The Gravedigger’S Daughter Read Free Page B

turned up or, if she had, it wasn’t practical for him to follow her at that time.
    Her heart beat in fury. Yet she was frightened.
    “My husband will kill you…”
    She didn’t want to think that this man might know Tignor. That he had a score to settle with Tignor. One of those guys that think they know me .
    You never knew, with Tignor, what such a remark meant. That he had true enemies, or that there were men, unidentified, unreasonable, who believed they were his enemies.
    One of those guys, they’d like to cut off my balls .
    Tignor laughed, saying such things. He was a man who thought well of himself and his laughter was quick and assured.
    Futile for Rebecca to ask what he meant. Tignor never answered a question directly, and especially not from a woman.
    “No right! No right to follow me! Fucker.”
    In her right-hand pocket Rebecca stroked the piece of steel.
    She’d had the impression that the man, the stranger, had made a gesture to take off his hat.
    Had he smiled?
    She was weak with doubt, suddenly. For he’d made no threatening gesture toward her. He hadn’t called to her as a man might do, to unnerve her. He had made no move to catch up with her. She might be imagining danger. She was thinking of her little boy waiting for her and of how she wanted desperately to be with him to console both him and herself. At the treeline a crazed-eye sun appeared briefly between massed clouds and she thought, with the eagerness with which a drowning woman might reach for something to haul her up His clothes .
    Trousers of some unlikely cream-colored fabric. A white, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie.
    It seemed to her, the man in the panama hat possessed a light floating quality, a hopefulness, not like the mean concentrated look of a man who wants to sexually humiliate or hurt a woman.
    “Maybe he lives out here. He’s just walking home, like me.”
    The towpath was a public place. It was possible he was taking the identical shortcut Rebecca was taking. She’d just never seen him before. Parallel with the canal was the asphalt Stuyvesant Road and a half-mile ahead was the gravel Poor Farm Road that crossed the canal on a single-lane wooden bridge. At the juncture of the roads was a small settlement, Four Corners. A storefront post office, a general store with a large Sealtest sign in the window, Meltzer’s Gas & Auto Repair. An operating granary, an old stone church, a cemetery. Rebecca’s husband had rented a ramshackle farmhouse here, for her second pregnancy.
    They’d lost the first baby. Miscarriage.
    Nature’s way of correcting a mistake the doctor had told her, to suggest maybe it had not been a bad thing…
    “Fuck it.”
    Rebecca was thinking she should have taken off her jacket, soon as she’d left work. Now, it was too late. Couldn’t make any move like that, taking off an item of clothing with that bastard behind her watching. A signal, he’d interpret it. Sure. She could feel him watching her ass, her hips, legs as she walked fast guessing she wanted badly to start running but didn’t dare.
    It was like a dog: turn your back, start running, he’s on you.
    Fear has a smell. A predator can smell it.
     
    When she’d seen this man the previous day, he hadn’t been wearing a hat. He’d been standing across the street from the factory gate, leaning back against a wall beneath an awning. In that short block were a café, a shoe repair, a butcher shop, a small grocery. The man had been lounging between the café and the shoe repair. There were many people around, this was a busy time of day. Rebecca wouldn’t have taken the slightest notice of him except now, she was forced to.
    Remembering backward is the easy thing. If you could remember forward, you could save yourself…
    Traffic was always congested at 5 P . M . when the factories let out. Niagara Tubing, Empire Paper Products, Arcadia Canning Goods, Chautauqua Sheet Metal. A block away, Union Carbide Steel, the city’s largest employer.