Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

“There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you, now.”

“But Dad-dy-”

“No. There is no Dad-dy. No more. Only just Mommy.”

She laughed, she kissed the anxious child. She would kiss away his fears. Seeing that she laughed, he would laugh, in childish imitation. Wishing to please Mommy and to be kissed by Mommy, he would quickly learn.

Never again would she utter aloud the name of the man who had masqueraded as her husband! He had tricked her into believing that they were married, in Niagara Falls. It had been her stupidity that tricked her, she would think no more of it. The man was dead now, his name erased from memory.

The child’s name, that was the father’s. A diminutive of the father’s. A curious name, that made others smile quizzically. She would never call him by that name again. She must re-name the child, that the break with the father would be complete.

Leaving Chautauqua Falls she’d driven the stolen Pontiac on back roads north and east through the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains and into and past the rolling farmland of the Finger Lakes region and at last into the Mohawk Valley where the river moved swift and sullen and steel-colored beneath shifting columns of mist. She had not dared to stop anywhere she and the child might be recognized and so she pushed on, pain-wracked and exhausted. In a shallow rocky stream beside one of the roads she washed the child and herself, tried to clean their wounds. She kissed the child repeatedly, overcome with gratitude that he hadn’t been seriously injured; at least, she didn’t believe he had been seriously injured. His small supple bones appeared to be intact, his skull that had seemed so delicate to his anxious mother, the eggshell-skull of infancy, was in fact tough and resilient and had not been cracked by the raging man.

Grateful too that the child couldn’t see his own swollen and blackened eyes, his distended scabby upper lip, his blood-edged nostrils. And that the child was so impressionable, he would take his emotional cues from her: “We got away! We got away! Nobody will ever find us, we got away!”

Strange how happy Rebecca was becoming, as the Poor Farm Road swiftly receded into the past.

Strange how jubilant she felt, despite her swollen face and aches in all her bones.

Leaning over to kiss and hug the child. Blow in his ear and whisper nonsense to make him laugh.

In cornfields they hid from the road and relieved themselves like animals. Afterward running and hiding from each other, shrieking with laughter.

“Mom-my! Mom-my where are you!”

Rebecca came up behind him, closed her arms about him in a swoon of happiness, possessiveness. She had saved her son, and she had saved herself. She would see that her life, though mauled and shaken as if in the jaws of a great beast, was blessed.

The child’s true name came to her then: “”Zacharias.“ A name from the Bible.”

She was so very happy. She was inspired. She would abandon the stolen car in Rome, an aging city beyond Oneida Lake of about half the size of Chautauqua Falls. This was a city that meant nothing to her except the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had business dealings there, he’d spoken of Rome often. She would leave the car there to confound him, as a riddle.

Parked the car, gas tank near-empty, near the Greyhound bus station. He will reason that we are traveling east. He will never find us .

She reversed the course of their flight. At the Greyhound station she bought two adult tickets to Port Oriskany, 250 miles back west.

Adult tickets in case the ticket seller was queried about a fleeing mother and her child.

Neither she nor the child had ever ridden on a bus before. The Greyhound was massive! The experience was exhilarating, an adventure. Nothing to do on a bus but stare out the window at the landscape: rapidly passing in the foreground beside the highway, slowly passing at the horizon. Though she was very tired and her bones ached yet she found herself smiling. The child lay sleeping beside her, snug and warm. She stroked his silky hair, she pressed her cool fingers against his swollen face.

Will you take my card at least .

If you should wish to contact me .

Accept from me your legacy. Hazel Jones .

“”Dr. Hendricks’ is the name. “Byron Hendricks, M.D.”“

The uniformed man, very dark skinned, with a narrow mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, regarded her with surprise.

“Fourth floor, ma’am. Except I don’t b’lieve he is there.”

Rebecca had not thought of this possibility. It had seemed to her since that evening on the canal towpath that the man in the panama hat had so sought her, of course he was awaiting her.

Rebecca stared at the wall directory. Wigner Professional Building. There was HENDRICKS, B.K. SUITE 414.

The child Zacharias was prowling about the ornate, high-ceilinged foyer of the Wigner Building, inquisitive and restless. Newly named, in this new city Port Oriskany beside an enormous slate-blue lake, he seemed subtly altered, no longer shy but frankly curious, staring rudely at well-dressed strangers as they pushed through the revolving doors entering from busy Owego Avenue. Until now he’d been a country boy, the only adults he’d seen had dressed and behaved very differently than these adults.

When he wasn’t staring at strangers rushing past him he was stooping to examine the polished ebony marble beneath his feet, so unlike any floor he’d ever walked on.

A dark mirror! Inside which, beneath his feet, the ghostly reflection of a boy whose face he could not see moved jerkily.

“Zack, come here with Mommy. We’re going up in an elevator .”

He laughed, the name Zack was so strange to him, like an unexpected pinch you didn’t know was meant to be playful or hurtful.

Zacharias meant blessed, his mother had told him. Already he was going for his first elevator ride. Though he still limped from what the drunken man had done to him, and his small pale face looked as if it had been used as a punching bag, he knew he was entering a world of unpredictable surprises, adventures.

The uniformed man had entered the elevator and taken his position at the controls. He said, “Ma’am, I can take you to Dr. Hendricks’s office. But like I say, I don’t b’lieve he is there. I ain’t seen any of ‘em for some time.”

It was as if Rebecca hadn’t heard this. In the elevator she gripped the child’s small-boned hand. A hot dry hand. She hoped that he wasn’t feverish, she had no time for such foolishness now. In Port Oriskany, about to see Byron Hendricks! He’d expressed surprise that Hazel Jones was married, what would he think that Hazel Jones had a child? Rebecca was feeling uncertain, confused. Maybe this was a mistake.

Her lips moved. She might have been talking to herself.

“Dr. Hendricks has to be there. He gave me his card only a few days ago. He’s expecting me, I think.”

“Ma’am, you want I should wait for you? Case you comin‘ right back down?”

The uniformed man loomed over her. She had to wonder if he was teasing her, that she might become shaken, tearful; and he might comfort her. Yet he appeared to be sincere. He was wearing white gloves to operate the elevator. She smelled his hair pomade. She had never been in such proximity to a Negro man before, and she had never been in a position of needing help from a Negro man before. At the General Washington Hotel the “Negro help” had mostly kept to themselves.

“No. That isn’t necessary. Thank you.”

The uniformed man stopped the elevator at the fourth floor and opened the door with a flourish. Quickly Rebecca stepped out into the corridor, pulling the child with her.