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She was jealous of her brothers. Herschel and August helped Pa in the cemetery because they were boys. Herschel was growing tall like his father but Gus was still a little boy, spindly-limbed, his hair shaved close to his bumpy skull so that his head was small and silly as a doll’s bald head.
Gus had been sent home from school with lice. Crying ‘cause he’d been called Cootie! Cootie! and some of the kids had thrown stones at him. It was Ma who shaved his head, for Pa would not come near.
Who was she: Rebecca? “Reb-ek-ah.” Ma said it was a beautiful name for it was the name of her great-grandmother who had lived a long time ago across the ocean. But Rebecca wasn’t so sure she liked her name. Nor did she like who-she-was: girl.
There were the two: boy, girl.
Her brothers were boys. So it was left to her to be girl.
There was a logic to this, she could understand. Yet she felt the injustice.
For her brothers could play in the marsh, in the tall snakeroot if they wanted. But she could not. (Had she been stung by a bee, had she cried hard? Or had Ma scared her, pinching her arm to show what a bee sting is?)
Each morning Ma brushed her hair that was girl-hair, plaiting the hair to make her scalp hurt. And scolding if she squirmed. And if she tore her clothes, or got dirty. Or made loud noises.
Rebecca! You are a girl not a boy like your brothers.
Almost she could hear Ma’s voice. Except she was in the cemetery trailing after Pa asking could she help? Could she help him?
“Pa?”
Oh yes she could help Pa! 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 fla
Pa shouted to her brothers who were working some distance away. His words were scarcely more than grunts with an edge of a
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 u
As soon as they’d arrived in Milburn, Jacob Schwart had forbidden the speaking of German by his family, for this was an era of German-hatred in America and a suspicion of German spies everywhere. Also, his native language had become loathsome to Jacob Schwart-“a language of beasts.” And so Herschel, who’d learned German as a child, was forbidden to speak it now; yet scarcely knew the “new” language, either. Often he spoke with an explosive stammer. Often it sounded as if he was trying not to laugh. Talkin, it was some kind of joke? Was it? You had to know the right sounds to talk, how to move your mouth, God damn they had to be the sounds other people knew, but how’d these people know? The co