Then Came Heaven (16 page)

“Lucy wanted dumplings,” she said, apologizing.

“Lucy always wants dumplings.”

“Well, she said Krystyna was going to... she was...” Her words trailed away and he walked past her, straight over to the sink to wash his hands. It was easier to say what had to be said with his back to her.

“Irene—”

She went to the back door and called through the screen to the girls in their playhouse, “Girls, time for you to come in and get washed up for supper!”

“Irene, I appreciate your help but—”

“No, listen... you don’t need to say any more. I was just going to get the food on the table, then I was going home. I wasn’t going to stay, honest, Eddie.”

He bent over and washed his face with his soapy hands to give himself time to think of how to handle this. When he turned, drying his face on a blue towel, she had withdrawn as far from him as she could get and was trying to put the last of the food on the table without infringing on his space. Though she tried to hide her tears, he saw them glimmer in her eyes. The sight of them made him feel small, so he relented.

“All I was going to say was that there’s still food left over that people brought last week.”

“It was old,” she said, keeping her face averted. “I cleaned out the icebox and threw a lot of it away. I also washed all the roasters and casserole dishes and put everybody’s names on them so you know who they belong to. If you want me to return them for you I—”

“No, Irene, you’ve done enough. I’ll make sure they get back to everybody. Now listen, you’ve made this nice supper. You might as well stay and eat with us.”

The girls came barging in.

“Are the dumplings ready?” Lucy bellowed.

“I’m hungry!” Anne declared.

The meal was laid out, steaming and smelling delicious, and though Irene gave the table a longing look, she did so backing away. “Ma’s expecting me,” she told Eddie. And to the children, “Girls, you be sure to wash up good before you sit down. Now come and give me a hug... bye-bye, honey. Bye-bye, dear.” She hugged them both and scuttled away.

The girls dove for the sink and the bar of soap while Eddie followed Irene to the front door, feeling guilty as hell for resenting her kindness. He remembered Sister Regina’s words. She only meant to help. Furthermore, she probably needed to be near him and the girls to handle her own immense grief.

She knew he’d come up behind her and paused, looking down at the screen door spring. “You want me to come again in the morning, Eddie? ’Cause I don’t have to if I bother you.”

“Irene,” he said, laying a heavy hand on her shoulder. Though he had not sighed, a sigh was implied. Neither of them spoke for a while. In the kitchen the kids quibbled about who’d get the first helping of dumplings.

“I only meant to help, Eddie. I didn’t mean to... well, you know.”

He squeezed her shoulder and let his hand drop. “I know, Irene.”

She got brave and turned to face him. “What do you want me to do, then?”

This time he did sigh, and put his hands in his back overall pockets. “I guess I need your help, Irene,” he admitted.

“Okay, then, should I come in the morning?”

Resigned, he answered, “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

She opened the door and said, “I’ll be here.”

He watched her hurry to her dad’s truck, which was parked at the curb. She got in and drove away a little fast for Irene, and he realized just how much he had hurt her without intending to.

________

The meal she’d cooked was delicious. He couldn’t tell the difference between her cooking and Krystyna’s. They both made chicken and dumplings the way their mother did. He hurried the girls to finish eating and let Mrs. Plotnik next door know that they’d be outside playing with a bunch of the neighborhood kids while he ran over to church to ring the Angelus. When he got back home the dirty dishes were still on the table and the children were still playing Annie-I-Over over at the small white frame United Brethren church across the street from the Plotnik house. The U.B. church, as it was known in the neighborhood, had a steep roof like a tent, so they could see the ball rolling toward them clear from the peak, and it had a grassy yard good for running, and two outhouses with lattice screens around the doors, very convenient. So all the neighborhood kids would be outside playing until their parents called them in. Anne and

Lucy were old enough to wash and dry the dishes for Eddie, but the sound of their carefree voices calling, “Pigtails!” softened his heart, so he let them go on playing and washed the dishes himself. Though Krystyna would never have let dishes drip dry in the sink, he had to cut comers wherever possible on the housework, so he left them to do just that.

By the time the kitchen was put back in order, it was time to call the girls in for their bath. It took three repeated calls and another fifteen minutes before they obeyed, coming in crumpled and winded, their cheeks rosy from exertion.

