“Hurry up,” Martin called. “It’s cold.”
A flicker of movement caught my eye as I glanced up to answer him. The curtain in the front window of the decrepit house where the old woman lived was being drawn aside. A corner of the woman’s face came into view. She was watching the men at the river.
“Look, Marty,” I said, wheeling him around by the arm.
“What?”
When I spun back, the window was empty. The curtain had returned to its place.
“Did you see her? She was there. In the window.”
“Who? What window?”
“The woman I told you about.”
“So?” Martin said, shaking his arm free and marching on.
“Don’t you want to see her? Don’t you want to see that she’s real?”
“No, I want to go home.”
He went on ahead, leaving me alone outside the woman’s house. I waited, hoping for some other sign of movement. But the house stood there as still and blank as before.
MY MOTHER WAS BUSY with the wash when we returned. She cleaned each garment by hand in the sink. The process usually took hours because she scrubbed every piece so ardently, almost unforgivingly. From that morning and on into the afternoon, my mother kept to her work, soaping and rinsing the clothes with an all-consuming fervor. She was rubbing the cake of soap into the clothes, driving it into every fiber of the cloth, then she thrust each garment underwater, rinsing it of soap, then wrung it dry, squeezing out each drop of water. She seemed to have forgotten we were there with her in the apartment. She simply continued washing.
The rest of the day inched by, one long hour after another. Our only distraction was the radio. My mother hadn’t let us play it in weeks, so the music was a balm against the quiet. I don’t remember what Martin and I did. All I remember was the heavy, leaden feel of exhaustion and the fact that my father didn’t return until it was nearly time for us to go to bed. We heard him on the front step, talking to someone in the alley, then at last, my mother pulled the stopper from the sink and the water began to drain. A heaping basketful of wet clothes sat at her feet.
“Hang these while I fix supper,” she told me.
I was hungry and tired and tempted to refuse, though I didn’t dare. The weight of the overloaded basket was almost too much for me. I heaved it into my arms and struggled to open the door. Neither Martin nor my mother noticed, so neither came to help. I didn’t want to put the basket back down for fear of not being able to pick it up again.
Gravity was taking over and the basket was slowly inching its way down my stomach and over my knees. My fingers slid frantically over the knob. Without warning, the door opened, bumping the basket and jarring me backward. It was my father, stunned to find me there, blocking his way. I rushed past him and into the alley, lugging the basket.
It was practically dark by then, too late to be hanging wash. The wet clothes would probably freeze, then we would have to leave them there for an extra day to let the hardened fabric thaw. Afterward, the clothes wouldn’t feel the same. All of the softness would have been beaten out of them by wind and frost.
Night was gusting in, rattling the clothesline and making it difficult for me to get the clothes to stay on it. One clothespin popped off and dropped into the mud, and another, then I would have to wipe them clean on the side of the basket. With every fallen clothespin, my frustration mounted and I had to fight to keep from crying. The outhouse was entering my peripheral vision as I worked my way down the clothesline. Once I reached the outhouse, the first tear fell. I cried until I’d finished hanging every piece of clothing my mother had washed. I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I would not miss Swatka Pani. I didn’t mourn her death. Then I realized that that was the very reason for my tears. She was dead and I didn’t care.
I didn’t want to go back inside, yet I couldn’t bear to stay out there either. I blotted my cheeks on the sleeve of my sweater and stared into the wind to dry my eyes, then returned to the apartment.
“Wash up. Supper’s on,” my mother said as I entered.
I ducked into the washroom and Martin followed. “Were you crying?” he asked.
“It was just cold out.”
“You were crying. I can tell.”
“So what if I was,” I answered, splashing water on my face.
“Were you crying because of Swatka Pani?”
“No,” I scoffed, though it was another lie.
Swatka Pani had embodied every fear I’d ever known. Each time she skulked down Third, her cane piercing the mud, I knew what was coming. Her presence would sound a warning in my mind. With her gone, there would no longer be a sign, no signal. All things frightful could now roam freely on the alley. I cried because I would no longer be able to see them coming.
“I’m not going to cry about Swatka Pani,” Martin declared. “I’m glad she’s gone.”
“Don’t say that,” I scolded with a glance upward. “He can hear you. God can always hear you.”
“Yeah, and I bet He knew Swatka Pani was going to hell, so he let the devil take her. That’s who killed her, you know. The devil. He came to collect her the way she comes to collect our rent money.”
“Martin, stop it. Stop saying things like that. It’s not true. That’s not how it works.”
“How do you know?”
I stormed out of the washroom to avoid answering. Both of my parents looked up from the table. “What’s going on in there?” my father asked.
“Nothing. It was nothing.”
I took my seat at the table and Martin followed. We dropped our heads to pray over the meal of chicken, onions, and potatoes. My father lowered his head and mouthed the words as usual, like a song he was singing only to himself. My mother was always the loudest, enunciating each syllable crisply, her voice overriding ours. That day she was murmuring the prayer. Even Martin’s small voice boomed over hers.
