The Gravedigger’S Daughter (41 page)

So Willie starts to stammer. Flush-faced, knowing he’s made a spectacle of himself. But not knowing how to back out of it saying, guffawing, “Anyway, Hazel. That’s how ‘Horseheads’ came to be. What you got to wonder, is why’d they stay here? Why the hell’d anybody stay here? Poke through the grass there’s not one or two or a dozen horse heads there’s
three hundred
. And you decide to stay, settle down and stake out a claim, build a house, plow the land and have your kids and the rest is history. That’s the twenty-four-dollar question, Hazel, God damn ain’t it?”

Hazel was startled by Willie’s vehemence. Loud-laughing and red in the face as she’d never seen him. Murmuring some muffled words not overheard by anyone except Willie, the waitress slipped away from his grasp and hurried through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

Willie’d seen the repugnance in her face. All that talk of horse skeletons, skulls, “Horseheads”�he’d ruined any beauty the moment might have had.

Next morning, Hazel Jones and the child were gone forever from Horseheads.

It was an early, 7:20
A
.
M
. Greyhound bus they’d caught out on route 13 with all their suitcases, cardboard boxes, and shopping bags. The Greyhound was southbound from Syracuse and Ithaca to Elmira, Binghamton and beyond. Hazel would leave their room spic-and-span Ethel Sweet would report. Her bed and the child’s cot stripped of all linens including the mattress covers and these neatly folded for the wash. The bathroom Hazel and the child had shared with two other boarders, Hazel left equally clean, the bathtub scrubbed after she’d used it very early that morning, her towels folded for the wash. The single closet in the room was empty, all the wire hangers remaining. Every drawer of the bureau was empty. Not a pin, not a button remained. The wicker wastebasket in the room had been emptied into one of the trash cans at the rear of the Inn. On the bureau top was an envelope addressed to mrs. ethel sweet. Inside were several bills constituting full payment for the room through the entire month of April (though it was only April 17) and a brief note, heartbreaking to Ethel Sweet who was losing not just her most reliable boarder but a kind of daughter as she was coming to think of Hazel Jones. The neatly handwritten note would be shown to numerous individuals, read and reread and pondered in Horseheads for a long time.

It was an old river city on the St. Lawrence at the northeast edge of Lake Ontario. It looked to be about the size of the city of his earliest memory on the barge canal. On the far side of the river which was the widest river he’d ever seen was a foreign country: Canada. To the east were the Adirondack Mountains.
Canada
,
Adirondack
were new words to him, exotic and musical.

Observers would have assumed she’d traveled south with the child. Instead she’d changed buses at Binghamton, traveled impulsively north to Syracuse, and to Watertown, and now beyond to the northernmost boundary of the state.

“To throw them off. Just in case.”

That shrewdness that had become instinctive in her. In no immediate or discernible relationship with available logic or even probability. It was
keeping-going
, the child knew. He’d become addicted to
keeping-going
, too.

“Come on come
on
! God damn it
hurry
.”

Gripping his hand. Pulling him along. If he’d run ahead on the cracked and potholed pavement impatient after the long bus ride she’d have scolded him for she always worried he might fall, hurt himself. He felt the injustice of her whims.

She walked swiftly, her long legs like scythes. At such times she seemed to know exactly where she was going, to what purpose. There was a two-hour layover at the Greyhound station. In several lockers she’d stored their bulky possessions. The keys were safe in her pocket wrapped in tissue. She’d zipped up his jacket in haste. She’d tied a scarf around her head. They’d left the Greyhound station by a rear exit opening onto a back street.

He was out of breath. Damn he couldn’t keep up with her!

He’d forgotten the name of this place. Maybe she hadn’t told him. He’d lost the map on the bus. Much-folded, much-wrinkled map of New York state.

Keeping-going
was the map. Staying in one place for so long as they’d done back there (already he was forgetting the name Horseheads, in another few days he would have forgotten it entirely) was the aberration.

“See, there’s been a sign. There might be more.”

