The Gravedigger’S Daughter (35 page)

It was the first week of October 1959. Twelve days after the man in the panama hat. Now came less seductively HAZEL JONES HAZEL JONES ARE YOU HAZEL JONES in the clamor and burnt-rubber stink of the assembly line at Niagara Tubing, Rebecca was beginning to forget.

She was a practical-minded young woman. She was the mother of a small child, she would learn for his sake to forget.

And then, Tignor returned.

She came to the Meltzers’ to pick up Niley, and was told by Mrs. Meltzer that Tignor had already been there, he’d taken the boy home.

Rebecca stammered, “Here? Tignor is�here? He’s
back
?”

Edna Meltzer said yes, Tignor was back. Hadn’t Rebecca known her husband was coming home that day?

It was shameful to Rebecca, to be so exposed. Having to say she had not known. She hated it, that Edna Meltzer should see her confusion, and would speak of her pityingly, to others.

She left the Meltzers’ house, she ran the rest of the way home. Her heart knocked in her chest. She had expected Tignor the previous Sunday, and he had not come, and he had not called. She had wished to think that he would come to Niagara Tubing to pick her up and drive her home…Niles Tignor in his shining car, at the curb waiting for her. In the new-model silver-green Pontiac at which others would glance in admiration. There was something wrong here, Rebecca could not think what it was.
He has taken Niley away. I will never see Niley again
.

But there was the Pontiac parked at the end of the weedy driveway. Inside, there was Tignor’s tall broad-backed figure in the kitchen, with Niley; firing questions at Niley in his ebullient radio-announcer voice�“And then? Then what? What’d you do? You and ‘Mom-my’? Eh?”�that meant he was talking but not listening, in an elevated mood. The kitchen smelled of cigar smoke and a fresh-opened ale. Rebecca stepped inside, and was stunned to see that something had happened to Tignor…His head was partially shaved. His beautiful thick metallic hair had been shorn, he looked older, uncertain. His eyes swung onto her, he bared his teeth in a grimace of a smile. “You’re back then, girl, are you? From the factory.”

It was one of Tignor’s senseless remarks. Like a boxer’s jab. To throw you off balance, to confuse. There was no way to reply that would not sound guilty or defensive. Rebecca murmured, yes she was back. Every night at this time. She came to Tignor, who had not moved toward her, and slid her arms around him. For days she had had such mutinous thoughts of this man, now she was stricken with emotion, she wanted only to hide her face against him, to burrow into his arms. Niley was jumping about them chattering of Dad-
dy
, Dad-
dy
. Dad-
dy
had bought him presents, did Mommy want to see?

Tignor did not kiss Rebecca, but allowed her to kiss him. His jaws were stubbled. His breath was not fresh. He appeared slightly disoriented, as if he’d come to the wrong house. And possibly he was looking over her head, squinting toward the door as if half-expecting someone else to appear. He was stroking her back and shoulders, rather hard, distracted. “Baby. My girl. You missed your old husband, eh? Did you?” Roughly he pulled off the scarf she’d tied around her hair, shook out her hair that was tangled, not very clean, to fall halfway down her back. “Uh. You smell like burnt rubber.” But he laughed, he kissed her after all.

Rebecca hesitated to touch Tignor’s head, stroke his hair, that was so changed. “See you looking at me, eh? Shit, I had a little accident, over in Albany. Had to have a few stitches.”

Tignor showed her, at the back of his head, where his hair had been shaved to the scalp, an ugly raw-looking scab of about five inches in length. Rebecca asked what kind of accident and Tignor said, with a shrug, “The kind that won’t be repeated.”

“But, Tignor�what happened?”

“I said, it won’t be repeated.”

Tignor had tossed his valise, suitcase, jacket onto chairs in the kitchen. Rebecca helped him carry these into the bedroom at the rear of the house. This room, to Rebecca the special room of their house, she kept in readiness for her husband’s unpredictable return: the bed was made, and covered with a quilted spread; all her clothes were neatly hung away in a closet; all surfaces were free of dust; there was even a vase of straw flowers on the bureau. Tignor stared at the interior of the room as if he’d never seen it before.

Tignor grunted what sounded like
Mmmm!

