I hate you, I hate you waiting. Leave me alone!
The tension between them grew tighter, ever tighter. For Rebecca refused to tell Miss Lutter where she went. With whom she spent her time. (Now that she was out of school, she was making new acquaintances. Katy Greb had quit school the previous year, she and Katy were again close friends.) Since she’d been attacked at school, so viciously, so publicly, ugly welts and bruises lasting for weeks on her back, thighs, buttocks, even her breasts and belly, she had come to see herself differently, and she liked what she saw. Her skin shone with a strange olive pallor. Her eyebrows were so fierce and dark, like a man’s nearly touching above the bridge of her nose. A rich rank animal-smell accrued to her skin, when she sweated. With what sudden inspired strength she’d struck Gloria Meunzer and other of her assailants with her fists, she’d made them wince with surprise and pain, she’d drawn blood.
Smiling to think how like the outlaw Herschel she was, in her heart.
And there was Miss Lutter, persisting. “I am your court-appointed guardian, Rebecca. I have an official responsibility. Of course I want only what is best for you. I have been praying, I have been trying to think how I’ve failed you…”
Rebecca bit her lip to keep from screaming.
“You haven’t. You haven’t failed me, Miss Lutter.”
The very name Miss Lutter made her smile, in derision. Rose Lutter, Miss Rose Lutter. She could not bear it.
“I haven’t?” Miss Lutter spoke with mock wistfulness. Her thin faded hair had been crimped and wadded up somehow, flattened against her skull beneath a hairnet. Her soft skin that was lined terribly about her nearsighted eyes, and sagged at her chin, glistened with a medicinal-smelling night cream. She was in her nightgown, a royal blue rayon robe over it, tightly tied about her very narrow waist. Rebecca could not keep from staring at Miss Lutter’s chest that was so flat, bony. “Of course I have, dear. Your life…”
Rebecca protested, “My life is my life! My own life! I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“But you must return to school, dear. I will see the principal, he’s a man of integrity whom I know. I will make an appeal in writing. I’m sure that he’s waiting for us to appeal. I can’t allow you to be treated unjustly.”
Rebecca would have pushed past Miss Lutter in the narrow hall, but the older woman blocked her way with surprising firmness. Though Rebecca was taller than Rose Lutter and heavier by perhaps fifteen pounds, she could not confront her.
“Your destiny, dear. It is bound up with my own. ”Sow not your seed in a stony place.“”
“Jesus didn’t say that! Not those words, you made it up.”
“Jesus did say that. Perhaps not those exact words, but yes He did.”
“You can’t make up what Jesus says, Miss Lutter! You can’t!”
“It is the essence of what Jesus said. If He were here, you can be sure He would speak to you as I am. Jesus would try to talk some sense into you, my child.”
In scrubby areas of Milburn you saw scrawled on walls and sidewalks and the sides of freight cars the words fuck fuck you fuk you which were not for girls to utter aloud. Boys uttered such words constantly, boys shouted them gleefully, but “good” girls were meant to look away, deeply embarrassed. Now Rebecca bit her lower lip, to keep such words back. FUCK FUCK YOU ROSE LUTTER. FUK FUK FUK ROSE LUTTER. A spasm of hilarity overtook her, like a sneeze. Miss Lutter stared at her, wounded.
“Ah, what is so funny, now? At such a time, Rebecca, what is so very funny? I wish that I could share your mirth.”
Now Rebecca did push past Miss Lutter, into her room slamming the door.
Damned lucky and you know it. You! It was so, she knew. He was reproaching her. For a father had the right.
Always in that dim-lighted room where time passed so swiftly she was missing something. Always she strained to see, and to hear. It was a strain that made her spine ache. Her eyes ached. Living again those confused fleeting seconds in the stone house that would mark the abrupt and irrevocable termination of her life in the stone house as a daughter of that house. The termination of what she would not have known to call her childhood let alone her girlhood.
