My heart faltered. I knew the watch. My mother had shown it to me when I was younger and told me it was her father’s. It was the one thing he had left her.
“Why? Why did she sell it to you?”
“Said she owed some money,” Mr. Sekulski explained. “Must have been a lot for all of the times she’s been here.” He held up a thin gold band. “This is hers too.”
It was my mother’s wedding ring. An aching horror descended on me like a sheet being pulled over my head. Once, after church, Martin had asked her why she didn’t wear a ring like other women did. She told us she was afraid of losing it. She told us that her hands were always in water when she was working and that she didn’t want it to fall down the drain or slip off.
The realization of what my mother had done came hurtling at me, then went careening off again. I tried to hold it down in my mind the way I’d tried to hold myself under the water in the bathtub, fighting all the way.
“She usually comes around every few weeks or so,” Mr. Sekulski added, shutting the lockbox. “She’ll sell a brooch or some candlesticks. Sometimes little things. Depends.” He waved to a pair of brass candlesticks sitting on the shelf, still nestled in a small cloth sack. It was the same sack my mother had tried to hide from our view two weeks earlier.
“Haven’t seen her in a while though. Maybe she finally paid off that money after all.”
The truth poured over me in one long, awful cascade. I gripped the painting to my chest.
“Careful,” Mr. Sekulski warned. “That’s a delicate thing. You’ll break it if you don’t watch how you hold it.”
I wheeled around and bolted from the back room only to run right into Martin. He had heard everything.
“You didn’t make me promise. You didn’t make me swear. Not this time.”
I pushed past him and he chased after me. “Let me see it.”
“It’s just the painting.”
“But she sold it. That man said she sold it. Why’d she sell it? Why’d she sell all of our things?”
I was racing through the aisles with Martin hard on my heels.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Martin, I said I don’t know.”
“I know you do. I can tell. Don’t lie to me.”
We were tearing through the store, making a scene. “Don’t talk so loud,” I told him. “We’ve got to go home.”
Martin pulled me to a halt outside the Savewell. “Why did she sell all of those things? Tell me.” He was trying to order me, the way our father did, to stand his ground, but it was desperation that flooded the plea.
“Tell me,” Martin implored.
“She needed the money to pay for Papa’s—”
I stopped myself, the word Papa tingling on my tongue. My heart bloated with a new kind of pain. “For his drinking,” I lied.
Martin struggled to read my face. “That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Martin’s face twisted. He wanted to believe me so badly that for a while I think he did. But over time, the lie I told that day festered. Martin would never forget it and neither would I.
As we headed home, Martin put his hand in my pocket again, ambling after me a half step behind. It wasn’t the last time he ever did that, but I remembered it as if it was. I can’t recall the path we took or who or what we passed. I pushed everything out of my mind so I could hold on to the memory of what it was like to have Martin’s hand in my pocket. I tried to memorize the feeling of his fingers against my hip, to fill my head with the heft of his hand and the tug of my coat as he walked alongside me. The feeling was so sweet it hurt, but I wouldn’t let it go.
Martin paused before we entered the apartment. “Can I touch it?”
My mother would never let us near the painting of the Black Madonna. Once Martin had stood on a chair to admire the painting close-up and my mother scolded him for breathing on it. I’d felt the temptation myself to wake in the night and run my hand over the painting, but I was too frightened to do so, afraid that somehow the marks of my fingers might show.
I lowered the painting away from my chest. I’d been holding it so tightly that the frame was driving into my ribs, leaving an ache with edges as square as the frame. Martin studied the painting, then laid his hand at the top of it and drew his fingers along its surface.
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” he said. “Now you.”
Martin waited, yet I was reticent. “It’s okay,” he assured me. “It won’t hurt. Better take those off first,” he cautioned. I was still wearing the bloodied bandages. “I’ll help you.”
I held out one hand, then the next while he delicately unwound the bandages. The hands that were revealed beneath were mangled. They didn’t seem like my own or even real. The welts were nearly black and were dotted along the edges with red clots. The blisters had turned white. The pile of bandages was overflowing in Martin’s arms. “What should we do with them?”
“Put them in my pocket.”
He stuffed the bandages into the pocket where his hand had been and I almost stopped him, but couldn’t explain why I didn’t want them there.
“Okay,” Martin said, urging me on. The painting was waiting.
With a tentative touch, I ran my finger over its surface, tracing the outline of the Black Madonna’s burnt robes, lingering along the folds, soaking up the texture of each shadow and line.
“Can I touch her face?” I asked. Martin was as unsure as I was.
I brushed my fingertip along the Black Madonna’s cheek, caressing it from one side to the other, then pulled away.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“All right,” Martin replied. “Do you want me to open the door?”
“Yeah, you open it.” I cast a glance down the alley. Swatka Pani’s house stood hunched where it had always been. Only now the fallen limbs of the rosebushes were gone, blown away. No sign of life remained. I gave Martin the key and he unlocked the apartment door.
“You want me to go first?”
“No, I’ll go.”
“Are you scared?”
