Small Town Girl (51 page)

Merle jumped and hit the air brakes.

Cy grabbed the Johnson bar and squeezed for dear life. With his other hand he hauled on the steam whistle. Machinery ground into reverse and the brakes grabbed. From the engine through the entire train life, everything locked in a deafening screech. Steam hissed as if the door of hell had opened. The smell of hot, oily metal wafted forth like Satan's own perfume. The couplers, in progression, drummed like heavy artillery from the engine clear back to the caboose while the two old
rails
, with fifty-three years' experience between them, felt it in the seat of their pants: forward propulsion combined with a hundred tons of drag, something a railroad man hopes he'll never feel.

"Hold on, Merle, we're gonna hit 'em!" Cy bellowed above the din.

"Jesus, Mary, Joseph," Merle chanted under his breath as the train skated and shrieked, and the puny car raced toward its destiny.

At thirty yards they knew for sure.

At twenty they braced.

At ten they saw the driver.

Dear God, it's a woman
, Cy said. Or thought. Or prayed.

Then they collided.

Sound exploded and glass flew. Metal crunched as the gray '49 Ford wrapped around the cowcatcher. Together they cannonballed down the tracks, the ruptured car folded over the metal grid, chunks of it dragging along half-severed, tearing up earth, bruising railroad ties, strewing wreckage for hundreds of yards. Pieces of the car eventually broke free and bounced along the flinty ballast of the rail bed with a sound like a brass band before tumbling to rest in the weeds. Throughout it all some compressed piece of the automobile played the tracks in an unending shriek—metal on metal—like a hundred violins out of tune. Dust! They'd never seen so much dust. It billowed up on impact, a brown, stinky cloud of dirt, momentarily blinding Cy and Merle as they rode along haplessly above the discordant serenade. The smell of petroleum oozed up, and sparks sizzled off the steel tracks, setting small fires in gasoline drips that flared briefly, then blew out as the train passed over them.

Slower… slower… slower… two terrified railroad men rode it out, one maintaining a death grip on the Johnson bar that had long since thrown the gears into reverse, the other still hauling on the air brakes that had locked up the wheels more than a quarter mile back.

Slower… slower… all those tons of steel took forever to decelerate while the two big-eyed men listened to the fading squeal that dissolved into a whine…

Then a whimper…

Then silence…

Cy and Merle sat rigid as a pair of connecting rods, exchanging a shocked, silent stare. Their faces were as white and round and readable as the pressure gauges on the boil-erhead. Number two-eighty-two had carried the Ford a good half a mile down the railroad tracks and now sat calmly chuffing, like a big old contented whale coming up for air.

Outside, something small fell—glass maybe, with a soft tinkle.

Merle finally found his voice. It came out as tight and hushed as the air brakes. "No way that woman's gonna be alive."

"Let's go!" Cy barked.

They scrambled from the cab, bellies to the ladder, free-sliding down the grab rails. From trie caboose, twenty cars back, the conductor and a brakeman came running—two bouncing dots in the distance—shouting, "What happened?" A second brakeman stayed behind, already igniting a fusee that started spewing red smoke into the gentle September morning, mixing the stink of sulphur with the sweetness of the fresh-cut alfalfa.

Running along beside the locomotive, Cy yelled, "Look there, the engine's hardly damaged." The lifting lever on the drawbar was a little scraped up, and a couple of grab bars were marred. The two men rounded the snout of the engine and halted dead in their tracks.

It was a sickening sight, that car riding thin on the pilot as if it had been flattened for a junkyard. The coupler at the front of the cowcatcher had actually pierced the metal of the automobile and protruded like a shining silver eye. Some broken glass remained in the driver's side window, jagged as lightning.

Cy moved close and peered in.

She was brown-haired. Young. Pretty. Or had been. Wearing a nice little blue flowered housedress. Surrounded by broken fruit jars. He closed his mind to the rest and reached in to see if she was still alive.

After nearly a minute he withdrew his hand and stood on a crosstie facing Merle.

"I think she's dead."

"You sure?"

"No pulse that I can feel."

