The Gravedigger’S Daughter (13 page)

Ma worked herself up into a passion, speaking at such length. Never, at other times, did Ma speak at such length. Warning too that Rebecca should not make the mistake of following her brothers, they were boys and they’d run off and leave her, you’re a
girl
.

Rebecca came to see that it was like a wound. Being a
girl
.

School! It was the great event of Rebecca’s young life.

Her mother had bitterly opposed her going. Her mother had tried to keep her home until the very last day. For Rebecca had to walk by herself a half-mile along the Quarry Road before being joined by other children; and, in any case, Ma did not trust these other children for they lived in a run-down shack close by the town dump.

Yet Ma showed no interest in Rebecca’s school, apart from these theoretical dangers. It was as if, when the dangers failed to materialize, she was scornful of school as she was of Milburn and their neighbors. Of course, she would not visit the school as other parents did. (Nor would Jacob Schwart visit the school.) Neither of Rebecca’s parents would do more than glance at Rebecca’s report cards. It would be years before Rebecca realized that her mother could not read English, and so she disdained all printed materials: she was capable of tossing out Rebecca’s schoolbooks with her husband’s old newspapers and magazines they meant so little to her. She paused only to look at photographs, occasionally. Once, Rebecca saw her in the kitchen staring at a photography feature in
Life
of fallen, bloodied, part-naked men, women, and children, sprawled amid rubble in some far-off city. When Rebecca came closer to peer at the caption, her mother jerked the magazine away and slapped Rebecca’s face with it.

“No. It is not for a girl’s eyes.
Bad
.”

And once I saw her, who had expressed such a terror of snakes, kill a snake with a hoe
.
We were hanging clothes on the line and a copperhead came out from under the house, in the grass about twelve inches from my feet and Ma said nothing but went for the hoe that was leaning against the side of the house and chopped at the snake chopped and chopped wildly at it until the snake was dead, bleeding and mangled
.

At the Milburn Elementary School, Rebecca’s first grade teacher was Miss Lutter who identified herself on the first day of school as a Christian. Miss Lutter was a thin woman with dust-colored hair and teeth that poked through her tight-pursed lips when she smiled. She told Rebecca and the others that they had souls that were “little flames” inside their bodies, in the area of their hearts; these little flames would never go out, unlike ordinary fire.

Rebecca, who had never heard such a thing before, knew at once that this must be so.

For: the coal-burning stove and the wood-burning stove in the Schwarts’ house were all that kept the house from freezing in the bitter cold of winter, so it was that the flames inside a person kept him or her from freezing, too. Almost, Rebecca could see the flames inside her father and mother, behind their eyes; yet she knew she must not speak of this to them. For any authority outside the family would enrage them.

Any belief of
those others
told to their children would enrage them.

And there is a fire in me, too
.

This revelation made Rebecca so happy, she wished there was her sister Freyda to share it with.

“‘Rebecca Esther Schwart.’”

He was making fun of her, was he? Her name? Or�who she was?

For she felt its impact, here amid strangers. How harsh the final blunt syllable
Schwart
struck the ear like the flat of a shovel wielded as a weapon.

“‘Rebecca’�are you here?”

Miss Lutter nudged her. She woke from her trance, rose and tremulously made her way into the aisle, and up to the lighted stage. A roaring of blood in her ears mingled with the applause of the audience�so loud! Like flames crackling. Rows of strangers,
those others
Pa would disdain them, yet smiling at her as vigorously they clapped their hands as if for these fleeting seconds in their lives the dark-haired gypsy-looking Schwart girl, the gravedigger’s daughter, wasn’t a figure to be pitied.

“‘Rebecca’?�congratulations.”

She was too frightened to murmur Thank you. She could not clearly see the face of the man who was addressing her, glittery glasses, a striped necktie, she’d been told his name and who he was and of course she’d forgotten. Desperately she reached for whatever-it-was the man was handing her�a hefty book, a dictionary�there was a tittering of amusement in the audience when, not expecting the book to be so heavy, Rebecca nearly dropped it. The glittery-glasses man laughed and caught the book�“Whoops, Little Miss!”�to hand to her more securely and in that instant she saw him staring at her curiously, as if memorizing her
the Schwart girl the gravedigger’s daughter poor child sent to school looking like a savage
.

In a haze of embarrassment and confusion Rebecca stumbled back off stage and returned to her row, and to her seat, where Miss Lutter was smiling at her, as the next name was being called.

