Do nothing that you would not want to be doing
when Jesus comes.
Say nothing that you would not want to be saying
when Jesus comes.
Go to no place where you would not want to be
found when Jesus comes.
She opened her eyes and looked around. She could think of no worse place to be when Jesus came, and she knew He was coming. Every nerve in her body told her so. She squeezed her eyes shut and saw the words emblazoned in gold thread.
Go to no place where you would not want to be
found when Jesus comes.
Thanks in equal parts to her mother and her sister, Violet had had the motto memorized by the age of six. She thought about that day and the horrible pain. It was washday, so it had to have been a Monday. Her mother had just finished filling the copper tin when Daisy accidentally knocked into it, sending boiling water down her sister’s backside. It truly was an accident. Violet was convinced of that, but pain was pain. In spite of her mother’s home remedies, angry blisters rose up from Violet’s skin.
Every night for a week, Violet balanced on a stool bending over the kitchen sink while her mother carefully tended to her burns.
“Read the first two words for me,” she’d say.
“Do nothing . . .”
“That’s right, and the next couple?” Her mother would pass a needle over the flame of a candle.
“. . . that you . . .”
“Good,” she’d say. “Keep going.” She’d slowly inserted the needle into the first blister. Stick, pop, squeeze until the wound was drained of fluid.
“. . . would not want to be doing . . .”
Her mother would move onto the next blister and start again.
“. . . when Jesus comes.”
“Close your eyes and see if you can say it back for Mother now.”
And so it went for seven days, and by the end, she had the motto memorized.
* * *
Violet pulled on Stanley till he got up from his seat and followed her out the side door. Given a choice between coward and sinner, she thought coward the more favorable option.
“What’s going on?” Stanley asked, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the sunlight. “It was just starting to get good.”
“You’ll thank me when the Pearly Gates open up to you, Stanley Adamski,” she said, as she pulled him toward home.
* * *
School had let out by the time Stanley and Violet got back to Providence from downtown. Hungry from all that walking but hesitant to return to their own homes just yet, they found themselves on the widow’s porch steps.
“Go ahead and knock,” Stanley said.
“Third time this week. Maybe we’re making pests of ourselves.”
Stanley pushed past Violet. Just as he raised his fist to knock, the back door swung open.
“Well, hurry up.” The widow ushered them into the kitchen and headed toward the stove. “Don’t want my pączki to catch.” The children exchanged confused glances. “Doughnuts. I already have some cooling on the sill. Give them a few more minutes, or you’ll burn your tongues.” She picked up a fork and tipped one up. “Perfect,” she said as she flipped all the golden confections frying in the pan. “Stand back,” she warned. “The lard’s very hot. Violet, you set the table, and Stanley, you pour the milk. Nobody makes pączki better than me!”
After the incident with Myrtle Evans at Murray’s store, the widow Lankowski had waited for the children to start showing up at her door. She didn’t have to wait long. She took to baking sweets and ordered extra bottles of milk to have on hand when they came calling. She thought both were in sore need of a mother’s love, though in Violet’s case, the widow held out hope that Grace would eventually come around, poor soul. The same could not be said for Stanley. She just had to look him in the eye to know. If his dear matka were still alive, maybe things would have been different, but with only Albert in the house, the boy had no chance at all.
God had not seen fit to bless Johanna Lankowski with her own babies. She’d pocketed that hope twenty-five years earlier, on the day two miners dropped her husband Henryk’s broken body on her front porch steps. Of course, she had been young enough to marry again but never considered it, even though there had been a few offers. She’d submitted to Henryk’s will without complaint, as God required a wife to do, but she vowed not to make the same mistake twice.
