On South Main Street, the taverns were little changed. Like the pool hall, the bowling alleys, Reddings Smoke Shop. At the Army-Navy Discount on Erie Street, a tunnel-like store with oppressively bright lighting and crowded shelves and counters, you could buy camouflage jackets and trousers, long woollen underwear, soldiers’ infantry boots and sailors’ caps, cowhide ammunition pouches marketed as purses for high school girls.
When she’d been friends with Katy Greb, Rebecca had often come into the Army-Navy store with Katy, for things were always “on sale” here. The girls drifted also into Woolworth’s, Norban’s, Montgomery Ward. Rarely to buy, mostly to look. Without Katy, Rebecca no longer dared to enter these stores. She knew how the salesclerks’ eyes would shift upon her, in suspicion and dislike. For she had an Indian look to her. (There was a Seneca reservation north of Chautauqua Falls.) Yet she was drawn to gaze into the display windows. So much! So many things! And a girl’s wan, ghostly reflection super-imposed upon them, magically.
The loneliness of the solitary life. Consoling herself she was invisible, no one cared enough to see her.
Only once, Rebecca happened to see her father in Milburn. Downtown, as he was crossing a side street en route to the First Bank of Chautauqua.
Out of nowhere Jacob Schwart had seemed to emerge, exuding a strange dark radiance. A troll-man, broken-backed and limping, in soiled work clothes and a cloth cap that looked as if they’d been hacked out of a substance harsher than mere cloth; making his way along the sidewalk with no apparent awareness of how others, glancing at him in curiosity and alarm, stepped out of his way.
Rebecca shrank back, stepping into an alley. Oh, she knew! She must not let Pa see her.
Herschel had warned Don’t let the old bastid see you, anywhere outside the house. ‘Cause if he does he flies off the handle like some nut. Says you’re followin him, spyin on him to tell Ma what he’s doin, crazy shit like that.
This was in April 1949. At the time Jacob Schwart closed out his savings account and bought the twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun and the box of shells.
That day, May 11. Could not bear going to school and instead she wandered along the railway embankment, and so to the canal towpath. An acrid odor blew from the direction of the dump, she avoided it by crossing the canal at the Drumm Road bridge. There, beneath the bridge, was one of Rebecca’s hiding places.
Hate hate hate them both of them. Wish they were dead.
Both of them. And then I would…
But what would she do? Run away as her brothers had done? Where?
Such thoughts came to her, mutinous and exciting, beneath the Drumm Road bridge where she crouched amid boulders and rocks, old rusted pipes, broken concrete, metal rods protruding from the shallow water near shore. This was debris from the bridge’s construction twenty years before.
She was thirteen now. Her birthday had gone unremarked in the stone house in the cemetery, as so much else there went unremarked.
She liked being thirteen. She wanted to be older, as her brothers were older. She was impatient with remaining a child, trapped in that house. She hadn’t yet begun to bleed, to have “periods”-“cramps”-as Katy and other girls did each month. She knew it must happen to her soon and what she dreaded most about it was having to tell Ma. For Ma would have to know, and Ma would be deeply embarrassed and even resentful, having to know.
Rebecca had grown apart from Anna Schwart, since Herschel’s disappearance. She believed that her mother no longer listened to music on the radio, for Pa claimed that the radio was broken. Rebecca had not listened with her mother in so long, she would come to wonder if she’d ever listened.
Piano music. Beethoven. But what had been the name of the sonata-a name like “Passionata”?
She must go home, soon. It was beginning to be late afternoon, Ma was awaiting her. Always there were household tasks but predominantly Anna Schwart wanted her daughter home. Not to speak with her and certainly not to touch her, scarcely even to look at her. But to know that Rebecca was home, and safe.
On the underside of the plank bridge were ravishing faces! Ghost-faces reflected upward from the rippling water below. Rebecca stared at these faces that were often those of her lost cousins Freyda, Elzbieta, Joel. And more recently the faces of Herschel and Gus. Dreamily she observed them, and wondered if they could see her.
She’d known why her brothers had disappeared, but she had not known why her cousins and their parents had been sent back to the old world. To die there, Pa had said. Like animals.
Why? Ask God why.
Ask that hypocrite F.D.R. why!
Rebecca recalled her dolls Maggie and Minnie. One of the dolls had been Freyda’s doll. The memory was so vivid, Maggie cuddled in Freyda’s arms, almost Rebecca believed it must have been so.
Both Maggie and Minnie had disappeared a long time ago. Very likely, Ma had disposed of them. Ma had a way of disposing of things when it was time. She had no other need to explain herself, nor would Rebecca have wished to ask.
Minnie, the sad ugly bald rubber doll, had been Rebecca’s doll. Minnie was so debased, you could not injure her further. There was a comfort in that! Hairless as a wizened baby. A corpse-baby. (In the cemetery, there were corpse-babies buried. Of course Rebecca had not seen any of these but she knew there were baby-sized coffins, in baby-sized plots. Often these dead had no names except Baby.) Rebecca winced to think she’d ever been so childish, to play with dolls. Katy’s retarded sister, a child with fat cheeks and glassy staring eyes, was always hugging an old bald doll in a way pathetic and repulsive to see. Katy said with a shrug, she thinks it’s real.
Except for the ghost-faces, the underside of the Drumm Road bridge was ugly. There were rusted girders and big screws and massive spiderwebs. That look of the underside of things, like skeletons you are not meant to see.
On days of bright sunshine, like this day, the shadows beneath the bridge were sharp and cutting.
Often it was said of the Erie Barge Canal it’s deeper than it appears. Sometimes, in the heat of summer, the canal looks as if you could walk on its surface opaque as lead.
My good girl who is all I have, I must trust you.
And so, how could Rebecca run away from home? She could not.
Now that Herschel and Gus were gone, she was Anna Schwart’s only child remaining.
A girl, you must not wander alone. You don’t want something to happen to you.
“God damn I do. I do want something to happen to me. I do.”
How Anna would stare at her, astonished and hurt.
A farmer’s flatbed truck was approaching the bridge. Rebecca clamped her arms over her head, stiffening. There came a clattering noise, the bridge shuddered and vibrated not ten feet above Rebecca’s head. Bits of grit and dust sifted downward.
On her way home, on Quarry Road, she heard gunfire.
Hunters. Often there were hunters, in the scrubby pine woods along Quarry Road.
Never would Rebecca know. But Rebecca would imagine.
How to the Milburn Township Cemetery in the late afternoon of May 11, 1949 there had come two brothers, Elroy and Willis Simcoe, with their sixty-six-year-old aunt. They had come to visit their parents’ grave site, that was marked with a heavy, handsome granite stone engraved with the words THY KINGDOM COME THY WILL BE DONE. Elroy Simcoe who was an insurance agent in Milburn and a longtime member of the Township board had lived in Milburn all his life, Willis had moved to the small city of Strykersville forty miles to the west. The Simcoe brothers were well known in the area. They were middle-aged, paunchy, and nattily dressed. They wore sport coats and white cotton shirts open at the throat. Elroy had driven his brother and aunt to the cemetery in a new-model gray Oldsmobile shaped like a box car. As soon as they passed through the cemetery gate they began to notice that the grounds were not so fastidiously kept as one might wish. A profusion of dandelions was in bloom, tall thistles had sprung up around the gravestones. An erratic swath had been mowed through grass with a look of drunken abandon or contempt and, most jarring to the eye, there were piles of soil heaped beside the newer graves like refuse that should have been carted away.