Tignor pushed Niley outside the bedroom, to whimper at the shut door. Suddenly he was aroused, excited. He half-carried Rebecca to the bed, she was kissing him as he pulled at her clothes and his own, and within minutes he’d discharged his pent-up tension into her eager body. Rebecca clutched at his back that was ridged with fleshy muscle. She bit her lower lip to keep from crying. Her voice was low, near-inaudible, pleading. “…love you so, Tignor. Please don’t leave us again. We love you, don’t hurt us…”

Tignor sighed with massive pleasure. His face with its curious broken symmetry glowed warm, ruddy. He rolled over onto his back, wiping his forehead with a brawny forearm. Suddenly he was exhausted, Rebecca felt the heaviness in all his limbs. At the latched door Niley was scratching and calling Dad-
dy
? Mom-
my
? plaintive as a starving cat. Tignor muttered irritably, “Quiet the kid, will you? I need to sleep.”

That first night. Tignor’s return, she had so long awaited.

Not wanting to think what it meant. How long he would be with her this time.

Rebecca left the bedroom silently, carrying her clothes. She would bathe before making supper. She would bathe, and wash her lank greasy hair, to please him. She walked unsteadily as if she’d been mysteriously wounded. Tignor’s lovemaking had been hard, harsh, expedient. He had not made love to her for nearly six weeks. Almost she felt as if this had been the first time, since Niley’s birth.

That massive wound of childbirth. Rebecca wondered if you could grow in again, heal completely. Had Hazel Jones ever married? Had Hazel Jones had a baby?

Niley needed to be assured, Daddy was really home, and would be staying home for a while; Daddy was sleeping now, and did not want to be disturbed. Still, Niley begged to peek through the crack of the doorway.

Whispering, “Is that him? Is that Dad-dy? That man?”

Later, after supper, Tignor was drinking, and repentant. He had missed them, he said. His little family in Chautauqua Falls.

Rebecca said lightly, “Just one ‘little family’? Where are the others?”

Tignor laughed. He was watching Niley struggle with the shiny red wagon he’d brought for him, too large and unwieldy for a three-year-old.

“There needs to be some changes in my life, Jesus I know. It’s time.”

He’d bought lakeshore property up at Shaheen, he told her. And he was negotiating a deal, a restaurant and tavern in Chautauqua Falls. And there were other properties…Ruefully Tignor stroked the back of his head, where his scalp was scarred. “This accident was some bastard tried to kill me. Skimmed my head with a bullet.”

“Who? Who tried to kill you?”

“But he didn’t. And like I said, it won’t happen again.”

Rebecca sat silent, thinking of the gun she’d found in Tignor’s suitcase. She supposed it was in his suitcase even now. She supposed he’d had reason to use it.

Hazel Jones might have a son like Niley. Hazel Jones would not have a husband like Niles Tignor.

“I know about what happened in Port Oriskany. Where you were taken into custody as a ‘material witness.’”

The words came out suddenly, impulsively.

Tignor said, “And how d’you know, baby? Somebody told you?”

“I read about it in the Port Oriskany newspaper. The ‘ambush.’ The shootings. And your name…”

“And how did you happen to see that newspaper? Somebody showed you, who lives around here?”

Still Tignor’s tone was affable, mildly curious.

“It was left in the mailbox. Just the front page.”

“This was a while back, Rebecca. Last winter.”

“And is it over now? Whatever it was, is it�over?”

“Yes. It’s over.”

Undressing for bed, Tignor watched Rebecca brushing out her hair. Her hand wielding the brush moved deftly, with deliberation. Now her hair had been newly washed it was very dark, lustrous; it smelled of a fragrant shampoo, and not of the factory; it seemed to throw off sparks. Through the mirror, Rebecca saw Tignor approach her. She began to shiver in anticipation, but her hand did not slow its movement. Tignor was naked, massive; torso and belly covered in coarse glinting hairs. Between his thick legs, out of a dense swirl of pubic hair, his penis lifted, semi-erect. Tignor touched her hair, he stroked the nape of her neck that was so sensitive. Pressed himself against her, moaning softly. Rebecca heard his breath quicken.

She was frightened, her mind had gone empty.

She could not think how to behave. What she might have done, in the past.

Quietly Tignor said, as if it were a secret between them, “You’ve been with a man, have you?”

Rebecca stared at him through the mirror. “A man? What man?”

“How the hell would I know, what man?”

