The Gravedigger’S Daughter (42 page)

“Hide most things you know. Like you would hide any weakness. Because it is a weakness to know too much among others who know too little.”

He was Zacharias Jones, six years old and enrolled in first grade at Bay Street Elementary. He lived with his mother for his father was
no longer living
.

“That’s all you need to tell anyone. If they ask more, tell them to ask your mother.”

He was a sly fox-faced child with dark luminous shifting eyes and a mouth that worked silently when other children spoke as if he wished to hurry their silly speech. And he had a habit, disconcerting to his teacher, of drumming his fingers�all his fingers�on a desk or tabletop as if to hurry time.

“If they ask where we’re from say ‘downstate.’ That’s all they need to know.”

He didn’t have to ask who
they
were, it was
they
,
them
who surrounded. By instinct, he knew Mommy was right.

They lived in two furnished rooms upstairs over Hutt Pharmacy. The outdoors stairs ascended the churchy dark-shingled building at the rear. A sharp medicinal smell lifted through the plank floorboards of the apartment, Mommy said was a good healthy smell�“No germs.” There were three windows in the apartment and all three overlooked an alley bordered by the rears of garages, trash cans and scattered debris. Always a smudged look through the windowpanes which Mommy could wash only from inside. A mile and a half away was the St. Lawrence River, visible as a dull-blue glow at dusk that seemed to shimmer above the intervening rooftops. There were other tenants living above Hutt Pharmacy but no children. “Your little boy will be lonely here, no one for him to play with,” the woman next door said with an insincere twist of her mouth, but Hazel Jones protested in her liquidy movie-voice, “Oh no, Mrs. Ogden! Zack is fine. Zack is never lonely, he has his music.”

His music
was a strange way of speaking. For never did he feel that any music was
his
.

Friday afternoons at 4:30
P
.
M
. he had his piano lesson. Stayed at Bay Street Elementary (with his teacher’s permission, in the makeshift library where by November first he’d read half the books on the shelves including those for fifth and sixth graders) until it was time then hurried over tense with anticipation to the adjoining Bay Street Junior High where, in a corner of the school auditorium backstage, Mr. Sarrantini gave piano lessons in half-hour sessions of sharply varying degrees of concentration, enthusiasm. Mr. Sarrantini was music director for all public schools in the township, also organist at Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic Church. He was a wheezing big-bellied man with a flushed face and wavering eyes, of no age a six-year-old might guess except
old
. Listening to his pupils’ lessons, Mr. Sarrantini allowed his eyes to shut. Close up, he smelled of something very sweet like red wine and something very harsh and acrid like tobacco. By late afternoon of a Friday when Zacharias Jones arrived for his lesson, Mr. Sarrantini was likely to be very tired, and irascible. Sometimes when Zack began his scales Mr. Sarrantini interrupted, “Enough! No need to beat a dead horse.” At other times, Mr. Sarrantini seemed displeased with Zack. He discerned in his youngest pupil a deficient “piano attitude.” He’d told Hazel Jones that her son was gifted, to a degree; he could play “by ear” and would one day be able to “sight read” any piece of music. But the steps to playing piano well were arduous, and specific, “piano discipline” was crucial, Zacharias must learn his scales and study pieces in the exact order prescribed for beginning students before plunging on to more complicated compositions. When Zack played beyond his assignment in
My First Year at the Piano
, Mr. Sarrantini frowned and told him to stop. Once, Mr. Sarrantini slapped at his hands. Another time, he brought the keyboard lid halfway down over Zack’s fingers as if to smash them. Zack yanked his hands away just in time.

“One thing all piano teachers despise is a so-called ‘prodigy’ getting ahead of himself.”

Or, with a wet-wheezing laugh, “Here’s little Wolfgang. Eh!”

Hazel Jones had offended Mr. Sarrantini, Zack knew, by telling him that her son was
meant to be a pianist
. He’d cringed, hearing such a flamboyant statement put to the music director of the township.

“‘Meant to be,’ Mrs.
Jones
? By whom?”

Another parent, addressed with such sarcasm by Mr. Sarrantini, would have said nothing further; but there was Hazel Jones speaking in her earnest, liquidy voice, “By what we all have inside us, Mr. Sarrantini, we can’t know until we bring it out.”

Zack saw with his shrewd child’s eye that Mr. Sarrantini was impressed by Hazel Jones. At least in Hazel Jones’s presence, he would behave in a more kindly manner with his pupil.

Scales, scales! Zack tried to be patient with the tedium of “fingering.” Except there was no end to scales. You learned the major keys, then came the minor keys. Didn’t your fingers know what to do, if you didn’t interfere? And why was
timing
so important? The formula was so prescribed Zack could hear every note before his finger depressed it. Even worse were the study pieces (“Ding Dong Bell,” “Jack and Jill Go Up the Hill,” “Three Blind Mice”) which provoked his fingers to swerve out of control in derision and mockery. Recalling the boogie-woogie piano pieces that made you smile and laugh and want to get up and jump around they were so playful, making-fun-of other kinds of music, he’d been so captivated by long ago hearing on the radio in the old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road he wasn’t to think of for that would make Mommy unhappy, if Mommy knew.

