The Grave of God's Daughter Read online

  As we neared Third, the distinct sound of Mrs. Koshchushko’s voice rang in the air. She was shouting and moaning, slicing through the quiet of the evening. We were accustomed to the commotion because it occurred almost nightly. Mrs. Koshchushko would break into screaming fits during which she would beg one of her two children, a boy and a girl in their teens, Peter and Irene, to put her out of her misery. “Finish me. Finish me already,” she would plead in Polish, turning it into a woeful chant. Like the rest of us, she was a Catholic, so suicide was an unutterable word, but I believe even Martin knew what she was asking.

  Mrs. Koshchushko would smash dishes, throw chairs, anything that was loud enough to compete with the pitch of her wailing. Her children had no choice but to stay there and wait out the storm of her tirades. Sometimes it took hours, sometimes minutes. All anybody on Third could do was pretend to ignore the noise. That evening, however, Martin stopped outside their apartment, trying to sneak a glance in the window.

  “We shouldn’t stare,” I scolded.

  “How is it staring if they can’t see me?”

  Before I could stop him, Martin slipped his hand from my pocket and raced up to the Koshchushkos’ front window.

  “Martin. Get back here.”

  “I only want to see what it looks like when she does this.”

  By the time I caught up with him, he was standing on tiptoe, face pressed to the glass. There was one light on inside and the coal stove was burning. I could see Peter and Irene solemnly sitting in the corner, eyes riveted on their laps. In the middle of the floor lay Mrs. Koshchushko, her legs sprawled out as she wept into her own arms. She was clad in a green robe, which fanned out behind her, barely covering her pale legs. Each racking sob played itself out along her back. I tried to pry Martin away from the glass, but he held fast.

  “Why is she crying so hard?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s sad.”

  “I know she’s sad. You don’t cry when you’re not sad. But why?”

  I could imagine a million things, a million reasons why she would be so rapt with pain, but none of them was worth conjuring in Martin’s mind.

  “Come on,” I told him firmly and he finally heeded the order. He returned his hand to my pocket and sighed. “Okay, we can go now. I’ve seen enough.”

  It was true. He had seen enough, far more than he should have. It was as if each of the acute miseries of the world sprang from the dirt on Third and took root there. Living where we did, hearing what we heard, seeing what we saw, we were filled to the brim with the world and it seemed as though we would not be able to hold an ounce more of what life held in store for us. For a seven-year-old, Martin had seen enough for a lifetime.

  When we turned away from the Koshchushkos’ window, Swatka Pani was standing in the middle of the alley, watching us. Martin gasped aloud. I pinched his hand to silence him. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere, as though she had materialized out of the mud like all of the other miseries.

  “I see you,” she hissed in clotted Polish.

  She waited for a response. Neither Martin nor I would dare speak.

  “I see you,” Swatka Pani repeated. “You were watching them. Wanted to see what happens in there, didn’t you?”

  She lifted her cane and started toward us in a slow, menacing crawl. My first instinct was to run, to flee, and Martin must have felt me restrain the reflex. His eyes flickered toward me, waiting for my signal. But I knew not to run away when Swatka Pani was addressing us directly. We were caught.

  “You find what you were looking for, boy?”

  As Swatka Pani drew closer, I stepped in front of Martin, shielding him from view.

  “He was only curious. He heard noises and got curious. That’s all,” I explained in Polish, my voice shaking, then trailing off.

  Swatka Pani switched her sights to me. She had a glint in her eyes like the kind of light that comes when a coal fire is burning so hot that the flame goes blue, then colorless, and the fire can’t grow much hotter. The air seemed to change, to condense and solidify, as if Swatka Pani was pressing herself up to us without moving. Martin peered out from behind me, too afraid to look away.

  “Mind your own business,” Swatka Pani commanded. “Or you’ll find someone else minding it for you.”

