by Shauna Seliy
Walter said, "Keep your mouth shut, Dad. Just help us get inside the house."
"How I did was I carried the sadness of losing Mirjana, losing her to Jimmy. The rock, the hammer, these are no problem—"
"Cut it out," Walter said. "I'm tired of you telling that story." He picked up a rock and cocked back his arm.
"It made me strong," Marko said.
Walter threw the rock. It hit Marko in the chest. Marko said, "See now, Lucas, rocks and things are no problem for me." He leaned over and picked up the rock. His lighter fell out of his shirt pocket, onto the ground. "Mirjana," he shouted at the house. "Zoli, you son of a bitch. Come outside!"
It was me who picked up the lighter and held it tight in my hand. Marko went on talking, shouting for Zoli, tossing the rock up in the air and catching it.
"He's not in there!" Walter said. "Shut up." He picked up another rock.
It was me who walked over to the carport and found the pile of rags and gasoline canisters.
I stood looking at the house. Just like Great-grandfather said had happened to him, ghosts climbed into my mouth and made it hard to breathe. I thought about my mother and my father. I thought of how Great-grandfather was leaving us piece by piece, first his dogs, then his animals, then his voice. I thought about the pear tree standing up in the empty field, scraping the sky with its black branches and broken bottles.
It was me who dipped the rags in the pools of spilled gas around the near-empty gasoline canisters, then tossed the canisters onto the porch.
Walter threw a rock, a window broke, then a second window broke. I don't really think it was possible that the music from the club was as loud as it seemed, but it felt like once the windows were broken, that music was roaring all around us, and that maybe it was the music, not the rocks, that was breaking the windows. I found a couple of sticks and wrapped the rags around them. Someone was singing "Samo Nemoj Ti." Someone was saying, "77 si rajski cvijet? You are a flower from heaven. "Tebe ljubitija necuprestatu I'll never stop loving you. The music was so loud and so beautiful, I was sure the house would explode, and the town would fall apart.
It was me who lit the first rag with Marko's lighter and held the branch like a torch. I broke the third window and threw the torch inside and then broke another window and threw in another torch. Later, Marko would say he'd done it and everyone would believe him, because everyone in Banning knew, everyone except for me until that night, that Marko had always loved my mother. But it was me who took the lighter and fixed it so the flame would hold after I let it go and tossed it at the gasoline canisters piled on the porch. I was the one who stood still and wouldn't run away even though the fire was coming closer and closer, so I could listen to that music roaring in my ears while I watched the house light up and let it wrap me in heat and noise. It was me.
Part Two
Chapter 15
Great-grandfather was wrestling bears in a traveling circus when he decided to come to Banning. He'd wanted to go to America and had left his village walking. One night, he came upon this circus and saw a man nearly taken to pieces by a bear. He didn't know the first thing about bears, but he needed money to get to America, so he offered to take the man's place. He wasn't as big or tall as most bear wrestlers, but he was quick on his feet, and he always gave the crowds a terrific show of how terrified he was. He wasn't pretending; he really was terrified. To calm himself, he talked to the bears, told them stories about his village in Russia.
The circus went all through the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As he went from place to place, he saved his money and kept his plan to go to America a secret. Then the circus came into the places where people were speaking Hungarian. Most of the time, he had no idea what they were talking about, but something in the sound of it, when he heard it, his heart did nothing but break. Though he couldn't be sure, it seemed to him, from the sounds of their words, that the Hungarians were always talking about things they wanted and couldn't have. In a room filled with their talking, the air would be so heavy with wanting that he'd have a hard time moving under the weight of it. Lying on his pile of blankets at the circus, he would hear the Hungarians passing by, talking, and he would almost weep. Sometimes he did weep.
He learned how to say a few things in Hungarian. He kept talking to the bears, and since he believed Hungarian to be a language of strung-together wishes, when he spoke it, without being able to help himself, his secret about wanting to go to America started to work its way out of his mouth. Sometimes the audience overheard. People wanted to help, and every so often, they handed him slips of paper, with names and addresses of people they knew in America. There were many Hungarians in Banning then.
But even after he'd saved enough for the ship and had pockets full of names, he still couldn't make himself leave. He knew it was only a matter of standing up and putting his things in his bags and beginning his walk to the sea, to a boat, but he couldn't manage it. He wasn't sure what he was waiting for. At night, he'd take his blankets and his rolled-up mattress out into the forest and lie down under the trees. He'd wait for the thought that would release him from the life he had and let him make his way into the life he had an idea was waiting for him someplace else. He'd look past the trees for the bright outlines of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. But nothing happened, no big idea came, only sleep.
The circus closed for a few days on the outskirts of Vienna, and Great-grandfather walked into the city. There was a festival and the Hapsburgs had opened the doors of the Imperial Chapel to the public. Great-grandfather patted the dust from his sleeves, wiped his shoes off with his handkerchief, and walked up the stairs into the chapel. Candles were burning, and sunlight was coming through the colored windows. He wanted to stand still, watch people come and go, and lean his head back so that he could see all the way up to the reaches of the ceiling, but he got swept along in a crowd. When they stopped, he found himself standing for a long time in a small room, not understanding what everyone was looking at. There was a set of shelves, and all along them rows of small urns. A man explained to him, in a whisper, that they were in the Heart Crypt, and that here, in front of them, were the hearts of the Hapsburgs, each one in its own urn.
