Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

This room, Rebecca saw, with a critical eye, had been flawlessly made up. The bed, that was just slightly higher than beds at the General Washington, with a plainer headboard and old-fashioned bedposts, was perfectly made. The ugly velvet drapes were arranged just so. A faint smell of cleanser prevailed. And a deeper smell of age, moldering plaster. The carpet was nearly threadbare in places and the walls were papered in a floral print with an off-white background that looked discolored. The ceiling was waterstained in a way to make you think of long-legged spiders scuttling overhead. The tall, gaunt window beside her, framed by heavy velvet drapes, overlooked a snowy waste of a side yard crisscrossed with numberless dog tracks, and now the sun was setting, these tracks were darkening like mysterious markings in code.

Tignor returned, in a heightened mood. His pale eyes lit upon Rebecca, seeing she had not removed her coat, nor even unbuttoned it, and he laughed, telling her to take it off: “You look like somebody waiting for a bus, girl. We’re not leaving yet. We’re having supper here, for sure. Relax.” When Rebecca stood, and fumbled with the cloth-covered buttons, Tignor tugged at them, and a button flew off, rolling across the carpet in a way that would have made Rebecca laugh at another time.

Tignor pulled off her coat, and tossed it carelessly onto a chair atop his own coat he’d tossed there earlier. He smiled at her with his big glistening teeth, stroked her shoulders and hair and kissed her wetly on the mouth. His mouth seemed to be swallowing hers the way a snake would swallow its small paralyzed prey. His tongue tasted of whiskey, and cigarette smoke, yet was oddly cool. Rebecca pushed from him and began to shiver uncontrollably.

“Tignor, I can’t. I can’t stay here. Do you expect me to stay here tonight? Is this the surprise? I can’t, see I don’t have my things. I don’t have a, a change of clothes. I have to work tomorrow, Tignor. By seven A.M. I have to be at the hotel. They will fire me if…”

Tignor let her chatter nervously. He smiled at her, bemused.

“No fuckers are gonna fire you , sweetheart. Take my word.”

What did this mean? Rebecca was feeling faint.

“I can’t stay the night. I…”

“I didn’t say we were staying the night. I just said I have this room. It’s here.”

He spoke like a father reproving a small willful child. Rebecca felt the sting, she could not bear to be rebuked.

Tignor went to use the bathroom not shutting the door. Rebecca pressed her hands over her ears not wanting to hear the zestful splash of his urine that went on, and on. She hoped he had not splashed up onto the toilet seat or onto the tile wall. Not that!

She would clean it away, if he had. She would not leave such evidence behind for the chambermaid to clean.

Just as Tignor returned to the room, zipping up his trousers, whistling, there was a cautious knock at the door: he’d ordered a bottle of bourbon, two glasses, a bowl of mixed nuts. The bourbon Tignor ceremoniously poured into glasses for Rebecca and himself insisting: “It’s no good a man drinking alone, Rebecca. That’s my girl!”

Tignor clicked his glass against Rebecca’s, and they drank. The bourbon was liquid flame going down Rebecca’s throat.

“First time I saw you, girl. I knew.”

He had never before alluded to their first encounter. Even now, it wasn’t clear what Tignor meant, and Rebecca knew she must not question him. A man who chose his words carefully, and yet awkwardly, Tignor would not wish to be interrupted.

“See, you’re a beautiful girl. I saw that right away. In your maid-uniform, and ugly flat shoes, I saw. Only you need to smile more, honey. You go around looking like you’re thinking your own thoughts, and they sure ain’t making you happy.” Tignor leaned foward and kissed Rebecca on the mouth, lightly. He was smiling at her, his eyes were of the same pale metallic hue as his hair, and he was breathing quickly.

Rebecca tried to smile. Rebecca smiled.

“That’s better, honey. That’s a whole lot better.”

Rebecca was seated on the old-fashioned, hard-cushioned chair, that Tignor had dragged close to the bed, and Tignor was seated on the edge of the bed, pleasantly heated, giving off an aroma of male sweat, male desire, bourbon-and-cigarette-smoke, looming over Rebecca. She was thinking that she was drawn to Niles Tignor because of his size, he was a man to make a not-small girl like herself feel precious as a doll.

Out of his trouser pocket Tignor pulled a handful of loose dollar bills. He tossed them onto the bed beside him, watching Rebecca closely. Like a card trick, this was. “For you, Gypsy-girl.”

Shocked, Rebecca stared at the fluttering bills. She could not believe what she was seeing.

“…for me? But why…”

Several of the bills were ten-dollar bills. One was a twenty. Others were five-dollar bills, one-dollar bills. And there came another twenty. In all, there might have been twenty bills.

Tignor laughed at the expression in Rebecca’s face.

“Told you there was a surprise waiting in Beardstown, didn’t I?”

“But…why?”

Rebecca was trying again to smile. She would recall how important it had seemed to her, at this moment, as at the crucial moment when her father Jacob Schwart was trying to maneuver the shotgun around to fire at her, to smile.

Tignor said, expansively, “‘Cause somebody is thinking of you, I guess. Feels guilty about you maybe.”

“Tignor, I don’t understand.”

“Baby, I was up in Quebec last week. In Montreal on business. Saw your brother there.”

“My brother? Which brother?”

Tignor paused as if he hadn’t known that Rebecca had two brothers.

“Herschel.”

“Herschel!”

Rebecca was stunned. She had not heard her brother’s name spoken in a very long time and had come half-consciously to think that Herschel might be dead.

“Herschel sent this money for you, see. ”Cause he ain’t coming back to the States, ever. They’d arrest him at the border. It ain’t a helluva lot of money but he wants you to have it, Rebecca. So I told him I’d give it to you.“

It did not occur to Rebecca to doubt any of this. Tignor spoke so persuasively, it was always easier to give in than to doubt him.

“But-how is Herschel? Is he all right?”

“Looked all right to me. But like I said, he ain’t gonna come back to the States. One day, maybe you can see him in Canada. Might be we could go together.”

Anxiously Rebecca asked what was Herschel doing? how was he getting along? was he working? and Tignor shrugged affably, his pale eyes becoming evasive. “Must be working, he’s sending you this money.”

Rebecca persisted, “Why doesn’t Herschel call me, if he’s thinking of me? You told him I work at the General Washington, did you? And you have my telephone number, did you give it to him? He could call me, then.”

“Sure.”

Rebecca stared at the bills scattered on the bed. She was reluctant to touch them for what would that mean? What did any of this mean? She could not bear to take up the bills, to count them.

“Herschel went away and left me, I hated him for a long time.”

Her words sounded so harsh. Tignor frowned, uncertain.

“I’m not so sure I will see Herschel again. He might be moving on,” he said.

“Moving on-where?”

“Somewhere out west. What they call ”prairie provinces.“ There’s jobs opening up in Canada.”

Rebecca was trying to think. The bourbon had gone swiftly to her head, her thoughts came to her in slow floating amber-tinted shapes like clouds. Yet she was anxious, for something was wrong here. And she should not be here, in the Beardstown Inn with Niles Tignor.