  I spun around and forcibly pushed Martin down Third, toward our apartment and away from Swatka Pani. He kept glancing back at her, and I had to twist him on his heel to get him to run. I scrambled to retrieve the key to our apartment from inside my coat, then gratefully slid it in the lock. Before I could twist the handle, my mother flung open the door, a harsh expression stamped on her face.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded, blocking our way. We could not enter the apartment before we answered her question.

  My mother was never home that early, so I hadn’t planned on concocting an alibi. I was at a loss and could do nothing but stare at her blankly.

  “Well?”

  Time came to a grinding halt. All I could hear was the absence of sound left in the wake of my mother’s question. In that chasm, I swore I could feel Swatka Pani’s eyes on my back. I swore I could feel her watching us from the end of the alley, waiting and listening to our every word. The urge to turn and look was irrepressible. When I did, she was gone. She had vanished completely. It was as if Swatka Pani had disappeared back into the mud she had come from.

  I wanted to forget seeing her, speaking to her, what she had said, all of it. Better yet, I wanted to unremember the incident altogether. Forgetting something meant that some trace of thought must linger in the back of the mind, hiding in some secret corner. I didn’t want the memory of Swatka Pani to occupy any space or make a home in my head. The worst part was that I knew it would.

  “It’s my fault,” Martin blurted. “I was in the library at school. They got a new book and I wanted to read it. It’s my fault we’re late.”

  My mother eyed Martin, but his face was placid, certain. I knew he was lying and he knew he was lying.

  “Fine then, get inside. Supper’ll be on soon.”

  She made room for us to pass and closed the door behind us with an admonishing snap. The coal stove was burning low, but it was warm inside the apartment, a comfort from the cold and all that had happened. That comfort quickly burned off once I considered what Martin had done. I feared my own lies, but not the way I feared for Martin and what might happen to him for his. He didn’t deserve to suffer for what I had started.

  Since I could remember, the nuns had hammered the notion of sin into our skulls, pummeling us with threats of hell and damnation. The way they described it, each lie we told was like a straight pin thrust into God’s heart. Martin had put his very soul in jeopardy without a second thought simply to protect me, and the gravity of his deed could have toppled me where I stood. Though I had begun in earnest and with the best of intentions, my lies had somehow become contagious and I believed I had infected my brother with them.

  “Take off those boots,” my mother said, returning to the stove, “or you’ll track mud from the gutter all over.”

  Still shaken, Martin and I did as we were told. We removed our boots and lined them up near the door the way my mother liked, toes to the wall. She claimed that that was where all of the dirt went, though as far as I could tell it went everywhere, on the toe, the heel, the sole. Even the laces had to be washed regularly or they’d become caked in mud, ratty and untieable. My boots were filthy from all the running I’d done that day. The leather was dull with dust and clods of mud clung to the sides. Martin’s shoes, on the other hand, were relatively clean except for a few blades of grass that had gotten caught in the treads. Martin’s boots were another donation from the Benedictine nuns, also used and handed down from boy to boy in some other family. The boots were too big for Martin, so he often wore two pairs of socks to make them fit, yet they still seemed so small and delicate and precious. Seeing my brother’s tiny boots sitting there next to mine made his gesture ev
en more poignant, the guilt of what I had done to him even more fierce.

  Martin was trying to act normal, but he was shaken. He took out his school books and prepared to do his homework, as he did each day when he returned from school. I always did the same, though it was only to keep him company. Schoolwork held little interest for me. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t dislike it either. I simply didn’t care one way or the other. The work never seemed challenging. Worse yet, it didn’t seem to matter. I imagined every twelve-year-old reading the same books, doing the same math equations, and printing the same grammar lessons all across the world and it depressed me. Nevertheless, I did my assignments, filled in all of the blanks and turned the work in on time, without fail. To do otherwise would bring consequences worse than any homework assignment—attention. If one of the children didn’t turn in their homework, they were made an example of by the nuns, who forced them to stand in front of the classroom and explain themselves. Then they had to stay after school with the nuns and copy Bible verses. I would willingly copy a thousand verses rather than suffer under the eyes of my classmates for even a second, but the punishment came as a package, so I did everything to avoid it altogether.