The smell of potpourri confused her, mixed with the smells of that other bedroom. She struggled to wake breathing rapidly and sweating and her eyeballs rolled in her head in the agitation of trying finally to see…what lay on the floor, obscured in shadow.
A wet glistening shadow beyond the bed. The soft fallen body that might have been (in the semi-darkness, in the confusion of the moment) simply discarded clothes, or bedclothes.
Ma? Ma-
No. She could not see. He was blocking her view. He would not allow it. When she was neither fully awake nor fully asleep she had the power to summon again the vision of her father Jacob Schwart smiling tightly at her and his eyes wet and fierce as he tried to maneuver the awkward weapon, trying to shift the barrels unobtrusively in that tight space, for he wanted to aim the gun at her and yet he did not want to touch her. For with his fatherly puritanical tact he would not wish to touch his daughter’s breasts even by way of an intervening object. Rebecca had seen her father staring at her chest, frequently in the past year, not knowing how he stared and that Rebecca saw, instinctively she turned aside, and thought no more of it. Nor would he wish to touch her throat with the gun barrels, where an artery was beating wildly. Still she tried to see past him, to where her mother lay unmoving. Where the upper body of what had been her mother dissolved into a shapeless darkness. She would see, she must see!-except not clearly. So long as her eyes did not open and she hovered in that twilight state between sleep and wakefulness she could see into that room and by an act of will she could see backward.
Again approaching the stone house from the gravel drive. And there was the crudely painted front door. And there, in the backyard of the house, the clothesline, and on the clothesline laundry stirring in the wind for it was a windy May afternoon, the sky overhead was splotched with swollen rain clouds. Towels, a sheet, his shirts. His underwear. So long as the laundry flapped on the line it was an ordinary washday, always there is something comical and reassuring about laundry, there could be no danger waiting inside the house. Even as a stranger’s voice came urgent and jarring Don’t go in there!-stop her! A woman’s voice, distracting. And yet already it was too late. For in history there are actions that no act of history can undo.
She was missing something! Always she was missing something, she’d failed to see sufficiently, or to hear. She must begin again.
Running along the Quarry Road, panting. And into the cemetery on the gravel lane that had become shabby in recent months, pebbles scattered in the grass at the sides of the lane, and weeds emerging. Dandelions everywhere! For the caretaker of the Milburn cemetery was not so fastidious as he’d once been. For the caretaker of the Milburn cemetery was not so courteous and deferential as he’d once been. There was a vehicle or vehicles in the interior of the cemetery. And something was wrong, there was some upset there. And a woman calling to Rebecca, who gave no sign of hearing. Calling Ma? in a voice so absurdly weak, how could Anna Schwart have heard it! Rebecca was inside the house when the explosion erupted. The very air shook, vibrated. She would believe that she had witnessed the shooting, the impact of the buckshot at a distance of approximately six inches from its soft, defenseless target, yet she had not witnessed it, she had only heard it. In fact the explosion was so deafening she had not heard it. Her ears had not the capacity to hear it. Her brain had not the capacity to absorb it. She might have fled in panic as an animal would have fled but she did not. A recklessness born of the stubborn inviolable vanity of the young, that cannot believe that they might die, might have carried her inside the bedroom where virtually in the doorway, for the room was so small, Jacob Schwart was standing blocking Rebecca’s way. She was pleading with him. He was smiling his familiar smile. It was a mocking smile of stained and rotted teeth like a crudely carved jack-o‘-lantern smile yet it was (she would see it so, she who was his only daughter and the only child remaining to him now) a mordantly tender smile. A reproachful smile and yet a forgiving smile. You! Born here. They will not hurt you. His words were senseless like so much of what he said and yet she, his daughter, understood. Always she would understand him though she could not have articulated what it was she understood in his despairing and jocular face as, grunting, he managed to turn the shotgun against himself and there came a second explosion far louder than the first, far more massive, obliterating; and something wet, fleshy and sticky flew at her, onto her face, into her hair where it would coagulate and have to be carefully scissored out by a stranger.