Joyce Oates: The Gravedigger’s Daughter

“Bastard. You have no right…”

Rebecca remembered now, she’d seen this man the previous day.

At the time she’d taken little notice. She’d been leaving the factory at the end of her shift, 5 P.M., with a crowd of other workers. If she’d noticed the man in the panama hat, she’d have had no reason to suppose he was interested in her.

Today, his following her, might be random. He couldn’t know her name-could he?

Her mind worked swiftly, desperately. It was possible that the stranger had simply chosen a woman to follow at random. He’d been in the vicinity of the factory as a hunter awaits prey, alert to any possibility. Or, what was equally plausible: he had been waiting for someone else but she had not turned up or, if she had, it wasn’t practical for him to follow her at that time.

Her heart beat in fury. Yet she was frightened.

“My husband will kill you…”

She didn’t want to think that this man might know Tignor. That he had a score to settle with Tignor. One of those guys that think they know me .

You never knew, with Tignor, what such a remark meant. That he had true enemies, or that there were men, unidentified, unreasonable, who believed they were his enemies.

One of those guys, they’d like to cut off my balls .

Tignor laughed, saying such things. He was a man who thought well of himself and his laughter was quick and assured.

Futile for Rebecca to ask what he meant. Tignor never answered a question directly, and especially not from a woman.

“No right! No right to follow me! Fucker.”

In her right-hand pocket Rebecca stroked the piece of steel.

She’d had the impression that the man, the stranger, had made a gesture to take off his hat.

Had he smiled?

She was weak with doubt, suddenly. For he’d made no threatening gesture toward her. He hadn’t called to her as a man might do, to unnerve her. He had made no move to catch up with her. She might be imagining danger. She was thinking of her little boy waiting for her and of how she wanted desperately to be with him to console both him and herself. At the treeline a crazed-eye sun appeared briefly between massed clouds and she thought, with the eagerness with which a drowning woman might reach for something to haul her up His clothes .

Trousers of some unlikely cream-colored fabric. A white, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie.

It seemed to her, the man in the panama hat possessed a light floating quality, a hopefulness, not like the mean concentrated look of a man who wants to sexually humiliate or hurt a woman.

“Maybe he lives out here. He’s just walking home, like me.”

The towpath was a public place. It was possible he was taking the identical shortcut Rebecca was taking. She’d just never seen him before. Parallel with the canal was the asphalt Stuyvesant Road and a half-mile ahead was the gravel Poor Farm Road that crossed the canal on a single-lane wooden bridge. At the juncture of the roads was a small settlement, Four Corners. A storefront post office, a general store with a large Sealtest sign in the window, Meltzer’s Gas & Auto Repair. An operating granary, an old stone church, a cemetery. Rebecca’s husband had rented a ramshackle farmhouse here, for her second pregnancy.

They’d lost the first baby. Miscarriage.

Nature’s way of correcting a mistake the doctor had told her, to suggest maybe it had not been a bad thing…

“Fuck it.”

Rebecca was thinking she should have taken off her jacket, soon as she’d left work. Now, it was too late. Couldn’t make any move like that, taking off an item of clothing with that bastard behind her watching. A signal, he’d interpret it. Sure. She could feel him watching her ass, her hips, legs as she walked fast guessing she wanted badly to start running but didn’t dare.

It was like a dog: turn your back, start running, he’s on you.

Fear has a smell. A predator can smell it.

When she’d seen this man the previous day, he hadn’t been wearing a hat. He’d been standing across the street from the factory gate, leaning back against a wall beneath an awning. In that short block were a café, a shoe repair, a butcher shop, a small grocery. The man had been lounging between the café and the shoe repair. There were many people around, this was a busy time of day. Rebecca wouldn’t have taken the slightest notice of him except now, she was forced to.

Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself…

Traffic was always congested at 5 P.M. when the factories let out. Niagara Tubing, Empire Paper Products, Arcadia Canning Goods, Chautauqua Sheet Metal. A block away, Union Carbide Steel, the city’s largest employer. Hundreds of men and women working the day shift erupted out onto the streets, as if released from hell.

Bats out of hell, it was an apt expression.

Whenever Rebecca left Niagara Tubing, she looked for Tignor out on the street. When he’d been gone for a while she lived in a state that might be defined as waiting-for-Tignor and involuntarily, without knowing what she did, she sought his tall broad figure in any public place. She was hopeful of seeing him yet dreaded seeing him for she never knew what emotions she might feel nor could she guess what Tignor might be feeling. Twice since March he had re-entered her life in this way: casual-seeming, parked in his car, a 1959 silver-green Pontiac, at the curb waiting for her as if his absence from her and their son-days, weeks, most recently five weeks in succession-was no more than something Rebecca had imagined. He would call out, “Hey babe: here.”

He would signal her to come to him. And she would.

Twice, she had. It was shameful but it was so. Seeing Tignor smiling at her, signaling her, she’d hurried to him. You would think if you’d seen them that a husband was picking up his wife after work, as so many wives picked up their husbands.

“Hey kid, calm down. People are watching.”

Or he’d say, “Gimme a kiss, babe. I miss you.”

But Tignor had not been there. Not the day before, and not today.

Vaguely Rebecca was expecting a call from him on Sunday. Or so she told herself. Last thing she knew of Tignor he’d been up in Port au Roche at the Canadian border on Lake Champlain where he owned or co-owned property: a hotel, a tavern, maybe a marina. Rebecca had never seen Port au Roche but she understood that it was a resort town, far more beautiful than Chautauqua Falls at this time of year, and always ten degrees cooler. It was not reasonable to blame a man for preferring Lake Champlain to Chautauqua Falls.

Not Tignor but someone else, Rita had nudged Rebecca to notice.

“Lookit the hotshot. Who’s he?”

A stranger, maybe mid-thirties, lounging beneath the awning across the street. He hadn’t been wearing cream-colored trousers but he’d been quirkily well dressed. A striped sport coat, beige trousers. Gray-blond hair that was crimped-looking and tinted glasses that gave him a movie-actor flair.

Eight hours on the line yet Rita still felt, or wished to give the impression that she felt, an avid if derisive sexual interest in an attractive stranger.

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

Rebecca had no more than glanced at the man. She had no interest in whoever it was.

If not Tignor, no one .

This afternoon she’d left the factory alone. She had not wanted to look for Tignor on the street knowing he wouldn’t be there, yet she had looked, her eyes glancing swiftly about, snatching at male phantom-figures. Almost it was relief she felt, not seeing him.

For she’d come to hate him, he had so lacerated her heart.

Her pride, too. Knowing she should leave Tignor, take the child and simply leave him. Yet lacking the strength.