He filled the bathtub and left them with orders to stay out of their mother’s dusting powder. A minute after he closed the bathroom door it opened again, and Anne came out in her underwear, bringing him a note. “Look at what I found on the clothes hamper, Daddy.”

It was written in pencil, nearly illegible.

Eddie I tuk yor close home and washd them you can coom & get them tomorr they will be irned Aunt Katy.

Aunt Katy,
 he thought, drooping with gratitude, 
bless your heart, old girl.

“What does it say?” Anne wanted to know.

“Aunt Katy washed our dirty clothes.”

He went into the bathroom and looked inside the hamper. It was empty except for the clothes the girls had worn today.

Aunt Katy Gaffke was his mother’s sister, a great-aunt to his girls, though they found shirttail relations hard to categorize, so they had always referred to her as Grandma Gaffke. She lived around the comer from the U.B. church, up the hill and across the street, about a two-minute walk from Eddie’s house. She’d been born in Poland, as had his mother, and had come to America with her parents when she was four. She spoke English with an accent and had never become proficient at writing it, but Eddie understood her message and the love behind her charitable deed.

The next day when he went to her house, he found his freshly ironed shirts hanging from her kitchen doorway, and Aunt Katy in a low armless rocker on her glassed-in porch, fast asleep. She’d been tearing strips of rags for making rag rugs, a common winter pastime for the old Polish women who sold them or donated them to church bazaars. Her lap, the floor and the rockers of the chair were so littered with strings that she looked like a bird in a nest.

He leaned down and touched her shoulder. “Aunt Katy?”

She jerked awake, tried to figure out where she was, looked up and mumbled, “Oh... hmm... must’ve drifted off.” The comers of her mouth were shiny. She dried them with an edge of one speckled hand and boosted herself up straighter in the chair. “Well, Eddie, didn’t hear you come in. Sit down, sit down.”

He sat on her daybed, which was covered with two of her homemade rag rugs that made the mattress nearly as hard as a church pew. It was late afternoon and the porch was on the shady side of the house. On a small crude blue-painted table in one comer were the coleus plants she’d taken in from her gardens and rooted for winter. Beyond the window martens were swooping around a fancy white birdhouse on a tall pole. Her cat was hunched up, watching them, on a concrete step that led from the porch door directly onto the grass, with no sidewalk between it and the street. He could look down the hill to his right and see his kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk in front of the Plotnik house. He could look to his left and see the top of the school grounds about thirty yards away.

“I sure appreciate your washing and ironing our clothes, Aunt Katy.”

She flapped a hand as if shooing a fly. “Gave me something to do.”

“I didn’t know how I was going to manage that. I’d like to pay you.”

“You might like to, but you ain’t goin’ to.”

“But—”

“Nossir.”

“But if this town had a laundry I’d have to pay them.”

“Nossir.”

“You know, you’re a stubborn old cuss when you want to be.”

“Yessir. And what’s more, I intend to keep on washin’ ’em ever’ Monday when I wash m’ own. Ain’t hardly got enough of my own to make it worthwhile filling that washer anymore.”

He got up and kissed her on the forehead, then sat back down. She smelled like homemade lye soap and fried Spam.

“How’re them little girls doing?” she asked, looking down the hill at them.

“Irene comes in the morning and gets them ready for school.”

“How ’bout in the afternoon?”

“Well, she’s been coming then, too, but I think it’s too much to ask of her.”

“Tell ’em to come here.”

“Oh, Aunt Katy...”

“No, you tell ’em to come here after school! They can play around here just as well as they can play around your house.”

“Are you sure?”

“They’d be company. Days get pretty long since your uncle Tony died. Besides, every housewife in the whole town knows Krystyna is gone. Your girls’ll have more mothers keeping an eye on them than they want. And 
you're
 right over there at church. Shucks, if they need you, they can just run over there, can’t they?”

“I guess so. ’Course, it won’t be so easy in the winter.”

“Then they can come here, like I said.”

“Are you really sure, Aunt Katy?”

“They ain’t learned to make rag rugs yet, have they?”

“No.”