He had no idea what she meant. The excited glitter of her eyes, the set of her jaws. She walked so quickly and so without hesitation people glanced at her in passing, curious.

Mostly men. There were mostly men here, at the river’s edge.

He was thinking again he’d never seen such a wide river. She’d told him there were a thousand islands in that river. He shielded his eyes against splotches of sunshine like fiery explosions on the choppy water.

Drowsing on the bus his head knocking against the smeared window and he’d seen through half-shut eyes long featureless stretches of countryside. At last farmland, human habitations. A cluster of mobile homes, tar paper shanties, auto graveyard, railway crossing and granary, Jefferson Co. Farm Bureau, banners wind-whipping at a Sunoco gas station, a railway crossing. Wherever they were traveling was less green than wherever they’d been hundreds of miles to the south.

Backward in time?
There was a wintry glare to the sun here.

The countryside ended abruptly. The road descended between three-storey brick buildings steep-gabled and gaunt looking like elderly men. There was a jarring ascension to a hump-backed old iron bridge above a railroad yard. Quickly he told himself
We are safe, it won’t fall in
. He knew this was so because his mother showed no alarm, not the slightest interest or even much awareness of the old nightmare bridge across which the massive Greyhound was moving at less than ten miles an hour.

“See! Over there.”

She was leaning eagerly across him to look out the window. Always when they entered any town, any city, whether they were going to disembark or remain on the bus, his mother became alert, excited. In such close quarters she gave off a damp sweetish odor comforting to him as the odor of his own body in slept-in clothes, underwear. And there was the harsher smell of her hair in those days just after she’d had to dye it, not wanting Hazel Jones’s hair to be black but dark brown with “russet-red highlights.”

She was pointing at something outside the window. Below was a vast lot of freight cars BALTIMORE & OHIO, BUFFALO, CHAUTAUQUA & NEW YORK CENTRAL, ERIE & ORISKANY, SANTA FE. Words he’d long ago learned to recognize having seen so often though he could not have said what they meant. Exotic and musical such names seemed to him, the province of adult logic.

His mother was saying, “Almost I’d think we have been here before except I know we have not.”

She didn’t seem to mean the freight cars. She was pointing at a billboard erected above a giant oil drum. sealtest ice cream. A curly-haired little girl lifted a spoon heaped with chocolate ice cream to her smiling mouth. A flash came to him Ike’s FOOD STORE glimmering like a surfacing fish for the briefest of moments before sinking away again into oblivion.

She was saying people had been good to them. All through her life when she’d needed them, people had been good to her. She was grateful. She would not forget. She wished that she could believe in God, she would pray to God to reward these people.

“Not in heaven but here on earth. That’s where we need it.”

He had no idea what she meant but he liked it that she was happy. Entering a town or a city she was always edgy but the little curly-haired girl in the Sealtest billboard had made her smile.

“We’re actual people now, Zack. We can prove who we are like everybody else.”

She meant the birth certificates. On the long journey from Binghamton she’d shown him these official-looking documents several times as if unable to believe that they existed.

Zacharias August Jones born
1956
. Hazel Esther Judd born
1936
.
He liked it that both birthdates ended in 6
.
He had not known that his middle name was
August,
that seemed strange to him, the name of a month like June, July. He had not known that his mother’s last name was
Judd
and wondered if this was so. And his father�
William Jones
?

Drawing his thumb slowly over the stamp of the State of New York that was slightly raised, whorled like a thumbprint the size of a silver dollar.

“That’s who we are?” He sounded so doubtful, Mommy had to laugh at him.

She’d begun to complain he was getting so damned independent-minded, and not yet six years old! And not yet in first grade! Her little billy goat he was. Sprouting horns she’d have to saw off, that was what you did with billy goat horns growing out of a naughty boy’s forehead.

Where was that, he’d asked. And Mommy had poked his forehead with two blunt fingers.

Though she’d relented, seeing his face. She’d relented and kissed him for Hazel Jones never scolded her child or scared him without a ticklish wet kiss or two to make everything well again.