"Their hearts?" Great-grandfather said.
The man nodded. "The dead Hapsburgs, their hearts."
Some of the urns were small, some were grander-looking, others were newer, shinier. After a long while of staring at them, Great-grandfather thought he could hear them beating. He put his hand on his chest and found that it wasn't the noise of their hearts beating that was filling his ears—it was his own. He understood, just then, maybe for the first time in his young life, that someday his heart too would be taken from him, and that there was nothing he could do about this, nothing even a Hapsburg could do.
That night, he gathered together the slips of paper that people had been handing him, the names and addresses of people in America. He copied them onto a single sheet of paper, whispering their names as he wrote them. There was a name that he liked from the minute he copied it, liked the way it sounded and the way it looked on the paper, Katalin, Great-grandmother's name.
The next morning, he started his walk to the sea. As he walked, he memorized the names on his list. He repeated them over and over. When he was tired, he would say, at each step, that name he liked, Katalin. On the ship, all the way across the Atlantic, he held the name in his mouth.
He knew what she looked like before he met her—that's what he told people—from saying her name for all those miles of walking. So that when he saw her, standing in the Banning company store looking into a barrel of black powder, he could walk up to her and introduce himself and know exactly what she would say when he asked her name.
My mother told me this story, and in the days after Greatgrandfather's voice left him, I heard pieces of it again from the great-aunts and great-uncles. My mother thought the reason the sound of Hungarian made Great-grandfather sad was that it was Great-grandmother's language and he missed her. If you
told her that didn't make any sense, that he couldn't miss her—they hadn't even met yet—she would say Great-grandfather's love for Great-grandmother didn't have anything to do with time. That's how the great loves were, the same as the Luna mine fire—that fire didn't seem to understand how unreasonable it was, blazing away for all those years for no reason anyone could point to. It didn't care about time, or about making sense—it only cared about burning.
The great-aunts and great-uncles flooded the farm after Greatgrandfather's voice went away. They brought boxes packed with food and liquor. They stood around his bed with worried faces, whispered in the corners of his room clinging to each other; or they cursed and broke bottles against the side of the house. Every so often, Kaya would sing.
It wasn't long after she'd sung one of her songs that two of the great-uncles got into a shouting match and ended up outside swinging at each other. We all followed them. They'd been drinking, and it had snowed, so whenever one of them threw a punch that missed, he slipped and fell over. The rest of them weren't so much breaking up the fight as they were yelling at the great-uncles to get back in the house so we could all get out of the cold. Slats made me go inside and put my coat on and bring her a sweater.
The great-uncles wouldn't let up on each other. Slats kept asking, "What in hell are they fighting about anyway?" No one seemed to know. "You should have a topic if you're going to fight this hard."
I brought her the sweater and she pulled it on. I was standing behind her. She turned around a few times and looked me up and down. "How come your coat stinks like smoke?" she said.
"How should I know?"
"What do you mean how should you know? It's your coat. Where you been wearing it?"
"Nowhere."
"You didn't go down and take a look at that fire, did you?"
"No."
"You stay away from there. Whoever was mixed up in that is going to be in some real hot water."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean with the police. Frank D'Angelo was already down there poking around. You better tell me if you know something." She looked at me for a minute, then she pulled her sweater tighter around her and got back to yelling at her brothers.
I went in the house and smelled my coat. It did stink. The other great-grandchildren came pouring into the room. I had to tell them a hundred times to leave me alone before they finally did.
In a closet, I found the old coat of Benci's that I'd worn out to the barn on Christmas Eve. It was a big old black coat with a fur-lined hood and wide pockets. I put it on and pulled the hood up. It went down over my eyes some, but I could still see. It made everything around me quiet, like being inside a cave. There was a grocery bag in the bottom of the closet. I put my smoke-smelling coat in there, and I stuffed the grocery bag under some shoes and boots.
When I went back outside, two cars I'd never seen before were coming down the driveway. They were big ancient cars, long as barges, one black and the other deep blue. Halfway to the house, they pulled over to the side and parked. The car doors opened, making a creaking sound. At first, it seemed like a flurry of black cloth, or smoke, was pouring out of the cars, but then there were flashes of pale skin, faces and hands, and I saw that they were priests, Orthodox priests with long black cassocks and beards and those tall black hats. They gathered up their books, closed the doors, and walked toward the house, their black cloaks brushing against the snow.
There were seven of them. Everyone, even me, knew what it meant when they came to you in sevens—they were bringing you the last oils of forgiveness to free you up of the sins you'd done on earth, before you left it. I pulled off my hood and looked at Slats. The great-uncles stopped cursing, put their fists down, and stepped away from each other. Everyone seemed to freeze to the spot they were standing on. No one went out to greet the priests.
