The Gravedigger’S Daughter (15 page)

Everybody staring at her. Even her friends, the girls she believed to be her friends, staring in resentment.

“Rebecca? You will begin.”

What a nightmare! For Rebecca, who was one of the better students, was always self-conscious when any teacher singled her out. And the story was so slow, so tortuous, its sentences lengthy, words like snarls�
apparition�cognomen
�
enraptured
�
superstitious
�
supernumerary
. When Rebecca mispronounced a word, and Mrs. Krause prissily corrected her, the other students laughed. When Rebecca pronounced such silly names as “Ichabod Crane”�“Brom Bones”�“Baltus Van Tassel”�“Hans Van Ripper”�they laughed. Of the thirty students in the classroom perhaps five or six were trying to make sense of the story, listening quietly; the others were restless, mirthful. The boy who sat behind Rebecca jiggled her desk, that was attached to his. A wad of something struck her between the shoulder blades.
Gravedigger! Jew-gravedigger!

“Rebecca? Please continue.”

She’d stopped, and lost her place. Mrs. Krause was annoyed, and beginning to be disappointed.

What was a Jew, Rebecca knew not to ask. Her father had forbidden them to ask.

She couldn’t remember why. It had something to do with Gus.

I am not
Rebecca thought.
I am not that
.

In a haze of embarrassment and misery she stumbled through the story. Seeing again the vandalized cemetery of that morning, the smashed pumpkins and the noisy wide-winged crows flapping up in alarm as Herschel clapped his hands and shouted at them. She saw the ugly marks that had so frightened her father.

Felt his fingers closing on her upper arm. She knew the bruises had formed, she hadn’t yet wanted to see.

It had been nice of her brothers to protest, when Pa grabbed her like that. Indoors, when their father was mean to her, or made a threatening gesture, it was likely to be Ma who would mutter or make a little warning cry, not words exactly, for Anna Schwart and her husband rarely spoke to each other in the presence of their children, but a sound, an uplifted hand, a gesture to dissuade him.

A gesture to signify
I see you, I am watching
.

A gesture to signify
I will protect her, my daughter
.

How she hated stupid old ugly old Ichabod Crane who reminded her of Jacob Schwart! She liked it that handsome dashing Brom Bones threw the pumpkin-head at Ichabod, and scared him out of Sleepy Hollow forever. Maybe Ichabod even drowned in the brook…That would serve him right, Rebecca thought, for being so pompous and freaky.

By the time she finished reading “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Rebecca was dazed and exhausted as if she’d been crawling on her hands and knees for hours. She hated Mrs. Krause, never would she smile at Mrs. Krause again. Never would she look forward to coming to school again. Her voice was hoarse and fading as the very voice of Ichabod Crane’s ghost�“‘at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.’”

“We are not Nazis! Do you think that we are Nazis?
We are not
. We came to this country twelve years ago. The war is over. The Germans are defeated. We have nothing to do with Nazis.
We are Americans like you
.”

It would be told and retold and laughed over in Milburn how frenzied Jacob Schwart was on that Hallowe’en morning. How, limping badly, he’d hiked up the road to the Esso station where he made telephone calls to the Chautauqua County sheriff’s office and to the Milburn Township Office reporting the Devil’s Night damage at the cemetery, and insisting that “authorities” come to investigate.

Jacob Schwart then hiked back home where he ignored his wife’s pleas to come inside the house, instead he waited at the entrance gates, pacing in the road in a lightly falling freezing rain, until at last, around noon, two Chautauqua County deputies arrived in a police cruiser. These were men who knew Jacob Schwart, or knew of him; their manner with him was familiar, bemused. “Mr. Schwarzz, what seems to be your trouble?”

“You can see! If you are not blind, you can see!”

Not only had Jacob Schwart’s truck tires been slashed, damage had been done to the truck’s motor. He was desperate, he would need a replacement immediately! The truck was owned by the Township, not by him, the Township must replace it immediately! He had not the money to buy a vehicle himself.

The truck was the Township’s responsibility, the deputies told him. The sheriff’s office had nothing to do with the Township.