Fortunately for the widow, she’d come to America as an eighteen-year-old bride with a gift for languages and lace-making. Back in Poland, her father, a teacher, had taught her German in honor of her paternal grandmother, and English, so she could read the works of William Shakespeare in his native tongue. Her mother, like most mothers in the mountain village of Koniaków, taught her the art of needle lace, so she could help out when they came up short at the end of the month. She took to the crochet hook like a baby to the breast, quickly mastering the scallop, swirl, and petal patterns handed down from her ancestors. Soon, she began creating her own openwork designs, inspired by nature. In winter, she studied frost blossoms on the windowpanes and reproduced their intricate shapes. In summer, she collected feathers and mimicked their lines. Much to her mother’s delight, several of Johanna’s cloths adorned the altars in the local Catholic churches, and some of the wealthier women hired her to make baptismal gowns for their children. She could turn cotton string into a work of art as easily as she could turn a page, and although needle lace was her specialty, eventually she could imitate any style of European lace set before her, including point, pillow, and bobbin.
After Henryk’s death, she took a job at the Scranton Lace Curtain Company on Meylert Avenue, down past the Sherman Mine. They specialized in what the English called Nottingham lace because the looms that originally produced it came from that town. The seamless fabric created on the factory’s machines looked homemade to the untrained eye, but Johanna could tell the difference. No heart. No life. The Lace Company’s curtains and tablecloths were too exact, too smooth for human hands.
In spite of her aversion to machinery, the widow quickly moved through the ranks from operator to winder, apprentice to weaver, jobs more often assigned to men than women. As a female, she still did not earn enough to keep herself. Males made a better wage since they had households to support and women could always marry. She took in sewing to earn extra money. At first, she mended a variety of goods, but slowly, she became known in Scranton for her ability to repair damaged lace by hand. Soon, the wealthy wives from all over town started sending their torn curtains and tablecloths to the widow Lankowski. One day Mrs. Dimmick, wife of J. Benjamin Dimmick, the president of the Scranton Lace Curtain Company, sent a servant to the widow’s home with an heirloom cloth. It seemed one of the children had gotten his hands on a pair of scissors and cut a gash across the middle.
“You’re wasting her in that factory,” Mrs. Dimmick told her husband after the widow had stopped by their Green Ridge home to return the repaired tablecloth. “I dare you to find the damaged portion.” Mrs. Dimmick handed the cloth to her husband. “I’m sure you have customers who would pay dearly for such attention to detail. Better yet, there are many who still prefer one-of-a-kind creations.”
By the end of the week, the widow started working from home for the self-supporting wage Mrs. Dimmick encouraged Mr. Dimmick to offer her.
* * *
The widow poured sugar into a paper sack, set it on the table, and grabbed the plate of doughnuts from the windowsill. “Take turns,” she said. “Drop a pączek into the bag, fold it closed, and shake hard.” Stanley grabbed for the doughnuts. “Where are your manners?” the widow asked. “Ladies first.” She pushed the plate toward Violet and went back to the stove.
Their bellies full, Violet and Stanley had as much sugar on their faces as they’d had on their pastries. “Don’t forget to wash up,” the widow said.
They both nodded and took turns at the sink.
“Thank you kindly,” Violet s
aid as she dried her hands. “I never tasted anything so wonderful.”
Stanley added, “Me too,” then smacked his lips and laughed as the pair headed out the door.
* * *
The widow sat at the kitchen table long past suppertime thinking about her situation. She had her books, her garden, her lace. All gave her pleasure, though the books caused some of the neighbors to regard her with suspicion.
“Always has her nose in a novel, that one,” one remarked in a disapproving tone. “Wish I had time for such folly.”
When Violet and Stanley came into her life, the widow realized what she had been missing all these years. “If only we’d had children,” she directed toward a sepia photograph staring down at her from a wall. In the picture, Henryk stood behind a seated Johanna, his hands on her shoulders, eyes glaring straight into the camera. He wore the new suit of clothes they’d purchased their first week in America. Like so many immigrants, they’d gone out and bought new American clothes and had their picture taken to show their families in the old country how well they were doing in the land of opportunity. In the end, that had been Henryk’s only suit, so of course the widow had him buried in it.
