The Gravedigger’S Daughter (37 page)

In a mock-amorous voice saying, “Jew-girl. Whore.”

Crumpling bills into balls and throwing them at Rebecca, at her face. Her eyes filled with moisture, she was blinded.

“What’s wrong? Too proud? You make your own money now, do you? On your back? Opening your legs? That’s it?”

Tignor had set the bottle of ale on the floor. Not noticing that he’d knocked it over. He grabbed Rebecca, laughing as he tried to stuff a wad of bills down the front of her shirt. He tore at her slacks, that were made of black corduroy, worn at the knees and seat. These were factory clothes, she hadn’t had time to change. He was stuffing bills inside the slacks, inside her underwear and between her legs as she struggled to get away. He was hurting her, his big fingers clawed at her vagina. But he was laughing, and Rebecca wanted to think
He isn’t angry then, if he is laughing
.
He won’t hurt me, if he is laughing
.

She was desperate hoping that Tignor wouldn’t hear Niley pleading
Mom-my
!

Tignor had stopped hurting her, Rebecca thought it might be over, except there came a sudden explosion of light at the side of her head. Suddenly she was on the floor, dazed. Something had struck the side of her head. She had no clear idea that it had been a man’s fist or that the man who’d struck her was Tignor.

He stood over her, prodding with his foot. The toe of his shoe between her legs, making her writhe in pain. “Eh, baby? What you like, is it?” Rebecca was too slow and dazed to react as Tignor wished, he lost patience and straddled her. Now he was truly angry, cursing her. So very angry now, and she had no idea why. For she had not fought him, she had tried not to provoke him. Yet he was shutting his hands around her neck, just to frighten her. Teach her a lesson. Shaming him in front of their son! Thump-thump-thumping the back of her head against the floorboards. Rebecca was choking, losing consciousness. Yet even in her distress she could feel cold air rising through the cracks of the floorboards, from the cellar below. The child in the next room was screaming now, she knew the man would blame her.
He will kill you now, can’t help himself
. Like one who has ventured out on thin ice in full confidence that he can turn back at any time, he is safe so long as he can turn back even as in her terror she was thinking he must stop soon, of course he would stop soon, he had never gone on so long, never seriously hurt her in the past. There was the understanding between them�wasn’t there?�he would never seriously hurt her. He would threaten, but he would not. Yet he was choking her, and stuffing bills into her mouth, trying to shove bills down her throat. Never had he done anything like this before, this was entirely new. Rebecca could not breathe, she was choking. She struggled to save herself, panic flooded her veins. The man was jeering, “Jew! Bitch! Whore!” He was furious, exuding a terrible righteous heat.

In all, the beating would last forty minutes.

She would believe afterward that she had not lost consciousness.

Yet there was Tignor shaking her: “Hey. There’s nothing wrong with you, cunt. Wake up.”

He pulled her to her feet, trying to make her stand. Though Tignor himself was swaying, like a man on a tilting deck.

“Come on! Stop faking.”

Rebecca’s knees had no strength. The hope came to her, quick as a lightning flash, that, if she sank to her knees, Tignor would take pity on her at last and allow her to crawl away like a kicked dog. And somehow, in that instant, it seemed to her that this had already happened. She would hide beneath the stairs, she would hide in the cellar. She would crawl into the cistern (the cistern was dry, the gutters and drainpipes of the old house were badly rusted and rainwater could not accumulate) and hug her knees to her chest, she would never testify against him even if he killed her. She would never!

But she hadn’t crawled away. She was still in that room. A lighted room, and not the cellar. Through the webby fabric she saw it: the neatly made bed with the quilt spread, Rebecca hadn’t yet turned back with her chambermaid’s exactitude, for nighttime; dark-gold circular shag rugs bought for $2.98 in Chautauqua Falls, in the post-Christmas sales; the straw flowers on the bureau that Miss Lutter would have admired. Tignor was grunting, “Wake up! Open your eyes! I’ll break your ass if�” He was shaking her, slamming her against a wall. The windowpanes vibrated. Something had fallen and was rolling across the floor, emitting foam. Rebecca would have slipped down like a rag doll except the man held her, striking her face.

“Talk back to me, will you! Shame a man in his own son’s eyes.”

