The Grave of God's Daughter Read online

  “Looking into a room isn’t a sin.”

  “Well, sneaking sounds like a sin. Sneaking does not sound good.”

  “Fine, then stay here.”

  Before Martin could pipe up again, I left him at the end of the aisle to go peek into Mr. Sekulski’s back room. It was a cluttered space the size of a large closet and it was lined with shelves, each overflowing with everything from a phonograph to a silver tray to a life-sized figurine of a cat. My mother’s painting was propped up on the top shelf between a candelabra and a dented teapot. Sitting there among the odds and ends, the little painting looked lost, the Holy Mother and child unquestionably out of place.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  I spun around to find Mr. Sekulski behind me, blocking my way out. He was not a big man, but his stomach hung out in front of him like a shield. He wore glasses, which rode low on his nose as though he was inspecting everything he saw. I sputtered for a few seconds, trying to come up with an excuse.

  “You trying to steal something? I’ll call the police, missy. Have no doubt.” His Polish was choppy and riddled with flattening slurs.

  Though I had been trying to sneak a glance into his back room, the suggestion that I would steal from him gave me enough fire to respond.

  “No,” I replied in Polish. “I wasn’t going to steal anything. I came to see if you had my mother’s painting.”

  “What painting?”

  “That one. The little one. The Black Madonna.”

  Mr. Sekulski studied my face until he was satisfied I was telling the truth, then he started barking questions at me again.

  “Well, what do you want? You can’t just come around here visiting the thing.”

  “I want to buy it back,” I told him.

  “Buy it back? With what? Paper money?”

  “I said I want to buy it back. How much will it cost?”

  He squinted at me skeptically and rolled his response around in his mouth for a minute, savoring it before spitting it out. “Fourteen.”

  The word fourteen came at me like a fist and caught me right in the middle of the forehead. It sounded like an unattainable sum, a sum so high it might as well have been a fortune.

  “Why?” I demanded, the question exploding from my mouth. Anger had made me bold. “My mother paid eleven dollars for it. Why is it more now when it was ours to begin with?”

  “That’s the price of business,” Mr. Sekulski pronounced with an unsympathetic shrug, as though the policy had nothing to do with him.

  “Promise me you won’t sell it until I bring you the money.”

  Mr. Sekulski let out a laugh, amused by my attempt at a threat. “Don’t worry. Nobody will want that thing.”

  That should have made me feel better. Instead, all that registered was the impact of the insult rather than relief. Nobody wanted the most valuable thing we had.

  “I’ll get the money,” I told him.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “I will,” I assured him. I wanted to convince myself as much as him.

  “Then I guess I’ll be seeing you,” Mr. Sekulski said as he moved out of the doorway, leaving me just enough room to slip by.

  I was fighting the urge to run out of there, but forced myself to walk, to make sure Mr. Sekulski saw me striding out of his store, unafraid. After Mr. Sekulski had shut the door to the back room, Martin peered out from around the end of the aisle. He had witnessed the whole scene and his eyes were wide with panic.

  “I told you not to go in there. I told you.”

  “It’s okay. Nothing happened.”

  “But you got caught.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t do anything to me.”

  Martin cleared his throat, expecting a further explanation.

  “What? I was only looking.” He exhaled a small snort, his usual way of telling me he knew I was lying. “Fine. Believe what you like.”

  “No, I only believe the truth.”

  “Okay, then try this one: we’re going home now.”

  Martin snorted again and rolled his eyes. “All right. Where next?”

  “The butcher’s shop.”

  “At least that’s not a lie.”

  THE BUTCHER’S SHOP sat in the middle of the block on Field Street, on the same side as the field. The storefront was painted a bright yellow and through the large picture window I could see the butcher, Mr. Goceljak, standing behind the counter talking to a customer, an older woman in a red felt hat.

  “Stay out here,” I instructed Martin.

  “Why? I got to go in last time.”

  “Because I said so.”

  “What’s inside that’s so special?” He went to look in the window and I yanked him away harder than I’d intended to.

