Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

He ate the meals Rebecca nervously prepared for him, from cookbook recipes. Tignor was easy to please: meat, meat, meat! And always potatoes: mashed, oven-roasted, boiled. In his spending moods he took her to Chautauqua Falls to buy supplies. “It’s our honeymoon, kid. A little delayed.” The old house was partly furnished but a new gas stove was badly needed, a refrigerator to replace the smelly old icebox, a new mattress for their bed, curtains and carpets. And baby things: bassinet, stroller, baby-bath. “One of those rubber-things where you pour the water in, you heat the water and pour it in, and there’s a little hose, like, and it drains out the bottom. And it’s on wheels.”

Rebecca laughed and nudged Tignor’s ribs. “You’ve been a daddy before, haven’t you? How many times?” She spoke so playfully, not at all accusingly, Tignor could hardly take offense.

Ruefully Tignor said, “Honey, it’s always for the first time. Everything that matters is.”

This remark so struck Rebecca, she wanted to cry. It was love’s perfect answer.

He won’t leave me, then . He will stay .

For some time Tignor behaved as if the run-down farmhouse was home to him, maybe it was true as he’d said he had grown tired of traveling. Maybe he’d grown tired of cutthroat competition. Though even when Tignor was officially home he was often away on what he called day trips. Driving out in the morning, returning after dark. Rebecca came to wonder if her husband was still an agent for the Black Horse Brewery? He was a man of secrets, like one of those fires that smolder underground for weeks, months, years. She wanted to think that one day he would surprise her with a house he’d bought for them, their own house in town. Tignor was a big battered-face moon in the night sky, you saw only the brightly lighted part, glaring like a coin, but you knew that there was another, dark and secret side. The two sides of the pockmarked moon were simultaneous yet you wanted to think, like a child, that there was only the light.

He means to leave me .

No: he loves me . He has promised .

Since Rebecca’s miscarriage, and the fever she’d had for days afterward, the feeling between her and Tignor had changed, subtly. Tignor was not so jovial any longer, so loud-laughing. Not so likely to shove her, shake her. Rarely did he touch her except when they were in bed. She saw him regarding her with narrowed eyes. As if she was a riddle to him, and he didn’t like riddles. He was repentant, and yet still he was angry. For Tignor was not a man to forget anger.

For Rebecca had caused the miscarriage, with her reckless behavior. Talking about Tignor to a chambermaid! Helping a chambermaid make up the room! When she was Mrs. Niles Tignor, and should have had dignity.

In her loneliness on the Poor Farm Road she would come to think that there must have been a logic to it, her behavior. In the way that, as a girl, she’d stayed away from the old stone house in the cemetery and so had saved herself from what might have been done to her on that last day. Couldn’t have known what she was doing and yet-a part of her, with the cunning of a trapped creature gnawing at its own leg to save itself, had known.

For Niles, Jr. would be born. The other (a girl? in her dreams, a girl) had been sacrificed, that their son would be born.

Dr. Rice explained: a miscarriage is often “nature’s way of correcting a mistake.” For instance, a “malforming” fetus.

A blessing in disguise, sometimes.

Dr. Rice explained: “Of course, the pregnant woman can experience grief almost as if she has lost an actual baby. And grief can linger, into the start of a new pregnancy.”

Grief! Rebecca wanted to laugh at the know-it-all doctor, an obstetrician, in angry dislike.

Dr. Rice of Chautauqua Falls. Examining Rebecca like a slab of meat on his examination table, prissy yet crude, fussy yet hurting her with his damn rubber-gloved hands and cold metal instruments like ice picks, she’d had to bite her lip to keep from screaming and kicking him in the belly. Yet afterward in his office, when Rebecca was dressed again, and trying to regain her composure, he offended her worse by telling her this crap.

“Doctor, I’m not ”grieving‘! I sure am not. I’m not the kind of woman to grieve over the past. See, I look forward to the future like my husband Tignor does. If this new baby is healthy and gets born-that’s all we care about, doctor.“

Dr. Rice blinked at Rebecca. Had he underestimated Mrs. Niles Tignor, mistaking her for some wishy-washy weepy girl? Quickly saying, “That’s a very wise philosophy, Mrs. Tignor. I wish that more of my patients were so wise.”

Home! By the time Niles, Jr. was born, in late November 1956, Rebecca would come to love it.

“It’s beautiful, Tignor. It will be special to us.”

She’d uttered these words more than once. Like words of a love song, to make Tignor smile and maybe hug her.

The old Wertenbacher place the farmhouse was called, locally. About two miles north of Chautauqua Falls in a hilly area of small farms, grazing land, open fields and marshes. It was at the western edge of the Chautauqua Mountains, in the foothills. By chance (Rebecca did not believe in coincidences, she believed in pure chance) Chautauqua Falls was an old canal town like Milburn, eighty miles west of Milburn. Unlike Milburn, it had become a small city: its population was 16,800. It was an industrial city with factories, clothing and canning mills on the Chautauqua River. There was canal traffic. The largest employer was Union Carbide, that had expanded its facilities in the boom years 1955 and 1956. One day, Rebecca would work the assembly line at Niagara Tubing. But it was the countryside outside Chautauqua Falls to which Tignor brought her, a crossroads settlement called Four Corners. Here at the juncture of the Poor Farm Road and the Stuyvesant Road were a small post office, a coal depot, a granary, Ike’s Food Store with a large Sealtest sign in its window, Meltzer’s Gas & Auto Repair. There was a two-room schoolhouse on the grounds of the former poor farm. There was a volunteer firemen’s station. There was a clapboard Methodist church and a cemetery behind the church. Walking sometimes past this church Rebecca heard singing inside, and felt a pang of loss.

Edna Meltzer attended this church and several times invited Rebecca to come with her. “There’s a joyful feeling in that church, Rebecca! You smile just stepping inside.”

Rebecca murmured vaguely she would like that, maybe. Someday.

“When your baby is born? You’ll want it baptized.”

Rebecca murmured vaguely that would depend upon what the baby’s father wanted.

“Tignor, he’s religious, is he? Nah!”

Mrs. Meltzer surprised Rebecca, the familiar way she laughed. As if Tignor was well known to her. Rebecca frowned, uneasy.

“Your own people, Rebecca: what kind of religion were they?”

Mrs. Meltzer put this question to Rebecca in a pleasant, casual manner as if she’d only just thought of it. She seemed wholly unconscious of were .

Why were and not are ? Rebecca wondered.

For a long moment she could not think how to answer this question. And there was the woman waiting for her, Tignor had warned her against.

They were in Ike’s. Rebecca was just leaving, Mrs. Meltzer was just entering. It was mid-September, dry and very warm. Tignor was away in Lake Shaheen looking at “waterfront property.” Rebecca was seven months’ pregnant and did not want to estimate how many pounds she’d gained beyond twenty. She was all belly, that hummed and quivered with life. Her brain had ceased to function significantly, like a broken radio. Her head was empty as an icebox tossed away in a dump.