Tignor dragged Rebecca to the bed. Her clothes were torn, and strangely wet. Her shirt had been ripped open. It would infuriate him to see her breasts, she must hide her breasts. Her naked female flesh would madden him. Tignor threw her onto the bed, he fumbled at his trousers. He blamed her, stupid cunt. His trousers were no longer sharply pressed. In the farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road, Niles Tignor had lost himself. He had lost his manhood, his dignity. His shirts were clumsily ironed, creases at the collar. A blind cripple could do better!

There was Niley, pulling at Daddy’s legs, screaming for him to stop.

“Little fucker.”

Rebecca knew now: she had made a terrible mistake. The worst mistake a mother can make. She had endangered her child out of stupidity and carelessness.

A bright blood-blossom on the child’s mouth, nose.

Rebecca pleaded with the man straddling her: not to hit Niley, to hit her.

Not him: her.

“Baby! Damn cry-baby!” Tignor lifted the screaming child by an arm, and threw him at the wall.

Niley ceased crying. He lay quietly on the floor, where he’d fallen. And Rebecca, on the bed, lay quietly now.

The fabric over her face had tightened. She was blind, her brain was close to extinction. She could not breathe through her nose, something was broken, blocked. Like a gasping fish she sucked for air through her mouth, all her strength went into this effort. Yet she could hear, her hearing was sharpened.

A man’s heavy panting, beside her. Wet snorting noise in his throat. Tignor had lost interest, now she’d ceased to fight him. He’d collapsed on the bed beside her. Amid the churned-up bloodied bedclothes he would sleep.

It was like slipping beneath the surface of water: Rebecca kept losing consciousness, then waking. A very long time seemed to pass before she had the strength to wake fully, and get to her feet. She moved so slowly, so awkwardly, she expected Tignor to wake, and grab her arm. Almost, she could hear his grunted words.
Cunt! Where’re you going!
But Tignor did not wake, Rebecca was safe. She went to the child, where he lay on the floor. Her face was bleeding, her left eye swollen shut. She could barely see him yet knew: he was all right. He would be all right, he too was safe, there could be nothing seriously wrong with him. It could not be. His father loved him, his father would not have wished to hurt him.

She whispered to Niley. He was safe, Mommy had him. But not to cry any more.

Niley was breathing, in shallow erratic gasps. His head fell forward at a sharp angle.
His neck is broken
Rebecca thought even as she knew it could not be so, and it was not. She had no strength and yet she lifted Niley, staggered beneath his weight carrying him out of the bedroom. He was breathing, he was not seriously hurt. She was certain.

In her dazed state Rebecca would not have supposed herself capable of walking from the bedroom to the kitchen and yet she managed to carry Niley into the kitchen, and did not drop him. In the brighter light of the kitchen she saw that the child’s small face was bleeding, and swollen; there was an ugly scratch at his hairline, leaking blood; his skin wasn’t flushed as usual but waxy-pale, with a bluish cast. His eyelids were not fully closed, crescents of white showed faintly. For here was the mechanism of vision, and yet there was no vision. Like a doll’s glassy eyes if you pushed the lid up with a thumb.

“Niley. Mommy has you.”

He was alive, he was breathing and alive and beginning to stir, whimpering, in Rebecca’s arms.

“You’re all right, honey. Can you open your eyes?”

His thin arms, legs: they did not appear to be broken.

Femur
,
clavicle
,
pelvis
: not broken.

Cranium
…Not broken.

Oh, she wanted to think so! Groping with her fingers, running her fingertips over him, the weakly stirring arms and legs, the head pitched forward against her chest. If his skull was fractured, how could she know? She could not know.

She washed Niley’s face, and her own. The child was groggy, but waking. He had not the strength to cry loudly, for which Rebecca was grateful. Rebecca washed her hands, her arms, her chest that was smeared in blood. Pausing to listen, if Tignor was waking and would come after them.

But the fury had spent itself, for now.

She had known for weeks that she would leave him and yet: she had not acted. Now she was desperate, and must act. She could not think where to go that would not be a mistake, a net to capture her and Niley and return them to Tignor.

Not the Meltzers’. Not the Chautauqua Falls police.

Never the police! She shared her father’s distrust and dislike of the police. She seemed to know that these men, men so very like Niles Tignor, would sympathize with Tignor, the husband and father. They would not protect her and Niley from him.