Finally, the widow stood and cleared the pączki dishes from the table. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to imagine how children might have changed her life. Just as sadness started to settle in, she glanced over at her husband’s picture once more. Henryk’s eyes, cold marbles, stared back at her. “I suppose God knew best,” she said aloud, “considering.” She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from inside her sleeve and spit the word “świnia,” bastard, into its center.
CHAPTER TEN
DUTY AND INDIAN SUMMER, two unlikely conspirators, coaxed Grace into the backyard for the first time since the tragedy. Violet wouldn’t be home from school for another two hours, so Grace decided to hang the wash herself. She dropped her basket next to the clothesline, shut her eyes, and tipped her face toward the sky, inviting the sun to warm her bones, to thaw her heart. The rays obliged, and for a moment, Grace convinced herself that a tonic of sun and sky might be enough.
“A little color in your cheeks. It makes all the difference.” Grief stood on the other side of the clothesline, examining Grace’s features. “At that angle,” he formed a frame with his thumbs and forefingers, cocked his head, and closed one eye, “you look like a young girl.”
Grace ignored his remarks and held onto the sun, absorbing its heat like the trees, the grass, and the flowers around her. Without opening her eyes, she pictured the spot where she was standing—the back half of her own yard and the beginning of Myrtle Evans’s patch of dirt. That’s what Owen always called it when he compared their properties. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, both families rented from George Sherman, owner of the Sherman Mine. The company houses looked forlorn, like rows of ragamuffins, some taller than others, but all uniform in their modesty. Soot from the mine and nearby culm bank fire dressed them in sober shades of gray and brown. Frost from the Pennsylvania winters kicked up the footers and bowed the boards, forcing porches to rest on their wooden haunches like old arthritic dogs. With no more than ten feet between them, huddled houses passed along the secrets contained inside. Mr. Harris, who lived to the right, used the Lord’s name in vain whenever he got his hands on whiskey. Louise Davies on the left watched for her husband each night in spite of his death four years earlier. Backyards ran into one another, and neighbors met in the middle to discuss weather or church or those out of earshot.
Yet, from late spring to early fall, Grace managed to color her house in pinks, reds, blues, peaches, and yellows. Sweet peas stretched up the back porch’s latticework, hiding the unpainted boards. Trellised roses craned their necks to view the scene below. Delphinium stood watch over the begonias as they fanned out across the soil. Snapdragons waited open-mouthed for lilies of the valley to breech their borders. Come summer, throaty toads from nearby Leggett’s Creek crooned from the shade of rocks.
At the slap of a screen door, Grace’s eyes popped open. Over on the Evanses’ back porch, Myrtle offered an armless rocker to a rather rotund woman. A missionary, if Grace’s recollection could be trusted.
“Good afternoon, Grace,” Myrtle called over from a second rocker. “So good to see you up and about.” She covered her mouth, and whispered something to her guest.
Grace waved a handful of clothespins that she’d retrieved from her apron pocket, peeled a sheet off the top of the basket, and hung it on the line.
“No one likes a busybody,” Grief said, pushing aside the sheet that separated him from Grace.
“She’s a fine Christian,” Grace murmured, smoothing the sheet back into place. “Not many like her who would open their homes to as many missionaries as she does.”
Grief walked the length of the clothesline and stepped around to Grace’s side. “She only puts them up long enough for the elders to take notice,” he said. “They’re someone else’s problem, soon enough.”
“I’ll not have—”
Grief put a finger to Grace’s lips, cupped his ear, and tilted his head toward the women on the porch.
“God as my witness,” Myrtle’s voice penetrated the sheetwall, “she threw that sparkler at her sister.”
“I told you!” Grief’s voice crackled with excitement as he slapped his knee.
“Don’t take my word for it. Ask my sister Mildred.” Myrtle started her rocker going. “She’ll back me up. We both saw the whole thing from this very porch.”
“Myrtle and Mildred. Two peas in a pod.” Grief shook his head good-naturedly. “Always have a bone to scratch between them.”
