The Gravedigger’S Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

Rebecca could yank out small weeds, drag broken tree limbs and storm debris to the wheelbarrow. She would not scratch herself on the damn briars as Pa called them or stumble and hurt herself. (Her legs were covered in bruises. Her elbows were scabbed.) She was desperate to help Pa, to make him see her again and make that luscious smack-smack noise that was a noise only for her .
    That light in Pa’s eyes, she yearned to see. That flash of love for her even if it quickly faded.
    She ran, and she stumbled.
    Pa’s voice came quick: “Damn you! Didn’t I say no .”
    He was not smiling. His face was shut up tight as a fist.
    He was pushing the wheelbarrow through the dense grass as if he hoped to break it. His back was to her, his flannel shirt sweated through. In a sudden terror of childish helplessness she watched him move away from her as if oblivious of her. This was Not-Seeing, now. This was death.
    Pa shouted to her brothers who were working some distance away. His words were scarcely more than grunts with an edge of annoyance, no affection in them and yet: she yearned for him to speak to her in that way, as his helper, not a mere girl to be sent back to the house.
    Back to Ma, in the house that smelled of kerosene and cooking odors.
     
    Deeply wounded she was . So many times . Till at last she would tell herself that she hated him . Long before his death and the terrible circumstances of his death she would come to hate him . Long she would have forgotten how once she’d adored him, when she was a little girl and he had seemed to love her, sometimes .
    The game of Not-See .

7
    Herschel growled, Promise you won’t tell ’em?
    Oh, she promised!
    ’Cause if she did, Herschel warned, what he’d do is shove the poker up her little be-hind�“Red hot, too.”
    Rebecca giggled, and shivered. Her big brother Herschel was always scaring her like this. Oh no oh no . She would never tell .
    It was Herschel who told her how she’d been born.
    Been born like this was something Rebecca had done for herself but could not remember, it was so long ago.
    Never would Rebecca’s parents have told her. Never-never!
    No more speaking of such a secret thing than they would have disrobed and displayed their naked bodies before their staring children.
    So it was Herschel. Saying how she, just a tiny wriggly thing, had gotten born on the boat from Europe, she’d been born in New York harbor .
    On the boat, see? On the water.
    The only one of the damn family, Herschel said, born this side of the ’Lantic Ozean that never needed any damn vissas or papers.
    Rebecca was astonished, and listened eagerly. No one would tell her such things as her big brother Herschel would tell her, in all the world.
    But it was scary, what Herschel might say. Words flew out of Herschel’s mouth like bats. For in the Milburn cemetery amid the crosses, funerals, mourners and graves festooned with flowerpots, in the village of Milburn where boys called after him Gravedigger! Kraut! Herschel was growing into a rough mean-mouth boy himself. He hadn’t been a child for very long. His eyes were small and lashless and gave an unnerving impression of being on opposing sides of his face like a fish’s eyes. And his face was angular, with a bony forehead and a predator’s wide jaws. His skin was coarse, mottled, with a scattering of moles and pimples that flared into rashes when he was upset or angry, which was often. Like their father he had fleshy, wormy lips whose natural expression was disdainful. His teeth were big and chunky and discolored. By the age of twelve, Herschel stood as tall as Jacob Schwart who was a man of moderate height, five feet eight or nine, though with rounded shoulders and a stooped head that made him appear shorter. From working with his father in the cemetery, Herschel was acquiring a bull-neck and a back and shoulders dense with muscle; by degrees he was coming more and more to resemble Jacob Schwart, but a Jacob Schwart smudged,