Niley was lying now on the kitchen floor, she’d placed a towel beneath his head. He was all right now, he was breathing almost normally. His face was not so white, some color had returned to his cheeks.

She would carry him out to the car, she would not take time to change his clothes. She would not even force a jacket on him, only just wrap him in a blanket.

It seemed to Rebecca then that she had done this: wrapped Niley in a blanket. She had carried him out to the car in the driveway, and placed him gently in the backseat. And there he would sleep.

She returned to the bedroom where Tignor lay on the bed as she’d left him, snoring. She would not have thought herself courageous enough or reckless enough or desperate enough to return to this room of such devastation, that smelled still of her terror, and yet she had no choice. The way out was through Tignor, she had no choice but to reach into his trouser pocket, to extract his car keys.

He did not stir, he had no awareness of her. His mouth was like an infant’s mouth, opening wetly as he sucked in air. His eyes were like Niley’s, partially shut, a crescent of sickly white exposed.

Such snoring! A sound of rude animal health Rebecca had always thought it, smiling as she’d lain beside Tignor in their countless beds. For more than five years, she had lain beside this man. She had listened to him snore, she had listened to his quieter breathing. How attentive she had been to every nuance of his body’s mood, that fascinated her as if his body were another facet of Tignor’s soul, of which she might be aware in ways that he himself was not.

Now the fury in the man was spent, Rebecca felt it reviving in her.

She had the car keys. Now they were hers.

Tignor lay in the rumpled bedclothes with a look of profound astonishment as if he’d fallen from a great height only to land on this bed, unhurt. He would sleep like this for ten, twelve hours. Without Rebecca to wake him he would be incapable of dragging himself from the bed to urinate, urine would leak from him in his sleep, soiling the bed. In the morning he would be shamed, disgusted. Yet in his stupor he could not prevent it from happening.

By which time, Rebecca and Niley would be gone.

She smiled to think so! There was a kind of peace in the room, now.

Deftly Rebecca was packing. She would not take time to change her soiled clothes. A few things of hers, and Niley’s, folded and tossed into the suitcase Tignor had bought for her years before. And then she picked up all the bills she could find in the room. She was methodical, determined. So much money! Tignor had won big at cards, he’d wanted her to know. She would not touch Tignor’s wallet, however, that lay on the floor where he’d dropped it.

From the top closet shelf she took the money she’d hidden away since March. Now it was fifty-one dollars. And the ratty sweater in which she’d wrapped the seven-inch piece of scrap steel.

Now Rebecca knew, why she’d kept this makeshift knife. Why she’d hidden it away in this room.

She tested the tip of the steel with her thumb. It was sharp as any ice pick. If she struck Tignor swiftly and accurately and with all her strength, against the thick artery pulsing in his neck, she believed she could kill him. He would not die immediately but he would bleed to death. The carotid artery, this was. She knew from her biology textbook. Deep inside Tignor’s massive chest was his heart, that would have to be pierced in a single powerful blow. She did not think she was capable of such a blow. If the steel struck bone, it would be deflected. If she missed by a fraction of an inch, the man might revive, in a paroxysm of anguish he might take the steel from her and turn it upon her, he might kill her with his bare hands. Her neck was bruised even now, from his half-strangling her. The carotid artery, so vulnerable, was more practical. And yet, even so Rebecca might miss. She was aroused, trembling in anticipation and yet: she might miss.

And did she want to kill this man, she was hesitant, uncertain. Did she want to kill any human being. Any living creature. To punish Tignor, to hurt him badly. To allow him to know how he had hurt her, and their child, and must be punished.

The child was waiting for her. She had no choice, she must hurry.

Rebecca lay the piece of scrap steel on the bed beside the sleeping man.

“He will know, maybe. That I have spared him. And he will know why.”

Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York. This was approximately two hundred miles north and east of Chautauqua Falls. Left behind in the car was no note, only just several wadded bloodstained tissues on the floor of the backseat of which one contained a woman’s ring: a small milky-pale synthetic stone resembling an opal in a slightly tarnished silver setting; and, in the glove compartment a flashlight with a cracked glass, a pair of soiled men’s leather gloves, and a much-creased road map of New York State to be identified by the car’s owner as his.