I didn’t have to answer. Martin opened the door and my mother was sitting at the table, stitching up the collar on the shirt she had been mending for my father. The note we’d left was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t look up from her sewing. She kept drawing each stitch in and out in a sweeping rhythm. When she did finally glance up, the needle froze in midair.
The painting lay in my arms, its back to her, yet there could be no mistaking what it was. The needle quivered in her hand, then my mother let out a sigh so brief but so full of agony that I heard every secret in it, every untold truth.
She did it all for you.
With unfeeling legs, I moved across the apartment and pulled a chair alongside the wall. I stepped on the seat and came face-to-face with the shadow the painting had left in its absence. That faint spot was everything I was, the product of darkness and sunlight and the proof that a presence, no matter how slight or small, still leaves its mark. Hands shaking, I rehung the painting of the Black Madonna and covered the shadow for good.
THE DAY I BROUGHT HOME the Black Madonna fell from memory, gone but not excised from any of our minds. My mother never asked how I had gotten the painting back or what I had done to pay for it. I believe the thought of what I might have learned in the process terrified her. It was easier to pretend that nothing had happened, for her as well as for me. What was not spoken was not real. To say anything aloud would have made it too true to bear.
That spring passed, and a year later, the man I knew as my father was sent to war. The National Polish Alliance drafted all of the able-bodied men in Hyde Bend and shipped them to France to fight the fast-encroaching German army. The steel mill closed briefly, as did the salt plant, then women began to take their husbands’ jobs and the work went on. Hyde Bend became a town of women and children. Men were scarce and those who were around were old or infirm, useles
s.
Two months after he was sent away, the man I knew as my father was shot through the back of the skull in a forest in the middle of the night as his regiment trekked north to fortify the front. His body was buried in an army graveyard outside Pittsburgh along with thousands of others. A stark, granite headstone listed only his name, date of birth, and date of death. Once a month we would make the journey to his grave, taking two buses and making a mile-long walk to get there. At each visit, Martin and I would stand silently and watch as my mother meticulously weeded the plot, ripping up stray dandelions and pulling out the dying grass. Afterward, we would leave and return to what we knew.
The war went on. Food that had once been scarce grew scarcer. People prayed more and went to church less. Time worked against us in every way. There was too little to the day to make enough money and too much night to consider what we didn’t have and what we’d lost. My mother continued to work at Saint Ladislaus. Father Svitek was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and grew ill. My mother tended him in his sickbed until he was moved to a hospital, where he too died. Another priest was brought in and my mother became his housekeeper. He soon left, then another priest arrived, then another. The priests came and went while my mother remained the only constant.
After that day, I never went back to the butcher’s shop. Mr. Goceljak knew where I lived and, early on, I worried he would come to the apartment and inquire as to why I hadn’t returned. He never did. Though I was only partly thankful that he didn’t. I never saw Mr. Beresik again either, except once I glimpsed him driving a truck down Field Street, heading out of Hyde Bend, toward his house. The truck was piled high with bales of hay, for the dogs’ bedding, I guessed. The bales were stacked neatly one on top of another, the yellow straw glimmering as strands blew from the bales and fluttered through the air, lost in the truck’s wake. I put the pain of missing both men away, tied it up tightly and hid it in the back of my heart.
A year into the war, I overheard women gossiping by the laundry lines and saying that the woman from the house on River Road had died. It was Mr. Goceljak who had found her. She hadn’t answered the door for any of her deliveries. Worried, he went to her house and discovered her body in bed, tucked neatly under the covers. She had died in her sleep, a peaceful death, the only peace she’d had in years. I wondered if the woman had ever thought about me, about the boy who came to her door to make deliveries, the one she chose to talk to. I wondered if she missed that person. There were times I would try to picture her face and all that would come to mind were memories of her disheveled hair, her loose sweaters, her house heaped high with refuse. They were the only images I had of the woman who was my grandmother. Later I learned that she was buried out of town. No one knew where, or if they did, they wouldn’t say. I assumed that Mr. Goceljak had paid for her burial. It was a feeling, never confirmed, and even years later, when I would pass his shop and pause, I debated whether to go inside to ask. The truth was something I didn’t trust myself with. It was better that I didn’t have it.
I never told Martin what I had learned about our mother or about what she had done, but Martin sensed I was holding something back from him, like he sensed every other lie, and for that, he never forgave me. I came to believe that the man I knew as my father must also have known the truth, maybe not all the details, but enough.
My mother had been an unparalleled beauty and there could be no doubt that he would have married her for that and that alone. Perhaps she’d lied to him about being pregnant and made him believe that I was his. Eventually he must have figured out that I wasn’t. I pictured him studying me as an infant and as I grew, not seeing himself in my face. I imagined his doubt rising and swelling, so much so that he drank to keep that doubt at bay.
In the absence of truth, my imagination was all I had. I tried to piece together my mother’s life, to envision her with the priest. I concocted a love story out of nothing and embroidered it with fictional details of stolen glances and tender moments. They would have met when she was a teenager, when she’d first taken the job at the church after her father had died. I could see her cooking meals for him at the rectory, pots steaming, mending a lost button on his sleeve or making his bed. I imagined that the spot where we always sat in church might have been the spot where she first saw him or the spot where they first spoke. I could never know the truth, but the romantic tale I’d fashioned in my mind gave me solace.