Tignor laughed. He’d pulled Rebecca to her feet, he was pulling her toward the bed, that had been neatly opened, top sheet pulled back over the blanket precisely three inches. They swayed together like clumsy dancers. Tignor had been drinking for hours and was in a jovial mood. Caught his toe on the shag rug beside the bed, cursed then laughed again for something was very funny. “The one who gave you the newspaper, maybe. Or his friend. Or all their friends. You tell me what man, baby.” Rebecca panicked and tried to push from Tignor but Tignor was too quick, grabbed her hair, shut his fist in her hair and shook her, not so hard as he might have but gently, reprovingly, as you might shake a recalcitrant child.

“You tell me, Gypsy-girl. We got all night.”

…an hour and twenty minutes late for work next morning. His car in the driveway but she did not have the keys and did not dare to ask him, the man so deeply sunk in sleep. She moved stiffly. Her hair was hidden in a head scarf. On the assembly line it was observed that her face was swollen, sullen. When she removed her plastic-rimmed sunglasses of the cheap cheery kind sold in drugstores and replaced them with her safety goggles it was observed that her left eye was swollen and discolored. When Rita nudged her, spoke in her ear�“Oh honey, he’s back? Is that it?”�she had nothing to say.

And so she knew: she would leave him.

Knew before she fully realized. Before the knowledge came to her calm and irrevocable and irrefutable. Before the terrible words sounded in her brain relentless as the machines at Niagara Tubing
What choice, you have no choice, he will kill you both
. Before she began to make her desperate calculations: where she might go, what she could take with her, how she could take the child. Before counting the small sum of money�forty-three dollars!�she had imagined there would be more�she’d managed to save from her paycheck, and had hidden in a closet in the house. Before in his playful mock-teasing way he began to be more abusive to both her and the child. Before he began to blame her, that the child shrank from him. Before the terror of her situation came to her in the night in her bed in the remote farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road where she lay sleepless beside the man in heavy sodden sleep. That smell of damp grass, damp earth rising through the floorboards. That sweet-rotten smell. When she was an infant wrapped in a soiled shawl to be carried in haste into the shed and held against her mother’s heavy breasts as her mother hid panting, crouched in the darkness for much of an afternoon until a figure threw the door open, indignant, outraged
Would you like me to strangle her?

And so she knew. Before even that morning in October when the sun had only just appeared behind a bank of clouds at the tree line and Niley was still sleeping in the next room and she dared to follow him outside, and to the road, and across the road to the canal; before she hid watching him from a distance of about thirty feet, how he walked slowly along the towpath and then paused, and lit a cigarette and smoked, and brooded; a solitary masculine figure of some mysterious distinction of whom it is reasonable to ask
Who is he?
Rebecca watched from behind a thicket of brambles, saw Tignor at last glance casually over his shoulder, and in both directions along the flat dark glittering waterway (it was deserted, no barges in sight, no human activity on the towpath), then remove from his coat pocket an awkward-sized object she knew at once to be, though it was wrapped in canvas, the revolver. He weighed the object in his hand. He hesitated, with an air of regret. Then, as Tignor did most things, he tossed it indifferently into the canal where it sank at once.

Rebecca thought
He has used that gun, he has killed someone
.
But he won’t kill me
.

When they’d first been married Tignor had taught Rebecca to drive. Often he’d promised to buy her a car�“Nice little coupe for my girl. Convertible, maybe.” Tignor had seemed sincere and yet he’d never gotten around to buying the car.

There was Tignor’s Pontiac in the driveway, she dared not ask to drive. Even to shop in Chautauqua Falls, or to drive to work. Some mornings, if he was awake that early, or if he’d only just come home from the previous night, Tignor drove Rebecca to Niagara Tubing; some afternoons, if he was in the vicinity, he picked her up at the end of her shift. But Rebecca could not rely upon him. Most of the time she continued to walk the mile and a half along the towpath as she always had.

It wasn’t so clear what to do with Niley. Tignor objected to Edna Meltzer looking after his son�the old bag sticking her nose in Tignor’s business!�and yet, Tignor could hardly be expected to stay in the house and look after a three-year-old himself. If Rebecca left Niley with Tignor, she might return to discover the Pontiac gone and the child wandering outside in disheveled soiled clothes, if not part-naked. She might discover Niley barefoot in pajamas trying to pull his shiny red wagon along the rutted driveway, or playing at the thirty-foot well where the plank coverings were rotted, or prowling in the dilapidated hay barn amid the filthy encrustrations of decades of bird droppings. Once, he’d made his way to Ike’s Food Store.

