“At regular intervals” all the wells in Chautauqua County were tested. Certainly!

Jacob Schwart had listened, and had nodded.

Yes sirs. Thank you. I am only concerned…

He hadn’t pursued the issue. He’d been dazed with exhaustion at the time. And so much to think about: housing his family, feeding his family. Oh, he’d been desperate! That ravaging will of which Schopenhauer wrote so eloquently, to exist, to survive, to persevere. The baby daughter who lacerated his heart with her astonishing miniature beauty yet maddened him, fretting through the night, crying loud as a bellows, vomiting her mother’s milk as if it were poison. Crying until in a dream dense as glue he saw himself clamping his hand over her tiny wet mouth.

Anna spoke worriedly of the “grave water”-she was sure there was danger. Jacob tried to convince her there was no danger, she must not be ridiculous. He told her what the township officials had told him: the water in their well had been tested recently, it was pure spring water.

“And we won’t be living here long.”

Though later, he would tell her bluntly, “We will have to live with it, for now.”

Was there an odor in the cemetery? A smell after rain of something sickly-sweet, moldering? A rancid-meat smell, a maggoty-meat smell, a putrescence-smell?

Not when the wind blew from the north. And the wind was always blowing from the north, it seemed. In these foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains south of Lake Ontario.

What you smelled in the Milburn cemetery was earth, grass. Mown grass rotting in compost piles. In summer, a pungent odor of sunshine, heat. Decomposing organic matter that was half-pleasurable to the nostrils, Jacob Schwart thought.

It would come to be Jacob Schwart’s unmistakable smell. Permeating his weathered skin and what remained of his straggly hair. All his clothing, that, within a short period of time, not even 20 Mule Team Borax could fully clean.

Of course he knew: his children had to endure ignorant taunts at school. Herschel was big enough now to fend for himself but August was a timorous child, another disappointment to his father, tongue-tied and vulnerable. And there was little Rebecca, so vulnerable.

It sickened him to think of his daughter whom he could not protect laughed at by her classmates, even by ignorant teachers at her school.

Gravedigger’s daughter!

He told her, solemnly as if she were of an age to understand such words, “Humankind is fearful of death, you see. So they make jokes about it. In me, they see a servant of death. In you, the daughter of such a one. But they do not know us, Rebecca. Not you, and not me. Hide your weakness from them and one day we will repay them! Our enemies who mock us.”

All human actions aim at the good.

So Hegel, following Aristotle, had argued. In Hegel’s time (he died in 1831) it had been possible to believe that there is “progress” in the history of humankind; history itself progresses from the abstract to the concrete, in this way realized in time. Hegel had believed, too, that nature is of necessity, and determined; while humankind knows freedom.

Jacob had read Schopenhauer, too. Of course. They had all read Schopenhauer, in Jacob’s circle. But he hadn’t succumbed to the philosopher’s pessimism. The world is my idea. The individual is confusion. Life is ceaseless struggle, strife. All is will: the blind frenzy of insects to copulate before the first frost kills them. He’d read Ludwig Feuerbach for whom he had a special predilection: it thrilled him to discover the philosopher’s savage critique of religion, which Feuerbach exposed as no more than a creation of the human mind, the projection of mankind’s highest values in the form of God. Of course! It had to be so! The pagan gods of antiquity, thunderous Yehovah of the Jews, Jesus Christ on His cross so mournful and martyred-and triumphant, in resurrection. “It was all a ruse. A dream.” So Jacob told himself, at the age of twenty. Such blindness, superstition, the old rites of sacrifice given a “civilized” cast: all were the way of the past, dying or extinct in the twentieth century.

He read Karl Marx, and became an ardent socialist.

To his friends he defined himself as an agnostic, a freethinker, and a German.

…a German! What a bitter joke, in retrospect.

Hegel, that fantasist, had been right about one thing: the owl of Minerva flying only at dusk. For philosophy comes too late, invariably. Understanding comes too late. By the time human intelligence grasps what is happening, it is in the hands of the brutes, and becomes history.

Broken-off pieces, like vertebrae.

Oh! I could listen to you talk forever, you have such wisdom.

Early in their love the young Anna had told Jacob this. Her eyes brimming with adoration of him. He’d spoken passionately to her of his socialist beliefs and she’d been dazzled, if slightly scandalized, by his certainty. No religion? No God? None? Anna’s religious background had been similar to his, her people were very like his, proud of their “assimilation” into German middle-class culture. In his presence she believed as he believed, she learned to mimic certain of his words. The future. Mankind. Shapers of our own destiny.

Now they rarely spoke. Between them was a heavy, palpable silence. Clumsy rocks and boulders of silence. Like eyeless undersea creatures they moved in intimate proximity to each other and were keenly aware of each other and sometimes they spoke, and sometimes they touched, but there was only deadness between them now. Anna knew him as no one living knew him: he was a broken man, a coward. He had been unmanned. The rats had devoured his conscience, too. He’d had to fight to save himself and his young family, he’d betrayed a number of his relatives who had trusted him, and Anna’s as well; he might have done worse if he’d had the opportunity. Anna would not accuse him for she had been his accomplice, as she’d been the mother of his sons. How he had acquired the exorbitant sums of money needed for their escape from Munich, their flight through France and their booking on the ship in Marseilles, Anna had not asked. She’d been pregnant with their third child then. She had their sons Herschel and August. She had come to see that nothing mattered to her except her children, that they not die.

“We will live for them, yes? We will not look back.”

He made such vows, as a man might make, though he’d been unmanned, he had no sex. The rats had devoured his sex, too. Where his genitals had been was something useless now, soft-rotted fruit. Pathetic, comical. Through such a flesh-knob he managed to urinate, sometimes with difficulty. Oh, that was enough!

“I said. We will have to live with it, for now.”

As she would not speak of her fear of contaminated water, even after heavy rains when the well water was so cloudy, and the children gagged and spat it out, so Anna would not speak of their future. She would not ask him any questions. How much money he’d saved, for instance. When they might be leaving Milburn.

And what was his salary, as caretaker of the cemetery?

If Anna had dared to ask, Jacob would have told her it was no business of hers. She was wife, mother. She was a woman. He would give her money each week: one-, five-, ten-dollar bills with which to shop. Counting out coins on the kitchen table, frowning and sweating in the halo of the bare-bulb light overhead.

Yes: Jacob Schwart had a savings account. Behind the stately neo-Grecian facade of the First Bank of Chautauqua on Main Street. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Jacob thought of this bank account, its exact sum, almost constantly; even when he was not consciously thinking of it, it hovered at the back of his mind.