The Grave of God's Daughter

by Brett Ellen Block

  “See, you’re one of them now,” Mr. Beresik joked.

  “I guess I am.” That meant I was on their side of the fence.

  “So I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.

  Sally was standing in the corner of the pen where the ends of the fence met. She seemed to be waiting for me. She blinked a few times, nostrils puffing, though the rest of her body remained motionless.

  “Yes,” I replied, the words falling out automatically, without feeling. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Mr. Beresik patted my shoulder. “You won’t be sorry.”

  Halfway down the road from his house, I glanced back. Most of the dogs had scattered, but Sally hadn’t moved.

  She knows. She knows what you’ve done.

  I tore down the hill, letting the cold air swim through my lungs. I cut across town, passing the far end of Third along the way, the end where Swatka Pani’s house was. The green limbs of the uprooted roses remained scattered in the garden, unwilling to turn brown or succumb to the cold. They were a reminder of all I had done, and the worst part was, they wouldn’t die. They refused to.

  RIVER ROAD WAS QUIET except for a faint radio melody from a radio floating out of one of the houses. I climbed the steps to the woman’s front porch and took the parcel Mr. Goceljak had given me from the waistband of the trousers, then studied it as if the name should have been there. Of course, it wasn’t. The woman must have heard the porch boards creaking because when I went to knock, the lock was already being turned.

  “Today’s not the day,” she said through a sliver in the doorway.

  All I could see was one of her eyes, hooded and anxious.

  “I know, but Mr. Goceljak had some extra kielbasa. He wanted to give it to you.”

  It was another lie to add to my tally. There were so many, I’d lost count. The woman was still suspicious and wouldn’t open the door any wider.

  “You don’t have to pay for it,” I told her. “It’s a gift.”

  Her face firmed into a confused expression, as though the word gift was unfamiliar to her.

  “If you don’t want it, it’s all right. Or I can set it down here on the porch and go.”

  “No,” the woman replied quietly. “I’ll take it.”

  I held the package out to her on the flat of my hand, the bandages making the pain bearable. She hesitated, fingers dangling in midair, then she opened the door a few inches farther, offering me room to pass the package in to her. She took it from me, then her eyes landed on the bandages.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  It was a weighty question, one I could have answered a thousand ways, a thousand times over. I had to consider how to reply.

  “I fell.”

  I had said the line so many times it was starting to feel true. I showed her the other hand as well, the matching set of bandages.

  “Does it hurt?” the woman asked, her concern sincere. I nodded that it did. “It’ll heal up though,” she consoled. “Children always heal so quickly.” The phrase, once uttered, seemed to prick her like a thorn.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Well.”

  “I can go.”

  The woman opened the door a hair’s breadth more. “The butcher, he told you about me, didn’t he?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  Even with her voice hovering at a whisper, the woman still sounded refined, dignified. She wasn’t angry, yet she seemed to want to clear things up. She appeared to want me to know the truth and only that.

  “A little can sometimes be a lot.”

  While she spoke, I glimpsed the person she must have been, with her hair done up, rouge on her cheeks, and wearing a clean dress. She had been a beautiful woman once.

  “I don’t leave this house. Not anymore. I’m sure he told you at least that much.” The woman cast her eyes over my shoulder at the river beyond, taking in the view and savoring it. “But just because I don’t leave doesn’t mean I don’t know what goes on out there.” She gestured to the road as if pointing to a distant land.

  “Is that how you know about Swatka Pani?” I ventured.

  The name roused the blood in the woman’s cheeks. “Nobody here in Hyde Bend forgets. Remembering’s all they have. It’s all any of us have. A gift from God, my son would always say.” She swallowed hard. “Now I know he was wrong.”

  A silence followed, lingering until the woman began to turn the doorknob back and forth in her hand. It was squeaking with each twist as she worked up to what she wanted to say.