  “You hurt me.” Martin rubbed his arm, more to make me feel guilty than because I’d injured him.

  “I’m sorry, but you have to stay out here. And don’t talk to anybody. And don’t touch anything. And don’t move.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stay here.”

  Martin looked sad and wounded; it was the face he made whenever he thought he was being excluded.

  “Please,” I begged.

  “Okay, but don’t take long.”

  “I won’t.”

  “If you do, I’m coming in.”

  “Fine,” I conceded, then I positioned him between the picture window and the door so he couldn’t be seen from inside. Martin stood against the wall and stiffened like a toy soldier, then flashed me a salute.

  “Remember: don’t move.”

  “I’m not moving,” he said between gritted teeth, trying not to open his lips.

  I took a deep breath and entered the butcher’s shop. A bell above the door sounded my arrival. The walls were the same chipper yellow as on the outside of the building and it was cool inside, as if the back door had been left open, but I knew that the air was chilled because of the iceboxes hidden in the rear of the store. I’d only been in the butcher’s shop once before, on an errand with my mother for Father Svitek. The delivery boy at the time had brought him the wrong kind of kishke and Father Svitek wanted my mother to exchange the sausage. This was before Martin was born and it was summertime. I remembered asking my mother why it was so cold in the butcher’s shop when it was so hot outside. That was when she told me about the iceboxes. When I asked her what was inside them, all my mother said was, “Ice.” I couldn’t be sure if she had said that to spare me the explanation of where meat came from or to avoid telling me that it was something we would rarely have the money to buy.

  Mr. Goceljak laid a thick cut of marbled beef on the counter for the woman in the felt hat to inspect. She scrutinized the piece of meat as if it were a gemstone, eyeing it from every angle to make sure she’d gotten the best cut. Mr. Goceljak waited patiently, letting the woman have her look. He was a thin, tightly muscled man with black hair and a hawkish face. He was so slim he had to tie the strings of his apron around his waist a number of times to make it fit. The apron itself was pure white from the neck to the chest, but from the midsection down, the fabric was stained brown with drying blood. After the woman nodded her approval, Mr. Goceljak swiftly wrapped the meat in a sheet of paper and presented it to her like a present. The woman counted out her coins and bills to the cent, then thanked him and walked around me and out the door.

  Mr. Goceljak hadn’t appeared to notice me until that moment.

  “What do you want?” he said in a manner meant to say that if I was about to ask for money for the church or the children’s choir, not to bother. His Polish was coarse, the accent irregular, and I had to struggle to understand him. I knew little about Mr. Goceljak other than the fact that his wife was gone. It wasn’t clear if she’d died or run off or just disappeared. Some people said he’d had to commit her to a sanitarium, that she wasn’t stable. Whether or not the story was true mattered little to me. All I hoped was that Mr. Goceljak would hear me out.

  “I’m here because I heard about
Donny Kopec, your delivery boy.” I’d been holding my breath in anticipation, and it took all my might to get those few words out.

  “What about him?”

  Mr. Goceljak put his hands on his hips as if to say I was already wasting his time. I took another breath and began, “Well, he was your delivery boy, right? And now he’s got a broken arm. So I figured you didn’t have anybody to make your deliveries anymore.”

  “So?”

  “I could do it. I mean, I want to do it. I want the job.”

  For a few painfully long seconds, Mr. Goceljak stared at me without a word. Then he came out from behind the counter and folded his arms purposefully. I had to resist the temptation to back away from him altogether.

  “You’re a girl, you know that?”

  “Yes,” I answered, somewhat tentatively.

  “And you want a job like this? Delivering meat? You ever seen uncooked kishke or kielbasa? It doesn’t look like paper dolls or anything.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you want this job?”

  “My family needs the money.”

  The sentence prickled as it passed over my lips, as sharp as tiny chips of glass. Though this wasn’t entirely a lie, it wasn’t the truth either, and it was as close to sin as I had ever come. I silently prayed that God would understand, that He might sympathize.