If Mommy knew
.
But Mommy could not always know his thoughts
.

Here in Malin Head Bay, in their apartment above Hutt Pharmacy, there was a plastic portable radio Mommy kept on the kitchen table. Restlessly turning the dial seeking “classical music” but encountering mostly loud jokey talk and news broadcasts, jingly advertisements, pop songs where the women were breathy-voiced and the men were bawling, and static.

He would play pieces by Beethoven and Mozart one day, Mommy said. He would be a real pianist, on a stage. People would listen to him, people would applaud. Even if he didn’t become famous he would be respected. Music is beautiful, music is important. In Watertown, there was a “youth concert” every Easter. Maybe not next Easter�that would be too soon, she supposed�but the following Easter maybe he might play at this concert if he followed Mr. Sarrantini’s instructions, if he learned his assignments and was a good boy.

He would! He would try.

For nothing mattered more than making Mommy happy.

Arriving twenty minutes early for his lesson with Mr. Sarrantini so that he could listen to the pupil who preceded him, a ninth grader whose spirited playing Mr. Sarrantini sometimes praised. She was one who executed her scales dutifully, doggedly; kept to the metronome’s pitiless beat almost perfectly. A husky girl with bristly braids and damp fleshy lips whose book was the blue-covered
My Third Year at the Piano
; she sounded as if she were playing piano with more than ten fingers, and sometimes with her elbows: “Donkey Serenade,” “Bugle Boy March,” “Anvil Chorus.”

At home Zack had no piano upon which to practice. This shameful fact Hazel Jones didn’t want anyone to know.

“We can make our own keyboard. Why not!”

They made the practice-keyboard together, out of white and black construction paper. They laughed together, this was a game. Between the keys they drew lines in black ink to suggest cracks. Zack’s hands were still too small to reach octaves but they prepared the keyboard to scale. “You’re practicing not just for Mr. Sarrantini, but for all of your life.”

Now, making supper, Hazel glanced over to watch Zack’s hands moving over the paper keyboard. He was a demon, executing scales!

“Sweetie. Too bad those damn keys don’t make any sound.”

Without pausing in his playing Zack said, “But they do, Mommy. I can hear them.”

Now they were no longer
keeping-going
there was danger. Even in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of the state by the Canadian border hundreds of miles from their old home in the Chautauqua Valley there was danger. Now that Zacharias Jones was enrolled in elementary school and Hazel Jones was working six days a week at the Bay Palace Theater where anyone could walk up and buy a ticket there was danger.

He
,
him
was the danger. His name unspoken he had become strangely powerful with the passage of time.

It was like a fair, cloudless sky. Here at the edge of the lake you glanced up to see that the sky has become suddenly mottled with cloud, thunderheads blown across Lake Ontario within minutes.

His mother’s games! Out of nowhere they came.

He would struggle to comprehend the nature of the game even as he was playing it. For always there were rules. Games have rules. As music has rules. Where such rules come from, he had no idea.

The Game-of-the-(Disappearing)-Pebbles.

Fifteen pebbles of varying size and shapes Hazel placed on the windowsill of the largest of the windows overlooking the alley behind Hutt Pharmacy. One by one, these disappeared. By early winter only three remained.

It was a rule of the game that Zack could note the absence of a pebble but not question who’d taken it, or why. For obviously his mother had taken it. ( Why?)

In later years Zack would understand that these were childish games of necessity, not of choice.

They’d gathered the pebbles on the stony beach by the bridge to St. Mary Island. One of their favorite walking places, at the edge of the St. Lawrence River. The pebbles were prized as “precious stones”�“good luck stones.” Several were strikingly beautiful, for common stones: smooth and striated with colors like a kind of marble. Zack never tired of staring at them, touching them. Other pebbles were not beautiful but dense and ugly, clenched like fists. Yet they exuded a special power. These Zack never touched but took a strange comfort in seeing on the windowsill each morning.

In no discernible order, over a period of months the pebbles began to disappear. It seemed not to matter if a pebble was beautiful or ugly, one of the larger pebbles, or smaller. There was a randomness to the game that kept Zack in a state of perpetual uneasiness.

Obviously, his mother was taking the pebbles away. Yet she would not admit to it, and Zack could not accuse her. It seemed to be an unspoken rule of the game that the pebbles disappeared during the night by a kind of magic.

It was an unspoken rule, too, that Zack could not remove any of the pebbles. He’d taken one of the beautiful pebbles away to hide under the mattress of his bed but Mommy must have found it there for it, too, vanished.

