The Gravedigger’S Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

HAZEL JONES had become a jeering din.
    “No. I am not. God damn you leave me alone.”
    Him removing his glasses. Prissy tinted glasses. So she could see his eyes. How sincere he was, and pleading. The injured iris of one eye, like something burnt-out. Possibly he was blind in that eye. Smiling at her, hopeful.
    “Like I was somebody special. ‘Hazel Jones.’”
    She had no wish to think about Hazel Jones. Still less did she want to think about the man in the panama hat. She’d have liked to scream into his face. Seeing again his shock, when she’d torn up his card. That gesture, she’d done right.
    But why: why did she detest him?
    She had to concede, he was a civilized man. A gentleman. A man who’d been educated, who had money. Like no one else she knew, or had ever known. And he’d made such an appeal to her.
    He was kind-hearted, he meant to do right.
    “Was it just I’m ‘Hazel Jones’ or�maybe, it was me .”
    Remembered you . In his will .
    Legacy .
    “See, I am not her. The one you think I am.”
    Must remember me, Dr. Hendricks’s son .
    “I told you, I don’t.”
    God damn she’d told him no , she’d been truthful from the start. But he’d kept on and on like a three-year-old insisting what could not be, was. He’d continued to speak to her as if he had heard yes where she’d been saying no . Like he was seeing into her soul, he knew her in some way she didn’t know herself.
    “Mister, I told you. I’m not her .”
    So tired. Late afternoon is when you’re susceptible to accidents. Even the old-timers. You get slack, fatigued. SAFETY FIRST!�posters nobody glanced at anymore, so familiar. 10 SAFETY REMINDERS. One of them was KEEP YOUR EYES ON YOUR WORK AT ALL TIMES.
    When Rebecca’s vision began to waver inside the goggles, and she saw things as if underwater, that was the warning sign: falling asleep on her feet. But it was so…It was so lulling. Like Niley falling asleep, his eyelids closing. A wonderment in it, how human beings fall asleep same as animals. What is the person in personality and where does it go when you fall asleep. Niley’s father Tignor sleeping so deeply, and sometimes his breath came in strange erratic surges she worried he might cease breathing, his big heart would cease pumping and then: what? He had married her in a “civil ceremony” in Niagara Falls. She’d been seventeen at the time. Somewhere, lost amid his things, was the Certificate of Marriage.
    “I am. I am Mrs. Niles Tignor. The wedding was real.”
    Rebecca jerked her head up, quickly. Where’d she been…?
    She poked her fingers inside the goggles, wiping her eyes. But had to take off her safety gloves first. So awkward! She wanted to cry in frustration…. hurt . Or were told you were . I don’t judge . He was watching her from the doorway, he was speaking about her with one of the bosses. She saw him, in the corner of her eye; she would not stare, and allow them to know that she was aware of them. He wore cream-colored clothes, and the panama hat. Others would glance at him, quizzically. Obviously, he was one of the owners. Investors. Not a manager, not dressed for an office. Yet he was a doctor, too…
    Why’d Rebecca rip up his card! The meanness in her, taking after her gravedigger father. She was ashamed of herself, thinking of how he’d been shocked by her, and hurt.
    Yet: he did not judge.
    “Wake up . Girl, you better wake up .”
    Again Rebecca had almost fallen asleep. Almost got her hand mangled, left hand this time.
    Smiled thinking crazily: the fingers on the left hand you would not miss so much. She was right-handed.
    She knew: the man in the panama hat wasn’t in the factory. She must have seen, in the blurry corner of her eye, the plant manager. A man of about that height and age who wore a short-sleeved white shirt, most days. No bow tie, and for sure no panama hat.
    After work she would almost-see him again. Across the street, beneath the shoe repair awning. Quickly she