“Yes. That’s who we are.”

By the time they filed off the bus, she had replaced the birth certificates carefully inside the zippered compartment of her suitcase, between pieces of stiff cardboard to keep them from tearing.

On the wharf was a weatherworn sign creaking in the wind.

M
ALIN
H
EAD
B
AY

He supposed that was the name of this town. He shaped the words silently malin head bay noting the rhythmic stresses.

“What is a ‘bay,’ Mommy?”

She was distracted, not listening. He would look up
bay
in the dictionary, later.

She was walking more slowly now. She’d released his hand. She seemed to be sniffing the air, alert and apprehensive. On the massive river were fishing boats, barges. The water was very choppy. The barges were much larger than he’d ever seen on the canal. In the water fiery sun-splotches came and went like detonations. In the wind it was chilly but if you stood sheltered in the sun it was warm.

In front of a tavern men stood drinking. There were men fishing from a pier. There were run-down hotels rooms day week month and on the crumbling steps of these hotels sickly-looking men sprawled in the sun. He saw his mother hesitate, staring at a man on crutches fumbling to light a cigarette. He saw her staring at several men of whom one was shirtless, basking in sunshine drinking from brown bottles. They walked on. She reached for his hand again, but he eluded her. He kept pace with her, however. Wanting to return to the bus station but knowing that they would not, could not until she wished it. For her will was all: vast as a net encompassing the very sky.

Ma lin Head Bay
. His fingers played the keys, the chords.

All that he could make music of was a consolation to him. And there was nothing however ugly he could not make music of.

His mother stopped suddenly. He nearly collided with her. He saw that she was staring at a grotesquely obese old man who sat sprawled in the sunshine, only a few feet away. He’d lowered his bulk onto an overturned wooden crate. His skin was white as flour, strangely whorled and striated, like reptile skin. His shirt was missing several buttons, you could see the scaly folds and creases of his flesh, warm-looking in the sun. In his fatty face his eyes were deep set and appeared to be without focus and when Hazel Jones passed before the man at a distance of no more than ten feet he gave no sign of seeing her only just lifted his bottle to his sucking hole of a mouth, and drank.

“He’s blind. He can’t see us.”

The child understood this to mean
He can’t hurt us
.

Which was how Zack knew they would stay in Malin Head Bay, for a while at least.

“You don’t look like you’re from around here.”

A slight emphasis on
you
. And he was smiling.

She didn’t seem to have heard, exactly. Poised yet childlike in her manner. The slightest flicker of attention directed upward at him as her red-lacquered nails took his ticket from him yet there came her blinding flash of a smile: “Sir, thank you!” As if he’d won a prize. As if for the late-afternoon half-price $2.50 he’d been granted entrance to a holy shrine and not the mildewy-smelling interior of the Bay Palace Theater where a rerun of
West Side Story
was showing.

Deftly she tore the green ticket in two and handed him back the stub already looking past his shoulder with that luminous smile at whoever was pushing close behind him: “Sir, thank
you
!”

New usherette at the Bay Palace Theater. Dove-gray trousers with flared legs, snug-fitting little bolero jacket with crimson piping. And, on the just-perceptibly padded shoulders, gold braid epaulettes. Prominent shiny bangs across her forehead, skimming her eyebrows. Dark brown, dark-red-brown hair. And the long-handled flashlight she took up with girlish zest, leading older patrons, or moms with young children, into the shadowy interior of the movie house where on the frayed carpet you might unknowingly kick a discarded box of popcorn or a part-eaten candy bar tangled in its wrapper: “
This
way, please!”

She might have been any age between nineteen and twenty-nine. He wasn’t a keen judge of ages as he wasn’t a keen judge of character: wishing to see the best in others as a way of wishing that others might see only the best, the crispy rind of surface charm and American decency, in him.