Merle remained as colorless as whey. His lips moved silently, but not a sound came out. Cy could see he'd have to take charge here.

"We're gonna need a jack to get her out of there," he told Merle. "You better run to the highway and flag down a car. Tell 'em to run to Browerville and get help…" Merle was already hustling off at an ungainly trot. "And have 'em call the sheriff in Long Prairie!"

At that moment the conductor and brakeman reached Cy, panting.

"He dead?" one of them asked.

"She. It's a woman."

"Oh my God." The conductor had a huge florid face that hung in soft folds from his cheekbones. He glanced at the wreck, then back at Cy. "She dead?"

"I think so. Couldn't feel any pulse."

They stood motionless, absorbing the shock while Cy—the engineer, and the person whose job it was to take command in emergency situations—took control of the situation.

"Better get that other fusee out," he told the brakeman.

"Yeah, sure thing." The brakeman headed up the track to the north, waving a red flag as he went, to set out the warning for any southbound trains. He would go a mile before igniting the flare, while the other brakeman walked a mile off from the rear of the train and did the same thing.

Left alone with Cy, the conductor said, "There's fruit jars all along the tracks. What do you suppose she was doing with all those fruit jars?"

The two men gazed back along the tracks at the shimmers of sunlight glancing off the pieces of broken glass.

"Probably some farmer's wife with a big garden," Cy replied.

Reaction to the tragedy only now began setting in, de-layed like the sting that follows a slap. Cy felt it deep in his vitals, a terrible trembling that traveled to his extremities and brought a faint nausea as he stood at the head of the train with a dead woman caught in the twisted wreckage of her gray automobile.

"Her license plate is gone. The back one anyway. I'll see if the front one is there." The conductor walked further around the train, but came back long-faced. "Gone too. Want me to walk back along the tracks and see if I can find it?"

"She's got a purse," Cy said, dully. "I saw it under one of her…" He quit talking and swallowed hard.

"Want me to get it, Cy?"

"No, that's… that's all right. I will."

Cy steeled himself and returned to the wreckage while a herd of lethargic holsteins, chewing their cud, watched from inside a nearby fence. The soft morning wind, not yet tainted by the red sulfur from the faraway fusee, carried the faint scent of manure, not wholly unpleasant when mixed with the continuing aroma of cut alfalfa. In the distance, a silo pointed toward heaven, where the woman had probably gone. Nearer, over a copse of shiny green oaks a flock of chattering starlings lifted and milled. One of the cows mooed, and the engine—its steam kept up according to railroad regulations—gave out an intermittent quiet chuff. All around, the bucolic countryside presented a picture of life as it should be, while Cy retrieved the purse of the dead woman and wiped it off on the leg of his blue and white striped overalls.

Merle returned from the highway, short of breath, and reported, "Fellow from Eagle Bend, going that way, said he'd get word to the constable and sheriff soon as he hits Browerville. That her purse?"

They all looked down at it in Cy's oversized hands. It was a little wedge-shaped, white plastic affair with hard sides. Its handle had been broken in the accident, and its jaws skewed so the metal clasp no longer worked.

Cy opened it and looked inside. He picked things out very gingerly, then set them back in with the greatest care: a clean white handkerchief, a rosary with blue-glass beads, a pack of Sen-Sen. And a small, black prayer book which he examined more slowly. Stuck in its pages was a recipe for "Washday Pickles," written on the back of an envelope, with the word
Mother
up in the upper righthand corner. A name was written on the front of the envelope with its cancelled three-cents stamp and its simple address of
Browerville, Minn
. The same name was written on the inside cover of the prayer book, and on a social security card they found in a small change purse that also held some school pictures of two little girls, and a dollar bill plus eighteen cents in change.

Her name was Krystyna Olczak.

Everybody in Browerville knew Eddie Olczak. Everybody in Browerville liked him. He was about the eighth or ninth kid of Hedwig and Casimir Olczak, Polish immigrants from out east of town. Eighth or ninth they said because Hedy and Cass had fourteen, and when there are that many in one family the order can get a little jumbled. Eddie lived half a block off Main Street, on the east side of the alley behind the Lee State Bank and the Quality Inn Cafe, in the oldest house in town. He had fixed it up real nice when he married that cute little Krystyna Pribil whose folks farmed just off the Clarissa Highway out north of town. Richard and Mary Pribil had seven kids of their own, but everybody remembered Krystyna best because she had been the Todd County Dairy Princess the summer before she married Eddie..

