Authors: LaVyrle Spencer
Eddie was on his knees at the fishpond when he was surprised to see one of those workhorses, Conrad Kaluza, coming up Father’s sidewalk. Con had hair as black as ink and whiskers to match, dark even after a fresh shave. He owned a little music store on Main Street and always wore nice trousers and a white shirt open at the throat.
Eddie sat back on his heels, pulled off his dirty gloves and waited.
“Well, Con, what the heck are you doing up here at this time of day? Come to help me clean out this slimy fishpond?”
Con stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the grass. He looked pale and shaken.
“Hey, Con, you don’t look so good. What’s...”
Con squatted down on one heel in the shade beside the pond. Eddie noticed the muscles around his mouth quivering and his whiskers blacker than ever against his white face.
“What’s the matter, Con?”
“Eddie, I’m afraid I got some bad news. There’s, ah...” Con paused and cleared his throat. “There’s been an accident.”
Eddie tensed and looked southward, toward his house. His backside lifted off his heels. “Krystyna...”
“ ’Fraid so,” Con said.
“She okay, Con?”
Con cleared his throat again and dragged in a deep breath.
“I’m... I’m afraid not, Eddie.”
“Well, what’s...”
“A train hit her car at the crossing out by her folks’ place.”
“
Jezus, Maria...”
Eddie said in Polish—
Yezhush, Mareeuh
—and made the sign of the cross. It took a while before he could make himself ask, “How bad is it?”
When Con failed to reply, Eddie shouted, “She’s alive, isn’t she, Con!” He gripped Con’s arms, repeating, “Con, she’s alive! She’s just hurt, isn’t she?”
Con’s mouth worked and the rims of his eyelids got bright red. When he spoke his voice sounded wheezy and unnatural.
“This is the hardest thing I ever had to say to anybody.”
“Oh, God, Con, no.”
“She’s dead, Eddie. May her soul rest in peace.” Eddie’s hands convulsed on Con’s arms. “No...” His face contorted and he began rocking forward and backward in tiny pulsing beats. “She can’t be. She’s... she’s...” Eddie looked north toward his in-laws. “She’s out at her ma’s house canning pickles. She said she was... she and her ma were... oh, Con, no, Jesus, no... not Krystyna!”
Eddie started weeping and Con caught him when he crumpled. Over at Wenzel’s the saw started up. It sang a while and stopped, leaving only the sound of Eddie’s sobbing.
“Not my Krystyna,” he wailed. “Not my Krystyna...”
Con waited awhile, then urged, “Come on, Eddie, let’s
go tell Father, and he’ll say a prayer with you...”
Eddie let himself be hauled to his feet, but turned as if to head toward the school building on the far side of the church. “The girls...”
“Not now, Eddie. Plenty of time to tell them later. Let’s go see Father first, okay?”
Father Kuzdek answered the door himself, a massive, balding Polish man with a neck and shoulders like a draft horse. He was in his early forties with glasses like President Truman’s, their wire bows denting the sides of his round pink face. He wore his black cassock most of the time and had it on today as he opened the door of his glassed-in porch and saw who was on his step.
“Con, Eddie... what’s wrong?”
“There’s been an accident, Father,” Con told him. “Come in.”
While they moved inside, Con explained, “It’s Krystyna... she... her car... it was hit by the train.”
Father went as still as if riddled by two hundred ten volts. Eddie had worked for the parish for twelve years. Father’s concern for him went far beyond that of a priest for a parishioner. “
Kyrie, eleison,”
he whispered in Latin.
Lord, have mercy.
“Is she dead?”
Con could do no more than nod.
Father Kuzdek’s breath left him like air escaping a ruptured tire. Rocking back on both heels he closed his eyes and lifted his face, as if begging divine sustenance. “
Erue, Domine, animam ejus.” Deliver her soul, O Lord,
he prayed in an undertone, then caught Eddie around the shoulders with one beefy arm.
“Ah, Eddie, Eddie... what a tragedy. This is terrible. So young, your Krystyna, and such a good woman.”