“Nor to crochet.”

“No.”

“Nor to embroider much.”

“No.”

“Well, they got to learn all three, ain’t they? I’ll keep their hands busy, you can bet on that.”

________

She kept their hands busy all right. The next afternoon when Eddie walked into her house he found his daughters elbow deep in flour.

“We’re making biscuits!” Lucy exclaimed. “Grandma Katy’s letting us cut ’em out with this. See?” She held up a round cookie cutter.

“And she’s already got pigs-in-the-blanket cooking!” Anne added. “She let us roll the meat up in the cabbage leaves, and put them in the roaster and I got to put the roaster in the oven!”

“You’re staying for supper,” Aunt Katy decreed.

And so a pattern was established. In the mornings Irene came before school, and in the afternoon Aunt Katy watched the girls after school. She fixed supper for all four of them and Eddie bought the groceries. She taught the girls to dry dishes for her, and on wash day Eddie would run over across the school grounds to her house sometime in the late morning and help her carry out her washtubs and empty them in the yard. On Saturdays, when he wasn’t needed at church so frequently, he cleaned his own house. The girls learned to dust the furniture and beat the rugs. On Sundays they learned to fix their own hair the best they could, and he tied their sashes, and sometimes helped Lucy fasten her barrette in her hair. On school days at four o’clock Eddie need not worry.

It was a small, safe town, Browerville, and as Aunt Katy had pointed out, parents watched out for everybody’s children, not just their own. Every adult in town knew not only the name of every kid in town, he knew the names of their dogs as well. A back door would open and a housewife would yell, “Rexy, get out of that flower bed!” or “Bunny, stop digging!” just as they might yell, “Anne, it’s cold out there. Go home and get your jacket!” or “Lucy, you can get hurt on that woodpile! Get down off of there!” Doors were not locked—not Eddie’s, not Grandma Gaffke’s, not anyone’s—so the girls could have walked into anyone’s house and gotten whatever they needed. If they had fallen and needed a bandage, someone would put it on. If their wound had been more serious, they would have been led down to Dr. Lenarz’s office. If they had been hungry and needed a snack, a cookie jar and glass of milk would have been offered. If they had grown sad and needed their mother, a pair of loving arms would be there to gather them in.

And so, just as the doors to Eddie and Krystyna Olczak’s house had always been open to others, others’ were now open to their children. The insurmountable logistics of being a working daddy without a mommy to look after his children were ironed out for Eddie by the simple charity that was taken as rote in this close-knit Catholic community.

Yes, his friends and neighbors and relatives took care of everything.

Everything but the loneliness.

CHAPTER NINE

The Chapter of Faults was a forum for the nuns to express their sorrow for any misdeeds committed during the week. It was regulated by the Constitution of their order and was held every Friday evening in the community room, presided over by Mother Agnes.

On the Friday following Krystyna’s funeral the entire community of nuns gathered after supper and Sister Agnes led them in the 
Veni, Creator Spiritus,
 followed by its versicle and prayer. From youngest to oldest, the nuns knelt before Mother Superior to accuse themselves of two or three exterior faults, ask for a penance from her, then return to their places. It wasn’t Confession—only a priest could preside at Confession—but it felt the same afterward, a cleansing and renewal to start over and do better next week, bolstered by the loving if silent support of those who knew the demons with which each nun was doing battle.

As it turned out, Sister Regina was the youngest one at St. Joseph’s, so she knelt first. Sister Agnes sat on an armchair while the late sun settled behind the playground and the room’s rutabaga walls faded to umber. In keeping with their vow of poverty, no one turned on a light yet, even as the shadows deepened.

Sister Regina bowed her head, giving herself a view of Sister Agnes’s skirts and cracked black shoes.

“Reverend Mother,” she murmured, “in the days since Krystyna Olczak died I have repeatedly questioned God’s wisdom in taking her. My sorrow over her death and the plight of her children has at times taken the form of anger, and sometimes that anger has been directed at members of this community. At other times it has forced me away from my community to be alone, which I know is contrary to Holy Rule. I’ve also defied our Constitution by voicing my discontent about all of this to one of the other sisters. For this I ask a penance, Reverend Mother.”