Eager to please her captive audience, Myrtle continued: “And then we heard poor Daisy accuse her sister. Violet! she yelled just before her dress went up in flames.”
When Grief turned around, he seemed to notice Grace’s wracked expression for the first time. “You really didn’t know?” He studied her for a minute before changing his tack. “I’m not saying it’s all her fault. That husband of yours played a part in this little drama.” His brow furrowed as he tried to get the words right. “No telling what might happen when you put trouble in a child’s hands. Isn’t that what you told him when he brought those sparklers home?”
“What harm can come?” Grace parroted Owen’s response, the last words he delivered on the subject. Somehow this detail, of all the details, this snippet of conversation between a husband and wife—for that’s what it was and nothing more, or was it?—destroyed her. She leaned forward, her hands trembling, her eyes glazed with tears, picked up a damp shirt from the basket, and pinned it to the line.
Nothing to be done about it now, she thought. You can relive a moment again and again and again. But you can’t change it. That’s the tragedy of time.
“See? All better.” Grief absently stroked the back of Grace’s neck. “A little truth,” he said. “A bit of a shock at first, but good for the soul in the end.”
Grace opened her mouth to speak, though she couldn’t imagine what words she would say.
“Hush.” Grief smiled broadly, exposing his yellow teeth, and turned back toward the women. “I want to hear the rest of the story.”
Grace didn’t need to hear the story. She’d lived it that day and every day since. Daisy’s screams, raw, feral, fractured, had compelled everyone within earshot to rush outside and bear witness. Grace, clad only in her slip, flew out the door and into the yard.
As Daisy ran toward the house, fire swallowed her dress and seared the flesh beneath.
“Lord Jesus. No!” Grace had screamed, wrapping Daisy’s flaming body in a rag rug she hadn’t remembered grabbing. She pushed the child to the ground, rolled her over several times, and dropped on top of her, smothering the last of the fire with her own body.
Owen reached the yard on Grace’s heels. Burned flesh saturated their senses. Thick, sweet, biting. Heat rose off Daisy’s body as he opened the rug. A leathery patchwork of red, black, and
mahogany reared up and settled itself where the dress had once been. Owen gingerly lifted the afflicted child, carried her toward the house, and whispered, “Be brave, little lady. Daddy’s here.”
Owen, Grace, and Daisy entered the kitchen as one.
Violet remained behind, feet rooted to the desecrated soil.
Being the closest neighbors, Louise Davies and Alice Harris showed up immediately. Doc Rodham arrived at the house not ten minutes later. One of the local children had run to get him, though Grace never knew which one. As with any calamity, so many people, including the young ones, claimed to have played a role that day.
Once Owen placed Daisy on the girls’ bed, Grace pulled a rocker up and studied what parts of her were still whole. Eyes, lashes, brows, nose, mouth, ears—the head in its entirety, untouched. She struggled to find comfort where she could. A disfigured body could be hidden under clothes; a disfigured face was another matter. It drew any manner of unwanted attention, and that would prove difficult for a girl. Grace’s eyes skirted past the worst of it in search of hope. The right hand seemed intact, though the same could not be said of the arm. Still, Daisy was right-handed. Feet, ankles, calves, unimpaired enough for boots. So she won’t be a cripple.
Grace held onto the promise of a mouth that could speak, feet that would carry, and a hand to be used in the service of the Lord. “Mother’s here,” she whispered, confident her daughter could hear her words. Daisy lay still but with eyes open, conscious and alert on the cotton sheet. Another good sign.
Doc Rodham entered the bedroom carrying his medical bag and the piano stool from the parlor. He placed the seat on the floor, cleared a small table, opened his case, and lined up his medicines. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he said, extending his hand to Owen. He draped a stethoscope around his neck and rolled his seat over to his patient. The fire had ravaged the front of her little body, thighs, torso, most of her right arm, and the whole of the left. He discarded the stethoscope, placed two fingers on the pulse at her neck, and looked into her eyes, so blue.
Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night Page 6