Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Tignor nudged her with his elbow. “C’mon, babe: drink up. It’s no good me drinking alone.”

They were not yet lovers. There was that tension between them, an edginess and a reproach on Tignor’s part. Rebecca understood that they would become lovers soon.

This afternoon, a Sunday, they would stop at several taverns and hotels along the river. Their destination was the Beardstown Inn. In all these places the Black Horse Brewery had business accounts, and Niles Tignor was known and well liked. It was a pleasure to see strangers’ faces lighten when Tignor stepped into a bar, and men glanced up. The camaraderie of men drinking together, even at midday. As a woman Rebecca would never know it and would not have wished to know it and yet: in Tignor’s company, in the green plaid woollen coat he’d given her at Christmas, to replace her shabby old brown wool coat he’d said looked like a horse blanket, Rebecca too was made to feel special.

That your new girl, Tignor? Kind of young ain’t she?

Maybe for you, pal . Not for me .

As in the corner of her eye Rebecca was aware of Tignor tall and looming like a bear on its hind legs so often she overheard such exchanges between Tignor and other men, strangers to her.

Jesus, Tignor! This one looks hot .

Rebecca overheard, and gave no sign of hearing. Moving off to the women’s room so that the men could talk together as crudely and as jocularly as they wished, without her.

Men liked to be seen with good-looking girls. The younger, the better. Could you blame them? You could not! It was jealousy on Leora Greb’s part, Leora was past forty and no man would ever look at her again the way Tignor looked at Rebecca.

Younger women in Milburn were jealous of Rebecca, too. Some of them had gone out with Tignor. He’d driven them in one or another of his cars, no doubt he’d given them presents. But their time was past, now was Rebecca’s time.

“Could be, honey, I got a surprise for you today.”

“Tignor, what? Don’t tease!”

He would, though. Tignor was a terrible tease.

Rebecca loved riding with Tignor in the robin’s-egg blue Studebaker that was unlike any other vehicle you’d be likely to see in the hilly countryside between Milburn and Beardstown, thirty miles away. Farmers’ cars, pickups and jalopies driven by young men passed them from time to time but mostly the road was deserted. Rebecca wanted to think that they were the only two people remaining in the world: no destination ahead, and no General Washington Hotel of Milburn behind where Niles Tignor was a prize guest and Rebecca Schwart was a chambermaid whose wages were paid in cash, off the books.

The Chautauqua River was frozen, ice-locked. Rebecca had never been so far upriver. All of the landscape was new to her, and made beautiful and mysterious by snow. In the distance were the Chautauqua Mountains, pale and fading in winter mist. Nearer were farms, farm land, stretches of uncultivated land. Rebecca was struck by cornfields in whose ragged and stubbled interiors she sometimes glimpsed the ghost-shapes of white-tailed deer. Mostly the herds were does and nearly grown eight-month fawns in their dull thick winter coats but occasionally she saw a buck: bigchested, massive, with elaborate antlers. When she saw a buck, Rebecca whispered, “Oh, Tignor! Look.” Tignor slowed the car to squint out into rows of broken cornstalks.

No creature so beautiful as a fully grown white-tailed buck with a full head of antlers. Tignor whistled through his teeth in admiration for one of his own kind.

“Jesus, girl! Wish I had my rifle.”

“You wouldn’t shoot him, would you, Tignor? Then he’d just be dead.”

Tignor laughed. It was impossible to know what he meant.

Rebecca thought calmly He has killed . Somebody, or something .

In her pride and vanity thinking But he won’t kill me!

Liking her to snuggle against him as he drove. Liking her to rest her head against his shoulder. He stroked her knee, her thigh through layers of winter clothing. He stroked her hand and her forearm up inside the coat sleeve where her skin shivered. As if his hand were moving of its own accord or in accordance with Rebecca’s desire. She began to feel excited, anxious. For Rebecca, sexual excitement was indistinguishable from anxiety. Wanting to push away from the man, and yet wanting him not to stop.

Her body was alight, glowing. In her breasts, and in the pit of her belly. Suffused through her very soul like a liquidy sunlight.

He has killed, I’m afraid of him .

I shouldn’t be here . I’ve come too far . This is wrong .

He will marry me. Someday!

Tignor had told her he was crazy for her. Told her he wanted to be with her. Be with . Rebecca knew what that meant.

Sex. This desire. Only through the sex was there the possibility of love. She had to be cautious of the man, she dreaded becoming pregnant like other girls she knew in Milburn, high school dropouts, some of them younger than Rebecca and already mothers. Tignor had warned her he wasn’t a man to marry.

Yet if he loved me. Then!

She knew that ugly things were said of Tignor. Even Mulingar who counted himself a friend of Tignor’s repeated rumors. He’d been married, more than once. No doubt he was married now. He had a family at Lake Champlain who knew little of his life elsewhere. He had a family in Buffalo. The remnants of families scattered through the state: his former wives mourning him and his children fatherless.

But not me. He would not leave me . I will be different .

“What is this surprise, Tignor?”

“Wouldn’t be any surprise, honey, would it? If I told you too soon.”

“Is it something to make me happy or…”

Rebecca’s voice trailed off. What was she thinking of, to hint such things to any man. That a surprise, to her, might make her unhappy.

Tignor grunted yes. He thought so.

She was wearing a peach-colored angora sweater she’d found in a wastebasket in one of the rooms at the General Washington whose stretched neck she hid with a knotted scarf, and a black wool skirt that fitted her hips snugly, and shiny black boots to mid-calf. So happy!

At the Beardstown Inn, Tignor had the use of a room.

A private room, a room-with-a-double-bed, and a bathroom.

A second-floor room available at the historic old inn for the Black Horse Brewery agent whenever he came there on business. Rebecca wondered uneasily was she meant to stay with Tignor, to sleep with him in that bed?

Tignor gave no sign. He was brusque, matter-of-fact. He left her in the room and went downstairs and would be gone more than an hour having drinks and “talking business” with the hotel manager. Rebecca used the bathroom cautiously and dried her hands not on a fresh-laundered white towel virtually identical with the towels at the General Washington but with toilet paper. She sat in a hard-cushioned chair by a drafty window, she would not stretch out on the bed, on an earthen-colored brocade bedspread that exuded a wintry chill.

My surprise , what is my surprise …

Tignor, don’t tease!

The Beardstown Inn was smaller than the General Washington, but of a comparable age. Like that hotel, it had originally been a stagecoach stop a very long time ago. The oldest parts of both hotels were their taverns, “tap rooms.” It was known that brothels-“whore houses”-were often part of these services for men.

Rebecca was made to think, shivering in a room at the Beardstown Inn: so long ago, girls and women designated as “whores,” how frightened and desperate they must have been, in the wilderness of the Chautauqua Valley. They would have been homeless, penniless. No families. No husbands to protect them. Some must have been mentally retarded. In time, they would become pregnant, they would become diseased. And yet there was something comical about the very words whore - whore house . You could not utter such vulgar words without smirking.