woods. Now their swift shadows passed over the snow-stubbled grass and over Hazel’s figure, several hawks cruising so low that Gallagher could see the sharp outlines of their beaks.

Hazel, too, noticed the hawks, glancing up uneasily. She began to walk faster as if to elude them.

Damn! Gallagher saw that she was ascending a trail, the rutty remains of a trail, leading farther uphill; Gallagher had intended that they take another fork and return to the lodge, he’d had enough of hiking for one day. But Hazel hiked on, oblivious of her companion. The hill they were climbing was a small mountain, densely wooded, with a jagged, uneven surface, sharp diagonal outcroppings of shale ridged with ice; for sunshine came only in sporadic patches here, the interior of the pine woods was shaded, chill. The summit of the hill was impassable, Gallagher recalled. He had not hiked this damned trail in twenty-five years.

“Hazel! Let’s turn back.”

But Hazel plunged ahead, unheeding. Gallagher had no choice but to follow.

He’d bought a house for her and the child in Watertown. A handsome red-brick colonial with two separate entrances, overlooking a Watertown park. But Hazel would not step inside.

In her soul, a shopgirl. An usherette. Shrinking in shame from the judgment of a hired caretaker.

A mistake, loving Hazel Jones . It would be a terrible mistake to marry her .

Gallagher wasn’t accustomed to such physical stamina in any female. On Grindstone Island, it was rare for females to hike this mountain. His former wife would have laughed at him if he’d suggested such a hike in the melting snow. Gallagher had come to associate females with smoky bars, cocktail lounges, dimly lighted expensive restaurants. At least, females he found sexually desirable. And there was Hazel in her windbreaker and man’s hat, hiking a steep hill without a backward glance. Other female guests at Grindstone Island, strolling with Gallagher on his family property, had stayed close beside him, attentive to his conversation.

Another peculiar thing: Hazel was the only visitor to the lodge in Gallagher’s memory, female or male, who had not commented on the display of photographs. Guests were always exclaiming at the “known” faces amid the Gallaghers and their friends, looking so thoroughly at home. Some of the individuals pictured with the Gallaghers were wealthy, influential men whose faces Hazel would not have recognized, but there were numerous public figures: Wendell Wilkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Robert Taft, Harold Stassen, John Bricker and Earl Warren, Dewey’s vice-presidential running mates in 1944 and 1948. And there were Republican state congressmen, senators. It was Gallagher’s habit to speak disdainfully of his father’s political friends, but Hazel had not given him the opportunity for she’d said nothing.

She was ignorant of politics, Gallagher supposed. She had not been educated, hadn’t graduated from high school. She knew little of the world of men, action, history. Though she read the occasional newspaper columns Gallagher wrote, she did not offer any criticism or commentary. She knows so little . She will protect me .

At last, Hazel had stopped hiking. She was waiting for Gallagher where the trail ended in a snarl of underbrush, in the pine woods. When he joined her, out of breath, sweating, she pointed at a scattering of feathers on the ground, amid pine needles and glistening ice-rivulets. The feathers were no more than two or three inches long, powdery-gray, very soft and fine. There were small bones, particles of flesh still attached. Gallagher identified the remains of an owl’s prey. “There are owls everywhere in these woods. We heard them last night. Screech owls.”

“And owls kill other birds? Smaller birds?” The question was naive, wondering. Hazel spoke with a pained expression, almost a grimace.

“Well, owls are predators, darling. They must kill something.”

“Predators have no choice, have they?”

“Not unless they want to starve. And eventually, as they age, they do starve, and other predators eat them.”

Gallagher spoke lightly, to deflect Hazel’s somber tone. Like most women she wished to exaggerate the significance of small deaths.

Hazel’s cheeks were flushed from the climb, her eyes were widened and alert, glistening with moisture. She appeared feverish, still excited. There was something heated and sexual about her. Almost, Gallagher shrank from her.

He was taller than Hazel Jones by several inches. He might have gripped her shoulders, and kissed her, hard. Yet he shrank from her, his eyes behind the dark glasses tremulous.

Damn: he was sweating, yet shivering. At this height the air was cold enough, thin gusts of wind from the river struck his exposed face like knife blades. Gallagher felt a stab of childish resentment, here was a woman failing to protect a man from getting sick.

He pulled at her arm, and led her back down the trail. She came at once, docile.

“”The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk.“”

Hazel spoke in her strange, vague, wondering voice as if another spoke through her. Gallagher glanced at her, surprised.

“Why do you say that, Hazel? Those words?”

But Hazel seemed not to know, why.

Gallagher said, “It’s a melancholy observation. It’s the German philosopher Hegel’s remark and it seems to mean that wisdom comes to us only too late.”

“”The owl of Minerva.“ But who is Minerva?”

“The Roman goddess of wisdom.”

“Some long-ago time, we’re talking of?”

“A very long time ago, Hazel.”

Afterward Gallagher would recall this curious exchange. He would have liked to ask Hazel whom she was echoing, who’d made this remark in her hearing, except he knew that she would become evasive and manage not to answer his question. Her manner was naive and girlish and somehow he did not trust it, not completely.

“Why is it, do you think, ”the owl of Minerva soars only at dusk‘? Must it always be so?“

“Hazel, I have no idea. It’s really just a remark.”

She was so damned literal-minded! Gallagher would have to be careful what he told Hazel, especially if she became his wife. She would believe him without question.

They left the densely wooded area and were descending the hill in the direction of the lodge. Here in the open sunshine Gallagher would have been blinded without his dark glasses. A smell of skunk lifted teasingly to their nostrils, faint at first and then stronger. It might have been emanating from a stand of birch trees, or from one of the guest cabins. At a distance the smell of skunk can be half-pleasurable but it is not so pleasurable at close range. That inky-cobwebby odor that can turn nauseating if you blunder too close.

Families of skunks sometimes hibernated beneath the outbuildings. The warm weather would have roused them.

“Skunks have to live somewhere. Just like us.”

Hazel spoke playfully. Gallagher laughed. He was liking Hazel Jones again now that she wasn’t leading him up the damned mountain to a heart attack.