It was April 1946. She was ten years old, and a winner of the Milburn School Township Spelling Bee. She had represented her grammar school, that was District #3. For weeks she had memorized lists of words. Such words as
profligate
,
precipitant
,
precipitate
,
epithet
,
dysphoria
,
expurgate
,
quotidian
,
lapidarian
,
lacrymose
,
stationary
,
stationery
,
unparalleled
,
inchoate
,
heinous
,
dais
,
dour
,
err
,
harass
,
impious
,
forte
,
slough
,
prophecy
,
prophesy
,
forgo
,
forego
,
resuscitate
,
genealogy
,
sacrilegious
,
braggadocio
,
gnomic
,
tortuous
,
fortuitous
,
contingency
,
autarky
,
temerarious
,
encomium
. Like other students who’d memorized these word-spellings Rebecca had only the dimmest idea of what they meant. They were mysterious sounds, syllables that might as readily have been in a foreign language as in the language known as English. A game it was, learning-to-spell. Yet it was a game that made you nervous, twitchy and sweaty through the night. Miss Lutter had insisted that Rebecca could compete with older students in the junior high school and so out of a terror of failing and disappointing her teacher Rebecca had memorized the words and Rebecca had won over the other children and now Miss Lutter was proud of her, and squeezing her icy hand; and the roaring in her ears began to subside.

Except she would remember
looking for them in the audience at the rear of the high school auditorium though knowing they would not come of course
.
Not her mother Anna Schwart, not her father Jacob Schwart
.
Never would they have come to this public place to see their daughter honored
. After the ceremony making her way like a furtive animal through the foyer of the high school, where a “reception” was being held for the spelling bee winners, their relatives and teachers and other adults. She was awkward and self-conscious among them, a solitary child without a family. Her face smarted with hurt, shame. Yet she knew how her parents would disdain this place and these people.

Those others
you must never trust, our enemies.

“Rebecca?”�her name was being called but amid the confusion of voices and laughter Rebecca could not be expected to hear. She was headed for a side door marked exit.

“Rebecca Schwart? Please come over here.”

Someone clutched at her. She was surrounded by adults. A woman with a bronze helmet-head and staring eyes. And there was the man with the glittery glasses and striped necktie, principal of Milburn High School, who gripped Rebecca firmly by the elbow and led her to a group of students and adults being photographed for the
Milburn Weekly Journal
and the
Chautauqua Valley Gazette
. Rebecca, the youngest and smallest of the spelling bee winners, was made to stand in front, center. She was told to smile, and so she smiled. Cameras flashed. Her startled squinting smile she held, the cameras flashed again. Hearing and not-hearing a murmured conversation not quite out of earshot.

“That Schwart girl�where are her parents?”

“Not here.”

“For God’s sake why not?”

“They just aren’t.”

And then Rebecca was released, and headed for the exit. From somewhere behind her she heard Miss Lutter calling�“Rebecca, don’t you need a ride home?”�but this time she didn’t turn back.

She had not planned to show the dictionary to them. Not to anyone in the family. She’d told her father about the spelling bee and the awards ceremony and he’d scarcely listened, nor had her mother listened. And now, she would hide the dictionary beneath her bed knowing how they would scorn it.

And there was the danger that one of them might toss it into the stove.

A long time ago Jacob Schwart had hoped that his sons would do well in school but neither Herschel nor Gus had done well and so he had become indifferent to the schooling of his children, he was contemptuous of Rebecca’s primer school books leafing through them sometimes saying they were fairy tales, trash. Newspapers and magazines he brought home he was likely to read thoroughly, with a perverse ardor, yet these too he dismissed as trash. Since the war had ended he no longer listened to the radio after supper yet he did not wish others in the family to listen to it. “Words are lies.” This pronouncement he made often, with a jocular screwing-up of his face. If he was chewing tobacco, he spat.

For so much since the war was a joke to him. But you could not always know what would be a joke, and what would not. What would make him laugh so hard his laughter shaded into wheezing coughing spasms, or what would
set Pa off
.

Something in the newspapers, maybe.

Shaking the front page of the paper, face contorted in derision and outrage. Slamming his fist against the paper flattening it onto the oilcloth cover of the kitchen table. Jacob Schwart had a particular loathing for the sleek-black-haired black-mustached little-man governor of New York State, his mouth worked in speechless fury seeing the governor’s photograph. Why exactly, no one in the family knew. Jacob Schwart detested Republicans, yes but Jacob Schwart detested F.D.R. and F.D.R. was a Democrat, wasn’t he. Rebecca tried to keep these names straight. What meant so much to Pa should mean something to her, too.

Those others
.
Our enemies
.
We are dirt to them, to scrape off their shoes
.

“What the hell’s this?
You?
”

It was a shock, Pa tossing the
Milburn Weekly
onto the table, flattening it with his fist and confronting his daughter.