My father lit a cigarette, as he did before each meal, then we all began to eat. The radio was still playing and a news program was on. Two men were discussing the German army and their steady spread across Europe.
“Filthy Germans,” my father muttered, responding to a comment one of the newscasters had made.
“Why are they filthy?” Martin asked.
“They’re greedy. They want everything they can put their hands on.”
Martin still didn’t understand. “Does that make their hands dirty?”
That was one question too many for my father. “No, damn it, I don’t mean dirty. Filthy’s just an expression. It doesn’t mean that they’re really filthy.” He took an irritated drag on his cigarette and exhaled a wrathful stream of smoke across the table.
“Well, I didn’t know,” Martin pouted.
“Well, now you do.”
My father pushed aside his plate and mechanically finished his cigarette while he listened to the newscasters bicker over where the German army would head next, south to France or east and deeper into Europe. He nodded his head when he agreed with what the men were saying or clucked his disagreement with his tongue.
The radio program came to an end and music returned. An upbeat tune wafted through the apartment, then was interrupted by a knock on the door. My father grudgingly got up to answer it, as though he’d been in the middle of something.
A policeman was on the other side of the door. “Evening,” he said in Polish. “Come by to ask about…” He gestured toward the end of the alley and Swatka Pani’s house. “You mind if I come in?”
The policeman wore a long, heavy overcoat and stood almost a head taller than my father, who backed away to let him enter. The officer’s presence threw the rest of the apartment out of scale. He seemed enormous in the small room.
“All of you here this morning?” he asked.
Martin and I looked to my mother, who deferred to my father. He nodded, fast and silent, then touched his shirtsleeve to make sure it was down, covering his bound wound.
“What about last night?”
“I work the fourth shift at the mill,” my father explained.
“So you weren’t home until this morning?”
All my father gave him was another nod, then the policeman swiveled on his heel. “What about you?” he asked, addressing my mother, Martin, and me. “You were home, weren’t you?”
Martin and I waited for my mother to reply. She merely nodded, though that appeared to be a feat on her part. She sat motionless in her chair, barely blinking.
“Hear or see anything out of the ordinary?”
Martin piped in. “What’s out of the ordinary?”
The policeman warmed a bit and took a step closer to Martin. “It means something different, like you haven’t seen or heard before.”
Martin considered the definition, then shook his head.
“What about you?” the officer asked me. I glanced at my mother. Her body was there, but she had vanished. I shook my head as well.
“And you?” he said, addressing her again.
“No,” she answered, her voice thin. “I didn’t see anything.”
“I’ll leave you to your supper then.”
The policeman closed the door behind him, then Martin hopped up from his chair to watch him from the window.
“Sit down,” my father told him.
“But—”
“I said to sit down.”
Martin returned to the table while my father hastened into his overcoat.
“Where are you going?” Martin asked.
“I’ve got something I’ve got to see about.”
“What something?” Martin pressed.
“Something, is all. I’ll be back.”
Once my father was gone, Martin folded his arms heavily. “He’s always going somewhere. Why can’t somewhere be here?”
My mother glanced up from her plate. “I don’t know,” she said. We waited for her to go on, but that short phrase seemed to have drained everything from her. She set down her fork, as though even that small weight was too much for her to handle.
“I’ve got to lie down for a bit,” she said, then she drifted into her room.
“I don’t like this,” Martin fretted. “She always helps us with the dishes.”
“Maybe she’s tired,” I offered, though her sudden departure alarmed me too.
“Or maybe she’s scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Scared of the man who killed Swatka Pani. Maybe she thinks he’s going to come after us.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, grabbing my plate.
Martin trailed after me with his plate in hand. “How do you know?”
“It just isn’t. Now help me with the dishes.”
“You always say things like that. You act like you know the answer for sure but you never explain it.” Martin put his plate down hard, causing a resounding ping. “You’re just like he is. Always saying things that you won’t explain.”
The insult stung, so much so that I couldn’t reply. It was true. I was constantly asserting truths for which I had no backing, no real facts, more to protect Martin than anything else, but he’d seen through me. My intentions were good. Yet that wasn’t enough.
Together, Martin and I washed the dishes without speaking. I was scraping and rinsing them while he dried. We finished quickly, and for once, part of me wished there were more dishes to clean, wished we could keep washing until things had gotten comfortable again and no one’s feelings were hurt.
WE WENT TO BED, lying back to back in an uneasy silence. My mother never left the bedroom and I didn’t hear my father come in, though he was the first one up the following morning. I awoke to his rustling in the washroom and his muffled cursing. When he stalked out of the washroom, cigarette bobbing at the corner of his mouth, the noise woke Martin as well. The bandages were hanging from my father’s arm and he was trying to rewrap them, but the tape had tangled into a snarled mess.
“I can help you,” Martin said, scampering out of bed.
“No, your sister’ll do it,” my father ordered, brushing Martin off. “Come round here and get this on straight for me.” The command was directed at me.