  “There was one thing I thought nobody knew, that way nobody could remember. But I was mistaken.” The woman eased the door open an inch more, drawing it to her, into the nook between her arm and her breast. “There are worse things than taking your own life. Even for a priest.”

  The peril in those words, the danger of speaking them aloud, rushed at me like a gust of heat coming from inside the dark house.

  “To fall in love. That’s far worse.”

  The woman seemed unable to keep herself from going on. She rested her head against the door, propping herself up to prevent the memory from toppling her as the story flooded out.

  “I never knew her name. She was young. A girl, really. Perhaps seventeen. I never met her, never even saw her, but she must have worked at Saint Ladislaus. In the rectory, I believe, doing the cooking and the wash. She was poor. Her father had died early, the way my husband had, and her family had little money. Maybe that was why. Maybe he saw himself when he saw her. I don’t know. I don’t know if it was love. I believe it must have been. I tell myself it had to have been.”

  The woman paused, struggling to continue. “It was a secret. All a secret. But then the girl, she became pregnant. It was too much for him. That’s what he wrote to me. He left a letter. He must have slipped it under the door in the night. I didn’t see it for hours. When I finally found it, it was too late.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “No one would have known. Not about the girl or the baby. Not ever. But it was my fault. I was stupid for believing, for trusting her. I should have never trusted that woman.”

  Her voice turned bitter but she gave no name. She was talking about a different woman than the girl she’d already mentioned.

  “Her own husband had just died and her son had drowned and I felt for her. I did. She said we were alike, she and I. Alone. She pleaded with me. She said she had no money and no one to help her. So I gave her a job cleaning the house once a week so she could get by until her husband’s will was settled.”

  The woman tugged the door tighter to her. “She found the letter my son had left. I believe she had been searching for it, searching for something to hold against me. She hadn’t wanted the job, hadn’t needed it. The money from her husband’s will came quickly and she got his land, his entitlements. It was all a lie. Then she said I had to pay her not to tell anyone what my son had done, the girl, the baby, all of it,” the woman said, stiffening with resolve. “But the money wasn’t what she wanted, not truly. She wanted somebody to suffer as she had. She had no husband, no child, nothing but herself. She wanted someone to be as miserable as she was and as alone.”

  “I refused to pay her. I told her there was nothing more she could do to me. There was nothing anyone could do to me that would be worse than what had already happened. After that, she never came back. I waited, thinking she would return to hound me. How afraid I was waiting for that knock on the door. It never came. I realized she must have found someone else, someone to replace me. From the letter, I believe she figured out who the girl was, then tracked her down and demanded money from her instead. A young girl, unwed, with a child on the way, would’ve had nothing, not then, but they must have struck a deal, some way for the girl to pay her off. I never saw Katarina after that day.”

  “Who?”

  “That was her name,” the woman said, surprised that I hadn’t known. “That was Swatka Pani’s real name.

  “I’m glad she’s dead,” the woman dec
lared. “God will hate me for it, but it’s true.” She chuckled lightly. “Not that He doesn’t hate me already.”

  I wanted to put my hand over the woman’s mouth to stop her, as if she could get us both in trouble.

  “I’m glad Swatka Pani’s dead. I’m glad I wasn’t the one she came after. And I’m glad that I’m not the one who had to do it, to kill her, but I’ll tell you something, I would have. So help me God, I would have.”

  “Don’t say that,” I shouted, stunned by my own voice. The woman had spoken the words that had been rattling through my mind, and it was a horror to hear them aloud.

  “There’s nothing I could say that could make Him hate me more,” the woman defended, opening the door wide, exposing the shambles of her home, her prison.

  “Don’t say that,” I shouted again, backing away from her.

  “God doesn’t care. Not anymore.”

  I was panting and trying to pull myself away from the woman, to extricate myself from her, though she wasn’t even touching me. Without warning, the top step gave way beneath me. The wood splintered, sending me tumbling backward over the porch steps to the ground.