Imagination also let me piece together how my mother had fallen prey to Swatka Pani. When the old woman from the house on River Road refused to pay, Swatka Pani sought my mother out and threatened her with exposure. I pictured Swatka Pani hissing about how she would let her secret loose if my mother didn’t pay her off. I decided that was how it had all begun. My mother sold everything she had, yet it would never be enough. I surmised that she’d even started stealing things from the rectory to pawn, then finally, she’d had to sell her beloved painting of the Black Madonna. Still, Swatka Pani wanted more. When the man who I believed was my father started using most of our money for alcohol, my mother could no longer make her payments. Then Swatka Pani must have grown impatient and upped her threats. The truth about my identity would shame us all. It would have ruined me. But my mother wouldn’t let that happen.
That night when Leonard knocked on our door, it was not a visit, but a reminder. Swatka Pani had sent him to make sure my mother met her to deliver the money. And they did meet that night, out by the laundry lines. It was my mother I’d overheard arguing with Swatka Pani while I was trapped in the outhouse. My mother must have told her that she would have the money later, but that Swatka Pani would have to meet her at the river to get it. Money was the only thing that would have gotten Swatka Pani there. In my heart, I knew my mother planned to kill Swatka Pani. She thought God had closed His eyes on her for what had happened with the priest and that there was little she could do to save herself. She could save me.
I could image countless things about that night when she met Swatka Pani at the river, the dark moon, the stairway, the bright shadow of the cross shining on the water. But the only thing I chose to believe was that in that moment, my mother loved me more than she could ever say or show or even feel.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PRIEST HAS BROUGHT THE FUNERAL to a close. I have heard nothing he has said, nothing except the sound of the wind blustering against my coat, flickering the grass and sending a hushing rustle through the trees. The other mourners step back, away from my mother’s grave, preparing to take their turns in line to throw dirt on the coffin, but they are waiting for Martin and me, courtesy for kin.
“Do you want me to go first?” Martin asks quietly.
I can only manage to nod.
Martin scoops up a handful of dirt from beside our mother’s coffin and clutches it in his fist, then opens his palm and lets the dirt drop in one heavy torrent.
“It’s your turn,” he says, moving aside, away from the coffin, leaving it all to me.
I fill my hands with dirt and the soil feels as solid as stone, the cold giving it heft. I spread my fingers and the dirt falls away, sifting and catching on the breeze, refusing to come to rest on the coffin. A few granules of dirt skitter over the top and glance off the wood, making brief contact, but that is all. This was how my mother knew love, only in passing. It was a thing that never stayed, lingering just long enough to make you miss it once it was gone. Her father, her mother, her brother, her husband, her God, and the one man she cared for, they had all left her, and their departure twisted her heart inside out. There was no room inside, no place to put Martin or me.
“You have to let them go now,” Martin tells me, touching my arm. The other mourners are waiting.
I step back, giving them room, and each man and woman toss their handful of dirt onto the coffin, then they head off down the rutted path from which they came.
“Do you want to stay for a while?” Martin asks.
“I don’t know.”
“You can,” h
e offers. “They can’t make you leave.” He is trying to joke, then he realizes the vague irony in his choice of words. After a moment, he adds, “I’m not going to stay. Not unless you want me to.”
“No, not unless you want to.”
Martin furrows his hands deeper into his pockets. “No, I’m going to go.”
“All right then.”
“Are you staying in town over night?”
“No, no I hadn’t…” I let my voice trail off.
Disappointment dulls his reply. “That’s okay. It’s a long drive back.”
My brother knows I have a family now, a husband, children, another life, a life that is waiting for me somewhere else.
As we stand there in silence for a moment more, I yearn to lean over to him and take his hand from his pocket and put it in mine.
“I’m gonna get going,” he tells me and I don’t stop him. “I’ll be down…well, you know where to find me.”
Martin looks around one last time straining to come up with something else to say. “Don’t stay too long. Looks like rain.”
With that, my brother turns from me and hastens along the path toward town. I watch him walk away then vanish down the road into nothing. In the distance, beyond the high point of path, lays the potter’s field. The rows of headstones stipple the land in wide, uneven arcs. I vaguely wonder which one was his, which one belonged to the priest, my father. There are so many, too many to count.
The cemetery’s caretaker appears, plodding up the path with a shovel slung over his shoulder, a wool scarf wound around his neck.
“Oh,” he says, surprised to see me. “I thought everyone had gone. I’d come back later, but…” He gestures to the sky and the looming clouds.
“No, it’s fine. I’m done here.”
“You sure?”
I nod, but don’t make a move to leave. “What do you do now?” I ask.
“What? With the grave?” He is hesitant to answer. “I’ve got to lower the casket and fill it back. Then I have to relay the grass. Put a little fertilizer on so it takes.”
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