Then Came Heaven Read online

  The children around town knew Eddie because he was the janitor at St. Joseph’s 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 Browerville was Catholic. Folks who passed through 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 the attitude, to hell with all you Polaks, 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; then again for Sunday 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, stuck their forbidden bubble gum beneath their desks and wiped their boogers on the undersides of the fold-up seats whenever they forgot their hankies. 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 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.

  They were back inside now, the drift of their childish voices no longer floating across the pleasant morning as Eddie did autumn cleanup around the grounds. Instead he listened to the whirr of the feed mill from across town. It ran all day long at this time of year, grinding the grain that the farmers hauled in as they harvested. Eddie liked the smell of it, dusty and oaty; reminded him of the granary on the farm when he was a boy.

  The town was busy. There were other sounds as well: from Wenzel’s lumberyard, a half block away, came the intermittent bzzzz of an electric saw slicing through a piece of lumber, and occasionally the rumble of the big silver milk trucks returning to the milk plant with full loads, their horns bleating for admittance. Now and then the southwest wind would carry the metallic pang-pang of hammers from the two blacksmith’s shops—Sam Berczyk’s on Main Street, and Frank Plotnik’s right across the street from Eddie’s own house.

  Some might disdain his town because it was small and backward, clinging to a lot of old-country customs, but Eddie knew every person in it, every sound lifting from it, and who made that sound. He was a contented man as he loaded a wheelbarrow with tools and pushed it over to the fishpond in Father Kuzdek’s front yard to clean out the concrete basin that had grown green with algae over the summer. It was an immense yard, situated on the south of the church, with the rectory set well back from the street and fronted by a veritable parkland covering an entire half block. The statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary stood in a stone grotto near the street, a rose bed at her feet and a screen of lush green pines behind her. The long sidewalk to Father’s house was flanked by great shade trees, intermittent flower beds and rock gardens, all of this surrounded by a fence substantial enough to stand till Judgment Day. The fence, of stone piers and black iron rails, set off the grounds beautifully, but it went clear around three sides of the church property and made for a lot of hand clipping when Eddie mowed the lawns. Sometimes though, the Knights of Columbus helped him mow and trim. They had done so last Saturday, the same loyal workhorses showing up as they always did.

  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?”
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br />   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.