Jacob Schwart told them that he and his sons could clean up most of the damage in the cemetery, but how to remove tar! How to remove tar! “The criminals who have done this, they are the ones to remove it. They must be arrested, and made to remove it. You will find them, eh? You will arrest them? ‘Destruction of property’�eh? It is a serious crime, yes?”

The deputies listened to Jacob Schwart with neutral expressions. They were polite, but clearly not very interested in his complaints. They made a show of examining the damage, including the swastika marks, saying only that it was just Hallowe’en, just kids acting up, nothing personal.

“See, Mr. Schwarzz, cem’teries are always targets on Devil’s Night. Everywhere in the Valley. Damn kids. Getting worse. Lucky they don’t set fires like some places. Nothing personal, Mr. Schwarzz. Nothing against you and your family.”

The elder deputy spoke in a flat, nasal drawl, taking desultory notes with a pencil stub. His partner, prodding at one of the broken gravestones with his boot, smirked and suppressed a yawn.

Through the blood in his eyes Jacob Schwart saw suddenly how they mocked him.

He saw, like the sun breaking through clouds, and his battered hands shook with the yearning to grip a poker, a shovel, a hoe.

He had no weapon. The deputies carried pistols, holstered, on their hips. They were cunning coarse-faced peasants. They were storm trooper Nazi brutes. They were of the very stock that had saluted Hitler, had marched and wished to die for Hitler. He would buy a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun to protect himself against them. But he had not the shotgun yet. Only his bare, battered hands, which were useless against brutes with guns.

It would be reported everywhere in Milburn how Jacob Schwart began to rave, excitedly. His ridiculous accent so strong, he was practically indecipherable.

“You are related to these ‘kids,’ eh? You are knowing them, eh?”

For suddenly it was clear, why the deputies had driven out here. Not to help him but to laugh at a man’s misery. To mock a man before his family.

“Yes. You are all related here. This hellhole, you protect one another. You will give one like me no help. You will make no arrest of the criminals. In other years, you have not arrested them. This is the worst of it, and you will not arrest them. I am an American citizen yet you scorn my family and me like animals. ‘Life unworthy life’�eh? You are thinking, seeing Jacob Schwart? Goebbels you admired, eh? Yet Goebbels was a cripple too. Goebbels killed his family and himself, yes? So why you do admire the Nazi? Go away then, get out of here and to hell, damn your Nazi souls to hell, I am in not need of you.”

In his vehemence Jacob Schwart misspoke. His sons, listening unseen to his ravings from one of the sheds, winced in shame.

What an outburst! Like some kind of hopped-up dwarf, gesturing and spitting and you couldn’t understand half of what he said. The deputies would joke afterward it was damned lucky they were armed, that poor bastard Schwarzz looking like he was some kind of smashed Hallowe’en pumpkin himself.

One-quarter Seneca blood
.

Somehow he’d acquired that reputation. In the Chautauqua Valley among those who knew Herschel Schwart without knowing his family.

He’d quit school at sixteen. He’d been suspended from Milburn High for fighting and during the two-week suspension he had turned sixteen and so he’d quit. God damn he’d been relieved! Kept behind in ninth grade, biggest kid in his class and made to feel shamed and murderous. Immediately he got a job at the Milburn lumber mill. Friends of his worked there, none of them had graduated from high school and they made good wages.

He still lived at home. He still helped the old man in the cemetery, sometimes. He felt sorry for Jacob Schwart. Each time he quarreled with the old man he made plans to move out, but by the age of twenty-one in October 1948 he had not yet moved out. It was inertia binding him to the stone cottage. It was his mother binding him. Her meals he devoured always hungrily, her tending to him in silence and without reproach. He would not have said
I love her, I could not leave her with him
.

He would not have said
My sister, too
.
I could not leave her with the two of them
.

His brother Gus, he knew could take care of himself. Gus was all right. Gus, too, had quit school on his sixteenth birthday, at their father’s urging, to help in the damn cemetery like a common laborer, full-time. But Herschel was too smart for that.