Martin climbed back into bed to sulk while I pried the mangled tape from my father’s arm and rebandaged the wound. Dried blood was crusted along the ridge of the cut and had stained the white thread of the stitches a blackish brown. The cut had become more gruesome than it was when it was fresh.
“Maybe we should wash it again,” I suggested.
“No, not now. After church,” my father said. “Go on and finish.”
I took care to rewrap the tape and was about to set the roll down so I could cut it when my father waved Martin over, saying, “Get your sister the knife.”
“She can get it.”
“What did I tell you?” My father’s tone was enough to send Martin trotting to the cupboard to get the knife.
“Here.” Martin laid the knife on the table loudly.
“Get over here,” my father snapped, putting down his cigarette. Martin remained where he was, clutching the side of the table. “I said come over here.”
Martin reluctantly approached. Once he was within arm’s reach, my father snatched him by the shoulder with his good hand, yanking Martin in close. Both Martin and I were then the same distance from my father, yet there was a world of difference in our positions.
“I won’t have any of that back talk,” my father said fiercely. “Now put your Sunday clothes on and get ready for church.”
Martin squirmed out of my father’s grip and went and hid in the washroom.
“Finish this up,” my father instructed. I listened for some trace of guilt in his voice, but heard none. Martin’s comment from the night before burned even hotter. I didn’t want to be compared to my father or be like him. At that moment, I didn’t want to share a single trait with him.
I picked up the knife, grasping it firmly. Temptation welled up and possibility pooled in my mind. The previous night I had held the knife with delicate purpose. That morning, I was gripping it.
My father took a long drag off his cigarette as I ran the blade over the bandage. With each stroke, the knife edged closer to his arm. He was oblivious, staring down at the floor. All thoughts ceased as I watched the progress of the blunt blade. The tape was giving way. The cut was arcing downward, closer to the exposed underside of my father’s forearm. He flinched when he saw how close it was and the tip of the blade nearly nicked him just as it cut through the tape.
“Jesus!” he shouted, standing abruptly. “Weren’t you watching? You could’ve cut me.”
My mother threw open the bedroom door. “What happened?”
My father jabbed out his cigarette. “Nothing.”
Martin was watching from the washroom. I could tell from his face that he’d seen everything. He didn’t know that I had done it for him.
But had I? I wondered.
I tried to trace the origin of the urge that had been flowing through me, but like a breeze, it was gone as quickly as it had come.
It was the lies. They were changing me. By lying, I believed I had opened some sort of floodgate. Every fear imaginable suddenly became possible. Was it my fault my father had gotten cut the day before? Was it me who had made my mother recede from us even further? Was it my hatred for Swatka Pani that had killed her?
I started praying in my mind, hoping God would hear me.
Our Father, who art in heaven.
My mother came out of the bedroom. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, more out of habit than suspicion.
Hallowed be thy name.
“Get dressed for church,” she said. She put the kettle on the stove for coffee and began to prepare breakfast. “And help your brother with his clothes.”
The prayer continued in my head, drowning out my mother’s voice.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.
My father went into the bedroom to change. Martin was still standing in the doorway of the
washroom in his pajamas. He took a step back when I approached.
On earth as it is in heaven.
I took his Sunday clothes from the closet, a white button-down shirt, a pair of gray trousers, and an ill-fitting blue blazer. The elbows on the blazer had thinned from wear and the cuffs had been shortened and re-hemmed so many times that the fabric buckled from the uneven underpinnings. Most young boys’ church clothes weren’t much different, though that didn’t make Martin look any less pitiful in the outfit.
Martin hesitantly took the garments from me and closed the door partway to undress. I waited outside as he climbed into his clothes and struggled into the blazer. Through the crack in the doorway, I saw my brother as I had never seen him before, as a little boy wearing a grown man’s outfit. Those clothes said more about the way he lived, the way we both lived, than I could ever bring myself to speak aloud.
Martin stepped out of the washroom, already itching to remove the blazer.
“I hate wearing this.”
“I know. But you have to. You don’t have any choice.”
For once, Martin did not question my tone of voice or press me for the deeper truth of what I’d said. He did not see beyond the plain meaning of those words.
WE WALKED TOGETHER, as a family, to church. My father was in his one good jacket, and under her coat, my mother was wearing her church dress, a maroon wool ensemble that had a matching sash. Though simple in cut, it was a beautiful dress that appeared as if it had been tailor-made to fit my mother when, in fact, she had purchased it secondhand. She wore her good gloves, the kidskin ones that made her fingers seem long and slender. With her elegant dress and gloves and her hair pinned up in a sleek bun, my mother looked completely out of place strolling next to the rest of us, and even more out of place on Third.
With each step, my guilty conscience weighed on me more heavily. As my boots broke through the top of the thawing mud, I thought I might get sucked down into it and drown right then and there. God could see me and He could see into the farthest reaches of my heart, always. He knew what I had done. I was terrified that I would be struck down the instant I stepped through the church doors. The fear gripped me tighter and tighter as we joined the procession of other families making their way to Saint Ladislaus for Mass.
The Grave of God's Daughter Page 13