  The wind was knocked out of me. My lungs stung, waiting for air. I opened my eyes, but couldn’t see. Seconds later, the world returned, blurry. I could make out the woman in her doorway, her face frightened and her body frozen, unable to cross the threshold. The woman’s mouth was moving, but I heard no sound. Then came an echo of words I could recognize.

  “Are you all right?”

  She must have asked me a number of times, however I only heard the last. I sat up, ears ringing, breathing hard. The blood rushed to my head and the first thing I felt was the sensation of the canvas cap. It was sitting askew on my head, ready to fall off and expose me. I yanked the cap down over my hair and eyes and scrambled to my feet, but stumbled, still dizzy, and braced myself on the ground. The once-white bandages were dingy with dirt. My clothes were covered in a fine powdering of dust.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, staggering away.

  There was no feeling in my legs as I bounded down River Road. My ears were buzzing, drowning out all other noise. I ran until I cleared the corner and careened over the cobblestone curb, then my knees gave out, pitching me to the ground again. I thrust my hands out to break my fall and a searing pain shot through my arms on impact. I remained crumpled there on the corner, desperate to catch my breath.

  Smoke from the steel mill’s stacks was pirouetting into the air in gray swirls until it blended in with the clouded sky. The full weight of what the woman had told me had not sunk in yet, nor would it for some time to come. As I lay there, I made no connections, drew no conclusions, had no idea of the gravity of what I had learned. Though I must have sensed it.

  All of my bones felt as if they had been loosened and were now out of place. Each rib cried out with each breath, resenting the movement. My body was like a sack of nails, each threatening to poke through with the slightest shift. I could not get up. I didn’t even try.

  AFTER WHAT SEEMED LIKE HOURS but was merely minutes, I stood, using my forearms for leverage. Once I was up, momentum took over and I found myself wandering back to the butcher’s shop. All I could do was walk. I didn’t have it in me to run.

  I could hear Mr. Goceljak speaking with a customer in the front of the store, then soon afterward he stormed into the back room, looking agitated. “It’s been so busy today I haven’t had time to think. That and I forgot to give you one of the deliveries,” he began, then he stopped and gawked at me. “What happened? You look terrible.”

  Before I could answer, the bell over the shop door chimed. Another customer. Mr. Goceljak’s eyes shifted to a package on the block. I could tell it was kishke by the way it was wrapped, how heavily the meat slumped inside the paper. “I would do it myself, but…”

  Customer’s voices sounded from the front of the store. “It’s for the Pierwszas over at the Slipper.”

  “But that place is—”

  “I know. But you’re only dropping off the delivery. You’re not staying around for a drink.”

  “But my outfit. Now I look—”

  “Like a mess. I can see that much. Makes you look even more like a boy. Just tuck those stray hairs under the cap and nobody’ll be any the wiser.”

  A woman called out in Polish to Mr. Goceljak, saying she was in a hurry. He pleaded with his eyes. “You can tell me about what happened when you get back,” he offered, then he cut through the curtain into the front room.

  Grudgingly, I forced my hair under the cap, pulled it low, and headed out the back door as always, passing the bicycle on the way. I paused to touch the handlebar and pet the seat. The bicycle seemed far less grand to me then, a flimsy jumble of rusted metal, yet it was everything I wanted and still couldn’t have.

  The Silver Slipper sat on the other side of Field Street. Decades earlier, it had been a house, and the clapboard remained, clinging to it for life. A few coats of navy paint were caked on the boards and wilting in long, jagged strips that flapped when the wind blew. What was once a porch had been boarded up to create a covered alcove, and an ill-fitting door made for a smaller opening was put out front. The sign above the door was as ravaged as the rest of the building. The lettering appeared to have bite marks in it, but it was actually buckshot from when a drunken patron tried to blow out the building’s windows, but was too intoxicated to aim straight.