They took some time for their emotions to swell, then Father made a cross in the air over Eddie’s head and murmured in Latin. He laid both of his huge hands right on Eddie’s head and went on praying, ending in English, “The Lord bless you in this time of travail. May He guide you and keep you during the difficult days ahead.” After making another cross in the air, Father dropped his hands to Eddie’s shoulders and said, “I ask you to remember, my son, that it’s not ours to question why and when the Lord chooses to take those we love. He has His reasons, Eddie.” Eddie, still weeping, bobbed his head, facing the floor. Father dropped his hands and asked Con, “How long ago?”
“Less than an hour.”
“Where?”
“The junction of County Road Eighty-nine and Highway Seventy-one, north of town.”
“I’ll get my things.”
Father Kuzdek came back wearing his black biretta, carrying a small leather case containing his holy oils. They followed him to his garage, a small, separate building crowding close to the north side of his house and the rear of the church. He backed out his black Buick, and Eddie got in the front, Con in the back.
The Reverend Anastasius T. Kuzdek commanded the driver’s seat the way he commanded the respect of the town, for though Browerville had a mayor, its undisputed leader was this priest. In an area of the state where the vein of old-world Catholicism ran deep, none ran deeper than in Father Kuzdek’s parish. Legends were told about the man, about the time neither family members nor the local constable could break up a fight between two drunken brothers-in-law at a family reunion. But when Father Kuzdek was called in, he grabbed the pair in his beefy hands, conked their noggins together as if they were little more than two pool balls, and ended the fistfight on the spot. When he stood in the pulpit and announced, “The convent needs wood,” firewood appeared like Our Lady appeared at Fatima, miraculously delivered into the nuns’ yard already dried and split. When he ordered school closed on the feast day of St. Anastasius, his patron saint, there was no school and no complaint from the Archdiocese. Some bigwigs in St. Paul once decided that Highway 71 should be rerouted to bypass Browerville, taking along with it the frequent tourists who stopped to see St. Joseph’s, both the church and the grounds, and drop their money in the offerings box and spend more of it at the businesses in town. Kuzdek took on the Minnesota State Highway Department and won. Highway 71 still cut smack through downtown, creating its main street and running right past the front steps of St. Joseph’s Church.
Father turned left onto the highway now. When he said, driving his Buick toward the scene of the accident, “Let us pray...” they did.
________
They spotted the red warning cloud from the fusee long before they saw the train itself. By now the cloud had stretched and drifted clear across the highway, stinging the air with its acrid sulphur fumes. The train, one of the little local freights, was only about twenty cars long, carrying hardware, grain, machinery, mail—hardly a deadly cargo, only the trappings of the ordinary lives lived in this peaceful rural area. They passed the caboose—even it had cleared the crossing—and paralleled the train until they saw, up ahead, on the shoulder of the highway, a gathering of vehicles: Constable Cecil Monnie’s Chevrolet, a truck from Leo Reamer’s D-X station, the sheriff’s car and Iten & Heid’s hearse. Browerville was too small to have a hospital, so when the need arose, Ed Iten used his hearse as an ambulance.
As Father slowed down, Eddie stared. “It pushed her all this way?” he said, dazed. Then he saw his car, flattened and ripped and peeled off of the locomotive in sections. Beside the train a body was laid out on a stretcher.
He left the Buick and stumbled through hip-high grass down a swale in the ditch, up the other side, with Father and Con close on his heels. The train was still steaming, its pressure kept up by Merle who would periodically climb up to read the gauges and throw another shovelful of coal into the firebox. The engine gave a hiccup, while across the tracks a herd of holsteins watched the goings-on from behind a barbed-wire fence. Nearer, the conductor, with his clipboard, stopped gathering accident data for the railroad company and stood in silent respect, watching the party of three arrive.
Never again would Eddie Olczak fear hell, for on that day, during those broken minutes while he knelt beside Krystyna’s body, he experienced a hell so unfair, so unmerciful that nothing in this life or the next could hurt more.
“Oh, Krystyna, K... Krystyna, why...”
Kneeling beside her, he wept as the souls in purgatory surely wept, to be set free from the pain and the loss. With his face contorted, he looked up at those standing above him and asked, repeatedly, “Why? Why?” But they could only touch his shoulder and stand by mutely. “How am I g... going to tell my little girls? What will they d... do without her? What will any of us d... do without her?” They didn’t know what to say, but stood by, feeling the shock of mortality come to stun them, too, as Eddie looked down at his dead wife. He took the collar of her dress between his fingers. “Sh... she made the... this dress.” He looked up at them again, fixing on the pitiful fact. “D... did you know th... that? She m... made this dress hers... self.” He touched it, bloody as it was, while Father Kuzdek kissed and donned his stole and dropped to one knee to pray.
