The Gravedigger’S Daughter Read Free

woman. There was nothing soft, pliant, melting about her; rather she believed herself hard, sinewy. She had a striking face, large deep-set very dark eyes, with dark brows heavy as a man’s, and something of a man’s stance, in confronting others. In essence, she despised the feminine. Except, there was her attachment to Tignor. She did not wish to be Tignor, but only to be loved by Tignor. Yet Tignor was not an ordinary man, in Rebecca’s judgment. Otherwise, she despised the weakness of women, deep in her soul. She was ashamed, infuriated. For this was the ancient weakness of women, her mother Anna Schwart’s weakness. The weakness of a defeated race.
    At the factory, men let her alone, usually. Knowing she was married. Seeing she gave no signals to welcome their interest. She never met their eyes. What thoughts they might have of her, she did not consider.
    Yet: the week before she had had to confront a smirking asshole who was always passing close behind her as she stood at the assembly line, a man who eyed her up-and-down to embarrass her, she’d told him to leave her alone God damn she would complain to the foreman but in the midst of the rush of words she had suddenly swallowed and her voice choked and the smirking asshole just grinned at her. Mmmm baby! I like you .
    Yet she would not quit the factory. Damned if she would quit.
    Since March she’d been working at Niagara Tubing. Assembly line, unskilled labor. Still the factories paid better than most other jobs for women�waitress, cleaning woman, salesclerk. You had no need to smile at customers, to be “nice.” The work was only just temporary she’d told her friend Rita, who also worked on the line at Niagara Tubing, and Rita had laughed saying sure, Niagara Tubing was just temporary for her, too. “Going on seven years.”
    This foreshortened horizon, it made you anxious because you couldn’t plot an escape route. Into underbrush? There were briars, wild rose, tangles of poison ivy. Into the trees? And out of sight of the towpath, where anything might happen?
    The bridge at the Poor Farm Road was at least a mile away. How many minutes, she couldn’t estimate: twenty? And she could not run. She wondered what would happen during those twenty minutes.
    The canal surface rippled like the hide of a great slumbering beast whose head you could not see. Only its length, stretching to the horizon.
    Except there was no horizon ahead, really. The canal faded into a shadowy haze in the distance. Like train tracks where your eyes trick you into thinking that the tracks narrow, shrink in upon themselves and disappear as if running out of the present time and into a future you can’t see.
    Hide your weakness. Can’t remain a child forever .
    She was hardly a child. She was a married woman, a mother. She had a job at Niagara Fiber Tubing in Chautauqua Falls, New York.
    She was not a minor dependent upon the charity of adults. She was not a ward of the county living in Milburn. The gravedigger’s daughter to be pitied.
    These were boom times in American industry, post-war. So you were told. So it seemed. Factories working to capacity in Chautauqua Falls as in other cities and towns in upstate New York where the largest and most prosperous city was Buffalo. All day long the sky of the Chautauqua Valley was streaked with two kinds of cloud: the natural, horizontal clouds and the vertical columnar clouds of factory smoke. Distinctive hues they were, rising from identical smokestacks. Always you could recognize the steely-powder rubbery-smelling smoke erupting upward from Niagara Fiber Tubing.
    At work she wore her long thick hair coiled in loose braids around her head, covered with a head scarf. Yet when she brushed it out it smelled of the factory anyway. Her hair that had been beautiful glossy black, gypsy-hair Tignor called it, was becoming dry and brittle and corroded like iron. She was only twenty-three and already she was discovering gray hairs! And her fingers