Edna Meltzer said, “But I don’t mind! Niley is like my own grandson. And any time Tignor wants him back, he comes over and takes him.”

At first, Tignor had been interested in Niley’s childish drawings and scribblings. His attempts at spelling, under Rebecca’s guidance. Tignor hadn’t the patience to read to Niley, the very act of reading aloud bored him, but he would lie sprawled on the sofa smoking and sipping ale and listening to Rebecca read to Niley, who insisted that Rebecca move her finger along beneath the words she was reading, that he could repeat them after her. Tignor said, amused, “This kid! He’s smart, I guess. For his age.” Rebecca smiled, wondering if Tignor knew his son’s age. Or what the average three-year-old was like. She said, yes she thought Niley was very smart for his age. And he had musical talent, too.

“‘Musical talent’? Since when?”

Anytime there was music on the radio, Rebecca said, he stopped whatever he was doing to listen. He seemed excited by music. He tried to sing, dance. Tignor said, “No kid of mine is going to be a dancer, for sure. Some tap-dancing darkie.” Tignor spoke with the teasing exaggeration of one who means to be funny, but Rebecca saw his face tighten.

“Not a dancer but a pianist, maybe.”

“‘Pianist’�what’s that? Piano player?”

Tignor sneered, he was coming to dislike his wife’s big words and pretensions. Yet he was sometimes touched by these, too, as he was touched by his son’s clumsy crayon drawings and attempts at walking-fast-like-Daddy.

Tignor came upon the sheet of paper with Niley’s crayon-printed
T E T A N U S
. And others:
A I R P L A N E
,
P U R P L E
,
S K U N K
. Tignor laughed, shaking his head. “Jesus. You could teach the kid every word in the damn dictionary, like this.”

“Niley loves words. He loves the feeling of ‘spelling’ even if he doesn’t know the alphabet yet.”

“Why doesn’t he know the alphabet?”

“He knows some of it. But it’s a little long for him, twenty-six letters.”

Tignor frowned, considering. Rebecca hoped he wouldn’t ask Niley to recite the alphabet, this would end in a paroxysm of tears. Though she suspected that Tignor didn’t know the alphabet, either. Not all twenty-six letters!

“This is more like you’d expect, from a kid.” Tignor was looking at Niley’s banana hat drawing. A figure meant to be Daddy (but Tignor didn’t know this clumsily drawn fattish cartoon figure was meant to be Daddy) with a yellow banana sticking from its head, half the figure’s size.

Later, restless and prowling the old house, upstairs where Rebecca kept her private things, Tignor found her word sheets and scribbled doodlings. She was stricken with embarrassment.

Mostly these were lists comprised from her dictionary. And from discarded public school textbooks in biology, math, history. Tignor read aloud, amused: “
gymnosperms
�
angiosperms
. What the hell’s this�
sperms
?” He glared at her in mock disdain. “
Chlorophyll
�
chloroplast
�
photosynthesis
.” He was having difficulty pronouncing the words, his face reddened. “
Cranium
�
vertebra
�
pelvis
�
femur
�”

Femur
he uttered in a growl of disgust as
feeeemur
.

Rebecca took the pages from him, her face smarting.

Tignor laughed. “Like some high school kid, eh? How the hell old are you, anyway?”

Rebecca said nothing. She was confused, thinking he’d taken the dictionary from her too, and thrown it into the stove.

Her dictionary! It was her most secret possession.

Grunting, Tignor stooped to pick something fallen onto the floor. This was a sheet of paper upon which Rebecca had written, in a lazy sloping script floating down the page�

“Who’re these? Friends of yours?”

Now Rebecca was stricken with fear. The way Tignor was glaring at her.

“No. They’re no one, Tignor. Just…names.”

Tignor snorted in derision, crumpled the page and tossed it at Rebecca, striking her chest. It was a harmless blow with no weight behind it yet it left her breathless as if he’d punched her.

Yet he wasn’t in a really mean mood. Rebecca heard him laughing to himself, whistling on the stairs.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

Niley saw her pressing both her fists against her forehead. Her eyes reddened, shut tight.

“Mommy is ashamed.”

“‘Shamed’…?”

Niley came to stroke Mommy’s heated forehead. Niley was frowning, that old-young look to his face.

