That light in Pa’s eyes, she yearned to see. That flash of love for her even if it quickly faded.
She ran, and she stumbled.
Pa’s voice came quick: “Damn you! Didn’t I say no.”
He was not smiling. His face was shut up tight as a fist.
He was pushing the wheelbarrow through the dense grass as if he hoped to break it. His back was to her, his flannel shirt sweated through. In a sudden terror of childish helplessness she watched him move away from her as if oblivious of her. This was Not-Seeing, now. This was death.
Pa shouted to her brothers who were working some distance away. His words were scarcely more than grunts with an edge of annoyance, no affection in them and yet: she yearned for him to speak to her in that way, as his helper, not a mere girl to be sent back to the house.
Back to Ma, in the house that smelled of kerosene and cooking odors.
Deeply wounded she was. So many times. Till at last she would tell herself that she hated him. Long before his death and the terrible circumstances of his death she would come to hate him. Long she would have forgotten how once she’d adored him, when she was a little girl and he had seemed to love her, sometimes.
The game of Not-See.
7
Herschel growled, Promise you won’t tell ‘em?
Oh, she promised!
“Cause if she did, Herschel warned, what he’d do is shove the poker up her little be-hind-”Red hot, too.“
Rebecca giggled, and shivered. Her big brother Herschel was always scaring her like this. Oh no oh no. She would never tell.
It was Herschel who told her how she’d been born.
Been born like this was something Rebecca had done for herself but could not remember, it was so long ago.
Never would Rebecca’s parents have told her. Never-never!
No more speaking of such a secret thing than they would have disrobed and displayed their naked bodies before their staring children.
So it was Herschel. Saying how she, just a tiny wriggly thing, had gotten born on the boat from Europe, she’d been born in New York harbor.
On the boat, see? On the water.
The only one of the damn family, Herschel said, born this side of the ‘Lantic Ozean that never needed any damn vissas or papers.
Rebecca was astonished, and listened eagerly. No one would tell her such things as her big brother Herschel would tell her, in all the world.
But it was scary, what Herschel might say. Words flew out of Herschel’s mouth like bats. For in the Milburn cemetery amid the crosses, funerals, mourners and graves festooned with flowerpots, in the village of Milburn where boys called after him Gravedigger! Kraut! Herschel was growing into a rough mean-mouth boy himself. He hadn’t been a child for very long. His eyes were small and lashless and gave an unnerving impression of being on opposing sides of his face like a fish’s eyes. And his face was angular, with a bony forehead and a predator’s wide jaws. His skin was coarse, mottled, with a scattering of moles and pimples that flared into rashes when he was upset or angry, which was often. Like their father he had fleshy, wormy lips whose natural expression was disdainful. His teeth were big and chunky and discolored. By the age of twelve, Herschel stood as tall as Jacob Schwart who was a man of moderate height, five feet eight or nine, though with rounded shoulders and a stooped head that made him appear shorter. From working with his father in the cemetery, Herschel was acquiring a bull-neck and a back and shoulders dense with muscle; by degrees he was coming more and more to resemble Jacob Schwart, but a Jacob Schwart smudged, distorted, coarsened: a dwarf grown man-sized. Herschel had bitterly disappointed his father by doing poorly in school, “kept behind” not once but twice.
As soon as they’d arrived in Milburn, Jacob Schwart had forbidden the speaking of German by his family, for this was an era of German-hatred in America and a suspicion of German spies everywhere. Also, his native language had become loathsome to Jacob Schwart-“a language of beasts.” And so Herschel, who’d learned German as a child, was forbidden to speak it now; yet scarcely knew the “new” language, either. Often he spoke with an explosive stammer. Often it sounded as if he was trying not to laugh. Talkin, it was some kind of joke? Was it? You had to know the right sounds to talk, how to move your mouth, God damn they had to be the sounds other people knew, but how’d these people know? The connection between a sound coming out of a mouth (where your damn tongue got in the way) and what it was supposed to mean drove him wild. And printed words! Books! Fuckin school! That some stranger, an adult, would talk to him, he was expected to sit his ass in a desk where his damn legs didn’t fit, because it was New York state fuckin law, an look in their damn face? With them little kids, half his size? That stared at him scared like he was some kind of freak? And some old bitch titless female teacher? Why the hell? At the Milburn school where Herschel Schwart was ostensibly in seventh grade, by far the biggest boy in his class, he took “special education” courses and under state law would be allowed to quit at age sixteen. What a relief, to his teachers and classmates! As he could not speak any language coherently he could not read at all. His father’s effort to teach him simple arithmetic came to nothing. Printed materials aroused him to scorn and, beyond scorn, if they weren’t quickly removed from his glaring eyes, fury. His brother Gus’s textbooks and even his sister’s primers had been discovered torn and mutilated, tossed on the floor. In the Port Oriskany newspaper which Jacob Schwart occasionally brought home, only the comic strips engaged Herschel’s interest and some of these-“Terry and the Pirates,” “Dick Tracy”-gave him difficulty. Herschel had always been fond of his baby sister the little one as she was called in the household and yet he often teased her, a wicked light came into his yellowish eyes and she could not trust him not to make her cry. Herschel would tug at her braids that had been so neatly plaited by their mother, he would grin and tickle her roughly beneath the arms, on her belly, between her legs to make her squeal and kick. Here he comes! Herschel would warn her. The boa ‘stricter! This was a giant snake that wrapped itself around you but also had the power to tickle.
Even with Ma in the room staring at Herschel he would so behave. Even with Ma rushing at him crying Schwein! Flegel! slapping and punching him about the head, he would so behave. Physical blows from their mother made him laugh, even blows from their father. Rebecca feared her hulking big brother yet was fascinated by him, those lips expelling the most astonishing words like spittle.
That day, when Herschel told Rebecca the story of how she’d been born.
Been born! She was such a little girl, her brain had yet to comprehend that she hadn’t always been.
Yah she was a squirmy red-face monkey-thing, Herschel said fondly. Ugliest little thing you ever saw like somethin‘ skinned. No hair, neither.
“Cause why it took so long, eleven damn hours, and everybody else dis-em-barkin‘ the fuckin’ ship except them, her baby-head come out backwards and her arm got twisted up. So it took time. Why there was so much blood.
So she got born. All slimy and red, out of their Ma. What’s it called-‘gina. Ma’s hole, like. A hairy hole it is, Herschel had never seen anything like it. Nasty! Like a big open bloody mouth. Later he’d seen it, the hairs, between Ma’s legs and up on Ma’s belly like a man’s whiskers, in the bedroom by accident pushing open the damn door and there’s Ma tryin to hide, changin’ her nightgown or tryin‘ to wash. You ever seen it? Thick hairs like a squirrel.