  Mr. Goceljak’s expression changed. I prepared myself for him to yell at me, to tell me to get out and never come back, but he simply asked, “Do you know how to ride a bicycle?”

  “I—yeah, I mean, yes, I do. Yes, sir.”

  This was a complete and unequivocal lie, and it seeped over my soul like a sudden spill. I’d never been on a bicycle in my entire life. Few children in town had ever touched one, let alone ridden one. I braced myself, waiting for a bolt of lightning to strike me down where I stood. But nothing happened.

  “All right then,” Mr. Goceljak said. “Follow me.”

  In a daze, still awaiting my punishment for lying, I let him lead me around the front counter and through a thin curtain into the back of the shop. It was less a room than an alcove full of scarred, wooden butchers’ blocks, metal tubs, and a sink. Sharp, steel hooks dangled from the ceiling next to strands of flypaper. On one side of the room hung two pigs. The heads had been removed and the bodies were split from the necks down through the legs. The cut was so smooth, the sides so even, it was as if the animals opened like books. Beside them was a rack of cow’s ribs laying on a chopping block. A stream of blood had collected beneath the ribs and the white spokes of bone were reflected in the pooling liquid. Mr. Goceljak was monitoring my face for a reaction.

  This is your punishment, I thought.

  I was so stunned by what I beheld that I couldn’t even blink. Perhaps it was my penalty for lying; it was, however, also a test, Mr. Goceljak’s test. It was my only opportunity to convince him to give me the job, so I looked the pigs up and down defiantly, biting the inside of my cheek until I proved I wasn’t scared or squeamish.

  “Good,” he said. “Now I’ll show you the bicycle.”

  I trailed him out the back door to a gravel alley. The bicycle was propped up against the steps and chained to a handrail made of used pipes. Its frame was old and rusted, and Donny’s accident had left a deep indentation in the front fender. The royal blue paint was flaking and the metal basket was crumpled at the corner. But to me, the bicycle was beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “You’ll have to wipe down the basket,” Mr. Goceljak explained, noting my interest. “The blood runs out of the packages and gets all over the metal. If you don’t clean it, you’ll have the flies chasing you. ’Em and the dogs.”

  “Dogs?”

  “If you pass any houses and the dogs aren’t chained up, they’ll run after you.”

  The notion of being chased by dogs had never crossed my mind, and it truly terrified me. “Will they bite me?”

  “You, probably not. But they’ll get at the meat if you let ’em.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Just ride fast,” Mr. Goceljak suggested. “And don’t fall down.”

  For someone who had never ridden a bicycle, those were possibly the worst instructions I could hear. Yet by then, there was no turning back.

  “Come by tomorrow after school. I’ll give you the route and you can start then. Pay’s a penny per delivery. You work Monday through Friday. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then. See you tomorrow,” Mr. Goceljak said and turned to go.

  “Wait. Don’t you want to know my name?”

  “I know who you are. I recognized you when you walked in. I know your mother. Works for Father Svitek.”

  The fact that I was both known and could be recognized swept over me like a strange breeze. I hadn’t imagined that either was possible.

  “Well, all right then,” Mr. Goceljak repeated, then he left me alone with the bicycle.

  I gazed at its curves, only to discover that it was a boy’s bicycle. The center bar was raised high in the frame. I knew there was a difference between bicycles designed for boys and for girls, but I had yet to find out exactly what that difference entailed. I chose not to think about it. All that mattered was that I had done it—I had a job. I was a delivery boy.

  MARTIN WAS RIGHT where I’d left him in front of the shop. As soon as he saw me, he let out an exasperated sigh, as though he’d been holding his breath the entire time I’d been gone.

  “Thank goodness,” he said. “I thought the butcher had cut you up into pieces and was going to sell you for stew.”

  “Martin!” I was half-scolding him and half-laughing. He was pleased he’d gotten a smile out of me. “Let’s go,” I told him. “We’re late as it is.” I took my brother’s hand and began leading him home.