The children around town knew Eddie because he was the janitor at St. Joseph Catholic Church and had been for twelve years. He took care of the parochial school as well, so his tall, thin figure was a familiar sight moving around the parish property: pushing dust mops, hauling milk bottles, ringing the church bells at all hours of the day and night. He had nieces and nephews all over the place, and occasionally on a Saturday or Sunday he'd prevail upon one of them to ring the Angelus for him at noon or six p.m.

In truth, weekends meant little to Eddie; he had no such thing as a day off. He worked seven days a week, for there was never a morning without Mass; and when there was Mass, Eddie was there to ring the bells, most often attending the service himself. He lived a scant block and half from church, so when the Angelus needed ringing, he ran to church and rang it.

The bells of St. Joseph's pretty much regulated the activities of the entire town, for nearly everybody in Brow-erville was Catholic. Folks who passed through town often said how amazing it was that a little burg like that, with only eight hundred people, boasted not just one Catholic church, but
two
! There was St. Peter's, of course, at the south end of town, but St. Joe's had been there first and was Polish, whereas St. Pete's was an offshoot started by a bunch of disgruntled Germans who'd argued about parish debts and objected to the use of the Polish language in liturgy, then marched off to the other end of town with an attitude of:
To hell with all you Polacks, we'll build our own
!

And they did.

But St. Peter's lacked the commanding presence of St. Joseph's with its grandiose neo-baroque structure, onion-shaped minarets, Corinthian columns and five splendid altars. Neither had it the surrounding grounds with the impressive statuary and grotto that tourists came to see. Nor the
real
pipe organ whose full diapason trembled the rafters on Christmas Eve. Nor the clock tower, visible up and down the length of Main Street. Nor the cupola with
three
bells that regimented everyone's days.

And nobody was more regimented than Eddie.

At 7:30 each weekday morning he rang what was simply referred to as
the first bell
: six monotone
clangs
to give everyone a half-hour warning that church would soon start. At 8:00 a.m. he rang all three bells in unison to start Mass. At precisely noon he was there to toll the Angelus—twelve peals on a single bell that stopped all of downtown for lunch and reminded the very pious to pause and recite the Angelus prayer. During summer vacation every kid in town knew that when he heard the noon Angelus ring he had five minutes to get home to dinner or he'd be in
big trouble
! And at the end of each workday, though Eddie himself was usually home by five-thirty, he ran back to church at six p.m. to ring the evening Angelus that sat the entire town down to supper. On Sunday mornings when both high and low Mass were celebrated, he rang one additional time; two if there were evening vespers. And on Saturday evenings, for the rosary and benediction, he was there, too, before the service.

Bells were required at special times of the year as well: During Lent whenever the Stations of the Cross were prayed, plus at all requiem Masses and funerals. It was also Polish-Catholic tradition that whenever somebody died, the death toll announced it to the entire town, ringing once for each year the person had lived.

Given all this ringing, and the requirement that sometimes a minute of silence had to pass between each pull on the rope, Eddie had grown not only regimented, but patient as well.

Working around the children had taught him an even deeper form of patience. They spilled milk in the lunchroom, dropped chalky erasers on the floor, licked the frost off the windowpanes in the winter, clomped in with mud on their shoes in the spring, and stuck their forbidden bubble gum beneath their desks. Worst of all, right after summer vacation when all the floors were gleaming with a fresh coat of varnish, they worked their feet like windshield wipers underneath their desks and scratched it all up again.

But Eddie didn't care. He loved the children. And this year he had both of his own children in Sister Regina's room—Anne in the fourth grade and Lucy in the third. He had seen them outside at morning recess a little while ago, playing drop-the-hanky on the rolling green playground that climbed to the west behind the convent. Sister Regina had been out there with them, playing too, her black veils luffing in the autumn breeze.