“Why’d you want to know that? Who is asking you such things? Somebody been askin you? Like at that school? Somebody spyin‘ on us?”
Like a match tossed into kerosene it was, how Ma would flare up excited and stammering if you asked the most innocent question. If you said some words Ma could not comprehend or had not even heard clearly (Ma was always humming and talking and laughing to herself in the kitchen, she’d pretend not to notice you when you came inside, not even glancing around, like a deaf woman) or asked some question she could not answer. Her mouth went ugly. Her soft sliding-down body began to tremble. Her eyes, that seemed to Rebecca beautiful eyes, immediately flooded with tears. Her voice was hoarse and cracked-sounding like dried cornstalks when the wind blows through them. Through her life she would speak her new language with the confidence of a crippled woman making her way across a patch of treacherous, cracking ice. She could not seem to mimic the sounds her children learned so readily, and even her husband could mimic in his own brusque way: “Anna, you must try. Not ”da‘-“the.” Not “ta’-”to.“ Say it!”
Poor Anna Schwart spoke in a whisper, cringing in shame.
(And Rebecca was ashamed, too. In secret. She would never laugh openly at Ma like her brothers.)
There were stores in Milburn, the grocer’s for instance, and the pharmacy, even Woolworth’s, where Anna Schwart dared not speak but mutely handed over lists hand-printed by Jacob Schwart (initially, though in time Rebecca would make up these lists) so there could be no misunderstandings. (Still, there were misunderstandings.) Everybody laughed at her, she said. Not even waiting till her back was turned or she was out of earshot. Calling her “Mrs. Schwarz”-“Mrs. Schwartz”-“Mrs. Schwazz”-“Mrs. Warts.” She heard them!
The boys, Herschel in particular, were embarrassed of their mother. Bad enough they were the gravedigger’s sons, they were the sons of the gravedigger’s wife. God damn!
(Ma can’t help it, her nerves, Gus told Herschel, and Herschel said he knew it, fuck he knew it but that didn’t make it easier did it? Two of em not right in the fuckin head, but at least Pa could take care of himself, Pa could speak English so you could make sense of him at least and also Pa had, what’s it called, had to hand it to the old man, Pa had dignity.)
Once, when Rebecca was a little girl too young yet for school, she was in the kitchen with Ma when a visitor knocked at the front door of the caretaker’s cottage.
A visitor! She was a middle-aged woman with fattish hips and thighs, a wide, ruddy face like something rubbed with a rag, and a cotton scarf tied around her head.
She was a farmer’s wife who lived about six miles away. She had heard of the Schwarts, that they were from Munich? She, too, was from Munich: she’d been born there, in 1902! Today she was visiting the cemetery to tend to her father’s grave, and she was bringing Anna Schwart an apple kuchen she’d baked that morning…
And there was Ma trembling in the doorway like a woman woken from a nightmare sleep. Her face was going sick, sallow as if blood were draining out of it. Her eyes were blinking rapidly, flooded with tears. Stammering she was busy, she was so busy. Rebecca heard the visitor address Ma in a strange harsh speech, yet warmly, as if they were sisters, uttering words too quickly for Rebecca to grasp-Sie? she heard-haben?-Nachbarschaft? But Ma shut the door in the woman’s face. Ma stumbled away into the back bedroom and shut that door, too.
The rest of that afternoon, Ma hid in the bedroom. Rebecca, frightened, shut outside, heard the bedsprings creak. She heard her mother talking, quarreling with someone in that forbidden language.
“Ma?”-Rebecca jammed her fingers into her mouth, to keep from being heard.
She was desperate to be with her mother, wanted to cuddle with Ma, for sometimes Ma did allow that, sometimes Ma hummed and sang by the side of Rebecca’s little bed, sometimes plaiting Rebecca’s hair Ma blew into her ears, blew the tiny hair-wisps at the back of Rebecca’s neck to tickle her just a little; not like Herschel who tickled so rough. Even Ma’s sweat-smell that was mixed with cooking fats and the stink of kerosene, she was desperate to breathe.
Only toward dusk did Ma reappear, her face washed and her hair tightly plaited and coiled around her head in that way that made Rebecca think of baby snakes, you saw coiled together sometimes, in the grass in cold weather stunned and slow-moving. Ma had fastened the neck to her dress, that had been unbuttoned. Her vague reddened eyes blinked at Rebecca. In her hoarse whispery voice she told Rebecca not to tell Pa. Not to tell Pa that anybody had come to their door that day.
“He would murder me if he knew. But I didn’t let her in. I would not let her in. Did I say a word to her?-I did not. Oh, I did not. I would not. Never!”
Through a window they could see movement in a far corner of the cemetery. A funeral, a large funeral with many mourners, and Pa would be busy well after the last mourner departed.
“Hey! Somebody left us some cake, looks like.”
It was Herschel, home from school. Lurching into the kitchen carrying a baking tin, covered in wax paper. It was the apple kuchen, that had been left by the farmer’s wife on the front step of the house.
Ma, guilt-stricken, folded her arms over her breasts and could not speak. A fierce blush like a hemorrhage rose into her face.
Rebecca jammed her fingers into her mouth and said nothing.
“Pa’s gonna say it’s some bastids wantin to pizzin us,” Herschel laughed, breaking off a large piece of the coffee cake and chewing it, noisily. “But the old man ain’t here yet, huh?”
11
“We will have to live with it, for now.”
So he’d said. Many times. Months and now years had passed.
Yet: they were so often sick. August, who was small for his age, edgy, rat-like, blinking as if his eyes were weak. (And were the boy’s eyes weak? It was too far to drive him to an eye doctor, in the nearest city which was Chautauqua Falls.) And Rebecca was so often sick with respiratory ailments. And Anna.
The Schwart family, in the gravedigger’s hovel.
More and more he was noticing the steeply slanting earth of the cemetery. Of course he’d noticed from the start, but had not wished to see.
The cemetery slanted upward, gradually. For the river was at their back, and this was a valley. At the road, at the front entrance where the house was built, the earth was more level. Death leaks downward.
When he’d applied for the job he had asked about the well water hesitantly, for he had not wanted to offend the township officials. It was clear that they were doing him a favor, yes? Just to speak with him, to suffer through his slow excruciating broken English, yes?
With their genial smiles they’d assured him that the well was a “pure” underground spring in no way affected by leakage from the graves.
Yes, certainly. The water had been tested by the county.
“At regular intervals” all the wells in Chautauqua County were tested. Certainly!
Jacob Schwart had listened, and had nodded.
Yes sirs. Thank you. I am only concerned…
He hadn’t pursued the issue. He’d been dazed with exhaustion at the time. And so much to think about: housing his family, feeding his family. Oh, he’d been desperate! That ravaging will of which Schopenhauer wrote so eloquently, to exist, to survive, to persevere. The baby daughter who lacerated his heart with her astonishing miniature beauty yet maddened him, fretting through the night, crying loud as a bellows, vomiting her mother’s milk as if it were poison. Crying until in a dream dense as glue he saw himself clamping his hand over her tiny wet mouth.
Anna spoke worriedly of the “grave water”-she was sure there was danger. Jacob tried to convince her there was no danger, she must not be ridiculous. He told her what the township officials had told him: the water in their well had been tested recently, it was pure spring water.