Mr. Schwart was profusely grateful to the township officials who hired him though he’d had no experience as a cemetery caretaker, nor even as a gravedigger.
He was a good worker, he insisted. With his hands, and with his head.
“You will not regret, sirs. I will assure you.”
At the time they’d moved into the cobwebby stone cottage in the cemetery, that had been only casually cleared after the departure of the previous tenants, and smelled strongly of something like liquid lye, the Schwarts’ youngest child Rebecca was a sickly five-month-old infant tightly wrapped in her mother’s filthy shawl. For much of the bus ride from downstate New York, this shawl had functioned as a sort of secondary diaper for the fretting infant.
So little she was, her brother Herschel would afterward recall, she looked like some hairless thing like a baby pig, and smelled like one, too. “Pa wouldna look at you hardly, he was thinkin you would die I guess.”
Had she been Rebecca Esther Schwart then? She’d had no name and no identity, so young. Of those early days and weeks, months, and finally years in Milburn she would recall so little. For there was little memory in the Schwart family.
There was Ma, who nursed her. Ma who sometimes pushed her away with a grunt, as if her touch was painful.
There was Pa. “Jacob Schwart” he was. You could not predict Pa. Like the sky Pa was always changing. Like the ugly coal-burning stove in the kitchen Pa was smoldering sometimes, flaring-up sometimes. You would not wish to press your fingers experimentally against the stove when the fire was up inside.
Other times, the stove was empty of fire. Cold, dead.
Jacob Schwart was profusely grateful to be hired by strangers in this small country town. Yet Pa, brooding in the stone cottage, expressed a different sentiment.
“Like a dog they wish to treat me, eh! ”Jay-cob‘ I am, eh! Because I am foreign, I am not-rich, I am not one of them! One day they will see, who is a dog and who is a man.“
Already as an infant she would begin to acquire an instinctive sense that her father, this powerful presence that leaned over her crib, sometimes poked her with wondering fingers, and even lifted her in his arms, had been grievously wounded in his soul; and would bear the disfigurement of this wound, like a twisted spine, through his life. She seemed to know, even as she shrank from such terrible knowledge, that she, the last-born of the family, the little one, had not been wanted by Jacob Schwart and was an outward sign of his wound.
She would not know why, a child does not ask why.
She would remember her panicked mother stumbling to her crib, clamping a moist hand over her mouth to muffle her crying. That Pa not be wakened from his exhausted sleep in the next room.
“No! Please no! He will murder us both.”
2
And so Jacob Schwart slept. Twitching and moaning in his sleep like an injured animal. After ten, twelve hours working in the cemetery in those early days he fell onto the bed in his work clothes, stinking of sweat, heavy mud-splattered boots still laced to his feet.
These boots he’d found in the shed. They had belonged to the previous Milburn cemetery caretaker, he supposed.
Too big for his feet. He’d stuffed the toes with rags.
Like hooves they seemed to him, his feet in these boots. Heavy, bestial. He dreamt of plunging into water, into the ocean, wearing such boots and being unable to unlace them, to swim and save himself.
3
History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from one another as shattered vertebrae. These words he hand-printed, gripping a pencil clumsily in his stiffening fingers. He had so many thoughts! In the cemetery his head was invaded by hornet-thoughts he could not control.
Clumsily he wrote down these thoughts. He wondered if they were his. He stared at them, and pondered them, then crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it into the stove.
4
You saw him at a distance: the gravedigger Schwart.
Like a troll he appeared. Somewhat hunched, head lowered.
In the cemetery amid the gravestones. Grimacing to himself as he wielded a scythe, a sickle, a rake; as he pushed the rusted hand-mower in fierce and unvarying swaths through the dense crabgrass; as he dug out a grave, and carted away excess soil in a tipsy wheelbarrow; as he paused to wipe his forehead, and to drink from a jar he carried in his coverall pocket. Tipping back his head, eyes shut and gulping like a thirsty dog.
Schoolboys sometimes squatted behind the cemetery wall that was about three feet in height, made of crude rocks and chunks of mortar, in poor repair. Briars, poison ivy and sumac grew wild along the wall. At the front entrance of the cemetery there was a wrought iron gate that could be dragged shut only with difficulty, and an eroded gravel drive, and the caretaker’s stone cottage; beyond these, there were several sheds and outbuildings. The oldest gravestones ran up practically to the rear of the cottage. To the grassy area where the caretaker’s wife hung laundry on clotheslines stretching between two weathered posts. If the schoolboys couldn’t get close enough to Mr. Schwart to taunt him, or to toss chestnuts or stones at him, they sometimes settled for Mrs. Schwart, who would give a sharp little cry of alarm, hurt, pain, terror, drop what she was doing in the grass, and run panicked into the rear of hovel-house in a way that was very funny.
It would be pointed out that harassment of the cemetery caretaker predated Jacob Schwart’s arrival. His predecessor had been similarly taunted, and his predecessor’s predecessor. In Milburn, as in other country towns in that era, harassment of gravediggers and acts of vandalism in cemeteries were not uncommon.
Some of the schoolboys who harassed Jacob Schwart were as young as ten, eleven years old. In time, others would be older. And some weren’t schoolboys any longer, but young men in their twenties. Not immediately, in the 1930s, but in later years. Their shouts wayward and capricious and seemingly brainless as the raucous cries of crows in the tall oaks at the rear of the cemetery.
Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!
5
“Anna?”
He’d had a premonition. This was in the early winter of 1936, they’d been living here for only a few weeks. Clearing away storm debris from the cemetery he’d paused as if to hear…
Not jeering schoolboys. Not that day. He was alone that day, the cemetery was empty of visitors.
Run, run! His heart plunged in his chest.
He was confused. Somehow thinking that Anna was having the baby now, the baby was stuck inside her distended body now, Anna was screaming, writhing on the filthy blood-soaked mattress…
Even as he knew he was elsewhere. In a snow-encrusted cemetery amid crosses.
In a place he could not have named except it was rural, and had a fierce desolate beauty now that most of the leaves had been blown from the trees. And the sky overhead massed with clouds heavy with rain.
“Anna!”
She wasn’t in the kitchen, she wasn’t in the bedroom. Not in any of the four cramped rooms of the stone cottage. In the woodshed he found her, that opened off the kitchen; in a shadowy corner of the cluttered shed, crouched on the earthen floor-could that be Anna?
In the shed was a strong smell of kerosene. Enough to make you gag but there was Anna huddled with a blanket around her shoulders, matted hair and her breasts loose and flaccid inside what looked to be a dingy nightgown. And there was the baby on her lap, partly hidden in the filthy blanket, mouth agape, eyes watery crescents in the doll-face, unmoving as if in a coma. And he, the husband and the father, he, Jacob Schwart, trembling above them not daring to ask what was wrong, why in hell was she here, what was she hiding from now, had something happened, had someone knocked at the door of the cottage, what had she done to their daughter, had she smothered her?