He couldn’t recall having taken notice of any usher/usherette at the local movie house before. It was rare for anyone to make an impression upon him. Nor was he a frequent patron of movies, in fact. American pop culture bored him to hell. The only twentieth-century music that engaged him was jazz. His was a jazz sensibility meaning
at the margins
. In a white man’s skin by accident of birth.

Here in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of New York State in the off-season everyone was local. Few summer residents lingered beyond Labor Day. The usherette had to be local, but new to the area. Gallagher was himself a new local: one of those summer residents who’d lingered.

His family had had a summer place on Grindstone Island, a “camp” as such places were called, for decades. Grindstone Island was one of the larger of the Thousand Islands, a few miles west of Malin Head Bay in the St. Lawrence River. Gallagher had been coming to the island in the summer, for much of his life; since his divorce in 1959 he’d taken to spending more and more of the year in Malin Head Bay, alone. He’d bought a small house by the river. He played jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn two or three nights a week. He still owned property near Albany, in the suburban village of Ardmoor Park, where the Gallaghers lived; he remained a co-owner of the house in which his former wife lived, with her new husband and family. He did not think of himself
in exile
nor as
estranged from the Gallaghers
for that made his situation appear more romantic, more isolated and significant than it was.

What ever became of Chet Gallagher?

Moved away from Albany
.
Living up by the St
.
Lawrence
.

Divorced? Estranged from the family?

Something like that
.

He’d been seeing the new usherette in Malin Head Bay, he realized. Not gone looking for her but, yes he’d seen her. Maybe at the Lucky 13 over the summer. Maybe at the Malin Head Inn. Maybe on Main Street, Beach Street. In the IGA pushing a wobbly wire cart in the early evening when there were few customers for most residents of Malin Head Bay ate supper at 6
P
.
M
. if not earlier. He seemed to recall that the girl had had a young child with her.

Hoped not.

They ever have children, Chet and his wife?

She does, now
.
But not his
.

The usherette had smiled at him as if her life depended upon it but had tactfully ignored his inane remark. He was thinking now he might have alarmed her. He was thinking now he’d made her uneasy and he’d meant only to be friendly as an ordinary guy in Malin Head Bay might be friendly, maybe he should go back and apologize, yes but he wasn’t going to, he knew better.
Leave this one alone
was the wisest strategy as he groped for a seat in the darkened near-deserted smokers’ loge at the rear of the theater.

And a second time, a few weeks later at the Bay Palace Theater he saw her, he’d forgotten her in the interim and seeing her again felt a stab of excitement, recognition. A man might make the mistake in such a situation thinking the woman will know him, too.

This evening the usherette was selling tickets. In her pert little military-style costume, in the ticket booth in the brightly lighted lobby. He was struck as before by the young woman’s manner: her ardent smile. She was one whose face is transformed by smiling as by a sudden implosion of light.

Her hair was different: pulled back into a ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades, partway down her back. You could see that she liked feeling it there, took a childlike sensuous pleasure in shaking, shifting her head.

The mood came over Gallagher at once. Weak-jointed, swallowing hard as if he’d been drinking whiskey and was dehydrated.
You ain’t been blue
.
No no no
.

Yet, oddly he’d forgotten this young woman until now. Since the evening of
West Side Story
weeks ago. Now it was October, a new season. Though Gallagher was emotionally estranged from his father Thaddeus and had not been close to the family for much of his adult life, yet he was involved in some of the Gallagher Media Group properties: radio-TV stations in Malin Head Bay, Alexandria Bay, Watertown. He remained a consultant and sometime-columnist for the
Watertown Standard
and its half-dozen rural affiliates in the Adirondack region: the only liberal Democrat associated with Gallagher Media, tolerated as a renegade. And he had his jazz gigs which paid little except in pleasure and were coming to be the center of his unraveled life.

When he wasn’t actively drinking he had AA meetings in Watertown, forty miles south of Malin Head Bay. There, Chet Gallagher was something of a spiritual leader.

Which is why, Gallagher thought, waiting in the brief line to buy his ticket for
The Miracle Worker
, a man yearns to meet an attractive young woman who doesn’t know him. A woman is hope, a woman’s smile is hope. No more can you live without hope than you can live without oxygen.