“If he doesn’t find us by the time all the pebbles are gone, it’s a sign he never will.”

He
,
him
. This was Daddy-must-not-be-named.

Now that Hazel Jones was an usherette at the movie theater, she had a way of speaking in mimicry of certain Hollywood actresses. As Hazel Jones she could allude to things that Zack’s mother would not wish to allude to. There was Mommy who’d had another name in that time living in the big old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road close by the canal where he’d played and there was Daddy who’d had a name not to be recalled for Mommy now would be very upset, he lived in dread of upsetting Mommy.

There is Mommy now
.
Mommy will be all to you now
.

And so whatever Hazel Jones said in her airy insouciant way was somehow not “real” yet it could be used as a vehicle for “real” speech. As one might speak through the mouth of a mask hidden by the mask.

The other game was the fearful game. For he could never be certain that it was a game.

Sometimes on the street. Sometimes in a store. In any public place. He would sense his mother’s sudden apprehension, the way she froze in mid-speech, or squeezed his hand so that it hurt, staring at someone whom he, Zack, had not yet seen. And might not see. His mother might decide no, there was no danger, or his mother might suddenly panic and push him into a doorway, pull him into a store and hurry with him to the rear exit, paying no heed to others staring at them, the white-faced young mother and her child half-running as if in fear of their lives.

Always it happened so quickly. Zack could not resist. He would not have wished to resist. There was such strength in Mommy’s desperation.

Once, she’d pushed him down behind a parked car. Tried clumsily to shield him with her body.

“Niley! I love you.”

His old name, baby-name. Mommy had uttered it without realizing in her panic. Later he would realize that Mommy had expected to be killed, this was her farewell to him.

Or, she’d expected him to be killed.

Only a few times did Zack actually see the man his mother saw. He was tall, broad-backed. In profile, or turned away from them entirely. His face wasn’t clear. His hair was close-cropped, glinting gray. Once he was coming out of the Malin Head Inn, pausing beneath the marquee to light a cigarette. He wore a sport coat, a necktie. Another time he was just outside the IGA as Mommy and Zack were leaving with their shopping cart so that Mommy had to reverse her direction, panicked, colliding with another customer just behind them.

(The cart containing their meager groceries, they’d had to abandon in their haste to escape by a rear exit. Fortunately by this time Hazel Jones was known to the IGA manager and her groceries would be set aside for her to retrieve the next morning.)

Zack was left shaken, frightened by these encounters. For he knew that any one of them might be
he
,
him
. And that he and Mommy would be punished for whatever it was they’d done,
he
would never forgive.

Back in the apartment, Mommy would pull down all the window blinds. At dusk she would switch on only a single lamp. Zack would help her drag their heaviest chair in front of the door that was locked, and double-locked. Neither would have much appetite for supper that evening and afterward practicing piano at the make-believe keyboard, Zack would be distracted hearing behind the sharp clear notes and chords of the imagined piano a man’s upraised voice incredulous and furious and not-to-be-placated by even a child’s abject terror.

“It wasn’t him, Zack. I don’t think so. Not this time.”

Hunched over the make-believe keyboard. His fingers striking the paper keys. The piano sound would drive out the other sound, if his fingers did not weaken.

In the morning, the pebbles on the windowsill.

If it was a clear day, sunshine flooded through the glass making the pebbles hot to the touch. Zack would realize the pebble-game was not a game merely. It was real as Daddy was real, though invisible.

Mommy would not allude to what had happened the day before, or had almost happened. That was a rule of the game. Hugging him and giving him a smacking wet kiss saying in her brisk Hazel Jones voice to make him smile, “Got through the night! I knew we would.”

A curious variant on the Game of
He/Him
gradually evolved. This was Zack’s game entirely, with Zack’s rules.

By chance, Zack would sight the man, not Mommy. A man who closely enough resembled the man of whom they could not speak, yet somehow it happened that Mommy did not see him. Zack would wait, with mounting tension Zack would wait for Mommy to see this man, and to react; and if Mommy did not, or, seeing the man, took no special notice of him, Zack would feel something snap in his brain, he would lose control suddenly, pushing into his mother, nudging her.

“Zack? What’s wrong?”

Zack seemed furious suddenly. Pushing her, striking with his fists.

“But�what is it? Honey�”

By this time the danger might have passed. The man, the stranger, had turned a corner, disappeared. Possibly there’d been no man: Zack had imagined him. Yet, in childish fury, Zack drew back his lip, baring his teeth. It was a facial mannerism of his father’s, to see it in the child was a terrifying sight.

“You missed him! You never saw him!
I
saw him! He could walk right up to you and blam! blam! blam! shoot you in the face and blam! he’d shoot me and you couldn’t stop him! I hate you.”

In astonishment Hazel Jones stared at her raging son. She could not speak.