  “So what did you do?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I waited outside for nothing?”

  “No, not nothing. Something. But it’s a secret, so you can’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even…?”

  “No,” I replied, knowing he meant our parents. “Not even them.”

  “What kind of secret is it?”

  “A secret secret. If I tell you, will you promise not to tell?”

  “I guess.”

  “No, not ‘I guess.’ You have to be sure, Martin. Absolutely sure.”

  “I can be absolutely sure. I promise. I won’t tell.”

  “I’m going to make deliveries for the butcher. So I can make money.”

  “What do you need money for?”

  “Everybody needs money, Marty.”

  “That’s not the question I asked. I asked what you needed it for.”

  “Nothing. I just do.”

  “Then why can’t you collect glass?”

  Once a month, a truck from Harrisburg would come to town to collect broken glass to melt down and make new. They’d pay a penny per pound, so my father would send Martin and me out with a bucket and a hammer. We would collect bottles and smash them in the bucket, then turn them in for change.

  “I can’t collect bottles. It wouldn’t be enough.”

  The pitch of my voice made Martin suspicious. “You’re not telling me something,” he groaned. “I can tell you’re not telling me something.”

  Thankfully, as we neared Third, I was given a reprieve in the form of a distraction, one which Martin quickly spotted. “Look,” he said, pointing happily. “It’s Ragsoline.”

  Coming up the road was an old black man in denim overalls and a floppy hat, the man we knew only as Ragsoline. He was leading a tawny, swaybacked mare pulling a wooden cart. The cart was filled to the brim and teetering with a tall load of rags. We called him Ragsoline because that was the phrase he’d yell out as he traipsed from one end of Hyde Bend to the other asking for people’s used rags, which he collected to sell to the paper factory a few towns over. No one knew where Ragsoline lived—it could have been miles away—all we knew was that he wa
s the only black man we’d ever seen. He had come to town once a week for as long as anybody could remember, and over the years he’d picked up a few Polish phrases that he would say to the people who donated their rags to him.

  “Dobre jen, Pani,” he would say to greet the women. Or he would say, “Dejkuya, Pani,” bidding them farewell with a tip of his hat.

  “Let’s talk to him,” Martin insisted.

  “No. We don’t have any rags to give him.”

  “So? Maybe he just wants to talk for a change instead of always asking for rags.”

  Martin ardently tugged me down the street, waving and calling out, “Ragsoline! Hey, Ragsoline!”

  Ragsoline slowed his cart. “Dobre jen Pan i Pani,” he said with a smile.

  “We speak English,” Martin said proudly. “You can speak English with us.”

  “Then good afternoon, sir and madame,” Ragsoline intoned. “What can I do for you today?”

  “We don’t have any rags to give you, but if we did, we would,” Martin said.

  “Well, that’s very kind, young sir. Very kind.”

  Next came a long silence during which Martin realized that he didn’t actually have anything to say to Ragsoline.

  “We’re sorry to bother you. My brother only wanted to say hello.”

  “Perfectly fine. Perfectly fine,” Ragsoline replied. “You can pet the horse if you like.”

  “Can I really?” Martin was asking permission from me as much as Ragsoline.

  “Of course,” Ragsoline said, then I nodded my approval to Martin, which Ragsoline noted.

  Martin approached the horse cautiously. “How do I do it?”

  “You just pat her. She’s old and she won’t mind it a bit. Like this,” Ragsoline instructed, demonstrating for Martin. Ragsoline stroked the horse’s shoulder and Martin mimicked him, rubbing the mare’s side, which was as high as he could reach.

  “We could use another hand here,” Ragsoline told me with a wink.

  The horse was standing perfectly still, her head slightly bowed. I stepped up to her and gently placed my hand on her neck. The short, coarse hide was smooth to the touch, the flesh warm. I ran my hand over her mane, letting my fingers slide through the thick hair like a comb. That was the first time I had touched any animal besides the stray cats that roamed the alleys, and it was like nothing I’d ever felt before.