Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

It would be pointed out that harassment of the cemetery caretaker predated Jacob Schwart’s arrival. His predecessor had been similarly taunted, and his predecessor’s predecessor. In Milburn, as in other country towns in that era, harassment of gravediggers and acts of vandalism in cemeteries were not uncommon.

Some of the schoolboys who harassed Jacob Schwart were as young as ten, eleven years old. In time, others would be older. And some weren’t schoolboys any longer, but young men in their twenties. Not immediately, in the 1930s, but in later years. Their shouts wayward and capricious and seemingly brainless as the raucous cries of crows in the tall oaks at the rear of the cemetery.

Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!

“Anna?”

He’d had a premonition. This was in the early winter of 1936, they’d been living here for only a few weeks. Clearing away storm debris from the cemetery he’d paused as if to hear…

Not jeering schoolboys. Not that day. He was alone that day, the cemetery was empty of visitors.

Run, run! His heart plunged in his chest.

He was confused. Somehow thinking that Anna was having the baby now, the baby was stuck inside her distended body now, Anna was screaming, writhing on the filthy blood-soaked mattress…

Even as he knew he was elsewhere. In a snow-encrusted cemetery amid crosses.

In a place he could not have named except it was rural, and had a fierce desolate beauty now that most of the leaves had been blown from the trees. And the sky overhead massed with clouds heavy with rain.

“Anna!”

She wasn’t in the kitchen, she wasn’t in the bedroom. Not in any of the four cramped rooms of the stone cottage. In the woodshed he found her, that opened off the kitchen; in a shadowy corner of the cluttered shed, crouched on the earthen floor-could that be Anna?

In the shed was a strong smell of kerosene. Enough to make you gag but there was Anna huddled with a blanket around her shoulders, matted hair and her breasts loose and flaccid inside what looked to be a dingy nightgown. And there was the baby on her lap, partly hidden in the filthy blanket, mouth agape, eyes watery crescents in the doll-face, unmoving as if in a coma. And he, the husband and the father, he, Jacob Schwart, trembling above them not daring to ask what was wrong, why in hell was she here, what was she hiding from now, had something happened, had someone knocked at the door of the cottage, what had she done to their daughter, had she smothered her ?

For he was frightened, yet also he was furious. He could not believe that the woman was collapsing like this, after all they had endured.

“Anna! Explain yourself.”

By degrees Anna became aware of him. She had been asleep, or in one of her trances. You could snap your fingers in Anna’s face at such times and out of stubbornness she would scarcely hear you.

Her eyes shifted in their sockets. In this place called Milburn amid the crosses and stone angels and those others staring after her in the street she’d become furtive as a feral cat.

“Anna. I said…”

She licked her lips but did not speak. Hunched beneath the filthy blanket as if she could hide from him.

He would yank the blanket from her, to expose her.

Ridiculous woman!

“Give me the little one, then. Would you like me to strangle her?”

This was a jest of course. An angry jest, of the kind Anna could drive a man to.

It was not Jacob Schwart speaking but-who? The cemetery man. Gravedigger. A troll in work clothes and boots stuffed with rags grinning at her, clenching his fists. Not the man who’d adored her and begged her to marry him and promised to protect her forever.

It was not the baby’s father, obviously. Hunched above them panting like a winded bull.

Yet, without a word, Anna lifted the baby to him.

In America. Surrounded by crosses.

He’d brought his family across the Atlantic Ocean to this: a graveyard of stone crosses.

“What a joke! Joke-on-Jay-cob.”

He laughed, there was genuine merriment in his laughter. His fingers scratching his underarms, his belly, his crotch for God is a joker. Weak with laughter sometimes, snorting with merriment leaning on his shovel until tears streamed down his whiskery cheeks and dribbled the shovel with rust.

“Jay-cob rubs his eyes, this is a dream! I have shat in my pants, this is my dream! Am-er-i-ka . Every morning the identical dream, eh? Jay-cob a ghost wandering this place tending the Christian dead.”

Talk to yourself, there’s no one else. Could not talk to Anna. Could not talk to his children. Saw in their eyes how they feared him. Saw in the eyes of those others how they pitied him.

But there was the little one . He had not wanted to love her for he had expected her to die. Yet she had not died of the bronchial infection, she had not died of the measles.

“Rebecca.”

He was coming to speak that name, slowly. For a long time he had not dared.

One day, Rebecca was old enough to walk unassisted! Old enough to play Not-See with her father. First inside the house, and then outside in the cemetery.

Oh! oh! where is the little one hiding!

Behind that grave marker, is she? He would Not-See her.

She would giggle, and squeal in excitement, peeking out. And still Pa would Not-See.

Eyes squinted and pinched for he’d lost his damn glasses somewhere. Taken from him and snapped in two.

The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk .

That was Hegel: the very priest of philosophy admitting the failure of human reason.

Oh! Pa’s eyes scraped over the little one without seeing her!

It was a wild tickle of a game. So funny!

Not a large man but in his cunning he’d become strong. He was a short stocky man with the hands and feet, shameful to him, of a woman. Yet he wore the previous caretaker’s boots, cleverly fitted out with rags.

To the Milburn officials he had presented himself with such courtesy, for a common laborer, they had had to be impressed, yes?

“Gentlemen, I am suited. For such labor. I am not a large man but I am strong, I promise. And I am”-(what were the words? he knew the words!)-“a faithful one. I do not cease .”

In the game of Not-See the little one would slip from the house and follow him into the cemetery. This was so delicious! Hiding from him she was invisible, peeking out to see him she was invisible, ducking back behind a grave marker quivering like a little animal, and his eyes scraping over her as if she was no more than one of those tiny white butterflies hovering in the grass…

“Nobody. There is nobody there. Is there? A little ghostie, I see? No!-nobody.”

At this early hour, Pa would not be drinking. He would not be impatient with her. He would wink at her, and make the smack-smack noise with his lips, even as (oh, she could see this, it was like light fading) he was forgetting her.

His work trousers were tucked into his rubber boots, his flannel shirt loosely tucked into the beltless waist of his trousers. Shirt sleeves rolled up, the wiry hairs on his forearms glinting like metal. He wore the gray cloth cap. His shirt was open at the collar. His jaws moved, he smiled and grimaced as he swung the scythe, turning from her.

“Little ghostie, go back to the house, eh? Go, now.”

The wonderful game of Not-See was over-was it? How could you tell when the game was over? For suddenly Pa would not-see her, as if his eyes had gone blind. Like the bulb-eyes of the stone angels in the cemetery, that made her feel so strange when she approached them. For if Pa didn’t see her, she was not his little one ; she was not Rebecca ; she had no name.