“
In nomine Patris
...”
Eddie listened to the murmuring of Father’s voice as he administered Extreme Unction, the same voice that had prayed their wedding Mass and baptized their children. He watched Father’s oversized thumb anoint his wife’s forehead with oils and make the sign of the cross on her ravaged skin.
Krystyna’s parents came, and her sister Irene, and they clung to Eddie in a forlorn, weeping band, and fell to their knees on the cinders, keening and rocking while Eddie repeated the same thing over and over. “Sh... she was on her way out to your house to c... can pickles with you... that’s all she was g... going to do, Mary. That’s where sh... she should be right n... now. She should b... be at your h... house.” And they stared through their tears at the wreckage of the fruit jars strewn along the railroad tracks, reflecting the noon sun like waves on a lake, imagining her loading them in the car a couple of hours ago, thinking she’d be returning home that night with all of the jars filled.
When they’d had time for weeping, Father gave a blessing to Mary, Richard and Irene, and the stretcher was borne through the ditch to the hearse, trailed by the bereaved. When the doors of the hearse closed, Mary asked her son-in-law, “Have you told Anne and Lucy yet?”
“Not yet.” The thought started Eddie crying again, dully, and Krystyna’s father clamped an arm around his shoulders.
“Do you want us with you when you do?” Mary asked, since Richard found himself still unable to speak.
“I... I don’t know.”
“We’ll come with you, Eddie,” Irene put in. “You know we’ll come with you if you want.”
“I don’t know,” he repeated with an exhausted sigh, looking around as if the holsteins in the field could provide an answer. “I think...” His gaze went back to Krystyna’s family. “I think it’s s... something I got to do alone. But you’ll come over to the school with me, won’t you? I mean, I don’t know wh... what’s going to happen after. What do we...” He stopped, unversed in the mechanics of death’s aftermath, his mind refusing to function for the moment.
Father Kuzdek stepped in and said, “Come, Eddie. We’ll tell the children together, you and I, and then you and Mary and Richard and Irene can all take them home.”
“Yes,” Eddie agreed, grateful to have someone tell him what to do next. “Yes, thank you, Father.”
The little group dispersed to the various cars, a new dread spreading through them. For they all knew that as difficult as the last hour had been, the next one would be even worse, telling the children.
CHAPTER TWO
Sister Regina rang the brass handbell and waited beside the west door for the children to come in from recess. They came barreling down off the hilly playground and gathered on the narrow sidewalk that connected the schoolhouse with the convent, a stone’s throw away. Double file they lined up, the same obedient ones doing so quickly while the usual troublemakers jostled and aggravated. She waited patiently until all of them were in rank and file before leading the way inside. The hall was narrow and shadowy after the stark sunlight of the playground. Some children detoured to the bathrooms while Sister went on ahead and placed the brass bell on one end of the parapet where it remained while not in use—and woe to the student who touched it without permission! She waited beside the drinking fountain outside her room, her hands hidden inside her sleeves, monitoring their return to classes.
St. Joseph’s Parochial School was laid out symmetrically, with three rooms on either side of a central gymnasium, divided from it by a thick parapet topped with square columns that created a hall on either side. Each hall had two classrooms holding two grades apiece. At the northwest comer was the lunchroom; at the southwest comer the
flower room, where the nuns raised plants for the altar.
At the east end the gym gave onto a storage room with a full bank of windows, but the folding doors were usually kept closed so the gymnasium remained gloomy. At the opposite end was a stage with an ancient canvas curtain sporting a tableau of a Venetian canal and gondolas rendered by some long-ago artist in the dull, monochromatic hues of rutabagas. Countless piano recitals had been held on that stage, for musical training was so vital a part of the curriculum at St. Joseph’s that the gymnasium had been named Paderewski Hall, in honor of Poland’s most famous composer.
That afternoon, as the third- and fourth-graders finished up in the bathroom, Paderewski Hall was dusky, as usual, the stage curtain lowered, the fold-aside storeroom doors closing off the rich east light from the gym.