How, the eldest son of German-born immigrants, he had acquired a local reputation as part-Seneca, Herschel himself could not have said. Certainly he had not made such a claim. Neither did he deny it. His straggly dark hair that was lank and without lustre, his eyes too that were glassy-dark and without lustre, his quick temper and eccentric manner of speech suggested an exotic background of some kind, perhaps unknowable. A shrewder young man would have smiled to think
Better Seneca than Kraut
.

By the age of eighteen he bore an angular horsey face scarred like filigree about the mouth, eyes, and ears from bare-knuckled fights. At the age of twenty he’d been wounded by another young man wielding a broken beer bottle, twelve clumsily executed stitches across Herschel’s forehead. (Reticent, stubborn, Herschel had not told the sheriff’s deputies who had wounded him. He had revenged himself upon the young man, in time.) His teeth had been rotting in his head all his life. He was missing several teeth back and front. When he grinned, his mouth seemed to be winking. His nose had been broken and flattened at the bridge. Though he frightened most Milburn girls he was an attractive figure to certain older divorced or separated women who appreciated what was special about Herschel Schwart. They liked his face. They liked his good-natured if explosive and unpredictable manner. His loud braying laugh, his nerved-up sinewy body that gave off heat like a horse. His ropey penis that remained a marvel even when its bearer was staggering drunk, or comatose. These were women who drew their fingertips in fascination over his skin�chest, back, sides, belly, thighs, legs�that was coarse as leather, covered in bristling hairs and dimpled with moles and pimples like shot.

These were women of coarse affable appetites who teased their young lover inquiring
which part of him was Seneca?

It was no secret, Herschel Schwart had a police record in Chautauqua County. More than once he’d been taken into custody by law enforcement officers. Always he’d been in the company of other young men at the time of the arrests, and always he’d been drinking. He was not perceived by county officers as dangerous in himself and he had never been kept in jail more than three nights in succession. He was a brawler, his crimes were public and boisterous, he lacked the subtlety of slyness or premeditation. Not cruel, not malicious or woman-hating; not one to break into houses, to steal or rob. In fact Herschel was careless with money, likely to be generous when he drank. In this he was admired, and perceived to be utterly different from his old man Jacob Schwart the gravedigger who it was said would
jew you out of your last penny if he could
.

And yet the tale would be told through Milburn for years how, on that Hallowe’en night, the night following the vandalism in the Milburn cemetery, several young men were surprised and attacked by Herschel Schwart who acted alone. The first of these, Hank Diggles, dragged out of his pickup truck in the dimly lighted parking lot of the Mott Street Tavern, could not claim to have seen Herschel Schwart but only to have felt him and smelled him, before he was beaten by his assailant’s fists into unconsciousness. There were no witnesses to the Diggles beating, nor to the even bloodier beating of Ernie LaMont in the vestibule of his apartment building just off Main Street, about twenty minutes after the Diggles beating. But there were eyewitnesses to the attack on Jeb Meunzer outside the Meunzers’ house on the Post Road: at about midnight Herschel showed up on the front porch, long after the last of the trick-or-treaters in their Hallowe’en costumes had gone home, he’d pounded on the door and demanded to see Jeb, and when Jeb appeared Herschel immediately grabbed him and dragged him outside, threw him onto the ground and began beating and kicking him, with no more explanation than
Who’s a Nazi? Fucker who’s a fuckin Nazi?
Jeb’s mother and a twelve-year-old sister saw the beating from the porch, and cried out for Herschel to stop. They knew Herschel of course, he’d gone to school with Jeb and intermittently the two boys had been friends, though they were not friends at this time. Mrs. Meunzer and Jeb’s sister would describe how “crazed” Herschel was, terrifying them by stabbing at Jeb with what appeared to be a fishing knife and all the while cursing
Who’s a Nazi now? Fucker who’s a fuckin Nazi now?
Though Jeb was Herschel’s size and had a reputation for brawling, he appeared to be overcome by Herschel, unable to defend himself. He, too, was terrified and begged his assailant not to kill him as with both knees Herschel pinned him to the ground and, with the knife, crudely carved into his forehead this mark