He was incensed, insulted. Rebecca had rarely seen him so upset. For there was
Rebecca Esther Schwart of Milburn District #3
, in a group photograph on the front page of the paper.
Spelling Bee Winners
.
Awards Ceremony at Milburn High
. Pa yanked Rebecca to the table, to stare at herself, a diminutive and startled image of herself, amid the gathering of smiling strangers. She had forgotten the occasion, she could not have anticipated that anything real would come of the flashbulbs and the jocular, jokey
Smile, please!
And now her father was demanding to know what was this! what this meant! Saying, wiping at his mouth, “
I
never knew anything about this, did I? God damn to hell, I don’t like any child of mine acting behind my back.”

Rebecca stammered saying she had told him, she had tried to tell him, but Pa continued to rage. He was one whose rage fed on itself, ecstatic. He wrenched the newspaper toward the light, at differing angles, to see the incriminating front page more clearly. Finally turning to Rebecca, disbelieving, “It’s you, huh! God damn to hell. Behind my back, my daughter.”

“I t-told you about it, Pa. The spelling bee.”

“‘Spelling’�what?”

“‘Spelling bee.’ Words you spell. In school.”

“‘Words’ I tell you words: bullshit. Every word that has ever been uttered by mankind is bullshit.”

Herschel and Gus, drawn by the commotion, examined the scandalous front-page photograph and article, amazed. Gus said it was good news wasn’t it?

Pa said, sputtering, “Bring the damn ‘prize’ out, I want to see this damn ‘prize’ for myself. Fast!”

Rebecca ran to get the dictionary where she’d hidden it. Beneath her bed. Shame-shame, she’d known it would get her into trouble, why she’d hidden the dictionary
beneath her bed
.

As if anything could be hidden from Jacob Schwart. As if any secret would not be exposed, like soiled underwear or bedclothes, in time.

Rebecca’s face was very warm, her eyes stung with tears. (Where was Ma? Why wasn’t Ma here, to intercede? Was Ma hiding away in the bedroom from Pa’s raised voice?)

Rebecca brought the
Webster’s Dictionary
to her father, she would obey him even as she feared and hated him. Seeming to know beforehand, with a child’s resignation to fate, as a doomed animal bares its throat to a predator, that he would toss the dictionary into the stove with a curse.

Almost, Rebecca would remember he’d done this. Tossed her dictionary into the stove, and laughed.

In fact, Pa did not. He took the heavy book from her, and laid it on the table, suddenly quieter, as if intimidated. Such a heavy book, and so obviously expensive!

His mind would calculate rapidly what a book this size might cost: five dollars? Six?

Gilt letters on the spine and cover. Marbleized endpapers. Almost two thousand pages.

With a flourish Pa opened the front cover, and saw the bookplate:

SPELLING CHAMPION MILBURN DISTRICT #3
*** 1946 ***
REBECCA ESHTER SCHWART

Immediately Pa saw the misspelling, he laughed harshly, and was triumphant. “Eh, you see? They are insulting you�‘Eshter.’ They are insulting us. This is no accident, this is calculated. Spelling the child’s name wrong to insult who named her.” Pa showed the bookplate to Herschel, who peered at it, unable to read. In frustration he poked the dictionary as you’d poke a snake with a stick, saying, “Jezuz. Keep the fuckin thing from me, I’m
lergic
.” This provoked Pa to laugh heartily, he had a weakness for his older son’s crude humor.

Gus objected. “God damn, Hersch’l, somebody in this family got something for once, I think it’s damn
nice
.” Gus would have liked to say more, but Pa and Herschel ridiculed him.

Pa shut the dictionary. Now was the moment, Rebecca knew, when he would lean over with a grunt, and open the stove door, and toss the dictionary inside…

Instead, Pa said, brooding, “God damn I don’t like for any child of Jacob Schwart sneaking behind my back like a weasel. In this hellhole where everybody’s watching us, you can be sure. Damn picture in the paper for everybody to see. Next time…”

Desperately Rebecca said, “I won’t, Pa! I won’t do it again.”

Seeing with relief that her father seemed to be losing interest in the subject, as he often did when no one opposed him. Suddenly he was bored, and shoved the dictionary aside.

“Take the damn thing, just don’t let me see it again.”

Rebecca snatched up the heavy book. Pa and her brothers had to laugh at her, she was so desperate, and so clumsy nearly dropping the book on herself.

She hurried back to her bed. She would hide it again, beneath her bed.

Hearing behind her Jacob Schwart haranguing his sons: “What are words, words are bullshit and lies, lies! You’ll learn.”

There came Herschel’s insolent laugh.

“So tell us somethin that ain’t bullshit, Pa, you’re the fuckin
jeen-yus
, eh?”