“Pa, no-”
Again the blast was deafening. The windowpanes behind Jacob Schwart would be shattered. In that instant father and daughter were one, obliterated.
26
Each of us is a living flame, and Jesus Christ has lighted that flame. Rebecca, remember!
These words of Rose Lutter’s echoed in her ears. Still she was trying to believe.
She was thirteen years old, a minor. She would be a ward of Chautauqua County until the age of eighteen. Though it was expected that, at sixteen, she would quit public school and take full-time employment to support herself, as other indigent orphans had done in the past.
For she had no parents. She had no relatives to take her in. (One of her brothers was twenty-one. But Herschel Schwart was a notorious fugitive from justice.) Apart from a few shabby items removed in haste from the old stone house in the cemetery, she had no inheritance, not a penny. Jacob Schwart had closed out his savings account at the First Bank of Chautauqua and what he’d done with his money, apart from purchasing a shotgun and shells, was not known. The words pauper, destitute were uttered on Rebecca’s behalf, in her hearing in the family court of the Chautauqua County courthouse.
What to do with the gravedigger’s daughter!
There was a proposal to send Rebecca to a home for “indigent orphans” in Port Oriskany, that was associated with the United Methodist Church. There was a proposal to board her with a local family named Cadwaller, where two other child-wards of the county were currently living amid a slatternly mix of five Cadwaller children: the Cadwallers owned a ten-acre pig farm, and all the children worked. There was a proposal to board her with a childless couple in their sixties who owned several Doberman pinschers. There was a proposal to board her with a Mrs. Heinrich Schmidt who in fact operated a boardinghouse on South Main Street, Milburn, where mostly solitary men lived, ranging in age from twenty to seventy-seven; some of these boarders were World War II veterans, and most were on county welfare subsidies.
The obese reptile-man! In her dreamy state Rebecca seemed to know that he boarded at Mrs. Schmidt’s. He awaited her there, smiling his sly wet smile.
“Girlie! Welcome.”
27
And yet: “Jesus has arranged this, Rebecca. We must think so. ”I am a light come into the world that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.“ You are welcome to live with me, Rebecca. I have made the arrangements with the county. Together we will pray to discover what this terrible thing means, that has touched your young life.”
For it wasn’t Mrs. Schmidt but Miss Rose Lutter, Rebecca’s former schoolteacher, with whom she could live as a ward of Chautauqua County for two and a half years.
Out of nowhere it would seem to Rebecca, her former schoolteacher had come. Yet there was the sense, that would grow upon Rebecca over time, that Miss Lutter had been waiting for Rebecca, for years.
Rose Lutter was the sole party in Milburn to offer to pay not only for much of Rebecca Schwart’s upkeep (the term “upkeep” was frequently noted) but also for a burial plot in the very Milburn cemetery for which he’d been a caretaker, for the deceased, disgraced Jacob Schwart and his wife Anna. Except for Rose Lutter’s generosity, the Schwarts’ remains would have been buried at county expense, in an unmarked and untended section of the cemetery reserved for indigents.
Paupers’ graves these were called. No headstones, no markers.
But Miss Lutter would not hear of this. Miss Lutter was a Christian, a bearer of mercy. Though she had retired early from public school teaching for reasons of health and lived now on a modest pension supplemented by a family annuity, she arranged for Jacob and Anna Schwart to be properly buried and for a small aluminum marker to be set into the earth at the head of the grave site. Since Rebecca had not been capable of providing information about her parents, their birth dates for instance, and since no one in Milburn much wished to rummage through the morass of old, yellowed, moldering documents that Jacob Schwart had left behind in boxes in the stone house, all that was indicated on the marker was:
SCHWARD Anna & Jacob d. 4-11-49
Rebecca perceived the errors here. The misspelled name, the inaccurate death-date. Of course she said nothing. For who could care that an immigrant gravedigger had killed his sickly wife with a single shotgun blast, and himself with a second shotgun blast, on a weekday in April, or in May?
Who could care that someone named Schwart, or Schward, had lived or died, let alone when?
And so in the Chautauqua County Courthouse when Miss Rose Lutter appeared amid a gathering of strangers, and all of these strangers men, and clutched at Rebecca’s hands in triumph, and uttered such extravagant words as special destiny, singled out by God Rebecca did not protest.
“Jesus, I will believe. Jesus, help me to believe in You.”
He was observing her, she knew. In the corner of her eye sometimes she saw Him. But when she turned her head, however slowly, He retreated. Vaguely she recalled that He had taunted her, once-hadn’t He? She would pretend not to remember.
She would come to know, in time: the man whom her father had shot in the cemetery was named Simcoe, fifty-one years old and a former Milburn resident and unknown to Jacob Schwart and his death by Jacob Schwart “unprovoked.” He had died en route to the Chautauqua Falls hospital in an ambulance, of massive gunshot wounds to the chest. His left forearm, uplifted in a futile gesture to protect himself against an explosion of buckshot at close range, had been shredded, a splintered white bone protruding.
This death was the outrage, the injustice. This death was the crime.
The Schwart deaths were lesser, of course. You could see the logic. The shotgun death of Anna Schwart, also at close range. Massive injuries to the head. The self-death of Jacob Schwart, at close range. Strangers would ask the daughter what she knew, what she could tell them. So slowly she spoke and with such confusion and often her voice trailed off into baffled silence so there were observers who believed that she must be mentally retarded or in some way “damaged” like others in the family perhaps, the wife Anna for instance, and at least one of the sons, or both.
And there was the father, the madman.
How Rebecca had left the stone house on that day, where she’d been taken and by whom, she would not recall clearly. What had been sticky and coagulating in her hair, that had to be cut out by a frowning nurse in whose fingers the scissors trembled.
“Girl! Try to stay still.”
In a strange bed nonetheless she slept for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours even with morning sun shining on her mask-face. Slept with her limbs entwined like snakes in winter, in a burrow. Her mouth was open, agape. Her bare feet, icy at the toes, twitched and paddled to keep her from falling. Inside her empty head water rushed rushed rushed over the gigantic ten-foot lock in a ceaseless stream. Damned lucky to be alive! don’t you ever forget damned lucky I didn’t blow your head off you are one of them aren’t you! born here why I couldn’t trust you going behind my back and wasn’t I right?