“Hello! That’s two-fifty, sir.”

Gallagher pushed a crisp new five-dollar bill beneath the wicket. He’d vowed he would not make a fool of himself this time, yet heard his voice innocently inquire, “Do you recommend this movie? It’s supposed to be”�pausing not knowing what to say, not wanting to offend the dazzling smile�“pretty arduous.”

Regretting
arduous
. Really he’d meant
tough going
.

The smiling young woman took Gallagher’s money, deftly punched cash register keys with a flash of her red-lacquered nails, pushed change and green ticket toward him with a flourish. She was looking even more attractive than she’d looked back in September, her eyes were warmly dark-brown, alert. Her carefully applied red lipstick matched her nails and Gallagher saw, couldn’t prevent the rapid search of his gaze, she wore no rings on any of her fingers.

“Oh no, sir! It isn’t arduous it’s hopeful. It kind of breaks your heart, but then it makes you”�in her breathy downstate voice, almost vehement, as if Gallagher had challenged the deepest beliefs of her soul�“rejoice, you are
alive
.”

Gallagher laughed. Those intense dark-brown eyes, how could he resist. His heart, a wizened raisin, stirred with feeling.

“Thanks! I will certainly try to ‘rejoice.’”

Without glancing back Gallagher walked away with his ticket. Already the young woman was smiling up into the face of the next customer, just as she’d smiled at him.

Beautiful but not very bright
.
Transparent (breakable?) as glass
.

Her soul
.
Can see into
.
Shallow, vulnerable
.

In the smokers’ loge in a rear seat. Ten minutes into the movie he became restless, distracted. He very much disliked the music score: obtrusive, heavy-handed. The stalwart melodrama of
The Miracle Worker
failed to engage him, who had come to see that failure is the human condition, not victory over odds; for each Helen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot. In such moods the shimmering film-images, mere lights projected onto a tacky screen, could not work their magic.

Yet we yearn for the miracle worker, to redeem us.

Gallagher’s bladder ached. He’d had a few beers that day. He rose from his seat, went to use the men’s lavatory. This tacky tawdry smelly place. In fact he knew the owner, and he knew the manager. The Bay Palace Theater had been built before the war in a long-ago era. Art deco ornamentation, a slickly Egyptian motif popular in the 1920s. His father’s boyhood, adolescence. When the world had been glamorous.

Wanting to look for the ponytailed young woman. But he would not. He was too old: forty-one. She was possibly half his age. And so naive, trusting.

The way she’d lifted her beautiful eyes to his. As if no one had ever rebuffed her, hurt her.

She had to be very young. To be so naive.

He hadn’t wanted to stare at her left breast where a name had been stitched in crimson thread. He wasn’t that kind of man, to stare at a girl’s breasts. But he could call the manager, whom he knew from the Malin Head bar, and inquire.

That new girl? Selling tickets last night?

Too young for you, Gallagher
.

He wanted to protest, he felt young. In his soul he felt young. Even his face still looked boyish, despite the lines in his forehead, and his receding hair. When he smiled, his pointed devil’s-teeth flashed.

In some quarters of Malin Head Bay he was known and respected as a Gallagher: a rich man’s son. Deliberately he wore old clothes, took little care with his appearance. Hair straggling past his collar and often didn’t shave for days. He ate in taverns and diners. He was one to leave inappropriately large tips. He had an absentminded air like one who has been drinking even when he has not been drinking only just thinking and taxing his brain. Finding his way back to his seat without drifting out into the lobby looking for the usherette. He felt a stab of shame for the way he’d spoken to her, as a pretext for provoking her into reacting; he hadn’t been sincere but she had answered him sincerely, from the heart.

When
The Miracle Worker
ended in a swirl of triumphant movie-music at 10:58
P
.
M
., and the small audience filed out, Gallagher saw that the ticket seller’s booth was darkened, the young ponytailed woman in the usherette’s costume was gone.