THREE BRUTAL HALLOWÉEN ASSAULTS
LINKED TO 21-YEAR-OLD SUSPECT
Area Youth a Fugitive Considered Dangerous
In each of us there is a flame that will never die, Rebecca!
That flame is lighted by Jesus Christ and nourished by His love.
How badly Rebecca wanted to believe in these words of her former teacher Miss Lutter! But it was so hard. Like trying to lift herself onto the tar paper roof of the toolshed using just her arms, when she’d been a little girl imitating her brothers. They’d laughed at their little sister struggling behind them, too weak-armed at the time, her legs too thin, lacking muscle. Where they scrambled up onto the roof deft as cats, she’d fallen back helplessly to the ground.
Sometimes one of her brothers would lean over to give her a hand and hoist her up onto the roof. But sometimes not.
In each of us a flame. Rebecca, believe!
Jacob Schwart mocked those others for being Christian. In his mouth the word “Chriss-tyian” was a comical hissing noise.
Rebecca’s father said how Jesus Christ had been a deranged Messiah-Jew who could save neither himself nor anybody else from the grave and what the fuss was about him, almost two thousand years after his death, God knows!
This, too, was a joke. Jacob Schwart was always grinning when the word “God” popped out of his mouth like a playful tongue. Pa would say, for instance, “God chases us into a corner. God is stamping his big boot-foot, to obliterate us. And yet there is a way out. Remember, children: always there is a way out. If you can make yourself small enough, like a worm.”
He laughed, almost in mirth. His rotted teeth shone.
And so it became Rebecca’s secret from her family: her wish to believe in Miss Lutter’s friend Jesus Christ who was Jacob Schwart’s enemy.
Miss Lutter had given Rebecca Bible cards, to be hidden in Rebecca’s school books and smuggled home. “Our secret, Rebecca!”
The cards were slightly larger than playing cards. They were full-color depictions of Bible scenes so precisely rendered, Rebecca thought, you might think they were photographs. There was the Wise Men from the East (Matthew 2:1) in their flowing robes. There was Jesus Christ seen in profile, in a yet more flowing, surprisingly colorful robe (Matthew 6:28). There was the Crucifixion (John 19:26), and there was the Ascension (Acts 1:10): Jesus Christ, His bearded face barely visible, in a now snow-white robe floating above the head of his prayerful disciples. (Rebecca wondered: where did Jesus’s robes come from? Were there stores in that far-off land, as in Milburn? You could not buy such a garment in any store in Milburn but you could purchase the material, and sew it. But who had sewed Jesus’s robes, and how had they been laundered? And were they ironed? It was one of Rebecca’s household tasks, to iron flat things for her mother, that didn’t wrinkle easily.) Rebecca’s favorite Bible card was the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Mark 5:41) for Jairus’s daughter had been twelve years old, she’d been given up for dead except Jesus Christ had come to her father and said Why make ye this ado, and weep? The damsel is not dead, but sleepest. And so it was, Jesus took the girl by the hand, wakened her, and she rose, and was well again.
Miss Lutter had not understood that the Schwarts did not own a Bible, and Rebecca had never wished her to know this. There were many things of which the gravedigger’s daughter felt shame. Yet she did not wish to betray her parents, either. Now in seventh grade she was not Miss Lutter’s pupil any longer, and saw her infrequently. She remembered Miss Lutter’s words, however. You have only to believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God and He will enter your heart, He will love you and protect you forever.
So she tried, tried to believe!-and could not, not quite. Yet almost she did believe! Each day, since Herschel’s disappearance, and the upset in her family’s life, and the widespread dislike with which all the Schwarts were now regarded, Rebecca especially wanted to believe.
When she was alone, and no one observing her. No one sneering at her, cursing her. Bumping against her in the seventh grade corridor, or on the school stairs. Walking quickly home from school cutting through alleys, vacant lots, fields. She was becoming a feral cat, furtive and wary. Her legs were strong now, she could run, run, run if pursued. A not-bright girl, you might think. A girl from a poor family, in mismatched clothes, ugly braids swinging beside her head. There was a certain hill above the railroad embankment, just before Quarry Road, where, as she descended it, skidding and slipping in the loose gravel, Rebecca felt her heart knock against her ribs for she was allowed to know If you deserve to fall and injure yourself, it will happen now.
Rebecca had recently learned to bargain in this way. To offer herself as a victim. It was in place of others in her family being punished. She wanted to believe that God would act justly.
Sometimes she did fall, and cut her knees. But most often she did not. Even when she became aware of the wraith-like figure in a flowing white robe and white headdress approaching her she did not lose her balance, her body had become agile and cunning.
Columns of mist, fog, lifted out of the deep drainage ditches on either side of Quarry Road, that was an unpaved country road on the outskirts of Milburn. Here there was a stark cold odor of mud, stone.
Rebecca was allowed to speak if she did not move her lips, and did not utter any sound.
Would Herschel be returned to them?
Jesus said in a low, kindly voice, “In time your brother will return to you.”
Would the police arrest him? hurt him? Would he go to prison?
Jesus said, “Nothing will happen that is not meant to be, Rebecca.”
Rebecca! Jesus knew her name.
She was so afraid, Rebecca told Jesus. Her lips quivered, she was in danger of speaking out loud.
Jesus said, just slightly reproachfully, “Why make ye this ado, Rebecca? I am beside you.”
But Rebecca must know: would something happen to them? Would something terrible happen to-her mother?
It was the first time Rebecca had mentioned her mother to Jesus.
It was the first time (her mind rapidly calculated, she knew that Jesus too must be thinking this) she had alluded to her father, indirectly.
Jesus said, an edge of irritation to His voice, “Nothing will happen that is not meant to be, my child.”
But this was no consolation! Rebecca turned in confusion, and saw Jesus staring at her. The man looked nothing like Jesus on the Bible cards. He wasn’t wearing a flowing white robe after all, nor a headdress. He was bareheaded and his hair was straggling and greasy, tinged with gray. His jaws were stubbled, his face was creased with deep wrinkles. In fact Jesus resembled the scummy-eyed men, derelicts they were called, bums, who hung about the railroad yard and the worst of the taverns on South Main Street. Those shabbily dressed men of whom Rebecca’s mother warned her repeatedly to keep clear, to avoid.
This Jesus resembled Jacob Schwart, too. Smiling at her in angry mockery If you believe me you are indeed a fool.
And then a car came rattling along the Quarry Road, and He vanished.
22
Nothing will happen that is not meant to be.
These were the words of the mocking derelict Jesus. Rebecca heard them taunting her through that long winter and into the freezing spring of 1949 which would be her final year in the old stone house in the cemetery.
It would be said in Milburn that the end came for the Schwarts soon after Herschel’s criminal behavior, and his flight as a fugitive, but in fact eight months intervened. This was a time of stasis and confusion: when one is locked in the paralysis of sleep, even as the dream is broken, disintegrating. Rebecca knew only that her father’s episodes of fury and despair, anxiety and sodden alcoholic depression, alternated more frequently, and were not to be predicted.