  While Martin and I began our homework, my mother started chopping a potato on a board at the sink. She cut it into slivers to make it seem as if there was more, though that only made things worse. The bits of potato would grow soft and mushy and, after a few days, they would disintegrate, turning the soup into a heavy, bland stew with the consistency of cream but none of the taste.

  “Don’t touch that shirt there on the table. I’m mending it,” my mother instructed, never taking her eyes off the knife.

  One of my father’s shirts was on the table. The collar had been removed and my mother was in the process of turning it. The front of the collar had become too frayed to be presentable, but we didn’t have the money for a new shirt, so my mother would cut off the collar, invert it, and reattach it so that the clean, unmarred underside was on top.

  “Sorry,” I said, inching my schoolbooks farther from the shirt.

  The big stew pot my mother favored was already on the stove. We were low on coal, so it would take time to bring the pot to a boil. Once she’d minced the potato as finely as she could, she dumped it into the pot, then she took a parcel wrapped in butcher’s paper from the icebox. My eyes locked on the package.

  My mother unwrapped the paper as if she was unwrapping a present. Inside were the cleaved ends of six sausages. I was relieved when I realized what they were. The nubby scraps were the remnants of Father Svitek’s supper. Early on, he had instructed my mother that he did not eat the ends of his sausages and that she was free to have them if she wanted. She took them without fail.

  My mother retrieved the large iron skillet from inside the oven where she kept it, and carefully placed half of the sausage ends in the center. They were to be my father’s breakfast. She dropped the remaining bits of sausage into the stew pot for us and gazed down at them like pennies she’d thrown into a wishing well, then she stirred them into the mix until they disappeared. She stood there at the stove staring into the pot for so long that even Martin ceased his studies to watch her. When my mother realized we were staring, she went to the sink to wash her hands.

  “All right,” she said, drying her hands on a rag. “I have to go out.”

  Martin and I shared a glance. My father spent his afternoons as well as evenings at the Silver Slipper and would come home only to shave, gobble down some food, and get his lunch. Even so, my mother made it a practice to be home when he arrived to eat and rarely left the apartment afterward. Her leaving before he came back was a bad sign.

  “Where are you going?” Martin asked, genuinely perplexed by the sudden change in routine.

  My mother’s expression flashed with worry. It was the same look I imagined I must have worn minutes earlier when she’d asked me where we had been. She was deciding whether to lie or not.

  “Just out,” she stammered. “I expect your homework to be finished by the time I get back.”

  She went into the bedroom and when she came back out, she was pulling on her dress gloves. They were far from extravagant, merely a thin, brown kidskin, but they weren’t nearly as beat up as her wool gloves, which bore holes from years of use. My mother was also carrying a small sack and trying to conceal it at her side.

  “Don’t touch the pot. It’s hot,” my mother said. Then she was gone.

  THE APARTMENT WAS QUIET except for the sound of the stew pot beginning to boil. I pretended to read while Martin tried, unsuccessfully, to balance a pencil on its point. Finally, he faced me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, preempting his question.

  “But?”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. “I have no idea where she’d be going or why, so don’t ask.”

  “She’s got to be going somewhere. She can’t be going nowhere. There is no nowhere. At least not around here.”

  “Then where do you think she’s going?” I suspected he had his own guess and was trying to get me to ask him.

  “I’ll tell you where. She’s going to the Silver Slipper to bring him home for his breakfast.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she wants to. She doesn’t want him to miss it or forget.”

  “When has he ever forgotten to eat?”

  “He hasn’t. But that doesn’t mean she can’t go there and remind him.”