In the space after the singing, the yelling, and the fighting, a heavy silence opened up. I'd been trying to figure out all day why there was so much more fighting and cursing than usual, and I finally understood that they'd been trying to drown out the quiet of Great-grandfather's voice being gone.
The priests got closer. Slats looked around at everyone and said, her voice low and cold, "Who sent for them?"
One of her sisters said, "We might try a doctor before a priest."
A brother said, "We'd have had to tie him down."
Benci walked out to greet them. He was the oldest, so it was his place to, but the way Slats looked at him, I knew she thought he was the one who'd asked them to come. He led them up the stoop, into the kitchen. Everyone walked past me and followed them inside. I could hear the priests' hard shoes knocking against the stairs on the way up to Great-grandfather's room.
A big wind blew across the farm and shifted the top layer of snow. I buttoned up the coat, dug my hands into the wide pockets, and watched Great-grandfather's windows fill up with people and shadows.
Eli came rushing outside. He hadn't been out with us during the fight and must have been inside with Great-grandfather when the priests came into the room. He came and stood next to me. We both looked up at the window. He smelled like the cold the deep woods give off.
"How come you aren't up there?" I said.
He shrugged. "Maybe if I don't watch, then it doesn't happen."
"What doesn't happen?"
The screen door slapped shut loud and it gave me and Eli both a start. Benci came out of the house, almost running. He got into his truck. I said, "He must have been the one sent for the priests."
"First, he should have made discussion with the others, the brothers and sisters, your dedka too. Make some agreement so that everyone is not so surprised."
"You ever hear of a Banning Two?"
He raised his eyebrows. "He tells about this to you?"
"He said a ghost was making him have this cough, a guy from Banning Two."
The wind kicked up again. Snow twisted around our ankles. He pointed to Great-grandfather's window, "In our religion, when a soul leaves a body, it must travel through some twenty tollhouses. At each one, you must face your accusers. They have records of your actions that you made. You have to pass through these, try to pass through these. They are up there, in sky." He looked up. "That's what they teaching us anyway. Our old friend has some fear, I think, that when he must do this, there will be some of his old friends. Maybe this is why he is thinking there is some ghost. Maybe has some fear."
"What would they be accusing him of?"
"Regular things that happened in life. The accusers are there to say that you did this, you did that, you failed at whatever you were trying to not fail as . . . as a brother, as a friend, as a son."
We watched Benci drive off into the fields. Up in the window, the great-aunts and great-uncles had their backs pressed against Great-grandfather's windows. Their heads were bent over; they were praying, I guessed, or looking at their shoes.
"What about the Two? Banning Two?"
"I haven't heard him talk about it for a long while. Always before with me, this was his way of talking about our friends that weren't with us anymore. He would say, 'Oh, you remember that guy? He is working now over in Banning Two.' Why? I don't know. He liked to think, I guess, that they hadn't gone so far away."
Another of the great-uncles came outside. He walked down past the barn, up into the fields. "Luca," Eli said. "You were a help to him before. Maybe he is look for you now, for more help. I think you must go inside."
I pointed to the great-uncle out in the fields. "He isn't in there. You aren't in there, either is Benci. Why do I got to go in?"
He started to walk away up the drive. He turned around after a while and saw that I was still standing there waiting for an answer. "That's what I'm telling you," he said. "It's you."
Inside the house, a mumbling run of prayers in deep unfamiliar voices hummed along the walls. Slats was sitting by herself at the kitchen table. "Guess it's official now," she said. She was concentrating on her hands in her lap, rubbing o
ne with the other, over and over.
"What is?" I said.
She gave me an empty look that I didn't see on her too often.
Everyone was lined up the stairs or in Great-grandfather's room. I took the steps two at a time. In his room, his white bed and white sheets and white skin seemed to be swallowed up in the ring of the priests' black cloaks. I got close enough to see his face. He was looking at the priests in a way I thought you shouldn't, squinting, waving them away.
The great-aunts whispered to me that the priests brought holy oil that had been blessed by the Metropolitan all the way over in Moscow. They read Gospel readings to him. They blessed his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet. They asked God to forgive the sins he'd made with those parts of him.
The head priest put the open Gospel book on Greatgrandfather's head and said another prayer. I looked around at all of the family. Some of their mouths were hanging open. They looked surprised. I didn't know them to be the kind of people it was easy to surprise. When bad things happened—someone getting shot, or all of a sudden dropping deathly sick or disappearing—they'd shake their heads, click their tongues, maybe cry, but they never looked the least bit surprised. Maybe what we thought was that it was impossible that Greatgrandfather would ever die. But then the priests were there, and it was as if they'd carried his death into the house and set it down in front of us, and the longer they stayed in the room, the more certain it seemed.
The priest took the book away from Great-grandfather's head, Great-grandfather looked around the room at all of the family. And then he looked right at me, like he was looking all the way through me, or inside of me, to see what I was made of.
Surprising myself, I said to the priests, "You got to leave." No one seemed to hear me.
"Hey," I said, louder this time. "You got to get away from him."
"Shh," the great-aunts said.
Great-grandfather was still looking at me.