For he was frightened, yet also he was furious. He could not believe that the woman was collapsing like this, after all they had endured.
“Anna! Explain yourself.”
By degrees Anna became aware of him. She had been asleep, or in one of her trances. You could snap your fingers in Anna’s face at such times and out of stubbornness she would scarcely hear you.
Her eyes shifted in their sockets. In this place called Milburn amid the crosses and stone angels and those others staring after her in the street she’d become furtive as a feral cat.
“Anna. I said…”
She licked her lips but did not speak. Hunched beneath the filthy blanket as if she could hide from him.
He would yank the blanket from her, to expose her.
Ridiculous woman!
“Give me the little one, then. Would you like me to strangle her?”
This was a jest of course. An angry jest, of the kind Anna could drive a man to.
It was not Jacob Schwart speaking but-who? The cemetery man. Gravedigger. A troll in work clothes and boots stuffed with rags grinning at her, clenching his fists. Not the man who’d adored her and begged her to marry him and promised to protect her forever.
It was not the baby’s father, obviously. Hunched above them panting like a winded bull.
Yet, without a word, Anna lifted the baby to him.
6
In America. Surrounded by crosses.
He’d brought his family across the Atlantic Ocean to this: a graveyard of stone crosses.
“What a joke! Joke-on-Jay-cob.”
He laughed, there was genuine merriment in his laughter. His fingers scratching his underarms, his belly, his crotch for God is a joker. Weak with laughter sometimes, snorting with merriment leaning on his shovel until tears streamed down his whiskery cheeks and dribbled the shovel with rust.
“Jay-cob rubs his eyes, this is a dream! I have shat in my pants, this is my dream! Am-er-i-ka. Every morning the identical dream, eh? Jay-cob a ghost wandering this place tending the Christian dead.”
Talk to yourself, there’s no one else. Could not talk to Anna. Could not talk to his children. Saw in their eyes how they feared him. Saw in the eyes of those others how they pitied him.
But there was the little one. He had not wanted to love her for he had expected her to die. Yet she had not died of the bronchial infection, she had not died of the measles.
“Rebecca.”
He was coming to speak that name, slowly. For a long time he had not dared.
One day, Rebecca was old enough to walk unassisted! Old enough to play Not-See with her father. First inside the house, and then outside in the cemetery.
Oh! oh! where is the little one hiding!
Behind that grave marker, is she? He would Not-See her.
She would giggle, and squeal in excitement, peeking out. And still Pa would Not-See.
Eyes squinted and pinched for he’d lost his damn glasses somewhere. Taken from him and snapped in two.
The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk.
That was Hegeclass="underline" the very priest of philosophy admitting the failure of human reason.
Oh! Pa’s eyes scraped over the little one without seeing her!
It was a wild tickle of a game. So funny!
Not a large man but in his cunning he’d become strong. He was a short stocky man with the hands and feet, shameful to him, of a woman. Yet he wore the previous caretaker’s boots, cleverly fitted out with rags.
To the Milburn officials he had presented himself with such courtesy, for a common laborer, they had had to be impressed, yes?
“Gentlemen, I am suited. For such labor. I am not a large man but I am strong, I promise. And I am”-(what were the words? he knew the words!)-“a faithful one. I do not cease.”
In the game of Not-See the little one would slip from the house and follow him into the cemetery. This was so delicious! Hiding from him she was invisible, peeking out to see him she was invisible, ducking back behind a grave marker quivering like a little animal, and his eyes scraping over her as if she was no more than one of those tiny white butterflies hovering in the grass…
“Nobody. There is nobody there. Is there? A little ghostie, I see? No!-nobody.”
At this early hour, Pa would not be drinking. He would not be impatient with her. He would wink at her, and make the smack-smack noise with his lips, even as (oh, she could see this, it was like light fading) he was forgetting her.
His work trousers were tucked into his rubber boots, his flannel shirt loosely tucked into the beltless waist of his trousers. Shirt sleeves rolled up, the wiry hairs on his forearms glinting like metal. He wore the gray cloth cap. His shirt was open at the collar. His jaws moved, he smiled and grimaced as he swung the scythe, turning from her.
“Little ghostie, go back to the house, eh? Go, now.”
The wonderful game of Not-See was over-was it? How could you tell when the game was over? For suddenly Pa would not-see her, as if his eyes had gone blind. Like the bulb-eyes of the stone angels in the cemetery, that made her feel so strange when she approached them. For if Pa didn’t see her, she was not his little one; she was not Rebecca; she had no name.
Like the tiny grave markers, some of them laid down flat in the grass like tablets, so weathered and worn you could not see the names any longer. Graves of babies and small children, these were.
“Pa…!”
She didn’t want to be invisible anymore. Behind a squat little grave marker tilting above a hillock of grass she stood, trembling.
Could she ride in the wheelbarrow? Would he push her? She would not kick or squeal or act silly she promised! If there was mown grass in the wheelbarrow not briars or grave-dirt, he would push her. The funny old wheelbarrow lurching and bumping like a drunken horse.
Her plaintive voice lifted thinly. “Pa…?”
He seemed not to hear her. He was absorbed in his work. He was lost to her now. Her child-heart contracted in hurt, and in shame.
She was jealous of her brothers. Herschel and August helped Pa in the cemetery because they were boys. Herschel was growing tall like his father but Gus was still a little boy, spindly-limbed, his hair shaved close to his bumpy skull so that his head was small and silly as a doll’s bald head.
Gus had been sent home from school with lice. Crying ‘cause he’d been called Cootie! Cootie! and some of the kids had thrown stones at him. It was Ma who shaved his head, for Pa would not come near.
Who was she: Rebecca? “Reb-ek-ah.” Ma said it was a beautiful name for it was the name of her great-grandmother who had lived a long time ago across the ocean. But Rebecca wasn’t so sure she liked her name. Nor did she like who-she-was: girl.
There were the two: boy, girl.
Her brothers were boys. So it was left to her to be girl.
There was a logic to this, she could understand. Yet she felt the injustice.
For her brothers could play in the marsh, in the tall snakeroot if they wanted. But she could not. (Had she been stung by a bee, had she cried hard? Or had Ma scared her, pinching her arm to show what a bee sting is?)
Each morning Ma brushed her hair that was girl-hair, plaiting the hair to make her scalp hurt. And scolding if she squirmed. And if she tore her clothes, or got dirty. Or made loud noises.
Rebecca! You are a girl not a boy like your brothers.
Almost she could hear Ma’s voice. Except she was in the cemetery trailing after Pa asking could she help? Could she help him?
“Pa?”
Oh yes she could help Pa! Rebecca could yank out small weeds, drag broken tree limbs and storm debris to the wheelbarrow. She would not scratch herself on the damn briars as Pa called them or stumble and hurt herself. (Her legs were covered in bruises. Her elbows were scabbed.) She was desperate to help Pa, to make him see her again and make that luscious smack-smack noise that was a noise only for her.