  I wanted to drop the subject, so I picked up my pencil and resumed my reading. I wished Martin would do the same, but he wasn’t giving up that easily.

  “Why? Where do you think she went?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “You never answered.”

  “I said I didn’t know. That was my answer. Now let’s finish our schoolwork before she gets back or else we’ll be in trouble.”

  Martin flopped back in his chair, defeated. He didn’t like my responses, though thankfully, he believed them. The truth was, I didn’t know where my mother was going. I could imagine a few possibilities, and none was heartening. Maybe she was leaving so she wouldn’t be home when my father got back, punishing him for his absence with her own. Or maybe she was going back to the rectory to do some work for Father Svitek, some overtime to make up for the money my father was wasting at the Silver Slipper. Or perhaps she was going to meet someone, a man even. Images of her in her kidskin gloves holding another man’s hand began to bloom in my mind, the man’s face hazy. I shuddered to shake the vision from my head.

  The nagging feeling of not knowing what my mother was up to had gotten to Martin. I could see that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on his schoolwork. He began to fiddle with the shirt my mother had left on the table. He pulled it close and studied the way she was sewing the collar back on, examining the stitches and the pins that held the half-sewn collar to the shirt.

  “Be careful,” I warned. “Or you’ll stick yourself.”

  “No, I won’t,” Martin protested, then he let out a hissing wince. He had nicked his finger on one of the pins.

  “See,” I said as he sucked the tip of his finger woefully. “Don’t get any blood on the shirt or then we’ll be in real trouble.”

  “I just wanted to see how it worked,” Martin mumbled, his finger still stuck in his mouth.

  “Then you should’ve asked.”

  I slid the shirt around and propped it up on our schoolbooks so he could see the way my mother had started to resew the collar. Martin needed something to occupy him, to take his mind off her hasty departure, and so did I. I took the needle out and used it as a pointer, showing him the little stitches that held the collar in place. I explained how to pierce the material with the needle and how to make a single stitch. To my brother, it was as if I was creating magic.

  “How does that little piece of string hold this big thing together? It’s not strong. It’s tiny.”

  “Alone it’s tiny. But together with more stitches, the t
hread becomes strong. Strong enough to hold the collar on for good.”

  This was miraculous to Martin, inexplicable. “Can I try?” he asked, excited but hesitant, as if he might not be able to control such magic on his own.

  I passed him the needle, smoothed out the fabric and pointed to the spot where he should start the next stitch. Martin took a deep breath and pressed the needle through the underside of the collar. When it surfaced, he seemed almost surprised.

  “Not too far,” I instructed. “You want the stitches to be small and strong.”

  “Small and strong,” Martin repeated. He scrutinized his stitch, making sure it matched my mother’s. While he forced the needle back through the fabric, creating a single stitch, I tried to recall how I had learned the technique myself. I sorted back through my memory, digging for a moment when I had sat with my mother like this and she had shown me how to draw a needle through cloth and line up each stitch. Then I realized that that moment had never happened. I had learned by peering over her shoulder while she sewed and stationing myself next to her at the table when she would hem my father’s pants. My mother had never tried to teach me. Instead, I’d learned by watching her when she didn’t know I was looking, or didn’t care. Part of me believed she was aware of what I’d done, that she had agreed to our silent tutorial simply by staying put and letting me look on. I could never be sure and preferred to hope.

  “Is that it? Did I do it?” Martin asked, showing me his completed stitches.

  “Yes,” I reassured him. “That’s it. You did it.”

  A knock sounded at the front door, startling both of us. We rarely got visitors, and my mother’s mysterious departure had set a foreboding tone.

  As I got up to answer the door, Martin put his hand on my arm, cautioning, as if anyone or anything might be waiting on the other side. The incident with Swatka Pani had unnerved both of us. My lies had become a blight, contaminating Martin too, and Swatka Pani’s words came as confirmation of my sins. The devil knew my heart as well as God, and he had sent a messenger to say as much.