  The front door to the Silver Slipper was always open. That was the saying, a familiar motto around Hyde Bend, and it was true. The door could not be locked because the bolt had been broken long ago and never fixed. I entered and found the porch unlit except for the dim light that was coming through the windows of the house’s old facade. Empty kegs were piled high, leaving little room except for a path that led directly to the old front door. Burbling voices and music from a radio bled into the alcove. Then came shouting, not playful, but raucous and harsh, followed by the thud of chairs overturning. I took a deep breath and pushed the door with my knuckles, the package nestled in the crook of my arm.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkened room, then I was greeted by an upturned table. Broken beer bottles were scattered on the floor. In the middle of the barroom a mass of men were struggling in a tangle of flailing arms and twisting legs. All the while a tinny trumpet tune was jingling from the radio.

  Then one of the Pierwsza brothers appeared from another room. It was Clement, squat, with his shoulders up near his chin, his ruddy face seeming to cave in under the weight of his brow. He was wielding the infamous baseball bat. Four nails protruded from the end. Clement lumbered toward the swarming mass, footfalls thundering on the floorboards.

  “Get up. Get off of him. Now,” he shouted in Polish, charging at the heap.

  A few men pulled away, then a pained, guttural moan seeped out from under the pile. Clement hoisted the bat high.

  “Move!”

  The rest of the men clambered to their feet, though one remained splayed on the floor. At first, all I could make out were his legs, one foot with a boot, one without.

  “Jezu Christe,” Clement uttered, then he dropped the bat to the floor where it embedded itself in the wooden planks. The men backed off farther still, revealing the man that lay before them. It was Leonard.

  I clamped my bandaged hand to my mouth, stifling a scream. Blood streamed from Leonard’s nose and mouth, ebbing over his teeth. He heaved once, then blood sprayed from his lips with a gurgle. The blood rained back down on him, spattering his face.

  “Look what you’ve done,” Clement shouted.

  “That stupid bastard shouldn’t’ve come back after what he did,” one man yelled.

  “He killed her,” another called out. The other men sounded off in agreement.

  “He’s a murderer,” another barked.

  Clement cursed them and knelt next to Leonard. As he pulled him into his arms, Clement dislodged something from under Leonard’s body, which skittered across the f
loor and came to a stop at my feet. It was the bottom half of a broken bottle, the rounded end still intact. The jagged, broken rim was slick with blood.

  I was holding my breath to keep from sobbing as tears poured over my fingers, hidden in the shadow of the cap. I inhaled once, too loudly, and all the men in the room turned. Their faces were blank and unrecognizable, all except one. It was my father. He was looking straight at me. I drew in a sharp breath. He continued to stare, but he didn’t recognize me.

  Leonard let out another gasp and the men swiveled back to him. Clement was rocking him gently, smoothing Leonard’s hair with a stubby hand. Leonard raised his arm to Clement, then it dropped limply. His gaze drifted and settled on me. A thin vein of blood rolled from Leonard’s nose, over his lip, and into his mouth, then his eyes went dull.

  “Leonard?” I whispered.

  Some of the men spun toward me.

  “Get the boy out of here,” one of them said.

  My father was staring down at Leonard’s body, his jaw flexed, resisting an expression. If it was disgust or guilt or satisfaction, I would never know. Nobody moved.

  I took a step forward, toward Leonard, then two men started in my direction. I dropped the package and took off running.

  “Let him go,” I heard one say as the door swung shut behind me. To them, I was a boy, but that was all and it wasn’t enough to make a difference.

  I ran hard, arms pumping, dashing across Field Street to the butcher’s shop and flinging myself against the front door. Mr. Goceljak was with two women, customers, each in wool overcoats and clean shoes.

  “They killed him,” I shouted. “They killed him.”

  The women went wide-eyed and exchanged glances. I was raving, tears streaking my face, my clothes grubby.

  “Go around back,” Mr. Goceljak ordered.