Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Minnie, the sad ugly bald rubber doll, had been Rebecca’s doll. Minnie was so debased, you could not injure her further. There was a comfort in that! Hairless as a wizened baby. A corpse-baby. (In the cemetery, there were corpse-babies buried. Of course Rebecca had not seen any of these but she knew there were baby-sized coffins, in baby-sized plots. Often these dead had no names except Baby.) Rebecca winced to think she’d ever been so childish, to play with dolls. Katy’s retarded sister, a child with fat cheeks and glassy staring eyes, was always hugging an old bald doll in a way pathetic and repulsive to see. Katy said with a shrug, she thinks it’s real.

Except for the ghost-faces, the underside of the Drumm Road bridge was ugly. There were rusted girders and big screws and massive spiderwebs. That look of the underside of things, like skeletons you are not meant to see.

On days of bright sunshine, like this day, the shadows beneath the bridge were sharp and cutting.

Often it was said of the Erie Barge Canal it’s deeper than it appears. Sometimes, in the heat of summer, the canal looks as if you could walk on its surface opaque as lead.

My good girl who is all I have, I must trust you .

And so, how could Rebecca run away from home? She could not.

Now that Herschel and Gus were gone, she was Anna Schwart’s only child remaining.

A girl, you must not wander alone . You don’t want something to happen to you .

“God damn I do. I do want something to happen to me. I do .”

How Anna would stare at her, astonished and hurt.

A farmer’s flatbed truck was approaching the bridge. Rebecca clamped her arms over her head, stiffening. There came a clattering noise, the bridge shuddered and vibrated not ten feet above Rebecca’s head. Bits of grit and dust sifted downward.

On her way home, on Quarry Road, she heard gunfire.

Hunters. Often there were hunters, in the scrubby pine woods along Quarry Road.

Never would Rebecca know. But Rebecca would imagine.

How to the Milburn Township Cemetery in the late afternoon of May 11, 1949 there had come two brothers, Elroy and Willis Simcoe, with their sixty-six-year-old aunt. They had come to visit their parents’ grave site, that was marked with a heavy, handsome granite stone engraved with the words THY KINGDOM COME THY WILL BE DONE. Elroy Simcoe who was an insurance agent in Milburn and a longtime member of the Township board had lived in Milburn all his life, Willis had moved to the small city of Strykersville forty miles to the west. The Simcoe brothers were well known in the area. They were middle-aged, paunchy, and nattily dressed. They wore sport coats and white cotton shirts open at the throat. Elroy had driven his brother and aunt to the cemetery in a new-model gray Oldsmobile shaped like a box car. As soon as they passed through the cemetery gate they began to notice that the grounds were not so fastidiously kept as one might wish. A profusion of dandelions was in bloom, tall thistles had sprung up around the gravestones. An erratic swath had been mowed through grass with a look of drunken abandon or contempt and, most jarring to the eye, there were piles of soil heaped beside the newer graves like refuse that should have been carted away.

A fallen tree limb lay slantwise across the graveled drive. In a very bad mood, Willis Simcoe climbed out of the Oldsmobile to drag the limb aside.

As Elroy drove on, he and his brother noticed the cemetery caretaker working with a small scythe, not very energetically, about fifty feet from the graveled drive. Elroy did not slow the Oldsmobile, there was no exchange of words at this point. The workman, whose name was known to Elroy Simcoe as “Schwart,” did not so much as glance up as the Simcoes passed by, his back to them.

Of course he was aware . Jacob Schwart was aware . Of all visitors to the cemetery, Jacob Schwart was keenly aware .

At the elder Simcoe’s grave, the brothers and their elderly aunt were shocked to see untrimmed grasses and dandelions. Pots of hyacinth and geraniums that had been lovingly placed about the grave on Easter Sunday, not long before, now lay on their sides, broken and dessicated.

Elroy Simcoe, a short-tempered man, cupped his hands to his mouth to call over to the caretaker, “You, Schwart!” Elroy meant to chew him out as Elroy would later testify. But the caretaker, his back still turned, refused to so much as glance around. Elroy called, in a louder voice, “Mr. Schwart! I’m talking to you, sir!” His sarcasm seemed to be lost on the caretaker, who continued to ignore him.

Though laying down the scythe in the grass, for the last time. Retreating without haste, or a backward glance. And limping Schwart went to a storage shed adjacent to the caretaker’s stone house and disappeared inside it and shortly afterward reappeared now limping purposefully in the direction of the Simcoes in the interior of the cemetery and now-so unexpectedly!-pushing a wheelbarrow with a strip of canvas tossed over its contents, bump-bump-bump through the grass! And no turning back now! Knowing what must be done . Now his enemies had begun their attack, no longer surreptitiously but openly . As Jacob Schwart approached the Simcoe brothers who stood watching him pushing the wheelbarrow apparently in their direction, watching the peculiar little troll-man with expressions of bemusement and irritation, there may have been harsh words exchanged. Elroy Simcoe, the surviving brother, and his elderly aunt would later testify that Jacob Schwart was the one to speak first, his face contorted with rage: “Nazi murderers! No more!” At this point both Simcoe brothers shouted at him, seeing the man was mad; and suddenly, with no warning, when Schwart had pushed the wheelbarrow to within twelve feet of Willis Simcoe, he pulled the canvas away and lifted a shotgun that looked massive in his diminutive hands, aimed it at Willis and in virtually the same moment pulled the trigger.

The stricken man would die of a gaping wound in the chest. His right forearm, lifted in a futile attempt to protect his torso, would be blasted away, white bones protruding through mangled flesh.

Now you see, eh! Now! The pogrom is done .

She was calling, “Ma? Ma-” childish and pleading.

Somehow she’d entered the stone house. Knowing perhaps she should not, there was danger here. A woman, a stranger, had called at her, to warn her. Rebecca had not listened, and Rebecca had not clearly seen the wounded man lying on the ground, in the cemetery.

She had not! She would claim she had not, afterward.

What she did remember was: laundry flapping on the clothesline.

Her belated realization, Ma would be mad as hell at her. For Rebecca should have helped with the laundry as always.

Yet: It can’t happen, today is washday .

In the kitchen something blocked her way, and this was a wrong thing: a chair, sprawled on its back. Rebecca collided with the chair like a blind girl, wincing with pain.

“Ma?”

Calling for her mother but her voice came so faint, Anna Schwart could not have heard had Anna Schwart been capable of hearing.

Then she called for her father-“Pa? Pa?”-reasoning even in this moment of terror He would want me to acknowledge him, to respect him .

She was in the kitchen of the old stone house, and hearing the sound of struggle in one of the back rooms. Her parents’ bedroom?

She was panting, covered in a film of cold sweat. Her heart was beating erratically as a wounded bird beating its wings. All that she knew, she was forgetting. Laundry? Washday? She was forgetting. Already she’d forgotten the unknown woman crying Don’t go in there! - stop her! She’d forgotten having heard gunshots; she could not have said how many shots she’d heard. And so she would not have thought He has reloaded. He is prepared . For it is an important distinction in such matters: if a man acts impulsively, or with premeditation.