Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

The girl’s coat lay trampled on the floor.

“It’s over, then. Good!”

Next morning, Rebecca’s face was so bruised and swollen, and she walked so stiffly, Katy insisted on calling Amos Hrube to tell him she was sick and couldn’t work that day.

LaVerne said hotly, “We should call the police! That fucker.”

Katy said, less certainly, “Should we take you to a doctor, Rebecca? You look like hell.”

Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table pressing ice chunks, wrapped in a washcloth, against her face. Her left eye had shut, enlarged and discolored as a goiter. Her mouth was swollen to twice its size. A hand mirror lay on the table, facedown.

Rebecca thanked Katy and LaVerne and told them she was all right: it would be all right.

LaVerne said, “What if he comes back to hurt you worse? That’s what guys do, they don’t kill you the first time.”

Rebecca said no, Tignor would not be back.

LaVerne lifted the telephone from the kitchen counter, and set it onto the table beside Rebecca. “In case you need to call the police.”

Katy and LaVerne left for their jobs. Rebecca was alone in the apartment when Tignor arrived later that morning. She had heard a vehicle brake to a stop at the curb outside, and she’d heard a car door slammed shut with jarring loudness. She was feeling too light-headed to go to the window to look out.

The girls’ second-floor apartment was only three rooms. There was but a single door, opening out onto the stairway landing. Rebecca heard Tignor’s heavy footsteps ascending, and then he was rapping his knuckles on the door. “Rebecca?”

Rebecca sat very still, listening. She’d locked the door after Katy and LaVerne had left but the lock was flimsy, Tignor could kick open the door if he wished.

“Rebecca? Are you in there? Open up, it’s Tignor.”

As if the bastard needed to identify himself! Rebecca would have laughed except for the pain in her mouth.

Tignor’s voice sounded sober, raw and aggrieved. She had never heard her name uttered with such yearning. She saw the doorknob being turned, frantically.

“Go to hell, you! I don’t want you.”

“Rebecca? Let me in. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I have something to tell you.”

“No. Go away.”

But Tignor would not go away. Rebecca knew he would not.

And yet: she could not bring herself to call the police. She knew she must, but she could not. For if the police tried to arrest Tignor, he would fight them, and they would hurt him, badly. As in a dream she had already seen her lover shot in the chest, on his knees bleeding from a chest wound onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen…

Rebecca shook her vision clear. It had not happened, it had been only a dream. A dream of Jacob Schwart’s, when the Gestapo had hunted him down in the stone house in the cemetery.

To protect Tignor, Rebecca had no choice but to unlock the door.

“Hey, girl: you’re my girl, eh?”

Tignor came inside at once, elated. Rebecca smiled to see that his face, too, had been marked: his upper lip swollen, with an ugly moist scab. In his right cheek was a jagged vertical scratch from her raking nails.

Tignor stared at her: the evidence of his hands on her.

A slow pained smile, almost a look of shyness, that Rebecca bore such visible signs of what he’d done to her. “Pack your things, we’re going on a trip.”

Taken by surprise, Rebecca laughed. “”Trip‘? Where?“

“You’ll see.”

Tignor reached for her, Rebecca eluded him. She wanted to strike at him again, to slap his hands away. “You’re crazy, I’m not going anywhere with you. I have a job, damn you you know I have to work, this afternoon-”

“That’s over. You’re not going back to the hotel.”

“What? Why?” Rebecca heard herself laugh, now frightened.

“Just get your things, Rebecca. We’re leaving Milburn.”

“Why the hell d’you think I’d go anywhere with you?-damn bastard like you, a man hitting a girl, treating me with such disrespect-”

Calmly Tignor said, “That won’t happen again, Rebecca.”

There was a roaring in her ears. Her brain had gone blank, like overexposed film. Tignor was stroking her hair, that was coarse, matted. “C’mon, honey. We got to hurry, we got a little drive ahead-to Niagara Falls.”

On the kitchen table beside the squat black rotary telephone Rebecca left the hastily printed note for Katy Greb and LaVerne Tracy to discover that evening:

Dear Katy, and dear LaVerne-Goodbye I am gone to get married.

Rebecca

Mrs . Niles Tignor .

Each time she signed her new name, it seemed to her that her handwriting was altered.

“There’s enemies of mine out there, honey, they’d never approach me. But a wife, she’d be different.”

Tignor, frowning, made this pronouncement on the night of March 19,

1954, as they drank champagne in the honeymoon suite of the luxurious Hotel Niagara Falls that overlooked, through scrims of drifting mist, the fabled Horseshoe Falls. The suite was on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tignor had booked it for three nights. Rebecca shivered, but made herself laugh knowing that Tignor needed her to laugh, he’d been brooding much of the day. She came to sit on his lap, and kissed him. She was shivering, he would comfort her. In her new lace-trimmed silk dressing gown that was unlike any item of clothing Rebecca had ever seen let alone worn. Tignor grunted with satisfaction, and began to stroke her hips and thighs with hard, caressing motions of his strong hands. He liked her naked inside the dressing gown, her breasts loose, heavy as if milk-filled against his mouth. He liked to prod, to poke, to tease. He liked her to squeal when he tickled her. He liked to jam his tongue into her mouth, into her ear, into her tight little belly button, into her hot damp armpit that had never been shaved.

Rebecca did not ask what Tignor meant by his enigmatic words, for she supposed he would explain, if he meant to explain; if not, not. She had been Niles Tignor’s wife for less than twelve hours, but already she understood.

Clamped between his knees as he drove, a pint bottle of bourbon. The drive from Milburn north and east to Niagara Falls was approximately ninety miles. This landscape, layered with snow like rock strata, passed by Rebecca in a blur. When Tignor lifted the bottle to Rebecca, to drink from it, as you’d prod a child to drink from a bottle by nudging her mouth, he did not like her to hesitate, and so she swallowed the smallest sips she dared. Thinking Never say no to this man . The thought was comforting, as if a mystery had been explained.

“Tignor, my man! She’s of age, eh?”

“She is.”

“Birth certificate?”

“Lost in a fire.”

“She’s sixteen, at least?”

“Eighteen in May. She says.”

“And ain’t been c’erced, has she? Looks like both of you been in a car crash’r somethin.”

C’erced Rebecca heard as cursed . No idea what this squat bald man with tufted eyebrows, said by Tignor to be a trusted acquaintance, and a justice of the peace who could marry them, was speaking of.

Tignor responded with dignity: nobody was being c’erced . Not the girl, and not him.

“Well! See what we can do, man.”

Strange that the office of a justice of the peace was in a private house, small brick bungalow on a residential street, Niagara Falls nowhere near the Falls. And that his wife-“Mrs. Mack”-would be the sole witness to the wedding.

Tignor steadied her, she’d had to be helped into the house for bourbon on an empty stomach had made her legs weak as melted licorice. The vision in her left eye, that was what’s known as a shiner , was gauzy. Her swollen mouth throbbed not with ordinary pain but with a wild hunger to be kissed.