God damn why hadn’t she hidden her papers from Tignor! Better yet, thrown them away.

Now that Tignor was home, she needed to keep the run-down old house clean and neat and “sparkly” as possible. As much like the rooms of a good hotel as she could manage.

No mess. No clothes tossed about. (Tignor’s clothes and things, Rebecca put away without a word.)

The irony was, she’d stopped thinking about Hazel Jones. The man in the panama hat. The look of urgency in his face. All that seemed long ago now, remote and improbable as something in one of Niley’s picture books.

Why’d anybody give a shit about you, girl!

A man’s scornful voice. She wasn’t sure whose.

Niley was sick. A bad cold, and now flu.

Rebecca tried to take his temperature: 101° F?

Her hand trembled, holding the thermometer to the light.

“Tignor? Niley needs to see a doctor.”

“A doctor where?”

It was a question that made no sense. Tignor seemed confused, shaken.

Yet he carried Niley, wrapped in a blanket, out to his car. He drove Niley and Rebecca into Chautauqua Falls and waited in the car in the parking lot outside the doctor’s office, smoking. He’d given Rebecca a fifty-dollar bill for the doctor but had not offered to come inside. Rebecca thought
He’s afraid
.
Of sickness, of any kind of weakness
.

She was angry with him, in that instant. Shoving a fifty-dollar bill at her, the mother of the sick child. She would not give him change from the fifty dollars, she would hide it away in her closet.

Tignor was away from home often. But never more than two or three days at a stretch. Rebecca was coming to see he’d lost his job with the brewery. Yet she could not ask him, he’d have been furious with her. She could not plead with him
What has happened to you? Why can’t you talk to me?

When Rebecca returned to the car with Niley, an hour later, she saw Tignor on his feet, leaning against a front fender, smoking. In the instant before he glanced up at her she thought
That man! He is no one I know
.

Quickly she said, “Niley just has a touch of the flu, Tignor. The doctor says not to worry. He says�”

“Did he give you a prescription?”

“He says just to give Niley some children’s aspirin. I have some at home, I’ve been giving him.”

Tignor frowned. “Nothing stronger?”

“It’s just flu, Tignor. This aspirin is supposed to be strong enough.”

“It better be, honey. If it ain’t, this ‘peedy-trician’ is gonna get his head broke.”

Tignor spoke with defiance, bravado. Rebecca stooped to kiss Niley’s warm forehead in consolation.

They drove back to Four Corners. Rebecca held Niley on her lap in the passenger’s seat, beside Tignor who was silent and brooding as if he’d been obscurely insulted. “I’d think you would be relieved, Tignor, like me. The doctor was very nice.”

Rebecca leaned against Tignor, just slightly. The contact with the man’s warm, somehow aggrieved skin gave her pleasure. A small jolt of pleasure she hadn’t felt in some time.

“The doctor says that Niley is very healthy, overall. His growth. His ‘reflexes.’ Listening through a stethoscope to his heart and lungs.” She paused, knowing that Tignor was listening, and that this was good news.

Tignor drove for another few minutes in silence but he was softening, melting. Glancing down at Rebecca, his girl. His Gypsy-girl. At last he squeezed Rebecca’s thigh, hard enough to hurt. He reached over to tousle Niley’s damp hair.

“Hey you two: love ya.”

Love ya
. It was the first time Tignor had ever said such a thing to them.

And so she thought
I will never leave him
.

“He loves us. He loves his son. He would never hurt us. He is only just…Sometimes…”

Waiting? Was Tignor waiting?

But for what was Tignor waiting?

He’d ceased to shave every day. His clothes were not so stylish as they’d been. He no longer had his hair trimmed regularly by a hotel barber. He no longer had his clothes laundered and dry cleaned in hotels. He’d spent money to look good though he’d never been overly fastidious, fussy. Now he wore the same shirt for several days in a row. He slept in his underwear. Kicked dirty socks into a corner of the bedroom for his wife to discover.

Of course, Rebecca was expected to launder and iron most of Tignor’s clothes now. What required dry cleaning, he didn’t trouble to have cleaned.

The damned old washing machine Rebecca was expected to use�! Almost as bad as her mother’s had been. It broke down often, spilling soapy water onto the linoleum floor of the washroom. And then Rebecca had to iron, or try to iron, Tignor’s white cotton shirts.